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WAR
Jeff Clark feature character as Pastor Jack Masters
Jeff Clark voice over of central character, "Jacob Jenkins"
War, a Jake Mahaffy film. Writer, Director, Camera, Editing
Producer Will Weatherby.
World Premiere Sundance 2004 in "Frontier" section
Awarded Ken Burns Best of Festival award Ann Arbor Film Festival 2004
This is the world after the end of a world... acre by acre, fence by fence, the war was lost."
WAR is a simple film portrait of four characters looking for work in the abandoned lands of rural America. Shooting alone for almost five years on a hand-cranked movie camera without a producer, crew or budget, we assembled an unconventional narrative out of these character studies, attempting in limited means to reveal the drama of a disintegrating society.
 "The word of the Lord is a burning fire..."
Pastor Jack Master drives down old county roads, stopping occasionally at the farm houses and trailers that spot the hills. He pretends to knock on the doors and invite people to his little New Life Church of God. He calls his wife from a payphone every few hours to check in and make sure the rapture hasn't happened yet. Jake Mahaffy's "WAR" has shown at Edinburgh, Atlanta, Stockholm, Jeonju, Calgary, Galway, Rotterdam, Sundance and other festivals. Read Self Reliant Film's review of WAR.
 International Film Festival RotterdamAtmospheric and sparse black & white film about the disappearance of country life. No bomb fell, but it might have done. A few people resist by living on.
Those who don't know what a post-apocalyptic mood really is will get the definitive answer from this film. The melancholy of the black & white images is scorching. The desolation of the bare drama speaks directly to the bone marrow. The war from the title was not fought out with weapons of mass destruction, but the effect on the landscape seems the same. The film is set in the countryside of Warren County, Pennsylvania. A region where (as almost all over the American countryside) the traditional family farm has more or less died out. And here, in this country so sensitively recorded by the film maker with a clockwork camera, nothing has come to take its place. There is only decay and the odd effort to keep something running in spite of everything. The film does not have a traditional story -it is mainly about mood - but it does have several intriguing protagonists. For instance there is the minister, Jack Masters, who goes from farm to farm to talk about the world after the end of the world. The farmer (fourth-generation) Jacob Jenkins inspects the fence around his land every spring and Hanky the Junkman keeps a scarce nodding donkey working on the land of Jenkins. A truly poetic film. (GjZ)
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE
USA, 2003
Film or films screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
By Scott Foundas
WAR - Review
Produced by Jake Mahaffy, Willard Weatherby. Directed by Jake Mahaffy. Screenplay, Jake Mahaffy, Paul Mahaffy.
Samuel Jenkins - Dustin Bertch
Pastor Jack Master - Jeff Clark
Jacob 'um-daddy' Jenkins - Andy Yurick
Hanky the Junkman - Paul Mahaffy
Radio Reverend Hiram Hill - Richard Kirkwood
A near-future that looks oddly reminiscent of Depression-era America provides the setting for "WAR," the striking debut feature by Jake Mahaffy, a virtual one-man-band filmmaker. Using a hand-cranked silent movie camera, Mahaffy wrote, directed, edited and shot this experimental epic over a four-year period in the rural farm country of Warren County, Pennsylvania. Focusing on the last surviving people in a violent, unforgiving universe, helmer leaves a good deal open to interpretation. Commercial prospects for such a work are understandably limited, but pic portends good things to come from its young creator and should garner a high profile in underground and avant-garde film showcases.
Made without a conventional script and cast with nonprofessional locals, pic shuttles back and forth between a few loosely interconnected characters. Among them: a dissolute pastor (Jeff Clark) who can hardly bring himself to leave the confines of his not-so-late-model automobile; a farmer (Andy Yurick) and his young son, Samuel (Dustin Bertch); and a junkman (Paul Mahaffy) who traverses the gray landscape salvaging scrap.
Mahaffy includes some bits of business involving the accidental death of Samuel's pet dog and the theft (by the junkman) of his radio. To a certain extent in those scenes, "War" is a dark fable about a heretofore innocent learning the mean, horrible truths of the world.
But pic is less appropriately viewed as a conventional narrative than as a dreamlike, sensory immersion into a bleak netherworld that looks something like "Night of the Living Dead" as it might be remade by Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. (Where and exactly when pic takes place is never specified, although pastor opines "this is the world after the end of the world.")
Though Mahaffy claims to have used the hand-cranked camera because it was the only one he had, the resultant stuttering, degraded images possess both an oddly primitive quality and a riveting impermanence (as though they might fall from the screen if we don't give them our full attention). Likewise, his soundtrack, all created in post-production, is a densely layered collage of interior monologues, radio broadcasts and incongruous effects, employed to suggest a society in which people inhabit their own private spheres, but largely turn a blind eye to their fellow men.
Above all, pic is a reminder that necessity is the mother of invention and that a driven, talented filmmaker can say as much or more with minimal resources than he can with the world at his fingertips.
Camera (B&W), Jake Mahaffy; editor, Jake Mahaffy; sound, Jake Mahaffy. Reviewed at Rotterdam Film Festival (Homefront USA), Jan. 26, 2004. (Also in Sundance Film Festival -- Frontier.) Running time: 84 MIN.
Jonathan Romney in Rotterdam 29 January 2004
WAR - Review
Dir: Jake Mahaffy. USA 2004. 84 mins.
Click to watch WAR trailer | Virtually a one-man labour of love, Jake Mahaffy's WAR is one of those works that French critics sometimes term a 'UFO' - a film that comes out of nowhere, or comes direct and unmediated from its director's unconscious. Working over four years without a crew and no sound, Mahaffy shot the film himself on a hand-cranked camera - accounting for some evocative flickers and variations of light and speed - then added a dense soundtrack of voice-overs, background noise and cacophonous radio. A film in the true American primitive tradition, WAR will certainly make its mark on the festival circuit, but will be tough to place commercially, except among distributors committed to the adventurous and outre. It comes to the Homefront USA section at Rotterdam after also playing the Frontier sidebar at Sundance.
The action unfolds in a rural landscape in Pennsylvania. The film starts with a dilapidated house collapsing, and Samuel (Bertch), a young boy in makeshift protective gear, telling us in voice-over, "This is all that's left. This is the world after the end of the world." We never know whether we are literally seeing a post-apocalypse landscape, a more metaphorical expression of the contemporary state of agricultural America, or possibly a representation of the boy's inner world. At any rate, this world appears to function relatively normally: trains still run, radios still broadcast (mainly ranting evangelists), and the local diner is apparently still serving.
At first, little happens: portly pastor Jack Masters (Clark) sits in his car and muses about his favourite all-you-can-eat buffet, Samuel's farmer father Jacob Jenkins (Yurick) inspects his fenceposts, and Hanky, a bald junkman (Paul Mahaffy) adjusts a strange cobbled-together network of pump machinery and inveighs against the local frog population. About an hour in, the pastor runs over Samuel's dog and the film ends with a dazzling tableau of conflagration.
For the most part, WAR could justifiably be described as a bunch of people (and animals) trudging around an inhospitable landscape in bad weather: inconsistently bad weather, at that, since Mahaffy's informal shooting schedule means that we often slip from autumn to snow-covered winter and back in the course of a single sequence. WAR is a figures-in-a-landscape film par excellence, and the handful of people we meet truly are figures rather than characters in the proper sense. Voice-overs, often tinged with surreal black humour, supposedly take us into their heads, but in practice the overdubbing keeps us unsettlingly detached from them, a discrepancy contributing to the film's distinctively alien feel. A complex sound design - an elemental storm of radio and other background effects - adds to the extreme sensory vividness.
The film entirely creates its own world, but the closest recent comparisons might be with Damien Odoul's similarly low-budget rural nightmare Le Souffle and with the sombre works of Hungary's Bela Tarr. Even at 84 minutes, War feels slightly over-stretched, with not enough variation of tone to keep the viewer hooked, but at its most powerful, it creates a mood and a set of images guaranteed to haunt the viewer. Ragged as it is, this may well be the most primally odd US debut since Eraserhead.
Producer/int'l sales/screenplay/cinematography/editor/sound: Jake Mahaffy
Main cast: Paul Mahaffy, Jeff Clark, Andy Yurick, Dustin Bertch
Production stills from WAR
WAR
Filmmaker... Jake Mahaffy
Producers... Jake Mahaffy and Will Weatherby
THE CAST...
Andy Yurick as Jacob 'um-daddy' Jenkins
Dustin Bertch as Samuel Jenkins
Paul Mahaffy as Hanky the Junkman
Jeff Clark as Pastor Jack Masters
Sherri Anderson as the old lady on the road
Richard Kirkwood as Radio Reverend Hiram Hill
Huckabone (Dustin's Dog) as Peppy
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