Curtis Miller
Curtis Miller
“In 2019, I drove out to Oklahoma with the intention of making a diaristic film about the sublime,” Curtis Miller recalls of his initial attempt at shooting a film about tornadoes. “I got myself in some pretty dangerous situations. I didn’t know what I was doing. There’[re] protocols that you should probably follow whenever you’re trying to track a storm that’s dropping inch-and-a-half hail, but I was driving around with a radar app on my phone.” When the pandemic began, Miller’s digging led him to pioneering tornado researcher Ted Fujita, whose archives are housed at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. That town experienced the first recorded F5-strength tornado in 1970; in 2021, Miller received an animated walking tour from local historian Monte Monroe of Lubbock’s memorial commemorating the disaster. He realized that rather than the sublime, he was chasing a social history. So, he hit the road for the next few summers: “Each time, I would meet new people, and they would direct me to new places. I just tried to be in a position of saying yes to everything.”
Miller’s debut feature, A Brief History of Chasing Storms, which premiered at this year’s Visions du Réel, is the sum of those encounters. An offbeat road trip through midwestern tornado alley, History’s sensibility splits the difference between experimental inspirations like James Benning’s landscape-oriented films and what Miller describes as the “sincere and peculiar” interviews conducted by Louis Malle in his 1985 farming community study, God’s Country. Storms assembles a cross-section of small-town experts who tease out the less-obvious dimensions of the storms’ impact on their communities. In Lubbock, Monroe’s impassioned historical perspective is given further context by local government official Juan Chadis, who spells out the storm’s disproportionate impact on the Latino community; in Wakita, Okla., where Twister was partially shot, Linda Wade maintains a small museum devoted to the film and explains how being increasingly prone to tornadoes has decimated the once-strong farming town’s agricultural output, implicitly an example of climate change precipitating the death of small-scale agriculture.
Miller received an undergraduate degree in film history and English literature at Indiana University at a time when its communications department still offered 16mm production classes and their curriculum leaned heavily experimental: “We were watching Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage more than anyone else.” After graduating, Miller moved home and ran a microcinema from his living room for a year-and-a-half: “My uncle’s a pastor. He gave me a bunch of folding chairs from his church, and I started doing screenings of films that were never going to play down there, everything from Ben Russell to Miguel Gomes and Deborah Stratman.” (The latter was one of his teachers in graduate school at University of Illinois Chicago.) Landscape footage was largely shot on 16mm, in keeping with the lineage of those experimental influences. Interviews were shot digitally so that Miller didn’t have to limit his shooting time with subjects, then tweaked in post to create a seamless film look. “My brother-in-law does post-production work,” Miller says. “He advised me on how to get it to look realistic.” At a certain point, “I had all this film but didn’t have the money to process it. So, I put the film in a refrigerator, cut together a trailer and applied for some funding through Illinois Arts Council. They ended up giving me enough money to be able to send it off to Negativeland to have the film developed and transferred.”
Underlying Miller’s curiosity was a formative experience from his childhood in Evansville, Illinois. “In 2005, when I was a sophomore in high school, my hometown was hit by a really bad storm. More than 20 people died. Every time I went back home, there was this ghostly imprint of the storm—large tracts of land were suddenly empty, no trees around all these houses—but no public recognition of it. I love the movie Twister, truly—it is a popcorn flick that I like to put on, and it’s interesting how important that film is to a lot of storm chasers. But what I was interested in is, how can I talk about this in a way that doesn’t spectacularize it but nonetheless recognizes its significance?” The film’s festival dates this fall include DMZ in Korea and Chicago International, Hot Springs Documentary and Tallgrass in the United States. Miller is currently “tinkering with some new short ideas right now and doing a little research on a potential project about the aftermath of coal mining in Warrick County, Indiana, near where my parents live.” —Vadim Rizov/Image: Kenza Wadimoff
