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Ivo van Hove on Directing Scenes from a Marriage and Angels in America
Theater director Ivo van Hove has made a habit of breaching borders.
Theater director Ivo van Hove has made a habit of breaching borders. Born in Belgium, he currently runs the internationally renowned Toneelgroep Amsterdam in the Netherlands and also brings his work to New York with welcome regularity. More significantly, van Hove makes an art of erasing the barrier not only between actor and audience, but also between one scene and another.
During the presidential 2012 election, his epochal production Roman Tragedies, which played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ran for nearly six hours without any breaks. Van Hove edited Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Anthony and Cleopatra to focus both the text and the theatrical experience on the relationship between politicians and the public. Audiences were encouraged to come and go where and when they pleased—even up onto the stage. The production became an exhilarating and indelible exercise in democracy, mounted by one of the reigning auteurs in global theater.
In van Hove's most recent work, Scenes from a Marriage, which runs at New York Theatre Workshop until October 26, the three scenes of the first act play simultaneously. The entire audience is divvied up and escorted into one of three makeshift spaces, where they watch the scenes play out in a different order from each other. Three sets of actors perform the central roles of Johann and Marianne, at various phases of their relationship. In the second act, seats and playing areas are spread throughout one open space. The three sets of actors often perform simultaneously mere inches away from a group of spectators. The play's collection of everyday relationship dramas become fodder for a mass ritual of coming together and tearing apart.
Soon after the production's opening, I spoke with van Hove, as he prepared to leave his American cast temporarily and bring in Toneelgroep Amsterdam once again to BAM, which houses his stripped-down version of Angels in America (October 24 – 26). Both plays focus on doomed relationships, yet the reputedly renegade "bad boy" of the theater could be more accurately defined by his fondness for long-term commitments.
Passionate conflict, with balls-to-the-wall brutality, tends to dominate your productions. But that seems to run counter to the relationships you've nurtured with theaters, actors and designers. You choose to work with the same people repeatedly.
I like loyalty, because it creates an atmosphere of confidence. Trusting each other is always the best environment to be creative. I don't like conflicts in my rehearsal room. I'm never provoking fights between my actors. I like an atmosphere where it's pleasant to work with each other. That's the best basis to build a solid building, supported by everybody because everybody is important. In rehearsal, the first days are there to create an ensemble that cares for each other, that wants to make each other better, and not just wants to make him or herself good. Helping them be aware that the others are equally important in a production is what I do. I don't know how I do that. It's from being very patient I think. Jan [Versweyveld], my designer who's always there, says I can be very full of temperament, but I can also be very patient with an actor and give them time to discover things. For me, it's important that the personality of an actor shines through and that the actor doesn't pretend to be somebody else because that's an illusion.
Your vision of personality seems to foreground contradiction. Here, they show both tenderness and selfishness.
That's true. And that's the character. I don't like texts that have only one dimension. The actor has to discover the Macbeth in himself when you do that play. The Lady Macbeth in yourself. You can't pretend that by putting on a wig and having a funny walk or something that you're somebody else. Then you're imitating somebody else and imitation is not art. So I want them to connect with the part in a personal way. That's the theater I like.
You said Jan is always there. That's uncommon for a designer.
He's not a designer who makes a design, then comes back for the last two weeks for tech. No, he's really interested in the collaboration with actors. For him, it's very important that they feel good in his set, that they understand the set very well. Also, when things are getting difficult, he tries to talk to them, to see how to make it better. For me, I have the feeling it's sometimes not clear who directed and who did the design. Of course, I do all the talking to the actors. But he also has a lot of ideas about me directing, just as I have ideas about designs. It feels like a Jan Versweyveld and Ivo van Hove production. It's a real collaboration.
And it goes beyond the theater. He's your partner off stage as well. How do you manage that?
For us it works very well. It's completely private, you know? A lot of the times when I'm a guest director in opera, or when I was in London, people aren't even aware that we're a couple until the end. We really have very different opinions. It's not that we always say, "Yes, you're right." Not at all. But we don't bring our private life to the rehearsal room. We keep it separate.
So when your actors are brawling and pouring water over each other in Scenes from a Marriage's second-act fight-to-end-all-fights, they don't look to you two for advice? You don't say, "This is how we do this at home"?
[laughs] No. I'm also not a director who gives a lot of examples from his own private life. Sometimes I do, of course, but not a lot. To illustrate something or to inspire other people. A private thing is a private thing.
Yet making the private public seems at the core of your work. It's remarkably intimate, even if not in the specific details of your or your actors' lives. The films you've chosen to adapt, Scenes from a Marriage or Cries and Whispers and Opening Night, were all intensely personal to their original writer-director.
I think any production by me is a piece of my autobiography. So, yes, these are very personal to me as they were to Bergman, to Cassavetes. It makes no sense to turn a movie into a theater play unless there's really an urge to do it because it was intended to be a movie. I only do that when I think I can tell something which I cannot do with any existing play. A movie is made by the edit. The big challenge for me then is to invent a world for it theatrically.
Do you know when you start how you connect with a piece personally or do you discover that as you go along?
Choosing a text is like being struck by lightning. It's something impulsive, like suddenly falling in love with someone. It happens that I think, "Oh, this would be great to do on stage." For instance, in Cries and Whispers it was staging death. It wasn't important for the public to know, but my father had just died a year before. I had witnessed it, so the production was perhaps my way to say goodbye him. And I wanted to stage death in a truthful way because it's always pathetic when people die on stage. I wanted to make it believable. It's challenges like that I'm searching for. Then, later, because I have to work with lots of people and I have to inspire them, I have to try to rationalize why it is that I'm in love with this. If I just say to everybody, "Be in love also because I am," that will not work. I have to give it words. And that's my preparation. I really prepare a text. I really think about it, about what it can mean. And then I discover new things again, I hope, during rehearsal. When I do a remake, like here with Scenes from a Marriage, which I did originally in Amsterdam, I found five to 10 pages of Bergman's text that I thought would interesting to deal with. Even with a tour, the performances develop more and more. It becomes deeper like a good wine. It's the same wine, but it becomes better.
Besides an instinctive connection, what do you look for in a text?
I need texts that are layered, that allow me to find—that provoke me to find—my own path in the roots of the text. I'm rehearsing now a monologue that Simon Stephens [adapter of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and the upcoming Punk Rock at MCC] has written for me. A monologue is the hardest thing to do on stage. But this is beautiful. And we're making great discoveries. "Why is this line here? Why is this character all of a sudden popping up there." I like discoveries.
Do you also learn something new when you bring different actors to a text or when a production plays to different audiences from country to country?
I try to create the same feeling of a temporary family. One of the reasons I like to work with American actors is that I love the American language. It's very earthy, very feet-on-the-ground. The actors here tend to go for emotions, which I love. It's also who I choose. I search for a visceral quality in actors. And that's true for audiences here as well. But it depends on where we are in New York. BAM is different from New York Theater Workshop. At BAM you have people who go on an adventure for something foreign. We play with supertitles. At New York Theater Workshop, it's in English and they pay more. They're treated very well. In Europe, we don't wait for one person who's a little bit too late. We start. Perhaps it has to do with the prices. In Europe, it's more democratic, more accessible, because you don't have to pay so much money. In New York, they're also a little more responsive. When they laugh, they really laugh. Americans are also very loud. You're also very open. It seems there's nothing to hide. I'm from Belgium, where it's totally different. Belgians are very quiet during the performance. A little bit like the Japanese. But when it's over, we show, "Wow, we really loved it."
Watching your work, though it's extraordinarily distinctive, I wonder if you've been inspired by another Belgian, Pina Bausch?
It's dance theater, but she was a huge influence on us at the end of the '70s. It was totally new, totally innovative, in the form that she presented it: the way she spoke about the relationship between men and women in a sometimes very hard, but also sometimes very sentimental way—sentimental in a good way. The fact that you could do this in a theater, go from pathos into raw realism, that's what opened up my mind toward what's possible in the theater. My kind of theater is totally different except we share the physical side, the bluntness of showing how people act towards each other.
Your productions push the actors and even the audience to a level of exhaustion.
When I started as a young man, I was influenced most by performance art. The physical exhaustion and the physical reality of what's happening right before your eye inspired me. I like in my productions that what you see is what you get and what's real at that moment. That's the difference between a production to me and a performance. When Marina Abramović sits there at MOMA for all those hours, she really is there and she really looks at you. And that's what it is. There's not a character; there's nothing else. And that's what I like in my productions also—when things become totally real at a certain moment. That's the moment I always search for.
In Scenes from a Marriage, you help the actors and the audience see the reality of performance by casting three actors for each of the main roles. Dallas Roberts has a different essence from Arliss Howard. The actresses are of different races. So I quickly stopped looking to make connections between them and just became aware of how each connected to the role itself.
Yes, totally. I rehearsed every scene separately so they didn't look at each other, only at the very end. For me, it was important that Dallas is Dallas and Arliss is Arliss and starts from himself, and not by, "Oh, Dallas is doing that so I'll do that also because we have to create together a character." No, for me it was very important that this Johann character is like everybody. Everybody is Johann. We all have experienced the things that these people experience in this text. That's the genius of it.
Is that also why you sometimes place your actors so close to the audience?
Yes, there you cannot fake.
And the audience can't fake.
Because you're visible. It's quite light. People can see how you react, so by having the public on stage, everybody's part of the same experience. You can look at each other. And in the second act, people aren't just looking at what the actors are doing. They're looking to each other.
And in the first act, even though we can't see most of the other audiences, we can hear them. I heard an audience laugh at a scene which my audience had watched earlier in silence. I wondered whether the actors were playing it differently or if that third of the audience was just in a better mood than mine.
That's exactly what I wanted. I wanted to have you remember some things. And think, "Oh, we didn't laugh at that moment. What's happening there this time?" So it creates like a collective memory. And it's like past, future, and present are all part of one time frame.
Bergman creates that sense of time in his films, so I imagine that's one of the reasons you're drawn to his work. What are some of the other reasons you're so attracted to adapting films?
I have to invent a theatrical world for them that has never existed before. Most of the time I am the first to do that with this specific text. Opening Night was never produced on stage before I did it. Husbands I also did on stage. Nobody did it before me. So it's like a world premiere of Hamlet. I'm almost 56. Over 30 years I've been making theater. And these works provoke a huge creativity.
How does that compare with approaching the much-produced Angels in America?
That's my other love affair. In the beginning, I wrote my own texts and made productions based on improvisation. But when I was 25 doing Troilus and Cressida, I discovered I could be even more personal in my work using a text that was over 400 years old. I could be totally myself. So I love to work with classics and contemporary classics, which is what I consider Angels. It will survive. I read the text and started thinking, "How does this text want to be produced?" That's my job. In the case of Angels, people may be surprised here because it's an empty stage. When Tony [Kushner] saw it for the first time in Amsterdam, he thought, "Well it's empty now. But the office will move in next, then the hospital will move in and this and this," but nothing moved in. It was an empty space, a space of imagination. The actors become really important because when you're on an empty stage your physical presence becomes very vulnerable and fragile. And I thought that was the best way to deal with this specific text.
It's always different for every text. I don't have a recipe like Bob Wilson, whom I admire a lot. But you know when you enter a Bob Wilson production [whose Shakespeare's Sonnets played BAM earlier this month], you don't even have to stay for two minutes and you can say, "Oh, this is Bob Wilson." I don't think that's the case with my productions. In Scenes from a Marriage, there's not one inch in our brain that's been thinking of beautifying it. This is like a raw house. What is in a house? A bed and a table. That's enough for this. Together with Jan and Tal Yarden, my video designer, we're looking for how does this play want to be produced?
And when casting actors, do you ask how does this character want to be played?
Yes. I'm not so fond of auditions. That's a very artificial situation. Everyone is nervous, me included. So I make it as short as possible. I don't pretend we're going to work with each other because it's stupid to do that, for me anyway. I follow my instinct a little bit there. I met Dallas Roberts at a party, for instance, and knew his work from movies and a little TV and I thought this might be interesting.
And your instinct led you to a different feeling when you met Philip Seymour Hoffman for your production of Streetcar Named Desire at New York Theatre Workshop?
I was really looking forward to working with him. But I just got afraid a little bit. It's a personal thing that happened. It never happened with anybody else, and I don't think it will happen again. I work in opera with big stars like that. So it had nothing to do with that. He was brilliant and it just overwhelmed me a little bit at that moment and afterward I thought, "I was totally wrong."
Are there other instances where you feel you would do something differently now?
All the time. But I'm content, and I mean that, with my life, with my mistakes, with my successes, and with my doubts. I have very good equilibrium in my life in the theater. I can live with critical reproaches. I, of course, want only good reviews. But for a day I'm depressed and then life goes on. To direct theater isn't a job for me. It's my life. I want to bring a text or an idea to the stage in the most extreme way. Something that's unique to me, to Jan, to the actors. It really means a lot to me. A very famous grand old lady of the theater in Belgium came to one of my early productions and said, "You and the theater, that will be a very good marriage." And it's turned out to be that way.
Scenes from a Marriage runs through October 26 at New York Theatre Workshop and Angels in America will play October 23 to October 25 at BAM.
Interview: Alejandro Jodorowsky on Psychomagic, the Theater of Cruelty, and More
The maverick filmmaker discusses working with the tarot, the surrealist moviement, and more.
At the age of 91, maverick Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has made his first ever documentary, Psychomagic, a Healing Art. In many ways, it's a companion piece to his recent self-reflexive and semi-autobiographical films The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, in which Jodorowsky inserted his present-day self into the narrative of his own boyhood and youth. Where the earlier films show Jodorowsky arriving at private rituals and symbolic acts to deal with his own issues, Psychomagic expands his sphere of influence to include men and women who find themselves in a cul-de-sac of existential distress.
Essentially a daisy chain of case histories, the film allows Jodorowsky to demonstrate the unconventional psychotherapeutic techniques he's developed over a lifetime spent studying various psychological systems and an astonishing variety of Eastern and Western spiritual practices. As you might expect from the man behind El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it can be a wild ride, full of sometimes totally bonkers, even grotesque imagery, yet also betraying Jodorowsky's full-blooded compassion for the vicissitudes of human suffering.
Ahead of the VOD release of Psychomagic, I had the opportunity to speak with Jodorowsky via Skype. We touched upon a far-ranging assortment of topics including working with the tarot, Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, the "last days" of the surrealist movement, and the films of Dario Argento and Luis Buñuel.
Early in your new documentary you mention your work with the tarot deck. How did that contribute to your development of psychomagic?
For me, the tarot isn't magic that let's you see the future. It's only a language to open the unconscious. That is all. It's to work with the dreams like Sigmund Freud worked with dreams. My films help me to speak about dreams, and put you on the table [in a tarot spread]. I use tarot to do that. But, in order to do that, I needed 50 years of working with the tarot, learning how to memorize the tarot deck. I memorized every line, every color, every meaning. [Jodorowsky proceeds to give a quick three-card tarot reading.]
Psychomagic techniques seem to involve a dreamlike, poetic logic. How do you arrive at the specific details of the treatments?
When you're working with me, first I make your genealogical tree. You have the son, you have the partner, the father and mother, the grandfather. Then I know where you are, what formed you. And then, when I know that, I will not experience you in a psychoanalytic way, an intellectual way. That is for psychoanalysts, who take dreams and teach you what is real life. I am different. I take what you think with the reality and I put it into the image of the dream. I use the language of acting, not speaking, doing things you never did before. New things. I am breaking your psychological defense with an image to go do something. I will say, "Paint your beard gold and kiss a woman, or a man, who has silver hair." I will say that's an image. That will open to you the unconscious, something you will discover. That is the work of psychomagic.
With most of the participants in the film, all we see is their short-term response to the treatment. What made you follow up with the woman who had throat cancer after almost 10 years?
What I did in the theater was an experience. Because I had a theater. I had to pay to have that theater. Because every healing I do is free. I'm not a psychoanalyst, so nobody paid me. It's free. Because I had a big theater, and in Chile I am very well known, I will have a conference in the theater. Five thousand people came. And then I decided to make an experience. I didn't know if collective thinking, like quantum theory says, could change reality, if we have a group of people who do the same thing. Can we heal this woman? She thinks she will die very quickly. And then I take the woman and I make the experience. And then I didn't speak with her. And then, when I made the picture 10 years later, I wanted to know, because I never repeated it. In order to teach healing, you need 5,000 doctors! It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I wanted to know, with thinking, do we or don't we have the power? The cancer, they say we cannot heal that. I don't know if they fought the cancer for years because it's a big, big business, and they don't want to find the solution. That I don't know. When healing becomes a business, it cannot heal for me. Healing is an act of love. You have to take the person in your arms. The psychoanalyst doesn't take you in his arms!
And then I get a telephone call from a friend of the woman, a student of mine. I asked him if she had died. He said no, she's alive. I asked if I could make an interview for the film. She tells how the experience was. She said it was very good. I don't know if it was a placebo. Placebos can be good also.
Yes, if it works, it's good.
But it was only an experience that I did once. I can't find 5,000 people for every person who has an illness.
Psychomagic includes short clips from many of your earlier films. Do you see this film, and the therapeutic work it illustrates, as an encapsulation of your entire career?
From the theater I came to the "happening," improvised theater, the theater of action, then to psychomagic. I came to it. I didn't create it. But, in all my pictures, I was searching for something. I respect very much the industrial movies. Movies from the beginning were an industry. Their goal from the beginning was to make big money. And then they discovered Hollywood and all that. But there was not one real truth, one real feeling, it was acting feelings. The show must go on! But for me movies are not a show, they're an art.
What is art? It's open for the person who does the work, new horizons, they will open the human soul. That's what I did in my pictures. I started to put real things into the picture. Reality says, "Problem! I am having problems with my mother, problems with my father." I was telling it all. Step by step, I was coming to introduce my real life into the pictures. I was having problems with my father in Endless Poetry, and I was shooting, and suddenly I jumped into the picture! Psychomagic is only real feelings, not an imitation. And that's what I was searching for. I put examples in my pictures, saying I am speaking always of the same thing, but in an artistic way. I show a guy closed in a tower [in El Topo] and in Psychomagic I show a guy breaking pumpkins. I did that in El Topo, but in a metaphorical way, not directly. And then I show in my film that it was the same position, but in another language: artistic language, therapeutic language.
Can you tell me something about your encounters with André Breton and other surrealists in the Paris of the 1960s?
I will speak about that in my third film. It's a trilogy: The Dance of Reality, Endless Poetry, and Essential Journey. That's number three. I hope, if I am alive, because I am an old person, to start it in January. The script I've done already. I am very happy with it. I speak about that time, until I started to be a movie director. I stop there. In it, I am going to France to work with the surrealists, with the theater of Marcel Marceau, with the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. I have those three worlds.
My mind was opened with philosophy. With surrealism, I think I am the last surrealistic moviemaker who's really surrealistic. But I am a little step farther, because surrealism doesn't show, doesn't explain. It's the mystery of something you don't understand. That is surrealism. A dream image you don't understand, you have no need to explain that. In the art I do, you know what you're doing. It has a finality. It has to solve your problem and come to felicity. Felicity of life. That's what I feel with the idiotic love story. Love is not like love with a star. Love is love. We need to show what love is. Tell the things that are true, make you go to happiness. Not an idiotic happiness, not Disneyland, a real internal life. Happy to be alive. I am alive. It's fantastic. What an incredible thing. Art has to give you with possibility to be what you are, not what the moviemaker is. Not what the actor is, you. It's complicated, no?
Speaking of surrealistic filmmakers, what do you think about the films of Luis Buñuel?
He was a surrealist, yes, but he's too realistic for me. He was a real person, in the real. And for me the pictures have not only a meaning, they're a painting. You can shoot something like that [mimes different angles], traveling shots, etcetera. Everything speaks. Buñuel's show only one point of view. He's sitting and everything is in the size of someone sitting. But he doesn't go out [he mimes leaving the Skype frame], he doesn't make other things. Hollywood discovered camera movement. Camera movement is fantastic! I need to have Buñuel in Hollywood and that would be good. He could show a deep meaning but with greater freedom of form.
When you worked with Claudio Argento on Santa Sangre did you know anything about the films of his brother Dario?
Yes, I like them a lot. He was a guy who doesn't give too much importance to the script. He can be not logical. The pleasure to shoot something that's weird! And I liked that. No message, no meaning. Very aesthetical.
Do you have a favorite film of his?
I am very old. I don't remember the names. I've seen it a lot of times, this picture. He goes into a building, he goes inside the house.
Deep Red. Profondo Rosso.
Yes! Profondo Rosso. Fantastic picture. A film like that, for his time, he made explosive cinema. Because it was the film of a director. Generally, in the industrial film, the director is an employee. The studios are surveying the script. You aren't free with the script. You need to shoot what's right there. Because, when you're free, you make the script to start the picture. But in the middle of the picture you can change whatever you want and put new things in. Because there are magic things that happen when you're shooting. In Santa Sangre, when the father commits suicide, the naked father, it was in Mexico, in the street. A very old woman was singing, drunk. There were a lot of bars there. I said, "Go find me this drunk woman, because it's the music I need for that suicide." And then he will kill himself, but in the image there's a real song of a person who's really suffering. And it's fantastic, like that. You need to be free. When you make the picture, the director is the poet. In Hollywood, the poet is the money. More money, more happiness. I say, "No." More poetical, more artistical—that is good. Like the tarot, that isn't a business. I know I'm crazy, but you need some crazy person in the generality, then somebody will use it in another way.
We certainly need more people in the world who are crazy in that way.
Yes, because crazy people aren't crazy. They're just using their mind in another way. And it's very interesting.
How closely did you collaborate with David Lynch on your King Shot project?
He was very gentle with me. He said, "Maybe we can make a picture." But my project was so crazy. Maybe I wanted to shoot in Spain. I wanted to do what I always do. But he had a little company at that moment. He was not able to have the money to do that. So, since I didn't have the money, I didn't do it. It was too expensive.
What can you tell me about your time with Arrabal and Roland Topor in the Panic Movement?
That was really a fantastic moment in my life. Because we were accepted within the surrealist group. That was the end of surrealism. A lot of surrealists were into politics. They were Trotskyists. Into the Romantic realization of the woman, not the real woman. Arrabal, Topor, and I were searching for absolute freedom. The artist needs to be inside the play, for example, inside what you're shooting or playing. You need to be inside, in your body. You are there. Not out of the work. You need to go farther than the intellect, farther than the unconscious. Farther than the religions. You need to find the panic. Panic isn't fear, panic is the totality. You need to find what a man is in totality. And then, if you are an artist in totality, you need to be a painter, dancer, mime, cinematographic creator, marionette. All the things I did. Because it's the totality. Searching the totality of expression, that's what we did. It wasn't a movement, it was only three persons. And we called it a movement. We wanted to show that culture was fake, was an illusion. Because three persons will go into history as a movement that doesn't exist!
Your performances sound a lot like what was called "happenings" in other countries or what the Vienna Aktionists were doing with their films. Would you say that's accurate?
No, the happenings were going on in the milieu of painting and sculpture. It was a way to develop the plastic arts. I made ephemera. Ephemera is not that. Ephemera is a kind of theater, psychoanalysis, dreams, surrealism. The language of art, with meaning. Happening is an expression of freedom, but only freedom.
So the performances were closer to what Antonin Artaud was talking about with his Theater of Cruelty?
I was a big admirer of The Theater and Its Double. I started from there. He opened my eyes. In Fando y Lis, you have a little influence of Artaud. I had a theater play of Arrabal, with Fando y Lis, but I didn't use the play, I used the memory I had as director of the play. With a lot of violence coming from Artaud. And then in El Topo, I had a Japanese Zen Master, Ejo Takata. Zen meditation, not like a hippie, real Zen meditation. Seven-day meditating without sleep. I was sleeping every night for 30 minutes, that's all. Terrible, incredible! I brought this experience to El Topo. Because Artaud made the Theater of Cruelty. When you see the cruelty, you are open. But then I didn't want any more cruelty. I decided I wanted to make the encounter with our self, make the cathedral [forms a steeple with his hands]. You are a cathedral. You aren't a butcher. You're creating the sacred. Some religions are fanatical. But I read the teachings of the Buddha, and I think there's something more true than Artaud.
Is it true that René Daumal's novel Mount Analogue was an influence on The Holy Mountain?
Yes. I love René Daumal, because I love his teacher. He had a great teacher, who was Gurdjieff. And in that novel, Daumal is speaking about his experience with Gurdjieff. More than surrealism, Daumal took it a step farther: The Great Game [a "counter-surrealist" journal founded by Daumal and friends]. He started to choke himself to see how it was to almost die. He was searching for stronger things, real metaphysical searching. I wanted to do his unfinished novel, Mount Analogue. He never finished it because he died very young from tuberculosis. But the family didn't want to give me the rights. I said, "Well, I will make my own Holy Mountain!" What I directed depicts Daumal's book. It's a group that goes with a teacher to find immortality on a mountain. That I took. Then I developed my ideas.
So, at the end of the film, when we see the making of the film, when you turn one camera on another, was that a way of opening it up to the interpretation of the viewer?
I never thought of it the way you are saying now. Maybe, yes. I went to a real mountain in Mexico. I brought a tiger, a monk, actors, all that. And the Mexicans told me it was dangerous. Why? "Because there are tempests, and when there are tempests, you can die. Be careful." No, I will go, because it's beautiful, the weather is so fantastic. I shoot what I shoot, and when I finished shooting, the tempest came. And then we started to run in concert, to get off the mountain, because it was dangerous! I was running and I slipped and [mimes rolling down the mountain]. But I had a hammer and [mimes jamming it into the ground]. "No! I don't want to die, I need to finish this damn picture!" I am making a picture. Like this, I will finish. This is the end of the picture, because it was the real end. It wasn't as good, but I put in reality into my film. I wanted to make real things, and that, for me, was a real thing!
We're making a picture. It's not a comedy. There are real sentiments, because all those people I found were not actors. Every person I showed had the problem I show in the picture. Real people I used, real tiger! I'm not a Hollywood company making fake everything. I asked Hollywood that I want a stampede of tarantulas, big spiders on a body. They made fake ones. So we went out and bought spiders and had their fangs cut out. We made up the body and then we used the spiders. Real spiders came out there. And the person who did that, also myself, never liked spiders! There he was, suffering something enormous with those spiders!
Are you currently working on any new graphic novels?
Graphic novels. That is my industrial business. Because I have The Incal, Metabarons, Sons of El Topo. That I am doing all the time. That is normal for me, because I have a big imagination. If I didn't have imagination, I would die. I am taking a step farther than Psychomagic with Psychotrance. It's a kind of literature, but at the same time you're reading, I'm giving you exercises. It's mixing a lecture with exercises to inspire what you do, the impact of having a trance. With drugs, you have a trance. I say no drugs. We can do it without drugs. How to do it like this. Not only meditation. Go farther than meditation. Go immediately to what you are when you're not intellect. What is in you? You don't need to take LSD. You don't need to take ayahuasca. Because those are dreams. I am saying do the same thing I do in movies. In movies, in a century of fake feelings, I am making real feelings. In a culture full of drugs, psychological drugs, I am putting in a real hallucination, guiding how you can do it.
Translation by Pascale Montandon.
Interview: Kate Lyn Sheil on Calibrating Her Performance in She Dies Tomorrow
Sheil discusses how she situates the specifics of work within such an ambiguous and allegorical film.
Amy Seimetz's She Dies Tomorrow is of obvious relevance in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The film, which had been set to premiere at this year's SXSW, grapples with the contagious nature of despondency and angst in a contemporary milieu that so often seeks to minimize or ignore them. These amorphous feelings prove to be an inexplicably transmissible disease passed from character to character, each of which stops in their tracks and calmly declares, "I'm going to die tomorrow."
That She Dies Tomorrow doesn't buckle under the weight of its heady themes and supernatural premise is a testament to how the performances ground the film in reality. In the film, Kate Lyn Sheil stars as Amy, a surrogate character for the director who quietly yet urgently probes the boundaries of the anxieties that ensnare her. Sheil, who commands the most screen time, captivates as she wields her mastery of minutiae. She's capable of precisely executing small physical gestures to convey forceful intent.
It's merely the latest in a line of exciting and unpredictable performances from Sheil, whose prolific presence in the New York independent film scene spans from working with early mumblecore pioneers like Joe Swanberg in Silver Bullets to partnering with boundary-pushing luminaries such as Robert Greene on Kate Plays Christine. She's equally as revelatory appearing briefly in a short film, the latest Alex Ross Perry project, an episode of House of Cards, or working through the very ethics of her trade as herself in documentary format.
I caught up with Sheil prior to the digital release of She Dies Tomorrow to discuss how she approaches conveying such potent interiority, her long-term collaboration with Seimetz, and how she situates the specifics of work within such an ambiguous and allegorical film.
What are the ripple effects of Kate Plays Christine in your work and career, given that it's such a meta performance about the nature of performance?
I worked with a director afterward who said that he wanted to work with me after he saw Kate Plays Christine because it made him feel like I would be honest with him if I didn't like the way that he was directing me. And I was like, "Oh, no, you're mistaken. I probably will not say anything at all and just try and toe the party line." Because that movie plays with what is real and what is fake, I feel like there could potentially be a misconception that I yell. Which is…not the case. Your guess is as good as mine.
That scene where you really snap was staged too, right? It was something Robert Greene invented to see what would happen when you felt boxed in by the experiment.
Yeah, it was scripted, essentially.
Is the movie at all a window into the way you work?
I think I spoke honestly about some ways that I approach acting roles in Kate Plays Christine, while lots of it is scripted, embellished or made up to create a narrative arc. I think there are moments that I speak truthfully about the way I do approach a role. I, personally, would never go to Sarasota and think that I had to interview people in order to play a part correctly. But I think I talk about my—I hate to say it—"process" in a truthful manner at a certain point, and that's how I would [do it]. That's probably how I approached this movie. Amy wrote this role, and then the best that I can do is just to try to find ways that I relate to the character and use substitutions to think of times when I maybe felt analogous.
Part of what makes Kate Plays Christine so fascinating is the way the camera allows you to externalize the process of thinking and deliberating. Was that at all helpful for She Dies Tomorrow?
Yeah, that's all that's all Amy's writing though. That was baked into the script from the earliest stages of it. She wanted the character to be very physical in the way that she was exploring that house and touching things in a way that, at least from the outside if someone were to catch you doing it, it doesn't seem like normal behavior. But when faced with the enormity of this thing, normalcy doesn't really mean anything anymore.
Amy Seimetz has said that the tactile details of touching the house came from her own experience grappling with the weird mix of emotions that arose from her becoming a homeowner. How do you find your way into this compulsion that's so visceral and unique?
It's Amy, she wrote it for me, and then she creates an environment on set where—I don't want to say it's not difficult, because I certainly was afraid the entire time that I maybe wasn't doing as good a job as I could. I didn't want to let Amy down. She creates an environment where you can sort of slip into it. We've known each other for such a long time, and we've worked together before. I love the way that she directs me. She's not precious with me at all. She will quite literally show me what she wants if I'm not getting it. [laughs, mimes direction] "Okay, that's what I'm supposed to do, cool!"
The beginning of the film is largely free of dialogue. How much of what we see was scripted or pre-planned versus discovered once the camera rolled?
Not much of an element of discovery once the camera starts rolling. Amy is pretty precise in her visuals, and she has worked with Jake Keitel, who shot the movie, for like 17 years now. They share a brain in certain ways in terms of lighting the shots. Because that element is so important to her, there really wasn't much of the "go with the flow, we'll just find it in the moment." There's a level of precision to it, which I like and appreciate. But that's not to say that she doesn't give you as much room as you need to emotionally find the scene. But, in terms of physicality, she really has planned it out pretty precisely beforehand.
Was that at all different from Sun Don't Shine? Since that was such a scrappy, on-the-go road movie, did really planting your feet in a location change the nature of your collaboration with Amy at all?
With Sun Don't Shine, yeah, certain things are obviously outside your control if you're shooting outside. But also with that, the economy of the way that she approaches making the movie, she still has a scrappy sensibility. That's my favorite thing because I think if you know how to make a movie for no money, then you can use those skills and continue to apply that to whatever budget you happen to be working with. She had everything on Sun Don't Shine so precisely planned out in terms of how to shoot the car because she and Jake didn't want it to become monotonous. In a way, that required a great deal of precision too. But then, of course, for that movie, you're shooting in Florida in the middle of summer. There are just variables. I got very sick when we were making that movie, so there are scenes where [they] had one thing in mind. And then she's like, "Okay, you're just gonna be sitting because you can't do anything."
Since you mentioned that Amy and her cinematographer share the same brain, do you feel the same kinship with her or other directors? A lot of your work comes from collaboration with people like Amy Seimetz, Alex Ross Perry, Robert Greene, among others, with whom you share a social circle. How does the process of working with them, where you might be more involved at the ground level of a project, compare with something where you're brought in through a more traditional casting process?
I love working with all the people that you just mentioned, and I think it's very lucky that I happen to know people that, by my estimation, are incredible. It's so wonderful to work with them because there is a shared history and a shorthand. It just so happens, as I said before, that I like their work a lot, so it's more bang for your buck. Not only do you get to work with friends, but you get to be in a project that you're probably going to like or would like, even if you had nothing to do with it. But, at the same time, there's something really something very fun about showing up to a set and just trying your best to execute the thing, do your job and then go home at the end of the day and it's not your old, close friends. There's something nice about both.
What's the best way to describe your relationship to that extended Kim's Video orbit? Muse, co-conspirator, something else entirely?
I'm so close to it that it's hard to think of what to call it. But that place meant everything to me. It's where I feel like I got my education in film. I think my life would be completely different if it hadn't existed. It truly does mean so much to me. Surprisingly, though I don't think any of us truly saw it coming at the time, a bunch of people who have worked there at a certain time actually started making their own projects. I feel very fortunate that I was around at that time. And it's nice to make movies with people [for whom] the impetus is a love of watching them. That's a very joyous experience.
I know you kind of scoffed at the word "process" earlier and put it in scare quotes…
Yeah, but…I used it! [laughs]
Well, we can just caveat that. I know your training as an actress primarily came from a theatrical background at NYU. She Dies Tomorrow is about the farthest thing from a theatrical performance: The film opens on a shot of your eye, and meaning gets conveyed through how your pupil moves. How did you learn to communicate in these micro moments? Did it involve "unlearning" any theatrical training?
Yes and no. I feel like it's all the same skill set. And then, of course, when you get in front of the camera, you learn to adjust and have a relationship with the camera also. Rather than acting for an audience, you're trying to be present with your fellow actor, more present in the moment. If there isn't anybody else there, which is largely the case for my stuff in She Dies Tomorrow, the camera's your audience. I haven't acted in a play in a very long time. I miss it, personally. I left school, and I never wanted to do to theater again. I was obsessed with movies, and I still am. But at a certain point, maybe a few years ago, I was like, "You know what, it would be fun to do to do a play!" But, I mean, I still struggle with it. I feel like a lot of my close friends who are actors talk about it too. I still walk away at the end of some days being like, "I was too big, or I was too aware of the camera. So I tried to be small, and I think it was too small." You still have these anxieties about that exact thing, calibrating your performance to the medium.
As an actress in a film like this, do you feel the need to "understand" the rest of the film like the nature of the contagion or the impressionistic transitions? Or is it a matter of performing your part and trusting that the rest of the film will fall into place around you?
I think it's important to make it make sense for you, but I don't think it's important for me to understand the structure of the entire film. But it's always very important for me to know what I'm doing to understand where, in particular, I'm coming from. I definitely trusted that Amy was doing something great with those parts of the movie. When she told me that's how the movie was going to proceed, that it was going to expand and extrapolate in that way, I was very, very happy. I was happy that there were going to be other people for the audience to sit with for a while. And I also love those scenes. The dinner scene, I think is so funny. Everything in the movie is wonderful, but [that's what is] coming to mind right now. I like the way that those scenes bounced around with my scenes and recontextualize my scenes to a certain degree.
I'm always fascinated with this duality that to communicate something existential and widely recognizable, it's often rooted in such personal and intimate performance. How do you manage the balance between the general and the specific, especially in a film like She Dies Tomorrow that has a more allegorical or representational edge to it?
I think that certain things are just outside of my control. The most that I can control is to try and make the character specific for me and then I can't get too caught up in thinking of the overarching themes. I just try and stay in my lane, stay focused and make it specific and individual. But if the person directing movie is creating something allegorical, then hopefully my performance lends itself to that goal.
What are your thoughts on the meta element of anxiety and death premonitions being contagious? Do you think the screen is porous enough that the audience could, or should, catch it? By the end of the film, I was wondering if I would end up saying "I'm going to die tomorrow" like all the characters.
We're obviously living in such a strange time right now that Amy never could have anticipated. Hopefully what people would feel more than anything is recognition, or that some experience that they've had is being reflected back to them. Hopefully that would make someone feel better potentially, less alone or less crazy. Something like that. But I mean, the movie is about ideas being contagious. So, maybe.
It was so interesting to watch in the back half of the film where, for certain characters, you can tell that the ability to express and verbalize their anxiety helps them manage it. Maybe that's the more constructive takeaway.
Yeah, there you go!
Interview: Seth Rogen on An American Pickle and Reconnecting with His Roots
Rogen discusses collaborating with Simon Rich, how the film enriched his understanding of Judaism, the exhibition prospects of comedy in the streaming era, and more.
It's been over two decades since Seth Rogen made his small-screen debut in Freaks and Geeks, though one could be forgiven for assuming he's been in the business much longer given all that he's accomplished since then. He wrote for the acclaimed shows Da Ali G Show and Undeclared in the early aughts, before then breaking out in front of the camera in two comedy smashes released in the summer of 2007, Knocked Up and Superbad, the latter of which he co-wrote with creative partner Evan Goldberg. Rogen helped usher in the still-dominant Apatow era of big-screen comedy, a reign that not even the North Korean government could topple with the cyber-attack launched in response to his 2014 Kim Jong-un assassination satire The Interview.
While Rogen's on-camera appearances have waned slightly over the past few years, his creative output hasn't, as he and his partners at Point Grey continue to ramp up production across film, TV, and streaming. Their latest effort, An American Pickle, holds the distinction of being HBO Max's first original narrative feature to premiere on the platform. But it also portends a distinctly more mature and reflective shift in Rogen's own work as the cinematic face of exuberant millennial prolonged adolescence nears middle age.
The film stars Rogen in dual roles as Ben, a contemporary secular Brooklynite app developer, and Herschel, his devoutly Jewish great-grandfather who emigrated from eastern Europe and reemerges in the present day after being brined in a vat of pickles for a century. Neither the film or the characters in it dwell much on the absurd premise, and An American Pickle blossoms into a silly but sweet tale of misunderstanding and reconciliation between distant generations that share little other than a bloodline.
I chatted with Rogen on the eve of An American Pickle's release. Our discussion covered how he collaborated with writer Simon Rich, how the film enriched his own understanding of Judaism, and how he envisions the exhibition prospects of comedy in the streaming era.
I saw Knocked Up as a teenager, and now it weirds me out that I'm older than you were when you made it. While working on it, were you aware that it might become such a generational touchstone for millennials? How do you feel about it now that it's almost like a period piece?
I think when you make a movie you never truly know how it's going to be received, honestly. Watch Hearts of Darkness, that's a good lesson in that! There's people on the set of the worst movie you've ever seen who think they're making a masterpiece, and there's people on the set of a masterpiece thinking that no one's going to watch or see it ever—and even if they do, they'll hate it. It's not uncontrollable, but it's hard to control and almost impossible to do with some sort of consistency. To that end, I'm glad that people still like any of our movies. The fact that any of them are viewed as remotely relevant in some way is lovely. You really don't know what's going to stand the test of time until time has passed, really.
I ask about that film partly because I feel there's an interesting evolution we can chart from there to An American Pickle, which has an insight and understanding that feels like it can only be conveyed by learning and living. Is this the kind of film you could only have made at this point in your life?
Yeah, I think it's definitely born of an older brain. Especially the themes of grief and how to process things we learned as kids, how we may have rejected those things even though they might add value to our lives, those themes are much more prevalent in my life as I get closer to 40 than when I was in my mid-20s. The idea of making a movie about grief and reconnecting with my roots was not prominent on my radar! [laughs]
There's such poignancy to the way the film shows how past generations, be it through religion or some other factor, are better equipped to handle grief and hardship. Has any of that been valuable, pandemic or otherwise, in your life?
Yeah, I think religion specifically. My wife's mother passed away earlier this year, and her uncle, actually. I've just seen with that specifically. Judaism has actionable protocols that do help. At one point in my life, I would probably write off all of it and say there was nothing helpful I was ever taught about religion. Now as I get older, I can cherry-pick and say you can take elements of this and apply them to your life as you find them helpful. Not all of this was born out of fooling people. Some of it was born out of truly trying to help people.
You've obviously done quite a bit of writing yourself on other projects. When it comes to something like An American Pickle, do you mostly just stay in your lane as an actor and let Simon Rich tailor the script to you? Or are you still involved in some writerly capacity?
I'm definitely still involved in some writerly capacity. I respect the writer and know their name is the one that's on it ultimately, and they have to be able to stand behind all of it and take ownership over it. But I try to be constructive! I just try to help and support the ideas that I can. I try to acknowledge it and say this isn't what I would do, always, but I'm not the writer! I try to respect that.
This film was originally geared toward theaters and is now going directly to streaming on HBO Max. In your mind, does the method of distribution affect the work you make? Or are you a platform agnostic and a laugh is a laugh on a big or a small screen?
We definitely make some films that are geared more toward a big-screen experience, in our minds at least, and some we are much more comfortable with that not being the experience. This being the perfect example of one of those! We understand that if we intend to keep making films for theaters, then they have to earn that right to be in a theater. Not every film automatically is granted that at this moment, and we understand that those are different types of films sometimes. It's not always based on budget or anything like that. Good Boys, although it wasn't expensive, is a movie we were confident would do well in theaters. There are some more expensive movies we would not be as confident that would be the best place for them. It's an active conversation, but I do think some movies are better geared towards a cinematic experience and some towards a streaming one.
It still strikes me as crazy that so much data shows comedy is one of the genres people most want to view at home instead of in a room full of people.
I think people just like comedy! But to me, some of the greatest experiences I've had in a theater, I don't think of the action movies I saw. I think about when I saw There's Something About Mary or South Park in theaters, the Jackass movies, these wild experiences where you can barely hear what's happening. Those are my favorite moviegoing experiences, and I think a lot of people feel that way.
Any chance you'd do a This Is the End sequel? It's a movie I've thought about a lot over the last few months each time celebrities try to center themselves in the dialogue around a moment of crisis.
Not a sequel, specifically, but we do talk about building on the genre of famous people playing themselves interacting with supernatural situations. There maybe is more to be done with that.
Interview: Dave Franco on The Rental, His Genre Influences, and Future Projects
The actor discusses collaborating with Joe Swanberg and a wildly talented cast on his directorial debut.
After a series of bit roles in television and film throughout the aughts, Dave Franco won himself a breakout role in Phil Lord and Chris Miller's 21 Jump Street that seemed to prime the actor for a future as the star of many a stoner comedy. And while he has memorably flexed his ad-libbing skills in comedies such as Neighbors over the years, the actor's recent work—most memorably in 6 Balloons, alongside Abbi Jacobson, and Joe Swanberg's HBO series Easy—points to his desire to stay ever-changing and not limit himself.
Now, with The Rental, the 35-year-old actor adds director to his list of credits. Co-written with Swanberg, the film finds Franco drawing inspiration not only from many a horror classic, most memorably John Carpenter's Halloween and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but also from the directors he says he's been lucky to have worked with over the years, including Barry Jenkins, Noah Baumbach, and his older brother, James Franco. The Rental is a slow-burn horror thriller about a weekend vacation that goes awry when two brothers and their significant others rent a seemingly perfect Airbnb property somewhere along the Pacific Coast.
Shortly after The Rental premiered to more than 1,300 guests at the Vineland Drive-In in Los Angeles, I had a chance to speak with Franco about shooting of his film, collaborating with Swanberg and his wildly talented cast, his future directorial ambitions, and more.
Is there a specific inspiration for The Rental?
The idea was inspired by my own paranoia about the concept of home sharing. The country is as divided as it's ever been, and no one trusts each other, yet we trust staying in the home of a stranger simply because of a few five-star reviews online. And in reality, while we were shooting the film, there were new articles coming out every week about homeowners with hidden cameras in their place. And I still use all of the home-sharing apps. In fact, I stayed in an Airbnb while shooting the film. I was trying to explore this disconnect where, even though we're all aware of the risks of staying in a stranger's home, we still do it. Why do we subject ourselves to that knowing we're potentially putting ourselves in danger?
How did you end up working with Joe Swanberg on the film?
I wanted to write the film with Joe because his main strengths lie in characters and relationships. Our goal from the beginning was to create a tense relationship drama where the interpersonal issues between the characters were just as thrilling as the fact that there's a psycho killer lurking in the shadows. At its core, the film really is about these characters and their relationships, and then we sprinkled a horror element on top to help accentuate the problems that they're going through. But when there are issues in your own romantic relationships, that can be as scary as anything else, even physical danger from a psycho killer.
What directors stand out who may have helped you the most in terms of taking the leap from actor to feature film director?
I've been lucky enough to work with a handful of really, really great directors—people like Barry Jenkins, Noah Baumbach, Seth Rogen, my brother, Phil Lord and Chris Miller—and the biggest thing I took from that whole group of them is, in general, they all create very safe, comfortable environments on set where they really encourage everyone to voice their opinions if they think that it will help the film in any way. And so, essentially, there are no egos on set and the main rule is the best idea wins, no matter who it's coming from. I definitely tried to adopt that mindset for my film as well.
You immediately establish tension between the two brothers with an allusion to a possible infidelity, and this tension methodically builds to a breaking point. I know you're a fan of clever genre films, so I'm curious whether there are any ones in particular that inspired you to capture that tension on screen.
Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Sean Durkin, Amy Seimetz, David Robert Mitchell, and Jeremy Saulnier are all making projects that are so nuanced and atmospheric. Their films take their time to creep up on you, as opposed to a lot of horror films that rely too heavily on cheap jump scares and, ultimately, feel disposable. I was lucky enough to convince Sean Durkin to produce my film, and he ended up being somewhat of a mentor to me, giving me the confidence to make a horror film that didn't have many jump scares. He would remind me that we had a compelling story and there was enough inherent tension between these characters that we didn't need to push the horror, that it was all simmering under the surface and that we could just let it build and naturally come out over the course of the film.
Your wife, Alison Brie, appeared in Scream 4, so it was great to see her working again in a similar genre because, though it's a slow burner, The Rental is a slasher film. I'm curious about your process when it came to curating this particular cast of actors.
Alison has a blast jumping back into it and letting go. I've obviously always known that she's an incredible actress, but when I was in a position where I was watching her intently for five straight weeks, I realized that she's one of the best. She's so unique in her ability to balance heavy drama with moments of levity, sometimes within a single scene. And, so, it was a pleasure for me just to see her in that light and just kind of spend time with her in that way. It just continued to develop an even greater appreciation for each other.
Regarding Dan Stevens, I've always loved him as a performer, especially when he's working in the genre arena, as in Adam Wingard's The Guest and FX's Legion. But in those projects, he's playing characters who are slightly heightened, so I was excited to see him in a role that felt a little more grounded and human. And one of his best skills is that he's really incredible at playing slightly villainous characters, where there are certain actors who play villains and audiences immediately turn on them when they start to make unethical choices. But Dan has so much fun with these types of roles—he really relishes in them—and as an audience, you can't help but root for him, even when he's making horrible decisions.
Sheila's mainly known for her work in Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, where she plays a vampire. And she's incredible in that film, but she's not able to emote very much because that's not what vampires do. I then saw her in Jeremiah Zagar's film We the Animals. She's only in a supporting role in that film, but she's able to bring so much soul and compassion to her character in a finite amount of screen time. And after seeing that, I knew that she was perfect for Mina. She has this inherent strength to her, but she can also show such a vulnerability when the scene calls for it, and that was the perfect duality for Mina, who's very strong-willed but who can crumble at any moment.
And then, finally, Jeremy Allen White is mainly known for his work on Shameless, and I've admired him from afar for a long time. He has this raw energy that feels unpredictable yet extremely down to earth. And the character of Josh is difficult to pull off because he has this rage inside of him, but at the same time he's very delicate and in touch with his emotional side, and I think Jeremy is one of a handful of actors who could pull that off.
The film was timely when you wrote it, but even more so now with the pandemic, civil unrest, and unprecedented political corruption. It may resonate even more with audiences now. Who could've anticipated that?
Exactly. Sometimes a film's success really revolves around the timing of when it comes out.
Are you already thinking about your next feature?
Yeah. I have a pretty strong idea for a sequel to this film, if I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to carry on with the story. And in addition to that, my wife and I have written a romantic comedy during the quarantine that I would direct and she would act in. It's a slightly elevated version of the genre, and it's inspired by such classics as Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally and Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle.
Interview: Bill and Turner Ross on the Constructions of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
The Rosses discuss how performance, accessibility, empathy, and nostalgia figure into their work.
The work of filmmaker brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross has always lived on the more experimental margins of the documentary form, and their latest effort radically pushes definitional notions of nonfiction to a near-breaking point. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets raised eyebrows when Sundance programmers slotted it into the festival's Documentary Competition section, given that the film, about a Las Vegas dive bar's last night of operation, was actually shot using a cast of hired actors-cum-barflys in New Orleans. What the filmmakers capture over the course of a whirlwind 18 hours—a day after Donald Trump won the presidency—might lack actuality, but they compensate with unvarnished authenticity.
The Ross brothers, who are based in New Orleans, have long been experts at capturing how people perform their identity within a given space and what that reflects about their humanity. Sometimes the performance is literal, as in their "dance film" Contemporary Color, a celebration of color guard staged by David Byrne at an event at Brooklyn's Barclays Center. But more often, their canvas is bigger, such as New Orleans's French Quarter in Tchoupitoulas, their Sidney, Ohio hometown in 45365, or the Texas-Mexico border in Western; these documentaries are also populated with people going about their lives in less staged circumstances. With Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the filmmakers narrow their focus to an admittedly synthetic setting to achieve an identical effect. Once the cameras start rolling and the booze starts flowing, the emotional honesty of the moments they capture outmuscles any concerns over genre labels or definitions.
On a Zoom call prior to the film's Virtual Cinema release this Friday, I spoke with the Ross brothers about the intellectual and emotional journey leading up to ideating and executing an unconventional project like Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. The conversation also covered how the brothers think about performance, choreography, accessibility, empathy, and nostalgia when making their films.
Your body of work is largely about what we can learn about people from the spaces they occupy and explore. Did your ability to explore these thematics get easier or harder with such a confined location in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets?
Turner Ross: We're interested in people in the space they inhabit, people in the spaces they create, how the spaces that they occupy both relate to them and are manifested by them. So, I think every film has a bit to do with that. With this one, I wouldn't say [it was] easier or harder. I would say we always set up a challenge for ourselves. And this was as challenging a dynamic as we could conceive given the films that have preceded it. You know, we're always trying to learn from what comes before. And the last film that we did was a "four walls" movie, but it was the Barclays Center in New York, tens of thousands of people, several hundred participants and a crew of dozens. We wanted to take that idea of constraints and a limited palette and say, "Can we reduce that down to actually four walls, just the two of us, to a group of people assembled? Can we give a sense of being there to a place that we've manifested? Can we elicit an authentic experience from an intention to a scenario?" But those are imposed limitations and obstacles, and that's what makes it interesting for us.
Bill Ross IV: In some ways, it was nicer to be confined to that space because that limitation was what it was. In other ways, it was incredibly difficult.
You mentioned Contemporary Color as another "four walls" movie. Did that experience of learning how to capture motion within a confined space help in making this one?
TR: Very much so. Contemporary Color is actually a dance film, so it involves choreography. Humans and their choreography through space is always interesting, and so we tried to create a space in which all of the corners of the room had potential. We filled it with people who would have an interesting dance with each other. The difference was we didn't know the choreography ahead of time. We just kind of had to create the scenario, create opportunities and then follow where they led. And so that made it much more of an interesting dance partner than just observing the thing itself.
You started conceptualizing this film with your Vegas visits in 2009 but didn't shoot the film until 2016. How did your understanding of the people, the bars, the city, the country change over time? How would the film be different if you'd shot it right away?
BR: I mean, each film is an extension of where we are as humans when we shoot it, so it would certainly have been more immature.
TR: It's an extension of us as people, as individuals, as humans in the world. It's an extension of ourselves as artists, the times that we're in, what we're thinking about, what we're responding to. So, certainly, 10 years ago, the world we were responding to is very different than the one that we find ourselves in now. In that sense, the world being available to us as the resource that we mine, certainly that would have been different. But, at the same time, what we were looking for at that time was much more of a gritty, verité, follow-where-it-goes street film in which we were just really wanting to see what was happening in that world. Not so much as a paradigm in which the movie takes place, a metaphor for experience, a framing device—which is what it ends up being in this film—but the actuality of what it was in 2009 during the Great Recession when people were living on the outskirts of Vegas, not seeking pleasure but a place to get by in the world. That spoke to us really as an image, as an experience and as a rich resource for painting a portrait of the contemporary American experience, which, again, extrapolated into these times would be very different. And, for us, it became the backdrop for this film so that we could create a microcosmic story that hopefully spoke to something bigger in that context.
BR: We know if we had made it 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been a bar film. I think it would have been much more like Martin Bell's Streetwise or Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog.
TR: I'd love to see that film!
BR: Oh, that movie would be sweet. But we'll get to that one. It just wasn't the right time then. It's good that we got to think about it for this long. A lot of things were reported in that bucket over the last decade, or I guess it would have been seven years.
You've described bars as almost liminal spaces where people go to be someone other than themselves. Is that realization part of what led you to view the people in this film as actors performing characters?
TR: We're always performing as people, and that comes into the genre-framing conversation. Our awareness of a camera has become a real factor in the world, but that's not what we're after. What we were curious about is what are these spaces that we choose to inhabit, that we seek in which to commiserate, that we seek in which to make stories, to tell stories, to put on airs, to be ourselves, to let go of things. Through all of time, people have found these types of spaces. And at the time that we made the film, we felt it was the most conducive space in which to observe and be curious about the conversations people are having with each other when they aren't talking about something in particular. And, so, if we can all share a drink and have a conversation, what does it sound like? That's in parallel to our interest in these spaces in general, and as a visual and cultural space, but also as a useful space. Who are we? Why don't we talk to each other like this? What stories do we tell what stories we tell ourselves? And what are we saying to each other in this moment in time?
Do you see your other films as having performances in their own way?
BR: Always, yeah. In a lot of ways, I don't see this film being much different than the others. They're all constructions. There's a camera in the room and we're all performing. We're all presenting what we wish to be seen as. I think that's been cranked up here, but by how much I don't really know.
TR: Our films are an amalgam of an experience. How can we distill it down to its essence, to make it sensical when it's shared? I think that's part of being a person in the world, what are you going to share with others in order to give them an idea of who you wish them to see? And that's performance. So, in that sense, our films are also performative. In this sense, we're just more acutely looking at that.
How were you all navigating the need to be specific to get the precise sense of place but also generalizable enough that anyone could see their own truth or experience reflected in the film?
BR: A lot of it is casting. We're casting a wide variety of folks for a lot of different reasons, but one of them being that folks will see themselves in someone there. Or pieces of themselves throughout. And that seems to have been the case so far, which has been great. But the beginning of the question was Vegas…
TR: We wanted to tell a specific story that was also universal. That's what Bill was talking about with casting. We wanted to make sure that there was representation in there so that there were different voices heard, which were authentic [and] would not [convey] an inauthentic experience, some sort of staged experiment, but something that spoke to an authenticity that we had perceived and experienced on our own. So, yes, we did a lot when it come to the framing of that world. We spent a lot of time in Vegas, certainly scouting and considering that and wanting to be authentic to that locale. But we also wanted to create a boundary in between so that when people watch the film, it isn't so acute that they feel removed. We want people to have this experiential opportunity. We spoke today with a woman in Moscow, different people all over the world, different age groups, different backgrounds, and [even though it] may not be [their] space, they know something like it. Those may not be your people, but you might know folks like 'em. And we wanted that to be the overriding idea, and not so much that this is a singular, specific story. We hoped that we would get to something that was more universal, even though it is a singular milieu.
We sometimes see the camera in the bar mirrors. Was it just too logistically complex trying to hide its presence? Did you just embrace your visibility?
BR: This is our fifth feature, and at this point, I think I'm just done trying to cut around us. We are there. If we weren't there, there wouldn't be a film. More and more, we have embraced the fact that we're just in the room. It's very intentional, but we're not focusing on ourselves. Because it's a mirrored room, we are popping up. We are leaving ourselves in there to say that this was a collective experience. This is all something that we experienced together. And we're shooting not at these folks, but with [them]. We are together.
A moment that really struck me in the film is the really heartfelt conversation at the end of the bar between Bruce and Pam, both older and of different racial backgrounds. We see them at first in close-up, then you zoom out to see from other people's vantage point from the other end of the bar in long shot. Throughout much of the film, we're in a moment so thoroughly, and then it evaporates. Why linger here a bit and change perspectives?
BR: There's two parts to that. One is, editorially, we needed to condense the scene timewise. But, also, because of that perspective, the scene becomes richer because the folks that you bounce around to are having trivial conversations when they are having a big life moment down here. And that's the way a bar works. Now, you're totally oblivious that somebody is having a life-changing, cathartic moment down here, and you and your buddies are talking about Olive Garden three seats down. I thought it was very telling what those spaces can be.
TR: And we wanted that inclusivity of the myriad experience and how the same situation, even within a small tight-knit framework, is experienced differently. And, as a viewer, that was Bill speaking to the cinematic intention. We realized that it was much more accessible as a film if we used the language of cinema to move around the space and to allow the viewers to say, "I have my own stream of consciousness in this space and can move around to the different conversations at will. I'm privy to all of the things in a way that even the people within the bar [aren't]." The omniscience is in favor of the viewer.
BR: There was one cut of this where we would just stick with Pam and Bruce for, like, eight minutes uninterrupted and not bounce around the room. We love that cut, but nobody else did! So we had austere intentions, and then realized we need to revert to the language of the movies.
Beyond just the difficulties of getting someone to watch or program something that's four-and-a-half-hours long, which is the length of your original favored cut, why whittle the film down to an hour-and-a-half? What's lost and what's gained?
BR: An audience is gained! [laughs]
TR: We always say that we make movies for ourselves first. We make movies for each other, and we try to solve that thing. Well, that four-and-a-half-hour movie was the movie that we made for ourselves and for each other. It turns out that what we loved about it was not translated to people outside of our own peculiar bubble. What we needed to do was distill that down to something that allowed people in and wasn't so cold and obstructive as to pull people out. It's not about observation, it's about inclusion for the people within it and the viewers, and we had to eventually really lean towards the viewer. Because if we're not successful in the end, if we can't share this, there's not an act of empathy. We can't create an artifact and then share it with an audience to have them have their experience. And so that is why it's 90 minutes.
Was it an intentional decision to shoot the day after the 2016 election or just a happy accident?
BR: I don't know if it was "happy," but it just sort of turned out that way.
TR: Generally, we're reflecting the state of the world at the time, what we were feeling and thinking. We were feeling sort of divided as a country and in terms of perspectives, and we were feeling pretty lost and like we should be able to do better than our vote on Election Day allowed. As artists, it was time for us to go to work. We set out to get the film in motion before we knew the results of the election. It wasn't about us making a film about our politics, but it was about the body politic. What is the state of people and what are they saying to each other? Let's not make an election film, but let's make a film about who we are during this time.
Trump is this kind of looming, mostly unspoken presence undergirding a lot of what's happening on screen, just as he has been in pretty much any bar for the last five years. How did you go about navigating the elephant in the room?
BR: It was just like a bar, with folks just getting into it, and that didn't feel quite right. So we'd move elsewhere. But that balance was struck in the edit. We didn't shy away from shooting all of it. It was present.
TR: But it also was a motivating factor in terms of why we chose to execute the film the way that we did: to create a container, a safe space to bring in a broad swath of people to choreograph the inclusion of those types. In scouting actual bars, there were some bars that, because of the way that Bill and I look, we would walk in, we'd turn the cameras on and they'd start chanting: "Trump, Trump, Trump!" Just assuming a certain point of view, and that's not the film that we wanted to make.
BR: To be clear, he is not talking about the Roaring 20s! [laughs]
TR: We scouted 100 bars, and we interviewed hundreds of people to be involved in this film. And there were certain spaces that certainly did have a limited viewpoint, and people found their own corner to back into. That's just not what we wanted to explore. We didn't want to have a space that spoke to a singular experience. We wanted myriad viewpoints and the opportunity to feel like you belonged in a space. That's both why we chose to shoot at that time and why we created our space the way that we did.
I'm sure you're getting this a lot, but obviously the film has evolved to take on additional meaning when being released in a pandemic where almost no one can congregate in a bar, or at least enjoy one like the Roaring 20s patrons are. Do you think it might change the meaning or reception of the film given that the audience is likely in a state of heightened nostalgia for the environment of a bar?
BR: That's funny because nobody's asked us that yet! I thought people would. You have to think it's going to. I mean, it's got to!
TR: We're as curious as you are. On the one hand, the themes in the film are still relevant and resonant. And, on the other hand, they change their articulation because of where we've ended up at this moment.
BR: Not just about your feelings on bars, but so much of what's brought up in the film has been heightened because everything is heightened right now.
TR: And not only what they're talking about, what the people are actually saying to each other. The context of the film, this idea of the end of things and uncertain futures, wrestling with identity and where we're all headed, these sort of existential themes that are intertwined in the conceit of the film and in the way that people are having discourse with each other. I'm super curious. What a bizarre fucking time to put out a film at all! Especially this one, where we're on edge about everything, we can't share space in this way. Who are we? I think that'll be reflected in the kind of feedback we get.
It strikes me that you didn't make this as an explicitly "nostalgic" film. Would you be okay if people received it that way?
BR: My biggest fear would be if they were just like, "Okay." Any sort of reaction, if they want to argue with it, great! People are free to do what they want to do, I just hope it's not just like, "Okay, honey. Well, we watched that." As if it's just one more piece of content.
TR: In the moment that we made it, our concern was not to date the film, to say, "Let's let it be of the world that it is, but let's also not fix it in that for all of time, hopefully." At the same time, it's already in the rearview, so you can't help but have some sort of nostalgia for it. Or, I don't know, maybe there's a hope for moving on. I think, inevitably, we make these things together to go through a catharsis together and with the people that we make them with. Then, it's left up to the audience, and I'm fascinated by what an audience does with it once it's theirs. I'll be super curious to have those conversations.
The Best Albums of 2020 (So Far)
These 20 albums reflect a reckoning with ourselves, the patriarchy, systemic racism, and our connection to the planet.
It's been a very long year—and we're only at the halfway mark. So it seemed like a good time to take stock of the human experiment circa 2020 with our first-ever mid-year albums list. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed who we are at our cores, both good and bad, the best albums of the year so far—almost all of them created prior to the crisis—reflect the simmering tensions that have been roiling beneath the surface of American life for years, if not decades. These 20 albums reflect a reckoning with ourselves (Arca's kinetic Kick I), the patriarchy (Fiona Apple's prismatic Fetch the Bolt Cutters), systemic racism (Run the Jewels's electrifying RTJ4), and our (dis)connection to the planet itself (Grimes's boundless Miss Anthropocene). As we grapple with what it means to shut down and rise up, music can give us an outlet, a voice, or—in the case of Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia and Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure?—an escape. Sal Cinquemani
Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Like fellow singer-songwriter Scott Walker, Fiona Apple achieved fame at a young age by making music that was more sophisticated and adventurous than that of her peers. Now, with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she's made an album not unlike Walker's The Drift—that is, unmistakably in the pop idiom but aggressively unconventional. But if Walker's late-career music was alienating and difficult, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is compulsively listenable, full of catchy melodic hooks and turns of phrase that linger with you long after the album is over. Released in the midst of a global economic and health crisis that could have been largely prevented if not for the disastrous mismanagement of a ruling class for whom mediocrity is an unattainable level of functionality, the album is prismatic for all that it reflects. On a purely musical level, it's a bold experiment in pop craft, a collection of songs on which Apple stretches her talents in adventurous new directions. It can be read biographically, as a self-conscious act of narrative-building that continues to define Apple's legacy as an artist. Most importantly, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a vituperative catalog of the failures and pointless cruelties of a society propped up by fragile, nihilistic, patriarchal ideology. Seth Wilson
Arca, Kick I
Where Arca's past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. Arca's gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout the album, Arca's beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you've grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether. The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive "Riquiquí" segues into the graceful ballad "Calor"; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca's career, Kick I is a celebration of actualization, whether that's spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another. Charles Lyons-Burt
Bad Bunny, YHLQMDLG
With his inclination for pairing heartbroken lyrics with fiery dembow beats, Bad Bunny has finetuned the art of crying in the club. On his second solo album, YHLQMDLG, the Puerto Rican reggaeton star offers dance floor-ready sentimentality that feels familiar, but he breaks out of his reliable formula with the most blistering production of his career to date, courtesy of Tainy and Subelo NEO. The viral "Safaera" is the best example of this audacious streak: Over an episodic five minutes, the track pivots between eight exhilarating beat changes, simulating the head-spinning pyrotechnics of a DJ club mix. With collaborations from today's hottest Latin-trap heavyweights and legendary reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee, the album solidifies Bad Bunny's rightful place in the Urbano canon. Sophia Ordaz
Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
Throughout her sophomore effort, Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers is often transfixed by a feeling of stasis. Songs like "Chinese Satellite" and "I See You" evoke the sensation of being frozen, exacerbated by the perpetual anticipation of doom. "I've been running in circles trying to be myself," she sings on the former. Again and again over the course of the album, the singer-songwriter laments her inability to find solid ground, her voice low but certain. These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning. Punisher's closing track, "I Know the End," is a travelogue at the end of the world, explicitly illustrating the cloud of uneasiness that hangs over the album. It ends with blood-curdling screams, until all the sound fades out and Bridgers's voice is hoarse. The end of the world is a central detail on Punisher, an influence over the uncertainty that falls over these dark but gorgeous songs. Jordan Walsh
Dogleg, Melee
Dogleg's Melee is a bristling, relentlessly cathartic collection of pop-punk. From the moment that the opening track, "Kawasaki Backflip," bursts into its full-band glory, the album never slows down or backs off from the Detroit group's loud, crunchy, anthemic style. Lead singer Alex Stoitsiadis shouts every word with dire conviction, his voice shredding and straining to deliver some of the best shout-along hooks of the year so far. "Any moment now, I will disintegrate," he frantically yells at the explosive climax of "Fox." Melee is the sound of a band pushing off self-destruction through sheer force of will. This isn't to say that these songs aren't complex, or that their loudness is a cover for a lack of imagination. The guitars on "Cannonball" splash loudly, creating violent ripples over the rest of the track, while "Ender" closes the album in a six-minute punk odyssey wherein Dogleg ups the stakes at every turn. Melee is exhausting in the best possible way, a cleansing release of tension in a howling, desperate rage. Walsh
Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
Sharp and precise in its references, descriptions, and personal confessions, Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways is thematically universal and powerfully prescient, in many ways acting as the culminating expression of the apocalyptic spirituality that's preoccupied Dylan since his earliest recordings. It's also a masterpiece of mood as much as lyrical poetry, and as stunningly and surprisingly atmospheric as many of the major musical achievements in a career more associated with monumental songwriting than sonic mastery. This is an album that showcases a similar comprehensive spectrum of ideas, attitudes, citations, perspectives, stories, and jokes as Dylan's greatest recordings. True, many of these are grave, but the few hopeful spots—like "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" and "Key West (Pirate Philosopher)"—are well-earned and, quite simply, beautiful. Latter-day Dylan is the man behind "To Make You Feel My Love" as well as "Not Dark Yet," and along with dispensing fire and brimstone, Rough and Rowdy Ways keeps romantic and spiritual faith alive, through both the fervor of unshaken convictions concerning the high stakes of the soul as well a basic yearning for love, companionship, and peace. As with his best work, the album encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages. Michael Joshua Rowin
Grimes, Miss Anthropocene
Claire Boucher has said that the process of writing Miss Anthropocene was an isolating experience, and that much of the material came from a dark, personal place. Even the album's most apparently apocalyptic lyrics, like the reverb-drenched "This is the sound of the end of the world" on "Before the Fever," seem to do more to elucidate the kind of headspace Boucher was in at the time of writing than any grand message about the world's climate woes. But while this overarching concept might seem flimsy, Boucher's broad-strokes approach to lyricism and confident, cinematic production allows her to explore concerns that feel at once both deeply personal and fundamentally communal. The latter in particular is bolstered by the way she dissolves the limits of genre, splicing together ethereal electronics with nü-metal guitars on "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth." On "Darkseid," deep bass and doom-laden beats grind beneath a brittle performance by Taiwanese rapper 潘PAN, and a Bollywood sample butts up against drum n' bass on "4ÆM." On an album as sonically diverse as Miss Anthropocene, the most significant thread that holds it all together is Boucher's wild imagination and commitment to experimenting with her sound. And the result is a challenging exploration of the conflicting boundaries and boundlessness of personhood, technology, and society. Anna Richmond
HAIM, Women in Music Pt. III
While there's plenty of genre-hopping on Women in Music Pt. III—hip-hop, reggae, folk, heartland rock, and dance—HAIM has created an album that's defined not just by exploration, but by their strong sense of individuality. Unlike the sparkling, thoroughly modern production of 2017's Something to Tell You, this album's scratchy drums, murky vocals, and subtle blending of acoustic and electronic elements sound ripped straight from an old vinyl. It's darker, heavier fare for HAIM, for sure—a summer party record for a troubled summer. HAIM's instincts to veer a little more left of the dial result in an album that strikes a deft balance between the experimental and the commercial, the moody and the uplifting. You're unlikely to hear these songs on Kroger's in-store playlist—on which 2017's "Little of Your Love" seems to have become a permanent staple alongside the likes of "Eye of the Tiger" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)"—but these songs are riskier, and ultimately that much more rewarding. Jeremy Winograd
Lilly Hiatt, Walking Proof
Lilly Hiatt's songs are disarmingly personal and immensely endearing, even when she's singing about fucking up—which is pretty often. There's an almost parasocial element to Hiatt's songwriting: Her voice is like that of an old friend who's perpetually in various stages of getting her shit together. Hiatt's fourth album, Walking Proof, forms something of a thematic trilogy with her last two albums: 2015's Royal Blue, a portrait of a relationship in its death throes, and 2017's harder, darker Trinity Lane, which depicted its immediate aftermath. Hiatt spent both albums seeking solace and guidance for her troubles everywhere she could, from family to her favorite records. On Walking Proof, she's emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound. There are a couple of lingering references to Hiatt's past relationship problems. But when, in the hauntingly stark closer "Scream," she claims, "I swear to God I'm done with him," it's convincing this time. Winograd
Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
A defining feature of last year's Dedicated was Carly Rae Jepsen's embrace of her sexuality—a topic the singer had, for the most part, previously sidestepped in favor of more chaste subject matter. The dozen songs that comprise Dedicated Side B, all leftovers from the original recording sessions, double down on pillow talk, lending the album a uniformity that its predecessor lacked. That songs as strong as the sublime "Heartbeat" and the anthemic "Solo" were left off Dedicated speaks to not just the wealth of treasures she had to choose from, but her ability to craft a cohesive narrative. "I'm at a war with myself/We go back to my place/Take my makeup off/Show you my best disguise," Jepsen offers wistfully on the meditative "Comeback," demonstrating the tangled multi-dimensionality of both her own psyche and the act of sex itself. Alexa Camp
The Best Games of 2020 (So Far)
Making the old new again could be the mantra of this year's gaming.
There are various reasons why the games on this list are our favorites of the year so far, but the key one is how many of them are so strikingly illustrative of how the old ways of gaming are increasingly evolving into something resolutely new. Doom Eternal and Streets of Rage 4 showed that small tweaks to well-established gameplay modes could breathe new life into beloved franchises. Countless technological advancements made in the 13 years since the release of Half Life 2: Episode 2 have allowed for the world of this iconic series to be realized anew, and in virtual reality, with Half-Life: Alyx.
Elsewhere, Final Fantasy VII Remake not only shows how far games have come graphically in 23 years, but also how storytelling sensibilities have shifted. Yes, the game's battles are more active and strategic than ever, its characters more well-rounded, its environments more breathtakingly expansive, but it's most impressive for the way its narrative engages with our memories and interrogates our expectations of what a remake should be.
Indeed, making the old new again could be the mantra of this year's gaming. But sometimes what's new today is simply what was unseen, or unheard, yesterday. An eraser is the dominant mechanic of If Found…, and how a trans woman from the west coast of Ireland is pushed toward erasure is its dominant theme. And The Last of Us Part II not only centers the experience of the queer surrogate daughter of the first game's prototypical white male protagonist, it evinces a hyperawareness about the nature of violence in games and the world at large.
For those of us who've been playing video games since a young age, there's something comforting about sitting with a great game and realizing that the medium has grown with us. Like a best friend, such a game sometimes even gives you a gentle ribbing, as in the way Lair of the Clockwork God addresses our evolving tastes and the medium's growth head-on, constantly breaking the fourth wall to point out how it's updating platformer and adventure conventions. And in 2020, when the world is continuing to predictably and catastrophically disappoint us, that this industry is still surprising and delighting us feels like a salve. Aaron Riccio
Alder's Blood (Shockwork Games)
Alder's Blood's intimidating and intense sense of atmosphere, the need for precise decision-making, and even the term "Hunter" register as a strong nod to Bloodborne. But whereas Bloodborne was just another incarnation of the hack-and-slash, lock-on-and-dodge formula that was popularized by Dark Souls, this game shakes up the foundation of a long-standing genre, stretching the familiar into a realm of nightmarish wonder. Not even leveling up from consecutive victories dampens the bleakness of Alder's Blood. Each Hunter creeps toward insanity, which forces the player to commit bloody human sacrifices in order to transfer experience points to new heroes. Here, success is more ephemeral than it ever has been in a turn-based tactics game, implying that a godless world should not be coveted. Jed Pressgrove
Desperados III (Mimimi Games)
This first installment in the Desperados series since the 2007 spinoff Helldorado is a prequel, and it opens with a flashback to protagonist John Cooper's last adventure with his bounty hunter father, during which he learns to "think slow, act fast." That's basically the modus operandi of German-based Mimimi Games's latest, because deliberate, stealthy gameplay is the player's key to victory. For one, it's more than satisfying to watch your minutes-long action planning, of furtive repositioning and queuing of unique skills, result in the swift and simultaneous sacking of guards at the hands of your five colorful posse members. While the plot and characters in Desperados III may be familiar, and the gameplay recalls that of other modern real-time tactics titles like Mimimi Games's previous Shadow Tactics: Blade of the Shogun, each scenario feels distinct. You'll need different skills to burn down a riverboat than you do to blow up a bridge or defend a ranch. Even slight shifts in terrain and available party members (or their inventories) serve to shake up your tactics. Riccio
Doom Eternal (id Software)
Doom Eternal is another frantic dance through meaty pink grottos and wide-open metallic arenas littered with colorful pickups, environmental hazards, and enemies. Where so many shooters opt for verisimilitude, there's something primal and thrilling to id Software's further embrace of video-gamey conventions, complementing the floating power-ups with extra lives and optional challenges. This is a game blissfully liberated from the shackles of plausibility and realism, demanding constant motion and engagement to manage health, ammo, and armor that you pull from demon carcasses via fist, fire, and chainsaw. Throughout, the variables crash together in endless, enthralling permutations as the weapons, their modifications, and the upgrades to those modifications create combos against the encroaching hordes. Everything has its response, its counter, and its priority, each of them shifting constantly as new demons appear and your ammunition dwindles. Steven Scaife
Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix)
Final Fantasy VII Remake is directly in dialogue with the player about what a remake can and probably should be, about how much of a waste it might be to proceed past the endpoint of this particular story—essentially the moment in the original where you're allowed to freely explore the world outside Midgar—and realize that the journey and the outcome has remained the same. You're given the chance to choose a different path, to face a literal hideous embodiment of the hands of fate in the game's climax. It's a forceful, kinetic statement—that this remake should not be bound by what we already know. And as monstrous as it can be, the symbolism of that gesture is incredibly daring. The game flips the script on the very idea of nostalgia being the only guiding creative force behind a remake, making it another enemy to be slain. The final hours of this game constitute an extraordinary act of subversion, actively challenging us through gameplay to expect more. Justin Clark
Half-Life: Alyx (Valve Corporation)
Creating a sequel-slash-prequel to an iconic video-game series 13 years in cryosleep is just as an unenviable a task as launching a big-budget title using new technology that might evolve the entire medium, yet Valve delivers with Half-Life: Alyx. Returning fans to the sci-fi nightmare of City 17, a young Alyx Vance fights the omnipresent alien invasion alongside other members of Earth's resistance, pulled into a plot to rescue a mysterious individual who disappeared some 20 years earlier. While Half-Life: Alyx's core gameplay doesn't deviate too far from that of other VR titles, Valve has refined the exploration, shooting, and physics puzzles that this series is known for into something that isn't played as much as it is experienced. In Half-Life: Alyx, fighting the Combine is just as compelling as exploring the derelict buildings of City 17, and being able to lift and inspect and throw any object contributes greatly to the game's feeling of immersion. Guns are reloaded by physically putting a new mag in and pulling the slide, marker pens draw on whiteboards, and liquid even sloshes around inside bottles. Boasting visuals that border on the photorealistic and intuitive 1:1 controls that feel entirely natural, Half-Life: Alyx pushes virtual-reality gaming to new heights. Ryan Aston
If Found… (DREAMFEEL)
DREAMFEEL's interactive novel If Found… is mostly told through the early-1990s diary entries of a young Irish trans woman, Kasio, who returns home to Achill Island in Ireland's west coast from college in Dublin. Scrawled with her memories and feelings, the diary's pages tend to be unassuming and use color sparingly, with just a few shades dominating the sketches of people and environments. At times those images will be scribbled out or written over, which is when the player breaks out the eraser. The framing device for purging Kasio's diary isn't totally clear until the very end of the game, leaving you to ruminate on the action itself rather than the context. If Found… never relies on a last-act twist, instead finding its power through the empathy and truth with which it traces the divergent trajectories of so many relationships. And if the sci-fi elements don't totally land, the strength of its characters and the specificity of its Irish setting most certainly do. Scaife
Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition (Cardboard Computer)
Kentucky Route Zero is a game often content to remain as mysterious as its namesake, an underground highway seemingly unbound by physical laws. Any fights, between unions and predatory companies, have already happened or doubtless will happen again. Instead, it explores the aftermath of cultural devastation, of how people survive in the ruins of the American experiment and how they build atop (or beneath) that wreckage, with the strange reality meant to represent what capitalism has done to the world. The magic is there, only contained and warped by the society that has grown around it. The characters' paths narrow as the game continues, as the fist of an unfeeling system closes and people are overwhelmed by weaknesses; you drift from the role of driver to the person being driven to a simple observer of what's to come. The people you encounter are refugees of greed and exploitation and obsolescence, and there's a sliver of hope as they defiantly continue, finding pleasure in creation and companionship. They write, they compose, they perform, and they record, inspired by past struggles and a world content to forget its own history beyond facile preservation attempts in arbitrary little museums. After seven years, this visionary masterpiece concludes, an impressionist portrait of people doing what they can in a world that will never recover. Scaife
Lair of the Clockwork God (Size Five Games)
"Why play only one genre of game when you could be playing two slightly different ones at the same time?" That's a somewhat misleading tagline for Lair of the Clockwork God, as you never simultaneously control the game's self-aware protagonists, Dan and Ben. Rather, you swap between them, as well as control schemes. Dan is a platformer enthusiast who refuses to interact with objects, while Ben is a stubborn LucasArts point-and-click adventure junkie who doesn't care to jump. Figuring out how to use the skills we associate with their favorite genres of game to navigate through a Peruvian jungle, apocalyptic London, and an alien spaceship results in a game that's fresher and more innovative than yet another standalone platformer or adventure game would be. Lair of the Clockwork God is an exciting way for creators Dan Marshall and Ben Ward to not only set it apart from their prior Dan and Ben titles (Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please), but to successfully extend their lovingly parodic style to a much broader range of genres. Riccio
The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog)
The consequences of Joel's stunning decision at the conclusion of The Last of Us come home in the game's sequel, which opens with a brutal execution as seen through Ellie's eyes. Abandoning her relatively carefree life in a Jackson, Wyoming colony, Joel's surrogate daughter and her romantic partner, Dina, travel to Seattle on a quest for revenge. A shift in perspective reveals the hollowness of Ellie's vendetta, as she's barely a blip on the radar of her supposed antagonists, who are consumed in a larger conflict brewing between two sets of "adults" playing war at the cost of countless lives. (If any of the character choices here seem foolish, glance outside at the real world and take in how well we're doing as humans in our present-day.) While much has been made of this game's grueling violence, its smaller moments of intimacy and empathy are what resonate most, with much of the lengthy campaign centered around your aiding of innocents caught in the aforementioned war's crossfire. In the end, The Last of Us Part II is about moving on from complicated legacies, ones for whom forgiveness might never be possible. Aston
Moving Out (SMG Studio, Devm Games)
Wacky mechanics and obstacles abound throughout the game's 50 levels, from Dread Manor's haunted floating chairs to the Flamethrower Factory's titular deathtraps. Each level adds another zany complication to your job. While at first your biggest challenge may be manipulating large or oddly shaped furniture through tortuous hallways, the increasingly outlandish assignments soon become full-on obstacle courses that not only require players to optimize their routes, but to nimbly move in unison across collapsing walkways. All of these various challenges make Moving Out overwhelming in the best possible sense. Even better, accessibility options allow players to modify things like the number of hazards in or the maximum time for each level, which is nice if you want to play with friends of differing skill levels—and stay cordial with them after a failed level. While the game takes pains to differentiate itself from real-world moving, there's one area in which it remains the same, and that's in the way it nails that feeling of accomplishment where, at the end of a move, something that once seemed impossible has nevertheless fallen perfectly into place. Riccio
Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020: Mon Amour, Film About a Father Who, & The Kiosk
There's colossal might to a cinematic image achieved through the scrappiest of means.
In the opening narration to his documentary Mon Amour, David Teboul recalls a message that his former lover, Frédéric, sent him in the middle of the night before taking his life: "It's crazy how many things we must invent to keep us from just eating, shitting, and sleeping." The great organizer of these "many things" we invent to convince ourselves to be something more than mere organisms is the belief in love. That, anyway, is the idea that organizes Mon Amour as Teboul travels from his native France to Siberia in order to interview locals about their experiences with love, as a way to mourn the end of his own love story.
What Teboul finds in Siberia is quite disheartening: that love, when it materializes in the figure of the lover, burns fast, and what seemed like a panacea to make our miserable world a livable place turns into the poison we call domesticity. Lovers become enemies we can't get rid of. But the little bit of love that's saved in the ashes of the deflated mirage that once promised to save us is once in a while rekindled through Teboul's prodding as he interviews elderly couples who seem to articulate their feelings for the first time in ages.
The very dispositions of these individuals mimic the abyss between what was once a prospect of a pleasurable life and the crude reality of vodka and violence that replaced it. In the rare moments when someone sings the praises of togetherness, they do so by looking down or away, as if addressing their own partners when speaking about love would mean losing the little bit of honor they have left after putting up with so much betrayal.
Although Teboul interviews young people, too, the strongest portraits are those of the elderly, who, on some level, take advantage of their cinematic moment to air their grievances and, once in a while, admit gratitude. A very old-looking woman in her mid-60s who lost her sight from reading too much Pushkin late at night tells us that any other man would surely have left her long ago, but not her husband, who senses when she's awake in the middle of the night, makes her tea, and tells her that if she dies he will follow her to the grave. Teboul's questions can be refreshingly unexpected. As when he asks the woman what her husband's favorite body part is. When she whispers the answer into his cute little mushroom ears, you sense that it's the closest thing to an "I love you" that he will ever hear. We don't know if his eyes water as she praises his ears, for he looks down and away, before then heart-breakingly saying, "The main thing is not to suffer, and not to make others suffer."
Teboul juxtaposes these portraits with digressions about his simultaneously wonderful and dismal times with Frédéric. These reflections borrow from Hiroshima Mon Amour, which Teboul watched as a child and has haunted him ever since. Frédéric, like Emmanuelle Riva's character in that film, was also from Nevers. In these poetic detours, we see barely lit naked bodies meant to represent Teboul and his ghostly lover, recalling the opening of Alain Resnais's film. It often feels like these autobiographical avowals, plagued by unnecessary classical music, belong to a different film. But they're symbolically important, if not indispensable, as if Teboul was offering a self-implicating gift in exchange for awakening the long dormant intimacies of strangers.
The absence of love, and our insistence on spending our entire lives looking for it anyway, is also at the core of Lynne Sachs's Film About a Father Who. Sheffield Doc/Fest is screening several of Sachs's documentaries on its streaming platform. For Film About a Father Who, Sachs spent over three decades amassing footage (from Super 8 to digital) of her father, an eccentric salesman from Utah who lived a Hugh Hefner kind of life, neglecting his children and hosting a different girlfriend almost every night at his official family home. Lots and lots of them got pregnant, which resulted in Sachs having what feels like hundreds of siblings, whose testimonials she collects here. Some didn't know who their father was until they were adults. Others, in order to protect themselves from so much hurt, still think of him as a kind of godfather.
The title of the film is an obvious play on Film About a Woman Who…, Yvonne Rainer's experimental masterpiece about heteronormativity and monogamy. Rainer's approach is acerbic, perhaps even folkloric, in the sense that her film portrays one specific woman wallowing in the sinking boat of heterosexual coupledom at the same time that it tells the archetypal tale of heterosexual domesticity writ large. Sachs's approach feels a lot less multi-layered. Film About a Father Who is so fast-paced and Sachs's narration so detached, or literal, that it can seem more like an underdeveloped absurdist comedy as random siblings keep turning up out of nowhere to give a brief account of their contradicting feelings toward their father. One of Sachs's many sisters recounts how their father was arrested for possession of weed when they were kids and how she didn't know whether to weep or jump with joy at the time. But the family constellation in Sachs's film is so vast we never spend enough time with any one single relative to see them as something other than an element.
There's a sort of North American pragmatic froideur in the film, also present in self-ethnographic films like Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, that Rainer queers through stylistic experimentation, and that Teboul completely avoids by surrendering to melancholia with gusto. There isn't much of a point in self-ethnographies where filmmakers protect their vulnerability through intellectualization, or prod their family wounds with a 10-foot pole. At one point in her narration, Sachs tells her audience that Film About a Father Who isn't a portrait but, rather, her attempt to understand "the asymmetry of my conundrum." The film is also shot in such a matter-of-fact manner that you may forget that the father is actually the filmmaker's. It doesn't help that the father himself pleads the fifth on every question and Sachs often directs her camera elsewhere, toward her siblings, instead of letting it linger on the silent and sad remnants of an aging womanizer.
Alexandra Pianelli also captures aging bodies in The Kiosk, but in a very different fashion. Her film was entirely shot on her phone, which was mostly stuck to her head, and without her ever leaving the tiny area behind the cash register of her family's press kiosk in a posh area of Paris. We never see the world outside of Pianelli's field of vision from her counter, and yet it feels like she shows us the entire mechanics of the contemporary world.
The film's subjects are mostly the elderly regulars who seem to show up at the kiosk everyday, for magazines and for Pianelli's company. Pianelli crafts a tale of hopeful pessimism about humans' relationship to otherness by explaining the ecosystem of her trade—namely, the slow decline of the printing industry in France and how the physical circulation of ideas can be the only connection to the world for an aging population that doesn't master digital technology and for whom kiosks play the role of cafés, pubs, or even the analyst's couch.
When filmmaker Pedro Costa said, at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, that all one needs to make a great film is "three flowers and a glass of water," not "money, cars, and chicks," this is what he means: the colossal might of the cinematic image achieved through the scrappiest of means. The Kiosk is a master class in filmmaking resourcefulness. Pianelli paints a portrait of our times through simple drawings that she makes of her clients, makeshift props and miniature sets made out of cardboard, and the anachronic gadgets around her workstation: a cassette tape player, an early-19th-century clock, coin holders that bear her great-grandparents' fingerprints, and the very publications that she sells. Pianelli's no-nonsense voiceover glues these elements together with the stunning honesty of the unflappable young Parisian for whom difference is an existential aphrodisiac. There's no affectedness here. It's as if a refined cinematic object accidently emerged on the road to her making an artisanal project for the sheer pleasure of making something out of dead time.
Pianelli humanizes the figure of the press kiosk clerk who, in turn, humanizes the strangers she comes across, from seniors who spend more time with her than with their own children to the Bangladeshi asylum seeker who goes to her for legal help. In one sequence, Pianelli witnesses a homeless man insistently offering his metro-ticket money to a bourgeois lady upset that the machine won't take her credit card. We also learn that the demographics of the clientele per day of the week is contingent on what kinds of publications come out on which day, as well as which niche newspapers are the most anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, or pro-monarchy.
Pianelli lets the serious emerge but doesn't dwell on it. Seriousness often comes wrapped up in quirkiness and play, as when she plays a guessing game with the audience, telling us what a random customer will buy before they open their months, solely based on what they wear, and always she gets it right. Men in suits and ties go for either the newspaper Le Figaro or Les Echos, while the well-coiffed ladies who don fur coats gravitate toward Voici, unless Kate Moss's ass is on the cover of a nearby fashion magazine.
At one point, Pianelli says that she considers herself a seller of dreams. By this she means that each magazine at the kiosk stokes a different fantasy, from a supermodel body to a nation without Arabs. But The Kiosk makes Pianelli a saleswoman of a very different sort. Instead of working as the intermediary between vulnerable denizens and the idealized images that tease and haunt them, she cobbles a much more original fantasy through the bodies they actually have. The kiosk becomes the prototype for the most utopian vision of the public library, or any old space inhabited by a curious mind—an ebullient infinity of poetry and care.
Sheffield Doc/Fest's online platform will be available to all public audiences from June 10—July 10.
The Best Films of 2020 (So Far)
It's hard to tell whether we're in the midst of a film apocalypse, a film revolution, or both.
It's hard to tell whether we're in the midst of a film apocalypse, a film revolution, or—most likely—both. The long-predicted collapse of the movie theater as an institution may be underway, though drive-ins seem to be having a moment. Brett and Drew T. Pierce's low-rent spooker The Wretched led the domestic box office for seven weeks starting in early May, Trolls World Tour became the first studio success story of the year, and June's biggest release wasn't a mega-budget superhero movie, but a Spike Lee joint on Netflix.
Nobody could have seen 2020 coming, but reflecting on the best movies of the first half of the year, it's clear that unrest was already in the air. Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You tracks the devastating, cascading effects of a gig economy on its workers—whose fates became immediately uncertain when a health crisis locked down the economy. In The Cordillera of Dreams, behind the mountain range that ensconces Chile, documentarian Patricio Guzmán finds the suppressed record of popular uprisings against Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship—images of militarized police forces attacking unarmed protestors that look unnervingly familiar. Dramas about women's experience in Trump's America, like Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Kitty Green's The Assistant, may end up being cinematic landmarks of fourth-wave feminism.
Of course, given our acute sense of living in an historical moment, perhaps we've been particularly drawn to films that reflect history and history-making, and apt to filter our interpretations through our consciousness of the tumult outside our windows. Even Andrew Patterson's enigmatic 1950s-set The Vast of Night, whose Twilight Zone-esque story—which is advanced largely through conversations on various telecommunications networks—about an unseen menace threatening a small town, feels tied to 2020 in ways that the filmmakers likely did not intend. In the final analysis, cinema can't help but reflect our world, because—even in the absence of theaters—it remains an inextricable part of it. Pat Brown
The Assistant (Kitty Green)
With The Assistant, Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate. The narrative is set in a film mogul's Tribeca offices, but it could take place in a branch of any major corporation throughout the world without losing its resonance. This is a pseudo-thriller composed entirely of purposefully demoralizing minutiae, and it's designed so that we feel as starved for rudimentary human emotion as the young woman, Jane (Julia Garner), at its center. No names are uttered throughout (the name Jane, which brings to mind the anonymity of a Jane Doe, is only stated in the credits), while the mogul is only evoked via male pronouns. Increasingly unsettling details seep into this deadening atmosphere, and after a while it becomes evident that we're watching—from the perspective of a powerless yet ultimately complicit person—a parable about rich, insulated predators like Harvey Weinstein, and Green's grasp of Jane's indoctrination into this perverse world is impeccably believable. Chuck Bowen
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles)
Kleber Mendoça Filho and Juliano Donnelles's Bacurau assembles a vibrant and eclectic collage of reference points. It's a wild neo-western that pulls into its orbit UFO-shaped drones, elaborate folklore, limb-flaying and head-exploding gore, and Udo Kier as a villain who shouts in a mockingly high-pitched voice, "Hell no!" The Bacurau of the film's title is a fictional town in Brazil's northeastern interior, depicted here at some point in the not-too-distant future. The citizens live in a relatively undisturbed harmony—until Bacuaru is literally wiped off the map (GPS no longer can locate the backwater), local cell service is jammed, and the people find themselves hunted, A Dangerous Game-style, by gringo infiltrators. Mendoça Filho is one of contemporary Brazilian cinema's most sharply political filmmakers, and Bacurau solidifies his commitment to rebuking Brazil's current administration and its willful erasure of the country's culture and heritage. Sam C. Mac
Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov)
Kantemir Balagov has set Beanpole largely in tones of dark amber, bright green and red, and filthy yellow redolent of old incandescent lighting—and it's the red of upholstery, Soviet imagery, and blood that cuts most forcefully through the brightest of those greens. Cinematographer Kseniya Sereda's color palette recalls that of Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Veronique for the way it gives settings an artificiality that nonetheless brings Beanpole's grounded sociopolitical commentary into greater focus. Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a nurse working at a Leningrad hospital after the end of World War II, feels trapped in trauma, suffering from recurring fits of full-body catatonia. Her psychological state is magnified by the more visible scars of the soldiers recuperating all around her, adding to the sense that Balagov's hermetically sealed vision of Leningrad only compounds and reflects Iya's PTSD back onto her. The filmmaker may depict the pain of his characters in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of collapse with delicate subtlety. Jake Cole
The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán)
Patricio Guzmán understands the totemic power of the long strip of Andean mountains that runs between Chile and Argentina, effectively severing the former from the rest of the world. But the ruefulness in his voice also gets at something else: that this wall of rock and earth is also a mausoleum. Throughout interviews with writers and sculptors, among others, Guzmán accords to the Cordillera a level of importance that's nothing short of reverential. And just at the point where it feels you can take no more of his metaphorical heavy lifting, the documentary gives way to an extended survey of the ravages and legacies of Augusto Pinochet's regime, including the doctrine of neoliberalism that's brought Chile to its knees in the present day. If The Cordillera of Dreams leaves us on a razor's edge between hope and futility, that's by design. Guzmán knows that the day when those looking for the disappeared are themselves lost to time is an inevitability, and it will be as tragic as the day when there are no more images left to depict the story of that search. But the documentary advances the belief that, until then, we will be stronger for exhorting ourselves to reflection and atonement. Ed Gonzalez
Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)
Da 5 Bloods is a mix of genre film and political essay, and it exudes, especially early on, a lurid, confrontational electricity that's often been so exhilarating in prior Spike Lee joints. Regarding a Ho Chi Minh City that, with its active nightlife and proliferation of fast food establishments, might be mistaken for a contemporary American city, Eddie (Norm Lewis) says that "they didn't need us, they should've just sent Mickey D's, Pizza Hut, and the Colonel and we would've defeated the VC in one week." The sly implication is that, one way or another, America got its hands on Vietnam. Minutes later, the Rambo and Missing in Action movies are familiarly criticized for offering a white-man savior fantasy of "winning" the war, while Otis (Clarke Peters) reminds us of a true hero, African-American soldier Milton Olive III, who jumped on a grenade for his platoon, a picture of whom Lee briefly and movingly cuts to. These pop-cultural references make us privy to how war is committed and then sold back to us as an often-exclusionary fantasy—a double dip of atrocity. Bowen
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
If it's true, as Balzac had it, that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, then perhaps behind every minor prosperity lies a misdemeanor. In Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, that petty offense is the theft of some cow's milk, which gentle-hearted chef Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and his friendly yet opportunistic companion, King Lu (Orion Lee), use to build a successful enterprise selling delicious fried honey biscuits in a small, not-quite-established town in 1820s Oregon. Like most of Reichardt's work, the film is a deceptively diminutive affair, an intimate, almost fabulistic story told with the warmth and delicacy of a children's picture book. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt's images honor the verdant lushness of the Pacific Northwest, making us feel as if we're seeing its Edenic beauty through the soulful brown eyes of Eve, the titular bovine who's been brought to this new land by her owner (Toby Jones) as an ostentatious display of his own wealth. But the film's boxy 4:3 aspect ratio serves as a constant reminder that Cookie and King's lives (not to mention Eve's) are ultimately constrained by forces greater than themselves. Even here, at the far distant edges of civilization, the film pensively suggests, the machinery of industrial capitalism is tragically inescapable. Keith Watson
Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
The dominant theme of Dan Sallitt's Fourteen is the relentless march of time and its indifference to personal hardship. Balancing a fine-grained attention to character with placid detachment, the film traces a decade in the friendship of Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling), former grade-school friends who've sustained their bond into young adulthood, where they've both managed tenuous livelihoods in the Big Apple. Through his unannounced and often startling leaps in chronology, Sallitt cultivates a feeling of implicit tension, a growing fissure in Mara and Jo's chemistry that bears itself out in pauses in conversation and in their interactions with a rotating gallery of supporting characters. One of the last times we see Jo, she's walking away from camera into a busy Brooklyn intersection—perhaps a call back to the earlier long take of the train station, a reminder of a larger network of people whose trajectories we ultimately have no control over. In Fourteen, Mara must come to accept the limits of her ability to influence these peripheral lives, and in doing so prompts an evolution of spirit that's at once painful and transformative. Carson Lund
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
A film that's constantly on the move, Jodie Mack's The Grand Bizarre is a brilliant bonanza of color, texture, and globe-trotting good vibrations. With extensive use of time-lapse photography, stop-motion animation, and quick-cut montages, Mack creates a sense of boundless energy and constant movement, of people and things (but mostly things) in an endless flow around the globe. Mack takes fabric—vibrant, beautifully crafted swatches and scarves from a range of different cultures—as her central image, seeing them on trains and planes, popping out of suitcases, on the beach, in rear-view mirrors, and in dozens of other configurations that present them not as objets d'art to be admired in some folk art museum, but as products moving in the international stream of capitalism. The Grand Bizarre is a rumination on human creativity, and it's so idiosyncratic and highly personal that it ends with the director's sneeze. It's also one of the most purely enjoyable works of avant-garde cinema made this century. Watson
Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise)
Documentary cinema's most popular formal device is the so-called Ken Burns effect, that famous slow-motion slide across an archival photo until the camera settles on the main subject of the image. Heimat Is a Space in Time abundantly indulges this device but never quite in the way you might expect. Instead, filmmaker Thomas Heise's photographic material creeps across the screen as if it were a tectonic plate, indifferent to the camera documenting it, which often only catches human faces for a brief moment before dwelling in negative space. All this time spent contemplating blown-up grain and blur might seem counterproductive in a film that, at least on paper, is a survey of 20th-century German history through the lens of Heise's own genealogy. But the emphasis on the micro over the macro extends to every facet of this sprawling four-hour work, which seeks to excavate real human thought and feeling beneath the haze of larger political structures. Lund
Liberté (Albert Serra)
As they move inexorably forward in time, Albert Serra's films don't crescendo so much as peter out. In Story of My Death, the harbinger on the horizon is the return of irrational, Romantic thinking in the late 18th century, which would effectively smother the enlightened libertinism that the story otherwise wallows in. And in The Death of Louis XIV, it's the fate promised by the title, to which the film marched with solemn certitude. Serra's new film, the audaciously perverse and amorphous Liberté, doesn't give up its game so readily. Nearly without narrative conflict, it homes in on a long night of sexual experimentation among a group of libertines hiding out from the French courts on the Prussian border in the late 17th century, and for much of Liberté's duration, the only things generating forward momentum are the subtly escalating intensity of the acts themselves and the faint expectation, however ruthlessly exploited, that the sun will eventually rise again. Lund
The 100 Best LGBTQ Movies of All Time
Cinema isn't the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can be among the most powerful.
Four years ago this month, in the aftermath of the attack on Orlando's Pulse nightclub, one call to action rose above the din: "Say their names." New Yorkers chanted it steps from the Stonewall Inn. The mother of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook penned it in an open letter. The Orlando Sentinel printed the names. Anderson Cooper recited them. A gunman murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the wee hours of that awful Sunday, massacring LGBTQ people of color and their allies in the middle of Pride Month, and the commemoration of the dead demanded knowing who they were. "These," as MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell urged his viewers, "are the names to remember."
The titles on our list of the best LGBTQ movies of all time are a globe-spanning, multigenerational testament to our existence in a world where our erasure is no abstraction. From Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael to Todd Haynes's Carol, naming and seeing emerge, intertwined, as radical acts—acts of becoming (Sally Potter's Orlando) and acts of being (Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason), acts of speech (Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied) and acts of show (Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning) that together reaffirm the revolutionary potential of the seventh art. "My name is Harvey Milk," the San Francisco supervisor, memorialized in Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk, proclaimed in 1978, less than one year before his assassination. "And I'm here to recruit you!"
The cinema isn't the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can, if the films listed below are any indication, be among the most powerful, projecting the complexities of the LGBTQ experience onto the culture's largest, brightest mirror. There's rage here, and also love; isolation, and communal spirit; fear, and the forthright resistance to it. These films are essential because we are essential: The work of ensuring that we aren't erased or forgotten continues apace, and the struggle stretches into a horizon that no screen, no matter its size, can quite capture. But this is surely a place to start. Matt Brennan
Editor's Note: The prior version of this list, published on June 7, 2019, can be found exclusively on our Patreon page.
Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924)
Many critics have chosen to downplay the film's gay subtext, but to do so would deny the power of Carl Theodor Dreyer's fastidious attention to the polarity of love's vicissitudes. If stripped of the notion that the artist Zoret's (Benjamin Christensen) attraction toward his titular muse (Walter Slezak), whose alleged bisexuality is clearly of a solely opportunistic strain, is physical as well as social, Michael essentially becomes an embittered (and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scène) tale of two cuckolds. Eric Henderson
Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)
An early landmark of queer cinema, Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform sees youthful desire as fluid, disorienting, and rebellious. Sagan sensitively regards the female camaraderie within the confines of a strict German all-girls school, as well as the burgeoning lustfulness of the teenage Manuela (Hertha Thiele). The young girl's affection for her sympathetic teacher, Fraulein von Bernberg (Dorothea Wieck), is expressed and reciprocated through furtive glances and brief sensual gestures that hint at an underlying and forbidden passion that can never come to fruition. Released just prior to the rise of the Third Reich, Sagan's tender portrait of unrequited love in the midst of oppression both excoriates the regressive ideals of the school's, and by proxy, the nation's, power structures and advocates instead for compassion, tolerance, and the normalization of all forms of desire. Derek Smith
The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1932)
Enrique Rivero's shirtless torso remains the most enduring emblem of Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, whether the actor is clutching his bare chest after witnessing his palm sprout a pair of lips or peering through keyholes while drifting through a gravity-free hallway. But this surrealist masterpiece isn't merely about flesh; rather, the body becomes an entry point to memory and art, where hands and mouths breed images to defy the mind. Decades of close readings, whether along psychological or self-reflexive lines, have been unable to diminish or demystify the film's effervescent sensuality. Clayton Dillard
Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Much of Beauty and the Beast's deep magic comes from Jean Cocteau's sense of himself as a vulnerable beast in love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais's triple role—as the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day's La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be—the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau's cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Max Cavitch
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)
Fireworks inaugurates not merely Kenneth Anger's own private mythology, but also the subversive expression of gay sensuality in American film, a torch carried into the early days of the New Queer Cinema. A veritable dictionary of homoerotic iconography, it is also, literally, a home movie shot while Anger's parents were away for the weekend, and a transfixing view of the violence and seditious rapture of being "different" in the 1940s. Fernando F. Croce
Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950)
Jean Genet's overpowering 1950 short, Un Chant d'Amour, is a milestone not just of gay rebellion, but also of pure sensual expression in film, a polemical vision of desire forged with the provocateur's randy ardor and the artist's spiritual directness. Having never made a film before or after, Genet nevertheless had an in-the-bone awareness of the medium as a procession of raptures—visual, cosmic, sensual—that could match and expand the passion of words on a page. Croce
Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing casting the plush-lipped Farley Granger as the straight man in his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's cruise-baiting thriller Strangers on a Train. Robert Walker's flamboyant Bruno Anthony gets all the ink, but it's Granger's poker-faced, blank-slate attractiveness as Guy that captures the illicit thrill of the chase. And the consequence. Once Bruno has availed Guy of his inconvenient woman and Guy refuses to return the favor, Bruno sets out to integrate himself into Guy's social circle and carry with him the threat of exposure and public shame. Their erotic one-upmanship reaches its breaking point in one of Hitchcock's gaudiest set pieces, a runaway-carousel climax depicting their rough trade of blows amid contorted petrified horses whose pinions look like they're pornographically violating their sockets. Henderson
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
The most complicated aspect of Rebel Without a Cause, and the thing that makes it seem daring even today, is its depiction of sexuality. Nicholas Ray brings Natalie Wood's beauty into full flowering and gets a simple, touching performance from her. And with Sal Mineo, he craftily put together a portrait of a tormented gay teenager. Stewart Stern's script tells us that Plato is searching for a father figure in Jim (and Plato's famed locker photo of Alan Ladd shows that he wants a Shane-type father, not a lover), but the way Mineo looks at James Dean leaves no modern audience in doubt as to what his real feelings are. Dan Callahan
Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)
There's a striking sense of fatalism that infuses Basil Dearden's masterful Victim, a scathing examination of England's rampant homophobia and problematic social codes. Dick Bogarde plays Melville Farr, a closeted lawyer victimized by an elaborate blackmail scheme targeting high-profile gay men. Constructed like a detective film, Victim follows Farr's investigation into the various catacombs of the London elite, where far-reaching compromise and repression construct a pressure cooker of emotional fear. Since homosexuality is illegal in England at the time, Farr's stake in the vexing search for the truth is both personal and professional. Mostly, Victim is fascinating for its consistent attention to the complex emotions of its gay characters, men who often show an unwavering honesty in respect to their sexuality. "I can't help the way I am, but the law says nature played me a dirty trick," one particularly conflicted character says, and this type of substantive dialogue reveals Dearden as a surveyor of progressive ideologies way ahead of the norm. Heath
Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)
Flaming Creatures was Jack Smith's first finished film. Well, in truth, it's his only finished film, since it ricocheted out of his hands when a trend of underground film raids made his opus a trophy for either side of a decency debate. Seized at the same time as Jean Genet's Un Chant D'Amour and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, it made it all the way to the Supreme Court, who could detect little value in its over-exposed rumpus of genitalia, transvestitism, baroque orgies, and dance dervishry. Meanwhile, Susan Sontag and Jonas Mekas heralded the film as high art, hijacking (so Jack saw it) his vehicle to bolster their tastemaker status. Bradford Nordeen
The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
If gayness remains figured as a malignant force in The Servant (a half-acknowledged deviance here mobilized in the pursuit of manipulation and personal gain), there's also something undeniably thrilling about watching it wind its destructive path, vivified by Joseph Losey's taut pacing, stylish formal play, and distressing-as-ever atmospherics. A film such as this probably couldn't be made now without cries of protest over its representational politics, which is probably a good thing. Matthew Connolly
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)
Scorpio Rising merges Kenneth Anger's fascination with rough trade with his burgeoning interest in the Dark Arts, at least as it applies to the standard "sex, drugs, rock n' roll" scene. What begins with references to James Dean and the soaring beefcake photography of Bob Mizer ultimately ends in a whirl of skulls, swastikas, the spiritual sacrilege of pissing on the Catholic altar, and the societal blasphemy of rubbing mustard into the crotch of a stripped leather geek. This is the Gospel according to Anger. Henderson
My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965)
The commodification of desire (and the desire in commodification) have rarely been examined with the cool wit of Andy Warhol's landmark film. Whose hustler is Paul America, the blond stud whom we first see lolling about on a Fire Island beach? Men and women of various sexual orientations spend the film's 67-minute running time lusting after, bitching about, probing into, and yearning for this midnight cowboy. Throughout, America remains a lanky libidinal enigma, or maybe just a chiseled blank slate. He embodies a distinctly Warholian vision of queer erotics that's tantalizingly ambiguous, achingly aloof, and always connected to that essential bulge in your pants: your wallet. Connolly
Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967)
In Portrait of Jason, Jason Holliday's waning lucidity becomes a clever rhetorical weapon against Shirley Clarke's occasional attempts to turn him into an icon of the gay black experience. But she wins out overall, and quite devilishly. As Jason sinks into disorientation, the clarity of the skull perched on the bookshelf behind him increases. When he breaks down after being harangued by off-screen voices, his tears feel nearly funereal. Jason exposes his self-destructiveness to Clarke because he intuits that the resulting object will outlive him—and that it will allow him to outlive himself, and his self-destructiveness. He's correct. But the film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting. Clarke's portrait immortalizes Jason in the same sense that a death mask—one covered in its sculptor's quick, pithy fingerprints—might preserve its subject's uncanny likeness. Lanthier
Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)
Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses takes the thematic and stylistic template of Hiroshima Mon Amour—traumatic memory, documentary interests, elliptical editing—and further layers it with reflexive elements related to the nature of identity as it pertains to a group of queens in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. Matsumoto's Oedipal tale has influenced directors from Stanley Kubrick to Tsai Ming-liang, but the film remains a singular work on the ways gender performance, whether in sexual practice or art, ubiquitously informs human behavior and interaction, right down to a trick who asks Eddie (Pîtâ) if she likes his muscles before lifting a chair to narcissistically show them off. Dillard
The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin, 1970)
Mart Crowley's 1968 play The Boys in the Band, whose melodramatic act-two truth-telling owes a significant debt to the bitter gaming of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, isn't a great one. Shot in the year of Stonewall, William Friedkin's film adaptation is indeed a time capsule of its era's mores, but if Crowley's limited palette of self-loathing and camp-drenched cattiness made the play an instant "period piece" per Vito Russo, the notion that it blames these men for their fears and lies (which sat well with moralists viewing it as a cautionary tale) seems a clear misreading. The dishy wit and behavioral truths of its late-'60s demimonde of sophisticated New York homos doesn't dilute the unnerving shame and emotional warfare that explode in its scabrous second act. The partygoers are caught in the tragedy of the pre-liberation closet, a more crippling and unforgiving one than the closets that remain. Michael's (Kenneth Nelson) final wish—"If we could just learn not to hate ourselves quite so very much"—has been largely fulfilled. Not quite so very much. Weber
Trash (Paul Morrissey, 1970)
With her googly eyes, a nest of burgeoning dreads atop her head, and a pronounced overbite that turns her lips into a pair of string beans, the transgender Holly Woodlawn's untraditional sort of glamour lends a surprising poignancy to the wrenching scene when she unleashes a volcanic tantrum of violated trust, festering jealousy, and, ultimately, wounded pride at the realization that perhaps it's her and not heroin that keeps Joe Dallesandro's cock flaccid in bed. The frazzled, cracked-glass-Cassavetes close-ups that Paul Morrissey bequeathed to her talent caught the eye of none other than George Cukor, who started an ultimately unsuccessful petition campaign in support of an Oscar nomination. Oscars, schmoscars. To call Holly's performance in Trash one of the very greatest in all of cinema would be an understatement. Henderson
Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)
An aging composer, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), takes refuge in a resort to recharge his intellectual energies, only to be completely unsettled by the beauty of a blond adolescent boy who's also staying at the resort. Luchino Visconti's masterful Death in Venice tackles complicated notions of idealization, adult-child affection, and the virtual impossibility of reciprocity with a philosophical depth that never feels immaterial. It also features a grand finale set to Gustav Mahler's magnificent "Symphony Number 5" where beauty, and the desire it begets, is proven to not stand a chance before man's propensity for annihilation. Diego Semerene
Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)
At this point in American underground cinema, gay directors were celebrating those sweet sticky things in contexts cerebral and performative (Flaming Creatures) and matter-of-factly declarative (Wakefield Poole's bawdy of work). Photographer James Bidgood's Pink Narcissus transcends any niche descriptor that applies—queer, camp, avant-garde, softcore, documentary expressionism—and plunges into the deep end of consciousness-annihilating erotic desire. If Cate Blanchett's Carol marveled, to her romantic conquest, "I never looked like this" (a pretty hot line in its own right), Pink Narcissus flips the equation to explore the electric sexual charge of finding in others the things that are also available at one's own fingertips. Henderson
Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971)
Though it depicts an eventful week in the lives of two semi-swinging Londoners—Daniel, a gay doctor (Peter Finch), and Alex, a divorced civil servant's scion (Glenda Jackson)—who begrudgingly share the affections of an aimless bohemian named Bob (Murray Head), Sunday Bloody Sunday is almost naïvely nonpolemical. No one needs to fight for the right to screw who they want, when they want, and with whatever paucity of adjoining obligations. It simply happens, with very little effort. Even the sex act itself is continually viewed as a compromise between two passive bodies; here director John Schlesinger foregoes the carnal thrusting that forced an X rating upon his previous film, Midnight Cowboy, instead showing blemished layers of flesh curled delicately and forgivingly up to one another. This calmness is never titillating, and thus never exploitative. But we soon learn that the characters are treating themselves and each other with such quiet unfairness that to exploit them visually would be crude and redundant. Lanthier
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