Things you should know about Ballast:
1. The website, where you can get a sense of the look of the film, is here: http://ballastfilm.com/trailer
2. The story, about the lives of three people in a small town in the Mississippi delta area, is not the most important thing.
3. This is not a movie the filmmaker did as a job; it's a love project.
4. It won two awards at Sundance, for dramatic directing and for cinematography.
The film begin with shots that look wrong, but turn out to be very much in service of the film's themes of the quietness and fragility of human experience and relationships. The hand-held camera shakes badly, and light coming in a window blows out portions of the screen while in others an unidentified figure who turns out to be one of the main characters is not merely rimlit or silhouetted but practically obliterated. There is no non-diegetic music to help you along, and it is a very quiet film. Neither the characters nor landscape (a character in itself) are talkative.
The story is told piecemeal, and you don't find out what has happened or how the characters are related until you're already quite far along: a man has killed himself, his brother has gone nearly mute in reaction, a woman is trying to keep together the pieces of her own and her son's lives with the barest resources, and her son's life is not so much aimless as amorphous. The director made this film by spending months in the location. He'd originally wanted to shoot a picture about the beauty of the area, but as he became more embedded in the local community, he came to feel that he could not impose his own story -- the only honest way to make a film would be in close collaboration with the people of the area.
He did not work with a strict script, but rather gave his actors, ordinary local people, the idea of who the characters were and where they were in their lives, and the language came from them. The resulting dialog is so natural it sounds like a documentary, and as far as authenticity and realism, this film could almost have been made from hidden-camera footage of the lives people who happen not to exist, but just as easily might have. He also gave quite free reign to his cinematographer, Lol Crawley, who lived up to his name by crawling into some very cramped and tiny spaces with a good-sized film camera to get close to his subjects.
In the end, the director had two films: one a visual story about the beauty of the region, and the other a mood piece told through incredibly economic editing. A single, brief shot of the mother's back as she scrubs a urinal tells you everything about her determination in the face of poverty and exhaustion. One second of a boy's bundled figure tells you everything through the way he walks. A very high number of cuts are and continue to feel like sharp jump cuts, creating and sustaining a tension that keeps you moving through the film. This technique, again, seems to come from a deep respectfulness and sincerity -- the filmmaker is not going to ask the actors to chew the hell out of the scenery, and is going to assume that as a viewer you will be intelligent and literate enough to put it all together.
This whole style of filmmaking can be placed in sharp contrast to projects like reality shows or even tearjerkers where the subjects, performers, and audience have their dignity sacrificed in order to achieve a cheap and ephemeral emotional impact. What is it ok to put yourself through in order to make a film for profit? For art? What is it ok to put other people through? Is it ok to tell other people's stories? When is it ok to use what you know as an artist about emotions to pull them out of your viewers?
This director seemed to think that it was worth investing a substantial amount of his own money (selling his property) to let a community speak for itself. He sacrificed the half of his film that was beautiful, the images that originally drew him there, to make the second film stronger. He sacrificed his own script and dialog, and in turn the community and performers gave of themselves, opening their town and their lives.
However, not all artists have a piece of property to sell. Some people have children or partners who are gravely ill, some want work very badly, and some may believe their project will provide a compensatory value -- economic or emotional -- to the people involved in making or seeing it. I have not made up my own mind but have begun thinking about what kinds of artistic and ethical ballast I want to have as a professional and what I am willing to cast off. |
