HOGTOWN

HOGTOWN explores new cinematic techniques while observing a century’s worth of inter-racial struggle and the birth of a new multicultural America.

NARRATION: The film employs text as narration in an unusual fashion, allowing the underlying sound to assert its presence. The text narration is shared with the characters themselves. Some of the character-delivered narration is direct address; some is spoken under the breath or in plainly spoken thought. Some is in the first person; some is in the third person: the characters are simultaneously inside the moment and observing themselves from the distance of memory.

PORTRAIT FRAMES. A number of our principals and peripheral characters stop in mid-scene to pose for their portraits. There is a limit of one portrait per person, and it is set for posterity.

EPIPHANIES: Scene structure typically entails a moment when we encounter a break between expectation and outcome at the plot level. Hogtown’s plot is largely illusory. The film’s primary aim from scene to scene is to arrive at individualized epiphanies, or still points in the characters' turning worlds.

TRANSITIONAL SEQUENCES: These short sequences are often landscapes or montages of unknown persons. Each transitional sequence has a focus -- e.g. poverty, immigration, imprisonment, beauty -- and in their aggregate they help to compose a wider sense of HOGTOWN, the world of the story.

BLACK AND WHITE WITH “ECSTATIC” COLOR. Our frames are ruled by mood, dominated by black tones enriched through Cinegamma filtering, perspectives influenced by careful and limited approaches to lighting, altered emotionally through canted and otherwise unusual angles. The people of HOGTOWN dwell in a perpetually dark place. There are fleeting moments, though, that seem to call for color. They draw us insistently, albeit briefly, out of the darkness and into the experience of some variation of beauty.

ABSENT EXPOSITION: This movie is both murder mystery and love story but it lacks much of the fabric of exposition we expect in mainstream films and will consequently disappoint some expectations. The murder mystery plot is for all intents a backdrop for the escalating epiphanies, and when details are missing, we've often let them stay missing rather than draw them in to serve or assert an illusory plot. We want it to keep an audience engaged at the plot level, but also to subtly betray the meaninglessness of a plot orientation, if that makes sense.

PERIOD-LESS PIECE: The film is set in 1919 but makes no attempt to hide contemporary buildings and some contemporary objects. Our position on this is that a period piece says as much about the time in which it is composed as the time in which it is set, and that most of the issues experienced in America in 1919 resonate through today. We’re sticking with that explanation, but to be completely honest, necessity is the mother of invention here. We have made the film with virtually no budget, and therefore could not afford to produce a full-fledged period piece.