Welcome to BlogDogIt Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 06:49 PM EDT

Green Tunnel by Kevin Gallagher

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A six month journey along the 2,200 mile long Appalachian Trail, condensed and reinterpreted into five minutes of stop-motion.

    The Appalachian Trail is a rugged wilderness footpath stretching 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine. Each year a few adventuresome individuals endeavor to hike its entire length in one long trek. For half a year these thru-hikers encounter all of the severity, grace and challenge to be found on the United States' most famed trail. Filmmaker Kevin Gallagher walked the length of this path and, in doing so, sought to capture the sometimes inchoate and transcendent experience of living in the natural world.


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    Each day of the six month trek, Kevin took photographs of a single quintessential section of the trail. Twenty four successive steps down the trail were captured each day. At the end of the journey he had over 4,000 slides which were then strung together to offer a condensed view of what an accelerated hike along the Appalachian mountain range would look like.

    Rapidly, the days of snow, rain and sunshine flash by the viewer as they lunge down the trail. The sparse, bleak colors of late winter give way to the fresh budding of spring time and by the end of the journey, the viewer is brought into the full flourish of autumn in Maine. From the snow capped ridges of the Great Smokey mountains to the jagged peaks of the White Mountains in New Hampshire the viewer is transported, almost before they know where they have already been.

    Stephen Vitiello's cyclical sound track offers a guide and a reminder to the viewer of the repetitive nature of the six million steps taken. Rhythmic and varying between claustrophobic and releasing, the sound edges the mind away from the concreteness of imagery.

    In an effort to bridge the divide from a contemporary America's pace and outlook to the natural world's slow rhythms, the film stands as an antithetically fitful and bombastic document of a measured and tedious exercise in endurance.

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