Holy Land

The Reckoning

In Kentucker Audley's tectonic, astonishing second feature people show up and dissolve like they're being swallowed into the land, itself always shifting, tilting from one locale to another between cuts as unsuspected as buried faultlines and just as sharp. Sometimes the adjoining geography has drifted far out past a chasm of black leader. Time is elastic, expanding to extend a slow moment, or contracting till a future point's unexpectedly here at hand. One's got the sense of a natural cycle churning and permuting, that the mesozoic hasn't left the continent, that splendor still remains. The action of the piece and its form and its locations come inextricably connected — a game of golf (the most 'landed' sport) occasions mention of the Mid-South's seismic history (all connotations of the phrase apply), and the protagonist's visit to a wellness clinic early in the film triggers a suggestion-recording to incant on the soundtrack: "We're gonna ask you to release that stress, release the pain, and forgive the cause of the stressor that created the allergy." The push-pull, peak-and-pass rhythms of the film exist consonant with activity in a bloodstream, and there's little to differentiate Cole (Cole Weintraub) and his behavioral cadences from the material of the work itself (which goes into motion shortly after the clinic sequence wherein our principal's connected by electrodes to the film-frame). Holy Land and Cole aren't just tangent to one another, and they're not even superimposed — he's walking fossilized within the matter of the movie. Impossible to say which wrought the other, no chicken-or-egg deal, only proto-Genesis and the holy land that a lot of us have forgotten, presided over by Audley who retains no illusions and reserves awe as he films the 'actual' streams at the end and beginning of the picture, where, incidentally, a bottle of Alizé's blown in for good measure.

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:









The actual Holy Land — which is to say, Holy Land, Virginia (think of that billboard in DeLillo's White Noise) — can't compete with the sanctity of its forebear, capital-N nature. The 'official' veneration of the place is press-on, just slogans on signs. Yet the signs are exalted too by the terrestrial calm that generously surrounds them, so in the beautiful passage of Cole's arrival they've metamorphosed out of something cheap and crass into 'stations,' to be sure, but ones totemic/immemorial. This give-and-take courses throughout, as when Audley shoots the poles along a stretch of power-line to show the way their 'incidental' cross arrangements provide an aleatory, and totally genuine, consecration: the presence of man on the planet.

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:







Everything's manifold here. When the roundtable convenes to critique Cole's work-in-progress novel (mentioned in the prologue by CW to a hammock girl we never spot again, whom he takes unreplicated initiative to invite on his trip — salient detail), the attendees' remarks come across as well-intentioned as they are totally dispiriting, absent of obvious throughline, and oblivious to authorial potential — but fair is fair or something: this novel by Cole's got low chance of fruition right now and, in any case, is already the film itself. Check it: this sequence grinds the knowing joke home about the movie's own structure (though as I've suggested Holy Land's the process of its own creation) and another one too about conformist philistines. You can learn a really good lesson from classrooms: namely that (I'm quoting my dad) "opinions are like assholes — everyone's got one."

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:



But before Cole makes it to the focus-group, and after his wheeling in town to crash at the house of a friend (appearing only momentarily in silhouette this friend registers another disappearance), he encounters a girl. Where does she come from? One trace of dialogue suggests she's a friend of a friend, who positions her as "the most extraordinary female that you've ever met, right."

—"Your real name's Bunny, or is that like a nickname people call you or somethin'?"
—"Yeah, it's my name since I was born. Given to me at birth, yeah."

First of all, and here's what I was getting at in the piece on Family Tree, this piece of 'dialogue,' her response, exhibits the quality where if you're reading it in a novel or short-story, maybe one by George Saunders, you say to yourself: "What an ear." But it happened before a camera, was caught by a mic, and instead you say, "That's not just an ear, that's lightning in a bottle," and this is the sacred element of the movies, one particular to the movies, where life's loveliness not only gets preserved and redepicted but, like revelation, helps bring life itself alive a little more. Those two "yeah"s are like bookends for the private library that's more than just words.

Second, and adhering to the line of scrutiny: Literature may well succeed in presenting a Daisy Miller, an Emma Bovary, or even a Caddy Compson but only the cinema, and only one so attuned as Audley's, will give you a Bunny Lampert. Contrary to received wisdom, the cardinal standard of casting is not "be Meryl Streep" — it's "be interesting and be charming," and that's the Truth. So here's this Bunny Lampert, not the Bunny Lambert-with-a-B signified by the end credits (a 99-year-old American aristocrat heiress of the Gillette fortune and widow of Big Paul Mellon) but rather Lampert-with-a-P, a "midnight beauty", to pilfer Du Bois' phrase from the Ginger Sand essay, whose soulful eyes and emotional delicacy coordinate a moral constant, the polestar in relation to which the Cole/film mechanism diverges in soft parallax.

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:






There can be no explanation for the ebb/flow of Cole's behavior or rejection of Bunny in the succession of scenes that follow their first lunar kiss (green stockings and a kneehole, beautiful composition, an abstract knot), although it might do to mention that the fortune-teller on the back deck predicts with the cross of tarot some beneficial outcome for the boy in "a trip over water". And while we certainly see Cole paddling at three points in a boat to nowhere-in-particular, once for each of the tarot reader's "card clarifiers" (Cole:"How come you didn't want to come over... the boat?" His friend played by Tim Morton: "I don't know, I just didn't feel it. Bad news, or sumpin'."), the prophecy hardly chimes with much resonance till we recall Bunny's words spoken under the sun: "I have olive undertone in my skin, it's from the Mediterranean blood on my mom's side."

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:







Lightning over water. People and matter exist as one in Holy Land, and Bunny is the good-luck-charm, the rabbit's-foot talisman that Cole rejects at his peril. His final encounter with Bunny, who's come to spend time at the flop-hostel where he's residing, ends in this exchange:

—"Say something to me. Say something."
—"What?"
—"Say something. I came all the way out here."
—"What do you want me to say?"
—"Say something."

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:



The plea for intimacy, in Lampert's open voicing, breaks the heart. Cole, closed-circuit, opts not for the romanticism of Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde" caught floating fragmentarily out of his car radio, but rather the idle bull-posturing he can share with his buddy at the crash-pad:

—"Like in the middle of the night, if you do end up getting that hooker or whatever..."
—"What's the demographic for prostitutes, out here, is it, it's like, strict 'Vietnamese', or..."
—"It's gonna, it's gonna be, poor — 'poor black'."

After Bunny departs from the world of the movie, the flip-out, breakdown process in the Holy Land-mechanism, first intimated by Cole's to-camera address at the picture's midpoint ("I guess this movie's already getting a little easier to make." — preceded by a shot where the shadow of the camera apparatus like the shadow of the cross marks his body), subsequently stifled, now achieves inexorable momentum.

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:



Primordial chaos. A random deal of the deck.

•••

A new beard.

•••

Lunch with sister Betsy.

•••

Blind-date and puke from a shot.

•••

Firing a rifle, militia-focused.

•••

Labor for wages.

•••

A paddleboat.

He'll circle and dance with you.

"The Physics of Night".

Lightning in a bottle.

Holy Land by Kentucker Audley, 2010:





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Family Tree

That Pouty Voice Defeated Thing

It's here:



And it's got 8,115 views at the time of this writing — is in need of at least a hundred eighty-thousand more. Because Family Tree demonstrates (and by no means am I saying here the film represents the concussive singular instance) that if you let people be themselves in front of a camera, and a good director's there to keep things alive and is of more than half a mind to cut the dross out later, you'll have magic and everything that happens outside the movies suddenly gets redeemed. I think it's probably just time to throw away the word "actor" and we had good cause to do so even at the point of Warhol or Godard/Gorin or now Costa or before that Méliès in whose pictures specifically (to reverse my obsessive reframing of Lumière in the realm of fantasy or, I don't know, non-realism, i.e. photography) we're hardly ever resident within the world of a scene, rather are watching a film that recorded someone performing. Anyway, either we chuck "actor" or we expand our idea of what an actor might be. "Its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention...", etc.

In this getaway film that pitches its tentpole midgrounds between Super Mario Galaxy and Sense and Sensibility there are two really good shots:

1.
GIRLS (in my generation) SIT IN FRONT OF LAPTOPS AND PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEOS OF SONGS. THIS IS WHAT THEY DO. AND THEY USUALLY DO IT WHEN THEY'RE THREE GLASSES IN W/ THE CÔTEAUX DU LYONNAIS. So if Audley ever makes plans to caption the film for an older crowd I might suggest:

Family Tree by Kentucker Audley, 2009:







2.
The second two-thirds finds Lena and Tim, both great actors, the latter peripatetic as ever in Kentucker's pictures, extending the pretense of brother + sister. I find the repartée and evasive eyelines very touching and very genuine, though full-disclosure, I never grew up with siblings. Still, I can share this: I had an uncle that once claimed to have recreated inside a safe-deposit box the surface conditions of the planet Venus. He used to dare his children to stick their hands inside as a test of will.

Family Tree by Kentucker Audley, 2009:



There are two supporting players beside Greta Gerwig worth singling out for vivid presence, and since we don't learn much about their backgrounds in the film I'll sketch them further right here and say the one lolls about like someone's eccentric niece, and the other's the sort of girl who if she ever moved to California would probably take a pass on the Karina Longworth readings but still apply for a vanity license that matched the KBL 852 plate in Kustom Kar Kommandos. That's not easy casting.

Family Tree by Kentucker Audley, 2009:




Or is it? Family Tree boasts the bond and the joy among friends making a movie. Moral: family trees might be more spontaneously generated than any blood-uncle could venture to guess.

Jouons.

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Ginger Sand

Chamber Trauma

"Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men think that Tennessee — beyond the Veil — is theirs alone, and in vacation time they sally forth in lusty bands to meet the country school commissioners. Young and Happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer, ten years ago."
—W. E. B. Du Bois, "A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South" [1899]

The Chickasaw air has been vanquished by Chicago winter's harsh gusts, and the shift is so abrupt as to reinforce the Team Picture milieu as Utopia and its summer as a moment in time to be prized. In the epilogue short Ginger Sand, David has ventured north, either in pursuit of that Sarah girl, or not, or got derailed somewhere long the course of the quest. Sarah vanished like all visions, and her substitute, Brandi (Brandi Perkins), has chanced to visit across the same weekend Eric and his girlfriend (Rose McCallum) are set to show. Their arrival activates a garrulous new mood in the host, before Brandi's passive-aggression tempers it back into catatonia by short's end.

Ginger Sand by Kentucker Audley, 2008:




A lot of us have been in that exact apartment more-or-less, and there's no point to analyzing the subtleties of the situation's dynamic because Audley's already accomplished the task and if the cinema's there to give the straight story without the 'writing' then my doubling-up on the matter would be, I think, not only a redundant effort but would make me look like a bigger idiot with the ill and age-old wish that performing 'criticism' on the matter can enact Mastery........ The question implicitly rises: "Who're your subjects, Master?", to which I guess the would-be critic would have to respond, and only then when forced: "Why, I am now master of this work," although what he really means to say even if he can't recognize it or won't admit it is: "This artwork is now my subject, and I have also mastered its artist, because I have spoke him." Q.E.D. Film criticism is above all an act of tremendous vanity. On one hand. On the other, I've decided, it's anxiety over the act of being a consumer as opposed to a creator.

Ginger Sand by Kentucker Audley, 2008:



"Excuse me, rude awakening, get up!" riffs Morton (in another amazing performance — this guy is something else) about turning the tables on Brandi, chef of what Morton terms "ginger sand" and who's a far temperamental cry from his own tagging-along GF, let alone the vision-girl in that line from the Kentucker recording stashed on the Benten disc: "And we could look up grey-goo on a website every day and take notes." A perfect sentiment and one that for me too's probably just as good as the someday patter of little feet.

Ginger Sand by Kentucker Audley, 2008:



But that's the thing with girls — they charm you with a little Du Bois and next they're inveigling a knife in your spine.

Ginger Sand by Kentucker Audley, 2008:



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And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You

Train Your Eyes! This Guy's Also Dissolving

On to black-and-white, a surveillance aesthetic and apparatus, the somewhere else that's not here. A cat passes through, and that's the something here that's living, keeping the place presenced.

Observe the difference between the cat's body's felicity and the lumbering bulk of the character Nick (Adam Craycroft), eyes fixed to the computer. And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You — a nice title, funny, pulled from later on in the picture during a dispute that's comical and harsh. But also a reminder we're somewhere between the lands of the living and of the dead, where he just comes around and dances with you. Everything's washed in brushed-aluminum greys, like the waters seen from the ferry.

And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:



Or a CTA train. Dateline Chicago. A passenger's got a stud off-center beneath her lower lip. Nick's agaze. He's a stocky and beaten Richard Garriott. As much as he'd like it to be his eyes can't operate independent of that twisting mouth, he's a mouth-breather on the inside, like how nowadays folks drink milk only inside of the movies. He does a bad job of spying on himself — what does Nick think he's putting forward when he evades a neighbor that passes in the stairwell with "I kind've been lookin' forward to gettin' dinner on, so.", or hunkers with his cell to tell Jessica, who's in England, whose apartment he's either sitting for or squatting at, "So you know what babe I think I'm gonna get ready for bed."? This man with a moustache like the pedipalps of a spider who cuts things short. This man with the expression like he's not sure whether he just shit his pants.

And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:






It's a lead-up to later — he's Sour Disgust-Puss as he audio-iChats the girlfriend about a guy who's "teaching her how to dance" ("a real whiz on the dancefloor"), and the "fuckin'"s start to flow like leachate. It's as though the caller to the talk-radio show's managed to teleport in-studio, moustache an extra frown above his lip. Bad-humor's quantum with this guy, next you know he'll be in your kitchen, and he'll be drinking your milk, and what's more he'll be doing it in an inside-out t-shirt, motherfucker. Kentucker Audley knows that two-gallon jugs are the dumbest-looking containers and that a marble counter can help exploit this reality.

And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:






The movie ends on a dream-sequence — well, not really, it's more another 'manifestation' in-film, another interzone. A woman's on the train-platform speaking in Spanish. Nick — or Craycroft — is wearing glasses now and reacting in stammers, his face ping-ponging confusion and (at last) focus. Inside and outside, here and not here, reacting but wanting: one expression vacant with wondering re: a tax refund and the other seeming serious to convey: "Stop the Genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka."

And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:







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Click here to go to the next page and read about Team Picture.

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Team Picture

Perseverance, or: Postcards from the South of Cinema

From the omega to the alpha, from the hosing-up of a 90%-inflated baby-pool to its sad-lawn emptying, thank the prince of Hell and lightbringer Lucifer, or only Sony and Apple, for helping develop Team Picture and all the alternate American cinema not geared toward rec-room jerks, serial assessors, terminal hobbyists, '70s-apotheosisists, or the guy sitting next to me as I write this — unless of course the lot's up for getting onboard with Feelings and Life-Shit and abandoning Wednesdays spent working out where they presently stand with early-Oughts Scorsese.

Furthermore? It turns out there're other places for an American to shoot in aside from New York. In this sense alone, Team Picture stands like a beautiful fable of reconsideration.

Obviously film festivals are glutted with dispatches that originate from contiguous States. The vast number of these pictures barely dark their ink enough on a schematic index of world cinema relevance to warrant pause; traces of personality and worldview, the impress of philosophical or storytelling ideas — these things are mostly absent from those movies, and when the shots aren't "handheld" their color-timing barely registers much past the hue of steamed clams.

Now it was really rich, whenever Coppola would suggest his anticipation of these little devices inventing a new Orson Welles. (The machinery makes the man!) The interviewer would ask him which young filmmakers he admired and of course he'd say Wes Anderson and Darren Aronofsky... Even if you're not pigging out on "content" to fill the hole of your days I'd think you'd detect a note or two in the semiosphere of something different from movie-movies having been happening over the last couple years in American cinema. In short, the blood's back on the tracks, better instincts are starting to strangle the 'whimsical' per capita, and little indication of being bowled over by the films of Akira Kurosawa's getting much display.

One of the worst motivations for becoming a filmmaker is having wanted to become a filmmaker. I don't think you can make good films, wanting to make films. Even if I'm making a film now that's ostensibly about cinema or some filmmaker, what I'm really doing is fighting the light from my mother's closet at 7 on any cold school-morning from age 6 or 11. Neither Kentucker Audley, nor his fellow-Tennessean Harmony Korine, nor Audley's conspirator-in-NYC-lancing Lena Dunham make their movies out of anything but a need to make-non-evanescent the experiences more murderous than movie-memories, to capture the exposed-to things shaken in respective humors.

A little to wit: Louis Skorecki, one of the damnedest writers-about-film ever, these days does the best 'film writing' possible by not 'writing' very much of it at all — instead, is blog-embedding YouTube clips of the latest Bob Dylan performances, which seems about right to me. Seems just as worthy as typing: The color of the sky in Osaka...

Likewise Kentucker Audley understands that the important things 'are already there.' The color of the late-afternoon Memphis sky, the overgrown lawns in maybe-never need of mowing, the air whose thickness you gauge just from the lean and relent of cicadas' mass clicking. Miasmic air modifying light. Air too hot for lots of shirt-wearing.

A miracle the equipment worked. — And even when Amanda Harris tosses the blankets on the hotel room floor for a suddenly chastened Audley, there's a give-two-shits quality that says: "Never had use for this many sheets anyhow." Even the body language is hot — butterknife cruel.

Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:



It might do to draw attention here to the fact that, as luck will have these things, Audley's a better actor than Al Pacino. Here he is in the first episode of Joe Swanberg's web serial with Ronnie Bronstein, at around the 1m 20s mark —


BUTTERKNIFE 1: Plastic Hassle

Spout | MySpace Video

Like with the best performers, some immutable persona eddies the surface as shin-budging undercurrents inflect the 'consciousness' of the thing. A selected Kentuckerography: the smarmy standoffish'ness of the Butterknife porchsitter; his invocation of a sort of Slothrop's dæmon in Dustin Guy Defa's forthcoming Bad Fever; and the un-self-conscious bodily cool of the Audley turn in Pillowface by Lena Dunham — who, by the way, might be justifiably deemed Tribeca's answer to Luc Moullet. ("Luca Moullet," whatever.) In Team Picture diffidence and good manners preside. When his character David quits the job at the sporting-goods store owned by his hepped-up stepdad (Greg Gaston, in one of the picture's several spot-on characterizations — alongside Bill Baker's David's-dad in dungarees, that Arkansas kitchen, Chapultepec in Germantown, the living-room hanging-plant, and then some), Kentucker breaks the news by twice offering, "I enjoyed it," gets 'gracious,' 'congenial,' 'endearing,' and 'hilarious' across all at once, and the whole moment's right as rain.

Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:







The language runs in rivulets, branching around, not exactly evading, whatever's out there. You really have to see Team Picture to hear Audley's ear, but consider the following:

— David and his girlfriend:
"What're you doin'?"
"I'm leavin' for my art show."
"What time does it start?"
"It starts at six."
"That's early, i'n't it?"
"No."
"What is it, normal?"
"Yeah, it's normal."

— His housemate Eric (Timothy Morton), on borrowing an extension of garden-hose to fill the pool:
"Why don't you go next door and borrow one of theirs? They love to share."

— David introducing his song at a café open-mic:
"Hello everyone tonight, hello everyone tonight. It's probably not night, it's probably, uh, 7:30. It's pretty close to night." (Some girl at the earlier poets' open-mic waxes existential — "in françois, of course.")

— Eric yelling to David from the living-room:
"What are you doin'?"
"Um, I'm makin' some changes around my room."

— David's mom (Terry Hamilton) addresses her son after hearing he quit the sporting-goods shop:
"All of a sudden you don't like this job?"
"No, I always didn't like it."

Eric/Morton brings the action of the film to a close — it's time to empty that baby-pool and get off the lawn for good — with a near-Faulknerian flourish: "Thank God, because all this business talk was makin' me feel like a real business-talkin' man. ... We're gonna worry our future out."

Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:




And so the cycle that began with filling the pool, and proceeded through coaxing Sarah (Harris) to come stick her feet in it while sipping a Pabst (S: "Sounds enjoyable." D: "Well yeah, it's great. Do you uh, do you like, uh, enjoyment? There's actually room for, uh, more than one enjoyer."), ends in deflation and the girl gone off to Chicago. One last melody from troubadour Audley — "I came down with the perseverance. / The perseverance. / The perseverance." — and one final shot that transfigures the yard into a place of abstraction, ambivalence, nullity and renewal.

Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:




Such is the perseverance. I like Audley and I like his films because through them he's saying: "Will not serve." His pictures dispense with the bullshit to express experience and everything that's deeply felt, especially the dusk-truth of life as something sad, and beautiful, but mostly sad. I like how he's sharing the secret it's always pretty close to night.

Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:



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"The Way You Have to Shoot Me Is So Disgusting — So Disgusting"

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Point Omega

"It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins' head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck."

•••

"Everybody remembers the killer's name. Norman Bates, but nobody remembers the victim's name. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates, Janet Leigh is Janet Leigh. The victim is required to share the name of the actress who plays her. It is Janet Leigh who enters the remote motel owned by Norman Bates."

(cf. the Histoire(s) du cinéma, Episode 4A — "Le Contrôle de l'univers")

•••

"Janet Leigh in the long interval of her unawareness. He watched her begin to drop her robe. He understood for the first time that black-and-white was the only true medium for film as an idea, film in the mind. He almost knew why but not quite. The men standing nearby would know why. For this film, in this cold dark space, it was completely necessary, black-and-white, one more neutralizing element, a way in which the action becomes something near to elemental life, a thing receding into its drugged parts. Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her."

•••

"Arbogast. The name deeply seeded in some obscure niche in the left brain. Norman Bates and Detective Arbogast. These were the names he remembered through the years that had passed since he'd seen the original movie. Arbogast on the stairs, falling forever."

•••

"They see one brain-dead room in six gleaming floors of crowded art."

•••

"The knife, the silence, the spinning rings.

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at."

•••

"He began to think of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real."

•••

"He found deeper interest in a scene when there was only one character to look at, or, better maybe, none."

•••

"Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies."

•••

"I arrived after dark.

" 'No plush armchair with warm lighting and books on a shelf in the background. Just a man and a wall,' I told him. 'The man stands there and relates the complete experience, everything that comes to mind, personalities, theories, details, feelings. You're the man. There's no offscreen voice asking questions. There's no interspersed combat footage or comments from others, on-camera or off.'

" 'What else?'

" 'A simple head shot.'

" 'What else?' he said.

" 'Any pauses, they're your pauses, I keep shooting.'

" 'What else?'

" 'Camera with a hard drive. One continuous take.'

" 'How long a take?'

" 'Depends on you. There's a Russian film, feature film, Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov. A single extended shot, about a thousand actors and extras, three orchestras, history, fantasy, crowd scenes, ballroom scenes and then an hour into the movie a waiter drops a napkin, no cut, can't cut, camera flying down hallways and around corners. Ninety-nine minutes,' I said.

" 'But that was a man named Aleksandr Sokurov. Your name is Jim Finley.' "

•••

"I'd done one film only, an idea for a film, some people said. I did it, I finished it, people saw it but what did they see? An idea, they said, that remains an idea.

"I didn't want to call it a documentary, although it was assembled completely from documents, old film footage, kinescopes of TV shows from the 1950s. This was social and historical material but edited well beyond the limits of information and objectivity and not itself a document. I found something religious in it, maybe I was the only one, religious, rapturous, a man transported.

"The man was the one individual on-screen throughout, the comedian Jerry Lewis. This was Jerry Lewis of the early telethons, the TV shows broadcast once a year to benefit people suffering from muscular dystrophy, Jerry Lewis day and night and into the following day, heroic, tragicomic, surreal.

"I looked at kinescopes of the early years, every distant minute, it was another civilization, midcentury America, the footage resembling some deviant technological lifeform struggling out of the irradiated dust of the atomic age. I edited out all the guest appearances, the lounge acts, movie stars, dancers, disabled children, the studio audience, the band. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting the nation's love and wonder at four in the morning, in closeup, a crew-cut sweating man in semidelirium, a disease artist, begging us to send money to cure his afflicted children.

"I had him babbling in unsequential edits, one year shading into another, or Jerry soundless, clowning, he is knock-kneed and bucktoothed, bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, the old flawed footage, the disturbed signals, random noise on the soundtrack, streaky patterns on the screen. He inserts drumsticks in his nostrils, he sticks the handmike in his mouth. I added intervals of modern music to the track, rows of tones, the sound of a certain re-echoing drone. There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God.

"I tormented myself over the running time, settling finally on a freakish fifty-seven-minute movie that was screened at a couple of documentary festivals. It could have been a hundred and fifty-seven minutes, could have been four hours, six hours. It wore me out, beat me down, I became Jerry's frenzied double, eyeballs popping out of my head. Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. This was not wrong. But I didn't want Elster to know about it. Because how would it make him feel, being a successor, a straight man to a rampaging comic."

•••

" 'Film is the barricade,' I told him. 'The one we erect, you and I. The one where somebody stands and tells the truth.' "

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SOCIALISME by Jean-Luc Godard: Trailer No. 2

...and No. 6?

UPDATED: The TWO new trailers for Jean-Luc Godard's forthcoming Socialisme may be the film-trailers to end all film-trailers.

FILM SOCIALISME / JLG / FILM ANNONCE 6 from fabrizio del dongo on Vimeo.

Donc les derniers mots de la bande-annonce.

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