The Lucky Bum Tour is Portland, Oregon filmmakers Vanessa Renwick (say ren-nik) and Bill Daniel, who have crisscrossed the USA in their big van, showing their entertaining and highly personal films at microcinemas and art venues.

Bill Daniel’s show, The Girl On The Train In The Moon, presenting train art as well as interviews with boxcar artists and railyard workers, is a little marvel of experience design. Originally meant to be a traditional documentary film, this black-and-white installation shows simultaneously on two screens. The moon is a rounded mirror-screen positioned well above our heads. The audience members seat themselves around the second screen, a small glowing rectangle positioned on the ground, as around the campfire it represents. Girl… shows us railroad graffiti and bits of hobo lore against the eerie screeching of the rails and the pops and clicks of the campfires Daniel sat around when he took to the rails. Most of the hobo artists have particular logos. One interesting discussion concerns the oft-signed but seldom-seen Bozo Texino, whose western hat has an infinity symbol for its base. Sitting in your vehicle at the railroad crossing will never be the same again. Instead of waiting for a train to go by, you’ll be scanning the boxcars and dreaming about riding to destinations unknown. Highly recommended.

In the December 2002 show at the Aurora Picture Show, Daniel also showed a few minutes of his work-in-progress, Point Comfort, Texas. Point Comfort is one of a growing number of heavy industry towns whose residents experience a high incidence of cancers. The work appears in four picture frames. Three frames present films variously showing people naming scores of cancer victims and footage of the town’s Formosa Plastics plant. A fourth frame encloses a picture of town residents. Though the filmmaker clearly blames the plant’s emissions for the cancers, he present no epidemiological data, trots out no scientists or activists, as in Laura Dunn’s excellent documentary Green, or Judith Helfand’s Blue Vinyl. This is a work of emotion, and as a cheerfully obliging matriarch listed what is essentially the Point Comfort Roll Of The Dead, I felt gutshot.

I’ve seen Vanessa Renwick’s experimental film program, Go, Baby, Go! twice. It is very very personal and very very challenging filmmaking. How challenging? Audience members have retched, groaned, and, on one occasion, fainted. Now frankly I’m deeply grateful to find an artist whose images provoke strong reactions from today’s seen-it-alls, but this is clearly not going to screen at a cineplex near you. So why should you seek it out?

Because while Go, Baby, Go! is not for the faint of heart, it is also a call to not be faint of heart. Many of Renwick’s non-fiction films address matters that it would behoove us not to avert our eyes from. The film Worse is one of the program highlights, and the poster child for what I’m talking about. This five-minute video profiles an elderly man who has picketed an abortion clinic six hours a day, six days a week, for several years. He’s a touch rambling and scary, but steadfast in his belief that abortion is a horror that will lead to the sort of disregard for certain lives that the Nazis held. Renwick turned on the camera and let him talk, and his conviction can only be admirable. His interview is followed by a snarky bit in which the Ladies’ Accordion Gospel Team sing “The March Of The Pro-lifer.” The song is amusing, but they come off as complete lightweights, flippant and willing to do fun, easy stuff for their cause, rather than to hang in for the long haul. Progressives take note.

The program can be roughly divided into the roller-coaster-ride films and take-a-breather films. A Nice Ass, Mine, The Yodeling Lesson, and Westward Ho give viewers a couple of minutes to collect their wits and rein in their reeling senses. A Nice Ass is a black-and-white video loop of steatopygy and a feather boa, vaguely reminding me of the Pink Elephants dance sequence from Dumbo. Arse-tickling eye candy. The Yodeling Lesson presents an exceptionally talented bicyclist whose look-ma!-no-hands! ride down a tall, curving hill winds up being far more engrossing, in that Cirque du Soleil way, than the fact that she’s bare-ass naked. Westward Ho is a, uh, quickie, that I didn’t know the name of, so I was calling it Rodeo Fellatio until Renwick set me straight. ‘Nuff said. Mine is a feather-light moment of truth for dog lovers.

Warning is a video collage of the overload of behavioral direction we receive in any given day, in the form of signs and sounds. Renwick has removed the film from the program, saying that repeated viewings over the Lucky Bum Tour taught her that it’s “a stupid movie.” Olympia is 10 minutes of a homebirth, in black and white. Yes, women do have babies every day. It’s still a miracle, and like many miracles, there’s an element of danger. You can’t tear your eyes from the footage of a gorgeous body heaving and straining in a terrible and beautiful process, partly because it’s shot on super-8 so that you must watch closely to make out what’s happening. The first time I saw this, the guy next to me passed out cold and hit the dirt when the afterbirth was delivered. Crowdog combines the stories of Renwick’s experiences going barefoot for two years and a trip she took to a religious ceremony at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. We see blurred color footage of her traveling feet for most of the film. Toxic Shock depicts the Spanish Inquisition-level misery Renwick experienced when she had Toxic Shock Syndrome through images of flaming tampons, gasoline nozzles, Molotov cocktails, and nasty needles. Makes you think twice. 9 Is A Secret envelopes you in a cocoon of ghostly folklore while the filmmaker explains how she changed her name to the Scottish Renwick, which means “of ravens,” and the appearance of ravens and crows at significant moments in her life, particularly deaths. Richart, the longest film in the program, is a profile of Richard Tracy, art teacher and collage artist whose massive and growing front yard installation is a thing to behold. Tracy discusses how he got his start, and his philosophy that not only can we all make art, we all need to. The protagonist has loads of personality and a ready tongue—the sort of character who has “ideal documentary film subject” written all over him. And his art is fun to look at. I defy anyone to watch Richart and not want to go home and make something. Yet it’s one of the weakest films in the program. Maybe because it’s far longer than the other films. Maybe because it’s one of her few strict narrative films. Or maybe because, while it definitely chronicles an experience Renwick lives—the experience of the experimental artist—it’s not about Renwick’s life.

Last year, the Lucky Bum Tour came to my little town, and filmmakers Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick were gracious enough to skip sleep and do an interview about their work. What followed was a comedy of errors. First, the tape of the interview mysteriously disappeared. Then, once the tape just as mysteriously resurfaced, every instance of Renwick’s voice was garbled and distorted and unrecoverable. Just Renwick’s voice, not mine, not Bill Daniel’s, just hers. How creepy is that.

RB: …I’m with Bill Daniel, whose installation Girl On The Train In The Moon played last night at the Alternate Current Space here in Austin. Could you please describe your installation, Girl On The Train In The Moon, for me?

BD: It’s kind of a video metaphor. It’s a documentary installation. It’s a non-fiction interactive documentary. Basically it’s an investigation into hobo subculture, especially graffiti, told on two channels of video, one video representing the moon, another video representing the fire, with an audio track. The idea is to create a situation like a campfire, where people are sitting around telling stories and listening to stories around a flickering light. So I just replaced the flickering fire with projected video, 16mm and Super-8, and played around with the strobe rate to make it flicker and then above is the moon, which doesn’t flicker but is also images, mainly people. The moon is mainly people.

RB: Okay. Could you tell me a little bit about the music? There was some wonderful banjo music, some great picking in the film.

BD: Yeah, all the audio in the piece is field recordings I’ve done, and the banjo piece in particular was an awesome catch. This kid, Andrew’s part of the new generation of rail riders, they kind of punks or crusty punks you’d call them I guess. Although he’s not, he’s not really a crusty, but he’s just, he’s like the latest version of the new breed of rail riders, and a lot of them are really into old-time music and they travel with fiddles and banjos and play this music. That particular recording was done at a kind of a hobo campout party in Dunsmere, California. And there was a train on the tracks right next to the camp, and so I’d set up a couple of stereo mikes right next to the wheels, waiting for this train to start rolling, and he just walked up, saw that I was fixing to make a recording there, and sat down with his banjo. So I just figured it out, one mike next to the banjo and the next to the rails. And the train started rolling away, at first really slow, with this squeaking, squealing, clang-squeal sound, and he started playing the banjo along with it. And the train passed in about 10 minutes, as it got up to speed and disappeared in the distance, and he just ended his banjo song as the train faded out, so… it was like the perfect recording, you know? One piece of tape, one take, and it’s a completely mixed track.

RB: That’s fabulous. So how did you come to make a film on hobos and train car graffiti? Were you riding the rails yourself?

BD: I did ride the rails to make the film, but I originally just saw the graffiti on the sides of trains. I was always into graffiti. I mean, I still am. I love graffiti. I totally cherish graffiti. And in 1983 I was stuck at a train crossing and saw stuff going by, and immediately freaked out. I’d never seen anything like it before. And this is—they call it mean streaks, is what the kids call it—but they’re done on these oil-based crayons. And Mean Streak is one of the brand names of it. But they’re monikers is what they are. They’re generally a caricature of the artist and a nickname.

RB: How did you do the research to track down the creators who are leaving their labels on the train cars?

BD: Well it’s part old-fashioned detective work, using the phone and phone books and asking around. And then I just asked everywhere all the time. I mean I would pick up any hitchhiker I ever encountered, just to ask, “Hey did you ever ride the rails? Have you ever heard of Bozo Texino or The Rambler?” And so it’s really an absurd quest, but I did it for so long that I just started meeting people.

RB: And how long did it take to make this movie?

BD: Well, it started in ’83 as a still photography project and then I started shooting film in ’89. And I’m still working on it now. One of the major interviews in the piece I didn’t get until last year.

RB: So this is an ongoing work that you could be working on then until the end of your life.

BD: I think I probably will. For the longest time I was trying to finish a film, you know. The regular old 16mm film. And it was the hardest thing and I… people were like, “Dude when are you going to finish your film?” And it was this thing I was carrying around as my thorny cross, and I had the opportunity in the show in New York last year, so I made an installation for that. And at the same time I was making installations out of media for other projects. And so the form just kind of revealed itself to me as a way of making the documentary work that doesn’t require you to commit to a single-channel, linear thing where you have to come up with tens of thousands of dollars to finish a print.

RB: So you’re in Portland (Oregon) now, but you were in Texas apparently when you started the film. So are you seeing new and different graffiti now and you’re getting the itch to run down new people and get them in your film?

BD: I’ve lost the fever a little bit. I don’t have that obsessive drive, you know, that got to find out every new graffiti that you see. I’ll definitely be working with the material forever, but thankfully, the fever’s left. As far as having to shoot every day. I mean I wouldn’t ever be able to sit still without thinking that right now, some train is rolling near me and I’m not photographing it. It’s like, it was an uncomfortable feeling.

RB: So how do you finance your films?

BD: Oh good grief. Carpentry, you know. I have some carpentry skills, and sometimes I work in the industry as a grip-electrician, which is a craft I really love, but I really can’t stand the industry. I can’t stand the product. I have a severe allergic reaction to narrative dramatic features, so…

RB: So what are you working on now, and what would be sort of a dream project for you? Or are you living your dream with Girl On The Train In The Moon?

BD: I’m definitely living my dream right now, traveling, showing films, and making films. Because on these trips, we’ll also shoot, gather materials for a project. I’m working on a piece about anchor-outs—boat squatters? And another piece about people who live in RVs in the desert. So we’re constantly gathering material as we’re touring, showing finished work.

RB: How often does your work get seen, outside of tours like this. Is this pretty much the forum for your work?

BD: Pretty much. I’m not really interested in festivals. And you know, like this train film took forever to make, so my kind of filmmaking output really fell off. So yeah, my work really wasn’t getting out that much. I have some older pieces that play in the underground film circuit now and again, but touring is really how I see getting the work out now.

RB: And how is the Lucky Bum Tour going?

BD: Awesome. It’s a great adventure. Highs and lows as far as which cities really have had good audiences. But this tour we’re interested in developing new scenes. So we’ve played places like Walla Walla, or Marfa, Texas, in the hopes of finding audiences. And we’re finding them in some surprising places.

RB: So what’ your connection with Peripheral Produce?

BD: Matt McCormick is our fearless leader. He’s the king of Portland, and he really has done a lot to organize filmmakers in Portland… a town with other filmmakers that weren’t connected by a scene. Matt, with Peripheral Produce, really kind of brought everybody together. (See our interview with Matt McCormick.)

RB: Thank you.

There’s more touring ahead for Daniel and Renwick. Daniel told me that they’ve found strong audiences for experimental films and film art in unexpected places. “It’s not just the larger cities. Places like Baltimore, Charlottesville… have a scene.” Check the Peripheral Produce site and watch for them in a town near you.

Bill Daniel’s Girl On The Train In The Moon will appear at a railroad art exhibit at Gallery Lombardi, January 9-30, 2003.

And Vanessa, I’m sorry.

—RB