Bullets For Breakfast

‘Western Pulp’ writer Ryerson Johnson, feminist poet Nancy Nielson , workers at a herring smoke house, postcards of master paintings, clips from a forties western, and the filmmaker are the main players in Bullets For Breakfast. Each of the characters shares a common space, a remote corner of Downeast Maine known as ‘Unorganized Territory.’
“There was a Colt 45 tied low and tight against his hip.”
Disparate images are linked via optical printing. Both original and archival materials are seen as cultural artifacts in this film which explores the violence implicit in gender barriers.
“‘There is no history but biography,’ he quotes modestly…”
By playing with differences between poetry, story telling, and visual narrative, Bullets gradually unravels the seductive power of collective myths and stereotypes. The film is a blatant hybrid of experimental and documentary technique. Stories are told and retold, images recorded like musical motives, in a structure which is cyclic and open-ended. The line between fiction and reality is deliberately blurred, as Bullets For Breakfast begins a process of seeing into hidden depths of subjectivity.
“Breathing hints of sabotage…”
“…Bullets is, at once a work in the ‘structural’ tradition of Ken Jacob’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and Larry Gottheim’s Mouches Volantes , and a feminist response to the (‘masculine’, ‘phallic’) rigidity of the structuralist tradition. In its reframing of images from Ford’s My Darling Clementine and in its use of visual and auditory layering within which viewers continually detect subtle, complex, ambiguous connections and dissonances , Bullets For Breakfast could have been inspired by Luce Irigeray’s This Sex That Is Not One.” – Scott MacDonald.