I’ve just gotten back from the Maryland Film Festival, in Baltimore, which focusses on the best of recent independent films. The discerning and ambitious programming has a valuable reflexive and analytical aspect—the films chosen help to clarify the meaning and value of the term “independent filmmaking.”
The formal definition of an “independent film” is one that is made with private financing rather than studio backing. But that covers too wide a swath of the industry, as proven by the overlap of Oscar candidates with the results of the Independent Spirit and Gotham awards. Independence isn’t a matter of financing but of urgency. An independent film is one that’s made within the arm’s reach of the filmmakers, that’s experiential—that the filmmakers make in order to see not just the world at large but also their own place in it. Independent films—and even the most stylized fictions among them—have a double documentary aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens, showing what goes on behind the camera and what goes on in front of it, and seemingly superimposing those two perspectives in every image. Independent films are made for the filmmaker to learn from. In effect, they’re student films—films by students of life, who aren’t professing but searching for their own place in the world and in filmmaking itself. Independent filmmakers don’t take for granted their place in the cinematic firmament and don’t even presume its existence. They see all systems as up for grabs, ripe for transformation, in a state of perpetual crisis.
That’s true of the best films I saw in Baltimore last week, in addition to festival films that I’ve previously written about, such as “Little Sister,” “collective: unconscious,” and “Kate Plays Christine.” Joining these films is Penny Lane’s documentary “Nuts!” The subject is the sort of historical curiosity that sounds all too ripe for an encyclopedia-like rundown—it’s the story of John R. Brinkley, who, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, pioneered the treatment of impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Brinkley; don’t read it. The telling of his story there is the exact antithesis of Lane’s film. She tells an extraordinary story—or, rather, she invents one, never taking for granted that the story already exists and is merely waiting to be found and told, but creating the story by the act of making the film. Lane is a story-maker, a sort of historical epistemologist, and also an artist of taste and invention. She uses animated sequences—but ones created by different animators, which keeps the film from being locked into a single style, lending each segment a different visual flavor and mood.
Lane does extraordinary archival research and comes up with newsreel footage that she allows to play at length, seemingly restoring the past to a vital immediacy. She displays a sense of reverence for the archival—and for the physicality of the archive and its circuit of connection to historical events themselves. She has a distinctively concrete and practical way with photographs, and so avoids generic documentary techniques such as the vague and slow camera-moves, and the graphic transitions and effects that dematerialize photographs. At the same time, Lane doesn’t turn Brinkley’s story into a metafiction of her own investigations. She’s a classical modernist whose good and wondrous story reflects her own astonishment at the weird ways of the world and its archival traces and trails. As Lane pores through the materials at hand, she herself watches the scope and implications of the project expand into astonishing realms of power and influence. “Nuts!” is fiercely original in its ingeniously dramatic storytelling, its vision of the place of such stories in the media-scape, and its aesthetically refined yet good-humored vigor.
Anna Biller’s wild and gory comedy “The Love Witch” is an effort to see classic Hollywood in a new way. Though it features cell phones and modern cars, it’s a story of the nineteen-sixties, centered on a young woman named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), in high-style costume and the makeup of stereotypical screen vixens, who is a literal witch—a Wiccan devotee endowed with supernatural powers, which she uses to instantly attract the men of her choice. She admits that she’s addicted to love, that she uses sex as a way to command love, and when she’s disappointed in love she turns to murder. The story of a movie’s production isn’t necessarily relevant to its affect, but in “The Love Witch,” it’s on the screen—the sixties-styled costumes and furnishings are handmade by Biller herself, and the movie, which was shot on 35-mm. film, features special effects that were done optically, as they were done in the pre-digital era. It shows.
Biller ingeniously tweaks Hollywood tropes, conventions, and clichés of a half century ago—the stranger who turns up in a small town after a long absence and, as a welcome guest, wreaks havoc; the flowing-haired professorial Adonis of modern romance; the police officer whose investigation is compromised by divided loyalties; the burlesque bar where the town converges and where destinies play out. “The Love Witch” is a parody, but a parody of discovery, in which Biller puts genre to the test of do-it-yourself artistry, and puts feminist ideology itself to the test of style. It’s not a perfectly accomplished film—the styles of décor, costume, and gesture aren’t always matched by a comparably exquisite camera style, and the cinematic conventions of the time are occasionally reproduced rather than tweaked. Nonetheless, the film pulsates with furious creative energy throughout, sparking excitement and giddy amazement that it even exists. Amid its freewheeling aesthetic twists and intellectual provocations, the astounding humor of “The Love Witch” often ascends to intentional hysteria.
Chad Hartigan’s sweet and sentimental comic drama “Morris from America” is nonetheless an experimental film—it’s an experiment in fatherhood, to see what kind of son matures from a certain kind of father. The story is simple: Craig Robinson plays Curtis Gentry, a soccer coach and widower who gets a job coaching a team in Heidelberg, Germany, and brings his thirteen-year-old son, Morris (Markees Christmas), with him. Morris doesn’t speak German (Curtis does—he used to play for a German team). Morris takes German lessons with a young woman named Inka (Carla Juri), and he takes his place in a German classroom at the end of a school year, quickly developing a crush on, and then a friendship with, an older girl named Katrin (Lina Keller). As the only black student in the class, Morris is subjected to weirdly inappropriate curiosity and blatant stereotyping (he must be good at dancing and basketball). Morris is also an aspiring rapper, and is ejected from a summer youth group for his language (he raps in English but his German supervisors and cohorts all get it).
Hartigan sticks close to Morris, who fuses with Markees Christmas, a remarkably poised yet vulnerable actor. Craig Robinson lends Curtis a firm manner and bluff humor that find a reflection in Morris’s blend of boldness and compunction, of fierce will and stern principle. Though the movie seems scripted and the action is staged with a calm precision, Hartigan wants to see, not to show. The director wants to discover through the action, to observe for himself his characters’ destiny. Hartigan both wrote and directed the film, but he seems to follow the turn of events rather than determining them. Without a word of doctrine, “Morris from America” feels like a work of liberal Christian cinema, an effort to bring a religious sense of virtuous conflict and redemptive struggle, a prospect of immanent grace, to ordinary lives and profane actions and desires.
The Maryland Film Festival is an exceptionally collegial one. It’s on the Northeast Corridor, easily accessible by train, so lots of New York-based filmmakers come down for it. It’s a noncompetitive festival (no awards, no juries), so it sparks no sense of competition. Its main annual event, the Filmmakers Taking Charge Conference, is a daylong gathering of those whose work is being presented in the festival, plus some other participants in the independent-film world, including distributors, programmers, publicists, and critics (I was one of them). The discussion takes place behind closed doors and is strictly off the record, so everyone on hand speaks freely about personal and business matters (which, of course, in the world of independent filmmaking, often intersect), and bonds by way of this frank talk and sudden mutual familiarity. What’s more, the independent-filmmaking scene, in which filmmakers work together, participate in each other’s projects, and lend each other a hand, is by its very nature a collegial one of shared aspirations and mutual appreciation.
Yet with collegiality and community comes the risk of complacency, of pride in mere belonging, of a sense of a community that’s both self-selecting and exclusive. It’s a risk that finds its double in a technical peculiarity of independent filmmaking, the crisis of image resolution. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the producer’s representative John Pierson godfathered an entire generation of independent filmmakers (his book about the experience is “Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes”). When he founded his production company, he called it Grainy Pictures, because the grain of 16-mm. film that was underlit, due to scant time and money, was a distinguishing mark of independent filmmaking. Grain and technical roughness in all dimensions of filmmaking were a sign of spontaneity, immediacy, and authenticity. But now an ordinary cell phone features a video camera of a quality similar to that of the highest-grade professional-level video cameras of a decade ago, which means that the default of low-budget filmmaking is no longer a rough image but a smooth one. Any grain on film is the product of a self-conscious and conspicuously chosen and crafted artifice; and the world of independent filmmaking runs the risk of a frictionlessness akin to that of its instantaneously high-tech images.
That’s where the festival’s screening of “My Last Film,” directed by Zia Anger and starring Lola Kirke, Kelly Rohrbach, and Rosanna Arquette, comes in. Nothing I’ve recently seen matches its moment-to-moment fury of pure imagination. It starts with the classic independent-film trope of an actor confronting the trials of her art and her business, but quickly veers off into comic dimensions that I don’t even dare hint at for fear of spoiling its joyful surprises. “My Last Film,” as its title promises, is a sort of comic cinematic apocalypse, something like Anger’s version of Chantal Akerman’s first film, “Saute Ma Ville,” a drolly pugnacious and pain-seared outburst of frustration at the amiable and decorous quasi-professionalism of the world of art cinema and independent filmmaking. It’s a sort of Grand Guignol of genre and genrelessness, in which the very branding of independent film, the circuit of artistic practice and critical terminology, the very pride in self-motivated creation, are undone with a radical derision that’s matched by an original style, one aided and realized by the audacious camerawork of Ashley Connor. I’m deeply impatient to see a feature by Anger—if that’s the direction that her inspiration pushes her.
What if the systems that have developed around independent films—including wondrously humane ones such as this very film festival—risk congealing into another set of norms? What if, in a time of YouTube and streaming video, the pipeline-hustle of seeking distribution and awaiting theatrical release, as well as the prospect of standing hat-in-hand before the gatekeepers of release and review, suddenly seem antithetical to the spirit of the cinema itself? And what if, as a result, the contours and (as James Gray calls it) the architecture of the feature film itself appear, to an audacious creative spirit, as a needless obstacle to free-spirited and constant creation, to the surface-tearing and screen-rending immediacy, the perpetual crisis that makes independent cinema necessary and keeps it vital? Feature filmmaking won’t end any time soon—it’s what most filmmakers, no less than critics, love—but it may begin to change, for instance, arising out of clusters of short films (as “collective: unconscious” does), to shrink, or to grow into double-wide vehicles, such as Bruno Dumont’s “Li’l Quinquin,” made of a collection of episodes of fifty minutes or less. Though Anger’s short comedy may well find its place in the cinematic ecology, and Anger herself should find a place in the realm of production, she nonetheless looks past the current world of independent cinema with a spirit of revulsion and revolt that’s majestically energizing.
