Gravel – Local Film Gets Recognition
By Annie Reichert ’06

Reprinted with permission of the Antioch Record

Antioch student Annie Reichert ’06 recently interviewed director Steve Bognar, producer Julia Reichert ’70, and actress Louise Smith ’77 about the locally shot and produced film Gravel – a short film that went to Sundance, played at the Cleveland Film Festival in 2003, was accepted to screen in the Atlantic Film Festival in Nova Scotia, and won Honorable Mention for best short film in the New Jersey International Film Festival. Louise, Associate Professor of Theatre; Steve, local filmmaker; and Julia, also a local filmmaker, all teach or have taught at Antioch College.

ANNIE: Steve, how long have you worked in Yellow Springs?

STEVE: My partner Julia and I have been in this town for going on 12 years now. Julia was an Antioch student in the ’60s; that’s the reason she’s in Yellow Springs.

ANNIE: So where did the idea for your film, Gravel, come from?

STEVE: Gravel came out of the desire to make a film about mother-daughter relationships. Watching Julia raise her daughter Lela, another former Antioch student, made it seem like those are the most complicated relationships between family members. A smaller impulse was to make a story about this region, its environment, and its communities – specifically the urban Appalachian community that you see in East Dayton and Cincinnati.

ANNIE: Can you describe the narrative style of the film?

STEVE: I hope it’s fair to call it a non-traditional narrative approach. It’s still narrative filmmaking, with acting and shots that help you understand the story, but in a less usual way; in a way that the audience has to pick things up, and go, “Oh, okay, that’s what they’re talking about.” The movies that excite me and Julia are the sort that respect your intelligence enough to not spoon-feed it to you.

ANNIE: What kind of film community exists around here?

STEVE: Well, Dayton actually has a very vital film community. A lot of it comes out of Antioch, because of Julia, and Jim Klein ’72, Anne Bohlen [Associate Professor of Film/Communications], and Chris Hill [Associate Professor of Media Arts]. When you want to make a movie, the support you get from very talented people in the area is amazing. By the way, at the beginning of the film there’s a sort of flurry of animated images of three women. Thanks to Dennie Eagleson ’71, we found Emily “Star” Sepik ’03, who spent weeks creating Polaroid transfers. She made around 300 to get 150 good ones to animate, which was very time-consuming. It looks great, and gives the film the sort of unique effect that an independent film needs to stand out.

ANNIE: What else makes this film unique?

JULIA: Steve is very modest so he won’t admit this, but to me, the film is very visually striking. Steve actually storyboarded the whole thing in great detail beforehand, which is a great visual tool to have before beginning filming. He’s quite a collector of images, and many of the scenes are ones he had sketched from driving around in Cincinnati. The other thing that gets noticed about the film is the thin narrative thread. I think Steve is trying to experiment with how little narrative he could get away with; how little plot he could give the audience and still have them feel like there’s a satisfying story being told.

ANNIE: Louise, what is different about working on a film versus working on stage?

LOUISE: When you’re filming, you’re inside a moment for a much longer period of time. On the stage, you go back to a moment over and over again and repeat them in front of an audience and in rehearsal. In a movie you sort of linger on one moment and you’re inside it for hours, and you have to find the energy to keep doing it, and you get interrupted and do takes over and over. Then it’s over forever and you never go back and do it again. You see it on the screen and it’s completely transformed by the editing process, so that’s really different. In theater, the feeling of technology is really different. The lights are way up high, and you sort of create this environment on the stage that you can just foster. In film, no one’s trying to help you stay in your world. The mic is over here, and you’re looking into the camera; your imagination has to hold the truth much more vividly than on the stage where there are all these things that prop you up and help you. I like the challenge of filmmaking. I like the camaraderie of it. I like watching the technology.

ANNIE: Do you find yourself reflecting back on states from the film when you watch yourself in it?

LOUISE: That’s a funny thing; I sort of detach myself from it. I don’t think of myself up there after awhile. It’s its own thing. I don’t relive it in the way you would think I would.

ANNIE: Steve says he wrote this story with you in mind, so do you relate to your character in some way?

LOUISE: There were certain parts of her circumstances that I could relate to in multiple ways. When I lived in New York City, I worked for five years with psychiatric patients. I got to see how, in these big institutions, in prisons and hospitals, how they process people, and then how, inside of that big institution, there’s a connection that would be very human, but would be transgressive to exercise inside this institution. My character waits until the person she connects with is out of prison, until she goes to visit him. I haven’t had a parallel experience, but I can relate.

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