The new Made Here short film Delta Bell (Animatic) from Marlboro, Vermont filmmaker Jesse Kreitzer, imagines a moment in the wake of Vermont's Great Flood of 1927, as an amateur diver embarks on an underwater search for his family’s sunken farmhouse. Trudging across the riverbed in a hand-welded suit, the diver desperately attempt to salvage what remains. This short animated film, which stands on its own, initially served as a study for a longer film project, and can be viewed here.
Filmmaker Jesse Kreitzer answered questions about the film via a video conference call with Vermont Public's Eric Ford. This transcript of the interview has been lightly copy edited.
Eric Ford: What made you want to create this project?
Jesse Kreitzer: I was born and raised in Marlboro, Vermont. I'm here now, but it took me 13 years to get back. and when I came back to Vermont, my relationship to the land was different, and the relationship to my family — not in a bad way or negative way, but I was trying to renegotiate what that change was to a sense of place and a sense of belonging. When you watch this film, it's like a stylized narrative fiction film about a diver trying to salvage a farmhouse that's been submerged in the wake of the flood. But that's just a creative way of covering up a very personal exploration of a sense of place and sense of belonging for me in Vermont. And, I feel like maybe it had sort of prophetic tendencies — it felt like it was the writing on the wall, and what we've seen played out in the past few months with extreme flooding in our state. And so I was looking at the flood of 1927. It's a story that's rooted in the past but is very much about our present and I think it is also wrestling with my fears around the climate crisis.
Eric Ford: Was the subject of the film based on research that you had done?
Jesse Kreitzer: There were a confluence of factors. One, of course, was the flood of 1927, where I did a deep dive on what happened. As a storyteller I like to use historical events as a sort of conduit, as a way of going into the gray areas and extrapolating or building worlds out of a historical event. The other piece of Delta Bell was this little-known movement in amateur diving history, which was during the Great Depression. Popular science magazines were publishing how-to instructions to build shallow diving helmets out of anything you can use — hot water heaters, mailboxes, milk jugs — to build these shallow diving helmets so anyone could go to the the river beds or lake beds to try to salvage anything of value during the depression. I took these two seemingly disparate anecdotes or movements or historical events — the amateur diving movement, and the flood of 1927, and that felt like a way to help tell this story about a diver trying to find his family.
And then there's one other little piece, the town of Mountain Mills, which is now sits under the Harriman Reservoir in Wilmington. I was looking at whole cities or towns that had been flooded and completely lost. And Mountain Mills was this milling town just 20 minutes from me, and some remnants still exist underneath the Harriman Reservoir. So that was another piece of it.
Eric Ford: This is a study for a film to be made, but it works on its own as a short film. Can you talk a little bit about what an animatic is? What was that process like to create this?
Jesse Kreitzer: The animatic is basically an animated version or an illustrated version of a live action film. A lot of times, directors will produce animatics just for not for entire films, certainly, but for complex scenes where lots of stunts or action is involved. And certainly that was the case with with Delta Bell. You're on the water, dealing with the shallow diving apparatus, with very complicated action sequences. But there's another side of it as an independent filmmaker, which is the challenge in the absence of the film — you're trying to produce something that doesn't yet exist. What assets or resources can you show to be able to convince an investor, to convince somebody of your vision? And so the animatic becomes a tool, not just a tool for your collaborators, whether you're working with set builders or production designers, but also to be able to show anyone. I brought on my longtime collaborators — Benjamin Mackey, who was the storyboard illustrator, Felipe Antunes as sound designer, and Jose Parody, who was the composer. It was just the four of us working together to produce this this short excerpt. There's a longer film and a longer script, this is the first six pages of the screenplay.
Eric Ford: Tell me about the title of the film, Delta Bell.
Jesse Kreitzer: A diving bell is a machine that allows divers to submerge themselves underwater. As a filmmaker, I always pull in reference material. And so, before I even made the animatic, I looked at pages and pages filled with archival material of different diving apparatus, and the diving bell is just such an incredible design. There's a long history of diving culture and using diving bells. And so really, the title is just referencing that apparatus. I know it hearkens back to a lot of blues songs that were built around the floods of 1927. We don't necessarily have deltas forming in Vermont, although you could make that case, but I imagine, in the wake of a flood you would be operating from a delta, or one might exist. It's the combination of the sort of blues folklore around great floods, not just in Vermont, but certainly in the south at that time and the diving bell apparatus.
Eric Ford: Are there any projects that you're working on now?
Jesse Kreitzer: My partner and I are in Marlboro, Vermont, and we are pursuing the buildout of a micro cinema here in Marlboro called the Schoolhouse Cinema. We live in an 1830s one-room schoolhouse that we've been restoring, and we bought an old chestnut timber frame, also from the 1830s, that was deconstructed a few years ago in Montague, Massachusetts. My language has always been through film and cinema, and the love for the black box, and to have that viewing experience. One of the few things most important to me in my life is having that cinematic experience with a collection of strangers in a room. Filmmaking-wise, there's a project called Toxo, which is about a woman suffering from toxoplasmosis. who is an animal hoarder who has her cats taken away — she voluntarily relinquishes control. It's in the aftermath of that decision and her contending with that.
