Last summer - while I was still in the middle of editing a feature documentary - I snuck in (to what little spare time I had) editing
Kyle Henry's short film
"The Half Life of War." Inspired by the memory of his father who was a war veteran, "The Half Life of War" is a 6 minute meditative piece that asks the viewer to consider how we memorialize war. It also illuminates how ubiquitous, yet obscure war monuments seem in our day-to-day lives.
Kyle and I would meet in the evenings after each of us spent our respective days editing other projects. He shot the footage on and off for nearly a year, capturing a variety of monuments spanning cities and seasons.
An experimental doc was a new challenge for me - no script, no dialogue, no story in the classical sense to guide me. This movie was to be more about evoking a mood, a feeling, a conversation with the viewer. It would largely be driven by rhythm and juxtaposition. Kyle himself wasn't even quite sure what direction we might take. The footage could be combined and re-combined any number of ways. The sound editing could be realistic - perhaps all diegetic/environmental - or it could be surreal, or possibly more documentary in nature as when we discussed editing interviews with war vets under the images.
Kyle gave me some guiding principles: First, let's find a progression that we like (could be exploring the monuments by season, from day to night, urban to rural, rural to urban, etc.). Second, let's begin on a note of mystery and draw the viewer in to our themes.
I think one of the reasons Kyle likes working with me is that I sometimes try to deliver two or three different versions of an idea early in the editing process. It gives him a something to react to and he can compare each version against each other. It helps him communicate as much what doesn't work for him as what does. No matter how rough or half-baked, he always tells me, "The first pass is about getting a dialogue started between director and editor." That's one of the reasons I love working with Kyle: he creates a safe space for me to experiment. Plus, since he's also an editor, he is able to try some things out too and is very clear with his directions.
Initially, we let our shots play long. This way we would feel the stillness and discover the cut points rather than, say, create the cut points. Every little tweak we made, we would watch from several shots back in order to get into the movie's rhythm each time we needed to evaluate a cut. So, you might have made a cut a minute and ten seconds in, but you're going to play back starting at the thirty second mark in order to evaluate it. Sometimes, no matter how deep our adjustments in the movie were, we'd re-watch from the beginning, make a change here, a change there... Then re-watch from the beginning again.
And so it goes when you build a film that is delicate and meditative.
We finished it in less than a month while Kyle finished a residency at Austin-based production company Arts + Labor last summer. It has since screened at the Cinedelphia Film Festival and the Mary + Leigh Block Museum of art, among other venues.
Check out the web site which includes not only the film but also original essays that discuss the film's themes, a director's statement, and
30 second shorts that re-appropriate footage from the film and the cutting room floor. We hope you enjoy the film. Please share it!
Half Life of War Facebook Page
