WORK IN PROGRESS

“In This Silent Valley”

“In This Silent Valley” is a 10-minute, poetic documentary set in the Deer Lodge Valley and surrounding regions of west-central Montana. Based on an original poem inspired by the region, this holistic portrait traces the influences of cause and effect through the valley’s history – ultimately, taking us back in time to the formation of the mountains that made the landscape what it is.

Generations of settlers have churned the land in search of heavy metals – gold, silver, copper – and scars of this geological trauma litter the landscape. The film follows these artifacts along the artery of I-90, stretching from Butte to Deer Lodge – East to West, present to past, and back again.

Sitting on the tectonic spine that is the continental divide, Butte was once the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco – home to people from all over the world and the now infamous Berkeley Pit. Just to the west, we see consequence give way to smokestacks and tailings at the mouth of the Deer Lodge Valley – materialized memories left behind by the Anaconda Mining Company. To the north, we arrive at Deer Lodge: home to the Montana State Prison, originally built in 1871 to deal with the flux of prospectors moving to the region. The prison looks out on the Flint Creek Range, as the film pulls us into the orogeny events that built the mountains tens of millions of years ago.

We follow this lineage through the valley’s history; the setting and circumstance becomes less human. We give up the seen – the pits, smelt stacks, tailings, prisons, mountains – and surrender to the unseen: an egoless empathy brought about by circumstance, causation, and tectonic plates in motion. Shiny metals, forged and scattered by the folding of these plates, lead to this valley’s history of human and geologic violence; and through it all, we find compassion as we follow our artery back to Butte. There lies a figure of igneous white watching over it all.