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The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant

Jim Finn

2020 01:01:05 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Animation, Documentary, Expedition/Travel, History, Landscape, Race, War

Description

For four years in the 1860’s, half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film follows General Grant’s path liberating the southern United States. Part travelogue, part essay film, part landscape documentary, it moves from the Texas-Louisiana border to a prison island off the coast of New England. But instead of relying on actors, vintage photos, and the sounds of bullets and explosions, the battles are illustrated with the paper reenactments of hex & counter wargames and bubblegum cards from the hobbyist gamer subcultures that have sprung up around the Civil War. The sound and music are inspired by 1970’s crime films to celebrate the destruction of the Confederacy with the synth jams they deserve.

Created by Jim Finn

Soundtrack by Colleen Burke

Photography by Jim Finn

Sound Design by Alexander Panos and Jesse Stiles

Film developed at Negativland Film Labs

Post Production Supervisor: Dean DeMatteis

Produced by Cat Mazza

 

About Jim Finn

"Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times said Jim Finn's films "often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His award-winning movies have been called "Utopian comedies" and "trompe l'oeil films". The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques.

He has been making films, videos, revolutionary needlepoint pillows and photographs for over a decade. His first feature film Interkosmos was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism" by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice's Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea, his film about a North Korean art residency, "brilliant" and said all three films "upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an 'experimental film' actually is."

He is featured in a 2010 Phaidon Press book called Take 100—The Future of Film: 100 New Directors. He was born in St. Louis and teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.