In 2006, Matthew Porterfield gave us Hamilton, a quiet, moody film about two young kids who have just become parents. Taking place over the course of only a couple of days, Hamilton captured the tension between stasis and unrelenting change that was occurring in both their lives, as well as the lives of their respective families and friends. Hamilton was impressive not only for its unusually evocative portrait of suburban Baltimore (Porterfield emphasizes atypical parts of the city as only a native could), but also its subtle yet sophisticated handling of the community. One really gets the sense of interconnectivity that is rarely seen outside of attention-mongering ensemble pieces. Instead of yelling from the rooftops, however, Porterfield remains understated in the way that he weaves the network between characters, often privileging implicit, almost instinctual, interactions that hint at something deeper than any explicit exposition could ever achieve.

With Putty Hill, Porterfield has made good on all the promises of Hamilton, creating a film that is at once more redolent and reticent, but that also takes his narrative experimentation another step forward. Returning once more to Baltimore, Porterfield this time explores a group of characters that have all been affected by the death of a young man, Cory, who never appears in the film expect for a photograph at his wake. Up until the penultimate scene, the characters are all shown individually, an effective narrative strategy that underscores the deep sense of isolation that runs throughout the picture. But as much as Cory is the element that binds the characters together, the story is less about him than it is the people that he knew. Each successive scene adds a little bit of pigment to the canvas, but the portrait of Cory remains incomplete. His enigma, however, serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it reminds everyone of their own transience (which seems to last forever, evoking a similar feeling as in Hamilton), but Cory’s mystery also comes to represent the limits of understanding, for both the characters and the audience. Just as his friends silently struggle to grasp his motivation, so do the vague suggestions of addiction and capitulation make Cory seem more real than any concrete facts. In this way, Porterfield also avoids any preachy messages and shows the utmost respect for the characters of Putty Hill. By not presuming to “know” them, he lets them live a little, and allows that their lives are bigger than the hour and a half run time.

Respect is a description I keep coming back to with Putty Hill. It extends beyond the people in the story and becomes a foundational aesthetic for the whole movie, particularly the cinematography by Jeremy Saulnier (who also shot Hamilton and was the director of Murder Party), the location sound recording by Phil Davis and Nick Rush, the sound design by Ben Goldberg, and the editing by Marc Vives. Long takes and environment-specific audio dominate, which combine to give real weight to the time and place of the scenes—a natural rhythm whose deceptive simplicity belies the rigor and artistry behind it. A mother’s voice cutting through the booming sound of heavy metal emitting from behind a teen’s door; echoes of an ice cream truck and a helicopter mixing as a group of young girls walk through a forest, smoking and talking amongst themselves, their voices little more than an evocative element of a richly mixed soundtrack. In a later scene, these same girls sit on a couch, watching television and chatting. As two of them get up and cross the room, the camera follows. The soundtrack, however, stays with the girls on the couch talking about the upcoming funeral, resulting in a complex audio/visual counterpoint that goes completely against every textbook definition of “editing.” It’s an absolutely liberating moment for both the filmmaker and the audience, and shows the sort of delicate revolutions going on just beneath the surface in Porterfield’s films.

While “naturalism” seems to be synonymous with much of independent filmmaking these days, the style seems perfectly suited to Putty Hill. An almost spiritual quality to its quietude and the humanistic joy of the wake distinguish the film and its singular qualities. In fact, I would encourage Porterfield to take this naturalistic sensibility even further in his next film. The two moments of non-diegetic music (a cello accompanies a montage of skateboard and BMX stunts, as well the closing moments of the film as a car drives through the night) stand out as unnecessary, as the music only reiterates qualities that are innate to the footage itself. These breaks in Putty Hill’s established aesthetic might not add to the scenes, but they do remind of the power of restraint that characterizes the rest of the picture.

Putty Hill’s story unfolds in alternating observational shots and documentary-esque encounters between the characters and an off-screen narrator whose presence is never clarified. Within the realm of the story, is this supposed to be the camera operator, or someone else associated with the crew? It remains ambiguous, and after multiple viewings I am tempted (but not wholly convinced) to interpret these private moments in a much more radical way as a variation on the theatrical monologue. These shared moments occur suddenly and disappear just as quickly, and in between time seems to stop. There is something secretive about these dialogues, as though the character speaking (or, in one rare instance, three girls in a pool) is the only one aware of the narrator. Some of the characters are more guarded than others – during the pool scene, one girl runs off camera under the pretense of being cold—but it is never what they say that is most important. Instead, it is that which they realize but do not share, or even acknowledge.

By fusing narrative and documentary techniques, Porterfield has created a film that feels very open. This is not to imply that Putty Hill’s aesthetic strategies are unintentional—on the contrary, the freedom for characters to come and go, and to be as open or closed as they please, is the result of great forethought on the part of the filmmakers. One never wonders whether scenes are improvised or scripted because—and this is what is most important—the non-professional cast lends both sincerity and authenticity to their characters. Roles big and small both leave their indelible impressions on the audience, whether it is Cory’s cousin Jenny (the up-and-coming teenage singer Sky Ferreira, the only name you might recognize in the cast) wandering through her estranged father’s living room/tattoo parlor while shirtless men listen to slow jams and await their turn to get inked; the police officers in the woods wearing shorts, carrying machine guns, and looking for a homicidal bank robber; or a grizzled, bear-like older man at Cory’s wake who scares two little girls when he starts to emphatically boogie-down. Under Porterfield’s empathetic direction, the characters of Putty Hill seem to live and breathe as few do in current cinema. Through them, the simplest actions become captivating, meaning that the film’s weight comes not from any revelatory truths (Porterfield shies away from anything so grandiose), but from modest gestures—delicate actions that, by saying little, speak mountains.

— Cullen Gallagher

Typically, when we speak of film as a collaborative art form we mean that the production process involves so many people (be it dozens or hundreds) that, at some level, assigning individual credit is insufficient and misleading. No one element in a completed film exists on its own: always it is interacting with other sights, sounds, and processes. Daniel and Abraham takes this notion of collaboration to an ambitious, minimalist extreme. The entire crew of this feature film consists of three people: director Ryan Eslinger, and the film’s sole actors David Williams and Gary Lamadore. All three shared writing duties, as well as all the other behind-the-scenes responsibilities. However, this stripped-down, DIY production style makes for more than just an interesting back-story to relate in interviews and post-screening Q&As. Instead, it’s an ironic counterpoint to the film’s narrative of deep-seated mistrust and human disconnection. The intense participation and investment of the makers comes through loud and clear on-screen.

Shot on-location in Catskill Mountains on the crest of winter, the movie begins with Daniel (Williams) parking his car and embarking on what appears to be a lengthy hiking journey. On the trail, he comes across the burly, gray-haired Abraham (Lamadore), whose demeanor is disconcertingly ambiguous. Are his comments about Daniel trespassing on his land intended as threats or coy jabs? Against all protests, Abraham is unable—and unwilling—to leave Daniel alone on his journey. At first offering to act as a guide, Abraham’s motivations become increasingly suspect as his patronizing sensibility becomes less passive-aggressive and decidedly more active. Naïve and unprepared for the journey, Daniel ultimately finds himself at the mercy of his two greatest threats: nature and Abraham.

On the trail, the two men’s conversations alternate between the pragmatic and the personal, but neither is very forthcoming with details. Daniel is on his way to spread his estranged father’s ashes, while Abraham has taken to the woods because of his own troubled relationship to his children. The surrogate relationship they find in one another, however, is less about atonement than aggression. Each of their inveterate father-son resentment manifests in each other. Unrequited rage steadily builds as they move deeper into the woods, culminating in a back-and-forth power struggle for control over their only knife, at once a symbol of survival, potential violence, and masculine authority (much like the conch in The Lord of the Flies).

Through Eslinger’s redolent direction, the desolate and treacherous landscape increasingly morphs from naturalistic surroundings into a projection of the characters’ own tortured psychological states. Like some phantom, Abraham can disappear from sight or appear directly behind you without warning: so familiar with the woods is he that he seems to be able to bend time and space. Daniel, on the other hand, seems lost in a snow-filled vacuum, and Eslinger’s eerie, ethereal score only enhances the alien-quality of the terrain. Paranoia even overtakes the soundtrack, at times masking sounds of approaching footsteps or over-emphasizing a pounding hammer. Similar to Daniel in his increasingly frenzied state, our hearing can’t always be trusted, which is at once a blessing and a curse. Together with his collaborators Williams and Lamadore, Eslinger achieves a sense of narrative balance, upon which the success and complexity of the story rests. Daniel may appear first in the title, but the film doesn’t necessarily privilege either him or Abraham. Instead, there’s a wonderful ambiguity to their actions and motivations that allows us imagine their lives outside of the movie and to think how their pasts (only briefly hinted at) are affecting their behavior. That the story can simultaneously be seen from both or neither of their perspectives is indeed something special.

Like well-trained musicians, the makers of Daniel and Abraham seem to be able to anticipate each other’s movements and actions. (Music seems a fitting analogy, considering the role of “the trio” across centuries and vastly different styles of music, from Beethoven’s Piano Trios to the Bill Evans Trio to Sleater-Kinney.) All the aspects of cinema are moving harmoniously in Daniel and Abraham. Nuances of acting are impeccably aligned with the camera’s field of vision, just as the precise soundscape blends with the editing to carve out the particularities of time and space. From composition and lighting to gesture and dialogue, mechanics and poetics function in tandem not just to add atmosphere to the story, but to irreversibly put it into motion.

— Cullen Gallagher

(Melvin Van Peebles’ latest film is opening in NYC at Cinema Village on Friday, 8/21/09, followed by Chicago on 8/28 and LA on 9/4. NOTE: This review was first posted in conjunction with the Gotham Awards, where Van Peebles was acknowledged for his contribution to independent cinema, as well as MoMA’s simultaneous salute to the multi-talented director.)

This year has seen the release of several films that exemplified the potential for screen artistry, such as the elegant 35mm cinematography of Lance Hammer’s Ballast or Azazel Jacobs’ devastatingly restrained script for Momma’s Man, yet no movie better conveys a love for storytelling than Melvin Van Peebles’ Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha.

Seated before the camera sporting a black fedora, red neckerchief, and mammoth cigar, Van Peebles spins a yarn that spans 30+ years and all the seven seas: the travels and travails of a young boy (played by the 75-year-old filmmaker) from Chicago with an unquenchable thirst for adventure. Van Pebbles’ narration has the same “itchy feet” as his character; it scuttles about with such agility that not only is it nearly impossible to pin down, but any attempt would unavoidably miss its charming whimsicality.

Most entrancing of all is Van Peebles himself, whose intimate narration makes it seem as though he is sitting across the room from you. His words have the rhythm of a great musician, and like a great bebop solo, they give the impression of being at once both improvised and highly deliberate. Even Melvin’s particular style of narrating seems to derive from musical, rather than cinematic, roots. Much like Bobby Womack’s spoken intro to his epic soul ballad “The Fact of Life/He’ll Be There When the Sun Goes Down,” Van Peebles fluidly combines confession, philosophy, and life-lesson. Nor do the affinities with music stop there, for Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha is also part musical. And the composer of all the songs and the score? None other than writer/director/producer/editor/painter/star Melvin Van Peebles.

Riffing off the established conventions of the Bildungsroman genre (in which a character goes from adolescence to adulthood, and ultimately achieves some sort of enlightenment), the scope of the film is by necessity tremendous. Starting at the age of fourteen, Van Peebles’ character lights out from his home in Chicago intending to go to Mexico, but winds up in New York. Years working in a restaurant give way to even more years spent as a merchant marine (including a battle with a pirate played by son Mario Van Peebles); a brief stint as a gigolo for elderly ladies; a used shoe-salesman in Africa; slave-labor as a miner; and even a daring escape from a sex-crazed gorilla. Moving effortlessly and unpretentiously through this outlandish picaresque, Van Peebles proves that he is a narrative charlatan like Orson Welles did in F For Fake. Both directors consistently make daring leaps in their storytelling, and their gambles become successively grander and more outrageous. So much of the joy of watching these movies is in reveling in the glory of these filmmakers’ narrative theatrics—they’re so good one can’t help but laugh at the extent of their skill, and its seemingly limitless potential.

As if to complement the deliberately hyperbolic story, the images are self-consciously artificial and exaggerated. Van Peebles doesn’t hide the limitations of his budget; instead, he accentuates them and then triumphantly transcends them. This movie is hardcore DIY. From endearingly cheap consumer-level computer special effects to an undisguised contemporary New York City that is supposed to pass for the 1960s, Van Peebles proves that it doesn’t take a big budget to make a big movie—just ingenuity and fearlessness. What looks to be a large pool doubles for an ocean (complete with a white sheet in the background, blocking out some incongruous scenery); a hand-drawn sign reading “Haul with Paul” is attached to the side of a moving van; and boldest of all is the fact that no characters age throughout the decades-long story. Playing a naïve teenager, the septuagenarian auteur fumbles with the brassieres of women some fifty years his junior. Such incongruity only adds to the film’s surrealist atmosphere.

Regardless of how unconventional and experimental it is, more than anything Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha is a joy to watch. It certainly breaks new ground, but never at the expense of its sense of humor. Van Peebles never seems as though he is trying to be obscure for the sake of being so; rather, he made the movie the only way he could. Take no prisoners. Make no excuses. Just make the movie by whatever means necessary. Melvin Van Peebles’ conviction and determination is nothing short of inspirational.

— Cullen Gallagher

“There’s a dissatisfaction with merely going to the movies,” proclaims Shirley Clarke in Noël Burch and Andre S. Labarthe’s documentary Rome Burns: A Portrait of Shirley Clarke (1970). Throughout, she is never without two things: a cigarette between her lips, and a sincere humility. Seated on the floor of a Parisian apartment with friends and colleagues (including Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono), the New York-native Clarke opens up about her revolutionary ideas about cinema, as well as her own misgivings about her earlier works. The three features she had shot at that point—The Connection (1962), The Cool World (1964), and Portrait of Jason (1967)—wrenched burgeoning cinema verite trends in new, groundbreaking directions. But for every liberating frame that passed through her camera, Clarke saw more work that needed to be done. To her, the then-current relationship between the audience and the movie was antiquated: “I don’t want them separated by the screen anymore.” In fusing experimental, documentary, and narrative film techniques, Clarke was a significant force in creating “modern” cinema in the 1960s.

Anthology Film Archives’ retrospective The Films of Shirley Clarke does more than pay tribute to her career as a filmmaker, which spanned from the 1950s through the 1980s: it also chronicles the larger evolution of independent filmmaking in America. From formalist shorts to naturalist features and Academy Award-winning docs to experimental video collaborations, Clarke pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be an independent filmmaker. Nor is Clarke’s “art” limited to just her movies—she was also co-founder of The Film-Makers’ Distribution Center; the Teepee Video Space Troupe (based out of her Chelsea Hotel home/studio); and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which continues to be a significant part of the film community after 40 years. As much as her films, these organizations constitute an undeniable part of her mission to forge a new symbiotic relationship between the audience and the movie.

Born in New York in 1919, Clarke first studied modern dance before turning to filmmaking in the early 1950s. Clarke’s earliest films show the influence of another pioneering female filmmaker, Maya Deren, who similarly had a background in dance. One can see traces of Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Meditation on Violence (1948) in Clarke’s Dance in the Sun (1953) and Moment in Love (1956), particularly in the use of fluid body movement across a cut that changes background but preserves the continuity of action on-screen. But whereas Deren’s films occupied psychological performance spaces, Clarke’s are far more rooted in reality: whether a naked rehearsal hall, a sandy beach, or even a reflection in a nearby stream, the physical reality of space is a clear concern.

Around this time, Clarke began studying with famed avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter, whose influence can be felt in the abstract, double-exposed cityscapes of Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round (1958). Clarke commissioned two scores for the film—one an electronic piece by Louis and Bebe Barron, and the other a jazz score by famed composer/arranger Teo Macero (responsible for the marvelous orchestration on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain). This integration of modern music into Clarke’s cinematic world would become an essential part of her style, particularly in her next film, The Connection.

There was little hope that Bosley Crowther, the un-hip, curmudgeonly film critic of The New York Times from 1940-1967, would ever “get” The Connection. Upon its initial release he wrote, “There is little about it to warrant the clamorous interest of the average moviegoer or to distinguish it as a significant piece of cinematic art.” A relic of the past, Crowther’s taste for middle-of-the-road, unadventurous mediocrity is exactly what Clarke was fighting against. An adaptation of Jack Gelber’s stage play of the same name and originally produced by The Living Theater, The Connection watches as a group of junkies sit around an apartment waiting for their dealer to show up. Some play solitaire, some walk in circles, while others pick up instruments (such as jazz legend Jackie McLean) to pass the time. But to Clarke, more important than “who” is waiting is the “who” is watching. In this case, it is a “square” documentary filmmaker who is continually pulled into the shot by his subjects. They chide him for purporting to make a “factual” film about drug addiction without ever having experienced it himself.

Herein lies one of Clarke’s reoccurring concerns: how much truth can cinema verite, whether as a documentary approach or narrative stylization, convey? What are the limits of the lens? Innately skeptical of cinema, Clarke may be making a film about junkies, but she has no intention of “showing” her characters off to the audience like some sideshow attraction. Even the fictional director in The Connection was forced to confront this issue: “The minute I put a camera on you,” he tells his subjects, “you change!” Of her own style, Clarke has remarked, “The very thing that was trying to be hidden is now trying to be exposed.” By revealing the filmmaking process, she allows her characters to retain their dignity, as well as an element of mystery—the tantalizing suggestion that beyond the view of the camera there is something secret and sacred that cannot be broken down into shots and dialogue, something horrific that shouldn’t be made light of.

While Clarke has slighted The Connection for being too “slick” (“Unfortunately, the cameraman’s reputation was at stake,” she explained), her next film was an even deeper foray into realism. From first frame to last, The Cool World is an indictment against Hollywood make-believe. Fueled by Dizzy Gillespie and Yuseff Lateef’s jazz score, it is an unrelenting portrait of youths who battle against a world that offers neither pity nor possibility. Consider the scene in which a white professor leads a disorderly group of black teenagers on a bus tour through Manhattan, pointing out “landmarks” such as Bergdorf Goodman, The Plaza, and the Public Library—sterile, iconic images that “translate” as “New York City” in countless Hollywood productions. But in Clarke’s movie, there is no oohing and ahhhing—just a cacophony of disinterested teenagers to whom these locales are but a fantasyland.

The Cool World is a Rebel Without a Cause (1955) for a new era. Instead of a violently sensitive Jim Stark (James Dean) confused by out-dated social mores, we have Duke (a ferocious Hampton Clanton, in one of his only film roles), a teenage drug dealer and warlord for his gang, The Pythons. And unlike Jim, Duke certainly does have a cause: he dreams of having his own gun, and having people say as he passes, “There goes Duke, he’s a real cold killer.” The first film shot on-location in Harlem, The Cool World has a special documentary value that lies beyond its fictional narrative (coincidentally, it was produced by a then-unknown Frederick Wiseman). Clarke has a real feeling for the natural movement of the human body, whether it is the unbridled ecstasy of a street preacher or a rumble between local gangs, or the quotidian gestures of passing pedestrians.

Once again, leave it to Bosley Crowther to say exactly the wrong thing (or, maybe it is the “right” thing for an old dinosaur like him to say): “The attitude in which [Clarke] functions as a recorder is that of the outsider looking in.” Looking back, The Cool World seems as unprecedented as John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), or even Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945). Three years before Katherine Houghton brought Sidney Poitier home in Stanley Kramer’s “topical” Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), Clarke gave us Duke—a modern incarnation of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas from Native Son (1940), who fights not on the anesthetized battle(play)ground of Hollywood, but in a harsh, unforgiving asphalt jungle. Completely lacking in moralizing or judgment, 45 years have not tamed the film one bit.

Clarke moved from the macro to the micro for her next film, Portrait of Jason (1967). Making full use of her understanding of bodily movement, theatricality, and non-judgmental observation, she recorded a 12-hour interview with a man whom it would be too simple to call just “a black, homosexual prostitute.” Edited down to 105 minutes, what expands on-screen is as much a study in personality as it is in cultural politics. Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights Film Journal has best described the indescribable nature of the film: “One possible explanation for the persistent unavailability…of a film so exceptional has been its unusual way of eluding all categorization. It isn’t a documentary, really; it isn’t even a ‘cinema verite’ exercise… If Portrait of Jason is anything we can give a name to, it is a record of a performance, a performance ably assisted by a filmmaker who most assuredly knew what, and who, she was filming.”

“If you critique what goes on in the world,” Clarke said, “you are also critiquing the media.” This goes back to how she didn’t want to use the screen to separate the audience from the movie. They exist in the same world—it’s not that one merely reflects the other, but that they exchange glances in a revolving circle. Shirley Clarke didn’t just tackle social relevant topics—she approached them in a way that was fittingly progressive. Each of her first three features focused on increasingly marginalized characters whose stories had either been misrepresented, overly simplified, or outright ignored by mainstream cinema. And her cinematic approach continued to grow out of her quest to redefine “realism” without distorting stylizations—first there was the meta-verite of The Connection, then the gritty naturalism of The Cool World, and finally the unabashed frankness of Portrait of Jason.Individually, they are all solid films that can stand on their own merits. Together, they form a trilogy that points the way for films like Killer of Sheep (1977) that were to come in the next decade. And in the context of Shirley Clarke’s own filmography (which includes such diverse films not discussed here as the Oscar-winning Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World [1963] and Ornette: Made in America [1985] which is as fittingly experimental as its subject, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman), they remind us that Shirley Clarke was more than just a visionary filmmaker. She was a rebel with a cause, one whose impact on filmmaking is still being felt 12 years after her passing in 1997, and will continue to resound loudly for many years to come.

— Cullen Gallagher

(Billy the Kid screens Sunday night, March 22nd, at 11pm as part of the Cinema Nolita/Hammer to Nail screening series in downtown Manhattan. Visit the official website to watch the trailer and then buy the DVD at Amazon.)

The first time I saw Billy the Kid, I had just come out of a screening of Juno feeling absolutely disheartened. I had gone into Jason Reitman’s film rather neutral, and having somehow avoided most of the pre-release buzz, I had few preconceptions about what I was about to see and how I would react. Without digging up a tiresome debate, I can simply say that I felt betrayed. Not only by Juno’s corporate-twee factor, but what I felt to be the film’s emotional and psychological distance from its characters. One of the more unfortunate aspects of a post-Wes Anderson cinema is not only the infantilization of emotions, but also the imbuing of younger characters with the psychology of someone twenty (or more) years their senior. However, neither Juno’s global disconnectedness—as though its characters aren’t actually experiencing the events in the story—nor its all’s-well-that-ends-well narrative, is surprising: it’s merely another film in a long tradition of unrealistic high school narratives.

But then, fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in a theater watching Billy the Kid, and I thought, Here is an antidote. Unlike the exaggerated characters in even the best high school movies, there’s something unshakably authentic to this fifteen year-old-kid from Brunswick, Maine with a rat tail who wears trucker t-shirts with cut-off sleeves. And it’s not just because Billy the Kid is a work of non-fiction, but rather that director Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.

Billy and his mother both make brief mention of how he is somehow “different” from the others. “I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign… just different in the mind—different brains, that’s all,” explains the boy, while his mother recalls his uncontrollable temper tantrums as a child. Even in the film, his furtive side-glances and slightly stammering speech both call attention to themselves. While we can deduce that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, the film smartly never explains this and instead treats Billy like any normal teenager. Billy the Kid refuses to be a disability-movie, instead leaving the varying diagnoses vague and inconclusive, and allowing his eccentricities to be what they are: colorful facets of his complex personality. In fact, the more one tries to pin down Billy’s “uniqueness,” the more one is confronted by how un-unique he really is. It is one of the greatest compliments to say about Billy the Kid, “Yeah, I can relate to that.”

It would be hard to create this character and story from scratch. Better dialogue couldn’t be written. Throughout the film, Billy’s spontaneous musings (which range from the confessional to the philosophical, and even on-the-spot poetry) provide not only great insight into his character, but also moments of sincere, affectionate humor. When he wants to, Billy can be uproariously funny, but often the innocent delivery of his expressions belies an unexpected depth. After experiencing his first kiss with his first girlfriend, he says to a group of older men hanging around outside of a diner, “Years of loneliness have been murder.” The men break out in sympathetic laughter, and one of them says, “All right kid, I like that!” We laugh not at Billy, but at the fact that he doesn’t realize how truthful and perceptive he is. His phrases aren’t the typical chatter expected of a sophomore in high school, and yet they don’t seem at all affected or inauthentic. Billy may receive special attention as a student while at school, but in so many ways he is far beyond his mere fifteen years.

What’s so extraordinary is the way in which Venditti captures the internal world of Billy—the overwhelming sense of emotion and thought that steals him away from the everyday circumstances surrounding him. “Sometimes I think the imaginative world’s much better than the real world,” Billy tells us, “but then, of course, there’s one difference: imagination ain’t real.” Venditti best captures this divide between reality and fantasy when Billy plugs in his electric guitar and prepares to rock out. He puts in a live concert DVD and takes off his shirt, but when he goes to hit the first chord no sound comes out. Frantically he shakes the amp and adjusts the chord, and finally—music! Venditti switches to the DVD’s soundtrack, removing all natural audio as Billy imitates his rock ‘n’ roll idols on-screen. But then she cuts to a shot taken from outside the house. We hear not the flawless audio of professionals, but the fumbling of a teenager learning to play guitar. Rarely have more glorious sounds been heard on a movie’s soundtrack: the notes aren’t all there, the rhythm is slightly off, but he’s playing the song he loves, and the passion is unmistakable.

While not indulging in his passion for rock music (Kiss, specifically), Billy goes through the things that all of us do—classroom frustration, family drama (“Do teenagers always bite off the heads of their elders?” he asks his mother), and awkward and emphatic first relationships. Ebullient over his new love, Heather, Billy sprints down the deserted small-town street illuminated by streetlamps. The way he pretend-boxes with mailboxes and leaps atop benches recalls Ernest Borgnine’s triumphant run at the end of Marty. At moments like these, Billy is so lost in his own world that it is as though he has forgotten the camera’s presence. And Venditti is respectful of his space. Out on the street, she lets him wander off into the distance, where he sits down on the sidewalk and improvises a poem: “Her eyes are like onyx glinting in the sun.”

Billy, himself, using his inimitable palette of expressions, sums up the magical power of Billy the Kid. Explaining his reaction to An American Werewolf in London, he says, “That scene really attacked me, though I knew it wasn’t real. You ever felt that way?” My answer is yes. Many times throughout Billy the Kid I felt “attacked,” but only in the most gentle, empathetic ways. And unlike Werewolf, this film is very much real.

— Cullen Gallagher

Everything is different in hindsight. Time heals certain wounds, while others fester and deepen with the passing days. Memories go in and out of focus. Problems either work themselves out, or else new dilemmas arise and take precedent, the old ones fading into the past. When the end is in sight, things just don’t look as bad as they once did. Perspective allows us to see things more clearly. And this is precisely what is missing in Morgan Dews’ piercing documentary Must Read After My Death, and also what makes the film so singular, so touching and traumatic to watch.

Must Read After My Death is based on the audio diaries and home movies of Dews’ grandmother, Allis, which the director discovered after her passing in 2001. More than just family mementos, the audiotapes documented the emotional and psychological near-collapse of Allis’ family in the 1960s. And Allis tells the story not from some safe distance into the future, but right in the midst of the crisis. The happy façade of the 8mm home movies of family gatherings, holiday dinners, smiling faces and warm embraces, is the perfect counterpoint for the skeletons-in-the-closet, whispered secrets of Allis’ diaries. Whereas the images represent everything the family wanted to show to the rest of the world, the audio represents everything they wanted to keep behind closed doors. A husband’s affair, his drinking that leads to physical violence, a son fallen behind in school, a daughter who runs off to get married, and another son that is institutionalized—these are just some of the worries of Allis. On the one hand, they are very much “everyday” problems, but that is where so much of their power comes from. Brimming with pathos, it’s hard not to relate to Allis’ overwhelming anxiety, and the sense that life is spinning out of control and offers her no possible recourse.

Begun as a way to communicate with her husband who was living in Australia for several months out of the year for work, the Dictaphone soon became Allis’ way of recording her family history for future generations (which she openly acknowledges at several points throughout). On another level, however, the Dictaphone was also a surrogate listener for Allis. In Roberto Rossellini’s The Human Voice, Anna Magnani clings to a telephone, desperate for human contact. But here, Allis clings to a machine that offers no such consolation. The voice she hears is her own. More than just a cathartic exercise, it provides proof of her existence, and a physical record of her thoughts and emotions.

Her husband ineffectual, and her children rebellious, Allis turned towards family therapy for help. Indicative of the times, they all told her that the family’s dissolution was her fault—she failed as a wife and as a mother. Their only advice was to conform to the stereotype of a “good wife” and “good mother” who is bound to the home and subservient to her family. But whereas the therapists were all judgmental, the Dictaphone remained a safe, objective vessel for Allis’ outpourings. The machine was her ever-present, always loyal, listener. There’s something extremely modern about her personal investment into technology, not only the extent to which it serves a cognitive role in her life, but to the point where the microphone exceeds the human potential around her. Where family and therapy failed, the Dictaphone succeeded.

With the exception of a few intertitles, there is no contemporaneous commentary inserted into the film. Allis’ diaries and home movies tell the entire story. There is no “looking back” and “reflecting” on things. Watching the film, we too are able to experience the story first hand, almost in first-person. We take the place of the machine, becoming the receivers for Allis’ anxiety, her frustration, her discontent, and—most of all—her hope for a better future for her whole family. Must Read After My Death is at once extraordinary, and completely ordinary. It’s the sort of story that happens in each of our lives, but that doesn’t in any way diminish its significance to either Allis and her family or to the audience.

What is extraordinary, however, is Allis herself. Not only her resilience and forthright nonconformity, but also her foresight in documenting her life with such openness and honesty. Allis is a real life Woman Under the Influence. She holds nothing back. Neither does her grandson, Morgan Dews, who with great editorial skill crafts Allis’ materials into a probing and unflinching portrait of the inner life of the real American Family—bruises, smiles, and all.

— Cullen Gallagher

The Honeymoon Killers

Though writer/director Leonard Kastle took some necessary liberties with the facts (everyone involved with the story was dead by the time the film was made), he stays true to their actual personages, the brutality of their crimes, and particularly to the almost mythic heights of their love for one another. Embittered, unloved, and obese, Martha (Shirley Stoler, in her first movie), a bossy nurse from Mobile, Alabama, is outraged to discover her sister signed her up for a lonely-hearts mail service—until she receives a letter from Raymond (Tony Lo Bianco). A con artist Casanova from New York, he sweeps her off her feet with romantic declarations. Yet when she visits him in the big city, he confesses to his scheme: he seduces lonely women through the mail, marries them, and then runs off with their money. Instead of being repulsed, Martha is fascinated. Partnering up, the two crisscross across the country, leaving weeping—and sometimes dead—brides in their wake.

Noir is a characteristically stylized genre. It has its own iconic dialogue, intonation, photography, location, and costume, to name but a few facets that immediately denote the genre. But, these are all superficial facets of the style, and Kastle does away with all of these, instead digging straight to the heart of the matter. He brings a refreshingly naturalistic interpretation to the poetry of desperation—sort of a fusion of Jim Thompson and Frederick Wiseman, if such an unholy (and awesome!) union were possible. Stoler brings something uncomfortably familiar to Martha’s pathetic sensibility. Her self-loathing is immediately recognizable. But unlike the noir-cliché of the woman dependant on her man, Raymond actually awakens an unknown power in Martha, and therein lies the contradiction that makes her so fascinating. She may be repulsed by her own self-image, but she radiates this magnetic power and sexuality that has Raymond hooked from their first meeting. He may think that he’s taking her along for the ride, but she quickly becomes the dynamic force that fuels their path of destruction.

Kastle made The Honeymoon Killers during a pivotal moment in American cinema. Old Hollywood and its Will Hays-monitored morality had collapsed. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969) were not only challenging acceptable notions of on-screen violence and sexuality, but also redefining the way our country is portrayed cinematically. And with John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) garnering both three Academy Award nominations (until then, reserved almost exclusively for Hollywood-made productions) and winning Best Actor for John Marley at the Venice Film Festival, American Independent Cinema was a capital letter movement like never before. These milestones provide not only context for The Honeymoon Killers, but also what Kastle was reacting to and, particularly in the case of Bonnie and Clyde, against.

“I didn’t want to show beautiful shots of beautiful people in color,” Kastle has explained. Shooting in black-and-white, he and cinematographer Oliver Wood used a documentary style, which only emphasized the intimacy of the performances, as though they were truly stolen moments taken from reality. The stark look of the film, often making creative and economical use of domestic light fixtures, perfectly matches the raw emotions and deglamorized violence of Martha and Raymond. At points, the naked bulbs of bedside lamps seem to burn out the image—creating a blinding brilliance that almost hurts to look at. And it’s true: the nakedness of The Honeymoon Killers, far more primal and stripped down than the archetypical stylizations necessary to outwit the former Production Code, is not supposed to be pleasant to watch. It’s supposed to touch something deep down inside of viewers, to show us the desperation of these lovers, and the intensity of their fidelity, which is so strong that even murder seems paltry compared to their love.

The Honeymoon Killers exemplifies one of the credos of independent filmmaking, which is that cinema is no longer in the hands of the privileged few. In fact, most student films have a larger crew than the one Kastle used! It’s remarkable, downright extraordinary, that such a groundbreaking, sophisticated film should come from a first-time screenwriter and director who had zero experience or aspirations as a filmmaker. A composer by trade, it was coincidence and opportunity that brought Kastle to the screen for this, his only film. A friend of his was a television producer aspiring to make a feature film. This friend happened to have a connection that netted him the even-then low sum of $150,000, and he brought Kastle on board as a screenwriter. Up until then, the closest Kastle came to writing a script was writing an opera libretto. A young Martin Scorsese was engaged as a director but was quickly fired for spending excessive attention on a beer can in the bushes (according to Kastle, at least). After an assistant was also fired, Kastle was left in charge of the direction.

To labor over Kastle’s economy would be to discredit film’s rapturous illusion of reality, or its severe, unadorned nightmare of violence. It spares us nothing of the horror, yet exudes restraint and denies us the comfort of seeing the totality of the deaths. Shock fades quickly, but The Honeymoon Killers goes for something far more discomfiting. The authenticity of the film rings such that every time it plays, Martha and Raymond live and breathe, and love and kill, again.

— Cullen Gallagher

(The Honeymoon Killers screens this weekend at the Walter Reade as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series “Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Culture.” Or if you are unable to catch it on the big screen, buy the Criterion Collection DVD at Amazon.)

While films had been made outside of studios for some time, Open City seems to embody the ethos of a movement—one that began as “Italian Neorealism” and has grown into an international phenomenon that continues to this day. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Morris Engel, the Iranian New Wave, American Film Noir, John Cassavetes… really, the list goes on and on. Rossellini liberated cinema from the hands of the privileged few and empowered the “little” people to stand up and speak out. He broke down the confining walls of the studio and turned the camera on the world. We all owe a great debt to this one film and its maker.

But there’s also a larger debt that has gone unpaid for far too long, which is that Rossellini embodied a far more important concept of an “independent filmmaker” that went beyond topics and aesthetics. He resisted labels and refused to be tied down to a single style. Yet the farther he moved away from the particularities of his earlier work, the more the world rejected Rossellini. He made a certain kind of movie, and that’s what they expected and, more importantly, understood. Such is the dilemma all artists face when they grow and change. In a time in which independent cinema is (once again) threatened by corporate facsimiles of an “indie” style, and critics use labels to carelessly pigeonhole films (is The Pleasure of Being Robbed really “mumblecore”?), it’s important to look back on this foundational filmmaker and consider that he faced the same problems that our contemporary filmmakers do.

Rossellini made only two more “Neorealist” films—Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948)—before embarking on a richly diverse career that has proven problematic and unpopular to viewers and critics for over half a century because of their non-conformist nature. The apex of this controversy are his historical films made for television: The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966), just out on DVD from the Criterion Collection, as well as The Age of the Medici (1972), Blaise Pascal (1972), and Cartesius (1974), which are available in a box-set by Criterion’s off-shoot label, Eclipse (packaged as Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment). On the surface, they are a world apart from his early work, lacking not only the immediacy of current politics, the bombed out streets of Rome, and the intense spiritual connection with the characters, but also the stirring drama of war. But once one moves beyond the obvious, the connections are all too clear: real locations are still being used, as are non-actors, and instead of the stiff formality of most historical epics, these films are decidedly naturalistic. And the dialogue of the characters is certainly rife with politics, spirituality, and especially art.

Firmly believing that “Neorealism” is more of a moral viewpoint than visual aesthetic, Rossellini engages in history the same way he does the present day. He is fascinated with the cultural forces at work, the pressures that people face, and the conditions that influence their actions: politics, religion, art, science, and commerce. He isn’t so much interested in dramatizing history as in empathizing with it. The scripts are like Socratic dialogues: refusing a reductive, hegemonic point of view, Rossellini allows characters to digress away from action and debate contrary opinions. The magnificent opening scene of the four-part The Age of the Medici is characteristic of this approach. At the funeral for the elder Medici, a crowd has gathered to pay their respects and air their grievances: friends and enemies, family and strangers, the wealthy and the impoverished, the voices and opinions all coalesce in a cacophony of contradiction. It’s as if he’s more interested in the why than the what of history, as opposed to most movies, which are content to use the past as conveniently pre-destined plot points for whatever love-story or action-epic they are working on. So many “historical” films seem even deader than the characters actually are in real life, but Rossellini makes these stories more alive—and more relevant—than ever before.

Part of the vibrancy of these films is that the characters don’t come off as ancient figures, but living and breathing humans like you or I. Just as in his earlier The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Rossellini removes sacrosanct icons from their high shelf and brings them down to earth. In The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, we are shown not the majestic rise of a young king but the humdrum minutiae of “being” in command. For most of the film, everyone seems to be bored, especially the King. At first they are waiting for the cardinal to die; later, Louis XIV’s rivals are biding their time for him to screw up or get tired of his new role; meanwhile, the King himself is still trying to comprehend the performance required of him. The dinner ceremony, in particular, is a masterpiece of bored regality: the servants behind-the-scenes are busy preparing the food, while the King himself seems as aloof and disinterested as the rest of the court. Rossellini doesn’t seem to be making a subversive statement about royalty so much as he is allowing this larger-than-life figure to be human.

No less an artist than Francois Truffaut told Rossellini that he was wasting his time with these movies. While I can understand that these are certainly unconventional films, I find it hard to believe that Rossellini’s expressive eye for detail has gone overlooked for so long. In The Age of Medici, Cosimo de Medici’s discussions of economics and politics, and Leon Batistia Alberti’s lengthy discussion of aesthetics and science, are among the most sustained and invigorating intellectual conversations ever put to film, not to mention the digressions into Donatello’s studio or the arguments about Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. They don’t seek to “entertain” us, and as much as Rossellini admitted these were didactic films, I don’t think their main purpose is merely “educational” either. So many of the conversations are timeless—such as the many discussions about war profiteering in The Age of the Medici or the taxation of the lower-classes in The Taking of Power by Louis XIV—and this is where I think the real value of these films lies. Not merely in the pageantry of the past, but in analyzing the foundational issues of society which continue to plague us today. Rossellini is not just showing us history, but allowing us to think and feel it.

It would be too easy to say that Rossellini was ahead of his time with these films, when really it is that his conception of cinema was so much richer, deeper, and more meaningful, than our own. We still haven’t caught up with Rossellini yet, but hopefully Criterion’s new DVDs will help bring us closer.

— Cullen Gallagher

(Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment and The Taking of Power by Louis XIV are now available on DVD through Criterion and Eclipse. Buy them both at Amazon.)

(Distributed by Film Movement, Troubled Water is now available on DVD.)

Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s third feature, Troubled Water (DeUsynlige), garnered both the Jury and Audience Awards for Best Narrative Feature at the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival. Well deserving of both, it’s an arresting probe into morality and forgiveness that leaves one stunned not only by its emotionally stark performances, but also by the film’s complex, musical structure that quietly underlies the narrative and binds everything together. Making his acting debut, Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen plays Jan, a church organist recently released from prison who is haunted by a crime he committed as a teenager for which he refuses to take full responsibility. Thinking it harmless folly, Jan and a friend ran off with a young child in a stroller; however, they were caught by surprise when tragedy accidentally struck. Legally held responsible for a murder he did not physically—nor intentionally—commit, Jan finds himself caught between guilt and innocence, never quite sure how to reconcile the youthful ignorance of his intentions and their unintended, fatal consequences.

Jan’s job as a church organist only fuels his moral contradictions. While claiming he doesn’t need forgiveness (as he isn’t guilty), the physical act of performing is an undeniably cathartic experience. The sight and sound of Jan’s rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is monumental: the escalating tension of colliding dissonances and octaves becomes the embodiment of Jan’s spiritual anxiety. His hopes and fears converge in the character of Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a single mother who is also the priest at the church where Jan performs. Through Anna and her child, Jan comes face-to-face with the ghosts that have haunted him since that fateful day so many years ago: they offer the divergent possibilities of both spiritual redemption and further condemnation.

Like one of Bach’s fugues that Jan plays, every narrative always has a counterpoint, flowing simultaneously and telling its own side of the story. Midway through Troubled Water, Poppe smartly switches to the point-of-view of Agnes (Trine Dyrholm), the distraught mother of the deceased child whose trauma is revived when she discovers Jan has been released from prison. Whereas Jan’s story was concerned with the prospect of redemption, Agnes’ is preoccupied with revenge. Poppe refuses to side with either character, and instead assumes the difficult responsibility of creating total empathy for both Jan and Agnes.

Poppe never simplifies the larger issues at hand, but he also contains them so they don’t wander off into vague-but-grandiose quandaries. The fugue-like structure of the script, which fittingly culminates with the fusion of both narrative perspectives, exhibits the care and concern that Poppe has put into constructing his movie. The pitch-perfect acting from the three leads shows a remarkable range of approaches, from Hagen’s weighty silence, to Dyrholm’s sudden emotional shifts, to Petersen’s implosion in the film’s final moments when everything and everyone she has come to believe in falls apart. Challenging and engrossing, Troubled Water is nearly impossible to tear your eyes away from.

— Cullen Gallagher

Ying’s Neo-Realist aesthetic is as visceral as Vittorio de Sica’s, yet he purposefully avoids the Italian director’s characteristic sense of sentimentality and pathos. We are given no access to Yun’s thoughts or feelings on his journey: we are left only with his gestures, actions, and sparse dialogue to interpret. While on a bus to the city, Yun makes the acquaintance of the first of several problematic father figures that will appear throughout the film—all of whom either abandon Yun, or whom he runs away from. Their relationships are based on actions: one teaches Yun how to eat watermelon like a man (that is, hurriedly and sloppily with big bites), while another shares his razor with the young boy, and all of them are involved with Yun’s exhaustive search for the father’s mysterious hotel address—a location which no one in the city seems to have heard of.

Yun carries with him two ducks as his only currency, and throughout the movie they are forever poking their head out of the basket. They are like Ying’s camera: peripherally involved in the story, but more aware of the world surrounding them. Ying’s style simultaneously recalls Hou Hsiao-Hsien—particularly his static compositions and narrative ellipses (both Hou and Ying prefer fragmentary stories in which the most dramatically important events are left off-screen)—and Jia Zhangke. Like in Jia’s Still Life, there is a documentary quality to the background of Taking Father Home’s compositions that runs parallel to the fictional narrative that plays out in the foreground. Within shots that can last up to several minutes, the camera almost always remains steadfast, rarely altering its composition—and yet the action rarely stays at the center of the frame: characters are likely to wander way off into the distance, performing key actions without easy access for the viewer, while others speak from off camera, never revealing their bodily presence.

In purposefully distancing us from the characters and their story, Ying has created an unusual contradiction: essentially, Taking Father Home is a first-person narrative (Yun is in every scene), yet we never connect with him on an intimate level. He is an enigma, and our disassociation with him only increases as his violent tendencies come to the surface, through the long knife that he carries for protection, and in the shocking yet sobering confrontation with his father. What’s so refreshing about Ying’s approach is that he never cheapens Yun’s emotions by pretending to understand them. He leaves the sanctity of Yun’s desperation and revenge alone, placing viewers in the same place as himself—as an unobtrusive observer.

But while we are (not) watching Yun, there’s a much larger story unfolding in the periphery: the warnings of a coming flood that will devastate the area. Intermittent radio and television announcements echo through the streets, mixing with the din of cars and passersby. By the end of the movie, however, the warnings can’t be avoided, and as the city is evacuated, the urban desolation is a perfect visual metaphor for Yun’s growing inner desperation. Ying’s reticent use of metaphors is but a fraction of his sophistication as a director. His imaginative sense of narrative (at once modernistic but also highly playful, and never at a loss for a sense of humor, or humanity) and resourcefulness as a director are clearly evident in his first feature film. (He has since completed another feature, The Other Side, which hasn’t been distributed theatrically in the US.) Ying Liang’s name is certainly one to watch out for in the near future.

— Cullen Gallagher

(Taking Father Home opens today, September 19th, at The Pioneer in New York City.)