Archive: Interviews
Marie Losier is an experimental filmmaker and the film programmer at the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) who has brought both her unconventional, intuitive filmmaking methods and her vast film knowledge to the making of her first feature film, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, a documentary about the unconventional love story between Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV musician Genesis P-Orridge and his—and then her—wife, Lady Jaye. It's a heartfelt and unusual masterpiece, and one of the strongest films in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Marie is a charming blend of otherworldly and gently down-to-earth. She was a pleasure to talk to about the process of finding the form for this unusual and moving film.
Miriam Bale: There are so many great songs to choose from, and you chose such beautiful ones. How did you end up with those?
Marie Losier: I had 15 layers of sounds, so there's a mix of tons of sounds. There are the environment sounds where I would put the mic in the house, then there's sound of rehearsals, and I use a lot of this music because it was live and it doesn't exist on record, it was just that moment that they were practicing and playing. And with those, I chose a lot of the songs that were free, that were from Psychic TV3, the band that I spent time with, because I knew I could use these songs. And then from Thee Majesty, which is Bryin Dall and Genesis. And Bryin also helped me mix the sounds, and he does all the mixing for Psychic TV. So that's how I chose. But I knew I didn't have the rights for the last song which I love, "The Orchids," so that's the one song I had to pay rights for, with Sony. Because, with Gen, there's so many songs that she just sold the rights for over the years, just to live. So it was a complicated process. But sounds and music were as important to me as the editing of the image. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bryin Dall, Genesis P-Orridge, Guy Maddin, Lady Jaye, Marie Losier, Martin Marquet, Pandrogyne, Psychic TV, Psychic TV3, Richard Forman, Sony, Steve Holmgren, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, The Orchids, Thee Majesty, Throbbing Gristle, Tony Conrad, Tribeca Film Festival
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Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which opened March 31 on Broadway, heralds the arrival of compelling new voice in the American theater. And it's not just because the production has snagged A-list comedian Robin Williams to play the title role, or because the play was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. This surrealistic dark comedy, set in the early months of the U.S. occupation of Iraq's capital city, is a bold and vividly theatrical take on issues and concerns that face Americans in the 21st century. The buzz about the 36-year-old Ohio-born writer has been building for some years now. His first play, Huck and Holden, debuted off-Broadway in 2005. Numerous awards and grants, as well as productions of his plays in theaters across the country, followed. Bengal Tiger, his most powerful play to date, has been given a gripping and imaginative production, directed by Moisés Kaufman, twice in Los Angeles and now in New York at the Richard Rodgers Theater. I spoke with Joseph last month, when the play was still in previews. Continue Reading »
Tags: Animals Out of Paper, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Huck and Holden, Kevin Tighe, Moises Kaufman, Monster at the Door, New York University, Pulitzer Prize, Rajiv Joseph, Robin Williams, The North Pool, TheaterWorks, Uday Hussein
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Filmmaker Harmony Korine's latest experiment is called Trash Humpers, and feels like a home movie made by anarchist youths who wear old age make-up and seem to be living like the mutants out of The Hills Have Eyes. Shot on VHS camcorders, complete with tape glitches and tracking lines, the project seems more like a found object than a movie, or a series of amateur vaudeville sketches that lead to murder. Shot in Nashville and released theatrically last year in a limited art-house run, the project re-emerged as a traveling art show where stills from the movie were sketched and painted over by Hungarian-American artist Rita Ackermann in their show "Shadow Fux" and accompanied by footage from the movie. Korine's latest work seems more specifically geared for being projected on the sides of walls. Few people will see it, but I'll take Korine's mad, Herzog-esque DIY aesthetic over mumblecore any day of the week. You don't "like" a movie like Trash Humpers, but I'm very happy such films exist. Korine touched base over the phone about his latest endeavor, sometimes taking the conversation seriously, other times veering into delightful hyperbole. Continue Reading »
Tags: Gummo, Harmony Korine, Mister Lonely, The Hills Have Eyes, Trash Humpers
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The swanky Lady Gaga never fails to surprise, and boggle, the pop culture mind. Whether it's her latest album or her use of eggs or horns of flesh, talk of the artist is never in short supply. How up-and-coming pop artists perceive themselves, how they choose to portray their fame to the world at large, may be largely attributable to their personal influences, and Lady Gaga is sure to rank high among them.
As was once the case, however, scholarly dialogue of Gaga's contributions to modern urbanity, for future musicians or otherwise, might have taken years to occur. Deep thinkers don't often move in a blur after all. With news reports hitting the Internet within moments of an incident, and mass hysteria following on every form of social media within seconds of that, it's about time the world of academia gets a wiggle on.
Gaga Stigmata, a website devoted to critical analysis of Lady Gaga, has it figured out. The site, which began last year and continues to roar along, features a variety of news on the shock-pop phenomenon that is Lady Gaga. From narratives and essays, photography, and more, the site gathers whopping acclaim with every new piece posted.
Gaga Stigmata is the brainchild of poet Kate Durbin, who co-edits the site with doctoral student Meghan Vicks, a teacher at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Durbin herself holds an MFA from the University of California in Riverside and is the author of The Ravenous Audience, a hot-blooded collection of poems dealing with American female archetypes such as Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, and others. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amaranth Borsuk, Amelia Earhart, Born This Way, Excess Exhibit, Gaga Stigmata, Kate Durbin, Lady Gaga, Marilyn Monroe, Meghan Vicks, Nicola Formichetti, ORLAN, Paparazzi, Telephone, The Ravenous Audience
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Polly Jean Harvey likes to do things differently. So it's no surprise that she enlisted a documentary photographer with little video skills and no musical experience to direct the music videos for all 12 tracks from her upcoming album, Let England Shake. Seamus Murphy, a British photographer known primarily for his work in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, filmed all of the clips in various areas of England using available light, combining still photos and documentary-like video footage. The shots are both quietly naturalistic and eerily incongruous—a skeleton on display in a museum, Harvey performing in a bare room, the ebb and flow of the ocean tide—and they serve to comment on Harvey's own quietly eerie ode to her home country. They are also, like Harvey's music, decidedly unlike anything else going on in pop music right now. The next video, for the title track, is set to be released on the same day as the album, February 14 (February 15 in the U.S.). I talked to Murphy about what it's like to work with PJ, turning the camera on his homeland, his love of David Lynch, and the shot we should be looking for in "The Glorious Land." Continue Reading »
Tags: David Lynch, Let England Shake, PJ Harvey, Seamus Murphy, The Glorious Land, The Last Living Rose, The Words That Maketh Murder
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The most exciting new releases can be older films. This is certainly the case with the work of the World Cinema Foundation, a Martin Scorsese-founded group whose mission is to preserve international classics. Beginning with Trances, a 1981 record of the Moroccan rock group Nass El Ghiwane, the WCF has restored 12 films ranging from the legendary (A Brighter Summer Day) to the obscure (Two Girls on the Street). Several of the films, like The Housemaid and Revenge, use interpersonal violence as a metaphor for greater societal tensions. But their main commonality is that they all look incredible.
For the next two weeks BAMcinématek will be showing the World Cinema Foundation's restorations. After seeing half the titles, I can already conclude that this is the New York repertory series of the year. I spoke to film critic and WCF Executive Director Kent Jones about it. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Brighter Summer Day, A River Called Titas, Al Momia, Kent Jones, Limite, Martin Scorsese, Revenge, Souleymane Ciss, The Film Foundation, Trances, Two Girls on the Street, World Cinema Foundation, Yeelen
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Peter Scarlet is the Executive Director of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. This is his second year at the festival. He has also held head positions at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Cinémathèque Française, and the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Aaron Cutler: I came across an interesting quote from you. You said, "We're here not just to do a film festival, but to start a film culture." Could you elaborate?
Peter Scarlet: Here in Abu Dhabi, and I think in most of the UAE, when people want to go to the movies they go to the malls, and they have a choice between midrange Hollywood and Bollywood—or next week, for a change, there's midrange Bollywood and Hollywood. Every once in a while, maybe every month or two, just to liven things up there's an Egyptian film. Some of them may be perfectly fine. But the world of cinema's a lot broader than that, and a lot more diverse, and a lot older. So one of the things we're trying to do with this festival is show films from countries that never appear on screen here, show genres like documentaries and shorts and student work and experimental work, and show films from the past. Last year I had a wonderful screening of silent films, including some Chaplin and Keaton archival prints, [accompanist] Neil Brand came here from London, and it was like, "Wow, I'm showing silent movies for the first time in the whole country!" It was revolutionary. Continue Reading »
Tags: Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Charles Chaplin, Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman, Jafar Panahi, Jean-Claude Carrière, Peter Scarlet, Pierre Étaix, Secretariat, The Accordian, The Circus, The Mummy, We Were Communists
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[Editor's Note: To read Part One of this interview, click here.]
Vadim Rizov: The visuals, as ever, are yours, and I would've recognized Babnik as your film without a credit. You've spoken online of your gleefully indifferent approach to space, which doesn't seem quite true to me: it's more like every room is its own setting with its own atmosphere. You're connecting space through tone rather than geography. Thoughts?
Alejandro Adams: Whatever I've said, it wasn't false modesty. I corrupt space as much as I honor it. Most of my effects in all three films are achieved through disorientation. The unrecognizable is really important to me. Depicting the unrecognizable is difficult. I think the most unrecognizable elements in my films are the ones that people sense are most "real." Continue Reading »
Tags: Alejandro Adams, Babnik, Canary, Michael Umansky
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[Editor's Note: Alejandro Adams's Babnik screens at UCLA's James Bridges Theater on Tuesday, October 12th at 7:30pm. Click here for more information.]
When they write a history of Twitter, hopefully a footnote will be spared for Alejandro Adams, the first meaningful filmmaker to make himself known that way, at least in my book. Conventional wisdom says you should use Twitter to beg for followers, chronicle your production, spam your friends and hope they suck it up for the greater good of social networking's future. Adams took a different tack: he got in touch with only the critics he admired and asked them to watch his work after making it very clear (through a barrage of polemics, hilariously self-aggrandizing declarations and gnostic aphorisms) he was playing on a whole other level.
The movies, fortunately, are good too. Around The Bay isn't quite L'Enfance Nue, but it's not that far off either: childhood has rarely been this abrasive. Canary's a tougher watch; its sci-fi framework is deliberately difficult to follow, and its most impressive setpieces involve very realistic rooms of people all talking at the same time, making a mockery of the Altman ideal of floating in and out of one conversation to each other. Here, the cacophony is the goal in and of itself. Babnik is a whole other creature, a first leisurely and suddenly urgently twisty crime drama; the less you know, the better. And not knowing much won't be a problem: it may be months or years before you get a chance to see this, or Adams' other two films.
So why read this two-part e-mail exchange between me and Adams? I've never met him, but this is the kind of promotional collaboration/collusion I try to avoid; it's vaguely sketchy. But he's a fun guy to argue and correspond with, and I'm comfortable whoring for him a bit. What I've done here is chopped up our back-and-forth into something more or less structured; it's out of order and distorts the actual chronology, but that seems appropriate. In part one, we mostly talk about acting; in part two, we mostly talk about visuals. Digressions abound, as do faux-aggressive taunts. Enjoy. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alejandro Adams, Around the Bay, Babnik, Canary, Michael Umansky, The James Bridges Theater, UCLA
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When Alex Timbers was 12 years old, he and an elementary school buddy had their own public access cable show in Manhattan. "It was sketch comedy, very irreverent and strange," Timbers reports. His favorite segment was called "Pyro Time." "We'd buy fireworks and explosives in Chinatown and blow things up—like a giant cod. We'd explode it and then play it back several times in slow motion and play 'Carmina Burana' [on the soundtrack]." Timbers explains that at the time he was going to a straight-laced "coat-and-tie" all-boys school, and the cable show was a way of letting off steam. "So there was an anarchic side waiting to get out." Now at age 32, Timbers is letting some of his anarchy loose on Broadway. He's making his debut on the Great White Way directing two productions you wouldn't think of as typical Broadway fare: Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, a rock musical he co-wrote with composer Michael Friedman, which opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on October 13, and The Pee-wee Herman Show, a new version of an early 1980s comedy show created by and starring Paul Ruebens, which begins performances at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on October 26. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, Alex Timbers, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Heddatron, Hellhouse, Les Freres Corbusier, Paul Ruebens, Stephen Sondheim Theatre, The Pee-wee Herman Show
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It's a quarter century now since Charles Busch captivated New York theatergoers, playing a Virgin Sacrifice (actually a 2000-year-old diva) in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. The hilarious spoof he penned for his own company, Theater-in-Limbo, was first presented in 1984 at the Limbo Lounge, located in the East Village's then crack-addled Avenue C. An instant cult hit, the production then transferred the following year to the now-defunct Provincetown Playhouse in the West Village, where it ran for five record years. Busch has since held his own as queen of drag theater in the city, but he is also, as he so inimitably puts it, "the Gypsy Rose Lee of female impersonation—a drag artiste with a literary pedigree." He was nominated in 2001 for a Best Play Tony Award for his Upper West Side drawing-room comedy The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, which enjoyed a 22-month run on Broadway. Over the years, he has given us a memorable gallery of characters, including the notorious wife of Emperor Justinian (Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium), a Malibu tomboy (Psycho Beach Party), a concert pianist fleeing the Nazis (The Lady in Question), a Hollywood star fighting communist threats (Red Scare on Sunset), an opium-addicted American diplomat's wife (Shanghai Moon), a murderous Hollywood has-been (Die, Mommy, Die!), and most recently, a fashionable Chicago lady mobster and a Russian crone (don't ask!) in The Third Story. Somewhere in between came the libretto for the short-lived Boy George musical Taboo—but he'd rather not dwell on that. Busch is now back on stage, playing the Mother Superior of St. Veronica's convent in 1960s Pittsburgh, in his new play The Divine Sister at the Soho Playhouse. Continue Reading »
Tags: Charles Busch, Die Mommie Die!, Psycho Beach Party, Shanghai Moon, The Divine Sister, The Lady in Question, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, The Third Story, Theater-in-Limbo, Theodora She-Bitch of Byzantium, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom
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[Author's Note: Marcy will read and discuss her novel, Bad Marie, tonight, Monday, August 23, 7:30 PM at the Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217).]
I first met Marcy Dermansky, author of the recently released Bad Marie—a novel that features an ex-con femme fatale the French New Wave would adore, and which seems to unfold frame by frame—at a press conference for Gus Van Sant's Milk. I was there covering the event for SpoutBlog, and trying to stay as far away as possible from the journalist groupies in the front row who were vainly attempting to maintain their professional veneers while obviously hoping to catch the eye of Sean Penn or James Franco. Marcy, film critic for About.com, happened to be sitting near the back with me, putting on no false airs whatsoever. We started talking and she told me unabashedly that she wasn't there in any writer's capacity. She simply wanted to see Sean Penn. And it's precisely this refreshing mix of honest fandom with a driving curiosity to observe the behavior behind the tabloids that Marcy brings to her second novel. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bad Marie, Greenlight Bookstore, Marcy Dermansky
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The Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso, just completing its fourth year, is one of the world's most prominent silent film festivals. Running from August 6–15 at São Paulo's Cinemateca Brasileira, it included films from Brazil, America and Germany, with titles by Raoul Walsh, Victor Fleming and G.W. Pabst. In previous years the festival spotlighted German, French and Japanese archives; this year the focus shifted to Sweden, with a chance to see some Greta Garbo silents and a screening of the cult horror film Häxan on Friday the 13th. I spoke to Carlos Roberto de Sousa, the series curator, to learn more. Continue Reading »
Tags: Carlos Roberto de Sousa, Cinemateca Brasileira, Humberto Mauro, Joris Ivens, Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso
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Regardless of what you may think of Ken Russell's movies, the English iconoclast filmmaker is without doubt a true original. Russell's singular talent is very much on display at "Russellmania!," a Film Society of Lincoln Center program (ending August 5), that presents nine movies made at the zenith of his filmmaking powers. Spanning his creative output between 1969 and 1977, the series includes the erotically charged adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel Women In Love, the film which brought him international recognition; his two quintessential works, The Music Lovers, the 1970 operatic portrait of Tchaikovsky, and the still inflammatory The Devils, which was released the following year; a quirky Busby Berkley-style version of The Boyfriend (1971); Savage Messiah (1972), an uncharacteristically minor-key portrait of sculptor Henri Gaudier Breszka; two eccentric and idiosyncratic takes on composers, Mahler (1974) and Liztomania (1975); the rock opera Tommy (1975); and the lavishly decorated biopic Valentino (1977) with Rudolph Nureyev playing the beloved silent-screen idol.
After abortive attempts at becoming an actor and a dancer, and a brief stint as a photographer, Russell embarked on his career as director at age 31 in 1959, making documentaries for BBC television. It was here that he honed his powerful visual style and set the tone for his eventual reputation as the enfant terrible of British cinema by offering highly original and often controversial takes on the lives of artists and their work. Through the '70s, having moved fulltime into feature filmmaking, Russell was hailed and reviled in equal measure, but nonetheless enjoyed the financial backing of the studio system of the time. Employing some of the best talent around, Russell achieved the rare distinction of being commercially popular and part of the mainstream British film industry while remaining gleefully outrageous and intensely personal at the same time. The antithesis, you might say, of Merchant Ivory or Masterpiece Theatre. Continue Reading »
Tags: Elize Russell, Ken Russell, Savage Messiah, The Devils, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Music Lovers, Tommy, Vanessa Redgrave, Women in Love
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The 1992 release of Orlando propelled director Sally Potter to forefront of independent filmmakers. She had achieved the seemingly impossible task of bringing to the screen Virginia Woolf's fantastical 1928 novel about a 16th-century English nobleman who lives through three centuries, while aging only three decades and changing gender in the process. Not only did she create a sumptuous historical epic with independent financing (it marked the first film co-production with Russia), she also retained the wit and tongue-in-cheek lightness of the original, expanding Woolf's story into the 20th century as well. The movie also launched the career of Tilda Swinton, the incandescent Scottish actress who played Orlando, as both male and female.
Potter had begun making experimental movies as a teenager in England and made her first full-length feature film The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie, in 1983. She had also pursued a career as a musician as well. The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently concluded a two-week retrospective of Potter's four-decade avant-garde career, including her latest work Rage, a set of confessional vignettes about a New York fashion event seemingly recorded by a schoolboy on his cell phone, which was initially released on mobile phone applications prior to a theatrical release last year. Continue Reading »
Tags: Caravaggio, Derek Jarman, I Am Love, Julie Christie, Museum of Modern Art, Orlando, Rage, Sally Potter, Sony Pictures Classics, The Gold Diggers, Tilda Swinton
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