1913 Massacre – A Film Inspired by a Woody Guthrie Song
Produced and Directed by Ken Ross & Louis V. Galdieri
We came together from very different places. One of us — Ken — has worked as an experimental filmmaker, director and cinematographer and has taught film to university students; the other — Louis —taught history and literature at the university level, and then began producing and directing.
While working on another project together, we discovered our common love of Woody Guthrie’s music, and our individual stories, our pasts, started making sense together. The more we talked about the idea for 1913 Massacre — a musical film about the ways people make and remake history —the more common ground we found.
Working together, we have discovered that we have different ways of putting the world together and telling a story.
Roughly, Ken makes up the world first visually and then finds the language for what he sees; Louis, first in words, then in pictures. Our different strengths, our different approaches, are evident when we are working apart: one of us works a DP/Director; the other, a Writer/Director. But they are also evident when we are working together, whether we are lighting, shooting, interviewing, writing or simply talking about 1913 Massacre.
Our film is in a very real sense the fruit of a dialogue, not only between two filmmakers but also between two ways of going about things, composing a picture or making a narrative. The film happens at the place where our two points of view — and our two lives — converge, where we are not just two individuals but a collaborative artistic energy.