'Western Wild' is a film combining and exploring
the iconography of the American West and contemporary topics. It is inspired
partially by the author Karl May and my personal history. This controversial, eccentric and extraordinary German author wrote about the American Wild West,
the Middle East and South America from his native Germany, having never been
out of his small village. Escaping a childhood of poverty, a mid-life of criminal persecution and imprisonment and numerous mental issues, yet decorated
with a high intellect, he is most known for his
moralizing Westerns starring Winnetou and his alter-ego Old Shatterhand.
Former President Obama is quoted as saying“This is unique to our country. There is no other advanced nation on
earth that tolerates multiple shootings on a regular basis and considers it
normal and to some degree that's what's happened in this country”. In my year
of researching into Karl May - gun violence, riots, racial injustice, church
burnings and hate crimes have escalated almost to a daily occurrence. Living between Pennsylvania and the Netherlands; I- like
Karl May - author works on America from Overseas.
My personal history
with firearms and gun violence is deep and varied. I grew up near one of the
bloodiest battles of America- Gettysburg. Lasting three days in 1863, there
were 51,000 casualties. Ending less than a decade before this was the longest
and largest historical genocide lasting from 1500-1800 of 150 million American
Indians.
As a child I remember
be woken up by the sound of a revolver as my father shot birds eating his
garden from the bedroom window. I helped load the shotgun gun shells that
killed every thing that moved; our dinner plates would be lined with the lead
buck shot balls that we’d managed not to swallow. We made our own flintlock
rifle from scratch and had the equivalent of an artillery cache in our living
room. In elementary school the kid brought a pistol to school in a paper lunch
bag that was luckily apprehended. Our
neighbors up the hill ran a gun shop and the owners son was in school with me
until the age of 14 when he threw his shotgun into his truck, causing it to
fire one cartridge into his torso: killing him instantly. Two brothers played
Russian roulette and one brother shot the other through the head in our fields
where we could be found playing on weekends.
My membership in the Fish and Game Club lead to my first
commercial art commission of drawing a huge life size Elk target for a shooting
contest. Two women were shot and one killed by a ‘mountain man’ who as an
abandoned child, grew up in the woods and lived in a hole in the ground off the
Appalachian Trail. For college I moved to Baltimore, which had an average of
300 murders per year. An artist in school with us was shot in the back as a
gang initiation across the street from my loft. Everyday I could follow trails
of blood around the city from the crimes which took place the prior night. My
life was almost taken once at close range, but I evaded this by asking for the
masked man to either do it now, but don't make me late for my cabaret job.
In Western Wild we witness is a phantasm of the movie
screen, which open up into chambers of forgotten histories, restless fragmented
dreams, lost honor and blind hope.
