Short Sighted

From the Ground Up: Steve Bognar's Gravel

Words: Holly Willis

Landscape photography is a known entity, with a prestigious history, list of iconic artists and accepted visual language. Landscape movies, however, are a lesser-known, relatively uncodified thing, despite the fact that the history of cinema is rich with examples of films that nestle into the land and tell their stories literally from the ground up. Filmmakers as diverse as James Benning, Tony Buba and relative newcomer Bill Brown belong to the tradition. Filmmaker Steve Bognar and his new short film Gravel fit in to this nascent group, too, thanks to the quiet association of character and space.

"I keep a catalog of places I want to make a movie about someday," says the 40-year-old Bognar, who lives in Dayton, Ohio, where he shot the film over the course of nine days in August three years ago as a creative break from a long-term documentary project. "The city in Gravel isn't meant to be Cincinnati or Dayton, but more a hybrid of postindustrial towns where the industrial muscle has sort of gone, but the ghosts of that remain. The people hang on, and this is their world. It's a world of past glory."

Bognar captures that sense of wide-open urban desolation in the initial shots of the film, when two teenagers make their way through the streets. The soft glow of afternoon light softens what could be an alienating background, and indeed, the film slowly unfolds to reveal delicate nuances of heartbreak and affection as a mother and teenaged daughter battle to assert themselves and yet still be paired. It's a thrillingly tenuous balance, and Bognar finds it -- and holds it -- throughout the film's 15 minutes.

"Part of the challenge of making the film was to minimize the amount of narrative we were handing people, to try to de-emphasize the need to constantly give information, and just to let this story float by," says Bognar. "Hopefully the viewer gathers scraps of story as it goes, but the film isn't paced with that sense of relentlessness that so many movies have these days. The risk, of course, is that people won't get it all, but that's the risk we were willing take."

Bognar explains the part of the impetus of the story was watching his partner, filmmaker Julia Reichert, navigate the seas of adolescence with her own teenager. "Parent/child relationships are very complex," he says laughing, "and having observed all the negotiations -- the desire to be supportive and yet wanting to say nasty things....How you walk that line is amazing! And when things erupt, I was struck ultimately by how funny they can be in a painful kind of way."

Bognar's observations have paid off as the film perfectly captures the sense of utter frustration felt by teens, and the often dubious and certainly ill-fated desire to be accepted expressed by parents. The fact that this relationship is the film's subtext, too, says something about Bognar's storytelling skills.

Bognar says the film is a mix of video, film, miniDV and beta SP. The DV helped with performances from his relatively untrained younger cast members, while film helped capture the landscapes seen as the characters drive through the countryside. The film also opens with a beautiful animated sequence made to evoke the memory of a death experienced by the mother and daughter. "We wanted to foreground this memory, and to evoke visually the crumbling and decay that envelope memory," explains Bognar. "The best visual corollary we found are Polaroid transfers." According to the filmmaker, a Polaroid transfer "is a partially developed Polaroid, split in half, emulsion still burning, slapped down on steaming watercolor paper, rubbed and peeled off." He says they're like dime store decals and the tattoos inside Cracker Jack boxes, when the promised image never peels off perfectly. "But that's the point: memory is imperfect. It has splotches and faded edges."

You can read exactly how Bognar achieved his stunning opening in the How-To section of the current issue of RES, now available on newsstands. And look for Bognar's film to air soon on the Sundance Channel.