Fault Lines - John Knoop

We make camp in a hardpan bowl at the base of the big dune. Sharon and I bring lots of
food and film. Others contribute various entertaining substances--wine, whiskey, and pot. There
are guitars, a saxophone and a couple of drums. It is a reunion of the old gang, disguised as a
filmmaking project. Eric Orr and Tom McEvilley come up from L A with artist Ron Cooper. The
campfire burns late every night.
Early the first morning we inflate the balloon and make a flight over the dunes. Kent has
fashioned a number of whimsical devices to create a fantasy element: a ladder to climb up to the
gondola, a pair of paddles to propel it. We have fun playing around with these and the chicken
feathers we jettison as the balloon ascends, but none of this ultimately fits into the concept I’m
now finding in the editing room, when the more complex and ambitious early plans for this film
are stripped away and it becomes a much different piece. Far more minimalist and something I
am proud of in its reduced form.
The third night, when the wind comes up, we are forced to bank our campfire and seek
shelter in our vehicles from the biting sand. About two in the morning we see lights moving
through the haze of the sandstorm. Several vehicles seem to be circling and probing about on the
desert floor as though lost. Eventually they find us and reveal themselves to be the Nye County
Sheriff's Posse. They have come out to see what we are doing here and what is all the stuff piled
up over there? They begin rummaging through the balloon bags excitedly, working up to a fever
pitch when they spot the bale of chicken down. In the dark, in the howling wind, several of them
keep pulling out handfuls of down to examine, and it disappears as fast as they can pull it out.
Within minutes, pounds of chicken feathers have evaporated into the desert, and so has their
certainty that we are drug smuggling hippies, picking up a load of marijuana that presumably
has been parachuted to us here at the big dune.
The next morning it is calm again, and I make a flight with the camera. I am able to get
over sand swept clean and trackless by the storm, and from a couple of hundred feet I frame a
shot of Sharon, a solitary ant-like figure, crossing a spine of drifted sand. In the final edit I use
this shot at the end of the film, the only time a human figure is visible in the entire piece,
dissolving that shot into a step-printed optical of brightly glinting grains of sand that I hope
suggest the Milky Way.
November ‘72
The soundtrack for Dune is by Jordan Stennberg, who decides we should record Tibetan
gongs in a mineshaft he has access to in the Sierra Nevada. I rent a stereo Nagra tape recorder
104