Cinetracts Q&A: Tony Buba

No one had any idea.

I remember thinking it would be really interesting. I go to most of the demonstrations in Pittsburgh and I thought, "Hey, I can make a buck filming some of these!" [Laughing] At that time, most of the demonstrations were about the environment and some about Black Lives Matter, but nothing to the extent of what we've been seeing. I thought this would be an interesting project and I'm glad to be a part of it, but it never entered my mind that this year would be like this. Nobody did, except Brockmire. The two TV series I've been watching are Brockmire and Babylon Berlin and both read more like documentaries than they do fiction.

Yeah, when you told me about this, I thought I would film one year from the time I shot the first protest and then whatever I was able to get to. Sometimes I go to these protests and I don't even think about shooting. For the one you will be screening, I didn't even have my camera, just my iPhone. I just went to support. I didn't even realize there were going to be people outside demonstrating. They were bringing up issues that led to the whole explosion in 2020. They're trying to address them and can't get them addressed. The politicians are just so dense, it's mind boggling. 

Because of the Antwon Rose murder. Bethany Hallam, who was just newly elected onto the county council (she wasn't even going to serve until January), was pushing for the council to adopt this police task force for the county because, unlike Columbus...what county is Columbus in?

I imagine most of Franklin County is made up of Columbus.

Pittsburgh is surrounded by 120 different municipalities, each with their own police force and some of these municipalities only have 2000 people in them. And some of the officers on these forces are barely making minimum wage and are not that well-trained. So, Bethany wanted an oversight board to ease this problem. And, we're there hoping it passes that night but of course it didn't pass. Bethany is part of a new group of women that have been elected in our region that are really dynamic and pushing for progressive policies. 

One of the things about digital cameras is that they somehow make you get lazy, and you're not thinking about limitations of equipment and how to solve those problems. With your phone, you don't really have a zoom lens, so the frame is always structured the same with things moving within the frame, so if nothing is interesting in the frame then, of course, it gets dull. But I often find myself just being lazy and standing off to the side and holding it and it's in focus and the exposure is perfect...so I was glad I showed up that day without the camera. That has somewhat been my whole career. When you show up and watch—a lot—you can get lucky and get a good moment. But you have to be there.

One thing that I have been doing—and that I hoped to come to the Wex to work—is sitting down and going through all of my hard drives. Also, the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, part of the Carnegie Mellon campus, reached out to a number of people in the Pittsburgh region about making COVID films… just looking out the window. So, I did two pieces for that. One is a triptych and the other is just looking out my window like I'm doing now talking to you. I shot out the window for two days and I kind of relied on old structuralism in thinking about how to approach it and to bring in COVID. The first shot is three seconds for C, and then I did O, so each shot is structured that way and repeated 19 times. I did the same thing out of my back window. I shot the amount of frames on time lapse and the film had the exact same amount of frames as people who had died of COVID in Pennsylvania up to that moment. And that's online through the Miller. 

Well, it's like that saying about being cursed living in an interesting time. I never really understood that, but now I do.