Michael Coleman: Grassroots Filmmaker

Michael Coleman steps out of a screening he programmed, under the moniker Generic Moving Images, a curated series showcasing films that have inspired his own work in form and ethos. This week, he is showing Billy the Kid, a 2007 documentary by Jeniffer Venditti, a prolific casting director in her own right, this is the only film Venditti has ever directed; Coleman describes the film as, "An absolute masterpiece. A real-life Julien Donkey-Boy." Coleman is referring to the 1999 film directed by Harmony Korine, he often speaks in references, he says it's "easier to communicate his ideas this way," and one of his major influences has always been Korine. "He [Korine] has this unique ability to intertwine high-art and low-art using different formats: VHS, DV, 16mm, creating a montage embracing analog footage. It's impressionistic filmmaking," Coleman states. With several grassroots films under his belt, Coleman's independent filmmaking has benefited from a cadre of friends and peers who were interested and committed to his vision. Coleman says he's been fortunate enough to be able to rely on this tight knit community of underground midwest do-it-yourself filmmakers to help "bring whatever wacky ideas I might have to life".

Michael is currently working on his Masters at the University of Missouri, while being a father, and trying to make it as a filmmaker. In the Fall of 2022, Coleman premiered DV Footage Log 2014-2020 at Film Diary 2.0 in New York, NY, at the Millennial Film Workshop. The 22 Minute short film, is an experimental collage that takes the shape of a rapidly moving diary through his life over the course of 6 years. Analog footage shot on a camcorder his then girlfriend, now wife, gave to him back in 2014. He's been slowly compiling footage over the years, documenting little moments of everyday banality, birthday parties, and live concerts. The footage chronicles a snapshot of what it is like to come of age in your twentie and the film was made as an exercise in personal reflection the year his son was born. A time when most people first learn to be an adult with experimentation and exploration and while DV Footage Log may feel random and unintentional, as Coleman puts it, "The entire thing is packed with symbolism, nuance, and varying degrees of visual motifs". The structure for the film was broken into three segments: the birthday party, engagement and fatherhood. The opening image is a train passing by. The camera shifts focus from the train to dry branches closer. A shift from a macro image to a micro. The creative objective to a subjective point of view. The film has a poetic rhythm to it, each image in sequence is seven or eight seconds. Each beat of the film feels exactly the same with no visual images more outstanding than the other. The important moments are within the ABC format with recurring visual motifs of cats, hands, and fireworks; these images set up each plot point. The final sequence of the film starting with his wife's hand in close up, at the hospital, catapults the audience into an impressionistic representation of birth through multiple images that separately feel unrelated, but when viewed in their accumulation, one can begin to understand what he is trying to show us, rather than tell us.

I asked, "What's next? What have you been working on?" According to Coleman back in January of this year, a friend of his made a comment about man who used to make low budget horror films out of Huntsville, TX. After a few months, Coleman remembered the name George Russell. Coleman loves outsiders artist types with strong beliefs, very idealistic, and a fan of horror. The more Coleman dug into the thousands of websites Russell has made since the early two-thousands, he realized he had to make a documentary. Coleman sent me the trailer for the documentary film about George Russel. With one film trip in the bag he sent me the first trailer. There are some spectacular cinematic shots of birds on a dew branch, large logger truck chopping down trees, flat tree areas, heavy forest with thin trees with a voice over of George Russell speaking about the state of Texas. He's calling it the Tower of Silence.