Four Self-Interviews about Cinema:
The short films of Norman Reedus A Filthy Little Fruit (2006)
By Prasad D'Srair
47Four Self-Interviews about Cinema: The Short Films of Norman Reedus
"I Thought Of You" (2006)
(Though not necessary to this self-interview, the film being
discussed here, as well as the others being discussed in this series,
can be purchased as digital downloads from www.bigbaldhead.com)
Concrete: To me, this film is the most intriguing of the three when
taken through our filter of "investigation of Identity"-I find the film
at once lends itself to literal investigation of concrete elements while
at the same time being intensely impressionistic (or expressionistic)
and overtly welcoming of abstract/felt reaction. Too, that Reedus both
wrote and directed this piece concentrates the punch of its usage of
abstract and actual-that no element of the film (from conception to
actualization) originated outside of the single Artist, so to speak,
makes this the most "wholly single minded" of the three films and so, I
think, the most quantifiable.
Abstract : Concrete elements such as it's being about-or "about" I
will put inside quotations-an actual personage, namely Miles Davis? Or
is there something else to it you're thinking of that frames it so
differently than the other two films we've chatted about?
Choice
C : You don't think that it so distinctly choosing an actual person
as "subject" leads to interpretation of it being, consciously, steered
in a certain way? I mean, certainly one can make abstract statements,
suggestive, allusive statements and atmospherically frame a film which
is about an actual person to also be about "things ethereal" but I don't
see how it is possible to ignore the choice of "Mile Davis" as the
central figure being depicted, to treat that inarguably deliberate
choice as neither here nor there, as
just-something-the-filmmaker-did-off-the-cuff. This choice isn't the
same as the "merely naming" a grotesque, hobgoblin figure "Richard
Nixon" as in the earlier discussed The Rub, it isn't just a suggestive,
psychologically-weighted name, not some symbol, or at least not "only
some symbol" to make a clumsy phrase.
A : I will never accept-and certainly not in the case of this film,
which is done as a combination of loose brush strokes and tempered,
intimately realized images-that any sort of "historical" or "devotee"
understanding of Davis is integral or even important to the viewing. And
further, I don't accept that "knowing about Miles Davis" (which I don't
and I don't seem to think you do either) would be anything but
destructive to one's reception and experience of this film.
Look at it this way-the film is presented as largely "dialogueless"
and the dialogue (or rather the "staccato monologue") that does exist is
placed inside of a memory, not even in "flashback", but in striped down,
suggestive memory-the woman, upset, yelling at Davis, her actions aren't
literal, aren't "filmed in time and place" but rather are a presentation
of the likely exaggerated elements needed to distill the emotion that
rings in Davis' head based on them. We are introduced to Davis (in every
sense) in this film through "our being Davis," the camera his headspace,
we looking out-so much so that before the Davis/Us character even has
remotely tangible things to focus on (memory, present moment events,
etc.) we see a blur of lights, freeform motion of fluorescents in shapes
and afterimages-an entirely alienated headspace, the result of the
altercation with the woman (which could have happened at any time,
either earlier in the evening depicted or ten years prior). So-because I
don't want to get too adrift-I can only see it as being a misstep to
investigate "Davis outside of the presented, representative Davis," a
mistake to try to figure out "what" "when" and "if" anything
Actual-from-Miles-Davis' life is being presented.
Repetitive
C : As always, I dig on your repetitive long-windedness, but man do
you dissolve things! Even if, as you say, we are introduced to
Davis-as-a-headspace, the events of the film are simple, intimate-so
very simple and intimate that the film seems, akin to portions of
Francois Girard's Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould-just a
vignette. Davis drives to a practice session; Davis pauses to get into
the mood to perform; Davis performs. Obviously, there is also much
artistry on display, but I see it more as artistry meant to depict this
tangible, actual thing an artist must grapple with-how to move from
being a "person" to being a "performance" (not even a performer, but the
distillation of that-A Performance) how to get shut of (or even how to
incorporate) elements of Self into Performance. Yeah, that artistry, an
interpretation of it is in the film, but just because the film is that
moment on display and it's a moment that a camera cannot just be pointed
at but that a cinema is needed to evoke.
A : Okay-but now think of the moment where Davis is stood near his
trumpet case, microphone at the ready, he looks up to see the rest of
the band there mute, immobile, staring at him-just looking, as if
expecting something and ill at ease due to "it" not simply being
there-every moment in the film leading up to this has depicted that band
having a swinging, jazzy good time, playing, motioning to each other,
fully existent as performers-in-performance: then, Davis shows up-Davis
who "in reality" would be someone they know, are intimately acquainted
with and so not some larger than life personality-and they become
still-life, they become the expectant observer, the waiting assessment.
Actuality
This is meant to depict any moment of actuality, just an actual
evening where Miles Davis goes to practice? Not at all, man-so what I
mean is it would be totally knuckleheaded to assign the specificity of
"this really happened to Miles Davis" to it. The film depicts something
that happens (not happened) to "someone," that happens to someone who is
expected to "come out of himself", to be a thing beyond individual-this
is a cinematic realization of a pressure to exists as
yourself-but-as-something-other-than-yourself, a Sartre-esque nausea.
C : I don't disagree with any of that-but why would it hurt if there
was historical basis to the film? For example, if that woman were some
particular woman, if some falling out akin to what is depicted had
literally happened between she and Davis?
A : The film is-as we both say-a shedding of some tension of Actual
to get at something Ethereal: event must be diffused into memory, memory
into mood, mood transmuted into music/art-Identity lost, or identity
rearranged to be a new identity, in a sense.
We start the film and the focus (the "character") is a nonentity, the
film progresses and it becomes clear that it is a
man-in-a-shook-up-headspace, then the man becomes a musician, then, at
the last possible instant, the musician becomes Miles Davis-without
clues from outside of the film, this final identity is still
nonspecific, the biggest cinematic move being conceptual: the camera now
"depicts the man," We (audience) are now "watching him" instead of
"being him". We-the audience-begin as the headspace, the confusion, the
swirl of emotion and eventually We are shed, along with what We are, and
the character stands before us, exorcised.
C : Miles Davis stands there.
A : You are particularly one track today. Okay-Miles Davis stands
there, but he stands there for Us to regard ourselves, not him, he's not
a bunny pulled from a hat, he's a representation of an aspect, a
collective aspect of Us, made individually manifest So why does this
suggest that anything in the film is "historically" to do with Davis?
The fight with the woman, it might as well be an "idea for a song" an
"emotion for a song," nothing of identifiable, decipherable import.
Or the story/memory he relates to the young boy-that surrealistic
vision of grandparents surrounded by cackling wasps, beckoning lovingly,
the image of the father at the boy's side vanishing as the boy walks and
the mixture of joy and maliciousness (that eerie, horrific look) on the
child's face, his grinning at a wasp alighting into one of the women's
mouths-certainly this isn't something that "happened to Miles Davis,"
the boy depicted is closer to Damien from The Omen than Davis, indeed,
the young boy Davis is telling the story to seems more proxy for Davis
than the boy in the story. What do you concretely make of that-not to be
aggressive, but if the presence of the actual Davis is so Actual, why
this?
Perverse
C : I saw that as a story Davis relates, just some odd, slightly
perverse thing, a displacement of his angsty mindset-the boy was a
distraction and that the story was obviously responded to favorably
(with laughter, with warmth) indicated to me, quite literally, an actual
intimacy, an intimacy with this boy, with the studio space, and this
acknowledgement of intimacy (safety, control) gets Davis loose from his
preoccupation with an earlier upset/trauma with the woman.
A : Sometimes I wonder what film it is you're watching. But anyway,
touching on something I've observed of Reedus as a director-when he is a
director of other people's source material-is his often "inverse use" of
progression. And it fits that in a film depicting a
loss-of-identity-into-artistic-expression that Reedus would move from
abstraction (POV film-work) to concrete representation (camera filming
subject) and would use the reveal of an actual, identifiable individual
to represent the loss of specific, not the stamp of it.
Abstraction
C : Because it's more of an abstraction to an audience member to
"become Miles Davis" than it is to "become a trumpet player"-yes, I see
that.
A : Anyone can be a trumpet player, anyone can be the eyes in a
trumpet player's head-but to realize one was just the eyes of Miles
Davis-it's a kind of trickery. But, it only really works when the series
of things we experience "as Davis" are themselves made of pure
expressionism-wasps and disappearing fathers, being slapped in the face
by a furious, devastated woman, wisps of light and colour.
C : Fine-I don't want to talk exclusively within the confines of this
film, for a moment, because it has to be pointed out that while what
you're saying may be applicable here, to this film by this filmmaker,
certainly it is not universally a move-toward-abstraction or
inversion-of-audience-versus-subject to depict an actual person in
cinema. You would agree, right?
A : I don't want to bulldoze you, so I'll withhold response for the
time being.
Dialogue
C : You're a sweetheart. In fact, I would say that maybe this
film-for the sake of cinematic dialogue saying I agree with your
take-might be a rarity. Just because a filmmaker says "This is about
Miles Davis" or whoever does not mean that it is a depiction of
actuality-no, it is an expression of some large idea filtered through an
attempt to distill some essence of said person, and so, in that respect,
abstract. But nine times out of ten, it is a richer experience to depict
"a person as a person" and that cinema might suggest an audience turn
their attention to "actual world events" or "the actual life or history
of some figure" rather than to solipsistic, interior banter is not a
deplorable thing, right?
A : Well...
C: Or wouldn't it be the same thing with an abstract concept? This is
a film about "Art"-should that make one contemplate only one's own view
of art, to twine what is depicted around one's own finger until it
resembles what they, themselves, think and feel, regardless of the
stimuli of the actual cinema? Or should it be to get one to step out of
oneself, to view Art as something "elsewhere" as something that exists
"regardless of personal perception of it"?
A : Fine questions. But this film-and in general the cinema of
Reedus' that has been displayed in these three films-is a cinema of
inducing solipsistic regard. I don't think any of the films we've
discussed have much concern with actuality and, indeed, as a set, I
think they are just rotations of a single set of observations. I think,
really, I Thought Of You-written and directed by Reedus-is the sequence
of all three films reduced in to one, distilled: the cinema of all three
pieces is expression of shedding Reality for Artifice then re-shedding
Artifice for the original Reality which can never be original, again,
for the very fact that it has been undone and reassembled.
C : I honestly don't know what you just said.
A : Reedus, with his films, does the equivalent of standing someone
before you, all dressed, polished, nice, unclothing them so their
unadorned, unself-conscious nudity is displayed, then putting the same
clothing back on them, with great care, retuning the person to their
original appearance-but, for the very fact that the audience has now
seen the denuded individual, the clothing loses its surface, it no
longer cloaks anything, anyone looking at the dressed person now sees
the nude underneath. But now take what I just said but make it about
Ideas-that is this cinema.
Finality
C : I agree in as much as I think the finality, the blunt finality
(whatever emotion it may evoke) in all his films is a reshuffling-the
audience thought X was being depicted but now must come to terms that
really Y was being depicted, yes. But in the case of I Thought Of You,
even as you say, Reedus begins with formlessness (the first moments are
characterless, are just motion, just elements of perception) then moves
into environmental identity (we know the eyes we are watching the film
through belong to a musician not because of anything in-referenced, but
because of outward shots of the other musician's practicing) then moves
into personality (the memory, the story to the boy) then into
particulars (the trumpet waiting, the microphone) then into Actuality
(Miles Davis, seen as part of the physical environment, performing).
wThat is the film-building a man from nothing, taking atoms,
relationships, fragmentary aspects and assembling them through a simple,
linear depiction.
No one is undressed and then re-dressed so that we can see the nude
body beneath the artifice-that simply isn't this film, no matter how
nicely you speak about it out in some "maybe land." This film is one of
as literal a depiction of the formation of an individual, in this case
Miles Davis, as could be. And so, therefore, I think it would only
benefit to examine it, to try to "know the film more" by "leaning about
the actual Davis"-this is the momentum, the beauty, the aim.
A : Look at it this way-take the same film, but remove the title
cards, the credit sequence, the "outside of the film" part of a packaged
piece of cinema: you would have no way of knowing it was a depiction of
Miles Davis, one way or another. I mean, I kind of agree with what
you're driving at, but see it as a footnote, moot to the actual pulse
and blood of the cinema, not what the cinema is built of.
Admittedly it's largely my own fault, but we've danced away from the
first cut of our conversation here, namely "is it essential" or "vital"
to the piece that "it's Miles Davis"?
I say No and further say that to really, honestly interpret the film
in your way is to dismantle the act of cinema-you make it not just
happenstance that Miles Davis has some touch of focus in the film, you
make the "actuality of the real Miles Davis" essential to what is being
displayed and it's just not.
Reality
C : I know what you're trying to get at, but as much as "cinema
itself is an observable reality" it is a meaningless one without some
stamp of the tangible, the historical. Even in these three films, the
reason I find I Thought Of You so imperative is because, by including
the "actuality of Miles Davis" it allows that it isn't just a riff,
isn't rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric-it fuses Expression with
Actuality. If it were just "about a rhetorical musician" even if it were
filmed the same and etc. etc. it would lack-artfully it would be nice,
but it would be reduced to a kind of superficiality, the kind of
superficiality (a word I use in a non-pejorative way) that Reedus' other
films have.
A : Expression is a reality in itself-Davis, you know, he was just as
much expressing wasps in grandmother's mouths as he was expressing some
spat he had with a lover. Art isn't connect the dots from "this happened
to me" to "here's a song I wrote about it."
C : I totally agree-but, come on, that's why the films depicts both,
right? The memory of the fight with the lover and the invention of the
surrealistic encounter between boy-and-grandmother/relatives are the two
expressive realities that fuse into an artwork.
A : Mmn.
C : "Mmn"? What's that?
Comfortable
A : I just-as much as in some mild way I'm with you-can't get
comfortable with any sort of thought that Art-"reaction to art", I mean,
not "creation of Art"-isn't about introspection, isn't about the that
fact that the very notion of reaction is to reveal oneself to oneself,
that one observes to give themselves a blunt of pertinence, not to
remain in the position of audience. And at the same time, I don't think
that the artist creates to "reveal to others", but simply to reveal
themselves through the act of revelation, that the result is the act and
the act is, must be, solipsistic. If we're audience to art and audience
is meant to remain audience, mute and unconcerned of itself, why would
audience be desired?
C : Do you think we are?
A : Well, I think I might be-I'm not so sure about you. Always nice
talking to you, though.
C : Always nice listening to you talk.
Pablo D'Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, essays, and also
conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate. He welcomes any and
all comments at
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