LOOKING (WAY) BACK: 2002

article-3058Lucien Freud

Rummaging the computer again, came up with this, originally published in Senses of Cinema. Little of it seems
to have aged into uselessness, so I’ll print it again here.

End Game: Some thoughts provoked by recent exhibitions, and Godard’s Éloge de l’amour

Veering into my own 60th year, having taken a sharp (and for some it would seem unhappy-making) turn in
my own creative work over the past ten years, I have in recent years given thought to the trajectory of the so-
called “creative” life – primarily in the work of painters, but also in other branches of the arts, including
cinema. The following are some thoughts prompted by recent exhibitions and JL Godard’s last work.

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Lucian Freud at the Tate Modern (August 2002)

At the Tate Modern (the older Tate museum) there was recently a retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud. I
managed an hour during a rather packed Sunday afternoon, also the exhibition’s final day, not really
comfortable, but all I was able to squeeze into my stay in London. Aside from having to elbow one’s way to see
the paintings – past people clutching their lecture devices who don’t really look but stand three or five feet
away listening to what I am sure is an academic facts and figures summary like dates, where he was living, and
other not really so important things vis á vis the painting, with ready-made interpretations of the meaning of
this or that – it wasn’t really enough time, but so life goes.

Freud’s earliest work (early 1940s) shows an immediate painterly talent. It is heavily influenced by surrealist
qualities and mannerisms – juxtaposing odd things (zebra head coming in through a window), strongly
distorted features, and so on. After a brief flirt in this direction he quickly settled in on portraiture, at first
while very skilled, using thin washes, built up in layers, these works sometimes come perilously close to
illustration – very good illustration but illustration. An early series of portraits limits the exaggeration to large
eyes and a slightly bulging top of head (a well-known one from this series is among a group with excessively
big eyes that goes dangerously into Walter Keane territory – a really trashy kitsch painter from ’60s America).
For this period his color palette is if not bright, at least not so limited and muted as it would become. Clearly
he is no colorist.

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Quickly enough, with some painterly hints from his friendship with Francis Bacon visible, Freud gravitated
towards his idée fixe, which he then pursued with obsessive intensity for the next 50 plus years – portraiture,
often nudes, in a palette of skin tones, earths, occasional reds, and when other “colors” enter, very muted.
Here and there are a few images without people, of foliage. At the outset of this his paint is thin, washes built
up to make a dense textural richness. This gave way to a thicker paint, in which in a meticulous manner he
harnessed very fine aspects of the brush, with small little ridges of paint showing the traces of the individual
hairs of the brush; this was done in a careful manner, heightening the richness of fine details. From a few steps
back the images, like Caravaggio, seem somewhat clear and tight; with your nose in the painting, the fluid
painterly qualities come to the fore. His balance in this is often perfect.

Such careful and meticulous detailing frequently (whether done in a painterly manner or more photo-realist
one) results in a rigid and dead image. For several decades Freud pursued this aesthetic, certainly an obsessive
and laborious process. Perhaps the best example is a large canvas of foliage, leached of color, a rich field of
tan, slight earths, depicting leaves and the dense bramble of a bush. At a distance the sense of depth is
amazing, one layer giving way to that behind it, several fold. Up close the depth vanishes, and what becomes
clear are the amazingly small but very painterly details – the edge of a leaf defined by a meticulous fringe of
thick paint trails of a stiff brush, applied with an exactitude which for anyone who has painted, seems
astounding. It is a very big canvas, and its surface is completely covered. I cannot imagine how many hours it
took, but certainly very very many. Unlike most such paintings, in which technique tends to overwhelm the
painting itself, here the balance is immaculate, the push-pull tension between the “image” and the “painting”
as precise as a tightrope walker’s step. This is just the opposite of the numerous examples in Western art of
the ‘look-at-me’ still-life exercises of flowers, peeled fruits and glasses in which the virtuoso act of painterly
perfection destroys the image, the tour-de-force sucking out any interest beyond an academic, yep, you sure
can make that illusion.

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In his portraits, limited in his color range, Freud though engages in discreet but in fact very strong spatial
manipulations. The space is normally flattened out, so that, for example, the legs of the sitter in the chair are
being looked down on while the torso and perhaps face are seen frontally. Within this unrolled space are often
foreshortenings pushed to slight extremes, such that one is not really aware, as one might be in surrealist
work, of the spatial warp, but feels it is “natural” while in fact it is highly unnatural. Through this spatial play
Freud imparts both a sense of monumentality to the most ordinary (a person in a chair or on a bed), and at the
same time secures a rich sense of psychological penetration of the person (always a bit grim and unhappy –
Freud must be approached with a buoyant spirit or he will fast take you down).

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A few decades ago this tendency toward monumentalizing in his work took a jump, and with it not only did the
paintings get considerably bigger, but the poses, the foreshortenings, the nakedness took on an aggressive
stance, the paintings clearly intended to shock the viewer: look at that cock, the folds of those labia, those
BALLS! The willfulness of the intent to shock is a bit overbearing in these. At the same time the paint begins to
thicken further, and the previous careful and obsessive detailing falls away, replaced by dense clotted clumps
of pigment. The subjects are slowly subsumed into the paint, losing much of their psychological intensity along
the way, with the scale and shock-value seemingly substituting for the loss in psychological penetration. Freud
seems to get sloppy and indifferent, a sense of exhaustion pervading the canvases, as if he were saying “so
fucking what?!” as the flesh sags, and the skin mottles into cellulite clumpiness. Surrounded by the hysterics of
our media-hyped world and the slide of the arts scene into pure sensationalism (sliced cows, plasticized
human bodies), the sense of shock has worn off, as well has the sense of painterly pleasure. By the end one
feels he is doing it now for the big money, from habit, out of a dumb incapacity to do anything else. In the last
room of the exhibit – mostly laid out chronologically – are some plain bad works. After 60 + years one must
forgive, though perhaps Lucian should hang up the brushes, even if already a bit late. However the long mid-
stretch of his career is rich and rewarding, with some incredibly good painting, albeit held tight within his very
restricted range of interests and palette. As with most obsessive artists, the end result is a curdling inward
finalizing in self-parody.

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Lucian Freud's Self Portrait, Reflection

Gerhard Richter at San Francisco MOMA (November, 2002)

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A retrospective of 40 years of painting. I went a bit eager, perhaps over-eager, having admired the isolated
picture seen in museums, and reproductions. The thought of seeing a large collection, spanning the career,
seemed enticing. At first it was – the first rooms, in chronological order, having the eclectic mixture which I
had known to expect: the soft-focus “realist” images, the raw and brutal scraped abstracts. In both cases these
seemed to have the weight of seriousness. The images taken from newspapers, rendered in grays and black,
their outlines softened with whiskered strokes, the facile rendering of mundane “reality” made mysterious
with the reduction to monochrome and the distanced effect of the soft-focus. Juxtaposed against the harsh
and large scraped panels, they played off each other nicely, as did the experiments in swirling paints done with
a large and sometimes serrated blade. The early work harkened with its newspaper typography and imagery
belonging to the American Pop art of the same time, but seemed invested with a German sense of gravity, and
a more attentive painterly quality (a small gray roll of toilet paper casts a subtle shadow). Likewise the color
panel experiments seemed a more severe case of Op art. Richter seemed ready to shamelessly touch all the
bases, including nods to Abstract Expressionist Action Painting, and did so with such graceful ease that it
seems almost a critique of these movements. Richter seems a born painter, able to hop from one mode to the
next like a child. And yet…

index RICHTER 1Richter-2

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Gerhard Richter Flow

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And yet, as room followed room of essentially the same tactics, the radical shift from the hard abstracts to the
gray and painterly city-scapes, Baeder Meinhof images, the gentle color land and seascapes, the saccharine
portraits of his wife and child, the intermixing of soft-focusing and scraped smearing (his unpainting), the
effect dulled, and slowly emerging from this accumulation came a powerful sense of obvious kitsch: what had
seemed serious decayed into a shallow game, a kind of nose-thumbing “look how I can paint” sucked dry of
any more meaningful content. The end result for me was a collapse into disappointment, all this obvious
talent thrown away in a sequence of empty gestures. On quite another frequency, it is the same sense evoked
by a Warhol, or Ed Ruscha retrospective: like Richter these are equally gifted with graphic talents, able to
conjure the catchy image, to exploit a certain range of painterly or graphic quality and to hang it upon
contemporary realities; and like these painters the more one sees, the thinner the content seems, until finally
the enterprise folds in on itself, reduced to parody or self-caricature. Richter’s later images of his child and
wife, unbearably kitsch in form and content, are not enhanced by the scraping then applied, rather the effect
is as if Richter were assaulting himself, attempting to eradicate the facile manner in which he makes his
images, as if scraping away the image would somehow rescue it from its fall into emptiness. It does not, but
rather underlines the essential void which no amount of painterly talent can hide, and into which Richter’s
entire career falls. The appearance of “significance” is a masquerade in this case, an accidental addendum to a
lifetime of flight from such significance.

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Jean-Luc Godard at End Game

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Which then leads to Godard’s latest, Éloge de l’amour. On the day of its release, I read the reviews in the
Village Voice and New York Times (worthy of a look). I saw the film on DVD at a friend’s in London, certainly
not an ideal manner in which to see richly visual work such as Godard’s. Éloge de l’amour certainly has an
elegiac feel to it, the front 2/3rds in often lovely, if rather conservative, B&W imagery, much of it Parisian
street scenes, a kind of documentary, but with a Huttonesque quality of being instantly old: lingering in the
mind is that one has seen these images decades ago and draws to question the remaking of them – why? The
camera is static, the compositions gelid, and lacking any originality. Rather they reprise a kind of history of
photography of Paris, echoing rather directly a long sequence of photographers of the last 70 years. The
“story” is one of the ones JLG has been telling for 40 years, starting perhaps with Le mépris (1963), and then
repeatedly since: the story of making a movie that isn’t quite made.

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Beneath this is the usual movie-centric subtext about culture, love/hate, America/Hollywood. In the reviews
one gathers there is a much more coherent “story” than there really is, with the supportive critics busy doing
the stitching job which Godard has neglected. Rather what is really there is a blank notebook, being filled in, or
not filled in, by a surrogate Godard. Literally there is a (note)book shown, pages blank, which the character
peruses here and there. JLG’s confession that beyond the aesthetics, beyond the now heavily redundant
“content” there really isn’t much there is made openly. It is the cul de sac of the cineaste, the dead end of
cinephilia. Godard, a self-admitted child of the cinema, was always trapped in the celluloid box, hence his
often errant politics, the expression of a worldly naiveté in which nearly everything revolves around the
cinema. Thus the capacity of the film critics to unravel what is really a hermetic thoroughly ingrown discourse
which Godard now loops (often gorgeously) over and over to himself, followed by an ever diminishing chorus
of fellow cinephiles for whom the in-references to this film, that text, etc. constitute a quasi-religious
experience, a cabalistic cult of knowledge that narrows ever more as time passes.

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The end result is a kind of decadence, in Godard’s case the inversion of the norm, where usually things get
more florid and exaggerated. Éloge instead swerves to a severe Bressonian austerity until it suddenly breaks
into a garish and somewhat schizoid and awful “video” which seems contrived to give digital video a bad
name. Cranking the colors into not so bizarre extremes Godard actually does little but the most obvious with
this medium, a severe disappointment in light of his past experiments in video and film. Juxtaposed to the
careful black and white which precedes it, it seems a calculated (and misguided) jab, a backward lament for
something about to be lost. One has no sense that he experimented with the new media for its own qualities,
but rather attempted to impose filmic ones on it, and failing (as proper) then forced some dubious aesthetic
pressure on it if only to laugh. Given his long ago work in video, long before it was in any manner fashionable,
this is a bit of a surprise. On the other hand he is 71, and life takes its toll. One senses in the cumulative piece a
tiredness of the work, of the failed (and illogical) fight, and of life. Godard was lost in Plato’s cave from the
outset, so he should not be surprised when this illusory ersatz world of film proves unsatisfactory – as a
replacement for life, it is indeed a very unsatisfactory substitute. One should not need 71 years to fathom that.
In Godard’s case, the self-parody is, as perhaps it should be despite the Gallic setting, in Swiss Calvinist terms.
You can’t go home again? Or you must?

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Meanwhile, in the titanic struggle which Godard has foolishly assigned to himself, it is Spielberg who is
winning and laughing all the way to the bank (if himself intermittently showing signs of his own unhappiness
with his periodic and pathetic attempts at “artistic seriousness”): the contest between art and Mammon is
ever a losing proposition, and Jean-Luc’s perpetual battle has taken on the character of Don Quixote. Jean-
Luc’s bitterness is palpable, though had he “won” – had Hollywood been vanquished from his constant jabs –
there is no doubt in my mind he would be equally unhappy and bitter: shadows are a very poor substitute for
life, and Godard has been shadow-boxing for his entire life. It is far too late for him to recall the original entry
into Plato’s cave wherein he lost himself.

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Endgame

Amsterdam, January 15, 2003

I’m here, to give, tomorrow at a conference, a talk on digital media and its preservation (which, ever against
the grain, I will suggest is a fruitless and unnecessary and even undesirable endeavor). I am in the Hotel de
Filosoof, at a window looking out over Vondelpark, and perhaps by chance it is an appropriate place for these
final musings. About ten days ago, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the last of a long sequence of screenings
across the USA, a man, more or less my age, opened the post-screening discussion with a five minute long
near eulogy, an embarrassing prelude of compliments on my past work, my seeming moral and ethical
rectitude, all of which was difficult to accept – I am far more amenable to nasty criticism than cheerful slaps on
the back. At the conclusion of his long list of positives he then landed what seemed in the context a sucker-
punch, announcing that all his anticipations of, in his words, “enlightenment” had been dashed by the work I
had shown, my last completed long piece, Oui Non (2002) being in his view an apparent complete failure,
lacking the honesty of previous work, et al. I offered no response, aside from my apologies for having failed to
live up to whatever expectations he had brought to the room, for which, frankly, I did not feel responsible. I
chose not to note that I have never perceived myself as a giver of enlightenment, and have always been
averse to either hero-worship or fandom, and decline to place others on pedestals or accept being put on one
myself: the laws of gravity and the nature of human avarice both assure that there is only one exit route off a
pedestal.

GEORGETTESMOKE

But, along with many other comments taken in during a 14 city, eight week tour of the USA – my first return at
all to my native land in nearly ten years – it served to underline a recurrent theme: the wish of those of the
audience familiar with past work to be served up, in effect, more of the same. Where, it was asked again and
again, was the narrative, the political directness, the this and the that which was liked of past work, and would
I be doing another film like All the Vermeers in New York (1990), or The Bed You Sleep In (1993), or whichever
was the speaker’s favorite. The frequent sense of disappointment in some for the new work – work which I
willfully and happily and willingly did in a manner utterly unlike my previous – was vivid and palpable, almost a
sense that I had betrayed the viewer, and hence myself and my own supposed talents. When I responded that
I had grown bored with my own work – the process and the end result – even if perhaps it had been good, and
that I had no interest in repeating myself as I saw other artists repeat themselves, this was met usually by
those persons with dismay. When they insisted their desire for further narratives and on my seeming moral
responsibility to provide it, I said that while I imagined I might in the future do something akin to my past
narrative work, but that it would not look or be done in anything like the forms I had used before, and that I
was not interested in making something I or they had ever seen the likes of before, this was met with a
dubious air. In defense, not of the virtues or wonderfulness of my past years of DV work, I noted that in my
own mind I had been, since commencing in DV, “playing” and that I thought, after 35 years of filmmaking, that
I had earned the right to do so, as well as to shift gears and in a sense start anew, all over again. And that the
“play” was fun, but also serious – an investigation and experimentation in a new realm, something I felt
reinvigorated my interest in work, and through which I had learned a great deal. I did suggest, by way of
pacifying my doubting Thomas’, and also telling the truth about my own thoughts, that I was – after six years
of such experimentation – feeling just about ready to commence on a “serious” work which would embrace all
that I had learned, but that this was not easy, since in effect I had no precursors to take as a guide or if I did, it
was more in the realm of music, painting, poetry, than in the cinema.

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Of course, such discussion provoked for me a curiousness about the flow of the creative fluid, and a greater
awareness of its volatile, living nature. Some artists commence almost full-blown, and tail-spin immediately;
some slowly grow, maturing over time; some last, some don’t. I am self-aware enough, and a harsh critic of
myself, such that I consider these things, and ponder my own nature, wondering where – attempting not to be
vain and fat-headed – just where in this spectrum I might fit. And I ponder, as I have counseled in the critiques
above, metaphorically, hanging up my own brushes when the due time comes rather than plowing ahead,
whether encouraged or discouraged by others, as a matter of habit or pride or arrogance. In the din of the
present world, especially in the shrieking media-saturated world of America and its copy-cat cultures East and
West, it would seem perhaps the proper and wisest stance would be withdrawal and silence.

MAIS OUI .. LA MORT

Emil Nolde - Blonde Girl and Man

While I do not have any idea if my scribblings (kept largely private) constitute “poetry” the following was
written a handful of years ago, a musing prompted by consideration of the career of Emil Nolde, a favorite
painter in my eyes, never mind his erratic output and ultimate decline:

By then Emil’s song had stuttered ground-ward

the brush once free and risking, the palette ripe with pleasured chance
that birthed small friends and miracles
now hesitated, clumsy, unsure, daubing into cruder
compilations, red and yellow and blue and green which grumbled
only flower,
recalling those of long ago that blossomed magic from his brush
and now only aped the old song gone adrift somewhere
the rift was time, the battered cortex tired?
or boredom, as if to mutter,
“still another flower, Emil?”

descended to always present kitsch, once most often masked with

tragedy, the gravity of death and irony weighing in
with heavy elements – metals of uranium

now sickly child faces signaled here exhaustion,

earned, but begging now for silence
– lift not the brush, mark not the pristine papers –
unless to risk still greater disappointments.

O Emil, our fates to live beyond our gifts.

VEERMER

A question as to why so many of my films have a death in them, and why?

1: Death: Hmmmm…. Is there a constant reference to death in my work? I guess from some view the answer
would have to be “yes” since more or less most of them either have a death (or two or three), or talk about
death in one way or another (even Bell Diamond touches on it), or… Actually one shot in Berlin, Liebesfall(e)
(1), doesn’t, but… Why? Because I try to make work about life, and the thing that is significant about life is that
it is finite – it lasts a while and then stops. For humans, who are conscious of this, it is probably one of the
most fundamental building blocks of consciousness, which is usually socially suppressed, manipulated in
various ways, or denied (as in religions that promise more life later), and taken altogether usually leads to the
making of socially imposed death: wars, executions, murders, etc. So for something to be about our lives, if it
is to be meaningful, it has to include this fundamental matter. That’s one way to look at it. Another could be
that I have some kind of problem with it, that it is a pathology. Certainly in my daily life I seem to make many
more comments, jokes, reflections and so on, on its presence and reality in our lives than the people around
me do. So maybe it is my sickness. Or, maybe, it is a “healthy” way to perceive things.

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bd-heroineBell Diamond

And what do I think about “death?” The same way I guess I think about life: we are here, so it seems, as a kind
of statistically unlikely accident — a planet circling a star (recently our astronomers finally came up with a kind
of proof, the tentative discovery of at least one other star – a pulsar – encircled by some planets, though it
seems rather obvious that this physical phenomenon would be commonplace in the universe) of a certain
kind, at a certain distance, under certain conditions, times, which allowed (a reasonable speculation) some
silicon and carbon atoms in the form of a clay (so the Bible says, no?), to rub against itself in a manner that
gave rise to very very simple animate organisms which then reproduced in a myriad of ways, following more
or less Darwin’s observations, leading to, among others, we humans, who in turn speculated on it, on our
placement in the universe, and at the same time, clever as we are, learned similarly to manipulate physical
matter in such a way that we have machines, hydrogen bombs, laser discs, and so on. So life got here. And life
– yours, mine, everyone’s – will go away with an equal arbitrariness: we will poison ourselves off the planet
with over-consumption, the sun will fizzle and die, a big meteor will impact, some yet unknown celestial burst
will send out a cascade of high-energy rays and… And who knows, except that for certain this little planetary
petri dish will surely evaporate, and we will go with it, whatever our efforts to migrate to some other place.
And the universe will care less. As it cares less about the doubtless hundreds or thousands or millions of
similar “life” experiments happening elsewhere in the universe. By this measure, what we think of as “life” and
“death” doesn’t really mean much, and such is what I think. On the other measure, the here/now one which
we each live, it matters emotionally, it matters biologically (we are designed to survive as best we can, and if
we weren’t we would have disappeared long ago), it matters “personally.” I, like most of us, have a built in
revulsion of a kind at the presence and vision of death: it’s a deeply programmed kind of survival response. On
the other hand I have an intellectual indifference, a kind of detached, well-this-is-what-life-is, this temporary
organic set-up which is very very complex, resilient, but finite, quite limited, wears out, and finally drops dead.
Naturally or not; by accident or design. And I guess, in various ways, I implant this sensibility in my work, the
impact of this primal instinctive flight from death in the name of survival conjunct with this consciousness that
in a way it matters not at all, it all being a kind of grand joke, an accident, which it is our fate to confront. I
suppose it is this quality which some critics refer to as the sense of detachment, or coldness, in my work.
Which I find vaguely amusing since I’d say that most of my films are quite emotional in their impact, they
provoke you to feel, and to feel as deeply as flickering shadows on a wall can. I am an ironist.

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A question about what being on the road means to me, and how it materializes in my films.

2. The Road. Well, I guess, yes, I am on-the-road, maybe, except for truckers and sailors and airline pilots, etc.,
rather more than most. I have been all my life as my father was in the military and as a child I was uprooted
once every 1 – 5 years, moving from Chicago to Georgia to Japan to Georgia to Kansas to Italy to Germany to
Virginia, in the space of 12 years. Moving got bred into me. And I have been moving ever since, like a bad
habit. Or maybe a good one. Or maybe it is not so simple as that.

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Europeans have the idea that Americans “don’t belong” at least not in their terms. We Americans have the
history of moving, from this house or this city to that, and around this is built a kind of theory of alienation,
which probably has some truth to it. My trouble is not that I feel that I don’t belong, but that I belong too
much – not just to America, but to anywhere I go. Culturally I’m “American as apple pie” in many respects, but
in others I’m totally not. I don’t believe in any kind of nationalism or anything like it, nor about romanticizing
“other” places. And I suppose this shows up in my work, wherever it is set. Ironically, it is very important to me
to set my work in real places – to find a way to show in filmic terms some aspects of what a place is like. Not
just how it looks, but how it feels, what it does to its inhabitants and what they do to it. I’m a regionalist of a
sort, just that as it were I don’t really come from anywhere. Instead I go to “wheres” and camp in them,
become a part of them, do my work, and leave.

A question about painting and painters, as I reference them sometimes in my work.

3. Painters. Yes, well I am very interested in certain painters, and learning about more and more. Good
painters teach you to see – not just visually, but spiritually, beyond the surface of things on into things. In
Angel City there’s Frank Goya, yes, a reference to Francisco. The narrative analogy is that Goya was a court
painter, a kind of aesthetic prostitute, doing portraits for money. He was good at it. And he also hated it, and
finally withdrew from that. And he had a dispassionate clear-eyed view of the world he did not flinch from,
even if maybe finally it made him a bit mad. So one can see sensuous, passionate nudes, and stiff court
portraiture, and Los Caprichos and the Disasters of War, and finally the black paintings, all from the same
artist. He was amazing. In the film Goya is also a whore, a hired “dick,” working as usual for the powers that
run things. But he’s also clear-eyed and goes to the truth. Another aspect of the name is that if you shift one
letter, it becomes A Frank Goy. Goy is Yiddish for a non-Jew. Goya is investigating Hollywood, which, whatever
one thinks of it, was founded by and is pretty much run by Jewish men. Goya’s view is, uh, critical about the
nature of Hollywood. Mine too, if not for that reason.

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hopper-hotel-room

Rembrandt Laughing was a kind of posthumous gift to Rembrandt, who, so his self-portraits (the only paintings
of his I really like excepting some other portraits) suggest, was far from happy as time went on. The film is a
respectful suggestion to lighten up. But otherwise the film scarcely draws on Rembrandt. With All the
Vermeers in New York, I had begun to really look at painting, with Vermeer being my hook. He is a fantastic
painter – a colorist of sensuous depth, an observer of the keenest eye, a psychologist and portraitist of the
highest order. I look at his paintings again and again, learning anew with each viewing. Something only the
best painters can offer. For the film, it was not only the sensibility for light which I learned from, and used in
shooting, but also the way in which Vermeer (like Edward Hopper) takes “reality” and then clearly strips it of
extraneous elements so only the essential remains, convincingly “real” though carefully orchestrated,
organized, and unreal thereby. Vermeer goes for the essence of things, be it a room, a city-scape, or a
woman’s face, and almost always with a subtlety which hides the origins of his effects. It was this which I tried
in All the Vermeers (and continued to pursue, with very different visual qualities, in The Bed You Sleep In.)
Other painters of current special interest to me are Monet, Manet, Uccello, Lautrec and Degas, Whistler,
Eakins, Corot, the sketches of Constable, Emil Nolde, and many others. And my next film will be called
Albrecht’s Flugel (2) (Albrecht’s Wing – Albrecht being Durer). I am in fact not so interested in his oil painting,
but in his water-color work of nature. And The Bed You Sleep In was visually rooted in – along with the
mentioned Vermeer/Hopper reference – also the American painter Richard Diebenkorn (Ocean Park series)
and the photographer Joel Sternfeld. This is not to say there is any effort to copy, but rather they were things
studied for a certain visual intelligence.

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edward-hopper-approaching-a-city-1946-painting-artwork-print

diebenkorn_ocean-park-79

A question about music in my work, and working with composers.

4. Music: I have worked closely now with two composers – Jon A. English (Bell Diamond, Uncommon Senses,
Rembrandt Laughing, All the Vermeers in New York, Frameup, and Uno a te…) (3) and Erling Wold (Sure Fire
and The Bed You Sleep In) (4). While Jon and Erling are quite distinctively different in musical terms, our
working processes together are quite similar. Within the filmic frame I usually have quite clear thoughts as to
musical qualities, needs, sometimes instrumentation for the music, and take an active part in forming the
musical framework. On the other hand, respecting them as artists, I like to leave as much freedom as possible
for them to write, and indeed I shoot the films, from the outset, in a manner that leaves large open spaces
ready to receive or participate with the musical element. Examples range from the abstract blue footage in
Rembrandt Laughing, to the columns in Vermeers, to the early yellow-stripe road shot in Sure Fire, to the cafe
shot in The Bed You Sleep In. From the outset, in filmic terms, I begin, not thinking of a specific music, but
rather knowing that music will be an essential element in a cinematic sense, and thus I think and direct and
shoot with this in my consciousness. In terms of relationships – both Jon and Erling are friends, and work with
them is casual, comfortable. I am unschooled in music and hardly speak a musician’s language but on the
other hand I have an overall sense of various arts, and can discuss in general terms, enough to convey my
ideas. And I am totally open to changing things around, putting in music where I hadn’t thought it was needed,
shifting things a bit; and both Jon and Erling have been willing to let the editing knife slice, re-arrange, shift or
delete things they’ve done. Jon is unfortunately quite ill these days. And Erling will be collaborating on the
Wien film, working with a large symphonic scale group of musicians.

rembrandtjonsupertext1Jon A. English in Rembrandt Laughing

A question about my use of texts used on screen, on their own or over the images.

5. Texts on screen: In general it is my interest to make things with multiple layers of content, of meaning. I like
to have things within my work run counter-point to each other, to establish spaces which suggest, but do not
articulate, this in the hope of provoking the viewer to think, feel, to fill in those spaces with something active
within themselves. So sometimes I find the use of texts, of various kinds, whether in voice-over, or in on-
screen writing, to be useful for this: you are watching an image, maybe with music, and with it arrives some
words, usually rather detached from any immediate significance. I think usually this prompts the viewer to
look again, within themselves, to seek something more than they had been looking for earlier. The use of
literary or philosophical quotes is, I suppose, to anchor the films in a historical context – as the quotes in
Rembrandt Laughing refer to Kierkegaard, Vermeers to Proust, and elsewhere to others. Or maybe it is just a
conceit…

rembrandtjontext2warnmarsh

A question about working with writers, when I do so.

6. Italy/co-writer: Actually I have in various ways worked with co-writers previously – whether through the
actors, who sometimes have “written” (literally, on paper) parts of their roles, or through improvising with
acting. And in Last Chants for a Slow Dance there was a co-writer (Peter Trias, died 2006) who did a bit of the
writing. But usually it is the actors. With Uno a te, Edoardo Albinati (5) collaborated with me in part because
my Italian would scarcely let me “write” anything much more than “ciao” and in part because I felt it would be
good to have someone intelligent, aware, Italian, to work with in checking my ideas and thoughts about Italy.
We worked very comfortably together – I might write something which he’d translate, and check with me if
there were things he simply thought wouldn’t work in Italian cultural terms. And I would say, well here’s an
idea for a scene, write something up. And then we’d go through it, and I might change it a bit, do some
editing, or soften the writerly tendency to clarify things I’d rather leave unclear. Edoardo was quite
understanding of the process of jettisoning things for cinematic reasons, and sat in on some of the editing,
helping to pare things down, move things, and so on. I fully expect and hope to work with him again, hopefully
on an ambitious 3-film Roma project.

A question about the political situation at the time.

7. 80’s/90’s: I suppose I am a pessimist. Or perhaps a realist. The 80’s, in my view, were a kind of catastrophe.
They represent the victory, however momentary it proves to be, of market capitalism, to which it seems all
else has surrendered. Market capitalism is a disaster in almost every way except, for the moment, in providing
“goods,” though it is a profound embarrassment to discuss at whose cost. The 80’s are arriving just a little
later in Europe, in the form of Berlusconi victorious in Italy, and so on. Everyone wants a free ride, and so it is
offered. I imagine though that the vast excesses of American-prompted “free trade” will beget its due
backlash, whether in the form of deeper, more profound modes of religious fundamentalism as in the Islamic
world, or recoils into primal regional groupings based on language, cultural roots, and so on. I feel like the
world is headed into a new kind of feudalism, with small armed cities, with quasi-private police forces, people
banded in small defensive groups, trying to hold off others. The economic inequities of American-style market-
capitalism seem likely only to provoke different kinds of active opposition, be it violent, sabotage, or…. Well,
history is a cyclical matter it seems, so now as the disruptions of so-called stable, familiar patterns get harsher,
it seems we are in for a time of the “hard man,” the desire for a “strong leader” who will whip the unruly
world into order. We only too recently saw what this all leads to and I won’t in the least be surprised to see it
happen again, as it already appears to be happening in Italy, in Germany, in …. So what do I see of the 90’s?
More of the same, with the explosion in population, subsequent depletion of world resources (we all want to
live in high-tech, consumer-fetishist fashion, so it seems), which very quickly will only heighten the clashes of
economic divisions, as it comes down to a more primal matter of simply who-gets-to-eat, who-gets-to-breath.
I am not optimistic, and as I travel the world, I get less and less so: there are too many of us, mostly wanting
the same environmentally costly things – we have about depleted the oceans of fish, and are on the way to
getting down to the end of forests, of killing off this or that species per day. We will pay the bill. But that I
think is the ironic fate of the species – we are so damn clever, and we are so primitive, all at the same time: so
while we can sit and not know what we are doing, we can’t stop ourselves from doing it. I’m 51 now, and likely
I will die before the really heavy plagues, famines, wars come along to reduce our numbers and issue a
Biblical-level lesson in humility. If I am lucky.

About future projects in mind.

8. Future projects: If the financing holds up, Albrechts Flugel, in Wien, in the fall. More than double my last
biggest budget, a whole $600,000. And maybe finishing up some old films left sitting. And perhaps, if I can get
the funding in line, a 3-year/3-film project in Rome. (6) And meantime I am shifting, seriously, to take up
painting, and, if my life allows, just a little bit of architecture. I am, quite seriously, very very tempted to quit
making films as the climate in these days has reduced it to an exercise in futility. It is sad – as a medium it is so
rich in possibilities for learning, for seeing, for broadening the social capacity to understand our predicament;
and (ironically) precisely those rich qualities make it perfect for a vehicle for the most mindless of drugs. And
money/power runs the show, so indeed it is the mindless drug peddlers who win the game. It is tragic, but so.
And in human history it has always been like that.

durer_wing

Footnotes:

(1) Shot, never finished.

(2) Partially shot, abandoned owing to utterly crooked producers (defunct Prisma Films, Wien).

(3) Jon A. English died in 1997.

(4) Since writing this, Erling also did the music for London Brief, Homecoming, and La Lunga Ombra.

(5) I note Edoardo received this year the Strega Premio, Italy’s highest award for literature, for his book La
Scuola Cattolico.

(6) None of these projects came to fruition, and in 1996 when digital video arrived, I left the film world of
money-hustling, narrative films, glamor, etc., and went to work in digital media. I have been far more
productive, creative, and happy since, though in turn the film world largely abandoned any interest in my
work.
PETER HUTTON: A RECOLLECTION
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I met Peter Hutton in 1974 (I think – can’t find sure info on it), during a wild trip from Kalispell, Montana to San
Diego and on to NYC for my first screening (of short films) at MoMA , and then up to Hampshire College where
he was teaching, and had arranged for me to screen Speaking Directly . I saw his films then – I think the first
time – and loved them: In Marin County, July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon
Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon (1971 ), Images of Asian Music. After seeing my film he was
surprised I liked them so strongly, I suppose figuring I’d only like films like my own. Not so.

While staying with him I had the brakes on my VW van fixed – I’d rebuilt the engine with a friend in Kalispell,
deep into autumn, and left with no brakes as we didn’t have tools to yank the wheel, rusted onto the spindle,
off. The engine began blowing smoke by Portland and I threw a rod in Missouri. Luckily I found a junker in auto
graveyard, yanked the engine myself and put it in my vehicle and it worked, if barely. Sputtered onto NYC for
the MoMA screening, all with no brakes. A Porsche shop next to the loft Peter had in Amherst did my brakes in
exchange for a lid of very lousy Montana homegrown. An adventure.

images2Images of Asian Music

Since that time we were friends, bumping into each other out on the rarified arts-film circuit, and I visited a
handful of times in upstate NY, once he landed his job at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson. He’d show me
work on his projector, some in editing stage. And we’d play cribbage in marathon bouts of 12 hours at a go, for
nickels and dimes, beers in hand. Never talked about art or films, though once he took me to the DIA
Foundation museum in Beacon NY. Through the years he swore he always won at the cribbage, though I
always seemed to walk away with a fistful of change I didn’t have when I’d arrived.

Not long after meeting him and seeing his films I wrote an article for American Film, the defunct magazine of
the AFI. At that time Peter was a kind of filmmaker secret, known and prized in the more rarified world of
experimental films, though his could hardly be called “experimental”. After all he made black and white silent
16mm films, with no “story” or narrative – just sequences of magical images that somehow cohered and made
their own visual and emotional sense. Like the very first cinema. He shot in Kodak Tri-X reversal, deliberately
underexposing one and a half to 2 stops, getting a grainy rich image of a wide range of grays-to-black and
almost no whites. He knew how to exploit the play of light which drew him like a moth in combination with
the granular texture of the emulsion. His relationship with the stock and his sense of imagery was near
mystical, and the results veered into the sublime.

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31

New York Portrait

In his earlier work – In Marin County, July 71…, and Images of Asian Music – his camera was sometimes
exuberant, mounted on a skate board (way the hell back then), or under a cock-fight aboard a Cambodian
coastal freighter, alternating with fixed shots. He also seemed to aim for willful “surrealist” shots. After these
early forays, his camera stilled, and what moved was the light before it – subtle shifts in tones, the grains of
the filmstock dancing. And he left behind the forced surrealist images and settled on the magic of his kind of
“realism” which often focused on the mundane transformed by the divine dance of light and film grain.

[Peter’s shift to camera stasis reminds me of Parajanov, whose Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was delirious
with camera movement, and who then changed to having long-take fixed tableaux, camera nailed to the floor
– artists are hard to figure out.]

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lodz symph hutton

Lodz Symphony

He pursued this line for some decades, gathering grants along the way (DAAD, Guggenheim, as well as other
accolades like Whitney Biennial screenings). He was a regular at film festivals – Berlin especially, and the New
York FF section for avant-garde films. He shot in Lodz, Budapest, and New York; moved to Bard he shot in the
Hudson River Valley. And his reputation as a filmmaker’s filmmaker broadened such that, so he told me,
Terrence Malick at one point asked him to travel the world doing shots for him in 35mm (turns out it fell
through) and other such things. He shot a few features for others, worked with Ken Burns.

Then in 2002 or so, telling me he was doing so because Tri-X was no longer available, he shifted to color. And
something happened.

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I am not one to mince words, or give deference to those who’ve done past work that was great but then slip
into something else. When Peter switched to color (and Tri-X in fact is still available), somehow he lost that
mystical connection between the granular structure of the film emulsion and the dance of light, and
something else. Art-making is an organic matter, there’s no on/off button for it; it happens successfully when
certain undefinable things align – often things out of the artist’s control. It happened with Peter when he left
the Tri-X. Somehow the magic evaporated and his imagery became pedestrian – yes, nicely composed, and
often with striking light, and yet lacking in that quality that was present in the black and white films. One
might put it down to the fact that Peter was a little color-blind, though honestly I don’t think that had much to
do with it. Something more to do with a certain kind of creative exhaustion.

Ironically, being more widely known, he became recipient to further grants, and traveled to shoot for them; he
was shown more broadly at festivals. Through a friend of mine he was invited to Iceland, where he shot
Skagafjordur. I recall seeing this film, a sequence of stunning landscape shots, glossy and gorgeous as in travel
magazine fashion, and thinking it was missing the graphics of the month – June, July, August – up in the
corner: calendar images. I recall visiting him in Annandale-on-Hudson, when he was editing At Sea, and his
stringing up the edit to that point on his 16mm projector and screening it for me. To my eyes it was for the
most part pedestrian; the sequences on board ship tragically vacuous compared to his own Images of Asian
Music; the ship building sequences are ordinary documentary (though with Hutton quirks, like a little camera
set-up or take-down movement at the start or end of a shot.) Only in a few sequences in the ship-dismantling
section shot in Bangladesh did a few shots sing. Ironically, perhaps by critics who’d never seen his earlier work,
At Sea was named “experimental film” of the decade. Aside from the simple matter that it is hardly
“experimental,” it also isn’t a good film. That it was accorded this title, or screened in the Whitney Biennial, or
then broken up to make a 3-screen “installation” at a gallery in NYC (to exclamatory good reviews), tells how
far our arts world has fallen. And sadly, how far Peter’s touch had strayed.
I saw a few other later pieces of his – the one shot in Ireland, the last one shot in a desert area in North Africa
– and they too are empty – perhaps nicely composed (a toxic notion), and innately “beautiful” (the coast of
Ireland, the moody sky; the exoticism of camels in the desert), but beauty and composition don’t suffice.

The last time I saw Peter was in NYC, at a busy gallery opening of his two installation pieces, and one of James
Benning’s, on the lower East Side – not far from where he’d lived and I’d visited decades earlier . It was full of
art-world people, some few of whom I knew. I had a few words with Peter, as he was besieged with others. He
passed on some comments about unhappy personal things, seemingly harried. At the time I thought he looked
a little gaunt, something I’ve seen before in others. As if something were eating at him.

Peter died of cancer of the lungs on June 25th, 2016, at the age of 71. In May he’d sent me this note, after I’d
sent him a letter about my own health. From this it appears he was rather blind-sided by his illness. The
ending was quick.

May 7. Jeeze! I came down with pneumonia the day I got your last message. My lungs are essentially shot, like
swiss cheese the Dr says. I’m on antibiotics and feel slightly better. Had a show in LA that just closed of Film
Stills, sold a few which was good since my daughter is getting married in a month and I’m footing the bill. The
digital thing has opened quite a few new exhibition opportunities, installations,trying to stay active but feel
the grip loosening a bit . I’m trying to finish my Berlin film from 1980, which time has rendered “archival”. I’ll
go to digital and maybe try another installation.I hope someone in Berlin will be interested. Carolina is down in
Peru wandering around with a camera, “off the grid” at the moment. Do you know La Furia Umana. They are
publishing a book about me, which will be out soon. Time and Tide……. stay in touch, glad you are healing.
Best P

I regret there’ll be no more cribbage marathons (though I haven’t played for ages – last time with Peter), but I
more regret that circumstances didn’t let me say to him how much his work meant to me, and how glad I was
to have known him and had him in my life. I never did talk with him about my thoughts on his later work,
though he was a modest sort and I suspect he would not have been bothered by my critique. In truth I think
he knew inside himself, and that he carried on as a kind of necessary show. He’d done quiet and extraordinary
work, and that was quite enough.

Sail on, sailor.

LECTURE

To speak, is, by its nature, a social act. Whether it succeeds in its intentions – that of communicating properly
from one organism to another – is dependent on a variety of factors: is the language shared? is there a
common ground to point to the aim intended? is there an overarching reason why the communication should
work? does the communicator possess the means to effect its purpose? Each of these questions is implicit in
our first words.

So here, by way of laying a little groundwork, I’d like to back up, before beginning, admittedly at risk of
seeming a bit academic, plodding, maybe overly precise. After all, presumably I am here to talk about the
topic of films, movies, cinema, and, while in some circles it is a topic given the gravity of serious thought, it is
more often consigned to the realm of entertainment, of gossip, of frivolity. So the idea of trying to be careful
in what one says would seem to run counter to the grain: doubtless, in most cases, we’d rather have juicy
anecdotes about stars and famous figures. I am sorry to say I will disappoint those of you awaiting such
revelations, albeit, like anyone experienced in the film world, I have my fair share of such tucked away.
However, my interests for here are elsewhere.

Today, here in the United States of America, my country, and I presume also yours, we are in the midst of
great shifts in our cultural, political, social, and economic worlds. In this way we are not any different than
most places elsewhere in the world: across the globe the entire human species, in all its cultural and social
subsets, is being severely tested. Ironically, the origins of that testing is within ourselves: the sphere upon
which we reside, this earth, our home, is reeling from the effects of our human habitation. Through the means
of our intelligence, our cleverness, our prehensile hands, we humans have quite literally transformed the
world — it is not at all the world which would have existed without us. And yet, within the short span of our
presence here – a few million years of identifiable homo sapien occupation, we have, imprinted deeply within
each of us.

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CASUAL TALK

In the interests of clarity – which I hope will be an on-going phenomenon in the words to follow – I think it
would help to let you know a bit just as to why I am here, and how it occurred that I would be here before you
today. So, first off I was invited… well, to be a bit more forthcoming the truth is that I was not exactly
invited; rather, I invited myself. It is an occurrence which has been, frankly, rather common in my life —
whether to sleep on some friend’s or acquaintance’s (or even a total stranger’s) couch or floor, or to find some
elbow-room in the busy halls of public, social discourse: most often, whether in a discreet manner or a rude,
blunt, fashion, most often I’ve had to materialize as a gate-crasher. It is little different here. There are of
course reasons for this, which range from the most mundane, to the more complex of social/political minuets.
I’ll try to explain.

Most often, to speak in public, to, as it were, be “given a hearing”, one must have demonstrated some
expertise, some authority – preferably derived through personal experience, and preferably certified through
some institutional stamp of approval – on some given topic. And then, as well, it helps to have provided some
indication that not only do you know your topic, but also you have the wherewithal to speak coherently,
cogently, and articulately, and if possible, even amusingly, about it. Many people who qualify for the former
fail terribly at the latter. Though by a curious twist, oftentimes in our era, and one suspects in others as well,
qualifying for the latter often gives the appearance of doing so for the former. Good talkers – among whom
we might count actors and entertainers, showbiz con-men, razzle-dazzle businessmen and politicians
(sometimes all bundled together) – frequently manage to get away with the flashy presentation of the
appearance of saying something of substance when beneath it all the only real substance was the saying. It is
an amusement to be observed all day, everyday, on television, or radio, or the halls of congress or academic
conferences. You may, at the end of this, make your own judgment about me in this regard.

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Given the foregoing, you can fairly ask – especially as I confess my invitation was essentially my own – just
what do I bring with me that qualifies your interest? Most often, these days, one would reply, quite simply,
“Fame.” And, depending on exactly what realm we were speaking of this might mean one were a known hot-
shot in sub-atomic particle physics, a local politico, a Donald Trump, a sexy up-and-coming rock star, or the
like. In any and all instances, your case would be considerably enhanced by having graced the cover of Time
magazine last week, having been on Good Morning America yesterday, and done a stint on Nightline or
Arsenio Hall. Puncturing through the orb of the mass media, by good old American entrepreneurial logic,
pretty much qualifies one for showing up and mouthing off: somewhere, someone is taking tickets, counting
heads, and if one is not “famous” there will be precious few stubs to tear. Being known by multitudes
bequeaths its own strange authority, for better or worse. Conversely, not being known is tantamount to
getting censored. By such a logic we find, by one more turn of the screw, that the mass media is largely a
mirror of itself: its open slots are mostly filled with those who actively engage in forms of mass media itself:
with actors, writers, politicians, sports figures, singers, and even, here and there, “directors”. It is not often
that those who toil in non-mass media find themselves enlarged through its mechanisms: Joe factory-worker,
the shop girl, the bank teller, the telephone repairman, the farmer, the unemployed — all these seldom find
themselves broadcast by multi-band frequencies back to the “masses”, except, perhaps, to play the fools on
daytime quiz shows, or to stand in as representative “social problems”, or as icons of “everyman” in slick beer
and car ads.

And so, then, in this instance, why me? By most measures I scarcely qualify as “famous”, not even within the
rarified, narrow-band, community of experimental/avant garde film artists, so-called independent feature-film
makers, or whatever other label one might wish to apply. While at times I’ve been vaguely acknowledged in
both of these little communities, it has usually been reluctantly, with insinuations that, somehow, I didn’t
quite fit in – and, being fair-minded about it, given the parameters usually applied by those slapping these
labels on, it is true, I don’t really “fit in”, nor in fact do I wish to. I do though, work in a media customarily
thought of as “mass”, albeit by that criteria certainly I have thus far failed badly in the arena. And hence,
“fame”, that necessary but often elusive ingredient, has largely eluded me – or being a bit more accurate
perhaps I should say I have eluded it.

Paramount1914

From the outset of my erstwhile career, I have always found myself thoroughly outclassed in this respect by
the rushing passage of my peers: in the sixties, as we were all starting out, Paul Sharits, Scott Bartlett, Hollis
Frampton, and a small host of others – the Mekas gang and friends among them, including ever famous Andy,
held the limelight. The names you read about in surveys of the 60’s “underground” films were my peers,
though, if you were to examine the literature of those years, you would be very hard pressed to find my name
among them. At that time I lived in Chicago – the so-called Second City – where an inferiority complex comes
with the cultural turf. And back then, during a few seeming pilgrimages to that perpetual American vortex of
hipness, New York, I found myself, and my friends, casually, and I think causally, dismissed out of hand – even
though in hindsight I could say some of them were considerably more talented and better artists than some of
those I’ve just mentioned. However we were not in/of/and by New York, and hence clearly just didn’t know
our asses from a hole in the ground. Or, in one bruising instance which I remember, in 1968, when the New
York members of Newsreel – the radical-left filmmaking propaganda organization founded in 1967 –
descended upon Chicago for the Democratic convention, we Second City members, having started our own
Newsreel organization, also in 1967, found ourselves simply run-over by the Big Apple presumption of clout:
we didn’t know where our asses were, but they sure kicked our butts around for our bother. Pity the poor
souls stranded in, oh, Tulsa, or Houston, or, worse yet and god forbid, in some small town. Ever since that time
I have harbored, in classic American fashion, a distinct prejudice against New York. It is, I regret to say, a
prejudice which the intervening years have given no reason to discard, but rather quite the opposite, have
only underscored.

In the seventies, with the emergence of far-from-Hollywood feature-filmmaking one found Mark Rappaport,
Jim Benning, Yvonne Rainer, Amos Poe, and a few others taking the bow. One might again note a certain
geographical bias – if they weren’t actually from there, at that point they were, having made the obligatory
move, living and working out of there: “there” being New York, self-announced capitol of the American
cultural high ground (LA proudly claims the low). Situated in the middle of the US art world, and its attendant
media arms, those in New York stood to considerable advantage in the swirl of cultural and academic interest
that surrounded the nascent “new narrative” film, as it got called back then.

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In the eighties, with the clacking PR-buzzword “independent” slicing through the cultural fermament, thanks
to, among others, the IFP, at first came a few holdovers from 60’s – 70’s politics – Rob Nilsson and John
Hansen, and Richard Pearce, along with a few others. And then suddenly, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Wayne
Wang, Steven Soderbergh, Susan Seidleman, – all a lot, lot closer to Hollywood in their hearts (despite
declamations to the contrary) and, duly, quickly a lot more famous than any of those I’ve previously
mentioned. Within the ethos of the Reagan decade, these people, and a host of others who tried to follow-
suit, had an apparent ace up their sleeves, which, neatly fitting the American cosmos, placed them at the heart
of things — their stuff looked to make real money, which in the US scheme of things is the proverbial bottom
line! Money talks/bullshit walks! And in general they even managed to get themselves into the pages of
Newsweek or Interview, and into ads for GAP or American Express credit cards! This is the real thing!
Significantly in hindsight one might also note that they were all, more or less, aesthetic and political
conservatives – even for all his fire and smoke, Spike Lee.

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Throughout this whole time, now nearly three decades, the refrain which I’ve long grown accustomed to – I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it – has been something like, “Oh, I’ve heard of or read about you….
(but I’ve never seen any of your films)”. I’ve heard this line echoed off the lips of regular film fans, directors of
world-class film archives, other filmmakers from avant to big biz, and even from Hollywood lawyers and
production types. So persistent is this that at this juncture I sometimes think I made one really major error in
my career, which was that I actually bothered to make the films for which I have accrued a reputation built
upon their having been “heard of” but never seen. Had I been really smart I would have perceived the
possibility of simply crafting the aura and the myth of an ever-unseen body of work, and forget the rest of it! I
mean making films is hard work and if one can have a reputation centered on unseen films… well…. The mind
boggles.

Still, it is out of this – this stealth career – which, curiously, my presence here today is spun. Put plainly, I’ve
been making films since 1963, some 28 years ago, and have managed, so far 20 some short films, mostly done
in the sixties and early seventies, and since then another 11 finished feature-films, as well as 2 or 3 others
awaiting completion. In sheer numbers, if the truth be told, it is considerably more than any of my
contemporaries in America, younger or older. And when I say “I’ve made”, given the nature of the film
business, maybe I should clarify a bit. In this case it means that: I found or didn’t find, or made, the money –
usually very little – to make most of these films, meaning in the vernacular of the business that I produced
them; then I thought or didn’t think, maybe wrote a script or maybe didn’t, took my camera out, loaded it and
shot film footage – sometimes of things, sometimes of actors acting under my coaxing and guidance, synched
the picture and sound, edited the results, sometimes wrote and performed the music, or otherwise, if there
was any, supervised, carefully, just what kind of music; laid out the graphics and titles where there were such
things, shot ’em on an animation table, cut the original for lab printing, the sound for sound mixing, did the
mix myself or closely supervised it, and sometimes timed the lighting for the printer and finally hassled the
thing through all the technical processes involved. By industrial film making standards one could say I wore a
lot of hats, almost all of them. For myself though, as a craftsman and artist, I just felt like I was doing my job or
jobs. And I will continue to do so, whatever the money at hand. Something in me feels there is a virtue in
getting ones hands dirty, messing with the nuts and bolts and grease of things, and conversely, I see a vice in
keeping ones hands clean.
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But, despite this near three decades of work, or probably in a way precisely because of it, none of the resulting
films has ever been theatrically distributed in the US or elsewhere, nationally broadcast, or exactly made much
ado about – with a few modest exceptions – even in the most esoteric of film journals. In point of fact some of
them are maybe a bit too strange, weird or something to be appropriate to the usual theatrical, or even art-
house, setting. On the other hand many of them would, or would have, fit in, but I was remiss in the next job,
that of salesman. Or perhaps – and I think this is in large part the actual case – no matter how good a film is,
even an accessible one, if it doesn’t cost a lot of money it is somehow tainted by its poverty. There are
certainly a few exceptions to this, so it isn’t a hard and fast rule, just a generalization. But the odd actual low-
budget film that does see the light of some kind of US distribution almost always has a between-the-lines note
that one ought to see it despite how little it cost, and despite its gritty, grainy rough edges. The obverse is that
a really expensive film, no matter how insipid and lame, at least offers the spectacle of extravagant waste and
idiocy, in vivid wide-screen color. And almost without exception, the mavens of the mass media hype machine
will encourage you to trot out for a look.

In my case I would guess that each of my films has been seen, in the United States, by no more than two or
three or, oh, maybe four thousand people – with the exception of two films broadcast at some graveyard hour
by WNET in New York, which perhaps were subliminally perceived by fifty-thousand sleeping bodies. All of
which is to say, I have remained thus far, steadfastly and adamantly unseen and, following naturally,
unfamous. And hence, my need here, yet again, to invite myself. I hope you will forgive my rudeness.

I should note though that while the things I’ve just said lend themselves to being interpreted as open to a kind
of bitterness in regard to this “being famous” stuff, it is not really that way at all. Actually, way back when I
was starting – I was nineteen years old – I was already quite aware that working in some mass media form,
such as film or pop music, inherently set one up for “fame”, and for all the things that go with it: for wealth,
and its subsequent isolation and distancing from the ordinary world. To be successful in such a field, –
whether you are a singer, TV newscaster, actor, or even only a modestly successful director -, this
phenomenon, in one way or another necessarily occurs. And, quite consciously, it was something I did not
desire (though certainly I also did not desire to labor away in my work to have it virtually unseen by the
world). In consequence, by means conscious and otherwise, I often did things which subverted and undercut
whatever possibilities existed for me in respect to pursuing the career/fame ladder. And likewise, I also busied
myself doing other things, for their own or my own sake, heedless of the potential effect on such a “career”: in
the sixties, for political and moral reasons I spent a bit over two years in prison, for refusing to do military
service, pretty much right through the height of the cultural ferment of that decade. On getting out I spent the
better part of the next two years engaged in as much political mayhem as I could manage. I worked for the
draft resistance, rabble roused, helped set up the left film making and distribution group Newsreel, was
involved in setting up a film co-op in Chicago, and worked for the “Mobe” – the organization that led to the
Chicago Seven trial. It wasn’t, politically speaking, really all that much, and certainly in hindsight it doesn’t
seem to have moved things at all in the desired direction I seemed to have had in mind – but it did gobble up
several more trips around the sun, and provide, as did the prison time, an interesting education. I suppose it
also laid the foundations for a future reputation as a uncompromising, foam-at-the-mouth, hot-head.

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In the seventies, I retreated into a nearly six year stay in the woods – in California, Oregon and then Montana
– far far from the cultural centers of New York or LA, or even Chicago. There, again, I was rewarded with a rich
education – in raising animals, gardening, scavenging the garbage of Kalispell, implanting myself in a rural
community, sharing life with a child (not my own), and living exceedingly frugally. I was, as is said, dirt poor,
but we survived quite well and learned a lot, about a lot of things. I am not afraid of the next recession or even
major league depression. Though again, I was far removed from any apparently useful “career moves”. Along
the way, with the kind of insights that long solitary walks in the woods can open up, my awareness of the
nature and effects of “fame” heightened, and my determination to try to avoid this increased. Looking at it
now it seems a bit comical, this concern about “fame” while rummaging through garbage bins to keep three
mouths fed. Immodestly, despite my circumstances, I knew I was very good at what I did, and that if I merely
followed through and worked at it, pudding would prove.

While out in the woods, though, I did also shoot and complete a first long film, in 1973: it was called Speaking
Directly. And while it took a another 6 and 2/3rds years to obtain a New York showing for it (in December
1979 – and not, I should add owing to my not trying – rather it was looked at by all the “right” NY people, who
duly passed on it) it did, elsewhere, far away – in Canada and Britain – make some ripples. In consequence, for
the first time for me, the walls of the cultural world were slightly breached. More importantly to me then, as
now, was that it, along with my other work, showed to good effect in places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or
Bloomington, Indiana, despite its quite non-commercial form and its direct critical, political, content. These
days there are some, even in New York, who think of Speaking Directly as some kind of American masterpiece.

Subsequently, in the mid-seventies, feeling I’d largely absorbed whatever lessons were to be offered up by
rural solitude, poverty and hard physical work, – not to mention long bitter winters – I found myself in
southern California, where, after a deliberate lapse of four years, I resumed making films. In Los Angeles in
1976 I made a nasty but funny satire about Hollywood called Angel City, and returning to Montana in 1977
made a kind of contemporary Western road film, called Last Chants for a Slow Dance. Both were made for
absurdly small sums, even for those days – $5,500 for the LA epic, and $3,000 for the Montana film – (and
we’re talking about feature length, color films, with actors, aerial shots, some snazzy graphic effects and all,
though of course in 16mm). As a consequence I was, momentarily, vaulted into the then-burgeoning
independent film world, getting invited to festivals in Europe – Edinburgh, Berlin, Florence, Brussels. Back in LA
in 1979 I made another film, Chameleon, this one for a whole $35,000, blown to 35mm too. It was a caustic,
nasty tale about a spiritually corrupted dealer in drugs and fake art: a parable about Hollywood and LA. Briefly
there was a little buzz spread about regarding my seeming talents: the hot air of the critics, without any
apparent sense of contradiction, anointed me a new American Godard, an up-and-coming Wenders (never
mind I’m a few years his senior), a this or a that. In the last few months I’ve been twice anointed a David Lynch
acolyte or something. All this despite that a look at my work would show a perfectly consistent aesthetic and
political continuum. I long ago gave up giving our friends the critics much credit for insight or intelligence. Back
in ’79 one major Italian critic felt sure Hollywood would take me under its wing, and this being America, in
some realms it was assumed I might make the only obvious next step and turn to Hollywood – or at least
something like it. Never mind that my Southern California films, Angel City and Chameleon, had both been
scathing critiques of Hollywood and its cultural parallels. One would have had to assume that either I was a
total hypocrite, or that I was so naive as to not have any idea what I’d made.

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And so, with the apparition of a “career” right around the corner, a seeming foot in the door to some kind of
real “deal,” rather than making the anticipated grown-up leap to Hollywood, I instead consciously made a
handful of films which, in their deliberate smallness, in their aesthetic, political and cultural radicality, only
reiterated my refusal to make the mainline move. At a time when the banners of The Great American Indie
were being hotly waved, and organizations were sprouting from coast to coast in their support, and the
concept was shifting from nickel-and-dime film making to heftier quarter and half-million sums, or more, I was
off piddling around making films for $8,000 (Slow Moves) or $25,000 (Bell Diamond), as well as a few others
for lesser sums that remain unfinished at this moment, and one, for German TV – Stagefright – which was just
plain hard-core avant-experimental. So much for career moves. For a decade this seemed to shunt me, yet
again, off to the margins of the great cultural Whoo Haa. My work, pretty much as usual, was somewhere off
the cultural trend map: it did not emanate from the hip hotbed of Soho where the stylistic posturings
culturally mirrored the Wizard of Oz politicking going on a few hundred miles to the south, or the fiscal smoke
and mirrors going on only a few blocks down Broadway on Wall Street: the politics, economics and films were
all of a piece, equally vapid and morally bankrupt, riding on appearances rather than substance. They were all
duly applauded and adored while the country stuck its head in the sands of history.

My films contrarily were about the inverse of the hip — two films about some unattractive, decidedly unstylish
unhip losers in Butte (where?), Montana, and Northern California (Bell Diamond and Slow Moves); Uncommon
Senses, a sprawling, politically and aesthetically, radical critique of America at the height of the conservative
Reagan years; and Rembrandt Laughing, a quiet, gentle, comedy of manners among the not-yet-fashionable
near-middle-aged, set in San Francisco, done for $10,000, at a time when the concept of “independent” had
moved into the multi-million range. As usual, for practical purposes these films were all but unseen in
America. One might say it is as if one had willed obscurity; or, others might say, “failure.” And, in part, I’d
have to admit this would be correct: the longer I was around, the more I knew, the less interesting or
appetizing the movie business seemed – whether in the knuckle-crunching version played out in Hollywood, or
the back-biting, trend-conscious version played out in various Arts Councils, foundations and the like. If the
measure of success was to be found there, then I didn’t mind passing on the whole affair. Though, being
myself, given the odd public forum, I generally spoke my mind, called a spade a spade as I saw it, and – I think
especially in the last, and current, conservative years – paid duly for the effrontery of actually using the
supposed right of free speech.

Along the way, a new, and dubious tag was affixed to me. I had not faded away, but, apparently oblivious to
the winds of fashion, or to that significant eighties imperative of making the honorable million or two, I had
instead doggedly persisted to make my ever inexpensive and “unseen” movies. And in turn I was anointed “a”
or “the” or an “independent among independents”, a “maverick”, an unruly outsider, a loner…. Finally the
specific label doesn’t really matter, rather its function does: the point is to diminish one’s meaning, to
marginalize, to push to the side; to, finally, walk over, dispose of, and try to crush. That is the real point of such
labels, whether it emanates from the offices of some commissar in a defunct USSR, or from the pens of critics
who are really little more than PR flacks of that big business – an ideological factory – called Hollywood.
However it is couched, those who would call another a rebel, an enfant terrible, and all the other similar
names, are really saying that one is an outcast, which, if we just reverse the order, says it more clearly: one is,
thank you, being cast out. Of course, the more vehemently it is said, the more suspicious it becomes.

mgm1

And so, to, in musical fashion, return to the motif announced at the beginning of this, I am here, decidedly, as
a self-invited gate-crasher. Having been cast out more times than I care to count, I’m back at the door,
determined to get in, however undesired that may be. Sorry. I am here, despite innumerable things, small and
large, which mitigate against the chances of someone such as myself getting to such a place; I am here in lieu
of numerous others, not dissimilar to me, who either fell by the wayside invisibly, or chose – perhaps more
sensibly – under the circumstances to find other things to do with their lives. In consequence, lacking a
degree, or a pedigree, or other institutional packaging ribbons, I’ve had to make this little excursion into
biography, for which I hope you will excuse me. I am a firm believer that one should know the background and
situation of those who deliver messages, the better to make judgment on that message.
Having said all this, you might well wonder just what is it that makes me either want to be here, despite my
obvious reservations and complaints, or what is it that allowed me to, or made me, persist. Or, you might also
think, “where does this guy get off saying this – he IS famous, well sort of….” (meaning you have heard of me,
and so you thought to come to this talk). Or maybe you think I kvetch too much, and, what after all is wrong
with the way things work in America. In the movies? In life? I can, frankly, imagine a host of doubts swarming
in your minds.

And so, then, I will try to tell you why I have invited myself, and tried, however lamely, to crash the party.

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HOW IT WORKS

In my previous words I tried, consciously, to be a bit conversational, casual, maybe even amusing; to describe
a bit of a part of a life spent making films, living in the cultural milieu which surrounds that, and trying to tell
you, and perhaps as well, myself, just why I took the paths I took. Along the way I tried, in a low-key manner,
to provide the underpinnings of a kind of argument as to why you might wish to bother to listen to me, to
consider and think about my experiences and the thoughts which they in turn have generated. I would not,
otherwise, be here today, or have spent the time thinking about these things myself. So perhaps it would be
instructive, if a bit academic, to go back for a moment here and look at the very word attached to my being
here: I am here, formally, to “give a lecture.” In general such a phrase is likely to induce a recoil: for the most
part to be on the receiving end of such – to “be lectured” is thought as a painful process, either because we
made some damn fool mistake, or, because it seems to imply a bit of heavy, brain-damaging, thinking.
Generally we regard it rather something like taking a bitter, even if just, perhaps, needed dose of medicine; we
seldom though imagine it as “fun.” But, sometimes a bit of brain-tickling can be just that. So let me, an
unschooled, self-taught, autodidact, if you will, spin a little bit of linguistic etymology. For those who might
have found that a bit too much of a lexical torment, it just means I’d like to take a look into the history of the
word we’re using here. Just what is a “lecture?”

LEECH/LECTURE/LEARN/LAW etc.

According to some etymological sources – mine was Websters Collegiate Dictionary a long time ago – in the
Indo-European languages the word for lecture derived originally from “leech” – as in the medical practice of
letting leeches suck the blood out of sick people, supposedly to help them. This was, as many things way back
then were, quite wrong-headed. However the intention was to help. Then the word morphed into “lecture”
which originally meant a reading, one from which it was intended one would “learn.” And from the process of
learning, one would draw conclusions and the word morphs into “law.” So, briefly, a lecture is meant to be a
useful, healthful process from which one might learn and in turn draw certain rules, or laws.

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With this in mind then, I’d like to take a look at a small world, the one I’m presumed to be at least somewhat
knowledgeable about, film making, and to try to understand a few things about it which are perhaps not
customarily perceived. To do this I’ll draw on a life of experience, trying to reflect through that something
more general and useful regarding our culture at large, and finally something you might find directly pertinent
to your own lives.

I am, as you know, a filmmaker. By the measuring stick one might normally apply to this, though, I sit far off at
the margins of the industry which film production constitutes, caught off in a little eddy, along with a handful
of others, while the larger mainstream roars loudly and quickly by. So forcefully does this larger main branch
go that it often picks up tidbits from my little eddy and takes them along, and does so so loudly that hardly
anyone ever hears it. The inhabitants of this backwash in which I survive count for perhaps one in 25,000 film
makers or people who in one way or another imagine themselves to be film makers. This is, of course, an
assertion that begs for some clarification, which I’ll try here.

In America most film making – by which I’ll venture the guess that this means 85 or 90% of film making – is
done in the service of a single, driving, motivation: to make money, preferably lots of it. This comes, though, in
many guises: from the obvious example of the Hollywood blockbuster, carefully constructed with all the right
“elements” – big stars, director, budget, hot script -designed to elicit the most bucks per theater,
internationally, possible, on to the more humdrum routine of the daily fill of TV time, of advertisements, of
MTV, and the like. Of the remaining little pool of 10 or 15%, most is devoted to utilitarian functions – to
educational purposes, to scientific study, to governmental or corporate propaganda, or the like. Beside these
two branches a last tiny little protrusion exists – maybe, being extraordinarily generous, 1% (though I suspect
probably more like .1%): here the driving motivation is to make “art”, or something like it. The proponents of
this are often screwball cases, like myself, who work away, heedless of such silly preoccupations as worrying
about money, insurance, pensions and all the things that go with it. We may or may not give much
consideration to our possible audience, and whatever our intentions, we often fail. But, most decidedly, we do
not make films in the anticipation of thereby making money; quite the opposite we do so despite the fact that
it most likely costs us money. The concept of the “deal,” with all its implications, sees us recoiling in disgust.

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Now I know that here I’ll likely be called into question, what with my numbers: certainly, given all you read
about it, “art” covers more than 1 or .1% of film making. After all, what about all those “independent” films
you’ve read about – you know, sex, lies and videotape, or Metropolitan or Spike Lee’s latest? What about the
classier Hollywood product, like, oh what the hell, Dick Tracy, Henry and June or The Sheltering Sky, or, oh, I
don’t know, some film where the director goes on TV and says he took a big cut and big risks, and the actors
said it was real tough, and gee whiz, they all did it because, you know, “they really believed in it.” And maybe
Ebert and Siskel said two thumbs up, and Canby said “masterpiece.” Isn’t all this “art?” My answer, as you
might easily anticipate, is most likely a rude, “fuck no!” Most such film making, some made under the sincere
rubric of “art,” is made by people who honestly confuse their earnest desire to “express themselves” with
their equally earnest intention to make a good buck as well, and they know in their hearts all too well the
formulas by which that buck is made. Their inner concept of “art” already has commercial intent and content
built in: it is, from conception, kitsch, and has as much relation to art as Hummel dolls do to Michaelangelo’s
Pieta.

This is not to say that art can’t, here and there, make money. Just that art doesn’t, and can’t, begin there –
perhaps (and having little to do with whether it is good or bad art — probably most money-making art is the
bad art) it can end there – making money. But when a big time (or little time) industry director takes it in his
head to make “art” – say Steven Spielberg making The Color Purple – he makes a great to-do of the sacrifices,
the difficulties, the mental and emotional torments involved; and, not having the vaguest idea of what art
might actually be, makes the inevitable piece of overblown doodoo. Whenever the mighty powers of
Hollywood begin to fulminate about art one can duly anticipate a certain heaviness of hand, a pre- and
portentiousness, and most often an awful thud as it tumbles downward in the Variety listings despite the
inevitable pages of free press rendered up by the national media, not to mention the 10 or 15 million spent for
promotion. Unhappily, Hollywood seems not to know that one does not take a little time off from the unhappy
rigors of commercial demands to make art; making art, or trying to do so, is a far far more rigorous a chore
than anything the heads of Hollywood, or their hired hands, can imagine. When, as happens on occasion,
Hollywood does make art (very very infrequently in our time) it is at best the consequence of a happy accident
rather than consciousness.

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Given that the foregoing smacks of a tirade, of a bit of petulance, arrogance, and for sure a certain lack of shall
we say, generosity, toward the likes of Mr. Spielberg, I can almost hear the chorus coming back, something to
the effect: well, what’s wrong with – and then a compendium of titles, the ones you can remember from the
past few years, the ones you liked, the ones you heard about that did big b.o. but you didn’t manage to see,
and so on. Distilled to its essence, it comes down to something like, “I liked it/millions of others did also,” and,
by a leap of illogic, ergo it is OK, and further, it is even, put under pressure, “art,” if “art” is the necessary
legitimizing word we need. My answer is, forgive me, “bullshit!”

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I’ll cite, because it is vaguely amusing, a recent personal instance of this kind of thing. This past summer I was
at the Telluride festival, high up in the Colorado Rockies, and as things happened I was placed on a panel
composed of an odd mix of supposed “independent” filmmakers: they included, sitting at the far right, Clint
Eastwood, who of late has busied himself with making imagined “art” in between stints at self-acknowledged
commercial shtick; Taylor Hackford, a producer and the director of “An Officer and A Gentleman;” Abel
Ferrara, maker of stylish, New York-set exploitation flics; our moderator, Annette Insdorf, a professor at
Columbia and intellectual gad-about the biz; then Babette Schroeder, Euro-helmer transplanted of late to the
US, director of Bar Fly and Reversal of Fortune; Richard Pearce, the maker of The Long Walk Home, and a
string of similar liberal minded, do-goody films of no creative merit whatsoever; and lastly, at the far left,
myself. We had gathered together, all present for having films in the Telluride festival, to talk, ostensibly,
about the imagined difficulties faced, thanks to the harsh taskmasters of Hollywood and their even harsher
taskmaster, the Market, for making – and I duly place this in quotes – “adult” films. Madame Insdorff opened
up with a soliloquy on the vicissitudes of the market, though mentioning a handful of, in her mind, “adult”
independent films that had miraculously squeaked through (in my mind these same films would qualify as
puerile drivel, so it was clear we had some kind of semantic problems before us). Annette proceeded, duly, to
toss the matter, systemically, right to left, into our expert hands. Clint, showman that he is, made the obvious
“porn” joke which attended the seeming question at hand, and then waxed long, if not exactly eloquently or
interestingly, on how difficult raising the funds for White Hunter, Black Heart, had been. The audience, slightly
numbed, wept crocodile tears on his behalf. The baton passed to Mr Hackford whose very name renders up its
own obvious appropriate joke, but he in turn waxed long and boringly on his own artistic pretenses, using the
inevitable cliche “really-believed-in,” and stressed his profound artistic sincerity. Mr Hackford was present as
producer of The Long Walk Home, a sterling example of mush-anointed-art typical of Hollywood’s liberal wing
– though along with Mr Eastwood, Taylor purported to be a struggling outsider! Truly, he, director and cast all
suffered mightily to make this wishy-washy tear-jerking commentary on the politically touchy topic of — uh,
well, civil rights events of 30 years ago. Abel Ferrara came next and provided some streetwise humor delivered
in good New Yorkese, which helped, if only momentarily to puncture the dubious solemnity of the event. In
contradiction to the two preceding him, Abel was happy to wise-ass that now he was a hot-shit Hollywood
director, and then, it was my turn. Speaking more briefly than those who had preceded me, I laid into the
pretensions of these Hollywood sorts with their sad stories of how hard it was for them and their ever-so
creative impulses, to deal with the demons of the business. I suggested that their laments were phony (and by
implication that they were phonies), and to claim they were “independent” was farce. Annette, looking
vaguely shocked, saw fit to promptly direct the talk elsewhere. Whereupon – and I am not kidding – bursts of
shouting and applause for what I’d said punctuated the thin Colorado air. Yells for “More! More!” echoed over
the mountain top where we had gathered. Instead Ms. Insdorff shunted things back to celebrity and a thin
gruel of talk where, in a spate of hyper-radicalism, Mr Eastwood – and this is a true story – said he was pleased
that his new film had allowed him to quote John Huston complaining how the process of selling popcorn
dictated what kind movie one could make, and so he thereby sort of agreed with this fella at the other end of
the table, and boy, take that on the chin Hollywood: had Clint ever acted so limp-dicked in any of his roles he
never would have left the mock West of Spain. The talk dwindled into sawdust, and after an hour was closed.
In a discourse among presumed grown, adult, intelligent people, most of the talk had been self-serving
bullshit, whining about funds, and thoroughly dishonest assertions of “independence” from people who have
long since been bought and sold and were, thereby, strangely, embarrassed about it all. To think that these
people, carefully culled for presentation at this major festival, in some way represented the enlightened,
intelligent face of American cinema, is at best a travesty.

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So I have cited this anecdote not for the intelligence or wisdom to be gleaned therefrom, but, sadly, for the
opposite factor. There, gathered under the auspices of a prestigious festival, of some import in the wheelings
and dealings of, at least, the US art house distribution and exhibition biz, were a small handful of people,
presumably intelligent, energetic, experienced, who, given the opportunity to speak in public took refuge
behind a veneer of liberal platitudes, of self-serving kvetches about money, and who did not dare look, even
momentarily, in the mirror to their own image. Like those who populate the political spectrum in America,
these people – perhaps marginally more sincere than their crasser peers – Freddy Fields, or Michael Ovitz, or
other On High Hollywood bigwigs – are, as their cringing behavior, as well as their questionable words,
revealed, thoroughly corrupted: intellectually, socially, morally.

20bucks

These are, I know, harsh words. In the present social atmosphere, they are in a way taboo. We are not
supposed to talk like this, or, if and when we do, we are quickly pushed aside by various means. One is
compared to the thundering know-nothings of the religious or political right – to Jimmy Swaggart or Senator
Helms. Or one is ridiculed as a throwback to the sixties and the shrill “off-the-pigs” sloganeering of the left.
Right or left, the intent and effect, though, is the same: to foreclose discourse, to shut off the option of public
thinking. The purpose is to sustain the status quo, to silently assert that whatever is going on – especially with
oneself and one’s own immediate world – is OK, nothing to get excited about, and certainly nothing to
criticize.

But, as the evidence of our everyday world insistently indicates, everything is not OK. However much we
would like to think it is, and would like to think our role in it is OK, we cannot these days walk down a city
block, take a drive through the rural back roads, or give a momentary honest look at the world around us, or
our place in it, and claim, with any honesty, that all is OK. The evidence, simple and plain, is to the contrary.

index

So, you might ask, what the hell has this to do with movies? This guy is here to talk films, and here he is talking
something else. So, I imagine, you might be thinking.

So, while I will redirect these words back to film, I must note that they can and will, necessarily, erupt out from
that world, and into the world at large.

Recently I read that in US exports, the entertainment business, of which I am certain movies and television
make a very large portion, (along with popular music), stands second only to aerospace — which is a nice
euphemism for a mix of commercial airliners, and, well, military exports – fighter planes, bombers, missiles,
you know, those run of the mill exports that keep the economy humming, or at least running. It gives a bit of
room to ponder, though it doesn’t, at least for someone who travels as much as I do, surprise: the marquees
of Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, not to mention myriad other smaller burgs, bristle with the titles and stars of
Hollywood: our exported shadow shows bring back, it seems, some very real very big bucks. I mean really
really big bucks: this is, on a scale that you and I may find hard to comprehend, really big business, and, like its
counterpart, the military-industrial complex, it would prefer to keep many aspects of its workings off-screen. It
is pleased to make its stars house-hold names around the world, it is pleased to have its aura induce screams
of delight from teenagers from LA to New York to Tokyo to Moscow to Rio; it is not, however, pleased to have
its real business aired in public.

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Posted on July 14, 2015 Posted in Arts, Personal Essays Leave a comment
ON BECOMING A NON-PERSON (PART 1)
lenin trotskyLenin & Trotsky; Lenin and no Trotsky

Back in the good old days, when the USSR existed, and America had a different monolithic moral threat to
warrant the building of our massive military, it was a practice of the apparatchiks there to carefully, if rather
crudely in pre-Photoshop days, edit history, or even the present, and indeed they had sufficient hubris to
imagine they were actually editing the future. Aside from the simple matter of deleting undesirables from the
ideological narratives spun by Lenin and Stalin, and then by the lesser figures who followed them – by killing
their opponents – they felt the compulsion to snip away at pictures and texts, to make such persons simply
disappear: if there were no pictures and no texts, the person was expunged from history. They became, as
the term was used in the Soviet Union, a “non-person.”

It was not only political figures who were subject to this treatment, but also cultural figures – some of whom
were indeed dispatched with a bullet, but more likely, at least in the latter phases of the USSR’s history, they
were exiled to some remote setting, and never mentioned again in public. Out of sight, out of mind. It was a
regular practice applied to any who diverged in their writing, painting, poetry or films – or even science – from
the official line. In hindsight, of course, the figures subjected to this social banishment constitutes for the
most part the best of Russia’s intelligentsia of the time, as well as of the satellite members of the old USSR.
After all, the Soviet Union, like more or less all political and social entities, became totally corrupted, and the
official story was that this was not so. Anyone brazen enough to speak of the Emperor’s New Clothes would
be exiled, silenced, and turned into a non-person.

ussr

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Of course in the USA, this supposedly doesn’t occur. Never mind that our current President, surely like all
those before him, doesn’t hesitate to liquidate American citizens, and others ungraced with this Constitutional
advantage, under some legalistic rubric, just as Stalin did. Politics at that level – whatever nice verbiage we
wish to drape over it and whatever deliberate self-delusions we like to entertain – is hard-core life/death stuff
in which killing “enemies” is s.o.p. And of course, in America’s culture the phrase and concept of “non-
person” is not used. As it were, “we don’t do that.” Just like we don’t do “torture.”

Well, we may not use that phrase, but we do something almost exactly the same, and for largely the same
reasons. Probably we’d use a different phrase, with seemingly a different meaning. The phrase might be
“dropped out of sight” or, “well, fashions change,” or, if one is of a younger cohort, “she’s old.” There are a lot
of handy metaphors to supplant the “non-person” label of the USSR, though the effect is the same.

dekooning erasedDeKooning Erased by Robert Rauschenberg

Of course, the concept of a “non-person” begs a certain question: what is a “person.” In this context it isn’t
you or me, or just any bi-ped with a pair of eyes, and what not. It is, rather, a person who is magnified and
known through the media – a public figure, certified by being shown or discussed in public media. To “be
someone” in this sense means to cut some kind of public figure. It might be a grand international one, like a
famous movie or sports or rock star, or a politician, or more exotically, perhaps a scientist like Stephen
Hawking. Or more frequently in our day, a highly successful businessman like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or
Warren Buffet. These are people who truly stride the global stage, and are recognized almost everywhere.
Or, stepping down a few notches from such broad renown and acknowledged personhood, perhaps a famous
writer or painter. And then to specialists in various areas – academic or business, or the many lesser sports.
Or media personalities heard or seen on radio or TV. Essentially this kind of personhood is secured through
the media, which these days is omniscient: there is hardly a public space left into which some kind of TV
screen, digital scroll device, and speakers do not intrude to show a parade of public figures or to thump to a
driven beat. In turn we have developed a social pathology in which the personhood conferred by the media is
sought after by almost everyone. “I think, therefor I am” no longer suffices. Rather we must ratify our
existence by appearing in the media.

hd lisi.

In part I think this explains the plague of “selfies” which has descended upon us. I sometimes wonder how
many selfies are made any given second on a global scale – it must be in the multiple millions! Each of these is
a small little media certification that one exists, and each signals that the maker of the selfie perceives
themselves as a non-person if they can’t see themselves in a picture or video. Look, I am in front of the Grand
Canyon! The Mona Lisa! The Eiffel Tower! I therefore exist and in my tiny little world, this is proof I am
important. The proof is in the photograph. Or the video. Or the YouTube item. Or Facebook. Or, up a step
or two, that one is in a “reality TV” show, or on the news. Each of these certifies one’s personhood, and of
course, the more there is of this, the more of a “personality” one is, and the more the world swirls around
you, hanging on your every word, each gesture. Or so it seems. And of course as this happens the more
likelihood that the central figure in this constellation will begin to take themselves as indeed bigger and more
important and, yes, indeed, worthy of all that attention. We need only observe the behavior of those who’ve
been escalated to such positions. And we need only observe the behavior of the selfie-taker: one doesn’t
actually spend any time in looking at Mona Lisa, in fact one’s back is to it, as it is to the Grand Canyon or any
other famous thing or landmark. The point is to be in front of something famed, and in some bizarre sense, it
is imagined this fame rubs off on the selfied-person.
Unknown000193CCRPSMona Lisa at the Louvre

I am reminded of a lecture I gave at a State University in New Jersey – the best paying gig I ever had. A one
hour talk to students of the media department. Introduced, I stepped up to do my one hour spiel, and gazed
out at a hip-hop attired crowd of young people, utterly caught up in the styles of the moment. Droopy pants,
tattoo’s, Simpson-style hairdo’s, Nike swoops – the entire generational look. And ditto, what came from their
minds. What they wanted to inquire of me – self-willed “failure” on so many levels – was how does one get
rich and famous, instantly. This was their desire, which, given the world they are surrounded by, is a vaguely
understandable thought for a very young person bombarded with the glories of celebrity 24/7, along with the
neo-liberal con that the only meaningful measure of value in the world is signified with dollar signs.
Unfortunately I had no answer for them – not the name of a reality TV show producer, not the magic insider’s
trick that would work like Abracadabra Open Sesame. Nope, none of that. Taken aback by the bluntness of
their inquiry I suggested that first they might want to learn how to do something, and to do it very well. And
that once they had done that, perhaps, with a lot of persistence, work, and luck, they might become “famous”
and then “rich.” I believe I was, no matter how carefully I had tried to phrase it, a huge disappointment for
them. They wanted, as Jim Morrison had it, the world, and they wanted it now. Just by getting in front of a
camera, on American Idol, or some “reality” TV show. For them, life’s success would be measured by equal
measures of fame and its partner, riches. They could not have comprehended how disappointed I was to see
that our culture has produced through its total educational system, the social culture as a whole, such a
shallow and empty generation of dupes. Though I am not surprised.

ON BECOMING A NON-PERSON (2)

articleLargeJames Rosenquist with his mother before a billboard he painted.

Once upon a time – seems like several lifetimes ago to me – in the sense mentioned in the previous post, I was
a modest “person.” To say I’d made a little mark in the marginalized esoteric realm – depending on the era
and the POV – of American Independent film, avant-garde, experimental, Underground, or whatever names
critics or academics cared to come up with. This began regionally – to say in Chicago, way back in the mid 60’s
when I landed a little review for my first short film, Portrait, from none other than Roger Ebert. He liked it. And
in the very constricted world of such filmmaking in Chicago, I seem to have emerged with a few others – John
Heinz, Larry Janiak, Tom Palazzolo – as a little local name. Also in the press a bit later there was a picture of
Kurt Heyl and me being arrested just prior to the Chicago Convention of 1968. A kind of “fame.”

P19Still from Portrait

And then I left for the West Coast and vanished for a while, materializing once in a blue moon on some short
film festival’s winners list. Big deal. And then, in 1974 or so, having made my first feature, Speaking Directly,
and serendipitously having it invited to the Edinburgh Film Festival – at the time a hot festival for creative films
– lo and behold it was reviewed, very favorably, by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the British film mag, Sight and
Sound. My “person” was greatly enhanced, and suddenly in the tiny realm of “new narrative”/experimental
or whatever film, I became a modest “name.” I then got invited to festivals with my next films, Angel City and
Last Chants for a Slow Dance, and these begot more print, which equaled more festivals, and more print. I
became in the film worlds of the UK, Germany and Italy a little “name,” written up in newspapers, mentioned
in magazines. I did not become a name, for some reason, in France. But, in the terms meant here, I had
become a real “person.” Around me a minor aura of fame attached. “Important people” deigned to talk to me,
sometimes even to seek me out. In the words of a long ago friend from my brief sojourn in college, “You made
it.” Whatever “it” was, it was having become some kind of public figure, a “name,” having acquired some kind
of “fame.”
VER33wide

Despite my disinterest in this phenomenon, or really my antipathy, and my peripatetic manner – moving
always to new places where in one sense I had to start all over again, this new personhood grew, though
modestly as the world in which it was housed was modest. After all, those who are interested in film-qua-“art”
are few and far between. The dullest Hollywood hack has more of this kind of personhood than the biggest of
avant-garde sorts. However, in 1989 I landed the modest funds from PBS to make a new film and came up
with All the Vermeers in New York, done in 35mm, and which managed to get a very mismanaged commercial
release in the USA. Courtesy of a personal note from me to Roger Ebert, it got 2 thumbs up in a national
television mention, and my erstwhile “fame” squared. If nowhere near the Hollywood hacks, nevertheless I did
find myself shortly thereafter on a podium with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Taylor Hackford (one of the
Hwd hacks) and Abel Ferrara in the rarified airs of the Telluride Festival. Not long afterwards I was at the
Beverley Hills Hotel, in the company of Kevin Costner and “the most powerful man in Hollywood”, his agent
Michael Ovitz. I was being feted with a Lifetime Achievement Award (1991) from the IFP, whose minions
whispered in my ears that soon the studios would be knocking on my door. They never did, but following
Vermeers, my personhood zoomed forward, little once-closed doors opened, and following a few more films –
The Bed You Sleep In and Frameup, unreleased theatrically if well received critically, I had had more than
enough of the total bull$hit of the film business, and I shifted to digital video when doing so was a film buff
heresy. My personhood and “fame” rapidly shriveled in the ever more money-minded ethos of the times, an
era in which the sole measure of value was calculated in numbers with a dollar sign beside it. No big number
there and you became socially worthless. In rapid order everything was monetized, and reviewers could only
do reviews of big-time big-buck films with the aim of making more bucks. Critics who once lavished praise on
my work no longer could be bothered to take a peek – it didn’t have a “release” so the papers didn’t cover it,
so they didn’t write about it, and hence did not need (or want) to see it. It was all about money. The rest
could go die. And they did.

VER37wideSteve Lack in All the Vermeers in New York

It is getting on 25 years since my modest fame peaked, lets say around 1993 or so, though like an albatross
around my psyche I still have people telling me they have “heard of” All the Vermeers, though most often they
have not actually seen it, or anything else I ever did. Forget those 38 other long films and all those shorts!
Such is the nature of fickle fame, that it lingers as an echo, detached as it always was from reality. Increasingly
over the decades, fame itself has become an end-all and be-all in our society. Hence “reality TV” and YouTube
and selfies. And hence the general tone of my visits to various educational institutions where the general
ethos seems to be wondering how to get rich and famous fast. On Wall Street, or in Silicon Valley or in LA in
the entertainment biz. The examples are there to emulate, so as young people normally do, they wish to copy
what they see. Jobs? Gates? Zuckerberg? Kalanick?

And now, today, while in my own view (and that of some others) I am doing some of my very best work, my
old fame/name is apparently so tarnished and worthless, such that people who once accorded me
retrospectives, or introduced me at screenings with lavish praise, cannot be bothered to answer an email.
Happened last week as I was trying to rummage up some autumn screenings on the West Coast. Having
written the same folks 2 or 3 times in the last months for the same purpose, this is what I wrote:

letter to cal arts

This was written to a place I’d been before, a few times and more in the last decades, and to people whom I
apparently incorrectly imagined to be “friends” of the kind one makes among peers in this business. Ah well,
live and learn. It is not, in the last years, the first time that such has occurred. MoMA, which once hosted a full
retrospective of my work (1991) now declines to answer an email. I understand most the staff moved on and
there are new people, but one would imagine institutional memory or rectitude would at least beget a form
letter, thanks but no thanks. But instead plain old nada. Ditto with a few other such institutions I’ve dealt with
over the years, in the USA and Europe. And people.

On one level I could frankly care less, except that this places large dings in my very minimal annual income,
and having no pension, SS, or other fall backs, at 73 and counting, it is actually damaging. Especially when
those saying “no,” whether in word or silence, sit in comfortable institutional settings and are well paid. And
more so when one imagined them as “friends.” Not that I am alone in America in this situation, which I think
is rather more common than our national pundits would like to acknowledge. Hung out to dry. Vets. IT
worker bees. Factory workers. White collar folks replaced with H1-B or AI machines. The poor. Artists.
Finally it’s all about the money.

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As an observer of the world, and particularly of the arts world, I know well that the fickle finger of fate (and
fashion) flits bee-like from flower to flower, and nothing is so yesterday as someone older (though if your
fame is hyper your decrepitude will be duly celebrated for having survived it all). And I know as well that for
the most part my work has been “out of fashion” for some time, not that it was actually ever “in,” though that
would scarcely seem to matter since most of “the people that matter,” to say many programmers, curators,
festival directors, etc. haven’t bothered to even look at my work for more or less 20 years, so in fact they
wouldn’t know if it were or weren’t “in fashion.”

Or perhaps it is my often caustic commentary in public regarding contemporary “art,” or my withering reviews
of presently popular films (say those of Jarmush, or Reichart) which has silently worked, in effect, to produce
an effort to silence me? Or the public engagements I have taken on of choice – such as defending Mark
Rappaport in his battle with Ray Carney. Or perhaps my loud-mouthed and persistent sharp criticisms of
America’s religion of capitalism, and all the mangling horrors it imposes on us, and on the world.

Who knows? Certainly not me.

I accept all these things, though not happily. One would like to think artistic quality had its own value. Or that
“paying one’s dues” might accrue a certain respect. Ah, but I am just an aged curmudgeon, so what the hell?

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“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an
author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of
everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
Alexis de Tocqueville

Frankly over the last decade or so I’ve pondered whether there is indeed some kind of blacklist at work. While
I am seriously skeptical such would be, out on my loose tether to my society the feedback I receive certainly
reads as if there could be one. I am certain in the small world of grants there is a rumor, which unfortunately I
cannot elaborate on here, which has functioned as a black-list in that world since sometime around 1989 or
so. As cynical – or is it realistic? – as I am about the nature of fashion, crowds, social politics, particularly in
America which I know the best, I don’t quite think it is paranoia which animates my thoughts on this seeming
banishment. Rather it seems something deeply enmeshed in the American ethos, something which has sent
many of America’s artists and writers fleeing to other lands which seem more hospitable.

Today as the curtain of Donald Trump’s administration is parted, and his yahoo policies are unveiled, my sense
is that if he manages to get his way, the blacklists will become very tangible, if they haven’t already done so.
And I, and many others, will be as welcome as Muslims to the newly Made Great Again America. And if he
does not, and is booted from the White House in a few more months, it probably won’t change much anyway:
the tenor of the times.

FALLING BEHIND, CATCHING UP

LONDON 1 (2 of 95)

London, tail end of a journey back to the USA, prompted by both a proposition to do something out in Pacific
NW, and by a little visa run-out snag. Left Palermo on a cheapo Ryanaire flight, and stayed a handful of days
with friends along the Thames, and managed to see a handful of others while in city.

LONDON 1 (3 of 95)

LONDON 1 (6 of 95)

Every time I return to London a neighborhood has changed, giant buildings have erupted into the sky, and the
tone changes drastically. Tourists jam the center, the museums, any place “known.” They take their selfies
and scramble onto the next foto-op. I betray my age with a sigh of resignation, appalled at the ADDS all
around me, the apparent emptiness of thinking that by having your mug in front of this famed painting or
place, it somehow endows one with anything. A vast collection of Kilroy-Was-Here imagery. It will be the final
testimony of the human race.

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Exiting Brexitland, I flew to Seattle, and then went on to Port Angeles and my friend Steve Taylor. He’s been in
5 of my films so far, and we plot another now, though I did not know that before. Things happen… Port
Angeles is now yet another of my “homes”, a still somewhat scruffy port town at the top of the Olympic
Peninsula, 22 miles across the Strait of San Juan de Fuca from Victoria, BC. I’ve stayed with Steve periodically
since 2002 I think, and lived not far away in Port Hadlock back in 2001-2. In his house, I shot Blue Strait back in
2012-3 as I recall. Steve had a lead role. [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/140067].

CARVER COUNTRY (2 of 95)View from Steve’s back window, looking out the fogged Strait.

This time around my schedule is hazy, with little tangible to dictate time. Finishing new film, Pequenos
Milagres, about my daughter Clara’s first 3 and a half years, pinned to the computer and editing. It’s now
virtually done, with just some technical stuff to tidy up, and sent off to the festival roulette game. It’s a highly
personal work, though I hope I managed to make it universal as well. Not really the kind of thing most
festivals would be inclined to take, or so I think. Too “experimental” for most documentary ones, and too – oh,
I don’t know what to call it, too “home-movie” or too personal-seeming for others. If my recent track record is
indicative perhaps none will invite it – such has been the fate of most of my more recent films – Canyon,
Bowman Lake, Dissonance, They Had It Coming, The Narcissus Flowers of Katsura-shima, Blue Strait and some
before then. Seemingly just out of tune with the fashions of the moment, or perhaps just not in tune with the
now decades-long social obsession with money and celebrity. It makes me wonder why I persist.

CARVER COUNTRY (11 of 95)

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Port Angeles. Downtown the repeated attempts to gentrify over the last 17 years I have known it seem to
chronically fail. Main street seems the same, stores or cafes opening and closing; further out the “For Lease”
and “For Sale” signs proliferate, the population seems not to grow, though on the flanks headed towards
Sequim, the highway went from two-lane to four, and shopping malls sprawl out a bit, but mostly towards
Sequim. The paper pulp plant to the west of town closed down, though I am told it is being fixed for some
new function. There is (of course) now a brewery pub in town, a seemingly mandatory thing now about
anywhere in the US. And while it seems a little spiffier in appearance than a decade ago, it also seem stuck in
time.

CARVER COUNTRY (15 of 95).jpg

And per usual for small town anywhere America it has its fair share of drugged out people, homeless camping
in public spaces – Trump’s losers, though likely as not if they could get to a poll booth, they’d vote for him. Go
figger.

DSC07321Strait of San Juan de Fuca from Port Angeles

Raymond Carver lived the last years of his life here, and is buried in the Oceanview cemetery just west of
town. There a marble slab lies, with a ceramic funereal image of him and Tess Gallagher, she awaiting her turn
for the fabled six-feet under. Beside the slab is a little bench, adjacent to which is a small metal box,
unlabelled. The grave is visited by literary tourists – writers, would be writers, fans – who must seem to know
from some source, that inside the box is a zip-lock bagged little notebook, in which their thoughts may be
scribbled or neatly written. Another contingent of those drawn to this site are alcoholics who feel that Carver
helped haul them through hard times and perhaps into sobriety.

TESSRAYMAY29 (9 of 25)

Among the notes written are some little Carveresque short stories, many items addressed “Dear Ray” and a
number of usually longer ones, in which Tess talks of her day, the visiting poet friends, the talk she gave, all
written as if to a living person. Ray Carver died of cancer, at the age of 50, in 1988.

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I find the idea of “fans,” or of writing to a dead person, or of making literary or other “fame” pilgrimages all a
bit odd, even perverse. It strikes me as a psychological illness, something that suggests the person holding
such a mind-set is not reconciled with life, and its necessary companion, death. In the case of Tess, it appears
to me as a kind of necrophilia, and in this case one of a cynical nature, that she has spent 31 years riding the
coat-tails of Ray’s fame. She is the controller of the Carver estate, and apparently defends it fiercely. While I
have never read it, a number of people tell me her own poetry is dubious. I know nothing of poetry, so
reading it would tell me little.

TESSRAYMAY29 (1 of 25).jpg

Lingering in the back of my mind, now for a decade and more, has been the thought of an essay, or perhaps a
kind of film, titled “Dear Ray” and then maybe a secondary one, “Notes from Carver Country”.

I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs of this part of America (running from Montana to
Washington, Oregon and California), images that often echo the world his stories described. Tempting.

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Along with Port Angeles, also spent a week in Portland with friends Mark and Jane. Like London, Portland is in
a phase of big changes incurred by globalized big money. The city is simply being bought, as in many other
places, and the locals priced out of their own homes. Today I read a headline which listed 200 US cities in
which the “median priced” home as a cool million. Chump change to our billionaires. Fiscal wrecking balls.

DSC07355PDX grafitti

Writing now from Butte Montana after an Amtrak trip here and drive from Whitefish. Along the way the car in
front of us had a head-on crash, as the fellow on the other side drifted into our lane a bit quickly. Texting?
Drugs? Idiocy?

DSC07541.JPG

I thought for sure there would be some dead, but crumple zones and seat-belts saw the passenger in the
white truck crawl out the window and likewise the driver of the blue car. The driver of the white truck, cause
of the accident, couldn’t manage on his own but was not seriously hurt.

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Here in Butte, yet another “home,” perhaps now for most of the summer. Lots of things to do. Perhaps some
kind of sequel to 1987’s Bell Diamond, with those left here and still alive. A landscape film in Yellowstone.
Something either photographic or cinematic with the Berkeley pit. Lots to do. Back in Port Angeles after a
touch of mulling things over, and knowing my old Sony XDcam back in Italy is on its last legs, I guess I decided
I’m not retiring just yet, bit the bullet, and bought a new camera, for a tidy bit of coinage, a Panasonic.

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Or perhaps it is an indication of terminal stupidity and recklessness. I suppose the end of the summer will tell.

PASSING TIME: OBITS

Sequence 01.Still008Dan Cornell and Hal Waldrup, up on the head-frame (illegally) for Bell Diamond

I met Dan Cornell in 1986, not long after arriving in Butte, Montana, to make a film. I had no script, title, or
money. Just a vague idea, my camera and things, Alenka Pavlin with whom I was living, and the decision to
shoot in Butte, because of the looks, the history, and the unemployment.

Arriving in early summer we went at the suggestion of someone we asked about a good place to meet people
to the Silver Dollar saloon. In ten minutes we’d met Terri Williams (now Ruggles), who offered us a place to
stay the night. Things promptly rippled out from there, and as autumn approached we’d shot a film, with
locals, in a “story” improvised as we went along. And made friends, and a curious attachment to this battered
little city. It became, for me, another “home.”

Among those met and participating in the film was Dan, originally from Brooklyn, NY., but transplanted by
choice at first to Bozeman to study, and then moved to Butte to settle in for the long haul. Dan had been in
Vietnam, a helicopter pilot, and had stories to tell and liked to tell them. Not just about his time there, but
about life. A smart guy too.

Sequence 01.Still005Sequence 01.Still006

Dan in Bell Diamond

At the time Dan was a contractor, painting houses, building, doing whatever circumstances in Butte offered.
Later on he became a teacher at the local high school, teaching painting things other than houses. He made
himself at home in his adopted city, and as time went on made a little figure there.

I recall in 1987 developing the story for Bell Diamond, with all the actors participating, and incorporating
aspects of his real life into the context. One evening, Dan, Hal Waldrup, Marshall Gaddis, Jim Duran (there to
record sound) and I clambered up the rickety Bell Diamond head-frame ladder, quite illegally, to shoot a scene
there at sunset. In it he recounted that the height – a bit over 100 feet up – was just about where the VC
would open up fire on his helicopter back in Nam. During the shoot, a very quick hit and run matter, we had
to duck twice to hide from a security guard patrolling the area in a pick-up.

Once the film was finished shooting, in September of that year, Alenka and I left for San Francisco where the
Leo Diner lab promptly trashed my original material in the developing soup (the processing machine went
down with my film in it), and added insult to injury on making the first print when someone threaded up one
30 minute reel improperly and punched sprocket dents into it. Even so, damaged, it was invited to the Berlin
Festival Forum, and got a mess of very nice reviews, 10-best-of-the-year mentions, and such. When Dan later
saw it he was disappointed and asked why I hadn’t made a film like the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona. I don’t
know how few millions that film cost, but Bell Diamond was $25,000 from an NEA Grant, nobody was paid,
local non-actors were the cast and Alenka and I were the crew. Sorry, Dan, no can do.

BUTTE THREE 11SM

After making the film I returned periodically over the decades to Butte to visit friends, staying once or twice at
Dan’s house. And in 2012, I returned to shoot Coming to Terms, and attempted a quickie second film (never
finished) in which Dan played a part.

In those last visits, Dan had stories to tell of a recent trip to Viet Nam, where he motorbiked into the
mountains with a local guide and had a great time. He’d also bought a nice BMW bike to tool around
Montana, and one summer spent some weeks on the road with his son, touring the Rocky Mountains. Back in
Butte he’d built a nice green-house addition to his house, and some raised beds for gardening. Settling in for
the relaxed pleasures of retirement.

BERKELEY PIT B 1 WIDECCSSM

Over the decades all my friends in Butte, who all knew Dan, fell out with him. And on my last visit, in summer
2015, after he’d helped make a board for me to do pastels on in his shop, and otherwise been ever helpful,
Marcella and I were going to house-sit for him while he took a trip. We arrived from Missoula, having let him
know we’d be a bit late to get to a what-needs-to-be-done look around his house. On arriving – at most 30
minutes later than originally planned, he promptly informed us we wouldn’t be house-sitting, were not to be
trusted, and otherwise did what my Butte friends said he’d done to them: seemingly arbitrarily turned on
them over some minor matter and, at least for them, succeeded in dissuading them from any further contact.
He accomplished the same for me and Marcella in that last meeting. Since leaving Butte back then, violating
my usual habit, I omitted Dan from correspondence or personal letters.

Though I wondered, regarding what had happened to my friends, and finally to myself, whether these
episodes were a kind of submerged Viet Nam induced PTSD behavior. Seemed likely to me. Or maybe it was
just that hot-headed Irish blood bubbling up. I recall him mentioning to me more than a few times, how he
had a list of 10 people he wanted to kill before he died. It wasn’t said like a joke, and he did clearly harbor
some kind of deep injury which seems to have prompted these thoughts. I tried to get him to lighten up, but
about this he was somehow seemingly very serious.

I had hoped to see Dan in the coming late Autumn, when I hope to pass again through Butte, to see friends
perhaps a last time, to try to patch things up. Seems he beat me to it.

At this age in life, at least for some of us, it is a time to try to wrap up loose ends, make amends where
possible, and otherwise make a deal with one’s self about one’s own life. Regret I wasn’t able to do so with
Dan.

THE FICKLE ALBATROSS

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All the Vermeers in New York, my 1990 film about the arts and stock market world of the time, along with
other things, has been restored by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and is to screen at the Rotterdam Film
Festival in January 2020. This has prompted the usual congratulations and nice words, though those who do
so probably have little idea that while, yes, it is a very good film, and so on, in my life it is also an albatross, a
shadow cast across my path. So a little story.

As the 1980’s were closing down, in 1989, I was finishing up a new film, All the Vermeers in New York. It was
my eleventh long film, and the first in which I had had anything remotely like a “budget.” $240,000, most
from the now-defunct PBS program American Playhouse, and the rest from a little NEA grant. Against advice
and the thoughts of some friends who know the “biz,” who had cautioned that AP was very script driven, and I
had no chance at all to get money from them, I managed to raise all the funds myself, after two beers with
Lindsay Law, then the head of AP. I made clear there was and would be no script, that I improvised, had no
“story” and would find it while making the film. I said it would be about the stock market, the arts world, with
a hint of deep New York history in it. He bought it and popped for their bottom-of-the-barrel budget of
$200,000.

For the first time I shot in 35mm, with acquaintances inquiring if finally I would get a DP because 35mm was,
well, 35mm and different, professional etc. I shot it myself, though I did have a camera assistant/focus puller.
No lights. The way I always shot.

After it was finished, it was more or less mishandled, in terms of “business.” It got a berth, to premiere at the
Montreal Film Festival, via a now-dead film world hot-shot who had assured my erstwhile “producer” – to be
unnamed here – a prize was in the works. Instead it was greeted with puzzlement, dubious press, and no prize.
(Somewhat later the head of the Venice festival told me he would have taken it.) It showed then in Berlin and
later at Telluride. I personally contacted Roger Ebert (who had reviewed positively my first 1963 film Portrait)
and asked him to look at it, which he did, and it got two thumbs up on Siskel and Ebert. But American
Playhouse found it just too strange for their imagined audience and they broadcast it in the TV wasteland time
of August. Opened commercially by the fledgling Strand Releasing company (no established distributor was
interested), against my advice it opened in 4 cities at once – New York (in a Village cinema that a month before
had been a porn house – I had argued to wait until it did BO elsewhere and then get a suitable setting),
Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In LA it had 7 good reviews and none bad. And as luck would have it,
the LA riots happened on the opening day and the city was more or less closed down, along with the cinemas,
for the next week. And so no BO, and pulled from theaters the next week. As luck would have it, it was bad
luck. While it ran for 6 months in Chicago and San Francisco, it flopped in NYC and LA, at least in $-terms, and
nationally it made no money I ever saw, even though it sat on the Variety Top Grossing 50 list for nearly 6
months.

It did find some TV sales abroad and nearly recouped its costs which didn’t need to be given back to American
Playhouse, so in effect it funded the next film, The Bed You Sleep In, which cost $110,000. For a brief period in
the “real” film world I existed. The next few films did not get commercial release, and I moved to Europe
where a few more unpleasant experiences inside “the business” confirmed my earlier view of Hollywood –
that I just did not want to be around or deal with the people who made their living making or distributing
films.

2874df95-9458-4e3c-8ca9-4a33795f36c7Emmanuelle Chaulet and Stephen Lack

Then, in 1997, shortly after it was introduced as a format, I had access to DV (digital video) through the
Dokumenta arts exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and after having a camera in my hand for one minute promptly
told myself I would never work in film again. I immediately began making work in DV, using its qualities for
what they were, very different from celluloid. For some years I was deemed an outcast in the celluloid world,
and treated as such. I proselytized for digital, saying before 1998, that it was the future, like it or not. And I
began making films without worrying about money, figuring out how to make them for absurdly small sums
(like a feature, La Lunga Ombra, with some modest name Italian actresses for $50 – of course no one was
paid). Since then I have made 9 narrative features in digital formats. And 18 long films of documentary, essay
&/or experimental forms. However, if one looked for public notice in reviews, articles and such, it would seem
as if I had died 15 or so years ago.
Sequence 01.Still010.jpg6 Easy Piecesjpg_00000022.jpgOUI NONHC MATTIE AND JEFF DRINK HOUSE
LETTERWIDE13X8.gifHomecoming

The reason for this change likely had a bit to do with aesthetics – my work in DV tended to be freer, more
“experimental” and less narrative. But it mostly had to do with money, which at bottom, is the driver for 98%
of cinema. It is a business first. I had left, just as I had appeared ready for the cinema lime-light. And while
there is, I am sure, no written blacklist, there didn’t need to be one – there was a censoring mechanism
already in place, the magical invisible hand of the market: if it won’t make money it won’t be shown, and then
it won’t be reviewed, and in practical terms it then more or less doesn’t exist. In the old Soviet Union
something similar was called making someone a non-person. Here we use other mechanisms to accomplish
the same effect.

And so while I continued to be productive, even more so than before, and while the creative/artistic quality of
my work maintained and even improved, I slipped into the cultural shadows. Lists of independent American
filmmakers of one kind or another almost invariably fail to mention my name. On the rare occasions that I
exist in such contexts it is nearly always All the Vermeers in New York or Last Chants for a Slow Dance, which
attach to my name. And never the long list of narrative features made in digital format since those times:

OUI NON

Homecoming

La Lunga Ombra

Over Here

Parable

Coming to Terms

They Had It Coming

Blue Strait

These films are all as good as Vermeers, if not as glossy – sez me. They are creatively all far more
adventurous, taking risks and pulling it off. But they are decidedly not “commercial,” and often are sharply
barbed politically. And they all cost one or two thousand dollars. Most were passed over by the festivals I sent
them to – especially in America where the Iraq war trilogy of Homecoming, Over Here and Parable, each of
which ends with a call for the impeachment of the Bush gang, was rejected by every festival they were sent to
– ones that had shown my earlier work.

And the same could be said of my “documentaries” and “essays” which also for the most part fail to hew to
conventional forms. I was at the Yamagata Documentary festival in Japan 5 times in competition since 1989,
but if you saw a list of US or world documentary filmmakers I would never appear. Or similarly, were my
landscape films Bowman Lake, Canyon and Yellowstone Canyon sent to a festival under the name James
Benning, I would bet they would be shown. Under my name they have never been screened. Weird world.

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ALL MATERIALS BOWMAN.Still015.jpg

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A list of my “documentaries” and “essays”: Speaking Directly (1973), Plain Talk & Common Sense (1985),
London Brief (1997), Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa (1999), 6 Easy Pieces (2000), Roma ritratto (2000),
Chhattisgarh Sketches (2004), Rant (2007), Swimming in Nebraska (2010), Imagens de uma cidade perdida
(2011), Narcissus Flowers of Katsura-shima (2012), Canyon (2013), Bowman Lake (2014), Yellowstone Canyon
(2019)

And “experimental”: Muri Romani (2000), Vergessensfuge (2004), Passages (2006), Dissonance (2011), Muri
Romani II (2019), Trinity (2012).

I, of course, have no way of really knowing why all this occurred, though to me it is pretty clear that the
decades-long shift in American and European culture to raw dog-eat-dog capitalist business behaviors has
taken root everywhere, including in esoteric film festivals which once at least provided a small shelf for less
commercial work. No more. Instead festivals are concerned perhaps about their corporate sponsors, about
running up a high warm butts count, and… And some of them seem to be scams, charging submission fees,
getting thousands of entries and cashing in. Well, I could go on but I will stop. The basic reality is that society
at large has become totally corrupted and there is little reason to think one’s own little puddle in it is not also
corrupted. How it shows itself is varied, but it does so.

SANTO PEDRO AND VITALINA

This past week, after reading about it for several years, mostly in glowing terms, I had the chance to see Pedro
Costa’s most recent film, Vitalina Verela (2019). It had screened at that year’s Locarno Festival, winning Best
Film, and its lead character, of the same name as the film, won Best Actress. It subsequently became a hot
item on the festival circuit. I haven’t been to festivals for some time, so I missed it. But, as things “opened up”
here in Boston I was informed it would be screening at Cambridge’s famed art house, the Brattle, and I
grabbed the brass ring and booked tickets.

I know Pedro a modest bit, meeting him a few times, chatting a bit. Not enough time to say “a friend” – more
an acquaintance. He says he likes (some of) my films, and I have liked his and seen I think most of them.
Haven’t seen the one about editing with Straub-Huillet. We shared together a quick recognition of what digital
video offered, and both jumped on it early. Myself in 97, Pedro in 99.

So after the lavish critical praise, and the prelude of having much appreciated his past films, I went in
anticipation of a cinematic treat.

Zurbarán – still life

Opening with a long Lav Diaz type shot, looking down a narrow alleyway, distant figures slowly approach the
camera and pass. Not clear at first, it is later understood this was a funeral cortege. In his opening gambit
Costa sets the terms for this film: it will be slow and measured; very slow, very measured.

As usual in his more recent work, the film is far less about “a story” than about atmosphere and tone, and the
poetic aura this generates (or doesn’t). In brief “the story” is that of an immigrant woman from the former
Portuguese colony Cabo Verde, arriving 3 days late in Lisbon for her husband’s funeral, and from that unfolds
in minimal form, a kind of backdrop, which we are told in voice over – her husband had left long ago, to make
money; he was a scoundrel, and now Vitalina is stranded in Portugal where, as she is reminded, “there is
nothing” for her.

Around this thin thread Costa constructs his film in a sequence of usually long static takes, carefully considered
and lit tableaux, echoing for the most part certain art of the 18th century, most closely the work of Iberian
artist Francisco de Zurbarán, one of the many artists of the time deeply influenced by Caravaggio. Set in deep
shadow, Costa orchestrates his images as if paintings – much remarked upon and noted by critics, with
exclamations about its “jaw-dropping” beauty. Like Caravaggio, the realist who used peasants and showed the
grime and grit of “real life” in his work, while draping it in extravagant if subtle and discreet lighting. Costa and
his cinematographer Leonardo Simões aim for a realism using carefully controlled and false lighting, no less so
than Hollywood. However in a sense they invert Spielbergian back-lighting, with, in effect, the light behind the
spectator illuminating the scene. Shadows tend to (very slowly) precede the entrance of a character, signaling
with a kind of ghostly ponderousness the next utterance or silence on offer.

Costa at work.

Occasionally the static images are punctuated with a slow tilt or pan – but very seldom. Rather we are led
through a sequence of very formal images, some of which recur as a motifs, with a religious solemnity given to
the most elemental of things. Vitalina arrives off the airplane from Cabo Verde with bare feet. The preacher’s
hand holds a pole, the frame of a door, passes by a wall. The frame of a crude confessional recurs a number of
times. Doors creak open and closed, providing momentary slashes of light. Each image is given an iconic
weight. Faces, hands, things, bodies – all heavy with gravity. With seriousness.

Step by step Costa builds his liturgy, establishing a slow and solemn cadence in which the film is transformed
into a quasi-religious ritual, as if counting rosary beads. The rhythm is measured in repeated images. The
characters are simultaneously monumentalized in long close-ups, their faces stoic and motionless, and
rendered lifeless. The occasional voice-over is repeated in slow paced words, some incantatory; others filling
us in on the background story of Vitalina and her errant husband Joaquin. Cumulatively these all combine to
make for a vaguely hypnotic flow in which the characters float, devoid of control or decisiveness, hidden in
Costa’s mostly oscura and very little chiaro. His seeming intention is to induce the spectator into a slo-mo
trance, drawn along not by drama or “action” but by submission to the lethargic pacing, actors frozen in place
in fixed tableaux, bodies standing in to represent or perhaps in Costa’s view, simply “being.” Following
Bresson’s dictum, his actors are reduced to models, who shuffle listessly, casting diffuse shadows on the grim
walls, muttering near indecipherable phrases (I sincerely doubt Portuguese speakers can understand half of
what is said and subtitled), or standing immobile, staring out of the dim shadows to which they are
condemned.

In this sombre shadow-play, sound is accentuated in a Bressonian sense: doors squeal shut and open; feet
shuffle on rough floors, objects are set on a table; in the far distance from these distinct sounds the voices of
the streets and alleyways float as if miles away. Costa’s figures are entombed in a claustrophobic world of
shadows talking to themselves, most often in almost inaudible mumbles, such that the handful of times when
a voice speaks out loud it comes as a shock.

Zurbarán – portrait of Saint Francis of Assisi

In composing his film, Costa has, certainly intentionally, genuflected to the tropes of the religion of his world –
Catholicism, particularly of the Iberian Peninsula. The film is a kind of Stations of the Cross, with Vitalina
assigned the role of staring out mournfully from the screen, lamenting her fate, and the fate of her people,
hidden in the shadows, hopeless. She kneels and sorrows at the foot of her own cross and crucifixion. In
phrasing his film in these terms, Costa gives his work an built-in lever on the spectator, which is well-trained in
how to behave in a cathedral, or a major art gallery: with hushed reverence. The hovering cloak of seriousness
hangs overhead. We don’t buy popcorn when going to a Pedro Costa film. And we don’t make wise-cracks as a
religious procession passes by, never mind the preposterous proposals that religion offers up: a virgin birth by
a holy fuck (!) spawning a tri-part god who sent himself to save the world from itself and is crucified for his
bother, and then ascends to the heavens there to dispense (depending on which sect of the subsequent
established religion one chooses to believe) harsh punishments or “love” to those who embrace and follow
him. Belief suffers no rational quibbles or examination – you do or you don’t believe.

In wrapping himself in the aura of religious severity, Costa has inoculated himself against criticism from his
most ardent “fans” – Pedro can do no wrong. Hence one watches in sombre seriousness, as his procession
passes by, and we watch as Vitalina watches her life go down the drain. The supplicants wash themselves in
the sadness of her life, and her stoicism in the face of her fate; it is a form of absolution or flagellation: I
watched, ergo I am good.

This is one of the tricks of the religious trade (and many others). If one does it – in this case watch a Costa film
– it somehow makes one good for having watched the misery he is showing. Just like being of the slim
minority of people who, say, watch a serious documentary about some serious subject, usually about
something you already know about and already agree with its sociopolitical slant, and so you learn little or
nothing, but you receive the benediction of a shared belief: it does nothing in the real world outside of Plato’s
cinema, but it makes the celebrants feel good about themselves. In intimate relations this is called
masturbation.

Unfortunately this all congeals, like the religious ceremonies it is aping, into an ossified ritual, emptied of the
intended meaning. In religion this signifies the moral corruption of the institutions, reducing the original life-
pulse which gave birth to the given religion into empty if solemn gestures. In art, including cinema, this often
turns to an inward fold, in which the artist regurgitates their own tropes, and drives them toward an
indigestible self-parody (Godard, Greenaway, Straub-Huillet and others), looping their particular
look/shots/mode of presentation and purported principles, again and again – instantly recognizable as theirs,
but increasingly less interesting except to disciples. In Costa’s case it has evolved into a form of very humorless
self-parody, his apparent obsessions(s) having swamped the life out of his stoic subjects, now cast in tableaux
in which they stand posing, or shuffle in the shadows, their faces often obscured, standing in for the weeping
figures at the foot of the cross.

In attempting to illuminate the lives of his characters and their world, Costa’s severe aestheticism instead kills
them. Where Costa says he makes these films to give voice to the lives of these immigrants, instead he
confines them to a narrow aesthetic trap, his aesthetic trap, far more limited than the socio-political realm to
which they are confined in reality. The truth is that precious few people will ever see this film, and of those
who do most live in an esoteric realm in which cinema is a bizarre host, in which watching movies, it is
believed, will give you insight into the truth of life, a delusion which they share with their fellow cineastes.
Costa – by his own admission – grew up in a cathedral, the Cinemateca Portuguese, ingesting his communions
there, where he learned the vast catechisms of the cinema and came away with a litany of things he’d learned.
He puts these on display for those in the know, a nod to this great name and and that and then another, for
the priests to decipher and nod approvingly. Like Biblical citations or the Torah.

As it happens, I have lived in Lisboa a bit, and in the late 90’s visited Fontainhas when it was alive, a favela of
homemade houses, mostly of immigrants from Cabo Verde, but also others. It was indeed a place of drugs and
booze (just like classier neighborhoods), and it was very poor. But as other similar places around the world, it
was also lively, colorful, energetic. As it were, compared to the dour Portuguese surrounding it, it had
“rhythm” which came with the African source of its residents.

In Costa’s portrayals, commencing with his early 35mm films, this liveliness is largely absent and in Vitalina
Verela, it is utterly absent – perhaps the men playing cards in the suffocating shadows being the only
exception. So while Costa claims to be giving these people a voice, showing them to the world from which
they are hidden, he is not really doing so; rather he is imposing his grim dour view upon them and claiming it is
their voice. Just like colonialists always assert they are doing good for those they have occupied, bringing them
salvation through Christ or capitalism. Of course Pedro would counter that his entourage of regulars are full
participants, voluntarily sharing this work, and hence it is an expression of themselves, and not just Pedro’s
vision. And in the muffled confines of the inner sanctum of his church, this will likely beget assent. As
colonizers invariably find reason to ethically and morally take the high ground in their own minds.

Pedro Costa
Vitalina Verela comes to its dour conclusion with a final entourage, heading to the cemetery, down the same
alley which we saw in the first shot. We’ve come full circle, ashes to ashes. Only at the film’s conclusion do we
find a glimpse of daylight, among the graves and mausoleums, where the immigrants’ burial places are marked
with numbers, erased in life and in death. As if a flashback we are then afforded a glimpse of Vitalina’s home
in Cabo Verde, a mountain top place of cinder-block and concrete, with vertiginous peaks behind it, the
Valhalla she left behind to face her personal hell in Lisbon.

In Portugal there is a concept, which once you understand it, seems tangible in their society and culture – the
concept of saudade. This is a feeling, a sensibility which draws from a nostalgia for something absent or lost,
or even something which never was; it comes as a sadness to be heard in the music of fado (fate), and
something which pervades Portugal’s culture. I was once told it derived from the disappearance of King
Sebastiao in the Battle of Alcazar in 1578, and his failure to return, which, supposedly the Portuguese have
waited for ever since. Or perhaps it is a reverie for the long collapsed empire. Whatever its sources, as one
who lived there and felt it, it certainly pervades Portuguese culture, in its arts and in every day living.

Pedro Costa provides a perfect embodiment of this saudade quality in his films, most particularly in Vitalena
Varela, where his solemnity pervades each frame. In turn we might say that he imposes his Portuguese
colonial imperialism on his characters, dressing them in darkness, weighing them down with a somnolent pace
in which they are suffocated and condemned to perdition, surrounded with a small chorus of extras who stand
immobile as the glaze of sticky amber congeals about them.
In reducing Vitalina into a religious icon, the stoic body and face (which won “Best Actress” in Locarno) set in a
looming darkness, Costa has sucked all her vita out and left an impressive shell. Some have suggested this film
is a kind of horror film. Or perhaps vampire, the Portuguese empire still taking gold from its victims?

At the screening (late afternoon of two screening), with the beating heart of America’s training ground for the
elite of its empire, Harvard University, a very short 3 minute walk away, the audience was composed of five
people, including me and the two friends I invited to come see it. Neither of my friends liked it.

There is a cure for everything; it is called death.

MY BRILLIANT (ACADEMIC) CAREER (1)

In the academic sense, I have never been a “good student,” and in fact my career in school has been
checkered with what the outside eye would perceive as failure. I hated high school and contrived to escape it
early by going to summer school each year in order to accrue credits enough to leave in 3 years rather than 4.
Along the way I was antagonized by the mostly bad teaching, and in turn I antagonized the system. At the
end of those 3 years I declined to go to my graduation ceremony and later found out I was punished for this
transgression by formally not receiving the papers that said I had completed my studies. I found this out much
later on, when I went to prison for refusing to participate in the American war machine, when they suggested I
do remedial classes there because there was no record of my having graduated. I noted for the prison
people that I’d done two years of college and they let it go. I was busy reading Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre,
Silone, John Barths, Duras, Brecht, and things like that while in prison.

Jon singing at Sadie Hawkins dance 1958

Going on to college in 1960 I anticipated a big change in the academic reality, but at the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago, where I landed to study architecture, it didn’t really seem that much different, except I
wasn’t living at home. Within 6 weeks I concluded I would never get a degree, and figured out how to
manipulate the system to my advantage by dropping all courses I didn’t enjoy within 6 weeks, in which case
these – like my high school diploma – vanished from the record as if I’d never signed up. I hence was on the
dean’s honors list my first two semesters, and got a scholarship. After that year I also concluded that
architecture was a business and I didn’t feel at all comfortable with that. So secretly, with regard to my
parents, I applied to go to an art school in Britain, the Bath Academy of Arts, and was accepted.

Crown Hall, IIT, home of architectural school and Institute of Design

That summer I went to the UK on a ship, checked the school and found it was a playground for rich kids, with
snazzy MG’s and Morgan’s and such, and decided I would not fit in or like it there either. So after a summer
of hitchhiking in Europe I returned to the US, where the Pratt Institute accepted me, but wanted me to wait a
semester as I’d applied late. I didn’t like that so I went back to Chicago and got into the Institute of Design, at
the time considered one of the top schools in the States for such things. I excelled, got straight A’s and the
second semester did all the work equally well but rebelled and told them they were just like the academies of
old which they criticized, and that they just taught a different set of rigid cliches, those of modernism. And I
left, looking to find a job over the summer, but the Postal Service, whose test I’d passed, required a Pledge of
Allegiance, which I could not do. I returned to ID, talked with the dean of the school, Jay Doblin, and told him I
didn’t want to get a degree, and would like to attend solely to use the equipment and take classes that were of
interest to me, but not other things. He told me that in his view I was already beyond what they had to teach,
and let me stay under the terms I described. But that didn’t last long as the Marines sent a recruiting team on
campus and I and a few friends did a political protest. We were called up to the IIT dean and told to cease and
desist, which the others agreed to do. I, instead, knowing I had no interest in a degree anyway, announced I
would protest against the Armour Research Institute, which was part of IIT, and did research for the military.
Meantime the Cuban missile crisis arrived, and I hunkered down with my friends to smoke dope and drink
lousy red wine waiting to be incinerated in a nuclear war. I sold everything I had (some books) and checked
the process of moving to New Zealand. However, by the time I had it all together to make that move the crisis
had blown over. So, almost arbitrarily, I decided to become a filmmaker, spent a month going to movies at the
Clark Street Cinema, which showed 2 different films each day – old Hollywood and European classics, and new
European and Japanese art house films – and got my film education. I bought a Bolex in NYC, and decamped
for Europe. And that was the end of my academic life. While I had “dropped out” in 60’s fashion I later
found out I’d also been expelled – not that it mattered to me. I spent a year and a half in Europe and Mexico,
hitch-hiking and making my first three films. And then returned to the USA knowing I would go to prison for
refusing to serve in the military. I was locked up from March 1965-June 1967. It was another education, as
meaningful and useful to me as the two years I’d spent in college.

And that was my academic career, until in 2007, I was invited to teach at Yonsei University in Korea –
considered one of the country’s top three schools – and was magically elevated to a full Professorship at the
age of 64. It was my first ever actual job. A year later they informed me that in Korea mandatory retirement
comes at 65, but they solved that problem by making me a “Distinguished Professor,” and I spent 3 more years
teaching (in the easiest job one can imagine) and quit of my own choice last July, 2011, though the school
wanted me to stay. And thus ended my brilliant academic career.

In the many years from leaving prison to becoming a professor I did have the experience of showing my films
at many universities, colleges and art schools, which for the most part was an eye-opening process. Back in
the early 70’s, along with many other things, these schools began to do “Film Studies” and related courses –
history, theory, and making. It was indeed quite fashionable, and in turn it bred a peculiar kind of academic
filmmaking, often weighted with theoretical or other ideological baggage – feminism, “minority” tilts, and all
kinds of things. In my glancing passages through these institutions I was often asked to look at work and give
my opinions, sometimes to PhD candidates who would then enter teaching film. The work I saw was most
often mind-bogglingly bad, though presented by the professors or teachers as good work. Usually it was
clotted with whatever fashionable intellectual winds were sweeping through, and usually they evinced not
even the most basic artistic sensibility. Most of these films seemed to strain to demonstrate some intellectual
“thesis,” and they were terrible. And over the decades this kind of “filmmaking” was taught, reproducing
itself. It also reproduced the notion in our groves of academe that after such studies, with one’s fresh
diploma, a job in the industry – either the actual filmmaking industry or the film studies industry – would
materialize. Anyone remotely connected with the industry is well aware that a degree is worth a little less
than toilet paper in the business, as the statistics available to those very schools, busy charging students 40K a
year and up, show, and of which they are quite aware. Similarly the chances for snagging the next
generation’s academic slot are rather dim as the line is endless and the places few and becoming fewer. So,
like many other things in our culture, what is offered up is more or less a fraud. I bring this up, perhaps
prompted by a letter I received last autumn, from a friend, Ray Carney, who teaches at Boston University.
Over the years he’s told me of his situation, which has steadily worsened, even as I have in the same years
crossed paths with former students of his, whose testimony is of a teacher who genuinely changed them for
the better, opened their eyes, and, well, did what a teacher should do: helped them learn to comprehend the
world honestly. I think his blog, now blocked by BU, offers testimony in its very high hits-per-day, and the
positive commentary on it, that Ray has been an inspiration to a generation of students. Which seems to
make him a threat to BU. (See www.Cassavetes.com.)

About 6 years ago I was invited to do a workshop at BU, a 7 day matter for BU students, but also open to
others. So I had around 12 students, including a few BU graduate film school ones, down to some young girls
utterly inexperienced. I’m used to this, and my teaching philosophy is to cut the bullshit talk, and get down
to a very carefully bracketed bit of work – work which should also be play. So after some days of this –
essentially little guided exercises that open up one’s creative spirits to what digital video can be – I had them
each make a little film, and at the end of the week we had a screening of films running around 90 minutes
total. And most of it was from very good, to quite creditable. Of course one can’t make those without innate
talent suddenly acquire it, though you can nicely tell them they should find some other outlet suitable to
whatever talents they might have, though film schools seem loathe to do so. In any event the person who’d
invited me was rather surprised and told me he hadn’t really expected the students to actually “do
something” over the week, where in reality they’d each made three or four simple “learning” films, and then
the final one. The students were, naturally, excited and pleased with themselves and the process, and I
suppose with this kind of teaching which so quickly and successfully prompted them to learn so much so fast,
and make something worth showing. As it happened, the teacher who’d invited me had also required the
participants to write a little diary of the process. He passed those along to me, and in those done by the BU
grad students there were comments to the effect, “why didn’t we do this the last two years?” Indeed. And,
being reasonably well acquainted with many film schools, I know most would be deliriously pleased if their
students made work so good as this workshop’s at the end of an entire year. But, for the most part, those
teaching don’t really know how to make such work themselves, and less how to convey to students the
sensibilities to try themselves. There are exceptions, of course – I’d point to Cal Arts as one school that seems
to work, but then it has some real filmmakers on the faculty – Jim Benning, Thom Andersen, Nina Menkes
among them, and from the viewpoint of students from there that I’ve met, they’re good teachers as well.

While doing that workshop, there was a little gathering for me, which the faculty seems to have pointedly
avoided, except as it happened, for Ray Carney. I’ve been to many schools and this seems endemic. If not of
the glamor/fame bracket (I am sure they’d show up for Spielberg or someone of contemporary Hollywood
fame) – my experience is that the filmmaker/teacher faculty seldom shows up for such things. I feel they
perceive someone like me as a threat – someone who actually makes films. When they have materialized I
have literally heard some teachers tell me they have, once upon a time, made one film, doubtless one I’d fear
to see. And they are the teachers! During that BU visit Ray told me a little bit about what the administration
was doing to him, and in turn I wrote a letter to the President of BU. In the turgid language of a bureaucrat he
replied that the Film Department was undergoing an administrative change of some sort, and that he’d take
my note into account. And indeed the Department did change a bit – it became more Hollywood oriented,
more technical, and more averse to creative thinking. In effect it became a trade-school with the little caveat
that the industry for which it cranks out techies has no room for them. I was told a year at BU runs around
60K. An expensive con. Though, I guess one must, in light of the rest of American culture these days, from
Wall Street to K Street, and doubtless down your nearby Main Street, rack it up to a generalized corruption –
economic, moral, ethical – which is now the nation’s “norm.” One would like to fantasize that universities are
pristine exceptions to this rule, but even the most casual look shows they are in reality – with perhaps their
sports programs demonstrating it most clearly – paragons of corruption, basically in the service of our
corporate overlords. Money talks and bullshit walks. Even in our most respected educational institutions.

CROSSING PATHS: JAMES BENNING

Amsterdam

Returning back from six weeks travel crammed with too much to ponder, a cloud of personal anxiety for
Marcella who is still in Italy with medical problems which make me feel I should be there with her, the gray
envelope of aloneness here in Seoul jangled only by the pressing matter of getting ready for academic chores, I
found myself looking through computer files for something else, and bumped into this – a letter to both Jim
Benning and Leighton Pierce, two filmmakers I respect immensely and like to think of as friends:

Hi
I hope you won’t mind me bunching this up, but since it’s about something by each of you, and kind of
comparative, and as I am dead tired from finishing up (I hope to hell – the Jeonju fest runs tapes through a
studio that is merciless, and I’d sent 3 so far, and each one has flaws I didn’t see – dropped pixels, shifted
image, little buzz line at bottom of one passage – and I was up to 11 last nite and up at 5am working to 1:30pm
before I took off for class and must make new tape tonite, poor me).

Anyway today I looked at a film of each of you – #1, and Ruhr. It would be hard to find two more wildly
different films (unless I opted for totally badly crafted ones) and yet somehow they both did similar things,
though coming from completely different angles.

I’ve seen #1 maybe 4 or 5 times before, but hadn’t seen it for quite a while. Like almost all your work,
Leighton, it rewards re-looking again and again. #1 is so rich, a first look is almost too much to take in, one
gets lost in the dust, the forms shifting so rapidly and organically, a wild painterliness almost overwhelming in
its seeming pace, the sounds shifting, hinting, guiding. But with each repeated look the rush of images takes
on more and more orderliness, like peeling back the layers of some gorgeous plant, each layer leading to
another equally beautiful and sensuous, yet still withholding its secret. Today I felt I saw so much more than
the last time, though it is clear this poem will remain ever elusive. And enticing. I am sure I could watch and
hear it 100 times – which I think I might have done with some of your films – well that’s a bit rhetorical of
course. How about 30 or 40 times? Anyway #1 is stunning, in quite a literal sense.

Then I saw Ruhr, on a sizable screen, with my good projector. Even with the compression it was quite clear
and detailed, though I am sure off original it is much more so. The compression mostly induced some motion
artifacts, little jerkiness – annoying, but one is able to read through it.

For a few decades, Jim, I’ve thought your work was sadly compromised by shooting in 16mm, and I fantasized
your being able to do it in 35mm, though I understood only too well the brutal fiscal logic that didn’t let you
do that (and why I pestered you for a decade and more about DV). So seeing the HD, the wide-screen format,
the far better sound was all a distinct pleasure. And I was very very impressed with Ruhr, which as radical as it
is I suppose for most people, I feel really works. Though the viewer must give it an awful lot, which I know
most (95% or more? of even supposedly adventurous festival goers?) aren’t game to give. But if you do then
you really look and see and listen, it is very rewarding, guiding one to be attentive to the smallest of things,
and in a way out of what most would think as almost “nothing” you offer a lesson in dramatic construction.
The little leaf in the tunnel, inconsequential and in most circumstances unnoticeable, makes an ironic little
dance; the dance of steel pipes in the making (reminded me a little of the lumber mill sequences in The Bed
You Sleep In), forcing one to look and look (and listen and listen), all the while shifting one’s sense of time
steadily to another state, while tuning up the eyes and ears. The forest sequence was gorgeous, the
composition really exquisite with the two heavier trunks constraining what almost seemed a spatially false
space of light between them; the dark mass to the right pulsating – I found myself thinking of Caspar David
Friedrick, and perhaps a touch of Gerhardt Richter (some things of his), and some of the denser images of
Pollock, especially late painting. The jets taking off, the long pause and then the rustle of the branches,
autumn leaves falling – this almost “nothing” was ripe with space to think and ponder. Its repetition was again
a lesson in drama – the dramatic act, the long pause, the rustled response, the senses being tuned to what is
in the image and the sound. The mosque sequence seemed a bit strange, though being familiar with
Germany, I knew it was not so strange, though I find this religious genuflecting dubious, sad, and a bit fearful –
whether of Muslims or our home-grown erstwhile Christians. The Serra cleaning was the one place where I
itched to see a not-Benning turn: as I watched and it came to a close I promptly thought that it would have
been gorgeous (and truthful) to have the guy go off screen with his stuff, and then shot unchanged do a very
very slow dissolve to the cleaned work, a large steel monolith in the middle of the screen. Kind of thing I
would have done. The street scene – stolid, drab, echt deutsch – seemed an anti-climax, though it too took on
its own burgerlich life, and off-screen the sound hinted at the wider world, the industrial sounds hovering just
a step away (again, was reminded of Bed where the sound of the pulp mill was ever present on the track).

And then the coke tower sequence, where you lay down the gauntlet, and I suppose most would decline the
offer. I looked carefully the whole time, while it was brighter my eyes at a later point saturated with the
contrast, popped back and forth, almost hallucinogenic, while the ears tuned to the sounds, seeming almost
Penderecki or some Alvo Part, the song of the industrial apparatus, trying to synchronize the repeated noises
that seemed to presage the sudden burst of steams, the light drowned by the industrial clouds, the sly rhythm
again building the sense of drama. The off-screen thump, the sequence of up/down siren(?) sounds
announcing yet another deluge. The light slowly dropping, and the coke tower coiled with black shadow,
morphing into the WTC towers – such is what an hour will give you to fill in the screen with your own
thoughts.

Great film, James.

What both films do, in completely differing tacks, is move the viewer to SEE and to HEAR. #1, a slightly long
poem, plunges the emotions, whips them into a frenzied sensuousness, and leaves you – like making love,
satiated and wanting more. Ruhr, a more massive work than its 2 hours suggest, takes another route, and
likewise tunes the eyes and ears, but leaves a vast canvas for the viewer to project their own thoughts onto
the process. I felt Ruhr to have an ominous tone, a weightiness related perhaps to Anselm Kiefer.

Off the top of my head, those are my thoughts of the moment. I’ll be chewing on them a bit and probably
writing more or more clearly on cinemaelectronica in the next days – if I can get damned Swimming fixed and
out of my hands.
Back in Seoul following my travels, I flicked on the computers which had frozen along with everything in my
living box in my winter absence. One put out a signal about DMI that sent me scrambling to Google to solve.
Five days later it’s back up. And the others are under the harness, taking care of chores (mistakes discovered
in screenings in Rotterdam and Jerusalem.) Shortly it will be on to new work – scavenging the several hundred
tapes to both get them on Hard Disks before my tape-running machines give up the ghost, and at the same
time to look at the material gathered since 1996, and find whatever films are hiding in there. I suspect there’s
3-5 features and lots more shorts waiting to be discovered and organized. And along with that beginning to
think about and take a few tangible steps towards shooting a film, narrative, in HD, in the summer, or perhaps
next winter.

Perhaps it is getting on in age, the fabled mid-life crisis arriving rather late (67 is not mid-life unless you are
Methusala), or perhaps it is a look at the changed world around me, but as I glance at the racks of tapes, or
begin to write people about new film, I find I am less than enthused, and instead silently ask myself, “what’s
the point?”

Certainly in my case it’s not the old stand-by, “to make a living,” as it is 100% certain that whichever of these –
odd films culled from the backlog of footage, or a quasi-acceptable narrative shot in HD – they are not in the
current world going to make any money, plain and simple. They will cost a little or in the case of the narrative
film, a little pile, of my own limited money with old age and its problems, more or less upon me, unprotected
by any insurance for health, life, etc. They’ll also cost lots of time and energy. So no, it ain’t for money, which
my work has never brought me, except belatedly here near end-game, tangentially, via a teaching job which I
guess I “earned” the right to have with 4+ decades of film/video-making. Nor is it for the cultural pats-on-
the-head of festivals showing your work, or retrospectives here and there, or an article written about one’s
work. I know some people like, appreciate, or even need such things, for their sense of self-respect or “ego.”
But being honest, such things really don’t mean much to me, perhaps because I am self-confident enough (or
arrogant, depending how you look at it) that I really don’t need external approval: I know very well that I am
very good at what I do, and given I am the one most acquainted with the actual processes and the penury
involved, I know it better than anyone else could. In fact often such sentiments are expressed in ways that
are actually irritating for me. So, nope, it’s not the back pats and gushing “loved it” that prompts me. And
when I watch the list of credits roll by in most films, and think someone just directed, or someone just did
camera, and someone else edited, well….

Being honest with myself I wonder is it exhaustion, just a tiredness in the face of what this work is, and I think
in some part it is. After nearly 50 years (in 2013) it would be hard to say making a film is exciting or a thrill, as I
read others imagine it must be. It’s a perverse kind of non-paying job, or a bad habit, or, probably a
compulsion. I don’t know how to do nothing, to relax; instead I am a non-stop workaholic, doing one thing or
another all day long. And I know – from my own experience – that some others are very much the same.

On another level, there is a kind of self-pleasure – doing something that pleases one’s self. When I find in
working something new, something I did not know or did not know I knew, there is a flash of cognition, and
this triggers a mode of happiness. That is the thing which, when others perceive it, and are able to articulate
it, I am able to feel a genuine sense of connection, of “communion.” It is perhaps the mix of this kind of
thing, along with the communion I feel with the work itself that keeps things going. For example I saw this on
Mubi, regarding James’ film, and I felt sure that when he saw this he felt a flush of something that I guess we
could say verges on the “spiritual.”

Matt Nelson

on Tue 02 Mar at 06:08 PM

As someone coming to Ruhr with almost no background in cinema or visual literacy, as a reader and writer, I
have to say that Ruhr affected me like nothing else I’ve ever seen. I learned much about the world, about
myself, through it⎯about how the translation of energy from one form into another forms rhythms which
themselves are only interesting in their breaks because the breaks suggest larger, more mysterious rhythms at
work, rhythms at higher levels of attention.

So the nature of my own attention seems different to me now because the film helped me attend to those
rhythms. The question of art’s fidelity to reality is an old one, and quite misplaced, I think. As Mr. Benning
points out, the shots were composed in a frame. And they are still in a way no human eye ever could be, which
allowed me the opportunity to experience something that I never would have, even if I had been in those
particular places at those particular times. I wouldn’t question any alterations made by the maker of the film
than I would trouble with a composer organizing the notes into a score. The manipulation of the matter reality
through a human consciousness is one way to understand art, and quite precisely personal, it seems to me.

And Ruhr changed my understanding of what might be an objective reality or a truth. That also seems quite
personal to me—a translation one person’s personal into another’s—and I’m glad to my bones to have gotten
the experience. So, should Mr Benning happen to read this: thank you.

Jim Benning

As it happens, while “known” in the rarified avant garde experimental film world when I met him back in 1977
or 78, I think at the Edinburgh Festival, James has mainly been in the cultural arts-world background, working
away with a consistency similar to my own: a workaholic. But he had to juggle his pay-day job, teaching (for
some time now at Cal Arts, since 1987; before that in NYC scrambling on grants and visiting artist gigs), from
which I suspect he extracted most or much of the money to pay for doing his films. His work required a lot of
travel over the years, really a lot, and I think we can guess he spent the last 3 decades on a real work pattern –
all for marginal money, and the usual festival/archive/museum screenings deal. And for much of it having to
cover the costs from his own pocket. In the last years he’s been rewarded (!) with some retrospectives, and
long over-due acknowledgment of the cumulative weight of his ouvre. With an eye to the future, the Austrian
Filmmuseum in Wien is beginning to make archival prints and K2 digital copies of all his films. (Need I say
there weren’t any US offers to do the same.) And with his newer HD digital works I feel he’s taken a leap in his
work, consolidating all he’s learned and applying it with tools that genuinely match his artistic sensibilities. I
confess a real pleasure in seeing this all unfold, however belated it seems to me to be.

With his new, appropriate for his work and far less expensive HD tools, I hope he can maintain the energies to
carry on at the standard he set in Ruhr, and in the related Pig Iron 30 minute film which I saw in Jeonju last
spring.

RuhrPig IronCasting a Glance (Spiral Jetty)13 LakesRuhrTen SkiesJames at work, Ruhr

Over the decades I’ve had the pleasure to share a small bit of time, usually over a beer, with Jim, and to see if
not all his films, most of them. He’s had kind words about my own efforts, which I appreciate. Perhaps in a
handful of years his work will be more readily available to share – on BluRay or whatever comes next that way.
Meantime if you’d like to take a stab at Ruhr, I think you can download it here.

Or for a bit of reading, you can try this or this. But the best would be try to see some of his films if you can.

10 Skies
[In a week or two I’ll continue with this rumination, with some thoughts on Leighton Pierce.]

NATHANIEL DORSKY, IN RETROSPECT

Triste, by Nathaniel Dorsky

Nathaniel Dorsky Retrospective at the Rotterdam International Film Festival

January 27th 28th 29th 30th 31st

Five shows in person and then the cycle will be repeated in a slightly different order for five more days
beginning on February 1st. Approximate time for all shows: 4pm

Thursday, January 27th and repeated on Tuesday, February 1st

Titled: The Two Sides of Light

Variations
Pneuma
Love’s Refrain

FridayJanuary 28th and repeated on Wednesday, February 2nd

Titled: Songs of the Earth

A Fall Trip Home

Alaya
Arbor Vitae

Saturday, January 29th and repeated on Saturday, February 5th

Titled: Songs of Another Time

Song and Solitude

Pastourelle
Threnody
The Visitation

Sunday, January 30th and repeated on Friday, February 4th

Titled: The Late Quartet

Sarabande
Compline
Aubade
Winter

Monday, January 31st and repeated on Thursday, February 3rd,

Titled: The Hours and the Days

Triste
Hours for Jerome

Link for Rotterdam Festival

I met Nathaniel sometime in the mid-1980’s, when moving back to the Bay Area which I’d lived in during the
late 1960’s and start of the 70’s. Back then he was already a fixture in the San Francisco film world, known for
his films (17 Reasons Why, Alaya, Pneuma), but also for being a “film doctor.” He was famed for his uncanny
capacity to be able rescue a film, so that if someone shot a hopeless mess, he could give it a once over, find
some editorial thread, and stitch it together, if not into gold, at least into something watchable, and if the stuff
was there to do the trick, maybe more. He was pretty busy at this trade.

I frankly don’t recall how we met – I assume some modest film event, but I really don’t remember. What I do
remember is becoming his dealer – well, a kind of dealer. As a bottom-of-the-fiscal-barrel filmmaker I had a
habit of buying up cheap, out-of-date, or otherwise odd or undesirable film stocks. When I had a weird
emulsion, or old film carton and can, Nick would eagerly snap it up. Or I gave it to him. He was a kind of
celluloid fetishist, enamored of the actual stuff – the celluloid base, the emulsion, the label, the can. I was just
a crude opportunist looking to save some money I didn’t have, and he was a lover of the stuff. He tells me
Triste was made of those rolls he got from me. He would hand process stock, and in one of my own films he
gave me a minute of outs of some beautiful hand-processed work, flashing blue. Also some sections of outs
from Alaya, sand shifting in the wind. And he let himself be in that film, Rembrandt Laughing, a filmic
valentine to one of the qualities that makes San Francisco such a pleasure.

Dorsky’s hand processed film, mangled on his living room rug

Frame grabs from Rembrandt Laughing

Along with himself as “actor,” and the blue, torn-emulsion film and the shifting grains of sand, he also became
in a sense embodied in the film through his persona, which materialized in his scenes, in my use of his
collection of sand, and in echoes that reverberate throughout the film of a certain sensibility which he is, and
which I hope I faithfully reflected. Nowadays thoughts of that film caste another tone as I am prompted to
remember Jon A. English, the lead actor/musician, and composer for many of my films, who died 14 years ago.
And Roger Ruffin, in this film and 3 others of mine, who died this past year. And as well thinking of the difficult
time some others have had since then. So it is a saving grace that I also have Nathaniel to think of, a glimmer
of the serious joy which the film was about. Though we are very different souls, Nick and me, along some very
fundamental places we share a deep kinship.

My life took me away from San Francisco, and a few years later, in Italy (a place Nick loves) the Pesaro Film
Festival, (once a very lively and good one, perhaps still is), invited me to program some films for them. One I
chose was Nathaniel’s Alaya – 30 minutes of silence and sand. For me it’s a gorgeous film, in its utter
simplicity, its masterful editing, and I’ve seen it maybe 5 or 6 times. One minute into it and I am in a
meditative state, wandering in my home-grown kind of Buddhist thought. Anyone who knows me at all
knows how hard it is to get me to watch a film once, much less twice, and five times, well….! However,
programming it I thought it was likely a hard film for most viewers, and I suggested they place it last in line,
lest people leave and miss the other films. The screening was on a hot Italian summer day, the cinema had no
air conditioning, and was packed. It was like an oven. The projector rolled and… and Nathaniel’s film was first
despite my suggestion, and my thoughts went gray as I thought of the empty cinema to come. Half an hour
later though I was elated – almost no one left, and later, when the discussion time came, the film drew very
positive comments. I’d miscalculated something seriously – my trust in the audience? my trust in Nathaniel’s
artistry? I learned a good lesson.

A dish of stones in Nathaniel’s apartment, shown in Rembrandt LaughingFrame grab, Alaya

The last time I saw Nathaniel was in Portland, Oregon, 5 years ago. He was doing a screening for a small
group, the Cinema Project. The setting was a small art gallery, on the east side of the Willamette, and
Nathaniel, as usual, was concerned with the projection – the color temperature, that the machine ran
smoothly, at 18fps, focus. He seemed a bit harried, and there wasn’t much chance to talk. If I recall properly
he, and a cluster from the screening, afterward went to a cafe, and Marcella and I joined, but it was a bit too
much to actually have words. Since then we’ve corresponded here and there, and I’ve watched with a warm
pleasure as his work has found screenings around the world – in Paris, New York, London. I’m trying to get
him here to Korea, not only for the selfish reason to see his films, and to see him, but also he’s never been to
Asia. At least not physically. He might like, and it would be good for his work to get seen in this part of the
world.

“In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a
film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the
sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of
heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.”
— Nathaniel Dorsky

PastourelleAubadeComplineSong and SolitudeThe VisitationLove’s RefrainTriste

As it turns out, one of my own films has been invited to Rotterdam as well so I’ll be able to catch up with Nick
there, see the new films I haven’t and see some others again. And if things work out, I suggested we go on
the train to Den Haag for him to see the gorgeous View of Delft, and a few other Vermeers there at the
Mauritshuis. And if very lucky, perhaps the canals will be frozen and we can go ice-skating!

Bowl of miso soup, Nathaniel’s feet, in Rembrandt Laughing

Nathaniel’s films are certainly not for everyone – in truth for a little minority of people who are open to a kind
of rarified experience rather remote from the hurly-burly of our society, and most of the cinema it produces.
But if you’re of the inclination to enjoy, say, a Persian or Indian miniature, or marvel at the exquisite
perfection of van Eyck’s “Als ich kann” or simply let the wonder of a flicker of light against a wall stun you,
then his discreet and subtle work just might be your ticket. So if at Rotterdam, or somewhere near, this is a
rare chance to see this work.