Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Flyover Country follows real-life passengers on a three day cross-country train ride as they struggle to make a scripted film. As boundaries progressively erode inside the compressed space of the train, the social and economic disparities among the crew, actors, and passengers become the real source of drama.
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Flyover Country received a 2021 Moving Image Fund grant from the LEF Foundation to support pre-production.
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Flyover Country received a 2021 Moving Image Fund grant from the LEF Foundation, to support pre-production.
The material in the proof of concept for Flyover Country is drawn from exploratory footage shot while traveling alone on the train. It begins to evoke the exploration of landscape, soundscape, and performance that motivates this project.
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In fiction films that use trains as a backdrop and story element, a pattern emerges of repeating and altering the strategies and motifs of earlier films. This cinematic vocabulary is an important reference for Flyover Country and the fiction film at its center. In many of these films, the train is imagined as a space of encounter with strangers, producing romance, mystery, and horror.
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Long-distance trains outside of the northeast corridor have a unique character and attract passengers from vastly different backgrounds. For some, train travel is the cheapest option, particularly in rural communities. Riding these trains on trips that last between two and three days can be a profoundly lonely experience, despite the fact that one is surrounded by people. Social boundaries begin to erode and a forced intimacy takes hold. Strangers become eager to talk, to unburden themselves. At the same time that this new kind of sociability emerges, structural inequalities and social disparities can become magnified among passengers from varied economic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Who can afford to eat in the dining car? Who must sleep all night sitting up in the coaches instead of in a sleeper? How are passengers treated differently by the train’s car stewards? When a camera is introduced into this environment, many people become more eager to talk, to perform, to be seen. Flyover Country is being developed in collaboration with three passengers met onboard cross-country train routes that span from east to west and north to south of the United States. Together, we are developing a script for a film to be shot on the train that includes cues for improvisation. The resulting project will merge what happens between “action” and “cut” with the backstage dramas that unfold as we attempt to make the film. The structure for Flyover Country will be non-linear, interweaving the scripted material, behind-the-scenes footage, verité style observation of passengers onboard, landscapes, and material shot off the train with passengers met onboard. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” Agnes Varda in The Beaches of Agnès The dynamic of riding the train through every bit of country that lies between one’s point of departure and arrival is largely one of disconnection, between the American landscape that pours in through the train windows and the intimate human scenes unfolding onboard. It is landscape reduced to a retinal experience, as inside the train one breathes recycled air and wonders what temperature it might be outside. A challenge for Flyover Country is to show how America’s mountains, valleys, towns, and cities projected through the train’s windows—which can appear natural, unchanging—are the product of the same forces which shape the human lives within. “To expose landscape as anything but ’natural,’ if natural means that the pains and injustices of the present are inevitable and immutable.”(1) This means finding points of intersection between, as Agnes Varda has it, the landscapes within people, and those along the train’s route. Following the film’s protagonists off the train to their respective homes will play an important role in creating these connections. (1) Jill H. Casid, “Epilogue: Landscape in, around, and under the performative,” in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, 97-116. |