(Gentle Music) (Film sounds and music) Radio West Films on PBS Utah Welcome to Radio West Films on PBS Utah.

Thanks for joining us.

The short films we want to show you today all have common characteristics, even though the subjects are quite different.

They're all portraits in one way, and they all have a very defined story arc where something has happened that changes or could change the course of the story.

And we'll begin with a story of Ed Brown, who went to war when he was a young man.

Ed told us his life in the rural West, gave him this skill set that made him useful to the military.

But those abilities didn't work for him when he returned, changed and traumatized.

So we had to look for something else to give him purpose.

- [Ed] They say, figure skates got four edges on each skate, and you're finding these edges and these moves.

You can make these really nice turns and then, the spot where there is no friction at all, where you can just start spinning.

It's like all your cares are gone.

You're floating like a cloud (chuckles).

(skates thudding) I've been down a couple times, you know?

Vietnam was a big down.

(somber music) You don't sleep over there.

There was people hunting you, you were hunting them.

There's no sleeping like that.

And so, that's why you did the amphetamine.

(somber music) Growing up in Montana, you were a good tracker and you listened.

And maybe, the smells of some animal, those traits, I was well taught and those traits kept me alive and, changes you, it makes you feel worthless.

How can I?

(somber music) Horrible, horrendous taking of life, what a man can do to another man, not a word for it.

(somber music) Pretty “????

?y ” traits, huh?

(Ed chuckling) (somber music) (child chattering) And I came back an amphetamine user and for 40 years of working hard, doing good, and it cost me a lot of years.

And Utah's where they dumped me off (chuckles).

Just started over again.

(Ed faintly exhaling) It's unbelievable for me to find ice skating.

You know, some say PTSD, you know, I guess we all got it to a point, but it just started driving it out of me, just from the quietness in your movements that you can do.

Instead of doing everything the army taught you, you could swing your arms and learn ballet on ice.

(gentle piano music) It was just something that felt good about it.

It just makes life beautiful.

So I took some nice beginning courses, to learn a little more and more lessons and more lessons and you're getting better and better and it just keeps getting better and better and better.

(gentle piano music) You start by little tiny things, you know?

And I can't quite do 'em as the coaches want you to, because you're older than they are.

They don't understand old, but you try to give 'em the best that you got.

You first get out there, you just try to get your legs in kind of a jumping jack motion, and your arms and you're leaning into your edges and so, you're turning and finding that edge on that blade.

Throw some nice spins and reverse and you know, you just... My mind takes over.

The coaches teach you all this stuff but then my mind gets it jumbled all up over there to do it old-school way, free.

You're just free out there.

(soothing piano music) You know, flying a kite off of a cloud, and here you're a butterfly, hanging onto that kite (chuckles).

(gentle piano music) Then it feels just like free motion, floating.

(gentle piano music) Makes me a happy person.

Yeah, I might have some bad days but the bad days are the good days, because they're over with and you'll do better on the next one.

Without the bad days, you don't know where your good days are.

(gentle music) I still, no good at it.

Bending your knees, and the more knee bend that you get, the better skater and control, and the turns are tighter.

And these knees have been well worked over the years.

It is curing everything from Vietnam, from me.

This body finally found something in training that it really, really loves, is that floating on ice and being able to use your hands, your whole body, your mind into trying to stay something that's beautiful instead of something that's harmful.

(gentle music) This next film is a story of faith.

Noah Van Sciver is a cartoonist whose work is known throughout the country and as comic books, a popular because they can be personal, but they're always thoroughly honest.

So it makes sense that when he set out to reconcile himself with the religion of his childhood, he first looked to art for answers.

(pencil scratching) - [Noah] The only reason I make art is because my mother was an art student at BYU.

She brought that influence into our family.

So now every single day I draw, I create something, I have a new page that didn't exist the day before and then I can go to bed happy.

(gentle music) I think comics are the most personal art form that there is.

It's a one-on-one communication, like I'm going to write it and draw it, and then you're gonna sit down and read it, but you have to do that alone.

There's like the illusion of movement panel to panel.

Your mind fills that in.

I just have to give you enough information in my art and let your brain fill in the rest.

That's the magic of it.

How few lines can I put on the page to communicate when I'm trying to communicate?

That's cartooning.

So it's a very intimate art form.

Honesty is something that people see in my work.

The only thing that matters is getting it done at my desk.

That's it.

Once it's created, it's created and I feel satisfied.

My father is still very involved in the LDS faith.

My mother's family goes very far back in the religion.

They met at Brigham Young University, had way more kids than they could support.

That was a big problem with our family and why we slipped into poverty.

And by the time I was sort of coming of age, my family was falling apart.

So my mother and father divorced because my mother lost her faith.

So when they divorced, they moved into different states and I stayed with my mother.

My mother was just a Mormon housewife.

All of a sudden she had to go back to work and she didn't really have a skillset for that kind of thing.

So there's probably five of us that were still at home with her.

It was just brutal.

She told me that Joseph Smith was a liar and a conman, that there was no such thing as hell, that God was a woman.

(Noah laughing) It was a lot of information that it was like very jarring to me.

And then my mother was working all the time, so she wasn't around.

So I spent my childhood from then on just on the streets, stealing things from Target and getting into trouble with friends and stuff and just making bad decisions.

I was very confused and very angry.

I grew up in the church where from the moment I was born I was told basically what my path was gonna be in life.

And that was very comforting for me.

Everything was all planned out.

I just needed to do what the church told me I needed to do.

And once my family split up, I didn't have that plan anymore.

Suddenly my life was thrown into chaos.

I felt like I had been lied to or something.

There wasn't anybody watching over me.

I could do whatever I wanted to.

That became the theme of the rest of my teens until I moved out eventually.

It was just a lot of tearing down of the past.

So I got into making comics of my own when I was about 18, maybe 19.

And for some reason I did a comic about Joseph Smith as like a superhero and his sidekick was a monkey named Moroni.

And then as I continued making comics more seriously I made several attempts at trying to tell the story of Joseph Smith and I just couldn't do it and I'd have to put it aside.

But when I turned 30 years old, that's when I really started reflecting on my past a lot more seriously and with an intent of like, okay, I think I've just been on the wrong road and I need to redirect myself.

Why am I where I am and how do I fix this?

What do I really want?

How do I get there?

(gentle music) When I looked back, I saw that the church really did have a lot to do with my identity and it was sort of this unresolved thing that I just wasn't paying attention to.

And then that became the purpose, like well, that's why I should do that graphic novel so that I can finally resolve that question in my life.

So I got a stack of books and a notebook and I just started doing my research and then writing things down and then traveling to different historic sites.

I went to Nauvoo, Palmyra, New York, and I just took a lot of photos and I just immersed myself in that world.

That's all I was interested in was working on that graphic novel.

(lively music) It just kind of clicked.

Here's what things are gonna look like.

Here's a symbol for Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, Emma Smith.

But that's not really enough.

Like, if I'm writing and if I'm drawing that scene, I need to sort of be that person.

I need to be that character so I really fully understand why they acted the way they did, what that would be like to be in their shoes and to just have a fuller understanding of why these events happened.

So, if I'm drawing Joseph Smith like on his childhood farm or something, I have to put myself in his shoes and understand like what his family was going through.

So in drawing Joseph Smith, I am inhabiting him.

Drawing his father, I'm inhabiting his father.

I have to be these characters in order to tell the story.

I can't be an observer like the reader is.

I have to become them and act these things out for the reader.

And little by little I did.

(lively music) The big revelation for me was that this is not a place where I should be.

This isn't for me.

It's not a church that I belong in.

What it was was a collection.

Seeing all of these events and things piled up on top of each other and going back and looking at them all, all of them together just didn't feel right to me.

It didn't feel real.

It didn't feel like there was truth there.

By the time I got to him with his own militia, I just felt like this is about power.

It doesn't feel like a Christian thing.

It just didn't feel like a prophet to me.

So my mother, she did take me in a place where I should have been.

(upbeat music) It was scary.

I was in the wilderness for a long time, but in the end she took me where I was supposed to be.

The hardest thing I ever did in my life.

Truly the hardest thing I ever did in my life was creating that book, but it was worth it in the end.

It gave me a lot of answers and a lot of peace of mind that I didn't have before that I was looking for.

I have calmness to me today.

I'm not frantic inside about leaving the path of righteousness.

I don't feel that same tension that I was feeling as a teenager or even in my twenties and I can just sit back and draw comics about myself now.

(Noah laughing) (upbeat music) This last film may seem more like a visual essay than a discrete story, but if you watch closely, you'll see it's very much an account of the people who lived in this place hundreds of years ago.

It's about what they left and what that means for the people who live there now.

- [Jim Enote] This is a harsh place.

To live in this part of the world, you need to live near water.

You're also looking for places where there's shelter and where there are places to collect certain plants, or nuts to gather.

Is there enough game nearby?

These are centuries and centuries ago, a time when people were focused on creating a very highly developed relationship to cosmological processes.

A difficult place, but what is going to sustain us?

How are we going to sustain the rest?

How are we going to be sure that nature is taken care of?

How do we help nudge the sun to come up every day?

And so I think in this area, this part of the world, we turn to stone.

(soft music) (rattlesnake rattles) To see these panels, that is telling you that this is a good place to live.

At least it was then.

What's in those petroglyphs was expressions, hardship, struggle, maybe even near-death experiences.

I can relate to that.

I think there's also images that relate to a kind of belonging, that these are here, these are my people, my kin, other sorts of beings around us, and the relationship to them.

These are experiences, and they represent patterns of lives.

What was here?

What was here then?

I look at them now, and I think what could be here today.

(truck rumbles) (truck whirring echoes) These are important places.

Where there are petroglyphs, there's going to be people buried nearby.

And when these places were blessed, they were blessed in perpetuity.

When you or I and others pass by a cemetery, there's some humbleness to that, right?

We don't throw our bottles in the places like that.

We don't make loud noises; we shouldn't.

We respect places like that.

And this is also art, a particular kind of art, without paper.

If you have the right eye, you can see that, when artists repeats.

You go down through the panels, and you'll see that artist again somewhere else.

They have a signature style.

And there's been times where I would study them and look at them and see the depth, and see how much energy they used to strike.

I think we have grown to understand Abstractionists, or Cubism.

Why can't this be accepted for that?

Why not accept this as part of the national and human experience?

We have monuments throughout our nation to great works by great people.

Do you really want to cast a fog on those in a way that you would with multiple trucks moving quickly and creating dust and sending this clouding, literally clouding our collective heritage?

(vehicle whooshes) The people will always be there.

Is this the direction that our nation is taking?

We care less.

We care less about people, and care less about things that are important.

And then later, we lament on what we lost.

Is that our future?

(Bright Music)