Lucy Raven’s New Film Captures a Dam Removal in the Pacific Northwest

When I started the body of “Drumfire” work, I was doing experiments around fluid dynamics and thinking a lot about the role of water in shaping the United States, particularly in the West, so it was kind of there from the beginning. When I began Ready Mix, I put those ideas aside, though there was a presence of water as an ingredient in concrete. That piece was followed by the Demolition of a Wall works, and while I was doing research for the mode of image-capture for those, with very high-speed video, I was also making shadowgrams—cameraless images that use a kind of inverse technology with a really quick flash.

One of the touchpoints for me in thinking about aerodynamics and the movement of air is 19th-century photography by Étienne-Jules Marey. He’s known more for the chronophotography stuff he did, but he made these experiments later in his career in Paris where he built a kind of smoke machine; all of these parallel channels of smoke would come out, and he would put an object in its path and the smoke would go around the object in different ways, creating vortices or patterns of different kinds of pressure systems in a way that could be seen. I was thinking about that while I was making the Demolition of a Wall works and started getting excited again about the idea of working with fluid dynamics. It started to build in my imagination as a condition where systems of disruption were drawn out in a way that built up tension before they were released.

How did you learn about the dam removal that you filmed?

Not very many dam removals have been done, but I found footage of these two that had happened in the last couple of years. For one of them, I saw a time-lapse of a reservoir draining, and it revealed millions of years of geologic time and thousands of years of inhabitation and then industrial exploitation.

I realized that contained so much that I wanted to focus this third work on a dam removal, so I started looking around and found plans for a series of four dams along the Klamath River that would be the biggest dam removal project that had ever happened.

What did you learn about the dam removal process itself?

There had to be a whole infrastructure-construction project to be able to take the dam down, because it was located in a place that didn’t have adequate access for all the earth-moving equipment that was going to have to come in to do such a huge job. That in itself was really interesting, and it led to a thought that in a way came out of a conversation I had with [curator] Candice Hopkins at the Carnegie Museum of Art where she brought up the point that there is not a word for taking down infrastructure. We have so much language around the building of infrastructure, but we don’t really have infra-destruction language. That was striking to me because a kind of inertia leaves monuments to industrial progress in place, and the idea of the removal… You can call it a “dam removal,” but that’s an inadequate description of what it entails and what it implies about taking down what was both a symbol and an actual driver of energy and economy and a kind of desire for control of a massive force. That became really generative for me to think about.

How did the process of filming Murderers Bar differ? How was it different for you? How did you think about how to try to capture an event with such a huge sense of scale and distance involved?

There are so many different scales in play. There are different time scales I was interested in, and I wanted to also involve a lot of spatial scales and perspectives, so that some shots would be extremely close and some would be much wider. Often for me the approach to how to film something comes from the nature of the forms I’m interested in engaging. Here, on one hand, was a sort of sculptural, infrastructural form that was inert with all this potential energy behind it. And then there was a long distance of 200 miles where that water was going to go out to the ocean. I knew I wanted to include that whole distance, and like the other works in “The Drumfire,” I wanted this to be an instillation with a seamless loop.

From the start, I was thinking a lot about a structure of something like Mad Max: Fury Road, a kind of there-and-back structure. I had that idea for the structure, but the way down needed to feel different from the way back up. After some early tests, I encountered a number of challenges involved in filming the river. It’s challenging to capture from alongside it, so I needed to get up in the air. I realized that almost every shot wanted to have some movement in it, so right away, again coming out of those studies of Marey and different kinds of optical capture of fluid dynamics, I was interested in how to capture turbulence, not just in the water but also in the air. I wanted the camera to be felt and have a kind of weight that would in some ways be in tension with the air and with the water. That led to new ways of filming for me.

I’d worked with drones extensively in Ready Mix, and I was working with Yancey Caldwell, a DP [director of photography] who worked on all three films. In Ready Mix, the drone was meant to behave like a 20th-century machine in lots of ways—to go around things on the ground and work in a kind of choreography with the machines it was engaging with. In Murderers Bar, I wanted to use the drone in a different way. One of the major operations [we undertook] was to undo the automatic gyroscopic setting that keeps the horizon steady in drones and also in most helicopter mounts, to be able to roll the horizon in shots. It’s something you’d recognize from films like The Shining and the helicopters in Apocalypse Now, before the gyroscopic mount became normalized. The kind of tension in many ‘70s films was really influential to me for this film.

Once you started to process the footage, was there anything that was different than what you were expecting or seeking?

Maybe the most unexpected thing to me was the long shot when the water was released from the dam, the initial burst through the reservoir. That’s a one-time shot, and I had a sense that we would be seeing a river forming. We were up on a ridge, and the sound of the river being released was astounding—a really complex wall of sound with a sort of Doppler effect going from the left to the right, and eventually filling up the entire canyon. Then the river itself, as I was watching the footage… We had practiced that shot many times, because it would only happen once. But when it actually happened, the fact that the river essentially emerges fully formed was unexpected to me. It felt almost like an adult being born out of the womb. It was completely its own thing.

You’ve talked about Murderers Bar in relation to movies like The Shining and Figures in a Landscape. How did you come to think of it in the terms of that those kinds of movies?

When I started thinking about the structure, it struck me that it was a kind of chase film—and that felt really complex to accomplish because there wasn’t exactly an object to chase. The water was a kind of figure, and I was thinking about this rush, this pressure, a kind of delirious energetic release.

I thought about certain scenes from Fast & Furious and Mad Max: Fury Road, or something slower and kind of menacing like Figures in a Landscape. I was also thinking a lot about James Cameron’s film The Abyss, the first film where you have CGI that is really able to embody water and create a figure out of water. I also thought about footage from something like the Tour de France, where you have a kind of a subject that’s not necessarily delineated in terms of foreground from background; it’s not just one subject you’re following but a kind of stream. I looked at how footage from that is shot and edited to convey a sense of cyclists moving through a landscape and then also show other closer shots to reveal how fast they’re moving. I also thought about the television chase of O.J. Simpson’s Bronco and wondered: How can we get that feeling—but with no Bronco?