Condensed Movie #1

During my stint as an entry-level acquisitions scout at a now-defunct art house distribution company, I amassed a small collection of VHS tapes from a vast pool of unsolicited submissions. By the standards of the art house canon, these were very bad movies, but I adored them for the sincerity of their intention. Bits and pieces of these movies became source material for a number of the videos on this compilation (Teenagers, Hymn Of Reckoning, Fantasy Suite). My favorite of these tapes by far was Silverwings, an ambitious Des Moines, Iowa production about a pilot transported by lighting storm to a medieval fantasy world in need of rescue from an evil overlord (a plot remarkably similar to that of the subsequent Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight).

I wanted to somehow share Silverwings with the experimental film/video festival community that had embraced Ken Burns Give You Something, and I didn’t want to simply assemble a comedic highlights reel. I wanted to show every scene, shot and character, in sequence. I was advised to trim its 123-minute duration to a more programmer-friendly 10 minutes, and recording the movie in fast-forward mode resulted in a piece much longer than that. Ultimately, I edited out almost every instance of dialogue, focusing instead on the often protracted pauses between lines, and on the faces and facial expressions that would never make a Hollywood cut.

This video is also availiable on Kent Lambert Videoworks: Volume 1