Tuscarora

Untouchable

Tuscarora, Nevada, zero-mile marker, end of the road. Seems like the end of the world based on its isolation alone.Vast horizon murals of lowering clouds; sometimes something near a cyan. At ground level piles of collapsed structure lie strewn like toppled lecture hall skeletons.
 

Schickele's documentary subject, Dennis Parks, was a middle-aged teacher, in fact, a sculptor and master pottery maker. His students live and work off the studio acreage, which not only includes a kiln, but ample studio space accessible to the clay that Parks uses on his artwork — the practice akin, one might say, on a much more modest scale, to the earth upended in industrial mining and fracking. It's the Tuscarorans versus the microgold barons.

Tuscarora [1992] was shot on an — inherently — ugly format, Hi8 video. At the time a signifier of "the real." This, however lets loose a slew of aesthetic questions too numerous for this post  As Dennis pronounces: "I am interested in permanence."

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of David Schickele:

Give Me a Riddle [1966]

Bushman [1971]

Tuscarora [1992]

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