Still from Amy Schmitt’s motionpoem, which adapts Erin Belieu’s “When at a Certain Party in NYC”

I’m stingy at the box office, but last week I saw Life of Pi in the theater for the second time. The movie is a visual knockout, a delirium of color, probably the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen onscreen, but what I love most about it is it central metaphor.

The script is deeply flawed. When the narrative is unveiled as an allegory, the telling is clumsy. But in that moment the film is transformed into a poem.

In my dual roles as literary director of Motionpoems–a poetry film company that will premiere a dozen new shorts at the Walker on April 24–and as a publishing poet, I am interested in the intersection of poetry and film. I’m interested in where the language of film intersects with the language of poetry. I’m always wondering what the forms have to teach one another.

It’s one thing to say that a script approaches the poetic. But what happens when a poem is the script? That’s what we do: At Motionpoems, co-founder Angella Kassube and I give great contemporary poems to our network of filmmakers and invite them to use them as scripts for short films over which they retain complete creative control. We do it because we believe film can introduce more people to the world of poetry.

Poems are, in many ways, perfect scripts. They often tell a story whether they’re narrative or not. They have a structure, a shape, and a progression of ideas, and they involve a speaker or implied speaker. More importantly, they are complete works of art, wholly contained and perfect.

We now have more than 30 films in our three-year archive at motionpoems.com. Here are some things we’ve discovered about this unique blending of artistic languages:

Pacing is essential.

Listening to poetry out loud poses a challenge for most people, a bit like being led on a blindfolded walk in a tangled wilderness. Poetry is a dense, convoluted landscape, and one can easily get lost if you’re not used to that landscape. Poets who are great readers of their own work are rare, mostly because their familiarity with their own work makes them tend to forget that every listener is new to it; often they simply read too quickly. For this reason, Motionpoems video artists don’t often utilize the poet’s voice, and choose to utilize a more careful voice-over instead. A film can pace a poem by slowing it down, pause it so the reader can catch up, and allow it to unfold on a timeline that’s organic to the way in which the poem might be absorbed by a first-time listener, not the way it might be read by a poetry aficionado.

Film can add layers.

A great example of excellent pacing is Scott Wenner’s adaptation of Norwegian poet Dag Straumsvag’s “Karl” from our 2010 season, but it’s also an excellent example of how a film can layer metaphors on top of a poem’s existing metaphors. “Karl” is, by itself, a haunting little narrative poem about a man who keeps getting misplaced calls from the police, but the film adaptation boldly sets the poem in the context of a derelict basement and uses two bugs—a moth and a spider—as central characters in the drama. Like Life of Pi, the film becomes an allegory for the poem, not a literal depiction of it, and as such, it multiplies the poem’s power to mean.

Film can amplify humor.

Most people think poetry is gravely serious. Not so. A lot of contemporary poetry is downright hilarious, but you wouldn’t know it from its sober façade on the printed page. A great recent 2012 motionpoem that takes its cues from film noir and turns a sardonic poem by Erin Belieu into a hard-boiled rant is Amy Schmitt’s adaptation of “When at a Certain Party in NYC.” The thing moves like a city bus: In this case a literal depiction is the perfect choice because the scenery glides by so quickly. Most poets chafe at any mention of the arts as entertainment, but film happily exploits the entertainment in art.

Film can restore poetry’s original power.

It should be said that what my Motionpoems co-director Angella Kassube and I are attempting isn’t to make poems better, or to interpret them literally, but to consider them as starting points for another art form, and thereby extend poetry’s typical readership. If, in the process, our video artists interpret, well, that’s a casualty of the process. Some will take exception to this, but it misses the point; our mission is to treat the poem as a creative start-point, not an endpoint. At The Playwrights’ Center, where I worked for a time, I was surrounded by theater artists, all of them collaborative by training and necessity. Poetry’s origin as an oral/performing art leaves it rather orphaned in print. Just as television is finally rediscovering the power of great scripts, Angella and I believe film can restore some of poetry’s birthrights.

We hope you’ll come see our new films at the Walker on April 24 and share in the discussion.

News Event: Pfc. Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks

Appearing before a military judge yesterday for more than an hour, Pfc. Bradley Manning confessed to supplying a vast quantity of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks. The former intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq alleged that he provided this suppressed information in order to make the public aware of the volatile secrets its government was keeping, as well as to spark an open debate about American foreign policy. According to Manning, he came to the conclusion that none of the materials he uploaded to WikiLeaks — which included videos of airstrikes resulting in civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, logs of military incident reports, information regarding detainees at Guantánamo Bay, and 250,000 cables sent by American diplomats internationally — could damage national security. Nonetheless, his ten guilty pleas could lead to 20 years in prison, and possibly more if military prosecutors decide to charge Manning with violating the United States’ Espionage Act.

Private Manning’s testimony — especially his statement that “the world would be a better place if states would not make secret deals with each other” — has only added to his underground appeal among advocacy and whistleblower groups. The eternal debate regarding government secrets and its willful misleading of the American public (specifically the question of whether policymakers and politicians should suppress information in order to “protect” the country) has only intensified in the digital age, when anyone with Internet access can disseminate vital information to mass populations. This controversial question is manifested in the figure of Private Manning, who represents a courageous freedom fighter for some, and a potential threat to national security for others.

Film Recommendation: All the President’s Men

The Orwellian tendency of governments to hide information from their constituents may be even more pertinent in an online age — a fact supported by the number of WikiLeaks documentaries in various states of distribution — but the question has been relevant (and insurmountable) practically since the days of Nero. One of the finest films to deal with the hegemonic suppression of information, as well as the enterprising quest by journalists and activists to uncover these secrets, is Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film All the President’s Men. Released less than a year after the fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War — a time when the barbaric crimes committed by the U.S. government and military were beginning to come to light, and when American action-thrillers were at their bleakest and most outraged (see also Pakula’s 1974 The Parallax View and Sydney Pollack’s 1975 Three Days of the Condor) — All the President’s Men follows two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (who wrote the book on which the film is based), as they uncover the Watergate scandal via their top-secret government contact, Deep Throat. Ultimately they discover that Watergate was not merely an attempt to conceal Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (a scheme intended to sabotage Nixon’s democratic opponent), but American covert operations as a whole.

If Private Manning and Julian Assange, among others, act as modern-day Bernsteins and Woodwards, then All the President’s Men‘s brilliant, formally complex portrayal of the interpenetration (and active resistance) between the government and mass media might shed some light on how volatile information is both concealed and exposed in the 21st century. The dogged investigations and editorial marathons undergone by Woodward, Bernstein, their Post editor Ben Bradlee, and various colleagues have transformed over the last four decades, yet the nebulous infrastructures meant to keep political machinery chugging away have remained in place. All the President’s Men is one of the finest, most disturbing, yet ultimately inspiriting exposés of the dark pathways through which such combustible information travels. The film is available on DVD through Netflix, on instant viewing at Amazon.com, and on YouTube.

News Event: The Oscars

As the 85th Academy Awards loom only days away (they’ll air on ABC this Sunday night, starting at 6pm), a flurry of articles, previews, and opinionated diatribes inundate the Internet, either touting the significance or decrying the irrelevance of this annual dog-and-pony show. Whether it’s the ceremony you love or merely love to hate, there’s little denying the cultural import these festivities carry in American pop culture. As bettors predict the honorees, naysayers lambaste the absurdity, and pundits question whether they even matter anymore, there’s little doubt that the awards will be one of the most-watched televised events of the year, and that a select number of powerful Hollywood studios (and artists) will bask in the glow of mass validation until the cycle of self-promotion begins anew for the next installment.

Film Recommendation: Cries and Whispers by Ingmar Bergman

Among the many filmmakers and cinephiles who have viewed the Oscars with a certain amount of disdain, Ingmar Bergman might be the most pedigreed. As the Swedish filmmaker writes in this brusque letter he sent to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences following the nomination of Wild Strawberries (1957) for Best Original Screenplay, Bergman wanted nothing to do with the “motion picture art humiliating institution.” Indeed, the director’s sobering examinations of human desperation, cruelty, and alienation would not seem to mesh well with the stolid, pseudo-highbrow message movies the Academy tends to favor. (Remember Crash? Or Argo, for that matter?) Wild Strawberries — the bittersweet story of an aging physician who reevaluates his life before accepting a prestigious award at Lund University (a ceremony he significantly considers a hollow ritual) — is available online at Hulu Plus and on DVD through Netflix. One of Bergman’s most well-regarded films, Wild Strawberries also (perhaps to the director’s dismay) won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the eighth Berlin International Film Festival as well as the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

“Hour of the Wolf,” 1968

Yet if you’re looking to avoid all the Oscars hoopla by venturing into some foreboding Bergmanian territory, a treasure trove of intense, thought-provoking cinema awaits you online. In addition to the voluminous DVD offerings that Netflix provides, the website also offers Hour of the Wolf (1968), Passion of Anna (1969), and The Serpent’s Egg (1978) through Instant Streaming. The first of these, Hour of the Wolf, would be my personal recommendation: the director’s haunting, nightmarish foray into the horror genre (kind of) literalizes the demons that typically remain under the surface in his films.

“Cries and Whispers,” 1972

Hulu, meanwhile, also offers The Virgin Spring (1960) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961), as well as many other titles through Hulu Plus. But the director’s most emotionally devastating film — and also the one that (not coincidentally) strays the furthest from Oscar territory — is also available for free streaming on Hulu: Cries and Whispers. (Ironically, Oscar voters continued to dismiss Bergman’s indifference and lauded the movie with five nominations, including Best Picture.) Concerning a trio of sisters (one of whom is on her deathbed) in a Swedish mansion at the end of the 19th century, Cries and Whispers returns to familiar Bergman territory (faith, doubt, love, death) while atypically conveying those themes through lush, saturated color cinematography (by Sven Nykvist). Including a shocking scene that’s referenced in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), Cries and Whispers achieves a naked empathy that’s cathartic in its honesty and ambition. If you’re hoping to balance the pomp and glitz of the Oscars with an unsettling appetizer (or if you want to avoid the awards altogether), check out this unflinching masterpiece from an auteur who cared more about cinema’s emotional depths than the laurels it might bring to his mantelpiece.

News Event: Russian Fireball Meteor

If you are on the internet right now, you’ve probably heard about the unexpected meteor crash in western Siberia, injuring thousands. The crash is also stunningly cinematic, with footage captured (largely by panoptically prevalent dashcams and security cameras) seemingly straight out of an action movie. The meteorite burning up in the atmosphere lights the world with an otherworldly flash and the resulting shockwave broke windows and damaged buildings across the region, one that houses much of Russia’s military and nuclear production. It’s an all too real reminder of our fragility on earth, since a similar event killed the dinosaurs who ruled the earth for 185 million years (that’s about 177 million years more than there have been humans).

Film Recommendation: Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) takes place in a Russian wasteland of its own, one referred to as “The Zone” that is reminiscent of the Zone of alienation surrounding Chernobyl, despite the film predating the disaster by 7 years.  Within The Zone lies The Room, a mystical space that can grant the wishes of any who visit it. This journey into the center of a forbidden and dangerous zone in the rural Russian countryside is science fiction and philosophical exploration, in equal parts, and led critic Derek Adams to write when comparing this film to Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now (1979), “as a journey to the heart of darkness, it’s a good deal more persuasive than Coppola’s.”

For those who can’t make it to a video store, Stalker is available on Netflix, though not streaming.

If you’re looking for a quick fix, a link to a film to watch while you twiddle your thumbs and think about our pending global annihilation, you can’t go wrong with almost anything from the Criterion Collection, all streaming for free on Hulu for this weekend only. (Though of course, you’ll have to stomach the film’s interruption with several ads, but thus is the price of freedom.) Several of Tarkovsky’s other films are available through Hulu, Ivan’s Childhood, Solaris, and Andrei Rubelev, and they are all worth watching.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival has been full of new discoveries and projects by filmmakers with whom Walker has had a long history. Now on day 7, I feel I can share a better overview of what I’ve seen with a better perspective. Most days start at 9 am with a film that is in competition for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, and I’ll be running from one venue to another—often at opposite ends of town until midnight or later. I’m far from alone in this endeavor as there have been over 250,000 tickets sold as of the mid-festival. In addition to the festival’s official selections, there are 890 films screened as part to the European Film Market which runs parallel with the festival. At the market, there are 7,650 industry insiders taking part by buying and selling films across all genres.

From the competition, my favorite and the most buzzed-about title is Sebastian Lelio’s Chilean film Gloria, a striking portrait of an awkward, yet charming divorcee in her late 50s entering the dating scene. The thing that sets it apart is the raw performance by actress Paulina Garcia who embellishes her character with humor, vulnerability and passion. It was picked up for U.S. distribution by Roadside Attractions and it’s sure to make the Oscar list for the coming year.

This is a close tie with Ulrich Seidl’s final part of his new trilogy, Paradise: Hope, which is set in a fat camp for teens.  Reversing the Lolita story, one of the young girls develops an obsessive crush on the camp doctor, a man in his late 50s.  As with Seidl’s other films in the trilogy, it mixes humor with behavior that is often taken to extremes.

Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Hope
Courtesy Strand Releasing

Many films from Sundance have also come to Berlin for their European premieres like Matt Porterfield’s engaging I Used to Be Darker (produced by Steven Holmgren from the Twin Cities and playing to packed houses here); James Franco and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar, a reimagining of the 40 minutes cut from William Friedkin’s film Cruising; Stacie Passon’s (she studied at the U of M) tale of fidelity in Concussion (produced by Rose Troche who was last at Walker with The Safety of Objects); and Kim Longinotto’s (her films Sisters in Law, Divorce Iranian Style, Shinjuku Boys, Gaea Girls all played Walker) heart-breaking documentary Salma concerning a Muslim poet who was confined to her home for 9 years starting when she was 13.

The Foum Expanded program is also presenting a focus on the work of Hélio Oiticica who may be familiar to Walker audiences for his CC5 Hendrixwar/Cosmococa Programa-in Progress installation realized with his collaborator Neville D’Almeida in which visitors remove their shoes before entering the space in the Burnett Gallery to lounge in hammocks, listed to a soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix music and to view the barrage of slides covering the walls. The festival has taken on staging one of the artists’ most ambitious variations of the work, Block-Experiments in Cosmococa-Program in Progress: CC4 Nocagions, a slide sequence with soundtrack that was installed in a swanky swimming pool for one night—unfortunately I hadn’t packed swim trunk (who would for Berlin in February?).  There is one more variation of the Cosmacoca that I’ll catch up with at the Hamburger Bahnhof on Friday. The head of the Projecto Hélio Oiticica, Cesar Oiticica Filho also presented the world premiere of his documentary on his uncle and there was a fascinating panel that included rare Super 8 films including the raw footage of Agrippina e Roma-Manhattan (Walker is in progress in digitizing the edited version of this title).

With just two more viewing days to go, I’m looking forward to Richard Foreman’s first feature film in 30 years Once Every Day, River Phoenix’s final film Dark Blood (yes, River Phoenix—he died before the shoot ended and the film was in limbo for decades), and the restoration of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason.

Chris Sullivan
Courtesy Taylor Glascock

I met Chris Sullivan quite by accident at the 2012 Vancouver International Film Festival. My friend and I had settled in for a screening of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt when the guy next to us struck up a conversation about the good crowd for the screening. He mentioned he was a filmmaker visiting with his film, we asked which film? That film happen to be Consuming Spirits and the guy we coincidentally sat down next happened to be Chris Sullivan. The Walker had booked Chris’ film literally right before I had left for Vancouver, so I was thrilled with the lucky serendipity.

Three months later after this brief meeting and as the screenings for Consuming Spirits at the Walker quickly approached, I seized the opportunity to interview Chris about the film and his work for an article on the Walker site. Our conversation spiraled in many different and interesting directions, many of which I was unable to incorporate in the piece that I wrote. Read on for our full conversation where Chris compares Prairie Home Companion to The Sopranos, feels lucky that he didn’t make a film about Lady Di, and diviluges that David Bowie is on his short list for his next film, even if David doesn’t know it!

Kathie Smith: The fact that it took you 15 years to make Consuming Spirits is always going to be something that accompanies any description of the film. I’m wondering if you can describe the development of the film, and more specifically, a chicken-or-egg question: Was it the story that came first or the visuals?

Chris Sullivan: The story did come from a few visual starting points. One of them is this body that was exhumed on Beechey Island which was connected with the Franklin Expedition, and its image is so arresting, it’s even sneaking into my new film. I have both a brother and a father who died prematurely, and there is a way that they were memorialized, like their sins die with them a little bit—that image made me think about this. There’s also this shaman image that is from an actual exhibit in the Field Museum in Chicago, and the description is very much like the description in the film. So this idea that a shaman is perhaps a romantic description of an alcoholic was also a starting point.

Shaman in Consuming Spirits

The film has autobiographical beginning points, but it is definitely a complete fiction, which I always want to make people understand. I come from a giant family, which I wasn’t willing to animate! I often find when people think they can explore something deep inside themselves, they get down to the bottom they realize: “Oh, wait a second. I don’t want to talk about this!” So fiction gives you the freedom to go to these places that you wouldn’t go if it was in fact the truth.

The environs of Consuming Spirits is similar to where you grew up, correct? Somewhere near Pittsburgh?

Right. I grew up in Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh is one of those cities—in a way like Minneapolis, where you have places like Nicollet Island, which isn’t what it was when I was there. The town, in terms of look, is similar to something…I’m having a blank on the river town that is on the St Croix…

Stillwater?

Yeah. Stillwater. I often think of it like Wheeling, West Virginia. But in Pittsburgh where I grew up, there was a forest across the street from my house. There was a farm behind me, even though I could see the skyscrapers of Pittsburgh.

When you say you had seeds of the story percolating in your head, did you then work on the script? Because one thing about the film is that it is so well scripted, and even though you are watching this animation with voice actors, it often resonates better than some live action film. Did you start on the script first?

It’s funny, in ’95 I started writing a whole other film that I got deeply into and I said to myself: “This is crazy. This will take me ten years to make!”

Little did you know!

Right! “Now I’ll make something more manageable!” But I did first write a prose narrative and then I started to work it into a screenplay. I feel very lucky that I did not make a film about the death of Lady Di, or something. If I was talking about it 15 years later, I would feel very odd. It did end up being things that would hold, and I don’t think I did that intentionally. I feel like that is a bit of luck on my side.

Because of that, I knew certain images that were going to happen, but there are important things in the film that were not in the original script. The most important is that Victor Blue was initially the protagonist. Often when you are writing a novel or a movie, you’ll be attracted to these kind of simple and perhaps even stupid characters. Or, let’s say, repressed characters. But as a writer that ends up being a real limit, because they don’t have any introspection, and that can be really frustrating. So Earl and Genny were characters that actually did have levels of introspection that allowed me to enjoy writing and to have a character that is as smart or smarter than me. I think writers often make a bunch of characters that are much dumber than them, but then they get a little bored. So the emergence of Earl Gray as the main character was something that happened as the film grew. That’s something that changed over the years.

So in terms of this idea of what was there and what came in, there are important things that came in late and there were important things that were there from the inception. And that goes for things in terms of what I shot. I primarily shot it sequentially. The closing scenes in the museum were something that were there very early on in the film, but the campfire scene was not. That was something that was shot in 2011.

When did you decide that you would be the voice of Victor Blue and did that have an impact in how the story was structured?

I often think of ‘life is there but for fortune go I.’ As the 10^th child of 11, we tend to take whatever crumbs are left. It’s kind of like a psychological position. But on the other hand, if that crumb is something delicious, we will also take it. I do think I could be that character and it’s just someone saying: ‘Hey. This is good. You should do this.”

I moved to Minneapolis because my drawing teacher Bruce Breland said, “Oh, I have this friend, Erbert Munzner, who teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. You should go there.” That’s what I did. I didn’t look for another school. I went and I bought a ticket.

I’m a little smarter now, but not a whole lot. It ended up being fortuitous and wonderful, but if I didn’t have that drawing teacher, if I didn’t have that conversation, I would have never spent my 20s in Minneapolis. Those are weird things that I have a lot of compassion for.

There’s a thing that Michael Jordon says—his mode is ‘you can be whatever you want to be’ which I think is totally untrue. Maybe one out of every 2 million people ends up being exactly what they want to be.

Easy for Michael Jordan to say!

I’m 52 and I do have this good feeling and I do think this is the best film I’ve made. But I haven’t made a film for 18 years!

When people think about animation, especially in the 21^st century, they think digital. Consuming Spirits is the complete antithesis of that, in all the best ways, as far as handmade cutouts and scale models and stop motion animation. Did you actually shoot Consuming Spirits on film?

Yeah, it’s shot on 16mm. It’s not even shot on Super 16, so it’s originally shot 3:4. As technology changed—it’s one of the weird things about the film—the newspaper tropes ended up being something that I went through in terms of how films are finished. There was a point when the negative got really dirty, and perhaps the whole film was going to get trashed. There were labs that would not deal with it, because I had already conformed it. Finishing it on film would have wiped out all my money and would have made it a useless 16mm feature film.

There is a lab here in Chicago that was really great and they ended up transferring the film for me. During the transferring we had to adjust the frame, because it was shot 3:4, and I was realizing that they really did manage to clean it, it’s going to finish, it’s going to actually be a film. I don’t know if it will be good, but it is actually going to happen. I was sitting there in this colorist room, bursting into tears, and they were looking at me like, “Are you okay.” There are all these moments when I just thought this thing would never happen.

Give me an idea of how much time is spent on one minute of footage.

It usually ends up being a week of making elements, meaning a different character or a different background. Usually it takes an entire day to get all the lighting right and all the layers of glass right. And then when the shooting starts, it’s about 300 frames a day. It ends up being a little more than 10 seconds a day to actually shoot. And if you have multiple characters and multiple camera moves, it will slow down.

The dialogue is also logged on little index cards and so you have to either move the mouth or move the little teeth. Some of the characters have replacement mouths and some of the characters have hinged mouths. That slows things down, but still you can get 250-300 frames a day. The drawings are slower. You can draw maybe 70-80 drawings a day. And again that usually means per character, so that if you have a shot with three characters in it, you duplicate that. The shooting of the drawing goes quicker. You can shoot 1000 frames of drawings a day.

Consuming Spirits

Would you say a quarter of the film is drawings?

Something like that.

And the rest all stop motion?

Right. That is a decision I made that had something to do with the technology of the time, but also getting a little tired of the film I had finished previous to that, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I had spent en entire year and a half coloring stuff, and still the color is very thin, very light like Egon Schiele-ish.

The idea of having a full color palette was something I really wanted to be able to work with and that’s what the cutouts provided—the kind of detail and texture. It was something I had never done before, so I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. There were times when I’d say, “I’m really proud of that shot” and then “I’m not proud of that shot” but there were things happening with it that were interesting to me.

There’s this term that Piaget uses called “esquema” which is the way that a kids draw. People do that with animation. It takes them a little time, but then they say, “Ok. This is what things look like.” And they let themselves fall into the film. Not everyone, of course.

I will still be in these screenings where there will literally be five minutes left of the film, and there is some couple that will get up, shaking their head, and walk out. It’s a weird film! And I sometimes forget that it’s weird. On the other hand, it does end up being a social experience, and this is something that is really important to me. I was afraid what reviewers would experience with 10 people sitting in an empty theater watching this film. So I was really excited by the fact that I got some in-depth reviews out of both Tribeca Film Festival and the Film Forum run, which was amazing. I had no idea that I would get that kind of reception.

Every once in a while you realize that New York knows how to do their thing, and one of them is to pay attention to art. Someone who has been a big support of this film is Tasha Robinson who writes for the Onion. She saw it at Tribeca and did an interview with me. She has been supportive, but real clean and professional. It’s not like we are buddies or anything, but she even did another full review of the film.

The thing that feels the most exciting is people, who do not know you at all, going into the film and being generous. I do not know A.O. Scott. I did send him a thank you letter via the promotional office but he is not my friend. And that feels so sincere and so real. Those are the kind of things that were like, “Whoa. This thing is a film, I think, maybe.”

There are of course people who still don’t like it, and there are snarky reviews as well. Some things that I am really proud of are: it’s not based on a book, it’s not a remake, it really only exists as a film. And for me, it really only exists in the social space of the cinema. People have watched it individually, and have been able to understand it like that, but there is something about sitting in a room full of people and experiencing it. I will have a somber serious audience, and then I’ll have another audience that is willing to laugh at the film, which is interesting to see. I like that. I really want to defend the right to assembly—the cultural value of assembly. All the people at Apple will have to realize that not everything should happen by the glow of a flat screen. We actually had somebody tell our technician recently that optical media is dead.

What? I guess that’s the new thing—declare the death of things.

I think painting has been dead for 50 years now!

You hold many of the credits in the film: obviously director and animator, but also, as I mentioned, voice actor and musician—the music in the film is great. Can you run down your technical and artistic duties of the film, if that’s possible?

Sure. I did all the writing and the music. I did have some musicians—Monty McCullom played violin on some tracks, my daughter Carmen played violin on some tracks, which she is somewhat sheepish about because she played them when she was 11 and now she is a concert violinist! And she says, “It’s a little hard for me to hear that.”

All the characters sing their parts. I shot probably three-fifths of the film, and in terms of the drawing even more. The other animators were really important too and they did wonderful work. I did all the sound editing and cutting. I ended up doing the color correction which was something I was doing just to get it ready for festivals, and I suddenly realized that I had gotten so deeply into it, that to actually pay for a color correction they would not do much more than I was doing and it would have wiped out any money I had left.

Is that uncommon? Doing the color correction yourself?

It is uncommon. The problem is that there were some technical issues that I had to deal with. If you watch the film real slowly you’ll see these weird jump frames or wiggle frames. The DaVinci is not meant to take splices and so it would often hop. So I lost the last five or six frames of almost every shot. There were individual frames that had to be duplicated and copied to fix aspects of the film.

There were times when I wanted someone else to be editing, but the reality was that there was not any budget left by the time I got it to those things. I am getting to the point where I probably have to give this thing over to a distributor if I want to get to work on my new film, because it is taking up all my time.

I’ve made some real big errors. I did not apply for an Academy Award. I don’t think I would get one, but I could have been nominated. But you don’t know how things are going to happen. In September I was showing in festivals, and I was getting rejections—I still get rejections from film festivals. I have trouble breaking the British barrier! I’ve gotten into one festival on the British Isles, but I’ve been rejected by six or seven. I have realized that this film is made for people other than filmmakers to see, but it takes some time and you realize, “Oh, this thing perhaps has some cultural value.” I wish I had a little bit more type A personality in me, so I could make these proper decisions. But it is wonderful to feel like the film is moving beyond me. It really feels great. And when I say things about having strangers see the film—of course I want my love ones to see it and I want my friends to see it—but it’s like a writer wants a stranger to pick up their book and read it and be moved by it. That’s what we hope art does!

You mentioned that you are currently self-distributing. Is there interest out there? Have you heard from any distributors?

There is interest. Again, things like getting an Academy Award, those things are important to people. The reviews from New York are really important and helpful, and I think that something will happen with it. It is complicated because—and this is a hard thing for filmmakers—I have yet to talk to a filmmaker who has actually made money after giving their film to a distributor.

There’s something that people aren’t aware of which is called a calendar fee. So when you go to an arthouse place and you are seeing a film and there are 12 people sitting there, that person is literally loosing money because they are actually renting the space. It’s not just, “Oh, too bad people aren’t here.” The filmmaker is going in the red. So you have to have people come in and sit in the seats and fill it up. It is really hard.

There’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is an amazing film that was abandon by the independent and critical community—which drove me crazy. I was in a theater watching it and people were getting up and leaving. This is an important film. What is going on? Those are times when you just feel like, what is wrong with the world.

A really great thing was, when I left New York, I got a call on Christmas day, and I’m saying, “Do people go to films on Christmas Day?” And someone said, “Hey Chris. I was just at the 1:00 screening with a full house and it looks like there’s another group coming in for the 3:00.” And I’m like, “Oh my god. This is a film. I’m not there and it’s happening!”

Karen Cooper who saw the film at Tribeca, she just said, “This is an important film. I’m going to put it in my program.” It was very funny, I was talking to her, I was like, “Is this a good idea? I’m not quite through with festivals.” I realized afterwards that, of course, you do this thing. Again, there is a certain green stupidness in me that takes some time to realize what’s important.

Karen Cooper does programming at Film Forum.

Right. She just saw it and within two or three weeks said, “I want to do a run.” That’s the other thing: people have to be brave, and she was very brave. Mike Maggiore also got on board, and was real excited about the film. Again, these are not people who know me.

Consuming Spirits seems to have many references while, once again, being completely one-of-a-kind. Associating Earl Grey’s soliloquies with Garrison Keillor and a Prairie Home Companion is actually not a Minnesota thing, because I’ve read that reference in places other than Minnesota. But in watching the film I also thought about the experimentalism in the Quay Brothers animation; in tone and visuals, I thought a lot about Lynda Barry’s novel Cruddy, which is a fantastic book; but also David Lynch in the Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet sort of way where you discover this whole other world hidden beneath the veneer of a small town; and I also thought of the Handsome Family, this dark country music.

It’s interesting because they did a cover of “The House Carpenter,” which is in my film. I had already recorded mine. The Joan Baez one was the one I got, but it was really interesting listening to their recording.

That’s great. I guess I didn’t even realize that. I think it is mostly just that tone: their songs are very dark, but they are also really tender. And then if you know the two of them, they are incredibly funny. There’s this mix of humor, darkness, and tenderness that I think is also represented in your film.

Who were your conscious influences in this film, visually, narratively and musically?

Someone like Lynda Barry is. One person who I was very honored to be compared to is Alison Bechdel, and her amazing and important work. Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, which I highly recommend—it’s an incredible piece of work. Joe Frank‘s radio stuff, I really love. In terms of David Lynch and Twin Peaks there is definitely a connection there. Also John Cassavetes is an enormous influence.

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands on the set of A Woman Under the Influence

There’s an important moment when I realized what I want to do with film, or what I appreciate in film. I was reading this script book and it had all this Hollywood stuff in it. There’s one chapter in this book called “What’s at Stake.” I come from this avant-garde community, in which I don’t know what’s at stake with people’s work. And I don’t understand what is really bothering them. But then there was a chapter called “The Central Question” and it said, every successful film has a central question, and the answer to the question is “yes.” That made me realize: I just identified what I don’t want to do! You can’t say what the object of desire is or what would be the goal. These people who are brave enough to say, you know, life doesn’t really work like that. You think you know what’s going to be important, but it isn’t. And the thing that you wanted? No you won’t get it. You might get something close to it, but you are not going to get that thing and you’ve got to swallow that loss. And that is going to be with you until you drop dead.

I think there is a beauty in that, too. Artists that I really love, or filmmakers, I can’t locate that thing, but at the end there is this sense of: there was this fuzzy question and I totally understand it or I totally feel for it. In terms of Wobegon, I see a close relationship between Lake Wobegon and The Sopranos. Both of these cultural things have said: “Guess what? When the show is over, there will be no closure. And you have just spent twelve hours in this place but there is no closure and you’ll just have to come back and visit again. And there won’t be closure again.” People criticize the way that the Sopranos ended, but I thought it was really brave. It ends in a normal stupid day, a normal stupid moment. And that is what life is like.

The thing that is weird about Minnesota is that my time there wasn’t the subject of my work—I still had all my Pittsburgh baggage—but it was the energy of being on the edge of the frontier, of human existence. The fact that if you walk straight north, if you veer enough that you don’t hit Lake Superior, you are basically walking into the Arctic Circle. There is something very real about that sense that you are marginalized by nature. That is something that is in the film, in terms of this idea that the woods is dangerous because it’s too cold or there are poison things. I remember this boy that got lost near Ely 33 years ago, there was a factor that you have to understand: if you get lost in the woods out there, you can only go about 300 yards a day. It’s full of swamps and thicket—you don’t walk for miles. This space can absorb you. That is something that is very Minnesota about Consuming Spirits.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your performance work. You are also a performance artist, and, as a matter of fact, you participated in the Walker’s Out There series, currently in its 25^th year. How do these seemingly disparate art forms come together in your work?

They do come together. There is something that happens on stage—the acceptance of shifts, the acceptance of different kinds of suspension of disbelief—that still does not function in film. Some people have talk about films like Holy Motors as being something that embraces this idea that film is a performative act and not a real thing. I love things about that film. I find it a little bit too smart to have any feelings, but I still really enjoy it and I’m really glad it’s out there. There is something I can do in performance that I can’t do in film. In my film I have to have a confession or I have to have an interview or I have to create these structures for a certain kind of open writing. But I can just do that on stage—I can just start talking in any form and any tense and that is accepted. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s something I think about a lot.

Performances tend to be several months of writing, a couple months of prep, and I perform the thing. They are, I won’t say disposable, but they are temporal. They allow my brain to be moving. I performed last year in Minneapolis at Open Eye, run by Mike Sommers and Susan Haas, but I hadn’t done a performance since performing at the Walker in ’95 or ’96. I had said, “I’m going to take a break; I don’t have time for this; I’m raising kids; I’ve got my job; I’ve got my film.” But I kept on missing it. It never went away. And I started it again, and got some critical support from a writer in Chicago, Monica Westin, who supported my performance work and has written on Consuming Spirits too. I wanted to try and bring something up while I was at the Walker, but things just got too insane and busy.

I want to do these things I have done in performance—these shifts of characters, where I’m talking to you but I’m kind of a character but kind of not—in film. I’ll be playing a little bit with that, and we’ll see how brave I am! It of course has some sort of ego base too. It’s scary. But hopefully I’ll be up there [in Minnesota] doing something in the next year or so.

You’ve alluded to the fact that you’ve got a new film and obviously some performance work. What do you have coming up?

Of course, I have quite a few screenings coming up with Consuming Spirits.

Where are the upcoming screenings?

I just showed in two public spaces that I knew nothing about: I had week runs in Lake Worth, Florida and Hudson, New York at arthouses there. I’m really curious to see how that goes. I’ve got a one week screening at the Seattle Northwest Film Forum. I have a screening in Edinburgh at a puppet festival there, which will be really interesting venue. A film festival in Istanbul, which will be an interesting audience.

Are you going?

No unfortunately. I am going to Luxembourg, which could be interesting. It’s hard to know when to press and say, “Well, you have to bring me.” A lot of places will put you up and fly you internationally. It’s great when it happens, but it doesn’t always happen.

I’ve got a run at the Gene Siskel here in Chicago that starts the 25^th. And that is a week run, and that’s my hometown theatrical. I have something that I’m almost positive is going to happen at Cinefamily in LA at a festival called Animation Breakdown, but the timing with that is a little unclear at the moment, so I’m not sure when the actual dates for that are.

Some barriers for the film have been LA and the British Isles, which I can’t figure out. I got another British rejection Dear John letter from Glasgow. Part of me is like, “Are you sure? Look at these reviews. Come on! Come on!!”

Here’s the thing to think about, when you make a difficult piece of work, you can sit down with it and if you start to get unsure, it can start to drift away from you. And I think that can happen with Consuming Spirits. You have to have faith. There’s always a point when I’m with an audience when I realize, okay, they’re in. But if you start to say, “This is just too crazy,” you can keep going there. And I do understand that some people can just say, “This is not working for me.” That is where the social thing happens too, where you start to feel the energy of people watching it and you start to realize, “Oh, we’re in this!” Even in the good reviews, there is always this thing like, ‘you have to make a commitment,’ or ‘this film is merciless at times.’ I do realize that even the films that I love there are those moments too.

In John Cassavetes’ films there’s always a terrible party you at for too long. He wants you to feel that discomfort, that pain. It’s not like you have to want the film, but you have to say, “I’m going to give this film the benefit of the doubt.” And then I think it will feed you. But I can understand you are sitting there, you’re at a festival and you throw this thing in the computer and you’ve got a cup of coffee and undivided attention is not going to work watching this thing. The first 30-40 minutes, you’re still like, “Where am I?” And then you suddenly go, “I think I see where I am” and it starts to solidify.

That’s such a great moment when that happens.

I like it as a viewer, but it’s scary as a filmmaker. You look at the early Tarkovsky films, and they’re actually conventional, and then, as he got trust, he gets more daring. You don’t know where that trust is going to come from, whether it comes from a review, or whether it comes from the energy of an audience—it’s hard to know. A lot of really great work is not necessarily easy to swallow. I don’t know if this film is a great film, but it’s not unimportant.

A scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice

Performance-wise, I’m not sure at this moment. I did a chapter from a performance called “Aggression Therapy” at Open Eye, and I have a desire to flesh that thing out. Right now it is just a 55-minute piece and I want it to be about 70. So I might resurrect that.

This was a piece that you did last year?

I did it a few years ago, in Chicago twice, but I didn’t take it on the road. And then I did it in Minneapolis, but I just did a 15-minute chapter from it. They [Open Eye] have a run going that weekend [I’m there], so there wasn’t any way I could perform there, and I didn’t really get anything else going. Maybe I will come up next fall. We’ll see what happens.

Film-wise, tell me a little bit about your new film.

The new film right now has a very long-winded title called The Orbit of Minor Satellites, which may change. It is a film with animation and 3D sets in it. The puppet-table-top stuff that is in Consuming Spirits, I ended up liking how that felt for people more than I thought I would.

I have two things: one is a space station on a distant moon that goes around Saturn which was a Soviet-American cold war peace gesture, and then there is a mansion turned into a psychiatric institute. I’m fascinated by the conversion of mansions—not just in the United States, in other places too. But in the Unites States they often get converted into health clinics or accounting offices. But then they are also abandoned. The concept of an abandon mansion is this amazing mis-step. How does that happen? The house I grew up in in Pittsburgh is more or less abandoned at the moment. It happens. It’s something about things that fall through the cracks, whether they’re people or whether they’re places. But there is a connection between the two.

One of the main characters is my daughter playing a teenager with a certain psychosis, which she does not have at all, so it’s safe! The actual psychiatrist character—I have a couple people whom I am interested in playing that part, that may actually be a known figure. Tim Curry or David Bowie, but neither of them know that. There will be a trailer up probably within about two months.

You are in production on this?

I’m in production, yeah. I did a big burst in the summer and I got about four minutes done on it and then all of this stuff hit me, so I have not done hardly any work on it for quite a few months. So I’m hoping to work on that. I may even do some Kickstarter thing or something like that. I have to get some more money for more employees and stuff like that.

Should I ask what the timeline is?

I want to have it done by 2015.

I have one other project I’m on the fence about doing. My first feature was called Rooms and it was made in Minneapolis. I got some rejections, and I was 28, and I got scared and withdrew it. I’m one of the main actors, and the other main actor is Joe Pastoor who lives in Minneapolis, and he is up for doing a revisiting of the film. We would record ourselves now, 30 years later. That would be something neat to do. There are things missing from it that I would want to revamp or want to change to make it feel like it’s mine again. There are some visual and some themes that still resonate with me. While I’m working on the animation, I may take a few months and actually finish a weird little live action film.

Rooms is a live action?

It’s live action with marionettes. It has this dual world thing, like the cutouts and the drawings. I’m doing something like that with the new film too, where I’m going to have some live action stuff that is like a 50s health film in black and white.

Is Rooms feature length?

It’s 85 minutes now, so I can still make it the appropriate length, which is 2 hours and 10 minutes, as we all know! The idea is that I would be adding this addendum and the butt element is that we have grown up to become model mortuary-ists. We create small neural dioramas.

That all sounds great! Do you have anything else?

One thing I would say about Consuming Spirits, some reviews say don’t bring the kids. I would say bring the smart kids over 12. I’ve actually had teenagers and young kids really get interested in the film. Kids who are 16 have really enjoyed it. It’s a weird film, but it’s not an esoteric film. So I’m game: all takers!

–

Consuming Spirits screens Friday, February 8 at 7:30pm and Saturday, February 9 at 3:00pm. Chris will also be taking part in an IFP panel on The Art of Animation – free in the Walker Cinema Saturday, February 9 at 1:00pm.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained. Image © The Weinstein Company.

Matt: Obviously if you’re going into a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know you’re going to get graphic hyperviolence, a rewriting of both cinematic and real-world history, and a subversion of one of the director’s favorite genres: exploitation flicks from the 1960s and ‘70s. So I wasn’t as outraged by the premise of Django Unchained — in which Jamie Foxx’s former slave teams up with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to kill white slaveowners and racists in the Antebellum-era Deep South — as some other people were (Spike Lee most publicly), though the underlying premise is unsettling (is it possible to make a badass revenge flick while remaining sensitive to this country’s insidious racial history and its unsettling aftereffects?).

After seeing the movie, though, it really does seem like Tarantino doesn’t have the ambition or the intelligence to indulge his fanboy tendencies while simultaneously saying something insightful or original about the knotty issue of race in American history. So my dislike for the film isn’t based on moral outrage or indignation at his insensitivity, since it’s obvious that Tarantino isn’t even trying to open up a dialogue about this tempestuous issue. But that seriously weakens my respect for Tarantino as a filmmaker (which is already only middling) and makes me question my enthusiasm for Inglourious Basterds, which I thought was a clever but precarious deconstruction of the integral roles that media and storytelling play in popular conceptions of history. It’s almost like Tarantino is so postmodern that he subscribes to the empty notion of “post-race,” which assumes that we live in a world that’s transcended racial divides and in which unique racial experiences no longer have to be respected — though anyone who thinks modern America is colorblind is oblivious to incarceration rates (and how they differ between whites and blacks) and to the widening racial and economic segregation in many urban areas.

“It’s almost like Tarantino is so postmodern that he subscribes to the empty notion of ‘post-race,’ which assumes that we live in a world that’s transcended racial divides and in which unique racial experiences no longer have to be respected…”

Jeremy: For me, I was not at all interested in the debate as to whether or not Django Unchained would enhance discussion about race relations in the United States. There have been so many films whose purpose has been to illustrate the very real racial inequities inherent in the culture, and the collective memory of the nation is certainly tied to a contemporary erasure of the horrors of those race relations. But, the thing about those films is that, though critically acclaimed, most of them suck (I’m thinking most specifically of Crash here) and none of them have managed to change the institutional and personal prejudices people face daily. School segregation and economic inequality seem to be increasing, not decreasing, not to mention the startlingly high incarceration and arrest rate differences across racial lines, but no movie, be it a mainstream critical darling like Crash or a deliberately provocative Blaxploitation-inspired-western epic like Django Unchained can make a dent in those problems. So I’m just not interested in judging this film by its ability to initiate discussions about race, whatever Quentin Tarantino may have said in interviews.

But, looking at the film itself, I think it has nothing to do with accurate historical portrayal or with the current situation in our culture. Like all of Tarantino’s films, this one is about film, existing entirely within the universe set forth by the pulpy B movies, Blaxploitation pictures, and spaghetti westerns that Tarantino grew up loving. Tarantino’s films,  so often praised for their “realist” dialogue, are so far from that, existing in a space so far from the real world, and so deep into minute obsession with the formal aspects of a particular era of studio production, that imitators consistently fail to keep up. I like Tarantino precisely for this, for his obsession, his use of bricolage and homage, and the way his films talk about issues from the perspective of living inside a 70’s film.

“[Django Unchained] has nothing to do with accurate historical portrayal or with the current situation in our culture. Like all of Tarantino’s films, this one is about film, existing entirely within the universe set forth by the pulpy B movies, Blaxploitation pictures, and spaghetti westerns that Tarantino grew up loving.”

And Django Unchained is one of his best in blending its particular combinations of styles and influences. It owes much of its style to the first revisionist westerns, the ultraviolent and morally complex films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, but it incorporates aspects from all over Tarantino’s library of influences. It has a lot of Blaxploitation in it, particularly a scene in which Jamie Foxx is chained up in a shack full of southern whites that could be copied nearly shot for shot from a scene in Foxy Brown. It also has a lot of deliberate Looney Toons cartoon violence, particularly in Tarantino’s strange cameo in an outrageously bad Australian accent. But beyond its charming blend of influences, the life-blood of Tarantino’s style, this film brings in some incredibly sweet moments between Waltz and Foxx. It’s a great buddy cop picture that happens to be set in the deep south during the wild west era.

Matt: You’re right that the best part of the movie by far is the rapport between Foxx and Waltz, and you’re also right that Crash is awful. I definitely didn’t want another highfalutin message movie about racial tolerance, and I had no misconceptions that Django Unchained could or should do anything to rectify the immense racial conflicts that still exist (have always existed) in this country. That being said, Tarantino’s infatuation with revenge storylines, indebted though they are to blaxploitation and Spaghetti Westerns, is more juvenile and simplistic than it’s ever been. I’m not a big fan of Kill Bill Volume 2, but at least in that movie Bea starts to come to the realization that eye-for-an-eye vengeance might not be as unproblematically gratifying as she had assumed. With Django Unchained, on the other hand, we’re supposed to be titillated and satisfied with the graphic (though, as you mentioned, Looney Toons-esque) violence that piles up in the last hour, including at least two men that are shot in the genitals and a woman who is comically blasted out of one scene by Django’s shotgun.

“Tarantino’s infatuation with revenge storylines, indebted though they are to blaxploitation and Spaghetti Westerns, is more juvenile and simplistic than it’s ever been.”

Aside from any question of racial sensitivity, Django Unchained‘s glorification of violence reveals not only a deluded view of human behavior, but also a filmmaker who seems to be running out of tricks. (I know Django Unchained is celebrated for its originality, but seriously, what does it have that we haven’t already witnessed in at least one Tarantino film?) He borrows some stylistic traits from Peckinpah and Leone, and even some broad plot points, but their treatment of violence is wholly different: Harmonica’s vengeance in Once Upon a Time in the West is carried out with a grim sobriety, as though he has nothing left to live for so he might as well embrace hopeless violence; and Straw Dogs is all about how vengeance can chillingly turn a man into a sadistic monster. As opposed to Django Unchained, which ends with a massacre followed by Django and Broomhilda von Shaft reveling in the carnage as though they’re in post-coital bliss. The movie is indeed supposed to take place in some kind of hermetically-sealed Movieland that has nothing at all to do with reality, but it’s not that simple; movies aren’t released into a vacuum. Django Unchained, in my opinion, operates at the lowest level of postmodernism, which suggests that nothing really matters in reality any more, so we might as well embrace a wholly artificial, mediated world.

Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio. Image © The Weinstein Company.

Jeremy: Here’s where we differ, I think. Tarantino’s films are definitely postmodern and supremely intertextual. You would have to be a bigger geek than I am (if you can even imagine that) to identify all of the visual and narrative references that Tarantino packs in here for his fellow geeks, fetishists, and lonely purveyors at the few remaining video stores. But just because this world is fake, doesn’t mean that nothing in reality matters. I think it’s exactly the opposite, and that his films use their own shiny exterior to talk about concepts in interesting ways. Tarantino’s garish, polished, stylized universe is one that foregrounds its own artificiality, the way that modern art started to do at the turn of the twentieth century. The film is not intended to be watched as a document of history, and since it is so phony, it can’t really be read that way, even if most of the mainstream critique of the film has come from this camp.

Yes, there are probably historical inaccuracies in the film’s setting and characters; the most commonly leveled one (by a variety of historians and critics) is that the ultra-barbaric and near-unthinkable sport of mandingo fighting never existed. But I think what’s remarkable about this film and much of Tarantino’s work, is just that it really doesn’t matter whether it is “true” in the real world. The sentiment of the characters in his phony universe shines through, and his thesis is strengthened by its unbelievability. Watching a cartoonized, glorified scene of violence and gore on the subject of slavery is a way to think about that unthinkable subject, not because of the conversations it starts about slavery here in the real world, but because that moment of comparison between the real-world horror of slavery and a juvenile revenge plot allows a space to imagine the alternative. The alternative to this film, in my mind, is to put forward something realist that brings up the same issues, and that might be an interesting proposition too, but realist work is just as fake as stylized work. They are both films, just films shot in different styles. And isn’t a willingness to display its own means of production at the heart of modernism, not post-modernism?

“Watching a cartoonized, glorified scene of violence and gore on the subject of slavery is a way to think about that unthinkable subject, not because of the conversations it starts about slavery here in the real world, but because that moment of comparison between the real-world horror of slavery and a juvenile revenge plot allows a space to imagine the alternative [treatment].”

What’s more, this film, more than any of Tarantino’s earlier work, enlarges the gap between itself and reality by injecting a-historical moments, super stylized violence, and a ragged storyline together to create a setting, which no viewer can take for historical. So I think you’re mostly right that Django Unchained is a part of Tarantino’s vague and unexplained obsession with revenge plotlines, it is in no way original or new to his work, and many of its characters are flat photocopies of characters from other Spaghetti Westerns, but that is what makes it a strong film. And though it certainly isn’t much different from some of Tarantino’s other films, largely Inglourious Basterds, Kill Bill, and Jackie Brown, it is as well crafted as any of them. Django Unchained certainly has its failings, and I do think Basterds and Jackie Brown are both much better movies, but it does some things remarkably well, and does it with style, beauty (in parts) and some genuine Hitchcockian suspense.

Matt: Your comparison between Tarantino’s artificiality and that of modern art in the early 20^th century is a very good point, although I think their historical contexts make all the difference: the formalist art from a century ago was responding to a Romanticist tradition that was dedicated to a faithful (or at least emotionally cohesive) portrayal of reality, whereas in today’s world we’ve been inundated with mediated artifice for decades. In other words, whereas the formalism of early modern art was breaking the artistic mold, today that kind of self-reflexive artifice is commonplace (witness the majority of television comedies today, for example Family Guy, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Glee, Modern Family, Community, etc.).

In terms of the historical accuracy of Django Unchained, I’m not really concerned with specific inaccuracies and definitely don’t think the movie should be read as a document of history; but I am concerned with the movie’s indifference towards the overall trauma of slavery. I wish I could agree that the combination of cartoonish, glorified violence and highly disturbing scenes of racial brutality offers “a way to think about that unthinkable subject [and] allows a space to imagine the alternative” to this kind of artifice, but I think the common interpretation is the other way around: watching that cartoonish violence side-by-side with scenes (albeit partially offscreen) of slaves getting ripped apart by bloodthirsty guard dogs or mandingo fighters gouging out each other’s eyes and getting offed with a hammer conflates these wildly different brands of violence, as though racial hostility is just another artificial trope for filmmakers to recycle into their own deconstructionist gimmick. This was partially true of Inglorious Basterds too, but not nearly to the same extent: imagine if Tarantino had balanced his goofy revision of World War II history with actual scenes of Jews being ushered into the showers or their corpses carted off by the dozens. He seems to have been aware that his kind of self-reflexive artifice comes off as heartless when paired with actual historical atrocity, so why is he comfortable including similar-minded scenes in Django Unchained? And while you’re right that a film about slavery in a more realist vein would be just as heavily mediated as Django Unchained, its effect on the audience would not be one of escapism and mollification, but (perhaps) an effect of introspection and unease. Django Unchained is certainly well-made, stylish, and visually beautiful—but in this case I don’t think that’s enough.

“Imagine if Tarantino [in Inglourious Basterds] had balanced his goofy revision of World War II history with actual scenes of Jews being ushered into the showers or their corpses carted off by the dozens. He seems to have been aware that his kind of self-reflexive artifice comes off as heartless when paired with actual historical atrocity, so why is he comfortable including similar-minded scenes in Django Unchained?”

Jeremy: Maybe you’re right, and I’m just a sucker for style. I love the tight, visually beautiful, and heavily stylized moments in this film just like I love the spaghetti westerns that they pay homage to. But, I don’t think you’re right to say that this film reacts with indifference toward the trauma of slavery. Take a look, for instance, at the film’s most charismatic character, Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Shultz. This is a character so disgusted by American slavery that he literally throws his life away only to kill a despised slave owner, and edify his sense of pure horror when faced with the reality of slavery. This moment actually makes little narrative sense, and feels relatively disjunctive in an otherwise tightly plotted enterprise, but I think it shows the film’s core, which is a strong refusal to accept this evil practice.

Perhaps there are indeed things and images too sacred, too intrinsically awful and unthinkable to be portrayed in Tarantino’s admittedly sloshy style, and if there are, then slavery may indeed be one of them. But I think criticizing this film for being revisionist or for being stylized is not dealing with it on its own terms. Certainly this film is unseemly, and probably in poor taste, but its vulgarity comes from the same place as Shultz’s misplaced sacrifice, a complete disgust and rejection of the ideas behind slavery. The film hates the institution of slavery so much that it finds it necessary to show some gruesome images of its horrors, and some disgusting rhetoric, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s speech about the phrenological justifications for slavery. What you see as a trivialization of slavery seems to me to be a sign of respect to its massive and terrible influence. It is exactly to avoid producing a mollifying or escapist film that those vile images and ideas are necessary. Absolutely those scenes are incredibly distasteful, but that’s their intent. I have a hard time believing that anyone walked out of that theater the same way they would have walked out of a real escapist film, like Avatar, or that anyone really thought that they walked into another moment in history. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that that’s what all the style and gauche camerawork is for, to make sure that people cannot take this revisionist tale for reality. And the truth that lives outside the film, unseen (like much of that gruesome scene with the dogs) and implied through the narrative, is more terrible. This film reclaims history, rather than portraying it, but by doing so does that somehow negate history’s influence? I don’t think so.

“I think criticizing this film for being revisionist or for being stylized is not dealing with it on its own terms. Certainly this film is unseemly, and probably in poor taste, but its vulgarity comes from the same place as Shultz’s misplaced sacrifice, a complete disgust and rejection of the ideas behind slavery.”

Certainly this film is closer to Blazing Saddles than it is to Lincoln, but through its stylized parody, it gets at something a bit deeper, while remaining beautiful, very funny at times, stylish, and entertaining for those who can hold their screen gore.

The Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund (WCF), an international production and distribution fund, announced on Monday that it has secured funding through 2018. Established in 2004, the fund supports projects by filmmakers hailing from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central and South East Asia. Initiated by the Berlinale and the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the WCF receives funding and support from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Goethe Institute, and the Federal Foreign Office. The WCF finances feature-length narrative and documentary films from regions “with non-existent or inadequately functioning production structures.” Filmmakers from the eligible regions submit applications and if awarded funding, collaborate with a German production and/or distribution partner.

Several films produced by the WCF have screened at the Walker, including Silent Night in 2008 with director Carlos Reygadas in attendance, as well as Paradise Now in 2005 with an introduction by director Hany Abu-Assad. Most recently, the Walker screened the WCF-financed and globally-acclaimed Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who created Cactus River, a short video for the Walker Channel last year. Thus far, every film supported by the WFC has screened in cinemas and international film festivals in many different countries. In 2012, seven WCF projects premiered at international film festivals, and two were selected as their nation’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards.

The most recent batch of productions to receive financing from the WCF includes Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere by Diep Nguyen Hoang (Vietnam), Historia del Miedo by Benjamin Naishtat (Argentina), Remote Control by Byamba Sakhya (Mongolia), and South Facing Wall, by Elvent Kutlug Ataman (Turkey). The projects were selected from 95 submissions from 37 countries, and a total of 140,000 € was distributed among them. The selection jury consisted of film scholar and curator Viola Shafik (Germany/Egypt), documentary film producer Marta Andreu (Spain), distributor and producer Jan De Clercq (Belgium) and WFC administrators Sonja Heinen and Vincenzo Bugno. Since its establishment, the WCF has supported 106 films.

Luther Price, Untitled #9, 2012
Courtesy Luther Price and Callicoon Fine Arts, NY

What was the first concert you went to?

………QUEEN…….BOSTON GARDEN  1975….I WAS 13………..

What is your favorite candy?

……..I LIKE SALTY AND SWEET…….PAY DAY OR IS IT PLAY DAY….CANDY BAR………….

What is your spirit animal?

……………CAT……….WE GET ALONG………..THEY KNOW AND I KNOW ………….WE JUST KEEP IT THAT WAY……….

What global issue most excites or angers you?

………WELL THATS KIND OF TWO QUESTIONS………….’EXCITES’……….WE NEED HOPE……..REBIRTH………….WE ALL HAVE BEEN KILLING AND FUCKING EACH OTHER ………OVER AND OVER AND OVER……………BUT I THINK ,…..AS THE WORLD IS GETTING SMALLER WE REALIZE …………….WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING …………….WE CAN BE BETTER……………..CLEAN UP THIS MESS………….ON EARTH…………BUT I THINK , MORE THAN EVER ,….WE ARE READY TO TAKE STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION…………..ANGER…………YES………BUT WHAT GOOD IS IT………………SADNESS ….SORROW …………………WE ALL THAT THERE IS WAR AND STARVATION ………………….THAT OUR TIME MAY BE RUNNING OUT……………….BUT WE KEEP FUCKING AND KILLING ….KILLING AND FUCKING ………………PERHAPS WE ARE NOT CUT OUT TO BE THE GATE KEEPERS AFTER ALL……….

What is one of the most unexpected influences on your art?

……………PATIENCE……………….

If you could pose one question to every person on earth, what would it be?

…………..LETS START OVER……………..

What is your advice for young people today?

……………MAKE IT BETTER………..DON’T BE A TAKER…….BE A GIVER…………….

Whom would you like to spend three hours in an elevator with?

………………DAVID BOWIE…………….WE PROBABLY WOULD’NT EVAN TALK…………….JUST COUNTING SECONDS…………………

Who’s your favorite superhero?

…………..AQUA MAN…….I HAD A CRUSH ON HIM …………….HE WAS PRITTY HOT………………..

What is your least favorite sound?

………………..A BABY CRYING……………….

Luther Price’s program is on Friday, February 1 at 7:30 pm in the Walker’s Lecture Room. Bring the quiet babies.

Describe a recent dream?

I realize this may sound like a fake dream, but I recently dreamt that I was standing amongst The Beatles as they were performing (which was awesome) but that they were all dwarves, or Little People (which was kind of weird). I think it was the only time I have ever dreamt about either the Beatles or Little People. It reminded me of that brilliant scene in Living in Oblivion where Peter Dinklage tells Steve Buscemi that the only place he’s ever seen a dwarf in a dream “is in stupid movies like this!” Now I’m remembering that the Beatles were briefly portrayed as dwarves in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which also could have been a dream sequence. OK, next question.

What is your favorite place in the world?

A small cottage in Riverhead, NY, overlooking the Long Island Sound.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?

Oh a person, definitely.

What is your favorite comfort food?

Right now it’s Matzos Ball Soup.

What have you been listening to lately?

Today it was Wayne Shorter, Adam’s Apple. I never grow tired of that record.

Last month I listened to Brian Eno’s latest release, Lux, continuously for three days straight while recovering from surgery and deep in the throes of morphine. It held up.

What was the last film you saw?

I watched a few hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA – one of the great masterpieces of our time. An almost unbelievable achievement.

What’s your most vivid Minneapolis memory?

I don’t know if this qualifies as a Minneapolis memory, but when I was 19 I started biking from Minneapolis to Chicago.  I got across the Mississippi, but then I found I had to start pedaling uphill for many miles. A pickup truck came along and gave me ride up out of the valley. Then I rode until it got dark and I found a bar to drink beer and eat burgers and watch basketball. Around closing time I asked if it would be OK if I crashed there and they gave me a room upstairs.

If you could travel back in time to any place, where and when would it be?

I would like to see America in the 15^th century, before any Europeans arrived.

Black Elk spoke about the time when the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds ran together, which always struck me as a beautiful description of an entirely different way of relating to the world. If I had to choose a spot, I would start with the island of Manhattan.

Check out all of Bill Morrison’s film at the Walker: Short Works, Short Films and a Conversation, The Miners’ Hymns, Decasia: The State of Decay, and his newest The Great Flood.