Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

NEAR THE BEGINNING OF JAKE MAHAFFY’S B&W POSTAPOCALYPSE EPIC WAR, AN OFFSCREEN VOICE MURMURS, “This is the world after the end of the world.” The quote refers to the film’s camera trail of poverty and economic devastation, images suggesting a ruined American heartland as shot by Andrei Tarkovsky or Walker Evans. But the quote could just easily apply to Mahaffy’s own brand of independent filmmaking. Over the course of five years, Mahaffy shot War with a hand-cranked silent camera and without a crew. “I started off with a script and a very clear idea of what I wanted to do,” he explains. “But I didn’t have the money to shoot dialogue. So rather than stop I decided to shoot everything except the script. I shot hours and hours of the lives of the characters not in the script. I would just roll film and hope that it would come together in the end.”
The result is a strange, ghostly depiction of lonely characters adrift in a rural wasteland set to a soundtrack of radio broadcasts and pensive narration. War played the Sundance Frontier section in 2004, and since then Mahaffy has continued to mine his singular style, returning to the festival this year with a short, Motion Studies #3: Gravity, part of a series of films “mocking the religion of science by artistically reinterpreting various scientific data.”