‘Back in the mid-80s, Jim Jarmusch was the last word in cinema chic, the coolest kid on the independent-movie block. Sixteen years and seven feature films later, Jarmusch stands as the last of a dying breed, defender of the purist faith. His newer films are packed with the genre tricks and mordant humour that have characterised all his output. But after drifting, unloved and unappreciated, in a cinematic limbo for most of the 90s, the world has started, once again, seeing things Jarmusch’s way.

‘His appearance only adds to the effect. Now 47, Jarmusch is practically identical to the Ohio-born, NYU-educated hipster who used his $12,000 film school scholarship money to make his first low-budget feature, Permanent Vacation. His second, Stranger Than Paradise, cost even less.

‘Jarmusch’s trademark upswept silver hairdo is perfectly in place; keen eyes ever eager to communicate some heartfelt idea; slow voice measuring out the words. “One thing that flipped me out,” he says, “when we made Stranger, we were very conscious that it was 1982. Though it was post punk, style was still very rock’n’roll. We lived in that milieu in New York, but we wanted characters who weren’t connected with that. We wanted them to look more like guys you’d see at the racetrack. And then two years later everyone started dressing like that. It’s funny how things happen.”

‘Funny, indeed. Between 1984 and 1989, Jarmusch spearheaded the independent film movement, alongside Spike Lee and Michael Moore, with a trilogy of perfectly executed, thoroughly individual films. Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, and Mystery Train all shared a three-part structure, a wistful nostalgia for American pulp culture, and a downbeat, low-key narrative style borrowed from European and Japanese models. Jarmusch – in contrast to Lee’s playful promotion of African-American consciousness, and Moore’s self-help political radicalism – definitely occupied the high end of 80s alternative film-making, purveyor of an unflappable existential world-weariness that heralded the rise of a new wave of American auteurism.

‘These days, however, Jarmusch is reluctant to dwell on past glories. “I don’t look back,” he says. “Especially not at my own work. I don’t know why. It’s not healthy for me. Looking back, in work and in life, is something I’m hesitant to do. I try not to. It’s funny, though, I’m transferring all my films to digital masters, for future DVD release, and it’s really excruciating for me to watch them again. Down By Law, or whatever. I leave really depressed.”

‘Jarmusch began the 90s with Night on Earth, his most ambitious film to date, boasting a pedigree cast that included Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, and a tricky five-city schedule. Despite Night on Earth, however, Jarmusch’s career stubbornly refused to take off – unlike Lee, who was gearing up to make Malcolm X for Columbia. “My films are hand-made in the garage,” says Jarmusch, “so it takes me a little while to get them together. My friend Aki Kaurismaki calls me the world’s slowest film director, after Kubrick. My rhythm is my rhythm, and – how can I say this? – I’m not ambitious, and I’m not career-orientated in that way. If I were, I’d make different kinds of films. I’m lucky and happy and want to keep making work, but I have no desire to be more prolific. But then I see someone like Aki, who works in the same way, or Claire Denis. They make films more often than I do. But I’m always telling them to slow down. I want them to be happy and healthy; they worry me because they get stressed out by working too much. I’m happy with my rhythm, slow as it may be. It’s how I talk.”

‘Despite the fact that Jarmusch’s work instantaneously became the pet subject of graduate theses, he’s as keen as ever to point up the collaborative nature of his film-making. “To me, the auteur thing is a lot of bullshit, because you collaborate on a film in every way, with everyone – even with whoever’s stopping traffic. But I’m contradictory, because I’m a control freak to the point that I want to know every prop, every ashtray, every colour, everything that’s in the set. But at the same time I’m collaborating with other people, who are helping me find those things. I would like to work in a more free way, but I don’t have that luxury because I don’t have that kind of budget.”

‘If nothing else, Jarmusch’s long run demonstrates that you get what you give, that the love you take is equal to the love you make, that – indeed – what goes around comes around. And it’s just as well he’s content with his lot. “I don’t want to be mainstream,” he says. “I like being in the margins. I’m happy where I exist. The things that inspire me I find in the margins. I’m not consciously trying to be marginal, it’s just where I end up and where I live. There’s a gift in there for me and I’m happy to have that gift.” — The Guardian

 

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Stills

 

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Further

The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page
Jimjarmusch.com
Jim Jarmusch @ IMDb
Jim Jarmusch @ The Criterion Collection
Jim Jarmuch’s Twitter
Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Invisible Jukebox’ @ The Wire
Jim Jarmusch & SQÜRL Interviewed
‘Jim Jarmusch Outs Himself As A Mycophile’
Jim Jarmusch Discography
‘Jim Jarmusch’s Notes for a Ghostbusters Sequel’
Jim Jarmusch interviewed @ Interview
French Jim Jarmusch Fan Page
Jim Jarmusch bio @ film.factory
‘The Auteurs: Jim Jarmusch’
‘The Loneliness of Jim Jarmusch’
‘Every Jim Jarmusch Film from Worst to Best’
Heck Yes Jim Jarmusch

 

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Documentary
‘Filmed in Sevilla during 3 days on the set of The Limits of Control, Behind Jim Jarmusch (2009) is a rare behind the scenes glimpse into the process of this American auteur. Director Léa Rinaldi unveils an exquisitely personal glimpse into the relationship between Jim Jarmusch and his impressive ensemble cast, including Isaach De Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, Billy Murray, and John Hurt. For one of the few times in his career, the author of Stranger than Paradise and Dead Man has allowed a camera, during three days to breach into his creative arena. From the labyrinthine alleys of Sevilla to its orange-tree shaded squares, or to a bunker-like studio, the young French filmmaker leads us into the set pulse. It’s an initiation to Time, the time it takes to make a movie.’ — collaged

 

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Extras

Jim Jarmusch, Bradford Cox and No Age perform Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer”

Jim Jarmusch in Bored to Death

Fishing With John Episode 1 – Montauk with Jim Jarmusch

Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch “Etimasia”

SQÜRL ( Carter Logan, Jim Jarmusch, and Shane Stoneback) “Pink Dust”

 

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Jim Jarmusch’s 5 Golden Rules
from Moviemaker

Rule #1: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary.

Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.

Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.

Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics…).

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

 

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17 of Jim Jarmusch’s 29 films

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Permanent Vacation (1980)
‘Rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and visiting sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) always manage to make the least of any situation, whether aimlessly traversing the drab interiors and environs of New York City, Cleveland, or an anonymous Florida suburb. With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch’s one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, Stranger Than Paradise, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema.’ — Criterion Collection

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
‘A downbeat pastoral just this side of sentimental, Stranger Than Paradise is a celebration of hanging out, bumming around, and striking it rich—American (pre)occupations as deep-dyed as they are disreputable. The film, which plays the [New York] Film Festival this weekend and the Cinema Studio thereafter, is a stringent road movie cum character farce, with a trio of lumpen bohemians—a teenage immigrant from Budapest, her Americanized cousin, and his affable buddy—boldly emblazoned upon a series of gloriously deadbeat landscapes (the Lower East Side, the outskirts of Cleveland, the anonymous Florida coast). It’s very funny, and it’s pure movie. No one will ever mistake this deadpan whatsit for a failed off-off-Broadway play.’ — J. Hoberman

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Down by Law (1986)
‘Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location in Louisiana, which in the context of low-budget independent New York City film­making was exotic, even more so than the previous picture’s forays to the forlorn outskirts of Cleveland and whatever derelict stretch of highway stood in for Florida. Here, the location is announced and front-loaded during the credits. New Orleans and its surroundings pass in review, from left to right, etched in crystalline black and white by Robby Müller’s camera: mausoleums, wrought-iron balconies, low-slung housing projects, shacks on stilts. After that, scenes unfold amid semitropical architecture and in the bayous; you hear Cajun accents and Irma Thomas singing, but for all the flavor of filé gumbo, the actual setting is no more Louisiana than the setting of Macao is Macao. Down by Law takes place in the land of the imagination, in the province of the movies.’ — Luc Sante

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Mystery Train (1989)
‘I am equally moved by that moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, but it deconstructs and expresses so much. It reminds us that appearances are deceiving. It made me think about black men as travelers, about black men who fight in armies around the world. This filmic moment challenges our perceptions of blackness by engaging in a process of defamiliarization (the taking of a familiar image and depicting it in such a way that we look at it and see it differently). Way before Tarantino was dabbling in “cool” images of blackness, Jarmusch had shown in Down by Law and other work that it was possible for a white-guy filmmaker to do progressive work around race and representation.’ — bell hooks

Trailer

Opening scenes

Screamin´ Jay Hawkins in Mystery Train

 

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Night on Earth (1991)
‘Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. Jarmusch starts out in Los Angeles, then moves to New York, Paris, Rome, and, finally, Helsinki. (Why Helsinki? As far as I could tell, so that the movie could end at sunrise.) Night on Earth’s cosmic title may lead you to expect a spiritual overview of the state of the world, but the joke is that these cabbies and their passengers all speak a universal language of disconnectedness. Before long, the taxis themselves begin to feel cozy and familiar. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton.’ — Owen Gleiberman

Trailer

Night on Earth – Paris

Night on Earth – New York

 

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Tom Waits: I Don’t Wanna Grow Up (1992)
‘Film director Jim Jarmusch used to consider music videos as a movie in miniature until he got into a fight with Tom Waits over the making of the one for this song. Jarmush explained to Uncut magazine: “He wanted me to cut it differently, and I said, that ‘it’s like a film I’m making, Tom,’ and, and he said, ‘no, it’s a commercial for this song. If people are watching TV, I don’t want them changing channel. If you can pop this crazy image in the earlier, it would help this, that, blah blah blah.’We had a big fight in which I dropped him in an enclosed parking lot behind a metal door in LA in the middle of the night,” Jarmush added. “He was pounding on the door. I vividly remember the insult, which no one has ever said to me again. He yelled through the door, ‘God dammit, Jim, I’m going to glue your hair to the wall.’ At which point I let him back in. It was a fight between friends. We reconciled.”‘ — Jim Jarmusch

 

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Dead Man (1995)
‘Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement. A period piece, and what’s more, one that draws directly upon a genre (the western), the film stands apart from Jarmusch’s other work categorically as well. Johnny Depp plays William Blake, who ventures westward by train to the dystopian town of Machine in search of work. While there, he meets Thel (Mili Avital), whose boyfriend (Gabriel Bryne) catches them in bed. The violence that ensues causes Blake to scramble across the wilderness with a bullet in his chest. Pursued by savage bounty hunters, his journey is an extended death scene—he avoids one meeting with mortality before encountering another.’ — Zach Campbell

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Year of the Horse (1997)
‘The film, directed by Jim Jarmusch, follows a 1996 Neil Young concert tour and intercuts footage from 1986 and 1976 tours. It’s all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk. These seances are intercut with concert footage, during which the band typically sings the lyrics through once and then gets mired in endless loops of instrumental repetition that seem positioned somewhere between mantras and autism. The music is shapeless, graceless and built from rhythm, not melody; it is amusing, given the undisciplined sound, to eavesdrop later as they argue in a van about whether they all were following the same arrangement.’ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

 

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Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
‘A more crowd-pleasing exercise in fathomless cool than its predecessor, Ghost Dog is an impeccably shot and sensationally scored deadpan parody of two current popular modes—the hit-man glorification saga and the Cosa Nostra family drama—and is predicated on the clash of at least as many behavioral codes. The hired gun known as Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is introduced reading the 18th-century samurai manual Hagakure. His lips don’t exactly move, but the text thereafter serves as the major indicator of his consciousness: “The samurai is as if dead.” Like the Parisian hit man who is the antihero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 Le Samurai (which, no less stylized, opens with a quote from the invented Book of Bushido), Ghost Dog is an ascetic loner who must ultimately wreak vengeance on the employer who betrays him. Cowled like a monk in his hooded sweatshirt, the urban samurai leaves his rooftop shack, complete with pigeon coop and Shinto altar, to glide unseen through the nighttime streets of his derelict neighborhood (a seeming mixture of Brooklyn and Jersey City).’ — J. Hoberman

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
‘Jim Jarmusch has been working on Coffee and Cigarettes for so long that when he started the project, you could still smoke in a coffee shop. The idea was to gather unexpected combinations of actors and, well, let them talk over coffee and cigarettes. He began with the short film “Coffee and Cigarettes I,” filmed in 1986, before we knew who Roberto Benigni was (unless we’d seen Jarmusch’s Down By Law). Benigni the verbal hurricane strikes the withdrawn Steven Wright and is so eager to do him a favor that he eventually goes to the dentist for him. There’s no more to it than that, but how much more do you need? A few minutes, and the skit is over. None of these 11 vignettes overstays its welcome, although a few seem to lose their way. And although Jarmusch has the writing credit, we have the feeling at various moments (as when Bill Murray walks in on a conversation between RZA and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan and exchanges herbal remedies with them) that improvisation plays a part.’ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Broken Flowers (2005)
‘Broken Flowers relies on Bill Murray’s persona, but it also turns that persona back on him. Instead of maintaining the satirical distance that made it easy to laugh at heartland eccentrics in, say, Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, Jarmusch’s film avoids caricature, and Murray’s poker face melts. Don feels a bittersweet regret at becoming exn his self-effacement has achieved high comic art, and he collaborates with Jarmusch at a point in his career when he’s trying to be something more than hipster-serene. Both succeed, by committing to the notion that a yearning to be reborn within a hopeless, brittle soul is worthy of drama—as well as a deeper, gentler humor.’ — Ken Tucker

Trailer

Excerpt

DVD Extras

 

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The Limits of Control (2009)
‘The effect of the new Jim Jarmusch film, The Limits of Control, is to prove that, however gracefully you groom a shaggy-dog story, it won’t stop roaming. Isaach De Bankolé—originally from Ivory Coast, and a Jarmusch regular, in works like Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes — plays a man with a mission. That sounds decisive, but the man is a nameless itinerant, and you can no more explain his mission than finish a jigsaw under water. Clad in a succession of silk suits, he flies to Madrid, takes a train to Seville, then takes another into rural desolation. In each place, the same thing happens, with minor variations: a contact approaches, launches into a discussion of art, music, drugs, or whatever, and trades matchboxes with our guy. Each box contains a cipher on a slip of paper, which he reads and eats. The tale is constructed with infinite care, and shot with an almost aching clarity by Christopher Doyle. (Whole theses could, and probably will, be written on its use of blood-orange red.) The cast, too, is so hip that it makes your gums hurt, with cameos for Gael García Bernal, John Hurt, Bill Murray, and a white-wigged Tilda Swinton, whose deployment of a transparent umbrella as a parasol is a typical gesture of stylized futility.’ — The New Yorker

Trailer

Archival Talks: Jim Jarmusch, “The Limits of Control”

 

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Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
‘The Thin Man with blood cocktails, an ode to hipsterism through the ages, a mainline shot of cool and a playful tribute to artistic fetishism, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive is an addictive mood and tone piece, a nocturnal reverie that incidentally celebrates a marriage that has lasted untold centuries. Almost nothing happens in this minor-key drift through a desolate, imperiled modern world, and yet it is the perennial downtown filmmaker’s best work in many years, probably since 1995’s Dead Man, with which it shares a sense of quiet, heady, perilous passage.’ — Hollywood Reporter

Trailer

Title sequence

“Only Lovers Left Alive” Q&A;: Jim Jarmusch, Tilda Swinton

 

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Paterson (2016)
‘In Jim Jarmusch’s thirteenth feature, Paterson, Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson who also happens to live and work in Paterson N.J. And like an earlier Paterson resident, physician-poet William Carlos Williams, he writes poetry in his spare time. During coffee and lunch breaks, and in the moments before he begins his route, Paterson writes poems inspired by everyday things. For example, a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches sparks a meditation on the pure, quiet love he feels for his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a charming, stay-at-home DIY dynamo. Jarmusch, too, loves poetry. He’s a fan, in particular, of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, members of what’s commonly known as the New York School of poets. (The poems in Paterson, in fact, were written by New York School poet Ron Padgett.) Jarmusch has drawn on that love, and more, to make a picture that shows how art—maybe even especially art made in the margins—can fill up everyday life.’ — Stephanie Zacharek

Trailer

Excerpts

 

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Gimme Danger (2016)
‘“It’s June 9. We are in an undisclosed location. We are interrogating Jim Osterberg about the Stooges, the greatest rock and roll band ever.” So begins Jim Jarmusch’s affectionate, thorough documentary – a film in which violence is swift and random, household objects are employed during the making of music, Wimbledon provides an unlikely recording location and John Wayne cameos alongside David Bowie, Art Garfunkel and Nico. One anecdote involves a tab of mescalin and a shovel. For the first gig, the singer was made up in white face, wearing an aluminum afro wig and a maternity smock and played a vacuum cleaner on stage. There are drugs, chaos, more drugs. Death, redemption, riffs are all present. As Iggy notes dryly, “It ain’t too easy being the Stooges sometimes, you know?”’ — Uncut

Trailer

Excerpt

Jim Jarmusch & Iggy Pop | ‘Gimme Danger’ Q&A

 

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The Dead Don’t Die (2019)
‘Jim Jarmusch’s style is so singular and versatile that if you fall in love with it, as some of us did over 30 years ago with “Stranger than Paradise,” you’ll believe there’s no such thing as a bad Jarmusch picture, because you’ll judge each new film in relation to Jarmusch’s best, not what anyone else might’ve theoretically done with the same material. “The Dead Don’t Die” is far from Jarmusch’s best, but there’s something to be said for its zonked-out acceptance of extinction.’ — Matt Zoller Seitz

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. So, someone tried unsuccessfully to break into my blog hundreds of times last night using many IP addresses. I’ve upgraded to a higher protection level, and they’re still trying to break in as of 5 minutes ago. Hopefully they’ll give up, but just to say if the blog suddenly goes haywire or dies or something, that’s why. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. People are so squeamish, no? Those Jesus pops certainly could’ve been in an earlier post here, now that you mention it. Good eye. I’ve never read ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’. I love the film version. It’s amazing, eh? Okay, I’ll look for it. Thanks, pal. I never met Gore Vidal, no. I was in a restaurant when he was in the same restaurant, and I sort of studied him from afar. I should probably praise cthulhu too, shouldn’t I, just to be safe. Done. (I did it IRL). ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m glad there were a couple of gods in there who lived up to the hype. Ha ha. Your love seeing the tears in my love’s eyes as his beloved bellbottoms are burning and having a moment of compassion in which he restores the bellbottoms with his magic powers and gives my love a lick of his Jesus pop which they both find so sexy that they log into your love’s OnlyFans account, turn on your love’s laptop’s camera and have sex which, when it finally goes live on your love’s OnlyFans account, is so erotic that word spreads and God hears about it and watches the video and is so turned on that he becomes inspired to create total peace in the world, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, I intend to avoid that WA documentary like the veritable plague. ** _Black_Acrylic, And feeling blessed is the ideal reaction! Thank you! Nice that you got outside. Well, surely they’ll let you have your laptop? Why in the world wouldn’t they? You’re not in prison, right? ** Thomas Kendall, Hi, Tom. Great to see you, my friend! I do like Jenny Erpenbeck, yes. In fact I think I read she has a new book out which I’ve been meaning to score. How are you? So, so excited for your long, long, long awaited novel to bring much needed joy into the world! ** Steve Erickson, Jesus is as annoying as fuck. Yikes. Ah, but I didn’t want to balance out the Slayer track. Fuck the non-black, you know? Balance is for pussies, as Slayer might have said, or at least thought. Spring should have that effect, although in this climate confused world we now live in, who knows? AIDOL will be mine as soon as I can get it. I’m sold. ** alex rose, Mr. Rose! A great pleasure, a great honor, a great … all kinds of other stuff. Sure, I’m totally down to have my stuff in that 7 day New York thing you’re doing. Use whatever you want, carte blanche. I’m thrilled that you asked and that you want include my things. When is it happening? What is it? I want to see, duh. Biggest love and deepest bow! ** Brendan, Hey! I was wondering if you noticed I restored that. I probably should’ve told you. I always like to surprise people, but there’s an assumption there that people will be so attuned to the blog on a micro level that they’ll know on their own, which is kind of gross. Anyway, yeah, the post still had its benevolent assaultive quality. Thank you from the future. You hanging in +? Love, me. ** Sypha, Ah, yeah, William Blake. Everyone, one last God add as proposed by Sypha. Sypha: ‘I think one of my favorite pictorial representations of God is William Blake’s “God Blessing the Seventh Day” (c. 1805). Usually depictions of the Old Testament God come off as looking very stern and humorless, but I kind of like how cheerful and happy Blake’s God looks.’ ** Right. Even though Jim Jarmusch’s films are kind of hit or miss for me — I like a few quite a lot, dislike a few quite a lot, and think most of them are okay — he’s a distinctive filmmaker, and I’ve never done a Day about him, and I thought I probably should, and I did. Jarmusch-y thoughts, anyone? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Over her more than four-decade career, New York based filmmaker, performer and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross boundaries of experimental film, video art and multimedia performance – from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit In The Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of human movement and the resiliency of the spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of cinema. An innovative exploration of an artist whom Cineaste called ‘the most important practitioner of experimental film-dance,’ — R.A. Haller

‘Amy Greenfield has been pushing the boundaries of dance and cinema since the early 1970s. Her work is known for its earthy rawness and proto-feminist point of view. In Greenfield’s 1974 work, Videotape for a Woman and Man, audiences may at first experience utter shock at seeing the two performers Greenfield and her male partner as being completely stark naked. This 33-minute film features the female and male performers in a series of progressive dance-like and often highly acrobatic body movements with pauses in the film that integrate vocal phrases in order to explain some of the emotions and motives that the film maker is intending to express to the audience. The nakedness of the performers ultimately expresses a sense of freedom in their complete exposure in order to communicate the essence of the raw emotions that a man and woman can experience towards one another in a relationship. In doing so, they clearly tell us that they have nothing to hide. Their emotions are real and unhindered because of their nakedness. The movements of these nude performers range from loving to violent to erotic and passionate as they tell their story through uninhibited movement.’ — Missy Briggs

‘In February YouTube censored Amy Greenfield’s films including segments from Club Midnight/Against Censorship. Greenfield was outraged at such censorship of art, placing it mistakenly in the category of “pornography”. The absence of any way to appeal directly to YouTube impelled Greenfield to contact the National Coalition Against Censorship. Supporting her work, and agreeing that the issue is very important for filmmakers, the NCAC, with the leading internet civil rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation, went up against the internet giant to help bring to light the issue of YouTube/Google’s censorship of nudity. With an outpouring of press and public support on the internet, You Tube, in an unprecedented and potentially ground-breaking decision, restored Greenfield’s films to their site, unrestricted, recognizing her use of nudity as art.’ — NCAC

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Amy Greenfield @ The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Book: ‘Flesh into Light – The Films of Amy Greenfield’
Amy Greenfield @ IMDb
Amy Greenfield @ letterboxd
DVD: ‘Greenfield: Cinema of the Body’
Amy Greenfield reviews ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’
Amy Greenfield, a Critical Essay
Amy Greenfield’s “Dance for the Camera”
Amy Greenfield’s Finely Spun `Antigone’

 

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Extras

CENSORED BY YOUTUBE

Frameform | Rewind: Amy Greenfield

 

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Interview: Making Antigone/Rites of Passion

 

TONY PIPOLO: I thought it would be helpful to divide up the questions into categories. First, I’d like to know what attracted you to this project, and how you think the subject of Antigone bears upon these times. Then, perhaps we could talk about the form the film takes; since you are associated with dance and choreography, it seems relevant to consider how you managed to exploit these talents and place them at the service of this story. Lastly, how filmmaking techniques–especially the framing and editing of shots–affected and were affected by the approach you took. I’m sure they’ll be some overlapping, but let’s begin with the first one. When did the idea of doing Antigone occur to you? Were you always fascinated with Sophocles’ play?

AMY GREENFIELD: Yes. When I read it in college, of all the Greek tragedies, it was the one that most interested me. And when I got into film, I thought, when I do a long film eventually, it will be Antigone. But originally the play didn’t feel personal for me. I just thought, “I know how to do that. Something in me knows how to make that into a film.” And those were the feelings, again, when I said, I think it’s time.

The idea was a little more frightening than I thought, though. Not Antigone so much as a long feature film. But I wanted to make such a film and I felt that I could play Antigone. I had different projects going at the time. That was the time when I tried more practical things like proposing something for cable television with postmodern dance–something I didn’t want to really do, even. Those fell through, but an administrator at Ballet Theater at the time said, “If you can bring something new to Antigone, do that, don’t think of doing a ballet for television.”

Other people encouraged me, too: a wonderful professor of Classics at the University of Southern Illinois, Joan O’Brien, wrote an essay on Antigone and androgyny, which turned out to be one way into the character and a take on the text I’d never been taught, and which led to looking at the sexuality going on in it. She’d been a nun but “quit” (if that’s the right word) because of the Pope’s attitudes toward women. She loved my wild pagan female nude film dances. She felt Antigone/Rites of Passion should be that physical.

But it was when I started to do video rehearsals with Bertram Ross, taking his body and face as material for script, that the film really started. So the way into visualizing the words started with the physical. The opposite process from mainstream dramatic filmmaking.

Then it became clear that I had to find a dramatic structure for the film. I luckily ran into a weekend screenwriting workshop with Frank Daniel, then head of Columbia’s Film Department. That workshop enabled me to begin and go on and on to reconstruct the texts from my own point of view as cinema.

Now, I remember the thing that got me to drop everything else–well, almost everything else–and concentrate on this film was asking myself the question: “if I had only one year to live, what would I do?” The answer was to make this film–and it took five years to make.

TP: So, clearly, your reasons must have been very compelling.

AG: Yes, but I didn’t even think of the reasons.

TP: It strikes me from viewing the film that your reasons were far more personal, as opposed, let’s say, to primarily polemical. Over the last thirty or forty years, people who have revived and produced Antigone seem to approach it almost exclusively as a polemical piece with a special message for our times. One finds it in college anthologies, for example, along with essays by Thoreau and Gandhi on Civil Disobedience. Your film does not strike me as being driven by motives or interests of this kind.

AG: No, I was not driven by those motives at all. I don’t understand them if you’re going to do the drama, not talk about it. The play is taught in most high schools and colleges and made so boring because of such textbooks. My drive was to bring its really very passionate life to the screen, and let the ideas come through that passion. I think my motives were close to why an artist like Cocteau would translate a certain myth or tale into drama, ballet, cinema, because he felt it corresponding to something very essential in himself and transformation of self into a larger sphere. He actually did a version of Antigone which got to his feelings about Charlotte Corday.  Also, I think I was motivated by terror. At the time when I started to conceive of and make the film, I used to wake up every morning experiencing terror. I couldn’t control it. It seemed to have everything and nothing to do with my life. It was real but not attached to something specific. Making the film brought me through it. Greek Tragedy, like a horror film or thriller on a popular level, ultimately brings the audience through terror via the fullness, the seduction of art.

TP: My feeling about the choice of beginning the film with the scene between Oedipus and the two daughters is that it does, as you’ve indicated, deemphasize the straightforward political aspects of the play. Beginnings–and endings, of course–are so important. But it also clarifies the situation for an audience unfamiliar with the story of the trilogy, especially concerning the curse on the family. There is this strong psychological bond with the father and because of the curse on the family, Antigone has no choice but to pursue the path that she does. It is all clearly laid out for her, but not just in cultural and political terms. I was wondering what you thought about how this relates to the political dimension of the play and how the question–which is really a question posed by all of Greek tragedy–of determination and free will fits into this.

AG: Well, I have trouble with such all-encompassing phrases that have been around for centuries. If I’d approached the film from that point of view, it certainly never would have gotten made, and if it had somehow, no one would have wanted to look at it. I was involved with the practical agonizing day to day decisions of getting onto the screen the agonizing choices of the characters in a story that’s so great that part of its greatness is that it makes into truth what in a literal way is really unbelievable at almost every turn.

But let me think. This interview is making me become conscious of stuff that was in there. You’re right. The film starts with the voice of Antigone over a black screen saying, “The story of Antigone began before she was born.” Before she goes into the cave, she says, “My birth imprisons me.” The beginning narration ends with “Antigone chose to go with him (i.e., Oedipus), to lead him in the wilderness.” So there are two extremes for her. A path circumscribed horribly by her birth and gigantic choices no one else would make, and once they’re made, they lead her to a narrower and narrower sphere within which choice can be made.

It’s interesting–the imprisoned birth–Antigone is a character who never changes. Instead, her choices keep her more and more on the track of her own character, and change everyone around her more and more. Then, when she seems to have no choice left, “Antigone takes her death into her own hands.” Creon, so he won’t get blamed for actively executing her, puts her in a cave to starve. Instead of dying passively and slowly, she chooses fast suicide, and it is that suicide which topples Creon.

In cinematic terms, when there seems to be no choice left for her, when she’s locked in the cave, the camera becomes her in an extended point of view shot, and we see only the rock walls, as if there were no space left for her in the world. Therefore, we as audience, are her as she travels through the seemingly endless and claustrophobic and amorphous cave. Then, the camera comes to a dead end wall. We see her feet–she is climbing the wall. A choice. There’s no way out, but she’s found a way up. Then the camera goes wild and out of that frenzied camera movement we see her, like an African death mask, dead, but in a way alive still through the camera’s motion, and her voice: “Antigone takes her death in her own hands.” I actually was holding the rope up myself with one hand, though in the film it looks like she’s actually hanging. I designed the “death” shot. I was totally active. It was an active choice. Her will had to be at the strongest point in her life to do that. It’s a metaphor for taking control of one’s own death, really terrifying to me, but very much an issue in our society now. Her final act of will makes for a release of energy, an explosion of events–Haimon’s suicide, Creon’s madness, and finally Ismene’s heroism as witness. Creon, unlike Antigone, comes in at the point of most choice for himself as new ruler, and he chooses wrongly. Under a misguided kind of patriotism, he chooses to unbury the dead and execute for the necessary act of mourning. Like Antigone, he won’t give in, but her force of will is greater than his. A shot where he seems to have most power–when he pronounces Antigone’s death in a cave, is done as a mug shot–he’s a criminal right up against the wall looking into the camera. The camera humiliates and imprisons him just when it seems like he imprisons Antigone. That’s a twist in the free will vs. determinism game. And unlike a tragic hero, when he relents, it’s forced upon him. And while finally he is vulnerable and cries out, he has seen his mistake much, much too late. His change of heart in burying the dead and unburying the living and his realization of his passion and tenderness as father for his son, both come too late. He is mad, unfit to rule even himself, taken over, unable to choose what he now wants–death. Bertram Ross’ incredible reversal in the way he uses his body, from hard and straight to collapsing in on himself and soft, the seductiveness with which he plays Creon, makes the character fascinating, dimensional, very modern.

But it is only Ismene who, through Antigone’s death, becomes free of that curse. Her choice to stay alive in the play was seen as a cop-out. Ostensibly it is a choice for personal survival, but it’s also choosing to be powerless before unjust law. The film gives her a second chance by developing her character after Antigone’s death. With her choice to wrest power and complete the vow, this time she emerges with dignity and a spiritual balance and calm which give the sense that no matter what happens to her, she’s free of the family curse, though everyone she loves is dead. Her breathing is the ultimate necessity of life, and it’s life which enables choice.

TP: We’re talking about complex ideas that come through, yet there are so few words in the film. The ideas come through a brew of pictures and sounds.

AG: There is something fundamental that we haven’t yet talked about, not only about my own filmmaking, which is very physical and visual, but about cinema in general which stresses these qualities. The text on the page is uncinematic. It had to be taken apart and resynthesized as cinema. The solution was to find some action-through line, for Antigone and Oedipus, then Creon, and branching out to the other characters–taking that as the core. It became clearer and clearer that that had to be the core; you had to move forward all the time through action. I couldn’t have a chorus, not only because of money, but it would have made the film even more artificial. Instead, I used dance, motion, as an in-between area between real action, acting, and metaphor. Once I do that, of course, I’m going to show the two brothers fighting, and once I do that, they are characters who appear and who have weight, and so forth. Then it’s a matter of generosity to the characters–as well as to the actors–I say, “Wait a minute, I just can’t see Polyneices getting knocked off?” and then “Why is she [i.e., Antigone] so passionate about this act?” and so it leads to showing their passion together, when she makes the vow to bury him after Oedipus has cursed him to die, and that brings us back to the family and the curse. In the book, Antigones, by George Steiner, he keeps coming back to this inextricable bond within Sophocles’ language, and to the eros connected with that family.

TP: To put it mildly.

AG: Yes, so there’s always a movement, an impulse, an impulse behind the words. It’s wonderful to deal with that and once you get behind the text and you say, oh, look what’s there–that’s pretty wild. Antigone says of Polyneices’ body, “If I die, I’ll lie with him,” and you think, “Let’s try that desire while she’s alive.” Then, of course, the action takes the film out of the area of abstract ideas and into this primal area. If you take out all of the other material with messengers and so forth, and concentrate on these primal scenes, you discover the strong action of the drama, which is laden with significance.

TP: This does partly explain the fascination of your film, in which we are not distracted by all of the connective tissue experienced through choruses and messengers, and all we are left with are these core scenes. There is no commentary, and no thread but the one woven by the drive to get the primal across.

AG: Which is connected with death. You said that in one sense the film is about the process of mourning, and the counter movement of that is the eros which infuses the drama.

TP: Yes.

AG: It’s built into the action, the choreography. When the brothers fight in violent arm to arm combat, they die, two twins, in an embrace. And we see Antigone attempting to carry out her words, “When I die, I’ll lie with him,” when she kneels over Polyneices’ body and kisses his lips, collapses on him from the attempt to carry him, and turns this action into rolling his body, then lying under him. Then, toward the end of the film, when Haimon falls on Antigone as he dies, that’s real kinky romantic, and Creon over Haimon’s body, gathering him up–here Haimon and Creon are both barechested, so it’s flesh to flesh, both dirty and wet. The tragedy is that the contact should have been in life. I’m not saying “Eros equals death” at all!

TP: Even in these actions, though, there is the political level. Let’s get into that aspect a little. On a low budget, and with the style of the film, how did you get the feeling of the State? I think you do, but it must not have been easy.

AG: Well, the political implications are all offscreen in the Oedipus at Colonus section. Only the voices-off evoke the City and the political power struggles. But once Oedipus leaves, that’s when Antigone makes the decision, or is driven, to go back to the city because that’s where her brothers’ fated battle is going to take place, and she has made her vow to her brother. This places the drama within the city structure and, you are right, to deal with the concept of the state was very difficult. Now, I would be able to deal with scenes of masses or extras. But when I made it, luckily it was inconceivable because I didn’t have the money–I mean it gets down to being so tight that even to have one more person there … it gets so difficult. So the sense of “State” came through the location–the actual State buildings of New York in Albany, plus costume, acting, music, well-chosen words …

TP: But I think the film gains from that forced economy. At least for me it does. There is something pristine about it in the way Greek tragedy is pristine. All the excesses are kept at bay and you get down to the absolute gut feelings and confrontations.

AG: Good, that’s what I wanted.

 

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9 of Amy Greenfield’s 16 films

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Dirt (1971)
‘… has been used in women’s studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, so does the beat and intensity of the harsh, eletronic sound. The audience can identify deeply with the woman’s movements and so experience the depth of this violence.–A. G. “She abandons her body entirely.”–Boston Sunday Herald. DIRT and TRANSPORT are counterparts and are ideally screened together.’ — A. G.

 

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Transport (1971)
‘TRANSPORT came out of many influences in the early 1970s: the dead of Vietnam; the poem by my poetry teacher Anne Sexton, “For God While Sleeping”; the post-modern dance experiments with trust, to give yourself totally while being lifted by another; and the airborne astronauts of moon exploration. In the film, a man, then a woman, are lifted from the ground and are carried through space. Most of the film is seen upside-down against the white sky. The man and woman never meet. Their relationship is made entirely through the film editing. They move between ground and sky, between death (dead weight), through gravity (conflict weight) toward space (floating space). Finally, they break out into space and are borne along as if flying through the white air.’ — A.G.

the entirety

 

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Dervish 2 (1972)
‘For twenty minutes we watch Greenfield, wrapped in a white sheet, simply spin. The ceaseless repetition makes us lose our sense of time and gives the dynamic movement an object-like permanence. And yet, the actual physicality of her body also seems to dissolve. Subtle superimpositions of alternate camera views create delicate image transparencies while the whippings of the sheet across the monitor screen emit luminous stroboscopic flickerings. Rhythmic ambient sounds of shuffling and breathing reinforce the hypnotic effects of optical repetition.’ –- Richerd Lorber

 

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Element (1973)
‘ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality. “In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ….’ –- Deborah Jowitt

the entirety

 

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Tides (1982)
‘The literary sources for TIDES came from Isadora Duncan’s “The Dance of the Future,” Maya Deren’s script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual In Transfigured Time, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. “TIDES is a cinema-dance dealing with the theme and image of woman and ocean. The entire film was shot with a high speed camera, creating action from two to twenty times slower than normal speed. Because of this extreme slow motion, the surge and flow of the woman’s nude body and the waves becomes intensely felt, continually moving cinematic imagery.’ — Film-makers Coop

the entirety

 

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Antigone/Rites of Passion (1990)
‘A feature film starring Bertram Ross, Janet Eilber and Amy Greenfield. Music: Glenn Branca, Diamanda Galas, Paul Lemos, Elliott Sharp and David Van Tieghem. An “emotionally charged feminist take” (The Village Voice) on the daughter of Oedipus. Amy Greenfield takes avant-garde and feminist filmmaking into a new sphere of storytelling. Dazzling, demanding, bold, triumphantly ambitious and successful …. Greenfield wisely decided to shoot her film as a silent, allowing her performers complete freedom of movement. … Greenfield and her cinematographers Hilary Harris (for the natural locations) and Judy Irola (for the architectural settings) keep the camera in perfect, expressive harmony with the performers. … Add to this spare, off-screen narration spoken by the various characters as they reveal their innermost thoughts. … Further add the film’s astonishing score, a great, richly varied hum and roar and shimmer. … Through the flawless fusion of all these elements we’re able to experience an ‘Antigone’ as if we had never seen it performed before, an ‘Antigone’ at once sensual and erotic, timeless and timely, for this film is charged with the tension of viewing Oedipus from his daughters’ point of view. … Inspired.’ –- Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

Watch the film VOD here

 

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Wildfire (2002)
‘Wildfire is digitally colorized into an intense raibow blaze, building from slow motion then layered, reversed, speeded to create a wildfire explosion of female energy. A beautiful film! A great film!’ — Bruce Baillie

Excerpt

 

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Club Midnight (2008)
‘CLUB MIDNIGHT is an evening of interconnected cutting-edge films, with cabaret stars Andrea Beeman; Bonnie Dunn; Francesca and Selene Savarie revealing themselves, body and soul, in a new nakedness, joined with spirituality and intelligence. The six films that make up CLUB MIDNIGHT, are challenging and exhilaratingly sensual, all inspired by the empowerment and expressiveness of erotic dance (to) the music of Philip Glass, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Lee Hazlewood, Dennis Hopper interpreting a poem by Poet Laureate Charles Simic (from which the film cycle takes its title), and (Amy Greenfield’s) inspired digital and analog manipulation . . . CLUB MIDNIGHT is a postmodern romp through a neo-feminist party.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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MUSEic Of The BODy (2009)
‘MUSEic Of The BODy, in many ways is not only a tribute to Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik both well known artists and musicians but also a pivotal experience for Greenfield. It was the first time she directed a large scale multi media stage event that would influence her own work for the next decade.

‘Her subjective camera zooms in and out at a dizzying pace on performer Suzanne Gregoire, who is completely nude in a pair of stilettos and a long string of extra large pearls. She is bound and tangled in the expansive string of pearls while she plays Nam June Paik’s interactive piano/video installation Pyramid- Interactive with her convoluted body. She pounds the piano in a desperate physical wail. The audience is given the ultimate impression of internal calamity pulled in a cerebral storm of transgressing emotions. Her image fills the mountain of screens, she hammers and tears at her pearls, her eyes make contact with the audience, her body shakes and quivers. The accompanying soundtrack facilitates and promotes this increasing transgression by mixing the rogue piano notes with the classic sounds of Beethoven’s piano sonata. Her head reaches back, the pearls tighten, she exhales, the piano fades, it is understood this dance continues on in an ethereal sphere now.’ — CTSart

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Quentin S. Crisp, Hi. Well, thank you for entrusting this place. And for coming in. And for the added information and link, which I will now pass along. Everyone, Quentin S. Crisp, one of the Neo-Decadent authors, gives us some extra information and a gateway to a very intriguing sounding work. In his words, ‘I just wanted to give a shout out (as they say) to two artists, Joe Campbell and Oscar Oldershaw, who did the styling and took the photo of me (Quentin S. Crisp) in polkadot dress and shades. This is a link to one of their collaborative pieces (film) that drew words of praise from Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“I can watch this film over and over. I don’t understand it but it is just fascinating. The camera work invites us into the ritual, we are part of the alienation.”)’. Thanks again, and respect to you. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Well, there isn’t a whole lot else to do in my realm these days other than do the workhorse number. Luckily that’s my bread and butter. Mm, ‘Frisk’ was banned in Canada for a number of years. Otherwise, I can’t think of any instances of actual censorship, although I wouldn’t be surprised. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’d forgotten all about that Marvin Lee incident until you mentioned LM. So, thanks. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Zac and I met one of the Neo-Decadents — Justin Isis — a few years back when we accidentally bumped into him in a pizza place in … Shibuya! Me too re: the missing, big, biggest time. ** Sypha, Hi. ‘Romance’? Hm, that’s … stretching it. ‘I Wished’ is 134 pages, so it’s roughly ‘Period’ or ‘God Jr.’ sized. Short but packed. ** John Newton, Hi, welcome. My pleasure re: the post. No, I’m not interested in writing a memoir. My upcoming novel is very personal and based in my autobiography, but it’s definitely a novel, not a memoir. That’s probably as close as I’ll ever get. Thanks for asking. Take care. ** Damian Murphy, Hadrian Flyte, Hi, thank you very much for entering and for answering John Newton’s question. I was rather curious myself. I’m pretty new to N-D, but I look forward greatly to getting to know your works ASAP. ** Shane Christmass, Hey, Shane. No, I haven’t read that book you linked to, didn’t know about it, but it definitely looks like a must-get. Thanks, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Can’t keep a trusty pair of headphones down. Pudding and custard. Now those are good ideas. Not common food stuffs over here unless I’m missing something. Your story! Excited! Everyone, Maestro of multiple mediums and definitely prose Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson has a new short fiction piece up at the Terror House site with the irresistible title ‘Dead Cat Bounce’. Get your eyes, etc. on it here. ** wolf, *distant, lonely, inhuman sound in the distance*! Gotcha, but competence in art of any kind is pretty gross. And that it’s treated as a legitimising requirement of ‘good’ art by so many. Re: literature, the powers that be give competence fancy sounding names like ‘lapidary’ and ‘literary’, but they’re usually just talking about competence that’s acting hoity toity. I would say it’s one of art’s big, eternal enemies, but that’s me. Oops, about Hubert. Poor thing. Tough decision, yeah. My asshole neighbors, who live directly below me on the 3rd etage, are nuts. They’re an elderly hetero couple. For a long time, the male would bang on my door two or three times a week accusing us of using a jack-hammer in the middle of the night. (In the middle of the night, I’m always asleep and Yury is sometimes up watching TV quietly). I even let him come inside and look around to see that I don’t have a jack-hammer. It’s always something bizarre with them. Love, me. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Me too about the lockdown. They just locked down four French cities, luckily not including Paris, so … uh oh. How was your weekend or I guess including Monday? It’s true that that Styles guy kinda makes the bun work. Ha ha, I’d watch that horror movie. Who wouldn’t? Love hiring planes to skywrite Peter Sotos’s ‘Tick’ in its entirety in the sky in Tahoma font above every city, town, and village in the world, G. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The new Gisele piece is just a promising early kernel of an idea at this point, but I’ll be sure to blab about it here when it coheres. Does Nick Antosca still writes books or has TV eaten his writing? I met him once at a reading. Super nice guy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Okey-doke … Everyone, Two new sonic constructions by the one, the only Steve Erickson. Let me let him tell you all about them. SE: ‘In the past few days, I’ve written two songs inspired by BLADE RUNNER and its soundtrack. The second one, “Of Course We Know,” began as a remix of the first, reusing some of the same sounds and melodies, but took on a life of its own. Here is the first, “Happy Android”.’ Wow, I’ll find that Takashi Miike film somewhere. Sounds nuts. ** Misanthrope, Another FWB of the Neo-Decadents, or maybe it’s vice versa. Sounds like a fun time you had last night. Annapolis is famous for something specific, but I can’t remember what. A university or something? Good news about your mom. Hope it goes really well today. ** Brian O’Connell, Good morning! ‘Beau Travail’ is terrific, yeah, I agree. One of her very best films, I reckon. Weekend + me: Mm, my editor sent me a pdf of the interior design of ‘I Wished’, and I went through it and okayed it. I spent most of yesterday at my friend/collaborator Gisele’s place talking about the next theater piece we’re going to do and discussing how best to film our piece ‘Jerk’, which we’re doing next month. I watched a documentary about the history of Black representation in Horror movies that was just clips and talking heads but was pretty interesting. And a lot of other forgettable things that, yes, I have forgotten. How and what was your painfully early class? And its aftermath? Happy next 24! ** Okay. I’m thinking that most of you reading this don’t know the films of Amy Greenfield due to how difficult it is to see or even read about experimental films in these blanded-out and corporation commandeered days. Count on DC’s to disrupt that crap whenever possible. So, get to start to know her films. That’s the idea anyway. See you tomorrow.