Film Details
Synopsis
Kelly Sears' 'Devil's Canyon' is a fable of a rejected cowboy that grows out of a doomed landscape, compiled from discarded magazines and encyclopedia from thrift stores and garage sales. It weaves together a haunting narrative of abandoned images and super 8 landscapes of the American West. Mechanical horses, a doomed automobile town, and distressed cowboys are composited into this tale of American tragedy, which is narrated by the poet Anthony McCann whose Marlboro - esque voice perfectly portrays the cowboys' lament.
As the initial images of the town Devil's Canyon are presented, showing us a decrepit, run down community past its heyday, an eerie silence is heard illustrating the isolation of the town and the American West. It's that silence that expects you to see a tumbleweed run across the screen, however, predicting anything in 'Devils Canyon' is a fruitless exercise, as it tells such an original tale in what you may assume to be familiar surroundings.
Upon the first words uttered by McCann, a figure of a cowboy appears, cut out of some old western magazine and stuck onto a super 8 shot of the town, his faint movement matching the sparsity brilliantly. "We were in trouble" crackles McCann, his voice singlehandedly characterizing the Wild West. As he goes through the plight of Devil's Canyon's residents we are given little information of what caused their current situation other than one descriptions such as "Montgomery was drinking famously again."
As each image subtly moves and drifts we are told about an automotive town past its prime, where its beloved horses have fled throwing Devil's Canyon into misery and insanity. It's a town "soft on flaws and discipline." As the town attempts to come to terms with what has transpired and tries to re-discover its past glories, the narrator "hopes to be forgiven" for what he has done as he speaks of the inhabitants and their depths to which they have fallen.
Kelly Sears tells of Devil's Canyon as being "part of a three-part series that involves investigating these fantastical dystopic Manifest Destiny stories with these tragic masculine protagonists." The film's concept stems from abandoned imagery of an age that seems to be rotting. "When you go to a thrift store or a garage sale, there are these images that have been abandoned. So I started collecting a lot of images of the American West, not really knowing what I was going to use it for, but really got into collecting that. At the same time, I was going into the desert, filming on Super 8 abandoned structures in the desert and was collecting these images of these abandoned histories. I reconfigured them into a story to tell a slightly other history that could have happened, critiquing Manifest Destiny, critiquing capitalism, critiquing this westward push to progress."
Devil's Canyon is brilliant in almost every facet. The aesthetics, audio and story all combine with such cohesion to create a surreal dystopia, that delights hauntingly to take you to a town filled with tragedy, despair and total madness.
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