Redoubt opened at Yale on Saturday, March 2nd, and will be on display there until June 16th. An original score by Jonathan Bepler adds an aural dimension that is very much of a piece with the rest of the film's nonverbal elements, including exquisite editing by Katherine McQuerry, whose own background in dance, Barney says, directly informed how she approached the project. Wachter exhibits the preternatural focus and stillness you'd expect of an expert marksman, and Barney, a former football player who has performed in his own work dating to the 1980s, has an actor's command over his body. Neither the Engraver nor Diana, who is played by a champion sharpshooter named Anette Wachter, dances in the film, but their presence on camera is no less embodied than the characters who do. Barney says that although he has long wanted to incorporate dance into a project, with Redoubt it came about as an afterthought. At that point, he says, he had to relinquish some control over how the story would be told and learn from the dancers themselves, who incorporated the art form in the unlikeliest of settings: in a hammock suspended high above the ground, in deep snow, along the trunk of a towering pine. As the film progresses, that language evolves from subtle movements barely recognizable as dance into fully realized pieces. Holmes, who plays the Electroplater, and Sandra Lamouche, a "hoop dancer" from the Bigstone Cree Nation who is introduced later in the film, to create the language of their scenes. Their role, it seems, is to bridge Diana's primordial, earth-bound pursuits with the cosmos, communicating through a language of movement that runs parallel to – or apart from – Diana's quest.īauer served as the film's choreographer as well, working with the dancers K.J. In the original myth, Diana is accompanied on her hunt by two nymphs in Barney's telling they become the Calling Virgin and the Tracking Virgin, portrayed in Redoubt by the professional dancers Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes. Furthering this synergy among Redoubt's elements are the four large sculptures, which Barney fashioned, in part, by pouring molten copper and brass through the trunks of burnt trees harvested from Idaho after a forest fire.īarney and his collaborators on the film tell the story of Diana and the Engraver, which unfolds over seven days, largely through dance. This creates a seamlessness between these two seemingly distinct components, and art-making itself thus becomes intrinsic to the project's grander narratives of hunter and prey, and their ever-shifting roles, and the alignment of terrestrial and celestial bodies – stars feature prominently in both the film and many of the engravings, and many of the film's scenes allude to a certain spiritualism between Earth and the heavens above. The Engraver takes his finished plates to a woman who lives alone in a small trailer, where she submerges them in chemical baths charged with electric currents – a process known as "electroplating" that allows for copper growths to form out of the engraved lines. It's the same process that Barney used in creating the engravings on display in the galleries, and the pieces the Engraver makes in the film resemble many of those in the exhibition. This threat grows more palpable as they edge ever closer, and while Redoubt is not an overtly political film, Barney acknowledges that the two characters personify the battle over wolves in the area that has raged since the 1980s, when Barney was a teenager living in Boise. More explicitly, the project's title, "Redoubt," refers to a libertarian movement in which far-right political activists and survivalists "vote with their feet" by moving to states with low population density, like Idaho, in the event that the country falls apart. They aren't adversaries, exactly, but like animals in the wild, each poses a threat to the other's way of life. Told in six chapters, one for each "hunt" in the story, Redoubt focuses on Diana and the Engraver as they circle one other in the wilderness, she on a quest for her next kill, he as he etches scenes of the landscape and its wildlife onto copper plates. Actaeon, a hunter in the original myth who suffers the consequences of one day accidentally intruding on Diana in the forest, here becomes an engraver, played by Barney himself, who makes a living with the U.S. Loosely based on the ancient myth of Diana and Actaeon, the film reimagines Diana, goddess of the hunt, as a nimble, calculating sharpshooter tracking a wolf in Idaho's backcountry.
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