I started writing this blog entry on September 17, while sitting by the waterfront at FDR Drive and East 23rd Street in New York City. I was attending IFP's Independent Film Week, and an outdoor film screening was about to begin, of excerpts from various feature films that indie filmmakers were making through the organization. I've been attending this conference for several years in a row, and while I continue to find its panels and lectures to be informative, I've found that having the opportunity to network with other filmmakers is even more beneficial.
This year I got to meet one-on-one with a respected advisor in the field of independent filmmaking and self-distribution, who acknowledged the steps I'd taken so far – a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog, a YouTube trailer – and gave advice on additional steps to take.
Fishing for constructive criticism, I asked if there was anything that I was currently doing wrong. With a slightly pained expression, she brought up this very blog, saying that it read more like a diary than a film production blog. I couldn't really argue with this. Much of the past year has been slow behind-the-scenes, so I took to writing about other things that crossed my mind – movies, culture, philosophy. For me, though, these topics were at least indirectly related to the themes of the movie, or to experiences that had influenced its creation.
In the world of indie film and self-distribution, I've repeatedly heard two pieces of advice which seem to contradict each other. One is that a filmmaker should concentrate on filmmaking, and leave the publicity and marketing to someone else. The other is that you, as a filmmaker, know your film better than anyone else and that therefore only you truly know how to market it.
For me it's been tricky because Saberfrog is a warped comedy that resulted from the uneasy mental state I was in when I wrote and directed it. In other words, Saberfrog is a personal film. And in order to truly understand the film and its potential audience, I had to understand the fool who made it.
About a week before going to the IFP conference, I made a somewhat shorter trip out of town to discuss my upcoming screening tour at a meeting of the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers. During my Q&A, I was asked: “What did you learn about yourself while making the film?” That was a pretty profound question, which I don't think I quite managed to answer, even after several years spent nurturing this nutty project.
I think the answer lies with something that John Karyus said when I interviewed him for a promotional video. I asked him who he thought the target audience was for Saberfrog, and he said, in part: “People who like more than one thing.”
To some degree, he was referring to the film's combination of elements from different genres, saying that it would appeal to people who like both character-based drama and B-grade horror movies. I thought that was an insightful statement, but I also think it runs deeper than either of us realized at the time.
One of the themes in Saberfrog is the tension between following your heart and following your conscience, between being a fulfilled person and being a moral person, between being a child-at-heart and being a responsible adult. Most people seem to believe that only one of those two paths is the right one, and that the other is false and delusional. But I guess I'm a yin-and-yang kind of guy, because I'm only truly happy when I'm fulfilled in both areas. I think it's important to do what pleases you, but I also think it's character-building to do the things that you don't feel like doing, or don't think you're good at.
A lot of people don't seem to think like that. The Internet age is all about niches and cliques, and finding the community of people just like you while shunning (or trolling) everyone else. Many people are happy to belong to a clique, whether it's based on politics or music or what have you.
But I've never happily belonged to any one clique. They each have their different prejudices, which go unchallenged if you only fraternize with people just like you.
Maybe you know the feeling of not quite belonging in any one place, to any one group. You might be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. You might be a Christian Goth, or a small-government atheist, or a Black Republican, or something else entirely that doesn't even have a name yet.
In fact, that's how every movement starts. Someone sees things differently. Someone says and does the things that no one has thought to say or do before, but which seem completely obvious afterward. Or someone says and does the things that no one else dares to do, because it seems so against the grain … and once they do, it becomes clear that other people secretly felt the same way and were just waiting for someone else to say it out loud.
Not everyone starts a movement, but I'm sure there are many restless souls out there who don't accept the shortcuts and easy answers that other people are content with.
So if you care more about seeking answers than following rules ... then this film is for you. This film is definitely for you.
And if you like foul-mouthed comedy, the movie has that too.
So come see Saberfrog.
How's that, Sheri?
Sunday, September 30 - Hamden, Connecticut. The Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St, 3 pm.
Monday, October 1 - Baltimore, Maryland. No screening scheduled, but I'll be in town!
Tuesday, October 2 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave, 8 pm.
Sunday, October 7 - Cleveland, Ohio. Cedar Lee Theatre, 2163 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, 2 pm.
Thursday, October 11 - Buffalo, New York. Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave, 8 pm.
Saturday, October 13 - Toronto, Ontario. CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave, 8 pm.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Saberfrog Road Trip – Tour Dates!
An idea came to me one day, for a movie that I had to make. A story about a guy named Josh, who goes on a road trip across several cities, to find old friends and recover his own past.
I thought I'd left my filmmaking dreams behind me, but this story came from my soul and demanded to be made. It would be full of comedy and drama and weirdness and deepness.
I got the film made, and the film had some showings in Rochester and Buffalo (the two cities in which it was filmed) and it got into a couple of small local festivals. But the demands of normal life could only be kept at bay for so long, and the film was sidelined once more. For a while.
But you can't make a movie just to leave it on a shelf. Films are meant to be seen, and shown. And I feel a need to complete the journey I began.
So I'm re-enacting the journey that Josh takes in the film. I'm going from Connecticut to Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Buffalo to Toronto. Along the way, I'm going to show the film, talk to people, make new friends, and come home with a record (and a video diary) about the experience.
Sunday, September 30 - Hamden, Connecticut. The Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St, 3 pm.
Monday, October 1 - Baltimore, Maryland. No screening scheduled, but I'll be in town!
Tuesday, October 2 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave, 8 pm.
Sunday, October 7 - Cleveland, Ohio. Cedar Lee Theatre, 2163 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, 2 pm.
Thursday, October 11 - Buffalo, New York. Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave, 8 pm.
Saturday, October 13 - Toronto, Ontario. CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave, 8 pm.
So if you're in one of those cities this fall, I hope to see you, and I hope you enjoy the movie!
I thought I'd left my filmmaking dreams behind me, but this story came from my soul and demanded to be made. It would be full of comedy and drama and weirdness and deepness.
I got the film made, and the film had some showings in Rochester and Buffalo (the two cities in which it was filmed) and it got into a couple of small local festivals. But the demands of normal life could only be kept at bay for so long, and the film was sidelined once more. For a while.
But you can't make a movie just to leave it on a shelf. Films are meant to be seen, and shown. And I feel a need to complete the journey I began.
So I'm re-enacting the journey that Josh takes in the film. I'm going from Connecticut to Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Buffalo to Toronto. Along the way, I'm going to show the film, talk to people, make new friends, and come home with a record (and a video diary) about the experience.
Sunday, September 30 - Hamden, Connecticut. The Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St, 3 pm.
Monday, October 1 - Baltimore, Maryland. No screening scheduled, but I'll be in town!
Tuesday, October 2 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave, 8 pm.
Sunday, October 7 - Cleveland, Ohio. Cedar Lee Theatre, 2163 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, 2 pm.
Thursday, October 11 - Buffalo, New York. Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave, 8 pm.
Saturday, October 13 - Toronto, Ontario. CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave, 8 pm.
So if you're in one of those cities this fall, I hope to see you, and I hope you enjoy the movie!
Monday, August 27, 2012
Me and my big mouth, huh?
It's been a frantic few months since my last post, when I boasted about being back in the saddle. Of course, my day job and personal stuff ended up occupying my time and energy. Well, it sort of gave me time to think about some bigger issues.
When urgent priorities need to be dealt with, I tend to get very single-minded and deny myself the little pleasures in life. I'm starting to realize that this is not the best coping strategy, and that one needs these little perks and pick-me-ups in order to stay balanced. So I've been letting myself go to the movies – particularly independent movies – a little more often lately.
On August 16 I drove to Buffalo for an animation festival in Buffalo River Fest Park, hosted by the fine folks from Squeaky Wheel. It was a good mix of comedies, dramas and experimental work, and it also reminded me how much I love seeing films in non-traditional venues, especially outdoors on a nice night.
This past Sunday, I saw a couple of the films in Project 5, the Little Theatre's mini-festival of films in limited release. The Color Wheel was a smartmouthed comedy-drama about the dysfunctional relationship between a struggling twentysomething actress and her slacker brother. It was shot on old-school grainy black-and-white film, which made it seem like a nostalgic throwback to films like Clerks and Stranger Than Paradise ... but with the more fluid shooting style of a modern movie, instead of the camera being nailed to the floor in a medium shot. I can only assume that titling a black-and-white film The Color Wheel was an act of conscious irony.
There seems to be a mini-boom in indie writer-actresses recently. To the club that so far includes Brit Marling (Another Earth, Sound of My Voice) and Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) can now be added Carlen Altman, who not only plays the female lead but also co-wrote the script with Alex Ross Perry, who (it gets better) plays her brother in addition to directing the film.
I enjoyed the snarky machine-gun bickering between Altman and Perry, when I thought that it was a reflection of the strained life-long relationship between two siblings. It seemed to get a little one-note once I realized that all the other characters in the film (especially Altman's professor ex-boyfriend) talked in the exact same manner. There is also a Neil LaBute-worthy shock twist at the end that left me more disgusted than amused by these two characters. It's the kind of twist you almost expect in an indier-than-thou movie like this, despite writer-star Altman's character constantly expressing her worries about doing something cliché. Despite these quibbles, the film was funny and a breath of grungy fresh air. I enjoyed seeing a film that felt real, rather than slick and packaged.
The other Project 5 movie I saw was the Canadian sci-fi/horror film Beyond the Black Rainbow. I've been wanting to see this one ever since a friend posted a link to the trailer, which made clear that the film was a stylistic throwback to 1983, the year in which it was set.
Imagine if Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento had teamed up in 1983 to do a remake of THX 1138, and you might have some idea what this movie is like. Artfully shot and deliberately paced, and designed with lurid reds and yellows, this is basically a film about a teenage girl trying to escape from a futuristic research lab/psych ward, with some cutaways and flashbacks depicting the Alvin Toffler-esque guru who's been trying to control her.
The film's claustrophobic setting and relatively small cast, plus its uncanny retro atmosphere (the vast sets and lurid red-and-yellow color scheme give an uncanny sense that this was really filmed in the 70s or early 80s) combine to create an overpowering feel of dread and menace.
The pacing sags a bit in the middle, and the tone of extreme melodrama had the audience openly laughing at some points. A 1966 flashback, seemingly meant to provide an origin-story, left me utterly baffled (though it was gorgeously – and appropriately – shot in extreme black-and-white). A lowbrow scene with two horror-movie-victim hick campers was so hilariously out of sync with the Eurotrashy art-house tone of the rest of the movie that I genuinely don't know whether it was meant to be as funny as it was. Overall, though, I found the film mesmerizing and mind-blowing. I can't imagine how such a strange and unique film got made (and it can't possibly be as expensive as it looks), but I'm sure glad it did. And I hope to hell there's a soundtrack album of the score.
I've always liked it when indie art films and dramas have a sci-fi or fantasy element. That might be my favorite type of film, and I'm glad that subgenre seems to be making a comeback. I guess I have to mention Another Earth, Sound of My Voice and Ruby Sparks again, since they seem to be part of this recent trend, along with Safety Not Guaranteed and Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Speaking of sci-fi and fantasy, some weeks ago I finally joined the rest of the world and saw Joss Whedon's The Avengers. Like many people I find superhero movies a bit played out (and many indie film buffs are coming to loath them – check out almost any IndieWire article or editorial in recent months), but Whedon's film put the fun back in the genre.
It was such a relief to see a superhero movie without the “society won't accept me” subtext that's been kind of bringing the genre down recently. I get that there's a big chunk of the comic-book audience that can relate to the idea of being considered a social outcast. But if superheroes really existed, why would they be persecuted? Wouldn't they be considered pretty awesome?
Fortunately, Whedon felt the same way. His Avengers aren't being beaten down by the Man – their biggest enemies are themselves and their own egos. Well, that and the alien armada they have to fight off. As one might expect from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this was a film about characters who are empowered – which superheroes really ought to be anyway.
Seeing all of these movies – after a long drought when I wasn't keeping up with movies at all – really refreshed my love for the medium. And it also helped me to realize where my passion lies.
There seems to be kind of an internet rivalry recently between nerds and hipsters – between the kind of guys who are into sci-fi and cosplay, and the kind of guys who are into garage bands and vintage clothing. I've heard it argued that nerds are sincere in their interests, whereas hipsters are ironic and mocking and therefore fake. But I'm not sure I see it that way. Nerds seem to be sarcastic and angry a lot of the time, and highly obsessed with the pop-culture of the past (because it represents their childhood). Hipsters, on the other hand, seem to be genuinely seeking out what's new and not-yet-mainstream.
I used to feel the opposite. When I had to read Waiting for Godot back in college, I was coincidentally reading a different book for fun: Medea: Harlan's World, an unusual book that resulted from Harlan Ellison gathering some fellow SF writers together to collaborate on an invented universe, then write some short stories taking place within it. While my college-age self considered Godot a pointless exercise in ennui and defeatism, Medea represented intelligent and creative people pooling their geek talents to actually accomplish something.
The geek/nerd world and the arty/indie world each have aspects that appeal to me. As at least one columnist has put it, the two culture are yin and yang. But I used to think that the two cultures kind of overlapped. 2001: A Space Odyssey was admired by hard-SF engineering types and pot-smoking hippies alike. David Cronenberg has horror fans as well as arthouse fans. Monty Python, Doctor Who and Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy were as appealing to PBS-watching Anglophiles as they were to LARPers. Even George Lucas was influenced as much by Akira Kurosawa as by Flash Gordon.
But in recent years, the two cultures have split away from each other, like the Skeksis and Mystics in The Dark Crystal. I'd rather not have to choose between them, but if I must, then I'm afraid that these days I side more with the hipsters. Whereas nerds are largely concerned with group loyalty (everything always has to be pleasing to “the fans”), hipsters are at least trying to be individuals, and I guess that speaks to me more.
I want to have my mind blown. I want to see and read things that expand my horizons. I thought science fiction was by definition about that – Captain Kirk exploring strange new worlds, Duke Leto saying that without change, something sleeps inside us – but maybe that's changed. Nerds like to see already-established worlds and familiar characters. That's why there are so many sequels and remakes nowadays. Nerds like to explore, and master, the worlds that are created by others. Which is fine. But as a writer and filmmaker, I'd much rather create worlds and characters and stories of my own, as all of my cinematic heroes have done.
I still like superheroes and aliens and so on, but not to the exclusion of everything else that movies are capable of. It seems the media is always arbitrarily deciding where the most important culture currently lives – from the hippies in Haight-Ashbury, to the punks at CBGB's, to the grunge rockers in Seattle – and now they've settled on Comic-Con as the epicenter of everything. In a few years it might move on to something else. But in the rush to cash in on these subcultures, it can get forgotten that there are other cultures and other tastes that shouldn't be overlooked.
The blessing and curse of the Internet is that every kind of culture is out there, but you won't find it if you don't think to look for it. It's too easy to get stuck in a rut, visiting the same handful of sites and listening to the same trollish arguments, because you don't know what else is out there. You can lose touch with other cultures that could expand your horizons. It's easy to complain about the culture you find on the Internet when you haven't even looked around to see what alternatives are out there. Lord knows I'm guilty of this.
I feel like, after far too many years trapped by nostalgia, I'm finally opening my eyes to the possibilities that are available in life. Maybe I'm reaching an age where things seem clear, after years of things seeming to get foggier. You have to let go to move forward.
I've continued to work on an itinerary for my road trip of screenings, and I'm very close to announcing it. I hope to have it up before the end of the week. Stay tuned ...
When urgent priorities need to be dealt with, I tend to get very single-minded and deny myself the little pleasures in life. I'm starting to realize that this is not the best coping strategy, and that one needs these little perks and pick-me-ups in order to stay balanced. So I've been letting myself go to the movies – particularly independent movies – a little more often lately.
On August 16 I drove to Buffalo for an animation festival in Buffalo River Fest Park, hosted by the fine folks from Squeaky Wheel. It was a good mix of comedies, dramas and experimental work, and it also reminded me how much I love seeing films in non-traditional venues, especially outdoors on a nice night.
This past Sunday, I saw a couple of the films in Project 5, the Little Theatre's mini-festival of films in limited release. The Color Wheel was a smartmouthed comedy-drama about the dysfunctional relationship between a struggling twentysomething actress and her slacker brother. It was shot on old-school grainy black-and-white film, which made it seem like a nostalgic throwback to films like Clerks and Stranger Than Paradise ... but with the more fluid shooting style of a modern movie, instead of the camera being nailed to the floor in a medium shot. I can only assume that titling a black-and-white film The Color Wheel was an act of conscious irony.
There seems to be a mini-boom in indie writer-actresses recently. To the club that so far includes Brit Marling (Another Earth, Sound of My Voice) and Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) can now be added Carlen Altman, who not only plays the female lead but also co-wrote the script with Alex Ross Perry, who (it gets better) plays her brother in addition to directing the film.
I enjoyed the snarky machine-gun bickering between Altman and Perry, when I thought that it was a reflection of the strained life-long relationship between two siblings. It seemed to get a little one-note once I realized that all the other characters in the film (especially Altman's professor ex-boyfriend) talked in the exact same manner. There is also a Neil LaBute-worthy shock twist at the end that left me more disgusted than amused by these two characters. It's the kind of twist you almost expect in an indier-than-thou movie like this, despite writer-star Altman's character constantly expressing her worries about doing something cliché. Despite these quibbles, the film was funny and a breath of grungy fresh air. I enjoyed seeing a film that felt real, rather than slick and packaged.
The other Project 5 movie I saw was the Canadian sci-fi/horror film Beyond the Black Rainbow. I've been wanting to see this one ever since a friend posted a link to the trailer, which made clear that the film was a stylistic throwback to 1983, the year in which it was set.
Imagine if Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento had teamed up in 1983 to do a remake of THX 1138, and you might have some idea what this movie is like. Artfully shot and deliberately paced, and designed with lurid reds and yellows, this is basically a film about a teenage girl trying to escape from a futuristic research lab/psych ward, with some cutaways and flashbacks depicting the Alvin Toffler-esque guru who's been trying to control her.
The film's claustrophobic setting and relatively small cast, plus its uncanny retro atmosphere (the vast sets and lurid red-and-yellow color scheme give an uncanny sense that this was really filmed in the 70s or early 80s) combine to create an overpowering feel of dread and menace.
The pacing sags a bit in the middle, and the tone of extreme melodrama had the audience openly laughing at some points. A 1966 flashback, seemingly meant to provide an origin-story, left me utterly baffled (though it was gorgeously – and appropriately – shot in extreme black-and-white). A lowbrow scene with two horror-movie-victim hick campers was so hilariously out of sync with the Eurotrashy art-house tone of the rest of the movie that I genuinely don't know whether it was meant to be as funny as it was. Overall, though, I found the film mesmerizing and mind-blowing. I can't imagine how such a strange and unique film got made (and it can't possibly be as expensive as it looks), but I'm sure glad it did. And I hope to hell there's a soundtrack album of the score.
I've always liked it when indie art films and dramas have a sci-fi or fantasy element. That might be my favorite type of film, and I'm glad that subgenre seems to be making a comeback. I guess I have to mention Another Earth, Sound of My Voice and Ruby Sparks again, since they seem to be part of this recent trend, along with Safety Not Guaranteed and Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Speaking of sci-fi and fantasy, some weeks ago I finally joined the rest of the world and saw Joss Whedon's The Avengers. Like many people I find superhero movies a bit played out (and many indie film buffs are coming to loath them – check out almost any IndieWire article or editorial in recent months), but Whedon's film put the fun back in the genre.
It was such a relief to see a superhero movie without the “society won't accept me” subtext that's been kind of bringing the genre down recently. I get that there's a big chunk of the comic-book audience that can relate to the idea of being considered a social outcast. But if superheroes really existed, why would they be persecuted? Wouldn't they be considered pretty awesome?
Fortunately, Whedon felt the same way. His Avengers aren't being beaten down by the Man – their biggest enemies are themselves and their own egos. Well, that and the alien armada they have to fight off. As one might expect from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this was a film about characters who are empowered – which superheroes really ought to be anyway.
Seeing all of these movies – after a long drought when I wasn't keeping up with movies at all – really refreshed my love for the medium. And it also helped me to realize where my passion lies.
There seems to be kind of an internet rivalry recently between nerds and hipsters – between the kind of guys who are into sci-fi and cosplay, and the kind of guys who are into garage bands and vintage clothing. I've heard it argued that nerds are sincere in their interests, whereas hipsters are ironic and mocking and therefore fake. But I'm not sure I see it that way. Nerds seem to be sarcastic and angry a lot of the time, and highly obsessed with the pop-culture of the past (because it represents their childhood). Hipsters, on the other hand, seem to be genuinely seeking out what's new and not-yet-mainstream.
I used to feel the opposite. When I had to read Waiting for Godot back in college, I was coincidentally reading a different book for fun: Medea: Harlan's World, an unusual book that resulted from Harlan Ellison gathering some fellow SF writers together to collaborate on an invented universe, then write some short stories taking place within it. While my college-age self considered Godot a pointless exercise in ennui and defeatism, Medea represented intelligent and creative people pooling their geek talents to actually accomplish something.
The geek/nerd world and the arty/indie world each have aspects that appeal to me. As at least one columnist has put it, the two culture are yin and yang. But I used to think that the two cultures kind of overlapped. 2001: A Space Odyssey was admired by hard-SF engineering types and pot-smoking hippies alike. David Cronenberg has horror fans as well as arthouse fans. Monty Python, Doctor Who and Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy were as appealing to PBS-watching Anglophiles as they were to LARPers. Even George Lucas was influenced as much by Akira Kurosawa as by Flash Gordon.
But in recent years, the two cultures have split away from each other, like the Skeksis and Mystics in The Dark Crystal. I'd rather not have to choose between them, but if I must, then I'm afraid that these days I side more with the hipsters. Whereas nerds are largely concerned with group loyalty (everything always has to be pleasing to “the fans”), hipsters are at least trying to be individuals, and I guess that speaks to me more.
I want to have my mind blown. I want to see and read things that expand my horizons. I thought science fiction was by definition about that – Captain Kirk exploring strange new worlds, Duke Leto saying that without change, something sleeps inside us – but maybe that's changed. Nerds like to see already-established worlds and familiar characters. That's why there are so many sequels and remakes nowadays. Nerds like to explore, and master, the worlds that are created by others. Which is fine. But as a writer and filmmaker, I'd much rather create worlds and characters and stories of my own, as all of my cinematic heroes have done.
I still like superheroes and aliens and so on, but not to the exclusion of everything else that movies are capable of. It seems the media is always arbitrarily deciding where the most important culture currently lives – from the hippies in Haight-Ashbury, to the punks at CBGB's, to the grunge rockers in Seattle – and now they've settled on Comic-Con as the epicenter of everything. In a few years it might move on to something else. But in the rush to cash in on these subcultures, it can get forgotten that there are other cultures and other tastes that shouldn't be overlooked.
The blessing and curse of the Internet is that every kind of culture is out there, but you won't find it if you don't think to look for it. It's too easy to get stuck in a rut, visiting the same handful of sites and listening to the same trollish arguments, because you don't know what else is out there. You can lose touch with other cultures that could expand your horizons. It's easy to complain about the culture you find on the Internet when you haven't even looked around to see what alternatives are out there. Lord knows I'm guilty of this.
I feel like, after far too many years trapped by nostalgia, I'm finally opening my eyes to the possibilities that are available in life. Maybe I'm reaching an age where things seem clear, after years of things seeming to get foggier. You have to let go to move forward.
I've continued to work on an itinerary for my road trip of screenings, and I'm very close to announcing it. I hope to have it up before the end of the week. Stay tuned ...
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Resurgence
I've been trying to write a new blog post for a while, but have thrown out two previous drafts as a result of new thoughts and experiences I've had recently.
I spent much of May pitching in on the production of Adrian Esposito's film Bury My Heart With Tonawanda, a period film about a young man with Down's Syndrome finding acceptance in a Native American community. On a couple of days I was asked to fill in as cameraman, which I never considered my strongest skill as a film student, but which is now an area where I feel more confident. It's been a very ambitious project, marshaling the talents and enthusiasm of many people from inside and outside Rochester, and I look forward to seeing its completion.
I've had other personal experiences and insights in recent weeks, which I was going to yammer about at great length – in fact, there are two previous drafts of this blog entry where I did just that. However, a recent family near-emergency caused me to rethink my priorities and whether my own crap is that important or not, so I'm gonna keep it brief.
On Memorial Day weekend, I visited my friends Greg and Misha down in NYC. They were throwing a kind of mini sci-fi convention for friends at their home, and I was invited to be a Fan Guest of Honor to give a presentation on Doctor Who. The presentation was well-received, and folks asked many questions during and after the presentation. I saw how much social capital there was in having knowledge of something that other people were interested in.
It was a great experience, and a further step towards recharging my faith in fandom. I've let the especially shrill fans of a different franchise – the Franchise That Shall Not Be Named (which had its thirty-fifth anniversary last month) – blind me to the acceptance and friendliness that can still be found in the larger fan community. I've complained enough about That Franchise's possessive fanboys, and doing so probably made me just as possessive as they were, and therefore not really any better than them.
While there is much in later installments of That Franchise that I would still defend, I think part of the continuing dispute is that its plaid-clad creator keeps clinging to an older expectation of the relationship between artist and audience. Basically, he's still trying to be Stanley Kubrick in a Joss Whedon world.
Once upon a time, a person who was into the arts – either as an artist or as a fan – tended to be a loner or an outcast. When you read interviews with 1970s directors like Spielberg or Scorsese or Coppola, they always seem to talk about growing up as the weird kid with asthma who had to create a rich fantasy life to compensate for the lack of outlets in their own life. Every subcultural movement, whether political (feminism, black power) or artistic (punk, grunge, rap), comes from a similar need to transform enforced separateness into an identity. Having a personal vision and trying to get it out there – whether the mass audience understood it or not – was why people wanted to become filmmakers in the first place.
That separatist attitude may explain why most artistically acclaimed films tend to be about alienation, victimization, loneliness, lack of emotion, lack of connection with other people. Or they tend to be protest movies about how society and the masses are dumb. Critics praised these films for being challenging and uncompromising.
Science fiction, in particular, went for these kinds of separatist themes again and again. The dystopian future that only the disaffected hero has the courage to defy. The mutants who are born special in a world that fears and persecutes specialness. The androids who struggle with human concepts such as empathy. The Gandhi-like aliens who force humans to consider how cruel and careless their own society can be. All of these played to a crowd that saw themselves as being deprived, marginalized and wronged.
But the culture has changed. In spite of all the manufactured rage you find on the Internet and on talk shows, to me the world seems friendlier and more accepting than it did when I was younger. It's much easier to find a welcoming community that shares your interests. Geek culture seems a lot more cheerful now. Which is as it should be, because humans are social creatures and we are meant to interact with each other. When I was younger, I wanted to run away. But now, I want to belong.
I feel like I've come full circle on this point, because as a kid I just wanted to make cool, fun movies. Perhaps years of studying film has made the role of the defiant artist seem more alluring, to the point where the kinds of movies I used to love – that I used to aspire to make – now can seem too easy, too safe, too mainstream.
Fandom also has a certain seduction, which part of me resists. It seems safer to obsess over something outside yourself – that objectively exists in the world already, that other people already know about – than to spend time digging inside yourself to produce something new, that needs to be promoted from scratch. It's easier to be a fan than to be an artist.
I do still have a desire to see something odd and different now and again, and I do still lament the way that established brands are replacing original visions. If you want to make a movie based on a story and characters you thought of yourself, it does seem that you need to steer a bit more towards an indie hipster audience rather than a genre fan audience. But just because an audience doesn't know they'll like something doesn't mean they won't like it once they actually see it. And if expectations for movies seem more limited nowadays, expectations for other storytelling forms have continued to grow. And you can't resist that. You can't be a separatist.
All this has been on my mind as I consider where the Saberfrog journey has taken me – from writing, to production, to the steps I'm now taking to find a wider audience for it. It really seems like the main character's journey in the film has mirrored my own progression. Josh starts out as a lonely, alienated nerd in search of meaning in his life, with only his obsession with a sci-fi franchise to give him solace. By the end of his journey, he has learned some life lessons and formed a connection with other people in the wider world.
That's what I'm trying to do now. After months or years of huddling in my shell, waiting for the storm to blow over, I'm ready to venture out into the world and connect with an audience again.
I'm finally putting together an official Saberfrog DVD, which I plan to have for sale by the end of the year. I'm also looking into setting up online streaming of the film at some point. I've even managed to write the first of the novels that Josh is obsessed with (though it could still use another draft).
But on top of all that, I'm planning to take Saberfrog on the road later this year. The film is a road movie, set in several different cities (if not actually filmed there). So I've decided it would be a good idea to actually go to those places – and maybe a few others – and screen the film for an untapped audience.
It might not happen. I might run out of time, or the venues in those areas might not be affordable. And the publicity and logistics could be challenging. But I've had the idea since April, and I'm finally announcing the goal here and now. God knows I've had some dark and despairing moments with this movie, but you can't make a movie and just shelve it. It needs to be seen.
I'm back, baby. And so is Saberfrog.
I spent much of May pitching in on the production of Adrian Esposito's film Bury My Heart With Tonawanda, a period film about a young man with Down's Syndrome finding acceptance in a Native American community. On a couple of days I was asked to fill in as cameraman, which I never considered my strongest skill as a film student, but which is now an area where I feel more confident. It's been a very ambitious project, marshaling the talents and enthusiasm of many people from inside and outside Rochester, and I look forward to seeing its completion.
I've had other personal experiences and insights in recent weeks, which I was going to yammer about at great length – in fact, there are two previous drafts of this blog entry where I did just that. However, a recent family near-emergency caused me to rethink my priorities and whether my own crap is that important or not, so I'm gonna keep it brief.
On Memorial Day weekend, I visited my friends Greg and Misha down in NYC. They were throwing a kind of mini sci-fi convention for friends at their home, and I was invited to be a Fan Guest of Honor to give a presentation on Doctor Who. The presentation was well-received, and folks asked many questions during and after the presentation. I saw how much social capital there was in having knowledge of something that other people were interested in.
It was a great experience, and a further step towards recharging my faith in fandom. I've let the especially shrill fans of a different franchise – the Franchise That Shall Not Be Named (which had its thirty-fifth anniversary last month) – blind me to the acceptance and friendliness that can still be found in the larger fan community. I've complained enough about That Franchise's possessive fanboys, and doing so probably made me just as possessive as they were, and therefore not really any better than them.
While there is much in later installments of That Franchise that I would still defend, I think part of the continuing dispute is that its plaid-clad creator keeps clinging to an older expectation of the relationship between artist and audience. Basically, he's still trying to be Stanley Kubrick in a Joss Whedon world.
Once upon a time, a person who was into the arts – either as an artist or as a fan – tended to be a loner or an outcast. When you read interviews with 1970s directors like Spielberg or Scorsese or Coppola, they always seem to talk about growing up as the weird kid with asthma who had to create a rich fantasy life to compensate for the lack of outlets in their own life. Every subcultural movement, whether political (feminism, black power) or artistic (punk, grunge, rap), comes from a similar need to transform enforced separateness into an identity. Having a personal vision and trying to get it out there – whether the mass audience understood it or not – was why people wanted to become filmmakers in the first place.
That separatist attitude may explain why most artistically acclaimed films tend to be about alienation, victimization, loneliness, lack of emotion, lack of connection with other people. Or they tend to be protest movies about how society and the masses are dumb. Critics praised these films for being challenging and uncompromising.
Science fiction, in particular, went for these kinds of separatist themes again and again. The dystopian future that only the disaffected hero has the courage to defy. The mutants who are born special in a world that fears and persecutes specialness. The androids who struggle with human concepts such as empathy. The Gandhi-like aliens who force humans to consider how cruel and careless their own society can be. All of these played to a crowd that saw themselves as being deprived, marginalized and wronged.
But the culture has changed. In spite of all the manufactured rage you find on the Internet and on talk shows, to me the world seems friendlier and more accepting than it did when I was younger. It's much easier to find a welcoming community that shares your interests. Geek culture seems a lot more cheerful now. Which is as it should be, because humans are social creatures and we are meant to interact with each other. When I was younger, I wanted to run away. But now, I want to belong.
I feel like I've come full circle on this point, because as a kid I just wanted to make cool, fun movies. Perhaps years of studying film has made the role of the defiant artist seem more alluring, to the point where the kinds of movies I used to love – that I used to aspire to make – now can seem too easy, too safe, too mainstream.
Fandom also has a certain seduction, which part of me resists. It seems safer to obsess over something outside yourself – that objectively exists in the world already, that other people already know about – than to spend time digging inside yourself to produce something new, that needs to be promoted from scratch. It's easier to be a fan than to be an artist.
I do still have a desire to see something odd and different now and again, and I do still lament the way that established brands are replacing original visions. If you want to make a movie based on a story and characters you thought of yourself, it does seem that you need to steer a bit more towards an indie hipster audience rather than a genre fan audience. But just because an audience doesn't know they'll like something doesn't mean they won't like it once they actually see it. And if expectations for movies seem more limited nowadays, expectations for other storytelling forms have continued to grow. And you can't resist that. You can't be a separatist.
All this has been on my mind as I consider where the Saberfrog journey has taken me – from writing, to production, to the steps I'm now taking to find a wider audience for it. It really seems like the main character's journey in the film has mirrored my own progression. Josh starts out as a lonely, alienated nerd in search of meaning in his life, with only his obsession with a sci-fi franchise to give him solace. By the end of his journey, he has learned some life lessons and formed a connection with other people in the wider world.
That's what I'm trying to do now. After months or years of huddling in my shell, waiting for the storm to blow over, I'm ready to venture out into the world and connect with an audience again.
I'm finally putting together an official Saberfrog DVD, which I plan to have for sale by the end of the year. I'm also looking into setting up online streaming of the film at some point. I've even managed to write the first of the novels that Josh is obsessed with (though it could still use another draft).
But on top of all that, I'm planning to take Saberfrog on the road later this year. The film is a road movie, set in several different cities (if not actually filmed there). So I've decided it would be a good idea to actually go to those places – and maybe a few others – and screen the film for an untapped audience.
It might not happen. I might run out of time, or the venues in those areas might not be affordable. And the publicity and logistics could be challenging. But I've had the idea since April, and I'm finally announcing the goal here and now. God knows I've had some dark and despairing moments with this movie, but you can't make a movie and just shelve it. It needs to be seen.
I'm back, baby. And so is Saberfrog.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
RIP JN-T, 10 years later
May 2002 was a pretty crappy time for me. I'd become involved in an arts organization I will not name, thinking it would be a great experience as well as a step forward in my film career. Instead it was one of the grimmest experiences I've ever had, due to some very ugly personal politics that arose.
I'd been promoted to a high position in the organization because some officers above me were not getting along with a colleague and suddenly quit. I thought I could sort out the resulting mess, and I was wrong. I wanted to leave the organization in better shape than I found it, but by the end of May it became clear that this was not going to be possible.
By the end of that month, I found myself thinking of John Nathan-Turner. He was the producer of Doctor Who during the 1980s, and played a large role in promoting the show in the US. Doctor Who was still near the peak of its popularity when “JN-T” (as he was widely known) became producer in 1980. By 1989, the show had been canceled after years of declining ratings and viewer dissatisfaction, for which JN-T was often blamed.
I didn't know a huge amount about the show's behind-the-scenes history at that point. But from the few available books I'd read on the subject, I got a sense that JN-T stayed aboard the sinking ship longer and longer, thinking that if he fixed one more crisis he could leave the show in good health … and ended up still in charge when the show was finally canceled, thus forever taking the blame for its demise.
I decided I would learn from his example, and not make the same mistake. As much work as I had put into the organization, and as much as I cared about its continuing success, I decided to resign my post and let it become someone else's problem. I eventually cut my ties with the organization entirely. It was a painful and devastating decision, but necessary for my mental health.
I then found out that JN-T had passed away on May 1, at a relatively young age. Doctor Who Magazine published a tribute issue in memory of the former producer, and when I read it it hit me hard. The issue described at length the personal attacks JN-T had endured during his time on the show, from both colleagues and fans. Friends praised him for keeping his chin up, continuing to do his work as best he could, and not sinking to the level of his attackers.
Misery loves company, so the saying goes, and I took great consolation in reading about the ups and downs of his time on Doctor Who, feeling that I'd walked a mile in his shoes. Disturbingly, I knew that this story was seeing print only because of his passing – to some degree, I owed my sanity to the fact that this man died exactly when he did.
But I never met the man. Over the years I've seen and read interviews with various people who worked with him, and certain themes have emerged. People seemed to like him socially but not entirely trust his artistic judgment, feeling that he didn't have the greatest understanding of scripts. Worse, he apparently felt a need to be the boss at all times, and would lose his temper if he thought someone was challenging his authority. So at least some of the criticism he endured may have been justified.
JN-T craved the approval of fandom, and made a number of personal appearances at conventions and on talk shows. By putting himself so much in the spotlight, he may have made himself a target. Years before the Internet was widespread, Doctor Who was the first geek franchise to allow the fans to have a say in the show's creative content. JN-T gave fan Ian Levine the unofficial role of continuity advisor, letting him insert references to old episodes as well as select old clips for use in flashbacks. Some fan-made artwork was also used in the show itself, including lapel badges worn by the Doctor himself (as played Colin Baker in the mid-80s). It's now felt that this emphasis on fan-pleasing in-jokes was detrimental to the show. It's a cruel irony that the historians asserting this view are probably the very fans who were demanding that kind of fan service back in the 1980s.
Perhaps the lesson is that fame is fickle, and that by putting yourself in the spotlight you make yourself a target. Some people have a knee-jerk assumption that anyone who reaches a position of fame and authority couldn't possibly be flesh and blood like you and me, but must be evil robots whose sole purpose is to add to the sum of human misery.
As an aspiring young filmmaker with big dreams, it never occurred to me that becoming successful and achieving your goals could make one a target of hostility, often from people you don't even know. This has become even more true in the Internet era, when an offhand Twitter remark can provoke a firestorm and wreck a career.
A more recent Doctor Who showrunner, Steven Moffatt, said in an interview that you can try to be a pandering crowdpleaser, but if the audience isn't surprised enough then they'll get bored. Whether John Nathan-Turner learned this lesson is hard to say – by his last couple of seasons he had apparently begun to cut himself off from fandom, and the episodes from those last two years are often considered to be among his best.
So the greater lesson might be that you can't please everyone all the time, and that all you can really do is maintain your integrity and do what you think is right, even when it would be easier not to.
I'd been promoted to a high position in the organization because some officers above me were not getting along with a colleague and suddenly quit. I thought I could sort out the resulting mess, and I was wrong. I wanted to leave the organization in better shape than I found it, but by the end of May it became clear that this was not going to be possible.
By the end of that month, I found myself thinking of John Nathan-Turner. He was the producer of Doctor Who during the 1980s, and played a large role in promoting the show in the US. Doctor Who was still near the peak of its popularity when “JN-T” (as he was widely known) became producer in 1980. By 1989, the show had been canceled after years of declining ratings and viewer dissatisfaction, for which JN-T was often blamed.
I didn't know a huge amount about the show's behind-the-scenes history at that point. But from the few available books I'd read on the subject, I got a sense that JN-T stayed aboard the sinking ship longer and longer, thinking that if he fixed one more crisis he could leave the show in good health … and ended up still in charge when the show was finally canceled, thus forever taking the blame for its demise.
I decided I would learn from his example, and not make the same mistake. As much work as I had put into the organization, and as much as I cared about its continuing success, I decided to resign my post and let it become someone else's problem. I eventually cut my ties with the organization entirely. It was a painful and devastating decision, but necessary for my mental health.
I then found out that JN-T had passed away on May 1, at a relatively young age. Doctor Who Magazine published a tribute issue in memory of the former producer, and when I read it it hit me hard. The issue described at length the personal attacks JN-T had endured during his time on the show, from both colleagues and fans. Friends praised him for keeping his chin up, continuing to do his work as best he could, and not sinking to the level of his attackers.
Misery loves company, so the saying goes, and I took great consolation in reading about the ups and downs of his time on Doctor Who, feeling that I'd walked a mile in his shoes. Disturbingly, I knew that this story was seeing print only because of his passing – to some degree, I owed my sanity to the fact that this man died exactly when he did.
But I never met the man. Over the years I've seen and read interviews with various people who worked with him, and certain themes have emerged. People seemed to like him socially but not entirely trust his artistic judgment, feeling that he didn't have the greatest understanding of scripts. Worse, he apparently felt a need to be the boss at all times, and would lose his temper if he thought someone was challenging his authority. So at least some of the criticism he endured may have been justified.
JN-T craved the approval of fandom, and made a number of personal appearances at conventions and on talk shows. By putting himself so much in the spotlight, he may have made himself a target. Years before the Internet was widespread, Doctor Who was the first geek franchise to allow the fans to have a say in the show's creative content. JN-T gave fan Ian Levine the unofficial role of continuity advisor, letting him insert references to old episodes as well as select old clips for use in flashbacks. Some fan-made artwork was also used in the show itself, including lapel badges worn by the Doctor himself (as played Colin Baker in the mid-80s). It's now felt that this emphasis on fan-pleasing in-jokes was detrimental to the show. It's a cruel irony that the historians asserting this view are probably the very fans who were demanding that kind of fan service back in the 1980s.
Perhaps the lesson is that fame is fickle, and that by putting yourself in the spotlight you make yourself a target. Some people have a knee-jerk assumption that anyone who reaches a position of fame and authority couldn't possibly be flesh and blood like you and me, but must be evil robots whose sole purpose is to add to the sum of human misery.
As an aspiring young filmmaker with big dreams, it never occurred to me that becoming successful and achieving your goals could make one a target of hostility, often from people you don't even know. This has become even more true in the Internet era, when an offhand Twitter remark can provoke a firestorm and wreck a career.
A more recent Doctor Who showrunner, Steven Moffatt, said in an interview that you can try to be a pandering crowdpleaser, but if the audience isn't surprised enough then they'll get bored. Whether John Nathan-Turner learned this lesson is hard to say – by his last couple of seasons he had apparently begun to cut himself off from fandom, and the episodes from those last two years are often considered to be among his best.
So the greater lesson might be that you can't please everyone all the time, and that all you can really do is maintain your integrity and do what you think is right, even when it would be easier not to.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Filmmaking and the Way to the Village
A journey of discovery, in three parts
PART ONE
When I was developing Saberfrog several years back, I'd been out of the filmmaking loop in a while, so I started attending independent filmmaker conferences in the NYC area in order to get caught up.
One of these conferences was DIY Days, which was probably where I first heard about the now-much bandied concept of “transmedia.” This year's DIY Days was last month, and I almost didn't go. I'd had a busy week at work and wasn't sure I was still up for the trip. But my recent trip to Los Angeles had so regenerated the geek side of my brain that it seemed fitting to do the same for the artist side of my brain.
DIY Days is a conference devoted partly to filmmaking but mostly to interactive media, with the philosophy that art which isn't interactive will be left behind. “The most valuable thing in the 21st century,” said one panelist this year, “is creating participatory experience.” Another panelist said that in the future, “Movies are going to have to have interactive elements, or people will stop watching them.” There were more talks and panels than I remembered in past years, divided up among different rooms so that you had to decide which ones you were going to and which ones you were going to skip. One room was devoted specifically to allowing attendees to discuss and present their projects to an audience.
I went intending to simply listen and take notes, as I was used to doing. Instead, two of the seminars I attended required audience participation. We weren't just being lectured about interactivity – we were expected to be interactive ourselves.
In hindsight, I should have spent less time at the lectures and panels expressing ideas I was already becoming familiar with. I should have spent more time networking, participating in creative activities, and learning about specific projects that people were working on.
Also, because I'd delayed the decision to attend the conference, I was able to get neither transportation nor time off work, so I ended up driving down very early in the morning, finding street parking, and then going to the conference. The experience caused me to realize how much my ability to cope with the streets of New York have improved since I was a college freshman.
The biggest thing I really learned was how much I'd learned already.
PART TWO
A couple weeks later, I finally saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a film that – despite its acclaim – I actually knew little about except that silent-era fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies was portrayed in it. What I didn't expect was that Melies was one of the main characters, and that his personal issues were at the emotional center of the film.
As someone who'd always been fascinated by Melies pioneering work in special effects, I had my doubts about the way Hugo portrayed him. According to this movie, Melies' career ended because the outbreak of World War One hardened audiences against the power of fantasy. I'd always heard a slightly different story – that Melies' career ended because he didn't develop creatively, that he was still making simple, stagey trick-films even as the film medium was becoming more sophisticated in its directing, editing and storytelling. WWI may indeed have been the final nail in the coffin for Melies (he did have to melt down many of his films in order to sell their chemicals, as the film depicts) but fantasy films continued to be made through the silent era and beyond.
Yet Hugo – like the recent The Muppets – asks us simply to mourn the fate of the poor forgotten artist, and not ask how he allowed himself to drift into obscurity. As Hollywood struggles to adapt to the social-media age, and grows ever more dependent on rehashing old brands established decades ago (before the Internet and audience fragmentation) rather than creating new brands, Hugo seems like special pleading for a bygone age, when the cinematic art was put on a pedestal, the individual auteur was revered, and the theatrical experience had little competition.
This aspect of the film hit a difficult nerve for me, as did the portrayal of Melies as someone who suppressed his filmmaking dreams for several years due to personal setbacks. I've been trying damn hard to get a grip on the new media landscape, and to escape the nostalgic view of film as a precious and sacred art form rather than one of many modern entertainment options. What really gnawed at me, I guess, is that Scorsese is such a gifted filmmaker – and made such a superb, heartwarming, emotional film – that his traditionalist view of entertainment felt all too persuasive. I guess it bugged me that he managed to manipulate my heart into accepting what my brain no longer believes.
I also found it ironic that Scorsese – who snob critics always hail as a “real” filmmaker while condemning fantasy filmmakers as escapist hacks – should get to be the one to celebrate the power of cinematic dreams and magic. It's either vindication, or the final insult.
PART THREE
For better or worse, I've developed an increasing wariness toward nostalgia. As a filmmaker and former film student, I've grown particularly resistant to the continuing emphasis on the 1960s / 1970's era of filmmaking (the era, of course, from which Scorsese hails).
I'm resistant to it because I understand it all too well. The modern era's emphasis on geek franchises and Internet haters often leaves me pining for an age that seemed warmer, more soulful, and more hospitable to creativity. My heart yearns for it even as my head strains to live in the present. I recently passed up an opportunity to see Midnight Cowboy on the big screen – even though I've never seen the film and have always been curious about it, I decided that I just wasn't in the mood. At least two generations of aspiring filmmakers have spent their lives in thrall to that “turbulent” counterculture era, and I just felt like it was time to be strong and cut the cord.
Yet certain filmgoing experiences still exert a nostalgic hold over me. As a kid I used to see obscure short films in a variety of venues – on 16mm in classrooms, libraries and museums, or as TV filler between movies in the early days of cable, or in traveling animation festivals at the Little Theatre. Those films seemed to come from nowhere – and because I don't remember most of their titles, I'll probably never be able to track them down – so I still remember them fondly for being mysterious and underground.
So when I read the event listings in City newspaper and saw an unheralded weekly film series taking place at the University of Rochester, my curiosity was piqued. Weekly showings of two films a night, presumably shorts, with no description other than their titles and the year they were made. But they were on weeknights, and I was often busy, so my curiosity went unsatisfied.
Finally, on the third week of the series – while still recovering from the kind of stomach bug that leaves you questioning your entire existence – I had the evening free and decided to check out one of these screenings for myself.
According to City, the screenings were held at Hoyt Auditorium. When I got there, however, there seemed to be a class about to begin. I asked one of the students if she knew about a film screening taking place here. She said this was a housing event, and suggested I ask one of the staff at the front of the room. I did so, and the staff person directed me to a campus events office.
Following the directions I'd been given, I went to the office and asked if there was a film screening taking place anywhere. I didn't have a City newspaper on me for reference, so I didn't know what the event was called. The girl behind the desk saw that there had indeed been a film screening scheduled in Hoyt Auditorium that evening, but had no explanation for why it wasn't taking place.
I began to wonder what I was doing here. Part of me felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, following a signal that spoke to him and no one else … but mostly I just felt like an idiot. I was sure no one else from off campus had just showed up randomly based on a cryptic listing in the paper that turned out to be false. I thanked the woman for her time and left.
With nothing better to do, I looked at the flyers posted on a curved bulletin-board thing near the door, curious as to what else was happening on campus. By chance, one of the flyers was for the very event I was looking for … and listed that evening's event as taking place in a different room, Meliora 203.
Armed with this vital new clue, I returned smiling to the office I had just left, and got directions to Meliora 203.
By the time I finally found my way to Meliora Hall and located room 203, I was more than 20 minutes late. I entered a dark classroom, where the familiar whirr of a 16mm projector was audible. The room had uneven brick walls, an old blackboard with math equations written on it from a previous class, and the smell of history.
As I took a seat, I was hit with the sense memories of countless similar screenings at nontheatrical venues throughout my life – in grade school, at libraries, at RMSC's Eisenhardt Auditorium (where they showed kid's films on weekends when I was little), at Visual Studies Workshop, at University of Buffalo, at NYU, at RIT. I remembered the squeaky chairs in the classroom where I once took film classes at SUNY Brockport. I felt like I was in a time warp. Here I was in 2012, sitting in an old, dark, cavernous classroom watching a 16mm film – that familiar sharp picture, framed by those familiar blurred edges and the obligatory hair.
Because the City listing gave the years of production for tonight's two films, I went in knowing I would be seeing films from the early 1970s. This led me to expect a film with grubby, faded, Super-8-ish colors. But the film currently playing was black-and-white, which was slightly less funky than I was hoping for.
The film was in Japanese with subtitles, and showed a Japanese film crew discussing their efforts to make a film, with much philosophizing from the director. Having missed the beginning, I had no idea what the film was about and struggled to determine its tone. Was this an improvised, arty drama about filmmaking? Was it a behind-the-scenes documentary? I finally worked out that the film they were making was itself a documentary … so this was a documentary about making a documentary. Was this supposed to be some kind of avant-garde deconstruction of the process? Or just an instructional film about how to make documentaries?
One of the first scenes I saw was of the crew demonstrating their equipment to the audience – their Eclair film camera (which the cameraman found heavy and difficult to hold), their Nagra sound recorder, their microphone on a homemade boom pole. I found myself being given a lesson from the past about how to use equipment that had been state of the art 40 years ago.
I sat there, and thought … Why am I here? Why am I watching this? Even after turning down a widely acknowledged classic like Midnight Cowboy, I still went above and beyond to find a semi-secret film screening so I could watch ... this? I don't even know what this is!
At that moment, I remembered something old, and learned something new.
What I remembered was that, when I was a film student, I actually kind of hated arty films from the 1960s and early 1970s. I sort of grew to respect the era they represented, after having them rammed down my throat by professors and film history books alike. But the actual films were another matter. Their navel-gazing plotlessness, unfunny attempts at whimsical humor, and pointlessly defeatist endings, not to mention their punishing overlength, made many of them a tough slog for my adolescent self to sit through. Somehow I'd forgotten that. I remembered the few gems, and forgot the many lumps of coal.
I also remembered my annoyance at the way that film schools (and probably art schools in general) treat the past as more important than the state-of-the-art. The emphasis is always on history, and there's always a trench at least twenty years wide that separates Then from Now, permitting no link between the two. Somehow nothing is worth understanding unless it's dead and buried. A leaf is only beautiful when it's fallen and pressed inside a book, not when it's still on the tree. This attitude almost seemed designed to convince you that nothing in your own lifetime could possibly matter, and that nothing you could produce will ever make it into the Canon.
So what was I so nostalgic for, that I was so willing to jump through hoops to attend a campus screening of a film I knew nothing about? I realized it was the experience I missed, of sitting in an unusual venue that had a certain feel and smell, and not knowing what you were about to see. Those oddball screenings were a lottery, and you might see something boring, or you might see something that you remembered forever. I wasn't sure I was enjoying this Japanese doc-within-a-doc, but it had been a while since I saw a film that was a challenge to make sense of.
Also, when I was younger, I was much more inexperienced and isolated, and for me film was a way of connecting to a larger world. Watching this old film about Japanese documentary filmmakers (and the film after it, Les Blank's “Spend It All”, about French-speaking Cajuns in Louisiana) forced me to realize that, as a younger viewer, I actually hadn't been that interested in other people or cultures. I wanted to expand my own mind, through movies and books.
But now that I'm a little older, and have done more and seen more and read more ... what really matters now is forming connections with other people.
At the screening, I got to chat briefly with other people about the films. And really, that's what matters. After mythologizing the experience of going to a hole-in-the-wall film screening, and thinking it's some magical lost art, I realize it's basically a college thing. As long as projectors and spare bulbs exist, screenings like this will continue. For them to continue to mean something, they should inspire not just thought, but discussion.
As you get older, you can lose your openness to new experiences, and try in vain to cling to what you're familiar with. That's always been my generation's trap – X-ers have spent their entire lives trying to crawl back into the womb, or at least the childhood TV room. But sometimes trying to recapture an old experience can lead you to have a new experience instead.
Like my excursion to New York for DIY Days, this screening was an opportunity to reflect on how much I've grown since I was a student, and how much the world has changed around me as well. Also like DIY Days, it helped me let go of the idea of art as solely a means of self-fulfillment and self-improvement, and to see it instead as a means of interacting with others.
The Japanese film was called “Filmmaking and the Way to the Village”.
Not a bad title.
PART ONE
When I was developing Saberfrog several years back, I'd been out of the filmmaking loop in a while, so I started attending independent filmmaker conferences in the NYC area in order to get caught up.
One of these conferences was DIY Days, which was probably where I first heard about the now-much bandied concept of “transmedia.” This year's DIY Days was last month, and I almost didn't go. I'd had a busy week at work and wasn't sure I was still up for the trip. But my recent trip to Los Angeles had so regenerated the geek side of my brain that it seemed fitting to do the same for the artist side of my brain.
DIY Days is a conference devoted partly to filmmaking but mostly to interactive media, with the philosophy that art which isn't interactive will be left behind. “The most valuable thing in the 21st century,” said one panelist this year, “is creating participatory experience.” Another panelist said that in the future, “Movies are going to have to have interactive elements, or people will stop watching them.” There were more talks and panels than I remembered in past years, divided up among different rooms so that you had to decide which ones you were going to and which ones you were going to skip. One room was devoted specifically to allowing attendees to discuss and present their projects to an audience.
I went intending to simply listen and take notes, as I was used to doing. Instead, two of the seminars I attended required audience participation. We weren't just being lectured about interactivity – we were expected to be interactive ourselves.
In hindsight, I should have spent less time at the lectures and panels expressing ideas I was already becoming familiar with. I should have spent more time networking, participating in creative activities, and learning about specific projects that people were working on.
Also, because I'd delayed the decision to attend the conference, I was able to get neither transportation nor time off work, so I ended up driving down very early in the morning, finding street parking, and then going to the conference. The experience caused me to realize how much my ability to cope with the streets of New York have improved since I was a college freshman.
The biggest thing I really learned was how much I'd learned already.
PART TWO
A couple weeks later, I finally saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a film that – despite its acclaim – I actually knew little about except that silent-era fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies was portrayed in it. What I didn't expect was that Melies was one of the main characters, and that his personal issues were at the emotional center of the film.
As someone who'd always been fascinated by Melies pioneering work in special effects, I had my doubts about the way Hugo portrayed him. According to this movie, Melies' career ended because the outbreak of World War One hardened audiences against the power of fantasy. I'd always heard a slightly different story – that Melies' career ended because he didn't develop creatively, that he was still making simple, stagey trick-films even as the film medium was becoming more sophisticated in its directing, editing and storytelling. WWI may indeed have been the final nail in the coffin for Melies (he did have to melt down many of his films in order to sell their chemicals, as the film depicts) but fantasy films continued to be made through the silent era and beyond.
Yet Hugo – like the recent The Muppets – asks us simply to mourn the fate of the poor forgotten artist, and not ask how he allowed himself to drift into obscurity. As Hollywood struggles to adapt to the social-media age, and grows ever more dependent on rehashing old brands established decades ago (before the Internet and audience fragmentation) rather than creating new brands, Hugo seems like special pleading for a bygone age, when the cinematic art was put on a pedestal, the individual auteur was revered, and the theatrical experience had little competition.
This aspect of the film hit a difficult nerve for me, as did the portrayal of Melies as someone who suppressed his filmmaking dreams for several years due to personal setbacks. I've been trying damn hard to get a grip on the new media landscape, and to escape the nostalgic view of film as a precious and sacred art form rather than one of many modern entertainment options. What really gnawed at me, I guess, is that Scorsese is such a gifted filmmaker – and made such a superb, heartwarming, emotional film – that his traditionalist view of entertainment felt all too persuasive. I guess it bugged me that he managed to manipulate my heart into accepting what my brain no longer believes.
I also found it ironic that Scorsese – who snob critics always hail as a “real” filmmaker while condemning fantasy filmmakers as escapist hacks – should get to be the one to celebrate the power of cinematic dreams and magic. It's either vindication, or the final insult.
PART THREE
For better or worse, I've developed an increasing wariness toward nostalgia. As a filmmaker and former film student, I've grown particularly resistant to the continuing emphasis on the 1960s / 1970's era of filmmaking (the era, of course, from which Scorsese hails).
I'm resistant to it because I understand it all too well. The modern era's emphasis on geek franchises and Internet haters often leaves me pining for an age that seemed warmer, more soulful, and more hospitable to creativity. My heart yearns for it even as my head strains to live in the present. I recently passed up an opportunity to see Midnight Cowboy on the big screen – even though I've never seen the film and have always been curious about it, I decided that I just wasn't in the mood. At least two generations of aspiring filmmakers have spent their lives in thrall to that “turbulent” counterculture era, and I just felt like it was time to be strong and cut the cord.
Yet certain filmgoing experiences still exert a nostalgic hold over me. As a kid I used to see obscure short films in a variety of venues – on 16mm in classrooms, libraries and museums, or as TV filler between movies in the early days of cable, or in traveling animation festivals at the Little Theatre. Those films seemed to come from nowhere – and because I don't remember most of their titles, I'll probably never be able to track them down – so I still remember them fondly for being mysterious and underground.
So when I read the event listings in City newspaper and saw an unheralded weekly film series taking place at the University of Rochester, my curiosity was piqued. Weekly showings of two films a night, presumably shorts, with no description other than their titles and the year they were made. But they were on weeknights, and I was often busy, so my curiosity went unsatisfied.
Finally, on the third week of the series – while still recovering from the kind of stomach bug that leaves you questioning your entire existence – I had the evening free and decided to check out one of these screenings for myself.
According to City, the screenings were held at Hoyt Auditorium. When I got there, however, there seemed to be a class about to begin. I asked one of the students if she knew about a film screening taking place here. She said this was a housing event, and suggested I ask one of the staff at the front of the room. I did so, and the staff person directed me to a campus events office.
Following the directions I'd been given, I went to the office and asked if there was a film screening taking place anywhere. I didn't have a City newspaper on me for reference, so I didn't know what the event was called. The girl behind the desk saw that there had indeed been a film screening scheduled in Hoyt Auditorium that evening, but had no explanation for why it wasn't taking place.
I began to wonder what I was doing here. Part of me felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, following a signal that spoke to him and no one else … but mostly I just felt like an idiot. I was sure no one else from off campus had just showed up randomly based on a cryptic listing in the paper that turned out to be false. I thanked the woman for her time and left.
With nothing better to do, I looked at the flyers posted on a curved bulletin-board thing near the door, curious as to what else was happening on campus. By chance, one of the flyers was for the very event I was looking for … and listed that evening's event as taking place in a different room, Meliora 203.
Armed with this vital new clue, I returned smiling to the office I had just left, and got directions to Meliora 203.
By the time I finally found my way to Meliora Hall and located room 203, I was more than 20 minutes late. I entered a dark classroom, where the familiar whirr of a 16mm projector was audible. The room had uneven brick walls, an old blackboard with math equations written on it from a previous class, and the smell of history.
As I took a seat, I was hit with the sense memories of countless similar screenings at nontheatrical venues throughout my life – in grade school, at libraries, at RMSC's Eisenhardt Auditorium (where they showed kid's films on weekends when I was little), at Visual Studies Workshop, at University of Buffalo, at NYU, at RIT. I remembered the squeaky chairs in the classroom where I once took film classes at SUNY Brockport. I felt like I was in a time warp. Here I was in 2012, sitting in an old, dark, cavernous classroom watching a 16mm film – that familiar sharp picture, framed by those familiar blurred edges and the obligatory hair.
Because the City listing gave the years of production for tonight's two films, I went in knowing I would be seeing films from the early 1970s. This led me to expect a film with grubby, faded, Super-8-ish colors. But the film currently playing was black-and-white, which was slightly less funky than I was hoping for.
The film was in Japanese with subtitles, and showed a Japanese film crew discussing their efforts to make a film, with much philosophizing from the director. Having missed the beginning, I had no idea what the film was about and struggled to determine its tone. Was this an improvised, arty drama about filmmaking? Was it a behind-the-scenes documentary? I finally worked out that the film they were making was itself a documentary … so this was a documentary about making a documentary. Was this supposed to be some kind of avant-garde deconstruction of the process? Or just an instructional film about how to make documentaries?
One of the first scenes I saw was of the crew demonstrating their equipment to the audience – their Eclair film camera (which the cameraman found heavy and difficult to hold), their Nagra sound recorder, their microphone on a homemade boom pole. I found myself being given a lesson from the past about how to use equipment that had been state of the art 40 years ago.
I sat there, and thought … Why am I here? Why am I watching this? Even after turning down a widely acknowledged classic like Midnight Cowboy, I still went above and beyond to find a semi-secret film screening so I could watch ... this? I don't even know what this is!
At that moment, I remembered something old, and learned something new.
What I remembered was that, when I was a film student, I actually kind of hated arty films from the 1960s and early 1970s. I sort of grew to respect the era they represented, after having them rammed down my throat by professors and film history books alike. But the actual films were another matter. Their navel-gazing plotlessness, unfunny attempts at whimsical humor, and pointlessly defeatist endings, not to mention their punishing overlength, made many of them a tough slog for my adolescent self to sit through. Somehow I'd forgotten that. I remembered the few gems, and forgot the many lumps of coal.
I also remembered my annoyance at the way that film schools (and probably art schools in general) treat the past as more important than the state-of-the-art. The emphasis is always on history, and there's always a trench at least twenty years wide that separates Then from Now, permitting no link between the two. Somehow nothing is worth understanding unless it's dead and buried. A leaf is only beautiful when it's fallen and pressed inside a book, not when it's still on the tree. This attitude almost seemed designed to convince you that nothing in your own lifetime could possibly matter, and that nothing you could produce will ever make it into the Canon.
So what was I so nostalgic for, that I was so willing to jump through hoops to attend a campus screening of a film I knew nothing about? I realized it was the experience I missed, of sitting in an unusual venue that had a certain feel and smell, and not knowing what you were about to see. Those oddball screenings were a lottery, and you might see something boring, or you might see something that you remembered forever. I wasn't sure I was enjoying this Japanese doc-within-a-doc, but it had been a while since I saw a film that was a challenge to make sense of.
Also, when I was younger, I was much more inexperienced and isolated, and for me film was a way of connecting to a larger world. Watching this old film about Japanese documentary filmmakers (and the film after it, Les Blank's “Spend It All”, about French-speaking Cajuns in Louisiana) forced me to realize that, as a younger viewer, I actually hadn't been that interested in other people or cultures. I wanted to expand my own mind, through movies and books.
But now that I'm a little older, and have done more and seen more and read more ... what really matters now is forming connections with other people.
At the screening, I got to chat briefly with other people about the films. And really, that's what matters. After mythologizing the experience of going to a hole-in-the-wall film screening, and thinking it's some magical lost art, I realize it's basically a college thing. As long as projectors and spare bulbs exist, screenings like this will continue. For them to continue to mean something, they should inspire not just thought, but discussion.
As you get older, you can lose your openness to new experiences, and try in vain to cling to what you're familiar with. That's always been my generation's trap – X-ers have spent their entire lives trying to crawl back into the womb, or at least the childhood TV room. But sometimes trying to recapture an old experience can lead you to have a new experience instead.
Like my excursion to New York for DIY Days, this screening was an opportunity to reflect on how much I've grown since I was a student, and how much the world has changed around me as well. Also like DIY Days, it helped me let go of the idea of art as solely a means of self-fulfillment and self-improvement, and to see it instead as a means of interacting with others.
The Japanese film was called “Filmmaking and the Way to the Village”.
Not a bad title.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Happy Cronenbirthday
Today is film director David Cronenberg's 69th birthday. Cronenberg's work was a big influence on me as a film student, and an even greater influence on Saberfrog.
I saw two of his films – The Dead Zone and The Fly – on TV as a kid, but I didn't know who he was yet. To me those films were just a Stephen King movie and a remake of a 1950s movie, respectively. But a bizarre promo clip of his William S. Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch caught my attention on MTV, and so I later watched the making-of documentary “Naked Making Lunch” (made as an episode of the UK arts series The South Bank Show) on Bravo.
Well, I say “watched”, but in those days if you didn't subscribe to a pay channel (which Bravo then was) then you could still hear the sound but the picture was scrambled. But since Bravo was still an arts channel back then, there was a lot of content that was worth listening to (and getting the occasional garbled glimpse of).
So I sat, fascinated, absorbing this distorted version of “Naked Making Lunch”, intrigued by the philosophical musings of Cronenberg, Burroughs and their collaborators. I was a big sci-fi nerd back then, but was also (like many alienated, artsy teens) fascinated by alternative and “subversive” ideas and intellectual concepts, and Cronenberg seemed to combine both of those interests.
When Naked Lunch finally came out on video, I found it “challenging” but also loved its emphasis on the power of writing, and its surreal, metaphorical portrayal of writing as a way of creating realities and reporting on the world as you see it. When I finally read Burroughs' original novel (which was more specifically about sexuality and drug addiction, and not so much about creativity), I didn't like it at all and found it very difficult to get through. Everything I had liked about Naked Lunch was Cronenberg's invention.
But while I was an admirer of a specific film he had made, I didn't become a big fan until 1996. That was the year that some RIT classmates and I drove to Ottawa for an animation film festival. While I had visited Canada on family vacations several times as a kid, I think that trip was when I really felt that I learned something about Canadian culture, and saw how much reverence Canadians seemed to have for their artists.
Leslie Nielsen had by that point been typecast in Hollywood as a comedy buffoon, but on the streets of Ottawa there were endless plastered posters for a dramatic play he was appearing in. Cyberpunk author William Gibson had a new book out at the time, and the local chain bookstore (Indigo or Chapters, I forget which) had a massive display for it, as if he was Stephen King or John Grisham. Coincidentally, Cronenberg's Crash (based on the J.G. Ballard novel, and no relation to the Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock movie) was in Canadian theaters at the time; while its U.S. release had been postponed due to its content, in Canada it was actually getting television ads.
Anyway, while we were there I snapped up a remaindered copy of Cronenberg on Cronenberg, a book-length interview by Chris Rodley, and read it avidly. I might have read half of it before we even got home. I found Cronenberg's artistic philosophy – his thoughts on censorship, on the media, on the role of the artist as a moral explorer – fascinating. As an American, I was also fascinated by his perspective on Canadian culture. At one point in the book (I don't know what page), he points out that American culture would rather move in the wrong direction than stand still, but that Canada would rather stand still. While American liberals tend to stereotype Canada as a haven of artistic freedom, Cronenberg had interesting things to say about the challenges of being a genre filmmaker in a country that has traditionally favored documentaries and dramas.
So I began to seek out his films. I still haven't seen his earliest films (the horror films that made him so infamous), but have now seen everything from The Brood onwards, as well as his earlier Shivers. But the two I enjoyed most were Scanners and Videodrome, for the way they balanced grotesque, disturbing imagery with stimulating intellectual concepts. Many fans still see Cronenberg as a horror director (the term “body horror” was pretty much coined to describe his work), but by the time I discovered him he had a greater reputation as an arty director and so I've always been drawn to the philosophical aspect of his work.
How well that aspect of his work holds up is not for me to say. While I have had the chance to watch “Naked Making Lunch” properly (it's an extra on the Criterion DVD), I haven't watched Naked Lunch itself in many years. I'm kind of reluctant to. I caught the beginning of it on cable several years ago, and was amused by a scene in which Judy Davis, explaining why she's injecting herself with bug poison, says, “It's a very literary high, a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.”
I found that line hilarious in its freshman-English-class pretentiousness. A “Kafka high”? Who talks like that? But I'll bet my younger, pretentious, college-aged self loved that line.
So there's a part of me that finds Cronenberg's intellectual solemnity more amusing than I used to. And I've also learned that some folks in Canada are kind of sick of hearing about Cronenberg (and other alleged national treasures like Atom Egoyan and Margaret Atwood) and are much more mocking of arty work that they find pretentious, humorless and dull.
But I can't mock Cronenberg for producing work that appealed so directly to my alienated, bookwormy younger self. The reality-warping, artistic musings of his Naked Lunch were a big influence on my previous feature, Curse the Darkness. And the combining of psychology, media, and bodily mutation in Scanners and Videodrome – as well as his own philosophizing in Cronenberg on Cronenberg – were all huge influences on Saberfrog, even if my own take on these themes was much more wacky and irreverent.
Cronenberg seems to have more or less left his sci-fi/horror days, becoming a respected director of dramas such as the excellent A History of Violence and the recent Freud/Jung biopic A Dangerous Method. But there's still a possibility that he may return to the genre that made him notorious. To quote one of his own lines – which has become a catchphrase in its own right, with most people not realizing it's from his remake of The Fly – Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I saw two of his films – The Dead Zone and The Fly – on TV as a kid, but I didn't know who he was yet. To me those films were just a Stephen King movie and a remake of a 1950s movie, respectively. But a bizarre promo clip of his William S. Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch caught my attention on MTV, and so I later watched the making-of documentary “Naked Making Lunch” (made as an episode of the UK arts series The South Bank Show) on Bravo.
Well, I say “watched”, but in those days if you didn't subscribe to a pay channel (which Bravo then was) then you could still hear the sound but the picture was scrambled. But since Bravo was still an arts channel back then, there was a lot of content that was worth listening to (and getting the occasional garbled glimpse of).
So I sat, fascinated, absorbing this distorted version of “Naked Making Lunch”, intrigued by the philosophical musings of Cronenberg, Burroughs and their collaborators. I was a big sci-fi nerd back then, but was also (like many alienated, artsy teens) fascinated by alternative and “subversive” ideas and intellectual concepts, and Cronenberg seemed to combine both of those interests.
When Naked Lunch finally came out on video, I found it “challenging” but also loved its emphasis on the power of writing, and its surreal, metaphorical portrayal of writing as a way of creating realities and reporting on the world as you see it. When I finally read Burroughs' original novel (which was more specifically about sexuality and drug addiction, and not so much about creativity), I didn't like it at all and found it very difficult to get through. Everything I had liked about Naked Lunch was Cronenberg's invention.
But while I was an admirer of a specific film he had made, I didn't become a big fan until 1996. That was the year that some RIT classmates and I drove to Ottawa for an animation film festival. While I had visited Canada on family vacations several times as a kid, I think that trip was when I really felt that I learned something about Canadian culture, and saw how much reverence Canadians seemed to have for their artists.
Leslie Nielsen had by that point been typecast in Hollywood as a comedy buffoon, but on the streets of Ottawa there were endless plastered posters for a dramatic play he was appearing in. Cyberpunk author William Gibson had a new book out at the time, and the local chain bookstore (Indigo or Chapters, I forget which) had a massive display for it, as if he was Stephen King or John Grisham. Coincidentally, Cronenberg's Crash (based on the J.G. Ballard novel, and no relation to the Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock movie) was in Canadian theaters at the time; while its U.S. release had been postponed due to its content, in Canada it was actually getting television ads.
Anyway, while we were there I snapped up a remaindered copy of Cronenberg on Cronenberg, a book-length interview by Chris Rodley, and read it avidly. I might have read half of it before we even got home. I found Cronenberg's artistic philosophy – his thoughts on censorship, on the media, on the role of the artist as a moral explorer – fascinating. As an American, I was also fascinated by his perspective on Canadian culture. At one point in the book (I don't know what page), he points out that American culture would rather move in the wrong direction than stand still, but that Canada would rather stand still. While American liberals tend to stereotype Canada as a haven of artistic freedom, Cronenberg had interesting things to say about the challenges of being a genre filmmaker in a country that has traditionally favored documentaries and dramas.
So I began to seek out his films. I still haven't seen his earliest films (the horror films that made him so infamous), but have now seen everything from The Brood onwards, as well as his earlier Shivers. But the two I enjoyed most were Scanners and Videodrome, for the way they balanced grotesque, disturbing imagery with stimulating intellectual concepts. Many fans still see Cronenberg as a horror director (the term “body horror” was pretty much coined to describe his work), but by the time I discovered him he had a greater reputation as an arty director and so I've always been drawn to the philosophical aspect of his work.
How well that aspect of his work holds up is not for me to say. While I have had the chance to watch “Naked Making Lunch” properly (it's an extra on the Criterion DVD), I haven't watched Naked Lunch itself in many years. I'm kind of reluctant to. I caught the beginning of it on cable several years ago, and was amused by a scene in which Judy Davis, explaining why she's injecting herself with bug poison, says, “It's a very literary high, a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.”
I found that line hilarious in its freshman-English-class pretentiousness. A “Kafka high”? Who talks like that? But I'll bet my younger, pretentious, college-aged self loved that line.
So there's a part of me that finds Cronenberg's intellectual solemnity more amusing than I used to. And I've also learned that some folks in Canada are kind of sick of hearing about Cronenberg (and other alleged national treasures like Atom Egoyan and Margaret Atwood) and are much more mocking of arty work that they find pretentious, humorless and dull.
But I can't mock Cronenberg for producing work that appealed so directly to my alienated, bookwormy younger self. The reality-warping, artistic musings of his Naked Lunch were a big influence on my previous feature, Curse the Darkness. And the combining of psychology, media, and bodily mutation in Scanners and Videodrome – as well as his own philosophizing in Cronenberg on Cronenberg – were all huge influences on Saberfrog, even if my own take on these themes was much more wacky and irreverent.
Cronenberg seems to have more or less left his sci-fi/horror days, becoming a respected director of dramas such as the excellent A History of Violence and the recent Freud/Jung biopic A Dangerous Method. But there's still a possibility that he may return to the genre that made him notorious. To quote one of his own lines – which has become a catchphrase in its own right, with most people not realizing it's from his remake of The Fly – Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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