Oak Street Films

As the date of next weekend’s shows at Barking Legs Theater approaches–and with it my first real opportunity to share with the public the beginnings of the “documentarian” fork of my career–it seems a good time to talk a little bit about how I try to approach the formidable task of translating others’ real lives into a series of images and sounds, and about the hows and whys of the difference between my methods and those employed by the producers of the dry and overly informative “video brochures” which often appear on cable and/or public television and that are, I feel, erroneously referred to as documentaries. The following remarks were originally to have belonged to a more scholarly kind of essay which I had expected to post to this site, and so I hope that their use here in the context of my simultaneous “plugging” of an upcoming event will not seem overly salesmanlike. They are intended to serve as a kind of preface to the work which will be exhibited on September 6; the intention is to shed some light on what exactly these films attempt to do. Those in the Chattanooga area who already plan on attending will learn a bit about what they will be seeing, and those in the area who are still “on the fence” with respect to their plans for that evening, will, I hope, be able to make a more informed decision.

Incidentally, if you are not in the Chattanooga area and would like to see these films, feel free to contact me and we’ll discuss the ways in which you might be able to do so.

See you after the jump.

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Nick Rombes, a writer whose opinions on movies and the general cultural state of the art are almost always right on the mark, recently expressed a sentiment which seems to be quite pervasive these days. In a brief preface to a post about music he states that he is “tired of [movies] because they are not so good any more. One day, they will be good again. Worthy of words. But not now.”

I think a lot of us know exactly what he’s talking about. The product at the multiplexes is both completely disposable and utterly moronic, and “independent” film has largely been reduced to banal non-stories about recent college graduates who whine about how hard their lives are in spite of the fact that they drive around in cars bought for them by their wealthy fathers. There are silly men-in-tights movies on the big screens and equally silly boys-and-girls-in-flip-flops movies on the smaller screens. To top it off, the audience for films is shrinking at an exponential rate–not only because the movies on offer tend to be so worthless in general, but also thanks largely to all 6,000 worthless cable channels, 6 billion internet videos of people “hilariously” being struck in the testicles by airborne objects, etc. Things are bad, and getting worse every day.

So why continue to make movies in this climate? Why do I even bother? I’ll give you a couple of reasons.

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Almost immediately after I finished writing my review of Alejandro Adams’ new film Canary–which, again, is in the final phases of post-production as of this writing–I decided that it might be enlightening to conduct an interview with one of the principal individuals who worked on the film. While an in-depth discussion with Adams himself is certainly in order (and in fact is likely to appear here in the relatively near future), I found myself particularly drawn to the idea of speaking with Carla Pauli, who plays the film’s leading role. Hers is a very subtle and nuanced performance, and it’s almost impossible to imagine a film like this working without that subtlety. Ms. Pauli was kind enough to respond to my questions in spite of the fact that she had no idea who I was, thanks in part to the urging of Adams. Her responses will be of interest, I think, not only to the (future) audience of the film in general, but also to other actors and to those directors–myself included–for whom the personal side of an actor’s process remains, to a large extent, a sort of mystical enigma.

Read the full text of the interview after the jump.

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I’ve been getting a lot of responses to my casting call for Hell Is Other People since my reminder last week, but those responses have been decidedly, shall we say, young and feminine.

I do have some male parts and a more “mature” female part to cast. I don’t want to discourage anyone from getting in touch with me if interested, but I particularly need to build a list of young men and women in their late 30’s or early 40’s, and so interested parties meeting those broad criteria are especially urged to get in touch as soon as possible. I can’t schedule any auditions until I have what at least looks like a workable list for all the parts.

The release of Psycho in 1960 without Production Code approval is often seen as marking the end of Hollywood’s long-honored program of self-censorship, and in a sense the release of that film serves as a rough point of departure for the deluge of sleazy exploitation films that would swamp the urban and drive-in markets for the next twenty years. There had been films of “questionable” moral character since the very beginnings of the cinematic form (take Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope photographs for example, which include some of the very earliest “skin flicks” among their number at a time before the celluloid cinema as we know it today had even been invented). With Psycho’s success, however, came a certain fading of the Puritanical silliness that had previously kept such films far from the open market, and suddenly all manner of previously taboo subjects (perversions, festishes, homosexuality,  etc.) became quite acceptable in films–so long as nothing was made too explicit, of course.

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As Chris Fujiwara points out in a recent article comparing Japanese and American audience reactions to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, American critics are by and large still unsure of Sirk’s sincerity: are these films meant to be taken as straightforward tear-jerkers or are they cynical pop-culture parodies? American audiences, in general, are all too comfortable with the latter reading:

In the U.S., screenings of Sirk masterpieces such as Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959), and even the mournful The Tarnished Angels (1958) are turned into endurance tests by audience participation rituals that, whether fueled by the urge to show off one’s camp sensibility or driven by a misguided sympathy with the irony evident in the films, ends up all but hooting the films off the screen. The result is that, regardless of one’s level of interest in “reception” (that hobbyhorse of academic film studies), seeing Sirk’s films in the U.S. often becomes more about the audience response than about the films themselves.

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When Alejandro Adams’ defiantly humanistic and formally rigorous first feature Around the Bay premiered to a packed house at this year’s Cinequest Film Festival, it was widely hailed by critics as a frank representation of the fractured modern American family, somehow engaging and undemanding of its audience in spite of its playful jumbling of conventional filmic syntax and its daringly suggestive sound design. It is described, in practically every response to the film I’ve seen, as a simple, unassuming character-driven drama. While this reading is more or less accurate, it is incomplete. Fundamentally, beneath its immediately observable patina of dramatic simplicity, Around the Bay is a radically poetic, associative collage on the subject of the dehumanized individual in the post-industrial, Capitalized world. The film is not about a deteriorating sense of the meaning of family so much as it is about barren interpersonal relations in general. It is not about the effects of inadequate parenting so much as it is about being inadequately human. Its characters are successfully presented as believably complex individuals, and yet within them lie broad archetypes. They each stand in for their respective generations, and therefore in a sense, their family is America writ small. The family drama, moving and affecting as it is, is really only the setting for a kind of grand lamentation of the automatic and empty life. The accessibility of the naturalistically rendered family story is one of the things that saves the film from becoming a heavy-handed allegory; however, critics who fail to see the deeper implications are, I think, missing the point.

Adams’ recently completed second feature, Canary–which I should point out has not yet been released or screened at a festival as of this writing–in many ways carries the themes of its predecessor a step further, this time within a somewhat dystopian science-fiction setting. Based (loosely) upon a 2004 short film by Sammy Samuelson, Canary revolves around characters connected in one way or another to the fictive Canary Industries, a corporation which provides internal organs to patients in need of transplants. The “catch” in these transactions (for CI functions as a profit-motivated enterprise rather than a Hippocratically medical venture–sound familiar?) is that the recipients must agree to a stringent set of dietary and lifestyle requirements, any breech of which is punishable by “repossession” of the organ(s). The playfully angry swipe at the current sorry and dehumanizing state of the United States’ healthcare industry is readily apparent here, but as in Around the Bay, the situation is meant also to resonate on a more general level: If Around the Bay was about human beings treating relationships like financial transactions, Canary is about social institutions treating human beings like objects to be owned and/or traded. It is, in short, a world not terribly unlike that depicted in Canary which produced Wyatt, the cold and detached father of Around the Bay–and millions of real people like him.

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I’ve always been fascinated by Frederick Wiseman’s films, but this fascination has grown in the last year or so (which is roughly about the amount of time since I started making documentaries in earnest)–primarily, I suppose, because there are numerous formal and thematic similarities between what I’ve been doing and Wiseman’s œuvre: we both make films about social institutions, and we both do so in a manner that attempts to present real events in a manner as divorced from our own subjective biases as is practicable (I don’t want to use the word “objectivity” here, because I don’t believe it’s possible or even, really, desirable). What’s so interesting to me about these similarities is the fact that my approach has not really at all been directly influenced by Wiseman’s work; I more or less developed my documentary aesthetic and process on my own as what I felt was the natural way in which to treat the material which had started falling into my lap.

It’s not at all hyperbolic to say that Wiseman is one of the world’s most important living filmmakers, and yet he rarely speaks analytically about his work. Why? As he puts it, in a recent interview with Nicolas Rapold of The Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source:

I don’t even particularly want to summarize [one of my movies] because if I could summarize it in 25 words or less I shouldn’t have made the movie….I’m specifically avoiding making the generalized statement.

What a great response, and one which is quite similar to what I have found myself saying numerous times when asked to summarize or otherwise verbally describe one of my projects.

There has recently been a fair amount of long-overdue critical attention directed at the work of Charles Burnett, mainly thanks to the recent restoration and subsequent DVD release of his lyrically naturalistic 1977 film Killer of Sheep. Formerly available only on low-quality VHS tape (which is unfortunately how I first experienced it), the film has gone, until recently, all but completely unnoticed by the general filmgoing public. It is wonderful to see that Burnett has finally been able to find a wider audience for his painstakingly honest depiction of blue-collar life in the Watts of the 1970’s–however, it is unfortunate that even less written criticism regarding his short films seems to have been undertaken, particularly in light of the fact that several of Burnett’s shorts have also been restored and released along with Killer of Sheep.

However unfortunate this critical oversight might be, it’s far from surprising. As a general rule, the short film as a form tends to be all but ignored by critics and audiences alike, perhaps at least in part due to its association with student films and an attendant knee-jerk assumption of amateurism. Burnett’s The Horse skillfully transcends such notions by virtue not only of its aesthetic and formal brilliance, but also of its dense subtlety of figurative suggestion. It is anything but the work of an amateur, and nothing if not a clear demonstration of the inherent power of the short-format film.

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Passion Flower will be screened alongside Ann Law’s performance of her Passion Flower Project dance piece at the Bud Frank Theater on the cumpus of ETSU. The show begins at 8:00 PM. Tickets are $15, and can be reserved by contacting Jen Kintner with the phrase “Passion Flower” in the subject line.

For more information about this performance / screening, please contact Elizabeth Worthington.