Still in Motion

Hidden Cities 2

In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle, or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zinc counters of the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze. Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn this: in the summer the windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."  --Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Kafka Was the Rage

There's something so eerie and unspeakably sad when a lot of your young Facebook friends are presenting a black box of mourning as their profile photos. I asked a friend who had died and he said a friend from Prizren who now lived in Prishtina. He was 24. I won't go into the particulars of what happened mostly because I really don't know except through hearsay, and to honor the family's privacy.

I then pick up a book a friend lent me a while ago and began to read the author's introduction. Many people ask me what Kosovo is like, what does it feel like there, how is it? And I can always come up with some sort of articulation about it, but that's all it is is an utterance, an answer to a question pulled from the flotsam floating on top of my brain. In other words, not very meaningful.

The following excerpt describes New York's Greenwich Village in the 1940s. The book is Anatole Broyard's memoir called Kafka Was the Rage. He wrote this intro in April of 1989, 24 years ago. The age of the man who died today.

I think there's a great nostalgia for life in New York City, especially in Greenwich Village in the period just after World War II. We were all so grateful to be there--it was like a reward for having fought the war. There was a sense of coming back to life, a terrific energy and curiosity, even a feeling of destiny arising out of the war that had just ended. The Village, like New York City itself, had an immense, beckoning sweetness. It was like Paris in the twenties--with the difference that it was our city. We weren't strangers there, but familiars. The Village was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair. We lived in the bars and on the benches of Washington Square. We shared the adventure of trying to be, starting to be, writers or painters.

American life was changing and we rode those changes. The changes were social, sexual, exciting--all the more so because we were young. It was as if we were sharing a common youth with the country itself. We were made anxious by all the changes, yet we were helping to define them.

That feels a lot like Kosovo to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dokufest 2011: Mirko Ilic Does Prizren

One of the personal highlights of Dokufest this year was meeting up again with old friends, and making new ones.  We had quite a few illustrious lights of nonfiction filmmaking there, James Longely, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gary Tarn, Marshall Curry, Alex Nanau, Pietro Marcello, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, etc., etc.  And then there was Mirko Ilic, wildman and creative force.  The guy is fly.  And while not a filmmaker, Ilic knows all about the intense power of the image.  Here is a "reprint" of the article I wrote for the DokuDaily during the fest after Ilic's talk there.  (Fisnik, you're a prince among men.):

Yesterday afternoon [24 July] in Prizren’s Hammam Museum, the great designer, illustrator and thinker, Mirko Ilic, delivered a talk to a packed house of young designers and artists in a lecture entitled, “Design of Dissent.”  The Bosnian-born 57-year-old runs a very successful three-person commercial design studio in New York City.  He was introduced by Prishtina-based designer, Bardhi Haliti, and later in the post-lecture Q&A, Ilic expressed intense admiration for the young artist, in fact, calling him “heroic,” since Haliti had chosen to give up a successful career in New York to come back and work in Kosova.

In his hour-long talk, the charismatic Ilic spoke eloquently and powerfully (and quite humorously) about his own personal journey to discover the power of good design and how it can be used to socially and politically charge a populous to think about the world around them.  And, in turn, protest and agitate for change.  In speaking specifically of the challenges young Kosovars might face in building a career in the industry, Ilic presented a cautionary tale.  Acknowledging that building a local vibrant economy in this young, burgeoning country is of utmost importance, he did mention that this is a designer’s great dilemma.  For if someone works for a commercial entity, he or she will constantly have to push products and ideas, which have little to do with the culture in which he or she is living.  It is a necessity to make a good living and build a sustainable career.  However, it can also sound a death knell for an up-and-coming artist’s ability to constantly create and present a singular vision and body of work that has substance, heft and meaning.  The age-old quandary of any creative in the face of a lucrative career is that that career will most certainly present an encounter with the ethics of design and advertising, which can be sticky.  (Portrait of Ilic by Lindsay Isola.)

Ilic “deeply believes in laziness,” and feels that the “lazy” creative—one who, say, might think about things six hours of his or her work day and actually produce something for about two—will, in essence, produce much more profound and meaningful work than the designer who “works hard” in front of his or her computer for a solid eight hours or more, for “thinking is the most creative aspect of this business.”  It is important to question why one is doing what one is doing for, historically, according to Ilic, “thinking has saved art.”  And the ability to produce socially and/or politically motivated work requires time to think.

In speaking specifically of designers and artists working in oppressive regimes, Ilic compared the landscape of working in a controlled and censored regime, or system, versus working in a totally free environment like the one in which he works in the US where he can create anything he wants and put it out for public consumption with little or no risk to his personal safety.  In systems of oppression, designers have had to learn to survive by mastering the subtle art of delivering the double message, becoming fluent in “double speak,” the encoded language that is hidden beneath the surface of a, seemingly, mundane symbol or image.  “Any idiot can do work that will land him in jail.”  It is the intelligent artist who will constantly dredge the depths of his or her creative vision to deliver a wallop subtly, and artfully, to his or her audience, in essence, saying to the client, “If you don’t trust me, I can always mess you up.  Trust me, and everything will be transparent.”  This takes risk and bravery from not only the artist, but also from the publisher of the work itself.

This led Ilic to talk about the importance of building a personal aesthetic, a personal vocabulary of protest through art, and protecting that at all costs.  He, himself, shills for big, corporate clients with big, fat budgets, creating commercials and other design work to sell television shows and other products.  However, he also constantly creates, self-publishes and self-distributes work that is not beholden to any paying client.  He says, “It is important to do work that protects the rights of others in order to protect your own rights.”  If artists can’t or won’t speak for the powerless, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the work is, indeed, meaningless.  “In order to be a good subversive, you need brains and the bravery to use them cleverly and clearly.”  Speaking specifically of gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, human rights, Ilic emphasized that “you must know your symbols to insult someone on purpose.”  In other words, effective insult never comes “by accident.” 

To wrap up his talk, Ilic shared an extended slide show of images that he has published in his seminal book co-created with Milton Glaser, The Design of Dissent, sharing the subversive work of artists from all over the world, work that could, and has, resulted in some serious trouble for its makers—imprisonment, expulsion from their homelands, and even, in some cases, death.  The book consists of designs that risk, particularly in their use of symbols and imagery of protest about what is happening in the artists’ own culture or country, protest “from within.”  An extension of this idea was addressed in the Q&A with the audience (many of whose comments Ilic summarily dismissed as naïve or misguided, urging people to go out and live a little and “then come back and tell me something worth knowing”). 

“Change must happen here,” Ilic stated emphatically to the audience.  For it’s all well and good, he says, for the very few who will get a chance to study abroad, or get opportunities to work outside their own country to build successful careers.  But for those who will stay and build an articulate creative landscape in their own country, the imperative is to have the bravery and intelligence to make a difference in your own backyard.

 

 

 

 

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Middle East Focus at Sheffield 2010

In the current issue of DOX Magazine, just released and currently available at the EFM lounge at the Berlinale marketplace, I have three articles published which I will "reprint" here on this blog.  Even though these festivals happened in the autumn of 2010, I think the themes are still pertinent enough to share now.  I hope you agree:

As part of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s extensive and impressive program this year, there was a strand that focused on the Middle East, a place rife with underground work.  While some of these films are certainly getting a bit of play at some of the larger Middle East fests, making and exhibiting independent documentary in the Arab world is a challenge in several distinct ways.  Even with new film funds developing and alternative avenues emerging for exhibition, oftentimes, there is severe political and social censorship with which filmmakers from the region have to contend. How successful the outcome of certain projects is up for debate, for quite a few pieces are unpolished, filled with the kind of “gaffes” of which most Western filmmakers (and audiences) are highly critical.  We must also remember, however, that a lot of these important and timely stories never get the appropriate professional support to help enhance their "market-readiness."  Nonetheless, it is important that these films get some play outside their own region at high-profile festivals, and in this case it was thanks to expansive programmers like Hussain Currimbhoy that they played at Sheffield.

The Middle East Focus strand at Doc/Fest 2010 showcased ten films from Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iran and Tunisia.  There were two feature-length films that were particularly striking, but for entirely different reasons.  While Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese: The Documentary is exceedingly well produced and executed, Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Waiting for Abu Zayd  is not.  In fact, at its conclusion, Atassi’s film devolves into a philosophical argument between the journalist and his subject, Atassi’s a frustrated off-camera voice expressing bewilderment to Zayd about the intellectual’s refusal to return to his native Egypt after 13 years of exile.  It’s an unintentionally morbid conclusion to what amounts to the only extensive documentation of Zayd’s life.

The two films have some palpable reverberations with one another since both say a lot about the constant struggle with creating contemporary meaning out of ancient Qur’anic traditions of Islam, and the complex social morés (and severe social restrictions) of being a good and faithful Muslim today.  In both cases, the films concentrate on these principles through interaction with state “criminals,” or exiles, in Zayd's case.

Fierce and fesity theatre director, Zeina Daccache, sets up Lebanon’s first prison-based drama project in Roumieh Prison, one of the most overcrowded penitentiaries.  The facility, built for 1,500 inmates, holds almost 4,000.  Over the course of a year and half, she molds a group of 45 actors plucked from the prison population and stages an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay from 1957, 12 Angry Men.  The story takes place in the confines of a deliberation room with 12 jurors deciding the case of a boy who is being charged for murdering his father. There is one man who decides to buck the unanimous vote of “guilty” which leads to a passionate interplay between notions of innocence and guilt.  As the prisoners themselves analyze all of the motivations of their individual characters, they start to work out deeply embedded personal, familial and social issues, all guided by Daccache in a magnificent performance of her own.  She stubbornly stays with her charges through all of their injurious self-doubts, through intense resistance to commit to the rigors of rehearsal, and the intimidating exposure of performance.  We learn immediately about the crimes these men committed, but the reasons why they find themselves behind bars (some for life) always surprise.  Yes, some blame their upbringing, their parents, their surroundings, but most reveal that the foibles of their own personalities are the “culprits” that led them to lose their way, resulting in  giving each of them much agency in their attempts at self-understanding.

The film documents Daccache’s work inside the prison, spending most of its time in the rehearsal / therapy process.  Monologues and song and dance routines that detail the prisoners’ life experiences are created and added to the spine of Rose's original play. Seen by many influential people in Lebanese government, the play (and the film) helped put into action a law from 2000 that was never enforced, which offers reduced sentences for good behavior. Two months after the staging of the play in which the characters talk about the need for the law's actual implementation, Lebanon’s Justice Ministry began approving reduced sentences.  Certainly, the existing structure of the original play, the play within the play, and the structure of Daccache’s CATHARSIS program (essentially therapy through enacting drama), has enhanced the dramaturgical work of this exhilarating documentary.  But the heart of the matter resides in the ways in which the inmates interact with the camera lens, with superb shooting by Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel, and sensitive and graceful editing by Michele Tyan. It is a focused and satisfyingly contextualized effort.

Syrian journalist and human rights activist, Mohammed Ali Atassi, who followed his protagonist for six years, is not as narratively successful in his film portrait of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in Waiting for Abu Zayd.  A brilliant and outspoken liberal theologian and intellectual, Zayd wrote several books challenging institutionalized interpretations of the Qur’an and Islam. Zayd was the victim of a ludicrous court battle that labeled him an apostate, resulting in his exile from his native Egypt. Atassi follows Zayd as he tours, lectures and comes face to face with a tightly controlled Middle Eastern press. One television station at which he is interviewed is owned by Saudi Arabians; any criticism of Wahhabism (the country’s dominant faith, and an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of Qur’an) is a serious breach, and Zayd is told this several times before he appears on air.  But clearly at that point in his life, he was a man with nothing more to lose.  In 1995, he had been banned from his native country, an enemy of the powers that control traditional Islamic practices and laws, and Egypt’s religious authorities forcibly divorced him from his beloved wife, Cairo University professor, Ibtihal Younes.

Subsequently, Zayd spent his time in exile writing books and raging eloquently in public debates, calling for a more humanist, modern approach to being a faithful Muslim. For the last several years of his life (he died in July of 2010, two months after the film was completed), he resided in Leyden in the Netherlands, where he continued to give conferences and public debates about his positions, which hardly appear to be so radical in any other place outside of the fundamentalist regime in which he resided.

The film is enhanced by fiery testimonials from Younes (pictured left with Zayd), and Zayd’s friend, Mohammad Hakem, a leftist political activist and student leader (who has also passed away since the film was made). But films about thinkers and intellectuals, particularly one as straightforward as this (and feature-length at that), pose enormous challenges to both the maker and the audience.  In essence, it fails as a cohesive film, broken awkwardly into aspects of a TV journalism profile, personal diary, and poetic ode to an indomitable spirit.  Atassi’s homage to Zayd captures the man’s humor and humanity but the forays into song, strange montage, and other filmic “effects” throughout the piece ultimately create distance from the subject, instead of providing valuable context.  More importantly, a greater understanding and contextualization of Zayd’s surreal journey into exile is sacrificed. 

Near the end of the film, knowing full well the propensity of the media (and, perhaps, Atassi) to lionize him in some grossly inaccurate way, Zayd states, “I need to be modest so that our leaders can learn modesty.  The intellectual who claims ownership of the Truth is the other leg of the dictator.  When an intellectual claims to own the Truth, he becomes the dictator’s servant.”

 

For more information on the Sheffield festival and market, and to keep up to date on deadlines for this year’s fest, which moves from autumn to summer (8 – 12 June 2011), visit the web site at http://sheffdocfest.com/.

 

Herzog, Berliner, Philibert, Strange at 7th Planete Doc Review Festival

With extraordinary expediency and ambition, this event, which takes place in Warsaw, Poland May 7 - 16, has become a destination festival in just seven years, with intrepid leadership by the inexhaustible, Artur Liebhart.  With an extraordinary program of the best of nonfiction cinema from around the world, the Planete Doc Review Film Festival brings world-class films to a country with many top festivals, including the Krakow Film Festival, which will be celebrating its jubilee--fifty years!--just a couple of weeks after Planete, May 31 - June 6.  Many filmmaker friends have told me that Planete Doc is in their top five favorite festivals to attend.

This year offers an extraordinary array of hefty filmmaking talent.  First up will be Werner Herzog's three-hour master class for professionals taking place Saturday, May 8th at 3:00 p.m. in the Kinoteka cinema, hosted by Polish arts and culture critic extraordinaire, Michal Chacinski.  And me.  (Yes.  Me.  It's published on the website if you don't believe me.  This is how I finally realized this might really be true, as well.)  Warsaw audiences will have a chance to meet with the director on May 8th and 9th after the screenings of his films.  A DVD box set in the Planete Doc Review series, with fifteen of Herzog's documentary films and a book--a collection of essays on his cinematic art published in the Krytyka Polityczna Reader--will be published as supplements to Herzog's master class.

Last year, the fest had a very popular Animadoc film section devoted to documentary animation.  This year, another special guest will be Martin Strange Hansen from Denmark, winner of the 2003 Oscar for his short narrative, This Charming Man.  Strange Hansen, a pioneer in the use of new media, will share his experience and expertise in a lecture on May 9th.   The "Pinly and Flau" film series will be screened beforehand.  These 3-minute-long animations for mobile phones were created on the basis of one hundred intimate stories from the lives of teenagers.

Friday, the 14th, will bring a three-hour workshop with the French filmmaker, Nicolas Philibert whose To Be and To Have was honored with the European Film Prize in 2002.  His latest film, Nenette, about a 40-year-old orangutan, played at this year's Berlinale.  The festival will also screen several of his films.

Lastly (but not leastly!), Saturday the 15th, Michal Chacinski and Jean Perret, the director of the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, France, will host a talk with Alan Berliner, renowned American filmmaker, photographer and video artist, three-time winner of the Emmy Award, and recipient of the 1997 Film Critics' Award at the Berlinale.  Berliner teaches a course entitled "Experiments in Time, Light and Movement" at the New School in New York.  All five of his wonderful films will be screened at the fest.

Quite the lineup, jestem prawo?  (I don't really speak Polish.)

The full program of the 7th edition will be published on the 5th of April and the program of workshops and panel discussions will be announced later this month.  During the first weekend of the fest, films will be screened in twenty cinemas in Poland on the same day at the same time; select films will be available by streaming straight to screening rooms around the country.  At ten of those locations, there will be panel discussions after the screening of Erik Gandini's award-winning, Videocracy.  Stay tuned for more news.

The Woman With the 5 Elephants

In Vadim Jendreyko’s gorgeously shot documentary feature, we meet the indomitable 85-year-old Svetlana Geier, a woman considered to be the greatest translator of Russian literature into German. She is a woman acutely aware of the echoes and reflections that bounce back to us when we really see, when we really listen, when we really absorb what surrounds us.  And that the exact right words, somehow, contain the ability to say something wordlessly.  “I believe that each spiritual experience leads us to treat one another better, to not strike others dead.  Quite elementary. And I believe that language is a very effective remedy.”

When we meet her, she has just completed new translations of 19^th-century literary genius Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s five great novels, the “elephants” of the title:  Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, The Brothers Karamasov. Before Geier came along, the tome known as Crime and Punishment was known in German as "Guilt and Atonement,” and the different emphasis takes on extra significance as we gradually learn details of Geier's complex biography.  The heft of her life is just as substantive, just as heavy with hidden detail, as each of these seminal literary works.

Her life is ordered, peaceful, purposeful in every way, from the type and variety of vegetables she buys at the town market (everything she cooks is made from scratch) to the way she irons her handmade linens, explaining to Jendreyko that the fabric being caressed under her hands, the warp and weave of each thread, creates a distinct texture and could only have been made in this particular way by its maker; the soft, flowing, beautiful piece of cloth wouldn’t be able to exist without each and every thread laid together just so.  There is a wonderful sensuality to her life that is reflected in Jendreyko's filmmaking, a luxurious sense of time passing, each moment an inspired one when life can change forever because of a gesture, a glance, a lifting of the eyes.  Geier has extraordinary eyes and a riveting presence.  She constantly reminds us that there is enough beauty in the world if you can just see beyond your own circumscribed view.  She offers Jendreyko, a consummate listener himself, a multitude of intelligent reflections and he takes them in in the spirit in which they're given, always gently probing, questioning, building a quiet maelstrom of emotion, never afraid to meet her challenging gaze.  It's an exciting collaboration and she grows more and more beautiful before his lens.  I'm hard pressed to remember the last time a woman in her 80s was represented so in film.

Still razor sharp, a fierce light emanating from laser-beam blue eyes, Geier is introduced in her home office where she continues her meticulous translation work, aided, in scenes loaded with droll humor, by collaborators who are themselves exacting and precise in everything they do, one of whom is a musician who is tasked with reading her translations to her out loud.  The rhythm of language and the exact right word are held to impossible standards, argued over vociferously, he always valiantly conceding to her final decision. She notices when things are “ridiculously ugly” and she is determined that language, above all else, “works.”  Punkt.

Born in Ukraine, Geier's teenage precocity and facility with languages brought her to the attention of the country's Nazi occupiers during World War II. Some fellow countrymen saw the Germans as saviors after the excesses of Soviet Communism. While she doesn't apologize for her youthful collaboration with the fascists--and is clearly still bereft when recounting the massacre at Babi Yar, where one of her closest friends was killed—it’s telling that she left her homeland for good when the Germans were driven out in 1943. She describes her life's work as repaying her "enormous debt to Germany."

Geier: “Right from the start, it is clear to Dostoyesvsky that the most important characteristic of a human being is his need for freedom.  And this freedom expresses itself in self-determination.  One does what one wants to do.  And our intelligence plays a fatal role here because our reason constantly offers us reasons, when we want to justify something.  We can offer a reason for anything, in fact.  . . . Here, Dostoyevsky is in sharp contrast to all the potentates of this world.  And for him, there is no doubt: there is no end that could ever justify a wrong means.”

When her son suffers a serious head injury and is confined to hospital, this sets off memories of her ill father whom she cared for in Russia after he was released from one of Stalin’s death camps and she drops everything to care for him.  This also unleashes an impulse to return to Ukraine, a place she has not returned since she left as a young girl.  When we enter Kiev on the train, we become aware of how and why beauty and function have become so vital to her existence.  The light in her eyes, the aura around her, dims a bit as she looks out the window of the train.  She tells her granddaughter, at one point, that the Russian and German languages are incompatible while the filmmaker slyly illustrates this by filming the gauge change for the trains that will travel through Ukraine.

The film interweaves the story of Geier’s life during this journey, her chosen dedicated vocation to literature, and the secrets—some very dark and painful—of this inexhaustibly hard-working and exacting woman who possesses a love of language that outshines everything else. “One cannot exhaust an excellent text, and that is probably the sign of the most superb quality.”  In his exceedingly intimate portrait, Jendreyko shows us a human being living an inexhaustible life, a life that celebrates the beauty of each small moment and, more importantly, the spaces between them.

 

 

UP AND COMING Benefit for Film Project on Female Immigrant Artists

This Tuesday evening, September 1st, I and Nancy Wong of 011 Design Collective, will be hosting a small fundraising benefit for a project called Up and Coming at DCTV.  The evening will begin at 7:00 p.m. with cocktails, music and schmoozing, and then at 7:45 p.m., we will be showing the first 10-minute installment of this multi-part, multimedia project followed by a Q&A with director, Eliane Lazzaris, and artists Priscila De Carvalho (pictured working in her studio) and Lina Puerta. 

Following the Q&A, author Charlotte Noruzi will discuss her design collaboration with Eliane Lazzaris on her book, Urban Iran, profiles and perspectives of independent Iranian artists.  There will be signed copies of the book available for purchase.  The event is a benefit to raise funds for a new microphone and for production costs on the next installment of the series, featuring Puerta. 

Up and Coming features film portraits of emerging female immigrant artists living and working in NYC today.  Each artist will tell her own story in a stand-alone segment that will focus on the strategies she has found to continue to seek to define her cultural and artistic identity in her adopted country.

Lazzaris is a multimedia artist residing in Long Island City, Queens.  She came to New York from her native Brazil in 2004.  Her book and design credits include projects for DCTV, the Inaugural Cinema Eye Honors (2008), Urban Iran and Translating Hollywood, a book by Sam Sarowitz on movie posters.  This project is her film directorial début. 

Lazzaris says that, "The art world continues to be dominated by men and immigrant rights continue to be debated in Congress, so I devoted this project exclusively to female immigrant artists as an opportunity to further recognize our important artistic and cultural contributions. 

"The idea for the project began shortly after I arrived in New York in '04 when I realized the difficulties I would face, as both an immigrant and as a woman, as I continued my commitment to sustaining an artistic practice in my life.  Looking for support and inspiration, I became increasingly involved with other immigrant artists. 

"This documentary series presents film portraits of female artists from around the world as they face the challenges of uprooting themselves from their home countries and relocating to the US.  To document their lives and work, I will follow each individual for a period of about eight months, focusing on the strategies they adopt as they seek to define their cultural and artistic identities on their own terms.  Each artist will be featured separately in an individual video. 

"I plan to further expand on the perspectives provided in the film series through a companion book project that will explore new directions in the material and offer more in-depth bios of the artists."

Please join us Tuesday evening to meet the director and the artists. We are asking for a suggested donation at the door of just $10 and there will be other opportunities to offer support throughout the evening with a raffle of items donated by some generous sponsors.  DCTV is at 87 Lafayette Street in Tribeca; we'll be in the big back room on the ground floor.  You can RSVP and/or send donations to [email protected].  Hope to see you there!

CARNIVALESQUE Distributes Raw and Inspiring Cinema

For its ’09 – ’10 release slate, new distribution company, Carnivalesque Films, announces the availability of ten great modern classics, representing some of the most outstanding and distinctive independent narrative and nonfiction films made in the recent past. The collection brings together stories united by a "raw, startling sensibility of disruption and celebration, where excess and transgression percolate in everyday life."  This small independent start-up created by filmmakers, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, curates stories "united by the raw and startling sensibilities of transgression, spectacle, and variations of truth and falseness.  Named for Carnival, a celebration where societal norms are turned on their heads and excess and transgression rule the day, Carnivalesque Films seeks to disrupt a viewer’s most cherished beliefs in unexpected ways.  . . . In real life, people behave irrationally, succumbing to madness or self-destruction in pursuit of dreams and desires. Carnivalesque Films acknowledges these dreams and desires by exploring them as literature from the characters’ points of view."

These seven titles are currently available on DVD:

*  Mardi Gras: Made in China directed by David Redmon.  Winner of twenty-one national and international awards, this multi-layered documentary follows the path of Mardi Gras beads from the streets of New Orleans during Carnival—where revelers party and exchange beads for nudity—to the disciplined factories in Fuzhou, China where teenaged girls live and sew beads together all day and night.  Blending curiosity with comedy, director Redmon explores how the toxic products directly affect the people who both make and consume them. The Los Angeles Times says Mardi Gras: Made in China “cleverly juxtaposes the apex of American bacchanalian excess with the sweatshop-like conditions that facilitate the fun.”  Stuart Klawans of The Nation says, “This is one of the best films I know about real (as opposed to op-ed) globalization.  Please welcome it.”  You can read my review from this blog by clicking here.

*  Orphans by Ry Russo-Young.  Winner of a Special Jury Award at the SXSW Film Festival, Russo-Young’s eloquent feature début tells the story of two estranged sisters who reunite five years after the death of their parents at the isolated farmhouse where they spent childhood summers and holidays.  As the two revisit their past and catch up on their present, tensions flare, threatening to end what’s left of a family already ravaged by death, jealousy, and secrets.  Andrew O’Heir of Salon.com says that, “Orphans is a striking first film that simultaneously summons the spirit of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Brian De Palma’s Sisters. Scott Macaulay, editor of FILMMAKER Magazine as a member of the SXSW jury praised it for its “personally crafted visual aesthetic.”

*  The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose by Sam Douglas and Paul Lovelace.  From their origins in New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene and their involvement in the Easy Rider soundtrack, to the lost years of constant drugging, endless touring and a final shot at redemption, Douglas and Lovelace’s film recounts the unique forty-year history of these true American originals.  With startling intimacy, the film also documents the band’s arduous, amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking struggle to capitalize on their recent resurgence in popularity, culminating in an unpredictable 40th anniversary concert in Portland, Oregon.  The New York Times calls it “rollicking and poignant,” and filmmaker, Bruce Sinofsky, co-director of such nonfiction classics as Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, says, “Bound to Lose is a hidden treasure!  A surprisingly moving and funny look at a dysfunctional musical family.  You can’t take your eyes off it.”

*  Manhattan, Kansas by Tara Wray.  For her filmmaking début, Tara Wray travels to rural Kansas in an attempt to reconnect with her mother, Evie, for the first time since Evie’s psychotic breakdown five years earlier.  She finds a parent still chasing her demons, both real and imagined, struggling to make a career for herself as an abstract artist and searching for the “Geodetic Center of the United States,” the finding of which will bring about world peace.  When Tara decides to aid her mother’s search, it sets into motion a surprising chain of events.  The Film Society of Lincoln Center says of this SXSW Audience Award winner: “Emotionally blunt and affecting, . . . acknowledging that love abides, even when forgiveness is not always easy or possible.”  Marrit Ingman of the Austin Chronicle says that Wray’s film is “everything a personal documentary should be.”

*  Invisible Girlfriend by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin.  Charles goes in search of his love, Joan of Arc, the invisible girlfriend of the title of this story of a 400-mile journey on a big red bicycle from rural Monroe, Louisiana to the Big Easy.  Along the way, he encounters a farmer, a witch, a tin man, and an ex-soldier who honors the dead.  This hybrid piece, which Michael Tully of Hammer to Nail calls a film “that transcends the realms of fiction and non-fiction to reach a new state of truth,” won the Ron Tibbett Award for Excellence in Film at the Magnolia Film Festival and garnered rave reviews from the likes of Joe Leydon of Variety—“a textbook example of what can result when savvy documentarians fortuitously connect (or, in this case, reconnect) with an interesting subject at precisely the right moment;” and Ty Burr of The Boston Globe—“A surprising and profoundly compassionate road trip about an America struggling to get back on its feet, . . . filmmakers Sabin and Redmon work at the intersection of Flannery O’Connor Avenue and Werner Herzog Boulevard.”

*  Kamp Katrina by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin.  Kamp Katrina is a multiple award-winning cinéma vérité jewel.  Shot shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated wide swaths of the American South, Redmon and Sabin document a small group of people who have taken refuge in a garden transformed into a tent city by an extraordinary New Orleans couple, Ms. Pearl and her husband, David.  Winner of a SXSW Emerging Voices award, a Special Jury Prize from the Independent Film Festival in Boston, Best Documentary at the Magnolia Film Festival, a Special Jury Award at the Nashville Film Festival, a special screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, top of Booklist’s Best of Editors’ Choice and a selection of the Southern Film Circuit, Kamp Katrina, in the words of New York Magazine, “captures (beautifully and unflinchingly) a harrowing breakdown of social order.  The result is a slight little film with a remarkable generosity of spirit.”  Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Times:  “The movie is a portrait of New Orleans after the flood, a debris-strewn ghost town where human kindness is overflowing.”

*  Intimidad by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin.  “Romance is where Intimidad soars, turning it into a documentary fairytale of truly humbling proportions,” says Michael Tully of Hammer to Nail. Intimidad is an original Mexican love story about family relationships and the meaning of home.  Cecy and Camilo, both 21 years old, have recently moved to the border in Reynosa, Mexico from Santa Maria, Puebla with a dream of saving money to build a home on the land that they’ve purchased.  One year later, they return to their hometown to reunite with their two-year-old daughter, Loida (pictured).  Shot by Redmon and Sabin and Cecy and Camilo, the film documents their lives over the course of five years mixing digital vérité with Super 8 and 16mm film.  The piece played as part of “The Contenders” series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, won Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Latino Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Sidewalk Film Festival, Best International Film at the Connecticut Film Festival, the Human Rights Award at the River Run Film Festival and the Ron Tibbet Award for Excellence in Film at the Magnolia Film Festival.

Soon to be released this summer and fall will be Redmon and Sabin’s Darlings, Alex Karpovsky’s Woodpecker and Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade, as well as other yet-to-be-announced films.  You can watch trailers and purchase DVDs for both home and educational/institutional use on the Carnivalesque site and titles can also be purchased on Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com, BestBuy.com, Borders.com, Netflix.com and Blockbuster.com.

You Can Have Both Love and Art: A Conversation with BARBARA HAMMER

Artist and filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, has made close to eighty (yes, that's 8-0) film and video pieces since 1972.  She says that her work is about "revealing, showing, expressing, uncovering that which has not been seen before."  Working mostly within a non-linear, metaphorical, vertically-structured methodology, she has created an extraordinary body of work, groundbreaking in its bold imperative to break taboos with her subject matter and in the ways in which a viewer interacts, physically and emotionally, with the images she projects on the screen.  In the 1970s, Hammer came out at a time when it was "a political act to work and speak as a lesbian artist in the dominant art world, and to speak as an avant-garde artist to a lesbian and gay audience."

Each decade since then has marked a new direction in her work since she never ceases to explore and delve deeply into the innermost reserves of her being to talk about sexuality, womanhood, illness, aging and mortality.  Her pieces are unflinching and raw in their immediacy, yet always carefully structured, aesthetically rich and rigorous in their use of the tools of modern media.  To sustain this creative impulse over a lifetime is truly remarkable.  What is also truly remarkable is that after just recently surviving ovarian cancer, this month Hammer celebrates her 70th birthday.  This year will be one of celebration with several international retrospectives in the works and the forthcoming publication of her book, simply called HAMMER.

A couple of days before her birthday, I visited her in her studio in New York's West Village to talk about this dynamic compulsion to constantly be in a state of creativity and what keeps her inspired:

Still in Motion (SIM):  You’re going to be celebrating a significant birthday in a couple of days.  And the last few years have been an exceedingly intense time, as well, filled with lots of profound transitions.  As an artist, a creator, how does this period of your life differ from any other time in your career?  You share a lot about what you’ve been through recently in your new film, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor; what compelled you to document your illness and survival?

Barbara Hammer (BH):  After four decades of work, I developed ovarian cancer.  Upon its discovery, I went through surgery and eighteen rounds of intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive treatment.  I’ve been in remission for two and a half years.  I never thought I was going to make a film of my experience, never ever.  When people would ask me about it, I would say no.  I went deep inside myself during that time and hung out very quietly and waited for a recovery.  Then, as I got better, I did feel like I wanted to give people hope because ovarian cancer is pretty severe.  I was also able to get women who own ranches to lend me their horses to ride—I love to ride.  You know, the C-word helps you get things sometimes [laughs].  You get on the airplane first, that kind of thing.

But now, I’ve been in remission for two and a half years, the film has been out for about a year and life has come back to normal.  At first I was just so happy to be alive; I still am.  I just noticed every little thing, like irises pushing through the soil in early spring; those things meant a great deal to me because it helped me to push through, too.  Now I find myself wrapping up because once you get a life-threatening illness. . .

SIM:  “Wrapping up” in what sense?

BH:  I’m finishing a book; I’m handing it in on Friday.  I just got all the stills together to burn a DVD today, and tomorrow I’ll go through some details in the manuscript and I’ve been working on the captions for the stills for a couple of weeks.  So, I’m really eager to turn this year’s work, nine months of work, over to the editor [Amy Scholder at The Feminist Press at CUNY] and take a breather, ride a horse, get outside.

Also, after I got cancer, I worked with my assistant to get my film archive in order.  I found that I was missing elements of one film, Bent Time [1983]. I wrote a grant proposal and New York Women in Film is paying a lab to restore it.  I just got an email before you came in the door that the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art] is buying it, along with A Horse Is Not a Metaphor and Lover Other [2006].  They’ll also be giving me a retrospective next year.

SIM:  You’re having a series of retrospectives next year.

BH:  Right now, it’ll be the MoMA, which will be in conjunction with the kickoff of the book, and then it’ll go to the Tate Modern in London and then the Reina Sofia in Madrid.  There’s also a possibility that the Irish Film Institute will do something, as well; I’ve heard they’re interested.

SIM:  So you’ll have a very well-deserved year of celebration.

BH:  Yes, a year of travel and celebration.  So, I’m getting my archives in order and I also have a large paper archive [pointing to many boxes lined up against a wall of her studio] to get organized by decade, or by film.  Now, I need to sell them to a university; there’s one that’s very interested in 1970s work.  My archive goes back to the 60s.  I kept everything all the way through.  I didn’t know that it was valuable but there’s interest.  Universities, oddly, don’t purchase film collections, so far.  The artist gifts them to the institution.  The archive will be compiled and moved out when it feels like the right moment.

Every time there’s a completion, there are new beginnings.  I don’t know what mine will be.  The trouble is, I always have a new film.  I have a film I’m working on now with a young woman called Generations: Two Bolex Dykes.  We’re waiting on a grant for that.  We just did a shoot last Wednesday, so we finished all our shooting.  She hand develops and cross processes the work so it looks very do-it-yourself.  We still have some sound to collect and then we both will be editing over the summer.  The idea is based on Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round, a film she made in 1958 about the bridges of New York City, a beautiful film.  There’s a jazz track and also a classical track.  When you watch the film, the images are repeated but the sound is different; you feel like you’ve seen two different films or two different versions.  You can’t remember that you ever saw a certain shot before, and yet you have.

We’re going further with that by taking all of our visual elements and all our sound elements.  She'll get the packet and I'll get the packet.  It’s a mentoring kind of a project but we’re going to reverse stereotypes since she’ll edit in film and I’ll edit digitally; we’ll have the exact same material and then her work and mine will be joined, displaying two different versions.

SIM:  How does she perceive herself as a working artist versus your own perception of yourself as a working artist?  Are there generational differences that you can discern, different approaches or sensibilities?

BH:  I think in the case of Gina Carducci, I wanted to inspire her to make work because she hasn’t made a film for five years.  Here was a talented person not using her talent.  Like many women and men who come out of college and are used to the structure of that environment—due dates, assignments, etc.—once you’re out in the working world, you can lose your way.  She works at a film lab so she’s working with film all day long.  It’s hard to generate enthusiasm for her own work.  But she’s so enthused now.  She lives, drinks and breathes this film.  I have to say, “Down, girl!.”  I wanted to jumpstart her.  The letting go will be in the editing process where we each do our own work.  If we continued to work together through the editing process, there would be a concern that at the end, she would not make a film again.  I don’t really think so in this case.  At some point, the person who’s mentoring wants the one being mentored to recognize her own development and then there’s a letting go.  This is the reason for this kind of editing structure.  She’ll gain so much authority.  The other leg up for her will be making the film with me.  She’ll get it shown at the Museum of Modern Art and it’s only her second film.  Her first film is great; she showed it at the Venice Film Festival [Stone Welcome Mat, 2003].

The bottom line is that I can’t generalize about a generation; I can only talk about this one person that I chose to work with to pass on my skills.  She’s a technician so she’s very measured in her approach to film and I’m not a technician; in fact, one might say I’m the opposite of that.  I work very spontaneously.  We both mentored one another in those differences.  That’s the great thing about collaborating.  You get to be more than yourself.

SIM:  What kind of characteristics does it take to be a working artist over the course of a lifetime?

BH:  Belief in yourself:  that you’re worth it, that you’ve got something to say and that it’s important to say it.

SIM:  Does that belief ebb and flow?  Is it fairly consistent?  Do you have a choice in the matter?

BH:  For me, it wasn’t so much a choice as much as it was a compulsion.  I was driven to make work.  I felt like I had a lot to say, especially after I came out.  In my film history classes there was absolutely no women's cinema, let alone lesbian cinema.  I spent a whole semester watching films at least three hours a week in this class and then we finally saw the films of Maya Deren [born, Eleanora Derenkosky].  Then I knew, for sure, I was a filmmaker.  There was a whole blank screen to be filled. 

I guess after a while I thought, if I kept making work, it wouldn’t be ignored.  Stan Brakhage was my model; he made a hundred films.  Like him, I have a discipline and a commitment.  I don’t think you can make discoveries in your work unless you’re at it every day—discoveries in writing or interviewing techniques, whatever you’re doing.  I have chosen to make this my life’s work.  It never came up, an option to do something else.

SIM:  Tell me more about how someone like Deren inspired and informed your own work.

BH:  She was not only the director of her own films, she was in the films.  Her presence in her films exhibited a kind of creative imagination I'd never seen before.  You knew that an image of a person clad in black with a mirror had come from her own aesthetic decision or dream or vision.  It gave me, and many others, the strength to believe in my own vision and put it out there, not do a traditional narrative or a traditional documentary, but to work in film as poetry.  That’s what she writes about. 

Also, there’s Man With a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (1929).  That inspired me because of the spontaneity, because the camera was a protagonist.  Somehow the camera’s always been my friend.  In fact, in one of my films, Synch Touch from 1981, I take it to bed with me.  People film me with my camera in bed.  Even when I took women out of the cinema and I was the woman behind the camera, you feel the camera as it’s swimming underwater in Pond and Waterfall [1982]; you feel the presence of the gathering of that light by this machine.  When I use the optical printer, I try not to hide the fact that I’m using a printer; I show the frameline; you hear the click of the printer in Optic Nerves [1985].

SIM:  Sensuality and an immediacy are markers of all your work.  You’re very fluid in terms of form, as well, allowing the material to dictate the way in which you tell a certain story.  A lot of your work strives for a three-dimensionality, a physical heft and weight to it, which is accomplished in many of your pieces.  You also pay a lot of attention to sound and music, which create really rich counterpoints to your visuals.

BH:  I did some experiments by leaving the sound completely off.  In the instance of Multiple Orgasm [1976], you see eight orgasms on the screen [four vaginal, four facial].  I left it silent because I wanted people to hear their neighbors in the theater breathing.  But everybody held his or her breath [laughs].  So that didn’t work.  Another film in which I experimented with this silence was Pond and Waterfall, which I just mentioned, an underwater film.  I wanted people to be aware of how much water they have coursing through their veins and their blood.  So I brought stethoscopes and had members of the audience wear them and listen to their own blood flow.  That was their soundtrack.  I also chucked that because everybody was spending so much time looking for some area on their body to listen to, they missed the film.  So those films both remain silent experiences for the viewer, as much silence as there can be, anyway.

I like to work with composers.  Meredith Monk is someone I work with a lot.  Neil Rolnick is another one, as is Helen Thorington.  There’s also Pamela Z.  I’ve been lucky to have been involved with a number of composers who bring their talent to the film.  I specialize in visual imagery; they specialize in aural imagery.

I’ve also collaborated with other filmmakers from time to time but only for three or four films.  But sound collaboration is something I’ll always be interested in.  For me, filmmaking is a very singular process, a very internal process.

SIM:  How has your relationship with audience changed over the course of your career?  Have there been certain times when your work seemed to resonate more forcefully than at other times due to what was happening in the modern culture?

BH:  In the late 60s and through most of the 70s, I didn’t know there were places to show films like museums or cinemathèques.  I showed my films at women’s centers, dyke coffee houses, bars, community buildings, anyplace where there could be a projector installed and a wall to project images upon.  One day, Terry Cannon called me from the Los Angeles Filmforum and invited me out of my community in San Francisco to come down to L.A.  I went down and was given a check at the end of the screening, imagine.  I showed my lesbian films to a mixed audience, most of whom I don’t think were gay.  People enjoyed them.  I got paid for it.  There was a program, an announcement in the Los Angeles Times.  I saw a whole world open up. 

Audiences have changed.  They’re more sophisticated now.  There’s still a small group who really like experimental films.  But people also like to peg you.  Audiences get stuck in their ways just as much as any of us can.  I made a dozen documentaries during the 90s, essay documentaries for the most part; some are more traditional, as in cases when I was working in a country other than the US, or in a language other than English.  When I returned to experimental film with A Horse Is Not a Metaphor, I think most people who knew my name thought I had made a straightforward film on what it’s like to have cancer.  They wouldn’t know the depth of imagery I’ve used, the layering I use for the emotional development of the piece through verticality.  Maya Deren talks about this poetic way of working, how a poem carries emotion versus how a story does; the images follow one another in a narrative.  This poetic way of working is when images build upon one another.  Mine builds in Horse through superimposition.  So this is a way that I can let audiences know there’s been a change in the way I’m approaching current work.  It behooves all of us to mix it up a bit and be more open to different ways in which an artist might work.

SIM:  Thankfully, there are curators and programmers out there that will help to push that agenda a bit, although they’re few and far between.  The stakes are pretty high for artists now and being creative in the work is not enough anymore, somehow.  The creativity has to extend to how you supplant that work into the larger community.  One might say that audiences now are too sophisticated, quick to have certain expectations, spoiled for choice. 

BH:  I never chose to make big budget films, which perhaps might be an expectation after a certain point in one’s career.  I never chose to make films that would be shown commercially.  I don’t think about meeting anyone else’s expectations.  It would be fine if I did but it’s just not my predilection to do so.  We are definitely more sophisticated—we have the Internet, YouTube where you can see, literally, anything, anytime; we can download programs whenever we want.  But still, experimental cinema doesn’t have its place in the world that it should have.  It should be just as strong as documentary film.

SIM:  Why do you think it isn’t?

BH:  Because young people aren’t exposed to it.  How many eighth graders see the work of Maya Deren?  I’ve taken my films, not the sexual films, but the underwater films, for instance, and shown them to kids that age.  They all got it, of course.  I think that’s the reason why we shut down and just learn that there’s "Howdy Doody"—well, that’s dating me, but—you know, "Sesame Street" and whatever else is on now.

SIM:  Well, kids are always being talked at; they’re still not listened to in any kind of conscientious way by adults.  They aren’t really allowed to take in things without some kind of mitigating filter.  What you also have in your work, to a large degree, is a lot of joy and humor which is very childlike, no matter the subject matter or how it’s treated.  That resonates deeply with anyone of any age.  You can’t fake that kind of thing.  It’s very effective in breaking silences, breaking societal rigidity or its denial to acknowledge a whole population of people. 

BH:  I think that by playing you can definitely change people’s minds.  But it’s not like that was a conscious decision on my part to use humor for that affect or to think of play as a political strategy.  It is, but I wasn’t conscious of it.  I just think it’s more fun; I mean if you can find a way to enjoy, especially if you’re not getting paid for what you’re doing as many of us artists are not, well, we have to find our own pleasure.  Pleasure can be in the making of work or the discovery of a creative impulse; concomitantly, you get to share that pleasure with others.  Maybe they will enjoy more, too.  Minds are changed through laughter, maybe more so than strict political treatises.  That’s not always the case.  There’s some humor in Nitrate Kisses [1992] but it’s also a very serious film.

SIM:  What’s happening in experimental work now that excites you?

BH:  I’ve been seeing a lot of this throw-away kind of art, in terms of visual art.  I go to galleries a lot and I see this way of being hugely creative in putting things together out of refuse, found objects or cut up pieces of velvet thrown on the floor.  There’s a feeling that anything can be art right now.  It’s a period where a certain kind of art like “abstract expressionism” or “geometric art” or “feminist art” is not dominating the field.  In other words, everybody is out there working.  There’s a rebellion against the wealth of the 80s and 90s before the recession.  So that if you make something out of ice cream sticks and Kleenex, it’s a good way to show a creative piece made by a creative mind out of the simplest materials.  I think it’s an attempt to shake up the curators and collectors and the big auction houses that have raised the prices so high.  Those things become a truer sign of the times.  And, in turn, they are curated, gathered, purchased.  It’s all cyclical.

SIM:  It’s so hard to stem the tide of the consumer culture in which we live.  Set in motion several decades ago, it really shows no signs of faltering, although the economic times now dictate a more conservative and responsible approach to how we spend our money.  But it is relentless, nonetheless.  It still seems that if one’s work is not commodified in some way, somehow you’ve missed the boat.  There’s an intense fear of obscurity.

BH:  It’s hard when there are just so many celebrities that are allowed an extraordinary amount of attention.  But I tend to ignore most or all of that kind of thing; I don’t know who the movie stars are.  I’m sort of a cultural nerd.  I don’t really pay much attention.  But that’s not the case in terms of “rich” culture, just the “junk” culture that’s around.  Sometimes the celebrity is well-deserved but the big deal about famous people doesn’t affect me much.  I want to talk about somebody who’s really pushing art and is having a show opening.  Carrie Moyer is a painter I respect very much. Sadie Benning has a show up right now at the Whitney, which I’ve heard is very good.  There’s Derek Jarman. 

[She gets up and grabs a bunch of DVDs stacked on a desk.]  What do I have here?  I showed my work at the London Film Archive.  They’re not allowed to pay you money for your work, but they asked me what I wanted from their collection and they gave me these.  Chris Welsby does beautiful landscape work in his experimental films.  Here’s [Abbas] Kiarostami from Iran; François Ozon, a very sensual filmmaker and I love the French language; Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating, one of my favorite films ever; Still Life by Jia Zhang-ke which is a brilliant film; Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien, another great filmmaker from England.  Oh, this is one of my favorites, Woman in the Dunes by [Hioshi] Teshigahara—it’s an incredibly sensuous film, skin against the sand, the black and white cinematography, the sand constantly coming down, always falling; there can be just one image in a film that inspires you and then you love that film.  Oh, this is great, too; have you seen Pasolini’s Salò?  That really shocked me when I saw it.  I love it.  I love taking taboos and breaking them and he was a master.  He had people eating in the toilet and shitting at the table publicly.  It just makes us think how we’ve proscribed ourselves culturally in a very strict way.  None of us are free. 

Taboos are there to be broken—why were they formed and who formed them and how many centuries old are they?  Where are we now?  Why can’t we talk about menstruation?  We are now, but for a long time we weren’t.  Menopause, cancer, all of the things that are the “fear” words, you know?  Old ladies making love?  They’re not sexual anymore.  There’s nothing that’s sacred as far as I’m concerned, that shouldn’t be looked at, shouldn’t be explored.

SIM:  For your forthcoming book, what themes emerged for you as you were writing it and structuring it?  You have this opportunity to write your own “tome” if you will, instead of having somebody else do it.

BH:  It has been a great opportunity.  Essentially, the book is by decade.  It’s the easiest way, really, because each decade, I took a different direction in my work.  In the 70s it was a time of coming out, both physically and with my films.  I wanted to put lesbians on the screen for the 20th century and into the 21st, so there were a whole group of films that did break taboos from that period.  In the 80s, I wanted to be known as an artist because I was only known as a lesbian filmmaker.  That wasn’t the way I defined myself; I defined myself as an artist.  So I took women out of my cinema and kept working on films that exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art until I got my own show.  There was also the thrill of working with an optical printer.  I tried to become a painter before I became a filmmaker but I decided I could use every frame as if it were a painting.  With the optical printer, I was able to paint the film as I did in Optic Nerves [1989], a film about my grandmother in a nursing home.  John Hanhardt saw it.  I was teaching in Chicago and I sent him a print.  He called me up, told me it was brilliant and that he wanted to put me in the [Whitney] Biennial.  That put me on the map as a film artist. 

From there, we moved into identity politics in the 90s and I felt I had already been there way before then.  I was doing that in the 70s.  But I returned to it with more of a “cultural studies” theoretical bent and brought theory into my practice, developing an intellectually rich cinema, as well as this hallmark of sensuality that I’d done in the 70s.  Now, in the 2000s, I’m looking at mortality; I’m looking at death and that shouldn’t be something that we’re afraid of talking about.

SIM:  That’s the taboo of all taboos, seemingly, beyond anything else.

BH:  I’m reading David Rieff’s book on Susan Sontag and her fear of death.  [Rieff is Sontag’s son; the book is called Swimming in a Sea of Death.]  It’s quite extraordinary because she was such an intellectual and faced so many things and had such a difficult time coming to terms with her own demise.  That’s been in my films since ’89 or ’90 where I danced with a skeleton looking it right in the face [Vital Signs, 1991].  But that’s quite different than having an illness and seeing your own bones deteriorate because the chemotherapy is destroying them.  We know death through life, our vitality and the appreciation of it, being conscious of that vitality.  All that is coming together in the work that I’ve made and am making now.

The book has newly-written intros to each of those periods, followed by reprints of articles I’ve written. There will also be the first thirty pages of a novel I wrote in 1970.  So it’s a diverse collection touching on many things, sexuality, film form and structure, the politics of abstraction.  It’s more of a compilation, not so much a memoir that I sat down to write except for these introductions for each section.  It was an interesting process; I liked it.  It’s tedious right now because I’m checking facts and dates, getting permissions from photographers, trying to track them down.  I’m also working with an amazing editor.  Amy comes over and looks at photos with me.  They’re too close to me.  We’re doing fifty photos for the book.  So we’ll look at the 70s, for instance, and she’ll pick out the ones she thinks we should use.  Later, I’ll look those choices over and realize her choices were exactly right.  It’s too hard for me to see.  I really respect her eye.  My partner [Florrie Burke] helps me with the writing sometimes since she’s so good with the English language and grammar and Amy does the fine corrections.  So that’s where we are.  When I get the galleys back, we’ll do the whole process again.  It’s a lot of work.  I always wanted to have a book; I always wanted to be in the library.

SIM:  I look forward to seeing and reading the finished product of all your hard work.  Thank you so much.

2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners and Nominated Finalists

This just in:  the 2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners and Nominated Finalists are listed here.  Congratulations to these talented journalists, writers and poets.  And on a personal note:  yay, Holland Cotter and W.S. Merwin!

Building Online Fan Bases--Scott Kirsner's Book Hits the Airwaves

Just out this month: Fans, Friends & Followers, a book about how creatives can build audiences for their work online while creating sustainable business models for themselves.  Kirsner, editor of CinemaTech, falls under the "guru" category when it comes to this stuff, and in his new book he presents some strategies through interviews and encounters with various artists who are (digitally) making a shekel or two from their works.  For as we know, for the most part in this day and age, the onus of survival and sustainability rests upon the shoulders of the musician, filmmaker, artist, writer, etc.

Kirsner's book is based on dozens of interviews with some of the artists pioneering new approaches to production, marketing, promotion, collaboration, and distribution on the Web.

The book features some new tools, techniques, and business models, along with thirty artist interviews, which include YouTube star Michael Buckley ("What the Buck"); the animators behind JibJab, Homestar Runner, and Red vs. Blue; video artist Ze Frank (“The Show”); comedian Eugene Mirman; singer-songwriters Jill Sobule and Jonathan Coulton; Damian Kulash of OK Go; filmmakers Robert Greenwald (Iraq for Sale) and Curt Ellis (King Corn); writers Brunonia Barry (The Lace Reader) and Lisa Genova (Still Alice); and artists Natasha Wescoat, and Dave Kellett.

The paperback is priced at $15.95; you can also purchase it as an E-book for $12.00 (it's 181 pages so you might want to have it on your bookshelf for reference).  It's available at Amazon.com, or you can purchase it directly from Kirsner's site by clicking here.  You will also be able to have access to a 35-page preview.

Joyriding in Pleasantville: Or the Perils of Pamela

If, on the day before your birthday, you find yourself driving around in your cousins' Jeep at 9:00 a.m. on a weekday downing two cups of coffee, 1/2 a tuna sandwich, 1/2 a bagel with cream cheese and an apple fritter--in less than 30 minutes--and, at one point, literally driving around in circles in the Shop-Rite mall's gigantic parking lot (where said fritter consumption occurred before circling back home), you are in deep shit. 

(That's me and my sister--the Peanut--in  front of the childhood manse in a much more innocent, bucolic time.  Maybe I should get bangs again.)

I've been an independent producer/writer (freelancer, whatever you want to call it) for years, decades, even.  I know the drill.  Long periods of drought, nothing much going on, and then a nice chunk of work comes through for several weeks, maybe even a few months, if you're lucky.  You work on something cool with really cool people.  You learn a lot.  And then when that fallow period hits, it's all right because you've got some loot in the bank, the weather's great and there are eight film festivals to attend in the next three weeks and your swag inventory is low.  Or you just decide to strap on a backpack and go explore something.

I'm finding myself in a hell of my own making (apparently) and thought this would be a good time to reflect on finding myself where I do, close on two years after moving back to New York to kick ass and have a cocktail or two with the mayor.  But New York is a solid town; it's been around a while as a world leader and hot spot for artists and it basically doesn't give a fuck if you show up.  Get in line.

I'm not young, I'm not rich (or have parents who are), I didn't go to Tisch or Columbia or The New School; I'm an arriviste, but a bit too late to the dance.  There is no earthly reason why I should work my ass off for so long, making about $20K over the course of two years, tops, and not have anything to show for it. 

Yes, I've made bad financial and lifestyle decisions (moving to an overpriced loft in Bushwick, ahem), and invested way too much in "business development" (loosely translated as going through most of your personal funds to be where the action is--or where the action you think you want to be a part of is--or something like that).  My mother told me over the phone a couple of weeks ago that she and my father were very concerned about what was going to happen to me when they were no longer around.  This is just horrible, really.

But I've traveled and worked in Dubai, London, Oxford, Tehran, Helsinki, Italy, Greece, and Damascus in less than a year.  Hey, I even lived in Fort Greene for a while, not too shabby.  And I've met loads of people I was thrilled to meet and relished the pleasure of them knowing my face and name, in return.  I hang out with Janet Maslin, for goodness' sakes, at the beautiful Jacob Burns Film Center several times a month where she interviews the super stars of the independent film world and where the audience, appropriately, gushes at the opportunity to sit in the same room with people who shine.  I've spent a lot of time doing that, too.  I've honed a distinctive voice that resides in the ether of the Internet and is there to be read for the lucky sods who stumble upon it, and thank you from the bottom of my cold, black heart to all those who've let me know that I have fans.  That's really nice to hear.

As a birthday present to myself, I went ahead and filled out and submitted an application to a very prestigious place for a residency, feeling (on a good day) that I might have a shot at a spot there along with all those other incredibly talented people that go and do their creative thing.  Mailed off this morning.

But I'm also fucking lonely and want more than anything to work with people again.  I adore my own company, but enough is enough.  And, I want to be paid for my talents and my efforts.  Not a lot, but, my god, something.  I'm not a charity case.  Oh, but wait a minute, apparently I now am.  And, honestly, I want the hell out of suburbia.  New York City needs me.  And think of all the Stranger Than Fiction screenings I'm missing; it's a crime.

Being whipsawed between Pollyanna optimism that my golden goose is going to come waddling around the corner any minute and dire despair that I'm a middle-aged wash-up that will be working at 7-11 when I'm 86 (not that there's anything wrong with that--go, granny) is probably something that most people go through.  Most thinking people, anyway.  Why am I spending my life chasing after quixotic dreams at my age?  Why am I still slogging through all alone?  Why am I broke--again?

To paraphrase Peter Wintonick when he said, "Don't ask what your local film festival can do for you; ask what you can do for your local film festival":  Don't ask what a film blogger can do for you; ask what you can do for a film blogger.

Meanwhile, I'll keep wearing my T-shirt that says, "Will review, praise and/or draw attention to your work of genius for the sheer love of it."  Matching undies sold separately.  Happy birthday to me.

A Smart Movie Now Playing Near You

Astra Taylor's latest documentary, Examined Life, is rolling out its theatrical release.  I saw this film at the last Woodstock Film Festival in October and loved, loved, loved it.  I also got a chance to sit down with its director here in New York this past fall to talk about the unusual subject matter she covers in her cinematic work.  If so inclined, you can read our talk here.  Or you can read Dennis Lim's New York Times article here. 

Examined Life opens Wednesday the 25th (day after tomorrow) in New York City at the IFC Center, and will also play San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Portland, New Orleans, and other cities in the coming months.

As always, opening weeks are crucial, so go support!  As an extra treat, some of the subjects in the film, our current day's most brilliant minds, will be on hand to join Taylor for post-screening Q&As at some of the evening screenings.  Avital Ronell will be at the IFC on opening night and on Tuesday, March 3.  Kwame Anthony Appiah will appear Thursday, February 26, and the exuberant Cornel West will appear Thursday, March 5.  Keep checking the website for updated schedules and director / special guest appearances.

A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius

 

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

THE END OF AMERICA Comes to New York

A new nonfiction piece from dynamic filmmaking duo, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (pictured), is playing at the IFC Center starting tonight, December 3, through Tuesday the 9th.  Based on the New York Times' bestseller by Naomi Wolf, The End of America, A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, the film captures Wolf in a live presentation, a la Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, as she passionately argues her case for immediate and unconstrained action on the part of the American people to take back our country, to come together as a nation and recommit ourselves to not ever again allowing a serving president, whether Democrat or Republican, to possess the unchecked power (and resultant corruption) that the Bush administration has enjoyed for the past eight years.  Yes, we'll have Obama in the White House now, thanks to a collective shaking-off of complacency and massive indifference (and not a moment too soon).  But, Wolf's urgent message makes clear that we are living in a time where that kind of negligence on the part of the citizenry of this country cannot happen again--not without even more dire circumstances than already exist. 

Wolf will be there at selected screenings throughout the week along with Sundberg and Stern for discussion and Q&A sessions.  Each evening after the 6:30 screenings, Wolf will be there with legal specialists from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and other guests.  Information on other theatrical showings outside of New York and a place to buy the DVD can be found by clicking here.

River of Shadows

Today, the Friday after Thanksgiving, an American holiday which sees the unnecessary slaughter of gazillions of poor turkeys; a particular day, like today, when a well-organized group of killers is continuing to slaughter people in Mumbai, India out of fear and hatred of our country; when we are poised equidistantly on the annual calendar between an historic election and an equally historic presidential inauguration, I'd like to recommend a book to read instead of a film to watch, for a change--Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.

Even though the book is about five years old, going on six, I think it's the absolutely perfect thing to read right now as we enter another year and think about the possibilities of launching ourselves into this "brave new world" we've been meaning to realize for a while now, but, somehow, keep fucking up. 

Solnit, a crackling, sparkling prose artist won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for River.  She celebrates the life and work of Eadweard Muybridge, a modern visionary and singular spirit.  In Solnit's estimation, Muybridge had much to do with the world as we know it today.  She weaves together biography, history, art, technology, the worlds of landscape and photography, and creates an original portrait of the world on the threshold of modernity, always circling back to Muybridge and his substantive contributions in high-speed motion photography, an advancement that made the motion picture possible.  (See?  No worries; we always come back to film.)  She revisits the global histories of mass transportation, mass communication and mass migration, in the context of the unrelenting industrialization of our everyday lives.  She draws distinct and thrilling conclusions about our tenure on this planet, thus far, and how we've intereacted with it and with one another through space and time.

Luc Sante, one of my literary soulmates (meaning the man speaks to me deeply with his words, not that we're literary equals!), writing for Bookforum, said, "Extraordinary. . . it is hard to do justice to Solnit's far-reaching perspective.  We observe the shadowy Muybridge walking, as if in his motion studies, against a continuously unspooling panorama of nineteenth-century America, so that Solnit is able to link, say, Sitting Bull's pipe-smoking break during a pitched battle in 1872 with the Great Strike that nearly changed the country's course five years later, and both events with Muybridge's bridging of space and time, her prose, terse and poetic, makes the book a pleasurably dizzying page-turner."  Click on the Amazon box to order it for yourself or to gift it to a friend.

Interview: Astra Taylor, Director EXAMINED LIFE

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and raised in Athens, Georgia, 29-year-old writer and filmmaker, Astra Taylor is a good case study for a life well-lived.  Unschooled until she was a preteen and raised by two independent thinkers to become one herself, Taylor currently occupies herself with wrangling high intellectual pursuits and philosophical theories into wonderful pieces of cinema.  Her non-traditional upbringing, or as she calls it, her  "super weirdo hippy background," stood her in good stead, providing a strong sense of confidence and an affirmation in her own abilities and artistic vision.

When she was just 23, Taylor made her first nonfiction feature about Slavoj Zizek, called Zizek!, a post-Marxist sociologist, philosopher and cultural critic, and all around wild man.  This film was the second feature-length project of the Documentary Campaign, a nonprofit organization that worked to combine progressive politics with artistic filmmaking.  The film premiered in '05 at Toronto and is distributed in North America by Zeitgeist Films. 

Wanting to make another film about philosophers, Taylor luckily met with producer Ron Mann, who as it turned out, had been wanting to make an anthology film about philosophers, too.  (As mom always said, "There's a lid for every pot.")  Examined Life, as I reported earlier after seeing the film at the Woodstock festival, is an exceedingly well-conceived, visually stunning piece, linking together some of the most brilliant creative thinkers in modern society, taking what is usually reserved for the hallowed halls of academe and putting it out on the streets for public consumption.  It's a very rich feast of ideas, theories and social and ethical quandaries told in ten-minute vignettes as we accompany each of these philosophers on a walk through very concrete places--parks, lakes, bridges, city streets, airports and yes, even a garbage dump.  Most of the subjects that appear in Examined Life (Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler) are people Taylor has worked with or studied under and to whom she feels a strong connection.  Ultimately, it was a graduate seminar led by Avital Ronell and the late Jacques Derrida that inspired her to try and take philosophy out of the university and into quotidian life.

On a lovely fall morning, Taylor and I met, appropriately, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village for our chat.  She was accompanied by her sister, Sunaura, who also appears in the film in the Judith Butler segment, and is a staggeringly talented artist in her own right.  (Click here to see some of Sunny's work.)  As life went by, we sat on a park bench and talked about her unique upbringing, her discovery of expressing herself through making movies, and what and who inspires her as an artist and a human being:

Still in Motion (SIM):  The subject matter you’re choosing to use in the medium of cinema is really interesting, quite a departure from the kinds of stories to which we’ve become accustomed.  What was the genesis of that idea, to talk to modern-day philosophers about the world in which we’re living, of trying to cinematically tell philosophical stories?

Astra Taylor (AT):  I’ve made two films that are explicitly about philosophy.  I don’t see myself doing films in the future that are as explicit, but are more, perhaps, implicitly philosophical.  I always see myself grappling with ideas, whether it’s in my work as a writer of nonfiction or as a filmmaker. It wasn’t so much a passion for cinema that drove me to pursue filmmaking.  Instead, it’s more of a curiosity about ideology and culture and ideas that has always been with me.  As a child, I had this one intense creative pursuit and it was one of the happiest phases of my life.  I had a magazine called Kids for Animal Rights and the Environment (KARE). I published it every other month for three years.  I put so much love and work into this thing so, in a way, I’m just trying to recreate that experience as an adult.

SIM:  How old were you when you started it?

AT:  I was eleven.  I didn’t go to school so I got to work on it everyday and I was such a stickler for the whole presentation.  It was the beginning of desktop publishing programs.  My whole purpose for doing this magazine was to reveal the fact that children were innate vegetarians, were innately kind beings and that we were systematically misled by propaganda from adults.  Old MacDonald’s happy farm and the cows that gave us milk—it was just lies that the adults were perpetrating against us. I really thought that I was leading this kid revolution and that the magazine would cause a generation of people to overthrow the meat-eating adults.  By the time I was twelve, I discovered that there might be some flaws in my theory.  And then, out of loneliness, I finally went to public school; I’d been unschooled up until that point. When I got to public school, I became friends with kids who weren’t from my immediate super weirdo hippy background.

SIM:  Were you home-schooled with just your siblings?

AT:  There were, maybe, three other families we hung out with. This was in Athens, Georgia so most of the homeschoolers were conservative Christians, which we were resolutely not.  When I enrolled in school, I had this amazing friendship with this girl who ate meat.  How could I be friends with someone who eats meat?  I had this little crisis of moral relativism and a good deal of confusion about what’s right and what’s wrong.  I can’t overstate the profound nature of that crisis for me as a kid, and my dedication to this animal rights trip.  I didn’t know the word “ideology,” but I think that’s what it was.  How is there this ideology that makes it okay to kill and hunt and farm animals?  Animal liberation was something I believed in so strongly, and I was surrounded by people who didn’t share my belief system at all.  I was raised in such an intense bubble of affirmation.

SIM:  Did you want to go running back to that bubble, or was it too late?

AT:  No, I didn’t want to be sheltered.  It was just that I became fascinated by belief systems and how my beliefs do—or do not—correspond to those of most people. I think that’s really my motivating question.  I have these strong values and strong principles, but don’t see them reflected everywhere in the world. Maybe my beliefs aren’t correct.  For example, when it comes to animal rights, many smart, intelligent people don’t agree with me at all.

SIM:  Did that undermine your confidence in these strict ideologies?  Some might become yet even more fundamentalist in their beliefs in reaction to that.

AT:  It certainly made me less strident, I think.  Anyway, all this was the reason why I eventually got into theory and philosophy when I was a teenager, exploring ideology, exploring the history of ideas.  Why do people think what they think?

SIM:  Who were the first philosophers you discovered on your own that resonated with you in a profound way?

AT:  It was [Gilles] Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus.  I think I was seventeen when I found this book.  It’s really a surrealist, Dada-esque work of philosophy.  It’s this creative, inventive hodgepodge that I thought was just the most mysterious, delightful thing I’d ever seen and in it were all these references to Marx and Beckett and James Joyce and Kafka and Lacan and Freud.  And I would pursue all of those references doggedly.  This book was really responsible for opening up a whole intellectual world.  Years afterward, I came upon this interview with Deleuze who said that his ideal reader was an ignorant sixteen year old for whom this is all new.  I was that reader.  It just so happened that the first American to ever write a book on Deleuze and Guattari worked at the University of Georgia at Athens and he was teaching a seminar; so I got to take a semester-long course with all these Ph.D. students just studying A Thousand Plateaus.  I was in heaven. At that point, I was on the path to graduate school and I went to the New School in New York to do theory.  I soon wearied of it, you know?

SIM:  Wearied of academia?

AT:  Yeah, deeply.  I’d gone to Brown University for a year right out of high school.  I thought it was horrible.  The place wasn’t for the smartest kids in the world; it was for the kids who most wanted to get A’s.  I was disappointed.  I thought I was going to find this intellectual community or something and I just didn’t fit in.  Long story short, I got an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School, but my final semester was spent dabbling in documentary.

SIM:  You’re not a very passive person or student, either. You’re demanding a lot when you seek and search.  You go to the mountain.  A lot of students feel like just because they’re physically there, sitting in a chair in a classroom, that that’s somehow enough to call it learning.

AT:  They do—they hand off their agency when they walk through the door in a way that I was never taught to do.  I was never indoctrinated into that.  Just last week when I was guest lecturing that really struck me, the passivity of otherwise intelligent people in the classroom.  How do you learn when you’re passive?

SIM:  What kinds of backgrounds do your parents have?

AT:  My dad’s a professor of medicinal chemistry.  I don’t think he got his Bachelor of Science, though, until he was 31.  He spent years as an undergraduate, partially dodging the draft but also pursuing a degree in classical music and playing in rock bands. He’s one of those wunderkinds that started college at fourteen but didn’t finish until he was 31. My mom was raised in this extremely counter-cultural environment in the 60s.  She didn’t go past seventh grade.  She did some community college studying theater and video and stuff like that.  They have very unusual backgrounds.  For me, especially when I was studying high theory in New York City, I was interested in the material but it felt so disconnected, so rarefied.  At the same time, there is still something valuable, intrinsic and wonderful about the subject matter. I just didn’t relate to the institution, the academy. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. During that time, I was also working at Verso Books, an independent publishing house, where I was publicizing these nonfiction books.  It was there that I started to see some examples of people who were public intellectuals, independent writers who didn’t have teaching gigs or writers who didn’t really have formal training in the field in which they were working.  These people became role models.

SIM:  I think that’s actually a very particular talent, to translate one’s thoughts and mental wanderings into something that you can share with other people.  We hope our teachers have that ability, but a lot really don’t.  Watching your films, I sense a generosity there to really want to share in that way.

AT:  I hope so.  My whole aspiration in both films was to build this inquisitive, affirmative momentum that carries on after the movie is seen.  The whole purpose is to take these intellectual pursuits off the pedestal.  I’m not trying to “impress” the audience at all.  In fact, I’m kind of trying to do the opposite.  People go into these films with such fear, certain expectations about how turgid and stuffy the subject matter’s going to be.  I’m trying to take it down a few notches but I also want to be inspiring at the same time, welcoming and inviting people into the process of critical thinking.  That’s really what I’m trying to do.

SIM:  When you were working on the conception of the film and its structure and the way it would play out on screen, what was the most important thing to you in terms of communicating with your audience?

AT:  I’m always thinking about audience.  This is not a work of self-expression coming from a place of personal conflict or desire.  I love those types of works of art.  I wish I could do that but that’s not my personality.  Certainly, I’m trying to communicate and inspire people to question things.  The audience is always there for me.  I’m constantly trying to balance the different audiences I imagine seeing the film.  For example, I want it to be accessible to the 16 year old who hasn’t been exposed to this stuff before.  But I also need to invite Ph.D.s, with a lot of expertise, into the film, as well.  Striking a balance for these different viewers is really first and foremost.

SIM:  With Examined Life, in particular, do you feel like you succeeded in doing that?

AT:  I had a really great moment just the other day.  I showed the film in Columbia, Missouri and this punk rock nine year old little kid watched the whole movie by himself without his mom and dad [laughs].  I thought, “Wow, maybe I did it.”  I’ve had lots of teenagers reflect on it and they pick up on exactly the sequences I thought would resonate with them—Peter Singer and Michael Hardt.  Revolution and consumerism!  I really thought of those two sections as being for younger viewers.

SIM:  That’s interesting because we don’t really think about that when we leave that stage of our lives behind.  How we’re taught to relate to the world and then, in turn, how we teach our kids to do that, is all about what we imbibe, what we buy, what we wear.  That’s a form of victimization that no one really talks about in the public sphere too often.

AT:  When you do meet socially aware young people, they’ve been raised in this neo-liberal society, a culture with a lot of libertarian sympathies, so you often hear them say, “fuck the government,” “fuck the Man,” and move towards this, sort of, anarchist perspective.  I think the revolution bit speaks to that.  I thought of my own sixteen year old sister when I was editing that section, who just joined Food Not Bombs and was discovering those kinds of politics for herself for the first time.  It also made me reflect back on myself, too.  And consumerism is definitely a central issue for youth.  They’re constantly being marketed to and are trying to find or express their identities through what they purchase.  Those two sections were the ones I assumed would resonate with young people the most.  (Peter Singer, pictured.)

SIM:  What de-radicalizes us, do you think?

AT:  This is probably the bias of my background, but I think it’s at least partly formal education or what has been called “compulsory” education.  Again, people don’t necessarily feel active in the learning process; instead, they’re like receptacles being filled with information, facts and figures.  There’s such an emphasis on learning by rote, on memorization, on testing, as opposed to experience-based learning or learning for its own sake. I’m always struck by the irony that I’m making films that are about Ph.D.s, people who are at the pinnacle of the academic system.  They’ve mastered the university universe, many of them teaching at Ivy League schools. My intention is to really bring them out into the everyday world, which I think is important since we live in such an anti-intellectual culture.

SIM:  Yes, we do.  This kind of fare that you’re offering is a tricky proposition.  You do have to be a bit clandestine about it, don’t you?  You also offer something visually quite rich.  The film is beautiful to look at and the aural and visual aspects play off one another in a really satisfying way.  You’ve taken advantage of how powerful cinema can be in reflecting and parsing these notions of who we are as human beings and all those funky questions we have all the time, passive folk excepted.

AT:  I think that’s why I’ve been so happy to discover this line of work. There was a period where I thought I was going to be a painter.  Then I realized that I couldn’t put any messages in my paintings that I found compelling enough; it wasn’t literal enough for me.  But months and months and hours and hours of my life I’ve spent painting and dabbling in music, too.  When I discovered documentary filmmaking, I was amazed. I got to frame things and think about color and think about sound.  One of the greatest lessons from filmmaking, for me, is learning about sound design.  I now experience the world in a new way—as a soundscape.

SIM:  Sound is where emotion lies—it’s through the ear, not through the eye.

AT:  I had this huge epiphany one afternoon when I worked on the first video project in which I was involved.  The sound was terrible. I realized that the picture can be bad and that’s okay; but if the sound is bad, your movie’s ruined.  I’ve read that with sight we gaze upon the world, but with sound, we’re in the world.  Blindness or deafness must disconnect a person in very different ways.  So yeah, working in film, you get to be a visual artist, a sound artist, an intellectual provocateur—it’s a great field.  I’m surprised everyone else isn’t trying his or her hand at this, too.

SIM:  Actually, everyone I know is trying!  If you do spend time in Brooklyn, you will find that everyone, and their mom, is pursuing filmmaking. Not too many passive folks you run into, that’s for sure.  I think it’s quite wonderful.

AT:  I do, too.  It delights so many of our senses.  Cinema is a really special medium.  But you’re right.  Most doc makers are not passive; neither are philosophers.
 
SIM:  These philosophers that you chose for this film, all to a person are people one would want to hang out with.

AT:  I’m glad you think so.  I feel that way, too.

SIM:  There’s such vibrancy, such an emphatic way of communicating in the way they all speak to us; it’s extremely dynamic and exciting.  Some even almost dramatize their thoughts.  How much directing did you have to do to get those kinds of “performances”?

AT:  I’m glad you use the word “dramatize.”  I had a nice moment with Martha Nussbaum where we were talking about her background as an actress when she was an undergraduate and how drama and philosophy aren’t at odds.  We’re trying to dramatize the human condition and I, too, find that really exciting. Performing for a good cause, making ideas engaging—to me, that’s a high calling.  I don’t assume that seriousness equals this brittle, bland form of communication.  Especially when you’re making a movie, you want to capture and convey emotion, movement, energy, beauty, excitement.  I think my subjects really understood this and so the directing part was great fun.  I’m often asked what my criteria for casting philosophers were and there was a whole constellation of concerns I was trying to navigate.  But, first and foremost, they had to be enthusiastic about the process and be willing to perform.  They also all had to be of a certain status as far as their careers were concerned; they all had to be people who focused on ethics and social responsibility, which are the main themes of the film, in a way, the heart of the film.  They had to be a mix of genders and races.  I did not want to make a philosophy film that consisted only of all old, white men.  I’m not here to reaffirm that as the image of the great intellectual.  I’m tired of that image.

SIM:  We all are; even the old, white guys are tired of it, I think.

AT:  There was affirmative action happening in the best possible way in my casting.  That was the case with my crew, as well, which was very diverse.  My producer is a black woman [Lea Marin], my cameraman is a Vietnamese immigrant [John M. Tran], my sound guy is half-Japanese and half-Indian [Sanjay Mehta] and our camera assistant was a white guy.

So, yeah, what was on someone’s CV was a factor.  But, there was also the personal, intuitive thing of asking myself if I connected with their work.  With almost every subject, there was some point in my life where they influenced or provoked me. I wagered that they would, in turn, have an influence on the audience.  Their work had to be intellectually rigorous, but it also had to be impactful.  The intellectual world isn’t disconnected from the emotional world, the embodied world.  I’m trying to embody ideas, to show that they emerge from human beings who are in the world, who move through space, who feel sad, hopeful, angry.  Again, the most important piece of criteria is what they answered when I asked them if they wanted to do this and if they thought it would be fun.  If they weren’t into the performative aspect of it, into going on an adventure, then it wasn’t going to work.

SIM:  It was, indeed, a fun journey because of that energy coming off the screen.  I think I was surprised at all the moments of humor; so yes, it was a good time.  I sensed the audience members at Woodstock were really enjoying themselves.  It was like being at a really cool dinner party where one could sit and eavesdrop on all these scintillating conversations with brilliant people.  It was a very life-affirming treatment.

AT:  I’m happy about that because I really don’t think that’s the assumption when people hear that it’s a film about philosophy.  They either think all the philosophers are dead and that I’m doing a historical piece, or they ask me how I’m going to keep the audience awake.  They expect a stilted, boring, stagnant, suffocating film.  Otherwise vibrant, engaged, curious, smart people respond like this is just the most deadly concept for a movie they’ve ever encountered.

SIM:  How do you overcome that and convince people to come see the film?

AT:  There is a whole subculture of people that live and breathe this sort of stuff.  There’s a captive audience; that’s a start.  But obviously, I’d like to reach beyond them, so I’m thinking about marketing and it’s tricky.  I’m trying to present these materials and the film itself as something that is the opposite of pretentious, to make it inviting, accessible, playful, entertaining.  That was my intention all along.  After all, I find this entertaining; it’s how I entertain myself.  I don’t think it’s such a huge leap that others might enjoy it.  However, there’s such intimidation and such a culture of fear around intellectual matters.  We’re so obsessed with credentials and that goes back to the whole academic trip.  I get asked that all the time: where did you go to school?  Which I hear as, who gave you permission to talk about this?  That is not how I was brought up to think.  Nobody gave me permission to be a filmmaker.  I decided one day to become a filmmaker with total hubris.  I’ve watched enough movies in my life to try and make one.

SIM:  For the first time, I’m living in a place where calling yourself an artist or a creative is not a snotty or pretentious thing to call yourself.  It can actually be a viable way you can construct a life and do important work and be satisfied in that work in a very profound way.  And that’s not to say it isn’t an exceedingly uncomfortable existence to lead, with your ass out in the wind all the time, no IRA in sight, or health insurance, for that matter.

AT:  Last week, I went to three different film classes as a guest lecturer.  To suddenly be on the other side of the podium, if you will, really struck me and got me thinking about that sanctioning from society and the credentialing process and all that.  It really bothers me.  I’m on the other side and I’ve been sanctioned.  I’ve been given permission.  I’ve been credentialed.  That happened to me when the film got to a film festival.  When my first film premiered at Toronto, I was recognized as a “filmmaker.”  This is something that Judith Butler and other theorists have written about, the speech act, the declaration.  When the authority says to you that “you are x,” you officially become “x.” Or another way we too often judge someone’s legitimacy is whether or not they make money doing their art.  I feel this reluctance, this ambivalence, a bit of reticence about that because I think you make films for yourself and if nobody accepts your films into a festival, you’re still a filmmaker, you’re still an art maker.  It’s about the act of doing it.

I’m certainly not against mentorship.  I’ve been very blessed with always having mentors.  I’m very curious about other people, very good at approaching people who are doing things I’m fascinated by.  It’s why I’m comfortable working with the philosophers.  I’ve always had amazing mentors and I’ve always pursued people for feedback, whom I feel could give me good advice.  So I don’t think we need to be totally self-made and autonomous and independent.  It’s just that we don’t need to get so hung up about going through the “proper” training and the “proper” credentialing to legitimize ourselves.

SIM:  Let’s talk about your active and passive presence in the film. 

AT:  That’s something I feel very ambivalent about.

SIM:  Well, I wanted to talk to you about that because your presence in the film could be described as ambivalent.  It was clear to me that you were trying to work out where, physically, you placed yourself in these scenarios.  It changed from segment to segment.  Sometimes we don’t see you at all or we see a sliver of you, a hand, your back.  Sometimes we hear you as part of some dialogue with your subject and sometimes we don’t hear you at all.  That was interesting to watch, you grappling with those decisions.  It was a physical representation of how we move through the world, how comfortable or uncomfortable we are in insinuating ourselves into any given situation.  Sometimes we know that we should hang on the periphery, that that’s somehow important, although we don’t know why, but we know that whatever is going to happen is probably going to be best served by us being “outside” the action.  There was a really interesting dynamic in the segments with Cornel West driving around in the car. I know that happened out of necessity for the most part, but his eye line looking directly into the rear view mirror was really interesting to me [West sits in the back seat directly behind the driver’s seat].  He engages you through that sliver of reflective glass and so the camera had to insinuate itself in a particular way in relation to him, but also in relation to you, the “hidden driver.”

AT:  This might seen a bit of a banal answer, but basically, the whole issue of my presence in these segments goes back to Zizek!, my first film.  I envisioned that as a film in which I was not present at all, partly because of the whole self-reflective filmmaking trip, showing the crew, etc.  It’s all been done before and it’s a dicey proposition.  And the film wasn’t about me.  But we were in production with Slavoj and I kept trying to arrange scenarios where we’d encounter people, where he would have to interact with someone to show what it is he does when he meets someone, to act the way he acts all the time wherever he happens to be.  These encounters were not manifesting in the way I’d hoped.  There’s one scene where a fan approaches him for an autograph but that was about it. In the editing room, we cut something together in which I wasn’t present and it felt really claustrophobic.  So my editor and I made the decision to include me a bit. We did so much filming, so there were some things I was just in because we would be conversing about something and we happened to like that moment and wanted to keep it in the film.

But yes, I was ambivalent and self-conscious.  And then, that self-consciousness was affirmed when the New York Times reviewed it.  In that review, the critic [AO Scott] basically calls me “a groupie,” and that became the meme that went through every review.  You’ve got a 24 year old woman making a film about an older man, and the assumption is that she wants to sleep with that man, which is an insane assumption.

SIM:  The whole Svengali thing where you're under someone's "spell."

AT:  Yeah.  There are lots of young men who make reverential portraits of other human beings and are never accused of the same thing.  The Amazon.com review says it’s a reversal of the love story, Harold and Maude.  What?  I love Harold and Maude as much as the next person, but come on.  However, I became really self-conscious after the film came out, even though I wasn’t at all self-conscious when I was making it.  When I began to propose my new movie, [Examined Life] I said that these are all going to be straight-up monologues, no presence of the director.  That would have been just fine; however, in my conversations with Avital Ronell (pictured with Taylor) leading up to the shoot, she basically told me that she wasn’t doing it unless I was on camera and we have a filmed conversation.  I asked her why.  She said, well, we’re going to talk about the fact that we’re filming because that’s what we’ll be doing and it just doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t fit my philosophy, to deny that you’re present there with me.  I said, well, Avital, I’ll tell you what: I feel very vulnerable and insecure doing this because of what happened with the last project. She said, too bad; I thought it was just fine that you were in your last film; don’t listen to all that.

Also, after Judith Butler invited my sister, Sunaura, to be in her section, Sunny told me that she wasn’t going to be in my film unless, at some point, I was in the film, as well. So I was kind of cornered!  In each scenario, I had a different position, sometimes due to geography or sometimes because of how I conceived of the specific sequence. In the Peter Singer segment, he’s speaking directly at the camera.  I’m not there.  It didn’t feel as though I should be there.  With Cornel West,  I had instructed the cameraman not to film me.  Now, I didn’t know what Cornel West would be like once that camera was on, but he was so intensely making eye contact into that rear view mirror just as you pointed out.  He was looking into my eyes with such urgency that the cameraman couldn’t help going back and forth between us, as you would do in a conversation. He told me that he just had no choice but to shoot me, that it was too bad that I told him not to [laughs].  Ultimately, I’m happy with it, mostly because I’m driving my 1990 Volvo and it shows how we were working.  We didn’t have the money to rent a town car for the evening.  That’s why he’s sweating; I don’t have AC.

SIM:  There is a real robust physicality in all the segments in various ways.  I think of the constant sound of the squeak the oars make as Hardt rows around the lake in Central Park.  And in the garbage dump with Zizek, you almost want to plug your nose; there’s a visceral quality to that, too.

AT:  Thoughts are visceral.  The motivations for thinking are often visceral ones, for example, when our body responds to what’s happening in the world and we’re overcome by grief or empathy or joy.  Deep feelings inspire us to think seriously about things.  This common perception of philosophy as something that just happens in the brain, as something that’s cold or calculated and emotionless, doesn’t make sense to me.

SIM:  Again, that speaks really well to your point of wanting to be as far away from the ivory tower way of approaching these great thinkers.

AT:  I do love the ivory tower approach in terms of seriousness, diligence, research, care and discipline.  I love all that.  I just don’t think those traits are exclusive to the ivory tower.  Now I see my presence in the film as still somewhat anonymous when I watch it and hopefully kind of low key.  Not “Astra’s having this great conversation and she’s so smart talking to these philosophers!” Instead, I am the inquisitive presence, interjecting here and there, raising a few down to earth questions.  I really tried not to be overbearing but sometimes there’s a tangent and it doesn’t make sense unless some sort of set-up or line of inquiry is established.  The only person to ask the question was me.  Thus, I’m in the film!

SIM:  I think you struck a good balance—as a viewer, I want to see and hear you sometimes; you’re our conduit into these worlds, our scout leader, if you will.  We want to know who’s driving the car; we want to see who West is speaking to.

AT:  We watched the first ten minutes in one of the classes in which I spoke last night and then when I came on screen, I had that uncomfortable feeling again, wanting to defend myself and say that I’m not that narcissistic; I’m not in the whole film!  But, then again, even if I’m not in it every minute, the whole film is me in that it’s a rather subjective film in terms of who I cast and in the way in which I approach them.  It’s a very gentle movie because I’m a gentle person.  I had certain ground rules.  I didn’t want to create any atmosphere of infighting or having them attack one another or directly debating one another.  There’s a lot of implicit debate happening and different perspectives, but it’s pretty subtle or understated. Philosophy is known for its argumentation and smack-downs, believe me.  It can be a brutal field.  But that stuff’s not in Examined Life (pictured, Taylor with Zizek).

SIM:  What inspires you cinematically?

AT:  The very first film I ever saw that resonated with me in the sense of me possibly doing something was Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I.  It occurred to me that I didn’t know the term “essay film.”  I had never come across anything like that in school or in life.  I walked out of the theater and thought, wow, you can write with a movie.  I always assumed I was going to be a writer, that that was my path.  Writing with a movie was such a cool idea; it’s like a book but with moving images. So she’s been a huge influence even though I was really disappointed by her latest movie (Les Plages d'Agnès).  I thought it was vain. She was constantly reminding us about how great she is, which is something we already know.  We’re at her movie. But it doesn’t matter.  She made The Gleaners and I, and I love Vagabond and Cleo From 5 to 7—I really love her movies.

Another filmmaker who’s actually had a big impact was Ross McElwee, the king of the personal documentary.  In Time Indefinite, he merges the personal and the philosophical so well and with such wonderful humor.  I have to say Examined Life would not exist without Bright Leaves.  There’s a scene where this rabid film theorist pushes him [McElwee] around in a wheelchair and screams at him that interviews should not be conducted while sitting down; you have to get out and move, cinema must move!  That caused a light bulb to go off in my mind.  I also love Manufacturing Consent, the Noam Chomsky film, because that was something that showed me that these intellectual subjects could be really fun and animated without being pedantic.

But, I’m not really an avid movie watcher.  I’m more of a reader.  I covet my ignorance as far as filmmaking is concerned.  I think sometimes you can study too much; you can study too hard and be overwhelmed by influences and other people’s techniques.  There’s something about approaching a project with nothing but my own inventiveness that’s really key for me.  But sometimes I feel a little ignorant at these film festivals.  Everyone’s talking about things I’m not really clued in about.  I feel dumb.

SIM:  I would wager to guess a lot of filmmakers experience that at festivals.  I’ve heard similar sentiments from a lot of first-timers.  It’s a bit of stage fright, maybe, and you’re getting a lot of attention (one hopes) in a very concentrated way—it can be overwhelming.

AT:  We all have imposter syndrome.

SIM:  What other films do you see yourself making?

AT:  I was just talking about this with Sunny yesterday.  She’s at a similar point in her painting.  I’m not sure what the content of my next film is but I can imagine its form.  I always approach things like this.  Before making films, I had this feeling of the kind of path I should be on—this kind of intellectual path but without a university.  I had this feeling that I wanted to create a specific sort of space for myself in which I could live a creative life of the mind, and I’ve kind of succeeded at that. Right now, I have this vague sense that I want to make a film that’s about ideas but with lots of emotion, without a conventional storyline.  I can sort of taste the direction I want to go in, but I really don’t know exactly what it is.  I’m also at a point where I’m being approached to do director-for-hire type projects that could be quite big by my current standards. I want to be able to feel confident enough to say no to that.  Even if my next film is very small, it should be the one I want to make.  These are not easy decisions.

SIM:  Those kinds of pressures can be confusing.  You feel like you might want to grasp those opportunities now since they’re being offered.  Maybe that won’t come around again, who knows?

AT:  It’s total insecurity.  You have to be realistic.  I’m a very pragmatic person.  I want to make movies and have a budget and a crew and all of that.  But I don’t want to make movies so badly that I would ever make anything I’m not totally connected to.  My desire isn’t to be a filmmaker, per se.  It’s a medium to explore a sensibility.  If it’s not the best medium, then I’ll do something else. 

Going back to influences and the notion of whom I really want to be when I grow up: the person I really admire, as far as the form and content and productivity of his work, is John Berger.  I’d like to be a John Berger in the sense of his literary pursuits, his beautiful nonfiction books that are basically documentaries on the page.  I just watched Parting Shots from Animals [a film from 1980 based on Berger’s essays].  What a multifarious, unique and earnest body of work he’s produced.  I’m so envious of it.  He does it with such sincerity.  He can use this direct address to the camera and you just go with him.  I watched about five of his films the other day and I was having the nicest conversation with him in my mind.  I just loved it.  If I can give people something remotely analogous to that, I would be so happy.

SIM:  He fully engages you.  I love that phenomenon when you are convinced that the person you’re listening to and watching is speaking directly to you; it’s so personal.  You know that if you sat in a room together, there’d be a connection.  Those that are going to appreciate the kind of work you do are going to take it in in a very personal way.

AT:  Right. I mean if you’re not willing to go with John on this trip he’s offering to you, you’ll just ignore it.  I’m sure there are people for whom his work is just completely irrelevant and odd and some would exclaim, “That’s not a movie!  Nothing happens!”  But if you’re there and you’re submitting yourself to it, it’s really delightful.  He expects a certain level of seriousness and commitment and engagement from his viewer and I really like that.  You should expect the best from your audience.

SIM:  Again, we’re talking about the importance of a non-passive audience; you need an actively engaged viewer for your film to be successful.  I personally like when I have to work a bit and ponder things while they’re happening.  It can be kind of exhausting but you’re so much the richer for the experience so you can’t complain too much.  Those of us who create things rely upon that willingness to participate in our vision.  We’re not making car commercials here.

AT:  You want to start a conversation.  That’s why it’s amazing to have people come up and share a flash of insight or how they might disagree with something someone said in my film.  Moving beyond working with philosophers, for me, the question might be will I assume a more active role in terms of presenting the theories that fascinate me instead of having these proxies presenting them? When my parents watched my film they thought it was amazing.  They saw that I had gathered all of these philosophers together talking about all the things that have mattered to me since I was five years old!  Still, John Berger is certainly the person with the career I’m most intrigued by.  Again, I’m surprised that there aren’t a million people trying to do what he’s done.  How can there just be one?

SIM:  Maybe most of us don’t think it’s possible to do what he does, otherwise there might be more. 

AT:  Or we assume that there’s no audience when there actually is.  Berger’s making these videos which he calls “television programmes,” that commissioning editors and producers and, even people on the street, would probably tell you are a terrible idea.  Typically, people in this line of work are obsessed with story and character development and all these things that are great, but we’ve shown that human beings can do them a million times over.  Why not try something different?

SIM:  When you and Ron pitched this at Hot Docs, how did it go over?

AT:  Oh my god, it was a disaster.  I meant to tell people this story last night.  I was trying to tell the class stories of my embarrassments and failures just to kind of keep it real a bit.  Not that I’ve been so successful really.  It’s just that I think it’s good to encourage people to be tenacious.

SIM:  Did you originally pitch Ron?

AT:  I had this proposal that I just hid in my desk assuming nobody was going to go for this.  It was just an ensemble piece with philosophers; I hadn’t devised the walking concept yet.  I met Ron for coffee and he said that he’d been wanting to do an anthology film about philosophers for a long time.  And I said, oh really?  Me, too.  And I emailed him my paragraph and he said that we were on the same wavelength; let’s go!  

So we took off together and TVO (TVOntario) came on board, which was awesome.  Then we signed up for the Hot Docs pitching forum.  I was the only person out of about 30 people who had not even begun production.  So I had no footage to show which put me at a distinct disadvantage.  It just bombed, went over like a lead weight.  I was told by one person that people in the Netherlands weren’t into "this sort of thing.”  One guy literally attacked me for my attraction to these “ponderous academics!!!”  He wanted to know how I could even think about doing this.  What could possibly attract me to philosophy, was what he wanted to know. And he said all this in the most antagonistic way in front of 500 people.  It was a really negative experience. For the remaining three days of the festival, all kinds of people (all 500, seemingly) were coming up and patting me on the back, telling me, “Oh, so sorry, philosophy girl. That was brutal.”

In the end, I was lucky because I didn’t really need any other pre-sales because TVO, a public broadcaster in Canada, a channel that really takes risks and trusts its viewers, had signed on.  It would have been a real disaster if I had desperately needed the support of the commissioning editors that were seated around the table.
 
SIM:  Well, there’s more to life than the fabulous pitch.  There’s no guarantee a commissioned piece is going to be any good either; it’s just that you have a ton of people standing by to pummel it into some sort of watchable piece, if need be.

AT:  I felt participating in the pitching forum was a useful experience.  But will all this make it easier for me to do a similar project in the future?  I don’t know.  We don’t know where the economy is going.  We don’t know where documentary is going. The filmmakers seemed to like my pitch, though. To them, I was pitching this unmarketable, uncompromising film that didn’t fit into the conventional television box. But the commissioning editors, obviously, have a strong idea of what their audience wants to see. And I just picture John Berger.  His ideas would also bomb in that context.  Yet, I think they’re brilliant.  He’s found an enormous audience.  So I’m not sure anyone really knows what audiences do, or do not, want to see, after all.

SIM:  Well, regardless, it’s a beautiful gift to be able to give yourself the opportunity to realize something that’s imbued with so much meaning for you.  Even if you never make a film again, you made a very distinctive piece that only Astra Taylor could have made—two, actually.  To me, that’s what’s so amazing about nonfiction filmmaking.  You don’t really ever have to have much else but that seed, that idea, of the story you want to tell. And life brings it to you in very organic and serendipitous ways and it gets made.  To a person, every filmmaker that’s completed a film speaks to that phenomenon and their awareness that that was what was occurring.  That does not exist in any other kind of cinema, not in that way.

AT:  I would agree.  I was thinking about serendipity in the midst of trying to give more concrete advice to these filmmakers in the classes I visited.  Being open and making connections is everything.  That’s what it’s like when you’re shooting your documentary; you’re actively looking for those magical moments.  You’re directing and you’ve got your vision and you know what you want.  But at the same time, you’re waiting for something to happen because it would make it even better.  So much of it is that innate gut feeling and tapping into that.  It’s not something you can mastermind and control.  I’ve never made a fiction film, but I would imagine once you’ve gone through your creative process writing your script, then you’re actualizing it. It’s about control.  Documentary film is not like that, as far as I can tell.

SIM:  Or the control comes much later in the process.

AT:  Those can be horrible moments when you think you might have gone down the wrong path and you’ve wasted precious time.  Or you’re shooting and you know you’re never going to use it but you just keep going in the hopes that it’ll get better.  I quite like that.  The lack of control can be terrifying and anxiety provoking, but that’s what’s so much fun about it.  Who wants to know what the day’s going to look like?  It does cause me a lot of stress, though.  I’m a worrier.  But if I didn’t take things so seriously, I don’t think I’d do anything.  Part of that anxiety is because you know you want to do a good job.  You want something ineffable to go right.  So much of it, too, is luck, getting to do this professionally, finding the resources and support, meeting people who will help you.  That stuff is a little murkier.

Making something that’s so singular and personal and not being so overly concerned about how much money you raise or how well it does, I think it’s very important to keep that in mind.  I do see people with their careers going, and getting more and more frustrated at how difficult it is to find support or reach an audience.  That’s something that I’m thinking about as the future looms.  If you’re making work that is unusual and quirky then you kind of have to be prepared to have a very small audience.  It’s about managing expectations.  I often think about who my heroes were when I was younger and how few books they sold, how few albums they sold, how they truly fared in real life.  It’s so much better to resist the common expectation that every film you make has to be bigger and better and gain a wider audience. When you make this kind of work, it’s just as hard every time.  But, of course, it’s totally worth it.

Reflections of a Former (and Future) Film Critic

Thanks to Jennifer Merin of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists for sending this along.  Click here to read Mary Pols' article.