WHITELICK
Tim Gallaher - 2011, 3:00, miniDV, San Francisco
Jesus and Satan, the ultimate opposing and polarized western deities, prepare for a showdown on battlefield Earth. But sometimes even the gods are in for a surprise. 'WHITELICK' is a raucous, heretical, and satirical puppet music video fantasy about the war between these two ancient adversaries and the American tragedies that ensue. Can the clashing cosmic titans be brought back into harmony for the good of all before it's too late? Only time and 'WHITELICK' will (kiss and) tell!
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Tim Gallaher is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and musician. With an undergraduate degree in film production, for the last several years he has combined music, video and storytelling, generating unique performances in which he accompanied his musical videos and their recorded soundtracks with live narration and singing while standing alongside the projected images. Aside from Fringe Festivals, his work has been selected to appear in various shows and performances, including Project>Soundwave 1 & 2 as well as the 2011 SF Underground Film Festival. Currently, Tim is leaving the performance aspects behind to more fully focus on video/film making.
Questions & Answers
ATA: The video looks like it was a lot of fun to make. Tell us a bit about the task of constructing the sets and assembling all the parts.
TG: Yes, this was a fun part of the project, especially since I've always postponed making puppet films in the past because the task of making all the sets and puppets seemed so daunting. But I bit the bullet with this one. Most of the sets were very easy to make, including the abortionist's clinic exterior, which was just brown board painted with a rectangular sponge in repeating patters to simulate the look of bricks. A standard picture frame was used for the clinic sign. The set that was the biggest task was making the Tree of Life. That was a wood and wire frame with chicken wire to add thickness, and then I just wrapped twisted brown paper around the truck and up the wire branches. Felt leaves attached with wire completed it. The blooming flower blossoms were added to the tree with After Effects. The grass was green fur material. For some reason, making a Jesus puppet didn't seem fun to me, and luckily I found this perfect macho-looking Jesus doll on the internet, so I didn't have to make him after all. The other dolls were purchased at thrift stores or also through the internet. I was able to get a lot of milage out of just mixing costumes on the dolls. I found an African American G.I. Joe, and his uniform became G.I. Jesus's, while Jesus's robes became the robes of the Arab gunned down by G.I. Jesus. Making a Satan puppet, however, seemed like an exciting and fun endeavor, so I hand made him and quite enjoyed the process. His head was sculpted in clay, and then from that I made a plaster mold. Then I put several layers of paper mache in the two molds halves, removed the two halves from the molds when dry and then glued them together to make the full head. The body was sewn felt, and paint completed the head.
The funnest aspect to making all the items was that, while involved in the construction process, I implemented a concentration/imaginative practice I've developed so as to make the physical tasks in my creative endeavors more open to the expanded states of consciousness that inspire my creativity. It's still something I'm experimenting with, but it allows me to see the materials and world I work with in creative projects in new, fresh and alive ways. This in turn, I believe, really adds an extra dimension to both my creative process as well as the finished product.
ATA: WHITELICK seems quite different from your other films. What usually inspires your work, and what was the spark for this one in particular?
TG: The inspiration for all of my work comes from the expanded states of consciousness I get into occasionally and which I have been lucky enough to experience since childhood. With these come accompanying insights that both the world and human beings are more than what our culture generally conceives either to be. I like to think of my work as an attempt to both deepen these experiences for myself as well as to share glimpses of what I perceive and feel with others.
"WHITELICK" is indeed a bit different from my other films. For one thing, it's taken me a while to just get consistently adequate as a cinematographer. Also It's the first film I've made in a while in which I pursued definite linear, logical themes and ideas. That said, I also left room for plenty of experimentation with preconscious, unconscious, irrational and spontaneous elements, which is my more standard way of working. I had been inspired years ago by an idea my friend Tom had about the history of the rift between Yahweh and Lucifer in Christian teaching/mythology. As you may know, Lucifer means "Morning Star", or brightest star; he was Yahweh's favorite arch angel. My friend had the idea that this was code for Lucifer being Yahweh's romantic beloved. My friend imagined that the lovers then had a fight and split apart, and that this conflict set in motion the suffering that pervades the physical universe since then. He imagined that a monastery developed in esoteric Christianity where monks would pray unceasingly for the reunification of the two deities and a restoration of harmony on Earth. I found this fascinating, but didn't quite know how to approach it visually. Then in recent years when so much of christianity in America has become heinously hateful and judgmental, being used to justify ugly nationalism, imperialism, war, homophobia, racism and other forms of violence, I became amazed at how blind American's seemed to this hypocrisy. Besides the obvious conflicts with our nation's historical separation between church and state, it sets up major conflicts with the actual teachings of Christ. It's like there was this huge, foul elephant in the "room" that few seemed to want to point out. At this point, desire to comment on the elephant merged with the earlier fascination with my friend's homoerotic take on western mythology. Not knowing how to visually represent Yahweh actually led me to substitute Jesus, and that worked out much better for the concerns I had about modern America and how polarized and conflicted we have become as a nation. God the Father splits with Lucifer, but God the Son has the potential to bring about reunification, so to speak. Regarding the gender issues satirized, I also couldn't help but notice that a lot of christians butch up Jesus in an attempt to attract more young men to their churches. I find this so preposterous that I decided that if they were going to make Jesus macho, as a androphile I would just push it further and make him a "Macho Man". All these ideas combined, and thus WHITELICK the film was born.
ATA: What is a "whitelick", anyhow?
TG: The name WHITELICK was born out of a trend my friends and I noticed in the early eighties regarding typical rock/metal band names at the time. There was always an adjective followed by a noun that set up an ironic or transgressive image: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, etc. We started to mix and match the nouns and adjectives to come up with amusing hybrids: Quiet Hatchet, White Sister, Twisted (Black) Priest, etc. Then years later while in the mountains of southern California, I saw a sign advertising deer lick, which I had never heard of and found hilarious. It naturally fit into this trend mentioned above, and the term "White Lick" came to mind. I liked the mix of the puritanical and the sensual it suggested, and I wrote and recorded the song, "WHITELICK", shortly after that. More recently, that juxtaposition of the puritanical with the sensual seemed a good match with the video I was conceiving about Jesus and Satan. So I built the video around the song "WHITELICK" as a type of music video.
Q&A by Liz Wing
