damianharriss, I’m not sure what in the phrase “programmatic musical scores” makes your mind turn to Ennio Morricone– or what in the words “plastic elements” evokes cinema’s barefoot naturalist, Terence Malick. In Days of Heaven, Malick applies the score delicately, with sensitivity to the film’s emotional weather and narrative currents similar to that with which Hammer employs ambient sounds in Ballast.

Thank you for your post. I hope it is read by many more.

You didn’t name drop the Dardenne brothers in your post, so I wanted to plug them here. They’re Belgian, and make films that have the same sort of aesthetic. Hammer has acknowledged that they inspired him– hell, they inspire anybody that sees their films, in which a character who is on the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder is confronted with some moral dilemma and comes, typically, to a redemptive insight. It’s powerful stuff, and I’ve been interested to see that approach to filmmaking applied to a contemporary American context.

If there is some sort of controversy surrounding the filmmakers skin tone or how he made a living before he made the film its nonsense.

Just watch the film. It exist on the screen in its own beautiful, melancholy space.

Glad you mentioned Shotgun Stories in the same breath, because this film reminded me a lot of it. Ballast didn’t move me as much as Shotgun Stories did — few recent films have — maybe because of the more meandering story or the lack of a powerhouse actor like Michael Shannon. But with these three directors–David Gordon Green, Jeff Nicholas, Lance Hammer…are we witnessing a movement in American cinema? Lyrical-minimalist-humanist-naturalist-formalist delights? I dunno. But I like it.

I pontificate and lay into films I have problems with as much as Mr. White or any of my colleagues do, but when I see something like Ballast, I’m jarred by the reminder that pointing a camera at something that truly stirs your soul beats a thousand pages of analysis.

Race is an issue, segregation is alive and well, but it plays out differently depending upon where/when/who you are. I’ve never felt the sting of (mostly economic) segregation in the deep South nearly as much as I did growing up in melting pot New York. Go figure.

I was raised about a mile from Jackson State University and I was nine before I ever played with any white kids in the area. I was lucky to have this opportunity to live and be apart of the black community that surrounded me. My family didn’t have any money, it didn’t matter, we were all one bunch of little boys playing football and baseball. I was lucky, I never had or felt that prejudice that the world sees. I was also lucky to live up in the delta in Greenwood and come to know the passion of the of the land it’s people.

It’s hard for me to truly take someone like Mr. White and others as real. Seems like they are pretty comfortable in thier little lives in their little offices pounding away at something they really don’t know crap about. There are people that get out and make films and there are people who sit around and piss and moan who are want-to-bees.

I have just finished that scipt I mentioned above. It has taken a long time for it to emerge from the depths of my soul. I have had great comments from both black and white actors and producers of the excellent quailty and authentisity of the piece.

A HAND FULL OF DUST takes place in the hot humid Mississippi Delta in 1949. This is a heart-wrenching story about two sharecropper families, one black, one white who are thrown together under severe circumstance and learn to love and help each other in order to survive the cruel and overbearing hand of the rich landowners. And they do survie… This sript arose from more than enough actual facts and happenings than it would take to rewrite any classic…and I witnessed most of these happenings

So, if someone who has never spent any time in the delta has an opinion akin to the ones I’ve read from Mr. White and others, they need to go down there and “Get some reality under their fingernails.”

I just lived back in the delta in 97 and 98, Charleston, Mississippi as I was writing a novel adaptation off of a stageplay I had produced at the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, SOUTHERN RAPTURE. Badja Jola who was in Mississippi Burning was the black lead and stared with Dwight Yoakam and Sally Kirkland and Peter Fonda directed.

After the play closed, Badja came to me and wanted me to write a one man show for him about the great Frederick Douglas. He wanted to present it to Danzel Washington as a project for a film. That’s pretty damn strong for an actor of Badja’s quality to come to a white guy and ask that.

It’s easy to sit on a pontifical thrown and smear soemone who has talent. It’s another thing to climb down off that thrown and see reality as it really is and not from a cubical in some highrise fifteen hundred miles away.

In A HAND FULL OF DUST there was no color for me…for Chirst’s sake…drop all the crap you all are building up around this film (Ballast)and see the heart and soul in it.

Thanks Steven…I truly appreciate your work…please keep it up.

Joseph Tidwell