To Nederland and Lump Gulch: A Sort of Pilgrimage with Jane Wodening

For those readers not familiar with Jane Wodening, she is perhaps one of the most gifted and unique writers working today. Her recent books include Driveabout, Brakhage's Childhood, and Wolf Dictionary. Jane was married to Stan Brakhage from 1957-87, and is both collaborator on, and subject of, many Brakhage films, notably, Window Water Baby Moving, Hymn To Her, The Stars Are Beautiful, and others. 

I finally got a chance to spend some time with Jane last Fall.

November 19, 2017, Sunday
I picked up Jane early; we needed about an hour (from Denver) to get up to the Blue Owl Book Store & Coffee Shop in Nederland where Jane is to sign copies of her books from 11:00 to 1:30. Jane brings mandarins, nut bars, sparkling water and some extra copies of LIVING UP THERE, and a few others. Janette, Jane's publisher, has helped organize the Nederland Books & Coffee Festival in which a number of local authors have been invited to sign books at The Blue Owl and other locations around town. I've already torn through BRAKHAGE'S CHILDHOOD with zeal, and am now half-way through the excellent DRIVEABOUT which Jane so graciously gave me last week. I'm very much in Jane-space right now.

Oddly, I don't believe I've ever been to Nederland, even though I lived in Boulder for several years. Perhaps I passed through there as a kid on one of those many family outings to the mountains, but I don't remember it. I am struck by the town's timeless feel--it is amazingly untouched by chain-store blight. As Jane's cousin Betsy (from Jane's father's side of the family) later explained to me, the citizens have fought hard to keep it that way. We arrive early in Nederland, and Jane treats me to quiche and coffee.

Upon arriving in Nederland, I had already noticed myself experiencing a deja-vu-like sensation. Something about a certain row of 100 year-old buildings...I feel I've seen them before. I realize fairly soon that I'm recognizing the locale from one (or more) Brakhage films, including, perhaps, the amazing TRIP TO DOOR (1973) which Suranjan Ganguly showed at the Celebrating Brakhage screening at CU this month. This little-known film also happens to be one of the most straightforward, documentary-like film portraits of Jane during those years. There are lengthy shots of Jane driving a massive old truck; passing through the forest; parking in town and jumping out to run errands at several shops.

The book signing goes well and Jane seems happy to have been surrounded by friends, and I think she sold quite a few books. The Blue Owl has kept me in tea and empanadas for these two hours and I've gone out to the car and loaded the Beaulieu with some Kodak Vision 50D. Jane and I talked about visiting the cabins earlier--the road to the cabin at 10,000 ft (from LIVING UP THERE) is not passable according to the locals, but Jane says we can surely make it up to the cabin that was home to the Brakhages for 23 years.

Now: Jane on the Carousel (2017) (16mm frames)

But first, Jane is on a mission: To ride "The Carousel of Happiness" just across the street. A Nederland landmark, originally built in 1910 (moved to Ned in 2010), with hand-carved animals and a Wurlitzer Player Organ. It's a dollar to ride, and she approaches it with the excitement of a school girl. I position myself just ahead of her on the double-swan seat as she excitedly chooses the moose with large antlers. The rest of the roll of 16mm goes by quickly here, and I'm hoping I've captured something of the pure joy that was emanating from her face.

Then: Jane in Window Water Baby Moving (1958)

From Nederland, it takes about a half hour to get to the cabin, through Rollinsville and up several muddy, slushy dirt roads in the area known as Lump Gulch, Gilpin County, CO. Upon turning into the rutted driveway to the cabin I notice it has a street sign: Mountain Joy Lane (according to Jane, at first they had only a Rural Route number, and by the time they left, the county had put up a sign calling it Brakhage Road--but now it's something else again, and that fact seems to inform the journey). I worry though that we are intruding on the new owners, and will be driven off. 

The Brakhage Home from 1964-1987

But my fears are for naught--Jane had been here about 5 years ago, and the current owner comes out to greet us, recognizing Jane immediately. She even invites us in to chat. She's a quilter with an amazingly large loom occupying the length of what once was the bedroom. Until we were invited in, the whole thing felt somewhat different than what I'd remembered in the films--a little like a half-finished facsimile of a Place I'd built in my mind. Things were moved around. The whole building not quite oriented in the proper direction. But I absolutely recognized the view out the former bedroom (now workshop) window as 'correct' and began to feel more at ease.

About 30 years ago, a year after Stan and Jane divorced, the cabin was sold. Several owners have come and gone, and the current owners have been here since 2008. There have been quite a few minor structural changes, I learn (front steps enlarged and front door moved; front/bedroom window enlarged significantly). It was even under foreclosure for several years, and had become overrun with wild animals. The owner kindly gives us permission to explore the surrounding property as we please and I am excited: I'm about to go load the Beaulieu with another roll but I can't get myself to do it. What would such footage be to me? A trophy? I can't quite see what I would possibly do with it, and this is no longer the Brakhage House. After all, I'm not documenting the past, and I don't want to shoot Jane here--though she is clearly through any bitterness about the divorce, shooting here would seem to be a back-step away from my hope of capturing her honestly, as herself, now. (But a few phone-pix won't hurt in this case--I'll just 'document' for the sake of souvenir, but not art.)

Jane shows me where the wishing well used to be, and we climb the rock pile as Jane calls it (really it's an extensive granite formation rising about 20-30 feet from the ground behind the house). OK. Now I feel like a real sissy as Jane insists on going up ahead of me over the slick snow covered rocks--she's more nimble than I, and at several decades my senior! Even so, I'm scared she'll fall and I offer help, but she doesn't want it. Once at the top, we admire the spectacular view. Jane jokes that the rock pile seems to have gotten steeper in 30 years--the only part of the Rockies to have become higher, while the rest erodes!

Back in the car, we stop at the bottom of Mountain Joy road, among the now-bare aspen grove I've so often seen in the films. We eat a peanut bar and a couple mandarin oranges and decide to take the back way through Blackhawk and into Golden. After a few minutes on the road, we pass a large, modern Gilpin Co. Library building and Jane recalls volunteering there when it was only a one room cabin--she also recounts how instrumental her efforts were to its survival. Later, as we approach Blackhawk, we muse on the subjects of bottomless lakes connected by volcanic tubes and our shared desire to live in geologic time instead of the hurried human sense of time (Jane is working on a new book called A Biography of the Earth.) We talk about the discovery of photons in the brain and most importantly, the need to find one's true fate.

The clouds clear just enough so a last bright slit of daylight follows us all the way back to Denver. And after saying our goodbyes I head home under the most spectacular, mother-ship-like formation of reddening clouds stretching across the front range.

********

Jane Wodening's latest book, Driveabout, chronicles the period shortly after the breakup of her marriage to Stan.

  Taken largely from her journals, this is Jane's journey through identity crisis and into self-realization. 

  Finding herself alone--with all the children grown up, and many of her contacts in the art world missing-in-action--Jane decides to wander the backroads of the Western (and later, Eastern) United States. 
  Living primarily out of her car, Jane meets many interesting characters, both human and animal, and her epic quest takes shape. Jane's spiritual understanding of nature is primal. The deft, observational interweaving of her internal and external journeys gives me hope for the human race. (TW)

Reprint of AMIA piece

This article was first published in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Spring 2012 issue. Though I am currently shooting color negative (due to the demise of Ektachrome in 2013) Film Ferrania is on track to manufacture a new color reversal film stock within the next year.

AT THIS MOMENT

I’m a committed color reversal filmmaker. I started shooting Super 8mm when I was twelve. At twenty, I discovered 16mm Kodachrome. Sometime later, I made a private commitment to explore the film medium until the end of my time here on earth.

Owning the simple, quality tools of amateur moviemaking (wind‐up camera, non-scratching projector, hot splicer, etc.) is easier today than when I started. They’re unobtrusive fixtures in my life and were built to last. Their effect on the psyche is far-reaching, however. The need to make films frequently springs to life in a reverie of hedonism, so much that even food or sex can’t compete. Projecting a color reversal original induces a superb high or, if you’re lucky, hallucinations.

I relish the anxiety of waiting for the film to come back from the lab and still get butterflies when I thread up a new roll. I can’t explain what kind of films I make. I’m an amateur with a day job. My films are public displays of affection.

Nearly ninety years after the advent of 16mm, I am aware how strange this lifestyle may seem. There are other mediums better suited to graphic imagery, but the sensual qualities of color reversal are what free my imagination. The definition of boring is trying to capture how the world really looks; capturing how it feels from an ecstatic state is profoundly interesting.

The ability to shoot, project, and edit from the same roll is a marvel of portability and economy. To work with color reversal is to sculpt elements forged in the explosions of distant stars at bargain‐basement prices. In skilled hands, color reversal film doesn’t have to resort to trickery. One of its gifts is a gritty, but otherworldly, perspective.

Yet I have doubts about cinema and myself. Is it wrong to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of beauty while there is so much ugliness and injustice in the world? Using film today is a willful partnership with uncertainty. It’s a corporeal dance with death but without the glamour. And I do understand the appeal of digital technology. Being a simulation of the corporeal, it affords some protection from doubt and a hint of immortality.

Making a print is the beginning of a more grown‐up effort, as my role shifts from pleasure seeker to preservationist. I do it because I’d like to share my work with a wider public. Someday I may project only my originals, accepting that they may be quickly destroyed. For now I accept the less‐than‐perfect materials we’ve been given.

Kodak’s Color Internegative II film (32/7272) is a high‐resolution print stock designed for low‐contrast color reversal originals. Yet a large majority of 16mm films have been made on projection contrast original, particularly those of interest to archives. In my work, every shot should be timed for maintenance—no change in color balance, no density correction, no scene matching. For this reason, I have learned to time my originals by eye, at least as a way of communicating my desires to the lab’s timer.

My sainted lab graciously humors me with a special internegative treatment: the lightest post-flashing combined with a 1.5 stop pull process. This is one bit of trickery that works and will greatly expand the limits of shadow detail, without compromising density. Shadows are the hinterlands where a large part of the magic of reversal occurs. Nathaniel Dorsky takes it even further. For him, a print can never be more than a facsimile. His reversal‐based films are edited to the qualities of the facsimile, not the original. He makes an internegative of many times more footage than the finished film and chooses only those shots that “translate” for the final cut.

A movie camera and body working in tandem can channel the subconscious. One could not set out to invent this rarified system on purpose. Its very lack of sophistication demands that you mean what you shoot and shoot what you mean. This is a form that exists at this particular moment, on this particular planet, due to an impossible confluence of factors.

Like many, I mourned the death of Kodachrome. My Bolex and I became one with it over the years. I almost never used my light meter with it. Kodachrome was the standard by which other films were judged. Its colors were forged in molten steel, and its blacks were more alive with shape and dimension than any 3‐D production.

Kodak then gave us Ektachrome 100D (7285)—a modern, “T‐Grain” emulsion. It is a happy film stock at first, and I’ve had to struggle to pull up the stakes of Kodachrome’s moodiness. But the initial amusement‐park rendition is not superficial; there’s a youthful wisdom there, in contrast to the stoicism of Kodachrome. I’ve learned to coax 7285’s subtleties to the fore. And I believe, as Stan Brakhage once told me, they are my subtleties—particularities of color that belong to no one else. This is one of them most profound mysteries of film, and it cuts across all genres: how so many people can use similar materials yet come up with such an infinitely shifting palate of possibilities. I guess that would be the definition of art.

I believe that as filmmakers, audiences, and preservationists, it is always in our interest to vocalize those ideas that might get us branded as “artsy,” “impractical,” and “crazy.” In years to come, these ideas will be more important. I hope it won’t be too late. I’m heartened to see a few younger people discovering the sensual delights of vinyl records, black‐and‐white photography, and filmmaking after having known only a simulated reality. After all, a life without a little hedonism is hardly worth living.