HOMECOMING was shot in May, 2004, in a process
of improvisation developed from a basic and clear concept, but without
a linear plot or a conclusion known at the start of shooting. The actors
were active participants in the development of their characters and
of the ultimate “story.” Shooting and sound recording were
done by the director, in what was essentially a one-person crew. The
film was edited simultaneously, with the cast looking a quickly edited
versions of the scenes shot, usually on the same day of shooting. This
was used as a feed-back loop towards developing thecharacters.
Technically the film was shot on a SONY PDX10PAL digital video camera, which has a built in 16 x 9 imaging chip. It was edited on Premiere Pro software, and Cool Edit and Sound Forge 7 sound processing software.
HOMECOMING was made only through the graces of the cooperation of various persons and organizations in Newport, and through the generous sacrifices of the actors, who, with the exception of Keith Scales, were not paid. Its motivation was not “business” but a moral and ethical sense that the circumstances of America today demands a meaningful discourse about what our country is doing, and how it impacts not only those policy victims far away, but at also at home.
Director’s comments:
In 2002 I returned to the USA, following a decade away, for a tour, as I wished to see for myself if the reports in the press and elsewhere which seemed to me suggestive of a sad and negative turn were indeed accurate. My trip took me through a wide swath of America, covering both coasts as well as the South West, Texas and the mid-west. I had to conclude that indeed, in the decade away, America had changed in manners both typical - America traditionally has been a rather conservative and conformist culture, despite the rhetorical bravado to the contrary - and seemingly new. Arriving in a flag-littered post 9/11 landscape, where a strident and familiar “patriotism” was in full bloom, one sensed beneath a gnawing insecurity and perhaps a kind of fear - though not one provoked by bin Laden, but something deeper. The landscape was full of sprawling WalMarts, crammed with cheap Chinese goods, the highways with SUVs, which seemingly were both a fashion and a necessitiy: the size of many Americans required such a vehicle. From coast to coast it seemed to my freshened eyes awash with money, cleaner, richer, and yet somehow less happy. The Iraq war was yet to begin. Following a trip in India and some work in Europe, I returned and settled in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, Port Hadlock, across Puget Sound from Seattle, to stay and research. HOMECOMING is the result.
Confronted with a nation which seemed only to know how to shriek at itself, whether from the right-wing “talk” shows of TV and radio, or from the leftist agit-prop of Michael Moore, I felt that to attempt to compete with this would itself be a kind of submission to the crudities and simple-minded rules of such a game. Whether America is capable of it or not, it needs to conduct a searching and quiet self-examination, which does not flee from unhappy and difficult truths about itself, nor succumb to numbingly simple-minded conclusions about complex matters.
HOMECOMING was an attempt to address these things, from within, speaking in a language which is indirect, poetic, refractive. I accept that this in effect disqualifies it by the mantras of the market, where the only and singular “value” is maximum financial profit to the disregard of all else. I am fully aware that in the present American context such an approach is tantamount to a kind of unintended self-censorship: such a work will, in all probability, not find distribution or “a market” precisely because it declines the requisite attitude, form and structure, and, inherently, content. There is no place in the present American cultural landscape for such a work, at least not within the institutionalized structures of business, and their off-shoots in the “cultural” world - theaters, cinemas, museums, universities, etc. The only place for such work is extra-institutional, in the myriad niches opened by the internet, in the subversive network which exists parallel to and within the structured system of the film and media industry, to which it is parasitic but in opposition. HOMECOMING has no “stars,” it has no glossy “production values” and naturally it has no PR budget, no posters, or all the other paraphernalia of a “real” movie. It has, hopefully, something else which cannot be bought for millions, just as it cannot be sold for millions.
America is presently deep within a trough of profound corruption. It is a corruption which transparently shows itself in the worlds of politics and “business”, in the vast lying machines of electoral campaigning, in the shuffling of accounting books in the offices of huge corporations, in the vast flush of money which is fraudulently gained and spent each day. It is equally transparent in the debasement of all its culture in which fame in and of itself is valued by a large portion of an ill-educated youth, addled by the junk culture of television, pop music, junk food, all pumped out by a business elite under the holy rubric of the Market Economy, presided over by a President who unctuously and loudly proclaims his Born Again “Christianity” while authorizing torture and state murder as policy, while gutting social programs for the weak and rewarding the most wealthy with tax breaks and industry subsidies, who appoints blatantly corrupted figures to the highest offices of the land, and yet speaks to his “base” of the fundamentalist Right of “family values” and “morality.”
It is all, alas, as American as apple pie: the born con-man selling snake oil is as familiar an America archetype as is Johnny Appleseed. For such a figure to find success, however, requires a ready and willing audience, and the broad American public is clearly ready and willing to buy whatever elixir is promised - whether it is a quick and tidy high-tech war to spread “freedom and democracy” to far off “evil” realms, or it is the thrill of instant fame on Big Brother, or it is consent that indeed a CEO or a Hollywood star, under the iron logic of the Market Economy Religion, should obtain 20 or 30 or 50 million dollars in payment for a year’s labor.
America is corrupt: morally, politically, culturally. The corruption pervades the entire system, from those who deal in finances to those who deal in arts; from those who sell to those who buy. Any honest look shows that these are intertwined in the most intimate of ways.
Welcome home.
