The video below is a six-hour documentary I made several years ago about the cultural landscape of Utah. I have written something here about what it is like to make a very long and idiosyncratic film about a broad (and admittedly strange) topic. If you are interested in reading about that process, be my guest. If not, I think the film (though I promise it takes a little patience) should, in an unraveling sort of way, be able to speak for itself, and you should just scroll down and watch it!
You will see that the film is broken into three sections. This is because I originally liked the idea of screening it all at once with two intermissions, but I hope you’ll feel free to view it on your own schedule.
Passwords?
Please note that the passwords to view these videos are listed below. I have done this because, at this point, I want people to access this film through specific sites. I am NOT trying to limit who sees the videos, but only how they see them. Please share this page with anyone!
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Around 2005, I began shooting interviews and collecting footage for a project that would become a millstone around my neck up until (and probably beyond) the day that I write this. I “finished” the film in 2014 and showed it a few times. I submitted it to a number of film festivals, but…. the film was (and still is) about 6 hours long.
Now, as you may imagine, a festival programmer is rarely willing to give away the screen time of three or four feature films to just one person they have barely/never heard of, even if they love his film. Now imagine asking them to give this kind of time to a film about “Utah Culture”. Obviously, I did not get this film into any festivals.
Some colleagues suggested I re-edit the film into a series. I did re-edit the film a few times, but I rejected the idea of breaking it into episodes outright. I said I didn’t care if people watched it in chunks, but I thought that creating intros, outros, mini climaxes, and recaps would completely disrupt the film because “Glorious Things of Zion,” I said, “requires a certain stream-of-consciousness-based editing strategy”. …or something like that.
About six months after the 2014 edit of this film was completed, I went from a full-time job as a film professor, to the hell of being an adjunct professor. Ask any adjunct, and you’ll often find that colleges pay them so little that they are often just as busy looking for extra work as they are making and exhibiting any art. (this is a travesty that I don’t have time to write about here, but It’s absolutely the biggest problem in higher education today. It’s bad for students, bad for faculty, and it’s totally unnecessary.) With this change in my life, most of my projects fell on the back burner and stayed there for years.
I am now in a position to at least think about production and distribution again, but I have mostly disavowed the gatekeepers. I don’t have time to promote work via festivals, exhibitions, press-releases, and all the other non-art-making activities that we filmmakers and studio artists get trapped in. I felt it would be fitting to make this difficult and demanding film the first major thing I post on this new Substack. I hope you’ll give it some time. Watch it all at once, or watch it ten minutes at a time… I don’t care. But if you like it, let me know!
THANKS
Tyrone Davies
-part 1:
password: OSZIONPT1pass
-part 2:
password: OSZIONPT2pass
-part 3:
password: OSZIONPT3pass
password: OSZIONPT3pass
hypnotic