(Editor’s note: This might very well be our first ever flat-out non-review of a review, but it actually speaks quite well to a dilemma that we have been pondering for quite some time. We are very thankful that Mr. Lowery has brought his sincerity and intelligence to this topic so we are proudly posting his ruminations here.)

When my faithful editor wrote me a few days ago to see if I might write a review of Bob Byington’s new film Harmony and Me to coincide with its release this week, I immediately declined. My reasoning in this choice can be traced to a second request, one from Mr. Byington himself, who on the red carpet outside of the film’s Los Angeles premiere a few months ago asked that I try not to judge his aesthetic choices too harshly (I recall that there was one shot in particular, involving a piano, that he was especially apologetic about). I don’t think he was worried about me writing a review; he was asking me to go easy as a friend.

He needn’t have worried. To be sure, Harmony And Me is a sloppy movie, so aesthetically apathetic that its visual carelessness begins to feel like its own laconic joke, but here’s the thing: as a filmmaker, sloppiness appeals to me. As a critic, the motivation that might lead a filmmaker to deal in sloppiness fascinates me. As a friend, I’m just happy to see my peers and confidantes get their work out into the world, sloppy or otherwise. I could write a good piece of criticism about Bob’s film, but in doing so I would have to ignore the fact that I know Bob. Or that Frank Ross, the editor, is one of my best friends, from whom I heard no shortage of stories about the nightmare that was post production, and that the amazing actress Margie Beegle is the mother of another good friend. I shot a film of my own in one of the locations used here. I’ve worked with Justin Rice on several projects, including one where he dressed in some of the same wardrobe (his own) that he wears in this film. None of these associations disable my ability to think critically about the film; they simply disable my desire to. I liked it, I laughed. Can’t I leave it at that?

This, then, would seem to be the basis of my declination, and yet here I am anyway, writing about not wanting to write about a friend’s work, and wondering where one draws the line. As a friend, do I owe it to Bob—in exchange for his having made a film—to give that film a strong piece of consideration?  Or as a critic, do I owe it to my friends not to watch their work? Which isn’t to say that Bob couldn’t take or wouldn’t appreciate a serious review: whatever I might write would at the very least be a good and honest piece of criticism, and I don’t know any filmmaker who doesn’t appreciate that. Indeed, I’d thrill to see anyone, friend or foe, write about my work with some degree of incisiveness! My artistic ego will always take a dissertation in my work by my brother-in-law over a capsule from a stranger, charges of nepotism be damned. But now I see I’ve mentioned my ego, and suddenly this particular bride has been stripped bare.

It’s that same ego, of course, which prevents me from bidding a grand farewell to criticism, and it’s working hand in hand with a true love of the form. I’ve no intention to stop. I’ve written about friends’ films before. This entire journalistic endeavor to which you’ve so graciously devoted your time this morning is run by filmmakers: incest is inevitable. But, in accordance to the social mores of our time, I do intend to draw the line, when appropriate, so as to not be prompted to expunge such a distended paroxysm of critical guilt as you’ve just trogged through, and which, I realize now, is probably doing  an even greater disservice to Bob and his film than any bad review might. There’s the title of his movie, up there above, and below it? Nothing but navel-gazing. I’ve read reviews of Harmony And Me that would suggest he’s getting a taste of his own medicine. I don’t agree with those reviews, and I’ll leave it at that.

— David Lowery

(45365 receives its New York premiere on Saturday, July 11, courtesy of Rooftop Films. The film will be released later this year through Seventh Art Releasing. David Lowery’s full review will be forthcoming, but for now, here’s a sampling).

I had the occasion to spend some time in Ohio this past week, and while I was there I thought not once of 45365 , Bill and Turner Ross’ magnificent ode to the Buckeye state. I strolled through downtown Columbus and sat at a roadside root beer stand in Dayton, and noted no referential asides, thrilled to no points of connection. My experiences there were minimal, and they were my own, and it was only as I sat down to write this review that I realized that I’d been a just hop, skip and a jump away from my subject’s milieu. That would be Sidney, Ohio, pop. somewhere north of 20,000. Its postal code is the source of the film’s title, but: as intrinsic as the place is to their film, the film doesn’t belong to the place, which is why neither sprang to my mind. This isn’t to say that one might fall back on aphorisms such as ‘It Could Be About Anywhere,’ because it couldn’t, and it can’t, and it isn’t. But the specifics of this film’s geography aren’t of a specifically cartographic sort. This isn’t simply a documentary portrait of a small town in Ohio, for the true subject of the film is not the town itself, nor its township, but of the time that passes through the former and around the latter, and the dimensional dialect that is struck up by their conjunction. For a film with its ears so close to the ground 45365 is downright cosmic.

(After Last Season is currently enjoying a presumably one-week release through Cinemark theaters. Showtimes, locations and the infamous trailer can be found at the official website.)

I still don’t know that I buy it.

Which is to say that, having driven 90 minutes to see Mark Region’s After Last Season at a Cinemark megaplex in the middle of the desert, having uttered the title at the box office with the same nervousness by which young men of old might have purchased a ticket to their first adult film, having sat down in the theater, having watched all 93 minutes of the film itself projected on 35mm and then driving 90 miles back home afterward, I feel no more convinced that it’s real than I did when I first watched (and watched and watched) the trailer after it surfaced online three months ago. The cards just don’t line up.

Let me suspend disbelief for a moment, though, and attempt to describe the film. After Last Season is as bad as it looks, but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. It is not at all unlike its trailer, in that it primarily consists of a series of choices that seem to have been made entirely arbitrarily, in service of a plot that is buried in non sequitur. To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide. The most direct example (even moreso than the cardboard MRI scanner) occurs when a character reads a story in the newspaper - and that newspaper is represented by a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, fresh from the inkjet printer, upon which has been printed the words ‘Morning News.’

The same goes for the performances, the sets, the special effects (which, in spite of whatever the credits might state, did not require the work of two effects houses), which are all symbols standing in place of real performances, real special effects, real physical space. And space! The film is obsessed with geography, without ever quite managing to establish it. The characters are constantly mapping out vague spatial boundaries. Everything is next to something else; nothing is ever empirical or definite. “I’ve never been to that town, but I’ve been through it” is one of the famous lines from the trailer, to which the film ads such bon mots as “is that the room in the middle of the hallway?’” and “we’re in the room next to the meeting room” and “we have another room next to the living room.” That last one is, in fact, the final line of the movie. Cut to black.

It’s all too easy to list off the film’s offenses against form and style: the headroom-obsessed compositions, the egregiously directional lighting, the sound that has been run through far too many noise-removal filters, the CGI that is clearly the work of someone who’s spent approximately one afternoon learning how to use Maya, the production design that consists primarily of blank pieces of paper taped obsessively to walls (there are three creative fetishes in the picture, and they are spatial adjacency, headroom and paper on walls). And the editing, which takes the concept of insert shots to a decidedly abstract level. These are all things that can be ascertained from the trailer; the full length picture simply provides them in greater quantity. In so much as the trailer is hilarious, so is the film. It’s ineptitude is staggering, in long form and short.

But in long form it’s also stultifying, and after watching it, I felt a discontent growing inversely to the expecations I’d entered the theater with. The film’s badness, I realized, is not fun. I went home and re-read Susan Sontag’s Notes On Camp, and found that not a single one of her famous line items could be applied to the film. “The essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails,” she writes of her subject matter, adding previously that “pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.” But those are mere means, and while After Last Season might seem to prescribe to them, it falls so far short of the necessary ends of camp that those of us who drove one, two, seven hours to see the film upon its release (an odyssey which is itself camp) were fated to diminishing return. This is not a self-sustaining phenomenon, on which midnight audiences can thrive. This is not a work of wretched, wondrous egomania, such as Tommy Wissau’s The Room. The film is academically fascinating, particularly when studied under the circumstances by which it is playing out on this national stage, and Sontag could certainly have written at great length about it and the conditions it represents; but it is not Camp. And so, in the wake of that fading hope, and in light of the absence of information about the work itself, all we’re left with is same giant question mark that preceded the film. Why?

A sign of artistic growth is that one learns from one’s mistakes and moves on. Let’s assume that Mark Region, whoever he is, is incapable of such a perspective, and that he also possesses the funds necessary to strike 35mm prints, have the film rated by the MPAA and four-wall a five-city release. If he is passionate enough about his work to take it this far, why the complete lack of promotional presence? He has done no press, save for one half-interview at the time of the trailer’s release. He has no presence online. There’s very little evidence that he actually exists, and while this artistic hermitage is admirable, it’s also highly suspect. I can’t bring myself to believe that the ego required to push a film of this caliber to this level of fruition would let that same film speak entirely for itself. There is purity of intent, and then there’s naivete, and for this film to exist on the level on which it’s being presented to us, one must believe that they can work in perfect conjunction. I’m not certain that I can. I don’t necessarily believe that it’s a marketing ruse; I don’t necessarily believe that it’s a practical joke. I don’t know that it’s not the sincere work a severely misguided individual. After Last Season has shed no further light on its own extancy, and hence I have only my experience as a filmmaker, my basic understanding of human psychology and my gut to tell me that something, something, is amiss.

— David Lowery

(Creative Nonfiction recently premiered at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. For more information, and to view the trailer, visit the official website.)

What is it about the sexualization of English professors that irks me so? I think of the cliche of the sturdy, masculine educator bewitching his female pupils with silver-tongued erudition on the works of Percy and D.H Lawrence and I wonder: what of their poor colleagues, the mathematics professors? Can’t fractal equations be as erotically stimulating as the breakdown of Pyrrhic verse? The answer, as any English major knows, is not likely—there’s little that can so easily compound the psychological dynamics between teacher and student like the aphrodisiacal qualities of language—but it was nonetheless a gust of fresh air to see Lena Dunham so precisely pierce this stereotype in her debut feature, Creative Nonfiction. Dunham stars in the film as Ella, a freshman student at an unnamed Midwestern college, who is working on a screenplay for a creative writing class that, in its early stages, could be synopsized by at least three sentences of this very paragraph.

To say that Dunham pierces it isn’t to suggest that she lampoons it as much as she gets over it. The theme and content of this work-in-progress, dramatized in brief 16mm flashes, is a small part of the otherwise digital film, but it’s an important one: Dunham has commented in interviews that it is an actual screenplay she’d been writing, that it was not turning out, and that this creative failure, in concert with her own collegiate romantic woes, begot the film. It’s often said that all writers have so many bad works in them, and that they just have to write their way through them; Dunham, however, has taken a meta-shortcut with Creative Nonfiction, and emerged with a film that is startlingly, hilariously self-aware of its own origins. The scene where her English professor accurately shreds her screenplay is a masterpiece of comic juxtaposition: two shots, one of the professor delivering his critique (”either this cabin is very remote, or this young woman is pretty stupid”) and one of Ella returning home afterwards, which in conjunction not only deliver a big laugh but pinpoint exactly what Dunham’s intentions are, and how she arrived at them.

Those intentions are modest; this is a film about the academic experience of a liberal arts education, and all the confusion and heartbreak that go hand in hand with enlightenment. It’s not a particularly new subject, but what Dunham brings to it is an uncanny verisimilitude, thanks largely to the terrific performances of her unprofessional cast, and her familiarity with their milieu, and also to her decision to photograph them in as haphazard a manner possible. The film looks like it was shot using the video function of a Sony Cybershot camera, and the actors frequently seem aware that one of their peers is pointing a recording device at them. It looks bad, in a general sense, like a YouTube video, but it serves the subject matter so well that I can’t imagine a more traditional style serving the film half as well. It feels accurate in a way that the 16mm sequences do not, which is why they’re slammed up against each other. The 16mm sequences, which for all intents and purposes are technically acceptable, feel like an awkward student film; the rest of the movie, which could scarcely be called cinematic, handily approximates that term anyway because it feels like a real movie.

This style also facilitates Dunham’s deadpan comic timing, which turns practically every other cut into a punchline of deflated expectations. Well, perhaps that’s overstating things; the film is indeed exceedingly funny, and sometimes in a formal manner, but what Dunham particularly excels in is teasing out the awkward humor after she delivers those punchlines, and building on that humor, and weaving it into more emotionally treacherous territory. In one sustained scene, there’s a joke about a dead father that quickly becomes deadly serious, even while the characters are laughing about it, and then many minutes and one major development later, it pops up again, a ba-dum-dum-ching to a moment that is actually quite sad.

The plot itself is rife with treachery—what college experience isn’t? To begin with, Ella is sharing her bed with Chris (David Unger), a friend who may or may not be platonic. Their relationship is a mess of mixed signals, which seems to suit him just fine. She’s not sure where either of them stand—she might like him, but only if he likes her—but that’s beside the point, because he’s already shown enough interest to make her think that maybe he’ll be the one she gives it up to, which is itself almost as much a creative decision as it is a personal one. Her screenplay is stuck in a rut, and sex, as it always does, seems like just the thing to clear the air and, hey, maybe this dude does like her after all. She vents her frustrations to her girlfriends, does laundry, listens to a fellow student try to explain that an awkward image in one of her poems is justified because it’s based in reality (and realize, even as she’s saying this, that she’s incorrect). You write what you know, and what Dunham seems to have realized somewhere between starting that bad screenplay and finishing this wonderful film is that sometimes it takes a long time to figure out just what it is you know.

— David Lowery

(In conjunction with the upcoming theatrical release of Goodbye Solo, MoMA has selected Ramin Bahrani for their “Filmmaker in Focus” program, running Wednesday, March 4th, through Saturday, March 7th. Or if you don’t live in NYC, you can buy Man Push Cart and Chop Shop at Amazon.)

The final shot of Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop is a doozy. Fulfilling a first act set-up in which a mechanic gives the young hero Alejandro (Alejandro Planco) a handful of pigeon feed, the shot moves from the boy, scattering seeds on the concrete, to a raft of birds gliding down to the concrete, where they feast at his feet. The articulation between the camera and the pigeons has an almost preternatural grace, and the magic is sustained even as Ale’s sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzalez) steps forward, reaching out, trying to touch one of the birds. It flutters away, and on the beat of the wings Bahrani cuts to black. The film is over.

Bahrani spent about a month preparing for this shot, which may suggest that it is of greater import to the film than it is. Suffice to say, I’m spoiling nothing of Chop Shop by revealing the contents of this scene, aside from the fact that it comes at the very end. Narratively, it is entirely arbitrary; it could have occurred anywhere else in the film and would have been just as impressive unto itself; coming as it does at the end, it functions as a grace note, pat and satisfactory. It gives the film a hopeful conclusion. It gives us a happy ending, while offering nothing for the characters but a brief respite from their scrapped-together lives.

What is it about faunal signifiers that justifies their use as transitive narrative elements? I’m thinking, to name some recent examples, of the stag in The Queen, or the horses in Michael Clayton. They are reprieves. They represent our id, our unencumbered spirit; they exist in aboriginal mythology and pop psychology alike, suggesting freedom or newfound sense of self. Bahrani’s film, though, is in the Neo Realist tradition, and the serenity of the moment belies the circumstances in which it occurs. There is no closure to it, and thus it is an empty gesture—albeit a momentarily comforting one.

I focus on this ending because it is to what I have traced my vague dissatisfaction with a film that is otherwise unimpeachable. It’s not that it ends poorly; it is that it does not end. Suffice to say, what does provide a form of meta-closure is the knowledge that the world in which Chop Shop takes place may not exist for much longer. And what a world it is! An entire third world country of wreckage, tucked away behind Shea Stadium in Willets Point, Queens. It’s known as the Iron Triangle, and it is a mess of automotive refuse that’s been hammered into walls and corridors and corrugated tenements. There are no sewers here, and on rainy days the entire place floods; the rest of the time, a torrent of cars fills its dusty causeway, waiting their turn to be tuned up, stripped down, repaired with parts of uncertain origin. It’s a dirty, grimy little empire, every bit as convoluted as De Sica’s Rome; and like Rome in centuries past, it’ll soon be paved over. A plan for major redevelopments is currently on Mayor Bloomberg’s table; if it goes forward, this blight on the landscape will disappear—and so too will people’s jobs, their homes, the infrastructure of their lives. Humans have the ability to wring the best out of any circumstance, and it’s precisely that tenacity which Bahrani excels in capturing.

And he does so with no shortage of lyricism. He doesn’t need birds to find poetry in the mire of everyday existence, and indeed, much of the film is made up of grace notes similar to that last shot—exquisite little moments, little pinpricks of life, isolated from the sweat and the soot. At the center of these is twelve year-old Alejandro, a little boy who is, more or less, playing himself. Ale (as he’s usually called) hustles his way around the Triangle, selling candy and bootleg DVDs on subways and spends the rest of his time working for the mechanic who lets him hole up in his shop. His parents, or lack thereof, are never mentioned; nor is the school that he’s long since stopped attending. He’s a true denizen of this world, and he’s setting himself up for a life that’s structured entirely around its principals. He’s tough—not as tough as he thinks he is, perhaps, but well on his way to getting there.

Then one day his sister Isamar arrives, fresh from juvenile hall. Sixteen years old, beautiful, her head in the clouds. More naive than Ale, but perhaps a littler more world-weary. She moves into his little shanty of a room, and almost immediately they begin to make plans, to dream big. Ale’s friend Carlos tells him about an old catering truck in one of the junk yards, and Ale decides that they should buy it and open up a sandwich shop. He wants to provide for his sister; as he sees it, she’s his responsibility, and her presence casts his perception of himself into clearer relief. He gives no credence to their difference in age. He’s her doting brother, her de facto father, her boss, her business partner. He’s in charge, and it is both frustrating and confusing to him when she ignores his authority and runs off to do the things that sixteen-year-old girls do.

That they both sleep in the same bed, that Ale is still on the cusp of puberty while Isamar is a little girl with a woman’s body, adds another troubling layer to their relationship. Bahrani doesn’t remark upon this, but it is an implicit fact which underscores everything that happens in the film—in particular, Ale’s discovery that Isamar has been supplementing their income through prostitution. This moment of realization is, in essence, one of emasculation for a character who’s masculinity was already a facade. This tough little boy is suddenly a little boy again, and the gross impropriety of his situation is suddenly exposed. Which certainly isn’t to say that Bahrani is passing judgment. Like Kiarostami, like Bresson (sometimes) and De Sica, his ball is in his characters’ court; he gives action and consequence unbiased consideration, and it’s up to the audience to imply the right and the wrong of it.

As a sociological model, though, Ale’s iteration of the American dream is unsustainable; as a psychological version of the same, he’s headed for disaster, and it is these twin inevitabilities that render the film’s denouement so surprisingly inconsequential. We have a clear idea of where these kids are headed, but the film doesn’t quite acknowledge it. As sensitive and refined as it’s been up to this point, there’s some form of disconnect there. A flock of pigeons lighting down from on high might provide a moment of aesthetic distraction, but they’re not going to even the score. Then again, in the finite world in which these characters exist, perhaps a moment’s distraction is all they can hope for. As of this writing, the plan for redevelopment in Willets’ Point is well on its way to execution. If there are kids like Ale and Isamar living amidst the industrial squalor there—and I don’t for a second doubt that there are—they’re about to undergo a paradigm shift. In that sense, Bahrani has crafted an impeccable testament to life on an implicit precipice; he cuts to black just before they fall.

— David Lowery

Neuroses endear themselves to genre; the format provides a slew of metaphoric hooks on which to hang one’s troubles, back alley brick walls on which to project one’s fears, dirty sheets and barren wastelands upon which to expend the seed of one’s frustration. Genre provides safe distance to vent, to delve, to shake one’s literary fist without having to stand up to those convictions. They are there if the audience wants to see them; otherwise, they make for a good, or perhaps merely passable, bit of yarn.

This is the perspective from which Carson Mell’s Field Notes From Dimension X has been conceived. The four-minute short film, which played at Sundance this past January, is less a science fiction tale than an outline of what science fiction can facilitate; this is pulp-writing as confessional. The deep loneliness of the narration, the sexual frustration, the self-loathing, all told with simple, eloquent prose—Mell’s film seems like something of the condensed version of a great short story Philip K. Dick never wrote. When the narrator speaks of masturbating against alien sunsets, closing his eyes and imagining the smell of women as “sad nudity blooms in the dark,” the context vanishes and all we’re listening to is a bitter man, upset by life but with just enough perspective to find some degree of poetry in it (it’s almost too easy to overlook the title card, which displays not an astronaut but a man with a bottle tipped to his lips).

What’s particularly fascinating is that this authorial voice belongs not to Mell—at least not directly—but to another of his creations. This is an extension of The Writer, one of Mell’s previous shorts, in which fictional pulp writer Lucas Reed waxes with gutter eloquence about the autobiographical extent of his work. “You can bet your goddamn bottom dollar,” he says, “that any time some space dude’s off on some stupid intergalactic star center getting tortured, I’m off in a hotel room, the wind’s blowing outside and some bitch has broken my heart.” Mell pokes a little bit of fun at this author’s perceived profundity, but doesn’t undercut what he has to say; likewise, Field Notes From Dimension X is played straightforward and sober, in spite of its grade-B setting, and in its naked metaphor Mell has written something that works both on its own terms and as commentary on that which it represents.

Mell writes with the clipped succinctness of a great short fiction author—he knows his work need not extend beyond itself. And indeed, he is a terrific writer; he’s had work published in McSweeney’s, and Chonto, another masterful short film, has recently been expanded into a novel. His films would almost work as radio plays, as bizarro episodes of This American Life, if they weren’t so beautifully tied to their visuals. Field Notes From Dimension X, like all of Mell’s other short work, is animated, with brush and ink illustrations set against photographic backgrounds. It’s disarmingly simple; it almost seems crude at first glance, until the ebb and flow of the imagery falls into line with the storytelling. There’s a little bit of Chuck Burns to his style, maybe a little bit of R. Crumb; but this is a film, not a comic book, and as such all comparisons fall aside. This is a beautifully original piece of work.

— David Lowery

(Goliath is now available on DVD. Visit the film’s official website to watch the trailer and learn more.)

There is a shot in David and Nathan Zellner’s Goliath that lasts for about the same duration as most of the short films that made the fraternal duo so beloved on the festival circuit, and which, on its very own, lifts this feature from the cradle of absurdity in which those films kicked and screamed and carries it to a level of comedy so deadpan that it is practically stoic. The shot involves the nameless, hapless male protagonist meeting his wife at her lawyer’s office to sign off on their divorce. To describe the scene any further would be to spoil the gag, which is itself a distillation of a joke into its most basic elements. On its own, this moment could be considered a study in the chemical components of a comic set-piece; coming as it does roughly at the mid-point of the story, it serves as a pivot point for a film that swings from farce into ever-deepening levels of discomfit.

Fans of the Zellners’ short films will find much that’s familiar here: the Austin locale, the lovely photography by Jim Eastburn, the Zellners themselves in starring roles. What some may not realize is that this is not, in fact, the brothers’ first feature film; in the late 90s they made an oddball 16mm comedy called Plastic Utopia, which I once upon a time had the pleasure of seeing projected with the reels out of order. This was followed by Frontier (unseen by me), a science-fiction fable shot entirely in a made-up language of Bulbovian. Then came the short films, which became perennial mainstays in the Sundance lineup and which, over the course of four or five years, saw their helmers’ idiosyncratic voices break, their funny bones grow into maturity. Their work became instantly recognizable and unqualifiably unique—not to mention increasingly mordant. A strange, bitter sensibility was stirring in even their goofiest of outings, and it is this sense of anti-pathos that blooms into full blown bittersweet misanthropy in Goliath. Their observant style calls to mind the old cinematographers’ adage about lens lengths: what’s a tragedy in close-up becomes comedy in a wide shot. Suffice to say, this is a film with a lot of wide shots.

The film begins as an account of a mid-life crisis, in which the protagonist (David Zellner) loses the two things that make him a man: his wife, who leaves him, and his livelihood, from which he’s demoted. He’s quite the sad-sack; he goes home at night, eats permanently shrink-wrapped microwave meals, watches internet porn, and tries to pretend that someone might care that he’s smoking indoors. Already emasculated, he discovers one evening that his one remaining point of validation—his beloved cat Goliath—is missing. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” he calls out, holding the electric can opener out the window, sending a warm, beckoning whir into the night air that will go unanswered.

And so the film ostensibly becomes the story of a man on a mission (and, resultantly, turns into an acute study of Freudian transference). The Zellners, consciously or not, understand how a pet can change one’s perception of a person. Just as one can move an audience to tears by wringing a puppy’s neck, so too can one create great sympathy for an unlikable character simply by showing him doting on his beloved kitty. Hence, they’ve given themselves free range to make their hero a loser through and through; furthermore, unlike other cinematic losers before him, he isn’t put-upon. He’s brought his misfortunes down upon himself (as exemplified in a horrifyingly hilarious scene in which he angrily pits his own infidelities against his wife’s). He’s sad, pathetic, and nearly entirely unsympathetic, but because he loves Goliath, we like him, relate to him. We’d laugh with him, not at him—except that he never actually laughs, and so we’re left stranded mid-chuckle.

That’s how the humor in the film works. It exists in an uncharted grey zone, on its own wavelength, which is why the shot I described in the first paragraph is both hilarious and rather sad. Half the shot is a build-up to a joke, and the other half deals with the substantial fallout, and throughout it all the Zellners maintain the same, steadfast tone. It takes guts to pull off a shot like that. The same goes for the ensuing last act of the film, in which, after learning the truth about Goliath’s fate, our hero fashions his life’s myriad woes into a righteous anger and sets out on a mission of vengeance. What happens at the climax of the film occurs on a slippery slope of truly disturbing behavior, but because the Zellners approach it from the same rigorous perspective as the rest of the film, the morality of the situation places distant third to the emotional veracity of the moment, which itself is compacted by its overall absurdity. It’s not exactly safe to laugh, but it’s pretty hard not to.

— David Lowery

Browsing the listener reviews at the iTunes music store is a good way to gauge the sort of response the album (only his third in over twenty years) drew. Likewise, Stephen Kijak provides a fine point of entry with his documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, which premiered at film festivals in 2006 to coincide with the release of the record but is only now enjoying a theatrical bow. Produced by David Bowie (who appears in the film along with other contemporary Walker devotees), the film chronicles its subject’s rise as part of the rock n’ roll trio The Walker Brothers, whose fame temporarily eclipsed The Beatles in the late ’60s. A handsome, moody crooner with a rich, velvety baritone, Walker was an unlikely teen icon and, like Brian Wilson, found in pop stardom a catalyst for pushing the boundaries of his form.

Unlike Wilson, he never succumbed to personal demons—and indeed, his pop music, for all its soulfulness, had a sense of cool detachment to it, which would give way to the increasingly academic strains of his solo work. This isn’t to say that said solo work isn’t impassioned; the sturdy thrill of singles like “20 Century Man” never fades, nor does the grandiloquent comic rush of “Jackie.” But Walker’s recordings kept pace with his encompassing study of contemporary and classical music, and that sense of bravado in his early solo work was gradually supplanted by a different utilization of the same fervor. That fervor did not plateau. By the time The Drift was released, he was making music that demanded to be listened to, rather than merely heard.

Which is precisely why it’s so helpful to see it as well. For all its biographical accounting, 30 Century Man is at its best when Kijak follows Walker into the studio to observe the process behind The Drift. All that noise takes on new meaning when one watches how it was constructed. Walker’s approach to recording is fascinating; he’s not a musical deconstructionist, but he’s constantly re-evaluating the means by which certain sounds, certain feelings, might be approximated. Most memorably, he hangs a huge side of beef in front of the mic and wails upon it with his fists; the resulting sound provides the percussion track to “Clara,” which, apropos, is a fifteen-minute operetta about the suicide of Mussolini’s mistress.

It’s a nice bonus, then, to discover that such a song’s author is, at least outwardly, neither a soporific artiste nor a myopic mad scientist, but rather a congenial, funny, curious craftsman. Curious, and confidant. Watching him at work, one wants to like his music more, which makes the film the perfect gateway: it holds open all the passageways the music itself denies.

— David Lowery

(Scott Walker: 30 Century Man opens December 17th at IFC Center.)

So what exactly goes on at Independent Film Week? Let me avoid answering this question by noting that, in asking a filmmaker to cover the event, my editors here have perhaps unknowingly run the risk of entrusting their coverage to someone whose approach to the business of motion pictures might be described by some as self-sabotage; someone who might actively avoid taking meetings or even talking about his film; someone who might, on a whim and for reasons entirely unrelated, decide he needs to give up coffee one day into the week and thereby incapacitate himself with severe caffeine withdrawal symptoms. Someone who may, indeed, spend the entire first day of Independent Film Week off in Brooklyn making an independent film.

Which is exactly what I did on…

MONDAY

Technically, Independent Film Week kicked off yesterday, but my plane didn’t get in until the evening, and since I was coming off an annoying bout with the flu, I’d decided to skip the opening night party. Feeling rested and ready to take on the day, I meet up with another out-of-town friend of mine and we quickly set about shooting some pick-up scenes for a film we’ve been working on for the past few months. We continue on until 1:30, at which point I hightail it into Manhattan to pick up my badge and take part in some pre-arranged meetings which IFP had set up for Lab filmmakers. We gather in a room with lots of tables and chairs, and are given a schedule of whom we are to meet, and at what time: speed dating. The whistle blows and I sit down at my first appointment, which happens to be with independent consultant Peter Broderick, who just this morning had published on Indiewire an article entitled “Welcome To The New World Of Distribution, pt. 1.” It’s an excellent primer on the challenges and opportunities independent filmmakers face as they bring their offerings to this radically evolving marketplace. I introduce myself and he asks “So what do you have for me?”

At which point I pause and frown and reflect for a split second on the fact that I have, in fact, nothing at all. I’ve been told that I should come prepared with business cards, postcards, clips, trailers and anything other promotional items that might affix my little film in people’s periphery - but here I am, pockets empty as usual (when I was at Park City with a film this past January, I handed out handwritten business cards, which were better than nothing, and actually better than real business cards - but you get the idea). I’d honestly planned to get some of these materials ready, but I’d put it off, and put it off, and then I was sick, and then I was on the plane, and now I’m here, trying to turn this gross deficiency into a bashfully charming attribute.

I make my way thusly through the rest of these mini-meetings with sales agents (both foreign and domestic) and publicists and marketing strategists and other folks who I’m glad to have broken the ice with. The best introductions are those in which the topic of my film hardly comes up - where we just spend those ten minutes talking about other things and getting to know each other. I’ve got good feelings about some folks - good feelings which I will now studiously fact-check before I make any decisions.

I then meet up with James, my producer, and head back to another friend’s apartment to look at dailies from a short film we shot in Texas a few days ago. Lookin’ good! And after that, everyone gets ready to head to the evening’s big party - but for me, it’s back to Brooklyn to finish shooting what I started that morning. We wrap up on that around midnight, imbibe for a short while and then retire. One day down.

TUESDAY

This morning finds us at the Chelsea Cinema on 23rd Street, where a clip or trailer from each of the lab projects will be screening before an audience of various industry types. I sneak into the theater just as the lights are beginning to dim. My clip plays at about the halfway mark, and I make mental notes to myself about color correction and sound mix. It looks pretty good up on the big screen, though. Afterwards, we chat with people in the lobby. A few festival programmers, a composer. I learn later that ASCAP has sent a lot of composers to the market to network with independent filmmakers - I’ll meet several more over the next two days. The crowd disperses, and James and Adam (my other producer) and I head to Brooklyn to get some vegan pizza for lunch. Then it’s back to Manhattan, where we realize we don’t know exactly what we should do next.

Most of the folks at Independent Film Week have projects in development. They’re trying to attach producers, to find money, to build buzz, to find more money. We’re only one day removed from Black Monday, but what a nice counter to all that downtown woe to see that the hustle and bustle of this insane business we’re in is as strong as ever, and focused here to a hilt. Independent film seems to be an increasingly illogical business venture, and yet the drive to find those ever-diminishing means is stronger than ever. I’m a little bit glad that’s why I’m not here, that my movie is done and that I have no reason to push it on anyone just yet. I’m an embedded tourist here this year - but just as I’m certain that independent film will survive as both a commodity and an art form, I’m pretty sure I’ll be back here myself someday with a project whose worth I’ll by trying to impress upon all the right people. It’ll happen.

But for now…well, for now, I’m suddenly realizing I’m in the midst of that severe caffeine withdrawal. I’d gotten to a point recently where I was drinking more than one French Press of finely ground coffee a day, and I’d arbitrarily decided that I needed to give my body a break from the stuff. Perfect timing. I decide to head back to Brooklyn yet again, ostensibly to get some e-mails taken care of but really just to go to sleep, to ease my throbbing head and clenching veins. I’m out until six thirty; then it’s back on the L yet again, and over to the SXSW / Austin Film Society party. As a Texan, I need to represent. As is usually the case with Texas events, everyone and their grandmother is here. I meet some cool folks, make the rounds, chat it up, and then head out to a screening of PJ Raval’s documentary Trinidad, presented by IFP and Rooftop Films. The latter organization has quickly become one of my favorite cinematic institutions, and it’s always a joy to attend their screenings - even when I’ve misunderstood where this one is actually happening and wind up walking from the Hudson River to the East River in search of their glimmering, inflatable screen. I make it just in time for the film. Afterwards, my body drained from its sudden chemical shake-up, I pass up on the downtown karaoke party and head back home. My plan is to burn some DVDs of the film to hand out to certain people, but sleepiness prevails.

POSTSCRIPT (WEDNESDAY)

I make it until five o’clock and then get a cup of coffee. Two more days to go.

— David Lowery

(The Fall is now available on DVD. Buy it at Amazon and visit the film’s official website to watch a trailer.)

How to wax ecstatic about Tarsem Singh’s The Fall without merely praising the broad strokes of its imagery? Here is one of those rare films for which exegesis is rendered mostly moot by any one of its frames. One could, conversely, write a terrific essay on Tarsem’s previous work, The Cell, simply because that film’s high-concept Hollywood script was at such contentious odds with his rather wondrous execution of it. It was a turgid, overcomplicated riff on The Silence Of The Lambs from which the director managed, on a purely visual level, to extract something primally effective. Here, though, he’s working from his own story, and one more suited to the scope of his lens; he understands that a film composed of one iconic image after another doesn’t need anything more complex than archetypes to function as a satisfying yarn.

And so we have the tale of an unlikely group of heroes seeking vengeance against a villain, and hoping to rescue a princess in the process. This villain is evil, and that’s all we’re told and all we need to know; the heroes, by virtue of their very opposition to him, are good. And between the chief protagonist and the princess who almost seems an afterthought, we accept that true love exists—not because we’re given any demonstrative display of such, but because that’s just how it goes in a story like this. The functional mechanics of the story work precisely because they don’t push past these most basic levels of narrative; it’s a fairy tale composed of the oldest and barest of bones, and upon this skeleton Tarsem has draped an embarrassment of ocular riches, and these two modes compliment each other in frequently spectacular fashion.

There are images here that are almost too rich to process, too vivid to comprehend, and so we’re forced to gloss over them, to skip to the next one. What makes this mode of filmmaking unique is that its impact is based on the singularity of these images, rather than their juxtaposition. The film flows, it moves forward, it progresses from one shot to the next with grace and ease and, especially towards the end, no shortage of emotion; but those shots individually evoke such wonderment that they simultaneously exist on their own terms. In this respect, The Fall harkens all the way back to the early days of cinema, when a single flickering image of a moving train sent audiences bolting out of its way. Here we get a man swimming with an elephant, a tree in the desert exploding in flame, figures unfolding in bold and vibrant relief against landscapes that seem not of this earth (but, as the production notes assure us, very much are). That Tarsem’s images represent the imaginary rather than the Barthian verisimilitude of the earliest zoetropes, makes no difference. This is a film whose power comes almost entirely from cinema’s base capacity for representation.

The Fall is tied to silent cinema in another, more overt fashion: there’s a primary narrative entirely separate from the fairy tale, in which a paralyzed stunt man (Lee Pace) makes friends with a little girl named Alexandria (Catinka Untaru) convalescing at the same Southern California hospital. It is he who spins this parallel fable, populated, Wizard Of Oz-style, with the fanciful equivalents of their hospital compatriots, and constructed with an ulterior motive that isn’t too hard to figure out but which manages to sneak up and surprise us nonetheless. The finale, in which the two storylines tragically dovetail, is unexpectedly wrenching. The image of birds fluttering from a dying man’s screaming mouth is one I’ll never forget, and it is matched squarely by Alexandria’s reaction to it.

Much has been made of young Catinka Untaru’s performance, and indeed, it’s the one aspect of the film that is more wondrous than the visuals. As the story goes, it’s not a performance at all; she didn’t know she was acting, and was merely responding to what everyone else was doing in the scene. She brings a vitality, a sense of unpredictability, a roughness that is a welcome counter to the gilded prosceniums she moves through. And then, at the very end, Tarsem gives the entire film over to her. As a montage of famous silent film clips unroll on screen, we hear Alexandria describing them ecstatically, tying them into the story of a movie she didn’t know was a movie, trying to find the words in a language she doesn’t even speak to explain what has happened and is happening and will happen hence, capturing in her childish exuberance just what makes movies so magical in the first place. It’s a bold move on Tarsem’s part, to tie his film so steadfastly to the history of the motion picture, to turn it into a love letter to cinema at large; but what doesn’t hold up in theory melts all doubts once it’s up there on the big screen, filling that space, turning this torrent of grandiloquent imagery into a celebration of the very means by which it’s been brought to life.

— David Lowery