Swain Wolfe, biographical notes:
Swain Wolfe is a writer and filmmaker who lives in Montana. He was born as Adam Michalo in Denver Colorado in 1939. He is Icelandic on his mother’s side and Russian on his father’s. His father was the director of the Woodman tuberculosis sanitarium near Colorado Springs. When the sanitarium closed after the second world war, his mother and father separated. She started a horse packing business at the Spring Creek Resort near Gunnison Colorado. After his mother and father divorced she married Samuel Wolfe who operated a ranch on the Taylor River. Sam adopted Adam and his sister Vicki. Adam took his grandfather’s first name, having no idea how ridiculous Swain Wolfe would sound ten years later.
Swain moved to Missoula, Montana with his family in the early fifties. After it was suggested that he leave high school, he worked in saw mills and the woods in Western Montana. Later he moved to Butte where he found work in the underground mines.
When you're underground for a while, you begin to get the feel of where the ore flows, how hard the granite is one place from another, how hot the wall temperature is from level to level, where the earth slips and messes up the tracks, and things you knew but never had words for. Then one day after work you drive over to Anaconda to see your girl and you realize something is very different. Your world is never going to be the same because you cannot be on the surface without thinking about what's underneath. And like water seeping through sand, that sensation invades everything, all your thoughts, your dreams. You're never the same. The mines let you see in unconventional ways.
"When I worked in the woods. I became intensely aware of trees, which created another world for me and a very different way of seeing. Our early ancestors believed the world was alive and aware of us. I believe that in some respect they were right and that affects my thinking.
--From an interview in The Bloomsbury Review.
While working in the mines he decided to make films. He returned to Missoula, worked as a potter, sculpture, and still photographer, before he began making films. Swain's first films were surreal art projects, including THE BOWLER HAT and THE VIOLIN PEOPLE. He made three films on migrant Mexican children and an environmental film, THE TERRIBLE NEWS, which led to an interest in cultural anthropology and the making of ENERGY AND MORALITY, a film about the effect of British Thermal Units on human behavior. In 1985 made PHANTOM COWBOY, a film about how groups and individuals claim ownership to socially useful ideas and use them to heighten their sense of identity at the expense of communicating those ideas to a broader public. After thirty years as an offending independent filmmaker he was forced to find other work. He self-published his first book, THE WOMAN WHO LIVES IN THE EARTH in 1993. His third novel, THE PARROT TRAINER won book awards in Arizona and Texas.
His films were made in Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Canada, Japan, Egypt, and Montana. He has had two exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and twice represented the United States in international film festivals. ENERGY AND MORALITY was one of five independent films of the one hundred films shown at the Input Venice Film Festival in 1981.
Swain's projects have taken him to a Bedouin shanty town on the Gulf of Aqaba and to an island in Alaska to observe and film grizzly bears. The latter project, The Sacred Bear, will explore bear stories from early Eurasian and North American cultures, and compare our present views of nature with those of our early ancestors.
One day in a meadow by the sea, he woke from a nap to find himself surrounded by five large grizzlies. He explained, "The bears were eating Chocolate Lilies. They ignored me. But sometimes, when I'm just waking up, I can still feel bears around me: large, serene, self-possessed bears."