The End of the Tour

So my tour around the south ended on Friday March 26, at 9pm in Durham, North Carolina. Following an excellent screening at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, I felt a surge of gratitude welling up in me, gratitude for having been given the opportunity to share God's Architects with all kinds of people around the south.

My very special thanks to the following individuals and groups for making this tour possible:
Allen Bell and South Arts
Stephen White and Western Kentucky University
Jo El Logiudice and Vanderbilt University
Maggie Jarrett and the Central Louisiana Arts CouncilCharlie Smoke and the Mobile Arts Council
Martin McCaffery, who runs the Capri Theater in Montgomery
Jeannie-Marie Brown and Millsaps College
Aga Skrodzka-Bates and Clemson University
Lori Davis and Western Carolina University
Lynn McKnight and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

And thank you to those unmentioned and unknown who also contributed to making this tour possible.

And finally, a very special thank you to all of you who supported the tour by coming to see the film when it played in your town.

Now that I'm back in Baton Rouge, I'm preparing for a number of screenings around Louisiana, as well as the Atlanta Film Festival and Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson, Mississippi.

Thank you for your support, and thank you for reading.

Zack Godshall

MS-SC-NC

Jackson to Clemson to Cullowhee
I write this before a journey to Durham tomorrow where God's Architects will play at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.

Yesterday, I somehow made it over to South Carolina from Mississippi, where I had a brief and nice stay in Jackson near Millsaps College where played. After a friendly screening and gathering in Clemson, I drove north this morning, to Cullowhee, North Carolina. Quite a drive, from the hills around Clemson to the mountains that surround Western Carolina University. The drive was a great slow winding succession of switchbacks and slopes, which forced me to slow down and look around, oftentimes perilously. Because of the long and freezing winter, most of the trees remain leafless, which offered me glimpses of mountains from the forests of other mountains, views rarely glimpsed this time of year.

On the downslope of one particularly slow curve, I am lucky enough to catch site of an over-sized shoulder where I quickly pull over, realizing I need to get out and stretch for a moment. As I open the door, I immediately hear the mild roar of a waterfall in the near distance. I turn and notice just steps away a narrow gravel path that leads into the forest, and I assume with little doubt that this is the way to the falls. Of course...this shoulder is really a stopping off point where people park while they visit the falls.

Alone I wander through a newly green glade of all manner of deciduous and fir tree, and soon crystalline waters flow along both sides of the path. This must be the water from the falls now flowing down the mountain in two separate streams.

The pool at the base of the white-waterfall reflects the blues and greens above. The falls themselves overflow a rock cliff some thirty feet tall and twice as wide. The rock stretches horizontally well beyond the reach of the fall and yet is continually wet from a watery glaze that covers its darkly green algae-slick surface. In drips and drops, water finds its way down the rock and into the pool and the forked stream beyond. Much of the water, however, rolls directly from the supposed river above and down the rock face until it runs up against a small ridge, a lip in the otherwise smoothly worn stone, at which point the water stutters, forming a waterfall in miniature before it gathers in beaded sheets and descends the lower face of the rock. Yet the most voluminous flows of water shoot out in one seemingly continuous flow beyond the face of the rock and into the low sky. But the water breaks up as it falls. At first hesitant about being thrust and scattered into separation, the droplets appear to linger in air above the pool. And yet a violence exists too, for the droplets manage to cohere somehow and pour collectively (though fly seems to describe it better) and crash against the rock and into a patch of foam in the blue-green pool. The sound, the roar, is unmistakable, and well known.

For a brief moment, the sun sneaks out from behind some clouds to backlight the rim of the falls, as if to make the clear and over-sized droplets glow for me alone.

All of this, a strange collaboration this afternoon, in the woods along Highway 107, somewhere in between Clemson and Cullowhee. Silver Run Falls.


music by Ross Jackson

Montgomery & Crosses

Montgomery
I arrived in Montgomery in time to get a tour of the city with Martin McCaffery, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the place and his deft driving abilities could not keep small gray rocks from falling out of the sky at the site of Hank Williams' eternal resting place. No manna from Heaven for Hank...just rocks. (Two cemeteries in two days...I wonder whose grave I might visit in Jackson?)
As for the rocks that were falling out of the sky, I have no idea, and neither did Martin. We just hurried back into his car and headed back to the Capri Theater - which he's been running for a quarter century. (He must've started the job when he was 20.) The Capri is a fantastic old one screen movie house where, incidentally, my buddy Scott Teems' highly lauded film That Evening Sun (starring Hal Holbrook) will play April 9-15. If you have the chance to see this movie, do, in any theater, wherever.
The Cross Garden
I had the chance to talk with a number of Montgomerians who watched God's Architects last night, and again and again they recommended I visit W.C Rice's Cross Garden (plenty of fine pictures at this link...check it out) a divinely inspired collection of crosses made from scrap wood and telephone poles and a garden of air conditioning husks that each tell, in hand-painted lettering, of the horrors that lie in wait for the unrepentant.

It is quite a place...less structural and architectural and more of a spiritual-yard-art-garden. Rice was apparently a sweet guy who cared deeply for the unrepentant. He didn't hate or condemn his neighbors...he just had a lot of pity for hellbent types, so much pity that he felt compelled to remind them again and again and again, in semi-ironic and heartfelt fashion, of just how hot it would be down there. (In my opinion, it's rare that one labors over such things out of hatred for others, and though I didn't have the chance to meet him, I don't think Rice did all that work out of spite or anger.)

If you're in the neck of the Prattville woods, make a pilgrimage out to the cross garden and bear witness to the result of what must have been years of work.


Jackson
Recently arrived in Mississippi's capital...that's two capitals in two days. No cemeteries yet, but I've still got 2 hours before the show, which is playing over at Millsaps College at 7:30pm.

Tomorrow I head east to South Carolina for a show at Clemson. I don't know a soul there, but when in Nashville, I did meet the siblings of a fella named Kerr (pronounced "car"). We'll see if I see him.

Alexandria - Lafayette - Mobile

Alexandria

In Alexandria, I stumbled upon this article in the local newspaper and subsequently made a pit stop in the Alexandria Museum of Art, which, as it happened, was having a retrospective show of paintings by Robert Warrens.

Alexandria-Lafayette (en route to Mobile)
After a very pleasant screening and discussion in Alexandria, I cruised 70 miles south to Lafayette, my hometown. There, I reunited with two old friends in a place known as the "4 Acre Wood", a hideout for raccoons in the middle of Lafayette.

Mobile
Once in Mobile, I sat in a leather recliner at the Crescent Theater where I joined a few late-night moviegoers for an impromptu screening of God's Architects.

The Crescent is a fine example of a new one-screen independent theater. Plans are already in place to return to the Crescent with the cast of my next film Lord Byron, an event which will include a screening and a late-night jam session with the musicians in that film.

After a steady 15 hours of rain, for which Mobile lived up to its title as America's rainiest city (excepting Alaskan and Hawaiian locales), Sunday was about as perfect as it gets: blue skies, brunch with the ever-hospitable Charlie Smoke (of the Mobile Arts Council) at an Irish pub, a well-attended screening, and an aimless wander through a 19th century cemetery where lie the remains of Joe Cain...one of the legendary founders of what we now know of as Mardi Gras. After the screening, I had the chance to talk with some incredibly friendly Mobilians, as well as the Pascagoulian parents of my good friend, photographer Britney Majure. I spent the rest of the evening researching high octane fuel with Gideon (Carson) Kennedy, himself a filmmaker who made a really innovate short film called Clandestine...composed entirely of archival footage and sounds.

A picture of a picture on the exterior wall of one of the research facilities...

Coming soon...Reflections on the Capri Theater in Montgomery, and rocks falling from the sky at Hank Williams' grave.

Cenla

So my time in Nashville was relaxing and mostly spent leisurely strolling around the campus of Vanderbilt. A fine campus indeed. Along with several students and professors, I had lunch with Alberto Fuguet, their visiting filmmaker/writer for the next month. Interesting fella who, from the sound of it, is going to make an interesting film up there later in the month. Before the screening last night, I joined some students for dinner...the same students who designed the fine artwork featured here in this post. See above, see below.

We had a fine turnout for the show...especially a surprise contingent from Clarksville, TN...some old friends from Baton Rouge who now work at Mission Clarksville.

Right now, I'm sitting in a coffeehouse called "Tamp and Grind"...oh yeah. Downtown Alexandria seems abuzz this afternoon...is it because the populace has grown restless with the knowledge that God's Architects will play at the Kress Theater this evening? Or is this typical of a Friday afternoon in the hub of Cenla? Or is it because warm weather has finally arrived down south? Or perhaps it's anticipation for the food and music festival Que'in on the Red that begins but one hour before the start of my film? Whatever the case, downtown Alexandria is more bustling than I would have thought possible, and it is certainly more pleasant than the place I see in my own dim memory from a wedding celebration I attended here nearly a decade ago. Perhaps my memory is more, or less, dim because of that celebration and not because of the place...for whatever reasons.

Two things, however, are certain:
1.) I will go a-wandering around this downtown soon, and have a stroll along the Red River, only 3 blocks from where I now sit.
2.) Where I now sit, in the "Tamp and Grind" coffeehouse, is a place better for sitting than any I know of in Lafayette, Louisisana, my hometown, and the generally-considered cultural center of Southwest Louisiana.


My two-night stay in Mobile begins tomorrow night and will include a lately-scheduled, nearly-midnight screening of God's Architects tomorrow night at 11pm at the Crescent Theater. Then Sunday afternoon, the film screens at Bernheim Hall (Behind Ben May Library), at 2pm. Check out Thomas Harrison's article about God's Architects in the Mobile Press-Register.

Southern Circuit Welcomes Zack Godshall and "God's Architects"

South Arts welcomes Producer/Director Zack Godshall with his insightful documentary film "God's Architects." Zack will be on the 2009-2010 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers beginning Tuesday, March 16, at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY, and concluding on Friday, March 26, with a screening presented by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC. Along the way, the film will also screen at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN; Arts Council of Central Louisiana in Alexandria, LA; Mobile Arts Council in Mobile, AL; Capri Theatre in Montgomery, AL; Millsaps College in Jackson, MS; Clemson University in Clemson, SC; and Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC.

More about Zack Godshall, "God's Architects," and the tour schedule

Web site for "God's Architects"

Audio interview with Zack Godshall