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“I’ve never heard tell of a

small speck of dust that is able to yell.”

Three Short Films and Some Miscellaneous Thoughts

by Pablo D’Stair

I have been deeply in love with short films since my early teens, when my habit was to sleep at night as little as possible and to watch whatever stations my lousy television could get—a station that of course came through clear was PBS and it was on some weekly showcase of independent cinema (the name of which escapes me) I came across Salesman and Other Adventures by Hannah Weyer. It made something quite particular come alive in me—not a television episode, not a movie…but the most fascinating and affecting thing I had seen.

Short films—I never sought them out, but would always be knocked flat when I happened on them, either in singles or in larger scope, by Malle by Girard by Gondry…by anyone, it didn’t seem like it mattered (honestly I think I preferred them nameless, makerless, free roaming peculiarities). Over the years I’ve come to hold them and their cousins—music videos, television commercials etc.—in a kind of sanctified light, though still never hunting them out, even resisting when I see them collected. There is something important in keeping this image I have of them as “just wandering around out there” alive, my understanding perpetually layman.

Introduction over, I present three films that have crossed my path quite randomly in the last little while and some sundry thoughts of mine that have come from them:

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A kind of giddy, hyper-focus can be presented in short film—not exactly a stunning observation, of course, but one I adore the format for, Adolf El Assal’s La Fameuse Route an example of precisely why. The incisive cut of the storytelling, the mode of expression on display here allows for a fullness that does not need to strike out at expansiveness—we as audience are not given an abbreviated version of a larger whole and we are not given a vignette meant to contain some crumb of atomic energy inside to be split by viewing, to outpour things more explosive than itself.

Sometimes, as in this film, the story (to call it that) the emotion, the nuance is all that there needs be, set against nothing else, even suggestively. Like the verve of a propulsive piece of music, this film indulges in the rhythms of a completely detached and wholly contained experience—the way an excursion out with friends needs no commentary, meaning, destination. The world turned surreal, intricate while at the same time terribly blasé and self-indulgent is what this cinema captures with immediacy—that splendid idiocy of friendship, that joie de vivre found in what even the most sympathetic outsider eye cannot exactly in good conscious call “life.”

There is in this film (and in short form cinema taken as a whole) a special and sincere magic of intimacy—no time for set-up, no time for establishing rules or consequence, audience has bought the ticket, are taking the ride and the tenacity of the filmmaker’s honest outpouring is there to either immediately infect or immediately be turned away from, no secret reason to spend time here, no revelation awaiting the viewer at the end. Like a catchy song one has never heard before and will never hear again coming over the radio while idling in a shop-line or through the wall from the party next door, the film is flat-fact-experience and the joy of cinema’s ability to colorize truth however it sees fit.

Me, yes, I find it funny, nuanced, feel a kinship immediately to this motely crew of rag-tags burping around in their vehicle along “the notorious road” to get to the whorehouse that simply does not matter.  Yes yes, I adore the care and detail in the ticks of the cartoonishly bloated and horny-as-fuck backroad police, at once equally dedicated to the existential pointlessness of their work and to the fact that there are a million things out in the dark woods to hump each other up against, on top of, or under in unapologetic sexual regale.

This is a drama of neither heroes nor villains, a comedy of foreign, in-referenced and crystalized humor—just a slice cut from the animal of listless, boisterous, abandoned desire for something, anything, another world to step in and swallow us up a moment then gently let us slide back off of its tongue to no place.

Adolf El Assal so gracefully turns a meaningless juvenile outing into a rich textured cinematic love song that I am honestly saddened to know that this short tryst of a film is being re-imagined as a feature length piece, am earnestly fearful that something could get lost just from the paired exposure.

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Ah the world post-apocalypse, just how are we to use you to express absence, out-and-out paranoid angst, the need to hold something dearer than our bodies which (pre-apocalypse but nonetheless) are inexorably moving toward dust—how to use you as a mirror to show us the most inward part of ourselves, as good old Hamlet might ask from his own special worldless Hell?

Of course, cinema has many answers, usually being playful with formlessness as much as possible—from out-and-out-yowls a al Michael Haneke’s Time Of The Wolf to the (vaguely) socially conscious early zombie films of George Romero to the Trigger Effect to bloody The Postman to basically every fucking television series currently spilling out from American televisions—but nothing ever did it better than The Twilight Zone and the filmmakers behind Patricia’s Box seem to understand just that. As Serling, Matheson et al. were able to consistently showcase, twenty-five-or-six minutes at a time, cinema can be as direct as “Okay, here’s what happened, look” and as pervasive as “Now think about that for the rest of your life”—that book-lover breaking his glasses, the world not nearing the sun but drifting away from it, that poor man you saved actually being the howling Devil and your charity actually a mistake.

Patricia’s Box is the heart of long form, wide angled cinema stripped down to six minutes and close quartered angst and it shows just how powerfully the obstructions of budget and time can be used to paint a world impossibly large and long reaching. Working from a script by Darren Joe, shot and finalized in only days for the 72 Film Fest and produced on a budget of “Let’s film in our basement and down the street” this is a study in the limitless scope of the short form—things are not “left out” but instead shown just enough to hauntingly carry themselves outward, whole histories are not made faux-mythic by overwrought dialogue meant to force-feed a vastness with expository-pathos, instead a particularized exactness is allowed a naturalism, reminding us as viewers of the tenuousness of not only our own survival but of what it would mean for us, personally, to indeed survive into an endless hollow.

The film (from its start as a slow progression of desolate images to its end as an overlay of just enough doomsday siren to let audience know, fuck yes, it’s all really that bad) is a proclamation that what would be lost in mass catastrophe is the collective pile of intensely personal mementos, memories, experiences.  Presenting death as all inclusive—exterior there is nothing, interior a friend’s corpse lays strewn and open eyed—this vision of our eventual end (apocalypse or no) resorts to no effects, no monsters, no societies-turned-militant-or-cannibal, just sets the stage for unsettled fears to show themselves and for each actor on screen to (almost with thanks) succumb to them, to finally be rid of the horror of living less loved than the contents of an empty box a little girl never did get to show to her mother.

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There is something almost holy in films made for reasons no human could possibly discern, put together from the energy and  having-a-day-to-fill of a group of friends with a camera handy—films not to be distributed, not to be entrants in contests, not to vie for any particular attention at all, just little crafted expressions of cinema that are as loved as an adolescent doodle on a notebook page, as labored over as the cover box of a mix-cassette not even given to anyone else.  The world of today allows public life to such things via YouTube and any number of sharing methods and is, I will say, a better place for it.

Sherm is a felt and personal oddity, a boisterous mash-up of olde-tyme silent film dialogue cards and slapstick Looney Tune antics set in the sober world of the everyday. This is a film of the cartoon devil set free to prance, scribble-scrabble and murder with impunity, even those he victimizes left with nothing to do but turn a confused expression and shrug.  And watching this little film, I can feel the perverse giddiness of the nonsensical and fevered minds that decided to take the time not only to put it together, but to do so motherfucking exquisitely.

I have, myself, been in possession of a camera and the desire to make even a lousy and hackneyed film come to fruition only to have plans waylaid by the fact that it is ever so much easier just to film inanity or the mugging faces of my friends, to explore effects buttons and let any actual ambition dribble away into the ease of “merely having a laugh with pals”—so in seeing so pristine an example of the unconsciously known truth I always felt (that yes yes if only we would go through with this it would be so beautiful in its self-referenced majesty, as sublime as it is meaningless, dear God let’s just do it!)—actually and fully committed to sound and image makes me long to get a camera and two friends together to waste some afternoons on our own bizarre kicks.

Films like this—not Indie or Dogme or…well not anything at all, really—are such a sanctuary for the intrinsic need for filmed expression, this ability which now that we possess we all, humanistically, need.  There is something in the spirit of such Nihilo Cinema (I want to call it something and this seems appropriate…though honestly, perhaps I betray it by naming it even with this negation) that is as deserving of attention as the most sober minded art-house meditation or ridiculously-budgeted spectacular—the thing’s very lack of desire toward anything beyond itself (even audience, it seems, as this gem has sat more-or-less dormant in a kind of YouTube purgatory for almost a half-decade) but insistence on its own irreverent polish makes it as artful, immediate, and genuine a cinema as any I tend to happen across.

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Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing late in 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

“Hey white boy, what you doing uptown?

Hey white boy, you chasing our women around?”

On Boris Wexler’s Roundabout American

By Pablo D’Stair

Being something equal parts cinema-lover and fatuous film-theorist, the experience of viewing Boris Wexler’s Roundabout American was a very particularized pleasure for me.  As perhaps some people have come to know through my writing, I have a bit of a soft spot for both dry, low-key comedy and for the “outsider looking in” expression of specialized aspects of America and its culture.  Wexler’s film delivers on both counts but does, in my view, something quite a step more interesting on top.

Our lead Alex (Edouard Giard) is a French divorcee who comes to America to be with a young woman he chatted with a few times on the internet, only to discover rather than the full-on-zesty-abandon sort of very French passion he had been expecting, he is unceremoniously told he ought not to have bothered, as the young woman needs to stay with her current lover due to the fellow having “drinking and anger issues” which necessitate her loyalty and help.  So our French-transplant finds a crumby flophouse motel, spends a night drinking at an equally dismal hole of a nowhere bar, expounding his desire to understand and be truly American—to be unrefined, without class, to be joyfully-joyless by freeing himself of the burden of the incessantly ennui-laden romantic ideas inherent in the European.  And when he wakes the next morning after having gotten blotto drunk, he discovers he has made a friend who seems capable of providing him with the opportunity to do just that—Ron (Patrick Zielinski) obese, guileless, open-armed and easy-hearted, offers a walking tour of the city of Chicago.

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Now, here is where my intrigue with the film began—already immersed in the atmosphere of the foreigner as fish-out-of-water, I half expected the theme to continue, this to be a “Well isn’t America funny when looked at from X Y or Z perspective” deal, but rather than go this (often delightful but certainly well-and-often-trod) route, the view of America’s Culture Wexler explores is far more ethereal, closer to an exploration of America’s Culturelessness. Closer, though not quite the thing—it seemed Alex was being traveled through an America as expressed only by a series of progressing tropes pulled from US film-comedies, each segueing quite seamlessly into the other to give a narrative of neither external nor internal logic, a logic that drifts through itself, a kind of commentary on the celluloid dream-life of the typical American-nobody, a person more aware of their world through its expression via lowest common denominator cinematic silliness than even a vague sense of the reality this silliness purports to skewer.

But let me be less ethereal in description, myself. As the film progresses, we see Alex guided through such time honored tropes as “Foreigner-getting-to-know-indigenous-American,” this via Alex befriending Ron—they walk the streets and have non-sequitur, witty back-and-forths, the exaggerated buffoonery Alex expected and (only perhaps sarcastically) spoke of the night before while drunken (something which seems should be personified spot-on by Ron) revealing itself to be less a grotesque and more a kind of “loser-zen.” Then, we have the “Meet the American-cum-foreign family” sequence, the script (which, by the way, boarders on being Bottle Rocket repeatable and nuanced in delivery…or if not quite Bottle Rocket perhaps what Gentleman Broncos should have been but just didn’t quite hit) done in a style of classically stage-mannered comedy—overly awkward introductions, precisely honed stereotypes that don’t quite fit stereotypes, the oddball secondary character who enters the room just to energetically deliver a humorous punch amidst deadpan-worlds-collide confusion only to bolt out, only to bolt back in twice as awkwardly at the next Flight of the Conchords-esque scriptural lull.

During all of this, we also get our first hint of “oddball fringe plot” that will extend our odd-couple’s adventure—in this case Ron taking far too seriously Alex’s offhand idea about a pizza delivery service that also delivers prostitutes. Yes, just so very American a comedy trope, the “No, this is not a very good or necessarily comedically sound idea…but it is a reason enough for hijinks” through which Wexler seems to delight in pointing out the distance between refinement-in-absurd-comedy and American-boneheadedness-in-comedy, coyly twisting the two around a controlled finger into an actual cohesive unit of genuine commentary.  The foreigner finds the idea absurd as something to actualize, decides to spend his last day in the country spending money indulgently and, as long as the idea of prostitutes has come up, by getting himself one of those (and, of course, one of the classy kind).

And here we have our next trope—for it just must be so in American comedies that Love is just a bought-and-paid-for fuck away, especially when the prostitute (Helena, a marvelous performance by Marielle de Rocca-Serra) is a golden hearted foreigner pretending to be an American, herself, and so capable of falling into the kind of unthought-through love Americans tend to over-romanticize foreigners into the high priests of. And love it is–instantaneous and full. Love it is.

Cue the “Let’s go ahead and run with that pizza/prostitute business solution to all woes of all our characters” trope—though Wexler is wise enough to take this forced-no-matter-how-you-slice-it decision and treat it as an enthusiastic romp, as the delivery system for commenting on the obviously blundersome heart of any such comedy. That is, unlike, say, Kevin Smith with his wholly dreadful Zack and Miri Make A Porno, wherein Smith tries to eke out some genuine pathos, to sublimate a boorish idea meant for eventual frat-house slapstick into something it simply is not, Wexler just tick-tock-tick-tock moves through the permutations of “running with a zany idea being harder than it seems” (some very nice scenes of interviewing potential whores) and seems to consciously do so only insofar as  it serves to get Alex back together with his hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold (who, in case you hadn’t guessed, is quite business savvy, to boot).

Ah, but I am remiss in not mentioning that delicately throughout this all some of the most important Wild Card tropes of Comedy-Movie-American-Style have been sprinkled in: we have the “friend with connections” who, overzealous and undereducated, has the entrepreneurial zap to get things going, if not smoothly then just enough to bring in the “running afoul of organized crime” element for some sense of that danger a comedy-trope-tour of America would not be complete without—and just for good measure, this criminal element allows for the high stakes “dirty politician” (in many senses of the term) angle to come into play.

And well…mix em up, mix em up the film plays on—but all for the purpose of our central wanderer Alex being able to explore himself in the funhouse mirror of how “the romantic male” is portrayed within the framework of the American laugh-along zeitgeist.  Some ups, some downs, some of those hijinks I mentioned earlier and another slate of rom-buddy-caper-comedy tropes eventually leaving Alex spat out just right back where he started, deus ex machina, all’s well that ends…well…maybe not quite.

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Let me reset a moment to explain that my aforementioned delight of this film was a measured thing on first viewing and that just around this seemingly “happy-in-a-way” ending being delivered I thought it had taken a wrong turn, lost the plot and actually just flatly become what I for a moment thought I’d been too generously considering it merely utilizing as a platform for delivering some original slant.  Because, of course, to row through the choppy waters of some ten or a dozen American comedy tropes can lead to a kind of seasickness, a little bit on the viewer’s part of “Well…I might be interested in this despite this” by the point of a sudden injection of “all of that was just for chuckles.”

Thankfully though, the film ends up even more where it started than it seemed it was going to—in fact it arrives Alex back to his baseline Europeaness, his malaise-ridden, hopeless-romantic self. For in the fallout of the rumble-tumble of zaniness, Helena is deported back to Russia, receiving not so much as a “Je t’aime” from Alex when he briefly speaks to her through partitioning glass at Immigration.

Alex, dutiful to his pulsating romantic overreach, months later takes a trip to Russia, arriving as he did in America, only to be met by Helena, properly put in his place by having it quite soberly explained that life does not work like a European romance, either, and then left outside a rather intimidating Russian nowhere hotel—no prospects, no love, just a heart full of never-going-to-be-filled.

Roundabout American is an understated, distinct, an uniquely affected journey through-and-out-of an America I can only imagine is exactly how the one I live in must seem to those who dwell outside of it—baffling, inane, meaningless, best appreciated in either just arriving to or being ejected from.

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Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing late in 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.