Local film maker/videographer Kurt Kolaja has been holding a camera in his hand for most of his adult life, making his living in television news in locations across the country too numerous to mention. Since moving to Crumpton, Mr. Kolaja began focusing more on making his own full-length documentary films, often returning to the themes of family, history, land use, hard work, and the meaning of community. His first film, Charlie Obert’s Barn was about his struggle to save his grandfather’s historic 19th century barn from demolition. Here, Mr. Kolaja discusses his approach to documentary film making, and the impressions he took away from the successful completion of his latest film on the Kent County Marching Band, Band Together.
How long did you take to complete this film?
K.K.: It probably took me two and a half years to get it stem to stern done.
What made you choose the Kent County Marching Band as your subject?
K.K.: The band is an obvious thing to shoot, you come to town and you see the band and you say, well how can you not shoot? So its always been kinda kickin’ around, I’ve used little bits of it for other things I’ve done. And so I thought, well let’s just dive in, and shoot it.
So your idea for the narrative came after the footage?
K.K.: Well, yeah. If I’m going to shoot a documentary, I’ll go out and shoot and shoot and shoot, and then come back and see if there’s a pony hiding in that pile somewhere. You know in the truest sense, one can have an idea of where a documentary is going, but you still have to be very open to where it will lead you. So the narrative is the sort of thing that needs to develop, the narrative will tell you where it’s going to go, as opposed to writing something, and blocking out the shots, and writing copy, and building it that way. This is, “well let’s see what happens.”
So you would say your approach to film making is more improvisational?
K.K.: More journalistic, you know I’m an old news guy. Film at 11 meant something to me.
You mean WBAL-11 news?
K.K.: Well okay, I worked there (chuckles at naïveté of interviewer) Film at 11, you’ve never heard that expression? Film at 11 meant, we’re gonna have something on at 11, believe it or not. We had to make the news. And we had to go shoot the film, and process it in the darkroom, and splice it and cut it. We used sixteen millimeter.
How about “Band Together”, did you shoot it in digital video or use film?
K.K.: Digital.
Do you have any desire to go back to using film? Is the process enjoyable or do you find it more labor intensive than rewarding?
K.K.: Well, film, at least up till this point still has a look that video, in my experience, just does not have. There’s a once removed quality to film, it’s painted. If you break it down to the pixels on a video camera, each little square is a bit of information, and it bumps up against that other pixel, and that’s where that information stops. In film, because of the process, those colors bleed together, so the edges have a more gossamer feel to them. There’s a richness to film, which I have yet to find in video. There are of course video cameras out there today that are way beyond what I can afford that might get close to that though…
Are there specific directors or filmmakers that inspire you?
K.K.: Not so much filmmakers. I never went to a film school, never spent a day in college anywhere. I got out of high school in ’74, and that was a time when I person could get a summer job in places. I was out of high school for one day, I knew a guy at a T.V. station in Erie, Pennsylvania, he said “Well if you’re going to go to film school, come work at the t.v. station for a summer, if you like it then I’ll guide you to a place to go to college.” Well, one of the news guys quit, paring their staff down to one, and they said, “Well okay Kurt come here, this is a film camera, this is the “shooty” end of it, this is the back end of it, now go point this thing at burning buildings and overturned cars.” So my path was always more journalistic than anything else. I have very little desire to make some big Hollywood movie.
What about documentary film makers, like Errol Morris, for instance?
K.K.: (chuckles) You know, I suck with names. I’ll tell you a guy I like a lot, staying with that journalistic theme, Charles Kurralt. I really like what that guy did. But there is so much stuff out there that never gets seen, by people we never hear about that is really provocative and interesting, for me to pick one out, well I just can’t.
I understand you submitted “Band Together” to a number of film festivals?
K.K.: Oh I submitted it to a lot of them. I was batting 0-9. But it’s been accepted at the Bend Film Festival in Oregon and the Chesapeake Film Festival. It can be discouraging.
Do you have any idea why your film was well received in some places and not others?
K.K.: Well you know, to find the right festival is hard. And I’ll tell you, I don’t know the inner workings of a festival. They often have programming schemes, and if a documentary fits in a way that is complimentary to the other eggs in the dozen, then it gets in. To be different, but complimentary at the same time. The guys in the Chesapeake Film Festival liked Band Together from a community stand point. But community is a difficult thing to get people interested in.
You mean it lacks the kind of sensationalist gloss people are used to?
K.K.: Right, there are no conjoined twins from India that are going to get separated by the great surgeon from Los Angeles. There’s none of that. Nobody gets blown up. There’s nothing extraordinary.
“Band Together” is about capturing the kind of understated beauty found in a close-knit community?
K.K.: There are stories to be told, by the person that lives next door to you, the mechanic who is putting your car up on blocks, the person who checks you out at the grocery store. And they don’t have to be this reality show, you’ve-just-been-thrown-off-my-island carnival act.
What was the guiding principle for the interviews included in Band Together, how did you know what to use and what to cut?
K.K.: I’ll listen to words that mean something to that person, and try to plug that in to a chain of events so that thought carries through the entire film. That boat goes down the entire river.
So you strove for a sense of thematic continuity from interview to interview, like personal tragedy and struggle?
K.K.: Well going into it I thought it would be a laugh riot all the way. It’s goofy. They dress up funny, they obviously are having fun, and they were nice enough to say “come on in”. And what surprised me about it is that while it was quite comical, when you spend a significant amount of time with any group or individual over a number of years, you begin to find out stuff about them. And that’s where this thing went. It went rather deep, and I started to learned about people, and learn about what it means to be a community. And that is a really hard thing to pin down, let alone film. To make that watchable, I found that quite a challenge.
How much are you as the filmmaker part of the story?
K.K.: I did the voice over, so there’s that. I was writer, shooter, editor, and narrator. When you’re working with a limited budget, that’s what you wind up doing. I would have liked to have had more cameras, that is, a crew, to help shoot the parade. Shooting a parade with one camera, that is folly.
In closing, what do you expect the local response to be to “Band Together”?
K.K.: Here [in Chestertown] it will play very well. It will be very interesting to see how it plays in Bend, a place removed, they have no attachment whatsoever to this. But if people can buy into the idea of community, then I think they will find there is a lot to appreciate.
“Band Together” will be playing from September 23-26 in Chestertown, Easton, Cambridge, and Chesapeake College as part of the Chesapeake Film Festival. It will be shown in Chestertown on September 25 at 8 PM at the Garfield Center for the Arts. For tickets, please click here.
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