Cinemad

Alex Cox is a longtime filmmaker with a deserved cult fanbase thanks to REPO MAN, SID & NANCY, STRAIGHT TO HELL and WALKER, and has continued to make low budget films ever since, including his 1991 film EL PATRULLERO (HIGHWAY PATROLMAN), currently in re-release in theaters.

Stan Brakhage and Godfrey Reggio Talk to High School Students: I found an old cassette tape of an interview I made for the print issue Cinemad #2. Avant masters Stan Brakhage and Godfrey Reggio met for the first time at the Telluride Film Festival in 1999 while speaking with high school students attending the fest. I was working there as a projectionist and asked Brakhage for an interview, he suggested I sit in and record this. I turned it into an article but its more interesting as a rediscovered time capsule. Brakhage showed three brand new hand-painted shorts (part of his Persian Series) and Reggio had some of his film clips show with a Phillip Glass tribute. Both were yearly attendees with regular fans, but the kids did not know their work - making for an even better discussion, exploring what their films are and their thoughts on the world at large. The sound quality is ok but raw from the cassette. If you are a static addict, this will sound beautiful. The students asked the questions. Reggio's voice is lower. Stan's is higher pitched and he speaks first.

To learn more about films about English Professors, I interviewed my friend Sean who is a college English Professor. Originally from Florida, now teaching in the middle of California, he skates, surfs, writes poetry and books, runs the indie Gorsky Press, and is a Thomas Pynchon scholar. We talk about the English Professor character in movies, real life awkward interactions, when and why books make good films, and get to hear some great secrets about professors that could make better films. Sean also reminds me about the power of movies on the public and political views, and how films might be harming our view of higher education.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is incredibly modest. From his first feature Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) to the popular Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), his films and installations play around the world in art houses and museums with huge critical praise, he’s won the big film festivals, become a darling of the art world too. But his surreal style feels honest and convincing….if you talk with Apichatpong he’s a huge movie fan that notices the magic of the world surrounding him.

Longtime artist and filmmaker Jennifer Reeder is originally from Ohio and puts much of that midwest town essence into her characters and themes in art, installations and films. Now living and working in Chicago for decades, two of her most recent shorts take nuanced looks into teen life that are very stylized but have an incredible honest feel anyway. The two are playing film festivals everywhere - A MILLION MILES AWAY won awards at Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground and Oberhausen and just played at Sundance. Her newer short BLOOD BELOW THE SKIN just premiered at Berlin.Reeder also just received a Creative Capital grant for a feature script called AS WITH KNIVES AND SKIN. Another thing Reeder has is amazing film titles.

My friends C and S, who used to be daily addicts, talk about films. For the drug-film genre, heroin movies often try to be the most realistic, whether glorifying or damning. C&S talk about what their day-to-day drug life was like, what they think of the films and characters, AIDS scares, art, needles and Alf. Its a surprise which one captures the lifestyle the best.

Calvin Lee Reeder has been kicking around the avant gutter for a long time now. His 16mm shorts weirded out audiences at film festivals and then two feature films did - THE OREGONIAN and THE RAMBLER. His layers of vivid color and texture in the film's images and constructed soundtrack pumps electricity into the genre characters and plots they inhabit. We work those ideas out, talk about losing confidence, a thing named Jerkbeast, and his day jobs and bands along the way.

This is a quick podcast, highlights from a panel discussion I led at the Off Camera Film Festival in Krakow in 2009, where Anna Karina was showing a selection of her films she made with Godard and a few films she directed. If you don't know her, she made some of the best films of the 1960s with Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo and other great French cinema icons. The films not only hold up today as fresh and inspirational with old school genre stories (love, crime, life) reinvigorated with an exciting, unexpected style. But you realize how much of modern independent cinema has learned/borrowed/stolen from the group, particularly the power of Anna onscreen.

Name a film. Immediately and from memory, Chris will tell you what date it was released and Chad will tell you what the box office was. How would two guys go from being obsessed with Hollywood so much that they know marketing statistics to being entrenched in the independent film world. One going from big budget movie numbers to making a soft-spoken, character-driven Sundance award-winning feature, the other writing for a smart, esoteric Adult Swim show.

Jem Cohen has been making films since the 1980s, from legendary short shorts ("This Is A History of New York") and mystical longer shorts ("Lost Book Found") to inspiring features ("Benjamin: Smoke" co-directed with Peter Sillen, and "Fugazi: Instrument"). He captures people in such a way that you feel an innocence that movie cameras used to capture 100 years ago. We talk about his latest feature "Museum Hours," new projects, his friendship with Chris Marker, motivations behind filmmaking and how American audiences are still surprising and strong. Jem is philosophical, often working alone with a camera on a street corner - but he is also a fun-loving humorous guy.

Kevin Everson makes a film a day. Not really, but his intense work ethic has resulted in tons of shorts and six feature films. Working in his own way with 16mm, video and long takes, he films African-American culture through daily family life. Creating a portraiture of people and their surroundings, Everson concentrates on the formal design of image and sound. But he also adds in sports, love and gambling - he's got insight to people. Instead of focusing on giant events and melodrama, he looks at what makes the seconds and minutes of our lives go by, with a subtle humanist touch and with some humor. When you watch his films you might get stuck on what's on the surface. To hear him speak shows you the other layers you don't want to miss. His new feature is THE ISLAND OF ST. MATTHEWS and will show at the Los Angeles Film Festival this June, 2013.

The super talented Toby Huss is modest. Don't let him fool you. From his time as Artie the Strongest Man in the World in "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" to all his voice work for Mike Judge, he's made a lot of people laugh. He also has a great live Variety Show in Los Angeles as the singing character Rudy Casoni, and a Funny or Die series as Brad Logan. We talk about doing voices and working as a character, and then Huss gets deep about humanity as we talk about his photography and his role as the fascinating Clyde Sukeforth in the new Jackie Robinson film "42."

We go deep, deep into Jeff Krulik’s mind. If you’ve barely heard of him, you know HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT (1986), an incredible time capsule of Judas Priest fans waiting to see a show. If you’ve pushed below the surface, you might know him capturing unusual celebrity personalities like Freddie Blassie or Ernest Borgnine. Keep descending and you’ll get to his great portraits of interesting outsiders. We go to the bottom of his mind where the monsters live and talk about his new project LED ZEPPELIN PLAYED HERE. Regardless of which Krulik films you’ve seen, you’ve got to spend some time at his YouTube page and JeffKrulik.com.

Ross Novie has been an A.D. (Assistant Director) for almost two decades now, known as the “go-to TV comedy A.D.” or “if you want to film in Africa talk to him.” He worked on Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and more shows and movies with a bunch of people you’ve heard of. He’s destroyed things, cued a volcano and keeps the air conditioning on. He has made a ton of short films too, plus he directed, co-wrote and produced a show called Secret Girlfriend on Comedy Central. We talk about what he does, fame, and try to see if he has any dirt on people so we could bleep out names.

Rick Alverson’s new film THE COMEDY is not necessarily a comedy. Depending on your limits for satire, many scenes will make you laugh while you might be cringing or even angry at other scenes. As we follow 30-something Swanson (Tim Heidecker) in his privileged yet aimless leisurely days, the ante gets upped when he stands to inherit his Father’s estate. Forced with the first major change in life, he and his friends (among them Eric Wareheim, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy and comedian Gregg Turkington a.k.a. Neil Hamburger) strive for connection and an understanding of the world – not by hip, gleeful emoting but through testing the limits of society and common taste with possible punishment at every turn. It’s a strong, timely film. Cinemad talks with Alverson about making the film and testing audiences for the right reasons.

Recorded in April, we catch up with Sam Green right after his first performance of THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER at the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival. Now (August 2012) Green is about to go on tour with Yo La Tengo to perform the show in other cities. LOVE SONG is an exciting new type of cinema, with the writer/director Green live on stage speaking in front of onscreen stills and videos, as Yo La Tengo is next to him, performing the film's soundtrack. A follow-up, at least in style, to Green's UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS from 2010 - we talk about this new pursuit of form for Green as well as his recent short film about Esperanto, THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.

In this accidental ode to Drunk History, Cinemad sits down at the Creative Capital retreat with filmmakers Cam Archer (sober), Braden King (drunk) and Deborah Stratman (drunk) to talk about film, audiences, erasing art, and parking lot power. We were in between a party and a bathroom, and the mics themselves sound drunk by the end, so, yeah…. sorry about that.

All at once a filmmaker, archivist, culture jammer, exhibitor, teacher and underground film historian, Craig Baldwin is one of the pillars of the experimental film world. As a filmmaker, his landmark TRIBULATION 99 (1991) is a calculated frenzy of reworked found footage layered with every conspiracy theory ever made forming a pitch-perfect statement of our times. He hasn’t slowed down since, making four more features, a DVD label and running Other Cinema in San Francisco's Mission District. A screening room with an eclectic lineup programmed by Baldwin of beautiful art films and important political works, OC finds the fringes of film and embraces them. We talk about filmmaking and how to get unusual cinema to the masses.

Filmmaker Vanessa Renwick takes the term "do-it-yourself" seriously. She has made films since the early 1980s, and we mean made them: writing, filming, editing, and even processing the film by hand. 30 years and films and videos later, she has created portraits of people, life and landscapes, with great images and strong ideas, both fun and insightful. We talk about her movies and longtime hometown of Portland, but more about hitchhiking and wolves.

Rooftop Films is a non-profit organization doing shows every summer in New York and Brooklyn on rooftops and in other interesting outdoor settings, since 1997. But they go beyond showing old classics and push the programming to include tons of shorts, new indie films and experimental works, plus providing filmmaking funds, coordinating youth media education, and renting equipment at low cost to artists. Founder and Artistic Director Mark Elijah Rosenberg and Program Director Dan Nuxoll talk about what Rooftop does and why, and previews this year's series of films.

Today's podcast is with the founders and film programmers of Light Industry, a microcinema in Brooklyn specializing in avant garde and unusual film. They are not only human databases of art film history, they know the hurdles of how to run a film festival and a screening space, putting on great shows. Thomas Beard speaks first, has a deeper voice. Ed Halter speaks second.

From their homes in Austin, TX, David and Nathan Zellner have been making weird and funny films since the 1990s. Their first two features PLASTIC UTOPIA and FRONTIER were extremely under the radar, even for film festivals. Then they went on a long run of making entertaining shorts starting around 2002, finding a cult comedy fan base. After playing Sundance every year since with shorts and their feature GOLIATH, they will be premièring their new feature KID-THING there next January. We talk about the glory of making a film on VHS in-camera, being featured extras in SALO, working with chickens, cats and sharks, and how they got back to their roots with SASQUATCH BIRTH JOURNAL 2.

What to say about Ken Jacobs? An avant-garde film legend from his early epic film STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH to his Nervous Magic Lantern live performances. Even at just 40 minutes, his new film SEEKING THE MONKEY KING is another epic, combining strong political statements with his incredible use of abstract 3D imagery, showing how a new technology (and tired fad) can be used to create great art in the right hands. Ken’s son, filmmaker Aza Jacobs, sits in and interviews him, covering his past and present work now spanning 50-plus years, his time with Hans Hofmann, Stan Brakhage and Nicolas Ray, and how Ken met Flo. http://www.starspangledtodeath.com/

Filmmaker James Fotopoulos helped me coin the term 'avant gutter' - too dirty for the art world, too existential for the genre film world. That was an immediate reaction - James' films have actually played at tons of film festivals and in museums and galleries over the past decade, having made more than 100 works of all lengths. He might even help connect the worlds without compromising style or tone.

You may know Bobcat from his long standup comedy career, his many acting roles from the 1980s and 90s, or that time he set a couch on fire. But Cinemad is more interested in the films he has written and/or directed over the past decade. Mixing a real underground, independent film vibe with some extreme plotlines, he provides a cutting insight to human nature that is hilarious but not all that absurd.

Cinemad podcast #2: Azazel Jacobs' award-winning film MOMMA'S MAN premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, and quickly became one of the most lauded films of the year, winding up on many "best of" lists. Released in numerous international territories, it was distributed domestically by Kino International. Jacobs' short film KIRK AND KERRY was named Best Dramatic Short at the 1997 Slamdance Film Festival and became part of the Permanent Collection of the New York Public Library. He later teamed up with fellow filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo to make the micro-budget feature THE GOODTIMESKID, which found a small but loyal following, and was released by Benten Films. In 2009, he received a commission from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create the short film I SEE. The son of avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Jacobs was born in 1972 and raised in lower Manhattan surrounded by important and innovative artists. He went to undergraduate school at the film department of SUNY Purchase and received his Masters from the American Film Institute in 2002.

Cinemad podcast #1: Nina Menkes. Called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today” by The Los Angeles Times, Nina Menkes's radical and pioneering work synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. Her seven films are a body of work Sight and Sound has called “Controversial, intense and visually stunning.” We talk about her films, the notion of the avant-garde tag, her teenage witch school, violence in cinema, freaky animals and her new film, DISSOLUTION. Interviewed by Mike Plante.