NOTES: (1) This series originally appeared in the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka) in September/October of 2011. The paperback and FREE E-BOOK has now been re-issued by Pocketful Of Scoundrel (an Imprint of KUBOA). (2) Though not essential to the reading of this series, the three films by Norman Reedus being discussed are available through Big Bald Head Productions
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 very and intensely impressionistic (or expressionistic) and in such 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 in a tentative voice—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?
C: You don’t think that it so distinctly choosing an actual person as subject leads to our, or any, 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 Miles 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 indications of fluorescents in shapes and motion—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 investigated 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.
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. 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 observers, become waiting assessment. 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 simultaneously 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 Davis tells. What do you concretely make of that—not to be aggressive, but if the presence of the actual Davis is so Actual, why this?
C: I saw that as a story Davis relates, just some odd, slightly perverse thing, a displacement of his angsty mindset—telling the story to 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.
C: Because it’s more of an abstraction to an audience member to become Miles Davis than it is to just 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.
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, already 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 an 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, then unclothing them so their unadorned, un-self-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 and make it about Ideas—that is this cinema.
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 musicians 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). That 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.
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 or 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 film 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?
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 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.
***
Thanks are certainly due to Norman Reedus, for not just labeling me a nutter and ignoring my oddly phrased communiqués, way back when this project was a half formed inkling. And enormous gratitude to Wendy Shepard, for not only showing interest from the get, but going so far above and beyond in helping spread word about these articles that this little project got enough inertia to take care of itself. Do check out the films, they are more than worth the time.
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