Music

NXNE FILM REVIEW: Sand Mountain

by Allan Tong

@ NXNE: Saturday, June 18, 6:45 p.m.

In 2005, Kathryn McCool, drove from Los Angeles to Sand Mountain, Alabama to photograph reclusive musician Cast King.  It was McCool’s chance to explore a land she had dreamed about while growing up in New Zealand.  In her childhood she staged photos to look like the American South of her imagination: cowboys, farmers, trailer parks.  Ever since she first heard a banjo, McCool felt the South calling her.

With a borrowed video camera, she chronicles her journey to Sand Mountain in a series of encounters.  There’s the old woman who runs a Christian motel where unmarried couples and threesomes are forbidden.  There’s one fellow who declares, “If I woke up one morning and found out I was a damn Yankee I’d shoot myself.”

Cast King used to record country sides for Sun Records in the fifties, then dropped out of the music business.  McCool finds him to be a grizzled, old man living in a brick house where he picks tunes on an acoustic guitar next to a broken TV.  His wife keeps his awards in a drawer.

King isn’t the only one making music.  Sand Mountain is full of country music played by God fearin’ people on fiddles and guitars in their homes.  It’s a poor place, “kind of friendly, but guarded,” concludes McCool.  Sand Mountain recalls Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, but is more personal.  Both films succeed in connecting place to music, where a plaintive  banjo rings through the hillside, where wrongs are settled through the barrel of a shotgun, and where the Klan used to roam unfettered up until a generation ago.

McCool isn’t the first filmmaker to explore the musical culture of the south, but her outsider’s perspective is refreshing, naïve, but also honest.

trailer:
http://vimeo.com/14136149