Domestic life on Fort Buchanan follows few strictures, least of all “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In Benjamin Crotty’s queer take on military melodrama, it’s all about the girl talk. The wayward army wives who populate a fictionalized U.S. Army base in Fort Buchanan inhabit a place that’s more pastoral artist colony than high-security compound. There’s no visible infrastructure, save for a cluster of high-design cabins, and Crotty conjures a fluid landscape governed not by military law, but by the laws of desire. The wives—both men and women—are given to sexual switch-hitting, leading to scenes that are by turns slapstick and surreal. The one exception is Roger (Andy Gillet), who remains fixed on husband Frank (David Baiot), an officer whose emotional detachment is compounded by his station far away in Djibouti.

If Roger’s travails give the film its emotional thrust, it’s Crotty’s unique cinematic vision, combining animated flights of fancy with 16mm realism, that continually dislodges viewer expectation. That, for instance, all the wives are French bohemians, or that Roger registers as barely older than the daughter he shares with Frank, are part of the film’s idiosyncratic logic and atmospheric pleasures. As Fort Buchanan unfolds across four seasons, its narrative structure becomes increasingly slippery and digressive. In the spring section, a comic scene with Mati Diop’s character seducing somebody else’s husband suddenly leads to a bacchanal group adventure in Djibouti and Andy’s reunion with Frank. But while there’s plenty of fantasy on display, the context remains very real. Times are tough, even for the U.S. government, and Fort Buchanan is under threat of closure.

Fort Buchanan’s hazy fusion of gender politics and wartime antics, and its mixture of TV-inspired melodrama and art-house aesthetics, together capture a distinctly 21st-century landscape in which the boundaries between high and low and between “here” and “there” have all but dissolved. The War on Terror, it seems, has become distinguishable from domestic disputes and romantic folly. Crotty, who was born in Spokane, Washington, and is based in Paris, maintains a foot in both cultures. His remix sensibility was evident in his first film, Visionary Iraq (08), made in collaboration with filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes, which followed a pair of incestuous teens as they enlist in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Crotty sees the two films as companion pieces, of a sort. If his earlier effort took aim at explosive teen idealism and the unholy marriage of war and global capitalism, Fort Buchanan, set a decade and a half later, is a more reflective work that finds its focus in the rituals and travails of the long-term relationship.

FILM COMMENT spoke with the director a month before his film’s North American premiere in New Directors / New Films on March 25 and 29.

The real Fort Buchanan is located in Puerto Rico. How much did it influence the fictional version in your film?

The action in my film is situated in France, but it’s true that the name is taken from the U.S. army base in Puerto Rico. My little brother used to work at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., and when he was working there, I got really interested in their consultable database. What you quickly realize is that almost everything in the U.S. National Archives is Army-related. I'd say 70 percent of the moving-image documents are from the Army. It’s really where we invested our national wealth! Anyway, at some point I found footage of people playing golf at Fort Buchanan. I was curious about this base because it looked a hell of a lot like a country club. It seemed like the kind of base you might end up at the end of a well-managed career in the army. So, I like this connotation, this mixing of military and leisure concerns. Fort Buchanan was also the name of an old fort in Arizona that only functioned for a few years in the 1850s and ’60s, and I like the frontier ring the name somehow retains. Lastly, I like the name because it is very difficult for French people to pronounce. They say: For Booshannon? I like how aggressively American the name itself is for a French-language film.

Could you talk about how the film evolved?

When I was a kid, I was in a theater troupe, and we toured around to elementary schools. I remember when we performed at schools on the Air Force base. I was really fascinated with the place. There were gates and checkpoints and separate stores. None of my family was career military. My father was in Vietnam, and I have two brothers who were in the Army Reserves. But we never lived on a military base. In Spokane, there’s also a high degree of individualism in the town’s architecture. So the uniformity of the architecture on the military bases was also something that struck me. I grew up in the Eighties during the Cold War. The army base rang a lot of bells in terms of how socialism had been described to me. I was intrigued by this place that registered as a mix of something definitively American—the military base—and an image (as I had understood it at the time) of Communism.  So, from a young age, I was interested in this idea of community.

I also saw this TV show called Army Wives. It was on for a really long time, during the entire War on Terror era. It’s a scripted, hour-long drama on Lifetime. It’s pretty well done. But what’s so weird about it is that it’s like Sex and the City with, from time to time, something really dark and serious. Awful events will happen. The show was sort of shameless in its use of topical events, but the focus really remained on their romantic problems.

Despite the military backdrop, the focus is on domesticity.

Yes, it’s also my interest in the domestic side of life on this huge military complex. With Army Wives, I thought, okay, this is the cultural production of the War on Terror. The circle is complete. I was also thinking about Martha Rosler’s collages. She makes these extremely violent juxtapositions of images of domesticity and war, like, a napalmed Vietnamese child in a suburban living room. What was so uncanny about Army Wives was how smooth everything was. It was basically like the collages, except it was no problem.

The influence of American TV on Fort Buchanan is particularly unique. I understand that the dialogue was in part generated from appropriated TV scripts. Can you talk about the writing process?

I wrote the story for the film first. I had ideas for the characters, and I knew I wanted a seasonal structure to the film. I downloaded [transcripts of] different shows, which you can find online for close captioning. I would do keyword searches in the transcripts. For instance, I would keyword search “regret” or “death.” [Laughs] In the autumn part of Fort Buchanan, [the characters] speak a lot about regret. What interested me in TV dialogue is actually pretty broad—the efficiency of writing, the "authorless" quality of it  (in terms of using writing teams), and the weird normative world it creates.  When I watch American TV, I’m often shocked or interested by the way things are phrased. For a French person watching Fort Buchanan, they perceive the dialogue as simply an "American” way of speaking.

You described the eclectic architecture in your hometown of Spokane. Built structures also play an important role in Fort Buchanan. The military housing we see is in fact a series of wood cabins that combine high-design and low-tech aesthetics. They look as if they might be found in an alternate version of an Ikea catalogue.

All the built structures in the film were created by Matali Crasset. She’s a French designer and a disciple of Philippe Starck, and she’s quite famous in France. She made the wood cabins and we used an actual eco-hotel she designed in Tunisia as the set for Camp Griffith, the fictional base in Djibouti. They all existed before the film. I was looking for sets and happened to meet this French guy who runs an art space in the woods. He was collaborating with Matali on these cabin structures, and I just asked to use them in the film. The proportions of them are very strange. They’re really small, which makes them very difficult to shoot in. Some are not even finished, so our set designer put walls on one of them.

Different characters come into focus as the seasons change. Roger’s romantic travails shift from foreground the background. In that sense, the film presents a decentered narrative. How did you develop your ideas about portraying a group dynamic?

I wanted to make a group film. I think that when you see the film now, the changes in seasons feel fluid. But when I was writing the film, I was really focused on this seasonal block structure. I was thinking about nature films and how they will follow a group of animals through different seasons that might migrate to a new place. I was thinking about the film in this way. I wanted to emphasize the group and how they interact together, rather than focus on a single protagonist.  In the winter portion that begins the film, Roger (Andy Gillet) is the protagonist, but he’s more in the background during the spring portion, where everyone is just looking for action. I was interested in characters sharing motivation, rather than individual psychology.

The seasonal structure also lends itself to episodic storytelling. I wondered if it occurred to you to make a television show rather than a film.

Yes. The film was actually financed as separate episodes. France 2 TV was involved. They pre-bought the summer portion, and later purchased the spring and fall. So, it will be showing on French TV.  I was really happy about it. It’s the equivalent of being on ABC in America. I’m pretty curious what the reaction will be.

But Fort Buchanan doesn’t share a TV aesthetic.

To me, the film’s visuals and aesthetic are very French. I felt this was important, especially with the dialogue coming from the TV world. We shot on film, though I’m not particularly wedded to 16mm. My cinematographer trained at La Fémis and we use a lot of fixed shots. We shot for about 15 days total, so it was pretty intense. We had four days to shoot in Tunisia for the Djibouti section of the film.

You’ve assembled a great group of young French actors to play the wives and husbands. There’s something interesting about seeing how the different acting styles cohere into a group portrait. How did you go about casting the film?

The winter portion was shot in February 2012. We really had no money at all, and we weren’t able to shoot again for a really long time. I knew a lot of the cast already and had a good idea about what I could and couldn’t do with them. To begin with, I’d seen Andy Gillet in Eric Rohmer’s final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, which I liked a lot. In that film, Andy’s a jeune premier, a really beautiful young man. Now, he’s just a little bit older, and something else is starting to happen. In Fort Buchanan, there’s a weird acceleration of his age. Everyone treats him like he’s super over-the-hill, which I like because he’s obviously not. Roger’s character is quite tragic and viewers have to feel something for him, and so it was important that Andy was empathetic. Pauline Jacquard and Iliana Zabeth, who plays Roger’s daughter Roxy, were both in Bertrand Bonello’s film House of Tolerance. My producer, Judith Lou Lévy, also acted in that film. I went to Le Fresnoy with Mati Diop and we’ve been friends ever since.

Roger’s husband, Frank, is played by David Baiot. He’s a French soap opera actor, and probably the most famous person in the cast. For French audiences, it’s quite funny to see the marriage of a Rohmer protagonist and an actor from what is essentially the French Days of Our Lives. We had a Tunisian co-producer from Godolphin Films who helped us cast for that part of the film. We were shooting in Nefta, close to the Algerian border, and we found people there. It was a little bit dicey shooting there because of the film’s gay content, but everything went fine.

The film is full of unpredictable narrative and tonal shifts.  One of the main forces guiding this unpredictability seems to be desire, and the characters’ attempts, both comic and tragic, to pursue their sexual or romantic objects.

Every character has his or her own matrix of desire. Some are more sophisticated than others. In the spring portion, three women go after Roxy’s character [Roger and Frank’s daughter]. It’s more because she’s there and they happen to live in a remote place in the woods. They can’t go to a club to meet people. Justine, Mati Diop’s character, goes after Guillaume, who repeatedly tries to tell her he’s gay. But it’s as though the people in the film can only respond to actions. Justine keeps pursuing him. There are parts of the film that are about this shared motivation, and parts that are more focused on the individual. The summer section is much more focused on Roger and Frank’s romantic drama. I wanted the last portion of the film, the autumn portion, to be something of a baroque construction. There are flashbacks and much more music. We also leave Fort Buchanan for the first time and see a supermarket. So, it’s both more real and more fantasy.

There’s a lot of comedy in the film. You’ve created a world where irony and sincerity seem to coexist peaceably.

I would say the film is more observational than ironic. This relates to the animal films I was talking about. Roger’s character can be quite funny at times, but I feel that the viewer’s relationship to him is fundamentally empathetic. I really admire Mati’s performance in the film. With Roger, we have some understanding of what he’s about. But Mati’s character is more opaque. I wrote this scene where she just goes insane on this guy, and wrote it from the perspective of the guy. I remember on the first day of shooting that scene, it was 4 a.m., and there were 30 people standing around her. In French, we’d call it un grand moment de solitude. I was so impressed with the way she brings incredible life to this character in a way that’s both funny and dignified.

In the spring portion, I really wanted to push the sex farce aspect, but it’s more about a comic vocabulary than about being funny. For example, there’s this toxic farm product that explodes. I always thought it wasn’t funny, and there was a moment during the edit when I removed it. But without that scene, the whole spring section becomes very tragic. Even if it’s not funny, it lets the viewer know that it’s a world where these things can happen. I feel this way about most of the physical comedy in the film. When Mati’s character is playing football with the guy and she falls into this puddle that turns out to be mysteriously deep, it’s as if nature’s conspiring to get these people together. She has to go back to his place to dry her clothes. She’s not capable of making it happen, so it’s as if nature steps in.

In the film, Fort Buchanan is under threat of closure by the U.S. military. There were many real base closures following the economic downturn of 2008, and you include an actual news report from French news. At first, I thought the report might be satirical, because it’s quite absurd.

I’d written a news piece that was very close to it, but then we found the report. For French people, the newscaster is a bit like seeing Dan Rather, and so its inclusion in Fort Buchanan brings a degree of weird domestic familiarity for French spectators.  He graciously allowed us to use that clip. It’s a bit like the Walt Whitman poem that’s quoted at the end of the film. It’s about men and technology and what we leave behind. I particularly like the language in that news report because they say, after the base closures, “there will be fewer soldiers and more technology!” It’s such a brute résumé of an epoch.

Gregg Turkington is the star and co-writer of Entertainment, the new film by Rick Alverson, in whose film The Comedy he had a small but memorable role, discussing the immaculate cleanliness of hobo dicks. In Entertainment, Turkington plays a man named Neil whose stage persona is that of a lounge act comedian named “Neil”—and though he is not explicitly addressed as such, the character of “Neil” is very near to that of Neil Hamburger, a character who Turkington has played, on stage on album, for nearly 25 years.

As if this weren’t confusing enough, Turkington also plays “Gregg Turkington,” the co-host, with Entertainment co-writer Tim Heidecker, of On Cinema at the Cinema. Begun as a podcast before being picked up by Adult Swim and produced as a regular online video segment, On Cinema features Turkington and Heidecker as two entirely indiscriminate movie reviewers who give every new release the maximum rating of “Five bags of popcorn.” (The “bags” are actually buckets.) As the show developed, reviews gradually took a backseat to a mortified character study of the hosts—Turkington’s hapless, schlempy expert, Heidecker’s bullyish prima donna—and their intrapersonal psychodrama, and the On Cinema “universe” expanded to include Heidecker’s vanity special-agent series, Decker (currently premiering new episodes on Adult Swim), and the Twitter accounts of both @timheidecker and @greggturkington.

To back up for a moment, here are the known facts about Gregg Turkington—not Neil, or Neil Hamburger, or “Gregg Turkington.” He was born in Darwin, Australia, and raised mostly in Tempe, Arizona, where he cut his teeth in a weirdo punk scene whose luminaries included the Meat Puppets, Jodie Foster’s Army, and Sun City Girls. He performed in a number of bands; edited the Bay Area zine Breakfast Without Meat, which focused on bargain-bin esoterica; operated the Amarillo Records label; and, in the early 1990s, introduced his alter-ego, Neil Hamburger, “America’s $1 Funnyman.”

FILM COMMENT spoke to Turkington on the phone as he was preparing to leave for an Australian tour as Neil Hamburger, about his various projects and personas. Entertainment, the Closing Night selection of this year’s New Director / New Films, screens on March 29.

I’m a little confused as to what foot to get off on here, because there are a couple of different Gregg Turkingtons...

Yeah, yeah…

....as well as Neil Hamburger in the mix. So, in Entertainment you’re playing, as you have for years, Neil Hamburger, but you’re credited as Gregg Turkington on-screen. There’s also another “Gregg Turkington” who appears in On Cinema at the Cinema and Decker, and the movie Entertainment doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that that “Gregg Turkington” would write.

No. And in general, the last thing that I’m willing to talk about is any of this stuff, out of character. Because we’re promoting this movie, I’m being a little more flexible than I would be normally, but in terms of wanting to go into all these different things from my past… if you can call it a career, from my career. I’m always very reluctant to get too into the nuts-and-bolts of that stuff because I think it kind of diminishes some of the mystery that you work so hard to build up with these thing, and I hate to just explain it all away.

With the movie Entertainment, we decided to make it not exactly “Neil Hamburger” but an interpretation of that, which was actually very liberating for me because I can discuss that without having to discuss the whole Neil Hamburger thing, in a way that I don’t necessarily want to do after spending the last 25 years being evasive about that.

I remember when I first because aware of Neil Hamburger records, which would’ve been sometime in the mid-1990s. On part because the Internet wasn’t quite the thing it is today, there really was a veil of secrecy around the character. I didn’t know anybody who really knew what the story was.

Yeah.

When you took the character out in the early days, when people really didn’t know what the story was, did you get genuinely hostile audiences like those we see in Entertainment?

When those first few records were made, the first three albums, I think, there was no live show. Those records were intended originally as conceptual recording projects, documenting an actual working comedian. Especially the first album, America’s Funnyman, but also there were a couple of singles that came before that, Looking for Laughs and Bartender, the Laugh’s on Me!!!!. With those singles, the idea was that I was making them up to look like this depressing regional comedian who was printing these records and putting them in the cheapest, crappiest sleeves possible and then just abandoning them in thrift stores, because I liked the idea of somebody stumbling on this thing and just scratching their head and saying: “What the fuck is this? How can this be? This is ghastly.”

And then Drag City approached me about doing the album America’s Funnyman, and at that point I couldn’t believe that there was going to be an entire album based on this concept. But I decided to put everything that I could possibly think into this album, every gag—some of them are technical glitches, weird audience response things, jokes that go nowhere—a million different concepts were crammed into that record. But at that point there was no live show. The audience sounds were either things that I recorded while lurking around bars with a tape recorder in my coat, or else using Four Track to multi-track myself applauding a lot or laughing or whatever, or getting friends to come in and be hecklers or whatever.

There wasn’t a live show until six years or something after the first singles. And that’s why you’ve got drawings on the covers of the records—I mean, I was just too young to look like what I thought Neil Hamburger would look like. But definitely after that, when I actually began performing out, there’ve definitely been plenty of shows that were as shitty as the shows seen in the movie. Partially because I’ll go out of my way to book shows in places that are a little iffy, just to see what would happen. Just to keep the character honest, really.

Has that extended to physical altercations?

Yeah, we’ve had a few. It’s actually a thing… I think because YouTube is out there, some of the most horrible things that have happened at these shows wind up on YouTube, and then you get people coming to the shows: “Hey, I saw on YouTube where somebody’s throwing rotten tomatoes at you, so I brought my own rotten tomatoes.” That kind of thing. They think it’s part of the show. But I don’t think there are too many people who would build into a show that they get to be physically attacked on stage. It’s happened, but not very often, fortunately.

Where did the idea for Neil Hamburger’s look come from? I was recently watching a documentary about owls recently, as you will, and at one point it was discussing how their feathers aren’t waterproofed, there was all of this footage of soaking-wet hoot owls caught in the rain, and I thought: “That’s Neil Hamburger!”  

Wow! I think, when I did the first record, I needed a cover, and I took from my collection of private pressing, vanity pressing lounge acts… I think it was somebody else’s cover, a drawing that I then took a razor blade and cut, altered, re-drew parts of the face, added this and that to it, made the hair much worse than it was. And then for the second single, Bartender, the Laugh’s On Me!!!!, I found a drawing in this book about alcoholism… I was flipping through a book in a thrift store and I found a drawing that looked exactly like the guy from the first record, it was just a very weird coincidence. So that sort of solidified the look, and then when it became an actual stage show, it was just a matter of studying these drawings and trying to make things look that way. So this horrific comb-over, which was done through collage and bad art, I had to actually reproduce.

The Hamburger voice, it sounds like you must drink a quart of heavy cream before recording in order to achieve that degree of phlegminess.

I guess that was just trial and error. Doing thousands of shows… I mean, the voice has changed over the years, basically because the first recording of this stuff is nearly 25 years ago, so it kind of mutates, like a real comedian’s voice changes throughout time, or a singer or whatever. It’s amazing, if you listen to the early Frank Sinatra records, what a sweet, high-pitched, angelic voice he has, compared to the also beautiful but more gruff, low voice that he ended up with. And certainly the Neil Hamburger voice has aged quite a bit over the years. I’ll tell you one thing, there was never some time where I was sitting there practicing, trying to figure out the perfect voice. It was more something that just came out and seemed to work, and as time went on, and it changed based on the circumstances of what this guy might be doing and where his voice might go after being beaten down from years and years on the road… Definitely the weariness in the voice made sense for a guy who’s been doing this for as long as Neil Hamburger has, both fictionally and realistically.

The other detail I love is the two drinks pinned under the arm. It’s like he loads up at the bar because he’s afraid he won’t get to spend his drink tickets after he performs.

I like that interpretation. Again, these things, you do them one night, and it clicks into place, and before you know it, that becomes part of the standard look.

You talked about doing the first Drag City record and loading it with as many miscues as possible—I wonder if you could talk about the paradox in doing so much work to create a professionally bad act.

Well, I mean… This gets into the question of what really is bad. The fact is that people really like those records, and if I do the show, people have a good time—well, y’know, not all of them—but a lot of them. And there’s plenty of comedy records that come out that nobody would say they’re intentionally bad, but they are just bad. Sometimes I think it’s a little strange to throw around terms like “bad” and “good” for things, because a lot of the things that are really bad aren’t discussed, they’re just forgotten or ignored. A throw-away Mike Meyers movie or something, an Adam Sandler movie, to me these movies are truly bad—you can’t even sit there and let them wash over you, it’s too painful, you’ve got to get up and turn them off or run screaming from them. And yet people are always going to refer to my stuff as bad, though I find that people tend to enjoy the things that I’m doing, so… I dunno. There’s definitely a lot of thought that goes into these intentional glitches or strange turns of phrase or archaic topics that are brought up in the show, but I’m reluctant to call it bad, even in the way that you’re describing.

But there’s certainly an element of aggression towards the audience. In Entertainment you have the scene in which Neil idly picks up the trophy while performing and pantomimes gunning down his audience at a house party…

That’s definitely a bad performance for that character, it’s definitely the result of being thoroughly beaten down. Also, you know, the guy who goes on beforehand does something which comics do all the time, which is… You’re hanging out backstage, having a pleasant conversation, getting to know this person, and they tell you a pleasant anecdote, and you think: “Well, that’s kind of funny, what a nice funny guy this is.” And then they walk out onstage and proceed to tell the exact same anecdote, and you realize that it wasn’t a genuine conversation, but they were testing material on you, manipulating you into thinking you were having a friendly conversation, and you feel completely used. So, to me, something like that is actually bad—that’s a bad, bad thing to do, a bad thing to do as a person, it shows a real soullessness that you would do this to somebody and not clue them into what you’re doing, and then go onstage and, word for word, replicate this thing that they thought was a conversation. And I think for Neil, standing on the side watching this guy do just that, this definitely added a layer of disgust to what was already there based on the things that’d been happening during the course of the movie. It’s just time to explode.

One striking aspect of the movie are all the odd bits of tourism that Neil embarks on, to the oil fields, the airplane graveyard…

You’d have to talk to Rick [Alverson] about that—those are things that he brought in. He would be the guy to ask about the greater meaning of that. But the airplane graveyard was something that, when we scouting locations, I knew about, and took him over to see, and we both agreed that visually it was pretty interesting. They don’t actually give tours of it, so we had to pull some strings to actually shoot there, because there is no such tour—in fact, none of those tours actually exist, those were all fictional. But the airplane graveyard is a place I’d actually been wanting to get into for years, so it was nice to have a reason, though they only gave us a couple hours to shoot there, because it’s part of a military facility, and you could only shoot in certain directions. 

It definitely gives a backdrop of capitalist wasteland, with Neil’s comedy just one more element on the trash pile.

I like it. This is why I’d rather just read people’s interpretations of these things, rather than give interviews.

Since you don’t buy into the comedy/anti-comedy dichotomy, would you call the title tongue-in-cheek?

I wouldn’t, no, no. I don’t think there’s anything inaccurate about the title. I think people might genuinely expect, if the first thing they hear is the word “entertainment,” they might expect something more like what you’d see in the movie That’s Entertainment!, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, things like that. But for the most part, the majority of entertainment that’s taking place in the world is on a much lower level, a much smaller scope. Even the smallest town has got a stage or two in it where somebody’s putting on a show, and the majority of people who work in the business known as entertainment are not making the big bucks.

I also thought of the Gang of Four record, though I don’t know if that was intended.

I don’t think that had anything to do with it. There was also a Bollywood movie that came out the year before with the same title, which we found out after we were completely done.

Probably not chasing the same audience.

Maybe. I’d say 10 percent. I would watch both of those movies, personally.

This will eloquently segue into On Cinema at the Cinema, which I would also like to talk about, however it works to talk about it. This season began after a contentious split with “Tim Heidecker.”

One episode, before Tim came back to rescue me… It’s tough… I mean, I’m not sure what angle… who’s speaking to you right now, you know what I mean? It’s kind of hard to start talking like that Gregg Turkington in the midst of talking about this other stuff, because they’re so different. Even though the Gregg Turkington in the TV series On Cinema at the Cinema bears the same name as me, I feel like he’s less like me than most characters I’ve ever played.

He almost certainly wouldn’t see Entertainment.

No. Unless he purchased it in an unmarked box, a grab-bag of movies at a discount shop. “Fifty movies for 50 dollars!” I think when On Cinema was just an audio podcast we did occasionally stumble into strange foreign films and art films that had come our way, but as a web series or TV series or whatever you want to call it, when you’re doing two a week it definitely tends to be the two biggest movies of the week, and it’s doubtful that Entertainment would be one of the two biggest movies of any week.

It seems like the defining characteristic of that Gregg Turkington is just a totally indiscriminate enthusiasm for whatever it is he trips across.

Yeah, I think we know all know folks like that… I won’t say it’s an epidemic, but I’ve certainly encountered a lot of people who seem to be fairly happy with the things being offered to them, in terms of food, movies, TV, book, whatever.

He does have a rather touching loyalty to the VHS cassette format.

Well, y’know, it’s funny how people just turn their backs on these formats so entirely. It’s happening right now with DVDs. You get these huge chunks of time where everything’s released in a format, and then the new format comes out—and it’s a mistake to believe that everything that was released in the old format is now going to be available in the new format. A huge percentage of things are left behind, and whether it’s CDs or LPs or anything, it’s crazy to throw out an entire format, because you’re going to lose a lot of great titles. With VHS there’s so many obscure horror movies—I don’t know if they’re great titles, but people pay hundreds of dollars for the VHS tape because it was never made available in any other way. In the meantime you’ve got these tapes that you can buy for a dollar a piece…

And I can remember when I was a kid, before people had home video systems, the idea that you could have your own film library seemed otherworldly and magical, that you could actually own movies rather than just waiting for them to come on TV or to come to a revival theater. And when VHS tapes first were for sale, they were really expensive, like $79.99 to buy some movie that you were interested in. And now time has passed, and you literally can have this incredible film library for 25 cents a movie, if you’re willing to put up with the shittiness of VHS tapes. And I can see where this guy kind of sees the magic in that, that he can have this incredible archive without having to put much money out there. You can walk into any thrift store in the country and walk out with a ton of movies, especially if your taste runs more towards mainstream garbage, like these guys’ does.

His particular sweet spot seems to be light comedies released between 1994 and ’98.

Yup, you’ve got it.

I saw that Bye Bye Love was used as a plot device in the most recent Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii.

And of course there’s a debate going on in the world of Twitter about whether or not that plot even makes sense, that Gregg would say: “I’ve never heard of this movie, I’d better add this to my collection, I don’t know this one.” A lot of the Gregg defenders are saying: “That’s ridiculous, that couldn’t be, of course he would know this movie.”

In addition to On Cinema at the Cinema and Decker, you have this supplementary Twitter material, all part of this ever-expanding universe that radiates out from On Cinema. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a multi-platform shtick quite like it.

I don’t think there’s been anything like it, it’s so multi-layered… You’ve got two different shows that you’ve got to watch in order to piece together what’s going on, and then stuff that takes place on Twitter and in interviews and stuff like that is, again, a huge component to a lot of these plotlines that are going on. This month in particular, we’ve got weeks of daily Decker episodes as well as On Cinema episodes coming out in the midst of it. It’s insane. I wish that I was just a fan tuning into this, because I’d be pretty into it. I mean, it’s funny, the guys at Marvel Studios are obsessed with the On Cinema world, and these guys are into creating their own universe and figuring out the rules for it, making sure there’s a consistency to it. And that’s what we have to do a lot of the time, to make sure that things fall into place as they should, and that we’re not, for the sake of a laugh, selling out some of the details about what these guys’ lives are about, and how these things fit into place with one another.

The little spats that carry over from one show to the other, and from one week to the next…

It all has to be really carefully plotted out. The dialogue’s all improvised, but the plots have to be plotted out, because when you’re filming these things in advance, you have to be sure of how they’ll fit together properly, like a puzzle, because they air at a different time than they’re shot, and with two different shows going on, and the Twitter stuff… It could be really easy to slip up, and screw up the timeline, and we don’t want to do that.

And how have you been dealing with pushing Entertainment, which is a different beast entirely, on Twitter?

I’m not. Really, I don’t really have a Twitter account for myself. You’ve got the Gregg Turkington one, which is strictly the character from On Cinema, and it doesn’t make sense for that guy to be talking about Entertainment, or anything like that.

And who does the Taco Bell illness-related Tweets?

Those are Neil Hamburger Tweets, and that’s another account. It does make it strange, I think, if people watch Entertainment and then say, “Huh, what’s the story with this guy?” and they end up at the Gregg Turkington Twitter feed and find this inane movie bullshit going on—it’s probably pretty confusing. But that’s okay, I’m fine with that, I’m fine with somebody being confused by that. Maybe they’ll dig a little bit deeper and get into that as well. Really these things are coming from the same perspective, they’re just being presented in completely different ways. It’s great when somebody taps into that and appreciates all that, while other people can’t make any sense of it. Y’know, that’s okay, too.

“Are you down with Larry Clark?” this magazine wrote in 2002, by way of prelude to a discussion of Ken Park that underlined the particularly divisive nature of Clark’s art and personality. This was around the time that then-59-year-old Clark was in the news for dealing a decisive beat-down to Hamish McAlpine, head of the film’s U.K. distributor.

More recently, Clark has kept a low profile—though a spat with art collector Peter Brant did crack Page Six in 2013—but this is about to change. Clark’s Marfa Girl opens in New York on March 27, his first feature to appear in theaters since 2005’s Wassup Rockers, and its follow-up is waiting in the wings. This would be the Paris-set The Smell of Us, which recently screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects, and now awaits a sufficiently dauntless American distributor. (Ken Park, it should be noted, never did get one.)

Clark (born 1943) first made his name as a photographer, a trade that he learned by accompanying his portrait-photographer mother on door-to-door trips around his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a teenager, camera buff Clark became addicted to amphetamines, and photographed his circle of fellow addicts in their middle-American dead-end purgatory. This biography in images, taken between 1962 and 1971, became his first book, Tulsa. More than 20 years later, Clark would make his feature-filmmaking debut with another document of heedless, in-the-moment youth, 1995’s Kids, starring the teenaged skaters who then congregated around Washington Square Park.

The Smell of Us returns to the skate-punk milieu, though in a radically different context. From a script co-credited to Clark and a young French poet named Mathieu Landais, the film looks at the comings and goings of a clique of skaters who convene around the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Their numbers include Math and J.P. (Lukas Ionesco and Hugo Behar-Thinières), Paris skate-rats who sell their asses for a few Euros using an online service; Pacman (Théo Cholbi), a bully; Marie (Diane Rouxel), Pacman’s posh fashion-plate girlfriend; and Toff (Terin Maxime), the unofficial archivist of the group, who documents their skate jumps and sexual exploits. There is also a haggard hobo, Rockstar, played by Clark himself in one of the two roles that he takes on, and a troubadour played by Bully star Michael Pitt who, along with reVolt, a band fronted by Wassup Rockers star Jonathan Velasquez, provides the soundtrack.

It is, in form, the most out-there, elliptical film that Clark has ever made—an approach demanded by the contingencies of the production, as he revealed in the course of an interview last week. He was in Paris when I spoke to him via Skype about his present, past, and future projects, and was fighting fit.

The Smell of Us

I’d like to start by talking about the origins of The Smell of Us, which I know came to you initially through the screenwriter Mathieu Landais. Could you talk about the process whereby that started?

Well, actually it starts 20 years ago when I was at Cannes with my first film, Kids. We were in the main competition when there were only five films in the main competition. It was very special: I got to see my first film in the Grand Palais on a gigantic screen in this big opera house with four balcony levels full of people. I made the film in ’94, and it came out in ’95. It premiered at Cannes. Well, actually, we had a midnight screening at Sundance, but anyway. So I was hanging out with the people at Cannes—the French producers and distributors and directors. Harmony [Korine] and I came to Cannes a couple days earlier and didn’t see any skaters at all, so we were keeping our eye open. We saw a kid walking on a little tiny beach in Cannes with a skateboard under his arm so we chased him down and started talking to him. We met his friends, and then we went out to his house and met his mother and met more of his friends, and talked to him a lot about what it was like to be a teenager in France, and they just told us all these stories. And I thought that I would like to make a film in France about adolescence. I mentioned this at a dinner to all these big shots, movie distributors and directors and producers and a couple of actors. I said: “I’d like to make a film about growing up in France.” Immediately, they said: “That’s impossible.” And I said: “Why?” They said: “You’re not French.” So, I kinda took that as a challenge. It stuck in the back in my mind as a challenge.

In 2010, I had a retrospective here at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. I was hanging the show, and the museum would close, and I would have to go out the back way, which is the back of the Palais also, and there’s a big, big courtyard there with a little pool. And there were like 50 skaters there. It was a skate spot. It was very funky, there was graffiti all over the place, and it was filthy. The pond had about three inches of green algae on top of it. It had turned out that the Palais de Tokyo and the museum were in a fight over who was responsible for this area in the back. Consequently, no one was cleaning it, and it was a skate spot. It reminded me of Washington Square Park in ’92, ’93. So I just wondered: “Gee, what happens to these kids when they leave here?” Because it was all different kinds of kids, all different ethnic origins, rich kids, poor kids just… like skaters.

So then Mathieu Landais came to my exhibition at the museum. We had a mutual friend in California who had sent some notebooks to Mathieu, because Mathieu was a poet and he likes notebooks. So this mutual friend, Joey Lou, who Mathieu actually never met—it was like an Internet friendship—gave me some notebooks to carry to Paris for Mathieu. So Mathieu came to the opening of the show and I gave him the notebooks, and I started talking to him. I read some of his poetry, and I said: “You know, I want to make a screenplay. I want to make a film about these kids in Paris. Would you like to help me write the screenplay, or write the screenplay?” So we started talking about it. We figured that we had to meet the kids. Consequently, we met a bunch of kids, and then through them, we met a bunch of other kids, like 18, 19, 20, 21 years old. We went to the nightclubs with them, all the clubs for the young people to listen to techno and drink and do coke and do MDMA and ecstasy and all that, and party. So I went out quite a few times, got to know them and told them what I wanted to do. They all had seen my films, Kids and Ken Park and Bully, so they knew me. They were excited that I wanted to do this.

Bully

I went back the States, and then I came back to Paris like 10, 12 times, and Mathieu was writing. We were on the phone like every day for a year. He’d never written a screenplay before, but he’s a writer, and writers can’t stop writing. After about nine drafts, I said: “Mathieu, this is it. I’m going to shoot this. I’ve got enough.” And then he kept writing. I think he ended up with 15 scripts.

As I got to know Mathieu, I found out his history, his story, and he had actually a really interesting story, and so I kept pushing him to put autobiographical stuff into his screenplay, pushing and pushing him that this would be better to make it like an autobiography, but to mix it up and fictionalize stuff, to mix characters together and so on and so forth. I also told him that I wanted the Internet to play a part in the film, and I wanted to show how kids get into trouble through the Internet. Every day you read in the paper that someone, some kid is in trouble because of the Internet because everything is recorded, everything is photographed, everything is documented. These kids go to a party, and they know there’s going to be a little sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and fights. Everybody films it with their camera, they document it. Today if there’s a big party and all these things happen and no one films it, did it really happen? It’s like a “If a tree falls in the woods” kind of analogy. So anyway, I wanted that in there, and I said: “I want to shoot some of the film through the kids’ POVs, through their phones and their cameras.”

I told him a lot of the stuff I wanted in it. We finally got a screenplay done. I think I picked the ninth draft out of 15 or 16 drafts. He kept adding. Just before we started shooting, he added this other character, Rockstar, this homeless, alcoholic bum spouting poetry all the time. He wanted Peter Doherty to play the role, and he met Pete and he agreed to do it. He was going to be Rockstar. He would’ve been perfect spouting all this gibberish, this poetry. But Pete’s a junky, and he never showed up. I talked to him on the phone like 20 times, and we had seven or eight appointments for dinner, for lunch, for meetings, and he never showed. I never met the guy. So I ended up playing Rockstar at the last minute, which was one of the producer’s suggestions, just in jest. I said: “No, no, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not an actor.” To cut to the chase, I played Rockstar because of Pete Doherty not showing up, that’s how it started. Ask me another question. That was a long answer.

The Smell of Us

I’d also heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that at one point Gaspar Noé was supposed to perform the toe-sucking scene.

You know, Gaspar is a friend of mine, and I don’t know if I asked him to do it. Probably I did, and if I did, he didn’t want to do it, I’m sure. I don’t quite remember, but Gaspar is a good friend. I see him all the time. In Paris, he’s omnipresent in certain scenes. He’s always there. He’s a good guy and he makes great films. But what happened in that scene… It was tough to cast the scene, cast the role, and we finally cast Bouli Lanners. He’s a well-known actor and he’s a director. He’s at Cannes all the time for his films. Google him, man, the guy’s at Cannes every year with a film. I talked to him on the phone—he’s from Belgium—and he agreed to do it. Then, we were supposed to shoot that scene on a Monday morning, but Friday night at midnight, he called me up and said: “Larry, I’m really sorry, but I can’t come and play the role. I can’t travel, doctor’s orders.” What happened was, he had a foot infection. He stepped on something, something happened to his feet, and he got an infection and it spread, and so he actually couldn’t travel.

So it’s Friday night and I’m stuck. We’re speeding through like crazy, with the location, everything set for Monday, and we have to shoot on Monday. I have a weekend to find an actor who will play this role, which was impossible to do. So Saturday morning, I said: “Fuck it.” I was playing Rockstar with a big beard and long hair. I got a haircut. I got my beard shaved off. I got my hair dyed black. I got a manicure and pedicure and I said: “I’m gonna to do this.” And I had no idea how to do it. I mean, the scene is just a mystery to me. Very odd. Monday, I went to the set and no one recognized me because I was all shaved and everything, except for the moustache. In the last minute, I asked the crew to cover all the mirrors because I didn’t want to see myself, and I had the makeup lady shave my moustache. I hadn’t seen my face without a moustache since I was in my twenties, and I hadn’t seen myself without a beard for 25 years.

It was funny because when I talked to the actors about playing the role I said: “Maybe we’ll sterilize his feet with alcohol, make sure he has no athlete’s foot or any kind of disease. It’ll be cool.” We started the scene, and Lukas takes off his clothes and takes his socks off, and this guy’s feet were filthy, man. After about a minute, though, there’s no taste at all because you licked his feet clean. All I could think of when I was doing it was: “What’ll my kids think about this?” I’m thinking about my daughter, who’s 28 now, saying: “That’s my dad.” That was spinning through my mind as I was licking Lukas’s feet. There was no plan for me to ever be in the film, and I wasn’t going to be in the film, and now here I am all over the film. Because I’m a finisher. If I start a film, I’m going to finish it.

Impaled

You mentioned that one of the things that was important to you was to integrate the effect of new technology into the script, and to make sure that was a part of it. In that respect, it seems like you’re building on the short film that you did, Impaled, in 2006, with kids auditioning to shoot a porn. Again you’re looking at the way that growing up with access to porn at a keystroke might impact somebody’s sexual imagination.

The idea behind Impaled was that kids are going to have an experience of pornography before they are even interested, or able to really have sex, at 8, 9, 10 years old—they’re seeing all this porno shit on the Internet. How has that affected their ideas about sex and, to take it further, their sexual life? These kids came in, they’d shaved off all their pubic hair—which was just mind-boggling to me because at that age everybody is waiting to get pubic hair, and then these kids shave it off because of watching porn. It’s really a good film because it is a documentary with a question behind it. As I was talking, asking them questions, I was really interested in their answers. And so this film—as I say, you read in the paper every day about a kid getting in trouble through the Internet. They go to parties. They film each other fucking, or doing something to a drunk, naked girl, and then they post it. Or, like, kids steal something and then they post something online: “Look what I stole.” It’s just amazing. Kids can go on the Internet, as in the film, and prostitute themselves over the Internet, like they’re applying for a job, and you read about kids doing that all the time. If you look at the porn sites there are advertisements, and guys pay kids to get together with them, get naked and do whatever they ask, and the kids get paid. There was a big article in The New York Times by a kid who did that for years: he was underage and he did it here for years. There was a big article about him, and how it fucked him up. That’s why that’s in the film. I met people here that had done that, that Mathieu and I had met. Pretty much everything in the film is true. It’s fictionalized, but it’s all based on real people and real events, and then mixing the people up, taking, in some cases, say three or four people’s story and putting it in one person.

In some ways these kids peddling themselves online isn’t vastly different from the kind of thing that you see in Bully, for example. In Bully, where you’re dealing with a case that is now 20 years old, you have kids using what technology is then available to them—phone sex—to sell the only thing that they have that has some kind of value: their youth.

When I was a kid, there was none of that. When I was a kid in the Fifties, nobody told me anything, and if you asked a question, likely as not you got slapped, you know: “Shut up, smart ass. Go in the other room and sit in the corner. Just keep your mouth shut.” It’s totally different because now there’s everything you want to know, you can immediately find out through the Internet. It’s a different world, and it’s interesting to me—I have kids that grew up with it. My daughter was like 9 years old, they were using Internet at school, and she was using it, and she might type in “My Little Pony,” the cartoon for kids that she loved, and a woman fucking a Shetland pony might pop up. You just don’t know what’s going to happen with the Internet. So it has always been interesting to me because of my kids, and it’s a new way to grow up. And it’s not a problem, it’s just their world. They’re born with it, so it’s natural to them.

The Smell of Us

One interesting character is Toff (Terin Maxime), who’s the photographer of the group.

There’s always a kid filming skating. They can skate and film, and they all shoot each other. They do it for a few hours and then they go home and watch the whole thing, all the tricks and the skating that they’ve done. And as I said earlier, everybody films everything at parties and everything. You look at concerts, or go to a concert, and I’m probably exaggerating, but it looks like to me that 90 fucking percent of the people are filming it and watching it through their phone. I couldn’t do that. I like to watch the fucking concert. I don’t want to film for two hours. But it’s like second nature to everybody.

So Toff, in the screenplay, he was the kid who videoed everything. And when we started shooting, I started thinking: “Well, you know, when I shot the stuff in Tulsa, my friends weren’t posing for the camera, but it was real, you know, documentary photography.” How can the photographer be there without breaking that reality? I was there because I was one of the guys in the book. I was just one of the guys. So it was normal for me that I just happened to be in a place where, if I didn’t have my camera, my friends would say: “Where’s your camera?” It was just a part of me, I always had it from the time I was 15 years old. During the filming, I said: “I’m going to make Toff me, and I’m going to have him be in places where he can’t be.” Even in a scene where he couldn’t possibly be there when, like, Math is getting fucked in the ass, he’s there. Because I wanted him to always be there. He’s also there when Math is getting his toes sucked. And Toff is me. The film became more personal to me because now I’m in the film, and there’s a character in the film who is me.

There’s another version of the film that’s going to come out in five or six months in September, which we’re going to call the Director’s Cut. It’s the same film, except I’m in the film as myself, like breaking the fourth wall, and walking through the film on many occasions. There’s a scene in the end of the film where I’m in it as myself again. I’m talking to kids… well, you’ll see it. That’s going to come out in September, and then we’re going to do a box set of both DVDs, which will be interesting. Because the Director’s Cut… you’ve never seen anything like it, I’ve never seen a director do what I did. I got so into it that it became something else, again.

The Smell of Us

Halfway through the film, a little more than halfway through the film… luckily I’d shot everything that I needed to shoot with Lukas and with Hugo, with JP and Math, but they didn’t get paid for the first two weeks, and after two weeks they got paid. And what did they do, of course? They just bought drugs and partied. They’d never acted before and they never made a film, and they didn’t realize how much hard work it is, and how intense it is. And I actually made the film for them. Because we couldn’t get enough money. It was a little more than half the budget, and I knew it was going to kill me. I said: “If I was 50 I could do this, but I’m 70, I can’t do this, I can’t do a film in half the time for half the money, it’s just impossible.” But the kids… they sent me e-mails, just begging me, calling me to make the film, and I told them I was going to make the film. And we had spent like a year-and-a-half getting ready to make the film, and I said: “OK, I’m going to make it for these kids.” But their life is, like, staying up all night partying and drinking and taking drugs. And so after two-and-a-half weeks or three weeks, they’re dead tired. So, Hugo and Lukas and Theo went on strike. This is a very French thing. It’s the French thing to do, everybody goes on strike, and if you’ve ever been to Paris, you see demonstrations every day, someone’s on strike everyday. Yesterday it was the doctors, the fucking doctors were on… some big demonstration.

So, anyway, they go on strike. The producers freak out, we go to lunch and I see them all shaking. I said: “Look, we’re going to keep going, we’re going to keep shooting.” They said: “What are you going to shoot?” I said: “I’ll just keep shooting, I’ll just re-write the whole end of the movie.” So I did. I mean, we have contracts, everything is legal and signed off on a contract. The producers were calling the agents and e-mailing the agents and the agent sent back an e-mail saying: “Larry Clark’s film is finished. They’re not coming back.” This is their agent. So I said: “Fuck it, they’re all fired and I’m going to finish the film.” So then I just re-wrote the rest of the film and finished the film.

I changed the ending. I changed the reason Math may be feeling what he’s feeling—we have an inkling, so the audience can kind of understand why Math is doing what he’s doing, because Math does not need the money. I want backstories on my characters. One thing I wanted to do when I made the film was that I wanted you to understand maybe why these people were acting like they’re acting. That’s very important to me. So we see in Diane’s character, Marie—she was a rich girl slumming with the skaters, and we see her go back to her nice flat with her mother, and we see her and her mother at a fashion show, and then we see Math at home asleep with his mother.

The Smell of Us

That was all brand-new. That was not in the script. Mathieu Landais had a whole other reason for Math being like he was, which I didn’t want to shoot. In my mind I said: “I’m not going to shoot this, I cannot shoot this.” There’s a book, a The Smell of Us book, which has 120 stills from the film and then Mathieu’s original screenplay in French… so if you read that you can see how I changed the movie completely. And by the way, Mathieu kept saying: “I don’t want anybody to know this is autobiographical, we have to hide all of this…” and then he names the main character Math. Which is kind of bizarre in the first place. But his payoff was when Math was 9 he got raped by a man, he got butt-fucked by a man. Now, I don’t want to shoot this. I just don’t want to shoot it. I had a couple of kids come in, and one kid was gonna do it, and his father was with him. He was cast, and then I started thinking: “You know, a 9-year-old kid isn’t old enough to make this decision.” He doesn’t realize that when he goes back to school, all of his classmates are going to make fun of him and he’s going to be known as the kid who got fucked in the butt, and he’s going to be miserable, and it might follow him when he’s grown up. And so I called him and his father back in and I explain all of this to him and I say: “You have to go back to school and kids are going to make fun of you and you have no idea what you’re getting into…” So anyway, I didn’t want to shoot that and I kinda questioned the parents who would allow a thing like this, allowing their kid to act in my film… even though if I had shot it, I would’ve shot it going into the sun with lens flare, you wouldn’t have seen anything.

But anyway, I cast this actor Dominique Frot, as Math’s mother. She only had a few lines, it wasn’t a big scene. But I got this idea, because Dominique is such a great actor. So I took Lukas outside and I talked to him and I told him what to think about and what Dominique was going to say—kind of, because I didn’t know what she was going to say, and she didn’t either. So I told Lukas what to think about when it was happening, and then I got with Dominique and I told her some ideas about what to talk about and what to do in a very general way, and then Dominique came out and I said: “I want you to improv.” And so she goes over to the corner for half an hour, and she puts music on—she’s a piano player also, a classical pianist. She puts her earphones on for literally half an hour with her eyes closed and just stood up and we were ready. And she just went off. We had 11 minutes left on the card, and we shot for 11 minutes with no cuts. And so she was kind of forced to keep going and keep going and keep going and in that one scene she steals the fucking movie, man, it’s so fucking good. We had exactly 11 minutes left, and after seven or eight minutes, she looked at me and said: “Larry we have to cut it, and what am I supposed to do?” And I wouldn’t cut. And I’m biting my hand, because it’s so intense, but I won’t cut. So she had to keep going, and then she really went all out, and it was so incredible what she did, and at the end of the scene when the glass breaks, when she’s trying to give him some wine? The glass actually broke in her hand, there was glass all over the place, right after the glass breaks we ran out of time on the card.

I love improv. I love just to take an idea and go with it. When I made Marfa Girl in Marfa, Texas, all I had was little notebooks with ideas I had from going to Marfa three or four times. I had maybe 30 pages of writing, characters and things I saw in Marfa that I wanted to put in the film, and I made that film just with my notebooks, no screenplay. My producers said: “Larry, I’ve got to have something, some kind of something so we’ll know locations, how many characters in a scene, how many days…” so I took my notebooks and made a 20-page script, double-spaced, which was just enough so that we can find locations and days to shoot, and they can figure out a shooting schedule. Then, basically, I was flying by the seat of my pants on Marfa Girl and just made up the film, which really helped me when we did The Smell of Us, because I just came out of a film where I made it up as we went along and so I was already in the groove, so Marfa Girl helped The Smell of Us a lot.

Tune in tomorrow for Part Two.

There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young that makes you do a double take. First you think, “Neat cultural apercu,” then you worry that perhaps Baumbach hit the Zeitgeist Analysis button a little too neatly on cue. It’s one of the film’s many juxtapositions of the lifestyle of Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who are in their mid-to-late forties, settled and somewhat jaded, and that of indefatigably enthusiastic, creative young hipsters Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). The latter cultivate—or seem just organically, with innate coolness, to have—a connection with the past and with archaic forms like VHS tapes, board games, vinyl LPs. Whereas it’s the older, hidebound couple who live in the world of present-day connectivity: we see them at home checking their mobiles, watching TV online, reading Kindles.

It’s a nice point, concisely made, but it worried me that Baumbach was overplaying his “How We Live Today” card—possibly because I’m still getting over the overzealous “alarm call” literalness of Jason Reitman’s indigestible Men, Women, & Children. But this is probably unfair to Baumbach, a much wittier, more graceful filmmaker than Reitman. While We’re Young offers plenty of caustic insights into contemporary bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle, plus a great deal of more ambitious philosophical inquiry, and for the most part—for the most part—Baumbach pulls it all off with lightness, delicacy, and that rare quality, joy. This may not be the most original of social comedies, but it has a distinctive and enjoyable tang—I’m in no way belittling it if I call it a tart sorbet of a movie.

Stiller’s Josh is a filmmaker teaching documentary while struggling to complete his own long-gestating project, an all-encompassing study of who knows what, exactly—no less than the entire contemporary global malaise, it appears—and in particular recording at length the cogitations of a guru-like penseur, one Ira Mandelshtam (echoes here of Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which Woody Allen’s character is similarly filming another venerable repository of ethical wisdom). Then Josh meets Jamie and Darby, who are attending one of his lectures; Jamie tickles Josh’s vanity by complimenting one of his early films. The two couples start hanging out, and Josh and Cornelia find themselves gawping in astonished delight at the younger duo’s vivacity, creativity, their unceasing inexhaustible on-ness. Josh is so impressed, and rejuvenated, that he fails to notice that he always picks up the bill at his coffee sessions with Jamie—an enthuser but also possibly a user.

The film’s prime joke is that what can make the young so appealing and inspiring to be around tends to look charmless and awkward in older people: when Josh and Cornelia start doing, you know, young stuff, they inevitably look absurd. Josh buys his instant ticket to rejuvenation—a hat. He also starts riding a bike, only to be told by his doctor that he has arthritis (“Arthritis arthritis?” he gapes in disbelief). Cornelia joins Darby at one of her hip-hop dance sessions, and is angular, clumsy, and out-of-step. But then she’s giving it a go and moving those creaky joints—which is better than staying glued to her iPad, right?

Baumbach works some of the ironies more elegantly than others. Josh and Cornelia accompany their new friends to an ayahuasca retreat, gagging on the mystic decoction to the sounds of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score. Some participants, but not all, get mystical insights (Josh: “It’s true, you see Egyptian shit. What are you seeing?”; Cornelia: “I’m in a deli in Bensonhurst”), and guess what, someone kisses the wrong person. Meanwhile, the couple have been neglecting their old friends, recent parents (Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz)—then go to their apartment to find them throwing a party, to which Josh and Cornelia aren’t invited. Their old friends aren’t impressed by their skin-deep attempts to be young, not even by the hat: “You’re an old man with a hat,” the Horovitz character tells Josh.

There’s a certain breezy obviousness to much of the humor: it’s like a broad, sitcom expansion of a Moral Tale or a Comedies and Proverbs episode that Baumbach’s beloved Eric Rohmer might have made on a sortie to Williamsburg. And the film is intensely enjoyable on that level. But Baumbach attempts to go a little deeper, to delve also into matters of truth, identity, and the problem of the Real Thing. Everything about Jamie and Darby is painfully authentic, so grittily organic that it can’t help looking like fakery, like a dazzling borrowed set of vintage clothes; it’s their ostentatious authenticity that makes them seem so phony. Conversely, the older pair unthinkingly live every day in the midst of a modern culture of phoniness, or iPhoniness, yet that’s what makes them authentic, in their way: they’re prisoners of their society and of their aging bodies, but they’re aware of it and doing their best to deal with it. They’re like most of us.

Less convincing is the film’s take on the problem of truth. Josh helps Jamie on his new doc project, which seems to spring breezily from the top of the young whiz’s head, triggered by an extraordinary serendipitous discovery. Except that all is not what it seems, and Jamie’s amazing find turns out to have been reverse-engineered; I imagine that Baumbach is thinking here of the controversy around the suspiciously convenient Catfish, a tall tale about tall tales. Things come to a head when a near-crazed Josh crashes an evening at Lincoln Center (where else), in honor of his father-in-law Leslie Breitbart (played with impeccable dry relaxation by Charles Grodin), a revered documentarist in the Wiseman/Maysles vein, who gives a speech on filmmakers allowing the world to offer its truths to them. But even this senior statesman of filmic truth—whose high principles allow for the grace of flexibility—doesn’t seem to think that Jamie’s crime of fiddling the facts is so heinous. At least his film works, whereas Leslie, after watching the latest cut of Josh’s work-in-eternal-progress, can only comment: “You just showed me a six-and-a-half-hour film that feels like it’s seven hours too long.”

At one point, Josh sneers about Jamie: “It’s all a pose. He once saw a sincere person and he’s been imitating him ever since.” Well, sincerity is a wonderful thing—but what if expressing your true self means that you only kvetch all the time? It’s a problem that once fueled a large part of Woody Allen’s career, and a problem that Larry David has solved quite satisfactorily—kvetching is funnier and a noble calling, so nu, live with it. As for the theme of ageing, Baumbach has addressed it before, together with Stiller; the film recalls the mind-boggling scene in which Stiller, as the protagonist of Greenberg (10), loses his composure at a students’ party; While We’re Young is a lighter take on similar themes, but with the comic grace that comes from resignation and reconciliation.

But While We’re Young suffers from a certain male skew. That’s partly because Stiller and Driver are such magnetic comedy players that they inevitably hog the limelight. Stiller has become his generation’s quintessential frustrated man, an actor whose very being seems increasingly concentrated in his ever-tenser shoulders. That makes him a mesmerizing yin-yang pairing with the gangling, floppy Driver, who’s so loose it appears as if his limbs could float free at any point and then recompose themselves into position at will (who knows, maybe he’ll get to demonstrate this power in the forthcoming Star Wars). As for Watts, while she’s also good at exuding crackly self-unease, she’s never 100-percent convincing at maximizing the humor, which was partly the problem with her Birdman performance (plus, it was a very underwritten role). As for Seyfried’s Darby, she’s a little lacking in color, and in any case underused. Darby complains at one point that she has the back seat role in her relationship with Jamie: “I’m the girl to his hitchhiker.” But the film rather places her in that role as well, and Seyfried doesn’t have the comic chops to make more of the part. I wish that Baumbach had cast more of a natural comedian—someone like Aubrey Plaza perhaps too obviously comes to mind, but imagine what she could have done with Darby.

This is also, I have to say, a film replete with zingers—and while Baumbach does zingers with a rare snap and eloquence, you might find myself suffering a certain degree of wit fatigue. Josh’s embattled buoyancy finally caves in when, after countless indignities, he finds his bike still chained to a lamppost, but with its wheel stolen. At last, I thought—a visual image that brings it all home. A visual image other than a hat, that is.

“His most important film to date,” the Argentine critic Quintín wrote in FILM COMMENT about Jauja, Lisandro Alonso’s feature (partly) about a 19th-century Danish engineer’s trek into the Patagonian hinterlands to find his daughter. “Jauja gives new meaning to Alonso’s past work, proving that his poetics isn’t necessarily tied to the use of non-actors, non-verbal performances, and minimalism. But the participation of Argentine poet and novelist Fabián Casas, actor Viggo Mortensen, and longtime Aki Kaurismäki cameraman Timo Salminen doesn’t merely imply higher production values—it also suggests a combined effort in which literary values, professional performances, and high-quality visuals fuse with and modify Alonso’s approach.”

Unlike Alonso’s past cinematic journeys into the unknown (from Libertad, 01, to Liverpool, 08), the Argentine setting of Jauja lies firmly in the distant past, during the campaign to suppress indigenous peoples that was known as “The Conquest of the West.” Mortensen’s character has arrived to join this effort, but as an engineer, he occupies a somewhat less heroic-sounding position, and when his daughter elopes, his search feels all the more desperate and quixotic (even if it looks beautiful).

“Jauja” in Spanish denotes a mythical land of plenty, but it’s also an actual city in Peru and, historically, a mining area (and consequently a site of colonial battles). It’s a suggestive, multivalent title that names without quite explaining, and with the story’s enigmatic deviations from a purely physical journey, Jauja itself ultimately manifests the urge to escape from a certain narrative—and for Alonso, an attempt to blaze a new path.

FILM COMMENT spoke with the ever-playful director last year at the Cannes Film Festival following the world premiere of Jauja, which is currently enjoying a much-lauded New York theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (where Alonso was 2014 Filmmaker in Residence) and IFC Center.

I was immediately struck simply by the vivid colors in the film. How did you get those greens and reds?

This is the first time I work with Timo Salminen. He has a great knowledge and perception about colors, and he used to work on films with Aki Kaurismaki. So he likes to push the colors to the limits, and to create delusions, not the reality. I asked him: “Where does the light come from?” “It’s from the lamp,” he would say. Afterward, in the color correction, in the postproduction, he just pushed the limits more, and I really liked it because you can see the colors in the landscape get a little bit more alive. And you know how I love to shoot those places, those wild places.

It has the effect of making you feel like you’re seeing a new land for the first time—the kind of shock an explorer might experience. Did you read any journals by explorers who went through South America?

Yeah, a little. I wrote the script with Fabián Casas, the poet, and read some books about some French guys who were traveling at that time. They were traveling on a horse from Buenos Aires to Chile, and that takes about three or four weeks. They just did that—there was no other way. We took some ideas from the books.

How long were you shooting on location?

We were in there for like three weeks. But after two weeks, we stopped because we were waiting for the old lady [Ghita Nørby]. She was busy and had to do some theater plays and other things. So we stopped for two weeks, and then we went there for the location at the end.

Where was that?

It’s at the very bottom of the continent. Laguna Azul means Blue Lake. I discovered these places by the Internet, but as soon as I got more informed, I just took the car and went.

And the chateau at the end of the movie and the scene in the cave, where was that?

That is in Denmark. And the cave scene is in a studio. Well, you see the entrance which was filmed on location. But the cave was in a studio. It’s like theater.

It looked a bit like a piece of black box theater. The older Danish theater actress, what was her background and how did you cast her?

Her name is Ghita Nørby. She’s kind of a living legend in Denmark. She acts frequently in Danish films, and she did more than 155 films. Viggo was a great fan of her since he was a Danish boy. He just mentioned Ghita for the role, and he got in touch with her. Suddenly she was flying to the end of the world, just to come with us, to be in a cave.

And speaking of Viggo, how was it different directing him? In the past, you have directed a lot of nonprofessional actors.

His mind knows how to create these characters. I didn’t know how to do a lot of these things. He’s a great actor, and I’m not able to tell him what to do or not, you know. Nevertheless, we talked a lot and when we worked, we would make solutions to the script and make it better. With Fabián, we just talked about who this guy is and blah blah blah. But, yeah, I mean, what can I do? I trust these guys. I don’t know what the hell they said in Danish, unless I think he was saying my lines.

Hopefully he wasn’t just saying the alphabet or something. It’s interesting because Viggo has a different style of acting from many you’ve worked with before, but it’s also partly because of the nature of the character. It’s as if Dinesen has been weakened by his experience already when we first see him. I wonder how he gets to this point.

Me too. I think Fabián at the same time was actually writing a novel with some of these elements, but the main character was a dog. And I don’t want to make a film about a dog. Well, not yet. So I just picked up some elements from his novel, which is much bigger than my 20-page script. In the beginning, it was a little bit linear but then after the girl disappeared, I think he made a crack in his head, or something happened. The film breaks itself a little bit and starts to have distortions in time, space, and reality. I’m not sure what it is, but I don’t really want to know. Not yet.

Why did you want to take the movie into that direction?

I mean, there’s no way to keep on in the film after he realizes that he’s not going to see the girl again. He has no horse, and he has not even a hat to protect him from the sun. He’s a man in a desert, and he loses all that he has, his daughter. He’s far away from his country. What I’m saying is: the character would not want to go on living after all that.

So it’s escapist in a way.

Once you lose your child, there’s no way to keep on going, to abide that feeling.

Extreme experiences call for extreme landscapes. Sometimes the movie reminded me of a western just because of the extremity of the landscapes. I’m wondering if there’s that equivalent kind of feeling for you—making a movie that’s a historical story, in an actual historical setting.

I love historical stories, but I think you [Americans] have to do the westerns. We don’t know how to do the westerns. I’m not able to do a classical western. I just leave it to someone else. This is my kind of twist on the westerns.

You have the search element in the plot, which you find in westerns, most famously in The Searchers.

Everybody talked to me about that film. I was going to watch that one, but then I was like: “No, no, it’s better if I don’t watch it.” But I know it’s one of the best of John Ford.

About the screenplay—which you mentioned was 20 pages?

Only one. One page! No, it was 20 pages long.

How does it play out when you’re making the movie? At certain points, when he’s walking and hacking his way along, you can effectively leave the specifics of a screenplay behind.

Yeah, I don’t ever read it. I had it in my pocket but sometimes I forget about it. No, for example, if Captain Dinesen is just walking through, I write a little bit more in terms of getting more money. I put some more of this and that, and expanded the situation, but it’s actually just, you know, a guy is walking.

You mentioned that Viggo had some input with the casting of Ghita Nørby. What other aspects did he work on?

He has three different roles in the film. He’s a producer, an actor, and he’s composing music with this guitar player who’s called Buckethead. You know, the strange guy? He plays with the mask and nobody knows his face?

He sounds like an interesting guy...

He’s a very interesting, strange guy. He’d go with the guitar on the stage and then suddenly he’d stop and he gets out a nunchaku. And he continues to play. Yeah, he’s a funny guy. Viggo is a machine—I mean, he never stops working. During the shooting, before the shooting, after the shooting, and until today. He was controlling the subtitles—that kind of guy. He had a lot of ideas on the structure of the film, and it’s super easy to work with people like that. I used to work with the same people who more or less know my films, and I was worried about, you know, “That’s a new guy.” But he won everyone’s confidence because he’s great as a person.

Do you have any favorite performances of his from his other movies?

I think the Cronenberg film, A History of Violence, is his best. The last scene—it’s only his face. Nobody is speaking at the table, and he can do all that with his face.

With Jauja, Viggo seems to be one of the more talkative characters that you’ve had.

Yeah, but nobody understands Danish.

Sometime you’re really going to have to get that translated!

I like how Danish sounds. I feel like I’m familiar and afraid when he is talking to Spanish people. I can read it so deep.

How did you decide upon the unusual 4:3 frame of the film?

Actually, we composed the film in 1.85:1, which is more panoramic, a little bit more modern. But then, when I asked for the transfer from the lab, I just asked them to give me a full frame, and I started editing in 4:3. The machine just gives it to you like that. I was thinking that if I go with a more ’scope film, people maybe would get the wrong idea about Viggo, the swords, and the horse, and they’ll look more for action. Is he going to kill the Indians? And that is not the film. So if I put it in an old frame, they will start seeing the film another way, not waiting for more action. It’s a better perspective to have.

Right, you share a kind of tunnel vision with him instead of expecting more action.

I think also it’s more like a pictorial thing. It’s more like a painting.

I read one interview with you in which you said: “Liverpool would’ve been much different if I had not made Fantasma.” So now that you’ve made Jauja, do you have a feeling like that again?

I think after Liverpool I just felt maybe I should start changing the elements that I work with. I was a little bit tired of the films I produced myself, so I stopped a little bit. I went back to the farm and started working; I meet my wife, and I have a kid. I needed to start thinking with new questions in terms of keeping going and getting stronger as a filmmaker.

Set in a contemporary Hungarian state that decides to enforce canine racial purity, White God features the tantalizing spectacle of a 200-strong dog pack wreaking revenge on petty bureaucrats who are only following orders as they impound mixed breeds. The canine avengers also target evildoers who sell fighting dogs on the black market and train them to battle to the death. As a snob-appeal treatment of the kind of slob-appeal scenario designed to put audiences through the wringer, running the gamut from “Awwww” to “Ugh,” the film has played at major festivals like Sundance and even won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prize.

As a fable about Europe’s persecuted underclass and immigrants, White God is riddled with messages — though the surface message, "be kind to animals, or else,” is more potent than any of this film's allegorical ones. Putting animals who stand for human groups together with real human characters confuses the issues. White God wants audiences to be moved because stray dogs are persecuted like homeless people. But viewers are prodded to despise the one actual street person in the movie for taking advantage of a dog. (George Miller did a vastly better job of keeping his meanings and sympathies straight with the human and animal cast of Babe: Pig in the City.) Strictly as an animal adventure it slides into melodrama so haphazard that it borders on camp. Sure, it is superficially daring to transfigure the outcasts in Hungary and other European countries into persecuted dogs. Just beneath the surface, isn’t it inherently sentimental to view them as the equivalent of man’s best friends, who’d be naturally loyal and affectionate if they weren’t put under the whip? And when Hagen, the canine antihero, inspires them to break out from a Budapest dog pound, isn’t it even more insulting to depict them transforming, lickety-split, into an organized terrorist army?

In a poorly explained setup, we learn that the Hungarian government has cracked down on the proliferation of mixed breeds by levying an exorbitant tax on their owners. The movie begins after many owners have given their dogs up to shelters or abandoned them on the streets. In White God mutts are the wretched of the earth—and “mutt,” in fact, has become the equivalent of “the M word.” At one point, Lili (Zsofia Psotta), the 13-year-old heroine, corrects a classmate for using it and insists on the term “mixed breed.”

In an ironclad version of the butterfly effect, the actions of Lili’s family put Budapest under siege. When her svelte mother heads to Australia for a three-month academic appointment with her new man (also a professor), she leaves Lili with her ex-husband, Daniel (Sándor Zsótér), a former professor who now works as a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse. Director and co-writer Kornél Mundruczó seizes this chance to dwell on the blood and guts of butchered beef, swiftly establishing an anti-subtle aesthetic. (Later, when the dogs execute a butcher, they ignore all the meat around him—they’re so radical and pure, their only need is to complete their kill list.)

Daniel is already at wits’ end, out of touch with his adolescent daughter and disconsolate over losing a wife who appears to have “traded up.” Then he learns that he’s also expected to host Hagen, Lili’s beloved pet, described as a cross between a shar-pei and a labrador. This tawny, sturdy animal drips affection and concern from every shar-pei-like fold in his face. But he doesn’t win over Daniel, who sees that Lili prefers Hagen to him. When a nosy, mean-spirited neighbor witnesses the dog entering Daniel’s flat, she tells him “mutts must be reported.” The next day she blows the whistle to Budapest’s canine control workers and maliciously accuses Hagen of biting her. Lili strives to protect her pet by taking him everywhere she goes, including orchestra practice—after all, playing passages from Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 on her trumpet appears to calm her four-legged best pal. (The film’s source music comments on Hungary’s resurgent nationalism and chaotic past; when a French horn player riffs on “The Internationale,” you wonder if he’s being sardonic or nostalgic.)

Sadly, Hagen disrupts the rehearsal, and Lili’s rebelliousness and intransigence enrage her father, who puts Hagen out on the street. From then on, the movie runs on parallel dog and human tracks. In succession, Hagen comes under the thumbs of a desperate street person, a slimy café operator who runs the dog equivalent of the gladiator market in toga movies, and a shrewd ex-con who buys Hagen (now called “Max”) precisely because the animal still has “heart”— a heart that he can twist into hatred with the proper sadistic regimen. Meanwhile, Lili keeps searching for Hagen while struggling to connect with her father and to fit in with her more worldly orchestra mates, who are into partying, dating, and drugs. It will take an outright dogpocalypse to bring Lili and Hagen face to face again.

The film’s internal logic is ludicrously sketchy. If the tax is supposed to be a burden, why do people still line up to adopt mixed breeds at the pound? If Lili’s mother is a campus social climber, wouldn’t she have paid the extra tax on the dog? Even the kid characters drop their strict obedience to their authoritarian conductor and move toward sullen rebellion in a matter of weeks. (The film is shaky on chronology, but we know everything happens in under three months because Lili’s mother doesn’t re-enter the action.) White God is full of shots that might resonate if the movie had more depth and finesse. The image of Hagen as a dog alone, standing at a stoplight next to an elegant dalmatian with a well-heeled owner, should be funny and poignant instead of merely pointed. It also begs the question: are dalmatians considered near-native Hungarians because the breed started next door in Croatia?

No one was looking forward to this movie more than yours truly. I grew up loving Jack London’s allegorical dog adventures The Call of the Wild and White Fang (and I still love them). I treasure George Miller’s Babe and Babe: Pig in the City for their cavalcades of complex canine characters. And I was all the more psyched when I discovered that this movie’s animal performers came from adoption lists or shelters, and found families after shooting. The most admirable aspect of White God is the skill of Teresa Miller, a second-generation dog trainer (her father, Karl Lewis Miller, supervised the animals in, among other movies, the Babe films, Cujo, and Sam Fuller’s White Dog). She seamlessly melds two brothers, “Luke” and “Bodie,” into Hagen. Together they bring persuasiveness and clarity to the most terrifying proceedings, including Hagen’s training for the dogfight—a mini horror movie in itself (his owner dresses like a serial killer)—and the gruesome clash of fang and paw in the dog ring. Even if you know that all the violence is simulated, you wonder how the dog performers feel as they nudge a rotting dog cadaver near a city bridge or eye a still-warm corpse in the dog ring. Unfortunately, the movie’s escalating extremism burns off Hagen’s individuality. He becomes a lean, mean fighting machine, and a robotic character.

Watching White God, I hoped for the longest time that the title would refer to the pale, frisky terrier mix who teaches Hagen how to survive in the streets and repeatedly rescues him from capture. These two share a chemistry that surpasses anything Hagen gets going with Lili. They exude an easy rapport as they lounge on an abandoned easy chair or sit quietly on a dump site on a hill overlooking a dog pond. The anonymous terrier retains qualities of canine soul while all the dogs around him are losing theirs, Hagen included. I thought the film might retain a shred of dignity if Hagen decided to make his pal a doggie divinity when he becomes leader of the pack.

No such luck. The movie never gets that imaginative or upbeat—it equates maturity with grimness. Mundruczó wants the phrase “white God” to catalyze thoughts about whether God is white, a particularly loaded question since he feels (per the interview provided in the press notes) that “The White Man has proved countless times that he is only capable of ruling and colonizing.” In the filmmaker’s own words, this movie uses dogs—or the timeless figure of The Dog—as “the symbol of the eternal outcast whose master is his god.”

Mundruczó says that deploying canines instead of human characters freed him from the inhibitions that would have come with depicting marginalized people and minorities. But revenge melodrama carries crippling limitations, too, including overweening demands for jeopardy and violence. If you’re going to use animals to create a political fable in action-movie form, you’d better work it out as beautifully as Matt Reeves did in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And you’d better make sure that you’re in control of mood and tone. The sight of dogs crashing through the gates of a pound and speeding down city streets and railroad tracks is both invigorating as a sprint to freedom and upsetting as a depiction of dogs becoming man’s worst enemy. But when they start tearing shopping bags and garbage bags from people’s hands, the spectacle often plays like a Mel Brooks parody of a terrible Irwin Allen disaster film, with lunatic bow-wows intent on eye-for-an-eye justice instead of killer bees.

Both of the most recent Planet of the Apes films are so much stronger as parable, narrative, and spectacle, that you’ve got to wonder whether the prestigious kudos for White God signal a return to the days when foreign-language movies with political and cultural aspirations were immediately graded up. The Planet of the Apes movies are even better at illustrating this film’s obligatory epigraph from Rilke: “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” The visually striking final scene of White God, designed to restore our affection for the dogs and our respect for Lili as an independent character, carries the clichéd message, “music soothes the savage beast”—even if that music is from bombastic old Franz Liszt.

Read the first half of this interview.

The Smell of Us

It’s interesting to look at Marfa Girl and The Smell of Us side by side. The Smell of Us is maybe the most stylistically radical thing that you’ve ever done, while Marfa Girl certainly does have that improvisatory quality about it but still sticks to the basic tenets of psychological realism. The Smell of Us is something else again, in terms of characters being where they logically should not actually be, or these jagged little scenes that pop up where you leave it to a viewer to connect them to the rest of the story, or not. Like when we see Rockstar getting the matching tattoo with Math…

I liked Lukas’s tattoo—he had this little skull on his finger and I liked it, so I got that. I got this in the film… [shows skull tattoo on arm] and then I got this [shows two skull tattoos on finger]. The first one I got looking that way, and when I look at it, it’s upside-down to me, so then I had a second one on so I could see it too. So I have two. And then I got the one on my finger, which I get complimented on all the time by old people, young people, bus drivers. I’m playing Rockstar, but the way Rockstar was written, he walks around saying kind of gibberish poetry and I’m not an actor and I didn’t want to do that anyway. So I figured out with Michael… Michael Pitt. I just turned 73, so my mind’s going a bit, but I’m fine. Maybe the movies’ll get better as my mind gets hazier.

Michael Pitt helped me with the character Rockstar. We both figured that I was strongest with just my “Larry Clark look.” Rockstar doesn’t talk in the film, and my idea was that he can talk but he just doesn’t choose to. He’s not mute at all, he can talk, and he actually sings John Lee Hooker with the guy playing the baby tuba. The tuba player is just a guy who would come to the street I lived on at midnight playing the tuba, and I would give him coins. I ran out and grabbed him one night to get his info because I wanted him to be in the film, just to have a tuba player in the movie.

Mathieu Landais wasn’t in Paris—he lives in Nantes and would come to Paris, but during the shooting he wasn’t there, and I had to improvise. I didn’t want a screenwriting credit either, I said: “Don’t give me a credit for writing,” but they did anyways, so now it’s written by Mathieu and myself because, as I said, we had to make up a lot of the film on the fly. And it’s a much better film for it. The script was good but wasn’t great. That happens in some films. I’m to the point where I can take a screenplay, and even if it’s not very good, if I’m interested in something that’s going on, I know when I make the film that I’m going to change it to make it the way I want to. So I’m always doing that, I’m always looking for something that I can improv on, if I think of something I’ll just do it right then and will improv it.

Probably the one film that really people thought there was a lot of improv in was Kids. There’s not. It was written: Harmony wrote the words and I insisted the actors say the words and I wouldn’t let them improvise, because I figured they couldn’t improvise anyway. They couldn’t; improv is not easy to do. Some actors can do it and are great at it and some actors can’t do it at all, they’re totally lost. If you don’t tell them “Stand here and say this,” they’re lost. The only improv in Kids is the four boys on the couch. We were shooting the party scene and these three of these kids came from California, they smoked a joint and improvised it. It’s a good scene that was spur-of-the-moment improv, but everything else in Kids was scripted, word for word. Same with Ken Park, which Harmony wrote from my diaries—I don’t think there was any improv in Ken Park.

The one film that had a lot of improv is Another Day in Paradise [98] because Jimmy [James Woods] was so good at improv—he’s fuckin’ the best, the best I’ve ever seen at improv. We would start doing a scene as written, and there’s like one sentence out of the scene, one little piece of scene that worked, and I said: “Start there and then improv.” And that was the challenge to Melanie [Griffith], Melanie did not want to improv at all. And Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner, Jimmy kind of forced them into it, like a challenge, and they would get more and more into it and tried to top each other.

Another Day in Paradise

There are a couple of scenes in The Smell of Us that really threw me. The scene where Math wakes up with a hard-on, Cab Calloway is on the TV, and he goes to the shower and puts the shower head to his dick—

He’s pissed off. Mathieu wakes up and he was pissed off that he had a hard-on and he puts cold water on it to make it go down. It was all connected to what his character was doing, sexually. He wasn’t enjoying it. And that was what it was for. I don’t think the audience has to understand it, it’s a good scene. I showed the film to someone the other night, about eight people, they knew nothing about the film so they’re seeing it cold… and I thought: “Man, I wonder if anybody understands this scene?” But it’s a good scene, it doesn’t make any difference. And the Cab Calloway! I was so happy that it turned on people to Cab Calloway, because when I showed it to these guys the other night, who were all in their twenties, they were knocked out by Cab Calloway. I said: “This is from the Forties.” They said: “This was the first guy to do rock ’n’ roll. Look at him dance!” And they realized that things that are going on now were going on, like, 70 years ago. Something had to be on the TV and we had to get rights very cheap, and I had two choices: some terrible old cartoon or Cab Calloway. Wow! So I let it play for a long time. I let you see Cab Calloway for a couple of minutes, a long time.

There’s some crossover influence from the fashion world in The Smell of Us as well, which you’ve have had in films before. Janice Dickinson and Jeremy Scott are in Wassup Rockers, for example, and here you have a cameo from Diane Pernet, and Natalia Brilli is credited as the production designer.

That’s right. She’s an artist, she’s really good. She does a lot of great stuff. She made me a leather skateboard, one of a kind, it’s incredible. Anyway, the fashion thing was really because of the character of Marie, Diane Rouxel’s character. We wanted to show her going back into that world, the fashion scene. And I thought if we’re going to have a fashion show, we ought to shoot it in Fashion Week. It’s got to be real, y’know? We actually shot that before we made the movie. We shot it then, because Fashion Week was three weeks before we started shooting. We shot the fashion scene and then made the movie weeks later. That was the first shot we got, actually.

The Rad Hourani show, all the unisex stuff?

Yeah. Luckily it was good, with the masks and everything. It just worked out.

The Smell of Us

Marie says something along the lines of: “It’s 2013, everyone’s gay.” Do you think there’s been a change in sexual identity, or a certain new fluidity, among these kids?

Mathieu Landais wrote the line. She says everybody’s gay and Toff says, “Not me,” and she says, “Are you sure?” Mathieu wrote that, and that was the scene. Me being me, just before we’re ready to shoot it, I think to myself: “What if she asks him if he wants a blowjob?” I took her aside and asked her to say that, and I didn’t tell the kid, Terin Maxime. So she said my improv line, and you can see the look on his face when he goes: “Yeah.” It was great. It was real, a real scene. I’m sure all directors tell one actor something to do and don’t tell the other actors because they want a true reaction. In Another Day in Paradise, James Woods slapped Vincent Kartheiser out of nowhere. They’re arguing out in the woods, the scene where Jimmy’s trying to shoot a whisky bottle and missing, and going crazy. Vincent and says something like “We’d better slow down now,” and Jimmy Woods’ character takes off on Vincent’s character, and Jimmy slapped him. I didn’t know he was going to do it, and Vincent didn’t know it. Vincent gets so pissed, and you see it in the movie, y’know?

I know that both Lukas’s mother and he himself have distanced themselves from the project, or given statements that express some sort of ill will…

Well, you know, the kid’s a kid. He wanted to make the film, and there were no surprises. He knew exactly what he had to do, and all those difficult scenes with him were rehearsed. There were no surprises. Well, rehearsing was a problem for him because rehearsing it, actually being there on the day, was a problem. But Lukas did a great, great, great job. He did everything I asked of him, and he’s wonderful in the film. He’s great. And he fucked up. They all fucked up by thinking they could go on strike in my motherfucking movie? I mean, that’s ridiculous. It cost 100,000 euros a day. You can’t just stop. So these stupid kids didn’t know that. They’re just like American kids, kids anywhere, taking drugs fistfuls at a time. He did a great job, though. His mother has quite a story too, but I’m not going to get into her. I’m proud of Lukas, and I’m proud of him in the film. I haven’t seen him in a few months—someone told me that he’s looking good. He left Paris for a while and he has a band now. He shaved off all his hair, a real punk. I think he’s healthy and kind of okay.

You mentioned that when you first had the idea of doing something about French adolescence, a lot of French producers had discouraged you, said you wouldn’t possibly be able to get it, not being a Frenchman yourself. Now that you’ve made the movie and that people have seen it, what has the response been generally among French people? Has there been any blowback?

The film has been in theaters here in Paris for almost nine weeks. And I think it’s still playing in one theater. That’s great. A movie being in a theater for two-and-a-half months is fantastic. We had a very good response. People are liking it. Like most of my films, after seeing the film, they don’t know what to say for a while. Maybe two weeks later, they can talk about it, or a week later. This happened with quite a few of my film. People see it then, two weeks later, walking down the street, all these different images from the film will hit them, things that happened in the film will hit them.

I don’t read reviews anymore, because it doesn’t help me at all, doesn’t do anything for me. I would read reviews, and critics… They don’t talk about the film. They spend the whole fucking article attacking me from the get-go, man. When I made Bully, a very well-known reviewer in New York said: “This is the first time that I’ve wanted a director arrested for making this film.” This is a famous critic! Motherfucker wants me arrested! I’m very proud of that. I think that’s great. And I know he said the only other time he felt that way was when he saw Natural Born Killers. So I’m in pretty good company. What’s the critic’s name from The New York Times?

Bully

A.O. Scott?

Tony Scott did a review of Bully, and never talks about the fucking movie, just attacks me, attacks me, attacks me. He said pornographers have more integrity than I do. First of all, I have more integrity than almost any motherfucker I know. That’s the one thing I do have. I’m very proud of that, that I can make somebody that mad. Here’s this sellout fucking critic that gives some of the worst fucking Hollywood movies of all time good reviews, but everybody else doesn’t, because it’s all politics. Talk about the movie for at least a few sentences in the goddamn review! When the New York Times review came out, John Waters sent me a note saying: “That’s the best review that you’re ever gonna get. It’s all good for box office.” That’s a negative review that makes people have to see the movie.

When The Smell of Us came out, it played in Venice first, and we got a review that wasn’t so good, and a couple more reviews that weren’t so good—and then Cahiers du Cinéma gave us 35 pages and the cover. They’ve never in 50 years put a filmmaker on the cover and given a film 35 pages. It’s the most incredible thing you’ve seen in your life. When it was published, by then reviewers were starting to come around and changing their mind and saying, “Wait a minute, maybe I was a little too negative to this film,” and now they’re liking the film. French reaction may’ve been a little negative. Now they’re coming out and we’re getting very good press. So I’m told. I’m not reading the good ones or the bad ones, but my producers tell me all the time and people tell me. It’s amazingly doing quite well.

Well, you’re certainly giving anybody who wants to take the personal-attack route plenty of fuel with this one, being so much in it yourself and being all over it.

Fuck ’em. I do a scene just for them. For the last 50 years, everybody who has criticized me, I do a scene just for them. Just to show them. You’ll see.

Marfa Girl

Can I ask you what’s next on the docket?

Last summer, I made Marfa Girl 2, a sequel to Marfa Girl because in Marfa Girl there are so many unanswered questions about the future. The film ends, and all these things have happened, and the film’s over, and you don’t know how it’s going to effect these people in the future, what’s going to happen. And I left it that way on purpose, it just happened that way, I was making it up as I went along. So I was gonna to make Marfa Girl 2. And so last summer we made it. Mercedes Maxwell and Adam Mediano are 18 now. They had actually just had their 16th birthday when we made the film, and that’s why the film is on Adam’s 16th birthday. Adam is one day older than Mercedes. The same characters are in the film, and I made it in the summer, and I totally made it up. I had no ideas, no script, no nothing. But I had the money. When the producer said, “I have the money. You want to make the film?” I said, “Yeah.” And I was sick. I wasn’t in shape. The money was there, so I said: “I might make the movie.” And I really actually just made it up day by day by day.

In the first one, the woman with the kid that seduces Adam on his 16th birthday, and he says, “Ah, Miguel is going to kill me.” Miguel is the father of her kid, and he’s in the penitentiary, and in Marfa Girl 2, he’s out. He’s home. Adam and Mercedes are together and married. All kind of things happen based on the last film. We’re editing that now.

And then I’m writing a new film that I’d like to shoot in Paris. I’m writing it here in Paris. I’ve been writing it for about a week, I just started. It’s called Five Women. It’s about five different women of different ages and how their lives kind of intertwine. So I’m writing that, something totally different. I’m 72, 73. I’m not sure how old I am anymore. I just had a birthday. I’m old. And I’ve known a lot of women, so it’s really interesting for me and a lot of fun to think about all the women I’ve known, and writing a screenplay because, as we both know, you can take three different people and make one character out of them. It’s fun to mix them up and come up with scenes and think back about things that’ve happened throughout my life. I’m in a very good period because now, I mean, I’ve lived quite a long time, and had pretty crazy times. It’s not so difficult anymore to write. When you’re young and you haven’t had many experiences, it’s different, but once you’ve experienced as much as I’ve experienced, and want to write and tell stories, it’s really fun. And I’m healthy. I was really sick last year. I had a couple of operations, I thought I was going to die, but now I’m healed. Took like 14 months for me to get back, but now going to the gym four or five days a week, and I’m back. I’m getting younger every day now instead of older.

Having been around as long as you have, having been documenting youth culture, from the point when you yourself were a kid through the better part of five decades, is there any sort of fundamental difference about the kids that you are working with now that you notice?

There’s a continuity. Kids are the same because, no matter how much they know, how much they Google, and how much they see, you have to experience it. They’re OK. It’s all the same. They’re fine. Kids today are fine, it’s their world, they’re born into it. They don’t know any other world.

Editor of nine Brian De Palma films, Bill Pankow remains “an actor’s editor” who observes and preserves the gestalt of a performance, making cuts that create a direct line of communication to the audience. This respect for an actor’s work is often overlooked in favor of the heart-pounding action and suspense sequences he’s engineered down to the split second in Body Double (84), The Untouchables (87), Carlito’s Way (93), Casualties of War (89), and Femme Fatale (02)—even though these moments of tension are underpinned by their stars’ entire physicality.

Born and raised in New York City, Pankow began his career as assistant editor to Jerry Greenberg on Kramer vs. Kramer (79) at age 26. Greenberg, who cut The French Connection and Apocalypse Now, became a mentor to Pankow and brought him on as an assistant on his next project, De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (80). Besides De Palma, Pankow has also edited films for Abel Ferrara, Robert Benton, Paul Schrader, and Zal Batmanglij (not to mention a couple of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark).

Last week FILM COMMENT spoke with the unfailingly polite Pankow about his long collaboration with De Palma in advance of tonight’s screening of Carlito’s Way at IFC Center.

Dressed to Kill

Do you start with a particular scene and really work on it until you’re happy with the rhythm, or do you assemble rough cuts of several scenes, and then proceed from there?

Usually when they’re shooting, what I try to do is try to get the scenes cut as quickly as possible in some sort of shape. Obviously, films are very often and usually shot out of order. What I do is take the first scene that’s been completed and try to edit that down into some rough version, and then continue from there, scene after scene. I don’t really look at it all together until we get to the end of the shooting process.

I read an old interview in which you were talking about how the sound of a Moviola would guide you in establishing the rhythm of a scene. In a digital era, is there anything to replace that? How has your practice shifted?

I think the rhythm has always been established by just feeling how long the shot needs to go on, or once the shot’s ended its life, or ended its importance. Rhythmically, it’s a thing in my head I guess, and I guess the sounds of a Moviola reinforced that and gave me a rhythm. Sometimes, when I feel a length is problematic, I’ll count off in my head a few beats, and see if those beats feel like they’re connected to the previous cuts in terms of length and rhythmic connections. I guess in a digital world I listen to counting in my head, or music in my head, if you will.

I also read that you sometimes become so familiar with dialogue that you’ll just turn off the sound and edit with images.

Yeah. It’s really important that the visuals be able to tell the story in the film. When I’m approaching a scene for the first time, I watch the dailies more than once, and familiarize myself with what seem to be the best takes, or the director’s preferred takes at the moment so I know what the characters are saying. Once I’ve roughed it out, then I’ll play it without the sound, just to reinforce how the images are flowing together, and whether or not, visually, I’m getting a sense of what the story is about or what the scene is about or whether the emotional moments hit. Once I feel comfortable with that, then I reintroduce the dialogue to make sure that everything is correct and also flows the same way, and then add sound effects and our music in layers on top. There’s always a layering effect that gives the audience the overall effect of the scene. But, in the bare bones, we take it one layer at a time to try to make it come together.

Femme Fatale

Can you talk about working with Brian De Palma? Have you developed a shorthand over the years when you’re communicating about different cuts of the film, or at different stages of the postproduction?

I’ve really had a very fortunate and very unique road to starting and continuing my career with Brian De Palma because I began as an assistant editor for a great editor, and a good friend, Jerry Greenberg. As an assistant, I was able to not only watch and learn from him, but watch and observe the dynamic between him and the director, and in this case, him and Brian De Palma. As my career progressed, I did more films as an assistant, and later as an editor for Brian, I really got to understand how he works, what his rhythms are, and how he expects things to proceed. I was able to take that on myself when I became an editor. And yes, we certainly developed a shorthand in the sense that I knew that he expected to see the scenes edited in the way in which they were intended. Certainly in the first cut, rather than try to push and pull things in a direction that I might want to take them, I could just do what I call “read the dailies.” I could see what the intentions of each shot were, and try to edit the scene with that in mind before fine-tuning it and proceeding to the next stage with him. So yes, it helps us move forward quickly and get to where he wants to be in a timely fashion.

Did you ever revisit the films he was referencing when you were preparing to edit?

I don’t always ask him what films he’s referencing, because he has such a vast knowledge of films. Certainly when some of the scenes are shot, I can see that he’s maybe referencing other filmmakers, or himself, quite honestly. For myself, what I do is usually try to take the genre of the film we’re about to edit together, and I look at films that are similar in that genre to make sure to incorporate the style of editing for that genre, or at least inform myself with that style so it helps me proceed with my own work, and also to provide Brian with the scenes that will be most effective for him.

You were an assistant editor on Scarface [83], which is obviously related to Carlito’s Way because that role was so tied up in Al Pacino’s persona. But then, in other ways, Carlito’s Way is like the anti-Scarface because his character is so subdued and trying to go straight. Did your work on Scarface influence or inform what you did with Carlito’s Way?

Working with Jerry as he was editing Scarface, I was able to see a lot of Al Pacino’s performances throughout the entire takes, all the pieces that were in the film and those that weren’t. I got a sense of how he worked and how he worked through scenes just by observing. I guess that helped me in editing Carlito’s Way. But the Scarface experience was obviously a character who’s way over the top, and Carlito’s Way is, in a way, simpler, but much more sophisticated, and as you say, subdued. I’m not sure I brought the energy of Scarface into Carlito’s Way, but certainly having observed Pacino’s work in that film, and watching him in other films obviously, I brought that to the table when I was editing Carlito’s Way. I always try to respect everything that the actors are doing to make sure that I don’t miss moments or nuance that they might be imbuing into the performance.

Could we break down a couple of the scenes in Carlito’s Way? I’m specifically thinking of the pool hall sequence, which is so complex in terms of space and narrative. It says so much about Carlito: you can see how he became a kingpin, based on what details his attention is drawn to and how he reacts. How did that look on the page versus how you constructed it?

On the page it seemed quite simple. He drives up with his cousin, he goes into the pool hall, and encounters these bad guys, and everything goes topsy-turvy. But the scene is quite interesting visually on many levels. Just the approach to the scene, for example: when they’re driving to the barbershop that has the backroom, Brian used a split diopter in the car so that Al Pacino is on the left side and his cousin is on the right side, and they’re both in focus. That helps the audience follow through and pay attention to both of them without having to rack focus or change angles. That allows us to stay in the shot and feel comfortable without cutting back and forth. There’s a comfort level riding into the scene, and his cousin tries to underline that by saying: “Don’t worry. He’s my friend. Everything going to be okay.”

When they get inside, what helped me most was having the experience of working with Brian and learning from Jerry, and how to make the audience understand the scene. You need to make them comfortable with the geography, but also to underline the character’s point of view. We want to be with the character. One of the ways you can be with the character is to follow their point of view. By staying with Carlito when he enters the room, and then seeing what he sees—the guy behind the bathroom door, and Quisqueya, the guy by the cooler who is going to pull a gun and kill everybody—we want to make sure the audience is oriented right at the beginning. Once you do that, then you can isolated the little pieces, and the audience will follow you. We don’t want them be confused or disoriented in any way. I had learned up to that point quite a bit about how to make that work by working on Brian’s films.

Were there other versions of that sequence which you tried and then discarded?

I don’t remember trying too many versions. Typically a scene like that will be edited quite long. In the first pass of a scene, I always put everything the director shoots in there. I try to at least represent every single angle to make sure that it’s all in there. Then this gets distilled down once we start working on it together and get the most salient points involved, tighten up the rhythms and everything. That’s what happens as a process later. What was really cool about that scene was setting up the trick shot and the reflection of the guy in the sunglasses and the reactions of the guys. Once the action begins, it’s just so chaotic, and again, I’m trying to keep the audience oriented in the chaos, while at the same time giving the audience a visceral effect to take with them into the scene and make them feel it that way.

Can you talk about putting the final chase sequence together? It goes on for nearly 20 minutes, but the tension is sustained throughout.

I worked on the film with another editor, Kristina Boden, and we worked on different areas at different times. It was a very tight time frame: I think we began in March or April, and we were mixing in August. We had to have a second editor and that’s when Kristina, who had been my assistant on a couple of my movies, came in. She had worked on the whole subway section as they were approaching Grand Central Station, and then it just fell into my lap to do the Grand Central part, most of which was one shot as you can see, or at least appears to be one shot all the way up until I think the time when Carlito is on the escalator and he looks up and sees the guy with the gun who says: “There he is.” I think that’s the time when the shot broke. It was kind of fun to do that. Brian had made some storyboards early on, and often had storyboards in his films. In this case, they were just the most basic boards, very basic computer-generated triangular figures that represented the space, just to help us orient how the characters would be moving or placed inside the space.

But what I like to do is I like to edit a scene that has storyboards without looking at them, as just a kind of challenge for myself. After I have edited the scene, I’ll refer to the storyboards and see if I’ve achieved what the director was looking for or if I’ve gone a different direction, and then I make sure the two versions come together.

Carlito's Way

Another moment that really stood out to me was when Carlito runs to the roof in the rain to watch Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) in her dance class. How do you approach a scene like that, when there’s no dialogue and it’s perhaps less action-based?

Again, it’s an example of Brian’s masterful visual storytelling technique. As many scenes as there are when you want to cut, and make sure you cut for effect, it’s just as important to know when not to cut (as I and other people have often said). We’re following Carlito, not only his character going to a specific place, but watching his eyes, and trying to pick the emotional moment, or the emotional feeling you get from his face, which is the right time to cut to what he’s seeing, and make what he’s seeing provide an emotional impact. We want the audience to identify with what he’s feeling. It’s a delicate balance and sometimes it’s trial and error, but it’s also fun to do that because you want to take advantage of the moment most when you can feel the emotional heartstrings the strongest.

Sean Penn is also so good in the film.

Sean Penn is great, and both Sean and Al Pacino are such nuanced performers that every take, they give you something a little different. That’s the mark of a great actor too—when there’s a little nuance that, if the director wanted to take the performers a little more in one direction or another, it’s usually available there by changing takes and pushing in a direction that might emphasize something else.

It’s an exciting film. It’s really cool. The music in there, Jellybean Benitez was the music supervisor and he provided all of those songs that just fit so perfectly all the time.

Nobody does split-screen like Brian De Palma—from Sisters (73) to Femme Fatale and most recently Passion (12). But does that make things more difficult when it comes to editing?

In Femme Fatale and also in Snake Eyes [98], for example, the split-screens are very, very carefully planned out. Each side is planned and shot with different lenses and different sizes to be specific to that point of view. It’s very rare that we use pieces that weren’t intended. It’s always fun to block those out. What I usually do is block out one side, and get the action working the way it should be, let’s say, for one character or one point of view, and then cut the other side for its own merit, for its own weight and value. And then I put them side by side and start to see where they come together, and make adjustments once each part is doing what it’s supposed to do, but also make sure the two sides obviously sync up and coincide perfectly.

Snake Eyes

Are there any editing clichés or trends that annoy you?

That’s a tough question. One thing that bothers me in action editing is when the audience is confused. A lot of times, films will go for the purely visceral effect—they want their gut-wrenching shooting, and blowing up, and moving around, and chasing. And that’s all great, I love that stuff and I love editing that stuff. The problem I have sometimes is that the audience is lost. You don’t know who’s shooting at whom. You don’t know who’s chasing whom. In the interest of serving the visceral effect, the narrative is given short shrift. That’s a problem that I think exists more often than it should, and there’s no reason for it.

What’s your ideal working situation with a director?

I think working with Brian De Palma is one of the most ideal situations you could have. We work together in looking at the first cut after he finishes shooting and we’ll discuss it. Historically, he’s always given me notes on how to proceed in terms of fine-tuning the movie and then asked me how long it’s going to take to execute those notes. I tell him and he’ll come back in a week or two, whatever the time frame is, and as we proceed through the process, the time frame that he’s away gets shorter and shorter, because there’s less and less to do until we’re fine-tuning it. Then he might start coming in a couple hours or a few hours every day for a while until we get it totally the way he wants it to be. Other directors like to be in the editing room all the time, and that’s fine also. You have to get each other’s rhythm and find out what direction they want to go.

When you were working on Carlito’s Way, do you remember making any major changes, or were there any difficult spots?

One of the difficult things was the nightclub scene. It wasn’t that difficult, but it took a while to get them just right. Also, the rescuing of Tony on the boat took a while to get just right in terms of the timing and the feeling of the scene in exactly how things came together. When we were mixing the sound when Sean Penn’s character hits Tony on the head with a crowbar, the sound wasn’t quite right in the studio. I asked one of our assistants to go to the butcher and get something. During a lunch hour of the mix we went into a studio and re-created a sound that was more appropriate.

That’s very giallo.

[Laughs] Carlito’s Way is interesting because the whole movie takes place in the space of time that his stretcher or whatever he’s on hits a crack and he’s thinking about it. It’s unique in that way I think and wonderful how successful that is.

Carlito's Way

It’s a cliché to say at this point, but Carlito’s Way is a great New York movie that effortlessly captures the essence of these different areas of the city.

When I was small, up until I was 7 or 8 years old, I lived in that neighborhood [Spanish Harlem]. I grew up on 119th Street and First Avenue, which was in that area.

You were going to school and coming of age during the heyday of the New Hollywood, and you were mentored by someone who worked with a lot of these people. Could you talk about your relationship with Jerry Greenberg?

I was coming up in my career as a sound assistant and film editing assistant. I was working in a sound department for a Dede Allen film. I think it was The Wiz. Anyway, Jerry had been working on Apocalypse Now, and had been out of New York for two years. He was coming back to New York to do Kramer vs. Kramer, and he telephoned Dede Allen who he had worked with quite a bit, and asked her for a recommendation for an assistant editor. To my surprise and delight, she recommended me. Jerry came to New York and we started working together on Kramer vs. Kramer. We hit it off, and then I worked as his assistant several times after that.

What was wonderful about Jerry, and a lot of other editors too, is that as they’re editing, they start talking about what they were doing and why they were doing it. Being privy to that thought process was a way for someone like me to be learning how to do that craft and art of editing. That’s something that’s a little bit lost now in a digital world because there’s no longer a need for an assistant to be in the room with you handing the film and handling the film. Quite the opposite, as they need to be in there own room with their own computer taking care of all the day-to-day business of the film editing room. I lament the loss of that sort of relationship.

Eventually, Jerry was working on Body Double, and the time frame required a second editor come on to finish, so I became a second editor. I was very young and new. I went to my own room with a Moviola. I think I burnt out three different Moviola motors going back and forth, back and forth, trying to find just what I considered the right frame. That was sort of a baptism for me, learning how to be an editor on my own. The relationship proceeded from there. On Wise Guys [86], I went back to being his assistant. When The Untouchables started, he was on another film, and he asked Brian if it would be okay if I started as second editor. When he was able to finish his other project, he and I would finish the film together, and that was the big break for me I think. It was wonderful. He’s a great friend still. I consult with him all the time. He recently received an A.C.E. Lifetime Achievement award.

What part of your experience on The Untouchables stood out for you?

It was very exciting for me to be working on a film of that scope and scale and be the editor. As I said, Jerry was away, so I was all by myself. It had this up-and-coming star, Kevin Costner, and Sean Connery in it. I wanted to do it well. Of course, I was a little anxious being a new editor. It was a lot of fun to do. There were so many wonderful scenes in there. When the footage for the train station—the so-called Odessa Steps comparison scene—came in, I was a little nervous about it. I said, you know what, this is the kind of thing that’s right up Jerry’s alley, and I think I’m going to leave it for him. I called him and I told him that. He said, no, no. You should go and jump in and take it, but out of respect, I said, no, no. I’m going to leave that for you.

There were plenty of other scenes I got to do. One in particular that I think amused Brian in the first cut was when the bad guy comes to get Sean Connery in his house, and Sean Connery pulls the gun out of the gramophone machine, and the other guy says: “You bring a knife to a gunfight?” And when the guy [outside] was shooting Sean Connery, I think I put every single squib, or every explosion on Sean Connery’s body or on the nearby walls that was shot with all the different cameras. When Brian saw it, he chuckled because it was way over the top and silly, but I felt I wanted to put it all in there and we’d take it down later.

Furious 7

At around 3:30 p.m. on the afternoon of November 30, 2013, a 605-horsepower 2005 Porsche Carrera GT went out of control after failing to maneuver around an uphill curve while traveling eastbound on Hercules St., which runs through Rye Canyon in the business-park area of Santa Clarita, California. The driver, Roger Rodas, and his passenger, the 40-year-old actor Paul William Walker IV, were coming from a nearby benefit for Walker’s nonprofit, Reach Out WorldWide, and friends of both men were in earshot when they heard the vehicle explode upon impact with a tree and telephone pole. The bodies, badly burned, were positively identified through dental records.  

Next week, over a year and two Paul Walker Memorial Car Shows later, the film that Walker was shooting at the time of his death, Furious 7, will be released to theaters. (Two other films that Walker completed before his decease, Hours and Brick Mansions, have already been released posthumously.) In the lead-up to the opening of Furious 7, much of the discussion has surrounded the means whereby director James Wan, producer Neal Moritz, and their crew completed the film without one of their stars. (The casts of Fast & Furious movies snowball in much the same way that those of Wes Anderson movies do—once you’re in one of them, you’re in all of them.) The process involved the participation of Walker’s younger brothers, 37-year-old Caleb and 26-year-old Cody, unused footage of Paul from the previous films in the franchise, and the help of Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital. I have not yet seen the results, but those who have seem without exception impressed, if not awestruck.

As noted in a recent Hollywood Reporter piece, both Weta and Universal have been mum about precisely which scenes required CG necromancy, hoping to avoid as much as possible drawing attention to a process that might encourage uncanny chills in potential customers. The Reporter item singles out two recent precedents for Paul Walker’s resurrection: the completion of episodes of The Sopranos after the 2000 death of actress Nancy Marchand, who played Tony Soprano’s mother, and similar work on that same year’s Gladiator, necessitated when famously bibulous star Oliver Reed, after running up an impressive bar tab at a pub in Valletta, Malta, near the scene of the shoot, was stopped dead by the explosion of his overtaxed heart.

Fedora

This was not so long after the controversial appearance, in 1997, of a commercial in which Fred Astaire, who had died 10 years earlier, dances about while using the new Dirt Devil Broom Vac™. Like a Diet Coke ad chock-a-block with dead celebs that had appeared some years prior, the Dirt Devil spot, licensed by Astaire’s much younger widow, Robyn Smith Astaire, gave rise to a small furor and some concern over the potential use of new technology to fill our screens with the famous undead, as though Hollywood was going to set to work straightaway Frankensteining together “new” films of Gable, Bogart, and company. These concerns have not, to date, been realized. Thus far, death is still the end for actors—at least as far as signing new feature-film contracts goes—though if you should have the bad grace to die before you’ve wrapped on a film, all bets are off. (James Dean’s timing in this, as in all things, was exquisite.) And because of this caveat, a small and exclusive category of performances exists: the posthumous performance.

For our purposes, we aren’t talking about performances that wrapped before the performer died, like Brick Mansions or Dean’s Giant, but those that the performer failed to complete to satisfaction before their death, the immovable fact of which filmmakers subsequently worked around. The physical absence of the performer, as a result, may be actively felt or detected in the film—and in the footage where they are present, one may fancy that the shadow of death is visible upon them.

Ed Wood

While this is the stuff of tragedy, perhaps the most famous posthumous performance has been played for comedy, recreated in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (94). I am speaking of the performance “given” by Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, better known as Béla Lugosi, in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (59). As relayed in Burton’s film, when Lugosi died in August 1956, Wood had recently shot a handful of quite random scenes with the Dracula star, and he painstakingly wound the narrative of his next project, Plan 9, around these, so as to not let a single frame of precious “final performance” go to waste. In order to tether these clips to his storyline, Wood used narration by the psychic Criswell, another of his stock players, as well as the connivance of his wife’s lanky chiropractor, Tom Mason, who “doubled” the physically dissimilar Lugosi by keeping the bottom of his face hidden with a cape flung over his forearm.

In the pre-CGI days, the emergency double was the only and best solution for filmmakers who had a movie to finish and a dead star on their hands. Toward the end of the shoot of Saratoga (37), 26-year-old star Jean “Baby” Harlow complained of feeling unwell, and requested that her boyfriend, William Powell, be allowed to take her home. Shortly thereafter she went into hospital, and on June 7, following premature reports that she had begun to mend, Harlow died of uremic poisoning, which today would go on the death certificate as acute renal failure. The few minutes of Harlow’s performance that still remained to be completed were shot with the assistance of an unconvincing voice double and a lookalike, Mary Dees, who director Jack Conway thought best to obscure with floppy hats, binoculars, and various other bits of business, despite her really quite remarkable resemblance to Harlow. (Mary’s scenes have been compiled here.) The actor Lionel Atwill, being as he was an infallibly polite Englishman, was good enough to film his death scene before going into hospital when a nasty and ultimately fatal tag-team of bronchial cancer and pneumonia befell him on the set of Lost City of the Jungle (46), though much else had to be made up with a fill-in and cutting-room floor sweepings. No such advance warning was provided by Natalie Wood: in November 1981, after the production of Brainstorm had returned from North Carolina to Southern California, star Wood, her husband Robert Wagner, her co-star Christopher Walken, and Captain Dennis Davern took a weekend trip to Santa Catalina Island on a 60-foot yacht called Splendour. What happened that night would give birth to endless speculation (as well as a tacky joke that starts “What’s the only kind of ‘wood’ that doesn’t float?”), but what’s certain is that Wood did not return. (Director Douglas Trumbull patched in the Natalie-shaped hole in his film with rewrites and a body double, and the film finally appeared almost two years later.) Most recently, we have the case of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (09), which Terry Gilliam had almost wrapped shooting when word came that star Heath Ledger had fatally overdosed on prescription meds. Gilliam completed the film with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell playing different facets of Ledger’s character while inside the Imaginarium, and with double Zander Gladish in a handful of scenes outside of it, wearing a mask. “That Mr. Ledger enters the film with a hangman’s noose around his neck is disconcerting,” wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, “if only because it serves as a blunt reminder of his death and even some of the early, irrelevant chatter about a possible suicide.”

Rather than detail the melancholy production history of John Candy’s Wagons East! (94), I will move along to perhaps the most interesting case of posthumous performance in the studio era, that of Robert Walker. Walker and his young wife, Phylis Isley, had first left New York to attempt Hollywood in 1939, without success, but when in 1941 she was signed to a seven-year contract by David O. Selznick, the couple, assured of their financial security, sold their place in Long Island and headed west, now with two young children in tow. Selznick helped to secure Walker a contract with MGM, and happily both he and his wife, now renamed Jennifer Jones, were embraced by the moviegoing public. Unhappily, Selznick was cuckolding young Walker with his new star, and the marriage officially disintegrated in 1945, the same year of his very touching performance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock, opposite Judy Garland.

My Son John

While Walker continued to work, he gained a reputation for heavy drinking and emotional instability. He was twice in trouble with the law for driving under the influence. A second marriage to Barbara Ford (daughter of John), who ought to have known a volatile boozer when she saw one, lasted only five weeks. In December 1948 he flew the coop from the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Kansas and, after being collared for drunkenness, wrecked the Topeka police station. Yet the film for which he is best remembered today, along with The Clock, was that of Bruno, mastermind of the “crisscross” scheme that sets Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (51) in motion. This was the actor’s penultimate role. On the evening of August 28, Walker’s housekeeper called his psychiatrist, Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, reporting that Walker was suffering acute nervous anxiety. Hacker arrived at Walker’s Brentwood home and, after attempts to calm the actor failed, called in reinforcements in the person of Dr. Sidney Silver. It was Silver who administered an injection of seven-and-a-half grains of sodium amytal to Walker, who had reportedly taken the sedative before with no negative consequences. This time, however, Walker stopped breathing, turned blue, and dropped stone dead at the age of 32. Incidentally I will note that I went to university with Dr. Silver’s granddaughter, and she informed me that this incident haunted him to the end of his days. 

More immediately, Walker’s death posed a problem to director Leo McCarey, who was then finishing the film My Son John with the actor. Walker plays the title role, and is a hoot as the scabrous, effete intellectual whose boorish parents (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) begin to suspect him of working with the Commies. McCarey, who was known for presiding over a loose, improvisatory set, had to pull off a helluva an ad-lib to wrap his movie without a climax or the linchpin performer, and under the circumstances did the best anyone could be expected to. Acquiring unused footage of Bruno’s death scene from Strangers on a Train, in which he addresses Farley Granger in a strangled voice from the wreckage of a carousel, McCarey made the last words appear to be coming from a mortally wounded John, giving his last testament to Van Heflin from an upturned automobile. In John’s final moments, which can be viewed here, he asks to be able to deliver a final recantation of his political affiliation—to be delivered, naturally, by tape recorder. “And so Bruno dies twice,” wrote David Thomson, “even if the character lives on.”

A whole separate category of queasiness is reserved for performances which become “posthumous” only after their stars, through negligence, freak occurrence, or combination of the two, actually die on-set. Offhand I can think of only two instances of this. The first is that of Vic Morrow, who was killed while performing in John Landis’s contribution to the omnibus film Twilight Zone: The Movie, decapitated by a falling helicopter that spun out of control when its tail rotor was destroyed by controlled pyrotechnics. (Also killed in the impact were two child actors, My-Ca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, aged 6 and 7.) The other is that of Brandon Lee who, in spring 1993, was fatally struck by a .44 magnum round while filming The Crow in Wilmington, North Carolina. A number of (sub)urban legends swirled around this incident in the years of my youth. One is that the Hong Kong Triads who had purportedly contributed to father Bruce Lee’s “mysterious” demise during the filming of Game of Death in 1972 had finally caught up with his issue. (The existing Game of Death footage would be integrated into a movie released in 1978 which, somewhat disturbingly, also featured My Son John actor/Angel of Death Dean Jagger.) Another is that the fatal footage had actually been kept in the final cut of the film.

The Crow

To the best of my knowledge, the Brandon Lee snuff footage is not readily available, though the death of Morrow, Le, and Chen can be seen, captured in long shot, in the 1993 Traces of Death, a collection of caught-on-camera atrocities which has been categorized under the broad definition of the “shockumentary,” though it has none of the poetry of the works produced by, say, Jacopetti and Prosperi or Climati and Morra, and all of the slavering ghoulishness. It has been around 15 years since I revisited any of the films in the Traces series, though I can well remember the host from the third installment onwards, a faceless metalbro who went by the name Brain Damage (producer Darrin Ramage) and established an air of stark and utter nihilism with his dreadfully droll punnery, speaking with a stilted, stentorian tone that sounds like that of a pre-adolescent lowering his voice two registers. (Here is his introduction for the third entry in the series, which should give you a reasonable idea of the sort of wit at play throughout.)

The necessity—or, more to the point, the profitability—of compiling such material has been made moot by the existence of the Internet, for anyone so inclined can now, with a minimum of effort, watch the panic-stricken final moment of Morrow and two Vietnamese children, or security-camera footage capturing the fatal impact of the Walker/Rodas collision. None of this has necessarily undermined Amos Vogel’s observation in his 1974 opus Film as a Subversive Art that the depiction of death—the biological event, not the sentimental trappings that surround it—is cinema’s “Ultimate Secret,” the “last stronghold of primitive taboo,” upheld by a “commercial cinema [that] either avoids death or romanticizes it.”

The film containing a true posthumous performance, however, is the nearest that “commercial cinema” comes to thanatological cinema. I specify performance, because though there is undoubtedly an aura to final films finished after their director’s death, the movies I’m discussing are united by the heightened awareness of the body—its presence, and the presence of its absence. Crude attempts to replace the departed serve to impress us with the impossibility of doing so. As a “final viewing,” then, the posthumous performance is a bit like the lying-in-state celebrity funeral that opens Billy Wilder’s Fedora (78). In speculating as to what brought audiences flocking to, say, Saratoga, we may assume it was the game of catching out the counterfeit Harlow, as well as searching the real, ailing Harlow’s face for any inkling of approaching mortality, any indication that she had one foot poised in the hereafter. The latter is, I fancy, a fruitless undertaking, for in every case mentioned save that of Lugosi, we are dealing with relatively young and vital animals. (Should one care to stare death in the face, a better start might be the filmography of life-loathing toper W.C. Fields, which is something like a protracted snuff film.) If nothing else, the posthumous performance serves to underline the basic necromantic power of cinema, epitomized in Mika Kaurismäki’s 1994 Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, in which director Sam Fuller revisits a tribal village in the Amazon basin where he shot rushes some 40 years previous and screens the footage for its inhabitants, who are astonished to see their long-dead relatives once again speaking and moving.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

The process of cinematic mourning and resurrection is rather well described in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The actual Lugosi, when he first appears, stands frail and ashen at the side of a grave which Criswell’s narration informs us is occupied by that of his late wife. “All of us on this earth know that there is a time to live and that there is a time to die, yet death is always a shock to those left behind,” the psychic intones. “It is even more of a shock when death, the proud brother, comes without warning.” Next, Lugosi, wearing a cloak and slouch hat and carrying a cane, exits a ranch-style home in some undistinguished Los Angeles suburb. He is still, per Criswell, in mourning for his departed wife: “The sky to which she had once looked was now only a covering for her dead body . . . Confused by his great loss, the old man left that home, never to return again.” At these words Lugosi steps off the left side of the screen from a long shot, and almost immediately the sound of screeching brakes is heard, signaling that the “old man” has just been struck by a car. (Given the framing, we have to presume that the car has driven onto his lawn.) This is not our final glimpse of Lugosi’s old man, however, for he is soon to be raised from his grave by a bolt of extraterrestrial lightning, and we see him twirling among the cardboard tombstones, modeling something very like the Dracula cape that we know Lugosi himself was laid to rest in. “From the blast arose the moving figure of the dead old man!”

page from Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet, by Helen Hill, 2005

There are roughly 65 film labs left in the world, of which around 20 are in North America. These ranks, along with the number of film stocks being manufactured, dwindled as digital technologies have saturated the realm of production and studios have moved away from film. When it comes to labs that process 16mm film—a mainstay of experimental film—and small-gauge stocks, only a few commercial options exist, mostly in the United States: Cinelab, in Boston; ColorLab in Maryland; Deluxe in New York City; Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas; and Fotokem in Burbank. One of the most recent casualties of this technological shift has been Pac Lab, which closed in New York, screening its unclaimed films at Anthology Film Archives.

The decline in commercial film production, however, has been countered by a rebirth in the phenomenon of artist-run film laboratories. What in the early Nineties was limited to a handful of cooperatively owned, independent labs, mostly in France, has grown into an international network of over 30, many of them formed within the last several years. The decline of film processing created a surplus of cheap, unwanted equipment that, in the right hands, could be repurposed for the smaller-scale operation of an artist-run lab. Saved from the scrap heap, many discarded contact printers and lomo processing tanks have begun a second life as artists’ tools.

For many, this historical juncture between film and digital media has been cause for lament. But among those in the growing artist-run film lab community, the view is considerably more sanguine. Many are younger filmmakers drawn to the creative possibilities of hand-processing in workshops at places like Mono No Aware, in Brooklyn, or Big Mama’s Cinematheque in Philadelphia. For these artists, film offers a range of textures and expressive possibilities not available in digital formats. Others are drawn to the “home-brew” DIY spirit that celebrates the autonomy of artist-run labs. Josh Lewis, who in 2012 founded the Negativland lab in Ridgewood, Queens, describes it as “a more involved way of being a filmmaker. You can’t rely on an industry that serves Hollywood. You need to be a technician and a filmmaker.”

For filmmakers like Lewis, the current moment offers the opportunity to sever cinema from its industrial tether. In many ways, this is the culmination of the avant-garde dream to become fully independent. Experimental film, at least at the level of materials, has been invariably tied to the commercial conditions of the film industry at large, though its output may have more in common, aesthetically and culturally, with the types of objects that circulate in the art world. Now, in response to a collapsing apparatus for the production of film, avant-garde filmmakers are developing the means and momentum to adapt and design their own methods of making films.

Brûle la mer

The current artist-run lab movement has historical roots in the independent strain of the avant-garde. In 1966, the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, modeled after the shared distribution structure of the Filmmakers’ Co-op in New York, added to its operations a darkroom and lab space for making films. Later, a few small labs were established in Europe, including, in the Eighties, Studio Één in the Netherlands, and Métamkine, or MTK, in Grenoble, France. Both of these were open to anyone who wished to use their facilities. MTK became a hand-processing hub for filmmakers in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, and by 1995 it had proved so popular that it had to shut its doors to newcomers. The founders, however, offered to assist others in establishing new labs.

Among the many facilities that MTK helped to build was L’Abominable, which has become the largest collective artist-run film lab today. L’Abominable, founded by 10 filmmakers in 1996, set up residence in a basement on the outskirts of Paris. It initially operated with no funding, scavenging equipment wherever it could, and later acquired support from the CNC (the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image), a branch of the French Ministry of Culture. Hundreds of filmmakers came to use its facilities over the course of its first decade. In 2011, L’Abominable moved into the kitchen of a former school in La Courneuve, a municipality that provides additional financial support to the lab. Even with their expanded facilities, which includes, rare among artist film labs, a continuous processing machine, L’Abominable has not been able to keep up with the demand, admitting a maximum of 40 new members per year. But like MTK, it has done much to assist others in forming their own labs. From 1995 to 1999, it published the newsletter L’ébouillanté, which organized a European network of labs that could share resources and information. Since 2005, following an international meeting of artist-run labs in Grenoble, the website filmlabs.org, along with two listservs, has provided crucial support for maintaining this network and expanding it to North America and Asia.

The most distinctive quality about the current artist-run lab movement is the international circuit that sustains it. In its current manifestation, the artist-run film lab can be both an autonomous unit in Toronto (Niagara Custom Lab), Seoul (Space Cell), Bogota (Kinolab), or other locales, and a satellite attached to an international network. The idea of a collective, which stems in part from the cooperative organizations of the Sixties, persists in terms of the labs’ mostly open-door policies as well as this broader global unit. These collective dimensions are both political and practical. On the political side of things, some labs are more explicitly anti-commercial than others: Anne Fave and Emmanuel Carquille, in their statement “We Remember (1995–2002)” on the L’Abominable website, pointedly describe “the necessity to establish our own means of production” apart from the industrial system, and many labs operate as non-profit organizations, securing grants to not only provide workshops to their communities, but to stage screenings as well. But not every facility operates according to these ideals. Some labs more strictly restrict membership, functioning as barely more than a shared artist studio. And some like no.w.here in London, the Super8 Reversal Lab in the Hague, Niagara Custom Lab, and Nanolab in Australia even offer processing services for a fee, particularly in those areas where commercial facilities have shut down.

Seoul Electric

Practically speaking, resources are limited. Equipment, even when acquired cheaply, is often difficult and laborious to maintain. Beyond the basic setup of a sink, a lomo tank (or bucket), and a contact printer, few labs have the plumbing capacity necessary for continuous processing machines. When Lewis came across a 35mm processor with 25-foot tanks from a lab that was closing in New Orleans, he found he could afford the equipment, but couldn’t manage a space adequate for it. Running an artist lab, moreover, comes with the reality of rising rents, the necessity of having a day job, and members who don’t always get along or stick around. Expertise in maintaining equipment can be learned but takes time. A few, like Lewis, are former employees of commercial labs; more often the people who run and service equipment are self-taught, like Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie of Nanolab, or gain experience by visiting other labs, as in the case of Kevin Rice, one of the founders of Process Reversal. And many labs, even well-established ones like L’Abominable, have struggled to find and maintain a workspace. Collectivity, more than a political ideal, may in fact be most effective as a survival strategy in an age of austerity and economic decline. Instead of rejecting the dictates of capitalism by declaring oneself independent, the pooling together of resources serves more appropriately as a calculated response to inevitable conditions. Where physical space is not guaranteed, the network helps to maintain and redistribute knowledge and equipment until a temporary home can be found. Quite simply, labs help secure the existence and future of each other.

In many instances, the idea of the collective, and the sharing of resources, has been more important than the establishment of a physical space. In 2011, L’Abominable was evicted from its cellar headquarters before moving to La Courneuve. Fave and Carquille maintain that it was “a collective, well before it was a space.” Process Reversal, a new organization located in Colorado, has yet to build a workspace, though its members have in the meantime acquired enough equipment to build several labs, and they devote their efforts to touring workshops and assisting the formation of other labs. Rice explains: “We don’t see ourselves as a site-specific organization. Our original intention was to set up some public workspace that all of us could access. Now it’s more of a supportive role, going to communities and helping them to set up their own labs.”

Tuohy and Barrie, in addition to maintaining Nanolab in Daylesford, a rural community outside of Melbourne, are just as busy visiting and setting up labs elsewhere. The pair has visited roughly two-thirds of all the artist-run labs in the filmlabs.org network, and as their activities show, creating a lab also means instructing others in lab work. What was once a set of carefully guarded industry secrets has become a matter of open access, with expertise and salvaged equipment shared among a loose federation of film artists. A typical lab origin story goes like this: two years ago, at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Tuohy, who was there showing his own work, met a group of filmmakers from Indonesia who were interested in setting up their own lab. They had been offered a space in a vacant government building that had, in fact, formerly housed a film laboratory. Tuohy and Barrie visited the facility, helping the filmmakers restore equipment and build a new printer out of various parts to get the lab functional. Its name, Lab Laba-laba, translates to Spider Lab, which is as good as any metaphor for the international web of artist-run labs.

The practicalities of survival are also a part of an enduring DIY ethos. In his workshops at Mono No Aware, which he runs in conjunction with Negativland, Lewis advocates the simplicity of the “bathtub model,” where film can be hand-processed at home. “There’s no secret knowledge,” he says. “You can make any kind of chemistry you need.” Hand-processing has the advantage of being cheaper and having a faster turnaround than commercial facilities, which often require shipment to an offsite processing center. Some artists, like Joel Schlemowitz (Incantation of the Spirit of the Silver Halide, 97) and Tony Conrad (in his cooked and electrocuted films from the Seventies), have made hand-processing part of their performances by shooting, developing, and projecting filmstrips in front of an audience. Among the resources available on filmlabs.org is Helen Hill’s Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet, a handmade, liberally illustrated and collaged 2005 collection of tips and procedures for making and processing films on one’s own. It includes a page on Hill’s 2001 film Madame Winger Makes a Film (A Survival Guide for the 21st Century), which also serves as a primer for DIY filmmaking. In it, the animated Madame Winger, a gravel-voiced Southern dame, asks: “When your film lab is reduced to rubble, how are you going to keep making films?” Much as the threat of “nuclear war or gigantic terrorist attacks” serves as the impetus for creating a “film lab bomb shelter” in Madame Winger, Recipes for Disaster was shaped by catastrophic events. The text exists only in photocopied form; the original was destroyed along with many of Hill’s films during Hurricane Katrina.

The decline of commercial film laboratories in the last 15 years was a result not of violent natural or man-made disasters as Hill mordantly predicted, but gradual technological and industrial change. Artist-run labs have sprung up to fill some of these gaps, though these are unevenly dispersed. The majority of independent labs are in France and other parts of Europe; the fewest are in the United States. Paradoxically, the persistence of a few major American commercial labs like Deluxe or Fotokem has undermined the establishment of artist-run labs domestically. Abroad, where commercial facilities closed far earlier, the necessity for independent labs has been around longer. Film manufacturing, which is more or less limited now to Kodak, along with places that process film, have historically had their base in the American film industry. It might seem then that where commercial facilities exist, there can be few or no artist-run labs. Yet, as many see it, the commercial base is necessary for the existence of even autonomous labs, if only for the continued manufacture of 8mm and 16mm film. (Though there are recent efforts to create homemade film emulsions, including the work of Esther Urlus of Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam and Alex MacKenzie in Vancouver, as well as various emulsion workshops in the U.S. run by Lewis and Process Reversal, these are not enough to sustain the level of production among the artist-run lab circuit.) However atrophied these commercial facilities have become, they function as the de facto base for which any filmmaking can occur. The continued industrial operations in the United States, then, enables the formation of artist-run labs elsewhere. Tuohy observes: “Kodak will last as long as Fotokem lasts. The artist-run film lab needs you to have commercial facilities in the U.S.”

The artist-run lab, however, is not only about reproducing the technical mechanisms of filmmaking. There is an aesthetic range between those that seek to approximate professional standards in processing and those who wish to use the laboratory as the site of experimentation. Moreover, many independent labs have engineered new equipment and techniques. In part, this is a pragmatic innovation: machinery acquired from defunct commercial labs or university classrooms usually has to be modified to fit the scale of the artist-run lab. But it also offers a new set of creative possibilities. Instead of the fetishism or the resuscitation of a “dead” medium (though that element certainly persists, perhaps most commonly in the art world), filmmaking finds new life in the autonomy afforded by the artist-run lab, fulfilling a longstanding avant-garde conception of the medium defined as an artistic one, well before its technological determination. Like more traditional artistic forms like painting and sculpture, it might be defined as a method of making whose tools can be changed and renewed, but whose governing impulse remains the same. Pip Chodorov of L’Abominable writes in “The Artist-Run Film Labs” in last fall’s issue of Millennium Film Journal: “There are no format wars, no compressing or codecs, no backing up or transcoding, no upgrades or obsolescence problems, no corporations to force us to buy new equipment. We are not in an economy but an ecology…” Film need not compete with digital media—and filmlabs.org serves as a crucial communicative infrastructure to the artist-run lab movement—but might coexist as a related form alongside it.

“While still a student, Napoleon had written on the last page of his geography book: 'St. Helena. Small island.' This may have been what we call a coincidence, but the thought must certainly have aroused terror in him in his last days.”

—Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon

Around the World with Orson Welles 

Pamplona’s other festival, Punto de Vista (aka International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) proved suitably bullish in its 9th edition, resuming after a two-year hiatus brought about by the Navarran government in response to the Spanish financial crisis. Dissent from the international film community, consolidated in a petition, forced the reprieve, though Punto de Vista had maintained its cinephilic pulse during this recuperative period of “austerity” by mounting successive seminars (last year focusing on the films of Ignacio Agüero and Pema Tseden). For its 2015 return, the festival was thematically positioned as something of an island, featuring an ambitious yet manageable program about the nature of archipelagic identity. From shark-hunting off Ireland’s coast in Flaherty’s Man of Aran to defining the very notion of Basque identity in a dedicated sidebar, from a Syrian intellectual’s exodus/exile (Our Terrible Country) to the melancholy of kleptomania (The Blazing World), Punto de Vista charted the uncertain dreams produced and the damages exacted by being all too remote. 

This conceptual gambit took on a playful feel in the hands of new artistic director Oskar Alegria. Island fever was never more palpable than in the festival’s choice opener, the admirable 1979 ethnographic feature documentary Study of an Island. Rudolf Thome and Cynthia Beatt’s film chronicles the plight of a group of Germans who arrive on the South Pacific island Ureparapara in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) with the intent of researching the local customs, language, and geography. From the opening shot on the arriving boat—passengers slouching on deck in the foreground, land looming on the horizon, a locally sourced pop song imposed on the soundtrack—the film looks bathed in the leftover light from René Clément’s Purple Noon, the textures suggesting naturalistic fiction. The sensation hangs on the film like humidity on a tourist, forging an uncanny relation between the feral nature depicted and clinical culture of the Western visitors, between intuition and science, the plucked spine of a young palm frond and a makeshift radio’s buzzing antenna. Unfolding like an anthropological performance in which the Germans become unwitting specimens, Study of an Island risks self-parody but sustains a sincere tone. As its European subjects descend into boredom, sickness, and incomprehension, the film comes to function as a postcolonial auto-critique, indebted to Jean Rouch’s ethno-fictions and pointing the way toward Miguel Gomes’s genre reconstructions.

And Then There Was Light

A similar ethnographic ambiguity could be found in And Then There Was Light, by Otar Iosseliani, a guest of honor at this year’s festival. Iosseliani’s 1989 film re-stages scenes from a Senegalese village that operates under an idyllic matriarchal code (cherish the shot of men hunched over sewing machines on an unpaved city street) until the arrival of European foresting industry inexorably alters their way of life. The paradox, of course, is that Iosseliani’s well-intentioned but intervening construct probably cast a similarly indelible impression. By the film’s subtle yet pointed conclusion, the villagers have dressed their native wooden effigies in the apparel of the timber gangs. This docu-fable is an anomaly within the Georgian filmmaker’s oeuvre, and it was screened at Punto de Vista to showcase his devotion to rituals of all kinds, in which the sacred and profane mesh: monastic choral singing, farmers felling wheat with scythes, a sweaty shift in a metal foundry, the incessant drinking of wine. In Euskadi été 1982, also part of “Chez Les Basques,” a program devoted to Basque identity, Iosselliani romanticizes farmers and villagers at work and play. This made-for-television doc is essentially an affectionate homage to the Basque people, and can best be appreciated as an act of displaced, pastoral nostalgia in light of the director’s then-recent self-imposed exile in France. 

These and other films in “Chez Les Basques” evoked “the country of the long farewell” (as the festival catalog lyrically referred to it) and served as a collective index to Basque identity, while implicitly calling into question various aesthetic means of representation. Is there a way of faithfully capturing the Basque soul on film? The festival highlighted the flattering but superficial attempt provided by another exile, Orson Welles, in his troubled TV series “Around the World…” Made in 1955, the episode features the director as European dilettante, whose fresh delivery verging on the sardonic (“Basques are... what Basques are.”) effectively reduces the footage to historical footnote status, revealing more about him than his subjects. But the festival trotted out one surviving subject in Chris Wertenbaker, incidental child-star of the episode’s first segment, in which he was enlisted as a guide and impromptu musician (his parents were friends of Welles). History coiled back on itself when the now-elderly Wertenbaker, teary from the festival screening, was tapped once again to pick up his guitar, 60 years later, and play the old Basque songs. F for fandango.

Le Curé basque de Gréciette

Perhaps best known today for his portraits of Godard and Cassavetes in the French Filmmakers of Our Time series, Hubert Knapp also portrays Basque quotidian life in Le Curé basque de Gréciette (58), with an approach evoking a croquis. Knapp profiles an octogenarian priest in remote French Basque country who plays pelota religiously and routinely pardons smugglers in his parish. If the Basque soul still eluded the grasp of such expressive portraiture, Louis Delluc and Rene Coiffard’s Le Chemin d’Ernoa (1921, also known as L’Américain) represented a quintessentially site-specific attempt. The light in mountainous Ascain becomes the foremost attraction of this smuggling drama, true to Jean Epstein’s concept of photogénie; its devotion to the luminosity of the area was echoed with a screening of the Lumières’ Rochers de la Vierge (1896), set in nearby Biarritz. Sadly, the print of the Delluc–Coiffard gem, restored by the Cinémathèque Française, proved rather ethereal itself, unable to endure a second projection. 

In Basque mythology, bees are sacred, and fittingly they represent the first Basque word (erleak) recorded in a sound film, In the Basque Country (Maurice Champreux and Jean Faugères, 1930). For Orkney Islands experimental filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, who was celebrated with a retrospective and a book of poems and essays on cinema, Hen Means Honey, bees evoked the landscape of her childhood in Kirkwall in her 1955 short Happy Bees. Tait (1918-99) eschewed the distinction between writing and filming; in Color Poems (74), one of 18 shorts presented in the retrospective, she intones verse about men returning home from the Spanish Civil War, over seemingly unrelated visuals, with the exception of the grainy image of empty black rubber boots quivering in the wind. Her written poetry conjures the fleeting sensation of looking, and of time’s passage, endemic to the medium of film. In her poem “Now” she describes her feelings while filming a poppy opening on a summer morning: “It gave me a sharp awareness of time passing, / Of exact qualities and values in light,” she observes, “And [I] felt time not so much moving as being moved in.” But she laments being unable to fully see movement while filming, only upon later watching the film: “My timing and my rhythm could not observe the / rhythm of their opening.” This intractable, infinitely divisible moment is at the heart of the cinema spectator’s alternate enchantment and frustration. Tait’s legacy of intimate, staunchly independent filmmaking deserves to be mapped for more than just cinephiles; kudos to Punto de Vista for pinning her on its atlas of islanders.

Cochihza

On Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua, a volcano named Concepción lies dormant, a sleeping body waiting to be wakened in Cochihza, Khristine Gillard’s gorgeous pastoral. Gillard’s 2013 film listens to the soporific rhythm of a community seemingly at peace in their tropical idyll but haunted by past eruptions and the imminent construction of a grand shipping canal that will part their land. The disembodied voices of old men carry through the trees as they dispute the taxonomy of wildflowers, play dominoes, and honor the memory of their ancestors. Bananas are harvested. Carnaval comes. Children swim. The island becomes shrouded in a storm. Cochihza, in one expansive yet efficient hour, taps into elemental mystery without ever losing its lucid gaze upon the natural world. 

Halfway across the globe, the Dutch island of Urk ceased to be an island after its inland sea had been dammed and drained to make way for arable land, leaving its fishermen inhabitants to lead seafaring lives farther from home. In Episode at Sea, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan attempt a record of the fishing community’s endeavors while laying bare their own process. “We would be loyal to the material that surrounded us and insert ourselves as moving bodies into the universe of ropes, nets and water,” write the artists, who state their intentions and findings with scrolling intertitles that are at once theoretically minded and drolly amusing. Episode at Sea is, among other things, a monument to briny labor, a tableau of circulating matter, and an artist studio in situ (imagine Jeff Wall staging outtakes from Leviathan on 35mm black and white as an asterisk to this wonderful undertaking).

Our Terrible Country

The festival’s competition, dubbed “The Central Region,” was elevated by CPH:DOX and FidMarseille titles having their Spanish premieres. Topical urgency propels Mohammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsi’s Our Terrible Country, a fractured and fractious look at the writer Yassin Haj Saleh, chronicled from his perilous perch as a fugitive from the country whose revolution he helped inspire. The threat of an emergent Islamic State suffuses Atassi and Homsi’s film with an air of palpable danger, while Saleh’s predicament produces a steady undercurrent of the sorrow of exile, as he attempts to Skype with his wife who stayed behind in a bombed-out Douma. Homsi, a young rebel who co-directs and becomes a player in the real drama, accepted the Special Audience Award for Best Film and dedicated the prize to his compatriots back in Syria whose stories have not been told. Perhaps the film’s increasing international exposure will go some way toward countering Saleh’s assertion (in an interview) that the Syrian opposition has “failed in translating Syria’s dreadful suffering into universal meaning.” 

In a gesture that typified the festival’s defiance of convention (or the efforts of a persistent jury), the prize for best film went to Guillermo Moncayo’s Echo Chamber, which consists of a ghostly 19-minute traveling shot through Colombia’s fecund interior via a decaying railway. The serene, linear glide of the camera moving through the jungle canopy formally expresses a notion of tranquility and progress. Then reverse shots reveal a boy astride a stationary motorbike mounted on the tracks, an image that belies the country’s once-modern rail system. A portentous weather report warning of an impending hurricane is broadcast from old speakers attached to the bike, interspersed with a soothing cumbia, “Hola Soledad.” A cow roams the graffiti-scarred corridors of an abandoned home. Residents are glimpsed on their porches and lawns beside the railway, unperturbed by the echoing, incantatory announcements of possible evacuation, while laundry is hung out to dry. The sense of contrasts gives the film an open-ended identity: is Moncayo channeling subjective states of mind amid objective realities? Is Colombia itself an echo chamber, reverberating with natural and political catastrophes over time? The film eludes easy summation, and any on-screen threat is subsumed by the onset of dusk, as this experimental docu-fiction sinks into an oneiric trance.   

Overall, Punto de Vista’s heterodox reputation was born out by an intellectually curious program that was worth savoring, if not celebrating outright. Given a week, you could see every one of the films. For object lessons on how to adapt Alain Robbe-Grillet to the screen, conceptual artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s 1972 La celosía offered a literal solution: just film the book. Meanwhile, in the spirit of the durational, the vast basement beneath the festival’s main auditorium played host to a three-hour anthology film commissioned on the subject of darkness; the work of 38 international directors looped in perpetual crepuscularity on a spectral screen. (Blink and you’d miss J.P. Sniadecki’s Silo Sketches.) I’m curious if the film will continue to unspool uninterrupted until next year’s edition, like a heart beating continuously in the dark to commemorate the festival’s survival to its 10th anniversary.

In just three documentaries, Bill and Turner Ross have cultivated a distinct perspective on American iconography, revealing locations at once remote and familiar, if only through the prism of popular media. These sites—their hometown of Sidney, Ohio (the subject of their 2009 debut feature, 45365), a New Orleans artery on the bank of the Mississippi River (Tchoupitoulas, 12), and the border towns of Eagle Pass, Texas and Piedras Negras, Mexico (Western, which recently screened in New Directors / New Films)—occupy spaces in our shared consciousness even if we’ve never heard of them. The undertaking of the Rosses’ films, in their impressionistic, free-form design, is to scrutinize the cultural symbols underlying that familiarity, probing what “Small Town USA” and “the American West” actually mean and how those meanings have changed over time.

Western, which earned a Special Jury Prize for verité filmmaking at Sundance, is rich in archetypes from fiction about the West. Two aging, chivalrous mayors, Chad Foster and José Manuel Maldonado, strive to preserve harmony and a bygone way of life, personified by rugged cattle ranchers like Martín Wall. But modernity encroaches on their turf, as a drug cartel destabilizes the region, leading to a ban on livestock trade. Suddenly Wall, an adoring father to 6-year-old Brylyn, is without means of support.

Throughout it all, the Rosses’ camera unobtrusively captures the cross-currents of life in a locality that may recall Ford and Peckinpah, but is a very real place, of and at odds with its time. Bill and Turner—who will be working this summer on “a bizarro concert film that David Byrne set up”—spoke with FILM COMMENT in New York during New Directors / New Films.

Your first feature, 45365, was intentionally shot in your hometown, and your next film, Tchoupitoulas, is very distinctly a portrait of New Orleans at night. Did you have specific locations in mind for Western? Or did you just want to make a film about the contemporary West?

TURNER: It’s both those things. I think it’s a location of the mind. It’s this mythic landscape. Everybody has some contextual idea of what the West, what the western is, what the American frontier is in people's minds the world over.

BILL: Because of films. Because film language has described that place. And our dad took us to see a lot of westerns as kids. We grew up in Ohio and so that was not a territory that we were familiar with, but we were because of John Ford. So the impetus for the film was to see what that actually looks like today. We had an idea of what we wanted, but we didn’t know where it was.

TURNER: Then we had to go out and find that, and we knew we wanted to see what the modern frontier was. So that leads you to a specific or somewhat specific region, and because we’re relying on visual storytelling very much, you need something to tell a story visually. And when we found this place, these two communities, and the iconic Rio Grande, the river that runs through the two cities that face each other, it tells the story visually already. Then whatever happens therein becomes the act of discovery. You find that place and then all of a sudden you realize that it’s championed by the patron, Mayor Foster, who is this infallible archetype of the West. He’s a big, tall man with a strong handshake and a hat and a mustache and he speaks the language fluently and is embraced no matter which side of the border he’s on… and we landed. He was our John Wayne.

I noticed, even just in the way shots were framed, tropes from Hollywood westerns. Like the way that Mayor Foster is introduced: he’s pictured from behind, almost this silhouette in a ten-gallon hat. He could easily be John Wayne or Gary Cooper. Were you thinking about framing him as though he were a classical western protagonist?

BILL: Absolutely. Every film has its own language—it dictates what it wants to be and what it should be. And while there’s a style that we’ve arrived at that we employ, because of the different landscapes and because of the different territory that you’re in, it wants to be shot in a certain way. We had walls covered with reference material for how a western should be shot, and there was a lot of Gary Cooper and John Wayne on the wall, and because it’s a big landscape it asks for big imagery, so we tried to shoot it that way.

TURNER: We work within the genre of nonfiction, we are relying on real life, on real humans and landscapes to tell these stories, to go fishing for these images and these moments, but certainly our conception of these is very conceptual, theoretical, aesthetic. We’re spending time thinking about how the story wants to be told visually, who are these archetypes that we are not only going to capture but to confront. Yes, you introduce Chad [Foster] by showing him from behind, he’s the man in the hat being addressed—that sets up who he is. And so we understand what he represents. But do we? He’s a real human being and hopefully we give some sense of his humanity and his real presence in the time and place in which he exists, so no, he’s not John Wayne. He’s Mayor Chad Foster in a real place. Yes, he cuts a figure—but is that the truth of his experience? That’s the idea, and that’s why we send people into a theater with the idea of western. You call it Western because you frame that idea. But is that actually the truth of the modern frontier?

I kept thinking of The Last Picture Show as I was watching. Especially because you have these two very courtly, paternalistic mayors on either side of the border, who’ve now both passed on—they reminded me of Sam the Lion in in the Bogdanovich film. Were you intending an elegy to the West?

TURNER: It became that in a way. It’s also a story of an uncertain future. The fading of a “once was,” people grappling with changing times, and people moving into a future that is yet to be told. It’s a simple story, but because these people’s real lives are what tell that story, these characters don’t quit, these characters don’t walk off a film set, these characters’ lives go on. The little girl, Brylyn, obviously her story goes on, to what future we don’t know. She grows up with a father who has very much embraced the aesthetic of where he is, the personality of where he is. And Mayor Foster represents what is becoming a bygone era. Certainly, The Last Picture Show is a wonderful reference. We think about that kind of stuff all the time.

I want to ask about your style. In a word, it’s unforced. You don’t lay out a thesis or insist upon a narrative, you just kind of accumulate atmosphere as you go along—although that makes it sound more accidental than it probably is. How much is forethought and how much is contingency?

TURNER: Forethought lands us in a situation, and contingency is the evidence. We’re throwing ourselves into thoughtful situations so that we may receive the truth of that experience.

BILL: There’s nothing interesting or adventurous or soulful about going in and demanding what it should be. We go in with a movie in our heads, but of course that’s going to change the second we start, and that’s what’s interesting.

TURNER: There’s a lot of serendipity, there’s a lot of allowing the things to happen, but you set yourself up to receive very intentionally. So we create a framework and try to be present in the most absolute way possible, where you become a part of the landscape, and things that are happening are natural and you are simply a tuning fork for those things. That’s the goal.

You don’t force a narrative but one emerges nonetheless, with the cartel situation. Was there a balancing act with respect to how much you should emphasize that versus your original vision of John Wayne’s place in the 21st century?

BILL: Your hand gets forced... We’re sitting on Martín’s ranch when he gets the news that the border has been shut down. You can’t avoid that, and you’re an idiot if you do. That is his existence, and to force whatever thought you may have had going into it would be ridiculous at that point.

TURNER: It was a balancing act, because we went down there with a major intention to not do the one-dimensional journalist thing: to not do the fly in, fly out, let’s point a camera at you and have you tell me about this issue and avoid everything else. What I hope we did with the film was to convey the experience that we had and that we felt was the more collective experience. To have these looming shadows, these specters of things that perhaps are not always on your doorstep but everyone is aware of. They do affect the general comings and goings, and for someone like Martín it actually shut down his industry. And for someone like Chad who is a major proponent of the border and trying to always preach the gospel of community and no spillover violence, he has to confront that. That’s a very real thing.

Do you try to make yourselves invisible? In all of your films you’re privy to exchanges that feel very private—and yet there you are, filming them. Is it part of your modus operandi to efface yourselves?

BILL: I always prefer to listen to somebody’s story rather than talk at them, and that’s just a personality trait, but we’re there, and we’re making friends with these people as we’re shooting. Whether they’re a good guy or bad guy, whatever. We’re trying to see who these folks are and really spend time. So they know we’re there.

TURNER: It’s a byproduct of the approach.

BILL: We get comfortable with people and they get comfortable with us, and so while we’re in the room, they feel like they can let that guard down and really reveal who they are. There’s no hiding that we’re in the room with the camera.

Tell me what you each bring to the collaboration. I’m interested less in the division of labor than the division of perspective, things that one of you is attuned to that the other might not be.

BILL: [laughing] We both love people. We love to meet new people and we both love new experience and the adventure and the travel. I think that’s probably why we work together, because we want to have big life experiences and be able to be old men and have good stories to tell. So we start there, but I think the approach is very different in the field when we’re shooting. I like to sit back a little removed and watch. I don’t get very close. Turner does—he gets very close and he gets these shots which I’m deeply envious of, where you can really feel someone thinking, and you see the ticking going on and you really get inside somebody’s head. That shit’s nearly impossible to film. Very few people can do that and Turner can do that. I do it rarely. I would rather be back and see the environment where the people exist, because I find that very interesting. I guess it comes out of our different personalities, but that’s contrary to what our personalities are. Socially, I’m very loud, and I’m interacting and running around the room, just wanting to get the most out of the room, and Turner will sit with you in a corner and talk to you all night.

TURNER: I think that’s generally accurate. But I think we also do the opposite occasionally. You’ll throw yourself in the bullring and sometimes I’ll sit back... But Bill is fascinated with the patience with the thing, and watching and being there in awe of the thing, and making sure the fleeting moment does not pass uncaptured. And for me, it’s an opportunity to actually be invisible and completely invest in whatever it is with an intensity that is unwarranted without the camera.

BILL: It’s competitive between the two of us. You want to come home at the end of the day and say: “I got the best shot.” Whether it’s a brother thing or whatnot, I don’t know.

Your films are discussed as a trilogy, and maybe that’s accurate or maybe it’s marketing, but are you interested in making more of these diagnostics of Americana? Or are you eager to move in a different direction?

TURNER: Both. Bill and I discuss this as a trilogy when we talk to each other, but it’s not a packaged deal like, “Here’s this marketable trilogy.” First of all, our shit isn’t marketable, so that’s not really a good device. But we talk about things as a piece. If we can explore ideas, maybe it has to happen over time with multiple projects. We had an approach to making these first three films, and now we’re thinking about an inversion. And all of that is to say, it’s not about the individual pieces. It’s an ongoing conversation.

Everything about the success of the Fast and Furious series is counterintuitive and unconventional. That’s what makes it low-down delightful. In do-or-die fights, the moviemakers let you see their heroes sweat: these movies celebrate exertion. In hyperbolic chase and demolition scenes, inspired stunt people and digital craftsmen bring audiences to the edge of reality—and then, in the best analog tradition, compel them to suspend disbelief. At the high point of Furious 7, the auto-maniac heroes, intent on rescuing a computer genius in distress, back a string of supercars straight off the rear of a cargo plane, then glide on parachutes into the Caucasus Mountains. The concept is so imaginative and the sight of skydiving in vehicles so glorious that viewers are primed to accept that the cars have been pinpoint-targeted. Your inner child might even fantasize that the drivers can steer in mid-air to safe, if not pinpoint, landings.

The gas-splattered esprit de corps the characters preserve even in extremis is hard to resist. Gang founder and Earth Father, Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), likes to say: “I don’t have friends, I got family.” The idea of friends as the family you choose has rarely gotten a more muscular workout than in the Fast and Furious films. Dom’s multicultural street racers and high-tech turbo-chargers combine the quirkiness and talent of workplace comedy ensembles with the all-for-one, one-for-all spirit of D’Artagnan’s Musketeers and Robin Hood’s merry men. Unlike most recent Robin Hood and Musketeer movies, though, these films really do depict the glories of teamwork. One of the comical suspense tricks that first-time F and F director James Wan masters with the help of longtime series screenwriter Chris Morgan is whisking idiosyncratic gang members like wise-ass strategist Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and kick-ass beauty Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) out of the action, only to re-insert them when most needed and least expected.

The moviemakers have wisely angled Dom’s group of renegades into an easy alliance with nonconformist American lawmen like elite DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson). They’ve become unsentimental patriots without losing their outlaw edge. Their competence, guts, vision, and loyalty provide an injection of group passion for audiences vast and curious—for the base these movies have won over 15 years and for the younger movie-lovers who, with every fresh edition, become new fans. Toretto's brother-in-arms and actual brother-in-law, former LAPD officer and ex-FBI man Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), has become a doting father, though he says he “misses the bullets” of his previous lives. In the film’s funniest self-reflexive gag, Brian comes off clumsy and sheepish in a line of cars filled with other parents dropping off kids at his boy’s school.

Going in, fans know that Walker died at 40 in November 2013, in a single-car high-speed accident, while riding in a Porsche owned and driven by a friend. Furious 7 was still filming at the time, but Wan managed to complete the action and also to underline a subplot about Brian’s need to lead a quieter life for the sake of his young family. To make it all click, he blended shot footage with odds and ends from previous movies as well as scenes performed with Walker’s real-life brothers, Caleb and Cody, as his stand-ins. (Jordana Brewster once again plays Brian’s wife and Dom’s sister, Mia Toretto.) As befits a Fast and Furious film, the wizardry is both roughhouse-elegant and touching.

What’s most seamless about the movie is the way Brian’s physical grace and emotional commitment grow out of Walker’s earnest embrace of his character. This performer updates the strong, silent type the way the young Redford did, by playing a figure who is aware, and self-aware, as well as hip. He isn’t afraid to show anxiety and vulnerability when Brian faces off with a scarily efficient martial artist like Thai star Tony Jaa. And he offers an ideal counterpoint to Diesel’s warm, brawny bluster. An epilogue centered on Brian simultaneously cements Dom’s acceptance of his comrade’s retreat from daredevil risks and expresses Diesel’s love and respect for his late friend and costar. In its use of images recorded over a decade and a half, it’s at least as resonant as anything in Boyhood. Unlike many memorials, it really is a celebration. By the time the words “For Paul” appear on screen, applause, not tears, is the appropriate response.

Furious 7 stems from Hobbs and Dom’s defeat (in Fast & Furious 6) of a cutthroat London-based gang with next-generation weapons technology, headed by former Brit Special Forces officer Owen Shaw (Luke Evans). Little did our heroes know that Owen had an even more dangerous older brother, with an even more sinister black ops background, named Deckard (Jason Statham). In Furious 7, Deckard Shaw is bent on avenging his kid brother. He seethes with the relentlessness that only Statham is capable of mustering: the actor must be venting all the dry-ice rage he accumulated while being referred to (inexplicably) as an aging action hero in The Expendables movies. After blowing up Han (Sung Kang) in Tokyo and putting the redoubtable Hobbs into the hospital, Deckard goes straight for Dom. Unable to help Dom himself (at least immediately), Hobbs arranges for the gang leader to engage with a formidable new partner—a dapper covert-ops chief who goes by the nickname “Mr. Nobody,” played by Kurt Russell as the opposite of a nonentity. Mr. Nobody promises to back up Dom as long as his crew rescues a computer wizard named Ramsey from a terrorist, Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), who craves Ramsey’s breakthrough spy technology. The gadget, “God’s Eye,” allows operators to locate targets by scouring all the surveillance and tracking devices in the world, simultaneously, with a simple search request. The quest for Ramsey and God’s Eye takes the team to Azerbaijan and then to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Dom chooses to face off with Deckard and Jakande on the streets of his beloved Los Angeles.

The filmmakers don’t miss a trick when it comes to freshening up the makeup of their International Brotherhood of Street Racers. Ramsey, for example, proves to be anything but a wan, bespectacled Person of Interest-type hacktivist. Instead, we get Nathalie Emmanuel of Game of Thrones in the role—and she’s a curly-haired dazzler of mixed English, Dominican, and St. Lucian ancestry. Understandably disoriented when saved from a speeding armored bus and thrown onto the hood of a car on a mountain road, this self-possessed character survives to weather Roman’s desperate flirtation and synchs up naturally with the group’s tech virtuoso, the super-alert, sneaky-droll Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), who happens to be Roman’s best friend. Generally smart about people, Ramsey calls Dom “Alpha Male” and Letty “Mrs. Alpha Male,” though Letty herself, still suffering from amnesia, can’t recall what it was like when she and Dom knew each other Biblically.

In a season that’s full of filmmakers expressing mental confusion via blurred vision and intrusive cutting, Wan does an expert job of bringing home Letty’s pain with bouts of free-association editing that meld into dynamic scenes like Race Wars, a convocation of speedsters held in the desert outside Lancaster, California. How refreshing it is to see a movie so unselfconsciously inclusive that Race Wars can only mean a car-racing event.

Best known for his horror movies (including the smash 2013 release The Conjuring), Wan stretches his talent in his most inventive, supple work yet, whether by executing tiny tilts of the camera to capture the details of close combat, or by giving his often grubby characters some moments of dress-up fun when they crash a Jordanian billionaire’s penthouse party in an Abu Dhabi skyscraper complex. His pacing lacks variety, and I wish he’d handed Statham more to do than scare the bejesus out of everyone with his laser-like glower. But Wan knows how to draw out and hone many different types of action-film performances. He encourages Dwayne Johnson to exercise his specialty—bringing out the outrageous humor of he-man prowess without undercutting it. He uses Russell wisely, as a genre icon, without letting the actor rest on his perfect casting as a cool covert-ops dude. Wan employs Russell’s vivid yet matter-of-fact delivery to gain laughs with gags as simple as Mr. Nobody’s preference for Belgian ale over Dom’s Corona beer. Wan and Russell build the performance to peak just right: Mr. Nobody, caught in a gunfight, whips out a set of snappy shades with night vision and commences firing like a Western gunslinger, an automatic sidearm in each hand.

What’s great and poetic about films like Steven Spielberg’s Duel and The Sugarland Express, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, and even Howard Zieff’s Slither is the way vehicles can assume personalities. What’s deliriously entertaining about these pulpy Fast and Furious movies is the way the actors’ personalities dominate even the oversize set pieces. Part of the fun of Furious 7 is seeing men and women in cars try to top classic action stunts that are done without them. One leg of the Caucasus sequence recalls the mountain chariot race from The Fall of the Roman Empire, while another resembles the heroic American soldiers in Lone Survivor bumping down a cliff, except in this case it’s Dom and Ramsey in a car that’s like (as Dom puts it) “the demon love child” of a vintage Dodge Charger and an armored military vehicle. At the climax of the Abu Dhabi sequence, Dom and Brian (and Walker and Diesel) appear intent on besting Tom Cruise’s skyscraper antics from Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and they do it from the front seats of a $3.4 million W Motors Lykan Hypersport.

Fast & Furious 6 crossbred its native genes with those of James Bond movies. This entry draws on the entire gene pool of action filmmaking, right up to a climax that intercuts Dom and Shaw’s final battle of the dinosaurs, a Predator drone zooming through downtown Los Angeles, and a tracking duel between Ramsey and Jakande that ups the ante on Zero Dark Thirty. There’s so much destruction at the climax that it’s like an apocalypse with a happy ending. Furious 7 is the demon love child of Fast & Furious 6 and a Mad Max movie. 

There’s a perfectly executed scene in Goodnight Mommy, in which the twin protagonists get cleverly meta in a game of “who am I?” with their mother. “Mama” the boys (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) write on a yellow Post-it note before carefully sticking it on her fragile, bandaged forehead. She’s freshly returned from surgery and her entire visage is wrapped in gauze save for her eyes and mouth—think Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. As her sons give her a series of clues, she can’t identify herself to save her life.

The game’s sense of uncertain identity quickly escalates to form the crux of the carefully crafted suspense of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s debut fiction feature, which unfolds almost entirely within the confines of an isolated house in the Austrian countryside. Pitting the uncanny against the domestic, the family’s dysfunction mounts to monstrous consequences. Their mother’s mummified face isn’t the only thing that the boys can’t recognize; her behavior is off-kilter too. Locking herself in her room for hours on end and drawing all the blinds closed, she’s become mean, neglectful, and borderline psychopathic. Luckily, the boys are good at making their own fun so long as they stick together. But when the bandages come off (revealing the face of actress Susanne Wuest) the twins channel their resourceful household tinkering toward more violent ends.

Shot on 35mm, the film’s kinetic outdoor sequences amidst corn stalks and hailstorms provide a harsh contrast to the still framing of the house’s stark interiors. The overall effect of its clean visuals and tightly calibrated ambient sound—an unnerving combination of serenity and terror—is sure to linger well past the closing credits. (Given the cringe-worthy nature of the subject matter, it’s perhaps not surprising that the film was produced by Ulrich Seidl, the partner and uncle of Franz and Fiala, respectively; Franz has collaborated with Seidl on several films.)

In pointed contrast to the chilly surfaces of their film, Franz and Fiala exude a great deal of warmth and, unsurprisingly, humor. FILM COMMENT talked with the writing-directing duo during New Directors / New Films about genre, mommy issues, and Austria’s conflicted relationship with Hitler.

The horror genre is an especially cumulative one: it’s difficult to make something new without referencing anything else. The first thing that came to my mind was Eyes Without a Face. A lot of reviewers have also pointed out similarities to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Are any of these references conscious, or did they manifest themselves unconsciously?

Severin Fiala: I think all of them are, in fact, unconscious. We love cinema and horror films and have watched a lot of these films together. But then when we had this idea for the story for our film, it just became about the story and the characters. We weren’t consciously thinking about other films while writing the script. There are so many films dear to our hearts that maybe come out here and there, but we didn’t intend that consciously.

Veronika Franz: Of course we’ve seen and we love Franju, but we also love Insidious, Bunny Lake Is Missing, so many different films. I really like the atmosphere and mystery of Nicolas Roeg’s films—the way you can’t really tell why it is so mysterious. I like this kind of tone. We really just wanted to make the kind of film we wanted to see, as simple as that sounds [laughs].

Horror is also a genre with which you can take a lot of liberties in terms of narrative logic, but in your film everything that feels surreal is eventually explained. Why was it important for you to keep the movie so firmly grounded within the realm of reality?

SF: I think the film is simply scarier if it’s rooted in reality. If it’s fantasy, you can push it aside more easily. In our case, we’re looking at family life, which is something everyone knows—everyone has a mother or knows about the bond between mother and child.

VF: It’s also about power games within families. Today as a single mom raising children you have to be in charge all the time, but the truth is that very often you’re not in charge at all—very often the children are in charge. So we wanted to thematicize this relationship in modern families.

But we also really like physical film: films that get to you and make you shiver, make you want to not look at the screen. And then after the ride is over, we like you to be able to think: “What was that all about?” We don’t like you to be able to sit there and think it all through while you’re watching it—we want to kind of erase that and then afterwards hopefully you can find something in there to go back to.

This film does both: as horror, it’s both physical and quite cerebral.

VF: Good! That’s what we wanted. And that’s why it’s rooted in reality—otherwise it’s just a mind game. I think the film really does tell us something about the existential state of mothers and kids.

The film hinges on the audience’s shifting sympathies. The fact that there’s no neutral figure to offer objectivity is key to the suspense. Was the dual perspective the plan from the beginning?

VF: The original idea was that Mom was coming home and looks different, behaves differently, and the two boys start to doubt who she is. We wanted to tell it from the children’s perspective, and that’s why it was very important that the children would be beautiful and fragile-looking.

SF: You can’t tell this story from a neutral perspective. Everything the mom does could possibly be explained quite easily, but the children don’t see it. It’s the children’s world of imagination and fantasy, so you have to stick with them or else the whole mystery doesn’t work. So the first half has more of a dreamlike feel to it, we think, because that’s how children see the world. It’s not about effects, it’s about how imagination and dreams and fears come together and make the world look really different from how adults see it.

VF: We wanted to shift that after about two-thirds of the movie and we also wanted to change the aesthetics. So first you have very static shots and its quite dark in the house—we had to build like 35 blinds to make it that dark [laughs]. After about two-thirds of the way through, we changed that: we have a very hard light and a handheld camera, which moves…

SF: …with a more documentary feel. Not this imaginary mode of the children—at least so we thought.

VF: We really wanted to follow through on everything, so everything every person does can be explained.

SF: But the mother doesn’t see that and the children don’t see that because they have different perspectives of the world. A neutral person could explain everything from beginning to end. But then it would be a boring film [laughs]. Our film is about this clash of perspectives and people not communicating clearly or talking to each other. That’s what maybe links us to Austrian cinema, where crises arise because people aren’t talking to each other. This film becomes not about talking but about seeing the world in a different way.

I’m sure you’re sick of Haneke comparisons, but lack of communication is a central theme for him as well. And your opening with the Von Trapp family singing is something that’s very specifically and recognizably Austrian. Can you speak a little bit more about the Austrian specificity of the film?

SF: The communication theme, we feel, is very Austrian—Austrians are not so straightforward, like Germans maybe. They’re always talking around issues—they never speak up or say what they mean.

VF: They cover their true thoughts and feelings very often behind irony, or by simply not talking. They also didn’t talk about Hitler, so it has a long history. It was only 25 years ago when the Austrian Chancellor [Franz Vranitzky] first publicly said in parliament that Austria was not a victim—Austria was guilty. I mean, that was 25 years ago! Until then, Austria would always say: “Oh, we were the first victims of Hitler Germany” Even knowing that Hitler was Austrian. [Laughs] And I think that’s very typically Austrian—kind of avoiding the truth.

SF: Many Austrian films address that, so that’s maybe what links us to them. But in the specific case of Haneke, we don’t really see the connection. We’re often compared to Funny Games, which for us is a film actually against horror cinema—and we love horror films.

VF: We don’t like that, actually. [Laughs] He’s very moralistic. And besides, it’s a completely different situation if two strangers are entering a house from the outside world, [instead of] two children dealing with their own mother. But maybe the connection is something about the precise coldness of our style. Personally, I’m more connected to Ulrich Seidl’s films that to Michael Haneke’s.

Veronika, you once said of Seidl’s films: “You take one step further, and you have a horror movie.” Which is kind of what you’ve done here. I’m sure you picked up a lot from working with him.

VF: Yeah, I think it’s more general, actually. It’s the Austrian art-house film, basically, which we are rooted in, but we wanted to take it further. The working method was very different from Ulrich Seidl. We had to shoot in six weeks, and we shot every day and had a really firm plan. Writing with Ulrich, we just kind of write short stories, or very precise treatments, but we don’t write any dialogue. We develop the dialogue with the actors and actresses, so very often the ends of the films change. This was not possible in our case, because we really had a firm plan.

SF: But what we learned from Ulrich Seidl is that we wanted to be as open as possible within our strict shooting schedules for surprises—for real life. Like when the hail happened, we were shooting a completely different scene inside, but we all ran outside to shoot that. We had to shoot that because it’s real and it’s there and it’s really good. Also the children’s… rülpsen? [mimes burping]

Ah, the burping contest! I loved that!

VF: Yeah, the burping contest! [Laughs] The boys were just doing it in front of the sound technicians. We passed by and heard it, and thought, we have to shoot that. What we also took from Ulrich is that we shot chronologically: we tried to go with the children through the story. We didn’t have the script on set, so the children didn’t know the story. They knew the basic situation: this is your mom, she’s coming back, she’s acting strange, and you have to find out who she is. We revealed the story to them day by day, in bits and pieces.

SF: How the story evolves and how they follow it is just how the children follow it in the film. That kept the actors interested in what was coming next. If you tell children how it all ends on the first day of shooting, they lose interest.

Working with young kids must make it challenging to get your vision across—especially given the dark subject matter.

VF: It’s very easy, actually.

SF: The only important thing is to keep them interested and to keep the atmosphere light and playful.

VF: Working with actors is always about trust. If they trust you, it’s very easy, and children just trust you. They want to do as good a job as possible, and they trust what you tell them to do. It’s more complicated with adult actors, because of course they have their own ideas, and maybe they don’t think you are right.

The kind of subtle suspense that drives your film is something I’d imagine is hard to convey in the writing stage—so much of it is in the sound and pacing, making the ordinary eerie. I particularly loved the sound in the moment when the mother is eating crackers in bed. Can you talk about your collaboration with the sound designers and how you built up the tension from the writing stage to the final product?

VF: The writing we did together—we didn’t separate the duties. So we sat together writing the script and would read it out loud to each other.

SF: You can really feel if it’s boring or stupid. It’s embarrassing to read your script out loud [laughs].

VF: It’s not very pleasant. But I think that helped with the suspense because we could see, OK, this is not working, and we could try to find another solution for the scene.

SF: Then we had this finished script, and we know it’s not perfect. If something is not working, you can try to fix it during shooting, and then the last chance you have is in the editing room, which is really connected to writing. It’s like rewriting the whole story.

VF: We knew there was going to be almost no sound. I mean, we have a very good sound designer obviously and a very good composer—Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian composer, and she’s also based in New York. It was very funny when we showed the film to her: she would say, “This film doesn’t need any music.” [Laughs] So we knew we wanted to make kind of a silent film that only has very precise tones. She was a little bit disappointed because she wanted to compose more music, and I think it ended up being only three or four parts where we used her music. The rest of it was a very delicate balance to not make it too loud. I dream of a film without any dialogue, so if we could have a scene and spare the dialogue, we would do that.

“[T]he sullen, impulsive films of James B. Harris have been consistently overlooked and underseen. Genuine B noirs in the purest non-reflexive sense of the word, Harris’s films are inglorious, pipe-dream-beleaguered gutterdives, with the cheap integrity of bygone pulp fiction.”

—Michael Atkinson, Sight & Sound, November 1993

James B. Harris uniquely kept the spirit of pulp alive at the dawn of Tarantino’s PoMo Pulp Fiction, in no small part because he knew the genuine article firsthand. His first gig as a producer was a 1956 adaptation of a crime novel by Lionel White, made with a fellow New Yorker who’d been trying to make his break into pictures, Stanley Kubrick.

The Kubrick-Harris productions resulted in three key, characteristic early works in the Kubrick canon—The Killing, Paths of Glory (57), and Lolita (62)—before the partners split, with Harris deciding to pursue a directing career of his own. In another respect, however, the friends would remain in artistic dialogue: Harris’s directorial debut, The Bedford Incident (65), is a dramatic treatment of the Cold War standoff that’s played for farce in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (64), while Harris’s Some Call It Loving (73), a hypnotic tale of erotic obsession, seems to have influenced Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (99).

Never a prolific director, Harris would go on to complete a trio of gritty crime stories that doubled as studies in compulsive personalities: Fast-Walking (82), Cop (88), and Boiling Point (93). These were brooding, disquieting works completely at odds with the emerging action extravaganzas of the Jerry Bruckheimer/Don Simpson school. And while Harris has remained a cult item in the U.S., he has been championed abroad, particularly in France, where Some Call It Loving recently enjoyed a successful commercial re-release, alongside a career retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

Shortly before his New York City homecoming for a similar career overview at BAMcinématek, Harris spoke to FILM COMMENT by phone about his work with Kubrick and his own films.

Killer's Kiss

I don't know a great deal about your early years, other than the fact that you were born in New York City, so I wonder if you could fill in some of the details.

I was born in Manhattan in New York City, then my family moved down to the Jersey Shore where I was brought up until I was a junior in high school, when they moved back to New York City. I continued at a prep school in Manhattan called Columbia Grammar, which is the oldest prep school in New York, affiliated with Columbia University. At that point, after graduation, I tried my hand at becoming a musician. I attended Julliard School of Music as a percussion major.

I know you're a couple years younger, but would you have been at Juilliard at the same time that Miles Davis was there?

I don't remember. There was a female trombonist named Melba Liston, but I don't know... Juilliard was a little beyond my musical ability. Percussion was one thing, but it included playing actual musical instruments, like xylophone and timpanis, and you also had to have a minor in piano and courses like composition and music dictation... I realized quickly that I was in over my head. My dad put me to work in his insurance brokerage company as an office boy, and when he started making investments in other areas, I went along with those investments, and those put me in contact with film distribution companies. And that’s how I learned the business, working in distribution companies until I was drafted in the Army in 1950.

In the Army I met Alexander Singer when we were being trained as combat photographers. Alex had been a boyhood friend, and was still a friend, of Stanley Kubrick. He introduced me to Stanley at some point, and after I got out of the Army, I ran into him again. He invited me to a screening of his latest film at that time, which was Killer’s Kiss—he had previously done Fear and Desire, and I was quite impressed. Kubrick was interested in putting his films on TV and thought that maybe I could be the distributor. It was revealed that his film couldn't be cleared because the producer, Joe Burstyn, had died in a plane crash, and therefore the film was tied up in litigation. We decided that there was really nothing we could do in that regard, so we talked about maybe getting together: I'd become a producer and he'd become a director with me. That's what we decided on, and formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures, and the rest, as they say, is history.

How did you find your find the first property that you worked on, which became The Killing? 

I found Clean Break at Scribner’s bookstore on 5th Avenue. It’s about the robbery of a racetrack, and I thought this would make a good film for us to do together. I gave it to Stanley to read the next day, and he was just as excited about this story as me—it was really well-written, it had a great structure which we followed in the final picture, the thing of following each participant in the robbery from the beginning to the robbery, which required flashing back, which was kind of unique in those days. 

The Killing

It's such an extraordinary cast in the movie, including a Brooklyn lug, Timothy Carey...

Tim had been in several pictures that Stanley and I had seen and we were impressed with him, so we didn't just find him in a casting call. One in particular where a girl had been kidnapped—

Crime Wave?

Yeah, that's what it was. Stanley was familiar with every picture that was ever made, and that's how that cast got put together, because Stanley knew all of the Joe Sawyers and the Elisha Cooks and the Ted di Corsias, people like that. And of course Stanley played chess with Kola Kwariani, the wrestler who starts the fight at the racetrack. It was Stanley's complete knowledge of all of these great character actors that resulted in us getting that cast.

Did you get a lot of pushback against using the unorthodox structure of the book?

Yes, yes we did. When we finished the film, we had a preview in Huntington Park or some suburb of LA, and we were told after the previews that we had ruined the picture. Sterling Hayden’s agent said we'd made a big mistake, and all our friends who'd seen the picture said we should edit it back into a straight-line story. Which we tried to do, actually. When we returned to New York with the finished film, we rented an editing room and tried to put the picture into a linear story. Midway through we looked at each other—the whole reason we acquired the book and made the picture was that we were so impressed with the structure. Why should we get off it? We had to do what we believed in, and it wasn't United Artists who had any complaints about it. So we abandoned the idea of straightening it out, returned it to its proper structure, and when we showed it to United Artists they thought it was terrific. You have to believe in your own feelings and opinions about things. If you're gonna fail, you might as well fail with your own idea. That's something that, if I were teaching, I would advise the students. If you feel strongly about something, first instincts are usually the way to go.

Paths of Glory

How did Paths of Glory come together?

Once Kirk Douglas agreed to do the film, he was very helpful in influencing United Artists to finance it. He was scheduled to do another film for UA called The Vikings, and I think he suggested that if they didn’t do Paths of Glory, he would take The Vikings elsewhere. Do you know the story about how I fired Tim Carey on the set of Paths of Glory?

I don’t!

Well, I got a call at six in the morning from the Munich police, saying Tim had been found abandoned on the highway, bound hand and foot, claiming he’d been kidnapped.  They thought production was responsible, looking for publicity, that it was a staged act. I said I knew nothing about it, but we needed him to work—they were holding him down at the police station.  I told them that Tim was making up this story because he wanted the publicity, not us. So they said they would accommodate us by bringing him to the film studio—they were gonna interview him there. But Jim wouldn’t agree to the statement he was supposed to sign, he kept changing things about it. So I went up to Jim and said: “We’re all waiting for you. Sign the paper and get to work.” And he wouldn’t sign the paper, so I fired him right there. You’ll notice in the battle scene, you never see the three men put on trial for cowardice. That’s because the battle was the last thing we filmed, and we couldn’t show the two other actors without showing Tim, too.

And the next project that came along was another difficult collaboration, with Brando on One-Eyed Jacks.

We had an arrangement with Marlon Brando after he had seen Paths of Glory and The Killing, he came to us and said he wanted to do films with us, but he said that first he had a commitment with Paramount to do a western, and he asked us if he could use Stanley to direct that for him. And so we agreed, and Stanley would move to Paramount with him to do the western and I would continue to look for future projects for Brando and Kubrick. But it turned out that Stanley was not the type of a director, the type of a person, that could go on with a star like Brando dictating every step of the way. All of his eccentricity and things drove Stanley crazy, so maybe I figured it’d be better to drop out of that deal.

In the meantime, I had found Lolita and I had acquired that. We’d no sooner got started on developing it when Kirk Douglas called and said he had been shooting a few days on Spartacus, and would we consider lending out Stanley to his company to direct Spartacus, because he wanted to replace the present director. We figured this was a good deal for us because it brought money to our company and it give Stanley an opportunity to direct three icons who were also directors: Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, and Charles Laughton. And Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis and John Gavin and so on. It turned out to be very beneficial to us, and gave Stanley something else in his filmography.

Lolita

What was the actual process of developing the script? I know the final screenplay is credited to Nabokov alone, but I understand that this isn’t, perhaps, the whole story.

No. Well, what happened was, while Stanley was doing Spartacus, we had assigned it to Calder Willingham, and Calder did the first draft. Stanley was not pleased with it—I thought it was pretty good but Stanley wasn’t pleased with it—so we sort of dismissed Calder. We had originally tried to get Nabokov to write the screenplay, but he said he just wasn't up to it. He felt that he had done all that he could with Lolita. But then he got back to us and said that he had a dream about it. I don’t know if he dreamed about the money or he dreamed about the screenplay, but he decided that he wanted to do it, and so we brought him over to California while Stanley was doing Spartacus and we put him to work on doing the screenplay. But it was voluminous and really overwritten, unwieldy, and very difficult to perceive as being the screenplay that we could use.

So we had the book, we had a draft by Calder Willingham, and we had a complete screenplay by Nabokov. And once I was able to raise the money and get the picture funded, Stanley and I sat down and we actually did the final screenplay, where we used all the better parts of everything and put it all together. We decided that we had departed quite a bit from the book and that we would be subject to criticism if we put our names on the screenplay, and thought that the best way to protect ourselves from the criticism by putting Nabokov down as the sole screenplay writer. And the irony was that he got nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay adaptation. 

I’ve read public statements by Nabokov where he’s said admiring things about the film. What was, if anything, his private communication about his response to the movie?

I spent so much time with him before the film, but after the film, I think his response to me was more in the form of congratulations, that he had wished he had incorporated some of the things we had invented in his book. I don’t know if he was just being kind and felt it was the appropriate kind of reaction. I though it was sincere at the time, and he seemed quite satisfied, while understanding the differences between the film and the book. I don’t think you can do better than that when you are looking for a response from the author.

The Bedford Incident

Since you had had up to that point the opportunity to observe Kubrick more than any other single director, when you yourself were in the director's chair with The Bedford Incident, were there any particular pointers that you were attempting to take from him?

Needless to say, during the seven or eight years that I was close to Stanley he was constantly either intentionally giving me pointers or allowing me to observe the pointers myself, watching him direct. An important thing I learned was that casting is 80 to 85 percent of the film. If you cast the right people and they're disciplined, they know their lines, and they're the right actors, you're going to get a lot of help. If you cast the wrong people, they're undisciplined, they don't know what they're doing when they show up for work, then you have a nightmare. [Sidney] Poitier and [Richard] Widmark were top, top professionals, always prepared, and they understood exactly what the characters were about. Poitier was that year's Academy Award winner, and I had Jimmy McArthur, Wally Cox, Marty Balsam was terrific, too... Even Donald Sutherland was in the picture. If you hire great actors, all you have to do is have the taste to know whether the scene plays and to deal in dynamics—either a little bit more or a little bit less.

As far as the technical side, Stanley, when I first met him, he was a big fan of Max Ophuls, and did a lot of camera movement. Most filmmakers, in the beginning, overindulge, are too preoccupied with cinematic effects. They forget that the play is still the thing. You see a lot of pictures where the directors are really too interested in showing off, and it starts to become annoying. When Stanley started to do Spartacus, he told me that he was working with a Technorama camera, and it had a slight strobe to it when you started moving the camera around. And so he was forced, in a way, to abandon all these ideas of the moving camera, and concentrate more on the content of the scenes. He said to me that if you have a scene that's really interesting, two people coming at each other to have a fight with hammers in their hands, all you have to do is put the camera in a place where everybody can see it clearly, and the content of the scene is sufficient. You don't have to embellish it with camera moves. If you have a scene that's really flat, and needs some help, you have then the possibility of some camera movement to make it seem like there's more action in it. Maybe it even requires music, so you don't play the scene dry, and you can put some score behind it.

When I first met Stanley, he wanted to make sure we were on the same page all the time, so he asked me to read Stanislavsky Directs, and a basic introduction to psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, where you start to learn about how people speak and they don't always say outright what's on their mind. I would advise any wannabe filmmakers to read those books because they give you insight into human behavior. So I think I was pretty much prepared. When I finished The Bedford Incident, maybe I wasn't ready to win the award for best director of the year, but I certainly felt that I was now capable of being very professional.

Even in The Bedford Incident, you’re doing something you’ll do through your career, approaching genre material—in this case a Cold War thriller—as an opportunity for character study.

What interests me mostly is obsessive behavior. I like to explore obsessive behavior. In Some Call It Loving, in Cop, with Jimmy Woods's over-the-top cop, and even in Fast-Walking, where Woods’s character has this obsession, wanting to live in Oregon and change his life, to live in Indian style. Boiling Point was an exploration of that fine line that runs between the criminal and the cop, that they live the same kind of life, that they have the same needs, meet the same women, the same prostitutes—there's not much difference between them. That picture, I think, was kind of mishandled by Warner Brothers, who insisted in editing a lot of the good things out, which broke my heart. 

Some Call It Loving

The credited basis for Some Call It Loving is a short story by John Collier. When did you come to it, and how did it develop into the final film?

When I was doing Lolita, I had come across a book called Fancies and Goodnights, a collection of short stories by John Collier, and in that collection was a 16-page story called “Sleeping Beauty.” I didn't want to handle it the way Collier did, though. I wanted to make a point: if you have multiple relationships in your life, you keep moving on from one girl to another, as I had... Could there be something wrong with all the girls? It had to be something within myself that was causing these abortive relationships. In John Collier's story, the guy who finds the "Sleeping Beauty" figures he's going to have happiness for the rest of his life if he can wake her up, and when he wakes her up, it turns out she's terrible, awful, impossible to get along with, to the extent that he's so unhappy that he puts her back to sleep. I figure that's the wrong way to tell the story. It's too easy to blame somebody else, too easy to blame all the women. Look at yourself and find out if there's something in yourself that's causing the problem. I wanted him to wake the girl up and have her be perfect, have her be everything that he wanted. In his case, he wants to get back to normal relationships, really romantic, just like he's back in school. And when it doesn't work it's his fault, not the girl's fault.

In the film Zalman King’s character stage-manages this elaborate fantasy life. How did you land on King, who didn't have much experience as a lead behind him?

He had been a television actor on The Young Lawyers, and he'd impressed me. I didn't want the typical Hollywood male star, really hunky and everything. I wanted somebody who looked like a real person. As it turns out, he went on exploring some of the same kind of themes in Red Shoe Diaries. He loved the whole idea of it, and had a lot of good ideas. His wife is a sculptress, and he was coming from a whole element of the surreal and fantastic. That truck that we used was his truck. He was just the perfect person, and really helped make the movie what it was.

The other big name involved is Richard Pryor. When the entire film is moving at a sleepwalker’s pace, he's off on his own thing entirely.

Yeah. I wanted the main character to be a jazz musician, because jazz music is based on variations of themes: improvisation after the melody is stated using solos as variations of the melody. Being a jazz musician, he would be around a certain element of people, and I figured if he performs at a club, the kinds of friends that this character would have would be somebody like the character Pryor played. I wrote the character, Jeff, and gave the script to Zalman, and he suggested we get Richard Pryor, who he had known as a friend from New York. He said: "He fits the character perfectly." Richard's part was practically all improvisation. He was not a major star at that time—in fact he had no money at all. I remember him calling me from Chicago and asking me to advance him some money to get to California to do the film because he didn't have enough money to get there. The only problem was that he was always on drugs, and it wasn't easy to work with, but I think we got what we were looking to get.

Some Call It Loving

The score, by Richard Hazard and Bob Harris, is such an integral part of the film. To what degree, if at all, was your background in music, in jazz, an influence on the filmmaking?

Bob Harris is my brother, who wrote the love theme for Lolita. We used Nelson Riddle for the rest... I can hear things in recordings, even if they're not from movies. For instance, Nelson Riddle had done the orchestrations and arrangements for Frank Sinatra's album In the Wee Small Hours. I could hear the voicing of the strings, even on the song “In the Wee Small Hours,” on the bridge of the song. It so impressed me that I thought: "Gee, I gotta get Nelson to do the score for Lolita." 

One thing about having a musical background: you don't have to buy credits. That's what most filmmakers and producers do. They don't really know anything about music or they don't have an ear for music, and so they feel safe by buying credits. Literally, they're gonna go for whoever's the top scorer at the time. I knew that Richard Hazard had done a lot of orchestration for the composer that I really loved and really respected but couldn't afford, Lalo Schifrin. So when you're getting Dick Hazard, you're getting a good part of Lalo Schifrin. It was a small independent film and I didn't have any big money to hire a major composer, but I know Richard Hazard is going to give me pretty much what a major composer would give me. I'd heard him do recording arrangements for Barbara Streisand, one that impressed me was a song written by Michel Legrand, the theme from Summer of ’42. I could hear the way he wrote for strings and knew that this was just the kind of a guy that I wanted. So having a musical background gave me a little edge in being able to find people who are very talented, but ordinarily wouldn't get hired because they haven't got a big name.

Some Call It Loving has a very similar theme to that which appears 15 years later in Cop—this idea of people applying a worldview very heavily shaped by a fairy tale view of romance to adult sexual relationships, which are much messier than that worldview allows for.

What you're talking about is the scene in Cop that I was really proud of, because it expressed how I feel about things. In Cop, the James Woods character is caught by his wife telling police stories to his little girl, and when he goes back into the bedroom, she says: "You call yourself a father telling that filth to a little girl?" And then he says: "What do you want me to tell her, about the Three Bears?" 

My point, which I put into words for the Woods character, is that many women, I find, suffer from disillusionment. A lot of women are really unhappy later in life. It's usually caused by disillusionment—the expectations that they had never really developed. And that's because they're promised growing up that they're little princesses, and they're gonna find the man on the white horse, that Mr. Right's gonna come along... They're given all this bullshit that they expect to happen, then what happens is they either find the wrong guy, they wind up waiting tables while their husband is flipping burgers or pumping gas, they get pregnant at an early age and have that kind of a commitment, their life is kind of ruined, they're no longer single, all the romance is gone. All the romance that they were promised, that they dreamed about, didn't happen, or it happened so quickly and disappeared that all that's left is disillusionment. Look at the divorce rates. Hardly anybody can stay together after seven years, six years. People think they're going to live happily ever after, but life isn't like that. 

When you talk about a similarity between Some Call It Loving and Cop... I think there's a bigger similarity between Some Call It Loving and Eyes Wide Shut, which Stanley eventually did. The funny part of that is in Zalman King's obituary: it had mentioned that Kubrick had been in touch with him for counseling—I guess because he did the Red Shoe Diaries, Zalman was thought of as an expert. In many ways, I think Eyes Wide Shut is a very expensive continuation or variation on the themes of Some Call It Loving, though a big production rather than my very small film.

For the full, unabridged version of the interview, click here.

The phrase “The Great American Novel” remains in the popular parlance, in no small part because of its frequent use in The Great American Comic Strip, Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Like most language denoting outsized ambition, I suspect it is generally employed in these overcautious times with real or implicit scare quotes, although many a writer young and old may aspire to it in their secret heart all the same.

We can, as it happens, pinpoint the moment of the coinage of “Great American Novel” quite precisely. This occurred in an article titled, of all things, “The Great American Novel,” which was published in The Nation in 1868, under the byline of John W. De Forest. De Forest, a Connecticut man, had served with distinction in the Civil War. Aged 35 at the beginning of aggressions, he mustered a company in New Haven, the 12th Connecticut Volunteers, fought in Louisiana and Virginia, spent, by his own estimation, “forty-six days under fire,” and ended the war with the rank of captain, before returning to civilian life and literary pursuits.

Searching for a definition of the Great American Novel, De Forest turns to the work which he believed had come nearest to hitting the mark, a novel which by some reckonings had hastened the coming of the recent hostilities, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The Great American Novel, after the model provided by Beecher Stowe, ought to provide “[a] picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” There needs also be “a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling…”

Fig. 2 Engraving by Hammatt Billings, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin page 321, 1852

Uncle Tom’s Cabin “was a picture of American life, drawn with a few strong and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait.” There was, then, room for improvement. At the time that “The Great American Novel” appeared, De Forest’s third novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, had recently been published by Harper & Brothers. The heroine of the title, Lillie Ravenel, is brought to the Yankee capital of “New Boston, Barataria” by her father, fleeing occupied New Orleans, though her sympathies with her homeland remain intact until they are challenged by her acquaintance with two eligible Northern bachelors. Until the appearance of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage almost 30 years later, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion was the definitive novel of the Civil War, perhaps only exceeded in literary accomplishment by the short stories of fellow combat veteran Ambrose Bierce. Modestly, De Forest only averred vaguely to his own literary output when discussing the various attempts at The Great American Novel, though like many a critic/ creator, the thing that De Forest proscribed just happened to be embodied in the work that he was producing.

The idea of The Great American Film has not obsessed our native filmmakers in quite the same way that The Great American Novel has our writers of prose, though I am not at all certain that this was the case in 1915. The cinema, in something like its modern form, was then barely 20 years old, the span of time which separates us from the first Toy Story and Billy Madison, and I hope that I am not supposing too much to say that the people who made and watched movies were still in the process of understanding exactly what it was they were—half-novel, half-play, or something else entirely.

I specify 1915 because this was the year that David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation premiered, in February, at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. With this colossal film, Griffith was making an attempt at the Great American Film in something like the sense that De Forest had described The Great American Novel, though despite his evident reverence for the figure of Lincoln, his own sentimental loyalties, inherited from his father, Confederate Colonel “Roaring Jake” Griffith, were closer to those of secessionist Lillie Ravenel. Griffith’s film, based on Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman, certainly boasted “national breadth,” moving as it did between events in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, both in antebellum and Reconstruction times, and using two representative families bound by sympathies, the Northern Stonemans and Southern Camerons, to represent the two sides of the War Between the States.

Birth of a Nation

We have recently passed the 100th birthday of The Birth of a Nation. Anticipating the event, the usually sanguine Dave Kehr, rarely moved to Tweet, announced “Looks like we'll have a whole year of people calling BIRTH OF A NATION the ‘first feature film.’ Which is just wrong.” In fact, the Birth centenary passed with little more than a quiet mutter of acknowledgement, while what acknowledgement there was tended to confirm that film culture is, in the main, sick to death of The Birth of a Nation.

In the AV Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky addressed the “troubling contradiction” at the heart of Griffith’s opus, that being “the idea that art or entertainment can be aesthetically good while being ideologically bad.” When it comes to the reputation of the “problematic” Birth, Vishnevetsky writes that “American culture has had a really hard time letting it go, or has turned not letting it go into a critical art in and of itself.” While typically perspicacious in his insights, Vishnevetsky is vague when it comes to describing what exactly that “letting go” (or “draw[ing] the line” or “dismiss[ing]”) would be comprised of. Burning the negative? (This was the subject of a fine recent essay by Glenn Kenny at Rogerebert.com’s Balder and Dash section, on what he terms the “‘What Is To Be Done?’ piece.”) It is not as though Birth is today praised in the terms reserved for a Great Gatsby or a Citizen Kane, to cite two American masterpieces generally thought to be uniquely American in their subject matter and manner of expression. One argument against the “letting go” of The Birth of a Nation came from proverbial stopped-clock Armond White in The National Review. “It’s important to fully confront the history of our cinema and media,” wrote White, “to measure their earliest falsehoods by their present racist lies and realize how we often mask and defend contemporary political presumptions. Otherwise, hindsight becomes duplicitous—a way to fend off honest self-examination.”

Unlike De Forest or Beecher Stowe, Griffith was not seeking to show America as it was in his day, but how, to his mind, it had been, and how it had gotten to be where it was at the present. Where it was in 1915, to be precise, was on the brink of a largely-unhoped-for war with European powers, a possibility which was referred to by what White calls the “powerfully homiletic subtitle ‘War’s Peace’” before a Matthew Brady–like scene of battlefield carnage, one of what Vishnevetsky refers to as “assorted pacifist asides,” which an audience of the day would have seen with newsreel footage of the Marne fresh in their minds. Today, when The Birth of a Nation is remembered, it’s not for its antiwar sentiments but for its battle scenes, and for its racial politics which have not, let us say, aged particularly well.

The Birth of a Nation

After making several cogent points, White, for whom self-examination is presumably an affair to be carried out in private, digresses into recounting a curious “dream sequence” in which he teaches Orson Welles to appreciate the beauty of Griffith’s Birth—which is odd, because it was reading of Welles’s esteem for Griffith that brought me in the first place to this artist who, to my teenaged self, seemed fusty and Victorian. In particular I remember a text which Welles wrote for a Spanish film magazine called Griffith in the 1960s, which is reproduced in Peter Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles:

“I met D.W. Griffith only once and it was not a happy meeting. A cocktail party on a rainy afternoon in the last year of the 1930s. Hollywood’s golden age, but for the greatest of all directors it had been a sad and empty decade. The motion picture which he had virtually invented had become the product—the exclusive product—of America’s fourth-largest industry, and on the assembly lines of the mammoth movie factories there was no place for Griffith. He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without work. No wonder he hated me. I, who knew nothing about film, had just been given the greatest freedom ever written into a Hollywood contract. It was the contract he deserved. I could see that he was not at all too old for it, and I couldn’t blame him for feeling I was very much too young. We stood under one of those pink Christmas trees they have out there, and drank our drinks and stared at each other across a hopeless abyss. I loved and worshipped him, but he didn’t need a disciple. He needed a job. I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D.W. Griffith.”

I re-watched The Birth of a Nation when it played at Film Forum a day before its New York City centennial—it debuted at Liberty Theater, near Times Square, an event which has not been immortalized as the Clune’s screening was in Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (76). I have returned since, and will continue to return, to Film Forum’s Monday screenings of Griffith features, where most recently I saw for the first time his 1924 America.

America

America, which finds the director once again trying to encompass a drama of national scope in a single film, was adapted from The Reckoning, a 1905 novel of the American Revolutionary War by a since-largely-forgotten author named Robert W. Chambers. Its dramatis personae includes many of the generals and statesmen of that conflict, among them General George Washington, King George III, William Pitt (seen having risen from his sickbed to speak for the rights of the colonies), Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. While the King is mere a dupe misled by “evil councilors,” the true villains of the piece are two real-life historical figures, Captains Walter Butler and Peter Hare (played by Lionel Barrymore and Louis Wolheim), both American-born Loyalists whose names have since been forgotten by most folks without a pronounced interest in musketry, though once they were hugely reviled figures for their roles in the Battle of Wyoming and Cherry Valley massacres of 1778.

The invented characters are Nathan Holden (Neil Hamilton), a farmer, express rider, member of the Boston Committee of Public Safety, and revolutionist, and the extended Montague family, proud descendants of Charles, Lord of Halifax. Their number includes the Virginia Montagues—daughter Nancy (Carol Dempster), for whom lovestruck Nathan Holden composes Romantic verse; sissified son Charles (Charles Emmett Mack); and the patriarch, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (Erville Anderson)—as well as a Loyalist uncle, Sir Ashley (Sydney Deane), whose homestead is located in “Northern New York.” It is there that the Southern Montagues retreat after having been coincidentally on hand to witness the battles of Lexington and Concord, in the course of which Charles has his tattered London finery reduced to rags and throws his tricorner hat in with the colonial rebellion, inspired by a memory of family friend Gen. Washington which has about it something of the quality of unrequited homosexual longing.

I have not read Chambers’s book—how many people living today can claim that distinction?—but I can’t imagine it has anything near to the same amount of influence on America that The Birth of a Nation did. The presence of Birth isn’t felt looming over America in the same way that it is, say, over Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), or Abraham Lincoln (1930), all works in which—with what degree of success we can debate elsewhere—the filmmaker may be seen attempting to redress or repudiate the reputation for racism that his greatest catastrophic success had (deservedly) earned him. In America, Griffith reworks entire sequences from Birth within a new historical context, right down to including some charming comic business with pussycats. The borrowing is most notably visible in the film’s climax of convergent montage, as Birth’s breakneck Ku Klux Klan ride-to-the-rescue, lifting a siege on a farmhouse by mulatto Lt. Gov. Silas Lynch, becomes a cavalry charge in which Nathan and his men rush to save Fort Sacrifice, where Nancy and other Mohawk Valley settlers have holed up against Capt. Hare and his half-Mohican, half-white army.

America

In America, again, miscegenation is an agent of anarchy, here as evidenced by Butler and Hare’s allegiance with the Native American tribes. In a treaty sealed among the stygian “council fires of the great Indian Confederacy,” Butler induces the Sachems of the Long House to fight with the British against the colonial uprising before retiring to his “hunting lodge,” a pleasure dome where dusky dames frug about in next-to-nothing. Hare, for his part, gets himself up in redskin drag before battle, so that he can slake his bloodlust with impunity, not bound by the white man’s conventions. (He is contrasted with Riley Hatch’s Joseph Brant, the college-educated Mohawk chief who comports himself with imperious manners.) An opening intertitle poses the revolution as “a civil war between two groups of English people”—justified on the part of the English Americans, certainly, but nothing to stay sore about. Griffith is curiously careful to disassociate the actions of Butler and Hare from the gentlemanly warfare practiced by the proper British regulars—this despite the fact that he had every bit as much inherited reason to detest the Redcoat as “Roaring Jake” had given him to hate the carpetbaggers. Griffith’s grandfather, Captain David Griffith, had fought against the Brits in 1812, and he came of revolutionist stock. In a Photoplay profile published in 1916, Griffith speaks of “a great-grandfather in Virginia, a stormy, fierce old man who refused to allow the word England to be spoken in his presence and who, as far as he could, barred his door to anything English.” In this same profile, Griffith recounts his first memory, of his father playing a “prank” that involved the threatening and intimidation of an elderly ex-slave with a cutlass. “That sword,” Griffith recounts, “remains the first memory of my existence.”

“Roaring Jake” died when Griffith was 10. Griffith, sentimental about him as a man who retains only a boy’s memory of his father might tend to be, speaks of the man’s great culture and intelligence, though the Southern gentleman described in the sword anecdote—tantamount to child abuse—sounds like a prick and a gloating bully who delights in striking mortal fear into a man incapable of defending himself, however many Waverley novels the bully had read notwithstanding. One wonders what he would have made of his boy come of age, an airy-fairy lad with a passion for dramaturgy?

If The Birth of a Nation was an anachronism when it first appeared, America was even more so. Calvin Coolidge, who gave the first radio address from the White House the day after the film’s February 21 premiere, had come to the oval office the previous summer after the premature death of Warren Gamaliel Harding, whose brief stay in Washington has widely been reckoned as among the most corrupt periods in all of American life. The film’s rather starry-eyed vision of the democratic experiment, then, may have seemed somewhat out of step with the cynical times, what we tend to think of as the F. Scott Fitzgerald period. (A word from blowhard Tom Buchanan, from the following year’s Gatsby: “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”) If Coolidge provided a presidential pull-quote to America along the lines of that which Woodrow Wilson famously supplied The Birth of a Nation, it has not been preserved by historical record. Griffith, it should be said, understood the system of patronage and kickback that defined Harding’s America—he decorated Birth with footnotes referring to Wilson’s 1902 A History of the American People.

America

Here is the other contradiction at the heart of Griffith: he was, for a moment at least, simultaneously antique and state-of-the-art, a difficult balance to maintain. (And to maintain it is not necessarily desirable—the same combination could be said to apply to suicide bombers using cell phone detonators.) Griffith’s films are very often touching in their obsolescence, however, for they seem to provide a tactile linkage to a bygone pastoral America, a place of milking stools and corn-lofts and carriage-houses and sugaring off maple cider. This they have in common with those of many made in this country near to the turn of the last century, though in Griffith this is not merely incidental, as it is in, say, Mack Sennett comedies, to which sleepy Los Angeles suburbs provide a backdrop.

Though not generally placed in the first rank of Griffith’s films, America contains some of the most ravishing images to be born in “the camera box of Billy Bitzer” (one of the film’s four credited cinematographers). I am thinking particularly of the smokepot-wreathed battlefield reenactments and the trick photography shots of Boston, particularly the “One if by land, two if by sea” view of the Old North Church from across the Harbor, which precedes Paul Revere’s breakneck ride—a legend which failed to capture my imagination in history classes of yore, and ever after, until I saw it here. In this set piece, as in the rout of the British at Concord Bridge and the bitter loss at Bunker Hill, Griffith quite outdoes Birth for sheer stirring spectacle. When possible, America was shot on or around the actual scenes of the events depicted, and Griffith’s film abounds with plein air views of the Eastern woods in all seasons, from the barren snow-fields of Valley Forge in the winter of discontent to the groves of white ash and black birch and red spruce from which the Minute Men pick off British Regulars. (That the Minute Men are borrowing from the Indians in their run-and-gun guerilla warfare style is a matter which is not touched upon.)

Steeped as he was in the pictorial tradition of the previous century, in lithographs and Hudson River Valley painting, the matter of Griffith’s legacy as a cinematic stylist is a tricky one. John Dorr, in his 1974 FILM COMMENT essay on “The Griffith Tradition” (which can be found in the Allan Dwan Dossier), traces the movement of the “essentially nationalistic tradition of dramatic narrative” codified by Griffith into genre filmmaking, particularly the Poverty Row variety practiced by such filmmakers as Dwan, who Andrew Sarris, in a semi-ironic jibe, noted that some French critics treated like “Griffith’s ghost.” In the case of Dwan, who worked under Griffith on Intolerance, along with Erich von Stroheim and Tod Browning, the connection to this tradition was not merely a case of influence, but of physical proximity—much as it was for John Ford who, in what is for Quentin Tarantino an unforgivable act of moral cowardice, rode with the Klan as an extra in The Birth of a Nation when aged 20. Ford proved that he had not forgotten Griffith in a film that appears in the “last year of the 1930s” when Welles met the disillusioned director of Intolerance. The film in question is Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, arguably the third-best film that he made which was released in 1939, and nothing less than magesterial. Again in Ford’s film, the presence of the British in the Revolutionary War is diminished while that of their Indian cohorts is emphasized—when America was released, we had recently ended one war with them as allies; when Drums Along the Mohawk appeared, we were about to go into another.

Drums Along the Mohawk

Unlike Griffith, Ford acknowledges the tribes, like the Oneida, who fought on the side of the revolution. Like America, Drums Along the Mohawk climaxes with a combined Redcoat and Indian attack on a rebel stronghold in Northern New York, the historically-real Fort Dayton. (The siege depicted in based on one in 1882, led by none other than Joseph Brant.) The last-minute reprieve, a convergent montage of reinforcements arriving while the defenders have fallen into a last redoubt in the blockhouse, seems almost certainly to have been undertaken after a re-viewing of Griffith’s America. (Or perhaps its 1915 antecedent.) Inasmuch as any director after Griffith took up the project of the Great American Film, it might be said to be Ford. In the year of its release, his The Iron Horse appeared, a dramatization of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, connecting East and West coasts and, in a symbolic sense, signaling another Birth of a Nation.

While Ford’s sprawling output went on to comprise something like a cinematic Comédie humaine, Griffith’s career petered out with his epochal ambitions. Towards the end of his life, in 1947, Griffith gave an interview which I am hardly the only critic guilty of over-quoting, in which he bemoaned that the modern cinema had forgotten “the beauty of moving wind in the trees.” This gets at the thing which makes The Birth of a Nation so impossible to forget. It embodies a harrowing juxtaposition of that which many of us value most about America—an Arcadian, bucolic tradition, with roots in Emerson and Leaves of Grass—and that which most of us would like to forget about it, a record of historical crime which may not be better or worse than those of other nations, but which is certainly thrown into grotesque relief when contrasted with the ideals that we have never ceased to represent ourselves as believing in. It shows both the beauty of moving wind in the trees, and the Blood on the Leaves.

Obscure Pleasures: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk runs through April 9 at Film Society of Lincoln Center. Read the full text here.

Twenty-three years can turn a rebellious Neon God into Xuanzang—from restless souls wandering around Ximending (the old city center of Taipei) in Rebels of the Neon God (92) to the pure spiritual idea embodied by the slow-paced movement of a red-robed Buddhist monk in the Walker series (12-). Tsai Ming-liang, the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based film director, has occupied a central position within the Taiwanese New Wave, and shined internationally within the realms of slow cinema and even beyond. His work has traversed a wide spectrum of mediums: art installations, video installations, street performances, theater, painting, and of course cinema, both shorts and features. His versatility and mastery are reflected not only in this multidisciplinary expertise but also in his capacity to investigate the very core of human passions and existence, through a magnificently devoted aesthetic.

Tsai’s films have also preserved the bygone city landscapes of Taipei in his earlier work (in Rebels of the Neon God; Vive l’Amour, 94; The River, 97) and the poetic presence of a black lake in an abandoned construction site back in his home country Malaysia (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, 06), not to mention conducting an intercontinental conversation between Taipei and Paris in What Time Is It There? (01) and Visage (09). All throughout, Tsai portrays what you might call his characters’ mindscapes, and undertakes an exploration of the potential of and possibility of cinema, the history and identity of cinema, and his own memories of the medium. With his iconic body of work, he has created an inner time that belongs to him alone and that further transforms every single aspect of his film world.

Among his collaborators, Tsai has stressed the importance of actor Lee Kang-sheng in his films and his life. “I wouldn’t have continued filming if there were no Lee Kang-sheng,” he has said. Tsai always worries and cares most about his actors; to them, Tsai is their teacher, friend, and family member. Shiang-chyi Chen (who plays the crippled ticket clerk in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, 03, and the lonely figure traveling in Paris in What Time Is It There?) once dedicated the Apollinaire poem “Come to the Edge" to him, in Tsai’s book about his latest movie, Stray Dogs (13). For Kuei-Mei Yang (Vive l’Amour; The Hole, 98), Tsai is like an ascetic or a Buddhist practitioner, and grows ever more so as time passes by.

Stray Dogs

Before making the award-winning Stray Dogs, Tsai wrote the following note to his lead actress, which appears in the book:

Before we started filming, I rang [Yi-Ching Lu] up.

I told her I was ill

And had no more passion.

After this one,
I shall stop making films.
I thought of Kuei-Mei and Shiang-chyi

and couldn’t bear not working with them one last time.
what do you think if your character was played by all three of you?

She agreed.

Starting Friday, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a retrospective of Tsai’s work, including rare mid-length films and a documentary about him, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center begins an exclusive engagement of Rebels of the Neon God, which had never had a proper U.S. theatrical run. This is a world carved out of time, and Tsai’s perception of life has changed his understanding of time. The 57-year-old filmmaker’s interview via telephone with FILM COMMENT, like his films, followed his own pace. After trying and failing to take the lead, this interviewer gradually became a listener to an artist and a man giving a moving and honest reckoning with work, movies, and life.

I would like to start with Taipei, since Stray Dogs revisits the city. The city landscape seemed to be more desolate and cruel in this film than in the past. Why did you choose to present the city that way?

Yes, let’s start with Taipei. But... well, that’s what you think. Don’t talk about meanings. You have your own interpretation, I have mine. I don’t want to talk about this, or anything related to meanings. Sometimes, I feel, those in the world of criticism have a different mindset from us. Taipei has its own symbols, but I feel like shooting anywhere is all the same. The location is not that important. Just shoot.

Stray Dogs

You have said elsewhere that Stray Dogs is your last film. I am wondering why you think it is your last one. Is this really the end? 

Many people asked about this. If someone invites me, I will consider it. I don’t really want to answer questions. It’s so boring and I cannot catch your tempo. Maybe the best way is just… I will say what I want to say.

I really want to say that I am sorry that I cannot be there in person. I don’t really know why the Museum of the Moving Image chose this timing to present a retrospective. Probably because my film style especially can garner attention in the West. My trajectory of filmmaking goes the opposite way: unlike everyone else, I don’t follow the typical trajectory, like starting from making short films and then feature films, from experimental to mainstream, or from the underground to “above ground” in China.

In terms of the film market, I do feel powerless. Because I am the kind of person who is afraid of being restrained. Any artistic creation is not meant to be restrained. I feel like my film is always about self-exploration. I think cinema needs freedom. For example, the film rating system only restricts it. It’s hard for cinema to avoid marketing issues. I feel I am very fortunate that my film career hasn’t been blocked by such problems, possibly because the power in my work that allows it to break into the international film festival circuits, or the film market in Europe. I do find a way. For example, my film can be distributed under the category of art film. There are traditions of showing art films in some particular theaters in Japan and Europe; however, it’s getting harder and harder for these venues to survive, due to, I guess, globalization. The reality is that if your film is not sellable, they don’t want to show your film. The film has to survive, and yet that reality makes it impossible.

Like my work, it’s so much about self-expression. I feel fortunate that my films keep being accepted in film festivals, art scenes, and also the academic world. Especially after I made Goodbye, Dragon Inn, many people from the art world began to get in touch with me. For example, Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang invited me to participate in the Kinmen Fortress Art Festival in 2004. My work was entitled Withering Flower. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum also showcased my video installation work and first presented it at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In my later work, I do art installation, video installation, theatrical pieces, and short films. I feel the central concept in my work hasn’t changed. I still create in the same way I make films. I just feel that I have more freedom by doing these pieces, and can care less and less about the mainstream market. Even the very concept of market, I can choose for it to be something non-mainstream.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

The movie theater has all kinds of limits, and I think the museum can liberate film, though there are still some limits. I need to think how to present my work, and the visual aesthetics must match a certain standard of quality. I hope I can view Taiwan as a starting point to cultivate an audience, by showing films in the museum, making an exhibition, or even making films for the museum. You see, film needs an audience in the movie theater, and it’s the same for the museum. However, I am also an Asian—I think people are not encouraged to visit museums in Asia. It’s not a habit. Those who want to watch films will only go to the movie theater.

In Europe, there is more room to develop, to grow. Why can the museums [there] appeal to guests of all ages? I think the differences lie in education. That’s why I put a lot of efforts in selling tickets to the students, especially those who are younger than high-school age. You see, the Museum of National Taipei University of Education is situated in the campus of the university, but how many people in the school will visit the museum? Not many. Some people even have no idea about the exhibition. So I went to the dining hall to sell tickets directly. If I can sell one-tenth of the total number of students in that school, then I achieve my goal. I hope I can let them understand the potential of cinema. This is the requirement of artistic creation. If I want to make films in the place I live, I need to cultivate an audience. I constantly try to encourage children to visit museums. The point is not to see my work but to have fun in the museum, to enjoy it, and to get used to that atmosphere.

Much of my recent work happened in the museum. Journey to the West can be shown in all types of big international film festivals, galleries, museums or other venues through courtesy of ARTE. I am also amazed and glad to see that a film like Stray Dogs can be released in the theaters in Europe. They have the tradition of appreciating films like this, of having the opportunity to learn about cinema once again! Instead of being fed all kinds of plot-driven films. Things like plot and genre are concepts that I want to subvert, but I can’t just be “a lone flower admiring itself” [i.e., take pleasure in work only by myself]. I want to be seen. That’s why I create constantly. The goal is to increase the likelihood of being seen.

Stray Dogs

Can I ask a question about Stray Dogs? About the final sequence, in front of the mural: the whole space is swathed in dark blue light. How do you create that beautiful panorama?

The sequence was shot during the night, so the lighting was a night setup, and the light also comes into the space from the exterior. Lighting actually takes the longest. That scene also relies heavily on the color grading and light adjustment during postproduction. Thanks to digital, the range you can adjust your light is wider than with 35mm. For Stray Dogs, I devote great attention to every detail regarding the lighting. I think all my later work is very much about the presentation of images on the screen. It’s like painting, how an artist draws a painting with paints. Throughout the course of filmmaking, I gradually realized that I paint with light. Making films is like drawing. Especially in the Walker series, my latest work, No No Sleep, the imagery is gorgeous. When I filmed it in Tokyo, I didn’t set up lighting, because they don’t let us do that on the street. It’s not permitted. So, I borrowed light from the streetlights, but you need to measure whether that streetlight can help you achieve the effect you want. Same situation for the bathtub scene: I only used what I can get on the spot—only the elements you can find there, such as the natural light, the character’s costume, etc.

In Stray Dogs, I was very fortunate to come across the mural painted by Jun-Honn Kao. It was not in my original plan. It’s not until we saw it during location scouting that we decided to use that. Actually, I tried to preserve everything left there. Everything about that space, including its mess. Nothing was moved. I was even worried that I could not keep it as it was. The ruins were still there when we finished shooting, but now, it’s gone. The building was torn down. So, in a sense, you can say that Kao’s mural is preserved in my film.

Journey to the West

I also want to talk more about your short films, particularly the Walker series, which began in 2012. The sense of slowness in the series differs greatly from that in your feature films. What kind of new understanding of slowness do you have when making the Walker series? Did it affect the way you made Stray Dogs?

Yes, it’s slower. [Laughs] The Walker series and Stray Dogs are two different concepts, but the Walker series does affect the way I think, especially when you find that Lee Kang-sheng’s body movement can be even slower. Let’s put it this way, I think the concept of “auteur” becomes strengthened. This is the speed of Tsai Ming-liang. This is Tsai Ming-liang’s film. These make me rethink: what is a director? What is an auteur?

For example, in Visage, there is a scene where Salome is dancing. A lot of people have made films about Salome. I still remember once at a screening of Visage in Moscow, an audience member came to talk to me after the screening, saying things like: “This is not Salome.” I just smiled at him and said: “This is my Salome.”

As for the Walker series, it’s very much about the spiritual aspect. I don’t do walking meditation [myself]. Neither does Lee. It just happened during my theatrical piece Only You [an elegant trio of monodramas performed by Lee Kang-sheng, Kuei-Mei Yang, and Yi-Ching Lu. Lee’s slow walk in “The Fish of Lee, Kang-Sheng—The Journey in the Desert” later evolved into the Walker series]. You saw a physical person, with his physical movement, conveying an abstract concept. You saw his body moving, walking at the fixed speed. A temporal flow. Why should I film this? It’s because your lifestyle needs to be changed. My health is getting worse. You have to change your life tempo, and that’s why I moved to live in the mountains. In the mountains, you feel time. Time is slowly fleeting. Wind blows and cloud moves. You can see time. Many people cannot see this, because they only see work, or all kinds of talking. They never stop.

Visage

The reason why I wanted to do something like the Walker series is rooted in my obsession with the idea of [7th-century monk] Xuanzang, and the characteristics of the times he lived. There was no car, no train, no airplane, and no cell phone. He just walked. He is Xuanzang. He cannot walk fast, or walk slow. He can just walk forward.

I think I experienced the highest degree of artistic freedom when I was doing the Walker series, because it’s not about a story, not even about meanings. It’s painting. Of course there are meanings, if you really want to say them—everything has its own meaning. Otherwise, how can those classic paintings make sense?

Indeed, the Walker series has some influence on Stray Dogs. Comparatively, Stray Dogs is more abstract and fragmented. No plot. It can be a dream, even a memory. Maybe not the memory of a person. Maybe it’s of the space: a memory about a family that used to live in this space…

Lee Kang-sheng is also in the cast of Sashimi, directed by Pan Zhi-yuan. Do you hope Lee can continue working with other filmmakers?

Not really [laughs], but you have no right [to tell him not to]. Lee is an individual. Of course, Lee also asked for my suggestions, and I gave the filmmaker some of my advice as well. For example, at the time when Lee agreed to play a role in Sashimi, he didn’t feel very well, so I was worried. After all, he has collaborated with me for such a long time. We know each other very well. There are habits. Especially, he mostly played “monodrama” [i.e., performing alone], with no specific development of events. He has his own character development that is distinct from any kind. And I am very concerned about his health. I always check in with him.

He has collaborated with some other filmmakers. However, I think most of them don’t know how to use him. I mean, Lee is a very special person. Every film that he enters will transform, with better quality. [Laughs] You will be led by him, but the premise is that you have to know how to use him. As for Sashimi, I also offered my help with the editing. I think the result is fine.

Do you feel like now finally you can spend more time doing what you love most?

Well, I want to just live. Live well. Live without doing too many things. Live without worrying too much. Eventually, many things will have something to do with your body. I found myself increasingly worried about my body. Same for you. You will also worry about your body, because problems will pop up. Lee is in the same situation. I think now the most important thing is take good care of my health. Live well. Things that I like or dislike to do are not important anymore. 

If you’re a cinephile with an interest in Southeast Asia, chances are you’ll think twice before ever hiring a Taiwanese plumber. Blame director Tsai Ming-liang, in whose films it never rains but it pours—usually indoors, to a degree that would have made even Tarkovsky feel the damp. In Tsai’s films, water seeps through walls, pours through ceilings, gushes up through drains in the floor—a problem that the director claims to have suffered from in every apartment he ever rented, the curse even following him when he moved to Paris.

Water is the first thing you become aware of right at the start of Tsai’s first theatrical feature, Rebels of the Neon God, now at last getting its first U.S. release. As young hoods go to work robbing a telephone box, rain pelts down outside—and soon enough, we see that this surfeit of water has worked its way into the apartment of one of these minor toughs, Ah-tze (Chen Chao-jung). He comes home to find himself ankle-deep in water, in which various objects (a sandal, a cigarette butt, a dead cockroach) float with poetic languor.

Already a fully formed Tsai Ming-liang film in many ways, this early feature from 1992 contains many of what would become his trademarks: the water, the fraught family dynamics, the slow pacing, the strange mixture of moodiness and slow-burn comedy sometimes verging on farce, and of course, the presence of Tsai’s regular lead, the airily melancholic Lee Kang-sheng. But Rebels is also very different from what would follow: it’s punchier and grittier, with roots in the realist TV dramas that Tsai had made after moving to Taipei from his native Malaysia. In Rebels, he has said, he wanted to be “even more documentary, even more real about everyday life in Taipei,” and what he achieves here is to inject rough-edged realism with a dash of punkish glamour. In its somewhat Melvillean views of Taipei after dark, neon-lit as the title suggests, and its story of outsider youth zipping around on motorbikes between crime sprees and bursts of sex, Rebels offers a funky nightscape of a film that, very roughly speaking, is to early Nineties Taipei what Jean-Jacques Beineix’s more comic-strip-styled Diva was to Paris a decade earlier. It also makes Taipei, for all the alienation depicted, look like fun, much more of a playground than the paranoid space of Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers, made six years earlier.

Rebels sets the pattern for later Tsai films in which characters inhabiting different worlds move in parallel, but observe each other at a distance (the most active observer usually being the Lee Kang-sheng character) before coming together in often dreamlike circumstances. Here Lee Kang-sheng (his character is referred to both by that name and, as in the later films, as Hsiao-Kang) is a failing math student in a cram school, and the despair of his mother and father—played respectively by Lu Hsiao-ling and Miao Tien, who would also become Tsai regulars.

One day Hsiao-Kang is out with his taxi-driver dad in thick traffic when they get into an altercation with Ah-tze, who’s on his bike, and who smashes Dad’s wing mirror. Hsiao-Kang then starts following Ah-tze, his new girlfriend Ah-kuei (Wang Yu-wen) and his sidekick Ah-Bing (Jen Chang-bin) around town. Given the film’s economy with dialogue and discretion about revealing motivation, especially Hsiao-Kang’s, it’s hard to say exactly what motivates his pursuit. Jealousy triggered by the sight of Ah-kuei’s hot-panted butt on Ah-tze’s bike? Revenge for Dad’s taxi? Or erotic attraction to Ah-tze himself, to whom Hsiao-Kang plays a sort of sad-sack mirror image? After all, they both ride bikes, favor denim, have clean-cut hairstyles, and at one point find themselves occupying adjacent hotel rooms.

Whatever the case, there’s a striking melancholy (it’s too low-key to call pathos) in the way that Hsiao-Kang hovers on the other trio’s tail, at one point sitting across a mall corridor as they eat, himself in plain view but unseen by them; in Tsai’s films, Hsiao-Kang is the city’s perennial Invisible Man. There’s something intensely creepy about his mission, as if we were watching an outsider stalking the threesome in Jules et Jim (not a random comparison, given Tsai’s love of Truffaut). But the shadowing is also comic in a deadpan way: Hsiao-Kang creeps into a games arcade to watch Ah-tze case the joint (arcades, phone boxes—we’re truly watching the lost world of the early Nineties here), only to end up locked in overnight and sleeping on the floor.

Hsiao-Kang’s bad night out is one of the things that marks Rebels as a Tsai Ming-liang film. There’s never any real, safe home in his films; if Tsai’s dwellings aren’t totally porous, water seeping in at every crack, they have windows that are too fragile, and Rebels starts with Hsiao-Kang accidentally smashing one when he tries to swat a cockroach. In Tsai’s cities, you sleep where you can—a theme that found its most heightened expression in the cavernous provisional squats of his most recent city features I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone (06) and Stray Dogs (13). In Rebels, people camp out in video arcades, or wake up in other people’s apartments and cramped hotel rooms, as Ah-kuei does when she graduates from sleeping with Ah-tze’s brother to Ah-tze himself.

Rebels of the Neon God is a city film in the fullest sense, in that it doesn’t just explore Taipei’s surface (although it’s very evocative of its busy streets by day and night) but delves deep into its hidden zones. Tsai gives us malls, diners, arcades, but also staircases, corridors, back rooms, toilets. Similarly, he doesn’t only show people’s public behavior, but catches them in their most intimate, even abject moments: Tsai is a genuine realist director in that his characters jerk off, throw up, are driven to the toilet by gut-ache.

In places, Rebels is as muted and slow-burning as you expect a Tsai film to be, but just as often, it’s vibrant, nervy, altogether rock ’n’ roll; one shot shows Hsiao-Kang contemplating a James Dean poster, and a terse John Carpenter-ish electronic bass line throbs throughout. The color is as vivid as the title promises: there’s a striking cut from the red lights of Ah-tze’s bike at night to the deep blue of a roller disco. And there’s a ferocious handheld sequence at the end when the young hoods are pursued by the arcade gangsters they’ve tried to rip off. But the visual pièce de resistance of the cinematography by Liao Pen-jung—Tsai’s collaborator ever since—is an amazing deep-focus night shot, panning up from Ah-ping puking on the ground to Ah-kuei standing some way off on a sort of industrial platform, seen through a wire mesh lit in deep red.

I’m not entirely sure what the English title means: that is, are its characters rebels against the neon god, or in his/its service? In one sense, the god is Taipei itself; in another, it’s the arcade games that exert such a thrall on these characters. But the reference is also to the deity Nezha, whom Hsiao-Kang’s mother calls the Neon God: she returns from a Buddhist temple convinced that her son is a reincarnation of the deity. So possibly it’s in the role of a vengeful god that Hsiao-Kang sets out to bring Ah-tze to justice; when he takes advantage of his quarry’s tryst with Ah-kuei to sabotage his bike, Hsiao-Kang scrawls a message on the pavement that isn’t translated in the subtitles but that apparently translates as, “Nezha was here.”

The film is wonderfully cast. As the parents, Miao Tien and Lu Hsiao-ling have furrowed, characterful faces that Tsai would go on to make the most of; Chen Chao-jung makes a cool, Delon-esque tough; Wang Yu-wen has an intensely sexy but forlorn presence as Ah-kuei. But at the center—which is where he’d continue to be—is Lee Kang-sheng, one of the most singular acteurs fétiches a director ever adopted. Such is the actor’s fragile opacity that it’s hard to know here, just as in the later films, how to read Hsiao-Kang: deranged, tragic, a comic Everyman, a fool, or a mixture of them all? Sometimes his face seems intensely melancholy, at others simply blank. At moments, he seems not to register whatever his character is going through, at others he goes off the rails; there’s a bizarre moment when, spying on Ah-tze’s distress over his wrecked bike, Hsiao-Kang gambols in jubilation on his bed, cackling like a goblin, only to bash his head painfully on the ceiling, which appears actually to be happening accidentally to the actor.

Tsai first spotted Lee as a young non-actor and drafted him into his 1989 TV film All the Corners of the World, promoting him to lead role in his follow-up Boys (91). What struck the director, he has said in an interview, was Lee’s odd pace: “I realized that his rhythm was a little strange, just a bit slower than everyone’s.” But Lee refused outright to speed up at Tsai’s behest, and this resistance became something that Tsai went on to incorporate into his direction. You might say it became the founding principle of Tsai’s work, all of it attuned one way or another to Lee’s resistance and slowness. His films became portraits of a man moving out of synch with the external world—something taken to the limit in the recent Walker shorts, performance pieces in which Lee Kang-sheng simply walks slowly. Very, very slowly.

In fact, for any study of film actors and their relation to time and change, Lee Kang-sheng is a quintessential screen embodiment of time—a man whose inner slowness has been outflanked by the speed of mortality. Like Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel—a model Tsai saluted by casting Jean-Pierre Léaud in his What Time Is It There? (01)—Lee has aged rather alarmingly in front of the camera. It’s hard to reconcile the almost childlike, sleek-coiffed waif in Rebels—made when he was 24—with the haggard, puffy-cheeked paterfamilias of Stray Dogs, whose features seem to have absorbed much of the moisture to which they’ve been exposed over years of Tsai films. Yet even the svelte anti-hero of Rebels has a weariness about his eyes, as though he’s already spent a few too many sleepless nights. It puts the finishing touch to this first, wonderfully perplexing incarnation of Lee Kang-sheng as outsider and ingénu—at once Dean-like loner and nebbish, vengeful deity and Imp of the Perverse.

Read our interview with Tsai Ming-liang here.

Androids Dream

While taking stock of four films at the 2015 edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real series, I kept returning to the last line of Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” The narrator of Ellison’s novel—nameless, friendless, and voluntarily committed to his hole in Harlem—isn’t like anyone we’ve ever met, and yet his strangeness makes him instantly relatable to everyone who’s felt alone in a crowd or a subway car. Part of the genius of his final, rhetorical question is that it’s his realization as much as ours that counts—we already knew we had a friend in him, but it takes him the entire book to realize that he has a friend in us and all the other lonely people.

While none of these films’ subjects achieve anything quite like the Invisible Man’s epiphany, they’re all looking, in one way or another, for the same sense of belonging, in an environment that callously, even deliberately, refuses to provide them with it. But, like Ellison’s title character, a major part of their struggle involves wrestling with the possibility that they prefer being alone. All four films are deeply concerned with the state of a particular city, but the city may be real or fictional, inviting or unsettling, unsettling because it’s constantly evolving or because it’ll look the same in a hundred years. To the extent that their inhabitants are hiding, they do it in different, even contradictory ways—hiding behind closed doors, or wandering through the streets, hiding in plain sight. It’s startling to think that all of these multifaceted looks at life have a claim to being, as the series they’re part of ambitiously suggests, “real.”

The people pulling the strings in São Paulo—the setting of Gustavo Vinagre’s part documentary, part surrealist head-scratcher, part screwball comedy Nova Dubai—seem intent upon embracing the shiny new “reality” of pop culture and cutting-edge technology. Their city is the third-fastest-growing in the world, and they want it known—the skyline is always getting higher, and glossy ads, like something out of LIFE magazine in the Fifties, advertise new high-rise apartments for happy young families. It’s all a little menacing, like a smile held for a second too long; Vinagre expresses this menace through a masked figure—half Greek chorus, half interloper—who chants “They’re coming” again and again. Yet the chant is at least partly comic, since the “They” refers not only to the forces of industrialization and globalization, but also to the sex-crazed gay youths at the center of Nova Dubai, whose “coming” is more biological than economic.

Nova Dubai

Much of the sexual behavior we see in the first half of Vinagre’s film takes place in dark rooms, behind closed doors. Bruno, a fairly unexceptional, homosexual twenty-something, spends hours on his laptop navigating his way between porn and Miley Cyrus. (Look out for a cringe-worthy yet ominous rendition of “Wrecking Ball,” with “break me” distorted to sound like “rape me.”)  In his laziness and casual hedonism, he functions as a kind of contemporary Everyman: the gay marginalization he represents (out of the closet but still in the house), all the more dangerous because it’s self-imposed, is only one flavor of 21st-century human marginalization, whereby we’re all supposed to keep playing on our phones while They build skyscrapers. A conversation with Bruno’s father, who remembers coming to the country to cope with the trauma of being gang-raped, gives us a sense of the tradeoff of life in São Paulo—safe but emotionless—and implies that its characters (and, possibly, the rest of us) are fooling around on their laptops at least partly out of fear, not freedom.

How to rebel against the city you live in?  Vinagre shows Bruno and his friends having sex in public near a construction site (one friend insists, “I can’t come between four walls”), but he’s too clever to suggest that sex is the answer. Hooking up with a muscular construction worker might raise a middle finger to the heteronormativity of the apartment he’s building (“I’m building families,” he says), but the man might not be gay, per the subtleties of Brazilian sexual binarism, and when he’s through, he puts his hardhat back on and get back to work. As Nova Dubai’s chilling final shot makes clear, sometimes the rebellion against Them must end in unconditional surrender, or worse.  By all means, have sex outdoors—just be advised that persecution has a way of coming in (forgive me) like a wrecking ball.

Lily, the main character of Matt Porterfield’s meditative short Take What You Can Carry, isn’t an outsider in any demographic sense (she’s white, English-speaking, attractive, and evidently well-off), but as played by Hannah Gross, she projects a deep sense of being out of place nonetheless. Sparse dialogue and a short runtime (half an hour) mean that we don’t get much explicit information about her, but this doesn’t mean she’s a complete mystery. Porterfield suggests his character’s state of mind expressionistically, as she progresses from claustrophobic rooms lit by the dawn to the gorgeous public parks of summertime Berlin in the afternoon. The two occasions of extended speech in the film aren’t dialogue but monologue, as Lily reads aloud from a letter she’s received, and later voices her reply.  The point of these scenes isn’t simply to communicate the letters’ contents to the audience; much more profoundly, we see Lily talking to herself, as if she’s trying to remind herself that she’s still here.

Take What You Can Carry

When discussing his new film, Porterfield has identified the novelist and filmmaker Georges Perec’s 1974 essay “Species of Spaces” as an important inspiration, and it’s not hard to see how Lily’s peculiar mixture of loneliness and gregariousness found its source in the Frenchman’s whimsical celebrations of his own idiosyncratic desires. “Like everyone else, I presume,” he writes, “I feel an attraction for zero points, for axes and points of references from which the positions and distances of any object in the universe can be determined—the Equator, the Greenwich Meridian, sea-level.” But of course, no point in space, zeroed or not, can last forever: “Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.” Like Perec, Lily craves the peace and security of motionlessness—in a sense, the security of space itself—but can’t deny the chaotic pleasures of time. Like Bruno barricaded in his room, she enjoys hiding in her little apartment, because it distracts her from the inevitability of moving—moving to somewhere else, and moving on with her life.

She wants to be peaceful and restless at the same time – and so she goes to a studio and dances.  Although Lily has carefully choreographed her own performance, DP Jenny Lou Ziegel uses it as an opportunity to capture all the quirks and beauties of the human body. The six-minute scene (the centerpiece of the film) works almost as a kind of therapy in the way it allows Lily to work through her anxieties and take comfort in her own restlessness: where Bruno has sex, she performs. The next and final scene, set in Berlin’s Viktoria Park, feels like a breath of fresh air—you’d think Lily has finally found her zero space. In fact, she’s stumbled on the importance of memory, the force that, both in Perec and in her own life, allows for motionless motion; wistful calmness in the face of the unexpected. As she recalls, thinking of a trip she took once, she “sat in a train … constantly moving even though we were perfectly still.” It’s an important, even epiphanic statement—a metaphor for the way memory works, and a model for the way life might be lived free of alienation. Take What You Can Carry is nowhere near as politically minded as Nova Dubai (time, not globalization or pop culture, is the “They”), but it’s more awestruck by humanity’s unique qualities—memory, nostalgia, loneliness—and more willing to forgive and even celebrate its contradictions.

Birds of September, Sarah Francis’s documentary and feature-length debut, is more explicitly “about” a city, Beirut, than Take What You Can Carry, but much as in Nova Dubai, its fascination defeats itself, pushing us up against the glass walls of modern life, no further. Francis and her crew (who are heard but never seen) drive slowly through town in a truck with glass walls, picking up passersby along the way.  Once their guests take their seats, the filmmakers begin asking for information: age, place of residence, profession, and, when the mood is right, fears, insecurities, desires, ambitions. Eventually, the questions subside and the people’s discrete answers coalesce into a steady stream of talk: a middle-aged divorced woman notes, a little sadly, that she’s “leading the battle alone”; a gaggle of tattooed youths muse on the importance of family. Although Beirut looms over these people’s shoulders at all times, Birds of September represents an unexpected technical variation on the “city symphony.” The jump cuts and split screens in the quintessential city film, Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, much like the time-lapse footage of Shanghai and Hong Kong in Ron Fricke’s Samsara (a recent confirmation of the genre’s longevity), literalize the accelerating pulse of the modern metropolis. By opting instead for slow, steady pans (motivated by a car traveling at human walking speed), Francis emphasizes her interviewees’ nostalgia, not the dynamism of the city they live in.

Birds of September

There’s an inherent problem of selection bias in this project: Francis doesn’t let just anyone off the streets into her car (her subjects are mostly middle-aged, and almost without exception well-dressed, articulate, and financially secure), meaning that her portrait of Beirut looks safer and tidier than the real thing. But even if her strategy is hugely counterproductive as a means of looking clearly and directly at the city, it’s effective as a study of a specific class of people who have built up their own relationship with the place they live. At times, the interviewees give the impression that achieving financial success and reaching middle age is mostly a matter of cutting oneself off from the rest of the world. When the divorced woman insists, “Loneliness doesn’t scare me at all,” there’s bravery in her words, but also surrender. As she loses her staring contest with the camera, she begins to shake, and her body language becomes more obviously defensive.  She should try dancing.

Francis leaves us with the Perec-esque observation that some people, despite being forced to live in the same spaces, are stuck in different points in time—some are trapped in the morning, some in the evening, some in midnight. As the film’s title suggests, the world is always changing. While it may be human nature to change, it may also be human to resist change—to be secure, unafraid, lonely. There’s a definite limit to the amount that can be learned from this insight, stoic loneliness being basically unknowable to anyone but the lonely person herself, but if nothing else, the recognition of common alienation is the first step toward building some community. As one of the glass car’s riders notes, the heart is the first part of the baby to form in its mother’s womb.  While that may sound a little too much like Deepak Chopra, it’s actually a tacit proposal that, just as in Take What You Can Carry and Nova Dubai, the new communities of the alienated reclaim what modernity trivializes—the human body.

The Spanish director Ion de Sosa’s second film, the dystopian fantasy Androids Dream, extrapolates human irrelevance to its logical, depressing conclusion. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Sixties Philip K. Dick science fiction novel on which it’s based, and Blade Runner, by far the most famous adaptation of this text, the androids are the persecuted party. Here, in the year 2052, they seem to have gained the upper hand, as if the emotionless, soulless things mankind built have outlasted their makers.  The beginning of Androids Dream consist entirely of static shots of abandoned buildings—models, one thinks initially, but in fact real apartment complexes and skyscrapers in the coastal city of Benidorm, Spain. The first real action of the film is over as soon as it begins: a man sprints through a doorway, only to be shot down by his buzz-cut-headed, impeccably dressed pursuer. More killings follow: in a kitchen, the aisle of a grocery store, and a frame store, next to endless prints of the same vapid couple. De Sosa may have in mind a bitter metaphor for the sudden violence of deportation Spanish immigrants face—a metaphor that’s not too far removed from reality.

Androids Dream

Since there’s little dialogue, almost none of it expository, it can be difficult to tell which of the figures in Androids Dream—a group of old folks limply dancing; a hushed church congregation; a too-cheerful housewife—are androids and which are human. Rather than keeping a clear tally of robots and humans, de Sosa concerns himself with the robotic and the human. It’s robotic to turn a blind eye to the deaths in the street, or to stare back at the camera without the slightest sign of emotion; it’s human, on the other hand, to feel fear, or to run through empty rooms like the dead man in the first scene. The human is the source of the film’s plot; the robotic dictates its setting. In the finale, the same suited killer from the first scene returns to chase a woman and her baby into the hills outside Benidorm. Like the ending of Blade Runner, the woman’s death evokes themes of Christian sacrifice, made crystal clear by the huge, electric crucifix next to which she collapses. That crucifix, more symbolically complex than it initially seems, brings the film back to where it started: the larger-than-life structures humans build themselves. In religion, as in architecture, we’ve always admired stoic immobility—I think of those people in Birds of September, aspiring to be as cold and emotionless as the buildings they pass by. In de Sosa’s rendition of the future, mankind has finally found a way to realize its ambitions: die a human and be resurrected an android. The housewife staring at (more like through) the camera has surrendered all fear and feeling—one gets the sense that she’ll still be staring in the next millennium.

Yet the fleeing mother and child are still part of a Christian tableau, and that means they die to give someone else a second chance at salvation—maybe it’s all of us in the audience, watching from the relative security of the present. The most startling aspect of Androids Dream and the three other films isn’t just their keen awareness of places, both macro and micro, or even their attention to the people who get swallowed up within these places. Rather, it’s the eagerness with which they propose big, borderline messianic solutions (memory, martyrdom, eros, the heart) to the deep problems of modernity that they pose. More often than not, these solutions are only presented as hypotheses, but even for their filmmakers to suggest them shows a rare investment in real problems, real places, and real people.