Historical Story

Click this link to view screenplay: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxcufOFiIwAvVDVwaTFvQ2FnXzg/view?usp=sharing

Combined Artists' Statement:

Tom: When Trevor pitched his story about how his ancestors ran out the settlers of the neighboring homestead, I was immediately jealous of his family history, or rather, I was jealous of such a crazy story.  It inspired me to search through my family history to find something equally kooky that would contribute to the story.  I did not find anything close to running out neighbors with guns, but it surprised me how similar were some of the stories that I found.  In the book “An Aspen Creek Homestead,” my cousin Dale J Hartvigsen writes of a neighborly feud over water.  Most of the people in the valley had to get water from Aspen Creek.  The only problem was that it was contaminated.  If you did not purify the water first you would get Typhoid Fever.  However, there was a fresh spring on a neighbor's land.  So what did my ancestors do?  They piped into the spring without the neighbor’s permission, which eventually forced him to sell the land.  Fights over water were a real issue in the 19th century.  In our story, it serves as the basic motivation for the Germans to chase out their neighbors.

Trevor: Looking back at my family history after having pitched the story, I found that I’d completely exaggerated the events. One ancestor, Walter Smail from Pennsylvania (not a German) and some sharpshooter friends fended off claim jumpers after staking their claims. I heard the story as a seven year old and in the time that passed it grew into something stranger. The detail that stuck with me is only two sentences long: “Another man had staked his claim on the opposite corner to Bill’s 160. He set up a white tent planning on staying, but Bill and Walter shot it full of holes during the late evening and the next morning he had pulled out.” It’s a smaller and less terrifying conflict than my childhood memory of the story became, but there is truth to strangeness of the violence that my little mind honed in on. Remembering this way turned it into mythological truth, formed through the weird old tradition of oral storytelling. The story we wrote is heavily fictionalized, and that reflects the memory distortion and modern perceptions of a far removed time period.

How we wrote is in contrast to New Orleans after the Deluge which is journalistic in process and purpose. It looks at people, draws their faces and transcribes their voices, to bring awareness to the realities of their experience. Ours is a tall tale and a ghost story, exaggerated to reflect the weird distance of time and memory as well as the weirdness of a time when people shoot at each other to take what they want. Ours is also a critique of the attitudes of a time where actions like that are acceptable, and of how cool a younger version of me thought the violence was.

Tom: To finish our screenplay, we drew upon another story from our ancestry.  In the same book before mentioned, Dale Hartvigsen writes about a time when JF Hartvigsen met a naked Indian on horseback by his homestead.  The Indian was hunting for food while JF was tilling the land.   The contrast between settler and nomad was very interesting to us.  Here are our ancestors trying to “own” the land, even fighting over it, when in reality it had always belonged to the Indians.  In our story, after all of the settlers have killed each other for land ownership, the Indian kicks the cabin and it falls to the ground.

Tom Hartvigsen

Trevor Bush

Audio Process Piece

If video does not work, click here to listen to our process piece

Artists' Statement

When the project to create an audio documentary was announced our minds grew wild at the fascinating possibilities.  We fancied that we could record a process that sounded like something else and then surprise the listener at the end by revealing what they were actually hearing.  For example, the listener would hear someone being murdered, but in the end realize that it was a very ordinary task such as tying a shoe.   However, we soon found that this would be a lot harder to do than we thought.  The end product turned out much different than what we had originally intended.  Yet we still created something that is interesting and gained much through the process.  

Going with the whole murder idea, we thought that ice hockey would be a good source to generate the sounds of death: blades could sound like knives; laces being snapped together could sound as if someone was tying up a victim.  However, once we actually retrieved the sounds, we found that they were not very analogous to homicide.  We had to come up with a new approach and decided that we would just focus on hockey.

As a result we have an observational style audio process of a man preparing for a Hockey match.  We say observational because like observational cinema, there are no interviews.  We only hear sounds.  Yet it can also be classified as performative as the sounds were created to represent a process that did not actually transpire as we recorded it.  With this style, it is as though the listener is the athlete himself.  At first he has a nervous focus.  The only thing he can hear is the sound of lacing up his skates or walking out of the locker room.  It is similar to the movie Rocky the night before the fight.  Rocky walks through the arena and the only thing that the viewer can hear is his footsteps.   In both pieces, the sound reflects the athlete’s state of mind.  As our hockey player makes it to the rink, he begins to hear the crowd and the adrenaline kicks in.  Finally, the music stops and the athlete is immersed in an intense focus.

Of course, this is what we hope to convey to the listener but we are aware that he may interpret it differently.  Using roommates as a test audience we asked what they thought of when listening to the piece.  The hockey game was pretty obvious but the sound of lacing up ice skates at the beginning did not click with them.  They thought it was someone dragging something through snow.  One person even thought of a crime scene.  With this ambiguity of the piece, we can say that we touched upon our original intent.  However, we were far from communicating either vision.  As we learned from Ira Glass, we had good taste but our end product was not as good as our ambitions.  It’s a work in process.

- Tom Hartvigsen

  Juan Rodriguez