I've been pimping The Augur a lot in the last few days, but I do so only in attempts to create an interested creative community. I have one last thing to say about the movie.
The Augur: Building the Future
I have and probably always will have an affinity for images that depict the process of construction. I am not an engineer, mechanic, carpenter, handyman, or even craft artist by any means, but I’ve been completely and mysteriously enthralled with the process of construction ever since the days when I used to watch Home Again with Bob Villa while I sat at the Formica countertop in my house and ate the pancakes my Dad made for me on Sunday morning. I was probably at most ten years old. My Mom was real estate agent and I faintly understood that my Dad was something called a “Human Resources Director,” both middle-class white-collar careers no where near manual labor. So I can’t explain through any early developmental clues why, but can only assure you that I’ll stop flipping through the channels in order to watch a crew of red-necks weld exhaust pipes onto a massive truck, or to gaze at the tedious process, in which tennis balls are manufactured. Maybe it’s just simply because construction is an action, and actions are what compose compelling images.
I hate to begin with something only to leave the thought unfinished, but the reason I have described my affection for images of construction is so that I can then tell you that The Augur by Takashi Doscher and Alex Shofner, which is a bout a young man who escapes a foreboding dark flood following him by constructing a device that he naturally seems to know how to build, also has my affections. I was speaking with Takashi about this video and most of what he told me how exhilarating the movie-making process was for this project. He spoke about how he and Alex decided to throw their storyboards to the wind and just create this video from nothing as it came to them, and there is was, the answer to my unexplained love for watching construction. The movie The Augur is a movie that hinges on the imagery of constructing a device, a beautiful metaphor for the very movie-making process, in which these images are rendered. However, it goes even further than that. Not only is the construction of the device a representation of the movie-making process, but it signifies the process that Takashi, Alex, I, and perhaps some of your reading this essay are in, that is building a career in the difficult industry of film-making. The doubts and fears that follow us are the dark pools of ink that drift towards the hero, and we can only hope that at the last minute we can through our own skill and natural desire escape to a better place even if that place is unknowable until we get there. Our hero in The Augur made it, but we left behind as he moves on. Hopefully when our turn comes, when it is down to the last second, we will join him. Until then we must keep building ever greater devices such as Takashi and Alex who have taken a great step forward with this movie in their use of special effects, suspense, and expressive lively camera work. This is the best I have seen from them.
written by Kyle Reid
