METAL AT THE MOVIES: PART 8: SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

LMAO. It's amazing, I type in the subject header of a journal entry, and accidentally posted it BEFORE writing it. Sowee. Someone asked me about the first edition of DAMNED IN BLACK (ITP: BLACK METAL NEWS 5/09), and it's mention of the TONY STONE film "SEVERED WAYS". However, the editor of ITP ethnicity is one quarter Cherokee Indian, who REALLY discovered America? I forgot to put up a film trailer? Sorry, here's the trailer for the TONY STONE film "SEVERED WAYS" featuring the music of DIMMU BORGIR, BURZUM, OLD MANS CHILD, MORBID ANGEL, JUDAS PRIEST ect. UPDATE: 7/15/09-BLABBERMOUTH.NET: Songs by JUDAS PRIEST DIMMU BORGIR, BURZUM, MORBID ANGEL are featured in the soundtrack for "Severed Ways", a film about Vikings in the New World that's scheduled to be released on DVD on July 28 via Magnolia Home Entertainment.

"Severed Ways" was written and directed by metal fan Tony Stone. The movie, produced by Heathen Films, takes place in 11th Century in North America, where Vikings, Indians and Irish monks are clashing for personal glory and religious dominance.

The plot (according to All Movie Gude): Many historians contend that Norse explorers settled on the North American continent long before it was "discovered" by Columbus, and this adventure blends historical research with the filmmakers' imagination in the tale of two 11th Century Vikings and their struggle to survive in a new land. Orn (Tony Stone) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) are the only two survivors of a bloody clash between their Viking clan and a band of Native Americans; aware that their best hope of survival is to move on, they set out to find a new territory to settle. While making their way through the wilderness of what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland, Orn and Volnard encounter a pair of monks from Ireland who have escaped from a Viking camp. They quickly slay one of the monks, but they allow the other (David Perry) to live, and he joins them in their daily battle to scratch out an existence in the beautiful but forbidding landscapes. Along the way, Orn wins an unlikely companion, a native woman (Noelle Bailey) who first saw him as he was laying waste to her village. :




NY TIMES REVIEW FOR SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA:
The clang of swords mixes with the sounds of the whispering wind, rustling leaves, singing birds and the occasional unsettling din of Norwegian black-metal music in “Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America,” which tracks two Vikings lost in the New World in 1007. Independent to the nth degree, the movie is the mad creation of a young American, Tony Stone, who not only wrote, directed and edited “Severed Ways,” but, as one of the warriors, also slaughters a chicken and defecates on screen. Standing in the forest at one point, he even begins head-banging, thrashing hair so luxurious that it’s a wonder that he isn’t scalped immediately.

The inspiration for this D.I.Y. epic — part art-cinema oddity, part home-movie extravaganza — is the real expedition by Thorfinn Karlsefni, an Icelander who planned to settle in the New World. Karlsefni hoped to inhabit an area on the northeast coast of Newfoundland that Leif Ericson had set eyes on seven years earlier and named Vinland. (The movie was shot in Newfoundland and on land in rural Vermont owned by Mr. Stone’s family.) The settlement didn’t last because the Vikings had a nasty habit of slaying native peoples, whom they called skraelings. This penchant for killing at first sight, the historian Jared Diamond has dryly noted, “was not a promising start to establishing friendships.”

“Severed Ways” opens with the two errant Vikings, Orn (Mr. Stone, the blond) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco, the brunet), leaving a beach littered with the bodies of men pierced with arrows. Determined to find others of their kind, they set off across breathtaking vistas and head into the past (via flashback), their dreams and encounters with man and beast. Mr. Stone, working with two cinematographers and shooting in digital, makes the most of the natural terrain, capturing its rough beauty in long shots and close-ups that convey the travelers’ evolving intimacy with their surroundings. He skillfully conveys this same change through the montage and framing, as his initially intentionally choppy cuts and Cubistic imagery give way to more unhurried edits and classic tableaus.

Not much happens, even as everything does. The two Vikings, speaking minimal, sometimes amusingly translated and idiomatic dialogue in Old Norse (“We’re toast if we stay here”), construct a shelter, build a fire, trudge through the woods, occasionally bicker and trudge some more. Mr. Stone, who studied with the independent filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Adolfas Mekas at Bard College, clearly has no use here for the ups and downs of conventional narrative. Instead, he pays scrupulous, almost loving attention to the details of survival (the Vikings chop a lot of wood) and to how being immersed in this strange world changes the men physically, existentially and spiritually, how it gets under their nails, rubs into their skin and finally settles into their souls.

This, at least, suggests the movie’s loftier ambitions, if not what always transpires on screen. Though there’s no doubt that Mr. Stone is as serious as a heart attack when it comes to creating an air of authenticity — hence the sloppily butchered chickens and authorial defecation — he never settles on a coherent tone for the movie. The idioms, excrement and heavy-metal flourishes certainly goose up the gritty realism, but they also undermine the movie’s moments of grandeur. (Given the Nazi fascination with Norse myths, the decision to use music by Burzum, a favorite of white supremacists, is unfortunate at best.) In one scene Mr. Stone manages to invoke Werner Herzog; in the next his characters are running around like costumed geeks at a comic-book convention.

That said, American independent cinema could use more young filmmakers who go off the story grid. Far too many, having embraced the workshop maxim “write what you know” with grave literalness, seem to believe (wrongly) that their first loves, screwy families and adolescences merit their own movies. Yet in drawing heavily from their lives, few end up being able to transcend the narrow confines of their stories, to push past the realm of the self. “It is a delicious thing to write,” Flaubert rejoiced, “no longer to be oneself, but to circulate in the whole creation one speaks of.” If nothing else, Mr. Stone, from his tangled hair to dirty feet, has taken himself and his story into the beyond — way, way beyond.

SEVERED WAYS

The Norse Discovery of America
INTERVIEW WITH TONY STONE FROM ALL METAL RESOURCE:
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to review the indie Viking epic, Severed Ways (which can be read here) which I thought was a fantastic film. Furthering that opportunity, I was able to ask a few questions of the film’s director Tony Stone who revealed much about his motivations in planning and executing this project, and how metal holds an indelible brotherhood with the themes portrayed in the film. Other topics include popular Broadway musicals, mead and Black metal assaults on McDonalds in Norway. Read on for a very entertaining introspective on the mind behind perhaps the first full length, metal inspired movie.

AMR: Tony, thank you for taking part in this interview. Your film Severed Ways, coming out March 13th, is a story of the Viking discovery of North America from the perspective of two pathfinders abandoned by their peers. If you could, tell us a bit more about the film and why chose this subject to create a film on?

Tony: It’s a story that’s never really been told cinematically. There have only been a few films on Vikings in the New World and for the most part they’re pretty bad and they usually take place in Florida. I was fascinated by Norse discovery after learning of it in grade school and since then I’ve always found it odd how we would celebrate Columbus Day every year as the “discovery” of America. And of course the “discovery” aspect is pretty absurd because this land was already settled by millions of people and Columbus wasn’t even the first white dude to show up here. The Vikings, the Basques, and the untold shipwrecked few had been roaming the beaches for hundreds of years before. The thing that’s interesting about discovery is it requires a return. That’s the existential conflict Orn and Volnard find themselves in. They want their story told, written in stone. SEVERED WAYS is basically an un-witnessed, unrecorded saga.

AMR: Now, Severed Ways isn’t your first film, could you tell us a bit about your background?

Tony: Actually it sort of is. I made a bunch of crap in college and I was working in film for a while, doing special effects with my uncle in New York City. And that’s where I grew up. But as a kid I also spent many months of the year in very rural Vermont, completely off the grid. There was no road, elcetric lines, and you’d have to carry in all your drinking water about half a mile. My dad in the sixties had bought a peace of land in case the shit hit the fan and built a very unusual hippie house that’s still standing today. I think he was ahead of his time, cause the shits finally hitting that fan.


AMR: Severed Ways is interesting because on one hand it is the epic journey (from my perspective it is at least) of two lost Vikings in the wilds of North America, yet there are no grand battles, dramatic love scenes and extravagant set designs. Much of this is due to financial restraints I’d imagine, but there is also a purposeful use of rudimentary techniques like all natural lighting, minimal dialog, and the use of the landscapes as your set design. What were your motivations when creating this film? Was your intention to provide an existential look at history?

Tony: Yes, exactly. Vikings are so wrongly depicted as historical subjects, that the idea of the viking is almost a joke in itself. There were no horns on helmets, these men were farmers and carpenters. Life was dirty, people wore simple clothes. If they tore, they could mend and their pants might look to you like sagging sweatpants, but that is how it was. The film is gritty and DIY in order to portray accuracy, but in a LSD anthropological way. The normalcy here is all the more accurate too. I wanted to tell the story of average Vikings, not of kings or lords. We ended up living sort of like the characters. We were off the grid and didn’t shower for weeks (because there wasn’t one). We smelled like swamp and shat in a rotting outhouse. I think that effected the end result.

And yes, there is very little dialogue. To me, it’s a more interesting rhythm. It conveys lots of information in it’s lack of it [verbiage]. When you were a kid, the first action sequences you encountered were in picture books and fables. Every thing is action. You see a picture of a forest and before it is this little guy and below it reads “and he went north. ” He does stuff and doesn’t have much time to talk. Not to mention the need to survive demands action. This is also the same rhythm of the Vinland Sagas. They’re very straight-forward and tell a lot of stuff in very little detail outside of their travels and deeds.

AMR: Continuing with this minimalist style, I thought it was impressive how the emotions of your characters came to life so vividly with very little actual contact with dialog and even facial features. I can’t remember a film that really used such simple uses of human interaction to bring to life this world you created. How hard was it to bring to life a movie while limiting yourself in such a way?

Tony: It was but for the most part we did everything for real like the characters did, except murder each other. We built a fort, killed the animals, got hypothermic in the snow. So we related and interacted to each to other physically. And each person brought there own physical traits to the movie. People chop different, run different, eat different. That’s usually how we still perceive people. Not some dumb back story where you understand everything about the character through some convenient spew of information. It’s also unfair and [un]interesting to have characters describe who they are immediately in a film. That’s not like life and is pretty boring to watch.

AMR: Now, since this is a metal site, I am going to steer several questions towards the metal aspects of this film. Before we even get into details about the soundtrack and such though, quite simply I have to ask, why metal?

Tony: Man, I could go on and on. Its obviously powerful and conontates many visuals of conflict and triumphantness. And it’s brutal like true raw nature. But put side by side with nature there’s a clash, its an artificial noise that doesn’t belong there and either do the do the Vikings in a sense. At the same time, I find the music to be a better fit then some tradional stringed score. That stuff is super arbitrary. As we all know, a lot of metal is written with Vikings in mind, from the lyrics to the album cover to the simple mystical tone of it. There’s whole catalog that’s right for cinema. I think Severed Ways is gritty and raw and coming from the same place as some Metal, especially Black. Its dealing with similar themes and conflicts and addressing them in minimal stripped down approach. SEVERED WAYS just happens to be a movie. Also, metal icons embody the true Viking spirit. Orn in the film is Lief Ericson meets Dave Mustaine. Volnard is Eric the Red meets John Bonham. I think that’s one of the main objectives of the film, to bridge the past and the present. People are the same today as they were then. Its all the same gene pool, just different dudes.

AMR: Feature films are notorious for keeping heavy music away with a ten foot pole, and those songs that do make it into the big screen are usually during the credits, in a horror movie, or some small scene where you barely get to hear the song. However, with Severed Ways, it seems this film was made for metal, especially black metal! Vikings, unforgiving landscapes, and religious conflict are all prominent aspects of metal, especially in the folk and black metal scenes. Why do you think metal isn’t socially acceptable to be featured in films?

Tony: People still find it grating I guess. And scary to most. It’s also funny though because heavy metal is so hugely popular but still underground. It’s and ode to its intensity and power. It’s not something to take lightly. It represents a rebelliousness and goes against the grain of the status-quo. Before churches were burning in Norway, McDonalds windows were getting smashed. And most films want to be subtle, not offend and appeal to as many as possible. SEVERED WAYS isn’t a subtle movie and its not concerned with trying to please most. And like we’ve said the ideas in certain metal are synonymous with the conflicts of SEVERED.

AMR: Tell us a bit about some of the artists that are featured throughout Severed Ways?

Tony: There’s of course Burzum. Popol Vuh who used to score Werner Herzog movies. Morbid Angel which we use a melencholy instrumental. Brian Eno, used as Heathen to Christian conversion theme. Dimmu Borgir and Old Man’s Child that reinforce the characters belief system. And a Judas Priest track.

AMR: Despite all that I have said about this film being pretty much filled to the brim with metal themes and connotations, there really aren’t that many heavy tracks. Most of it is ambient and atmospheric songs taken from metal artists. How hard was it to pick the right music?

Tony: A lot of what we hear is what we were cranking while making the film, so it was a natural fit to put in in. The heavy stuff is used when the VIkings are a cohesive unit and kicking some small scale ass, so we used triumphant early Dimmu Borgir and Old Man’s Child. As the characters fray apart, the more atmospheric metal kicks in, which is just as heavy in a way. It’s all coming from the same perspective. When they’re on a spiritual quest, we go in more 1970’s psychedelia land, using Brian Eno and Popol Vuh to tell the tale. But the spiritual power of Burzum underlines the film, representing the all-encompassing power of nature. It’s there as an ery existential theme of the soon decay we’ll all find ourselves in.

AMR: Are you planning on releasing a soundtrack to accompany the film?

Tony: I don’t think so but we’ll see. Maybe a limited edition vinyl. Bands were super helpful in allowing me to use the music but a soundtrack is another level of complication. But it would be awesome.

AMR: If you could pick a metal soundtrack to accompany the film Annie, what artists/songs would it contain?

Tony: Mortician.

AMR: Thank you Tony Stone for letting us grill you about your upcoming film, Severed Ways. Do you have any final thoughts or comments?

Tony: If you like mead and sod roofs, this movie is for you.
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-\m/ -l-