Cinemad

RONNIE BRONSTEIN

2009-04-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

I first heard about FROWNLAND from Scott Macauley, the editor of Filmmaker Magazine. He was on the jury for SXSW in 2007 and was compelled to fight hard for an award for the film and tell others about it. I first saw the film on DVD as a submission to CineVegas, with its weird handdrawn cover, scrawling pink-and-white image of a family at a dinner table, as if an underground comic book artist re-imagined Bunuel’s EXTERMINATING ANGEL. The movie inside was unlike any other film of recent times. Director Ronnie Bronstein packs a lot of punch in the film with realistic dialogue instead of snappy lines. Main character Keith (Dore Mann) is not your typical leading man. He is unlucky in life and love, as a girl that’s just a friend (Mary Wall, Mrs. Bronstein) comes to him to cry about other guys, and his day job takes him out of Manhattan to peddle coupons door-to-door in the ‘burbs, only to leave him far behind on bills with a hostile hipster musician roommate, who may spit more verbal abuse at him than Kinski did at Herzog. The atmosphere of the film recalls the grime of 1970s’ 42nd street glory, shot on film, projected on film, with unknown actors throughout New York. When you see the end credit of “2007” it’s bewildering.

After a long festival run, no distributor would take the film on, receiving a stint at the IFC Center in New York and various one-off shows around the country at small art houses and universities. Frequently interviewed by websites and mags already, we concentrated on recent days, with the film starting a 4-day run at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, a double-feature screening with Josh Safdie’s THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED, and with a DVD release of FROWNLAND coming this summer, the first release from the new label Factory 25.

CINEMAD: For a film without distribution or even indie stars, people seem to be finding FROWNLAND.

RONNIE BRONSTEIN: They’re finding it. Thing is, there’s not so many people out there that should find it. That’s what it comes down to. I just have to say that off the bat. The disclaimer before we get down to it, whatnot, especially since you told me that you could post this also at the Filmmaker Magazine site. Because they already have done a pretty extensive interview with me.

Yes but this is a follow up.

Not to be egomaniacal about it, but it sounds humiliating, because the world is constantly turning out new product, new movies are coming down the pike all the time, and like this douchebag, this dipshit, is talking about the same thing, he’s treading water. Running on a treadmill. Fuck, man, ya know?

I wanna make it clear: my process is a long one. I got this new project I’m working on. FROWNLAND will finally come out on DVD and I’ll be done with it. You know what I mean?

Completely.

All sorts of tasks will be behind me. But at the same time, the fact is that anybody who shows up and sees this thing in LA – This movie will not occupy any real estate in their skulls until they see it, so ya know, I need to effect some kind of freshness when I talk about it. It’s only old to me.

Mary and Ronnie Bronstein.

Did you think of having a film festival life rather than a theatrical life when you were done making it? As a projectionist for places like MOMA, you understand non-traditional theatres and films discovered long after they are finished editing.

I don’t know, man, that’s a good question. It's hard to access what my hopes for the movie were. Because the struggle behind the movie was not a commercial one, you know what I mean?

All I can say is I kind of nursed a nitwit notion that there were other people like me with the same itch they wanted scratched. And this movie would scratch it. If anything, what’s unrealistic is you imagine that there is more people like that. And you have to maintain that false pinheaded assumption all the time you’re working, otherwise, why would you work?

You are not bitter about the process.

Not disappointed by any means. That sort of critical approbation in whatever cult it is that has sorta coagulated around the work has been so strong, and the connection to it has been so deep and matched my connection to it that I feel pretty successful with it in that sense.

I don’t know. Filmmakers these days need to look beyond the short-term fortunes of finding a place in the industry. Even the margins of the industry. It’s just not where my head is at. So it doesn’t disappoint me that the film wasn’t, like, picked up or something.

I mean, the time for me to worry about this stuff was when I was coming up for ideas for my movie. You know what I’m saying. I didn’t think about those things, I didn’t worry about those things. And they weren’t my concerns, it wasn’t my struggle, so now I can’t just sit back and be bitter about it.

Some filmmakers do set out to make quote “indie film” in a low-budget manner. Hopefully they are not worrying about the indie film world liking it. Nor should you sit around thinking, “Mechanics won’t like my film.” Someone that works on a car could like your film. That’s totally part of the equation.

The word ‘like’ is such cheap word anyway. Obviously I wasn’t going out of my way to alienate people with the movie. In fact I was surprised, I was struck, by the level of venom that people have continually spit at it. Ya know?

I feel some people read it as a deliberate sort of middle finger to them or to the industry. I don’t know, I certainly didn’t conceive it that way. I tried to be as sensitive as I possibly could to a character I knew was difficult, that would test the limits of people’s tolerance, but that in itself, I thought would be interesting and engaging to dig into.

That’s what makes your film work, the characters.

If you were to worry whether what you’re doing is likeable, well, that's this sort of hovering on top of your work rather than being inside of it. That kind of thinking is just a contaminate.

Absolutely. Have your screenings solidified that feeling?

Again, from my point of view, and my point of view is pretty limited, my life was irrevocably changed the moment I premiered it. I can’t tell you the amount of new life experiences the movie has fomented for me. The people I've connected with, the people i've wound up collaborating with. The whole experience with acting in Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film. That came out of their seeing the movie and for some ineffable reason coming to the conclusion that I needed to perform for them. Jesus. I've had so many crazy experiences. In general, the people that have responded to the work have responded so strongly that I lose sight of the fact of the most people that have never heard of it. I mean i think it's a success.

More than expected?

By the time I was editing it I was so emotionally invested in it and my self-esteem had been so bankrupted that while – whatever. It was not on my radar to judge its success on financial terms. It wasn’t like I made it to get the money back, the same way you don’t go on vacation thinking you’re going to get the money back. It was money I spent and whether it was a success or failure was gonna be based on how people felt about it.

Being a projectionist for a living, did you get the sort of extended perspective of films, beyond reviews and articles and the importance of something being newly released?

A very warped perspective. Almost a delusional one. I’m projecting less now than I have in a decade because I’m working on this stuff all the time. I haven’t made this little money since I was 22.

Congratulations.

Nonetheless, I project on the museum circuit, the rep circuit in New York City. And there’s such a healthy vibrant sort of culture that surrounds that. You know, people that go to the movies everyday wanting to put on boxing gloves and sort of duke it out with ideas.

This isn’t an environment where… You think of the moral responsibility a filmmaker has to prod and poke people, you know, out of their passive viewing habit. Well, I don't work around a passive demographic. I’ve always seing audiences watching challenging work, so maybe it just warped my perspective of how many people like that are out there.

I’m not a big fan of the per-screen average of something that is truly low budget, truly tiny. Because there’s an independent film that stars two recognizable actors and then there is an independent film, if your meaning of independent is based solely on budget number or studio affiliation. What is important to me is: if thousands of people saw a film you made with very little resources – that is incredible.

It seems like I’m so green that I don’t have deep insight into the way the industry works. It just seems that the distributors of independent movies are playing it to safe, and it's to nobodys benefit. They're consciously picking the most accessible movies from the crops of independents and funnelling them through the first-run pipeline, but they don’t seem to be making much money off of them. So since no one is making money, all it seems to be doing is ruining the culture.

Let’s make it clear that you haven’t just been sitting around doing nothing since you finished the film.

My process for my own work is painfully slow. I mean, it’s not something I’m embarrassed about. I work slowly, and I’m comfortable with that. The first sort of step, after the thematic scope of a project is mapped out, the first step for me is to create a central character who will become the anchor of the work. For instance, with FROWNLAND it took four months of heavy collaboration with Dore until Keith was alive and breathing, so I could sort of wind him up, and spin him around and toss him into any situation and he could respond in character. This new one is taking a little longer. I’ve been working for about seven months with this my lead. And now finally the character is there, he's alive.

Right. In your new script?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But I did take a break to work on Josh and Bennie’s movie [The Safdie Brothers’ new GO GET SOME ROSEMARY, which Ronnie acts in and helped edit]. And I can see why people attach themselves to greater, higher infrastructures in their life. Why they get jobs that tell them where to be everyday, and why. It’s a true pleasure to be involved in something so creatively engaging and fulfilling and yet not have to steer the ship.

Like, I had my base sense of purpose, the reason to get out of bed, that was taken care of, without any of the angst and stress that comes with having to create your own infrastructure.

Once that movie was done, oh my God, it was like being punched in the gut. Terrible, man. I lost my wind.

Cause you had to go back to—

Waking up everyday and having those panic attacks.

There was no school schedule.

Oh my God, no. I don’t want to give the impression of lethargy.

Your general motivation was because you wanted to make a film. It’s just a matter of – you gotta do it your way.

Right, that’s right. I don’t know. What the product is is kind of secondary. I’m just looking for that sense of purpose, so I don’t feel like I’m flailing.

How is your new project going?

We just finished with such a successful weeklong exercise. This is gonna sound so overwrought, but this guy is on a crusade against, I don’t know, the spiritual, intellectual, imperialism. Just grabbing hold of consciousness these days, ya know? This guy is just against everything. I took [the actor] into this single-room occupancy, way into the dirty end of Brooklyn, and he was the only one under 65. Entered into this environment and sort of sparked a revolution. Sounds corny, but by the end of this week, he fermented such a violent upheaval amongst the people. I can only call them inmates. Just the sad souls living there. He had to be removed.

So you got the actor to spend time in an old age home?

I wouldn’t call it an old-age home.

An apartment building with mostly senior citizens.

Only by default. These people have nowhere else to go. This place is as cheap as you can possibly live in the city, ya know? Like the very, very end of Greenpoint. The part of the neighborhood that will never be gentrified.

Oh wow.

I’d rather not even get into that, because I’d rather the work just speak for itself. I don’t think I can make it sound good, so…

What’s up with the DVD for FROWNLAND? That’s an actual done deal?

I have to just sign the contract. Yeah, but it’s moving ahead. Like a deluxe edition that would come out with the score on vinyl.

Are you happy it continues to get the occasional theater screening?

I’ve had really good luck. And, of course this is something I don’t think I would have not explored if had found distribution in the states early on. It had a week run in New York and it had so many screenings in New York. I had one at MOMA, I had one at BAM, then I played a week in Chicago, a week in Seattle, we have this LA run coming up. And then Mark who is a producer on this film – we sort of did this huge outreach of reaching out to University cinematheques because there is money there, they have budgets, money they have to spend. And I’ve been able to bring in some money in which to live off of, just by simply going out to Universities and showing them the movie and lecturing them. It’s been satisfying, a lot more satisfying.

It’s just like each city is a little dead-end. It’s nice when you get these theatrical runs then you’re entitled to space in the local newspaper. That’s the reason to go theatrical – not to make the money back in ticket sales, but to sorta be able to get your voice heard in the press.

The film will have a life, you know what I mean? It was purchased by MOMA, it was purchased by the Harvard Film Archives. It exists now. It won’t disappear. I feel like I made as much noise as I possibly could with such an aggressive, craggy movie.

Did you go to film festivals before you made FROWNLAND?

Nah, I was just working in an air-sealed vacuum environment. But i don't know. I feel like it’s such an anemic time in cinema right now…and like if somebody makes a movie, and the struggle behind that movie is not a commercial one, and their goal is not to make their money back, but rather to just try and make noise and affect the culture.

I think it’s a really empowering time because there’s very little competition. It’s a very good time to make a lot of noise with a very little bit of money. If one has the sort of tenacity, go for it.

All these Q&As that you’ve basically done for over a year now. Do you think you find audiences that way?

Yep. You do. I think there’s probably many people who think the Q&As are more interesting than the movie. I just have a personal disinclination of the kind of niceness that seems to define most screening Q&As. Where people are talking about their budget, or finding nice anecdotes, funny anecdotes about the making of the movie. And thankfully, I was spared that. No one even asked those questions, ya know? I guess the movie, at its worst, upsets somebody. It upsets them the way a molecule gets upset. And then they hold me personally responsible for that. And then I’m on the hot seat – I don’t know. It’s a nice place to be.

This has nothing to do with your question, but I guess if I had to attach FROWNLAND to an established genre, the genre I find most personally irritating is the trope of the loveable loser.

Keith (Dore Mann)

You’ve got that in spades.

Somebody who just can't hold it together. His infrastructure is a wreck. He can’t get a girl, he can't move ahead at his lousy job, that kind of thing. Movies that focus on nerds are the most superficial example. But whether it’s REVENGE OF THE NERDS or SIDEWAYS -- these movies use all sorts of insidious tricks to make it easy for the audience to sympathize with the character. They make it so that this character will appeal to the loser in everyone.

And there’s something disgusting about going into a movie theatre and being made to feel, for two house, that you're more tolerant towards weakness than you will be the second you leave the theatre. I was going out of my way to avoid that trap. What does it really mean to spend time with somebody that you might instantly dismiss, and what does tolerance really mean? And tolerance and compassion, the nature of tolerance, maybe it only has value when you don’t feel it. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah.

Being considerate of somebody who is different from you and maybe weaker than you. Again, the value of that comes into play when it’s a fight inside of you to get it.

Your characters portray that struggle we can relate to, they can’t deal with each other.

Maybe that’s what bugs people so much. I mean, my relationship with you is the most sort of extreme example of people getting upset, at the movie during CineVegas. What’s more common is someone will raise their hand in the audience and will ask a question in which the subtext is hitting the text over the head with a mallet. They aren’t really asking me a question. They are just disguising a very negative statement. Like a question like, ‘What do you think you were gonna achieve with this movie?”

That’s the kind of hostility I’m used to. In Vegas it actually erupted into screaming. Like something that is physical. And in a way, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that.

The guy who was booing, did he actually ask a question? Did he stick around?

He didn’t just boo, he booed for several minutes. I mean, jesus, to drain the air out of your lungs and then re-draw new air and then drain it out again and again. That guy was committed. I kind of respect that. But when I addressed him, well, I didn’t even have the chance because somebody else got up and started screaming at that guy.

In defense of the film –

I value confrontation. I feel like our culture has become so unconfrontational that I’m happy to play a role in that. Like my own little turn of the screw in the vice of our culture. And make something that is creating that kind of conflict, or that kind of dialogue, makes me feel good. Makes me feel successful. And not in some cheap punk way. Not looking to punch buttons for the sake of doing so, that would be valueless.

Either an audience member or Keith's roommate in the film.

No, you gotta go all the way. If you make a film about teenagers, let’s find the truly uncool kid. Not just somebody that has acne and wears black.

Well, just what I was trying to get at. And again, I wasn’t sparing myself in the sense that the whole movie for me was the struggle. I want to create work where that struggle is embedded inside of the work. Where it feels like the guy that made it isn’t just standing on top of everything judgmentally. I wasn’t trying to preach about tolerance. I was trying to expose how difficult it is.

Fuck, man. Whether you’re a student working in the dorm or whether you’re working retail, or walking around the city, like in any environment, you come across people once in a while that are just off. There is something off about them, ya know? Are there is a kind of mindset that one instinctively adopts when they are around someone like that. It’s like you are walking down the street and the somebody asks you for directions, and just because of the vibe they are giving off, you find yourself saying, “Sorry, I don’t live around here.” Even though you know exactly where they want to go, you just wanna push that person away. Or if you’re working retail and some guy comes up to you, you find yourself answering questions very strategically that will preclude any follow up. You just want to push that fucker away.

And in reality, what does it mean to dimiss somebody that isn’t doing anything bad per se but is just off? In life you can do that so easily and never think twice about it. There is no real reason to question it. You force someone away from your little territorial bubble, and go about your business and never have to question whether or not that dismissal was justified, you know? So, wow, a movie theatre is a really good place, I’m thinking, to sort of confront people with people. It’s that old adage of ‘the captive audience.’

And they paid for it.

And the thing is, why can’t people just leave the theatre the same way they can dismiss someone in real life. Why is somebody staying through the end and getting that upset? If you wanna dismiss this guy, you can easily do so by getting up and leaving. I’m not gonna mind.

He booed through the entire credits.

That makes the film so much more powerful. Because it’s easy – you can watch distributors. They fucking file out of films after 10 minutes. And that’s their job, to watch movies. It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be good at releasing this.” Then you got a film festival goer: ‘Well, there’s something I might like better…” so it’s easy to skip. Then you got somebody who doesn’t like the film and they stay all the way through. When they have an incredible amount of opportunities right outside the door. Especially in Vegas.

My film always plays better when people have to buy tickets. In a festival, where people buy badges, and you're not laying out money for each screening, you don’t feel like they have to justify sitting there if it's not your thing. You can just get up and leave and see something else. But once somebody slaps down that $10, they feel like they have to sit through it to get their money’s worth.

For it to work, FROWNLAND relies on that commitment. Which is why I’ve turned down every offer to have it stream on the internet. I know what internet culture is like, and I know how flaky and flighty people are in their internet search habits, ya know? And the way people jump from page to page on the internet is the way people watch movies on the internet. It’s one and the same, I think. I don’t even want to enter into that. Because I know the movie cannot succeed in that way.

I think it’ll play well on DVD. But if you’re the casual audience at home, then it might not work.

Right. But that just outlines how ridiculous or how deluded my general point of view is. I’m worried—I’m turning down opportunities that might be financially rewarding ones—I’m turning down opportunities because it’s more important to me how people see, if they’re gonna be able to see the right way, than it is for me to turn a buck. I don’t know, I’m gonna have to get over that if I wanna keep working, but that’s where I’m at.

But that’s why making this film wasn’t a job. And crowds have connected to it.

Connections have been so strong. Again, if I’m measuring success, basically how strongly the work is actually communicating and how I want it to communicate, then I feel like a million bucks.

Has Dore Mann done anything since?

Not acting-wise. You know he’s going through life. My relationship with him is really complicated, and in a way, it’s really possible that I cannot separate my personal relationship with him with my working relationship with him. They can’t exist independently. We just got so deep into it…Oh God, it’s almost like we accidentally stumbled into the field of psychodrama without the therapeutic knowledge of how to deal with it. But he’s moved into kind of a different line of work. He’s not doing acting. He’s doing social work.

He didn’t do that before?

No. He was always interested in politics and history. That’s what he studied in school. Now he’s working for a needle exchange program. He was working for a suicide hotline at some point, and now this is what he is doing.

So for the film world, he will only be Keith from FROWNLAND, making it stronger.

In general, I really like seeing new faces in moves. I like the lack of baggage. I feel like those are the ones you can really project onto.

When the actors are unknown, it doesn't make it a documentary, but it definitely adds the level of a real world, someone's real experience to a viewer. You are introduced to the characters instead of a favorite actor doing things.

Look, this idea of realism, at face value, this belief in camera as truthteller. The camera is an idiot. The camera is a fool. It doesn’t have anything to say. And some of these movies substitute verisimilitude for discernment. There’s a mistake in that. This idea of realism that all you have to do is sort of capture the external world as it is, as it unfolds, and this is enough to capture how reality makes you feel. And it doesn’t require any sort of heightening and prodding, and getting underneath with the crow bar. I just don’t have a relationship with that, you know what I mean? Because I know how the world makes me feel doesn’t necessarily show up on my face.

But I get so serious when I talk about it. I think the movie is really funny. It’s just that—Maybe that humor reveals itself on repeated viewings. Maybe more than the first screening when you’re so disoriented of where it’s going and who your sympathy should be anchored to…that being in that state of unrest, being in that state of not being sure, isn’t a state that works in tandem with laughing. The second viewing you know where it is, where it should be, and where you stand on watching it…and you can sort of get into that texture of what’s funny about it.

There is an endless discussion about when somebody is laughing at, and somebody is laughing with, a film. And at times something is so extreme I need to laugh in shock.

Exactly. Or just laughing at pure nuance. It’s not even what you’re seeing is funny. But you’re seeing a detail and the case of FROWNLAND you’re seeing his neck contort and his veins pop out of his neck at a moment of such supreme discomfort. That in itself, those details, you wanna react to it. You wanna feel something rolling up inside of you. And you want to let it out, it’s like a steam pipe, ya know? And what are you gonna do? You’re not gonna yell, and you’re not gonna cry in anguish, so the laughter just ends up coming out like a bark.

Absolutely.

Again, I don’t want to use my own movie as an example. Because that implies that I think it’s successful. I’m just saying that these are things I’m attracted to, you know what I’m saying?

We are talking about audience reactions to your film, though. And what you think about them.

I didn’t want to the coddle the audience by orienting them to a fixed point of view. I didn’t want to make a morality play in that sense, where there was good and bad. I wanted to pivot around these variuous viewpoints and allow people to sort of feel both ways. Like the roommate. You can say that guy is sort of an arrogant prick. At the same time, when you think of the random lottery of possible living arrangements…who would actually want to be living with Keith? Nobody! No matter how tolerant you are as a person, ya know? I don't care how much compassion you have for the human race. I mean, sure, Keith doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. But his total inability to read social clues is hardly a saintly quality.

The saint is someone who can deal with him despite all that.

Right. That’s not realistic. The idea is that by the end of the movie you can find grounds for compassion. I hope so. But it’s through a constant process of chewing him over and regurgitating him. Maybe the compassion comes through the backdoor. First you feel good watching the roommate cruelly bitch slap Keith, and then you feel good watching the roommate get bitch slapped himself. Maybe guilt that sits at the root of compassion. I don't know.

(phone hangs up)

Hello?

(Bronstein calls back)

Sorry, I don’t know what happened.

It’s like you combusted. And then the phone just went out.

I turned to vapor. The Nude Bomb. I got no clothes on now.

Is there going to be…

Someone asks me for what my big inspirations are…what’s so fucking funny about that: by the time you have an aesthetic in place and you’re looking in the world to pick the people that booey that aesthetic, you’re already passed the point of influences. Like for me, as a kid, probably THE NUDE BOMB is a bigger influence on the movie than like Mike Leigh. What you see when you’re 12, you’ll never, ever, ever for the rest of your life be that invested in a movie as you are when you’re 12.

Have you run into any 12-year-olds that have watched FROWNLAND?

It’s funny, I was brought out to Norway to show it. First of all, they brought me to this town. And I went and it was all 13-year-olds. A row of 13-year-old kids.

Really?

I don’t know, man. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t make me feel good. It’s not like I want to force this. It’s the same reason why I don’t have it on the internet. It needs to find the right people.

So the guy who was booing in Vegas, did he stay for the Q&A? Did he ask anything.

No, I said to him, “You want to make the first comment?” But then he got cut off.

Somebody else started defending it. Then someone else started defending the boo-er.

Yeah. It was fun, ya know, it was fun. Who doesn’t want to take part in a riot? By no means a riot, but it touches upon that, that, that deep-seated desire.

People should be as hard on the films as the films are hard on the audience. That’s what I wanna live. I wanna live inside of a culture where that is not just acceptable. That is par for the course.

It’s hard for me to even get financing. Someone would see the movie and think, ‘Of course, it’s hard to get financing not making commercial work.” But I’m even saying beyond that. When I have people who are willing to sit down at the table with me, and hear what I’m going for. Since I value that struggle inside of work. Not just all work, but work that I take to…usually you wouldn’t sit down with a businessman until you were on top of your work so much that you can just outline all the details for them and hopefully get them onboard. For me I can only speak about what I’m doing in very broad strokes. Until I’ll be done with it. And even then, it’s going to be something I’m constantly chewing over. Again, I’m looking to expose that struggle in the work that I make. There’s never this point where I’m just together with it. With this new one I’m working on, I’ll never be together until the day I’m done with it. Until it closes over.

Have you found non-traditional financing for the new film?

I just got a grant. And that was really great, that was the first step. A businessman, a producer takes the greatest risk for a work of art. They are the ones putting themselves in the biggest jeopardy based on the way society looks at the world, because they are the ones putting up the money. So in a way, it’s very hard to imagine me creating very personal work unless I share in that risk. I saved up a lot of money for years to do make Frownland, and now I don’t have any left, so i'm reliant on investors. But it’s still really hard for me to come to terms with accepting someone else’s money given the kind of work I wanna make. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m just beating myself up, but…

Enough distributors have lost tons of money on supposed safe bets. So why not take a chance and have reasonable expectations?

I don’t think if I did get into distribution, based on the level of – based on the kind of deal I would get. I don’t think anything would have been that different. Best-case scenario, I’d play a week in LA, a week in New York, a week in Chicago. You know what I’m saying? I did all those things. It’s just that they would have spent money on advertising, while the only advertising available to me was reviews in newspapers. But all the reviews were good.

Is anything extra on the DVD or is it just the film?

I’m so leary about that kind of stuff. I find ultimately, I don’t know, there isn’t a great thrill. There’s a compulsion to go through DVD extras, but the second they start you are ready to go next thing on the menu.

I don’t mind seeing someone’s short films that I wouldn’t be able to see…stuff like that.

I have some great, great, great process ephemera I would like to include in the package. Like from Dore -- I could make a book out of Dore’s character journals. I have just the most rancorous exchanges between Keith, the roommate and Charles. They are great. So great. Keith’s constant need to be indirect forces him to go thru the most circuitous, longwinded aggressions to explain why he is asking for the money for the bills. He can’t just fucking say, ‘Please, I need the money. It’s due tomorrow. I need the money.” No. He has to recount some analagous anecdote about his fucking grandmother in order to build up the strength to ask.

You wrote the journals?

I would be the middleman. They would write them, I would clean up to get the kind of responses we needed. I would only orchestrate it… But no, they would write it in character and I would clean them up and send them along. So yeah... By that point, it was months into the process and the characters were so formed. I sort of need the presence of the characters to get the details of the scene. That’s the way I work.

That’s great.

What makes the scene come together, those details, they aren’t the type that can be invented on paper as an absolute thing. I’m looking for pure nuance. You wanna know how your film is gonna go, but you wanna be surprised by how it gets there. This would be a simplistic way to put it.

That’s a good quote to end on.

End on something better than that. To hear someone talk about process, it’s the lamest thing ever. Focus on what we were talking about the movie, about the culture. Process I think is…eh. It’s always self-indulgent.

I’m gonna say I met you and you were all tan, wearing a mesh t-shirt.

And a message. I had a message.

Anyway, you got any money?

Nope.

God, it's so much easier to be honest with people who don’t have money. End on that note. I like that…. I want the struggle to be inside the work.

See FROWNLAND this weekend, dammit:

April 23rd: 9:45pm
April 24th: 7:30pm, Midnight
April 25th: 5pm, 9:30pm
April 26th: 5pm, 9:30pm

Double feature with THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED by Josh Safdie

At Cinefamily:
http://www.silentmovietheatre.com/

TONY STONE

2009-03-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Vikings rule - The kickass new film SEVERED WAYS finally gets to theaters, courtesy Magnet Releasing, opening in New York this month.

A graduate of Bard College, filmmaker Tony Stone’s first feature, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, unleashes an almost-new genre – the indie historical drama. It might also be the ultimate heavy metal video. Based on historical research, Severed Ways follows two Vikings stranded in medieval America, encountering both Native Americans and monks, everyone trying to survive. It is deeper than an action film as the Vikings are complete characters, violent but missing their girlfriends. In a way, Old Joy with Vikings.

Shot on mini-DV, the result is stunning, a period piece that looks like a painting but feels like an inside view with characters even speaking in Norse language.

Interviewed director Tony Stone for Filmmaker mag, check it out here...

Great REDCAT shows coming up

2009-02-19T16:41:00.000-08:00

Two great shows are coming on the next two Mondays at REDCAT in downtown LA:

O'ER THE LAND
Deborah Stratman's new feature takes us into the wild wild world of, well, America - exploring battle reinactments, RVs, gun shows (the kind where you can shoot something and it will blow up) and the incredible story of an airman who parachuted from his plane only to get caught in a thunderstorm for 45 minutes. Stratman's tone and camera is controlled yet playful, with beautiful imagery and far more humor than you would expect. What the hell is going on in this country? The freaking wild west never ended.

Also shows with Stratman's "Paranomal Trilogy" of short films. An older Cinemad interview with Deborah is here.

Mon 2.23.09 8:30 pm
http://www.redcat.org/season/0809/fv/stratman.php

BRUCE CONNER'S EXPLOSIVE CINEMA: A TRIBUTE, PART 2
Bruce Conner was one of the first to rework found film footage into new short films, but that's not what makes him one of the greatest. His movies examine politics and celebrity, sex and violence, using images you may recognize but with his notable hand in the mix. Although he was adored by academics and the art world, Conner was not interested in making everyone happy. He made films because he had something to say. Sadly, he passed away last year.

Surveying the filmmaker's work over a 50-year span, the program includes A Movie (1958, 12 min.), Marilyn Times Five (1973, 14 min.), Permian Strata (1969, 4 min.), Mea Culpa (1981, 4 min.), Looking for Mushrooms (1967, 3 min.), Looking for Mushrooms (1996 version, 15 min.), Report (1967, 13 min.), Television Assassination (1995, 14 min.), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977, 5 min.), Valse Triste (1977, 5 min.) and - the caveat - Bruce's last film, the gorgeous Easter Morning (2008, 10 min., DV).

In person: Dennis Hopper, longtime Conner friend and co-conspirator, and guest of honor Jean Conner

Mon 3.02.09 8:30 pm

http://redcat.org/season/0809/fv/conner.php

Bruce Conner's Explosive Cinema: A Tribute, Part 1 is being shown on February 28. See cinema.ucla.edu for program info.

The Cinemad interview with Bruce Conner is available here.

Bruce Conner

2009-02-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

You may know BRUCE CONNER as an experimental filmmaker – whose films dominate their bastard grandchildren of music videos in style, form, humor and commentary, some 50 years after he started. You may also know his collage, assemblage, sculpture, photography, print making, painting and conceptual art. He even took a ton of photos of influential punk rock bands in the 1970s. Basically, if you are creative in any format, you would be inspired by something Conner made. Sadly, Mr. Conner passed away in 2008 after a lengthy illness. He was one of a kind. This interview took place in 2005, as his film LUKE (1966/2004) was making the fest rounds, and his show of punk rock photos was opening at the Barbara Gladstone gallery.

CINEMAD: Your film LUKE is showing at festivals.

BRUCE CONNER: It had a sneak preview at CineVegas, and then it premiered at the New York Film Festival and the London Film Festival. It’s also showing at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York from January 4th until the 29th. That’s in conjunction with an exhibition of fifty-three black and white punk photos that I took in 1978 at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco.

How did you find the punk rock scene? In 1977 Toni Basil called me and said, “You gotta go to Mabuhay Gardens tonight and see the world’s greatest new rock band, Devo.” So I went there and I liked the show, the place was pretty interesting. I started going back to see if I would find another band just as interesting. There were a number of events there, some of which I photographed. Most of my photographs are of San Francisco and California punk bands; some of the bands were obscure and only played once. There are pictures of Toni Basil and Devo and a few others that are better known.

“Devo: Airborne”

The Search and Destroy you showed me had great photos of The Avengers and Negative Trend. Also in the show are Crime, UXA and the Mutants. Usually there’s more than one photo of each band. There is one photo of a band called Ointment that gave a great performance and then disappeared.. Vale, who published my photos in Search and Destroy magazine, told me recently that he thought they were the best punk band he remembered seeing at Mabuhay Gardens.

But were you drawn to the scene quickly? In its own way, it reminded me of the energy of the poets, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who had been characterized as the Beat generation in the 1950’s. Then in the ‘60s some of the same people were called the Hippie generation. This creative phenomenon appeared to become publicly conspicuous in San Francisco every ten years.

You must have seen it differently than everybody else since you had lived through the other two angry youth movements. They weren’t always angry. They were complicated periods of time, just like we are in right now. I wish we could find more people with that kind of intensity today. It’s worth gravitating towards that type of environment. A kind of activity that compels people, despite the limits of their technological or professional abilities, to produce, perform, and have their say.

Were the punk photos pretty conscious, or more snapshots? The second time I was there, I saw Vale, who worked at City Lights Bookstore, he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m interested in this stuff.” And he said, “ I’m starting a new magazine called Search and Destroy about the punk scene.” I said, “Maybe I could take some photos for that.” During the next year, I probably wasted too much time trying to take photos that would be appropriate for the magazine.

I had no idea which of three bands playing each night would turn out to be really unique and interesting. I ended up being at Mabuhay Gardens several days a week. I also conceived creating a photographic document during the year of 1978 at Mabuhay Gardens. I didn’t receive any money for the photos printed in Search and Destroy. But, over the years, I’ve gotten used to paying people to look at my work.

cover image of Negative Trend by Bruce Conner.

The reverse of the mainstream. Well, people think they’re paying me when they go to a film festival, but as you and I know, festivals don’t pay the filmmakers when they show their films.

Do you get paid for books and art gallery sales? I don’t get paid when any of my words or work are published in books. Art galleries sell my work once in a while. I distribute my films through Canyon Cinema. It’s questionable whether I’ve ever made back the costs of more than a few of the short films. Beyond the initial cost there are the expenses of maintaining and producing new prints, transferring, archiving and all the rest of it. I like to support Canyon Cinema because they are the only viable 16mm distributor of short independent films. The films they distribute are about as independent as film can get. They are usually produced by one person who has conceived the work, filmed it, edited it, and distributed it.

What was the impetus behind finally putting out the DVD of some of your shorts (2002 B.C.)? It was produced as a fundraiser for charitable organizations. It was available through the galleries where I exhibit.

People could obtain a free copy if they made a donation of fifty dollars to a non-profit organization such as Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic or the Food Bank in San Francisco. The dealers and I dealt with it as public service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Manhattan. It also brings people into the gallery to see my drawings, prints, photos, paintings, etc. My justification, in terms the IRS understands, is that the films are nothing except a form of publicity for me to bring people closer to the work that is for sale at the galleries. If I were to actually try to deal with this as a business, there isn’t any business. [laughs]

People seem to have the illusion that, because they see these films and they read about them, it means substantial cash in the pocket for the filmmaker. In contrast to the ‘50s, many of the short films that get shown at film festivals, are there for practical reasons such as getting jobs in video or commercial film. Or it’s necessary for academics who must publish or perish. Or it’s pure vanity. I guess I fall into the latter category.

A MOVIE (1958)

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, these types of films were in a different economic community that had created its own distribution, venues, literature, and news. There were film groups and film societies all across the country. People did make money, but after a while, it became clear that these people had to be “helped” by others who were not artists. They took “pity” on these poor artists. They decided it was time that there should be grants administered by non-profit organizations (that would take all the money that was available) so artists could present their wonderful hobbies to the world. So everything was transformed to the point where that earlier film community no longer existed. It had been a classic example of free enterprise before the takeover. It’s now totally monopolized by non-profits who do wonderful things for the filmmakers and take the lion’s share for themselves.

It’s nearly impossible to start a film group because every city has a film festival that is charging filmmakers to display their films, collecting all the money at the gate, and having nice parties for their friends. I’m not sure how long things like this will go on. After a while some filmmakers won’t want to do it. Many people are going to be making low-cost video productions that are available on the Internet or elsewhere. Perhaps the festival environment for these types of films won’t be so promising for promoters.

A lot of the festivals’ job is connecting filmmakers to meet an agent, a manager, financers, other film production folks, to continue to produce work. It’s a big trade show. Many of them do a good job of showing the films, but at least half of it is trying to further yourself with these things. Do you think the answer would be that the film festivals simply rent the films they show? I think that would be nice, but why would anybody want to do that? Independent filmmakers pay for it and the festival pockets the money. I’ve tried to ask for film rentals at film festivals. The New York Film Festival says, “Well, you get the honor of your films being shown in our festival in New York.” The festival burns up the audience in the area. The people who see it there are unlikely to see elsewhere in the city afterwards. No second run theaters.

Right now, LUKE is doing the trip around to festivals. [Producer] Henry Rosenthal is handling all that for me since he has entered his productions in film festivals before. The theoretical goal is to find a sale to cable or commercial television. We’re not renting it, we’re not selling copies, and if that doesn’t pan out, I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with LUKE. It’s possible that it will never be available, because if I need to pay people to see my movies, why bother? It means a lot more work. 2002 B.C. is no longer available. We accomplished what we wanted to do. Now I have another DVD with CROSSROADS (1976) and LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967). It is distributed by the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. It seems more sensible to the gallery to have it for sale even if we don’t end up making a profit. It makes it seem a little more reliable and business-like.

LUKE (1966/2004)

How have you made a living? Being an artist of fifty years, that’s not job security. Well, at one point in the ‘60s, I had four jobs simultaneously. My wife was also teaching. In the ‘70s, my grandmother died and left me some money. My uncle died and was equally generous. My father left me some stock in a company that has since been absorbed by Kroger. So, after a while, I could pay my basic bills. I’ve assumed that I could live off this mainly because I bought my house here in San Francisco in 1972 when the costs were very low. We just take care of ourselves in a simple way. I’ve been telling people for ten years I’ve made enough money to live on from my work for the last 10 years. I started assuming that was the case in the 1990’s but I didn’t know what it really cost to live in San Francisco, the most expensive city in America. I was living off some of the inheritance that I received.

Buying a place back then was a smart move. I made enough money to live on in 1960. The next year, I made absolutely nothing and it pretty much stayed that way with minor improvement for years. Then I slowly started to have more income selling my work. I had a dealer, Paula Kirkeby, who told me, “I want to have a show and we need to raise the prices.” I said, “I don’t think people will buy this stuff at a higher price. We’re already charging $250 for these drawings and we only sell two or three out of the twenty-five we put in a show.” She said, “You might as well not sell them for $500 as $250.” We raised the prices and we sold two or three from the show.

I had a show in Los Angeles in 1991. The prices had gone up so much that I thought, “This is outrageous.” But I remember hearing somebody at the opening say, “Oh, these prices are so reasonable.” It seemed to make a difference when people realized that the work was at a certain economic level. Now the galleries will raise the prices and tell me afterwards, “Here’s the extra money.”

I expected people to value the work for what it was and not its prestige. I didn’t sign a lot of my work in the 1960s. If I did sign it, I would put my name on the back. I always thought that a signature on a piece of artwork represented an advertisement for Coca-Cola or Salvador Dali (interchangeable entities). I wanted to see that each piece had the character of a phenomenon that could be experienced without any predispositions or expectations about who made the work or when it was made or anything else. I want the work to live and succeed on its own merits, nothing else.

COSMIC RAY (1962)

In fact, you can see that a number of my films don’t even have my name on them. I would complete them and, sometimes as an afterthought, I would add titles. I was more interested in finishing it and showing it to people and I would forget to ever put a title on it. COSMIC RAY (1961) did have my name in it at one point. My credit was only three frames long among all those flashing frames. Since I edited the film linearly in an A-roll and didn’t use a work print I would lose a frame every time I made a splice. After a while my name disappeared. It was a gratuitous demonstration that my ego involvement was too demanding.

And when you do get your name in there, you just stay on it, like in A MOVIE (1958). In A MOVIE, I decided that the credit concept was so absurd that I would just sit on it long enough for people to think that the name credit was all that the movie was ever going to be. Rushing movie music and “Bruce Conner” on the screen forever and ever. I just assumed when I made A MOVIE that every film I made afterwards could be spliced onto the end of it. The other movies would be like a continuation of the same film so I wouldn’t have to make any more titles. But of course, each of the following films changed character.

At CineVegas you told me you waited on LUKE because you didn’t want to release it without music? It was shot in regular 8mm and was intended to be shown at five frames per second. It had a production cost of less than four dollars. The camera and projector were very inexpensive because regular 8mm film was being phased out for Super 8 in the 1960’s. I could photograph using the features available on an 8mm camera that are more awkward or costly with 35mm. It was possible to fade in and out while running the camera, advance the film forward and backward by hand, film at fast speeds so things were in slow motion or do single framing of one picture at a time. I could take thousands of individual photographs with an 8mm camera and look at them in a little viewer.

I put my 8mm films in the Museum of Modern Art Film Archives in New York, and they made 16mm enlargements of them in 1984. I used that 16mm copy when Patrick Gleeson decided couple of years ago that he wanted to create another musical soundtrack for a film of mine. He has worked with synthesizers in advance of everybody else, introduced synthesizer to modern jazz, and created a lot of wonderful music.

He was able to do a stereo track for LUKE with such precision that I knew I could never turn it back into film after synchronizing it to 3 images per second on digital tape. LUKE will only be on video. I have been working more with video, in part because it gave me the opportunity to put the original stereo soundtrack by Terry Riley into CROSSROADS.

REPORT (1963-1967)

How did you come to create a new version of REPORT (1963-1967) this year? One of the projects I’ve had in mind was to recreate the character of one of the seven unique edits of REPORT before it was finalized in 1967. Between 1963 and 1967, it went through seven transformations. My concept was to make every viewing print similar using the same soundtrack, but the images would change with each print. People could see this long process of various images at different viewing times. The experience would be similar to people’s memory of seeing films when they are shown again. There is sometimes a moment of wonder when the images seem to be different or in a different order than when the film was first seen. I have been told by people after they viewed A MOVIE a second time that they were sure that I had re-edited it. In the 1960s, it was possible to make unique reversal prints. I would just edit the A-roll of REPORT (one single line of 16mm film) take some images out, move them around, put other ones in. During the first eight minutes of the film, I used one image that would repeat over and over and over as a film loop. The prints went into distribution or into people’s hands, and then they would someday disappear from wear and tear.

All on 16mm? Yes. So after transferring REPORT to digital, I went back and tried to recreate the character in one of these earlier versions. There’s a series of repeat images during the first eight minutes. The repetitive image I chose had been used in the third or fourth version. All of the various repetitive images were consolidated into the negative that was finally made in 1967. Obviously, coming back to this some 35 years later, it’s not going to be the same thing. Of course not, it’s on digital video. I changed the edit of the last five minutes, moved some images around or added other ones into it.

I can’t put it in Canyon Cinema because they don’t rent videos. They sell videos. A problem with selling videos is that the wonderful people who care so much about films and lecture about them in schools or present them in museums will sometimes cheat the filmmakers and Canyon Cinema by making copies for their multimillion-dollar non-profit organizations. This problem came up with the DVD of 2002 BC. There were people showing it in classrooms. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art put it on exhibit in the worst possible manner by exhibiting it next to a sculpture by Ed Kienholz called Backseat Dodge, which had a transistor radio in it running at all times. My video was on a monitor inside a clear plastic box with sound coming through the box. It was in a brightly illuminated environment. Of course, on the DVD it says that it is not for be shown for public performance.

Canyon Cinema also told me that rentals were dwindling for some of the titles available on the DVD. I want to preserve Canyon Cinema as long as possible. They have one and a half employees, they’re always on the edge of dissolution, and they’re the only viable distribution that I know of. They take care of the films wonderfully, they’re knowledgeable of what the films represent, they treat filmmakers with respect, they pay rentals immediately on request, and they treat the clients who rent the films very well. They’re dependable, unlike some non-profit organizations.

MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-1973)

How did you feel, seeing all the images in REPORT again? The film itself? It always takes care of me. I was passionately involved with the subject matter. I try to make films that would have interest to me in the long run since I must continually look at them again and again if they’re going to be distributed or exhibited. REPORT is one of them, and it’s gone through a lot of transformations. I was so emotionally involved initially with REPORT that I would have to leave the auditorium while it was shown. It would disturb me so much that I would be physically shaking. I find it very difficult to convey my feelings or how I experience these films. I know they aren’t the same as other people’s experiences because many haven’t lived through the whole process. Perhaps they’ve only seen it once.

I try to structure the films so that there’s something new that can be found in them each time they are viewed by using the techniques that I’ve to found work with memory and kinetic relationships. I am aware of the way in which things will change in people’s consciousness when re-experiencing something. I had become aware that these experiences are like part of a movie in my consciousness and other people’s consciousness. When you recollect these images or even recollect other movies, they get are assembled differently. Invariably, if you see a movie a second time there has to be something else that’s rewarding in order to enjoy it another time.

When I saw one or two of your films in college there was this pressure from the instructor to interpret the film only one way, the “official” way. “Grrrr” (the artist growls.)

Which I never understood, especially as you made multiple versions. Sometimes when academics take over and write their books, they take all the fun out of it. They try to knock the balls off of them. I remember being at a college in the Midwest. I was invited to do a film program, exhibit in the art gallery, and visit a film class. We were watching A MOVIE in the classroom, and some of the students started laughing at the beginning of the film. The teacher said, “Shut up! This is a serious movie!” God, I could have throttled the guy!

So wait, he thinks you having your name up there for ten minutes was serious? This was at the first part, where all the cars are racing, one after another. There’s other stuff that’s intended to be ludicrous, but it’s not really a comedy. It has had an undeserved reputation for being a comedy. Andrew Sarris wrote a review of the presentation of the History of American Avant-garde Film in the Museum of Modern Art. He took vengeance on Jonas Mekas and all the independent films he had to look at. He had exploited his position at the Village Voice writing reviews of movies under Jonas Mekas’s authority. He must have hated all of the films that Mekas liked. Unfortunately the commentary and presentation at the Museum of Modern Art would make this reaction totally justifiable all by itself. Every part of the juice was excised, analyzed, historicized: use a lot of big words that people don’t commonly use for communication.

It’s important to analyze things to a certain point. But chances are, somebody, somewhere has beat off to MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-1973). Well, yeah, the music is wonderful. Sometimes you hear groans as the audience starts to see the third or fourth repetition of the song when it’s shown publicly. The audience was looking for an erotic girlie movie and it wasn’t catering to them.

Once they started to get “invested,” then you’d cut away. Things just kept repeating over and over. It was a girlie movie but it wasn’t following the girlie movie format. I was turning it around and beating those jocks over the head with it.

Porn gets used and consumed, and then thrown out. That’s kind of my feeling about Marilyn Monroe, too.

About how she was consumed and then thrown out? Yeah. That’s the tragedy.

Do you ever connect that film with REPORT? Yeah, I recently put them back to back. It’s hard to judge how people relate to this since they’ve become historical icons. Back in the ‘70s, I thought nobody would be able to understand REPORT again because they wouldn’t know the details of the assassination of President Kennedy. The media celebrated the 25th anniversary and the 30th anniversary, and then Oliver Stone made the movie called JFK (1991).

Did you see the movie? I did after a while when it was on VHS. People told me that it was a lot like REPORT. I didn’t think it was. He used a similar style of presentation with his own simulated media coverage. The only thing I really liked about the JFK movie was the clip of Eisenhower when he left office as the President of the United States. He warned the American people about the military industrial complex. His message was profoundly ignored at the time. It’s an amazing statement by someone who should really know, who led the American forces through a successful campaign in Europe during the second world war. Although it appears to me that we lost the war against the Nazis.

You think we lost over time? I recently looked at some anti-Nazi movies made during the war. The American view of the cruel Nazis actually looks kind of benign compared to the way things are here in the States. Almost like a travelogue to encourage to vacation in Nazi Germany to get away from the loss of civil liberties, stress and invasion of privacy here.

Encyclopedia Britannica had an educational film in the early ‘60s about despotism. I think it’s something that the current administration would not like to see presented today. It depicts how people lose their freedom piecemeal and the characteristics signs of despotism. I have this definite impression that, over the decades, we didn’t really win the war. This country kept taking over characteristics that were attributed to the Nazi regime. You can look at some of the old posters and books about life in Nazi Germany from the Second World War depicting people pulled off the street and thrown into jail without a trial. A so-called President or Fuhrer can take anybody off, doesn’t need Congress to declare war. The Bill of Rights is treated as a sort of nostalgic, quaint document.

I remember a time when politicians would tell you exactly what their point of view was and you would either vote for them or you wouldn’t. When they went into Congress, they usually did what they said they were going to do.

BREAKAWAY (1966)

Now, the assumption that a candidate should tell the truth is shrugged off and the subject of amusement. The bigger the lie is, the more support people give to it, apparently. As Goering said, the big lie wins. There are a lot of things that Hitler had initiated in running his empire that have been implemented in ours.

You told me something one time when you were wearing an American flag pin. I had an American flag pin on my jacket. Some people who were opposed to the war or the Bush administration said, “Why are you wearing that flag?” I decided a long time ago that that flag belongs to me; it doesn’t belong to the government or George Bush or the war makers. It’s my flag, and I’m not going to surrender it to them just because they misuse it.

ALMANAC 2009

2009-01-15T01:02:00.001-08:00

short film compilation coming soon

The Flaming Lips

2008-12-02T09:20:00.001-08:00

New interview with Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips up at Filmmaker mag's website, talking about his DVD release of CHRISTMAS ON MARS, which is a cool little emo-sci-fi film.

interview is here

Bruce LaBruce

2008-11-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

New interview up with Bruce LaBruce in the new issue of Filmmaker magazine:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2008/otto.php

"The film has a lot of strong social and political commentary. Is anonymous sex more exciting with a zombie? Listen, zombie porn is the wave of the future. Think of all the potential orifices to be explored. As to your question, if you‘ve ever had anonymous sex in a park or even in a bathhouse, basically it is like having sex with a zombie, and not necessarily in a bad way. Zombies tend to be kind of emotionless and anonymous — they all act pretty much the same, and they‘re interchangeable — so having sex with them frees you from the personal and emotional restraints of normal sexual behaviour and allows you to overcome all your inhibitions and really go crazy. That concept interests me, but the sociopolitical dimension of the zombie phenomenon interests me even more. As the master, George Romero, always reminds us in his films, zombies result from the alienation, materialism and rampant consumerism that is the logical outcome of advanced capitalism. Zombies are the ultimate consumers."

ATA Film Festival in SF starts

2008-10-01T02:46:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Artists' Television Access celebrates independent and underground film with the 3rd ATA Film and Video Festival on October 2, 3 & 4, 2008.

On Thursday, October 2, the festival opens with Craig Baldwin's latest feature, MOCK UP ON MU. Drug orgies, spaceships and monsters, oh my… Rising from the hippie-UFO scene, MU follows the intertwined lives of Jack Parson, inventor of rocket fuel, Marjorie Cameron, new age sex leader, and L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer turned Scientology founder, as the "insansational" '60s feeds them with the occult, beatniks, and spaceships to the moon. Cultural historian and culture jammer Baldwin has made cult masterpieces like Tribulation 99 and Sonic Outlaws, and may know every conspiracy and urban legend invented from Alcatraz to Bermuda. His takes on the lurid history of the universe are crazed yet commonsensical. Mashing up real events with rumors and miles of found footage, he creates an elegiac fairy-tale so cohesive that you'll feel like a manic scholar afterwards.

Don't miss the intro act by MU-vie star, Stoney Burke as John McTaint (think McCain).

On Friday and Saturday, October 3 & 4, the festival will showcase 20 short films that run the cinematic gamut of art, comedy and lucid trip. Some of the highlights include Tony Gault’s CASE HISTORIES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY – a hilarious case study of 80s club life as interpreted by Unsolved Mysteries and then reinterpreted by Gault, the beautiful, flickering SPHINX ON THE SEINE by Paul Clipson – a luscious display of wires, lines, light and contrast, and VISIONS OF WASTED TIME – an apparently controversial but utterly unique home movie by Neil Ira Needleman. I didn’t get to see Kerry Laitala’s RETROSPECTROSCOPE but love all her work and the title is sure promising.

In addition to the screenings, the work of 11 experimental film and video artists will be displayed as installations throughout the gallery during the festival and in the ATA Window in October.

ATA is at 992 Valencia at 21st Street. Doors open at 7:30pm every night. Screenings start at 8pm. Tickets are $10. Limited amount available online.

For complete information, including interviews of the filmmakers visit http://festival.atasite.org/2008

FESTIVAL PROGRAM

Thursday, October 2 - Opening Night

Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin).

Friday, October 3:

Why Was I Born (Marlon Gonzalez); Vivid Dreams (Jim Granato); Ants (Ants Ants Ants) (Clare Samuel); Case Histories in Psychotherapy (Tony Gault); Kogel Vogel (Frederico Camapanale).

The Quite Storm (Jibz Cameron); Sunshine Bob (Christian Simmons); Martha's Party (Marthaxiv) Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show (Lise Swenson/Richard Schimpf); Sphinx on the Seine (Paul Clipson)

Saturday, October 4:

Ghosts and Gravel Roads (Mike Rollo); Retrospectroscope (Kerry Laitala); Nocturnal Transmission (Carl Diehl); What for What (John Davis); Visions of Wasted Time (Neil Ira Needleman)

In Search of a Mystic Bartone (Mack McFarland); Baird's Beaked Whale (Douglas Schultz); The Stalin that was Played by Me (Daya Cahen); Infection (Esther Maria Probst); and 3x1 (Telemach Wiesinger)

Gallery Installations - October 3 & 4

Ode to Kirlian (Sam Manera) and Television for Ghosts: The Big Storm (Shalo P.)

Window Installations – October 2-October 31 (7pm-midnight)August (Vanessa O'Neill); Ozuland 002 (Carlos Sansolo) Poderia Haver Algo No Fundo Do Espelno (Ericka Frankel);Steve Martin on the Loose (Rebecca Whipple); RGB Expose (Nick Briz); The Isthmus of Kansas (Christopher Cassidy); Baghdad Plan Is a Success (Sabine Gruffat); Close to Home (Jan Hakon Erichsen); and Sandwich: The Musical (Eric Arsnow)

CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN TONITE

2008-09-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles:

The World Premiere of CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN, a new documentary by Lee Anne Schmitt. Filmed in beautiful 16mm film, TOWN records the present day landscapes of towns throughout the Gold Rush state established by industrial companies. As the company went, so did the town, experiencing huge booms of prosperity in different economic waves of the country. Although the company always ruled – one town made sure it had only one way in and out. When a union protest tried to form, it was blocked outside the city limits. If an employee quit or was fired, they had to move away. Alas, almost all of these companies in the film have moved away or went under, transforming each would-be city into a ghost town. Schmitt does a wonderful job of capturing each location with investigative and nostalgic ways, yet without too much mystery or pity. The beautiful (and scary) buildings and artifacts left behind in each landscape are lost histories for the audience to piece together, made even more timely with today’s financial waves (I make that analogy knowing it’ll work every year somehow). Schmitt’s controlled style and camerawork is solid and intuitive, with narration letting you learn things about each town that you can not see. By capturing this unseen world within one of the richest states – in the world – we learn about some fascinating American landmarks and feel the need to learn more about our own neighborhoods.

Check it out – its not too late:

$9 [students $7]

REDCAT is located at 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 - at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure and at adjacent lots.

Tickets are $9 for the general public, $7 for students with valid ID. Tickets may be purchased by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org or in person at the REDCAT Box Office on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets (30 minutes free parking with validation). Box Office Hours: Tue-Sat | noon–6 pm and two hours prior to curtain

For more information, go to www.redcat.org

The film/video program is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud.

New Interviews

2008-07-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

New interviews and an article I wrote,
that are on other websites:

Interview with Daft Punk
for Filmmaker mag, about their film ELECTROMA, now out on dvd

Drawing on Inspiration
article on DIY no-budget animation done for Film In Focus

and my interview with Don Hertzfeldt was in the Feb 08 issue of The Believer

see the side links here for older interviews.
Upcoming interviews with Peter Hutton and Leighton Pierce.

Working on a Cinemad Anthology and short film DVD, this is my 10th year of "publishing."

WENDELL B. HARRIS JR.

2007-12-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

In the film CHAMELEON STREET (1989), the enigmatic Doug Street goes through a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon.

The point of the film is not just to tell a story of a con man, but asks what a black man is expected to do to make a living in this modern world. Based mostly on the true story of super-con-man William Douglas Street, Jr. the film is written and directed by Wendell B. Harris, Jr. who also turns in an uncanny performance as the lead character.

The film existed in the burgeoning indie cinema of the early 90s. Unlike most of the films around him though, Harris provided a complicated character and not a simple genre drama or comedy. The extremely intelligent Street has great ideas to fight the system, but is constantly stumped by tiny details he cannot control. It’s a drama and you root for Street to win but feel sorry for the people getting conned as well. And it’s bittersweet funny, as the sardonic humor in the film rings all too true. Above all, you feel the frustration that leads to fighting back against the grain.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990. But that didn’t lead to distribution. Rather, the prize led to many meetings in Hollywood, the insult of a possible remake rather than a distribution deal, some deals for writing scripts, and a brutal joke. CHAMELEON STREET did get a forgettable theatrical release and Wendell was able to write some scripts. Only now at the end of 2007 does the film finally get a DVD release.

CINEMAD: I’m glad the film is finally coming out to DVD.

WENDELL HARRIS: My DVD distributor told me, “Please understand that CHAMELEON STREET is being perceived as an ‘art-house’ film by retailers. This will affect their initial buy.”

I’ve always had a really big problem with understanding what the word art-house film means. What is an art-house film? To me, it always has a connotation that, from a marketing standpoint, it means that not much of an effort is going to be made.

I would agree with that.

That may not be the case with Image. I think John Powers [marketing Vice President, Image Entertainment] knows what he is doing. What is your take on that phrase?

The art-house tag? That does mean that they will not put as much effort into it as they would toward a bad movie with a famous actor. I don’t necessarily think an art-house film has to make you think, but for the most part, it’s a film that’s not escapist.

It’s not TRANSFORMERS (2007).

No. You’re not going to be thinking while you’re watching TRANSFORMERS.

There are films from all over the world that are called art-house. But when I hear the words ‘art-house’, for some reason, it’s genetically speared into my DNA: I always think of EL TOPO (1970). And I haven’t even seen EL TOPO. But I think about this film! I’ve heard that the director lined up a million lizards and shot them on camera.

Frogs. [Actually, the famous frog scene is in the follow-up film to EL TOPO, called HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973).]

OK, frogs then. But that’s what comes to my mind whenever I hear that art-house tag. Shooting a million frogs. Something accomplished on a very low budget that very few people want to see. I have never fought people who call [CHAMELEON STREET] an ‘art film’ or a ‘black film’ or an ‘avant-garde’ film. To me, an art-house film is an un-marketed film.

CHAMELEON STREET has never been marketed aggressively. Up until this point, this is the most exposure it has ever received. The only reason you’ve ever heard of the film is because some film critics from 1990, 1991 and 1992 … they would not let it die.

The first time I heard about your film was because of the controversy of it not getting distribution. I don’t know what the show was, but you were being interviewed on a PBS show. It was specifically about how no one would distribute it even though it won at Sundance. Only Will Smith wanted to buy it so that he can make a remake.

That’s partially true. It went through four permutations. It was Arsenio Hall. Then Will Smith, then Sinbad. Between 1990 and 1993 I was totally focused on getting through the gauntlet. You know. You’re running through this gauntlet trying to reach a distributor. I never said Hollywood suppressed CHAMELEON STREET until around the mid-90s.

I remember when Elvis Mitchell came with the BBC to interview me at my apartment in Burbank. At one point Elvis Mitchell says to me, “Sorry for your film being suppressed.”

I said, “ Uh – what do you mean? Why do you think that?”

He said, “Well, why do you think Warner Brothers has paid you a quarter of a million dollars for the remake rights? Yet they refuse to distribute your film.”

The camera’s running and I’m going , “Aaaaaaaah…er, ah…” Robert Krulwich made the same point a year later on an ABC special. Now it’s 2007 and I can tell you: yeah, it was suppressed, all right.

How do those discussions with distributors go? “We really love your film and we think it’d be better if we make it again?” It’s purely business for them to buy a good idea and put someone famous in it.

That’s true. If you make the money, you’ll be promoted. If you don’t make the money, you won’t be. But as Orson Welles said, “There’s something more important in Hollywood than money. What vision is being promoted? ” In other words, what are the ideas being promoted in the film? Ideas get demoted and suppressed. Money is not the final arbiter. Content is king. It is what’s going to be given / fed to the American public and to the world.

The ideas in CHAMELEON STREET have always threatened the status quo. I was essentially paid a quarter of a million dollars to . . . it almost feels like bribe money, or hush money. I was told repeatedly by every distributor in Hollywood, “It’s a wonderful film! We just don’t know what to do with it.” But they knew exactly what to do with it. Suppress it.

I forgot to mention it was also being considered for Wesley Snipes as well. Each time it was given to a different person, it was given a different ambience. For Wesley Snipes, it was changed into a kind of car chase movie. For Sinbad, it was changed into a kind of goof-ball character. For Arsenio, it was a hybrid of the two.

Wendell B. Harris, Jr. as Doug Street.

Did they tell you what other titles they were going to call it?

No, they were going to keep it CHAMELEON STREET. By the way, when this went down, I was also given an associate producer credit, so that when the film was remade, I would be consulted.

Did winning Sundance not pack enough punch?

The prize of winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is a 14” crystal obelisk. But that’s not the real prize. The real prize is that you get immediate access to every major production house in Hollywood. You get 25 meetings with all the top people. I could take the next three hours and tell you about my meetings with Jane Fonda’s company, Robert Redford’s company, Barry Levinson, Ed Pressman, Irving Azoff, Steven Spielberg, whoever! That’s the real prize.

If you were alive at the time you’ll recall I’m sure that 1989, 1990, 1991- that was the epoch of the black director. That was when being black was such a wonderful plus and you could actually get a good deal. After Sundance, I went to Hollywood in 1990, got an apartment in Burbank. I told myself that I was going to make myself as available as possible for the next three years.

But by 1993, after being there for three years, working to get work, I was sitting in Musso and Frank’s. A friend of mine who worked over at Paramount came over to my table and said, “Guess what I just heard?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “Well, it goes like this ….. All you have to do to get a production deal in Hollywood today is be black, male and NOT Wendell Harris.”

(Laughs) I said, “Thanks a lot!”

That sucks.

It makes a great anecdotal story. But man, when you actually go through it, it’s like going through hell.

I heard of one project called NEGROPOLIS.

That was one of my projects that I was pushing. I pushed to get that made for about four years. That was my satire comedy. I did get a bite in 1992 from Spike Lee’s production company but the deal fell apart. I pitched NEGROPOLIS all over Glib Town. In retrospect, I think some people in Hollywood were perhaps disturbed by the premise of NEGROPOLIS. You know, you walk into these meetings in Hollywood and say, “Okay, the whole movie takes place in ancient Rome except the emperor and ruling elite are all black and all the slaves are white. Isn’t that hilarious?” The response would always be, “Isn’t that amusing - ? Yes, what a novel approach. Do you see that novel door over there? Go make a novel exit.” I guess white people don’t want to be slaves. Who knew? Oh well ….. But the Senate is mixed. There are a few white senators. Koreans, too .

But there is so much hilarious stuff in NEGROPOLIS. Like I said, ancient Rome is being run by a black emperor named Canigula. Not Caligula -- Canigula. I wrote some great roles for several great artists: Shirley Caesar, Aimee Mann, Dom Irrera, Stephanie Miller, Aretha Franklin, Leah Krinsky and Chris Tucker…. This was before Chris Tucker started making 50 million per pic. One of the characters I loved was the Middle-Aged Hercules. He’s still strong but he wears a truss. Wanted Bill Murray for that. Then there is Alexander the Great who happens to be Jewish. Very Kosher but he’s got this long flaxen waxen blond hair which he is totally obsessed about… constantly combing his hair. I wrote that part for Howard Stern. You have to remember back in 1990 Howard Stern looked like he was about to assume the mantles of Groucho Marx, Pigmeat Markham, Jack Carter and Don Rickles. So, I wrote this great role for him. Also wrote a phenomenal role for Oprah Winfrey…. Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile and Cosmetology. Cleopatra runs this global corporation called Cleo’s Cosmetics, Inc. whose main product is beauty makeup for women. You would have seen facets of Oprah that have never been seen on film. That woman is a great actor. But they always stick her in these stolid, rustic, turgid, bucolic, Jemima matron roles. She has so many nuances but you never…. Well , anyway --- She was born to play Cleopatra. Then there was “Canigula.” That’s the part I wanted to play.

We should talk about something positive around the film. Was this your first feature?

I had experience with 8mm back when I was 9. But, yes -- it was my first feature on 35mm. Prior to that, it was short films in 8mm, super 8, 16mm and super-16. Working for years at Prismatic Images…. our audio/video studio in Flint, Michigan, which was incorporated in 1979. The end goal was always to make feature films. But to get to that end goal, there were 8 or 9 years shooting weddings, commercials, state lotto ads, making dubs for people of their VHS and beta tapes. It all built up to the making of CHAMELEON STREET.

It was obviously friends and people from around the city, everything coming together to help.

You got that right. Two-thirds of the investments for the $1.5 million budget came from my parents, Helen and Wendell B.Harris, Sr. that was $740,000. The remainder of the budget came from other investors. It took 4 years to get essentially a quarter of a million dollars from investors. It was like scraping dried blood off the sidewalk. You make hundreds of presentations to potential investors and only a handful come through.

But then it did.

It did. I’ve always said that CHAMELEON STREET is like the emblematic independent production. Everything about it is from the independent world and that experience.

Did you already know about the subjects that made the main character? It was essentially based off two scam artists, correct?

Certainly 90% of it is Doug Street’s story. The section where he impersonates the foreign exchange student from France comes principally out of Erik Dupin’s experience. Although, I have to add, Doug Street has a hot and heavy foreign film addiction. He loves German and French films.

You heard their story and were taken by it?

In 1983, I read a Detroit Free Press article on Doug Street. He had just been incarcerated in upper state Michigan for his impostor activities. In the article, they ran through what he had done during the 70’s and early 80’s. The moment I read the article, I said ‘Ah! What a fantastic film!’ I walked into the kitchen and told my parents. That’s how it all began. That was May of 1983. Took a year and a half before I went up to Kinross Correctional Facility in upper-state Michigan to interview Doug Street on three-quarter inch video. That began a prolonged period of research, which continued for the next 3 years, using letters mostly. I visited him a few times after he got transferred to Jackson Prison.

When you take this movie around the world, it’s amazing how some people respond. After screenings there would always be a question and answer session. You’re standing up there answering questions. It was like people were talking to Doug Street and not me! They got angry with Doug for treating this woman like that or using this kind of language, or whatever! If I ever saw the power of media, it was then. I would be answering questions at the end of the screening and people would be talking to me as if I were Doug Street …. completely oblivious to the fact that I’m just the actor. It was his life’s story that had been painstakingly researched. There were 36 versions of the screenplay written over 4 years. Doug Street wrote innumerable letters and everything in the film comes out of his experience.

That’s a good acting job too.

You hear about these people who are on soap operas, you know --- they’re walking through the grocery store and someone reprimands them for doing something to someone’s husband on the show. It’s very interesting.

Doug Street (Harris) makes a black Barbie for his daughter.

Did you understand his motivation? Is he nuts or is he somebody who just got so frustrated with society that this seemed like the thing to do?

I wouldn’t call him nuts. You used the word frustration, which is the illegitimate brother of anger. I know that Doug is angry. He told me one time, “I’ve got anger that goes back to kindergarten. Anger is my best friend.” It goes back to things that happened in his childhood which he continued to fester over as the years went on.

The anger that is present in Doug Street is present in 99.99% of black males in America. Every black male in America has been touched by this anger. Sometimes it feels like you’re being marinated in anger. Why? The playing field of this country is not only uneven --- it has potholes. And some of these potholes have signs that say, “For Colored Only.”

I’m not necessarily leaving out black women either. I’ve been black for 53 years now. Certainly, I’ve never met a black male who’s happy with the way black people are regarded and treated in the United States.

Does he have a wall that is missing that enabled him to take the steps to do things he knew he would get caught and put in jail for?

On the back of the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, there’s a small little blurb that reads:

CHAMELEON STREET IS A FILM BASED ON THE TRUE STORY OF AN AMAZING CONMAN FROM MICHIGAN WHO EXCHANGES HIS DEAD END LIFE FOR A BRAND NEW IDENTITY. IN FACT, MANY NEW IDENTITIES ARE ASSUMED: REPORTER, DOCTOR, LAWYER, DETROIT TIGER AND MORE.

For Doug to actually take his bit of black anger and channel it into these various roles, I feel that there are so many things at play here. The effects of racism really boil down to personal experiences. You talk about ‘Oh, I went over here and this happened to me, the next minute that happened to me’. People who are constantly railing on ‘black people really need to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, get on with their lives, stop playing the blame game, stop playing the race card’ have not only missed the point … they have also missed the past. And they have also missed the elliptical nature of racism. Racism insists that your Present, Past, and Future are all identical. Playing the race card …. ! What a canard. The moment you are born into this country they hand you a race card. It’s a color-coded society. It would certainly be hypocritical to deny that. When Doug Street takes his experiences and says ‘I’m not going to play this game the way they are hypocritically laying it out for me. Instead, I’m going to go through these permutations that reveal how hollow and shallow the game really is.’ Then he proceeds to perform 36 hysterectomies at a Chicago hospital without getting past high school, let alone medical school.

He’s showing that society is ready to bow down at what you’re wearing, or what you say your degree is. All of that does work on a thematic level. But when you sit the real Doug Street down, you look into Doug’s face, you hear him talk about what he did, when he did it, who he did it to….. you can see he gets a real charge out of making this society dance to his tune.

Which is incredible.

People are amazing. People can do so much! The people who actually make the decisions for the masses in this country and in this world, they are very aware of ‘the power’ of the people, and how important it is to keep people thinking: Keep quiet, pay your taxes, just shut up and shut down, keep on keeping on and keep off the lawn while you’re doing it.

Don’t think about how we are raping you physically, spiritually, medically, financially, culturally. Don’t think about any of that. That’s partially why I think the whole undercurrent of Doug Street’s life and what he has attempted to do, really does expose this hypocritical , harsh life we’re living in, in high relief.

Did he enjoy the process of the film being made, something being done with his life? After he was caught, what was his mood?

He was only caught the two times. He was incarcerated not because somebody found out he had been impersonating someone, but because he was turned in by his wife. Another time he was caught because he had used someone else’s credit card, using too many charges. The point is that he wasn’t caught because of trip ups in his impersonations, but because of what he regarded as betrayal by his ex-wife.
He really is one of the most incredible con men that lived because he didn’t get caught.

That’s true. That’s true. We didn’t tell the whole story. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told a lot of people. The screenplay that we shot was a 274-page screenplay. That’s longer than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), along with half of GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). We shot an amazing story. I could make another two CHAMELEON STREETs with the footage left over!

Production still: Incarcerated in Jackson Prison, Street (Harris, left) listens to fellow inmate Eugene Raymond (Henri Watkins) explain why he killed his mother over comic books.

I take it he was smart enough to know that sooner or later, if you’re not playing by the rules, you’re going to go to prison.

One word you have not used in this interview that usually crops up is ‘compulsion’. He’s been incarcerated on more than one occasion for living this kind of lifestyle of impersonation. I don’t want to, in 2007, make any kind of equivocal statements based on where Doug’s head is at now. But I will say that between 1983 and ending with our joint appearance on the Geraldo show in 1990, my impression of Doug was that he felt it was his duty to continue with this lifestyle. He would make an effort to shore up or eliminate those aspects of his life that ended up always getting him in jail. Like bad credit card debt, or a woman.

The existence of racism … in so many words, this seems to be his take on it. As long as he is living in a society that promotes inequity, where a Katrina can take place at the drop of a hat, he is going to continue his crusade which other people have labeled (usually white people) a criminal compulsion. Racism is a criminal compulsion. Nothing good comes out of it. It triggers all kinds of angst and emotional abortion. Things happen. Things don’t happen. Some people weep, some people wail, some people work and some people impersonate other characters, like Doug.

It’s not done in a way where he’s ashamed of who he is, he wants to be someone else. That’s more like giving up. It’s different to say, I want to be a doctor so badly that I’ll just do it. That’s almost more of a psychotic thing where you’re trying to erase your identity. Instead, he was more like ‘look asshole, I can do this.’

When I’m standing in front of an audience after CHAMELEON STREET, I often end up mentioning that Doug literally performed 36 hysterectomies. There is always this gasp of horror that comes from the audience. Mostly from women. And I agree … it’s worth a couple good gasps. But Doug would say it’s also worth gasping at the way doctors are treated like demi-gods in this country. Not just doctors but anybody with a degree. And it really bugs him that our society kow-tows to an idea of professionalism … not the real thing. Cutting a woman open without a medical degree is an extremely disturbing aspect of how far he was willing to take this thing. I hasten to add that every one of those 36 hysterectomies was blatantly successful. But it’s small consolation to those women who scream at me, “HOW DARE HE!”

Production still: Street (Harris, center) removes uterus of female patient without a medical degree, high school diploma or GED. Dr. Wendell B. Harris, Sr. hovers in the background serving as medical consultant for this scene.

It’s hard enough to make a film about somebody and their life, which you also want to make a film in which their condition exists in. At what point in your editing or your shooting, do you think, ‘Ok, this is going to be my comment.’ When there’ll be other times that reflect what happened exactly.

I did not see CHAMELEON STREET as an opportunity for Wendell Harris to start editorializing or adding to this or that experience. When I get a response from an audience member who acts like this entire thing came out of my experience, it is disheartening because I have to go back five steps and explain that this was a well-researched film. It was Doug Street’s life story, not mine. I did not spend four and a half years on that script so that I could get my take or slant grafted in. When we were shooting the film I would always tell the crew, ‘Look …. What we’re doing is, we’re putting Doug Street alone, naked, on top of a large Formica table. We’re putting these klieg lights on him and we’re going to shoot him from every angle.’ That’s what we did. One thing you haven’t quite asked me yet is, ‘What was Doug Street’s reaction to the film?’

Yeah that was coming.

There’s a famous registered letter that Doug wrote and sent to my mother, the executive producer, Helen Harris in 1989, hours after he first saw CHAMELEON STREET. He sent a brief one-page letter … very succinct, very pithy, very to the point. Doug was very disappointed. He felt exposed, that liberties had been taken with his life story. He was most upset with the slogan on the poster we used in our first campaign: I think therefore I scam.

He was very offended about that. He forgets that I got that line from him. One thing he was very pleased about was getting any revenue from the film. Through contractual agreement he did get a cut of the film’s revenue. He never turned down any of the checks.

What’d your parents think?

They liked it. My mother is very much alive but my father died in 2000. But they both liked it. They would have liked it even more if it had made a profit for the Harris family. I was just thinking earlier this morning that the film was released 17 years ago. The only thing that has gotten me through the last 17 years, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, are the memories of watching CHAMELEON STREET with audiences in Italy, Germany, and America. That as well as the reviews critics have written. I mean – I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve spent the last 17 years sitting in a corner fondling reviews of CHAMELEON STREET. But an odd thing happens when you spend the family’s fortune on an independent film that sinks, not without a trace but certainly without a profit. Some people kind of look sideways at “artists” anyway. But when the artist doesn’t make any money they go from looking sideways to looking down, avoiding eye contact. And if you don’t make money for a very long time they stop looking altogether.

But the memory of seeing audiences in Germany, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, almost falling out of their chairs laughing…. That helped sustain me.

Did you always act in your films growing up?

Yes. Acting is always #1. Everybody has three aspects of genius…. Everybody has three talents – three areas of expertise in which they can perform at genius level. But one of these talents is your main root and the other two branch out from it. For me, it’s acting. Acting is my main root. Writing and directing came from my desire to act back when I was four or five years old. That’s when I told my Mom, “I think I need to start directing and writing my own films. That way, I’ll always get the part.”

That makes sense. After the three years in Burbank, did you think wanted to try acting instead?

I had a development deal with Jerry Weintraub, Cary Granit and Matt Leipzig at Warner Bros. for an alien / UFO movie. I was contracted to write the screenplay in 1991. I stayed in that development posture for about a year before everything evaporated into the ether. It’s called ‘turnaround’. I then moved back to Michigan with my research that I had done. Took all that research into a different direction, for a film called ARBITER ROSWELL. I started writing that script in 1993. I was writing other scripts for Hollywood and Showtime at the time. All the money I was making was being funneled back into ARBITER ROSWELL, which we started shooting in 1997. Steven Soderbergh was one of the actors we shot with. Also Ed Lawrence, Joel Weiss, Denice Marcel and Serena Roney-Dougal. Began making trips to Roswell with film crews …. Interviewing most of the major participants including Walter Haut, Glenn Dennis, Phillip Corso, and Carl Vick. Extensive interviews with the crème de la crème of ufology: Stanton Friedman, Linda Moulton- Howe and Michael Hesemann. We also interviewed counter-intelligence agent Frank Joseph Kaufmann on multiple occasions. There is no doubt that Frank Kaufmann is the most important witness / percipient of the Roswell incident --- period. The actual process of shooting and editing ARBITER ROSWELL extended over the next 10 years. There’s a trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL on the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, which will give you an indication of what that film is all about.

The bottom line is: What’s great about being an independent is that you get to do it your way. I spent three years in Hollywood writing scripts for people and got a very good taste of what it’s like when you have a committee of six people giving you notes about the screenplay and screwing it nine ways to hell.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t work, but it does pay the bills. It doesn’t get the film made with the vision intact. 13 years have been spent on ARBITER ROSWELL – that’s three times as much time spent on making CHAMELEON STREET. You lose all kinds of things when it takes 13 years to make a film. You lose the respect of most of your family and friends. People don’t return your phone calls. But here’s the plus. At the end of the process, you get what you want. I was spoiled by CHAMELEON STREET where 99.9% of what’s on screen is what I wanted. The exact same thing is the case for ARBITER ROSWELL.

That’s great. Do you see the end coming? The finished product? Or do you see that some things still need to fall in place first?

The trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL is a 33-minute trailer. The finished film is a three-hour film. All the footage has been shot, but it is not completely edited yet. This 33-minute trailer gives a very good taste of what the finished film is all about. Many people have told me that once the DVD gets released, it’ll be much easier to find investors to help complete ARBITER ROSWELL. To be finished after 13 years…..

You started it with Jerry Weintraub, but do you actually own it?

The screenplay I wrote for Weintraub was called UNTITLED UFO STORY. That was just a generic title. That screenplay is still owned by Warner Brothers and Jerry Weintraub and has nothing to do with ARBITER ROSWELL. With Jerry Weintraub, a very funny guy, by the way, he gave me complete ownership over all the books his production company purchased to research UNTITLED UFO STORY. It was almost like $3,000 worth of research material. But I have to make clear that there’s no relation between ARBITER ROSWELL and UNTITLED UFO STORY.

You made a friendship with Steven Soderbergh from meeting at Sundance. Weren’t you there before his film was?

Here’s how the world perceives it. SHE’S GOT TO HAVE IT (1986) by Spike Lee and SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE (1989) were both released before CHAMELEON STREET. Steven had won [the Audience Award at] Sundance for SEX, LIES. Even though CHAMELEON STREET was actually shot and completed before [either film]. I took 11 months editing CHAMELEON STREET. That’s what, like four times as long as the guys who edited GONE WITH THE WIND ---? That’s about a year. That was brutal. Spike and Steven had both gotten out of the box with their films.

By 1990, Steven was one of the judges [at Sundance] along with Wim Wenders. The first time I ever met Steven was at a CHAMELEON STREET screening. The lights come up; we go up on stage and answer questions. Somebody from the back asked me a question that was so erudite and on the money, that I said, “Who are you? Are you a filmmaker?”

This voice in the back mumbles “Um, yes.” That was Steven, that’s how I first met him.

When you win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance ---- that is not an automatic distribution deal.

Or even a job.

Although it did transpire into three development deals. Steven kept saying “Don’t worry, it’ll come through. It’s going to come through!” This is in 1991. When a joke starts going around Hollywood that all you have to do to get a production deal is be a black male director and not Wendell Harris, I finally got hip to what was happening. Shame on me spending three years trying to work with them. I should have moved back to Michigan, worked up my company and gone on to the next film. But, I could not believe you could win the Grand Jury prize and not get some kind of deal.

What Hollywood cares about is money.

You said a mouthful there. I went to a million of these meetings. I pitched and I pitched until I was hoarse. I remember belly aching to Soderbergh, “I’m pitching and pitching and they’re nodding and showing me the door.”

He said, “You know what I do when I go to these meetings, I don’t talk. They think I’m extremely profound. You might want to try that.”

I wish I had now. All that talking I did was so much lost carbon monoxide.

Doug Street (Harris) refuses to pose seriously for his mug shot.

The film wouldn't be the same if made by a studio.

I’m sure you’re aware of how many of your decisions, as an independent, are made by how much money you have. If I ever sat down and went through CHAMELEON STREET and said ‘I wanted to do this, but I had to do this’ because you are limited with money. All of that means nothing when you can actually put your product on the table, go to bed at night and not lose sleep over, ‘I wish I had done that, I wish I had this or shot this’. Being an independent is glorious.

Will Smith has apparently copied your scene about solving the Rubik’s Cube to get respect. Do you have any idea of what that was?

I don’t necessarily blame Will Smith for the impression of CHAMELEON STREET. He was smart enough to marry Jada Pinkett Smith. If I have a problem at all, it’s this: I feel that CHAMELEON STREET deserves as much distribution as --- uh …. what’s the film with the dead guy on the beach?

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (1989).

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S! If I were to walk through the country and ask people about the two films, people would recognize WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S immediately. Then they would ask me, ‘Where is CHAMELEON STREET?’

BETZY BROMBERG.

2007-07-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Betzy Bromberg has been independently making films since 1976, which have screened all over the world in festivals, one-woman retrospectives and group shows. She has a true talent for working images and sound together, constructing films that continue to grow in a category of their own. She meticulously feeds emotional experience into her work, giving new life to the experience of memory, leaving nostalgia out of the picture. Her large body of work has continued to vary with every film, straying away from style and repetition.

DIVINITY GRATIS (1996) deals with the struggle between ever-advancing technologies and the preservation natural history. BODY POLITIC (GOD MELTS BAD MEAT) (1988) focuses around the mechanics of the body as it evolves with and without the blankets of religion and science. Her latest work, A DARKNESS SWALLOWED (2005), is an astrological exploration of the mind and what we call “memory” as we gradually experience a slow fall, into a funnel. Using primarily close-up imagery that seems abstract at first, Bromberg creates an overall experience of distorted enclosure that lasts for days.

Using abstraction, photography, documentary, distinct optical effects, 3-dimensional textures and ferociously edited sound design, Bromberg has been able to create films that have so much depth to them, it’s hard to articulate what you comprehend, but yet so easy to articulate the experience. She often provokes curiosities surrounding the ever-developing cyclonic future, mortality and the way we (as humans) evolve throughout time.

She has been working special effects (as well as optical visual effects) in the film industry for over 20 years. As the director of the Film/ Video program at California Institute of the Arts, she continues to teach several classes during the fall and spring.

Interview by Nick Murray.

Most filmmakers I know have certain films that inspired them to make films themselves. Is there a film that inspired you to jump into certain angles of film work?

I really got into filmmaking through photography. I had taken film classes but not with the initiative of going into film. Really, I saw myself as a photographer.

Originally I studied journalism, and then photography. When I transferred schools, I went looking for a photography class, got bumped into an experimental film class instead. So basically I came in the back door, not a direct route.

When I ended up taking an experimental film class by accident, it was really eye-opening. The first experimental film I had ever seen was in high school was Norman McLaren’s PAS DE DEUX. I remember seeing that in the gymnasium, coming out and going “Wow, that was really wild with the trails and everything.”

So, in some ways, the background was always photography.
After making films for a while that I started to notice filmmakers.
And that was sort of mind blowing to me. That was a moment that woke me up in a different way.

I remember in one class we had a couple years ago where you had us listen to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Does music influence your films before you make them? Is there a driving within the texture, an emotion, part of a ventilation that leads to inspire certain ideas?

It’s all of it. Music is time-based. Where actually, films have a parallel structure with image-making. When you listen to a piece of music, it’s not that you’re corresponding an image to a specific sound; but there’s an essence of movement, an essence of texture, that you can somehow parallel with film - so you can feel how it builds, how it connects, how it dissolves.
All of that is structure for film.

For instance, with Bitches Brew, you can listen to it and have a complete correlation, yet never see an image. I don’t mean it literally translates in a visual way. But to it is a time-based medium, which may have the structure or feel of the a film. I think when I listen to music, or when I’m inspired by music, a lot of the time I’m relating to it in a filmic way. You know, it’s not about images, and I’m not about seeing the images for the music.

It’s also about the way things interact in music.

How they collide, how they disperse. But it’s really a parallel.
Any art form, I guess can be a parallel.

Literature, in a way, does the same thing, only you’re walking through it in a different way. We’re trained early on how to take in literature- to read every word in a literal way - where as in music, you move through its passages, and it moves you through phrases and passages as well. It’s just a different type of literature.

Bitches Brew. People ask me that all the time! It’s great because I took time to think about it, and really, it was listening to Bitches Brew . . .

The only thing I can clearly remember being life-changing to me in terms of an experience- in understanding how far you can go with an idea, taking it to its limit, further and further. There can be incredible results if you keep going and can do it well.

You pick up where you left off and transition into the next place.
Bitches Brew, the actual piece, is only 25 minutes! From start to finish, it’s an incredible album.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

There’s also a correspondence to film, in that there’s something living, breathing, interacting such as the movement within it.

Film also has that, it works in that way. A narrative doesn’t usually work in that way, as it ends up being about story line.

Narrative is a hard word to describe. I picture a swinging door that opens and closes. It’s hard to find out where that definition lies in filmmaking, it’s a gray area. In A DARKNESS SWALLOWED and specifically DIVINITY GRATIS, there’s a pacing and timing in the structure that all evolve. There’s an ongoing theme of evolution throughout your films.

And technology. Our civilization moving forward at an incomprehensible speed, looking at technology and WHAT DO WE DO WITH IT? Having choices with that technology.

Evolution is just fascinating to witness- how we evolve as people. But in terms of individuals, even politically, in terms of companies. That’s the moment where you get to see this flux in movement of how we evolve as individuals politically and psychologically.
It’s fascinating.
It’s really hard not to make a judgement about it.

Especially, like you and I, living day to day. But if you remove yourself and enter into that of an entire species, how we are part of a species and how we evolve is actually really fascinating. Once the emotional quality is removed, humanity is really interesting to see.

We don’t think of ourselves as species, when in actuality, we’re just another kind of species trying to survive, so that many of our choices are probably based not on the intellectual voices that we think, but very simple choices:
What do we do in order to continue to procreate, you know? (Laughs)

To think that all the specific things are really minor in comparison. But there’s never any perspective to how specific that is as it relates to an evolutionary process. When it comes to filmmaking, do you try to make your work present a theme of pacing?

You mean like how the world moves?

The way you can give life to the pacing.

I think a lot of the life in a film is that a lot of the visuals and the camerawork is really the living and the breathing, like that of a performer. In the same way you see the film process. It’s almost like a travel through (in a strange way, to live and breathe in the mind at the same time of the exposure) a visual landscape, or whatever. I think the feeling of life behind it is because of this exploration that’s happening.

You never set out in the beginning to say look, a film’s going to be an exact length. Basically, you watch the shots over and over again, to determine when the right moment to cut is; how it unveils itself, how it builds pressure, how it releases pressure.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

To me it’s really an organic process where you have your own time to work out how and when you’re going to use a shot. And of course that really depends on the shooting. Because that’s where you’re setting the pacing, to a certain extent.

I think it’s in the shooting where you’re setting the overall pacing for the whole film, establishing time.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED took you 6 years to make and was an emotional trip for you. Was there a certain idea you tried to keep in your mind while editing it? Trying to keep outside influences away from the editing, or did you just let it all go and keep at it?

Really, just going at it. It was 3 years of shooting and that pacing was established by a lot of things.
You’re shooting with an intervelometer.
You’re adaptive to the sun movement, you’re shooting over time.
There’s no way that you’re not.
In a different way that you are when there’s light that just comes out. You’re really following the direction of the sun; how it moves, for me, how it was reflecting in the water.

So the pacing was established in terms of how the sun moves. I made sure I shot the intervelometer footage over a full year, so I would capture the entire different movement of the sun over a year.

The distinctions, the differences, the shortening and the lengthening of the days. All of that established the pacing in some ways. All of that footage has a quality of reality to it.
It’s very graceful in how the sun moves through the days.

You’re recording that, but you can’t see that when you’re shooting. You’re not hooked into knowing what that’s going to look like, but the footage that comes out has a definite rhythm to it. It’s not like any other kind of rhythm I’ve shot.

Shooting with the macro lens determined how a lot of it had to be cut.
I had to learn how to shoot properly with the tripod, how to shoot to look like it was handheld, because I don’t like stiff tripod shots.
That took a long time to learn how to move and breathe.
When you’re shooting with a macro lens, it’s easy to blow a show because you’re shooting such a tiny area.
You can’t move very well, you can’t breathe wrong, or your breath is going to blow the shot! You have to get your whole body positioning together.

I was getting to a point in my filmmaking where I knew how to shoot in a way that I was good at.
It meant that it was time to move on to a different plane.
It was time to shift gears and head into a new way of shooting. Capturing the small moments took a while to learn.

The simple things you learn along the way; which never, of course, seem that important. one of them is that when you're shooting with the tripod, you always go to your last position first, and then you back up to your first position. That way, you can comfortably move around to your last position. You become more comfortable with the way you're shooting, as opposed to the other way around.
End position first, back out of it. That way you’re starting in an uncomfortable position, but you get to become more comfortable with as the shot progresses.

Such basic things; such as taking your time with the shot. You know how filmmakers are always rushing because the sun is going down, your actors are waiting for you because you only have 2 hours to shoot in the space. That was something I really enjoyed about shooting A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

You never had a time limit.

Most of the film was shot in my back yard on my own time. It was really luxurious. I had time, I could take a break, go relax for a while, come back and shoot. It’s always a stress to get a shot and you know the clocks ticking and you stress out.

Do you normally give yourself plenty of time without the constraints?

Yea! I like to finish work because you don’t get to the next place until you complete something. But honestly, when I was younger I wanted to make films faster. I think now about “God, wouldn’t it be great to be able to knock out films every two years?” to keep people present with your work. But honestly, it’s really about the process. It you want to make long films, that process takes longer. I’ve never pressured myself that way. I’ve never rushed a film out to make a screening or a deadline. It takes as long as it takes, as long as you can stay with that process.

Sometimes certain filmmakers will base the speed of the process based on a deadline or a grant.

Some people need that motivation. I see that in students too. A deadline is a great thing because it motivates them to get it done. I believe that staying on something for a long period of time actually deepens the experience of making it.

There’s some sort of great adrenaline rush to watch the visuals rush in when you’re making a film.

It’s such a great process. It’s wonderful to have this thing in your mind working all the time. Even when you’re not working on the film. You know, driving, for instance and you’re still thinking about it. I like being in that process.

It feels good.

And the between film doesn’t feel that good.
You put so much life into making them, you finish a film and then you crash. Then you get all antsy because you know you need to start something.
For me, the comfort is knowing that you’re working on a film, just working on it, staying in that space is great.
And then, of course, you have to finish. I mean, you can’t let it go on eternally.

All filmmakers have different approaches to how they make films. But when it comes to style, there is concern for being more distinct as you continue making films. This can be daunting unless you can get past that aspect make the film you want to make.

But that’s something I’m completely over. I can’t say that it was never one of my concerns. But now, I look forward to the moment where there’s some clear thread that’s exciting enough for me- to feel like it’s the journey I want to go on now. That’s the film I want to pursue.

Sometimes I’ll get a big old color scheme for a film. Something specific will come in.

Usually it’s a certain subject matter, a certain amount of structure that helps devise some kind of project.

I’m much more interested in working different kinds of ideas.
How it evolves and what that looks like.

It’s interesting to see a body of work. You know, style does change.
I was always under the belief system that somehow it’s intrinsically through everything. But that’s not really true. You never control the change in a body of work.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

The word NARRATIVE versus the word EXPERIMENTAL; I feel that people are often afraid to use the word NARRATIVE around experimental work. EXPERIMENTAL is already a really strange word to use when describing a film, and seems senseless to use -

But which is better?

They’re both derogatory-

Right, but that’s the problem.

Experimental isn’t really a good terminology. I think every film is a narrative. From someone who is completely non-narrative, that may sound strange to say. But I really do think that if you’ve got a piece that’s really time-based, it moves over time, there’s some element of narrative to it. Even for films that never move. There’s still a beginning.

The experience of starting from one place and ending in another. I think that all films are narrative to some degree.

The words definitely become derogatory, especially the way people often describe your work and you as an artist. I’m sure you brush it off-

I brush it off because there’s just so much academia and discussion about films, as much as I’ve done, there’s a simpler way to understand a piece.

Most experimental films provoke some kind of radical experience. That’s what is interesting to me. The language surrounding it doesn’t do too much for me. The experience of watching a film, what that will do to me. What I learn from that.

I’ve always been interested in the way film works on people’s perceptions and the different ways you see a piece. You can be sad, get upset or feel good. One of the most interesting things is when you come out from seeing a film, you see the world differently for a half an hour or a day. When you finish a film, after months or years of looking at it, can you look at it in any other way as your piece of work, or can you try and conceive what kinds of perceptions people are going to have afterwards? You can’t control how people are going to feel after watching a film, but in your recent work, have there been any kinds of feelings you were driving toward people having?

When I’m making it, I’m not thinking about ‘This is how people are going to feel’, I mean I do have certain things in my mind where I want them to feel a certain way internally.
Within the interior, close, intimate space that feels familiar, but if not, there will be holes within the interior that you can try and fill in, or trigger.
I have specific things that I’m after, but when you come out of it in the end, you’re curious to find out how people really are responding.
I think that with my work, I like when people go into sort of a dreamy state, for maybe two days sometimes. Just kind of walking through in different ways, I love that. That makes me happy, when their unconscious is conjuring up all of these images again, and they’re entering in. They have a lingering effect in that sort of way.

You can feel when someone really connects with your work. It’s not necessarily from something that they say. It doesn’t have to be verbally conveyed to you. But you can see the person if they’re looking at you and your eyes make contact. They, on some level, got the work on this deep level and you know it. To me, that’s the best. When I can make that sort of human connection. When those moments happen. If you can’t exactly say what it is they experienced, it’s just created this circuit that’s lively. You can really feel it. That’s a great up.
I feel at certain times, that’s the best way to decide.

The majority of your films show in the theater. In Los Angeles, people are able to see a lot more independent work without going to a multiplex. When you make your films, you always hope for an audience to see the films in a theater. Are you ever curious about opening a wider audience toward your films? I was wondering your thoughts about ever placing the films on DVD or anywhere else but festivals? Festivals-

Are very selective. I mean how many festivals can you screen your film at? I’ve gone through this.
You’re always evolving with the changing technology.
Recently, I’ve had a problem with a lot of experimental filmmakers packaging their films in a box that are going for $29.95. There are a lot of filmmakers who all of the sudden, their films are on DVD and you can buy them.
I mean, I think that’s great. I don't have a judgment value on them making those decisions, but I felt really uncomfortable about it. This has been a long, interesting journey trying to figure out what actually makes me feel uncomfortable about it.

I love the idea that its got greater accessibility. I talked to Deborah Stratman, I said
“How do you feel about putting your work on DVD and selling it?”

She said “Well, if it reaches a wider audience, that’s great! I’d love people to see my work. I feel a bit odd, but it’s such a great thing.”

I totally understand that, but for myself, there’s something I still feel uncomfortable about it. Part of it is the amount of work, time, money, expense and everything that’s put into work that’s all of a sudden selling for $29.95, YOU CAN GET THE BOX SET!

I was just in Buenos Aires, Argentina showing work and it was a greta experience on so many different levels. I did transfer all my films to HI-DEF and onto DVD, for preview and not for sale in any way.
Anyway, I had a few extra copies with me, there were people that I met and I ended up giving them copies of the film.

I realized, that’s the ticket! I don’t want to sell them! It’s not about selling them!

But it’s really nice to be able to give somebody a piece of work who might never be able to see it again. It probably seems very simple to someone who’s already grown up in the modern technical age, but for me that was a revelation that - it doesn’t have to be about the selling of it. There’s sort of this great thing that comes out of the digital medium that makes it possible for people who never, ever would be able to see the work. I was just so happy to be able to personally give them a DVD of it. It was really cool.

It’s a very tricky question either way. Because economically, and universally appealing. However the piece becomes sort of a copy. It becomes disposable when you sell it/market it. You’re disposing of the work.

That’s a great way of putting it.

The work into a film becomes the work of a product-

It just completely changes the exchange.
It’s not like I walk around chanting. But when I had the DVD’s made, I had them very professionally done in a way that makes them secure in terms of quality. It was expensively done. But it’s just my new revelation, this type of exchange.

And, of course, it has to do with the way it’s shown.

I’m adamant my work is shown on 16mm. In Buenos Aires, it was all shown on 16mm, which was fantastic. People were seeing it properly. That’s the only way I really want people to see my work, but there is a reality check. 16mm is becoming less and less viable for print and exhibition. It is what it is. Maybe we’ll have a nice little turnaround, where all kinds of 16mm will come back to life. But it seems fairly evident that it’s become harder and harder to show these films on film.

It’s just a shift you have to do as a filmmaker. It’s the same thing with shooting, when will you have to start shooting on video. I’ve seen so many experimental filmmakers having this anxiety for so many years that FILM IS DYING! DO WE DO THE SWITCH! DO WE START SHOOTING ON VIDEO?

There’s this whole anxiety around the subject matter. Finally I became so exhausted with the anxiety, I’m just going to keep shooting 16mm as long as I can.
What can I do? I love it!

It’s doable for me, 35mm is too expensive and honestly, the equipment is just too heavy for me to be able to shoot myself.

I’m going to stick with 16mm for as long as I can; on the shooting side, the exhibition side, finish-to-print side. And there’s nothing wrong with changing when it’s done. I’m just going to have to respond to that moment, and I will.

I don’t mind moving to different technology if it’s as good or better. For instance; sound. Working with mag sound and then switching to PROTOOLS. No issue. PROTOOLS is a fabulous program. It’s incredibly pleasurable to be able to have that kind of control over the work. It’s way better then MAG. That wasn’t an issue.

Just get on board, because it’s all changing. You have to work with it. What else can you do? Or you stop making art. And I don’t want to do that.

I want to go back to sound. In A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, the soundtrack is almost all percussion. It’s so meticulously done. You’ve got these great metallic scraping sounds and textures. I’m curious of your approach to the sound design, how you composed it, how the sound production correlated to the images when you were putting the soundtrack together.

It’s dissonant. It’s a raw sound and it is forceful. It’s not quite ambient sound in the background of the image in any way. People can either tolerate it or they can’t. People who are adventuresome in music, I find, are enthusiastic about the sound. But there are people who find the sound to be very claustrophobic for them and find it to be difficult. The soundtrack is probably the most controversial aspect of that film for an audience.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

When I was shooting, I went to a Metal Supply concert, which is Jean-Pierre Bedoyan and Paul Cutler. It’s all very spontaneous percussive sound. I heard them play at The Troubador. Listening to them, it was almost like going down a rabbit hole. It went into this weird, dark, space. I had never heard their music before. I remember being mesmerized by it and being in that space for two days following; which is what I love about music. You go through all of the emotional, psychological spaces of the experience.

So I was working on my film and I had a moment when I realized, that was what the film was doing in certain ways; going down a rabbit hole. I wanted to go ahead and get some of their music to accompany it. Luckily, knowing how to get in touch with Jean-Pierre, he was open to working on the soundtrack. He is someone who has constructed soundtracks from beginning to end and has worked in sound for films.

I was very careful because I like to have a lot of control with the sound. I was a bit concerned about positions of control. But I was also totally open to what might work.

I got the film edited, silent. He came over, I projected it, he watched it and thought about it. He knew how I wanted it to work, which was to give me a bunch of sound and I would work with that sound.

So he would do the sound while watching it?

It ended up being a live thing. A live accompaniment to the film. Because they put contact mics up to their instruments, it was no problem to record with a noisy projector in the space. I picked the middle section of the film, which was a half hour section, we went over to Jean-Pierre’s house and set up the equipment and basically ran it. We did three takes. It was a great rush.

Each run was completely different in terms of texture and space, and where they went in the film. They provided me with an hour and a half of amazing music, which I then edited to the picture. There were so many interesting connections. At times, the sound was much more textural than the visual, and then at other times, it was the opposite- so there’s a constant dialogue.

There’s a constant interplay. It’s really intense. Sometimes the sound looks like the visual. Sometimes, the opposite. The visual will look like a frozen, still image and yet the sound will be a constant swirling, percussive phrase. But they work with each other in really interesting ways. Certain moments where the sound and image link up are my favorite moments in the film.

That’s how you edited it I assume, shot by shot. Which phrases worked well with each other.

I was also working in sound with Zach Settel, a composer who lives in Canada. Every couple of years, he’ll drop off cassettes and CDs at my house. Sometimes he’ll come and dump off a bunch of his pieces from his hard drive and say, “Do what ever you want with these!”

Also I work with Pam Aronoff, who I also worked with on DIVINITY GRATIS, which had so many specific pieces. She composes to the image. I gave her a specific section to work on and all this raw sound material from NASA and she constructed tracks from that. For A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, she actually constructed a track from ultrasounds- sounds from within the body. She used the raw material of her own ultrasounds, and constructed a brilliant spooky composition from that. It’s a strange section.

I’m lucky - the composers I work with give me amazing material and allow me to sculpt with it.

That’s the way I like to work if I can. I’ll cut the film silently and then adapt the sound afterwards.

BODY POLITIC had a lot of sync sound and sound I had constructed before I began shooting. Sometimes sound can come first. There are all sorts of strange things happening. Things you never imagined, where the results end up with a construct of the mind- new spacial dimensions that result as an answer to combining sound and image. It’s really fun!

I’m always trying to have the maximum amount of enjoyment while making a film. It’s always great if you can figure out a structure that will allow you to enjoy the process.

That’s part of the ticket. If you can pull that off, you’re in good shape. Not that there aren’t many torturous moments. (laughs)

What are you considering doing now with your films?

I’m taking it easy on myself. I have a lot of amazing outtakes FROM A DARKNESS SWALLOWED. Usually when I make a film, I use all of my good footage. Occasionally I have extra shots left over. But in A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, I have a lot of amazing water shots that I never ended up using.

So I have decided to make an 8 to 20 minute water film. I have a whole concept about what the water’s about in my mind. It’ll be a shorter film comprised of those shots. I haven’t spent any time on the sound yet. And I still have a lot of editing to do. I can’t wait to go back to the flatbed right now.

When school’s out.

When school’s out! (laughs)

I don’t want to have any downtime. I want to go straight to the flatbed and start cutting right where I left it. I hadn’t constructed a lot yet, I had only used a couple of shots.
I used to feel strict about the idea of using any shots that remotely resembled those in A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, but now I’m actually feeling not that strict about it.
I mean, how many people really have seen A DARKNESS SWALLOWED? Honestly, how much of a problem is that? It’s really not!

It’s hard to describe. I was sitting on the floor in the very front because it was beyond sold out. I was really close to the huge screen, so these large images began to take on an even more surreal 3-dimensional quality. You stare into these long images, by the end of the film, you remember the film as a whole and not every single shot. The images were different from each other, but the impact of going into this different space-

The film is strangely minimal. It’s so rich and there’s so much color, so much texture. But honestly, in terms of how many different types of footage there are, it’s minimal in a strange way. I would imagine that in some ways they sort of blend into the space of that exact moment. The beginning of the film had photographs and narration. Completely different from the rest of the film.

The photographs and the narration give you a context for the entire film. In a way, the two photographs; child there, child not there. The film lives in the territory between being and not being.

The last shot of those photographs actually pans up - you’re catching the borders and the edges of those shots, but you’re actually looking at the black space in between.
That’s where the whole film is lives.

Which all fits into the context of the vortex, the spiraling rabbit hole.

Lost Pet: APART FROM THAT

2007-06-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

For the Wholphin blog I'm starting a column about Lost Pets - great films that are lost, not from 100 years ago, but just the last decade....

Read it here.

TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies.

2007-03-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

"Not 4 $ale: A Vidjoe Rodeoe"

The Westworld robot, a video ape and Don Knotts started a pirate TV station. Not a metaphor, this is science fact. They have the finest video switching equipment but only cable TV footage and disco technique. All hail TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies, a 'video band' who mine old VHS tapes and make golden nuggets.

More realistically, the Sheriff is a guy in LA who takes tons of found footage, from commercials to rare TV to Arnold to music videos and mashes them together to make new crunchy vids. His live shows at Star Shoes in Hollywood made him an underground legend, and this DVD collection of 30 videos is pretty killer.

TV Sheriff’s style is reminiscent of Animal Charm’s transgressive feel with more recognizable sources, and with the speed and techno vibe of EBN (Emergency Broadcast Network – remember them??) and even some of their politics. If Vice magazine’s TV Carnage wasn’t laid up in the hospital, but religiously healed by E, you would get TV Sheriff. Is there a name for this genre yet? Can I make one? Channel Knobs. No that sucks. Knob Surfers? Toaster Heads?

Because, there used to be this primitive home video switcher thing called Video Toaster and…screw it. See – its hard to mash ideas together. But the Sheriff pulls it together in a funny way, always entertaining but also with some social and political observations in there. YES, it is easy to say TV is twisted and sick and the evil tool of rich people. But it’s hard to show that and not be condescending. All hail TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies.

Slick DVD production is great, easy to navigate and tons of extras, include “collaborations” with Coldcut, DJ Q-Bert and VJ V2, and an introductory essay by Gerry Casale (from Devo), which is like a blessing down from the heavens.

www.othercinemadvd.com

CAM ARCHER.

2007-02-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

This interview originally appeared in Filmmaker magazine, much thanks to them. Cam's feature WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN is being released Feb 28 in NYC.

24-year-old Cam Archer was born and raised, and still lives today, in Santa Cruz, California. Archer’s short films, including BOBBYCRUSH and AMERICAN FAME 1: DROWNING RIVER PHOENIX have played many film festivals, including Sundance, CineVegas, AFI, Outfest and Tribeca. His first feature script, WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN, was accepted into Sundance’s January Screenwriting lab in 2005 and the finished film (well, read on) premiered at the 2006 Sundance Festival, before playing New Directors/New Films and the Locarno Film Festival.

With a kind but unabridged eye, Archer portrays the lives of teenagers in awkward gay love in most of his films, with vibrant color photography and constructed soundtracks of stylized dialogue, ambient sounds and music. The films are not showing an adult’s view of a kid’s world, but try to see it from the subject’s fantasy. TIGERS follows Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) and his naïve pursuit of a cool, older teen, Rodeo (Patrick White).

Your short films are all 16mm, and your feature is HD. What do you think of HD?
For the longest time we had it written into our budget that we’d be shooting on film and ultimately we could not afford it. Everyone wants to shoot their movies on film, or at least I still do. The HD is still a really big camera, you’re not going to be able to shoot even in a little store and not be noticed unless you're shooting with those really small DV cameras. We probably shot too much footage, that’s the thing with film we would just buy a certain amount. It’s not like we had more sitting in the freezer in case we needed it. We bought all that we could afford and that was all we got. We had to really be careful. But with the video we shoot around sixty plus hours I think. For my short BOBBYCRUSH, the shooting ratio I believe was 1.5 to 1. It was interesting to have the ability to shoot more.

BOBBYCRUSH.

You ended up reshooting stuff too, right?
We did last December. It was crazy, with the whole house arrest thing.

Can you talk about that at all?
We wanted to do re-shoots but then it wasn't as simple as just calling up the kids and getting them to do it because one of the actors was under house arrest. We weren’t allowed to go inside unless we were a family member, so we were going to have one of his family members go in and run sound inside the house while we shoot from outside, through the windows at him. Finally I was leaving messages for his parole officer. I guess it finally worked out - he was able to take a couple days away from his house arrest. I don't remember how that worked out.

I wonder if parole officers in California have established guidelines for working with actors and film productions.
Right??? I think he was pleading his case to them simultaneously with me, saying how important it was to him to be a part of the film. I think that they saw it as being a positive influence. They weren’t asking to see the movie, thank god.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

How do you even go about casting kids? Especially when you want real kids, not “professionals.”
Kids aren’t really actors, you know. They’re told there actors when they’re young. Things like, “Oh you are such a performer.” It comes from an outside source, maybe it's a parent, maybe its a casting director spots them on their looks. Then next thing you know they’re working and are an actor and they know about getting into a part. There are just so few kids that can actually become someone else the way that adults can. So what Aaron [Platt, longtime friend and cinematographer] and I have always done is just kind of wait for moments where either the kids are being themselves - that’ll work and then that becomes part of the character - or you shoot endless amounts of takes trying to get the right performance. I think the kids do a great job in the movie definitely, but one of the things I was always stressing to them is to listen to what the other actor in the scene was saying. They’re [often] not listening, they're just waiting for their line. They just want to get through the scene to prove that they’ve memorized it, so a lot of the most powerful moments are when the actors are just standing out in nature, looking into the camera. The viewer can get their own meaning out of it. I don't know, what does Larry Clark do? (laughs)

In your shorts you used friends as actors. With the feature you got kids that want to act. How does the vibe on the set change when the parents are there?
The energy changed. There were so many people working on this film, to go from working with Aaron, myself and Stephanie [Volkmar, his costume designer], to having a team of people crowding around a monitor and we have the parents sitting on the couch with us, doing a scene about how big is your penis? Everybody is watching you as the writer/director. “Okay, let’s just get through this scene.” It was changing the way I would have gone about it had it been just a couple kids and us. If the actor’s mom is in the other room and they’re doing a scene where they’re masturbating… Nobody masturbates in a another room while their mom is in the other room.

Safe to say some of the controversial subject matter got into the finished film.
I think I toned it down for the most part. The script was a lot more explicit and I was working out scenes and totally changing scenes. There was one scene where the Logan character puts on lipstick and then he kisses Joey on the hand. When I told the actors I took that out they were so excited. Yes, they did sign on and they read the script and knew what it was, but I found myself almost censoring parts. Was that a good idea in the end? I don't know. Did it have something to do with the parents and the large crew? I don't know. As we went along everything was changing. Looking back I realize I shouldn't have given up on things that maybe could have worked or we should have at least tried.

The images are heavily stylized. Was your goal to see the kids own viewpoints?
I think it comes from my days at UC Santa Cruz, where very early on they encouraged us not to rely on, or use at all, any sort of sync sound. I hated them for pushing that on us, but then I grew to love it. It forced us, Aaron and I, to come up with a new, original way of telling the not so new, or original, stories we wanted to tell. The characters in my films are rather conventional, they want things that other people want, but in their minds, and in the world of the film, things are all but conventional, which I love. Because there's such a diverse palette of costumes, sets, props and colors, people always want to know what time period the film is supposed to be set in. To me it doesn't really matter. Whenever you want it to have taken place, I guess. And...why not let it be sort of 'timeless'? There's nothing historical here, no truths. It's about emotion, style and the search for identity. I mean, it's a film about a kid's first crush, which is a very emotional, visual time. It’s an experimental time. So why not let the film be something of an experiment? Aren't people sick of the same old indies, with their handheld cameras and reality TV acting? I sure am. I like filmmakers like Jodorowsky. I'll watch one of his films and there will be stuff I don't get, and maybe he doesn't get it either, but it really doesn't matter. I'll create my own meaning, and if it doesn't appeal to me, I'll wait for the next thing that does. Independent films are losing their edge. They are all kind of starting to look the same to me. We need more films that confuse us. And I'm not talking about twists. Kyle Henry's ROOM is such a great example of the type of independent film that is, sadly, becoming extinct. Kyle is clearly a filmmaker who does what he wants. He takes a simple story and makes it his own, with the camera, the sets and with his characters. He’s challenging the audience to keep up with him, which is great. I feel like I do the same in TIGERS. Like, did you catch that Fleetwood Mac lyric I just used as Logan’s voiceover? What the fuck? Films that challenge their audience are what I look to for inspiration.

Wait, kids viewpoints? Yeah, that's why I did it too.

Are you using mountain lions to repesent something like the horrible ages of puberty coming for the characters? Or is a lion just a lion?
Puberty is a lion, I like that. Originally, the lion was supposed to represent the outcast, or the thing thing we know nothing about, but are told to despise and want dead. So Logan identifies with the lion, feels surrounded by the 'tigers' at his school, and wants nothing more than to be left alone, living independently of the madness, the close mindedness and the hatred. I don't know, it made sense when I wrote it. Puberty is a fucking beast, isn't it? It's just a question of when that beast's going to visit you and then when it's going to be done with you.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

Audiences who see your films always want to know if they are autobiographical.
I think more than anything I was a kid that an uneventful childhood and was staying at home writing little stories, reading books and nerding out and watching too much television. I was very much like my older brother, who ended up doing the sound for all my films. He was just old enough that he was starting to do things before me, of course, and getting into trouble. I would see how that affected my parents so then that kind of made me shut down in a way and just be this kid that would rather sit around and daydream than go out and actually create things. So I think that part from me is definitely in Logan. He basically gets what he wants for a time being then ultimately gets rejected or whatever or shut out from the world that he thinks he wants to be a part of. But I wasn't hanging out with mountain lions as a kid either.

How did the Sundance lab affect the script? There’s always the two schools of thought where it is great to get help, and then some people think the script is yours and now a bunch of people are working on it.
This is the first film project I was planning to do where I had a script. Everything before was all notes or I would come up with a shot or we had these actors and then that would determine what the movie would be. I wrote the script and I went to the lab thinking, “Oh, this is going to be weird. People don't know how I work…” Maybe I wouldn’t even use the script, this will be a really rough blueprint. I kind of realized in the lab that it is important to have a really tight script. I honestly think that the script really did help it. I’m proud of the script, it really does make a lot of sense and it does work and there are character arcs and everything. The movie is a big mess and I’m proud of that mess as well, but it’s totally different. So, yes, the lab definitely helped because it helped me learn how to write a story. As far as how to tell that story visually – I’m still learning that one. Maybe it had to do with having short days and having to rush through scenes and not liking those scenes in the editing room, I don't know.

What kind of discussions were there in the lab?
Working on story, concentrating on what was at stake for Logan, the main character, and working on that character arc and the idea of plot point and climax. Stuff you learned in classes that you take, but then here you have these pros. I actually didn't take notes every meeting. We’d meet and then I’d go back to my little cabinet and just write down the stuff that I remembered. I think it was Frank Pierson who was talking about, you're only going to use the stuff you remember. I thought well if that’s true I’ll try that out. I’ll just write down what kind of bothered me or what is a good idea or what I should concentrate on. [After the lab] I took time off and then I came back to it and started to rewrite everything.

And that felt like it worked?
I think it worked. It’s really hard to get honest feedback about a script especially if you’re sending it to friends. That’s the great thing about the lab is that not only do you have experienced people but they don't give a shit about hurting your feelings. Its not as if they’re ripping apart pages in front of your face.

But they’ve got that distance to where they can see. Unlike, “Oh man, we’ve got the same shift Saturday night and I’ve got to work with him.”
Yeah…. “I read it.” “Did you like it?” “No I didn't - what do we tell him?” “Just tell him you read it and it was good.” You know. That’s what you constantly have to seek out as an artist. I think that as you get more and more established or as you create more - I don't know if the two are necessarily the same - it just becomes harder and harder to find that honesty. I’ve actually been sending out scripts to people I’ve had as mentors in that lab because they’re open to reading it, which is awesome. Hopefully they will still be honest.

You’ve been a volunteer at Sundance, then got your shorts in, then the lab and the feature. Very few people have experienced Sundance on as many levels as you have.
There’s a bunch of people that diss it. Especially lately, I read a lot about how Sundance is corporate, Sundance is this or that…. But I still think hands down the best American films are there every year in my opinion, especially independent films. I’ve been going there for about seven or eight years. It’s been interesting to see it change, because it is changing, but independent film is changing. What, ten years ago, maybe we would have been all the rage for everyone hating it or loving it. It would have been a bigger film at the festival. But at the same time the festival is showing it, so it’s not as though the small films are completely shut out. It’s just that you now have to have a different approach to getting people to see it. Obviously everyone wants to show their movie at Sundance. Everybody knows what it is; it’s a very weird phenomenon. I read something online that said the only reason I get my stuff shown there is because I used to work there. I never got to meet anybody that would have anything to do with programming film. Never. It’s just such an odd thing to read but I could understand how some people might think that. Sundance has a strange energy, there’s a weird energy there especially between filmmakers who are showing their films there or not. Filmmakers are so competitive! I know a lot of people that would say that they’re not but man I feel like they are.

After your shorts played Sundance and you were in the lab, did producers or financiers offer to fund the feature?
Yeah. I turned down Bunim-Murray. They’re the producers from The Real World. I’ve spoken about this in nearly every interview and nobody has printed it.

Really?
Yeah, they were going to give us five hundred thousand dollars, which, at the time, was ten times the amount I thought that we needed to make TIGERS. Nobody believed me when I told them that we needed that little - and they were right because we spent seventy thousand. Bunim-Murray wanted to have a say in casting, they wanted final cut, the typical story, and then I thought about Real World… MTV misrepresenting youth culture for the past twenty years? Um, okay, should I jump on that boat too? I thought, we’ll just find another way to get the money. Also they were going to delay it so that we would maaaaybe be shooting it this summer, and that was going to be maybe. They wanted to do some rewrites. My producer at the time was saying I don't think the movie is going to make that much money back and [Bunim-Murray] said they were prepared to take this as a loss.

So what’s the point of making it for them?
I was already a loss in their eyes, which is kind of comforting because then you don't have to let anybody down. (laughs) Ultimately, it would probably be a very similar film, we just would have been able to pay everyone. But I would have been attached to that company. I made the film the way I wanted to, it turned out the way it did and that’s something to be stoked on.

So now IFC is going to release it to theaters?
Yeah, and Wellspring is going to do the DVD. After Sundance, and after having several months 'away' from the project, I went back into the editing room to swap out music I knew I (the project) couldn't afford. What was supposed to take only a few days, and only have to do with the music, turned into a three week, scene by scene re-edit. A total re-structuring of the film. I hadn't really watched the film since just before Sundance, when I had to approve the master, so it was like everything was fresh and new to me. I literally was in there re-loading tapes, using alternate takes, putting in new footage, new scenes and then deleting about 20 minutes from the Sundance cut. I was working by myself, no one giving me advice, so there were times when I really questioned whether or not what I was doing was good for the film. I was taking yet another risk on what had already been a risky project. At the time, we had just been told that IFC/Wellspring wanted to release the film and then here I was tinkering away, changing the film, its tone, its scenes, dramatically. I remember sending IFC the new cut and practically holding my breath until they told me they were cool with it. It was a total relief. Because really, I'm so much happier with the new cut, and it's like the Sundance, New Directors/New Films version never existed.

Are you going to move on to adult actors after this?
It was more that I was trying to figure this story out. It’s just taken me this many films to figure out what I’m trying to say and I think they were all leading up to TIGERS. If you look at the shorts its obvious, the progression is obvious. So it just made sense to make a movie about kids. Everyone wants to compare you to someone else so you can never be really thought of as original anymore.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

There are adults in there. I was happy to see Fairuza Balk.
I think what it shows you is getting her, getting Kim Dickens from Deadwood, is that maybe the bigger budgeted films aren’t that rewarding [for actors], or maybe it had to do with [previously] being in Sundance. Who knows, but what’s nice is there’s a collaborative effort. The scene with Fairuza when Logan drops the grocery bag is mostly improvisation. Originally there was only one line which was, “You know everything you touch turns to shit.” The rest was purely Fairuza improvising lines, it was great. Everyone has a fair say in these smaller films, I’m not opposed to hearing suggestions and being open.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

It played Locarno in August. Have you heard feedback?
No. It would be nice to see what the European audience thinks of it. No offense to Sundance but what kid or teenager can afford to go out there? I feel that the film has still yet to play to what I believe will be its biggest audience - teenagers.

How do you think teenagers will see the film differently from adults?
I just think young people will have an easier time identifying with the film and that they won't be alienated by the style. The few teens that have seen it, seem to really dig it, and that couldn't make me happier. Some old guy watched my film and told me afterwards that I should go see THE DA VINCI CODE (2006) to learn how to write a proper story. Shit. I would never see that film, and I hope anyone who digs my film would never see it either. The kids out there want something to shake them up, I know I did when I was a teenager, but I'd have to go back in time, to the 60s and 70s to see what I call 'progressive' films, films that make you think. Even if kids hate TIGERS, at least they're thinking about it. Movies like TIGERS and MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004, Gregg Araki), which I love, come from a very young, punk sensibility, and not the type you can buy in the mall. And really, how many times can a kid watch a Wes Anderson film?

Is there a specific way coming-of-age films succeed or fail in their portrayals of kids?
Sure. You've seen TIGERS, right? We failed! Kids are all over the place. Some act like adults, some act like infants. It's tough to say that anyone's really getting it 'wrong' in movies. Are filmmakers sugar-coating their characters? Well, yeah, that seems to happen a lot.

What happened to you as a kid to end up making these films? Your answer can be mundane, fake or both.
Actually my parents and brothers are very supportive. Oh, I know – I had fainting spells.

When you were a kid?
Like from ages 10-12. I would just faint. It used to happen a lot.

www.camarcher.com

Confessions of a Short Film Programmer.

2007-02-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

I was one of two short film programmers for Sundance from 2002-6, and a short and feature film programmer for CineVegas from 2002 to now.

In 2004 I wrote about watching thousands of short films and crap I noticed. Waking up to an alarm clock in the first shot - drinking from the Jack Daniels bottle - hot sex with no nudity - changing clothes montage in front of the mirror... I'm sorry, its time for some new ideas.

Find the article here at Filmmaker magazine, one of the last mainstream mags with quality writing.

One of the things I did not mention in the article: why do film schools try to teach students by showing them features and then expecting them to emulate what they have learned inside of a short?

As you can guess, it is quite hard to tell a deep story, to establish characters, to create a world within 5 to 15 minutes. And once you go over 15, it had better be amazing or audiences will start to drift. There are shorts that succeed in all these ways, but not many.

Yet students are not watching amazing shorts by filmmakers who may have been on the same level with similar resources, or more importantly, at the same creative stage. At age 18 or 21 or 25, you may be able to recognize the talent behind Ford and Hitchcock, but how can you possibly translate similar film structure and metaphor into a short when you are learning? It would be better to simply watch certain scenes and learn editing and composing shots, using sound and pacing, for example.

At the end of the day, students are spending time and money at schools in order to learn how to be a filmmaker. How many are going to be successful, or are even talented? 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? And with the wisdom of someone at 21? Just teach them the tools. The Cassavetes are going to create themselves.

Regardless of that, universities should serve all students equally. Let them rent the famous shit on their own. Show them short films because that is what they are required to make at their level. And pay the filmmakers of the shorts some rental fees, as they may have learned from a school and are now making it on their own. Let me know if you need the names of some good films.

STEPHANIE BARBER

2007-01-09T22:05:00.000-08:00

16mm film is captivating. There is something oddly holding you when you see 16, even from a (often) defective projector. Your knowledge of the medium is something heavily scratched, with hollow sound, also staticy, and therefore less than what the filmmaker intended. But you can still feel a power from it, the color is lurid, the grain huge, moving, and interesting, the presence of a world that is the closest to humanity in a captured image. There is an air with 16 that makes you think you are being allowed permission to truly see through someone else’s eyes.

So when you see a collection of someone’s films all on 16mm, it’s an event. I saw Stephanie Barber’s work at Cinematexas 2006. Some things were constant: beautiful color, strong framing of singular images, capturing in-between moments of common day life that resonate. TOTAL POWER DEAD DEAD DEAD (2005) is a 3-minute vignette of a laundromat’s small TV, snack machine and arcade game, bubbling with fake light, as narration asks you to speak certain words out loud. CATALOG (2005) is a group of shots where live people stand silent, reenacting still photos Barber had found. There is constant narration but it does not tell you the story of the people. Rather, you have to choose what you take in when watching.

Some things were different: DOGS (2000) is one long take essentially, of two paper machee dogs breaking down the universe and their existence, playing with the entire notion of innocent wonder vs. academic pretentiousness. You guess at the film’s intent, and then it wins you over because we’ve all said these things out loud.

All of Barber’s films are inquisitive. In a way, they present your world around you as a foreign land to explore.

CINEMAD: What is your output like?
STEPHANIE BARBER: Twenty-three films.

Wow. All 16mm?
All 16, yeah. Well, I have Super 8, too, but I’m not counting that. I have a lot of Super 8 stuff.

That’s pretty rad. How did you get to use Super 8?
I got a Super 8 camera when I was in high school. My mom had one and it even had a sound recorder but I actually hadn’t used it. It was the kind that had mag sound on it. I started making little Super 8s with friends. The Super 8s were a little more narrative in the beginning, or animation that was maybe closer to what I’m doing now, just these strange stories that are pulled along by the mag soundtrack and the images are just things that have been said or maybe haven’t been said but could be considered alongside of what’s being said. You know what I mean?

So you were fracturing the narratives right away?
I guess I was. [laughs] But the other ones were more friends that have underwear on their heads and whatnot.

Was it a natural progression to 16mm after that?
Even though I was making those films, I was really thinking about how I was going to be a poet, because I always had really good professional options – poet or experimental filmmaker. [laughs] But I went to college and I just kind of randomly took a cinema class and it was with Larry Gottheim, and I really fell in love with film.

Was he at Binghamton?
Yeah, also with Ken Jacobs, Ralph Hocking, and Maurine Turim, some real heavy-hitters.

So that was your first exposure to that type of film?
That was the first time I saw anything, and the first one I saw was THE FLICKER (1965) by Tony Conrad. And I started crying, I was very moved. It’s funny because I don’t actually make work like that, but at that time, we really paid so much attention to that.

Were you painting when you were growing up, too?
I painted, but nothing too super-serious. I was going to a performance arts high school for playwriting, so I was sort of entrenched in narrative. And I think my films now do have some strange relation to narrative.

We can go on and on about the terms but it’s not experimental. You’re not just throwing things together and seeing what sticks, it definitely seems planned. Do you like any term for your films?
I go with experimental because it’s easy, but I have that same feeling. It doesn’t really bother me. We know what that means, like, “Oh, you’re in that realm.”

But you do have stories, even if it’s just a short story or a moment in the films.
Haiku, little poems… [laughs]

Do you find yourself doing more filmmaking than anything else? I read that you still have some installations of paintings, too.
Not that much recently, because I’m living in this house that’s constantly needing construction, so that’ll be for another year. We’re knocking down walls and stuff, so there’s nowhere to paint, but I make a lot of music. So music and filmmaking are what I spend most of my time on. And poetry.

So you’re splitting your time between making films and being on your roof fixing holes.
Exactly. That’s what I was doing today.

LETTERS, NOTES (2000).

What home repair skills have you learned from making art?
A high tolerance for tedium and exactitude. So I get all of those jobs where you have to be really careful and exact.

Judging from this amount of work, I guess you’re sticking with 16mm.
For sure. I was working on a video with my friend Randy Russell and we were making kind of a zombie movie.

American Job Randy? [Star of Chris Smith’s 1995 movie.]
Yeah.

Awesome.
But that’s kind of been on hold since I moved here. I have made two videos, and I think I’ll make videos here and there but I’m not going to Hollywood. [laughs] I’d love to make a 35mm film just because it looks so beautiful, but it’s kind of out of my budget right now.

I used to do a lot of dense hand-painted, hand-collaged work, and that would by necessity end up being really short because every single frame was super manipulated. The longest of those is a film called IT FELT POSSUM, and I think that’s six minutes.

DOGS (2000).

How long did you spend working on the text for DOGS?
Two years.

Consciously for two years or off and on?
Pretty consciously. There would be like a month where I wouldn’t work, but yeah, a long time. It seems crazy. The general ideas were all right. What was difficult was making it seem like a viable conversation, putting in “um”s and “oh”s. Every single one of those things are scripted.

There were some other places that the dogs went and I kind of chopped all that up and I was going to make this film Dogs II. [laughs] In Dogs II, Pocket goes over to visit Spike and Spike is listening to this piece of music by Samuel Barber called “Opus #19.” It’s really an excellent piece of music. So Pocket is wanting to chat and Spike is kind of into it but he keeps interrupting and saying, “Wait, just listen to this part, don’t talk.” But their conversation is supposed to follow the exact arc of the piece of music. So I had to take all of that out and put it aside for Dogs II. [laughs]

I thought it was pretty great because it did sound totally conversational, to the point where I thought, “Yes, I had all these same thoughts, and yes, I felt totally annoyed by other people talking this way.” Yet it’s not like they’re doing something that I don’t do.
I know. People are very weird about that film. For a lot of people, it’s their favorite one that I ever made, and actually not filmmakers but painters and other people. I guess its the pretentious thing that people don’t like, which is goofy because in trying to make that sound like a viable conversation, I felt like I nailed a lot of that out.

I guess in other ways, it’s more pretentious, because it’s forced to try and sound natural. There’s this little thing that happens, and it’s a really specific thing that was also really difficult to work on with the writing, which is that about six minutes in – and you know that first two or three minutes is really awkward to watch, you feel kind of embarrassed for the filmmaker – Pocket says, “You know, I’m really interested in making wrong choices.” And he gives an example and says, “No, it’s something a little more obvious or sentimental.” He’s commenting on what happened in the first few minutes. He says, “If I were a chess player, I’d make a chess analogy.” You know, like a wrong move. Do you play chess?

Not since 5th grade.
I’m not good enough to do this sort of thing but you can imagine. And you kind of have this thing that happens where you believe in the characters, where you’re not even thinking about it anymore, you’re just kind of listening in on a conversation after that. I’m not sure if people would say, “Oh, it’s because you sort of owned up to the fact that that opening move that you made as an artist was the wrong move,” thereby hopefully making the whole thing better, and it kind of has this fulcrum at the six minute mark where it pulls away from itself.

SHIPFILM (1998).

It’s just such a different film than something like SHIP FILM (1998) or CITY AT HEART (2003) with those hands playing foosball. Those are like nice, in-between moments that seem to resonate, but if you do that with DOGS, it just wouldn’t work. You actually have to sort of beat people down. It can’t just be this one-note joke. You actually have this narrative effect over this long scene with these ups and downs. It’s interesting.
What’s crazy is that I never saw MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981) until after I made that and somebody gave it to me. I really loved it and after watching it, I would ask people about it. And a lot of people hate that film, too. [laughs] So then I felt okay. But it all comes down to your suspension of disbelief and whether or not you really like to listen in on a conversation.

The voices you picked for DOGS sounded college age. It seemed like college kids discussing things at the point where they’re realizing that they’re not the ones who are going to change the world, yet are still hopeful and aren’t stupid.
I think somebody else said that, too. I wasn’t even aware of that. Both of those men that read were both probably 35 when they read. They’re both super amazing artists, Paul Dreucke and Nick Frank. The thing that I was afraid of and kept trying to keep out of them was like an Ira Glass thing, like, “Don’t NPR it.” It never dawned on me that it would sound college-y but people have said that, and I don’t understand that. Maybe because they sound young, or maybe that’s the last time that people have conversations about work they’re making or love?

With TOTAL POWER DEAD DEAD DEAD, you simply cruised in somewhere and saw that set up?
Yeah, the laundromat by where I lived. It was really amazing. Isn’t it so great? Everybody’s like, “Look at me!” It has so many connections to CATALOG, all these little things that want to be looked at.

You just took your camera in there…
No, I had to go back and get my Super 8. I lived about half a block away. So I shot it on Super 8 and then printed it on 16mm.

TOTAL POWER DEAD DEAD DEAD (2005).

Where you have the audience talk, was that something you had been wanting to do for a long time or did that just come out of seeing the images?
I think it came out of seeing the images, watching the Super 8. That’s an interesting question. I don’t really remember, but I would say that came after.

Had there been times when you were showing your films that made you want more crowd participation?
No, I never watch my films when people are watching. Too scared. [laughs] But I just like that there’s something unbelievably lonely about speaking to a movie. I mean, there’s the obvious situationist dialogue about the massive amount of two-dimensional images that we interact with each day, and then just giving up and being like, “I love you!” Really intimate things like, “I love you” or “I’m gonna die” or “We’re at war.” And then just trying to make people lick their hands, just to see what you can do.

It’s pretty amazing to see who in the audience is gonna go for it. I think when people hear that, they feel trapped, like the film knows what’s going on and they don’t want to admit that they’ve been a willing observer.
Seems like it would be pretty awkward.

You have to pay for the art, not just in the ticket, you have to do some work.
I wanted to have dance moves, have people do the splits or something. “You, on the left rearranging your bag full of bags!”

How do people usually respond to that?
My friend Carl Bogner was the first person that I showed it to, and he’s this really great curator from Milwaukee, the kind of person you want to show everything you’ve ever made and talk to about it for hours because he’s such a good watcher and thinker. I was in the projection booth and he was in the screening room, and then he came in and said that he cried. I thought that was really perfect.

Was it from pain or happiness?
I think just from the touchiness of it. The final title page is an image of a man wiping his eyes. It’s from an allergy commercial so it looks like he’s crying. I think that one is what got him. But then again, it’s also really different to see something alone in a movie theater, where the bitter sadness of it would be a lot more recognizable than the awkwardness of, “Say hi to your neighbor.” That kind of makes it a little more giddy.

One time I was in Mexico City and I went to this cinema arte, which I guess I didn’t realize was a porn film, and I figured I might as well stay and watch the movie. And I was in the upper left hand corner, there was a guy in the upper right hand corner, one guy in the lower left, and one guy in the middle, and I was just like, “Man, this is just the best thing ever!” Just something about the five of us in this really big movie theater watching this Swedish porn film in Mexico…

That sounds like something you made up because it’s so great.
I loved watching it in that situation. I mean, I mostly I was thinking of how great our positions were, like we should just start a musical. [laughs] It seemed like, “You guys, we could do anything we want in here! Our parents aren’t home!” [laughs]

And then what happened when you guys all had to walk out?
I think we all walked out without looking at each other. I don’t even remember walking out it was so uneventful. Maybe people left before it was over. I don’t know that they liked a woman going in there. There are a lot of bars that are for men only.

So I’m not gonna count DOGS as having actors, but pretty much everything else is found footage, photos…
A lot of found footage, a lot of found photos, things that I shoot that look like found footage, like CITY AT HEART is shot. The hands are shot and the airport is shot but not the kids, that’s found.

CATALOG (2005).

So then what made you make the jump to CATALOG, using only actors?
That was an installation that I did at a museum where I had five rooms and I actually had live actors. It was probably better for the actors than for the people that came. I was actually kind of jealous of them because everybody had really different experiences. Actually, one of my friends who was in it is here right now. She’s outside painting the house – I’m not gonna interrupt that. [laughs] But her scene was - she was Teresa Columbus and she was on a beach with those chairs – Meredith Root and Teresa Columbus. So there were bathing suits and somehow that really got a big reaction.

With people walking around them?
Yeah, and there was a kid in there at one point who was trying to touch their boobs. [laughs] So that was going on, and Randy Russell was there, who was the guy with the computer. And you know, they would have breaks where the lights would go off every 15 minutes and they would shake it up for a minute and then it was back open.

But the last hour of the opening, he didn’t take any breaks, he just went into this zen state and it was in the middle of the gallery. Other people had their own sections and he was in the middle of the gallery at a desk with no computer, just his hands there. And it seemed like it would be a really great thing to have done, so I kind of wished that I had done that.

People were just walking around and trying to touch them and stuff. And I wanted to make that into a film because I liked the idea of doing that on film, which was sort of unnecessary. [laughs] And because I always make films like that anyway, of just shooting a photograph, so I thought that would be funny. They’re each from found photographs and then they’re repositioned. Instead of shooting a photograph, I thought I would shoot the people freezing, and then the nice little moments with them blinking or the wind rustling things. Like the one where they’re at an outdoor table and it’s lit like it was a flash photo that had been taken.

CATALOG (2005).

Was CATALOG created from the fascination of recreating stuff or was it this overall thing you were trying to pull together from common experience? There is constant narration as well.
When you’re making something, you’re thinking about every different thing, but with both of those things – the installation and the film – it was mostly about trying to find what was so poignant about the stillness, poignant or funny. I like that it’s both really funny and really sad at the same time. And the text is a lot about time travel and about photographs and about rooms. And it’s really, really dense. Usually I need people to listen to every single word of what’s being said in order for something to work, but for that piece, I love that it’s purposefully dense and I love that you can’t stay with it.

It’s impossible.
You can’t get every single phrase from it, because…

You’ll be ignoring the image if you’re listening.
Yeah, and the image is so simple, it’s right there. So it’s a nice contrast – the soundtrack is so labyrinthine and they’re talking about these physical rooms, labyrinths, time travel capsules, and royalty, also. And the whole thing about the traitor is really good, and the implicatory tone of the reader. “You who have heard this story so many times…”

Very different than your film METRONOME (1998), where the audience laughs completely from the style of voices, obviously being playful instead of just being one person saying things.
Yeah, that’s really super playful, but morose… She’s gonna cut his feet off. That sucks. [laughs] And he fell in love with her, and that sucks for her. [laughs] I just talked to my niece about that film because she came to the show in New York.

How old is she?
She just turned seven. And I said, “Oh, did you like the film?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I have some questions. You know on that one [sings a little], did you want it to sound, you know, kind of messed up and silly?” And I said, “Yes I did.” [laughs] But it felt like she was kind of worried for me, like she had to be the one to break it to me, like nobody had told me that I wasn’t singing too good.

I think I’ve watched CATALOG four times and I still couldn’t tell you every word that’s in it. I’m just like, Oh yeah, that little thing in the background.
The decorative pink basket?

Yeah, I’m assuming all that stuff was pretty set up.
It is. I have a friend who’s a philosopher, Seth Goodman, and he likes to transcribe the text so he can kind of “get it.” [laughs]

He wants to enjoy it on another level?
He’s a logician, a very specific person.

Did he come up with any conclusions that you didn’t expect?
Oh yeah, he’s super brilliant, he always says really great things, mostly about DOGS, he was really interested in that. I don’t know if he’s transcribed CATALOG yet. But I have the text for it.

Let me know what he thinks. Are you oing to give him the text or would you rather him transcribe it?
I think he likes to do it, because I think that’s how he’s internalizing it. You know how sometimes when you’re trying to memorize something, you write it out and it helps? I think he’s trying to grapple with it.

Do you just have a shitload of old photos around?
I have less now. In Milwaukee I had glued maybe 2000 of them to my floor and then put a whole bunch of polyurethane over them. But I still have a lot, it’s really kind of pathetic. I used to move a lot, and when I’d move, five or six of the boxes would be full of other people’s photos. [laughs] But that’s why I glued them down. I was like, “I’m not doing that anymore.”

It’s a fascinating subculture. I just found out that there’s conventions just for people selling other people’s photos. And they’re packed with people, and judging from the footage that I saw, it didn’t look like it was all artists.
I kinda felt a little bummed out when I found out it was such a big thing, but because I’m into it, I can understand anybody wanting to look. It’s so great to just look at a photograph, and one of the reasons why I think I use them so much is that I’m always trying to figure out, like, what is it? Is it about time travel? Mortality? Like if I could look at your face or at a photograph of you, I’d probably like to look at your face, but I could sit around and look at a photograph of you for a really long time. And I think most anybody can. There’s something about that separation – and I don’t know if it’s wonder about time, or if it’s like immediately nostalgic, because the only things that are still are things that don’t live… I don’t know.

I often think about while everybody was dressed this way – something that’s quite a bit different, like in the ‘40s where everybody had to wear a suit to get on a plane.
So for you it’s more like time travel. Like they don’t realize that they’re in the ‘40s and someone should tell them. [laughs] When I was a kid, I would do this thing where every time somebody would take a photo of me, I would make a regular photo face but I would do my hands weird. And that way I would know exactly what I really felt then, like I would be smiling but my hands would be saying, “Actually, my sister is a jerk.” [laughs] Or whatever I was thinking about at that moment. But I had these little hand signals for talking to my future self, but I don’t really have any chart of what they were so that kind of failed.

I was just at the antiques store looking for fans but at every antique store has seven boxes of photos. And they’re all of families and it blows my mind that a family would get rid of that much history.
Yeah, I don’t know. People die.

I guess so, and there’s nobody left, or no one left that cares. It’s insane. Do you have more of other people’s photos than your own photos?
I probably do. That’s pretty bad. I have a lot of my own but it’s close to equal. I guess if I died, I wouldn’t mind having them thrown away or sold at a yard sale. It’s kind of like shaking it up, because everybody that I know can just remember me, or die themselves if they so choose, but everybody who didn’t know me should get a little something. [laughs] It’s sad, but sometimes I don’t think it’s that sad.

Tribulation 99.

2007-01-08T23:26:00.001-08:00

Why are film festivals cool? Because sometimes you get to travel in time. At FLEX 2007 (Florida Experimental) the fest director Roger Beebe brought down Craig Baldwin as a juror and screen his first feature TRIBULATION 99 (1991). Beebe introduced Baldwin and revealed a fact about many of us age 30-40 folks – TRIB 99 got us into experimental film. For Beebe, he got inspired by Baldwin and started making work. For me, it was a new type of film viewing experience all together.

Connecting the dots of underground cult horror, terrifying conspiracy theories, maniacal documentary and avant sensibilities, TRIB 99 is an important a document of the second half of the 20th century as you will ever need. Cramming almost every oddball conspiracy theory – and underground government fact – together through found footage, 50s style shock narration and superhuman editing, TRIB 99 holds up today as it did when I first saw it 15 years ago. At the time, I thought I had seen cult films, but TRIB 99 struck new ground for me. At turns hilarious and terrifying, 15 years later I laughed just as hard and got totally freaked out by this fucking world. Baldwin has cultivated Bruce Conner, B movies and secret reports into a career of culture jamming. We are all the better for it.

So you have the DVD instead of the theater experience I’m talking about. But still a great deal with Baldwin’s commentary and two early, rare shorts by him, ROCKETKITKONGOKIT (1986) and WILD GUNMAN (1978). See where it all came from.

www.othercinemadvd.com

Afro Promo.

2007-01-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

The DVD Afro Promo is a collection of trailers, put together by Jenni Olson and Karl Knapper. It is a wonderful and interesting document of late 20th century USA filmmaking. The trailers are of so-called "Black Cinema". Meaning a cinema that is made by Blacks or made by whites but has a predominate Black cast and/or just a dominate Black actor (Sidney Poitier).

The DVD jacket has a wonderful essay by Yale professor Terri Francis about what is Black cinema. What I want to chat about is the making of certain trailers. Better yet a trailer that I believe will be consumed by Black America. The trailers for Boss Nigger and Cleopatra Jones are quite interesting because of the decision-making-process that is involved. Both show action/sex/humor but what is funny is how horribly cool they are.

For an artist such as myself I become interested in how and why things are made. Cleopatra Jones (1973 written by Max Julien and directed by Jack Starrett) is a film about a United States Special Agent, Tamara Dobson, assigned to crack down on a heroin dealer, Shelly Winters. The trailer has the sound drop out twice. It is clearly a mistake but there is something cool about the imperfections of any art medium especially film. What I like about it is that no one thought enough about it to have it fixed. I could not imagine any mainstream white film's trailer with the sound dropping out.

I consider myself somewhat of an expert in Blaxplotation cinema but somehow Boss Nigger (1974 directed by Jack Arnold) aka Boss aka The Black Bounty Killer aka Big Black Bold Boss escaped me. The trailer is a social critique as well as entertaining. First of all the song (written by Leon Moore) is infectious ("they call him Boss, Boss Nigger, he's so bad" repeat). It introduces the trailer so you the viewer is going to enjoy the ride no matter if he or she wants to or not. The song also is played in during action sequences.

After being insulted by the song, the song begins to rescue the viewer. Because every time you hear the song "Boss Nigger," Fred Williamson, aka The Hammer - a former defense back for the Kansas City Chiefs - and his partner, will save the day by "installing Black Man's law into a white man's town" (whatever that means?). Opps, I am getting ahead of myself. Boss Nigger is western about two Black men, Fred Williamson (who also written the film under the alias of Jack Williamson) and D' Urville Martin, riding into a town and somehow becoming sheriff and deputy (I think? I actually never saw the film). In the trailer, they engage in shoot-outs, blow shit up, Boss kisses white women to "satisfy their curiosity", lock up the bank president (a Marxist critique) and arrest whites for using the word "nigger" in public ("two days in jail or a hundred dollars fine", hell I wonder what the penalty for saying "nigger" in private). The four minute trailer has it all; economics, first amendment, sexuality, race, violence, politics and on and on. There is a funny scene where D' Urville Martin mentions that he was a slave "six years ago" then the next scene begins with an explosion. The trailer is one of these things that I put in the category; how can something be so wrong but yet so right.

The Afro Promo DVD allows us to really take another and yet closer look at "why things are made".

Kevin Jerome Everson
Associate Professor of Art, University of Virginia

www.othercinemadvd.com

BILL DANIEL

2007-01-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

When the mastermind Craig Baldwin came to Tucson in 2001, I set up a show for him at the local MOCA, which happened to be an old warehouse on the rails. Trains still passed by at regular intervals (loudly), so I told him maybe have a projector outside to show films on the trains. Baldwin said that was perfect, as his partner-in-crime, Bill Daniel, had tons of 16mm footage from riding the rails. I had heard of Bill but had no idea we were destined to meet.

Now I equate new cultural movements in cities by watching where Bill moves to, way ahead of the movement. He and brother Lee (cinematographer for many Richard Linklater films) were in Austin in the 1980s, then Bill moved to San Francisco before it got sort of revitalized in my mind, then Bill hit Portland before a scene blew up there. Now, when in-between film tours, he lives in Shreveport. Let’s see how the theory goes.

Bill has created great images in all these places, with early 80s punk rock photography, to helping Baldwin with his manic films, to various installations like THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN IN THE MOON (2002-3), to Bill’s beautiful “documentary” on hobo train graffiti, WHO IS BOZO TEXINO?, which has been a decade in the making.

Never content to be in one place, Bill has toured as much as any band with his films. He’ll be on a 50 city tour this Fall (2006), so if you want to host a screening hit him up at billdaniel@hotmail.com. Check his website at www.billdaniel.net. The Bozo Texino dvd is available through microcosmpublishing.com and AK Press. He is also trying to get his book of punk photos funded, look at www.texaspunkpioneers.com.

CINEMAD: Were you and your brother like film nerds growing up, with cameras and shooting stills and stuff?

BILL DANIEL: Yeah, it all started out with BMX, but we called it Pedal-cross because BMX hadn’t been invented yet. We got an old Argus non-reflex 35mm camera that we found in Dad’s closet. We would take pictures of each other jumping ramps over trash cans or crashing on the baseball diamond on purpose, stuff like that. So yeah, it all started out of us wanting to document our motocross fantasies.

Did you see ON ANY SUNDAY (1971) when you were a kid?
Oh my God, that movie completely printed both of us for life, that and ENDLESS SUMMER (1966). We lived for the image of California.

Did you guys grow up in Austin?
We grew up in suburban Dallas, and Austin was the closest we could get to California. The moment we graduated high school, whoosh! High tailed it down. We moved to Austin, went to UT [Univ of Texas]. I was three years ahead of Lee, and I went to business school like an idiot. He had the benefit of seeing somebody stumble in front of him. “Business school? Fuck that, I’m going to film school.”

Were you just worried about getting a job?
Where I come from, the idea of going to film school or studying art was just so completely alien. The two words “film school” would never appear in the same sentence. But my brother, like I said, a lot happened in three years – punk rock and all this. We’d seen a different side of life. Actually, our next door neighbor in Dallas was a cinematographer. He did commercials and industrials.

So then you just had to figure shit out on your own after you burned out of business school?
Yeah. I started working in still photography. That was one impetus to drop out of business school. I was already working in studio photography as an assistant. I was making good money and having a great time and traveling and learning tons of photography skills. Through all this, I was fooling around with super-8 film, making experimental cine-plastic deals, put in some industrial music, Zoviet-France and stuff like that. I lived in an old hotel next to the photo studio that I worked in, and on the next block over was 6th street and the Ritz Theater and all these punk rock clubs. I was shooting punk shows 3 or 4 nights a week. My whole universe was this little microcosm in downtown Austin. Lived on our cruiser bikes and it was pretty idyllic.

Are most of the punk rock photos from Austin or from all over?
Mainly Austin. Later Dallas, but mostly Austin during that time, the ‘80-’82 era.

When did you start using super-8 film?
I started fooling around with super-8 in 1983. I’d seen a couple of Les Blank films and that’s what kind of turned me on originally. So by ’87, I knew that film was what I wanted to do, and I knew somehow that San Francisco was the place to go. I moved to San Francisco just having some intuition that it was Mecca. It really was for me.

Were you getting gallery shows in Austin or just constantly taking photos?
It was more integrated into the punk scene. We did a zine called Western Roundup. Some other publications used my photos. I did a couple of DIY art shows. In the hotel where I lived, downstairs there was an artist-run gallery. It was all very in-the-community low-end stuff. I did my 2nd or 3rd photo show with Mr. Biscuit of the Big Boys, who just died recently. Which is really sad for our generation of Austin counter-culturists, because Biscuit was one of the totally wild characters, a real shining light.

I was friends with the Big Boys and I toured with them, took tons of photos, most of the photos for their albums and stuff. I was kind of the Big Boys’ house photographer, I guess. They were THE skate band. We were really into skateboarding at that time, and this was between skating's second and third waves. Skating was not really cool in 1980. The OP thing was fading and Thrasher had just started as a newsprint mag. But the Big Boys were "Fuck you, we’re skaters!” They’d have their boards with them on stage. It was really goofy, but at the same time, we were really excited to have a kind of music that identified us, even though skateboarding was really unfashionable then. It was kind of the beginning of the hardcore scene, except that it wasn’t hardcore yet. It was still wide open and creative and goofy and anything goes. Within the next two years, it kinda morphed into a more rigid hardcore scene.

Plus you guys were off the coasts. A delay of culture.
Yeah, it was the pre-internet world of being off the coasts. We made it up as we went along. When touring bands would come through, it would be this infusion of new ideas. When Minor Threat came through, it taught everyone the proper way to wear short pants, and that was to take a pair of old black suit trousers and cut them off at the knees. Every band that came through left a particular impression.

Was the majority of your photos documentary style?
Documenting punk shows was definitely my main deal. But I was also doing these abstract industrial landscapes that were influenced by listening to industrial music, Zoviet-France, Throbbing Gristle and all that. Superimpositions, multiple exposures, night city scenes lit with a flash. That stuff was developing along the side at the same time as the punk documentary stuff. It’s actually the kind of photography I’d like to get back into at some point.

The expanse of Texas?
No, no, not at all. More like urban decay, and also more like an abstract thing. There was a painter in Austin, Philip Trussell, a true beatnik, been a painter since the 60's, just a fully-committed, fuck-the-establishment-do-it-on-your-own artist---he was one of my first artistic mentors. He was looking at my punk photos and gave me a lot of encouragement. I think my abstract photography was really inspired by his paintings, which were like beatnik cubist landscapes.

How was San Francisco when you showed up there?
It was like another golden era. I got there at the end of ’87. From then until the dot-com boom was a really awesome, creative, fruitful era in the Mission. I was based in the Mission, and 992 Valencia St. was really the center of the universe.

The address of Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema.
Yeah, Other Cinema and ATA [Artists’ Television Access]. ATA was really active in those days, too. There was a huge amount of stuff going on underground, rent was dirt cheap… My friends in Austin would say, “How can you afford to live in San Francisco?” I was living cheaper in San Francisco than I could in Austin. It was amazing. You didn’t need a car, you could pile a bunch of friends in an old Victorian and split the rent 5 ways, burritos were gigantic and less than three dollars… And tons of free shows, bands and films.

Did you already know people up there or was it just kind of obvious that it was a city for you?
The corny story is – I’ve told it a million times – the first thing that happened to me in San Francisco was meeting Craig Baldwin. I didn't know anyone yet. On my second day in San Francisco I rode my bike down the hill from the Haight where I was crashing until I could find a place, and I went down to Valencia St. I knew Valencia St. was the place where I was going to find what I was looking for. I had been to a killer punk show at a space there called the Tool and Die in 1981, so I knew that would be a good place to start looking for something cool. Well of course the club was long gone, But right in the same block I saw a poster for this “Eyes of Hell Cinema.” It had the most amazing line-up of film screenings on it, three shows a week, every genre, vintage experimental films, grade-Z movies, bizarre documentaries, everything was on this one, very graphically busy calendar. I marched up to the address, which was 992, and Craig Baldwin opened the door with a Jolt cola in each hand and said, “Hey, you just moved here? Come on in!” Within about 3 hours Craig had explained the entire past and present of the San Francisco film scene. I was just taking notes as fast as I could.

San Francisco was so rich then and there were so many places to plug in. It had both the benefit of being a big scene and a lot of different things going on – SRL [Survival Research Laboratories], secret breakfast clubs, the Cocophany Society, art spaces with no name – but things were still cozy enough that everything kind of rubbed up against each other, kind of like a small town scene. There were dozens of collective households, there's a great story waiting be told there, the history of all those collectives. Victorian mansions, warehouses, and storefronts and huge raw spaces divided up with stolen billboards. Studio Four, Shred of Dignity, the Vats, the Cauliflower Collective, there were a ton of these things, and each one had a different personality. The infamous collective house by Golden Gate park where everyone had to sleep with a different roommate each month, what was that place called?... .Some were a little more hippie or more urban primitive, and they all did house shows, so there were crazy art events happening in these places all the time.

So you got along with Baldwin right away?
Yeah, for sure, kindred spirits. He talks fast, just the way I like it. I've been really lucky to work with him, I have so much respect for his work, and I mean how often do you get a chance to work on things that you actually respect?

When you got to SF, what did you start working on?
I wasn’t doing any still photography at that point. I started working with Craig right away. He was working on TRIBULATION 99 (1992), I did some work on that. And I was also involved with a lot of things at ATA. I programmed a twice-a-year super-8 festival called All-City Super-8. One of the first events that I went to at ATA was a three-day, round-the-clock event called the Festival of Plagiarism. ATA was like an art clubhouse with no adult supervision.

Mainly what I was doing, film-wise, was these little sound super-8 documentaries, kind of Punk Verite. I was really into mag stripe super-8film, which they stopped making a few years back. Sad, because that was an awesome means. If they made that film right now, I would be shooting it for sure. Fucking rad – sync sound in a little cartridge, cheap, pretty poor sound but I like that rattle-y quality. I love the way that shit sounds with the automatic level going all over the place and the glitchy in-camera edits. Oh man. To have single system sound-- cheap hand-held camera that recorded image and sound, together, in-sync, good grief, that was a miracle. Now it's just an accepted fact of life that every device in the world records motion picture with sync audio.

So I was making these short documentaries of panhandlers or artists that were working at ATA, I did two on bike messengers. I was a bike messenger for a couple of years thinking that I would make a film about it. Documenting the job was kind of my excuse to work as a messenger, which I guess was a dubious career move. At the time, I was doing photo assisting, which made more money than at messenging, but I was totally burned out on commercial photography. I was just hating advertising. I quit photo assisting a few times just in disgust of the whole advertising culture. But I would always fall back into it because it was freelance and easy money and I really loved the craft, I just couldn’t stand the culture of it.

So I thought, “I’ll make a documentary about bike messenging and I’ll be a messenger, that way I’ll get paid to make a film.” Great, but hammering all day on a bike for a pretty skimpy wage will just wear you right out. End of the day you’re not really in the mood too much to try and make a film. But I did, sort of. I strapped cameras to the bike, taped a mic on the handlebars, recorded radio chatter, and interviewed some messengers. I ended up with a couple of eight-minute films. One’s called A BAD DAY CYCLING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT WORK (1989), which was a sticker that I saw inside the offices at Quicksilver Messenger. The other doc is called A BIKEMAN’S HOLIDAY, which documents this annual messenger ride out to the Russian River. “Oh, it’s the weekend, let’s relax by riding our bikes 90 miles completely drunk to go camping and bring nothing but more beer.” We took off early Saturday morning from downtown and when we got to the Golden Gate Bridge, everybody pulled over and dropped acid.

Were there many wrecks?
Well, everybody got lost, you know? About three hours later, the pack kinda got split up. I wasn't tripping because I was supposed to be at work, you know, making a documentary film
But you never thought about trying to get into films as a job? I've probably worked at least a little bit in every department; AC work, loading, some cinematography here and there, swung booms, was a recordist, did a lot of lighting because that translated from the photography work. I did some grip electric, would gaff smaller shows… I never really pursued it as a profession. It’s cool to work on friends’ things, but I knew that to really get into it was to go back into the world of advertising, and I just hated advertising so much that it didn’t matter how much fun it was to make a film. It’s just not worth it.

When were you checking out the whole hobo scene and get the idea for WHO IS BOZO TEXINO?
I had been kind of documenting graffiti since ’83. Then around ’89, right when I was doing all those short super 8 documentaries, I thought, “Well, fuck, I’ll do one on hobo graffiti. It’s perfect, I can take the camera with me on the train.” It started as a twelve-minute super-8 film and then it kept on growing and growing and I thought, “I should shoot some 16, I’ll optically print the super-8 up and this’ll be a 16mm film.” It started out to be reversal, but then I started shooting negative, and it just kept growing and it spiraled out of control.

It doesn’t seem like hobo graf is covered too much.
There’s a book coming out in the next few months and I’m helping the guy with a chapter on monikers. It’s mainly aerosol freight graffiti but there’s one chapter about what they call monikers, which is the stuff that’s in my film, the old school stuff. But yeah, it hadn’t been paid much attention yet. I've found a few newspaper clippings from over the last fifty or sixty years, but nobody had really done any in-depth thing at all.

When did you first hop a train?
I hopped a freight in ’87 out of Houston. I was living in Galveston at the time. I actually tried to catch one out of Galveston, but a rail worker said, “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to get to California.” He said, “Get in the truck,” and he took me to Houston, like sixty miles up the road, took me to the yard and said, “These are the trains that go to California, sonny.”

Did he make that trip just for you?
He was driving into Houston anyway. He just saw me in the Galveston yard with my pack and said, “Sonny, I don’t know if you heard the news, but the trains don’t run here no more.”
He told me which part of the yard westbound trains were built in, so that saved me a lot of trouble there, but I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was definitely beginner’s luck. By the time I was living in San Francisco I met people who were into freight hopping. One guy, Barry Schwartz, a video artist, crazy motherfucker, man. He would do these video installation performances on trains. He would get out there with all of his video gear, audio gear, and all of this scrap metal, and get underneath a pig train – a trailer on a flat car – and wire piano wire around some metal and put contact mikes on the train, drag mikes, spin cameras from weird shit and do these really amazing industrial performances. All of this while flying through the desert at 70 miles per hour. His videos are some of the coolest things ever done with trains and cameras.

Did he make it into BOZO TEXINO?
Yes. He says, “ I never drink but that one night I did.”

How did the film start to take shape? You were making it for over ten years, right?
Or 16 years. I don’t keep count, really. It kinda kept growing and it went through a lot of identity crises. At one point I thought it was going to be a straight documentary. I was writing a humanities grant. Talk about being out of my element. Whatever. I learned how to format an academic paper correctly and brushed up on my grant-language skills a little bit. It was kind of a folly. It was an interesting experience, but I did not get a humanities grant.

Every year or so, I would get a pile of film and go out and shoot some more. A lot of the interviews were done sporadically when I could finally track somebody down, get a little bit of film together and some time to go out again. At one point, the film really ran aground when I realized that in order to finish it on film, you know, make a print, it was going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Tons of money. It was going to take all of this optical printing, plus all of this contact printing, because by then it wasn’t just super-8 and 16mm, it was also reversal and negative. I was going to have to decide if the printing master was going to be reversal or negative, and whichever way I went, half the footage was either going to have to be flopped or contact printed twice. It just turned into a technical boondoggle. That’s when it went into deep hibernation for about five years.

And then in those five years, all those clever people down in Silicon Valley made Final Cut Pro, and all of those projector companies were getting all the business people set up to do their Power Point presentations and they made those cheap projectors that are so bright and pretty. And I said, “Okay, I’ll make a fucking video. Projectors look good, they’re cheap as shit, and as much as I hate computers, I can afford a G4 and learn Final Cut Pro.” And of course it was fun as shit. Final Cut Pro is a blast. I was late coming into it, kicking and screaming the whole time, holding onto this romantic notion of, “My hobo film has to be a film!” And in a way I wish it was on film, mostly because of archival stability.

Basically it just comes down to, “Do I want this to exist at all?”
That’s true, but I have to say also that going the digital route changed the film aesthetically in some ways that I really like. Sure, film looks great, but I had shots that were over or under or too flat or out of date stock that was fogged, so I was able to tweak a lot of the stuff, like all this color footage that was all fogged and weird. So it was really fun, it was kind of like photography again. In film printing, you’re pretty limited with that you can do with the lights, but in a digital domain, you can really play with the contrast and the black levels and the gain and all that, so that was really fun. I was also able to do a couple of other things, like flop some shots to get better screen direction and stuff. But I think there’s only one dissolve in the entire film, and there’s no speed changes either.

Dude, where’s the one dissolve?
Oh man, it's in the last shot. This kills me. I ended up putting a jump cut in to snap it up because it was such a long take, even though I loved it as a long shot. I would watch it again and again while I was editing. It’s Grandpa walking down the line of cars at the very end. Like, “Man, this is beautiful, this is what my hero Les Blank would do, he’d let this shot roll.” My brother shot it with his Arriflex SR, so it’s a really great shot.

But I chickened out. I thought, “It’s way too fucking long, I have an economic imperiative here to make a snappy film” and I didn’t want to sit in a theater with this thing a thousand times with people fidgeting, so I chickened out and put the dissolve in there to make a jump cut and snap it up. Then Vanessa [Renwick] and her daughter Montana, who are the aesthetic executives, were like, “What’d you do that for, that’s terrible!” If I get a chance to get into the tape again, I may restore Grandpa’s long, long walk. That’s another great thing about digital versus film: wanna change the show? Throw it in the Avid again, make some changes, spit it out again, It's nothing like having to go back to recut the negative.

So when you’re going through, say year seven, midway through the fifteen years or whatever, are you just dealing with it and doing other projects as they come up, like Craig’s SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM (1999)? You must have had this insane moral dilemma that you had to finish BOZO and do it right for the people.
It was a horrendous psychological burden. I would be walking down the street and a block away, I would see a friend coming towards me and I’d be like, “Oh no. Oh no. I hope they don’t see me.” And then it’s, “Hey Bill, how’s your movie going? Are you ever gonna finish your movie?” “I don’t know, man, sorry.” Then the grant people saying, “You know, you’re a little behind on your production schedule, aren’t you?”

Now my friends are the ones moving to the other side of the street. “Oh shit, here comes Bill. He’s gonna invite us to another screening of his movie. I’ve seen it already, Bill!”

How much contact did you have with the people who are in it? Did you pretty much go out and shoot and see them and talk to them and that was it?
Most of the tramps in the film I just ran into on the road. Ride with them for a while before bringing up the subject. "Oh hey, wanna be in my movie?" "Huh?" Some of the tramps I would run into again over the years. A few I've been able to keep up with. Grandpa’s pretty much my adopted grandfather now. He’s actually got a birthday coming up. Some of the really dear people in the film, like Robert, the black guy in the middle section of the film, that was just a chance encounter riding out of the Stockton yard. We rode together for two divisions and then we said goodbye. I’d love to get him a copy of the film, because he’s the heart and soul of it. But yeah, that’s a weird thing about this kind of a project.

It’s a weird thing about documentaries in general, it’s so strangely possessive of people’s souls. The Native Americans had it right: you definitely capture someone’s soul in a photograph, and it’s even worse in a film and even worse in a documentary. You’re carrying around this bizarre psychic responsibility when you put somebody in a documentary. In a lot of documentaries, you keep a distance between you and the subject, and everybody you’re filming kind of implicitly signs onto this contract of the distance. Like a one-night stand; “We’ll be really intimate during the filming, then you’ll take it away and do whatever you want with it, and maybe I’ll see it or not.”

A lot of the guys in the film seem like lifers, but is the hobo dying out because of rails going out or is the lifestyle always gonna be around?
It’s definitely dying. There will always be people riding freights, one way or another, but what there isn’t so much of is the lifer, the professional who is able to make it a sustaining life. That’s true for a lot of reasons.

One, there’s just a lot more security. We live in a police state that’s not as bad as the Soviet Union, but we’re definitely losing civil liberties and certain freedoms of movement in public space. Sure, riding freight trains has always been trespassing, but the margins are definitely shrinking. Also, the economy. There’s not a lot of easy-to-get labor jobs. You need a social security card for everything.

But today the classic hoboes, somebody who travels for seasonal and temporary work, are Latin American illegals. That’s actually a glaring omission in my film, that they're not even alluded to. That’s why my film is not really a documentary. There are a lot of aspects of the culture that I never really get into. Migrant workers, its a great story that I just didn't get on film.

Did they not want to be identified in a film?
Probably no more or no less than regular tramps. But that omission is more about just the limits of film as a medium. An hour-long film doesn’t have that much carrying capacity. You can't put everything into 56 minutes. Even if you jam it pretty tight, it’s nothing like writing. I had such crazy ambitions for the film. It was going to have all these different historical sections: the Depression, the turn of the century, Jack London, Jack Kerouac, the wobblies, contemporary Mexican migrant workers. “Oh no. In one film? All that stuff and try to carry a storyline, too?”

So a lot of the 56 minutes is given over to nurturing the story through, and that meant I had to be less expository, “Here is the classic hobo in 1880.” I had done a lot of research and had crates full of file folders and tons of found footage, boxes and boxes of found footage. And then at one point, I said, “No way, it's just not going to fit into the film." There just wasn't time for all of the historical material. I probably should have made a feature, huh?

What about Bozo Texino – the man - grabbed you? A basic narrative to follow?
That basic narrative locomotion, that was there from the beginning. Even when it was a twelve-minute super-8 film, it was about seeing this image and getting bizarrely infatuated with it, it being the driver for both the narrative and the making of the film itself. Even as the film was spiraling out of control as a humanities documentary, I was still working with this narrative of looking for Bozo. Even when I had all these crazy tangential ideas that never panned out, I always had the same thread working the whole time. I hope that my next projects have some kind of guiding beacon like that, because I’m definitely not the kind of filmmaker that has a script and goes out and executes it.

You also did the installation THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN IN THE MOON (2002-3) along the way, too.
Yep, 2001, that was in the dark time when the film was on the rocks and not making any headway. I decided that I could make an installation out of it. Get my hands on the material and deal with the subject, have a good time and do something that was relatively cheap and easy to do. It turned out of be super fun and it ended up influencing the way I work, “Oh, this is fun, this’ll be a good way for me to work while I’m working on a film, I can make installations with the material along the way rather than get bogged down fundraising or not being able to do anything because I don’t have money or enough material yet.” And that was designed to be mobile and so I ended up touring the shit out of that on a show I did with Vanessa called the Lucky Bum Film Tour, that was 2002 and 2003...

That’s what the Sail Van is, mobile installation. It's the next project, which will hopefully turn into a feature, it’s based on peak oil and environmental collapse and survivalism, a screwed up future of squandered resources. I’ve shot and collected some footage and been doing some installations in that direction. I did one at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where I built Noah’s Ark out of an RV trailer. I built a wooden double-ended hull and projected videos through the windows of the trailer. One side was the interior, had some photography in there, and the other side was the exterior. That project morphed into the Sail Van, which is my Chevy van with sails on top and I project video onto the sails. This is the thing that I got the Creative Capital grant for and it’s where all my efforts are going to go in the next couple of years. Hopefully by next spring I’ll be touring with the van again. Vanessa and I did a short tour last year called Heart Attack Island. It was a prototype run of the Sail Van.
You should say something about touring, because you’re a professional.
I am now because I don’t have any other income. That’s the definition of a professional. I pushed away from the dock now.

In the beginning, was the idea of touring influenced by Craig and then realizing that you can do it?
Yeah, Craig has been on the circuit for years. Also the model of touring with a film owes a lot to the method of touring with a band. Working for the door, rather than for institutional guarantees.

It’s definitely getting easier, both as the touring network is getting a little more developed and people start to recognize it more. But it doesn’t really fit into the paper very easily, the weekly arts and entertainment paper. It doesn’t really fit into the film section; are they going to fit me in between Mel Gibson and some other epic garbage? The people who are into street culture aren’t going to be looking in that part of the paper and the people who are looking for Mel Gibson – WHO’S BOZO TEXINO? isn’t going to register with them.

You need a feature write-up. Pretty much. The Pick of the Week thing is good because those aren’t specific to discipline. The papers are divided up into such strict genres. Dance, theater, galleries...The world that I'm into doesn’t really fit into one of them. The critic who writes about music or art is more likely to have something to say about my films than the person who has the job reviewing dramatic Hollywood features. The audience who'll go to a temporary venue in a warehouse to see a touring film are not the same people who open the paper to the film section because they have a date on Friday night.

But you’ve had pretty good luck in cities. Even smaller cities seem to be treating you pretty well.
There’s definitely the small town nothing-to-do factor. Circus comes to town and, woo hoo! But even big cities have certain small town dynamics, because there’s all these scenes evolved around certain spaces and certain types of art. In Chicago, you can do five different shows at five different places and not have any overlap.

Is this the end of the interview?
Yes.
Do we need some kind of climax scene? Resolution? Feel-good ending? Just kiddin’. I will ask that you get my website in there: www.billdaniel.net

top and bottom pics of Bill Daniel by Plante.

The Vice Guide to Travel.

2007-01-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

If your vacations center around finding living dinosaurs in Africa, guns in Pakistan, or hunting mutant animals in Chernobyl , I have the guide for you, whackjob.

Vice is starting a series of DVDs of short docs (5-10 min each) with a theme to each collection. Vice is a magazine and website (viceland.com) devoted to a nice mix of gonzo journalism and funny rants that is able to say more in a paragraph of brutally honest writing than a newspaper could fit into a safe, libel-evasive feature story. Reporting with an opinion, I suppose. Like a friend in the mini-mart telling you about how trannies used to run the motel down the street, and how it was kinda cool.

Their guide to travel is not about real tourism but chasing down urban legends and internet rumors, mixing in some politics when called for. The Sons of Hunter S. Thompson present Frontline. They heard someone in Bulgaria will sell you a warhead no matter who you are, so they went and interviewed him. They heard about a dinosaur in the Congo, so they went there. They heard about leftover Aryans in Paraguay, so they sent a black guy there to find them. And more crazy places, plus extras.

While I was expecting more Jackass quality, THE VICE GUIDE TO TRAVEL is actually a lot more deep. Solid production quality and actual journalism, having fun discovering a new world and giving a face to simple headlines. Plenty of style to make you interested and also laugh. Earth is a fucking strange, scary place.

Each DVD comes in a probably-awesome 72-page full-color hardcover book. But they only sent me the DVD. wtf.

www.viceland.com/guidetotravel/

Werner Herzog's Docs and Shorts.

2007-01-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

Let me get the fanboy shit out first: This is easily one of the best box sets I will ever own. Finally a huge collection of the legendary director’s work, whose behind-the-scenes stories make any American director’s complaints about filming seem like a kid whining about recess. Since his first short film, the now minor Herakles (1962), Herzog has thrown himself to film philosophically and literally to making images, with a career filmography not of blockbusters and stars, but of compelling stories and outsiders as heroes.

Werner Herzog is one of the few filmmakers in history to make consistently great films across different formats – films from 10 minutes to over 2 hours, in both fiction and documentary. Maybe only fellow countryman Wim Wenders is close in scope, while Martin Scorsese has made a small handful of docs, and pure documentary filmmakers, like the innovative Errol Morris, have not had success with narrative features.

The box set has six discs with various languages and subtitles. What makes this truly significant is how hard these films have been to see outside of film festivals and the odd retrospective series. Even with the popularity of Herzog’s narrative features (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) only one in this box had a wide DVD release – the poetic landscape portrait of the Kuwaiti oil fires, Lessons of Darkness, previously found with a second disc of the rare Fata Morgana, while Wodaabe: Herdsman of the Sun has been long out of print on VHS and Land of Silence and Darkness only recently came out on DVD under the radar of the press. The rest are rare to impossible to find until now, with four shorts available on a disc from England, and the lucid doc about Herzog himself, I Am My Films, previously getting tossed around on a bootleg vhs made from a 16mm print somewhere in the world.

What is apparent in this collection is Herzog’s enduring knack of telling a unique, true story. Yes, you can go on Google and find an interesting subject no one has heard of. But a group of people who are both blind and deaf and still communicate with others? A woman who survived a plane crash then two weeks alone in a jungle? A tribe in the Sahara who consider themselves the world’s most beautiful people? A “documentary” on mirages? Herzog knows a good story.

Then examine the way certain subjects are handled by Herzog. This is his genius. A doc on auctioneers – as a new language. The story of a ski jumper shot in super-super-slow motion, with Herzog talking about him like he was saving the world from killer meteorites. And you believe he could.

Or the deceptively simple Lessons of Darkness. Sure the landscape shots of the Kuwaiti oil fires are stunning. But Herzog’s narration (available in both English and German) and his filming style breaks the situation doooooown. The landscape is described not as Earth but “a planet in our solar system.” The fireman putting out the fires are studied as madmen on the loose.

Or combine these two facets of the Werner with the short doc La Soufriere. Herzog heard about a volcano island about to explode. In the island’s only city, it was reported that a single man refused to leave. Herzog HAD to go to this island to find the man. He took two cameramen and went to the city, where even the snakes had deserted the town. He found both the man and a creepy city that existed only then, only there.

The set is not a complete collection of the man’s work. That would be too mammoth. But with many of his recent titles becoming available – The White Diamond is a great, already-neglected film – the Herzog shelf at the video store is getting closer to perfect.

Herzog himself would shy away from the hyperboly. In interviews he insists he is just a man telling stories and feels his audience shares the dreams he has. It’s just that Herzog is a lot better at illustrating those dreams than the rest of us.

Look - this review is obviously for people who are only slightly aware of Herzog, like they have seen only Grizzly Man. Anyone that knows of Herzog is already out the door: “Herzog box what? Oh fuck – I’m there.”

www.wernerherzog.com

Animal Charm's Golden Digest.

2007-01-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

DVD of the year (1984).

The Charm is two men: Rich Bott and Jim Fetterly. They find videos, usually the educational and instructional kind, occasionally the public access kind, often the incredible homemade music video kind, and reedit the footage into a new, organic short film…. er, video. What’s interesting about that? No matter how much the mash-up, you can still sense what the original video’s intention, what it’s sellin’. But the original is so ridiculous that it doesn’t deserve to exist anymore. The Charm’s remix, with jumps, loops and new soundtrack either tells you what the video really meant or is simply screaming back at the original, “You suck.” What’s interesting about that? It’s fucking hilarious.

You know what else? Their shorts are really smart. Not just jamming crap together, but ripping apart notions of selling, deconstructing videos made by companies for strictly its own employees, or championing home-grown entertainment. The forced-joy of owning a backyard full of sports opportunities (“Family Court”) is looped until we realize that suburbia may be the last vestige of Rome. A simple industrial about a company boss (“Mark Roth”) is completely re-understood with a thriller movie soundtrack. One of my favorites is the redux of Bill Murray’s Meatballs where all the shots of Murray and lead kid Chris Makepeace are taken out, as the remaining shots are treated with lovingly nostalgia (“Marbles”, the name of the dead frog in the film). It’s Thom Anderson’s Meatballs Plays Itself for you art fans.

And much, much more. The collection seems pretty comprehensive, from their classic “Stuffing” to Rich’s poignant vocals on “Moving Day.” The extras are great: the Charm’s previously unseen first video - “Sunshine Kitty,” a live video mix from a gig at the Aurora Picture Show (featuring “Wow”), and a video scrapbook of VCRs.

Just buy it and play it at work, dork.

www.othercinemadvd.com

Star Spangled to Death.

2007-01-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

THE (REPUBLICAN) ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.

Aza Jacobs sent me a copy of his father’s film STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH (1957-59, completed 2003-4) for me to review and it’s been staring me down ever since. Half because of day jobs taking time – half because this film is an epic in every way imaginable. Avant-garde, historical, political, allegorical, maniacal: six hours and forty-five minutes of obscure found educational and nature films mixed with 1950s street theater footage shot by the filmmaker and updated with anti-Bush thoughts and opinions from the past five years. That’s right, 50 years in the making.

Ken Jacobs is the man who created this monsterfilm.

The film is avant-garde: styles of editing and photography are mixed and matched, found footage sometimes plays out completely and other times it cuts back and forth with footage shot for the film. Soundtracks come and go between famous songs, narration, religious radio and political speeches. Long sequences of these sounds are over a black screen.

The street theater ranges from dicking around with garbage to amazing chiaroscuro portraits of people, buildings, movements and shadows. The main characters are The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (played by underground legend Jack Smith), who is random and wild, and Suffering (the ultimate lovable underdog Jerry Sims), who needs love and understanding in this world. Their street ‘performances’ are layered with various sounds from the found footage, African hunts from the first half of the last century, exotic dancers, and sickening rah-rah America speeches from Nixon and Reagan. Jacobs connects the fairy tales of Frankenstein and the Ugly Duckling with reality.

Text by Jacobs comes and goes, providing social and political commentary (“Forget ‘far-right idealogues’, they’re crooks,” or “Religions are bedtime stories gone amok…”), and occasionally goes by so fast its put into the subliminal realm – but on DVD you can pause and scan and read. This changes the viewing experience from the theater, as you are dissecting it in your own home at your own speed, enforcing the essay nature of the film. Which is: our country was based on brutality and is still sick.

Spangled is a healthy lesson in our country’s sordid history. There is various archival footage of blackface singers and racist cartoons. Reagan speaks of the best country in the world and on-screen text has Christ telling his followers to intermarry with his aggressors in order to overtake them. Jacobs grew up with McCarthyism and sees it in full force today. His comments and film parallels are almost always as humorous as they are shocking, fairy tale as vital opinion, a la Dr. Strangelove.

And while the text tells you what he thinks, Jacob doesn't confine the viewing experience to a traditional documentary way. Spangled doesn't use archival clips edited to make a point, rather entire short films within the film, such as the safari documentary and the entire Nixon “checkers” speech. The Smith and Sims characters sometimes seem totally insane, other times you see people hanging out, walking around and thinking in long takes. Themes repeat but this is not a one-note exercise. Every viewing is different for each audience member.

While this epic is frenzied, you can see the method and enjoy it. Ken Jacobs is known as a powerhouse in the avant film world with his various movies and lightshows, as well as his huge personality that rubs people in different ways – one festival programmer dubbed him the John McEnroe of the avant-garde. But it is this kind of ferocious nature we need from art. People need to be pissed off when they make films sometimes.

www.starspangledtodeath.com

PHIL SOLOMON

2006-12-17T21:32:00.000-08:00

After a ten-year absence, Phil Solomon returned to Los Angeles from Boulder, Colorado with two retrospective programs (one at REDCAT and one at the UCLA Archive), combining new and older works. Solomon has been making lushly beautiful and haunting films for over thirty years, and has exhibited his work in every major venue for experimental film throughout the US and Europe, including 2 Whitney Biennials and three Cineprobes at MoMA. He has been teaching filmmaking and aesthetics at the University of Colorado since 1991. His friend and colleague, Brakhage, with whom Solomon collaborated on four films, called him “the greatest filmmaker of his generation.”

Both LA shows were epic, with large audiences and a complete hush through the silent pieces. People somehow didn't even cough or move. Or maybe I was too transfixed by the imagery, a fluid mix of found and created footage exploring family, memory and general beauty.

CINEMAD: How did you get involved with making avant-garde films?

PHIL SOLOMON: When I first saw [avant-garde] film I had been so indoctrinated with Hollywood film syntax that I simply didn't have the map with which to find my way through to it. I didn’t know the rules of the game. I didn’t know how to consider the screen as a formal rectangle with two-dimensional spatial tensions, rather than as a window to a daydream. I didn’t have an informed understanding of what we might call, for lack of a better term, the “aesthetic” experience, as opposed to the semi-hypnotic trance state induced by the lull of complex identification cues that literally entrances us when we experience narrative film – and how different this was than the contemplative experience of looking at any painting or listening to music. It took me some time to realize that the condition of watching most narrative films was actually antithetical to experiencing the contemplation of form, which in my mind is the essence of artistic apperception. And it wasn't until I got out of school that I was able to start teaching myself something of the history of the arts, of which I had a rather superficial familiarity. I didn’t study the history and aesthetics of painting in college, or contemporary poetry, and I knew very little about classical music at that time.

So it all came together for me after college, in terms of eventually seeing myself in the context of making film art as an individual, and to envision myself in that historical trajectory of art-making, rather than only considering the Hollywood industrial model of making films. And truth be told, I no longer thought about making “avant-garde” films, or “radical cinema”, or “underground” cinema (which has now, ironically, come to be “ground-under”). I simply thought about making films along the same lines of the individual artisan tradition in the other kindred arts of painting, poetry, photography and music. Individual, rather than collaborative filmmaking. Economy of gesture – retaining only the essential images. An emphasis on poetic form, including visual rhymes, metaphor, ellipsis, and ambiguity – reading between the lines, so to speak, and therefore reading between elliptical juxtapositions of non-linear, non-narrative sequenced shots, and so on. I find the analogy of most narrative film as akin to popular literature to be a useful one. My films seem much closer in their temperament, ideas and tendencies to the form and content of certain - somewhat hermetic - poets like Emily Dickinson, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, and Jorie Graham. Or textural narrative painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder, Francis Bacon and Anselm Kiefer. Or the polyphonic re-imagined, and re-remembered aural American narratives of Charles Ives. Or the ambiguous, lush, and mysterious ambient landscapes in the organic electronic music of Brian Eno.

But to answer your question directly, I really became involved with this area of filmmaking because I discovered it in college quite by mistaken identity – and I encountered a variety of committed, passionate teachers there and studied at a time when there was a cultural openness to new forms “in the air”, an integral part of the intellectual climate of the day. There was such a thing at that time of a “liberal arts education” for its own sake, as a normal and legitimate part of a (fortunate) young person’s life-cycle, a time set aside for the development of the life of the mind and the spirit, and not just seeing college as a utilitarian job training/technical school – which is what it mostly has become. My students often feel like they simply cannot afford the luxury of time and money to “expand their consciousness” if it doesn’t involve a career track in some way.

They are now global competitors, living in a country completely and unashamedly controlled by a small, super-rich elite, who have run amuck with the world without even any pretense of “democratic” checks and balances, and all of the role models for young folks seem to be about making it, becoming famous, living out Warhol’s supreme prediction of the idea of fame and its transient nature. The entire notion of the development of the life of the mind, of the private, thoughtful, contemplative and self-aware individual – and the encouragement of the relaxed state one has to achieve, in my view, in order to even begin to receive an aesthetic experience - has given way to the worker bee mentality of the ever busy, ever connected, ever wired and jacked-in-from-morning-till-night electronic buzz seeker, complete with a round the clock, round the world false sense of (cyber) community and the false reassurance of an instant, ersatz intimacy in front of their screens or on their portable phones. Many students I see on campus can’t seem to stand to be alone with themselves in thought for even 10 seconds after class – they have to be immediately “in touch”, and get hooked up on their cell phones. Jabbering on – about anything, as long as they are not faced with the terror of being alone with their own thoughts. And the silent, hushed, communal aesthetics of a darkened movie theater has given way to the size and depth of an I-pod screen, and human expression is now reduced to the clipped telegram jargon of non-stop text messaging, which then carries over into the one-liner shopping mall aesthetics that I see in the plastic arts, etc. Everything now seems to have been reduced to the ceaseless chatter of disposable “small talk” in all of its various forms. Screaming, bellowing, small talk and disposable chatter coming at us from every possible portal. But I digress…

People think that if you are making this type of work you aren’t really making “movies” and have no idea what’s going on in Hollywood, and that’s not true.
No, in fact I came to film art because I loved many American narrative films, particularly from the so-called golden era (for me, the 40s-early 70s), and I think there is something in my work that very much references these films, which remain so vivid in my consciousness, my daydreams and – most unfortunately – my romantic ideals.

Again, I point to the difference between reading Stephen King or Grisham –“page-turners”, where you literally are not even aware of the words on the page as you mind-swim through the books. Its just the human lust for narrative, simply wanting to know what’s going to happen next – versus, say, reading Emily Dickinson, where you are hyper-aware of the form – the words, how they look, how they sound in one’s inner ear… the distance between the words, the formation of lines on the page and reading “between them”, the imaginary leaps and unpredictable collision quotient per capita. We are hyper-aware of both the form on the page as well as the residual meanings and resonance in lived experience beyond. Interestingly enough, my films in particular often exploit the rather abstract qualities of narrative film syntax, as it has come down to us from Porter and Griffith – particularly the elliptical assumptions we make in decoding the classic POV/insert shot, parallel editing and so forth. And, by the way, my films move through the gate at the same rate as the “movies”…neither of which really move at all…

Incidentally, you know that no one saw and cared for more Hollywood movies than did my dearly missed friend, Stan Brakhage. He was the most generous of moviegoers. They relaxed him. But he didn’t confuse them with art.

Psalm III: Night of the Meek (2002).

Before you screened the TWILIGHT PSALMS series you said they were influenced by the Twilight Zones you grew up with.
First of all, it was on reasonably late at night, Fridays, at 9:30 p.m. on the east coast, if memory serves. I remember it was on right after Perry Mason (I always get a bit of a chill hearing the Perry Mason theme because I know that something wicked this way comes…). My sister and I would often watch it together (as an older sister, her duty was to always try to terrify me). These were really frightening for us, starting right from the first notes of the unforgettable Maurice Constant theme - though a lot of them now seem somewhat thin or a bit goofy from a contemporary perspective. Rod Serling burned bright, fast and then out.

I came to realize that they were not so much about horror or fear, but about the strangeness of life, the coincident, twists of fate, karma…the Zone between reality and the imagination, which Thomas Pynchon really picked up on in Gravity’s Rainbow years later. They were psychodramas, which is at the very heart of much of avant-garde film history. And I find now that these shows were prescient moral tales with a resonant sense of right and wrong, some kind of cosmic comeuppance, cosmic balance at tale’s end. There was always a moral payoff at the tag, and Rod Serling gave us an abbreviated sermon as the camera tilts toward the sky, the heavens, where we are left to ponder our peculiar fate as self-aware mortals – time beings - on earth. When I was a kid, I was always drawn to fantasy and science fiction, to “alt.” worlds. My imagination was sparked by comic books, rock and roll, and television. I really was a child of television, perhaps really the first or second generation to be so hooked.

And many [Twilight Zone episodes] are about children. They weren’t about aliens and monsters, like say The Outer Limits, they were about real life…with a twist. I later came to see Serling as a serious writer. I studied his work in live television, including Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, and I was aware of his taught script for Frankenheimer’s SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964). He worked best, however, in short-form narrative, as opposed to his film scripts, or the hour-long episodes of the fourth season. And to top it all off, Serling hailed from Binghamton. That was his source, his fount, the Binghamton of another time, not the rather dark, cloudy, vacated and foreclosed place that its become, but the Binghamton of the town square and carousel in high summer – the Ivesian Binghamton of Serling’s Walking Distance. But that’s another story.

In regards to Binghamton, how did you find the school?
I was admitted into several private colleges but we really couldn't afford them. So I had to stay local – and that meant the SUNY system - and Binghamton advertised that they had a major in cinema major (no other NY State school had one at that time – though SUNY Purchase was just starting up their film program). Harpur (as it was known then) also had a strong pre-med program. My father had always dreamed that I would be a doctor – the typical Jewish-American paternal fantasy. He brought me home microscopes and books about the history of medicine, not so subtle hints of what he wanted me to do.

But I always loved the movies and I kind of daydreamed of being a “new Hollywood” film director. I made regular 8mm films with my friends in high school, and even some proto music video -like pieces, based on A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964) kind of non-sync energy and the music montage sequences that were starting to permeate everything. The film department sent me a form letter that emphasized the term “art cinema.” Well, at that time, 1971, we were right in the middle of the so-called American Film School Renaissance and the flowering of the directors from the live television era - the great run of American feature films from late 60s and early 70s. I used to bus into Manhattan from the suburbs to see “foreign” films. I knew some of the French new wave and Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, DeSica. I was fairly informed with the notion of “art cinema”, or so I thought. I was actually very angry when Ken Jacobs started the first class by showing Tony Conrad’s THE FLICKER (1965).

That’s the first thing you saw?
Yes.

That must be to weed people out…
To some extent. This was a general Intro to Film class with about 200 people in the lecture hall. But it was also my introduction to Ken Jacobs – he was intense, serious, sometimes outrageous, very confrontational - but always challenging and engaging in his approach to teaching. I was perplexed, but mostly frustrated and suspicious. As I said, I simply had no context. I didn't really understand modern art at all, had no conception of formalism and abstraction, so it took me a while – I needed to understand the whole complex notion of the idea of modernism in general. I remember publicly voicing my annoyance about two weeks in: “When are we going to see major motion pictures in this class?” I wanted my movies.

For whatever reason Ken, who was notorious for not suffering fools gladly – well, I think he understood where I was coming from and was rather gentle and reassuring with his answer, pleading for patience. For this I’m most grateful, because I hung in there – and he remains one my dearest friends and most important influences to this day - and in some ways, he will always be my teacher, the source of all of it, the big bang for me. A great, great artist, and my life was completely changed in encountering him. It took me about a year and a half to really warm up to [avant film.]

I had a breakthrough with - of all things – Stan Brakhage’s most didactic work. It was a film called BLUE MOSES (1962). It’s a polemical film, a reflexive narrative comedy about the absurdity of narrative film syntax and illusion-based cinema. There’s an actor (Robert Benson) talking about how ridiculous this all is. There’s a cameraman behind every scene, etc. It’s very funny and an odd bird in Stan’s oeuvre and young people seem to always be terribly excited by their first encounter with ideas of reflexivity. I still find this to be true. I would characterize BLUE MOSES as a “deconstructive” comedy. It was didactic enough, entertaining enough, and obvious enough to penetrate my rather naïve framework. I remember going up to Ken after class, as I was in the throes of my revelation, and saying something incredulous like, “You think someone could really learn new ways of seeing and understanding from watching these films repeatedly?” Ken said, with one eyebrow raised, “Well, what do you think I’m doing here??”

Remains to be Seen (1989).

Also, at that time, the noted writer and scholar of film, Fred Camper (check out his utterly thorough and authoritative website on Brakhage and others sometime - www.fredcamper.com) was visiting the school. He put ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1959) up on the analytic projector [with which you can control the speed and go frame by frame without burning film] and really analyzed it, broke it down shot by shot. That really opened the door wide open for me. Especially to the formal ideas that I simply wasn’t picking up on, like cutting on shape-rhymes. I was presented with the simple but profound notion that juxtaposing one similar shape next another, in and of itself, could be a meaningful and articulate, poetic gesture. In other words, we see how the circle of light reflecting off of a bowl cuts to the moon, in relatively the same part of the frame, containing the same size, shape and diameter, etc. A formal gesture, but also a resonant idea. That was really important to me. In fact, if you look at my work you can see a lot of that going on, sometimes barely perceptible, but shape analogies are an integral part of my editing logic in almost every film. But I needed to have someone first point to it, legitimize it, and prove it to me like a lawyer. Using these analytic tools, my teachers gave me a primer for understanding formal film aesthetics and for learning how to rethink my assumptions about cinematic language. I could now consider the frame with a different set of glasses.

Studying with Peter Kubelka further reinforced many of these ideas within a highly detailed formal presentation over the course of a semester looking at his work, with an emphasis on sound/sync relationships, right down to the frame level, which is really where my work resides. So in my classes, I don't just talk abstractly about aesthetics. I’ll often analyze the films, shot by shot, or frame by frame, and reveal the deep formal structures not immediately apparent on just one viewing. By demonstrating the aesthetic coherence and penetrating the deep structures and logic of the work, I try to legitimize the richness and value of these films for my students. Shifting from professor to lawyer and back again. Then they start to get it. But frankly most leave school and never make or go to see these kinds of films again. They, well…they go to work.

Are the classes you teach theory based or more production, how to make a film?
I do both - one each per semester. I think I’m rather privileged in that respect because I only have a Masters degree. But I’ve always taught critical studies classes, ever since those years teaching night school at Mass College of Art throughout the 80s after getting my MFA there. At Harvard, I was a teaching assistant and they gave me a Distinction in Teaching Award, even though I didn't actually go to Harvard – I was the projectionist.

When I applied to Boulder, to be able to teach critical studies courses was one of the main features that I was attracted to. Stan had set that precedent here, as artist-teacher of critical studies and theory- indeed, he never taught production, didn’t believe in it (for himself). It was a newly formed degree program at the time I arrived in 1991. There had been a non-degree program here for years, an offshoot of the English department. So I kind of snuck in with both camps, critical studies and production (where I now just teach the advanced classes) – but I probably wouldn’t be able to do this here if I was hired today. Critical studies teaching now strictly requires a PhD, at least in our program.

I teach very much like my teachers did, highly influenced by the charisma and vitality of Ken Jacobs – I teach very eclectic, interesting critical studies courses that are quite rigorous, but perhaps are not as formally academic as those of my colleagues. I don’t have to publish my writings, though I have done some work in that area and hope to do more. In fact, I am slowly starting a book about Brakhage and his Sunday salons. But I teach, when I’m at my best, primarily from what I would characterize as a kind of prepared spontaneity, and I have curricular freedom, a generous budget and an excellent film library to work with here.

We still show film on film, as much as possible. We actually have movie projectors in a film program, can you believe it?

In terms of teaching production, I am always inspired by the example of Saul Levine. Saul Levine was one of my teachers midway through college and later at grad school. My very first production teacher. A brilliant 8mm/super-8 sound filmmaker, now making digital videos. Saul has a world view informed by his politically charged disposition, and his egalitarian, open-minded approach to teaching production, his lack of any pretense in his style, his range of hip smarts, and his sincere passion for encouraging creativity and personal expression were all very exciting to so many young filmmakers over the years. The foundation of my aesthetic was truly formed at Binghamton. And refined afterwards – matured by my own studies and filmmaking apart from schools. I took off between college and grad school for three years. And made some films that form the foundation of my work.

How do you like your early films now?
My early films? (laughs) There’s some that I’ve destroyed or don’t distribute – well that’s probably too strong, as I actually I almost never destroy or discard anything I’ve done. A terrible packrat, awaiting, like all of us, for some imagined graduate student of my dreams to pick through and preserve for posterity all of my “stuff”. I would say that my student films were somewhat naïve, romantic, and rather imitative. But something of the essence of what I’ve always been doing ever since is in there. Those very first films were clearly simplistic Brakhage imitations. What my friend, the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, refers to as “Ye Olde Avant-Garde Girlfriend by the Window” films, in the grand tradition of every budding film artist finding his own Jane Brakhage in the viewfinder…

I do think that students naturally tend to go through imitative stages. I used to have this wacky theory about art and evolution (though I really don’t believe in the evolution in the arts in the same way – can we make the case that today’s composers more highly “evolved” than Bach, for example?). In biology, there’s a notion called ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Which roughly means that the development of the zygote mimics the evolution of the species as it continues to develop. The notion that the development of individuals is a progression through adult ancestral form. We go through our fish stage, etc. Evolution is “mimicked” in our own individual development. Similarly, budding filmmakers might go through their Lumiere period (turning the camera on, shooting what’s in front of you, home movies, etc.), their Meliés surrealist/magic tricks stage, then their Deren-esque psychodramatic stage, then perhaps their lyrical/metaphorical Brakhage stage, and so forth…These patterns have obviously changed and accelerated with changing technologies and aesthetics, particularly with the advent of music videos.

Clepsydra (1992).

For me, psychodrama was initially the most compelling form for the angst-ridden, hormonal spewing disposition of troubled youth. The oneiric, primal cinema of the tortured young man or woman…slow motion/black and white/murky images of running naked through graveyards and the hallways of the school at night, and so on (laughs). Then there were all of these soft focus domestic observational films, kind of imitating Brakhage’s small gauge SONGS series. P. Adams Sitney articulates this shift quite in student filmmaking accurately in the BRAKHAGE (1998) documentary by Jim Shedden that we both appear in. So I learned the rules like most do, by first imitating what I saw, trying to make films that were like those that were already considered by others to be “legitimate”.

Then I really started out on my own when I took a Bolex out into the night and found this button that no one had shown me how to use. The T/I time exposure button. I started to do these time exposures quite accidentally, not quite knowing what I was doing. I got back this roll of film shot at night, with about a second of footage that looked like it was the middle of the afternoon. That just floored me. It opened up new possibilities for experimentation and then expression. That’s the way my work often evolves. I’ll bump into a technique and then find a way to use the technique expressively, essentially.

One of the problems that I am seeing now with many filmmakers is a kind of fetishization of technique for technique’s sake. Like using hand processing just to give their films an avant-aura, an anti-digital, funky, handmade, lo-fi patina. Easy-baked “artful” meaningless facades. They must have by now a broken shutter program for video (laughs). I’ve heard they have 35mm cameras that have switches to give it that broken shutter look, where all highlights vertically streak.

I saw an outrageous little piece recently that was tacked on as the tail credits of a very mediocre film called THE JACKET (2005). Check out the ending some time. I think the director copped to it and said it was an ‘homage” to Brakhage. But it’s virtually a direct, un-credited rip of MOTHLIGHT (1963).

By the way, I had an opportunity to work on a Hollywood film myself. Through the auspices of my friend, the filmmaker Lew Klahr, who made music videos with some of these folks who work in the business. It was actually a very wonderful experience. The director of the project, Mark Pellington, is very familiar with Lew’s work and some other avant-garde films and made some highly respected music videos as well as personal films. He’s a very smart guy, a good guy. He was making THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002) and wanted to do something different from the usual horror/sci-fi fare. He invited me to show WALKING DISTANCE (1999) to his technical and pre-production crew at Paramount, so I flew out to LA and showed my work in one of those famous preview rooms on the lot. Mark was very interested in the unusual techniques and the crew was respectful, curious and intellectual in their approach to me and the work - which really surprised me. Smart, hard-working folks, mostly from academic backgrounds.

What type of crew members?
The preproduction crew, the special effects people, the cinematographer, and the overall design people. Mark was really into a fully aesthetic idea of pre-production and incredibly meticulous and comprehensive preparation. But as we proceeded in the discussions and analysis of the script, he began, in his excitement to do something fresh, to think of using me as a kind of ‘alt. special effect”. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t work like that. My magic didn't quite work that way. My techniques aren’t digital or programmable. The chemical treatments I do are based on too many serendipitous things. Like the amount of black or contrast in a shot, and so on.

What I wanted to do for them was a self-contained, creative credit sequence. I essentially had a misguided dream of attaching a 3-minute avant-garde film to a feature as a fully realized opening credit sequence, a la Saul Bass or Maurice Binder. That's what I pitched, a little film abstractly linking moths and disasters (the core theme of the film) but they weren’t really interested in that idea (laughs).

In post, Mark’s budget became tighter and tighter and hence the storytelling had to commence immediately, so we dropped the whole idea of a title sequence. But, all told, it was certainly a relatively benign experience, in terms of all of the Hollywood horror stories you hear about. Stan congratulated me on getting out alive with my filmmaking soul intact. He was worried about me, himself having walked out on an opportunity of working with Hitchcock when he was a young man.

I actually learned quite a bit during those few days on the Paramount lot that was very useful in my teaching about the industry, and they were all very kind to me. And I made a little money for my own work to continue. Even the producer, who was acting just like the hard-nosed cliché of the suit (“we don’t pay for tests”), turned out to be a decent guy, a very intelligent man who knew a great deal about art, studied at Brown. What I learned was that these people in the industry don’t really set out to make these bad films that we all loathe when they start out. They were - all - deeply into this project, with real enthusiasm and lots of collaborative ideas. No industry jaded cynicism apparent, at least not yet. Money wasn’t mentioned at these meetings – they were all being paid very well, but they were in it for the action, the creative buzz.

But eventually the money pressures came down and the suits get involved. The creative people are dead serious and full of excited comradeship – at least in pre-production, before the compromises are made, day-by-day, and the thing is eaten alive - and they truly work their asses off. I was exhausted after just two days of pre-production. My students have no idea how hard these people actually work for their good wages, and how different the day to day business is from the seamless pleasures and fantasies we glean from the finished piece. So I gained a little insight into that world, and was definitely reassured that I wasn’t cut out for it, both temperamentally and physically.

Psalm III: Night of the Meek (2002).

Is there at some point that you became comfortable with rhythm and then you started to explore your own type of narrative?
I made a film, for example, called NIGHT LIGHT in 1975. Which was really kicked off from my little time exposure experiment. NIGHT LIGHT was a very simple thing - just clouds going by the moon, things on the street. It's a rather unformed but beautiful film. Really like a sketch. That was a pre-curser to my film NOCTURNE (1980), which took several years to make. There I really found the core of my aesthetic.

I experimented with the idea of using a certain amount of found footage material integrated with my own original, which seemed to broaden the scope of my own material. In lieu of actors, found footage gave me allegorical images to work with that could speak to what I thought were larger concerns than just a formal assembly of my technical experiments. I’m very taken with that idea, to using found footage as something that is archeologically “true”. I’m drawn, for example, to the later Bruce Conner films as my template, including TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (1976) and VALSE TRISTE (1977), where he uses it sincerely, nostalgically, poetically, rather than A MOVIE (1958) or REPORT (1963-67), which I find brilliant, but bitterly ironic, and which is the common mode of almost everything these days, and altogether too easy now. It’s much harder to be – sincere - without falling into sentimentality. The ironic mode has really dominated found footage filmmaking. Taken to its end game perhaps by Craig Baldwin, whom I have great respect for.

But now you have meta-ironies piling atop each other, ad-infinitum. Enough. The most difficult challenge for young artists today is to achieve any kind of earned sincerity or a true sense of the authentic in this horribly cynical, maddening time of multi-layered facades, remakes, and ever present duplicity on a global scale. And what do we call the Grand Canyon when kids refer to their lunch as “awesome”?

Have you found things that you are comfortable using over and over again? Or does every film contain lessons being learned?
It’s amusing to me that in the field of painting you can have your “blue period”, you can do repeated motifs over a period of time and that’s even expected. But even in the marginal world of avant-garde film there is a different attitude toward technique, especially if you acquire some degree of mastery. There is unspoken sense of: “What else can you show us?” “Can you top this?” Etc. I would like to be able to explore certain techniques over the course of several films.

Avant-garde filmmaking, what little there is left of it, seems to now revolve around its yearly cycle for programmers and festivals. And I too play that game with myself sometimes. But I start to worry when I see people making films specifically tailored for the film festival circuit. I’ve done pretty well and have little to complain about, but there is always the possibility of the implied “Hmm well we’ve seen this before…” or “This is not quite as good your last one.” There is this unacknowledged expectation of endless artistic progress (laughs). That’s why I really appreciate artists like Ken Jacobs, who go deep into what they are doing, and mine those caves for every nugget, finding new treasures by using the same tools with imaginative variations. And there are endless variations to be mined.

But to answer your questions, yes, I have re-used certain shots, and certainly techniques and tropes again and again. Water, in all of its various forms, for example, seems to appear in every one of my films. That old adage about essentially making one big film may be especially true for me.

Are you referring to Ken Jacobs’ Magic Lantern works?
Yes. And the Nervous System. And now the digital realizations of these live performance pieces into finished, definitive, edited works. I’m still exploring variations on things I’ve been working on for years. For example, this so-called “stressing” of the image. I’m still interested in that, though seeing so many other people indulging in this area rather superficially - entire generations of students who have seen my work and the work of several others – and it makes me now somewhat self-conscious of the potential clichéd use of certain techniques.

Innocence and Despair (2002).

I find that many of these people end up trying to make an effect, going for the “wow factor”, rather using the stuff of film towards a deeper expression. Well, part of me now just wants to play it straight. Part of me just wants to shoot the side of a barn, in color, on a tripod, for an hour. You know? (laughs) But I don’t feel that way very often. Again, this field is so marginal, that you have to remind yourself that very few people really care what you do at all. And your audience is comprised of mostly other makers. In many ways, perhaps it's the “survival of the sincerest” (for filmmakers that is - the low cost and accessibility of digital has added a different set of complex motivations).

There is no other reason to make films at this point. You’ve got to be nuts. I’ve been teaching for 30 years or so. And very few sustained film artists have come out of all those years of teaching this. Same is true for Ken. But I notice now, on You Tube and MySpace that everyone is an artist and everyone is – or they assume they are – interesting to everyone else. Hmm. As James Joyce predicted HERE COMES EVERYBODY. And Warhol might add AT LEAST FOR THEIR 15 MINUTES (what we might now call their “quick time”).

Well, wish I had more time to check everyone out in the worldwide open screening, the Everybody Film Festival (where they now only project on video, by the way). Sorry, I’m out. Carry on, boys and girls. I’m going fishing.

On the surface it appears the University of Colorado has been very supportive of yourself and Stan Brakhage.
Yes. My work wouldn’t exist without all the grants that I’ve received from my school, and the support and academic freedom that my dept. has given me. It’s actually been a very good gig here over the years. And in terms of providing, for the most part, a “safe house” for Stan Brakhage, Film Studies has a right to be proud.

Virgil Grillo founded the department, along with fellow English professors who loved and wrote about film. Virgil didn’t really get this kind of cinema in his heart of hearts, but he respected it. And he managed to get Stan Brakhage a job after years of trying (while Stan was commuting from the mountains to Chicago), and he knew and respected what Stan had accomplished and particularly how he was considered in the world. And the University eventually made him a Distinguished Professor, one of the very few in the arts at CU.

Do my colleagues show up at every avant-garde program? No. But they do show some of it in their various film classes. Then again, I certainly don’t go to see every film that aligns with their interests and specialties. However, we now have a new chair – Dan Boord, who is very smart, incredibly wide-ranging in his taste in the arts, an established video maker, and really pro-active in taking the program into the future. We just started a graduate program and are defining the terms of that degree as one of “fine art” motion picture making- that is, personal, poetic moving picture visual thinking, as Stan used to say. So we are not confused in our mission or too eclectic in what we can offer at the graduate level, and that we strongly affirm to all those interested that we are not USC or UCLA. We don’t have the means to be that anyway. Here, we will carry on the enormous legacy of Stan Brakhage, who lived and worked and taught among us. It is his light that we hope will illuminate the future of our department in terms of media production at the graduate level.

I have also been heading up a project tentatively called The Brakhage Center. The University library now has the complete film works of Brakhage and about 80 boxes of his papers. We’d like to make the space in our new building (called ATLAS - http://www.colorado.edu/ATLAS/home.html) into a major archive and scholarship resource center for the study of poetic film. Not only for Stan’s work, but eventually for experimental film and media in general. Kind of an Anthology [Film Archives] West. We’ll have a beautiful theater, opening this year (which I helped to design) with state of the art 16mm, 35m film and HD video projection. We now have an annual symposium in Stan’s name that we will hold every year (check the Film Studies website at http://www.colorado.edu/FilmStudies) and I hope that this will eventually become an international event – a kind of limited version of the Flaherty, over a long weekend, with an distinct emphasis on poetics and aesthetics, rather than politics. The TIE Film Festival (www.experimentalcinema.com/) will take place at CU in the fall of 06. We’re keeping the legacy going.

It’s perfect for the Wild West.
Although I must say that I’m saddened by the fact that the last people who ever had the great privilege to have taken a class with Stan Brakhage have now graduated. Every year now, it seems, a new generational shift shows up. I’m convinced that last year I taught the most intense, rigorous and sophisticated class on Brakhage ever offered (the syllabus can be found on Fred camper’s website here: http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Solomon1.html).

I don’t think that I could get away with the singular intensity and the sense of necessity of that kind of class commitment now. This generation, this past year’s crop of students was different than last years. It seems, at least in my thoughts right now, that a moment has passed, and something else is happening for these kids. But you know, over the years, the percentage of people who are really interested in this kind of film has always been about the same. It’s never really grown, to all of our befuddlement, even with all the marvelous work and great teaching that has gone on in the last 30 years.

The recent LA show was very refreshing for me because it was a partly a new audience for me. An excellent audience, some of the very best Q and A I’ve ever had. The films had the room. It was so encouraging to me, topped off with a wonderful New York Times review (November 18, 2005 - http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw30/1872.html) by Los Angeles resident Manohla Dargis, who wrote so perceptively on the work and the evening at REDCAT. She has always been such an insightful and passionate reader of my films when she wrote for the Village Voice back in the late 80s. I was so happy to have come full circle and to see her again in LA, some fifteen years later, and still have retained her respect for the older work and sparked her appreciation of the new work. It reaffirmed everything I’ve done, and encouraged me to keep going. At least a little while longer…

Psalm II: Walking Distance (1999).

Sound vs. silent – at what point in making a film do you know when it will have sound or not?
Depends. Usually, as I go along, at some point in the editing process, I’ll just hear…the silence. Or I’ll start to imagine the sound – in other words, I will begin to feel the absence of sound as a negative space, a place that needs to be attended to and realized. There was one film in particular, CLEPSYDRA (1992), which I was sure was going to be a sound film, but I tried it and it simply didn't work. I showed it silently to Stan and Marilyn, and they said, yes, it was done. Stan convinced me of its silent integrity, but he has always had the courage to remain silent. There are so many particularities of the surface in that film and my initial track had something fairly ambient, like an ethereal haunted house, which got the mood right and the feelings I wanted to convey were made more evident - but I think it did override the particularities of texture and the subtlety of the rhythms. And I think it’s actually more terrifying as a silent film.

And, as it turned out, its one of my least popular films. That's a mystery to me, but I’ve always wondered if it’s partly because of the absence of sound.

How do you know it’s not popular?
It’s almost never rented. No one ever talks about it in the conversations at or after the screenings. I myself had to finally write an article about it! I published an article analyzing it, shot by shot, in an issue Millennium Film Journal (issue 35/36). It’s an extrapolation of an article someone asked me to write for a European journal meditating on the idea of a single frame. The article, without the 26 photos that accompanied the analysis, can be found here: mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ35/SolomonFrame.html

That's a great article, talking about when you see a still for a film it's a photo taken on the set, it is never a frame from the actual film. It's a staged representation of the film, not the movie itself.
The other side of that is that it might be impossible to make an art of the freeze framed still that's part of a movie continuum.

Yet for experimental film, isn’t it almost always an actual still of the film printed on a poster or in an ad or book?
Well, that’s right, but rarely do those stills carry the full aesthetic integrity of a formal photograph for me. With hand-painted/direct cinema films, you probably stand a better chance, and many of Stan’s frames are indeed gorgeous and fully realized unto themselves. I posited in that article that static frames culled from a film always exist in a “state of potentia”. Whereas still photography deals with the aesthetics of the considered frozen moment, etc. Forms in stasis versus forms becoming…

That article shows the important relationship between filmmakers and the lab. Which may be lost now to video.
In the old days, labs used to joke about, purposely undermine, and disparage filmmakers. Even Western Cine used to make fun of Stan when he first started. He learned how in order to get them to do what he wanted – like print glued moth wings – he learned how to play the fool. And eventually that lab came to be inseparable from his artistic identity. A completely unique lifelong personal relationship between a filmmaker and a lab – which existed in synchronicity for exactly fifty years (John Newell died just a few months before Stan).

Western Cine – now The Cinemalab – has been trying once again to appeal to individual filmmakers. I recommend them. They are also getting a lot of film industry and archival work, including nitrate preservation. So they have really becoming specialists in order to survive, and they are good at what they do. And they’re here, a real boon for us. Also Forde Lab in Seattle is a terrific lab. But one by one, these labs are fading away. I just learned that Kodachrome 16mm, my stock for virtually my entire career, has been discontinued. So I will either have to adapt somehow or turn to other media. The end of 16mm filmmaking, in many ways, is finally here.

I do all my own timing in the optical printer, so I’ve always had fairly straightforward printing done in the lab. Unlike my friend Nathaniel Dorsky who spends thousands of dollars correcting .5 magenta here, etc…. Now there’s a lost art. His work is really about the actual sensual experience of the print. Nick’s films often live or die by the color temperature of the projector bulb…

Many avant filmmakers refuse to release their work on DVD, or don’t want it seen on a small television. Are you in that camp?
I’m experimenting with it. I do make DVDs for press and festival purposes. But, like most of the people who state this position, my work simply doesn't really translate very well to that medium, particularly in terms of the complexities and the particularities of texture in the films, the quality of reflected light in the room, and the subtleties of color. It just kind slides off your eyes on video, particularly when you are staring into the aquarium tank of a TV set. Flat screens are better, and HD will be better still. Projection is getting much better. The sound is fantastic, and I’m very interested in exploring surround sound in my work.

HD does hold a lot of promise, but I’m still going to make films or originate on film as a long as I can. I simply have never felt the video aesthetic below my neck – it’s hard for me to grab hold of the image and breathe the air. It seems much more conceptual and “heady” in feel to me. Much closer to the sense of a recording – even to audiotape - than an emblazoned silvered stencil. The texture of film, the shutter, the true black, the reflected light, the intermittency all swing somehow with my deepest impulses. Not just nostalgia, but in terms of my physiology and perception.

Filmmaker James Benning doesn’t like the philosophy of watching stuff at home. Getting up, phone rings, a million distractions.
As Stan used to note, how can you be a colorist when every TV set is tuned differently (which is usually more radical than color temperature differences between film projectors)? If I’m going to make works for HD in the near future or for the internet, which I’m thinking of doing, I think I will need to make original works specifically for that medium. Keep my films on film as long as possible. Pip Chodorov (see Flicker/Frameworks at http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/index.html and Re:voir video editions http://www.re-voir.com/) just asked me to participate in a new (Blue Ray) DVD box set of selected avant-garde films. I’ll try that, and see how it comes out and how it feels.

When a film has obviously reached its shelf life of distribution, part of me is curious now to send out notes in a bottle to the world at large, to make the work more accessible, despite the loss of “aura” of film projection. In fact, I just got an email from a kid in Michigan whose teacher showed an academic DVD that I’m on from the University Film Journal and he said that seeing my film changed his life. Can’t argue with that kind of access and chance encounters.

I’m sad for the loss of 16mm projection around the world and at so-called “film” festivals. They aren’t making portable projectors anymore at all. What they’ve done at REDCAT is like building a glorious new church for cinema. Magnificent projection. Hallelujah! Amen! I heard things in my soundtracks that I hadn’t heard before on the optical track – things I’d forgotten that I had put in. And the reflected light was so strong, so dynamic. Glorious.

Have you found more acceptance from the art world than the film world?
The art world…. (long pause). Well I’m about to flirt with it myself in a major way, with a very ambitious installation commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC come September (www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/advance_exhib_sched.htm). Certainly video makers and particularly installation artists are taken much more seriously by the art world. Gallery representation seems to provide the keys to the door and there is real money to be made that could sustain an artist, which filmmakers have never been able to do without a “day job”. So many filmmakers are learning to go the route of limited editions in order to generate a unique aura (in the Walter Benjamin sense) from the immaterial conditions of motion picture film presentation. Installations now give it a (saleable) sense of “thing-ness”.

The avant-garde briefly had its flirtation with the art world back in the 60’s when Artforum had TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON (1969) on the cover – articles on Stan and Eisenstein, on Michael Snow and Structuralism. This was published in about in 1970 I think. That was the last time, it seems to me, that avant-garde film proper was embraced by the art world (with notable exceptions, like Warhol and Snow and so-called “artist films” like Richard Serra’s work or more recently, Matthew Barney).

Then video art had gallery cache. Video in the box or installed in a room looked more like an art object than vaporous film did. There is simply no object value [in film]. Video at least looked like it had object value. There is some sense that this is changing, though it is more about installation than film rentals and screenings. The kind of intense communal receptivity and the sustained commitment of a “captured audience” in the dark seems now to be utterly passé.

It's the same misconception at work when Brakhage is thought of as a filmmaker and not as a painter.
Well he was a filmmaker who painted on film. But he talked about that a lot. He was very proud of the evolution of his painting over the years. Thousands upon thousands of individually painted frames, a monumental career in painting. And why didn’t painters accept or engage in what he was doing? Ironically, he knew more about and cared for the work of painters than anyone else I ever knew. This has always been a real puzzle for me, in terms of the reception of film from the other arts, by the way. Every filmmaker I know has books of poetry, a vast record collection, photo books… But I almost never see other artists from other disciplines really interested in avant-garde film. “They want their movies”, as Stan used to say.

I don’t know - when you go to poetry readings, I suppose its mostly other poets there. Same situation. Avant-garde music does have some popular crossover audience, viz. John Zorn. Distribution and availability is the key there. The biggest disappointment for me is that when I show my work, especially in New York, its mostly other filmmakers in attendance. And they have their own baggage, just like I do when I attend their shows. So I often get fairly uninteresting technique-oriented questions at those shows. I do love showing my work to non-filmmakers. Especially those informed by the other arts. A fresh perspective and un-jaded takes. We need to reach a more diverse group, and that’s been one of my sustaining motivations I’ve been in teaching all these years.

I confess that I’m continually perplexed by the utter lack of current scholarship on avant-garde film (save for Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema series - I’m included in the just published last volume, number 5). P. Adams Sitney did groundbreaking work in this area, and is still writing about and engaged with film, but very few have followed in his wake. There is an entire history of film that’s simply been, for the most part, left out of academic publishing outside of small journals and magazines - the last thirty years or so of some great, great work. Indeed, Stan believed that there was more generally fine work being done these days, by more people, than in the heyday of the sixties.

Honestly, I don’t get it – why all this intellectual power in film criticism is still so utterly devoted to American popular film. It’s all so fucking obvious most of the time. Most American popular narrative films simply don’t stand the test of time and are not worthy of deeper analysis or serious thinking (I know this from being a projectionist for many years – most simply do not bear any repeated screenings). I know they are writing about it mostly for careerist/academic pressure reasons. Because someone will actually publish it in a certified academic press and they can add it to their resume. Or because its easier and probably more fun. More people will read them.

You want to talk about film theory in schools? Good ol’ WAVELENGTH (1967) is chock-full of (still) interesting ideas – it sits at the very core of the concept of narrative, of time and space. And all of these professors are talking about the use of the color red in fucking MARNIE (1964)? Or whatever it is. Why aren’t film theorists more interested in this kind of work? They think that it’s all so hermetic and marginal.

Or they simply don’t get it and haven’t bothered to go out of their way to see it. Martin Arnold’s films present fascinating theoretical issues in terms of both narrative and ideas about the medium. The work of Arthur Lipsett could take up a lifetime of study, but he is virtually ignored. Janie Geiser, Lew Klahr, Matthias Mueller, Peter Tcherkassky, Eve Heller, Luther Price, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Nathaniel Dorsky, Mark Lapore, Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, Vincent Grenier, Peggy Ahwesh, Nick Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Nina Fonoroff, Jennifer Reeves, David Gatten, on and on, incredibly fertile grounds for thinking about every aspect and every genre of cinematic thinking.

But most academics still write about the likes of Hitchcock, as if there something else new to say. There’s certainly no payoff for writing about this kind of work, which has such a limited market, so there ends up being a kind of self-fulfilling cycle of marginality. The fact remains that very few people have seen this kind of work, and that severely limits your potential readership.

[Avant] work is open and alive. Resistant to this kind of limited thinking. It’s very, very challenging to talk about. How do you talk about the ineffable? It’s going to, I believe, require a kind of creative, poetic writing, not dry academic writing. Great living criticism has been invaluable to me in understanding the other arts. Helen Vendler’s work on poets, Harold Bloom, John Berger, Leonard B. Meyer or Charles Rosen or Leonard Bernstein’s books on music, Sontag and Barthes on photography, on and on, the dozens of great art catalogues in my collection – invaluable teachers, my helpful guides into the infinite complexities of the other arts. And we still end up in the academic film world with more psycho-babbling nonsense on Hitchcock’s simplistic and perfectly transparent films (well, VERTIGO (1958) is another story….)

I dream of a new kind of criticism that approaches film as a poet would. More lyrical, more emotionally resonant responses to the work. There have been two such examples of this on my own work from Lee Ann Brown in The Chicago Review and Dana Anderson in the Millennium Film Journal. Or let’s call for even more formal, thoroughly analytical writings. I would love to see some experimental/poetic films broken down shot-by shot, just like they do with CITIZEN KANE (1941), and so on.

As a teacher I would love to see that and have that made available for students as study guides. A shot by shot breakdown and analysis, say, of ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1959). David Bordwell does a fine job on Conner’s A MOVIE in his Introduction to Film Art book, in my opinion, that might serve as a good example. James Peterson is quite detailed in his book Images of Chaos, Dreams of Order as well.

I’m happy to hear that a filmmaker a generation before me is not put off by a new technology (ProTools) while still embracing the original tools (film).
I’m certainly not a Luddite. I was onto ProTools very early, starting in the late 80s when it was called Sound Tools. 2 tracks for like $1,500.00. I now have a substantial HD home studio with all the attendant software for digital imaging and sound. I had one of the first digital synthesizers, a Yamaha DX-9 and the first commercially available (post-Fairlight) samplers. I’ve always been interested in electronic music and sound designing and recording. I know you get some resistance from filmmakers because technology is changing and the medium is now, finally, after years of town crying in the squares, really disappearing underneath our feet.

I have tried to keep up with some contemporary pop music and pop culture, but I’m just not interested in hip-hop music. My students have tried to break me down on this. They hear what I’ve played them in class, like Steve Reich’s early tape loop pieces, and they find affinities with the plasticity of sampling in hip-hop and electronica. But the loss of the uncanny and unforgettable (vertical) melody in American culture is as telling as the loss of film. A sign of the times. They also have tried to convince me about the import of The Simpsons, which I know is smart (I prefer the quick referential wit of Family Guy), but I find it –and I’m supposed to find it– too, let’s say, acoustically annoying (like the relentless mind-numbing beat and the lack of vertical movement and development in most hip-hop that I’ve heard). I am out, I know…

The South Park guys were your students at Colorado, right?
Well, Trey was, but he was a completely self-directed and self-motivated student, even then. He was my first T.A. and my first friend on campus. Trey, in fact, was the person who first took me to Stan’s house when I came here to be interviewed. He was a great guy, very helpful to me during my first few years here, and we all (well, most of us) loved him – he actually slept in the attic above the office for a time. And Matt and Trey have subsequently helped us out with their good fortune with donations for our animation equipment.

I saw Trey on Letterman recently and he said, “Yeah, we took a few film classes.” Well, that’s somewhat revisionist – he was King of the Hill here for a few years and so were his crew. They made CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (1996) during school and most of the faculty appear in it and some financially supported it. South Park started here with their student animation projects, which were the big hits of the annual student shows.

But going back to what you were saying, I really do appreciate the crisis that’s upon the generations after mine. I suspect that the Brakhage model of individual artists going around like Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman with their films in tow, singing for their supper or making their pitch, is no longer a valid working model for my students. They are envisioning something else, a completely different way of relating to the mediated world. They want something much more integrated with the popular culture, without the apparent separation between the high and the low, etc. Some variation of video DJs, or web streaming of their Digi-Indies, some kind of crossover. Not the hermetic, marginal, solitary artist model that shows to such a limited audience with the obligatory (and sometimes deadly) Q and A, when you can reach the world instantly on the web without leaving your home. The artist/teacher/touring model is clearly no longer a viable one. They all seem to want to belong to something, these children of divorce, for better or for worse. Hence the recent rise of collectives that’s being talked about after this year’s Whitney Biennial. And maybe that’s a good thing. But I’ve always been drawn to the idiosyncratic consciousness and the utter privacy of deeply informed thought and feeling left to us by individual artists. Emily D up in her tower…

Whether it’s the Internet or crossing over into pop culture – I hear the term “experimental narratives” used by students in expressing their aspirations a lot. We’ll have to see about the future of distribution and the conditions of reception. I’m rather cynical. I find the Internet sometimes fascinating in its potential and – mostly - not. Primarily because, as deToqueville observed in Democracy in America, with all the benefits of “democracy” and now of media access, you also have what we might call the Ascendancy of the Mediocre. Everybody now has a website or a MySpace window display. Who is going to determine where the art is? How do we determine quality or what is essential in the culture, when one only has a limited time on earth to give one’s self over to any given work. Or is this idea simply no longer an issue? When there is any lack of editorial criteria, or consensus, and standing “the test of time” becomes an absurdly glacial idea in the light of contemporary ZAP, etc.… you know what I’m saying.

Of course I realize how absurd and effete my position must seem. I’m glad to be outside of all of it, frankly. It’s really not my problem anymore, except as a teacher. And, as I said, I’m having a website built for my own work and musings, so perhaps I’ll feel differently once that’s up. I’ll be curious to see if I can make any real connections to my work from it. But it will soon be just another jip-joint, another roadside stand on the bitted superhighway…

On the other hand, of course, it certainly is possible to find something wonderful by chance. Created by someone who would never have otherwise had access to these means of distribution, to the entire webbed world at large. And when its delivered in HD on a big screen it could be a wonderful thing.

But I’ll tell you, I suspect that that the reception for works distributed across the wires will still be rather superficial in nature, and much of the work being created will reflect that condition. There will always be a surfing element to the on-line experience, skimming the surface, a momentary buzz on the screen while you’re searching for the next thing, with five other things going on at the same time.... It won’t be the kind of – dare I say spiritual - communion we had on Monday night [at his REDCAT screening]. Maybe the work will be addressing those very issues. Will people be able to watch this work and have an epiphany, a revelation that shakes them to the very foundation of their being? Like Ms. Mitchell says, you gain something and you lose something, seems to me.

Did your Dad get over you not being a doctor?
One of the saddest aspects of my life is that my father did not get to see me as a full professor and a Guggenheim fellow at a major University, with the words “Professor Philip Solomon” on the door. I got this job just after his death, and I had been off of a serious academic career track for some time, trying to extend my adolescence and keep that ol’ gang of mine intact before we all broke apart and “settled down”. He would have been tickled to see my current success, such as it is, even if he never did really understand the nature of what I was doing or how and why I was being acknowledged for it. And it would have been fascinating to see him hang out with Stan, who might have convinced him.

Brakhage and Solomon at Telluride.

When I told him once, many years ago, that I had a solo show of my work coming up at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, he replied, “Well…maybe this will lead to something…” That was my father, right there. And my job and title at CU is something he would have understood. That is where it led, Dad. So it was a bittersweet irony for me that after he passed away, I suddenly arrived in Boulder, into the welcoming arms and emphatic bear hug of Stan Brakhage, who knew and loved and understood everything about my work - indeed, he eventually owned all of it. And in some ways, I was now freed up to leave the east and to follow the sun, to light out for the western territories... Ready and fated for my 13-year close encounter with Stan Brakhage, the memory of which will sustain me for the rest of my life.