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December 08, 2005
Even cocks started small: Sundance's Aluminum Fowl
Jim Ridley in Nashville Scene profiles Sundance short Aluminum Fowl: "Sundance shorts programmer Roberta Munroe hails the film as “an unflinching look at what it means to be poor and unemployed.” At times, [it] resembles one of the first Sundance award winners, Charles Burnett’s 1977 film Killer of Sheep, a study of a Watts homeowner struggling to support his family by working in a slaughterhouse... “It took 2 years to make a 22-minute film,” [director James] Clauer says, laughing. The genesis involved filmmaker Harmony Korine, Clauer’s longtime friend and fellow Nashvillian, with whom he’d worked on Korine’s locally filmed... Gummo. Korine had formed a production company, O’Salvation, with French fashion designer and film producer Agnès B. ... [Clauer] and Korine were at the now-closed strip club Showtime when they ran into a friend from junior high [who worked] shuttling cocks between Kentucky and Louisiana. The idea stuck. When Clauer went down to Louisiana to visit, he was drawn to his friend’s neighbors, four kids between the ages of 15 and 18, who spent their time raising cocks, obsessing over aliens and manufacturing homemade bling out of tinfoil." Ridley describes the process of accumulating 80 hours of footage in his piece. "They ended up with a 22-minute cut, capped by a poetic voiceover Clauer adapted from conversations with the four brothers... Though impressed, the Sundance shorts programmers suggested that Clauer make the film even shorter. “It was horrible to decide what to cut... But in the long run, it makes you understand your material better.” He says he’s “really happy” with the new version, nine minutes shorter, although the longer cut was accepted into Rotterdam." Ridley has details on the work of other emerging Nashville filmmakers as well. “It’s a portrait, but I wasn’t trying to do a political or sociological portrait,” Clauer says. “It was more like, ‘Damn, that’s the way it is.’”
Posted by pride at December 8, 2005 03:00 PM
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