June 29, 2006

Zach Reichert in a scene from “The Patrol,” a film he made with fellow YSHS student Nathan Moore. The film, which won a gold medal in the 2006 National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition, will open at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. on July 1.

By Don Wallis

Three years ago, Zack Reichert and Nathan Moore, then eighth graders at McKinney Middle School, made the first of several films they have made together. “It was pretty bad,” Moore said recently, smiling ruefully at the memory. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

They know what they’re doing now. Recent winners of gold medal awards in a highly competitive nationwide competition, Reichert and Moore, juniors at Yellow Springs High School, were recognized recently as among the most promising young filmmakers in the country.

Reichert and Moore’s “The Patrol,” a two-part drama about a World War II battle and its haunting aftermath, was one of about 250,000 student entries in the 2006 National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition. Only a tiny fraction of the entrants won gold medals.

Ceremonies in two famous American venues are honoring the work of Reichert and Moore. Their gold medals were received in a ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York City. On July 1, an exhibition featuring “The Patrol” and other National Scholastic award winners will open in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Closer to home, Reichert and Moore’s film was judged “Best of Fest” in the annual Sundog Festival for student films from around the region, hosted by Yellow Springs High School and held May 20 in the Little Art Theatre.

“I’m amazed,” said Melina Elum, Reichert and Moore’s media arts teacher at YSHS, “by their knowledge of the art and craft of filmmaking — the cinematography, directing, acting, special effects, editing, and the whole process of writing and then telling the story.”

For all their skills and success, Reichert and Moore are refreshingly modest. In an hour-long conversation recently, not once did they mention the awards they have won. Instead, they spoke of their passion for the creative experience of making films. Doing this work, they said, is its own reward.

“To have a vision of something,” Reichert said, “and go to work on it, and then complete it and see your vision come together on the screen — that is really cool. It makes it all worthwhile.”

“Making films,” said Moore, “is what I like to do. For people to see my work and gain something from it — that’s great. But even if I knew that nobody would ever see it, I’d still be making films.”

It’s good that people see it. “The Patrol” is a masterpiece. Part I is set on a battlefield in Belgium, where soldiers perform a grim, slow, dance of death. In Part II, a survivor returns to try and make some sense of it all. Each part is only seven minutes long, and yet the tragic reality of war is fully, deeply and powerfully rendered.

The film looks, and feels, like war. There is a gray, bleak, deadening tone to everything in it — the sky, the landscape, the faces of the soldiers. They move across the desolate landscape in an agonizing tension. When they fire their guns at the enemy, you feel the soldiers’ despair. When they are killed, you mourn the senseless loss of life.

Such is the power of “The Patrol.” As Elum said, “These young filmmakers succeed in compelling the viewer to not just watch the film, but to feel emotions of caring for the characters. This is a very difficult, all-important — and very rare — achievement in filmmaking, at any level. It’s also a very difficult thing to achieve in seven minutes!”

How did they achieve it? Reichert and Moore give a lot of credit to the spontaneous magic of the creative process. “In a sense,” Moore said, “circumstances created this film.” The inspiration for the whole project came in a flash to Moore one day as he was driving through the countryside and spotted an old, abandoned barn. One look and he knew this was the perfect setting for the World War II film he and Reichert had long hoped to make.

They had made two World War II films together before, and they had a bevy of props left over — soldiers’ uniforms, BB guns that look like army rifles, a machine gun Moore made from a battle reenactment kit. They also had a collection of World War II sound effects, such as gunshots and bomb bursts, computerized and ready to use.

Research wasn’t needed. They already knew a lot about World War II, thanks to reading its history, watching classic war movies, and listening to their elders, Reichert’s grandfather Joe Robinson and Moore’s grandfather Barney Moore.

Most importantly, they had a lot of help from their friends. Yellow Springs young people are blessed, as Elum said, with “a huge amount of talent which helps maintain high standards and growing interest and appreciation for the art of filmmaking.” Tapping this pool of talent, Reichert and Moore gathered together a crew of local young people eager and able to help them make their film: Aaron Zaremsky, Charlie Cromer, Simon Freeman, Jesse Peterson, Dylan Clonch, Cody Andrews and Carey Dixon.

Zaremsky’s help was critical to the success of the film. He was its lead actor, and did a significant share of the writing, editing and directing. “Aaron played an enormous part in our project, both onscreen and off-screen,” Moore said.

And the high school’s high-quality digital video equipment was theirs to use free.

They began shooting their film in the afternoon of the day before Thanksgiving 2005. When they began, Moore said, “We knew where we wanted to go, but we didn’t know how to get there.” Soon they could feel themselves getting there. Creativity’s magic excitement kicked in. “We got into a groove,” Moore said. They worked fast, revising Reichert’s script as they went, improvising new dialog and action, sometimes whole scenes. “We kept coming up with new stuff on the spur of the moment,” Reichert said.

Five hours after they began, they were finished filming. That night Reichert and Moore edited the footage, and part one was completed. Amazingly, it was done in one day. Part two took longer, about four days.

“The Patrol” is, given its subject, full of brutal, deathly action and yet it is full of subtle human nuance, too. In one riveting scene, a soldier (played by Zaremsky) is searching the battlefield’s wasteland for his fellow soldiers. He finds them — in a pile of dead bodies. The enemy approaches. To hide, the soldier becomes as dead himself: he lies down among the dead, shuts his eyes, holds his breath. The enemy takes him for dead, and moves on. His life is spared.

Now he can come back to life. When he opens his eyes, the light in them seems to flash bright white. When he breathes, a puff of his breath is visible in the frosty air. He is alive, and the audience feels a flicker of hope. But all the other soldiers remain dead, and the audience feels the hopeless sorrow of war.

What is the meaning — the message — of “The Patrol”? They had neither meaning or message in mind, Reichert and Moore said, when they made their film. Their focus was on getting exactly right all the realistic details of production — the setting, the props, how the film would look. “We were just going for realism,” Moore said. “Above all, we wanted to make it real.”

They succeeded brilliantly. And by making it real, they enabled the film’s meaning to rise naturally out of the creative process, and send its own message. Reichert tried to express it, “I think the film shows how fragile human life really is,” he said. “And how far human beings will go to try to end conflict. Guns. War. They just ‘fuel the fire.’ And so it’s never ending.”

He thought for a moment. “We didn’t set out to make an anti-war film,” he said, “but in a sense, that’s really what it is.”