 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. My name is Nick Nurburne, and I am an experimental filmmaker and a photographer. I guess I would describe myself as a media artist. A lot of my work is about a 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 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, 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 got to write it down. Whoops. Well, because when you go back and look at your shots, 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 trying to do something tricky. And you're like, oh, how about F-5.6 at 1,500th of a second? So you write down 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. 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 our 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 bade 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, you know, it's not that intimidating shooting this stuff. People are always scared of shooting film because it costs money and you know, you don't want to mess it up and you want to get it perfect, but digital costs money too. I mean this camera that I'm shooting on, I think I paid a hundred dollars for it. You pay a hundred dollars for a digital camera and what do you get? You know, 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 sixties 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, you know, 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, you know, to set up and compose your image. What aperture do we want? We want it all in focus or just the plants and focus. There isn't really a foreground. No, 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 one forty-fifth. 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 going to 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, you know, 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, you know, exploring like I love. Fiction also, but something about nonfiction is just, it's just magical to me. And I guess the documentary tradition, even the parts that I don't, you know, 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 truth that we, 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 what the finished product is going to be. You always think you 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 this 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 Purpich, 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. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.