Creative Capital

Braden King speaks of filmmaking passionately, as “the way I want to lead my life.” For him, the projected image holds the promise of growth and discovery. On top of that, however, he intends to change the average movie going experience, which he describes as “You go to a movie, you sit down, you watch. For the viewer, the film doesn’t change.” With his 1998 film, Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, King indeed created a different kind of cinematic experience. An austere, black-and-white portrait of an Alaskan port town made with photographer Laura Moya—whose experience in Alaska formed the film’s basis—_Dutch Harbor_ reflected King’s fascination with landscapes. But it was the film’s nontraditional screenings that proved to be an eye-opener.

The film toured internationally with live, improvised musical accompaniment by the Boxhead Ensemble, a shifting group led by composer and musician Michael Krassner. Scoring sessions, which involved the Boxhead Ensemble crafting the film’s original soundtrack experimentally while watching outtakes and film stills, spawned an alternate screening life for Dutch Harbor. The original compositions became starting points for an improvised live score that varied at each screening, affected by venue (e.g. movie theater or rock club), audience reactions, and the musicians’ moods at that moment. Sound and image shifted continually; each screening turned out to be a completely different experience for filmmaker, audience and musician alike.

For King’s Creative Capital project, Here, the landscape shifts to Armenia. Co-scripted with Australian writer Dani Valent, Here tells the fictional story of a present-day American cartographer who is traveling and working in Armenia, creating a new satellite survey of the country. The film features a series of what King calls “cinema-maps,” brief interludes about fictional explorers who map the world in fantastic and mythical ways. To be shot by a currently undetermined group of experimental filmmakers, these “Explorer Story” sequences will flow seamlessly in and out of the main narrative. Once again, King will work closely with Boxhead Ensemble’s Krassner. As with the idiosyncratic sessions for Dutch Harbor, they’ll be “exploring unique locations for the actual recordings. I imagine Michael will be traveling to Armenia at some point.”

The script for Here was selected for the “No Borders” section of the Independent Feature Project Market in fall 2005; once all the funding is in place, King hopes to start shooting by mid-2007.

Growing up just outside Chicago, King knew in high school that he wanted to be a filmmaker; he would drive into the city to see as many films as he could, from Stan Brakhage’s experimental work to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. There have been other influences, such as the poet E. E. Cummings, painter Anselm Kiefer, and especially music—“so much music”—from John Cage to Sonic Youth. In 1994, he worked for the Chicago Film Festival, where he met Moya. Over the course of three weeks, the two fleshed out the idea for Dutch Harbor; four years later, the transition from dreamer to doer was complete.

King’s attraction to film lays not so much in the product but in the process. What does he hope to achieve through it? He thinks for a moment before replying, “I’m not necessarily so interested in creating a ‘great film’ in the traditional sense. What interests me more is creating a new kind of film that contains more powerful, visceral and engaging cinematic experiences.”