 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground, I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, experimental documentary filmmaker Nick Nuerburn works on a springboard for the arts project at the Fergus Falls State Hospital. Then listen as documentary filmmaker Christian Berg details his film on Grand Rapids area artist, Gendron Jensen. My name is Nick Nuerburn, and I am a experimental filmmaker and a photographer. I guess I would describe myself as a media artist. A lot of my work is about landscape, history and place. So place is really central to everything that I do and all the subjects that I try to explore with my work. So I've been making films for the past five or six years, pretty seriously, and I've sort of been developing my photographic practice for the past 10 years. They feed into each other in interesting ways. And so a lot of my work has to do with rural places, with Minnesota and Minnesota stories and sort of what you could call forgotten stories. Let's go this way, I think. So, Krister and I are going out to shoot some photos around the state hospital. And even though I've shot a lot of photos and a lot of video of this place, every time you come back, you see something new. I think it's like, I think it's right here. I think this is it. So I made a film about the state hospital here in Fergus Falls, which is called Today I'm Going to Kill Myself, but first I'm Going to Dance, which is a quote from a patient who was institutionalized here. And they would say it every week before a dance therapy class. And they would dance themselves silly, and drench themselves in sweat. And it was the best therapy they would get all week. But every time before this class, they said it. The film is sort of about the legacy of the state hospital in Fergus Falls. And the stories that people tell about the state hospital now. You can't see Chemical Dependency Program written on the awning, right? But in the negative, you might be able to see it. What do you think of that? So we're shooting at F-11 at 1,500. That sounds good to me. The thing about this film is that it's really sensitive. Like if you look through here, you really have to give it credit for like what it can pick up. It's right on the awning right there. The brown awning where it says Chemical Dependency Programs from where the sign used to be. All right, so we're on frame number 10. And then we gotta write it down. Well, because when you go back and look at your shots, you know, a lot of times you'll be like, oh, that was so close. Or maybe the meter said shoot at F-16 at 1, 250th of a second. But you're like trying to do something tricky, you know? And you're like, oh, how about F-5.6 at 1,500th of a second? So you write down like what the meter saw and what you shot at and if you used any filters. And so that way you know what you did when you go back and look at your negative. The process is as much a part of my work as the final product. I mean to me, the making of it is the joy. Once a film is done, you know, getting it out there in the world is its own job. I travel a ton. I kind of have a couple different home bases. Minnesota, Washington State, Georgia. And I sort of launch out from these different places. And I shoot a lot of photos and I talk to a lot of people and I go to a lot of small town museums. And I'm always looking for these stories that are sort of on the underbelly of things. So a lot of my work, I still shoot on film and that has as much to do with the way it looks as the process, the way it makes me shoot and the way it makes me go through the world. And there's an old joke that we tell in Bemidji. It's that if the snow didn't melt one winter and we never thought out, you know, freezing on a little town and everyone in it like a statue that the people who chisel us out a million and one years from now, will go back home and say that they had discovered these ancient people who worshiped someone named Paul Bunyan and bathed the blue ox as gods. One of my films is about the history of Paul Bunyan and the history of the US Dakota War of 1862, which was the largest of all what we call the Indian Wars. And it's one of the reasons that the majority of the Sioux don't live in Minnesota anymore. And it's a really important story to understand Minnesota and how we've gotten to the point that we're at. I'm from Bemidji where Paul Bunyan is kind of a big deal. He's kind of a god. We really love Paul Bunyan in Bemidji and that's fine. But I was sort of interested in trying to understand why we hold up this giant man as so central to our identity. And so to me, the idea was I want to explore the history of how Paul Bunyan became sort of the hero in Minnesota's story that it tells about itself. But at the same time, bringing in another story about Minnesota that maybe isn't quite as resolved and isn't as much fun to talk about and isn't something that we like to say happened. So the idea is to sort of trace these two histories alongside each other. It was the biggest of all the Indian Wars, though it can be hard to tell these days. The war started pretty small right here when the white man who owned this warehouse refused to distribute food that the government owed to the tribes living nearby. There is a horrible famine because animals had become scarce as more white people had moved in. The Dakota people were starving, but this white merchant told them that for all he cared, they could eat grass or their own dung. It was one aggression too many, and he was soon found dead. His mouth stuffed full of grass. Some say that the war ended here at Fort Snelling, where the last remaining Dakota warriors and their families were taken. Down here at the island below Fort Snelling, it used to be a sacred meeting place for the Dakota, and it's also where the army imprisoned them while a riverboat came to ship them to reservations in South Dakota and Oklahoma. 1600 people were held here, and when the riverboats left, the army kept some of the Dakota men behind. These men faced military trial, and 38 of them were hung publicly the day after Christmas in 1862. It was and still is the largest mass execution in US history. And now, if you visit Fort Snelling's great gift shop, you can buy this book of Dakota Sioux caricatures that you're supposed to cut out and put into a diorama. I guess it's a personal film. It's a personal film about coming to terms with where you're from and the good things and the bad things about where you're from. My dad's work has definitely influenced me. My dad is a writer. He writes about Christianity, Native American spiritualities, the gap between native and white ways of understanding the world. And so growing up with him, telling me all these stories about Chief Joseph or about Red Lake and all of these histories of Native America that are so sad and so complex and contradict the dominant narrative of America. You know, I guess I was always raised questioning sort of our founding myths. That's sort of what the Paul Bunyan project was about was questioning this founding myth and trying to show the other side to it. Krister is great. It's great to have an extra set of hands and an extra brain. He's not just a set of hands. I think right in here, it's not that intimidating shooting this stuff. People are always scared of shooting film because it costs money and you don't wanna mess it up and you wanna get it perfect, but digital costs money too. I mean, this camera that I'm shooting on, I think I paid $100 for it. You pay $100 for a digital camera and what do you get? Not very much. And film is like six bucks a roll, costs 12 bucks to develop it. So when you think about buying a $2,500 digital camera, you think about all of the film you can buy with that same money and your negative lasts for decades. You don't have to store it on hard drives. That stuff isn't free. So it's like the price thing. I think people are misinformed about how much shooting film actually costs. I think people are misinformed about how much shooting digital actually costs because it is not cheap to shoot digitally. And this camera was what? Built in the 60s and it still works today. I mean, what digital camera from five years ago can you shoot with now and still produce the top of the line, crisp, gorgeous, complex image that this camera can shoot? So to me, it's like, they're just different. They're good for different things. And part of what's great about shooting on film is that you really have to stop and look and consider what you're doing and it takes a long time. And this camera isn't even that complex. I mean, there are much more complex film cameras to shoot with that take hours to set up and compose your image. What aperture do we want? We want it all in focus or just the plants in focus? There isn't really a foreground. So it's not like there's a person in front of it. Let's do... Your reflection might be... Yeah. Let's do F8 at 1 45th. It's pretty light and quick and easy but you still have to really make some hard choices out in the world when you're shooting. And I just find that to be its own reward. Yeah, I mean, animation is really easy and everyone likes it. I mean, animation is just an easy way to fill in the gaps. I tell people that my films are documentaries but they're not maps, graphs and talking heads type documentaries. I'm more interested in memory and the way that people tell stories in their own words. I mean, in all of my movies, people, they won't say like, I liked your movie. What an interesting story. They'll be like, I love that animation at the end. I could watch that all day. And that's fine. Animation is really fun to watch. It's really simple to make. This little hot dog finger is gonna go into the frame and point to Fergus Falls. I guess when I said, I don't do maps, graphs or talking heads, that's not true in this case. We can say that this is not a standard map graph. Definitely not. Ever since I was a little kid, documentaries and the newspaper, stories in the newspaper and museums, things that helped me engage with the real world. Not that the imagined worlds aren't worth exploring like I love fiction also. But something about nonfiction is just magical to me. And I guess the documentary tradition, even the parts that I don't, some parts are more influential to me than others. Certain journalists and photographers and filmmakers are more influential on me than others are, but the documentary tradition is just intoxicating. So it's not history with a capital H. It's small history. It's backyard history. It's personal history. And it's informal and a lot of it's incorrect and a lot of it's misremembered. But to me, that's how history functions in our daily lives. And that's sort of what I'm interested in getting at with my work is trying to find this place between the truth that we read in books and the truths that we explain to each other. The way we might misremember a fact or the way that we tell the story about Paul Bunyan, even though we know it's not really true, we still tell it. And to me, the reason that type of history is just as important to our everyday experience as the history that we read in books and that we know is correct and that is formalized, I guess. I'm interested in the informal stories as much as the formal ones. You know, you always think you know what the finished product is going to be. You always think you have a grasp on it, but you have to let other people get their hands in it. I mean, that's when something becomes magical. I do owe a lot of people, I think. Springboard for the Arts is just a groundbreaking group of people. They're the ones who brought me to Fergus Falls in the first place. Well, last year I did an artist residency here in Fergus Falls, which is basically a time when an artist comes to a place and explores the place and makes work about the place. And there are different types of residencies, but this one here that Springboard has been doing is specifically about engaging with the state hospital building and some of the history of the state hospital building. You know, they don't want people to necessarily make work about the state hospital, but just to help people make new memories up here and to start to care about this place again. Krista and I go very far back to Purpitch, the Arts High School, it's an important place in the story that I tell about myself. My work is really situated in the art world rather than the documentary film world. My work is influenced by artists, not necessarily by entertainers. I look at myself as an artist first and a documentary filmmaker second. It's just one form. My name is Christian Berg and I'm a filmmaker and public television producer and director. Growing up in Grand Rapids for me was a very special experience. As a filmmaker, I always seem to come back here. Maybe it's some kind of homing instinct, but you know, the pine trees and the clear waters of the mine dumps and the red iron ore dust seems to draw me back all the time and the people that are up here. The stories that people tell and retell, I think, are from those formative years. Where they draw the most meaning. And Northern Minnesota is where that happens for me. I've mostly worked on national PBS shows dealing with science, dealing with history, but Pustinia is the first film that I've done as an independent. I've known Gendron since I was eight years old. He was a dear friend of my father's and he's been a character that's always fascinated me and he has a poetic way of talking and he's devoted his life to his medium and to his subject matter, which is objects from nature, which he calls relics. Mortal leavings, he calls them. His vocabulary is extremely unique and colorful and he's someone that I've always wanted other people to know about and as a filmmaker, that's a privilege. The beginning of his creative journey basically starts while he's in a monastic community. He had thoughts of joining the community of actually taking monastic vows and becoming a monk and he went another path and the path took him into nature. It's been an interesting journey. At first I was involved with a larger project wanting to do a feature length documentary on Gendron's life. There were some upstate New York filmmakers who had started in on a project and I kind of insinuated myself into it. I said, well, I've known him since I was a kid. There were a few attempts at some fundraising that fell through and in the meantime, I was organizing volunteers and getting equipment and I would go out and shoot with Gendron every time he came back to the state. So I built up a collection of footage and after the project basically fizzled, I had another opportunity to shoot with Gendron in New Mexico where he moved to in 1987. I also happened upon some footage that an earlier filmmaker who also wanted to make a film about Gendron had shot years ago if I had cut this short and made something in the early 2000s when I was shooting with him in Northern Minnesota, it wouldn't have been the film that it wound up being and by continuing to put those tapes on a shelf and waiting for another opportunity, we finally had the elements that worked together as well as they did. Narrative film, The Director is God and in documentary, God is the director. You let the footage inform your decisions and I was working with an incredible editor, Greg Feinberg and I cut down the footage to the essentials of what I thought should be there and then he took it from there. The way that the early footage of 40 year old Gendron interacted with the modern footage of 75 year old Gendron, there was almost a dialogue built between them and you also see the consistency of his message where there's even one point in the film where he talks about the motion that he sees in the bones. I mean the bones, you can't get much more still life than bones, they are as dead as can be. But he sees movement and motion and 40 year old Gendron basically finishes the sentence that 75 year old Gendron starts. Inanimate, inert things supposedly but the bones are not static to me. The bones are not static to me even though the creature's dead it's never static. And then my editor animates the bones to give them that motion which because it's a moving medium you can't pass up those opportunities. I wanted to give people the feeling of what it's like to hang out with Gendron because hanging with Gendron is really almost a spiritual experience in itself because he's a self-taught artist, largely self-taught and extremely articulate in expressing himself about what motivates him and what he sees in the bones. When I find them I feel this tingling in my hands and then I feel some on the naked nape of my neck and go sneaking down the spine. It's the oldest part of the brain, it's primordial. It's all instinctual. It's all rooted in the naked nape that's frying in my hands and the ingestion of air in ecstatic surprise. Here you are. You, they say, and I say you. You know, it's like falling in love again. I mean bones are considered symbols of eridity, sterility and death but Gendron sees them as, he calls it portals unto exaltation. He sees them as a window, as a connection to the divine, to the eternal. He might draw the cross-section of the half of a black walnut shell or he might draw the hip bone of a grasshopper and he draws them to epic size and you would think you're looking at a photograph of some alien landscape but it's not, it's what's right under our feet which really gets back to his central message which is to open your eyes and to look into nature. I hope viewers will check out Gendron's work. He does have a website online. He's in a number of permanent collections. Just last year he and his wife, the very accomplished artist Christine Taylor Patton were both accepted into the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and his work is part of major collections all over the country. So I would hope that people would both seek out his work and follow his admonition to open their eyes to the world around them and to care for the world around them. Thank you so much for watching. Join us again next week on Common Ground. 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