AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FILM is a cruel place, maybe especially if you came of age (like I did) dreaming big during the Wes Anderson/Paul Thomas Anderson/Kevin Smith/Quentin Tarantino years, in which every miserable hack was allegedly one breakout spec script or shoestring feature away from becoming the next Spielberg.

NJ-based filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell is the opposite of a hack, but he does describe himself as miserable, and has always been up front about the many difficulties of trying to write, direct and self-distribute his own unique flavor of low-budget cinema (imbued with a clear love for neorealism, slow cinema and documentary) while also holding down a workaday job, without flashy connections or inherited intergenerational wealth. Bell has quietly built a massive body of work, and watching any of his films—a handful of which are free to watch on leftist news site Means.TV, many others of which he happily shares with anyone who’ll ask—his mordant sense of humor is immediately obvious.

The one exception might be Bell’s first feature The Winds That Scatter, a solemn meditation on the alienation of a displaced Syrian refugee (Ahmad Chahrour) trying to eke out a living in an apathetic, oblivious United States. Since then Bell has turned out a brief meet-cute romantic comedy (The City is Like a Character in the Film), directly engaged Ridley Scott’s casual Islamophobia with the short film Mohammed So-and-So), woven a staggering portrait of George W. Bush entirely from archival TV footage in the miniseries Miss Me Yet1, and delivered a stunning naturalistic portrait of life for a NYC delivery man at the margins during COVID, in his most recent feature Failed State codirected with Mitch Blummer. And more. (For my money, Failed State is, and will one day be recognized as, one of the essential films about the pandemic’s atomizing effects on society.)

Chris is one of the hardest-working and most true-blue grassroots independent (as opposed to NEON/A24 “independent”) people making movies today. He’s also a dear friend; I caught a screening of his hilarious short Pilgrimage at a 2011 showcase organized by Kings County Cinema Society (RIP) and approached him thereafter to say how much I loved it. This evening at Roxy Cinema New York, Chris is holding a “memorial service” screening for his second feature, Incorrectional, starring Ali Alwan and Rayvin Disla as Ali and Saeed (respectively), a father and his teenage son whose strained relationship eventually demolishes Bell’s narrative in real time. It’s a bracing, droll, humanist work that deserves, and deserved, more attention. A few days before the event, I called Chris to try and understand why he was doing this.

Tonight, you will appear before and after a screening of Incorrectional. I’m assuming there is some kind of talkback. But the main thing is… you are also going to purge the film from a hard drive? From all hard drives? Just spell that out for me.

I’ll briefly introduce the film, and we’ll watch the film, and I have a eulogy planned to say after the film, and then I’m going to have other people give eulogies. I have two confirmed, and I don’t know if somebody else wants to do it. After those, then I’m going to hook up a laptop, hook up the project hard drive, and the last thing is I’ll delete the hard drive in front of everybody. I was gonna destroy the hard drive, but prices on hard drives have went up considerably in the past even few months… So I’m not doing that.

Always cost-conscious.

But I will delete it, and then I’ll, you know, I’ll clear the little recycle bin, so everyone knows.

They’ll hear that little paper crinkling noise or whatever. In ATMOS.

I think watching all of the files get deleted is going to be a very surreal, unnerving, disturbing, and moving experience all in one. It’s also kind of cool if people just get up and leave during that, in which case they’re not going to see me probably do the whole process, but I think they trust me. And I’m saying it now that I’ll do it, so I’m on record.

Are you going to sit and watch the film with the audience, or are you gonna… get a bite to eat? Pace around outside?

No, I’m gonna watch it. I don’t normally do that, but I kind of have to. I haven’t watched it since it premiered at Torino, other than file checks or whatever.

But why this film? I saw it when you first sent it to me in 2017, and again a few nights ago… It’s a nice little picture.

People have told me that they really love it. Someone said it was a masterpiece. Someone else said it’s my favorite thing they’ve ever done, and only one of those people was my wife. But the main reasons are legal ones.

I’m sad this is happening. It’s also a relief, in a weird way, to learn there’s a more solid reason than, “Chris hates the film.”

No, I lke it a lot. But I do think that this is fitting because of the general makeup and nature of Incorrectional in particular. If you watch this film and you’re like, “Oh yeah, then he deleted it ten years later” or something, I don’t think that would be too shocking.

But… you gotta explain more. “Legal reasons” could mean anything.

Well… I had an email address for the film. “Incorrectional.film” at gmail or something. I never checked it because nobody cared about Incorrectional.

How can that be true?

This film premiered at the Torino Film Festival, and then I had a screening in at Spectacle in 2018.

Part of the screenings organized by Zach Fleming, Caroline Golum and myself.

Yeah. Those were both really great, gratifying experiences. But it did not play a single other place afterwards. I tried, got close to a couple festivals, Woche der Kritik in Berlin... Same with the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. I know programmers liked it, or at least they told me they did But it was a lot of… “Couldn’t fit it in.”

I’m sorry. We’ll talk about the festivals in a second. But back to the email…

I didn’t check that inbox much after the initial run of rejections… I’m just busy, I was doing other projects. I ended up getting an email from, let’s just say, an entity. They weren’t super aggressive or anything, but I didn’t see it, so they followed up. And I think people lose patience when they’re sending multiple emails and nobody’s responding. And eventually, I was able to reply to them, but emotions were running a little higher than I would have liked.

I love “entity”, very sci-fi. What were they emailing about?

They were saying there were some things in the film that they had legal rights to. It was all totally fine, but people get upset when they feel you’re ducking them. By the time I came into this, they were already kind of pissed off. I did get legal counsel, whatever little I could afford. I also talked to some other filmmakers: “Have you ever experienced something like this?” One of them took it upon themselves to jump in and get involved, their heart was in the right place, but it kind of made things even messier than necessary. So you have emails not returned, and then you have someone getting involved who’s not part of the film. We ended up figuring it out, but it was this crazy, messy, highly emotional thing, for a film that is very personal and small, and not even in any kind of monetized circulation.

So they’re aware of the Roxy screening.

Yeah. “Can I have one last screening?” And they’re fine with it, so we settled on that.

It’s a shame though. I love this movie. I think it perfectly represents your low-key approach to filmmaking, your sense of humor, and also reflects your interest in Kiarostami, in slow cinema…..

I love Simbiopsychotaxiplasm but I hadn’t seen it yet when I made Incorrectional. The diet at that time included Akerman, Tarkovsky, the Iranian New Wave… I love Jafar Panahi, especially The Mirror.

There’s a good bit of This is Not A Film in here, too.

Incorrectional was a film that needed—like, really, really needed, institutional backing. Film festival approval, critics’ approval, whatever, to help it along and attract people who know about that kind of stuff. Nathan Fielder was active then but I feel there’s been a full resurgence of playful metadocumentaries since….

“Docu-fiction hybrids” or “metatextuality” or self-reflexiveness, it’s all the rage right now. I’m increasingly worried it’s a substitute for having a real idea, or a real story to tell, or a real idea about how to tell that story…

Incorrectional came about from watching too many new movies and being really frustrated at the lack of exploration and the lack of experimentation. I was having a hard time making something, or getting it out there, so I wanted to break apart the form and try something new. I was going against a lot of what I was seeing. It’s the 2010s, I’m having to work overnights, and in my spare time I’m seeing Mumblecore 2.0 take off in Brooklyn.

Mumblecore 2.0?

You know… Movies about white people hanging out in apartments, talking and having sex. It didn’t really particularly interest me. At the time I was actively going against that particular grain. I’m more open-minded now, but there was way too much of that stuff back then. Some of these filmmakers were more ambitious than others, and as I had my own filmmaking struggles I realized, well, they shot in those apartments, and cast those people, because it was easier. Those people were their friends. Those were their apartments!

You should have released Incorrectional in six different formats, with six different aspect ratios. To quote Christopher Nolan, “there are six suckers born every minute.” But that’s just a joke.

I was gonna take the movie on the road, but COVID hit when I was preparing to do that. So it lived online to view in full for free, for many years. I don’t think anybody gave a shit. Until the entity did.

I was prescreening DVDs for a couple of film festivals at that time, and… Because of the DSLR revolution, a random film with an absolutely terrible script was even funnier, because it now had this professional sheen that it would not have had two years ago. And of course that look is dated now.

You could get a digital camera that shot good video, and that meant it was versatile, and you could do guerrilla and get away with it because people thought you were taking still photos. Suddenly you’re seeing a lot of films that employed shallow depth of field, which meant the film was shaped around that, and if you didn’t want your film to look like that, then you were probably in trouble. So it enabled people to make a film look good in a certain way, but it also tricked them into thinking they could make something that people would appreciate, but then what ended up happening was that a bunch of films that all kind of looked good but flooded the zone. People with money were still able to shoot on film. Looking back, it’s funny how unquestioningly that look was just accepted.

I mean, film has a kind of accelerationism built into it: the newest thing must automatically be the best thing. (Must it?)

MiniDV is making a comeback now. People are exploring it as an actual tool instead of just, “this is the new best thing we have.”

Why do you think that’s happening, though?

It’s, y’know, a way to stand out. I also think the people using it are of a generation that grew up with it. Broadly speaking, it’s an image that’s ingrained in their heads, and they want to speak with it. Those who are too young to have experienced anything other than a crisper, more HD image, maybe they’re finding the nostalgia in it. I think lo-fi has a certain longing to it. And personally I think the texture of MiniDV is very evocative, very specific... If you shot something personal, that’s probably what it looked like. I mean, I think that era of digital filmmaking is really cool. Even the more upscale stuff… Whatever camera they shot Pieces of April on…

But another reason this screening is tripping me up because I’m thinking about being old, I’m talking to other filmmaker friends, and we’re all kind of doing the same thing. I’m forty now, and I ask them, can you imagine waking up when you’re sixty and getting a form rejection email from FilmFreeway or whatever? You’ve made seven features, and still nobody gives a shit? How’s that gonna feel? Thinking about the last ten or so years, it’s a really rough go. But none of us are gonna quit.

I agree. Have you kept up with Ali?

Unfortunately he died, I think in 2021. COVID. Ahmad, the lead of my prior feature The Winds That Scatter, he died of pancreatic cancer. Then Ali.

Oh God, that’s horrible.

I had a Facebook page for Incorrectional… After years of inactivity, this mysterious account started messaging the page asking if they could see the film. I was like, “Who is this?” Because it was online. I consulted with Muhammad Dagman, and he confirmed the account was Ali’s brother. He really appreciated the film, because he had pictures of Ali, but nothing in motion. So it felt really good to be able to give that to someone.

I remember Incorrectional being shared by To Each Their Own Cinema in 2024, one of those cool curated newsletters with film links and recommendations… But I know you’re used to being a one-man show, too.

Especially Miss Me Yet, I’ve been finding fun ways to get that out there. Same goes for Failed State. I just had to figure that stuff out, because I don’t have pockets full of money. I couldn’t fourwall my own screenings even if I wanted to. And… Incorrectional is my most personal movie. I took it all very personally, the struggles to get it made, to get it shown, and now this. But this also enables me to do something different.

The eulogy.

Right. It creates a little urgency at least. It’s part of the film’s life, a weird little history. Not to sound grandiose or anything… Even though it’s sad, it also ties in with what I was trying to do when I made the film.

Say more?

Because the film breaks down about halfway, coming back together in a different way, through the structure of it. I wanted a film where the character turns and looks into the camera and says something that tips it into documentary. I wanted the fourth-wall-breaking to replicate this feeling of a nasty fight, between a father and his son. Rote subject matter but the real thing can be incredibly shocking to watch. That’s something we all have had, with whatever family member. Can we bring that back? Can we bring that passion? Can I tell it in a new way? And that was really exciting.

The replication being your disagreement with Ali, the actor, who calls it quits halfway through shooting a scene.

Ali was a pain in the ass. But he was great. And I was like, “He’s being great in this moment. He could fight me on-camera, as the director.” Because we got on each other’s nerves in real life, this was a chance to collaborate on a deeper artistic level. Ali can tell me what he wants to do. You set the parameters. Here’s the sandbox, and you give them the power to do whatever they want within that. And what he did was, to me, really incredible. I’m sure I annoyed him too, by the way. I’m an annoying guy, you know?

That’s not true.

Later in the film’s more straightforward documentary portion, I’m following him and he’s constantly asking me if it’s a real film. I didn’t tell him to do that, but that’s fucking awesome. I loved that. I loved editing that. It’s really funny. That was all him. I didn’t tell him to turn to the camera and ask me if we were actually shooting a movie. That’s weirder than I can ever come up with on my own.

“Representation” usually refers to how one character, or a small number of characters, reflect back on their attendant communities, or groups, beyond the film or media in question… In Incorrectionnal you’re exposing the perils of representation in an interaction between two people.

I really wanted people to go into Incorrectional as blind as possible. I wanted them to feel everything was really happening in reality. Part of the fun is figuring out who would question whether something was real or not, and if that even matters, as an article of faith…

This is a fundamental tension for me. Somebody will say “Shoot a movie in your apartment! Cast your friends as thinly veiled versions of themselves!” Like, bro, that’s not why I go to a movie. I wanna get outside my world, not deeper into it…

I do think there is a part of the representation conversation that never gets brought up. And that’s the fact that you are pulling together people from different walks of life and collaborating with them. There’s some form of solidarity there, especially when the dynamic on set is not super rigid. But what avenues exist for a low-budget, intentionally artistic film, in America? Incorrectional just sat on Vimeo for years. This is why I’m making a horror film next: even if it sits there untouched for years, it’s an easier pitch.

Anything that gets made for less than $300 million is gonna need to be a horror film, a true-crime film or a biopic. (Is Showtime gonna be all three?)

Or something with a recognizable lead. Which I’m open to.

To your earlier point: forty isn’t that old, in a lifespan, but I suspect we’re both feeling our age. I’m pivoting to hand-drawn, 2D comics, because that’s something I can control, theoretically, and do faster, theoretically, than making a film. But your dreams and attitude have always seemed very realistic to me…

And I’ve been miserable for twenty years. (laughs)

Well, I’ve known at least one filmmaker I would call successful for almost as long; no names. We catch up only every so often, and to hear them tell it, it’s always doom and gloom.

Two lessons there. One is that you’ll never be satisfied. It’s always going to be: “I could have used this other thing” Or “This person slighted me.” Maybe you’re always gonna feel that - and that’s real! But the other lesson is that you should be careful who you’re complaining to… Personally, I’m on my fifteenth film right now, and it’s probably gonna be another year before a film festival can say yes or no. And I’m just paying people out of pocket to tell me yes, or no.

I’ll keep it vague and say I know programmers exist who actually watch films in full, in good conditions, but the FilmFreeway, Withoutabox, Vimeo, speed-watch industrial complex is real. And it’s not meritocratic.

But even if they say yes, it’s uphill. I make a film for $10K and I’m up against something international that got tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in state support?… That’s gonna have more polish. Nothing is more depressing than the “art film landscape”.

I always think about Coppola’s “little fat girl will be the next Mozart” comment from Apocalypse Now. The liberation and democratization of media. Which is kind of accurate but he didn’t foresee, or didn’t warn us, that a huge variety of people, talented and untalented, would make stuff that just sits there, and a very very small percentage is what actually gets programmed at festivals.

On social media people say: Go out and make your film. They’re selling you a dream of making it to a prestigious film festival that looks and feels a certain way. What if it never happens? You have to constantly reckon with your own craziness in trying to make something, even before you’re worried about it connecting with people.

Back to Incorrectional for a sec: after the narrative implodes, there’s a scene where Ali and Muhammad are talking about the Arab Spring, with real skepticism. As long as I’ve known you, we have shared an interest in geopolitics. “Failed state” is literally a term of art for those Washington D.C. think-tank vampire types. What’s the story there? And are you aware it’s box office poison?

We were talking about wanting to collaborate with people outside your vicinity, not just Brooklynite twentysomethings. That film already existed so… I wanted to see where my other interests were. In the 2000s and 2010s the cliché was, “They hate us for our freedoms.” Didn’t make any sense to me so I started reading more, about Islam, about Palestine, imperialism, anti-imperialism, other economic systems… And that ends up informing the kind of films I want to make, which always have an element of class. So for Winds That Scatter I collaborated with a middle-aged Syrian Muslim man, shooting in 2012, right after the Syrian Civil War.

And still in financial-collapse territory. For years I was fond of saying the Great Recession never actually ended, unless you’re Jamie Dimon or whatever.

Right. So Incorrectional was born of all these things. I was a film critic at the time too, right? So I was seeing lots of different stuff. I was meeting some filmmakers because I had bills pay, I had to work a lot, and I realized some other filmmakers didn’t have to work at all to pay the bills. I understood class politics through that as well. And yeah, I got to a point where I was working overnights on the weekends, and I was shooting Winds at the same time. And I was in post production on Winds, and I really felt exhausted. I was aggravated at seeing a lot of films that were not really adventurous or ambitious, and that’s when I conceived Incorrectional. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a film that did this?” Similar to Miss Me Yet: you start off with Bush doing these shitty things, killing 100,000 Iraqis, and it ends with him on Ellen. I was thinking about it so much it became, “Well, I guess I have to do it myself.”

That was a weird time. All that can be said about it right now is that I don’t know how real those uprisings were, and it’s kind of it’s just a huge lesson in: Where does a story come from? How are you getting it? Does it conform to what you wanna hear? Looking at all of those countries in the quote-unquote Arab Spring, I don’t know but I don’t feel certain any of them are in a better place. If we can look historically at color revolutions, which are more or less made to look like genuine uprisings, years later you learn the West may have been putting a thumb on the scale. I wanted to include all of these things and how messy they are. And I think people still have a very odd look about the Middle East in general, and maybe it’s slightly improving, because of what’s going on in Palestine. Sadly..

Politically, this is the most despairing time I can recall in my lifetime. Maybe it’s not all America’s fault, but it’s bad-bad. We’re through the looking glass. At the same time, the possibility that DSA candidates can win insurgent races and push the Democratic Party to the left is legitimately exciting, but I have a ton of skepticism about the likelihood of that actually happening. The co-optation and watering-down seems inevitable.

The more I read and learn, the more tangled everything seems. It’s just going to be very hard to untangle entrenched power of capital, and that’s really what we need to do. The Democrats used to be, then pretend to be, the party of the New Deal…

The majority of them are proudly to the right of Eisenhower, now. A lot of my graphic novel is trying to deal with this.

Yeah, although I think they still love to hearken back to that as a good thing, as if they’re the same people ideologically, and they’re not. The problem with the New Deal is that this social democracy relied on a deal between organized labor and corporations. When the profit margin was getting slim, and wages were too high, and the companies weren’t making enough money, when you saw a big push for deregulation, you saw globalization. You saw financialization. Which is what ends up happening if you’re not going to fight against the actual system. If you’re making this kind of compromise, which is social democracy, you’re going to get to a point when they’re like, “Well, wait, profit is what matters. Capital is what matters. So if this isn’t making money, what are we doing here?” Some of the programs being advanced may only help people for one or two years, and I support that. But the fundamental change is what needs to happen. Nobody agrees on how we’re going to do it, and nobody agrees that we can do it. But I try to be optimistic that whatever is getting done is a step in the right direction.

Back to Incorrectional: is the film a happy memory for you? Or is it a relief in some sad way you’re taking it out back and <gunshot noise>?

I’m upset. I think people would dig it. I don’t blame them for having no idea who I am. I wish it had found its audience. But I’ve also had people say, “Hey, it’s really cool what you did with this movie.” People with no reason to lie to me or butter me up at all. So I do appreciate that. Getting footage of Ali to his family, that’s important too.

“Important” doesn’t quite describe it… Listen, I’m at work, I need to go downstairs in a few minutes and meet Rob Tregenza (another indie maverick, whose new one, FAST, is also an inside-out movie about its own making, or lack thereof…) Can you explain what just happened with Miss Me Yet? Why did it get taken off Letterboxd?

Earlier this year, I got messages from The Movie Database (TMDB) saying, “We’ve changed our criteria for what we allow on the website, so we’re taking down Attention Shoppers”-which is another archival film I made-”and we’re taking down Miss Me Yet.” They also took down an experimental short I made, but that one was fine. Miss Me Yet is a pretty big deal for me. A lot of people saw it, and it’s got an easy hook. Its presence on these websites allow more people to hear about it and see it, as well as my other stuff. I wrote them back and explained, “I need this.” They never responded. TMDB took them off but they survived on Letterboxd.

Which is a bigger deal anyway.

Yeah. But I’m not one to check reviews of my movies on there.

I’ve been having fun with it—I recently logged Out to Sea, My Fellow Americans, Grumpier Old Men and I’m Not Rappaport all on the same day—and I know it’s a helpful place to gather links to stuff. But I also gotta say I kind of hate what Letterboxd is doing to film culture. (Maybe film culture was always terrible.)

It is really nice to get reviews, and it does help people see stuff, hear about stuff. I have gotten other people asking for a link to Failed State or getting interviews for Miss Me Yet, because they saw somebody log it on Letterboxd.

Those are real positives. But sometimes I tell filmmakers, “Don’t look at the peanut gallery on Letterboxd. You already made a goddamn movie, which is huge. Work on your next movie!”

If somebody sends me a positive review that they wrote, I’ll clip it and I’ll spread it. But I don’t need the psychic damage of checking a bad review. My life is miserable enough. Anyway: last week a friend told me Miss Me Yet was no longer on Letterboxd. Which means that because TMDB took it down, eventually Letterboxd did too.

It’s worth noting, Letterboxd used to source its information about titles from TMDB. And Letterboxd did not take down Carlos or Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Nope. And there’s lost films on there, stuff that cannot be seen anywhere, and people are logging it. Very strange to see them assert a strict criteria suddenly. You can’t say it’s about film history if you’re also doing that.

Right. I mean, I definitely will file a complaint and encourage any readers to do the same. I also wonder if it’s connected to the rumored sale in Letterboxd’s future…

Having my work on Letterboxd has been a net positive for me, and I’ve tried to build off that because I don’t know what else to do.

Personally, I think you’re on the come-up. But it’s a slow burn. When we showed Failed State at Spectacle, tons of people came, well beyond the cult of Chris Bell, and I’m no mind reader but it felt like it was hitting. And you’re one of the most prolific people I know. Always working on something. How do you learn from all these experiences without bitterness?

I’m insecure, and I dwell on a lot of stupid shit. But this has caused me, for obvious reasons, to reflect a lot. It’s the sunk cost fallacy. If I don’t write, I’ll go crazy. I’m going through footage and editing for an archivall project, and this is basically the writing process, but it’s in the editing suite. And I realized because I wasn’t actually writing, that it was making me go crazy. I need the act of actually writing and conceiving, on paper.

You’re 40, I’m 39. After over a decade of failing to get programming jobs, writing criticism for pennies, running myself ragged organizing screenings for free, watching Spectacle go in a wildly different artistic direction than what we built in the 2010s… Nothing was more liberating for me than when I started drawing They Saved Biden’s Brain. But it’s also been kind of awesome to try and disabuse myself of younger, more naive expectations, and just let that stuff go. Clearly I’m still trying. But there’s something about doing a thing just to do it, not because you think it’ll produce a specific outcome.

Why am I feeling bad about a movie when there’s people who literally can’t eat today, or they don’t have a place to live because of the system we live in? And I’m sad about a movie I made?

There’s no getting around that, though, Chris.

My thing is, I have never felt more like I wanted to quit than in the last few weeks. But that’s probably because I was not taking enough vitamin D, and it’s probably because I am doing this screening.

Don’t quit.

I won’t. What the fuck else would I do?

Current Mood: Solemn… 😑

Current Music: Angelique Kidjo - Born Under Punches

HEAR ME OUT: what if movies were better twenty years ago? Or at least, the ones released every weekend by major motion picture studios? This hot take should be impossible to disagree with for those of us throttling head-first into middle age, unless you’re one of the Odyssey/Brand New Day lotus-eaters. It’s also so broad and basic it must be dismissed. I came of age at a time when the “digital revolution” allegedly threatened to upend cinema (making, distributing, exhibiting, criticizing, you name it), so every year of moviegoing added up to a kind of “temperature check” on the health of the medium. Movies were still monoculture, such that I could go to the multiplex every weekend (and some weeknights) relatively affordably, and was offered a variety of cinema that’s outright stunning compared to what’s in wide release today. The center seemed to be holding just fine. Even the junk movies from that year look better than the junk of 2016 or 2026, largely because they were still shot on celluloid, and the digital uncanny hadn’t crept into every last nook and cranny of their images (to say nothing of “artificial intelligence”.)

In 2021, just after we crossed into the second year of COVID, MUBI Notebook’s then-editor Gina Telaroli courageously OKed a personal (which is to say, insane) pitch from me to write a reflection on the 15th anniversary of Alejandro Agresti’s 2006 metaphysical romance The Lake House, which opened like this:

A decade and a half is not really long enough to commemorate a film’s anniversary—but then again, bogus nostalgia for the immediate past is the main engine of pop culture discourse today. So here’s a wild proposition: what if 2006 was the last great year for adventurous, bigger-budget movies? It’s impossible to answer, of course, but consider these studio releases: Marie-Antoinette, Children of Men, Southland Tales, Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima diptych, Inside Man, Miami Vice, Idlewild, Crank, Idiocracy, The Holiday, The Black Dahlia. Millions were spent on bizarre highbrow and/or vanity projects like Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, Soderbergh’s The Good German, Tommy Lee Jones’ (phenomenal) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, or Ryan Murphy’s (excruciating) Running With Scissors. World Trade Center and United 93 both tried going for the jugular without losing audiences in accusations of poor taste, with scattered and discouraging results. Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, easily the best in an otherwise risible spate of mid-aughts Phillip K. Dick adaptations, relocated PKD’s hippie colony nightmare to the anonymous corporate exurbs of Orange County. (Linklater’s b-side the same year was his adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a fascinatingly Altmanesque ensemble narrative leadened by its nevertheless understandable “Fuck Bush” tendentiousness.) Even the generic (or malformed) crap of 2006 was more interesting, and perhaps more emblematic of its era, than much of what is called “scripted content” today: Little Children, An Inconvenient Truth, 300, Apocalypto, Lady in the Water, Stranger Than Fiction, Half Nelson, Hollywoodland, Little Miss Sunshine, Silent Hill, The Break-Up, Perfume, The Prestige.

7pm this Friday at Roxy Cinema New York, I’m inaugurating 2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die (working title “Steve’s Labyrinth”), a repertory event that will serve as testament to this non-thesis, with a vintage 35mm print of Darren Aronofsky’s beleaguered passion project The Fountain. The series description reads as follows:

The United States is embroiled in an ill-advised Middle East quagmire with no end in sight. After years of fascism enabled by both sides of the aisle, Democrats are preparing to retake a Congressional majority. Whatever’s left of the major movie studios looks to recruit young and international talent to punch up vanity projects and defibrillate dying franchises. Tech disruption has forever changed the way information disseminates (and capital flows.)

This is not a description of 2026, but of 2006: the last great year for big-budget cinema. Maybe that’s not true, but every awards season, some critic or columnist or programmer tries to make the argument that the bygone year has been an especially good one for movies. Taken as a whole, 2006 was that exceptional year (not to be confused with Ridley Scott’s 2006 vineyard drama A Good Year), particularly but not exclusively due to the fact “indiewood” subsidiaries like Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent Pictures were still in business. The Marvel-DC-Disney-Lucasfilm industrial complex was only just sputtering into existence. Weird movies got multimillion dollar budgets. Small, slice-of-life dramas still had a place in the multiplex. The digital revolution of Zodiac would come in 2007, as would the first wave of iPhones, forever changing how we engage with cinema.

Since this all-35mm program merely scratches the surface of that watershed year’s embarrassment of riches, we invite all attendees to brainstorm their own 2006 retrospectives as each 20th anniversary passes. Maybe 2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die is a brazen exercise in nostalgia for aging, millennial cinephiles, but it also offers a look into the recent-yet-distant past, at a tradition of quality that was easy to take for granted – a time when Hollywood was still Hollywood.

This is as “poptimist” as my film programming gets. But I want to emphasize, as I did at a recent BAM screening of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, that there’s a logistical reason for it as well: the barren husks of once-great movie studios are not making it any easier to show celluloid film in the 2020s. This laughable concept would be better served for its 25th or 30th anniversary, but I’m not confident we’d be able to book so many vintage prints of these recent-past classics in their original formats. Not everything is available anymore; a print of Apocalypto has been maddeningly elusive despite the fact it opened on film in over 2,400 theaters in November of 2006.

The series is not deep cuts only (hello, The Departed) but I also want to mention a handful of titles which have become staples in the oasis of NYC repertory film over the last several years: Miami Vice, Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, Inside Man, Idiocracy, Southland Tales, Old Joy, The Fall, Deja Vu, Silent Hill, Paprika… I have fond memories of seeing most of them in theaters, and we’ve chosen not to include them. 2006 Movies You Must See Before You Die also boasts a murderer’s row of guest speakers including Caroline Golum (for Black Book), Matthew Shen Goodman (for Crank), Laine Elliot (for Click), Stephanie Monohan (for The Black Dahlia), Séamus Malekafzali (for The Wind that Shakes the Barley), Toney J. Brown (for The Departed) and Alex Lei (for A Scanner Darkly), with more to be announced.

There is no empirical argument to be made that 2006 was better than 2005 or 2007, a year which got a lot of attention due to the releases of No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. But 2006 remains my millennial happy place, a sanctuary in time. I didn’t know how good I had it. Hope to see you at some of the screenings.

iN cAsE yOu MiSsEd It . . .

• Until August 13, BAM is showing a new 4K restoration of Ngozi Onwurah’s groundbreaking Welcome II the Terrordome, ahead of that film’s imminent blu-ray release. I interviewed Onwurah about it for Filmmaker.

• Speaking of Roxy, they just closed out a Nicholas Ray retrospective including his masterpiece of suburban miscontent, Bigger Than Life (1956). I reviewed that film for Screen Slate.

Current Mood: Nostalgic 🥺
Current Music: Jay Z and Linkin Park - Numb/Encore

Special thanks to Mitchell Mailloux-Glidden, Dillon Friend, Emily Apter, Gina Telaroli, Laurence Bond, Elaine and Dustin.

TONIGHT AT 6:45 PM, “The Baffler Presents: Global Texas” kicks off at Brooklyn Academy of Music with a rare 35mm screening of Tommy Lee Jones’ 2006 directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Last night I had a long discussion with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, ZOOMing in from his home in Mexico City. Beyond his work as a screenwriter and director, Arriaga is a decorated novelist and cineaste. (His 2023 screenplay Upon Open Sky was made into a film by his children, and is now available in English via Sticking Place Books.)

Even if you cannot make our screening in Brooklyn tonight, I think a lot of what he says is valuable, especially regarding the relationship between Mexico and the United States. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and flow.

I appreciate you making the time for this, Guillermo, and I’m sorry for bothering you on WhatsApp these last few weeks. Our mutual friend Fernando Llanos told me you might be busy with the World Cup.

Well, it’s true I’m obsessed with the World Cup. Right now my son is in the other room waiting for me to finish so we can watch the match between Paraguay and Germany. I’ve also been traveling a lot, so I’m not always available. Recently I’ve been in Italy and the Dominican Republic to promote a new book. I’ll be traveling to nine countries in total, as of right now.

Any plans to visit New York?

I’m avoiding the U.S. for a bit. If it’s not absolutely necessary to travel there these days, I’ll wait.

Understandable. Well, I hope tonight’s screening is the first of many 20th anniversary revisitations for The Three Burials. I saw this movie in theaters and was just blown away. There’s not too much out there about how it came to be. So let me open with a broad question: how did you and Tommy Lee Jones get linked up together?

It was a process of many years. In 2001 Tommy Lee called me, because he had seen Amores perros. He wanted me to adapt a film for a remake—I can’t remember which. I was going to travel to L.A. to meet with him, and my plan was to tell him in person that I do not adapt other people’s films. I want to write original screenplays only.

Now, Tommy Lee thinks of himself as bilingual, but he really speaks very little Spanish. So I’m in L.A. and I get this phone call: “Hola, Guillermo! Se habla Tommy Lee Jones!” He tells me he wants to work with me even if it’s on a different project. So we go out for dinner. I need to get an idea of his taste, because everything in this business is taste. If you’re working on something that has nothing to do with your taste, it becomes a nightmare. So I ask him: “Who is your favorite film director?” He turns around and points at this watercolor painting on his wall. It’s a picture of a samurai. He says, “My favorite director is Akira Kurosawa.” Kurosawa did the painting. I say, “Wow. Who is your favorite living American author?” He says, “Cormac McCarthy.” Well, that is my answer as well. I ask him, “Do you like hunting?” He loves hunting. He says, “I have a ranch, I’ll invite you.” So we go hunting. I’m thinking, I can work with this guy. I tell him the story of Melquiades Estrada. He says, “Okay, write it.”

Just like that?

Well, his only thing was, “I want to be the protagonist.” Which was great with me. But I don’t just write a screenplay and hand it off, I’m very involved in the production as well. I was involved in casting all the Mexican actors, along with producer Michael Fitzgerald. I helped scout locations, I was there for the shoot, and I appear in the film as well. I was very close to this project, and I’m thankful to Fitzgerald, Tommy Lee, all the people involved.

Cursory internet research suggests the story was inspired by Esequiel Hernández Jr., a teenager (and U.S. citizen) who was murdered by U.S. Marines near the border in 1997.

This movie is not an adaptation or a response to what happened to Esequiel Hernández. It has to do with people I knew from my own life, brothers who are the protagonists of my novel A Sweet Scent of Death. These guys are very poor Mexican farmers. They cannot read or write. I have known them for many years. I am still in touch with them. One of the brothers died, but I spoke to the other just a few days ago. He is still working in the United States. Very decent people. The film is an homage to them.

Tell me more about how their stories are threaded into The Three Burials?

One friend of mine crossed into Texas to work, so he could send money to his wife and kids back in Mexico, a very common situation. Eventually his wife crosses the border as well, and suddenly he stops hearing from her. No news, nothing. He decides he won’t cut his hair until he hears from her. One, two, three months go by. He’s crying. He thinks she’s abandoned him. A year and a half later she reappears, and the reason is because she used a fake passport. You must remember, back in the 1990s at least, it wasn’t a crime to cross the border into the United States. The crime was to do so with false papers.

So in The Three Burials, you see a guy with a phone in his store, charging customers per phone call. It’s because my friend’s wife was in jail and she had the option to make one phone call. This is before cellphones, or these people don’t have cellphones they can afford. Let’s say a woman calls for her husband and he’s not there, and the shopkeeper forgets to tell him she called. So he has no idea what’s going on. That’s an example of real incidents that inspired my script.

Obviously Tommy Lee was and still is a seriously respected Hollywood actor. This was his first theatrical feature. Did you have carte blanche to write whatever you wanted? Was there any studio involvement? Rewrites, complaints, things you were obligated to include?

This movie was financed completely by Luc Besson. You may think of him as a director but he is, and was, very active as a producer in those days. At the time I was on my world promotional tour for 21 Grams. Tommy Lee called me and said, “Let’s go seduce these guys.” He knew Luc Besson loved diving. So we went to the Bahamas with Luc, Michael Fitzgerald, another producer named Pierre-Ange Le Pogam. These guys said, “We will respect absolutely what you and Tommy Lee have in mind for the film.”

The movie is conversant with mythic frontier tropes, cowboy stuff, et cetera, but the depiction of border town culture is also quite detailed. Dingy. Lived-in. The commingling of Mexico and the United States is presented as a fact of life.

I’ve been obsessed with the border since I was a kid. I think I know every crossing location in the United States and Mexico, even the most remote ones in New Mexico and Texas. I love the interaction between the two cultures. It’s far deeper than anyone can imagine. Shooting the movie, we were at a bar in Texas with a band, and they were alternating: one hour they would play Mexican music, the next hour they would play American honky-tonk music, and so on. Mexican cows were mingling with American cows. Illegals with citizens. They are very, very, very close, and not as different as people would like you to think. So I wanted to portray that world which I love, and a profound friendship between two characters, a Mexican and an American. I did not want to make a “political film”.

Say more about that.

I’m not just obsessed with the border, I’m also obsessed with racism. But it has nothing to do with the political climate, not 20 years ago or today. The context of a story is what makes it political, not the intent of the author.

I went back and listened to a talk you did in 2006 where, talking about teaching writing classes, you warned your students not to try being deep or profound.

Because it doesn’t mean you will not be profound, or deep, or that you cannot be. But your job is not to be “deep” on purpose, your job is to tell a story. If you are deep, the story will be deep. If you are shallow, the story is going to be shallow.

I’m not interested in political statements, but human ones. I don’t want to make propaganda. And by the way, I am very thankful to the United States, a place which has given me many jobs and where I have been very respected. Nobody ever questioned my nationality or right to be there, even if I was directing Hollywood actors as a Mexican. When I was shooting The Burning Plain, Jennifer Lawrence was constantly mocking my accent, my poor English. But it was all in good fun.

For those too young to remember the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), can you talk about how American trade policy affected your life in Mexico, and/or the Mexican film industry, back in the 1990s?

In Mexico it affected the sectors that had no chance to compete with their equivalents in the States. I saw that in real time with my friends who inspired The Three Burials. The state of Tamaulipas, in the north, borders Brownsville, in Texas. They had the best sorghum crop in the world, but when the agreement opened the borders for the products, they had no way to compete with subsidized agricultural products from the States. So all of them went bankrupt. And they were already very poor. This is the reason why 80% of that family migrated, or tried to migrate, north. I have one friend who asked me to be the godfather to his kids. He migrated when his wife was pregnant. He didn’t meet his daughter until she was seven years old. And this is also why the cartels began gaining power. If there are no opportunities for anyone, then black market stuff, drug dealing, becomes your best option to make money. So that’s where it comes from in The Three Burials, me seeing how lives are being changed across these three worlds. There’s a jealousy aspect as well that’s in the film.

Jealousy?

Well, families can disintegrate under this pressure. No one talks about this, but let’s say a man goes to the States in order to work, and his wife is afraid he’ll take up with another woman when he is there. He sends remittances to his wife in Mexico without knowing if she is with another man. You need a strong bond of trust between husband and wife to make that jump. I have a friend whose grandchildren do not speak Spanish at all. When they came to meet him in Mexico there was no way for them to communicate. Stories like this. And the NAFTA era led to an explosion of migration from Mexicans, but the more recent border crossings are almost all people from other countries: Haiti, Cuba or Venezuela, for example. Mexicans get blamed for everything but during the “catastrophe” of the Biden years, almost none of the migrants were Mexican.

This film was released during the same awards cycle as Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by you. Were you involved in both productions? How would that work?

I was shooting The Three Burials while Babel was in preproduction. I had been intensely, intimately involved with the filming of Amores perros as well as 21 Grams. But Babel is the only film I have written where I wasn’t on-set for production, because of my huge falling out with Alejandro.

We don’t have to get into it if you don’t want. But you guys haven’t collaborated since, if I’m not mistaken.

I was completely shut out of Babel: the production, the promotion, everything. But after almost three years of not speaking with each other, Alejandro and I met up recently and talked about all of this.

Babel came out alongside Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men, and those who were paying attention at the time will recall Alejandro, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón being labeled “the three amigos”. This really bothered me, especially having seen the Disney film that moniker references. On the other hand it was exciting to see gringo audiences turning out in droves to watch these movies by Mexican filmmakers in American multiplexes. What are your thoughts on that?

People paid more attention to these three Mexican directors but there are many who have been successfully working within, or in collaboration with, the United States. The integration between the respective film industries has continued. Look at Michel Franco shooting Chronic with Tim Roth in 2015, for example, or Alonso Ruizpalacios shooting his 2024 film La cocina with Rooney Mara in New York City. Fernando Eimbcke shot his film Olmo in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Is it a net positive, in your opinion? Or has this chance to get American dollars, or work with American actors, diluted Mexican films?

It’s a good thing. Mexico is the most important economic partner of the United States. Most of their products are sold to the U.S., and the U.S. sells most of its products to Mexico. The shared economy between the two countries is almost a trillion dollars. We are neighbors. Nothing is going to change that.

To pivot slightly: I’m curious to know what your regimen is as a writer. You are perhaps Mexico’s most celebrated living novelist. You had published several books before your first screenplay, Amores perros.

I came into cinema as a novelist, yes. Producers began buying the rights to make my novels into films. Cuarón wanted to do A Sweet Scent of Death well before my work with Iñárritu. He wanted his sister to adapt the book, and his brother to direct. But the project crumbled and ended up in the hands of a lesser director. A very good director, by the way, but not on Alfonso’s level. If you see my films you can tell they are heavily influenced by literary structures.

I assume you’re referring to the non-linear, fractalized structure of the Inarritu trilogy…

Yes. Because this is how we tell stories in real life: we jump around. We don’t go linear when we’re speaking to one another in real life. As a screenwriter I am more influenced by Faulkner, or Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, than I am by other movies. I was very hurt, for example, how many critics alleged the structure of 21 Grams had been determined in the editing room. Of course I was happy when Stephen Mirrione won an editing award at the Venice Film Festival, but that aspect was always there in the writing.

How does writing become difficult for you?

Well, my last couple novels were about 700 or 800 pages. From the first word on the first page, I rewrite each of them completely. I transcribe word by word. I’m making corrections but also rewriting. If I’m not changing the fundamental structure, then I am cutting out words. I hate repetition of words. I hate cacophonies. For me the distance between characters means everything. It’s not the same if I say to you from 10 meters away, “I’m gonna kill you.” This is quite different from (pulling his face close to the phone camera) whispering, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” Right?”

Definitely. But how do you decide on what you want? Outlines? Rearranged index cards?

I do not plan these things out in advance, neither my novels nor my screenplays. I improvise when I write. Whatever comes to my mind at that moment. I don’t know how to logistically organize this process, I just allow the novel or the screenplay to reveal itself to me, for my unconscious to dictate whatever it is I have to say.

In a 2016 interview I did with Paul Schrader he said, “I’m not a real writer… I’m a binge-writer. A real writer writes every day; they say you should do 500 words in some format or another, at least. A real writer can write a book for years on end; a screenwriter does something in six weeks.”

But I consider the screenplay a piece of literature and spend almost as much time on it as I would a novel. I’m a perfectionist. I take care with the language and structure, the pauses, the lines, the cadences. I have the weight of every silence, every movement, and every word already down on the page. It’s a question of style, and style is how I end up rewriting or restructuring what I have already written. If Brad Pitt wants to work with Iñárritu, and I send him Babel, and it’s not good enough for him, or it’s not good enough for the president of a studio, they won’t do it. So I need the screenplay to be as intense and beautiful and powerful as possible. A screenplay is your first, last and best chance to seduce someone.

What if a producer rolls up to your house with a wheelbarrow of money and says, “I want to adapt one of your novels into a film?” Is that a nightmare? A writer friend and I were recently talking about the best-case scenario which is, a novelist is paid for the option but the movie never gets made and the rights revert back to them. Or the movie gets made but nobody hears about it, it’s buried, and the novel’s reputation is untainted.

I will follow Hemingway’s advice: “Take the money and run.” I just optioned a novel which has not yet been translated into English, but it’s been a huge success in Spanish-speaking countries. It’s going to be a streaming series and I have nothing to do with the production itself, I’m just waiting to see what they do. But yeah, I’m very good at negotiating deals. I find I must be very tough.

And back to your work with Tommy Lee: why is it that you didn’’t want to adapt or remake somebody else’s film?

It’s not my world. It’s not what I have to offer. I have been offered some big, big projects and I have rejected all of them. People I admire deeply: Faulkner, Hemingway, everyone. I refuse. Even if I am tough negotiating these deals, it’s not because I want to make money. If that was my intention I would say yes to these proposals. I’m interested in creating a body of work.

Your body of work can be quite brutal. I thought Amores perros and 21 Grams would prepare me for The Three Burials, but I’ll admit I was scandalized seeing it in the theater as a teenager.

It may surprise you to hear this, but I’m a very happy man. I’m not tortured. I’m not grumpy. When people meet me, they can’t always reconcile my work with the person I am. They ask, “Why do you have such-and-such themes in your work?” It has nothing to do with me. What are the mechanisms of the conscious mind that lead to these decisions? It’s true I had a very tough childhood because of the streets I grew up on. But it didn’t create a traumatic experience which I could not overcome. For me the idea of exorcising your demons or traumas in artmaking is bullshit. Your unconscious makes these choices and I don’t know why it happens, but it does.

Your Wikipedia page says you are a teetotaler.

Yes. I have never drunk alcohol in my life. I have never done any kind of drug, not even marijuana.

Why is that?

Well, I’m a man of extremes. I refused because I wanted to do things that people would only do when they were drunk, actually. I come from a neighborhood where, in order to be a man, you had to drink and do drugs, and so I said: “I’m going to be a man without any of that. And I will be more crazy sober than you guys are with drugs or alcohol.”

One of my dreams is to write a critical biography of Dennis Hopper, not just as an actor but also as a photographer, filmmaker, art curator, connector of people. He’s usually written off as a raving maniac, and of course his substance abuse problems were legendary before he got sober in the late ‘80s. But he regularly maintained that the alcohol, cocaine, the LSD, it was for work, because he was trying to function at this level of insane productivity. His obsessions and his ideas were his own, they weren’t just drug-induced hallucinations. Anyway: I spoke to a screenwriter who worked with him on Backtrack and she said he was even crazier sober than before.

I knew Dennis, actually. I met him in Las Vegas. I told him how much I loved his film The Hot Spot. He called me and asked if I would write a film for him to direct. I went with a friend of mine to stay at his house in Venice Beach and work on the screenplay. Dennis had masterpieces by people like Basquiat, Warhol, all these guys.

Probably this is the house he had designed by Frank Gehry.

Spectacular house. An architectural marvel. Anyway, soon I got a phone call: Dennis has been taken to the hospital, but that’s all I know. After he gets out, he tells me, “I have cancer, but I’m gonna be okay.” I tell him, “Once you are healthy, we’ll make the film.” We had the financing and everything. His son was going to be the lead. This was in September 2009. He died in May 2010.

Can you say anything about the plot?

No, I’m holding onto it. I want to save it.

Fair. But why do you love The Hot Spot so much? Even among Hopper fans it’s considered a lesser work… I think a lot of people object to how sleazy it is.

It’s a bit like The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry: the quintessential small Texas town. But Dennis’ version is more asphyxiating. The heat, the chemistry between Don Johnson, Jennifer Connelly, Virginia Madsen… The music by John Lee Hooker, that’s what I love. It’s a great film. The Hot Spot is why I wanted to convince Dennis to make a last film, and why I wanted to produce it.

The Three Burials is kicking off a selection of four films about Texas. Are there other movies you think capture Texas accurately?

Well, you mentioned Lone Star. I would also say Giant. I know Texas very well, all of it except the Panhandle. But Steve, have you ever been to Mexico?

Just once, as a kid. I was with a bunch of Christians who were doing some missionary day trip in Ensenada. They helped build a house in a slum over the course of a single day. To be honest they seemed just as focused if not moreso on getting tacos and margaritas at this tourist spot afterwards. I came away feeling a bit ashamed of myself.

Tarantino stayed at my place when he was working on the script for Django Unchained. I showed him around town and he said, “This is nothing like what I envisioned in my mind. I thought it would be a chaotic, dirty place, everyone honking, stray dogs everywhere, smoldering barrels emitting toxic vapors into the air…” You should come to Mexico City. You’ll be very impressed.

I really want to. I’m also aware there has been an invasion since COVID, Americans working remote jobs while living in Mexico City especially.

Even before COVID, but yes. Right now Mexico is full of Americans. The prices of homes and apartments, the rents, have all been raised by these Americans and Spaniards.

Back to Tarantino for a moment: I know a lot of people claimed Amores perros was influenced by Pulp Fiction.

Quentin is someone I respect a lot, but that pissed me off. I would say, “Man, the world is bigger than the United States!” I was much more influenced by a Mexican film by Jorge Fons called El callejón de los milagros. If I have any American influence, again, it’s going to be Faulkner. My great influences are Faulkner, Shakespeare, and Juan Rulfo.

And Coppola.

Really, Coppola?

Yes, specifically the two Godfathers. I pretend the third one does not exist. In my world it was never made. And I love both of them, but when I was nine years old I saw The Godfather: Part II specifically and said, “I must write something like this. I must direct something like this.”

We’re aligned on that. Since you mentioned Jorge Fons, though, I’m curious if you could tell me any other Mexican filmmakers who are important to you. I’ve programmed some films by Felipe Cazals, and was lucky to interview him before he died in 2022, but his work is mostly inaccessible here in the States. Same goes for Arturo Ripstein.

I grew up with Ripstein and Cazals’ films. These were hugely important directors in the 1970s. And maybe you know this already but Alfonso Cuarón worked as an assistant to Cazals. Servando González is another crucial filmmaker for me. I watched his film Vento Negro five times in a row, it was a big influence on Amores perros.

Can you speak on the relationship between The Three Burials and No Country For Old Men? Maybe this is a problematic question. To me they have similar themes and milieus, and obviously Tommy Lee headlines both of them. But it’s always been a bit unfair how much more attention goes to the Coens.

I love both of these movies. No Country is another instance of a film I saw five times in theaters, while I was in Portland shooting my directorial debut The Burning Plain. We had some days off so I went to see it again and again. For me it’s a masterpiece.

But to answer your question: The Coens saw The Three Burials and decided they wanted to make something like that. It’s also why they cast Tommy Lee.

Really?!

Yes. As I mentioned, Tommy Lee is a huge fan of McCarthy. He actually had Blood Meridian in development for many years, and the plan was for him to play The Judge.

Sounds amazing…

You know Cormac McCarthy lived a very reclusive life. A lot of No Country was shot in a town called Las Vegas, but it’s the one in New Mexico. But years before No Country, Tommy Lee went there. I guess he was heading towards a diner to eat dinner or something. Some guy pulls up in a beat-up pickup truck and yells to him: “Tommy, come here!” The way Tommy Lee explained it to me was, “Either this man is crazy, or he’s more important than me.” So Tommy Lee walks over to see what the deal is. “What do you want?” The guy replies, “I’m Cormac. Don’t eat at this restaurant. Come have dinner at my house instead.” And meeting Cormac had been one of Tommy Lee’s dreams.

This sounds like something from one of his novels too.

It’s a shame he didn’t get that Nobel Prize.

I’m gonna wrap up, but one more question. What is the worst American film made about Mexico?

(Long pause) There is no one film, but I absolutely hate the way Mexico is always yellow. There is some color filter they started using for Mexican scenes. It’s ridiculous. When you see Mexico, Steve, you will realize it’s not yellow.

Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker I respect, with many works I love dearly. But I worry he opened a pandora’s box with that filter in Traffic…

I’m rewatching Breaking Bad and every time they show Mexico it’s with this damn filter.

Enjoy the football match, Guillermo. Thanks for agreeing to do this. I hope we talk again sometime.

No problem, my friend.

Current Mood: Stunned 😲
Current Music: Benicio del Toro - Shake, Rattle and Roll

Special thanks to Fernando Llanos and Guillermo Arriaga.

STARTING TOMORROW NIGHT at Brooklyn Academy of Music, I’ve organized a four-film series in conjunction with The Baffler‘s new issue “Global Texas”.

The whole issue is fascinating, but Lauren Fadiman’s “The Invention of Antifa” is especially worth reading right now, adjoining the 1990s Waco crisis with the more recent Prairieville Detention Center trial, whereby (after Fadiman went to press) a group of leftist activists received a cumulative 150 years in prison sentences, under terrorism charges, for <checks notes> voicing displeasure at the existence of cops, and reminding people Emma Goldman exists. Freedom isn’t free, indeed…

Having been to Dallas, Houston, Galveston, McKinney and Corpus Christi, I know Texas is too vast, too complicated, too stereotyped and too beloved to be encapsulated by a pithy four feature films. That said, I consider each of these a masterpiece, and they are rarely screened in any format, anywhere. We’re kicking off at 6:45pm with a 35mm print of Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006), one of those “indiewood” pictures from the good ol’ days that would not in a million years get financed today. Brutal and despairing—yet also weirdly tender and quotidian—in its analysis of U.S.-Mexican border relations after five long years of the “Global War on Terror”, The Three Burials is also intriguing counterprogramming to that British filmmaker’s upcoming attempt to reignite public interest in Homer’s Odyssey…

At 9:30pm we’ll reconvene to watch the new 4K restoration of Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), starring Paul Newman. At his best, Ritt is one of the studio filmmakers whose work pushed closer towards realism years before the “New Hollywood” explosion epitomized in Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider et al; Hud addresses an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease among the cattle owned and operated by an aging Texas rancher (Melvyn Douglas) and his ne’er-do-well son, the eponymous Hud (Paul Newman in a career-best performance.) Adapted from Larry McMurtry’s debut novella Horseman, Pass By, it costars Brandon DeWilde and Patricia Neal as Hud’s nephew and long-suffering housekeeper, respectively; James Wong Howe’s high-contrast Panavision cinematography won him an Academy Award.

Next week I’ll be back at BAM on Tuesday July 8th for the second half of the series, with John Sayles’ magnum opus Lone Star (1996, also 35mm) at 6:45pm, and we’ll conclude with the late Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) that same night at 9:30pm. I’ll be introducing all four screenings; hope to see you there. And tomorrow morning I’ll be publishing a special interview here at Element X to kick off the series. No spoilers……

Current Mood: Dusty 🤠
Current Music: Freddy Fender - Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

AS MY INTEREST DRIFTS further and further away from contemporary cinema (Backrooms? Obsession? The Odyssey? I have to wash my hair that night), it’s an honor and a privilege when I get the chance to try and support still-alive artists in my reduced capacity as a critic/journalist.

To wit, I’ve published three filmmaker interviews in the last 10 days:

• For Tone Glow, a far-ranging conversation with husband-and-wife filmmaker duo (and fellow Ridgewood, Queens residents) Sarah Halpern and Tim Geraghty about their staggering new miniseries/documentary monument, which just concluded a wildly successful week run at Anthology Film Archives. The film probes into the history of Tim’s home state of Rhode Island from a formally kaleidoscopic, unabashedly political and courageously personal perspective, foregoing the tropes of “objective” nonfiction cinema. I don’t know when or where monument will play next, but I strongly urge any programmers reading this to get in touch with them; for me it’s instantly one of the key films of 2026. (It also makes me happy this is their first interview ever published about monument.)

• For Screen Slate, a discussion with San Diego-based film theorist/historian/director/educator Jean-Pierre Gorin, most famous for cofounding the Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Luc Godard, occasioned by his NYC takeover which continues tonight with Vladimir and Rosa at L’Alliance Francaise, and concludes tomorrow in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with Poto and Cabengo at e-flux. Gorin is a true raconteur who, to borrow the term of a friend discussing the British artist/author Stewart Home, “bores a million wormholes one sentence”. Our conversation is a kind of Gorin 101; after 90+ minutes of base-covering questions and answers, I felt a bit like it was time to start the real interview. Anyone in New York should prioritize making these last two screenings.
  

• For Filmmaker, a talk with Chie Hayakawa, whose debut feature Plan 75 starkly addressed Japan’s aging population crisis, and whose new movie Renoir is a deep meditation on grief as experienced by an 11-year-old girl in the summer of 1987. Like many Japanese filmmakers, Hayakawa spoke with a certain diplomatic formality, but as the interview went on we began to dig into the different ways people react to death, emotionally and societally. I think Renoir is one of the best coming-of-age films I’ve ever seen, and recommend making time for it before it leaves IFC Center this Thursday.

Last but not least, I’ll be at LOW Cinema tonight, in Ridgewood, to moderate a Q+A with James N. Kienitz Wilkins about his new picture The Misconceived, a brutally hilarious send-up of aging millennials coping with the fact their dreams of becoming rich and famous in the art world may not pan out as planned. (James invited me to design the above poster for the film.) We’ll be joined by my high school friend Matt Romein, who worked on the film’s motion-capture (or “MoCap”) aesthetic, rendering an upstate mumblecore dramedy in the style of a Grand Theft Auto cutscene via Unreal Engine. Tickets are still available, and James has tapped me to introduce the 10pm show of Ralph Bakshi’s misbegotten “Roger Rabbit on acid” movie Cool World as corollary programming.

That’s it for now. FDT, have a great weekend (if that’s your bag), and hopefully I’ll see you at the movies.

Current Mood: Busy! 🤪
Current Music: Herbie Hancock - Goodbye to Childhood

Special thanks to Davis Fowlkes, Monika Uchiyama, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Nico Pedrero-Setzer, Yuka Murakami, Eric Barroso, Jake Perlin, Michael Krause, Chloe Lizotte and Maxwell Paparella.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, for better and for worse, I dated a journalist. She invited me to collaborate with Topic—the now-defunct progressive movie studio and multivalent online magazine created by eBay’s less-problematic founder Pierre Omidyar—on a package of stories focusing on Braddock, Pennsylvania, once the breadbasket of America’s steel industry, more recently one of those decrepit Rust Belt towns besieged by opioid addiction, collapsing social services and DSLR-toting hipsters in search of urban ruin. Specifically, I was hired to interview Braddock-based filmmaker Tony Buba, a documentarian with whom I had only passing familiarity. Tony quickly became one of my favorite living American filmmakers: if you only watch one of his masterpieces, pick Sweet Sal, his 1979 portrait of neighborhood hustler Sal Carulli1. If you watch another, make it Tony’s breakout feature Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988), a rib-bruisingly hilarious meditation on the eponymous town’s decline, and a ruthless interrogation of Tony’s mixed feelings over becoming the preeminent documentarian of said decline.

There’s an exchange from Lightning Over Braddock that lives rent-free in my mind, daily if not hourly, only moreso since I first saw the movie eight years ago:

PROTESTER: What do we accomplish when we go out there and demonstrate in front of the U.S. Steel building? They’re sitting there on the sixty-fourth floor. But when we go to their homes and churches, it’s killin’ em. And that’s what we’re doing. We have to meet ‘em somewhere and that’s where we’re meeting ‘em. We have to meet ‘em in church, we’ll meet ‘em. And when they go to Hell, I’ll go to Hell after ‘em, probably. That’s where they’re headed.

SAL: There ain’t no Hell. This is Hell. I think.

In the years since, Topic has gone under, Tony’s films have been restored and re-released on blu-ray via Kino Lorber (I wrote the booklet essay at the invitation of the great R. Emmet Sweeney, who works at Kino; check out his blog Old New), I have become a shop steward in Local 2110, and Braddock’s resident lumbering idiot John Fetterman2 has become the most disappointing Democrat in Congress which is really saying something.

This month, Spectacle offers New York residents four chances to see Lightning Over Braddock, restored on the big screen, with Tony in person for Q+As on May 15th and 19th. These are some of the most vital documentaries about labor ever made in this country and I give them my highest recommendation. In the hopes of drawing attention to those screenings, below is my resuscitated Topic piece; enjoy.

Tony Buba’s 1979 black-and-white documentary Sweet Sal opens with a stream of trash talk. The film’s namesake, middle-aged wise guy Sal Carulli, leans against the exterior of a bar on the main drag of Buba’s hometown of Braddock, a declining suburb of Pittsburgh. Sal is talking about his favorite subject, himself. “The real name is Sal-va-to-re,” he explains, drawing out each syllable for maximum pizzazz. “It’s a beautiful name! It means savior. Savior. Am I a savior? I’m a killer! I’m a killer, I’ll pop somebody in a second! Savior.”

I called up the filmmaker one afternoon at his home in Braddock Hills, where he’s lived since 2001, after his childhood home in Braddock proper was pulled down. Buba, who is featured in the Topic documentary series Braddock, PA, has chronicled the lives of the people he’s met along the way in his own dozen-plus films. He describes Sal as a “mafia wannabe,” always decked out in alligator shoes and silk suits, who had apprenticed at his grandfather’s cobbler shop before running a bookmaking joint.

As is the case with many of his other films, Buba himself appears in Sweet Sal, walking bemusedly beside Sal while he plays tour guide: “Aw, Braddock, it’s got all the nuts in the world,” Sal sneers, indicating the passersby. “The people who made you, they should cut them loose; the people you’re with, you should cut them loose. They’re saner than what the hell we got in these streets here.” Adorned with a cropped pageboy haircut, quick to turn a snarl into an even further over-the-top grin, Sal is persuasively menacing at first, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off him: he’s a leading man with a knack for turning every last exchange into an ersatz Shakespearean monologue—making him the perfect alter ego for Buba, the soft-spoken “bard of Braddock.”

At 74, Tony Buba has made a career of chronicling the bizarre afterlife of Braddock, a steel town whose population has been on decline since World War II. Buba was born in 1944, around the time that those who could leave Braddock did—veterans on the GI Bill with access to education and low-interest mortgages in brand-new suburbs. Those who couldn’t, didn’t, usually prevented by redlining or lack of a better job. Buba began making films as a graduate student in the 1970s, and the town lost more than 3,000 people over the next ten years.

Buba’s parents came from the impoverished Italian region of Tursi, settling in Braddock in the 1920s, when Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks were at their peak. By then the town’s population was 20,000, most of whom were immigrants from Italy, Croatia, and Slovakia. (In his 1983 short film, Voices From a Steeltown, Buba explains that Carnegie hired immigrants because they weren’t unionized and “he didn’t want any labor problems in his mill.”)

Buba defines his life by the difference in options afforded his generation versus his parents’. His father, Edward, was a welder for 40 years, who never wanted his sons to work at the mill. Instead, Tony spent six years in the National Guard before studying film at nearby Edinboro University and later Ohio University; his brother went on to edit movies for George A. Romero, eventually working on Michael Mann’s 1995 epic Heat and the 1997 Johnny Depp vehicle The Brave.

Like his friend and collaborator Romero, creator of Night of the Living Dead, Buba’s sensibility stems as much from a love of cinema as it does from a hardscrabble upbringing. Romero’s 1978 film Martin—in which a young vampire targets women in Braddock—was filmed at Buba’s childhood home.

As a student in the 1970s, Buba took to documenting the old-timers of his hometown in a series of short 16 mm films he would later call The Braddock Chronicles—vérité snatches of working-class life from the inside out, glimpses of dereliction that neither make time for pity nor ask the viewer for theirs. Buba tells me his impulse to document Braddock came out of periodic visits to his hometown, where he’d notice how little things—and people—had changed over the years. His first film, the two-minute 1972 short To My Family, was an homage to his grandfather’s shoe shop, which had just been shuttered.

Buba traces Braddock’s peak back to the postwar period, before the steel industry collapsed, when middle-class people could make enough money to exit for posh Pennsylvania suburbs. His conflicted feelings about pursuing a career in the arts—built on his parents’ foundation of manual labor—are impossible to miss across the films.

Buba’s 105-minute masterpiece, Lightning Over Braddock, turns 30 years old this year. It’s probably the closest thing the filmmaker has to a breakout hit, predating Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary about the decline of Flint, Michigan, Roger & Me, by just over a year. Lightning Over Braddock played a slew of film festivals, taking home a nomination for Best Film at the Independent Spirit Awards, and securing distribution from New York–based Zeitgeist Films. But while Moore’s career now has him crisscrossing the globe as an activist filmmaker and celebrity, Buba has remained in Braddock.

Lightning Over Braddock is unique among Buba’s body of work: it builds on the relationships chronicled in his prior films, but also sees the director starring as a caricature of himself, torn between continuing his practice versus cashing out and going “big time.” Sal, forever ready for his close-up, returns as leading man. The film is an autobiographical mea culpa for a brush with fame that never really happens. Using himself as a kind of narrative prism, Buba invents his own language to skirt the perimeters of fact and fiction: one scene has him being interviewed about Sweet Sal on a TV show, clearly patterned after Siskel & Ebert, before cutting to Sal sitting alone at home, disconsolate, watching Buba talk about him on TV. In this warped version of reality, Sal develops a fan following due to his performance in the earlier short, while Tony (briefly) wins the attention of a mysterious Hollywood producer. More than halfway into shooting, Sal quits the film, throwing Tony’s new project into crisis.

Buba portrays himself as a guilt-ridden Catholic, equally beleaguered by the falling out with Sal and his inability to get a grant to finish a documentary about the impending US Steel plant closures; he asks his grandmother to say a prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. At confession for the first time in 20 years, Buba tells the priest he’s a documentary filmmaker, and the priest consults a printed-out list of stock advice to be given to people of varying professions. “Documentary Filmmakers” is near the bottom, just above “Sex Therapists.” He tells Tony: “Thou shalt go to Hollywood.” Near the film’s end, Buba shows us the closing of a nearby US Steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio; an unnamed executive is quoted on the nightly news as saying, “We are in the business to make money, not steel.”

There are a handful of filmmakers with careers comparable to Buba’s: In her 1976 film Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple fixed her sights on labor inequities and union struggles at a coal mine in southern Kentucky. With an unflinching eye, the late Les Blank chronicled offbeat American traditions—a garlic festival in Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, a crawfish boil in Always for Pleasure, a Minneapolis “polka palace” in In Heaven There Is No Beer?—that stretched back for generations. Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries like Canal Zone and Titicut Follies betray a patience for the nitty-gritty of building relationships with on-screen subjects that’s comparable to Buba’s. And then there’s Martin Scorsese, another Roman Catholic descendant of immigrants who couldn’t help but notice the has-beens and “wise guys” around the neighborhood while he was growing up.

Though he’s made five features and more than a dozen shorts over the past 45 years, Buba describes himself as slow to finish his films; he carefully builds his movies around his relationships with the people on-screen. Many of the same characters appear in multiple films, as do pet motifs—Buba constantly weighs the costs of filmmaking with Braddock’s more urgent needs—and jokes about his status as filmmaker, hiding behind the camera. The 1981 short Mill Hunk Herald features an accordion version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” but Buba was unable to secure permission to include a local performer’s rendition of the same song for Lightning Over Braddock. Instead, he takes to describing his legal woes in voice-over: the rights to the song cost $15,000, three times the per-capita income of a Braddock resident.

Buba’s work probably isn’t flashy enough to command the attention of Hollywood studio executives, nor opaque enough for hard-core art house cinephiles—he describes his movies as failed stabs at agitprop, forever in the shadow of his idol Luis Buñuel’s 1933 classic Land Without Bread, a half-hour pseudo-documentary that juxtaposes the adventurism of tourists and photographers against the shocking poverty of the mountainous Las Hurdes region. While the Braddock Chronicles carried on that humanist tradition, Lightning is as much about the filmmaker’s own crisis of conscience, a rumination on the role of hyper-regional documentary in the face of economic crisis. Later docs like Struggles in Steel: A History of African-American Steelworkers (1996) and We Are Alive! (2013) are less neurotic than Lightning: the former, codirected with Buba’s high school classmate Ray Henderson, may go down in history as his angriest work for its depiction of racism suffered by black steelworkers, while the latter methodically documents an unsuccessful push to keep open the community hospital operated by the University of Pittsburgh.

Struggles in Steel concerns the steel communities of Braddock and neighboring towns, including Duquesne and Pittsburgh, and the African American workers descended from former slaves who migrated northward in the late 19th century. Ray Henderson had worked for 18 years at the Duquesne Steel Mill, and called Buba up after watching a TV documentary about job losses in the industry, incensed that it failed to include a single black laborer. Struggles features over 70 retired black steelworkers reflecting on their experiences both in the mill and against the union. There’s also a sly elision on the filmmakers’ part: as Buba tells me, he didn’t interview any of the foremen or factory people discussed by the steelworkers, because “we didn’t want it to be as though they needed a white person to validate their story. … If I’m not honest to the people I’m interviewing I’ll end up distorting what they say, moving them in the direction of whatever my political thoughts are.”

The testimonies are sobering: they detail racist oppression and neglect over centuries, from sharecropping through lynching, segregation, and rates of chemical poisoning that befell laborers in Braddock’s unregulated days as an industrial powerhouse. The film focuses in particular on the mistreatment of Henderson’s elders at the hands of the steelworkers’ union, which privileged white workers and withheld benefits from black members. One interviewee describes training an inexperienced white man, then seeing him go on to become his boss. The workers filed a civil suit against the union in 1974 and eventually won—but while reparations of half-a-billion dollars were called for, the payment was ultimately $30.7 million, spread across 40,000 former steelworkers. The laborers describe the double offense of being under-compensated and signing away their rights to sue again, a searing indictment of the lack of solidarity awaiting workers of color after the end of World War II. What leavens the material is the obvious camaraderie between the filmmakers and the talent, cracking wise about a nightmarish situation—the same common touch that separates Buba’s work from other hard-charging, dogmatic works of nonfiction.

In his earlier movies, Buba wonders whether his grant money could be better used in the service of the poor—but then, his career is also an object lesson in the drying-up of public arts funding. We Are Alive! relied on a Kickstarter campaign to generate funds for completion; donor rewards included a dinner of pizza and wine at Buba’s own home. Finished in 2013, the film is a chronicle of direct actions against the closure of the full-service University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Braddock, but most of the activists involved were never optimistic. Over the course of Buba’s narrative, their demands shift from keeping the hospital open to asking for an 18-month extension to figure out a low-cost alternative. In the end, UPMC went through with the closure, citing the high cost of operation and “a continuing declining utilization of the facility by the community.” Buba disagrees, effectively accusing University of Pittsburgh of abandoning Braddock, and using the crisis to profile his hometown from a new angle: the post-steel activist community. Like the earlier films, We Are Alive! sidesteps the wringing of easy elegies from a stale Rust Belt narrative. It’s representative of a filmmaker who has remained on the ground, taking audiences through the unglamorous paces of grassroots organizing, and inevitably returning to the question: “Now what?”

Current Mood: Socialist ✊
Current Music: Gang of Four - Paralysed

Special thanks to Tony Buba, Jake Perlin, Brad Hanford, Lygia Brubeck and Madeline Leung Coleman.

“YOUR WRITING WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU DIDN’T APOLOGIZE SO MUCH.” That’s some advice I got recently from a fellow critic-turned-programmer, somebody whose work and determination I admire very much, during a long overdue WhatsApp call. He’s right, and I’ve taken it to heart… But also, I’m Catholic and he’s not. And since I resumed cartooning in 2024, I have only barely begun to think about how to integrate my recent exploits with pen and ink alongside my slightly better-established practice (?) as a movie critic (???).

But if anything synthesizes these totally contradictory passions, it’s my two-page contribution to the most recent product released by Cashiers Du Cinéma, a gloriously upstart zine written/drawn/edited/published exclusively by movie theater employees, founded by local geniuses Dan Welch and David Cardoza.

Last February, Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a series honoring films about cinema workers, with a special release in which contributors would address specific titles.

From the list of available movies, I chose to laser in on Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 Best Foreign Language Film winner Cinema Paradiso, a four-hanky salute to the ✨magic of the movies✨ that was inescapable if you grew up loving film in the 1990s. For paid subscribers only, the pages are below.

More comics will be coming, quite soon, for better or worse. Until then, please visit Obvious Fake Press to order the full Cashiers zine (or indeed a box compiling the four issues that have been released thus far, plus the BAM special.) Happy weekend and vive le cinema.

Read more

MY SLOW PIVOT from moving to still images continues…

7pm this Friday (March 27) you can catch me at WORD Books, in Greenpoint, where I’ll be moderating a discussion with polymath cartoonist/writer Brad Neely (remember “Washington, Washing-ton”?) about Creased Comics, his new collection of painfully hilarious single-panel strips being published by the indomitable New York Review of Comics; Brad will be signing copies after our talk. This event is free, but RSVP is recommended.

On Sunday (March 29) I’ll be at Metrograph to introduce a screening of Kaizō Hayashi’s 1994 noir-pastiche-thriller The Most Terrible Time in My Life, part of the launch party for BOMB Magazine’s Spring 2026 issue. As a contributing editor to BOMB I was honored to conduct a wide-ranging, three-plus-hour interview with Hayashi, most renowned for his trilogy of films starring Masatoshi Nagase as “Maiku Hama”, a hilarious Japanese iteration of Mickey Spillane’s private detective Mike Hammer. For now our conversation is available in print only, however the full 5,000+ word discussion will go online later this summer.

It’s serendipitous that the films have been restored and are now available stateside via KANI Releasing, even moreso that the Metrograph screenings coincided with the publication of the BOMB issue. This is Hayashi’s first ever interview in English, and a years-in-the-making labor of love for me, who first encountered the films on DVD via the King County Public Library system in my hometown of Seattle 20+ years ago, then programmed the un-restored trilogy at Spectacle in 2018, followed by screenings of Hayashi’s restored debut feature To Sleep so as to Dream during COVID, which introduced me to Mika Yoshida, a NYC-based journalist from Japan who has been friends with Hayashi for many years. She put us in touch, and the rest is history1…

A few more recent/emergent things…

• This weekend also means the NYC opening of my dear friend (or “cine-sister”) Caroline Golum’s second feature Revelations of Divine Love, playing at Anthology Film Archives (with a parallel Middle Ages series programmed by Caroline) before expanding to other theaters and territories. When all is said and done Caroline will be recognized as one of the visionary geniuses of 21st century independent film, plus I have a brief nonspeaking cameo.

• Recent writing for Screen Slate included a memorial appreciation of no-wave legend Amos Poe, a Valentine’s Day writeup of Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give and an interview with Hong Kong filmmaker (now based in Melbourne) Clara Law.

• Last month I contributed a two-page comic about Guiseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, a movie I hate, to the zine/booklet organized by Cashiers du Cinema in conjunction with their Brooklyn Academy of Music series honoring movie theaters and the poor unfortunate souls who work there. As with BOMB, I’m in good company….

• In the spirit of getting my act together, I’ve been consolidating my interviews with filmmakers into a list on Letterboxd, a website I technically hate, while aggregating materials for a personal-professional website. (Still buffering…) As of this writing there are 80 interviews logged/linked, spanning 15 years of work, with more to be added—including a new interview with the director of my favorite film from 2025, coming very soon to this blog!

• April 24 thru May 3, the Museum of Modern Art will host a retrospective in honor of Tarsem, director of The Cell, The Fall, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” music video and much more. I was honored to collaborate with legendary curator and critic Dave Kehr on this idea. Tarsem will be joining us at MoMA for Q+As on April 24th, 25th and 27th.

That’s plenty for now. The hustle continues. No war with Iran. $ell $ell $ell!

Current Mood: Frantic 🤪
Current Music: Radiohead - The King of Limbs Live From the Basement

SUBSCRIBERS TO THIS BLOG MAY REMEMBER my interview last year with Mexican filmmaker Emiliano Rocha Minter (also one of the founders of La Cueva, a collectively-run DIY cinema in Mexico City) about the films of his parents, Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha. This was predated by select engagements of Minter and Rocha’s works at Spectacle, in Brooklyn, but the hook in late summer 2024 was a now-bygone series on Criterion Channel, which occasioned a really superb piece by Will Noah in the Criterion Current.

Something that got kicked up in these discussions was, Sarah’s very first short film Adagio (1980) had just been restored: a silent, 8-minute psychodrama shot on gorgeous Super 8. The plot (so far as I can tell) follows a middle-class woman who, bored with the stillness of her domestic life and the predictable advances of a man, flirts with changing her identity entirely, represented via a wardrobe switch-up in a lush forest as well as a nervewracking encounter with a gang of urban misfits who, in their style and demeanor, anticipate the punks of Minter’s more famous works shot later that decade on ¾” video. Adagio also feels like a priceless artifact, a means of witnessing someone’s consciousness shift in real time: muddled, dreamlike, gorgeous, crystalline.

I began looking for venue that would host a screening of Adagio (ideally followed by a discussion about Sarah’s work) but kept striking out. Conversations with Emiliano expanded to include artist and educator Fernando Llanos, a multihyphenate who was close with Sarah during her life and had just completed Sarah x Minter, a 72 page monograph (in Spanish) about her published by EDICIONES NECIAS. (Fernando was also the storyboard artist on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros and worked on a new book commemorating the film’s 25th anniversary.) Almost immediately the question became, “Why has there never been a New York City gallery exhibition dedicated to Sarah’s film and video work?”

That changes tomorrow (Friday November 14th) when Emiliano, Fernando and myself will be at Various/Artists, in the Lower East Side, to open El presente es el futuro: the Videos of Sarah Minter, which will run through December 14. If you are in New York, please come; please share this info with other New Yorkers who might be interested. Official gallery text below, and deep thanks to Garret Linn Benitez and Scott Kiernan of V/A for their tireless support bringing this project to fruition.

Various/Artists presents the first ever monographic gallery exhibition in New York City dedicated to Mexican artist and filmmaker Sarah Minter (1953-2016), organized in collaboration with her son Emiliano Rocha Minter and author/artist Fernando Llanos.

A key figure in Mexican video art, Minter’s background was linked to theater, film and graphic design. She burst onto the Mexico City scene with the shot-on-video punk docudrama Nadie es inocente (1986) and the indie feature followup Alma Punk (1991-92), both made in direct collaboration with street kids and punk communities in the Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl suburb of Mexico City.

Minter moved fluidly between narrative and experimental cinema, large-format video installation, video sculpture, single-channel video and photography in a lifelong pursuit of new freedoms, both formal and thematic. She used the DIY ethics of punk to seek out utopian alternatives to contemporary society; to those who knew her, her autonomy was also represented by her ever-present bicycle. Along the way she found allies, partners and friends with whom she formed an emancipated community built on long-lasting bonds. These collaborators populate the visually fragmented worlds of her videos, each importing their own narratives and personal lives.

This exhibition offers a small, focused survey of her creative legacy through production stills and short-format video works, including the United States premiere of the new restoration of Adagio, Minter’s very first short film from 1980.

HAPPY FRIDAY. I’M FOREVER STRUGGLING with the “newsletter” part of this newsletter. I really feel every Element X post should be an immaculately structured, rigorously researched and thoroughly self-edited masterpiece for the ages. Unfortunately time is running out, the world is ending (despite last Tuesday’s election results) and I’m broke. So just for the record, here are a few things happening in my world…

• Over the course of this month, Spectacle, in Brooklyn, is holding a first-ever US retrospective honoring the groundbreaking, still-alive Danish feminist artist Jytte Rex, organized by myself and Nicolas Cadena. Many of these films were newly scanned and/or subtitled specifically for this series, with the support of the Danish Film Institute. While this started out as one of my ideas, Nico (a brilliant filmmaker and thinker, by the way) has taken the lead and made it what it is; check out his stunning series trailer here.

• Also happening all November at Spectacle is the United States premiere of a new 4K restoration of Atolladero, the 1995 cyberpunk “paella western” written and directed by Óscar Aibar, and starring Iggy Pop in dubbed Spanish. This is a wild and (it should be noted) fairly taboo-shattering film, which I first saw on a bootleg DVD maybe a decade ago. Showing it in any form—let alone this jawdropping new restoration—is a late Spectacle dream. I agree with whoever wrote, “Aibar’s feature debut as writer-director is must-see genre cinema, consistent with other antic visions emerging from post-Franco Spain such as Alex de la Iglesia’s Accion Mutante and Julio Medem’s The Red Squirrel. (It may also be of special interest for fans of Sergio Leone, Alex Cox, the Coen Brothers, Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog)…”

• Similarly not for the faint-of-stomach: for Filmmaker Magazine I interviewed actor-director Alex Winter and prosthetic makeup wizard Bill Corso about Freaked, the 1993 gross-out horror comedy classic directed by Winter (at that moment, one of Hollywood’s hottest Gen X stars thanks to the Bill and Ted franchise) and his writing partner Tom Stern. While I don’t know yet about repertory screenings in New York or Los Angeles, Freaked has just been restored in 4K, and is now available to rent on VOD, plus Umbrella Entertainment has put out a gorgeous 3-disc blu ray box set with tons of extras, if that’s your bag.

• I’m in today’s Screen Slate with some quick thoughts on Elvira Madigan, a 1967 Swedish period piece that caused a considerable stir upon its initial release in New York City but remains fairly obscure today. One big reason for that is its filmmaker Bo Widerberg was a dedicated leftist who positioned himself in many ways as the anti-Bergman1. I tried over the years to poke into the idea of a Widerberg retrospective, being told on two different occasions by Swedish Film Institute representatives that they (still) had their hands full with Bergman stuff2, so the Film Forum series kicking off tonight feels like manna from heaven.

• Last thing - I wrote about a different Swede in Screen Slate a few weeks back, when Film Forum gave a week-run to Göran Hugo Olsson’s 3.5 hour documentary Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, comprised solely of footage from the archives of Swedish public television between the years indicated. While a Screen Slate writeup is technically supposed to function as a recommendation, I’m grateful to editor Nico Pedrero-Setzer for helping give me a platform to express some misgivings about Olsson’s approach to the material, which I found amateurish at worst and baffling at second-worst. The NYC run has ended but the film has distribution via Icarus.

See you at the movies; I hope to have a new piece of criticism (!) about a work of mainstream-ish contemporary cinema (!!!) ready next week.

Current Mood: Tired 🫩
Current Music: The Game - Money

2025 IS FULL OF SURPRISES, including the revelation that pop chanteuse Charli XCX is a devout user of the beloved movie-ranking website Letterboxd. On August 2nd, Charli logged the 2000 horror thriller Cherry Falls: she Liked the movie with a heart and wrote, as a review, “happy birthday 2 me”.

Slowly but surely, Cherry Falls is reclaiming its place within film culture. Starring the tragically departed sensation Brittany Murphy as goth teenager Jody Marken, the movie takes place in a fictional town where a hooded killer begins picking off teenagers, all of whom are revealed to be virgins, resulting in a student body determined to lose their collective innocence in a massive orgy. The supporting cast speaks to the project’s higher ambitions: Terminator star Michael Biehn plays Jody’s father, the sheriff of Cherry Falls; Candy Clark gives Jody’s sweet yet alcoholic mother a worn-out grace, and Jody’s unctuous English teacher is played by Y2K-era comedian Jay Mohr, then at the peak of his powers as a leading man.

Cherry Falls is cheerful in the way it embraces its own shit-eating luridness, a vibe immediately recognizable to anyone who came of age watching movies or TV around the turn of the millennium. There’s also a subtle, dignified intelligence to the film’s approach that’s not always guaranteed with teen slasher thrillers, anchored by Murphy’s performance: her signature mix of caginess and vulnerability is deployed beautifully in an unabashedly pulpy horror film whose undertones of incest, hypocrisy and latent abuse are impossible to ignore; in just 90 minutes she seems to grow from a suburban naïf in over her head to a hardened young woman able of defending herself (if reluctantly).

Here I’ll confess I did not grow up with Cherry Falls, but rather watched it at the recommendation of its director, Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright (most famous for introducing the world to Russell Crowe in his harrowing neo-Nazi drama Romper Stomper), after we exchanged messages online about a different project he had worked on. Cherry Falls was, in fact, hard to get ahold of for many years: it had been budgeted and greenlit as a major studio release in the wake of Scream, ala Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Summer, but a series of mergers and acquisitions had had unfortunate side effects on the production. Wright and his team ran afoul of the Motion Picture Association, who rejected the studio’s application for an R rating so many times the bean-counters lost interest in the project and sold it to USA Films, who eventually dumped it onto broadcast television. As a result of these misfortunes, Cherry Falls is technically the most expensive TV movie ever made.

After several years of failed attempts to get Cherry Falls screened before an American audience in an honest-to-goodness movie theater, I managed last month to organize a special engagement of the film at LOW Cinema, in Ridgewood, Queens, and Geoffrey dialed in from Melbourne for a post-film talkback1. In the hopes that Cherry Falls will continue to gain new fans (and, as you’ll read, that Universal will one day take an interest in restoring Wright’s original vision), I figured I would publish our Q+A here in honor of “spooky season”. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity; learn more about where to stream Cherry Falls here. Note: this interview contains spoilers.

Tell me about the genesis of this project, and maybe also what drew you to the material. For me, the late Nineties was a time of taboos “shattering” but also intensifying; there are many reasons but I’ll cite Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky as a major one. So here’s a film about the cultishness of small-town USA, kids and adults both looking other way when they learn girls have been raped, a film that exposes parents, teachers and cops, really all their authority figures, as moralizing hypocrites.

I had just come off the preproduction of Supernova2, a very large science fiction project at United Artists. I had liked that script. I had talked James Spader into doing it, I had a vision for it. They were building my zero-gravity sets, they were building my spaceship. The department heads, the cast, I had sold them all on my vision, built from the version of the script which had excited me. But there was a new regime at United Artists, and the lead executive didn’t like where we were going with it, even though it was pretty much exactly what had been shown to me in the first place. Now I was being instructed to do the rounds and say, “Hey, we’re not doing that. We’re doing this.” Crazy, right? In the space of like 24 or 48 hours, she had a very different draft written by an outsider, and it was sent to me, and I said, “This is not what I signed on to do.”

All of a sudden, it became a very different thing. A lot less science involved. My feeling was, it didn’t even need to be a science fiction film; you could have told the gist of that version of the story in a different genre altogether. The science fiction element of it became very superficial. Well. I didn’t want to play anymore, and I was told that I was making a big mistake, because you don’t do this with executives. They get upset. Word gets around. Plus the fact that, you know, she was newly instated, and to be stood up like this would make her very angry. And of course, that’s all true. One thing led to another, and I was out of that project. Lightning struck and I came across Cherry Falls, and I grabbed it with both hands.

Brittany Murphy and I were managed by the same company, so I would see her in corridors of this building occasionally, we got to know each other slightly, and we did start to talk about this project. The screenplay was by Ken Selden, whose wife Eli was Brittany’s manager. Eli said, “Why don’t you think about directing this?”

I sat down with Ken. The usual thing is, you can sit down and do what they call “the director’s pass”, or you can sit down with the writer and just talk it through, try putting a little more of your DNA onto the page in terms of pacing, what you want to accentuate, which characters you want to prioritize, that sort of thing. When I came on board is when we decided to lean more into the incipient sexual tensions that were going on, but that was already in the script; that’s what drew me to the material. We just pushed it a little bit further. At that stage I had a reputation as a director who would be inclined to do exactly that, so everyone knew what they were getting into.

It was a relief to find come across something that I knew would not change radically. I was very keen to get going with it, because it was a much smaller project and much less likely to to be messed around like that—or so I thought, in my naivety. Of course there were some surprises waiting for me on that front too.

We’ll get back to the production in a second, but: you were the one to suggest I check out Cherry Falls, and specifically said you wanted to speak on the record about it because you wanted to address some of the apocrypha out there about Brittany Murphy.

Yes. Brittany and I were friends; Cherry Falls was always intended as a vehicle for her, because we had the same agent. You know, allowing girls and young women to bear the burden of what the industry expected of them, and to handle all the pressures that were brought to bear, it’s a simple fact, not enough attention was paid to her mental health and wellbeing. At the time we made Cherry Falls, there was a lot of abuse going on in Hollywood. I’m not saying Brittany was subject to that kind of abuse per se, but that’s the town. It just is, was. People put up with a lot of bad things; all that has changed, but it hasn’t changed quickly or drastically enough.

Brittany: I think she struggled to accept continuing her journey in the foreseeable future in the indie world. She had a taste of the mainstream and she felt that’s where she belonged. A lot of actors debase themselves in independent work, and some never return to the mainstream; others bounce back and forth at will, people like Willem Dafoe, you know. I think she always felt that world was somehow inadequate to her original task, a measure of failure. I can’t be any more precise about it than that, and I think she struggled in that regard, and she shouldn’t have. She was still making a lot of money, she was still doing great work, and she could have found her way back into the mainstream had she persisted, or perhaps she may have been happy to spend the rest of her career moving around in the indie universe. But what killed her was all sorts of pressures and insecurities, and her partner Simon Monjack was exactly the wrong kind of person for her to be with. The moral of the story is that they were both in the same emotional fight, which probably brought them together. But they had a toxic dynamic… what’s the term I’m looking for?

“Codependent”?

Codependent. That meant that it wasn’t really a big surprise to me that he passed shortly after she did. When he died, my first reaction was that he had contributed to to her continued ill health and made things worse. After his death, well, I felt bad for feeling ill towards him.

She’s the reason Cherry Falls works so well, her performance. She’s the film’s center of emotional gravity. As a viewer, she’s the only one you feel you can trust. I also think a lot of the interest that we’ve seen in this screening is from Brittany fans who maybe didn’t know she headlined this slasher thriller, before she was a top-billed marquee star…

It’s well established that Brittany had, like a lot of people, some experience with illegal drugs. The bigger issue was her experience with legal drugs, stuff that she could get over the counter, that I think probably did more damage then than anything else. If you study the story of Jerry Lewis, for example, you know he struggled for years with painkillers. Brittany was a similar case, but there’s been at least one documentary full of conspiracy bullshit and all the rest of it. And her father bought into that. Of course, I think he sort of had to, because it was his inadequacies as a parent that I think could, you know, contribute to her being so vulnerable emotionally in the first place. It stands to reason he would think that there was some elaborate reason for her demise, but there wasn’t. There were just a lot of ordinary, depressing issues that were not solved, and I think she needed closer friends in her life too. That wouldn’t have been easy, because she could push people away. She was a very loving girl, but she wasn’t the kind of person that let you get too close, not even when she was feeling strong. So I think that when she was feeling vulnerable and weak, that impulse just got worse.

It’s an unbelievably sad story. In our discussions leading up to this screening, you alluded to having endured problems before, during and after production. Walk me through that?

The whole problem was that the company that developed and believed in Cherry Falls sold it to another company that had no skin in the game in terms of its development. All this happened fairly soon before we were actually ready to shoot, very disturbing. But left-field things like that can and do happen in the movie business. No one had seen this coming, but there you go. Suddenly Marshall Persinger, the other producer who developed the project, Eli and Ken Selden and myself were dealing with a group of executives who had nothing to do whatsoever with acquiring and developing the material.

Now, there must have been something about it they liked, but you couldn’t tell from the way they spoke to us. They weren’t giving it a great deal of respect. And things got worse when we went out to Richmond, Virginia, when we were ready to shoot. My producers were as producers are: they asserted themselves, they wanted to make sure their voice was heard in various regards, and I was cool with that. I had become particularly close with Marshall Persinger. But their persistence banged heads with the executives from the new company, and they were subsequently banned from the set, which was shocking.

And I think they looked at me and thought, “Why aren’t you threatening to leave this project, or quit, if they follow through with this?” I caught up with Marshall and I said, “Look. I’ve already had a huge confrontation with a Hollywood executive on Supernova. I can’t have two in a row like this, right? It’s going to destroy me, utterly.” Marshall and Eli, “the girls”, they understood. Were I in their shoes, I would maybe be disappointed that I hadn’t made more of a die-on-this-hill defense of their right to be close to the shooting. But they understood my reasons, and I said to them, “I’m going to be reporting to you at the end of every day, discussing everything with you, it’s going to be awkward, but it’s not like you’ve been disenfranchised all together. We can make this work.” That was my line at the time. I believed it, but of course, it was fairly impractical, and as time went by, you know, I heard less and less from them, because I think they lost heart. But they were still determined to make sure that the project got completed and the right thing was done by it.

By the time we were ready to roll cameras I had already and immediately lost a major member of the crew. I’m not sure if I should say who it is, in case I get us all into some sort of legal strife, but I think it’s okay for me to say that a very important member of the crew was immediately fired. Ostensibly. Because there’d been some sort of emotional problems. But I think it was more like they didn’t agree with the new owners’ view on what was going on inside their office, inside their department. And they were just gone.

This is insane.

I remember someone from the new company coming to me and saying: your producers are gone. We’ve just fired this guy. Are we going to have trouble with you as well? I said, “Man, I have just come here to Richmond, Virginia to shoot a movie. That’s all I want to do.” Right? So to their credit, they did leave me alone. I think that they probably had to spend their energy dealing with other people. I’ll be honest and say, I don’t feel like I was subjected to any further pressure after that.

Finally we got about to shooting the movie, and I was so excited to work with Brittany. She she was complaining about being in physical pain from a car accident she had suffered months beforehand; she was still suffering. She was in physical pain, and having a hard time dealing with it. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if indeed things were as simple as that with her, or if that was the beginning of some sort of addiction with over-the-counter drugs… I honestly don’t know. But there were some straightforward physical issues with Brittany, in terms of how long we could keep her on set to shoot. She didn’t have a lot of strength, and we had to work around that. But she was fantastic to work with. I loved every minute of it, and the cast loved her too, and the crew loved her. Everyone loved her; she had a great vibe. So despite these other things, I was very happy with our teamwork on the project.

How long was the shoot?

I think it was six weeks and three days, maybe six weeks and two days. Something around that vicinity.

In our correspondence these last few years, you’ve mentioned pushback from the residents of the town where you were shooting, Richmond, Virginia.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a whole other story. A high school in Richmond was very happy to take our location money and let us shoot there. They thought it would be fun, even3. But then, of course, the the parents of the students found out what the principal had planned and executed, and they began to rally just outside of where we were shooting—many times. They broke into the set, too, to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between extras playing angry parents and the actual angry parents of Richmond. I remember saying to the first A.D.: “ We have a lot of extras tonight. What’s going on?” And she said “No, they’re not allowed. Because they think you’re responsible.”

So I try and get out there lunchtime. When I say “lunchtime”, remember we’re doing night shoots here. So I’d go out there and and try and speak with these townsfolk. What I discovered was that politically conservative Baptists like a drink just about as much as anybody else. So after a half-day shoot, we would repair to a local watering hole, a bar, I would have a drink with them and try and calm them down. Note that I wasn’t doing this at first, but I did this after a few weeks of, you know, observing what they were up to. There were times we had to stop filming because of their chanting and their protests. We had security there, but I was always worried that our security, which was nothing special, would be overwhelmed in cases where we were outnumbered by about 30 to one. Well, as time went by, we developed some relationships with these parents, and pretty soon, of course, they wanted to be extras too. This is all part of the madness of this shoot, and I haven’t even gotten to the arrest yet.

Now’s a good time.

He won’t mind me saying this, because he’s gone on record himself, he’s written about it. But at that stage of his career, Michael Biehn was into some illegal drugs, and after hours, he began to play up a little bit. To the point some people complained. So one day while we’re shooting a scene, he’s in his nice, crisp uniform, I look around and I see three more sheriffs. I ask the woman from the wardrobe department, “Who are these guys?” I thought they looked really cool. I liked their uniforms. But shouldn’t everyone have the same uniform? She was the one to tell me: “They’re the real thing. They’ve come to arrest Michael.”

So when I called cut, they made their move. They were very gracious, by the way; it wasn’t like I.C.E., just barging in in the middle of whatever you’re doing and dragging you by your fingers. These guys were kind enough to wait for me to call cut before they moved in and apprehended Michael. They took him away, and we had to scramble to find a double and shoot him from enough different angles, especially from behind, so that we could cut them in. But that meant we lost Michael for the last two weeks. He never came back and we had to work around that. We did get Michael back for 24 hours in postproduction, we brought him in for ADR and put his voice on a few shots and scenes, things like that. It was not easy but we got away with a few shots there. Watching the film, I don’t think you can tell which is and is not Michael.

It reminds me of Ed Wood, casting a dentist to play Dracula—mostly Dracula’s forehead—in pickup shots, because Bela Lugosi had died. (You’re a far better filmmaker than Ed Wood.)

There was also this very strange arc in my relationship with Jay Mohr. I was pleased to bring him into the project because of his sharp wit. The camera liked him. It was something uncaring about him, and he was keen to, you know, establish more of a film career. And I thought, yeah, this guy will be interesting. It worked out well for first few days, but then began to notice something. This is not a criticism of his work. He always delivered. But just, for whatever reason, he tended to resent the way I operated, the way I directed him. I tried different things. Nothing seemed to work. It was just very difficult. Remember, I worked with Russell Crowe, and at times it seemed Russell got up on the wrong side of the bed each and every morning. I know what a difficult actor is, or can be, but if they’re delivering in front of the camera, you just wear it, y’know? With Jay I had to wear it, but it was just a shame that we couldn’t have had a more convivial relationship.

So there was Brittany complaining about her aches and pains. Jay kept wanted to go back to his trailer and be alone, or something. And Michael, well, he got himself arrested. Candy Clark and I had a lot of fun together, and she became a good friend of mine; I loved hearing all of her stories about American Graffiti and things like that, and the man who fell to her experiences were taken forward.

It was pretty crazy but as the film progressed, we were getting on much better with the people who had originally come to tar and feather us, or worse. The conservative religious protest group became very friendly, I have to say. In the end we let a few of them join in the shooting of the orgy scene. It was all crazy, but now it’s kind of a funny story, and it worked, mostly.

So this had been budgeted at, I believe, $9 or $10 million, with the full intention of a theatrical release. Right?

I think it was more than that. (laughs) The budget we started out with wasn’t the budget we finished with, because I can tell you categorically, positively, there was a rumor going around that our postproduction budget got siphoned off to Nurse Betty. I honestly don’t know if that was true or just some kind of crazy scuttlebutt, but I can tell you in postproduction I had less resources, less time, than I had had with Romper Stomper, which was made on, I don’t know, maybe a fifth of the budget of Cherry Falls? A quarter? My postproduction resources on Romper Stomper were far greater than what they were on Cherry Falls. Everything was very skimpy and quick, because the owners didn’t believe in it. Right? We’d had a test screening and the reactions they got were vivid and intense. But they weren’t the ones the company was anticipating. I distinctly remember teenagers coming out slack jawed from the first screening. They said were shocked—not shocked from the point of view of, you’re jumping out of your chair with horror, but shocked at the subject matter and shocked at some of the dialog. And this worried the powers that be, quite a lot. That’s not what they wanted to hear.

For me, I said, that’s fine. We’re dealing with a dark horror farce, about teen sex. So embrace that shock value! That’s always what we thought would happen, you know? But I think honestly, they didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that that’s what we were doing. So we had ever-fewer resources to finish the film, to the point where it got really hard. And this brings me to how we lost a lot of the material for the final cut. Because at one stage I was asked to come in and do what you call “the airline version”, which is the least offensive, least shocking, least controversial cut of the film possible, the cut you could put on an airplane. The idea being, anyone could turn it on, watch it, and not be offended. That’s the version you just saw.

That’s the only version that’s out there.

The only surviving cut of the film is the airline version. There were two versions: one which was basically the director’s cut, and then the studio cut which, by the way, still had a lot of bells and whistles, still packed a lot of punch. But what you just saw tonight was the airline version.

So there were three cuts: yours, the studio’s, and then the airline cut of the studio’s.

I remember going to the Universal lot for the cutting of the airline version. Cutting this out, cutting that out, and I’d ask the powers that be: “Are we there yet? Have we removed enough shots from this so we’re at the airline version?” They’d say, “Oh yeah, we’re good, we’re there now.” Great—got that out of the way. I’d look forward to people seeing the one we had put together creatively, but everything happens so quickly towards the end of post production that these important reels literally got misplaced, lost.

Lost as in, lost? Or is it just sitting somewhere un-catalogued?

No one’s ever found them. I joke about it like it’s the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Someday, someone’s going to come across a cardboard box with this material in it. Some lucky person will get the job of reinserting those scenes, sequences, and shots back into the thing, and there’ll be a whole new film to re-release. Unfortunately, I’ll probably be dead long before that happens. So probably, only a few hundred people saw the film we intended to make, in those preview screenings, plus the cast and crew. But there you go.

For what it’s worth, I think the film has real bite, even the airline version. But what you’re saying makes sense because the scale of visible production is greater than the finished film: there’s slow-mo, freeze frames, voiceover, stuff that feels maybe like it came from a reedit or a nip-and-tuck. Also, the film has no pop songs on the soundtrack, which feels rare for a teen slasher flick of this era. Just scoring. But uh… Tell me about the license plate in the first scene that says “SUPNOVA”?

I had to make some sort of comment about my experience and I felt that I could get away with that. So it was my little humble little protest in that scene, absolutely. (laughs)

Worth mentioning the film did play in European theaters, and won a prize at Sitges, in Spain, kind of the premier festival for horror and phantasmagoric cinema. But this, too, was the airline version.

Correct. We had a great time at Sitges, or at least I did, I think I was there by myself. We won Best Fantasy Film, which was the the top award. And I was asked if I wanted to forget about Hollywood and stay in Spain and make horror films. And I always regret saying no. It’s a terrific country, and it has a great cultural attachment to horror, to this day. It always has, in literature and in film as well. I should have stayed there in Europe and made some movies for the Spanish studios. I should have done it. I deeply regret it, but there you go.

Can you recall any deleted scenes that you know really pained you to remove? You know any do you have, like, a favorite scene that was cut?

I want to preface this by saying basically every sequence lost a shot here or there, sometimes a line, sometimes a whole shot. Usually, the reason is that it was about sex. Sometimes it was about violence, but usually sex, I would say; at a rate of, maybe seven out of ten cuts were about sex, three were violence.

But the scene that probably was the most impactful that we lost was a rape scene, a flashback to the past, really the key to what the film is saying. We were quite elaborate with that information and that part of the story. And we thought we did a very good job in it, but most of that is is done and it’s just too bad, because we spent quite a while putting it together.

Say more about the objections that were raised by the MPAA? What were the specific things that they were so upset by?

I think it was the inextricable, inescapable intertwining of sex and violence, which you could say goes on in the genre all the time anyway. We were surprised at their objections to the fairly farcical idea that you have to lose your virginity in order to be safe; this usurpation of the norm bothered a lot of people. The new owners weren’t inclined to fight on our behalf, because they had not gone through the long gestation period. They just wanted to give in and move on, write it off, because it literally was not their baby. Like I said, it was a shock: meeting all these people on set that you have never spoken to before in your life, let alone about this project, and suddenly you have to deal with them. But as I said, to their credit, after all these other crazy things happened, I was left alone.

But we had changes in the A.D. department, changes in the production managing department, in other words, the new company brought in their own people. So it was also my job to somehow I didn’t want the rest of the crew to think of these newcomers as a bunch of spies, right? Which is what we were worried about, that they were working for the other company, that they were there to keep an eye on us, you know, and I made a special effort, socially, to get to know these people very well after hours. I feel I got them to believe in what we were doing, such that there was no tension on the set between the original crew and the new members who were brought in by the new owners. We we somehow managed to become one family, organically... But by then, a lot of damage already been done with Eli and Marshall and what have you, but at least as we were shooting, that tension dissipated.

This is a genre question about the process of everything getting shuffled around. There’s a lot of red herrings in the movie: it’s Brittany’s mom, it’s Kenny, it’s all these people. Did you lose anything in these cuts that you maybe wanted in terms of, like, misdirection? Was there someone that maybe you wanted to point to that you couldn’t because of these cuts, or was it like kind of all on the table?

That’s a good question. I think we probably did lose a couple of beats of misdirection because they had been attached to moments that received objections for other reasons, and there was no way to cut around ‘em. It’s not like the information was was available in other ways. I mean, this film sustained a lot of cuts, you know. I’m often surprised it hangs together as well as it does. I do think that we probably lost some tension and some cohesion in the process, but people still get off with the audacity of the central premise and for the craziness of the performances and things like that, you know.

You’re describing a situation that clearly required a lot of diplomacy and a lot of quick, creative, on-the-spot problem-solving. And I do think that the film still has a lot of personality and a lot of, like I said, a lot of bite. I think your initial idea of subverting the genre and kind of making this indictment of society comes through. So you know, we were really excited to have this 25th anniversary screening. This is the first time it’s played at a ticketed screening at an American theater.

What you just said is quite startling, that this is the first public theatrical engagement of the film in America. The international release was extremely patchy, because once the US had gone before cable, a lot of other territories went along with that. But not all of them: in Japan, we did well, and Spain, and other parts of Europe, Scandinavia, so on and so forth. It’s had a very mixed history, but it’s been good for my soul to air some of these things tonight.

Current Mood: Autumnal 🍂
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails - Just Like You Imagined

Special thanks to Geoffrey Wright, Davis Fowlkes, John Wilson, Cosmo Bjorkenheim and Cristina Cacioppo.

Something I’ve been reluctant to share here is that, starting last summer, I’ve gravitated back towards my childhood passion of cartooning1. Curiously, I found myself working out my animosity towards Materialists in the form of a joke “fan poster”. Having taken a step back, I can see my influences included Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities, Guy Jouineau and Guy Bourduge’s poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”) and Fukuda Shigeo’s proto-Mad Men silhouettes of doomed salarymen…

Later in the summer, my pals Davis Fowlkes, Cosmo Bjorkenheim and John Wilson (of HBO’s How to with John Wilson) announced they were going to be showing Song’s film at LOW Cinema, their new 45-seat theater in my neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens2. I facetiously offered to make a cleaner version to promote the screenings. To my surprise and delight, they said yes, and last night it was officially installed in the LOW poster case. But why give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome shilling for a movie you hated? All I can offer in my defense is, there’s more than one way to criticize a film…

Separate from my official debut as a poster artist (move over, Drew Stuzan!), I also wrote a short piece for Screen Slate in praise of Elia Kazan’s 1960 melodrama Wild River, which screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives, a movie I respect too much to try sullying with bad cartooning. I wish I had had more room to get into Kazan’s explicit references to the agitprop films he made with Leo Hurwitz and Sidney Meyers before going full snitch, his second wife Barbara Loden’s casting in Wild River as one of many checks on Montgomery Clift’s liberal conscience, and Kazan’s increasingly problematic posthumous reputation, alas.

Current Mood: ArTiStiC 🎨
Current Music: Handel - Sarabande (from Barry Lyndon)

I DRAGGED a handful of loved ones to the Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea to pay our respects to Harun Farocki’s installation Deep Play in the winter of 2008. On those white walls, the great German artist-filmmaker-theorist had mounted twelve different screens/projections, each confined to a fixed vantage point; in aggregate, they totaled twelve different POVs on the 2006 World Cup soccer final between France and Italy. So for example, one camera (Farocki’s own) remained rigidly pointed at the stadium from maybe a mile away, and it captured antlike spectators trickling in and out as the sky changed colors over the game’s one hundred and thirty-five minutes. Closer POVs were trained on individual players, on coaches, on crowds, or on broadcast TV systems.

Deep Play was an art exhibit about soccer but also a piece of widescreen interactive journalism, a kind of bowdlerized X-ray of then-modern spectatorship. And while this particular World Cup final had already gained international notoriety for French captain Zinedine Zidane’s headbutting of Italian captain Marco Materazzi, Farocki’s disentangling of the all-seeing apparatus that enabled its broadcast meant relegating the match’s most famous moment to just one of innumerable data points to be mixed and matched on the all-seeing timeline. It doesn’t take a Marshall McLuhan to recognize that our means of both making and sharing visual media, whether documentative or utterly bogus, have multiplied exponentially since 2006; today, the idea of a major television event broken down into its constituent camera angles feels quaintly pre-digital.

Memories of Deep Play resurfaced while watching Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), a documentary portrait of Peruvian-born torero (bullfighter) Andrés Roca Rey. Serra deprives the viewer of anything one might expect going into a “sports documentary”: there are no interviews, there’s no voiceover narration, no expository montage, no detailing of Rey’s childhood or introduction to bullfighting nor any real acknowledgement of his social life outside the world of bullfighting. So, stripped of these accoutrements, what’s left? Deep Play came to mind because Afternoons feels like a kind of inverse. Serra’s camera is obsessively trained on Rey. You hear the cheer of the crowds but never see their faces. The bulls in the arena have already been stabbed multiple times; Rey’s task is to finish them off while they are at their most fatigued (and thus, their most dangerous). There is no godlike hand at the control console, no relief found in cutting to something or somebody else. Somebody is smiling, but not the torero.

Taken in full, it’s a bit like ESPN directed by Andy Warhol, an exercise in minimalism against the current of ever-expanding digital maximalism. Whatever we learn about Rey, we learn from watching him at work which, necessarily, includes getting dolled up in traditional garb and no small amount of the hurry-up-and-wait bullshit immanent to sports (as well as filmmaking). After each match, Rey and his entourage load into a vehicle, but we never get an establishing shot from the outside. So it’s unclear whether it’s a bus, an SUV, a van or a limo. Serra repeats the same interior shot each time, with Rey focused on—or past—the camera, looking like Bill Murray in Wes Anderson’s The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou. In the ring he looks like Warren Beatty sometimes, unafraid to make a fool of himself. Sometimes he looks like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. His handlers and sidekicks gas him up after the matches: You showed a huge pair of balls. Warrior, you are great! The people want you. It’s for your style. Slow motion. Life is nothing, you got balls! The extremity of such statements shows how high Serra might want to take us in his quest for eternal greatness. It’s hard not to wonder if Rey’s very real bravery is being put to the test purely for its own sake, unlike that of someone fighting in defense (allegedly or otherwise) of their homeland.

Like the dances between Rey and his doomed combatants, there’s a lot more to be said about Serra’s film as a portrait of male vanity, and of these elite group dynamics, especially versus the phantom crowd dynamics we hear, but never see, in the arena. An early-middle section exposes the way Rey’s posse talk about him—and the bulls—differently when he’s not around, his seat conspicuously empty as the anchor of the frame as we’ve come to expect it. Taken as a portrait of sychophancy, Serra’s film is rivaled only by Wolf Koenig and Roman Krotoir’s classic 1962 verité featurette Lonely Boy, about proto-Beatles-level superstar Paul Anka. I have no idea if Serra has seen it, but outside his new film, Lonely Boy helped me unlock the boys-club rituals of Marty Scorsese1.

In her superb Running Away From Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn From the Films of the Forties, the massively underrated critic and antiwar activist Barbara Deming mapped depictions of what is now called PTSD, in epochal Golden Era studio releases during and after the second Great War. To quote Deming:

Men die in these films, for this is war, but they fall on a battlefield bright with visions of the life they “almost happily” die to secure; each with his family photograph, his letter from sweetheart, wife or Mom, with news of the home town he is proud of, tucked in his pocket; or the page he has torn from a magazine—”Your Ideal Home”. “We shall utterly defeat the enemy,” the government film A Prelude to War quotes General Marshall. And at his words, a bright bright globe eclipses a dark.

Later,

…The emergency operation will never end. The camera cannot take its fill of that face, where teeth bite lips, eyes suddenly roll in a swoon (for this, name at random almost any film.) Here is no controlled rendering of the facts of war. The camera voluptuously involves us in the destructive moment, moves in too close and dwells overlong, inviting us to suffer in the ecstasy of dissolution, the thrill of giving it all up.

This compulsion, betraying itself in film after film, belies the bright tableaux arranged, the bright words carefully mouthed, and hints at some very different sense of the actuality of things, repressed but secretly insistent. And a long look confirms just this. The figure of the clear-browed soldier with the dream in his eyes turns insubstantial, and another figure claims attention, member of no happy clan, a figure of bitter aspect, withdrawn upon himself, who cries, “Don’t you ever wonder if it’s worth all this—I mean what you’re fighting for?”—who cries, “I stick my neck out for nobody… I’m not fighting for anything anymore, except myself!… All hail the happy days when faith was something all in one place!”

That last line comes from Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca. Just as his yearning for “all in one place” doesn’t make him a fascist, Afternoons of Solitude is not reactionary or jingoistic. Rather, it addresses cultural heritage in form; it acknowledges the passage of time by dint of its existence.

A Spanish colleague who saw the film last weekend told me the commonsense feeling on the mainstream left is that the world has moved on, and the matches should be abolished in Spain the same way they are in Argentina, Cuba, Denmark, Canada and most other countries (as well as Mexico City, Catalonia and Barcelona). In Spain it’s a posh, controversial sport whose populist origins have been ceded to aristocracy. The fights are time-honored rituals, nonnegotiable crucibles of masculinity, bloody and breathtaking old-world grand guignol theater. Another anecdote: before Grasshopper Films picked Afternoons up for distribution, multiple friends told me it was the best film they had seen in 2024, with the caveat it was unlikely to play in the United States due to its unflinching brutality. Jokes about seeing it at Lincoln Center are usually accompanied with jokes about PETA protesters dumping blood on you as you leave the cinema.

I’ve read as little as possible about this movie, but the best negative review was from the beyond-redoubtable Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado, on Letterboxd:

Sadism in pretty pictures. Serra is obsessed with death and ways it can be aestheticized; he is also at heart a provocateur who probably stays too much time jet legging the international film circuit, so he frankly lacks the moral seriousness to reckon with something like this beyond thinking of the ways film apparatus can relate and mythologize the performance of bullfighting. One of the reasons I thought Pacifiction2 was his best movie so far is that it erased the distance between Magimel’s agent of empire and Serra himself, Afternoons of Solitude might’ve been worthwhile if it did the same, but its distance mostly allows him and his audience off the hook, it's a vile movie about evil as spectacle for us but its updated take on bullfighting’s grotesquerie remains pure symptom.

Serra has cultivated a following within international cinema for his revisionist takes on holy cows such as Don Quixote, the Three Kings and Louis XIV. In 2014 I spent a long afternoon in the Lower East Side talking with him about Story of My Death, his (arguable) breakout which depicts an unholy meeting of Casanova and Dracula as the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism, to put a too-fine point on it. (We hung out at Cakeshop3.) As I understood it, Serra’s patented technique involved multiple cameras rolling in digital, so that scenes were blocked and documented in a way allowing traditional dramaturgies to get spiked, made slow, hyperrealistic and perhaps even boring. Young and stupid, I told myself Serra and I had hit it off, surely better than he had with other critics and interviewers. I remember being especially pleased with myself when he affirmed my description of his project as being “against fetishizing the past.”4 With his farts and shit jokes as signposts in the history of the life of the mind, Serra was all about taking history off the pedestal. And while Afternoons of Solitude doesn’t skimp on grime, mud, guts or blood, you have the feeling of watching “history” in media res, it’s all just too close to call beyond the disaster economics of who lived and who died. The film’s gnarliest moments require you to ask, “What just happened?” Once you start watching it’s impossible to stop, and once seen it’s hard to forget.

Whatever else needs to be said about the racist, revanchist, xenophobic tide sweeping Europe and the United States, it’s a reaction to the last several decades’ worth of globalization. Wages go down, the cost of living goes up, the cost of (some) goods is cheaper, national identity becomes fragmented by relentless exposure to the rest of the world (or at least, pointillized fragments of its representations via the internet), and beacons of cultural homogeneity such as a bullfight inevitably harken back to a simpler time. Serra loves jokes and joke-formats, thus, an action movie about banality. Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan was the one who initially hipped me to Serra, and I kept recalling something he had said about the (relatively few) action sequences in Michael Mann’s Blackhat and Ferrari: “When they happen, it feels like the end of the fucking world.”

Like a witness’ phone, leaked police bodycam or security camera video, Serra’s film makes it hard to look away. Animal-like, it evinces no performative opinion about its subjects. At its most firing-on-all-cylinders moments it provides two and a half layers of spectatorship: there’s watching the bull, watching Rey, and watching Rey watch the bull. Our avatar Rey looks incapable of enjoying anything. Repressed. Pent-up. Insecure. Turgid. Afraid to say the wrong thing. Catholic.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if Serra’s foregoing of context/exposition is an absconding of responsibility, the kind of gimmickry that has reasonably dogged his mostly rapturous critical evaluation over the last decade. The older I get, the more haunted I am by Jimi Hendrix’s comments in a 1967 interview when asked about his guitar technique:

Gimmicks? Here we go again. I'm tired of people sayin' we rely on gimmicks. What is this? The world is nothin' but a big gimmick isn't it? Wars, napalm bombs and all that. People being burned-up on TV...

It’s a cliché for critics to say a specific fleeting image or moment conjures a whole world, but that’s almost what happened for me watching Rey kiss, and touch, a portrait of the Madonna and child three times before entering the ring, in one of Serra’s many paparazzi-esque static single shots. (“All hail those happy days when faith was something all in one place!”) Would seeing Rey using a smartphone shatter the sweeping mythos drilled in on by Serra? Or would it not make a bit of difference? Your mileage will vary.

I’ve referenced a lot of films trying to reckon with Afternoons of Solitude; Serra is, for all his high-art adjacency, also a creature of cinema. He knows how to make death look good. And instead of arguing the sadism of the bullfights gives Spain some kind of inconveniently truthful engine like, say, the violence defended by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, he shows it as it is: an organic spectacle of national character, rooted in manufacturing consent and greasing the gears of industry. There are other examples, and we don’t always get a chance to look this close.

Learn about where to see Afternoons of Solitude here. Special thanks to Nico Pedrero-Setzer, Irene Rihuete Varea, Phil Coldiron and Rachel Yara.

Current Mood: Stunned 😵‍💫
Current Music: Matmos - Kendo for Yukio Mishima

ELEMENT X LIVES! Let me explain…

When this journal started in 2021 the dream was to publish rigorous (or at least long) essays and interviews about films, or tendencies in FiLm CuLtUrE, which I felt deserved more attention than they were getting. This mission was supplemented by the occasional hot take on a hypervisible work of mainstream or contemporary arthouse cinema; in brief, the goal was to address what I felt nobody else was addressing, either in terms of subject matter or critical argument. I feel it’s been successful if obviously (and, to many, disappointingly) sporadic.

What I wanted to avoid, perhaps to my own detriment, was using Element X as an honest-to-God newsletter. Why repackage the same information I was sharing on social media? Especially if it was information about screening series in New York City and I was trying to reach (or expand to) a worldwide audience? Et cetera.

But, as it turns out, in 2024 all economics are disaster economics, and so it’s time to leverage everything. I’m reminded of a (now-shuttered) business on Aurora Avenue, the main arterial of my hometown of Seattle, called Stupid Prices. The billboard promised “Insanely Stupid Prices! Everything Must Go!”

(As a bit of housekeeping, I don’t begrudge anyone for unsubscribing or withdrawing their $upport. I get notified by email whenever this happens and I usually re-subscribe the person in question, if I know them personally, for free, for the rest of their lives/this newsletter. Is that a blessing or a curse? Nobody has complained yet.

As a second bit of housekeeping: I’m 100% sincere when I say the $upport received thus far has not just compensated my efforts to produce criticism on this Substack but also helped keep me physically alive, and thus made it possible to continue my programming activities at large, which is hopefully not nothing.)

Anyway: here are a few contemporary items, hopefully of interest…

• Starting this Friday at Brooklyn Academy of Music, I guest-programmed a series in collaboration with The Baffler magazine on the subject of their latest issue, “Facing the Future”. The program engages notions of demographic change and seeks (like the issue) to balloon-pop some of the entrenched stereotypes about voter blocs and generational shifts that are endemic to American political discourse (RIP). Highlights include Christopher Jason Bell introducing the now-quaint G.W. Bush campaign documentary Journeys with George (2002), Rick Perlstein introducing the acid-laced gerontocracy satire Wild in the Streets (1968), a conversation with journalist Gaby del Valle about eugenics and the right wing after Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006), a discussion with writer-director Alex Rivera after his 2008 feature Sleep Dealer (2008) and much more. Most of these are screening on 35mm prints, too.

• My friends at Screen Slate just published a new zine entitled KILL YR LANDLORD, hopefully self-explanatory. I contributed a piece about MTV’s misbegotten first foray into theatrical cinema, Joes’s Apartment (1996) which is about the friendship shared by Jerry O’Connell and a host of singing and dancing CGI cockroaches. You can read an excerpt here and purchase the zine for $8 here.

• I’m also in the new issue of Filmmaker Magazine with a long profile/interview of Stephen Sayadian, the artist/designer/filmmaker who directed such porn cult classics as Nightdreams , Cafe Flesh and Dr. Caligari (1990). This is print-only but feel free to message me for access to a PDF. Or subscribe here!

• This month at Spectacle, in Brooklyn, we’re hosting the NYC premiere of a 2K digital restoration of Robert Wynne-Simmons’ long-unavailable Irish horror film The Outcasts (1982). After chasing this restoration for over a year, I’m beyond thrilled we were able to partner with colleagues at the Irish Film Institute on this limited screening engagement, as well as the intrepid boutique distributor Deaf Crocodile, who are releasing The Outcasts on Blu-ray at the end of this month.

• Also at Spectacle: one night only (Sunday October 27), filmmaker and artist Winnie Cheung will present their scabrous satire Residency followed by Q+A. This film is not for the faint of heart but its forward-thrusting interrogation of the limits of facile art-world identity politics (and gnashing shot-on-DV aesthetic) have stuck with me since I caught it last winter.

• Finally: as detailed in these pages, I’ve been involved in helping restore/subtitle/re-release four incendiary films directed by the French-Martinican playwright and filmmaker Julius-Amédée Laou: two features and two shorts. Thanks to the indefatigable writer and curator Ashley Clark, Laou’s body of work is now streaming on Criterion Channel. Please watch, please rate (if you use Letterboxd), please share. I published some moist-eyed thoughts on the history of this project over on my Instagram, as well.

More soon; thanks for indulging me. Longer letter later…

Current Mood: Optimistic _🥹
Current Music: Metallica - To Live is to Die

SOMETHING JUMPS off the screen and it’s scorched onto your brain. Branded for life. Small screen, big screen, no matter. Sarah Minter’s 1986 film Nadie es inocente (None are Innocent) happened to me in this way. Nadie es inocente was shot on ¾” tape so it’s really more of a video than a film, but whatever it is follows a gang of teenage punks playing themselves in a paper-thinly fictionalized docudrama version of their lives in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, the vast and hardscrabble ex-urb of Mexico City dubbed “Neza York”.

When I was a teenager in the suburbs of north Seattle, going “punk” would have meant buying a Dead Kennedys shirt, or black Chuck Taylor Converses, or a wallet chain, and striking a defiant pose. It never happened; the ne plus ultra would have been the mohawk my friends joked about me getting, extra funny because I was and remain the biggest square of all time. As a cinephile, my best frame of visual reference for the sooty sand-scapes and leather motorcycle jackets in Nadie es inocente was George Miller’s original Mad Max trilogy, or maybe a Mexican spoof of Mad Max like Francisco Guerrero’s Intrepidos Punks1. But punk is not a consumer choice or mere dumb affect for the kids you see in Nadie es inocente, nor its progenitor short film Sábado de mierda (Saturday of Shit, or Shitty Saturday, codirected by Gregorio Rocha with Minter); these children have no one supervising them and no imminent opportunities available, so they look out for one another. They also try to have fun.

These films are rare, precious and all-too-human artifacts from a bygone era. They don’t just show urban poverty but also the consequences of pre-NAFTA globalization, as the territories skirting Neza’s margins include massive piles of abandoned clothes and decrepit industrial wastelands, which the gang of “Mierdas Punks” (Shitpunks, or Punk Shits) correctly identify as the perfect types of venues for a pop-up punk show or bottomless moshpit. The films feel like unfakeable dispatches from a real-world desert dystopia. They adjoin the hyperreal fluidity of handheld video with druggy, surreal editing. Comparisons to Luis Buñuel’s 1950 masterpiece Los Olvidados invite themselves; I would add to the same list Leandro Favio’s Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965) and Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984). (Minter and Rocha’s films also feature un-licensed music exported from the “First World” such as the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and This Heat; after watching them, you will never hear these songs the same way again.)

It’s a breakthrough that Rocha and Minter’s collaborations have been available to stream this month on the Criterion Channel, as part of a program called “Mexico City Punk”, featuring Nadie and Sábado as well as Minter’s riotgrrrl feature Alma Punk (1991) and no-less-crucial documentary from 2010, Nadie es inocente: 20 años después (None are Innocent: 20 Years Later), which returns to the Mierdas Punks who “starred” as themselves in the prior films. (It’s worth noting that the Criterion Channel is only accessible to viewers based in the United States and Canada, but several of Minter’s works live for free without English subtitles on YouTube.)

Sadly, Sarah Minter passed away in 2016, and Gregorio Rocha in 2022. So in hopes of drawing attention to the Criterion package, I reached out to their son Emiliano Rocha Minter, one of the cofounders of the mysterious Mexico City microcinema known as La Cueva, and a highly accomplished director of narrative films in his own right. Emiliano’s 2016 debut Tenemos la carne (We Are the Flesh) is a scabrous horror-satire that’s currently free to watch via Tubi, albeit with ads. Emiliano and I caught up via ZOOM; hanging on the wall of his office was a gigantic vintage poster for Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Emiliano, I’m embarrassed we haven’t met in person yet because we have friends in common. My friend Kristin, who spent some time in Mexico City, was telling me about you before I even realized your parents were Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha. And I first saw your film Tenemos la Carne because it was programmed at Spectacle by my friend and colleague Josh Bogatin in 2021.

Yes. But tell me about the cinema, Spectacle. I don’t understand how it works. I’m really curious about it.

Well, it’s all-volunteer. The theater pays its bills, artists or filmmakers or distributors get paid, either on the basis of box office, or a flat fee… But there’s no staff who gets paid. And among the volunteers there’s no formal, established hierarchy. It opened in 2010, I’ve been there since 2011. When I started there were four people; I think now there are about fifty people. In 2010 there was nothing unusual about an arts venue where people were willing to do this kind of creative-service work for free. Now, there are fewer of these places, and I have met at least a dozen people who seem to have spent years under the impression Spectacle was a job, paying me and others a livable wage…

But what about the people who founded this theater? They are kind of hardcore, no?

It was a couple different guys in 2010. None of them are involved anymore. (sends photo of Troy Swain)

So this guy founded the space with some other guys, and now he and the other guys are not around.

Not on a daily or operational or even on an aesthetic, creative level. There’s an extended family. There’s a new generation of programmers and volunteers. Their ages vary, some are young enough that I think they maybe followed the theater online from their teenage years.

Here we have La Cueva, which is also a kind of "microcinema", but we have different art projects in the same building, kind of focusing on studio artists.

No website, no social media—just WhatsApp and physical reality, is that right?

That’s right. It affords us a way to show performances too.

My friend C. Spencer Yeh reminded me, every Spectacle screening is a kind of performance.

How did you learn about Sarah’s films?

I went to a big feminist survey show at the Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the Hammer Museum, in 2018. They were playing a short clip from Nadie es inocente on a TV in a gallery; the thing that caught my attention was “Flowers of Romance” by Public Image, Ltd., which was one of my favorite punk records and still is2. I reached out to Claudia Bestor at the Hammer and she referred me to you, because the film did not have a US distributor. You understood the Spectacle ethos perfectly, which is rare, so we had a small retrospective. Thank you again for that. Since then Nadie has been shown by e-flux, at the Museum of Arts and Design…

And we showed some of Sarah’s films here at La Cueva. Will Noah came, he saw them and he came back to me with a proposal to show them on the Criterion Channel.

Do you enjoy representing your parents’ films, answering questions about them? Or is it more of an obligation?

It’s my duty to do this, in a way. And it’s easy for me to lapse into talking about the films as if I was there. I was never there! Well, for some of them I was. Sarah’s later work, for instance: I was the director of photography on Nadie es inocente 20 años después. But what I’m trying to say is, it’s personal, it gets personal, it’s held in my body and my mind. I feel so related to the films, I know the people, I know the stories. It gets easier for me to understand what was going on in that period… The more I have the opportunity to see them, the better I understand them. For me it’s natural, organic. And since both of my parents have passed away, it’s a way to connect with them. 

Has this work of promoting their films and talking about them ramped up?

The work is consistent since Sarah passed away, in 2016. That’s when it became a big part of my life. 

Do the films have regular distribution in Mexico, or is it mostly screenings?

It’s mostly screenings and exhibitions. It’s good that they are on the Criterion Channel for a while—it’s a way for people to access the work without my participation. I was waiting for that. Because the work lives in a strange place, between cinema and video art. It’s funny because you saw the film in a gallery context…

Do you have a favorite among them?

When I was a kid I saw Sábado de mierda and I thought it was just so cool. I was with my father and it really appealed to me.

Sabado feels like a dream, or an experimental film. Nadie feels like documentary at some points, fiction film at others. In Alma Punk, you’re seeing the tools of video and documentary applied to a more straightforward narrative, but still very authentic…

It’s super scripted. In a way, among the four on Criterion, Alma Punk is the most like a classical movie, but shot in a digital or artistic way. Trying to find a path for the characters, the script… Sábado de mierda is more wild. More improvised. More chaotic and more open to the lives of these punks under the pretext of doing a film. Much more about being there, shooting stuff as it’s happening. That’s what you bring to the screen. Alma Punk and even Nadie es inocente, the gaze is about bringing “your film” to these situations. But these are different approaches to the same thing.

Some of the same 16mm footage appears in both Sábado de mierda and Nadie es Inocente.

It really breaks the style of Nadie es inocente in my opinion, but I understand that it appeals to the character of the project. They were loving the same person, the same atmosphere, the same world. Sarah shot those scenes on 16mm and this was a way of saying, “I was part of that as well.” I think it could have been difficult for them, as a couple—doing films about the same stuff. Like, what the fuck? (laughs)

Before we turned the recorder on, you mentioned that it was only recently you had really sat down and watched Alma Punk front to back. If I may ask… Why?

My philosophy with their works is, I’m not an expert. I’m becoming a little more aware but always, when someone asks me, “Can we host a screening of Alma Punk?” I say yes. Or a different artwork. And then I see it with different eyes, because we watch it together. I’m always excited to see new works by them as the requests come from curators, cinemas, galleries.

The difference between watching it on a computer, or alone, versus with an audience…

Yes. We watched Alma Punk in a full, crowded, excited cinema. 

At Spectacle we also showed Video Road and San Frenesi, two short films that are, let’s say, less punk than the ones on the Criterion Channel… San Frenesi felt more French New Wave to me, while the rest of her works are super intimate. Breaking down barriers and artifice.

Video Road was the two of them, a collaboration. I love the style, the aesthetics. San Frenesi, I like, but that’s more like a student film. I think they were really obsessed with Wim Wenders and the road trip vibe. More recently, we found a super-8 film Sarah made, called Adagio. Maybe the only film before she switched to video forever. It was so nice to see this early work from her. Celluloid film is so exquisite, of course. I think the films you mention are when she leapt from the filmmaking mentality to the video art idea. A different approach to reality, where you can really see time passing. 

They traveled to New York and saw works by Nam June Paik at an exhibition. It was the video art moment, you know? It just sounds cool: “Video art”. That became her commitment. I don’t think she wanted to do more movies. I never knew Sarah to have a screenplay or a pitch for a feature film. She was shooting everything herself. She didn’t want or need the entourage that cinema requires. But Gregorio kept making movies. His 2003 film Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa (The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa) is really amazing. 

Did you grow up punk? Did your parents self-identify as punks? Or were they outsiders, making these films?

I think they were punk, in the sense of their free spirits. The more appealing thing for me is the spirit of doing things without asking permission. Then you can get more into anarchism, very interesting… But I think they were punks at heart, but not in a dogmatic way. What really appealed to them about the Mierdas Punks was their humanity. You see these kids and you fall in love because they are so true, you know? Doing 20 años después I met these guys, and they were amazing, truly special people. They found punk as a pretext to gathering and having something to believe in, in a world that was not giving them anything to believe in. If you are from the suburbs of Mexico City in the 70s, the 80s, that’s hardcore shit. There isn’t much of anything. Their houses didn’t have water. So you understand how they get into these gangs and find identity, a kind of weird family. There’s always a part of society that doesn’t fit in. Punk could be a possibility of finding new standards if you weren’t the normal type. In that way, Sarah and Gregorio really related to them. They were definitely the punks of their film school. Sábado de mierda was supposed to be Gregorio’s thesis, but of course it was a huge problem for the instructors, seeing this film.

Controversial?

Well, just, “this is not what we asked you for.” 

Were the works famous during your childhood? Or more in the 2010s? Was there a reevaluation or did they get the same kind of attention all along? Are they famous now? (Will they be famous after the Criterion streams?)

Nadie es inocente and Sábado de mierda have always been cult movies. Alma Punk, I think it has a new following. These films create communities, people are stuck because they made these films together, you know? Not stuck but glued. They are joined together. That’s what happens when you make a film! 

My understanding is Sarah went in a more “fine art” direction, still shooting video and still photography but in an interdisciplinary way3, while Gregorio continued making feature and documentary films, and was also a collector of film materials, an archivist.

My father loved history. He started to do these documentaries about history, but then he started to get into cinema history, and there he started to become an archivist. His last sixteen, eighteen, perhaps twenty years, he was obsessed with making a huge collection of films—35mm, 16mm, super-8, but also machines of cinema. Cameras, projectors, a lot of stuff. And then more and more stuff. He was free to make this archive which was alive, in a way. Going off of, how you can introduce old things to the present, to new generations of viewers? I think experimental cinema is one of the few areas where this kind of stuff is appreciated, you know? So he became obsessed with this. This archive became a huge project for him—like making a filmoteca, but with different formats and technologies… Sarah went more in the line of video art, that was really her obsession, moreso than cinema. 

Why this obsession? Did he want to connect young people with the materiality of cinema?

I think my father was in love with the past. He had old motorcycles, engines, projectors, mechanics. There’s a part of our family that came to Mexico from Switzerland and I learned they made clocks. It’s crazy! I said, of course: that’s the part of my dad that’s obsessed with clocks and engines. He was always obsessed by history, saying he was born in the wrong time. He loved the past more than the present. A nostalgic obsession. All his money was spent on old stuff (laughs). He was also obsessed by the value of the old stuff. A lot of stuff was salvaged from the trash. He moved to Estudios Churubusco, the big studio in Mexico; there’s a lot of filmmaking history there, from the 1920s and on. It’s an old place of cinema. He became obsessed with the history of this place. An obsession with telling stories from the past before they vanish, before they fade away. He was really deeply connected to these ancient things. Not just the stuff, but family history as well. Photos and documents were hugely important to him. “Don’t throw that out!” I think it’s a very specific character in society. You’ll find this personality type in every culture, the archivist or the caretaker of the past. 

Here it could be a collector, a curator, a connoisseur—a hoarder, which is someone who can’t let go of anything… You visit their home and there are dozens, hundreds, of items like newspapers, clothes, clocks, furniture, whatever it might be…. But when you talk about engines and clocks, I get the impression of someone with a very orderly mind.

He was obsessed with the administration of things. He wanted to accurately gauge the value of everything he had. He was really methodical in everything. He wanted everything in its place.

About your own filmmaking: this is what you always wanted to do? Or was there a “lightbulb moment”?

Growing up, I wanted to be a physicist. I don’t know why. Then I went with my father to a shoot. They were shooting some scene with horses, with guys dressed up like Mexican revolutionaries, in the north of Mexico. For Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa. So we’re in the middle of nowhere, in the north of Mexico. And it was the most exciting thing I ever lived. “This is true adventure,” I thought! I fell in love with cinema then, there. That was the moment I decided I wanted to become a filmmaker. The feeling was so strong, so exciting. It was a little Apocalypse Now, like… it starts raining, it’s impossible to shoot, everything was a mess, they were shooting in 16mm. All I could think was: “Wow, this is a cool job!”

How old were you when this happened?

Thirteen.

Had they shown you specific films, growing up? What was their canon?

Sarah was obsessed with Man With a Movie Camera, by Dziga Vertov. For her, that was the fountain: if you see that film, you can learn a lot. It always makes me think of the possibilities for cinema, but in a really simple way. I always keep that film in my heart. It’s a fucking classic! The classic of the classics. I should watch it again.

And Gregorio?

He loved Harold and Maude. He was always talking about it. I rewatched it the other day, I mean… It’s pretty wild, a love story between a kid and an old woman. He was emotional and sensitive about that film, and I love it too. I love Hal Ashby, that period of American cinema is quite amazing. 

What can you tell me about their dynamic as a filmmaking team?

I think Sábado de mierda and Nadie es inocente came from a moment they were doing a lot of things together. Sarah started as a graphic designer, then she became obsessed with cinema; my father was in film school, and that’s where and how they met. So I think the first ten years of the relationship, they were doing everything together, thinking together about films, why and how to do them. I think in the end each of them was in the school of the other. Everything they learned to do, they did together. Sábado de mierda, the photography was made by Sarah, but it’s a student film. For the school. Gregorio was in the school and Sarah wasn’t, but she was attending the classes without actually being in the program.

Auditing?

I guess so. Gregorio was in this program, and then they become obsessed with this idea of video as freedom. The opposite of film, because film is so difficult and so expensive, whatever…. So they get into this idea of freedom, always. I see Sarah’s life in particular as a pursuit of freedom. She came from a family of eight siblings. She had to find her own. She started working without a degree or anything. Her attitude was, “if you want to do it, you can do it.” It’s like a magical life of things happening—but at that moment in Mexico there wasn’t much government money for films. If you see stuff from the 80s, the 90s, it’s pretty rough. I think that’s why they looked for a way of doing films with total independence, total freedom. This is how they shot Nadie es inocente: two people, sometimes one more person helping, one camera, and they go into the suburbs with these punks… You see the photos and the crew is three people, it’s crazy.

What has changed in Mexican cinema since the era they were making these artworks together?

I’m not an expert. What you can clearly see is that shooting a film in that period was hardcore shit. (laughs) Few directors were making films for so little money. After Y tu mamá también, Japón, Amores Perros—that’s the “Mexican miracle”, because these films came one year after another. Mexican movie stars become international movie stars. Cuarón shooting in the States, Iñárritu following him. This led to a new period and from there, the last few decades, the number of films we make here in Mexico has been growing and growing and growing. And there’s plenty of money—from the government, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, whatever. I feel the market is actually strong now. Lots of films going on. Everyone is a filmmaker, a producer… 

Mexico has become a center, if not the center, of the Latin American film industry. So when I see a film like Alma Punk or Nadie es inocente I’m like, wow. There really wasn’t much back then. Not just film but the art industry in general. That was kind of related with Sarah, because a lot of her friends came from the art world, not the world of cinema. Not filmmakers. The art scene in Mexico is huge now too, it’s crazy: galleries, money. I think there were just a few small things going on back then. Which is why I reevaluated, and re-valued, the films, because understanding that makes them more unique. There’s something about the innocence and the approach to the filmmaking that is so hard. Today you see the opposite: more industry money means less truth. If you see Alma Punk, you see it’s a portrait of that period of art and cinema in Mexico—it’s got a lot of truth. A girl trying to find her way in a man’s world. I love watching the film today and it’s like, maybe these characters don’t exist anymore.

Was there a great promise of money or fame at the other end of making something like Alma Punk?

No. The money was impossible. When you talk about “independent cinema”, it’s so confusing now, what does it mean? It means people get to do a film for reasons other than money. That whole perspective has changed. Maybe like three percent of the films made in the world are done in this hard way. Even Cassavetes, you can see the goal was not to make money. These people wanted to do something because they wanted to do it! And it’s funny because film is the perfect excuse to do something. If you approach someone and say “We’re going to do a film”, they respond: “Ah!” It’s like an adventure. Nowadays, you can do an independent film in that way, and there are people out there who want to make true, real cinema. But if you’re in the industry you’re going to encounter a lot of shit.

Tell me about working as cinematographer on Nadie es inocente 20 años después. You must have been very young.

I was twenty, or something like that. I always remember shooting this scene of Rafa dancing. Some kind of ballet. Rafa Punk was so charismatic, a true poet in his soul… We hung out with him a lot, and somehow we get this idea of him dancing in his house, with this dreamy light. I don’t remember where it came from. This is the best thing about cinema: the moment of shooting something when you and your cinematographer kind of acknowledge, “Wow, this is something special.” I think that’s why we make movies. Sometimes you are there together at the precise right time, the right hour, you know it was beautiful, and you know it’s in the file. In the can. I always remember that scene.

My filmmaking experience is best left undiscussed. But even I’m aware there’s no magic bullet, all-in-one piece of wisdom or advice that will teach you everything you need to know. You could get the best advice in the world and the instant you’re on-set, trying to make the thing, there’s gonna be something you never anticipated having to deal with… Did your parents shape your approach? What did you learn from them, as a filmmaker?

They gave me the approach of cinema as a possibility: “If you want to do a film, just go and do it.” Like… don’t wait until someone tells you or allows you to do something. For me all the education from them was, no excuses. Especially from my mother. It’s a way of approaching life as well: if you really want something, you have to use whatever is available to you. And then you realize how much talent is available to you, the richness of the things in your life. That is what makes it possible to make a film, and it’s always possible. 

Can you tell me anything about your new film? Is it a horror film like Tenemos la Carne?

It’s my second feature, and it’s about being a director and trying to make a film. It’s a surrealistic comedy. I reached this moment of saying, “I want to laugh about everything and not take things so seriously,” you know? Free yourself from what you think is important; laugh about everything. 

Current Mood: Motivated 😈
Current Music: This Heat - Live in 1982

Special thanks to Emiliano Rocha Minter, Kristin Thoreson, Josh Bogatin, Claudia Bestor and Anthony Banua-Simon.

MAUDLIN AUTOBIOGRAPHY seems increasingly necessary to harness reader attention. Well. I was a terrible athlete as a child. I’m the least hand-eye coordinated person you’ll ever meet. By and large, I hate sports and, growing up, I especially hated the kids who were good at them. (In my school/church, sports were very important.) It’s a cowardly, kneejerk skepticism: I hate them because I don’t understand them, because I don’t have an athletic bone in my body, and because I am probably too old by now to ever force myself to decipher their rules, codes and cultures. The social gains just aren’t there anymore. For me, watching a game means squinting to follow the evolution of live-TV broadcast aesthetics, engaging in petty voyeurism (both of the crowd and the players) and, most of all, enjoying a social opportunity to not-talk, crossing my fingers that nobody will ask me to explain or analyze or prove that I understand what the fuck is happening on the court/field. Unless the Seattle Mariners are anywhere near the playoffs, I don’t care and couldn’t begin to tell you. I’m just here for the spectacle.

For these reasons, I walked into Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers fearing and presuming I wouldn’t be able to understand the movie, only to take relief—two hours and fifteen minutes of it—in realizing Challengers is not really about sports so much as about spectacle. It’s a vision of the culture of pro athletes, dotted with impossible-to-ignore product placement (albeit less pointed than in Fincher’s The Killer) and refracted through a millennial story of lust, nostalgia and regret. (It’s very 2024 for a film to claim to be about something when its real interest is in the boojie, bajillion-dollar lifestyle of that thing’s most famous practitioners.)

The plot of Challengers follows a pair of tennis players named Art Donaldson (Mike Feist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and the woman who came between them: Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a onetime prodigy whose career was brought to a screeching halt by a torn ACL. Before that happens, Art and Patrick meet Tashi in 2006, when they are still conspicuously thirsty college students who have been “bunkmates” since they were young. Before long Patrick is dating Tashi, but he fumbles it due to his unbridled egotism and her hard-charging nature, so she flips over to Art, who is far more sensitive; they get married and she becomes his coach. Patrick drifts to the margins, living out of his SUV while playing lower-circuit matches for chump change, his best days behind him. Well after he has become a champion with the sponsorship deals and nonprofit foundation that entails, Art’s confidence deteriorates as he grows increasingly suspicious that Tashi only loves him when/because he’s winning at tennis. Tashi aims to disprove Art by pushing him harder to win. Circumstances oblige Patrick and Art to play one another for the first time in years, long after Tashi and Art have cut Patrick from their lives. Patrick attempts to seduce Tashi, discerning the tension and sexlessness of her picture-perfect home life with Art.

Challengers jumps between the climactic rematch in 2019, used as a contemporaneous framing device, and a telling of the history of their love triangle that wends its way from 2006 to the present. The trifecta is anchored in the suppressed homoeroticism of Art and Patrick (which Tashi exploited, or revealed, in her initial meeting with them) and each character’s crushing need to win. But that’s not quite right; it’s how Art and Patrick comport themselves vis-a-vis Tashi’s crushing need to win, now projected onto them, that pushes the narrative forward. Chaos factors could include Art’s world-weariness or Patrick’s shit-eating charm, which seems teflon even as his life falls further into dereliction. It’s a clever contraption of a plotline and all three of the leads make the most of the material; more on that later.

When I say Challengers is a “real movie” I mean it as a compliment, with the caveat that the state of cinema is dire. In my youth (the Bush/Clinton years), it was guaranteed that studios would release at least a couple of what I’m calling “real movies” in theaters every weekend. And it’s not hard to understand why people were excited about this one: hot actors playing out real-ish life dilemmas with great music, camera movement, flair, precision. No CGI robots or AI-generated interdimensional vortices. Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay is not based on a preexisting character, franchise or intellectual property. Zendaya is a bona fide movie star, such that her name and fame have eclipsed her actual acting career—until Challengers? Mike Faist was great in Spielberg’s weirdly underrated take on West Side Story. And if Guadagnino was always too bombastic for the arthouse, he enjoys a reputation, not wholly undeserved, as one of the few directors who can bring a real appreciation for aesthetics (and sexuality) to what has become an ever-chastening era for Hollywood movies. Like I said, the bar is low.

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CERTAIN MOVIES desperately need to be seen first and talked about afterwards. I was blown away when a colleague with especially high cinematic standards showed me Martha Coolidge’s debut feature Not a Pretty Picture; I was also vaguely ashamed to participate in a film culture that had kept the movie relatively unknown in the almost 50 years since it premiered. Coolidge made the film in order to come to terms with her own date rape as a sixteen-year-old, in 1962, at the hands of an older boy whose name in the movie is “Curly” (played by Jim Carrington). The filmmaker is played by actress Michele Manenti who, an early title card establishes, is herself a rape victim as well. As one might expect, the reenactment is beyond harrowing, but Coolidge manages to offset the dramatized scenes with documentary footage, turning the camera on herself as she workshops the material with her young actors.

Not a Pretty Picture is hard to watch, but every frame is worth, and will seize, your attention. It addresses unthinkable subject matter with stomach-pitted courage; it will not leave you feeling good, but it is not an abject exercise in making the audience suffer. In its quest to understand, Coolidge’s experiment reveals its own inherent humanism. The film is among the most confrontational debut features ever made by an American director, one of the greatest films of the 1970s, and for me, upon that viewing, it was instantaneously one of the greatest films ever made.

I’m not usually this hyperbolic, nor do I find myself reaching for the old critical saw of a movie being “just as relevant today as when it was released.” But in this case it’s simply the plain truth. Film culture is for the better now that Not a Pretty Picture has been restored, and is being distributed by Janus Films; accordingly, I was excited at the chance to speak with Coolidge over the phone a few days before the film began a week run at Anthology Film Archives.

The first time I saw this movie it was years ago, a standard-definition copy, sitting there somewhat anonymously on your official Vimeo page…

Oh, God… (laughs)

Since then the Film Foundation and the Academy Film Archive have restored Not a Pretty Picture from the original 16mm elements; it played at the Academy Museum in December of 2022, at MoMA in June 2023, and now it’s at Anthology Film Archives… And it looks great. But even if it didn’t, I would feel the same need to tell you: everyone I know who encounters this movie is just blown away. It grabs the viewer by the lapels and does not let go.

I'm really thrilled that you're saying that to me. I know it was pretty avant-garde at the time; I got the idea when I was at the Flaherty Seminar1. I just knew I had to do it and I already knew how to do it, somehow, how to improvise with my actors. If I could find actors who were willing to share their findings, not just with me but also with the audience, that’s where things start to get really interesting. But it’s also easier for the audience that way, because they could still really feel and see how a rape like this hits a person.

In casting Martha (or “Martha”), why was it important for you to work with a girl who had herself suffered a date rape?

It was important for me that, number one, I not be the only person on the cast or crew who had been raped. Secondly, I wanted someone who could speak from their experience. I knew there was going to be an age gap, that the actress would be younger than me, obviously. But I wanted someone who would be fighting some of the same devils and memories that I was, who would be at a point where they were ready to share their experience with an audience.

In the non-reenactment parts, actor Jim Carrington talks about rape—guys who don’t realize it’s rape when they’re doing it, or this kind of primal drive that, according to him, leads men to rape. He sounds off the cuff, but it’s clear you took the time to sit together and discuss these things: not just the material but also how it feels, what it means. For the documentary passages, did you ever ask the people onscreen to do a second or third “take”?

Maybe if somebody got something wrong, like a name, but I never asked them to repeat what they had said. What I did find was, the more we talked about things, the more they’d go into it. Which is why it was important to me to work with people willing to look at themselves in that way, to examine their own feelings.

Curly is such a brazenly cruel and manipulative character, but Michele’s Martha states it very honestly: “Something about Curly intrigues me!” When it sounds like Jim is kind of defending the character’s logic, or rather his lack of logic, his caveman brain… How do I put this? He would be canceled for talking like that in 2024. Or he’d be accused of hanging out with rapists? Rape apologism?

Well, he’s a guy. (laughs) Jim had some issues facing the rape himself, the fact that some guys do this. He was trying very hard to put himself in their position, but the thing is, he wasn’t a rapist! So I was happy with the way this turned out: you see Jim fighting with himself, hitting the wall, et cetera. And prior to the film, he and Michele had been in some acting classes together, so I was grateful for that.

Right, there’s an acknowledgement that Jim and Michele had, by the time you were shooting Not a Pretty Picture, known each other for four years. I’m assuming Michele was cast first; did she recommend Jim?

I knew them totally separately. They lived very different lives: she was very involved in dance, in artistic movements that way, and because she had been raped, she was not just going out with anybody. Jim was more into hanging out with his friends, doing stuff like that. They were not on the same course, socially speaking.

At one point Jim is talking about all the aggression he’s trying to tap into, for his performance. He says to Michele, in a kind of disbelief, that he felt the frustration, he even says he wanted to hit Michele in the face. But Michele says she never doubted him at any point, she always knew he would not hurt her. For me this is one of the most striking moments in the documentary part of the film.

I was watching, other people were watching, and we would have intervened if something like that happened. But it was good that Jim said that; he was conscious of what was going on inside of him, and what it was doing to his mind. That was exactly the purpose of having them talk about it, instead of just doing the reenactment in a theatrical way.

How consciously did you want to include these moments? Not just him being challenged on his views, but also of kindness between the performers. It’s very moving when Michele and Jim hug at the end of one of the toughest takes…

I put it there on purpose. The thing about theater—about rehearsals, all this stuff—it makes you feel so close to one another. I wanted the audience to see that. For all the stuff we had talked about, all Jim’s aggression, et cetera, that he and Michele felt so close working together on this. It’s also one of the reasons I felt safe making the movie that way. For me, it was important to get that side, to see the closeness happening between the actors in real time.

You didn’t want them to go full Method, or to hate one another?

No. No. I knew they were professionals, though, and even if they did hate each other, it wouldn’t have stopped the performance. It wasn’t artifice, it was honesty; human beings can hate and love at the same time. You can be going along, having a terrible time, and then suddenly you’re laughing at a dumb joke. We’re complicated!

There are some moments of humor between you and the actors, a welcome relief, but also, kind of like you’re saying, it’s all very complex.

Well. People are funny, sometimes especially when things are tense! But it really matters who is the butt of the joke.

Most writeups of the film include the moment when you are, hand over your mouth, witnessing this minutely detailed reenactment of your own rape. Was it supposed to be a 1:1 reenactment? Or a kind of mutant reinterpretation?

I was not trying to 1:1 reenact the exact occurrence, in part because I had forgotten (or repressed!) certain details. And I knew I had. But I did want to recreate the general movement of that night: the other couple making out in the other room, those things. For me it was more about getting the feelings right, making sure it hit people the right way.

Curly was a rapist, no question about it. And he definitely raped more than one girl at my school. And there weren’t that many girls to begin with. He was less obvious about it than it appears in the film. One difference? I went further with the character of Curly’s friend West Virginia, played by John Fedinatz. I thought he was a really good character, being sort of the bottom of the the kissing order or the hitting order; of the guys, he was the one who got picked on. I liked what it did for the story, where it brought the audience’s thinking. So I added those parts.

The scene where Curly effectively throws West Virginia down onto the bed, where Martha is sitting, then leaves, Martha says, “Hi”, and they have this kind of hushed conversation… I found this moment so heartbreaking. Mostly you're like, “Oh, this guy is different from Curly.” Later in the film it's actually said (but not shown) that West Virginia may have been involved in a gang rape.

Right, but you don’t know if those things are real.

So he didn’t do it.

I don’t think so. This is important to the film: if a guy is bragging about it, it might not have been a real thing. Not that it isn’t done, because of course it’s done. But how do I know what did and didn’t happen?

I'm personally glad to hear that about West Virginia, because separate from the sadness around the rape, I felt a lot of sadness watching Curly treat him so terribly…

I felt that way too. John is a very real actor.

Even after the most uncomfortable moments of the film, there’s a longer, slower realization that’s also very sad, which is that these kinds of things get swept under the rug all the time.

You asked why I got a girl who had been through it. Well, way more people—way more people—have been through this than we might predict. I’m certain of this. And they don’t all want to talk about it. In the case of Michele, the guy who had raped her was a mayor. It was planned, premeditated. It was not identical to my experience. That difference was important too.

Talk about the decision to cast your real-life roommate Anne Mundstuk from those days. She’s playing herself, fifteen years younger, and she has an insane monologue early in the film, talking about how badly she wants to “get fucked”. I’ll admit I was kind of like, “Where is this going…?” Later in the film, once she’s out of “character”, she confesses that she had been teased by other girls who thought she was infatuated with you as a teenager. And concedes that she was. It’s like, you need to go back and rewatch everything to understand those dynamics.

And Anne had never told me that before; at that time we were just really good friends. It was great for me to hear that. The movie was revealing lots of things that had gone unmentioned at the time, things which were influencing our behavior. But it was literally me walking down the street thinking, “Who am I gonna cast as this character?” and I ran into her, asked her if she would be in the movie.

You weren’t worried about breaking the illusion, with her age difference. Or maybe that was the idea?

I thought about it a lot, I felt the point was better made by her being there and being real, whatever the age difference. The other actors had age differences as well, but they weren’t as extreme. Nobody ever told me it wrecked the movie for them. Again: it was a very complicated relationship, so I felt good she was in it. Our school was a ski school, we skied all the time, there were, I don’t know, sixty-something boys and maybe fifteen girls. It was not equal. And I had applied late in the summer. When all this started happening, I felt there was something unfair about the breakdown of boys and girls. How did the faculty feel about it? I went to talk to the headmaster, or the principal, and I realized he was one of these guys who would have said, “Well, that girl was drinking and wearing a short skirt. So of course it’s her fault.”

Just just for the clarification of the reader, you're talking about the guy who appears in the second to last the scene of the movie… For me, as the viewer, there's a moment where you think, “Oh, maybe a real conversation is about to happen here.” But it’s the opposite.

And that is exactly how it happened in my life.

Those final twenty or so minutes of the film really focus on the… I don’t want to say “consequences” of the rape, but the fallout. Her being alienated at school, made fun of by other girls… Did you receive any flack from anyone for putting a face to that? From a Third Wave or an even further left perspective? (I hope the answer is no…)

The answer is no. I mean, it was never hidden what the movie is about. I think because it’s human, because people are very real, it wasn’t such a reach for people to discover what the actors were doing. I think they’re sympathetic. I think it got complicated, a little bit, when some hardcore feminists came and this particular group didn’t want anything male, period. “Don’t touch anything male.” Well, there’s different kinds of people. If a guy gets raped, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. And a girl can be out on a date, wearing a short skirt, wanting to be sexy, wanting to have a good time… And if it gets out of hand, she can say no and mean it, and that still doesn’t mean she didn’t want to have fun in the first place. Things can get beyond you, people can get carried away, and then you’re struggling with how to stop it. Which is part of why rape and exploitation of women is very difficult for people to handle. These are the things we want to understand, but it’s very hard getting there.

While shooting this, did you need to take breaks to collect yourself? Your own response to what’s being staged is integral to the drama of the overall film, if that makes sense.

The cameraman was the one who needed breaks, because holding a 16mm camera like that, running continuously, takes a lot out of a person! He was very big to do it, but we had to be very conscious how long he could hold the camera, and we didn’t have an infinite amount of film stock. You don’t want to get into a situation where you need to repeat everything.

Here’s a wild question…

Okay. (laughs)

In the New York Times, J. Hoberman put Not a Pretty Picture in dialogue with American Graffiti. But when I first saw the film, the movie that came to mind most urgently was… Animal House. Not in terms of sensibility or quality, but the milieu is almost identical: East Coast, early Sixties, prep school, a bunch of guys (who are, as my father would say, “old enough to know better”) grabbing a bunch of beer, en route to an all-girls campus… And that film plays rape for laughs, or at least, it plays the Tom Hulse character’s temptation to rape an underage girl for laughs.

Yes, played for laughs like in so many other movies.

One thing the movies have in common is this attention towards the role of folk music in the early Sixties. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is a major motif.

I licensed that song because I love it. But I also had to have original music written for the movie, because I couldn’t afford to buy real music from that time. I mean, it is real music in the movie, but it’s newly created music, because I couldn’t afford to license these historical doo-wop and pop songs. Chevy Chase wrote some of the music in the movie, actually; he was a friend.

Your more famous later work includes Valley Girl (1983), Real Genius (1985), The Prince & Me (2004)… I found a great interview with you from around the release of Valley Girl where you talk about how you didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “feminist filmmaker” or, God forbid, a filmmaker who specializes in rape. You’re making the point that a movie designed for women and men was nearly as rare, and as radical, as a movie ostensibly just for women. So my question is… did Not a Pretty Picture help you find work in Hollywood? It’s not what my mind usually conjures when I think, “calling card film”….

Well, it was offbeat. But at that time, trying to get directing jobs as a woman was extremely offbeat! It was never meant to be my “calling card film”. In fact, the first movie I was called in to talk about—to read, and then to come back and present how I would make it—was Animal House.

…What?!

(Universal executive) John Daniels brought me in to talk about Animal House several times. I had my prep done, I had broken the script down, I had a whole presentation about it. I really wanted to do it! But it went to the right person. John was much more what Universal wanted for that script. But I liked the script, I knew I could bring something to it, make it more well-rounded… It’s really funny you said that.

This is insane. Lest we wander too far of topic… Give us a taste of Martha Coolidge’s Animal House? The things I mention are played for laughs, and some have aged far better than others, but Animal House doesn’t take it as far as your film. I mean, it would be impossible…

Yes, I would have had to walk that line very carefully. It’s a comedy after all. But it did say something real about men and women of that age. I was a stretch, but that was John Daniels. It was very creative of him to consider me for that script.

Do you ever wish you had made it? Did Not a Pretty Picture ever feel like a liability?

No. Once I got the idea, I understood how important it was, to look at that aspect of this occurrence. I think it was good because it did really show so many things that women complain about when they see any kind of rape or abusive scene in a movie; hopefully, the movie made them feel like someone was thinking about them, and how they feel. It’s just a thing that happens in almost every girl’s life, that’s just the way it is. Girls ask themselves, why are all the guys so bad? And they’re not all bad, of course, but the truth is there can be something very powerful something very attractive, in that badness. Especially if you’re young and naïve.

I also need to know if this inside/out, documentary/fiction hybrid approach was chosen to make the movie easier on the viewer. You don’t shy from including your crew (which is mostly made of women) in the margins of the frame, even when you’re in the foreground.

That was part of it, yes, to make the audience feel more at home.

There was never going to be a version of this where the real Martha Coolidge did not appear onscreen.

Never. It was always going to involve me going through this experience I had had.

So, tell me about the film’s life once it was completed? In other interviews you’ve mentioned there were a restrictive number of prints in circulation, and that impacted the movie’s release…

It had to do with just how much (or rather, how little) money the distributor and I were willing to put into having more prints around. We had enough that it was screened all over America, various places and festivals all over the world—in a way, movies had longer lives then. It played festivals for a few years after the initial premiere at American Film institute. It was screened at the first iteration of Sundance which was, at that time, the “Utah/US Film Festival”. And yes, it was a little bit of a problem if, suddenly, if the film became very busy and somebody wanted a copy I didn't necessarily have.

The vintage poster has all these pullquotes from different newspapers all over the country, so to me that suggests there was a pretty comprehensive rollout for this movie…

It was a very long, very slow road. I did get those quotes very early—in other words, I knew it had been screened, it often screened for the press prior to its release. And this is a job, you know, not just making the film but then you have to really go muckraking about it. To make the picture I had gotten a nice grant from the American Film Institute, and the AFI screened it at the Kennedy Center, in D.C. That was the premiere. Then came Boston, the Academy, New York. I don’t remember what New York theater it was, though, I’d have to look it up. I know it played at libraries, women’s groups organized screenings on college campuses… In those days it was sort of a mishmash. Independent films like this didn’t get a straight theatrical release. So Not a Pretty Picture played wherever someone wanted to book it. I remember learning it was held over at a theater in Amsterdam for years, if you can believe that.

But my biggest surprise, traveling and speaking with the movie, was that it introduced me to a whole other category of people who had been raped, and that was men. Who felt even more constricted talking about it than some of the women at that time, if you can imagine… They told me how they couldn’t talk to anybody about it. And like a lot of women who get raped, they blamed themselves for it after the fact. It was really interesting.

Did you have “feedback screenings”? The movie has such a unique shape, it’s far ahead of its time, it’s also deeply personal, closely held trauma…

I got feedback that affected the film but I wasn’t testing it over and over and over again to see the audience’s reactions. But someone who hadn’t seen it before, of course I asked what they made of it. That was part of my conception.

I have to assume women would come up to you after screenings to share their own experiences.

Definitely. If it wasn’t them it was a story about their sister, their friend, their brother…

And what about people in your life who didn’t know this had happened to you until they saw the film?

There definitely were some. But I was in therapy at the time, I had people I could talk to; I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing a wrong step. I was very positive about doing it when I did it.

Telling your own story, what would a wrong step have been?

Well, I was painting a picture of myself. I didn’t want to say, “I’m a victim. I’m a victim.” This is just one step that could have been wrong, making myself and the character both look like complete victims. Which is certainly a reaction a woman can have to an unfortunate, traumatic event. But I knew I wasn’t doing it for that. I knew so many people have had experiences like this. All kinds of people were going to see the movie.

Another friend who saw it this weekend said that yes, it‘s a great film, but he worried it may have been traumatic for you or for your actors to go back to that memory. I can’t claim to know, of course, but I think the idea was to confront the memory, or to de-traumatize…

Looking at your emotions, your reactions, how something felt to you—I knew those key issues affected me very strongly. Trauma comes from people not understanding what happened to them, or how it happened. I felt it was important to show those things, that it would ultimately make people feel better.

Current Mood: Somber 😔
Current Music: Franco Mannino - Adagio per Pianoforte (from L’innocente)

Special thanks to Martha Coolidge, Vadim Rizov, Chris Boeckmann, Ellie B and Isaac Davidson.

AFTER THE AMBLING, muddled narrative of Mank (which didn’t juxtapose great against its lavish production values), it’s nice to see David Fincher back in David Fincher mode; I was surprised how much I enjoyed his new Netflix offering The Killer, a supremely nasty satire of permalancer culture in barely-even-trying action movie drag. In Fincher’s rendition of the eponymous French graphic novel written by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon (adapted for the screen by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker), Michael Fassbender plays a self-impressed freelancer hitman who finds his workaday bushido shaken by a botched hit in Paris. Soon some very evil (as opposed to our antihero’s strictly business evil-for-hire) people have located his safe house in the Dominican Republic and brutalized his girlfriend. His all-too-reasonable quest to take revenge (and regain control) leads him on an odyssey whose conclusion, as hack film critics like to say, raises more questions than it answers. For this, The Killer’s silky edits and smooth-gliding camerawork make it equal parts performance of precision (see the “Execution is Everything” tagline) and post-Gen X meditation on How We Live Under Neoliberalism.

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I LOVE INTERVIEWS1. Other people’s words are reliably much more interesting than whatever I come up with. In 2016 I interviewed legendary hiphop radio deejays Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Garcia. They told me they liked the piece, so I asked if they knew any more outlets where I could write for money. They introduced me to some editors at Mass Appeal, who greenlit an interview with the legendary claymation animator David Daniels, timed to a one-man retrospective happening that September at Anthology Film Archives. Daniels pioneered the art form known as StrataCut, wherein logs of material are built of clay, then sliced down and photographed one frame at a time; entire animations done in-camera. You may not know his name but you’ve seen Daniels’ stuff: he worked under claymation master Will Vinton (creator of the California Raisins) and made interstitials for Sesame Street, designed commercial graphics for commercials and TV, segments on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, the opening credits for Alex Winter’s misbegotten flop classic Freaked and short-lived MTV show The Idiot Box, and much much more. Daniels’ Youtube channel is an online StrataCut museum.

I called Daniels at his studio (Bent Image Labs in Portland, OR) and, like Stretch & Bob, I found him quite easy to talk to; our interview ran a great deal longer than the Mass Appeal geniuses thought necessary, so an abridged version was published, to my dismay. (Before too long it would disappear from their website entirely2. Seven years later - last Tuesday - I went to a short film program at the bar Freddy’s, in Brooklyn, hosted and organized by Brian Ratigan of Non Films. Most of the shorts were by contemporary filmmakers (including my friends Paul Taylor and Jason Lobe), but there was also a presentation of Peter Gabriel’s hybrid stop-motion live-action video for the song “Big Time” and, to my total astonishment, an in-person Q+A with David Daniels. Turns out Daniels is in New York for “StrataGanza”, at Pratt Institute, October 3-6: an unprecedented weeklong workshop, a historical gathering of the StrataCutters. Our conversation has been reedited slightly for clarity.

How do we even classify your early work? “The clay years”?

Well, it's plasticine. Clay has two or three meanings: it's not pottery clay, it's not ceramics, it's not clay that dries in the sun. It's oil-based plasticine, so it will stay malleable almost forever. It can dry out and become hard if you put it on a backing surface; the impulse, by the way, to do StrataCut came, partially, from clay sculptures getting so dusty and so ragged so quickly, so it's not hard-fired pottery clay, Sculpee or Fimo, or millefiore - that's an Italian slice term. The depth and the limit of clay animation, as done by Will Vinton Studios or by Aardman, the people who have work with it as characters - they all face the difficulty of presenting objects and sculpts without it getting damaged and old. This is what I found out as a young kid sculpting: this is a problem! This doesn't work for me! This is gonna be really difficult! So the ‘cut-clay’ was an attempt to reinvent it as clean. I can store it easily, I can knock these things around, I can take a StrataCut block and kick it? And generally, it will still function when I slice it away – whatever I put into it will come out clean and pristine. So that, to me, was in a sense the reinvention trick that most pleased me in attempting to come up with a way to use this never-hardening medium that was actually unique.

When you go back and look at those StrataCut animations, do they feel less sophisticated than they did at the time? Do you wince?

I think you wince; it's standard-def, there's too much contrast in some places, there's too little fidelity, you're limited. When you look at Buzz Box, there was no optical printing; everything is in-camera. Which, when you understand that, is mindblowing. You look at it now, “Ehh, it could be a little more polished.” There's an enormous slickness to modern film and media-making that are not present in my earlier work. My first theme was to speak to a funhouse mirror of both happiness and horror: how consumer media puts images of complete banality and optimism next to others, of terrible desolation and horror. It combines, every few seconds, back to back, between the commercials and the newscasters, I tried to create the illusion that a brain-dump-download had just happened, where all of the happiness and horror went together. To get through people's filter, I couldn't have just taken TV and edited it; I needed to find a way to break through that filter, and so many people would respond saying, “That was one of the scariest things I've ever seen!” But if you sample any one still image, you would never be able to say “Oh, that's somebody getting shot. Oh, that's somebody dying.” It's an exercise in seduction and abuse, trying to just speak to the aesthetic overload.

I could go through many different moments, but even with Donald Trump it's relevant: the lack of informational continuity, his ability to go – in the middle of a sentence! - from belligerent to a nice guy who “uses the best words”… To (be able to) jump back and forth so quickly, it's because our brains, or at least, the society has been so massaged by images... between entertainment and hard news, that he exists. That was the message of the 80s to me, and as much as there are some technical flaws or shapes around the edges, I feel that's still a very relevant message, still.

The sound, too, is in this kind of perma-flux..

Big shoutout to Drew Neumann. Because he spent six months to actually find a way of describing a soundtrack neither of us had ever done. Samplers had barely even existed at that moment, so we were doing massive overdubs of very very tiny samples; the aesthetic was maximalism, which was just an inside joke against minimalism, which is what our teachers at CalArts were steeped in. They had been born into modernism, adopted minimalism as a rejection of modernism, so Drew and I were trying to reject them with maximalism.

Can you talk a little bit more about this moment? There's a consistency there, I feel – but it seems very punk to me, of a piece with Gary Panter, maybe Lynda Barry, very L.A., your work on Pee-Wee's Playhouse... If it is a CalArts connection, I'm not sure.

I think that's a good thing to point out. You'd call it post-expressionism, right? The reinvention of Edvard Munch, The Scream, works from the 1920s which were leading up to fascism, Hitler and World War II. In a way, yes, punk was a rejection of the glossy and prepackaged – the thing about minimalism is, there's something beautiful about it, at the time I just felt like, okay, everybody's done it. Yes, in a way, you had Mark Pauline and Survival Research Laboratories, Henry Rollins, whose music with Blind Idiot God, was selected for Alex Winter's Freaked, which I did the opening credits for...

I think punk (at its best - when artfully juggling noise, and not just bad music) expresses the post-expressionist, maximal frustration and physical visceral anger as cutting clay and throwing knives back into it to destroy, melt and smear it afterwards... That visual constructive/destructive anger works well with a punk soundtrack. Making huge, complex clay time-woven blocks for weeks, and then cutting them under hot lights in a noisy room with constant hum… It’s very physical, sweaty, exhausting. Performance work with no audience. Much more so than art forms like drawing animation, working at a computer, or painting -- these are contemplative, and generally do not break any kind of sweat.

There's also a Cold War nightmare in the background, through the 1960s and 70s. It comes into its own in the 80s, with the Strategic Defense Initiative; oddly, I think I'm always waffling between those two poles, of seduction and abuse. Musically it's loud/soft, with beautiful melodies and grinding hard things at the same time, even though I know I was before them. With the animated flow cutaways, I'm trying to seduce, and then going to the staccato, strobing, hard things, where everything melts, is destroyed, and comes back again, it sort of fits in the self-irony of “Big Time” - it's all a big put-on. You could allow yourself to go glitzy, and in StrataCut, things are popping all over the place in very fluid and beautiful ways. As well as kind of a nasty, dirty, edge-filled way; clay has a dark-corner-of-the-world funk on its edges you don't wanna get rid of.

I'm juggling fireworks when I do these animations: I'm asking how much information and chaos I can throw at something, as well as how structured and coherent I can make it, so people know I haven't lost them. If I don't ride the chaos and embrace it, it becomes kinda boring. I could use the time to perfect a StrataCut block so well it looked like still animation, but you make these artistic decisions as to where you want the fireworks, how controlled you want them.

To me, punk was too pure, and I couldn't pretend to be that – New Wave was too synthy, so really, Nirvana hit it for me, although I was quite proud to be a part of the Peter Gabriel video. I did a Michael Jackson “ABC” piece which was pure gloss, but I did it in reverse – when you know everything was done in reverse, there's no character animation and there are no optical effects – that's sort of going back in time. The amount we assume and know, from the 1990s on, that everything has been post-touched and post-produced, layered on after the primary image... Part of the time machine is to think, “Wow, how did you put that all into camera without any of those tricks that are so common now?” It worked, oddly, because I was using so much primary color – when you use so much clay, you're using a lot of primary material, throwing in hundreds and hundreds of pounds of this stuff. It's really hard to premix a palate for such quantity of clay. To go to pastels and subtle colors takes a lot of time: you gotta boil it, double-boil it, mix it up, it's a huge set of palette questions. I tended to do what I could with what I call “Oaxacan colors” - bled primaries, black and whites, offsetting yellows, bright yellows and dark blues. And pixellate 'em. Those little animals in Oaxaca get painted up so pretty. Anyway, there's a childishness to that palette which goes to the perversity of the sort of adult, dark worldview. There's consumption on Pee-Wee's Playhouse and ABC and subliminally, there's something else going on there that makes it interesting – not just fluff.

They took me as an artist and said, “We like what you do – can you do something for us?” I couldn't go too far with certain things; you look at The Idiot Box, the MTV show open I did for Alex Winter: I got to make this crazy alien creature blow out of the TV set, and inside his brain is a tin can, the lid pops open, and inside the is a little creature. Those kinds of things are hilarious to me. Like Buzz Box, I'd take you as far as I could without you dropping off. The joke between Drew and I in making it was, “How much can we throw at an audience, and how long will they sit, without walking out? Let's take it to wherever that fine borderline is, force them to be uncomfortable in their seats, but without actually walking out.” (laughs) Our side bet was 1 out of 20, and it wasn't far off in the early screenings.

There's something about inundation – the fact that you'll have the slices depicted in the frame, so you get one car, one rocket, then you get another one, then the entire frame is clogged... These would have been isolated, centered images under minimalism. You're pushing the question of their... viability?

Viability, watchability... It also was, to me, a great way to deal with mass culture. Here I had a medium that could duplicate thousands of things in one slice – hundreds of cars, let's say. I was trying to, in a sense, show that off: I'm not limited to one model of car! That duplicates modern consumerism, right? A million models, or at least a million colors of the same thing... kind of an Andy Warhol joke, where you're saying, Hey, I can silkscreen every version of Marilyn and Elvis for you, but you're really mocking the ability of consumerism to do that. Cars and rockets, you know – the same technology that builds the cars is building the weapons. I try to have a relativist view of war and peace, because many of our greatest inventions were spurred by war. What causes the human race to invent things? It was mixed media - not just the pure morphic time-blocks. The opening title sequence for Freaked! is full of actual eggs, and unwound cassette tapes, and physical things – hair combs, all sorts of things. It helps give the clay a different feeling, combined with other looks and feelings.

If it's just flat-screen, hypno-morphic clay, I think it's only interesting for 30 seconds. It needs something else to keep it going. I am fascinated with bringing a little more character animation to another piece but I don't know if I'll ever get to it – defined characters doing defined character things within StrataCut, while 3D versions of those characters are coming out of the block and going back in. If you could imagine looking at yourself from here to eternity, however long you've been on Earth, as a StrataCut, the moment you step outside to become a reflexive look, you become three dimensional and look back at your two-dimensional surface. You can contemplate: “That's me, moving through that thing!” Before you're sucked back in and have to live your life again. That's a metaphor for eternity and I believe there's character animation that could be interesting, in that.

Because StrataCut is 2-and-3 dimensional at the same time.

I actually don't say it that way enough, but I'm glad you pointed that out.

So maybe this sounds dumb, but... how conscious, or how wary, were you of showing the log? The block? Did you try to hide the dimensionality of the base?

Well, there have been times when I've just done textures or full-frontal cutting. In Buzz Box there are several full frontal pieces that don't go on that long – in the documentary you see me cutting these kind of Incan pyramid shapes on a down-shooter, big, long structures tapered to the lens. They're small at the top and thick at the bottom, but they have a deep ziggurat; those were straight up, right into the lens – that's an example of me thinking “this'll be dypsomorphic enough”. Everything in Buzz Box was edited in rewind – I never had a flatbed or any kind of regular speed equipment. I ended up feeling 36 frames per second was the right speed, but originally I thought 24 frames was the right second. As I began to reedit them I realized, 48 frames by hand is too fast; 24 is too slow, and I started to get a rhythm going that was 36. It was definitely an after-the-fact thought. It would have been 2-1-2-1-2-1, and that was partially because the blocks were too slow. This has to do with how you build: the rules by which a line diagonally moves through the block create the speed, so if that line is really flat, it's a flash. If it's really perpendicular to the lens, the line is barely moving at all. I designed the motions intuitively, thinking oh, this is about the right amount of motion – but I was wrong by 50%. When I really wanted to play them back, I wanted them to be about 50% faster, and it started to pick up a kinetic energy. Again, I wouldn't hold on those longer than 7 or 10 seconds at the most. I put a lot of flashy white clay and other spectacular types of stuff in there to make sure the eyeball was getting plenty of information.

At this point, I would show the edges on everything. The side view of a StrataCut block, makes the mystery of what appears on the surface even greater. I made a very conscious choice to stay Strata-Flat - directly facing the camera. Those were some of the first things I did. Then I started doing the multi-plane stuff, with the blobs of gloss as you're cutting away.. I blurred them. Once I got to the last piece of glass I had this moving background, and I would put a lightbulb right underneath that last slice; there'd be a second piece of glass, right up in the lens, big, so there would never be an optical pop. And I dropped the glass to sandwich the last slice, and slowly heated it with the lens in the back, which slowly created a lighting strobe. And then I could smear the thing. Those came after I got past stages one, two and three in sort of experimenting with stuff. And I never looked back – seeing the cracks and the sides and the edges, all the stuff that makes it strange, is really important to me.

Whether you're shooting on film or with one of these super-duper HD cams, though, you're gonna need to know your framerate ahead of time – right?

...Yes. I would have a more precise understanding of what result I wanted; it's something of a formula, where the thickness of your slice determines how the speed with which you want it to move. Smaller blocks, like 3” by 4”, I can slice thinner. Larger ones, like the Gary and Mike Acid Trip, I needed a guillotine – it was so thick, so difficult, so heavy. You have to go thicker when you get bigger because of the sort of surface tension, the control – it doesn't respond the same way. I had to think through the effect I wanted so I put in the slant of the speed because of that.

I'm thinking high definition is 16K. They're barely thinking about 8K right now, but 16 is not that far off – when you realize what's behind the curve of all these crazy resolutions it sounds like it's a long way away, but it really isn't; I'm talking to the people building this stuff. It's all compression and parallel processing and graphics processing units. I would think ultimately VR, at 64K, will probably be a resolution limit where it really just won't matter anymore. Now, that may be ten years away, I don't know how I will shoot it per se; the depth map is really critical. In “baked” VR, which is narrative film VR, I'm telling you an experience – as opposed to gaming VR, where you're finding that experience, with options. You're going from A to Z and the storyteller is telling you the story. By “baked”, we mean there's no option to divert to a new path or a new place. I'm coming at it as a cinema storyteller so I'll probably bake it, but current VR is taking all its cues from the same node right now: the center-pivot. It's boring because you can only morph to another pivot – you can't actually move your head around it. That's the second revolutionary piece coming to VR. So you'll get to see Meryl Streep eventually, not as a 2D thing – you'll be able to look around the edges of her, so she's actually popping out as fully dimensionalized from all views of your head motion. The high resolution plus the depth will allow veracity, so you'll be truly transported as opposed to crudely. I believe that's a fundamental “oh fuck, what am I watching?” So much more interesting, again.

You've put a ton of your material online – it's not hard to imagine where many artists would take a patenting, or proprietary approach. Can you tell me about your thinking?

It was very mysterious when StrataCut first came out: there were no computers, but so many people would share their enthusiasm for this crazy stuff that didn't make sense – it was at once coherent and overwhelming. The process of figuring out timed sculpting and a motion flow that coexist in space, over time, these kinds of ideas, led to me thinking about how virtual reality and augmented reality will effect StrataCut. I was trying to examine it in MRI scans about seven years ago and through CG StrataCut; they reveal totally different outcomes of the same idea. The reason I love future technology is, not only am I an artist or a creative still searching for something better, but part of why my work stopped in 2000 was, everybody was saying “Oh, that must be CG.” The magic of having put all that effort into creating something astounding for the eyeballs was denigrated by Jurassic Park, by Pixar, et cetera. (Laughs) People thought “Oh, that's just another special effect.” I believe a new epoch is coming, a new moment is upon us, and high-resolution, high-fidelity, depth-mapped images will allow both the analog version, the colored-clay, putty-programming that I used to do, to reveal itself in a super high-resolution medium, and therefore be amazing again.

It gives me some hope that returning to the medium might actually be worth it; it's not that many years until I will have a 16K virtual reality with depth maps that you can pivot your head around. Or I'll have the ability to do an augmented reality, where the context of spatial actuality, combined with the virtual overlay, is an amazing combustion between two visual elements, to create a hallucination or “halluci-dation” if you wanna call it that, a digital hallucination. That's hypno-morphic, and compelling! So all the sudden, I wasn't born too early; I felt that film was a very crude medium when I was young. Now I feel there's actually brain-to-brain transplant mediums beginning to emerge, where we're so separated from our own body awarenesses, or you're so immersed in what's a hallucination, a holograph in reality, whatever – time-sculpting will become relevant again.

More than that, the ability to bend the blade is fascinating to me. A straight blade, because of the nature of knives, is a limit – to create the optical flow, either from an analogue color-cut block or from a generated series of live-action spatial frames, allows you to cut any direction with any kind of.. you could take ice cream scoops, corrugated ripple knives, you can do anything. It transforms the language possibilities one more time. So that's why, perhaps, I have a little perspective. I've been putting up a little stuff, mostly spurred by the Anthology show, and the compression of time in the presentation; I'm used to showing at Anima Mundi or Chilimonos, other festivals that would have me talk for three hours, so I could both show my work, show my slides, explain the process/history... knowing I only have 80 minutes, I've been forced to say, “hey, how do I show the history of StrataCut in 4 and a half minutes?”

Can you talk more about the discrepancy between CG and clay?

I think naturally, CG tends towards cleaner, more synthetic results; I'm impact-neutral. I feel the beauty of taking colored mud and programming it and making the time-sculpt; I also feel the amazing potential of CG. I don't think they end up being the same thing – maybe the same theory or set of ideas works, but you would have to uniquely attack the CG for its own aesthetic results, right? I embrace both. I believe in the larger sense that there's time-blindness in all of us; we have not developed our sixth (or seventh, if you like) sense. As an evolutionary species we've developed what we needed but we've never needed to understand motion over time. So I'm trying to sort of pull back the curtain in my own discoveries and hopefully share a little bit of that in speaking to the integrated co-relationship of all moments in time, together, as a metaphor. When I do another clay or “primary” StrataCut, I will involve as much textual combinations as I can. There's a sort of a graffiti aspect, or a Banksy aspect, to it that I like to explore. It's where you place the cuts and what they're doing – what's directly next to them, behind them, all that real/gritty context, will make some future piece even that much more interesting than the stuff I've done in the past. I'm currently in the middle of an augmented reality startup project (youar.io) that involves a bit of AR/VR with six degrees of freedom, the ability to have depth maps in VR, so a lot of these things are quite close to me, technically, right now – I'm trying to invent things that don't yet exist, at least, are five years on the horizon. I don't know what that makes me! I would hope once the tech is usable, I'd still have the energy left to make a film with it. Right now I'm very addicted to trying to reinvent those mediums, and seeing the work other people are doing with creating ever-higher fidelities and depths of understanding of medium.

I believe the higher resolution rates will allow more human stuff to happen, but I know that sounds like a contradiction. It will be that much harder, again, at 16k or who knows? - 64k, for computers to fake “human”. If “human” is captured in a flash or in an instant, a computer has to work very very hard, very very long, to get that resolution. Very oddly, it opens up a reinvention of handmade stuff, because that will be uniquely marketable and seen for the kind of reverse-marketing: something that isn't what everybody else, or all the other machines, are doing. So that's a new opportunity. Pokemon Go, for instance – it's a surface image thrown on a camera view. Blended, or mixed reality, where actual virtual objects are completely integrated in a plane-space and you cannot tell the difference – you're asking an entirely different question there. 

Special thanks to David Daniels, Brian Ratigan and Ava Tews.

Current Mood: Creative 🎨
Current Music: Vito Ricci - Cross Court (Get It)

NEW YORK CITY is currently the site of a festival honoring Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán, initiated by the U.S. premiere of his debut feature length documentary El primer año (The First Year) at Anthology Film Archives. Guzmán is best known for his three-part masterpiece The Battle of Chile (which plays through September 21 at Brooklyn Academy of Music), the essential filmic testament to the U.S.-backed coup d'état of September 1973 which deposed Chilean president Salvador Allende - Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist president - and replaced him with General Augusto Pinochet. In the subsequent two decades, over two thousand Chileans were murdered (or “disappeared”) by the Armed Forces, over 27,000 interned and tortured, and approximately 200,000 exiled to other countries - including Guzmán, who relocated to France. (As always, the number of crimes officially accounted for is likely a magnitude lower than what really transpired.)

If you watch The First Year immediately before The Battle of Chile you’ll see it dovetails cleanly with the mobilization of discontent against Allende (among both bourgeoisie and reactionary military elements), but the film’s primary purpose is as a time capsule of Allende’s first twelve months as head of state. The First Year resonates as a moving (if not heartbreaking) straight-arrow document of a time of wild hope, offset by increasingly chaotic internecine political conflict. Guzmán - then in his early thirties - detailed sweeping reforms in education, literacy, food subsistence and intense mobilization of rural workforces which had been previously bound up in latifundism (effectively, indentured servitude on rural estates.) It’s critical to note many of these reforms were in the works years if not decades before the presidency of Allende, who won by a razor-thin margin and inherited an inflated economy.

Guzmán’s more recent documentary trilogy - The Pearl Button, Nostalgia for the Light and The Cordillera of Dreams - juxtaposes the legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship with Latin America’s broader history of colonial exploitation, as well as meditations on time, land, and the cosmos; those docs are currently playing at IFC Center. For those not in New York, many of Guzmán’s works are available to watch via streaming service OVID1. I recommend making time for these films, as well as for my friend Nico Pedrero-Setzer’s writeup in Screen Slate, Sam Brodsky’s interview with Guzmán in Film Comment, as well as a discussion with him published by the leftist film-exhibiting collective Cine Móvil. Is that too many links? I doubt it. It’s Guzmán season. The same week it was announced he had been awarded Chile’s National Arts Prize (the only filmmaker to receive it after Raúl Ruiz), I had the pleasure of speaking with the 84-year-old documentary legend via ZOOM from his apartment in Paris. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

These screenings are timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973 - the other 9/11. Can you describe the lives these films have had in your home country these last fifty years?

The Battle of Chile only screened on Chilean public television four years ago. It was prohibited, systematically; not just by the government but also by the heads of cable television, who wanted nothing to do with the film. The Battle of Chile has screened in over twenty countries - countries in Africa, the Middle East, France, Italy, the USA. I could make a book just of international recognitions received by the film.

Meanwhile, The First Year remained in total obscurity. There were only six copies which remained in Chile until after the coup, and they were lost or destroyed, nobody knows. It’s a miracle: one of them appeared in the north of France, found by the director of a cinema club, and he sent it to us. The negative was in excellent condition, and now it’s been beautifully restored. I’m very happy.

Now, the film itself is very loose: less mathematical, with a dialogue, with a narration closer to the spectator. It shows happy people in the hope of Allende, which I think is important. The First Year is also significant as a document of Castro’s visit to Chile in 1971.

Let’s talk about Castro’s criticisms of Allende. Castro was quoted by the New York Times almost a year before the coup, warning Allende that his revolution would fail if he didn’t get his political opponents under control. I also read a Times op-ed from 1974, written by the economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, which quoted Castro as saying “Marxism is a revolution of production; Allende's was a revolution of consumption.”

The Chilean political apparatus has always been governed by the bourgeoisie. It’s difficult to make the hypothetical: what if Allende had adopted a more Castro-like approach? The constitution of Chile could never have imagined that a Marxist-Leninist would become president. What gets lost is that Allende’s mission in that time was to keep faith in government: he admired Che, he admired the Cuban government, but to the end of his days he was always a social democrat. He did not plan a revolution and he did not fear the Left. He did want the Unidad Popular to launch an aggressive populist movement against the right, and The First Year attests that he succeeded. But of course the right responded with terrible measures. Before the coup they had done everything in their power to get him out of office. They alleged he was turning Chile into the Soviet Union, which was absurd.

Fidel Castro came to Chile and did a talk in the national stadium. Allende refused a gift from Fidel, which was a bunch of military weapons. They stayed in the basement at the presidential residence at La Moneda, and Pinochet exhibited those arms later in order to justify his coup. He was trying to demonstrate that Allende was more radical than he had presented himself as being. The problem is, Allende found Castro’s gift inopportune. Allende never accepted arms or force as an acceptable way to govern, and this is what led to his downfall. He refused to leave government as a prisoner. He did everything to stay faithful to his original plan until the final moment, when he committed a heroic and suicidal act2. It was unfathomably painful for him and it’s still painful fifty years later.

I’m obsessed with counterfactuals. I have always wondered what your work would look like if the coup had not taken place; if you had remained in Chile. Is it fair to say The First Year provides some glimpse of an answer?

Without the coup, Chile would have been drastically different today, and so would I. But in reality, I don’t think my filmmaking would have changed very much. I think it would have been a more perfect sort of style; I would have been more exact.

American viewers may not be aware how long Allende was pushing for a socialist government, running for president four times in sixteen years. It was only when I read Régis Debray’s Conversations with Allende that I realized Allende’s famous agrarian reforms expropriating rural estates bigger than 200 acres and so on, were not really “Allende’s” - they had been in development long before his presidency. Not just decades - generations.

You’re correct that the reforms were incomplete. But they were massive reforms aimed at helping people who had been exploited. It occurred in an intense way for the Mapuche people in the south of Chile; The First Year shows the force of the Mapuche farmers, their passion, their ability to influence politics and wage power. If the reforms had not happened under Allende they would have kept protesting. The problem is that Allende did not have the proper internal government to keep the laws in place.

Which is to say, his domestic agenda lacked support within the government.

Allende was always in the Unidad Popular, but within that party there was a huge range between moderate and radical groups. And also some very, very aggressive ones, especially the socialists. So it gets confusing; there was also the Communist Party itself which was, in fact, more moderate at that time than Unidad Popular. Even though Allende was within the socialist bloc in a UP-led government, he could not stop the groups wishing for more radical reforms. UP was divided years before the coup took place. I remember filming a meeting of the Cordón Industrial Recoleta in Santiago, a conversation between these different factions, which appeared in Part II of The Battle of Chile…

Let me quote from a detailed piece on The Battle of Chile, in Jump Cut, where Salome Svirsky broke that passage down as depicting…

• the challenges of trying to achieve socialism in one country;

• the constraints imposed by the legal road to socialism;

• the difficulties of coordinating actions across parallel worker organizations (the unions, the CUT, the cordones) and party leadership, etc. (i.e. the question of democratic organizational and inter-organizational structures);

• the independence and autonomy of the worker’s movement—that is, independence from even a friendly state like Allende’s (i.e. the instability of dual power).

Yes. The members wanted Allende’s government to be more aggressive and more revolutionary. I’m not saying Allende was timid, but he was always conscious of the political process into which he had been elected. He was very careful to respect the constitution and would never accept becoming a Castro-style leftist dictator. He was not a radical revolutionary in that sense. 

Maybe a corny question but: do you have an overall feeling - positive, negative, neutral - about the ability of documentary filmmakers to effect political change today?

I think my outlook is optimistic. More critical documentaries are being made, but also it’s easier to make fiction films which question the political and economic structures of the world. So I do have optimism.

Did The Battle of Chile send you to a place of despair? Depression?

After finishing the second part, I had a breakdown. I’ve had several crises. Really, the stress of exile was a very violent thing; my first few months in Paris were really hard. Those years were really very difficult for me; the hardest. The only good thing was having Chris Marker around. After the death of my friend and cameraman Jorge Müller, mercilessly killed at the age of 27 with his wife Carmen Bueno, that was the darkest period for me. I haven’t had such difficulty since that period. 

Thoughts on recent narrative films about these political struggles? I’m thinking of Manuela Martelli’s Chile ‘76, Santiago Mitre’s Argentina 1985, the films of Pablo Larraín…

I liked Chile ‘76 very much. Larraín’s movies as well. To be honest, many interesting fiction films have been made in Latin America, I just haven’t really been able to get close to them. 

For many, the election of Gabriel Boric was a heartening sign, but any left-leaning administration in Latin America still faces enormous pressure both internally and internationally. Thoughts on the road ahead for Chile?

Unfortunately I cannot answer this for you. All I can say is, Chile is a complicated country: the right wing has taken the upper hand again, there’s a lot of ignorance and, to me, a great emptiness. I just don’t have enough contact with Chile as it is today to give you a real answer. 

Back to The First Year - I had not expected the film to be narrated by Simone Signoret, nor for the credits to indicate it was distributed by SLON-ISKRA3, the organization founded by Chris Marker.

Chris was always very serious, a little reserved. He had an air of mystery about him which caused much admiration for me. When Chris Marker approached me and offered to help with The Battle of Chile, I just couldn’t believe it. Thanks to his wonderful donation of film we were actually able to finish it. So that was the relationship: yes, I was his disciple, but we were also friends. It lasted for years. Eventually I lost contact with Chris for many years. We ran into each other at a film festival in Canada, but he had changed; the revolutionary wave that we had all passed through was over. This was a different Chris. But the important thing was that we re-encountered. 

I had been obsessed with La jetée well before I met him. To me this movie was magic, totally splendid. I always loved science fiction. 

I didn’t know this about you. Which books? Or films? I’m actually wearing a Planet of the Apes t-shirt right now…

Science fiction has been a fascination for me since I was a teenager. Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury… I’ve basically seen every science fiction movie you can think of. I still look at movie showtimes in the chance there will be a science fiction movie. My favorite to revisit is probably The War of the Worlds. 

I’m presuming you mean George Pal, not Spielberg.

Of course.

Special thanks to Sam Brodsky and Martin Lucas. ED. NOTE: wild discrepancies existed between the web and email version of this post - I think Substack got confused between draft histories. Hopefully all is fixed by now (1P EST September 13 2023.)

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