World Without End - Orkney
Showing at Raleigh Film & Art Festival Oct. 5th, 2025
Shot on the scottish island of Orkney in summer 2023, the film explores the visual relationships between the ancient stone circles of the Ring of Brognar and the medieval cathedral of St. Magnus. There are interludes of water, air, earth and relected sunlight
ShowingsSun, Oct 5th, 3:00 PM @ Screening Room 2207- Runtime:0:10:00
- Director:Bruce James Cooper
https://rfaf25.eventive.org/schedule/68b20c59566d0e9ace96a25d
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05/05/24 - Review of World Without End 2 - Orkney by
M.S. Mason, formery of the Christian Science Monitor
World Without End
By M.S. Mason
Bruce Cooper’s new film “World Without End 2 - Orkney” is a visual poem that draws its imagery from
a breathtaking Romanesque church built in the 12th Century. Cooper celebrates the red and yellow sandstone bricks of the Saint Magnus cathedral in Orkney, Scotland and its surroundings low hills covered in green and purple. Nearby the water of the ocean laps against the rocks, while most impressively the ancient tall stone monuments of the Ring of Brodgar reach heavenward, stately yet mysterious.
Inside the stone church we see only the windows, light pouring through stained glass gorgeously decorated with saints and holy allegories meant to teach as well as to entertain the faithful (and the rest of us) with their stories and their symbols. In the dark we must look upward to these paragons of holiness. Meanwhile, medieval choral music followed by bagpipe music calms and underscores the stony architecture and landscape with its everlasting meaning. The film struck me as a kind of prayer, fixing my thought on the title…words that end a well-known liturgical prayer.
Because the imagery flies by quickly and while outside imagery also moves in and out of negative space like an echo from the past, the viewer is called upon to reassemble those images in the mind as we later reflect on it. The film works in consciousness exactly the way the mind works in revery. Perhaps we watch Cooper’s own thinking about his experience of Scotland and this haunting cathedral as we watch his film. But films like his are also surprising in their innate capacity to awaken longing in the viewer’s own thought. The longing for meaning, I think. Perhaps Cooper has found his in time present and time past.
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04/11/2023 - Upcoming Class: Cinema of Childhood at School of Living Arts - Taught by Bruce Cooper
Syllabus for Film Studies block Starting on November 27th – Cinema of Childhood. This block is a thematic study of the depiction of childhood and growing up in narrative and experimental cinema. Rather than the
genre of “children’s film” these are instead six films about the subject of childhood. Each screening will be preceded by an introduction of the director and his work, and will be followed by a discussion. Each
student will write a research paper/report on a seventh film of their own choosing.
Class One: 400 Blows, dir. by Francoise Truffaut, France 1959
Class Two: Night of the Hunter, dir. by Charles Laughton, USA 1995
Class Three: Walkabout, by Nicholas Roeg, Australia 1971
Class Four: My Life as a Dog, dir. By Lasse Hallstrom, Sweden 1995
Class Five: Kinder Rose I, III, V, VI by Bruce Cooper, USA 2010-2022
Class Six: Days of Heaven dir. Terrence Malick, USA, 1978
The grade for the class will be based on
25% Attendance (and make-up viewings if necessary)
25% Class participation in discussions
50% Research paper -Bruce Cooper
From CELLULOID/ALL Magazine No. 3 July 1994
I first saw Bruce Cooper’s 16mm film Romance in Solitude last year when I worked at the Canyon Cinema office. It stuck with me, this film with all it’s rough edges -- the wild race of double-exposures--birds, snow, cities, rocks above oceans, the mountains of Colorado. The painful part: a filmmaker on a “foolish Parsifal’s quest” (as Bruce puts it)--technique--a mixture of semi-narrative with imagistic abandon--the slow painful parts: immaturity apparent. Romantics may not be what they’re looking for in young filmmakers these days. They say poetry is dead, so the film poet must be doubly dead. The film is a flawed beauty--but to me this is the only kind of beauty because it has honesty and heart.
No small coincidence that Romance in Solitude could be about Romanticism. Even in the didactic social fame scene of today’s “underground there are still exquisite quests being mad. The poet, the film poet, still walks these streets and climbs the mountains--but the world’s no longer interested. Too self-serving...does not sell..does not simulate action. Too many fallacies and aversions pervade the idea of it, so much distaste for the foolish unscientific quest that we invented a new age for ourselves (post-modern) to avoid it...make it small.
The film stuch with me so long because I had a built in and personal context to solidify it. I think about it constantly still. Bruce, I knew, has grown up on Colorado, and I later found out, just a few miles from where I had. He had moved to San Francisco as I had, with maybe some high expectations about the “community” of filmmakers here. The city, for whatever reasons, did not work out. Bruce has moved back from the Emerald City--Oz perhaps fulfilling his needs by allowing him to return. We met at his parents suburban homes for the first time. I know this place well already. The same. Memories. Watching again Romance in Solitude the gaps comes to me in sectional waves.
And now Romance in Solidtude goes a step further to compare the light spirit with the light here/there ( in San Francisco) as I tried to do with Below Angel World. An interplay too subtle even for film. It must come in a more round about way, outside the emulsion but still on it. Romance comes back to me in solitude, as the film had taught; as Bruce Cooper’s wisdom has shown.
I think I found in Bruce an unexpected soul mate.
SFCINEMATHEQUE
Thursday, April 17, 1997
First Person Films from Colorado
California College of the Arts
Filmmaker Bruce Cooper will present a group of recent films by mostly emerging artists from the Denver-Boulder area. Many are graduates of the Film Studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where Stan Brakhage, Phil Solomon, and Don Yannacito teach production. “Presented silently, the films envision romantic themes: the search for self and love, the holy night when inward eyes open; purity, decay and death; the return to earth & to the stars. Irony and disillusion are evident, yet an inspired vision of truth and beauty unreels through each film.” (BC) Filmmakers include Joey Thomasik, Eric Waldemar, Cori Chavez, Carl Fuerman, Jim Otis, Robert Schaller, Bruce Cooper, Tim Wilkins and Stan Brakhage.
EXCERPTS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY CONCERNING FILM SCHOOL AND FILMMAKERS I KNEW
In the spring of 1987 at CU Boulder, I was at a Crossroads with regards to my ambitions to become a filmmaker. I had taken many College credits of film aesthetics and filmmaking and even done a few internships in the film industry but I had no prospects of, or illusions about, making a living in the world of Art. The excitement I had felt studying silent film did not fully translate to narrative film with a few exceptions such as the 1978 film Days of Heavenby Terrence Malick (essentially a silent film with an interior monologue). I also did not find the teachers who were interested in narrative as compelling and recognized a certain laziness in professors from other disciplines (English, History) who introduced film screenings into their classes. Essentially, they didn’t want to have to teach material, only present work someone else did in a making a film of it. That all changed when I met Stan Brakhage.
I had heard about Brakhage, mostly as a figure of derision, along the lines of “he actually made a 16mm film about what the baby would see while still in the womb” (Window Water Baby Moving). My other professors, such as film historian Bruce Kawin, dismissed Brakhage’s history of silent film class as including anyfilm that was silent, not just films from the period of 1895-1928 I had also heard that Stan was dying of emphysema and this would be his last semester at CU (he, of course, didn’t have emphysema and would teach there for another 15 years) so I thought I better take his class on Philosophical Film in the fall of 1988, However, prior to my starting this class there was a death in my family.
My father, James Phillip Cooper, had been born in 1931 in Chicago Illinois. In the Fall of 1988, he had just turned 57. I had seen him briefly over the summer while I was living and working at the Keystone Resort in Summit County Colorado. He and my mother had come to see me in a musical of “The Music Man” where I played a villainous salesman. I saw him also a few times at
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the beginning of September when I was picking things up at the house to furnish my new apartment on Walnut St. in Boulder. I remember that on one of these occasions he looked particularly haggard, old and preoccupied with worry. I stayed later than I had to that day to talk to him about nothing in particular, but I had a sense that I should take this opportunity to connect with him. A few days later I got the phone call from my tearful Mother that he had died in the middle of the night from a sudden heart attack. I remember thinking that I had had some kind of presentiment of this, days before and somehow, I wasn’t surprised at his dying. When I arrived back home in Lakewood that afternoon, I saw my father’s body wrapped in a cheap violet polyester blanket from head to foot. Nobody had touched him so this was how he must have gone to sleep that night. My Mother later said that she was sleeping in an adjacent room because of their mutual snoring, and that it seemed that he, my Father, had come into the room and kissed her while she was sleeping. Whether this was an actual event or not, there is no way to know. My Mother reported that Dad had been feeling chest pain the day before and she had advised him to go to a doctor, but that he had said something like “it’s not worth the effort.” After I heard that I made every effort to take care of my own health and consult with any doctor or health professional available. I don’t want to leave others alone and abandoned because I did not take care of myself. That is also a reason I went into alcohol rehab at the age of 57-58, I wanted to outlive my Dad.
Looking back at his life I can’t blame my father for giving in so soon. His own father died at 45, a drunk on skid roe in Chicago. His Mother, my grandmother, had serious mental issues all her life (although she outlived him by 10 years) and he was basically on his own growing up. I don’t think his marriage to my mother was a particularly happy one, but he did love her and I know she was very lonely after his death. As for his legacy, there was a 20K payment from life insurance which he held because of his job at Sears Robuck. He never lived long enough to collect his Navy pension which would have taken effect at 60, nor did the government pay it to his survivors because of a technical error Dad made in filing it. None of my two wives or any of my children met him and as of this writing, only my brother Dean and I are alive who knew him well. I do have a short black and white 16mm film I made of him fishing about a year before his death. I rented a projector and showed the film at his funeral which was presided over by my Uncle Lee, a minister in the Church of Later Day Saints. I do remember the organist saying that it was one of the best funerals that she had played for, all my relatives from the Mid-West flew out and spoke about highly my father. In any case, within a few days after the funeral he was buried in the military cemetery at Ft. Logan and I was back at CU Boulder.
Having just lost my father at age 57 it was a shock to meet the filmmaker Stan Brakhage who, as age 55 and born in 1933, was just two years younger. Some kind of transfer of affection probably happened in my mind between the two men. Brakhage was also a father of five children and so had a kind of fatherly aspect to him when he choose to show it. I had missed
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the first two weeks of class due to Dad’s funeral and initially Stan’s teaching assistant (and future wife) Marilyn Jull told me I couldn’t take the course. However, when I told her my family situation, she sympathized right away and told me I could stay. I remember thinking that Marilyn was a serious person and sensitive to the tragedy in people’s lives. She would later give birth to Stan’s last two children after she gave up being his teaching assistant. I still saw her around the campus, usually with a baby carriage – she remained an intellectual but also bloomed into a wife and mother and later an effective Artist’s widow, an underrated institution.
I soon found out that Stan Brakhage was not very dynamic as a conventional film teacher. He would show us a film like Carl Dreyer’s Ordet and then ask the silent class if they thought the film was “Philosophical.” The silence was deafening, and he didn’t have much in the way of skills to promote conversation. I found out in later classes, that Stan’s real teaching gift was as a storyteller. If he had known the filmmaker, or somehow been involved in the making of the film, he could relate fascinating tales, mythological almost, but still grounded in reality. However, in this first class it was clear he didn’t do much research on the makers and just relied on his impressions upon viewing the film with us. I don’t fault him for this because he was simultaneously very busy making some the best hand-painted films of his career – Dante Quartet, Novalis Last Hymn to the Night and Persian Series to name a few.
I soon learned that Stan wasn’t dying, and that he had a history of health scares that often motivated him to make certain artworks. He did something almost out of the blue by inviting the whole class to his Boulder Hilltop apartment (the apartment from I, Dreaming) to watch 16mm films. Of course, only a few of us came but I remember I brought a bottle of Vermouth (which I didn’t even know was alcoholic) and the silent version of Love’s Choice, the film our D.W. Griffith class has collectively made. Stan liked it well enough as an homage to Giffith, a filmmaker who he admired but is universally maligned today much as Stan himself is, but for different reasons. I remember this night seeing a sound print of Faust III which is the first time I ever saw actors in a Brakhage film (they were part of his Boulder Sunday Associates Group, mostly aspiring musicians). I began to take Brakhage a lot more seriously after this evening and I began to seek out books by and about him.
Generally, however, Stan was resistant to getting to know you outside of class. He had many students and not much time for anyone who hadn’t proved themselves an aficionado of Avant Garde film. I remember another evening when he invited some students over to his apartment, this time in the CU Boulder Student Family housing unit. It was tiny and cramped. Marilyne was in the one bedroom with the babies and Stan had set the film projector on a board across his sink to project prints on a bare white wall. He was showing us a variety of psychodramas by Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and himself. He has a large collection of film on 16mm, most of which went to the Museum of Modern Art on his death. Later, Stan moved the operation from his home to run a Salon series on Sunday nights in the Fine Arts building. It was less intimate but more people could attend. I was a regular there, off and on from about 1990-1994 when my first child was born and I felt like I had to spend less time in Boulder and more time at home in Denver. I still talked to Stan on occasions and helped him produce a large show in 1996.
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Here are some memories of another filmmaker I knew in the 1990s who achieved some provenience during that time and later. I met Phil Solomon at a San Francisco Cinematheque show in the Fall of 1990. He was guest teaching at the now defunct San Francisco Art Institute along with some other notable names like Ernie Gehr and Gunvor Nelson. I had worked briefly for the Cinematheque writing program notes in early 1990 but found it very cliquey, like most arts organizations, and so I moved to Canyon Cinema, the long-time distributor for avant garde film where the staff was more agreeable and focused on business, not friend groups. However, the programmer for the Cinematheque, Steve Anker, was capable at his job and generally supported young filmmakers, and so I followed the calendar for anything related to Brakhage or anyone inspired by him. That is how I came across Phil Solomon’s show which concluded with a found footage film called “Rocket Boy Vs. Brakhage.”
You can’t find this film today, and Phil probably destroyed it, but it was actually reviewed in the New York Times around 1992 and I saw perhaps the only live showing in San Francisco. The film was a punk rock inspired send-up of Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, Faust film and other films by Stan and included scenes of a childhood Phil Solomon holding a machine gun shooting emulsion scratched “bullets,” supposedly at Stan. There was some genuinely funny found footage of a dog (Dog Star Man) driving a car while having “closed-eye vision” experiences but also some sneering text cards implying that Stan a womanizer. To be fair to the film, the accusations against Stan were mostly true enough in a general sense, but framed in a disrespectful way and obviously pandering to the anti-art feminists at SFAI that Phil taught with. The truth is that Solomon (and he would admit this later) owed much of his aesthetic to Brakhage and shared many friends, like the filmmaker Ken Jacobs, in common. Later on, Phil began to spin this film as an ironic “homage to Brakhage,” that after he met Stan and became friends with him.
That night however, the film felt snide and politically correct to me and I challenged Phil after the show about why he had made it. I don’t think he expected anyone in the Cinematheque crowd to not appreciate his jabs and he was immediately defensive. He said that Brakhage had yelled at him once during a question-and-answer period in the past (he had an audio tape of this) and that Stan had tried to proposition some of Phil’s female friends. I don’t doubt any of this is true, in fact Stan later apologized to Phil after Phil played the old tape back to him, however the whole gesture of the film reeked of the elite snobbery of the liberal upper-class of Art Teachers and students at SFAI (Ernie Gehr was an exception) who were only too happy to spit on the people who had gone before them, highlighting the personal defects of the older generation in order to promote the films of the new generation. It had actually got to the point where the film studies majors were more interested in the Andy Warhol knock-off movies directed by Paul Morrisey (Frankenstein, Flesh, Trash) than Warhol’s actual art films like Chelsea Girls, Sleep or Empire which had just been re-released in brand new 16mm prints by the new Warhol museum.
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A week later or so, I met Phil again at the apartment of David Gerstein who was Operations Manager at the Cinematheque. There were a number of filmmakers present and in the middle of the group there Phil was inexpertly strumming an acoustic guitar. I asked him to let me have a try and he brightened up a bit. I must have looked like a musician because he said something like “now here’s someone who really knows how to play guitar” Now of course, I wasn’t any better at guitar than Phil was but we reconnected at that point as being associates through the Cinematheque. I also met a long-time friend that night named Gail Camhi, a New York Filmmaker who had studied with Hollis Frampton. Phil knew Gail because they came from the same New York City Jewish milieu and he mentioned that she admired his more abstract films like Secret Garden and Remains to be Seen. When Phil later moved to Colorado to work at CU I brought Gail out to introduce her to Brakhage at Phil’s house and both of them got a chance to see her films - I don’t think they liked them. I did show my early film Firepage(about the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade) to Stan and he later said it “haunted” him.
Anyway, those were my only encounters with Phil Solomon in San Francisco. In the spring of 1991, I was working at Canyon Cinema and heard that Phil had applied to teach film at CU Boulder Film Studies and been hired at a tenue track professor. I later learned that Phil had been sweating bullets during the interview thinking that Stan (who had a vote on the hiring committee) had somehow read the review of “Rocket Boy vs. Brakhage” in the New York Times because it had been printed right next to the review for the new Batman movie. As it was Stan had no idea of any of that and he took to Phil right away after meeting him. However, Stan did not vote to hire Phil because there was an in-house candidate he was loyal to, but the vote did go Phil’s way and he taught at CU film Studies for 25 years before retiring in 2017, two years before his death. He and Brakhage ended up becoming best friends and Phil took a lot of heat from the liberal arts establishment for that in the years to come. They mocked him as “Prince Phillip” and called Brakhage “King Stanley” as if they were somehow avant garde royalty trying to rule over the rest of the world of film.
Phil’s reply to this criticism of Brakhage was that Stan was not the “Pope” of Avant Garde film, but instead the “Monk.” By this he meant that Brakhage’s vision was concerned with, primarily, interior sight and not building some kind of empire. Of course, as of writing this in 2026, Brakhage’s films have been vilified as “non-political” and effectively buried by film academia. If Dog Star Man is even shown it’s cited as a toxic example of the masculine drive to conquer and subdue nature rather than as the creation myth Stan intended it to be. Strangely, enough, Hollywood has a grudging respect for Brakhage, the filmmaker most associated with non-narrative forms. You can buy (and I have) brand new 16mm prints of Stan’s films from preservation negatives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at fairly affordable rates. In death, not in life, Stan’s art finally transcended the institutions and is available to a broader public. I hope the same will happen one day with Phil’s films, but I suspect they will be lumped in with the Post-Modernists and Deconstructionists - Phil had very little real interest in either, although he was eager to keep on good relations with everybody. He also had a dream of being accepted in Hollywood and would often wonder if he had any real prospects there.
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I could mention several other filmmakers that I knew and whose films influenced me. Mostly, they were my friends, other students at CU Boulder making projects on a shoestring budget. One friend of mine named Patrick Singson made a short 16mm film about Nikoli Tesla (this was years before the famous Tesla automobile) and I played a villainous Thomas Edison in a black and white room lit by a single light bulb. I still have a copy of this film and it shows a little bit what I might have become had I pursued acting instead of filmaking. Another college friend, Brent Poole, and I collaborated on several short films across a pastiche of genres. We continued this even after graduating and into our 40s even. In both cases, the creative efforts and the friendships waned as time went on, but in the prime times in Boulder and San Francisco was almost like being in a band, or a creative collective at least. I still maintain a relationship with Brent although our creative work together seems to be mostly past. As for Patrick, he cut off contact with the rest of us and has gotten into eastern spirituality.
Some more on my journey with drugs and alcohol here. There was the sense that artistic people needed to have some kind of fuel for their endeavors. Many films of the 60’s and 70’s celebrated altered states of consciousness (Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle for example) and so drinking became a part of my creative regime again. However, at this point I drew the line at Marijuana, Mushrooms and Psychedelic drugs. I was finished for good experimenting with those because they seemed to have greater and lasting effects than just drinking beer or wine. Of course, by eschewing drugs I began to drink a little bit more and soon it had become a comfortable habit among artistic friends in gallery circles and late-night film showings. I shortly discovered gin and tonic as the most friendly and inexpensive of the liquors available as your local Applebee’s restaurant at 12am. However, I did refuse to day-drink because I perceived that it took away your energy to create art. The idea was that you make the short films straight and sober, but you had permission to drink when you watched them with friends. This was, of course, before the internet when you actually gathered with friends in person to experience media.
As I was learning the craft of small gauge filmmaking on celluloid, I was also interested in music. For 100 dollars I had bought a 6-string acoustic guitar but I had no idea how to play it. My Mother was particularly angry that I had bought it with some of the money I had saved for college. I didn’t take lessons for years, but only messed around with individual notes. Later I got the idea that there was something called guitar chords, but I couldn’t keep the instrument in tune (this was before the age of electronic tuners or cell phone tuners). Also, no one told me that two guitars needed to be tuned to the same note in order to sound good together so I was mystified when a friend of mine and I would try to play together and it sounded terrible. It wasn’t until my first marriage that I began to play music on a regular basis with others. By then I could understand how to use a song book and a guitar tuner and even add in the pennywhistle. Had I been a better musician in film school I might have written music for some of my short films, as it was, I used records, mostly of classical music or progressive rock music. Because of my interest in film, I began to drift away from Rock music towards folk and classical.
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The first class I had in film school was the History of Silent Film taught by a professor named Bruce Kawin who had authored a couple of books on William Faulker’s screenplays. Kawin was a huge fan of silent comedy (Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton mainly) and horror film. He also admired the filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who is almost universally despised today because he defended the southern perspective in the Civil War in his film Birth of a Nation. Kawin argued that Griffith wasn’t a racist based on his film Broken Blossoms which featured an interracial love affair, and he also liked Griffith’s Intolerance which was a four part treatise on the human misery caused by noble ideas. The general silent film class has 200 students but the class Prof. Kawin offered after that, just on D.W. Griffith alone, had 11 students. The university went on with it anyway because many of the film prints had been ordered from the Denver Center Cinema, a short-lived venue at the Denver Center for Performing Arts created by a film scholar named Adam Reily (more on him later). We watched all of Griffith’s feature films and about 40 short films. For a final project the 11 of us made a film called Love’s Choicewhich was an homage to Griffith’s melodrama films of 1909-1913. I was the cameraman and played a bit part as a murdered postman. The film later got a soundtrack by the jazz pianist Hank Troy and is in the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art. We sent a video copy of the film to Griffith’s silent film actress Lillian Gish but she never responded. Another benefit of this film was that I got to date the leading actress for 4 months afterwards and we made one more Super 8 film together, now lost.
The later film history classes I had did not compare to the first two in 1985. Even when I took a horror film class from Bruce Kawin again, I began to see how politically correct he was and what a feminist he declared himself to be. He fit into a class of scholar I’ve since come to find ubiquitous: secular Jewish left wing intellectual, chain-smoking, usually single men who posed as feminists to pick up women – a mostly futile strategy, in short the kind of liberal who was later cancelled by the “Me Too” movement. When I asked Bruce Kawin about Stan Brakhage’s classes he was dismissive, saying that Brakhage’s silent film class included any film that was silent i.e. avant garde films, and that he didn’t stick to the Hollywood/ European Art Film canon but went in non-professional directions. However, I can’t deny that Kawin had great taste in Hollywood films, he was the first person to introduce me to the film Days of Heaven by Terrence Malick. This film became my touchstone all through my college career because it was essentially a modern silent film (1978) with a voiceover soundtrack and very inventive cinematography. When I asked Bruce Kawin about Stan Brakhage’s classes he was dismissive, saying that Brakhage’s silent film class included any film that was silent i.e. avant garde films, and that he didn’t stick to the Hollywood canon but went off in left field.
At this moment the Denver Center Cinema entered my life. This institution was a high art theater housed with the symphony and ballet in Denver. The founder, Adam Reily, programmed everything under the sun but especially loved silent Hollywood. The list of films I saw here, many in 35mm, is vast: A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 457, The Last Picture Show, and Children of Paradise to name a few. The only thing lacking was the avant-garde cinema. For silent cinema the DCC hired a pianist named Hank Troy who I also worked with at the later Denver Art Museum Cinema in the 1990s. Troy, who did the soundtrack for our short film
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Love’s Choice could improvise chords and melodies on the piano over all sorts of films – melodramas, war films, comedy and romance genres. When I left Denver in 1998 Troy was still working, but Adam Reilly had died of AIDS and the city used his death as a pretext to shut the DCC down and give the theater to the Denver Ballet in 1987.
Later in my college days we began to study synch-sound filmmaking with larger 16mm cameras and some very expensive quarter inch tape decks. I did not like this kind of the filmmaking as much because the larger amount of equipment took away the spontaneity of the handheld, or small tripod stabilized, camera. There was also the sense that this was “Hollywood” style filming and some students began to separate themselves from the rest as “the professionals.” The whole Hollywood mentality seeped into the film school as soon as we started shooting synch-sound dialogue and everyone was working on scripts and screenplays. What was lost was any idea that film could transcend theater or novels and aspire towards music, sculpture or painting. All the student films quickly began to resemble a sort of “resume” for those hoping to break into the film business. Even filmmakers who had been very creative with just the silent camera and music became conventional and stilted once synch sound was an option.
Alcohol entered my life again in a big way when I accepted a job working a Salmon cannery in Petersburg Alaska in the Summer of 1991. Initially the employees would do factory work for 16 hours a day and then the we would hit the Harbour bar for about 2 hours of drinking beer. After a while of this, it seemed important to be able to get drunk faster and thus to get home sooner to catch up on sleep. Hard liquor was the solution this this and I developed a taste for Bushmills Irish Whiskey, 20-30 dollars a bottle and high quality. My friend Terry and I would only drink Bushmills, not because either of us were Irish (I was Norwegian and he was French-descended) but as an affectation and to prove that we were “above” drinking low-cost common whiskey like Jack Daniels which we discounted as “sludge.” It helped that we were working about 60 hours of overtime a week canning salmon and so had plenty of money to throw around. Drinking whiskey also became associated with reading fine literature – some friends from the cannery would hike out into the Alaskan Muskeg where there were hikers’ cabins and we would read aloud from our favorite books like The Great Gatsby while drinking whiskey out of paper cups and nursing hangovers in the morning. So what began there in Alaska was an association of high art with alcohol use that would grow to plague me in my 40s and 50s especially.
I have since learned that creativity, in its proper sense, has to be approached in sobriety both in art and in family. When raising kids the ultimate reward that that they want to create families of their own. If that happens, then you did well as a parent.
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