COMPLICATED SPACES—The Evening Class Interview With Heinz Emigholz, Pt. Two

Part One of this interview can be found here.

Guillén: I recently spoke with Pedro Costa who had some interesting things to say about space and filming space. Like yourself, he relies on natural light, not only to get an image with light, but to infer space through off-frame sources of light.

Emigholz: I only use sources of light that are in the house or sunlight. I don't use artificial light, no film lights, in my films because these architects themselves thought about the light situation so much. They placed their houses at certain angles to the light and the landscape. I film wherever possible—where the light is—but I don't throw light into the scene myself.

Guillén: Which leads me to ask about your working methodology when you're shooting. You've clearly done your research, you've established a chronological gameplan for the buildings and how you want to shoot them, you've had to go through the machinations of gaining access and permission, so then you arrive at the building: now what? How much time are you given? Because of the vagaries of weather and the way light is coming into the structure, how much time do you have to create?

Emigholz: I have to start immediately. I make one decision after the other. Usually there are three of us. There's one guy who helps with the camera, which is a really big camera, and he schleps it around. Another person does the sound and talks maybe with the house owner.

Guillén: To keep them out of the way?

Emigholz: I have no time to talk to them. I look at the building and I have to concentrate. It's a complete act of concentration actually. What you said isn't exactly right. I don't know the chronological order of the buildings. When I'm shooting, I'm not really interested. We graph out a travel plan to connect the houses we want to film. The Goff film involved nine thousand miles so, of course, you couldn't shoot chronologically from California to Tulsa and back to California. We film the buildings in proximity so we can do them all in one laid-out trip. The chronology takes place at the editing table, which is an interesting moment when you learn how the houses clash and are connected with each other. That's a fantastic moment. In the Loos film, for example, you'll see that he uses certain elements for a couple of houses in chronology, as if he was using up modules that he had stocked up or something.

What I like is when you arrive at a point and you don't know the weather before. It makes no sense to have written a script for a sunny day and then there's overcast skies. It's better to feel free and that you are open for the situation. It's wonderful to have an overcast day because that means we can do a lot of complicated shots without big F-stop ranges that make it impossible to create certain images because there's too much contrast otherwise, too many shadows. I take the situation like it is and I react very fast to it. I start filming almost immediately and the others have to deal with sometimes complicated social situations. If you look at the DVD for the Goff film, one of us did a film on the side about how we arrived at a building and talked to people. Of course, I have very little time. But it's interesting that an object dictates the number of shots I have to do. First we go around, we go in, and then suddenly something builds up. I have to do this, this, this, this. I look at the light and gauge what we should do in the morning, what we should do in the afternoon. The decisions are made real fast. I don't have to sit and contemplate. I'm just working. Because I can't contemplate by looking through the viewfinder. My decisions to use a certain angle arise from the situation that I find there and then I shoot the image. I'm almost always faster than the people I'm with because I know what I want. When I do one image, it already dictates the next two that I know have to come either after or before. I'm addicted to filmmaking because I like that moment. Your mind has to be on the spot 100%.

Guillén: It's that quality of being present in your films that is its dramatic quality. You have another description you've used here and again—"recognition of the manifest"—which comes into play here. You're saying that—when you come into a place—it reveals itself to you in an obvious way so that you know what you have to do.

Emigholz: And there's always more I could do. I never have the problem of not knowing what to do or having enough to do. Other kinds of problems might arise. For example, in the Loos film I go into a house in Winter and come out in Spring because it was so cold when we first entered, there was ice rain, and we couldn't continue filming. We had to postpone shooting until the Spring. That was a situation I couldn't control. Not only the weather but the light. It was too dark and I didn't want to use artificial light. Otherwise, when I'm shooting I never hesitate because there's always so much to do.

Guillén: In contrast, then, to Pedro Costa who—in order to access his spaces—has elected to minimize his equipment and has switched from film to video, you're very clear about wanting to work with celluloid and the large cameras necessary. Why are you so committed to 35mm?

Emigholz: The high resolution. If there is a video camera in the future that produces that kind of high resolution, of course I will switch to it. For example, I'm doing a whole project now with a new camera called Red. It has a high resolution. A 16mm negative has just a quarter of a 35mm negative. You can cheat in 16mm and video. You can never tell how far objects are away from each other because the space doesn't read. In 35mm, it does and you can't cheat. You can read the space and that's why I like to use it. Of course, when I'm dealing with architectural space, 35mm is what I want to use. But for a current project I'm doing that deals with cityscapes, I'm very excited about using the Red camera.

Guillén: Another quality I like about your filmmaking is its luxurious autonomy. You really are an auteur filming auteur architecture. You film what you want to film. Pym is your production company. You're calling all the shots and—from what I've read—you only pursue the work of an architect if some space they have created has captured your imagination.

Emigholz: But, to be accurate, it's not only my company. Of course, I try to find combatants so, for example, with the Loos film and the Schindler film, I went to Austria to an Austrian company. They knew my work. I said, "Would you want to produce?" because they could access Austrian money. I didn't produce those films with German money. So I work with different companies as well as my own company. Whenever it's possible to do a co-production, I do.

Guillén: Is it primarily contemporary architecture you're interested in? You have no interest in historical architecture?

Emigholz: Yes, sometimes. For my last feature film two large scenes were filmed in the Cologne cathedral and in Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia. But I always choose locations that mean something to me. The Cologne cathedral was the bad guy and La Sagrada Familia was the good guy. [Laughs.]

Guillén: I was delighted to read that you're considering doing a monograph on the Mexican architect Luis Barragán.

Emigholz: I just today bought another book at Moe's about his work.

Guillén: Do you know Adriana Williams?

Emigholz: Who? Adriana Williams? No.

Guillén: She was Barragán's lover in her youth. She now lives in San Francisco and has written a beautiful coffee table volume on him. I thought it might be interesting to link the two of you up. I don't know if you would need her insight for the kind of work you do….

Emigholz: It's not in process yet; but, at a certain point we have to get access to all his buildings and I don't even know if it would work. You can never know beforehand.

Guillén: She's very well-situated socially in Mexico and might be someone who could help you gain access. I got excited when I read that you were interested in his work because I fantasized getting my fingerprints on that project a bit.

Emigholz: If you can help, that would be great. I want to do Barragán and I want to do Pier Luigi Nervi and I want to do a German builder Ulrich Müther—who's done beautiful shell structures all over the world—and I want to do Auguste Perret, a French architect.

Guillén: Has any Japanese architecture intrigued you?

Emigholz: Not really. Schindler's almost Japanese in the beginning. Also, I want to stop the series! I don't know, that might turn you off. [Laughs.] I have three feature film projects that deal a lot with architecture but in a subliminal way and they're not about specific architects.

Guillén: Returning to the sticky thicket of experimental filmmaking—which is something I'm still trying to get a handle on—part of the argument I had with my friend after we watched Schindler's Houses revolved around the issue of non-narrative films. I said I wasn't sure if I would call your films non-narrative. Though they may not be structured narratives, they're certainly narratives about structures. For me, there's a story being told; there's certainly a chronology and a momentum driving the film forward and maintaining my interest, and he complained that chronology is not narrative. I didn't know quite how to respond to that, but, I nonetheless still felt that there was a narrative momentum in your films. Do you think there is?

Emigholz: Yes, and each time I watch them I always see little bits and pieces of stories that come out of the material and tell you something. For me it's—as you've said—you get driven forward and want to see more and want to see how it connects and so on; but, of course, in terms of film narrative that's a really big topic. There are certain rules how these narratives work, how they build interest, and if there's three acts, and if there has to be a conflict and the conflict has to be resolved, all this stuff, and this of course doesn't interest me. Unless you see the film and think, "My God, that building inspires conflict or there's something going on between him and the builder." Sometimes one sees that too. Loos had problems with certain rules in building and he does this to avoid it.

But I find it quite alarming that all these rules about narrative filmmaking are equally applied to documentary filmmaking. You have a certain set of rules if you're going to film a BBC-like documentary. You go into an archives and get a few little bits and pieces of film, you have a pile of photographs, you have a voiceover, you have music, you have the hand of the composer or the architect who makes a drawing; a computer could make such a film. BBC documentaries could be done by machines. But then if you have a certain approach to the spaces, an individual approach, maybe a poetic approach, can you really deal with this world of narrative formulas? You have to find your own way. Maybe that's what experimental documentary is all about. On the other hand, as I've said before, it's rather simple what I try to do. To this day I don't understand why there aren't more films like the films I make. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this documentary form came from schoolteachers preaching content. The teacher tells you what's important and what's not important. Look to the right corner and you'll see something important. But as soon as there's anything like a hierarchy of language—when somebody tells you something and you listen and you don't look somewhere else—then documentary films are guarding you and guiding you through the jungle or the chaos of the photographed world. When they say, "This is content. This is nonsense", it has nothing to do with it.

When I create an image, of course I can compose it and control it to a certain degree, but why do I sit in the cinema and watch my own films? Because I always see something new in them. As if what was there in reality that I filmed really comes through. You can't read it in one reading. As I've also said, with the Internet you can get all sorts of information about Rudolph Schindler in a second. I don't have to use my film time up with that information. I can use my film time to show you the complicated space. If I would put a voiceover narrative on top of my films, it would subtract your energy from experiencing that space.

Guillén: Surprisingly, I felt that when Thom Anderson first appeared in Schindler's Houses. I was startled, distracted, to see a person. For that matter, I was startled to see the three cats!

Emigholz: You see? It's almost like a vacuum cleaner that draws everything to it. You look immediately to the person or the cats and the space recedes. If I would only film shots with people, you wouldn't look at the space.

Guillén: Finally, you have made comments I find so intriguing about the relationship between architectural structures and nature. You've indicated that some of the architects designed their structures with the thought of what the nature surrounding them would become in time. And in my own background leading ecotours to Mayan centers in Guatemala, I frequently observed the romanticized notion of culture or civilization being reclaimed by nature. I would tell my participants, "What you see here are the bones of a civilization covered over in rain forest; but, that's not how these centers once looked. Like Americans, the Maya paved over nature." They preferred the fecund complexity of structures against structures; the "thicket" that you have referred to in describing architecture in European cities. Can you speak about what Mark Peranson has termed the "strange affiliation of culture and nature that houses have."

Emigholz: On the image it is simultaneously there, whether I film part of a branch on a tree or a plant or a house: they're all on the same level. For me, the nature is absolutely necessary. The view through a thicket to a building, connecting trees with buildings, is a topic for me. It's a task I like. You'll find in my films more shots with no building at all in it. Even in the Schindler film, there are a lot of shots there where there's nothing of a Schindler building; but, it deals with nature, structures, and how do I get from one corner to the other. It's a very interesting topic or task to do that. To build up such a contrast between nature and buildings seems to be wrong to me.

Guillén: You call it a "crime" at the beginning of Schindler's Houses.

Emigholz: Yeah. But then you see, for example, how the color wears off so you can see the raw wood underneath. Perhaps I told you this story already but there was one house owner who said, "Well, you can film our house if you give it a new paint job." [Laughs.] Little did that person know that I'm absolutely not interested in new paint and an ideal state of the house. I said, "Thank you, no, we don't have the money to do that." Though the Schindler houses might be beautiful once they're restored, I prefer them before such restoration.

COMPLICATED SPACES—The Evening Class Interview With Heinz Emigholz, Pt. One

As I detailed in my previous entry on the PFA program "Architecture As Autobiography", German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz accompanied several of his films to Berkeley. My thanks to Shelley Diekman and Kathy Geritz for negotiating some one-on-one time with Emigholz and for inviting me to have dinner with him later that evening. He's kind, charming, his eyes light up with mirth, and he's about as brilliant as they come.

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Michael Guillén: It's my understanding that Schindler's Houses is the twelfth installment in your ongoing project "Photography and Beyond", which you initiated in the early '80s?

Heinz Emigholz: The first film was done in 1984 followed by a long pause because, in effect, I didn't realize this was the first film in the series until I started back up in 2001. There is a subgroup called "Architecture As Autobiography"; but, the whole series "Photography and Beyond" includes other films as well; films about writing and drawing.

Guillén: Much like Rudolph Schindler's interlocking architecture, your own creative ventures seem intricately interlocked. Can you give me something of an artist's mission statement about what exactly you're striving for with "Photography and Beyond"? And how the subgroups fit into the overall structure of the project?

Emigholz: "Photography and Beyond" involves the product of human design that are already structured and then I come along with my camera and do something further with it. It means that you have to read your retina. The "beyond" is your brain that reads your retina activities. You have to have a certain attitude about your vision and how you look, how you gaze, and how you actually read what enters your mind through the eyes. This sounds a little bit banal, but the film photography is the main point of what I'm trying to say. I want to activate certain work or activity in the mind of the onlooker. This is what it's all about. The "beyond" is not a heaven or anything; it means I'm interested in the processes that take place behind the retina in reading the information that enters the brain through the retina.

Guillén: It sounds like you're trying to strip away interpretive information to gain more direct access to what you're seeing?

Emigholz: In a way, too, it's a form of concentration. When your mind is active while looking at something, it's a concentrated act. It's not an unconscious act. Well, in a way, it will always stay unconscious activity; but, a lot of consciousness is brought to it because the act of reading is a conscious act.

Guillén: So the "Photography and Beyond" project includes not only the architectural films but other photographic and cinematic documents?

Emigholz: Yes. Plus, up to now there are seven or eight films about architecture. "Photography and Beyond" Part Eleven, for example, is a collection of 60 short films about recent modern architecture in Austria by living architects that—assembled together—run five and a half hours.

Guillén: So the subgroup "Architecture As Autobiography" is something of a historical reclamation project? Clearly you're using the oeuvre of these auteur architects to reveal how they have told us about themselves through their constructions; but, are you not also layering in your own biography?

Emigholz: In a way. When you spend so much time on a project, as I have for the last 10-15 years, it becomes a part of your own autobiography. The way I see things and objects and situations may be inductive of how I see and how I think; but, mainly I would think it's about the work of the architects. I show you their work in a chronological order so it can make sense for you when you combine all these houses and buildings, all the material I offer. The language of architects is architecture. You have to read their language and—though they do not write—they build their autobiography.

Guillén: I ask the question because you not only situate the architecture in chronological order to reveal an architect's creative evolution; but, you likewise inform your audiences of when you have photographed the structures. There's an informational counterpoint going on; two chronological currents.

Emigholz. I don't want to be ideological with this work. While I choose the architects who I wish to film, and while that might already be a point, and though there might be many architects whose work I don't include even if I think their work is wonderful, there are three obvious facts that I can tell you before you look at a sequence: 1) the name of the building; 2) the date it was built; and 3) the day I was there to film it. On the day you watch the film, you can then make a connection between the three dates and create a triangulation of time. In all these films I put the days of my work in there because, in a certain way, they turn into documentaries about the years I shot them. There's so much material in the houses and around the houses that tell a story about the particular time I shot the film. I found it necessary not to approach or present the buildings in a kind of timeless fashion, as if to say this is the ideal state they're in and they should stay like this, or this is how they should look, or anything like that. I just say, "This is how they look" and how they looked on that particular day. This is very important to me because I don't like certain ways of photographing architecture, where artificial light is used to dramatize the structure or certain lenses are used to try to present an idealized state of the building. That's exactly what I do not want to do. Buildings are surrounded by society and surrounded by time and procedures in time. Maybe the Schindler buildings weren't built to last forever. They might have been built to last for only a certain while and then to fall apart. You see the efforts now that people take to keep them up, to conserve them, and those efforts at conservation are, likewise, a sign of the times.

Guillén: As someone who favors aesthetics of ephemerality, that's one of the aspects I most enjoyed about Schindler's Houses: how you captured the variant states of repair or disrepair of the buildings. Some are looking quite stately and glamorous up on the hillside while others are water-stained and pockmarked, looking somewhat worse for wear. Some of the interiors are quite chic while others are a bit lived in and threadbare. I enjoy applying aesthetics of ephemerality to architecture. The erosive and gradual shift into delapidation fascinates me as a testament of the weathering of time. And, as you say, reconstructive efforts to thwart that onslaught are equally fascinating. There's a certain chance to it all, why some buildings survive and others don't.

My training is in Maya studies and that's possibly the only realm I've applied a concerted focus on architecture. There the aesthetics of ephemerality have reduced structures to ruins, which in turn entertain a certain popularity and provide a certain allure for tourists. Your comment about the triangulation of time recalls me to an architectural device the Maya frequently used in ornamenting their doorway lintels with hieroglyphic carvings. Frequently, especially in the Usumacinta basin, their structures were long, horizontal, with three doorways. The carved lintels above each doorway depicted a sequential moment in a ritual act, much like a comic book strip, but epigraphy has revealed that the ritual sequence was not historically bound to any one period or any one individual. In fact, the Maya seemed more concerned with stressing the aspect of time rather than the tense of time. History is not something for them that has happened. History is something that constantly happens. And that's an observed truth you notice each time you look at these architectural artworks. I associate that with what you're saying.

Emigholz: They had a completely different conception of time.

Guillén: The vigor of the sound design in your films is what drew me—as the onlooker—into the present and into the presence of these structures. Not only was I having an intellectual experience about them, but I was having a sensate experience through the soundscapes. Can you speak about the insinuated continuity of space past the frame and how you use your audio design to likewise insinuate that continuance and to create a sense of immediacy?

Emigholz: Yes. It's not synchronous sound. That would not have made sense because all of the shots are just five to ten seconds. What we did was we recorded the sounds around the houses from different angles and perspectives. Then we created a sequence of the sounds which we designed with these recordings. All the sounds we recorded for any given building were used to create a soundscape for that building. Each building has a very special surrounding soundscape. I must say it was quite an elaborate process.

Guillén: Would you consider your architectural films experimental documentaries?

Emigholz: I would say they are hardcore documentaries because I have found a very simple form—though it's complex at the same time—of documenting the work of these architects. What's "experimental" about it when you show all the buildings of one person and put them in a certain order? When I came to this solution, I was shocked that this type of film hadn't been made before. It's not so much "experimental" as it is artistic research.

Guillén: As an aside, I attended the Schindler's Houses screening with a friend of mine, a photographer and experimental filmmaker, who I thought was going to really appreciate your films. Instead, we got into a heated debate after the film walking to BART. He didn't like what you were doing at all. He said you were in serious need of a bubble level.

Emigholz: [Chuckles.] That always happens. I'm used to that. I take it easy.

Guillén: Can we talk a little bit about how your films trigger that contention? What are the qualities of so-called formal architectural photography that you consciously work against in your films?

Emigholz: It's not so much about going against as it is going for something else. I'm very positive about what I want to read. When you walk around a building and you look at it, your head and your mind is always changing positions. I'll lean my head to the right side, I'll lean to the left, I'll look up, I'll look down. This kind of activity is rarely represented in film or, if so, like in Hollywood movies, canted angles are used to express a demented mind. They let you know the guy is ripe for the nut house. This is already a linguistic device inside of filmmaking; but, I'm not interested in these kind of languages. I'm interested in how I react to certain spaces. My head is not screwed to my vertebrae at 90° or 180° angles. It's totally loose on my vertebrae and I want to use that kind of freedom in my photography. It's banal to spend too much time proving there's a horizon or gravity. Everybody knows that. Nothing can fall out of the picture. [Laughs.]

When you look at a certain gaze that I project into space, photography is very much about taking something in. I project a certain gaze into space and you, the viewer, has to read that. You have to work on it to get that complicated space right or to read it in comparison to the other images I present. It's really true that—when you work in a kind of film language—if you always have these 90° or 180° angles right, then you work within limited possibilities to connect images and to edit them together. There are certain rules of editing that I can avoid by doing two completely different framings. A lot more angles are possible and there are a lot more possibilities to connect images. That sounds a little too "insider"; but, it has the effect that I can construct images that are as complex as reality.

Let's say I want to combine that lamp there [Emigholz gestures to a light fixture towards the corner of the room] with this point here [Emigholz references the corner of the desk] and this [Emigholz points to the floor]. What I would have to do is step 10 meters away to get all three points straight on in one frame. But what I could do is angle the camera like so and I will capture these three points in the image. This is what it's about. I try to connect entities inside of an architectural situation that might not usually be connected. I do this to create the space. I have to do this. It has nothing to do with being "against" anything. This 90° photography—where everything is filmed straight on—is a singular case; it's just one possibility of all the possibilities. Sometimes I use it. I'm not on a mission "against" that. It's just not up to the level of what I want to achieve.

Guillén: In his Cinema Scope essay on Schindler's Houses, Mark Peranson describes how your camera placement "dissect[s] the space along straight lines through an oft-canted frame." And Doug Cummings—who has written so insightfully and thoroughly about your work at his site Film Journey—highlights how these canted images juxtaposed against each other induce a playful feeling of motion in the body.

Emigholz: A lot of rhythms in space are possible. Lines overlap each other and create a certain sensation when you look at them. Of course, I'm not looking only for lines that juxtapose or counterpoint each other, as you've mentioned. With film as a surface art, I have to deal with a lot of surfaces within one frame. Then there are colors. There is not only positive space, but negative space. There's space between volumes. With photography it's just the same whether I have a piece of sky or piece of stone. Both take a certain amount of space on my plane, you know? Everything three-dimensional becomes two-dimensional on the plane of my image. I compose these planes. That's my way of working and I'm having fun doing it. But I'm not having fun doing it the other way where I try to get it all straight. To get it straight means you have to heavily distort the image and—for a lot of architectural photographers—it's their business to do that.

Guillén: One of my favorite quotes is from Austrian architect Hundertwasser who says the straight line is godless.

Emigholz: [Laughs.] Well, I wouldn't mix it up with religion. Anyway, it's just one case out of many possible solutions; it's just one solution.

Guillén: Your training wasn't in architecture?

Emigholz: No, I'm an amateur like you. I just love complicated spaces. I love to work with complicated spaces in film so I started as a cinematographer for my own films. This is what I love to do: to create somatic events and spaces in frames and planes in images.

Guillén: I thoroughly enjoyed your Cinema Scope essay on King Vidor's film The Fountainhead. Yours is a wry and unique perspective on film and I encourage you to write more essays. You mentioned earlier about how skewered angles indicate mental instability and that would be a fascinating subject right there.

Emigholz: I'm actually working on another essay that might appear in a future issue of Cinema Scope. That previous essay and the one I'm working on are both part of a book I'm writing. The book is in German and it's kind of a very strange diary about one day in Los Angeles. I've continued that diary and it's about films and events and architecture and so on.

Guillén: Though you weren't trained in architecture, can you recall if there was a first building that was an aesthetic arrest for you and got you all intrigued in architecture and in playing with complicated spaces? Where did that impulse come from?

Emigholz: I started with films that analyzed filmic movement. These were pixillation films with landscape. I started in the '70s with that. To analyze the filmic pan, the rotation. It sounds very abstract but it was a kind of music for me in the sense that I composed them for single frames. That was a program I did for a couple of years. I did five or six films that way. At the same time I was actively studying Rodchenko and Russian modern photography in the '10s and '20s. There were some German photographers too who went into that field where they actually brought a Constructivistic view into the world; a kind of cubist consciousness about what you could do with an object in space, with representing it in space. The first film where I used this camera was in 1975 after all these musical, strongly composed films. I started to use a handheld camera again. I actually did real-time shots, not just animated time, so I shot 24 frames and I projected 24 frames. That happened in San Diego in 1975 when I did that again and that was for me a revelation to go into space photography—let's call it that—and continue working there. From then on, I've done this.

Guillén: One of my first influences when I was a young man was an architect, Jay Pace, who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. He taught me that architects were truly poets of space. Working with space is a certain form of material poetry. That's what I commend you for. I feel you have poetically accessed these complicated spaces. I liked a term you brought up in one of your interviews where you talked about "feeling with the eyes." There's a synaesthetic quality to your work. I like when you talk about its musicality. You're melding art approaches through the medium of film.

Emigholz: I've given a lot of thought to the so-called language of film and the logic of film. There are certain semiotic approaches that move in that field and make up a language or logic of filmic imagery; but, I wouldn't use these words. I would always talk about the poetics of film, the poetics of surfaces, of bringing them together or showing them in space. It's very clear when you look at my films that they're not sensational. I say I'm going to show you 40 buildings and then I show you 40 buildings. [Laughs.] I don't do more but I do it in a certain way. I don't dramatize it. If you go into it and meditate about it, there might be an outcome for you because you can think about the work of that person and what that person experimented with, how they came up to solutions, and so on. I would say that to do a film—it sounds almost boring when you tell someone what I do with film; it sounds like, "Okay, wow, really? 40 buildings."—but, of course, you know that in every single image there can be such an event taking place or a different kind of order of events. For example, there might be something in the air. There might be a little wind or something. Poetry, too, deals with these kinds of sensations. It's not about a car chase. I've never read a poem about a car chase. Maybe there is one, I don't know. [Laughs.]

Guillén: You've used the term "meditative"—as several writers have responding to your work—and I won't disagree with the term; however, I prefer the term "contemplative" in its true etymological sense of being "within the temple." In your case, within the structure, or within your somatic experience of the structure if—indeed, as they say—the body is a temple. I guess when I think of "meditative", I imagine some outcome, or some concern for outcome (perhaps attachment to or detachment from). With "contemplative" I envision more an observation of space wherein things do happen. The themes that came across to me in the sequence of 40 buildings were actually multivalent and deep: themes about context, time, the aesthetics of ephemerality, how space is defined.

Emigholz: The thing is that everyone is living within a house and, thus, these are familiar observations. You might be living in a house unconsciously but, even then, you can relate.

This interview continues here.

THE VISITOR—The Evening Class Interview With Tom McCarthy

After drilling the dentist, I relinquished Jenkins to his next journalist while I walked across the hall to speak with The Visitor's writer-director, Tom McCarthy, a strikingly energetic and goodlooking man with a bright smile that helped me take root in the moment. He apologized for the interviews running a bit late. It was his fault. Hurrying down from his suite, he spilled coffee all over himself and had to rush back to his room to change.

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Michael Guillén: Mr. Tom, The Visitor is a wonderful film. Congratulations on following up on the beloved Station Agent with yet another film that audiences are relating to so well.

Tom McCarthy: Thank you very much.

Guillén: You wrote the script with Richard Jenkins in mind? What did you see in Richard?

McCarthy: First and foremost, knowing I was going to have four main actors, with three of them being non-American actors, or at least not very familiar to American audiences—Danai actually has dual citizenship with Zimbabwe and America—I felt like I needed a guy who could really not tip the scale. To throw a big Hollywood star in that role—although there are many wonderful actors—didn't feel right to me. There were many things but that's where it started. I thought, "Who could I get for this role who could disappear into it and who will represent an everyman? And an everyman that possibly is an extraordinary?" I started combing through a very short list of American character actors who I felt could fill that need and I just very quickly settled on Richard. I felt he was right in many ways.

We were working in L.A. together—well, not together, we were working on separate movies but we were both in L.A.—and we sat down and had dinner. By the end of that conversation, it felt right and I knew I was going to write the script for him. A year later I handed him the script.

Guillén: It's a great gift you've given to him and, by extension, to us because he is such a familiar face and this is the role that will give him the name recognition he deserves.

McCarthy: Yeah, it's funny, traveling with this movie in the last three-four weeks, it's been exciting to see him getting this sort of recognition and feedback, not only from the critics but from audiences. That's really the wonderful part of this junket circuit, when you actually get to sit in on all these screenings and get immediate feedback from the audiences. In a lot of interviews I do people say, "Wow, you were so brave to cast Richard in this role and to give him this opportunity" and then they always follow that in the same breath with, "But I've always loved him." [Chuckles.] So maybe it's not the bravest thing. I think it was just an obvious thing that a lot of people had overlooked because he was ready and—as you say—he is beloved.

Guillén: You're so multi-talented. You act. You write. You direct. As I was reviewing the press notes, I was intrigued by your process of casting while you're writing the script so that the writing becomes a process in which you hold the actor in mind. Can you talk a bit about the benefits or drawbacks of writing that way?

McCarthy: I don't know what the drawbacks are because—as you say—it's a process I've been adopting. There's a lot of how-to-make-a-movie guidelines; but, I think I constantly try to blur the line and put things out of order so to speak to get the most out of the people I'm working with. For instance, I would give my editor Tom McArdle a draft of the script before we even started shooting—maybe even a year before—and say, "Hey, read this. Let's start talking about it." And get feedback from this guy who I work very intimately with in the second half of the film process so why not include him earlier? See what he thinks about information about character, about style, y'know, how he sees it as an editor. It's a fascinating process.

With regard to casting Richard in the movie, it's just tremendously helpful to start writing. It makes the part so much more personal when you get a three-dimensional sense of who this person is. You can get a sense of their spirit and their personal rhythm and combine the two. That's always finalized in the two weeks of rehearsal. I always rehearse for two weeks prior to shooting. Part of that rehearsal is not just to make sure the actors understand what they're doing and get them on the same page; but, to fine tune the script. It's the final step in bringing the character and the actor together for me on the page. It makes the process more personal for me.

Guillén: From the page, then, to the screen, how do you develop the pacing and rhythm of the film? I was telling Richard about two of my favorite moments—among several moments in the film—but two which really stood out for me for subtly portraying such depth of grief and they were when Richard entered the apartment and glanced at flowers in the room. I read that as his being so detached from life that the evidence of life was startling to him. Richard credited you for those moments, saying you know how to let the camera linger. How do you figure out that pacing from the page to the screen?

McCarthy: That's a great question. It's a process that continues right through the editing. I turn that back to Tom McArdle, my editor, and say, "How can we keep things moving and stay out of the audience's way but at the same time maintain the pace that we think is necessary to let this story unfold?" A big part of that is in the storytelling and in the editing, just to hang a little bit ahead of the audience. So we're cutting from Walter walking out into the street and saying, "Do you have a place to stay tonight?", not having them answer, but all of a sudden he's back in the apartment and Tarek emerges from the bedroom. It's little things like that which keeps the movie paced at a rhythm that is consistent with our style; but, at the same point, we maintain a tension in the movie. We subtly try to stay ahead of the audience and I think it creates its own tension, so to speak. It keeps the audience involved in the film, both in an emotional way and intellectually on some level.

Guillén: Speaking of tension, the political tension in The Visitor takes something of a back seat to its character-driven narrative and, yet, it's quite present, quite evident, quite relevant. As I discussed with Richard, I appreciated that the film does not offer false remedy. We also discussed how Walter's marrying Mouna could have resolved some of the heartbreaking issues of the film but that such a remedy would have rung false.

McCarthy: Right. Absolutely. We get that question a lot, especially with the more general public. Really, honestly, practically, that couldn't happen that quickly or that easily. Most importantly, in my mind, emotionally these two people aren't those type of people. They're not 24. I have two friends in New York, a young woman who just married this gay man because he wants to live here with his partner and they're all best friends. They didn't even think twice about it; but, they're all much younger than me. I asked them, "Have you guys thought this thing through? [Laughter.] It's wonderful. I love you all; but…!" I felt like this old man. I'm trying to do the math in my head. They got married, had the wedding, had a big party, it was a lot of fun. And I think it will all work out. There's that carefreeness, that courage and abandon at 24, that I think Walter and Mouna don't have.

Guillén: And for young people a year or two means nothing because in their minds they have so many left.

McCarthy: Exactly. That's exactly how they all treated it. That said, they have the time, it's a lot of work, like a credit to them, they put in their time taking pictures, visiting families, all these things they have to do to say, "Hey, we're getting married" not just to have a green card. It's a long process. So we find things speed up in The Visitor in a way we can't predict, especially regarding Tarek's fate, and—although Walter marrying Mouna to resolve these issues would be nice—I don't think it's realistic for this one.

Guillén: I'm grateful you didn't take that route. So though The Visitor offers no false remedy, the film is being heralded as having much hope. Can you speak to what it is in the film that's inspiring that hope? And how it works against the frustration most Americans are feeling in the face of these nearly inhumane bureaucracies?

McCarthy: That's a really good question actually. I think the hope comes out of the connection of these people. I know from traveling quite a bit and seeing people in all walks of life, that I'm always amazed at how we hear one thing about, let's say, the Syrians and then you go to Syria, you meet the Syrian people, and what a great group of people. Whenever that happens, whenever I connect with people, let's say I'm sitting at a table in New York with a guy from Israel and a woman from Lebanon and they're getting on fantastically weeks after the invasion happened two years ago, or something like that, and discussing it in an open and honest, give-and-take way. There's a lot of hope in that. The Visitor has that. Ultimately, we put our hearts into these characters who do connect in a dramatic, awkward and—at times—a funny way; but, they do connect. There's hope in that. A government can't take that away. They can control so many other things but that's something that can survive. Quite often after this movie people want to know what happens next to these characters; they're that invested. Last night at the screening up at San Rafael, the audience kept asking, "What happened to this person? To that person?" When that happens, when an audience is connecting with the characters in such a way, we've done our job right. It's a real credit to the actors.

Guillén: You present empathy as a political option.

McCarthy: Right. Or as a starting place. And I don't try to answer a lot of questions in this movie. Rather, I say, "Hey, as we move forward—especially in the run up to the elections where this has suddenly become a front page issue (when I wrote this three years ago, it wasn't such an issue)—hey, as we're talking about this issue, remember it's a human issue first and foremost and not just a political issue. It's a social issue. It's a human issue." It's easy to forget that, even for a lot of very smart people.

Guillén: In terms of shifting gears, you've finished up The Visitor and are now acting again in Duplicity for Tony Gilroy? Is it hard to shift gears?

McCarthy: No! It really isn't. I love acting. First and foremost, I'll always be an actor. It's such a pleasure to go work with people who I respect and enjoy so much. I love being on set and thinking about nothing but acting. After you write and direct a movie, and your mind is going—in a beautiful way—in a million directions, it's so nice to be on set and be like lah lah de dah. I think I'll go chat with Julia Roberts for a while. I think I'll watch Tom Wilkinson work for a day and chat him up. I'll watch Bob Elswit, who's shooting the movie, because I've known Bob for a while now. I've worked on two movies that he's shot. It's a joy. It's pleasant and very informative in a lot of ways to just be a fly on the wall for all these wonderful directors.

Guillén: Does acting inform your writing?

McCarthy: Absolutely. Now it all informs each other. I don't even know what's informing what anymore; but, it's all the same process. It's storytelling. I'll sit down on the set and talk to Tony about this, that or the other and—when you get right down to it—there aren't that many directors, especially people whose work I really respect, so that when you have the time to work with these guys, not just be on the set but intimately involved in the work process, it's incredibly informative. You get to sit there and talk in a way that's very personal and communicate on issues that we as directors understand and confront. I've only directed two movies, as has Tony once he's finished this one, so it's great and incredibly helpful to have that kind of exchange.

Guillén: Well, on my part, I feel personally grateful to have the opportunity to thank you, Tom, for this film. It puts a human face on such an important issue. I can already rank it as one of my top ten of the year. It's such a lovely film. I missed it when it played at Toronto because it's such a quiet film that it got run over by so many other loudmouths; but, I'm delighted its reached its theatrical distribution and hopeful that audiences will appreciate its value.

McCarthy: I hope so. It's been a lovely journey. You're right about Toronto. It was such a crazy, huge festival and by the end people began talking about The Visitor, and afterwards people were talking about The Visitor, but while we were there it was a small film in a big sea. We had a wonderful premiere at Sundance and, since then, the movie has rolled out in a slow, gentle way. People have really been responding and, of course, that's the most gratifying thing.

Guillén: On that note, my final question regards being a small film among big films cohabiting New York City locations. I was laughing at something Richard said in one of his interviews where he quipped that they'll gladly close Central Park for I Am Legend but good luck for The Visitor.

McCarthy: We were, of course, shooting in Washington Park also because it's right outside NYU and it's where Richard sees the stick drummers and has a couple of scenes in there. We see him again listening to them while he's eating the pizza, which is a scene I really love in the movie. I Am Legend shot in there a month before us. They weren't supposed to, of course, but they bought the whole park and I live there, I walk my dog in that park, and it looked like a military operation, literally, they had so much equipment. I guess they really ticked the City off by doing things they said they weren't going to do, including setting off some explosions. So the City blocked it off. They said no one can use that location for three months. We said, "Well, we've already shot the first half. We need to go back and finish it." No. No. No. Finally, and luckily, they said, "Okay, you can go in but no equipment. You can bring a camera." [Laughs.] So we were in there with everyone holding something that they could possibly work. Fortunately for the film and our style, we could make that work because it was a very personal, intimate look at New York and we weren't doing anything too technically crazy.

Guillén: Thank you very much for your time today, Tom.

McCarthy: A real pleasure. Thank you for your comments.

Cross-published on Twitch.

04/20/08 UPDATE: Michelle Martin conducts an NPR interview with Tom McCarthy, Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman.

Elizabeth Blair's NPR podcast teases out how the spare classical piano and the rhythmic djembe summarize—by contrast—the plot of The Visitor. Tom McCarthy says Walter's experience with the two instruments "says a lot about how the character gets transformed over the course of the film." Both Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman discuss how learning to play the djembe helped develop their characterizations. Blair's podcast includes McCarthy's comments on how he recruited acclaimed composer Jan Kaczmarek—himself a Polish immigrant—by sidestepping salary and contract issues and delivering a copy of the film directly to Kaczmarek who, upon seeing it, made himself available. Further, he discusses how he researched the immigration and deportation issues at the heart of the film.

Bob Mondello adds in his own NPR podcast that Tom McCarthy "isn't intent on drumming messages into the audiences' head so much as he is in using drumming to reveal character through smartly nuanced performances."

As Rob Davis phrases it in his Paste review: "[W]e discover that Walter's late wife was a pianist, which makes his desire to play the piano wonderfully ambiguous. Is he seeking something new or trying to reconnect with something lost? He may not know himself, but when his interest serendipitously turns from the piano to the drum, McCarthy seems to offer a window into Walter's soul." Rob offers additional commentary on his Errata podcast from Sundance, where he caught The Visitor.

04/21/08 UPDATE: Howard Feinstein at Filmmaker writes: "That people, particularly Arabs, are subject to the horrors of a dehumanizing set of detention centers is anathema to McCarthy, and he refuses in his film to simplify the system to make it palatable for the viewer. Rather, he deconstructs it, bypassing abstraction and honing in on one typically windowless facility in a rundown section of Queens as an archetype of its excesses. 'These are not just horrible detention offices policed by bogeymen,' he explains. 'Instead what you see inside them is a faceless bureaucracy. Many of these institutions are privatized, run by a huge company. They hire people from the usually depressed surrounding community and pay them a low or minimum wage.' The workers inside are distant, nasty. 'These employees are not the most equipped at dealing with prisoners.' " [The Filmmaker photo of McCarthy is courtesy of Henny Garfunkle/Retna Ltd.]

THE VISITOR—The Evening Class Interview With Richard Jenkins

I've already lathered praise on Tom McCarthy's sophomore feature The Visitor, which is opening up theatrically in the Bay Area this weekend. I had the chance to talk with lead actor Richard Jenkins as he was being shuttled around on press junket between journalists. Just before he got to me, he turned to where I was waiting and quipped, "The dentist will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience."

* * *

Michael Guillén: [Singing] "I've grown accustomed to your face. It's second nature to me now." [Jenkins chuckles.] Your performance as Walter Vale in The Visitor, however, is the role that will give you name recognition as well. From hereon in we will know who Richard Jenkins is. It's a stellar performance.

Richard Jenkins: Thank you.

Guillén: Can you speak a bit about your acting background? You've been around for quite a while. How have you developed your style of acting?

Jenkins: Harold Guskin is the first name I'll throw out there. He was the coach that I studied with in graduate school. I went to undergraduate school and thought I was just wonderful. I was so good. [Chuckles.] And then I went to graduate school at Indiana University in the Indiana Theatre Company, which is a graduate touring company, and Harold was in the company with me. He was a little older than we were and we were doing The Importance of Being Earnest, Antigone, and Twelfth Night. And I was just awful in all three of them. He played Teresias, the blind soothsayer, in Antigone. He replaced an actor. He rehearsed it at home and then came in and did his part cold and he was fabulous. I thought, "Oh my God." I knew he taught acting so I said, "Could I study acting with you?" He said, "I wondered when you were going to ask." That's when I started to develop a point of view about what I do, with him, and I'm a slow learner so it's taken me a lot of years to really incorporate and believe in it.

Guillén: One of the qualities that I've admired over the years is the lived-in experiential texture of your performances, particularly in this performance in The Visitor. You have such an economy in what you do on film. So much is conveyed through so little. It amazes me and I wonder how you learned to do that?

Jenkins: You have to trust that people will understand what's going on in your head, if something's going on in your head. Our tendency as actors is to explain who we are. It was my tendency for years, as opposed to just being it, doing it, and trusting that people will make an emotional connection. It's a very hard lesson to learn. You think you have to—we call it "show and tell"—you have to say, like, "I'm happy now!" Do you know what I mean? And, as I said, I'm a slow learner because it's a hard thing to trust. "Am I interesting enough? Are they watching me? Are they bored? I can't begin." But it's true. There is an emotional connection that only happens when you're not lying.

Guillén: Your performance reminded me of diarist Anaïs Nin's description of the large dimension found in small gestures. In The Visitor specifically there are two moments that moved me profoundly, like stones dropping into water and falling rapidly into depth. I felt this drop into depth in my body; a palpable grief. These were two moments when you entered the apartment and each time noticed flowers in a vase. For me that registered your character's awareness that there was life present in the apartment.

Jenkins: That's very interesting. I would give Tom McCarthy credit for that one. I hate to do it; but, I will. [Chuckles.] Tom was willing to watch this stuff, take it in, so that an audience could see it. Sometimes a director will move [a scene along too fast] so that it doesn't allow whatever is happening to happen. If you can't see it, it doesn't matter what you do. So I give him credit. He was amazing with the camera and how much he lingered on things. Sometimes he would be on a face that you wouldn't think would be the focus of the scene; but, he found things that interested him in the movie and he moved the camera there. He's the most patient filmmaker I've ever worked with.

Guillén: He wrote this script for you?

Jenkins: Yes, he wrote the script for me. So I said, "Jeez, if I can't do this, I'm really in trouble!" We had dinner. I barely knew him and we went out to eat and talked for a couple of hours. A year or a year and a half later he said, "I wrote this part for you."

Guillén: You were no doubt surprised?

Jenkins: Yes!

Guillén: What do you think he saw in you?

Jenkins: I think he saw some kind of everyman. Somebody who could walk down a New York street and no one would stop to stare at him. Tom liked things he'd seen me do and he was kind of stewing about this character for a long time. After we ate he said, "I saw qualities in you that I felt Walter had." When I read the script, I thought, "I understand this. I really understand this." Sometimes you read scripts and you think, "There are so many guys who could do this better than I can." But this one, I thought, "If I don't get to do this, it will be really hard on me."

Guillén: You are a countenanced actor, in the sense that heart and mind interplay actively in your performances. Before I attached your name to your performances, whenever you would come on screen, you would feel familiar, and I would feel comfortable watching you. Again, that experiential texture I was talking about earlier. As if my life experience immediately found a comfort zone in yours. As someone who's getting up in years, what I've long appreciated in your performances is the play between humor and gravity that you usually don't find until someone's lived in their body for a while.

The final image of The Visitor, which serves as the poster for the film, of Walter Vale drumming in the subway station, can you talk to me a bit about what you feel is being said in that image?

Jenkins: It was a funny feeling of anger and freedom. I was really pissed off but at the same time I felt really free and alive. It was that combination. Because there were a lot of people that weren't in the movie who were just walking by and the camera was way away so I felt alone in that situation. I would never do that on my own. The fact that I could sit down there and play and play loud and play as fast as I did, was freeing.

Guillén: One of the things I most appreciated about The Visitor—and I can honestly say this film is already within one of my top ten of the year—was that it didn't offer false remedy. The script could have gone in different directions. Walter could have married Mouna to resolve some of the heartbreaking issues in the narrative.

Jenkins: If there's one question that we get over and over, it's that one. "What are you doing?!" But, you know, as we were filming it, that never crossed my mind because emotionally neither one of us were ready.

Guillén: Exactly. She still honored her husband. You still honored your wife. For the two of you to partner would have rung false.

Jenkins: You're right. It would have been false. It would have been tacking something on. As an actor you know when you're playing something that feels forced or phony or a lie. I know that if Tom would have asked us to play the scene that way, no one would have been happy; it would have felt wrong.

Guillén: So though the film doesn't offer that remedy, precisely for being inauthentic, The Visitor has been heralded as inspiring much hope. What do you perceive as the nature of that hope? What is the film giving its audiences?

Jenkins: It's people who never would cross paths who are thrown in together. The connection they make is, I think, incredibly hopeful. They're totally different people with totally different backgrounds who find a connection that is really deep and lasting. I think that's incredibly hopeful.

Guillén: There's also something to be said for the shift in relationship with bureaucratic forces. The other scene that moved me was when Walter is in the detention center and the security guard keeps telling him to step away from the window. There was a lot of frustrated energy in that scene. What would you say is being said to American citizens with that scene?

Jenkins: If I thought that way, I couldn't have done the scene. I think I added, "Do you hear me?" That's what was so frustrating: the realization, finally, that you are helpless. I say to Zainab, "We'll get him out. Don't worry about it." It's like, "I'm here now. We'll get him out." But the truth is, he's helpless, he's absolutely helpless, and that realization is powerful. Until he faces that guy, Walter thinks everything's going to be okay.

Guillén: Your interaction with Mouna (Hiam Abbass) is wonderfully palpable, especially in that scene when she comes to guide you away. In her wisdom, in her embodiedness, in her awareness of grief and loss and the hard face of bureaucracy, she can come in and help you transition.

Jenkins: She's so selfless in this movie. That's a tribute to Hiam. She's had a very interesting life herself. There is a wisdom about her and there is an understanding of the world about her that Walter or I don't have; that I didn't bring with me to this movie. She says, "There's nothing we can do. Come on." Later she asks me—which I always thought was incredibly selfless—"Are you okay?" She asks me if I'm okay. But the way she does it seems—I don't know—it's hard to do. I know that if I were in that situation, it would be a hard thing for me to pull off as an actor and she does it effortlessly in both of those scenes because I think it has something to do with her experience in the world.

Guillén: What's next for you? What are you working on now?

Jenkins: I'm not working on anything right now; but, I'm in the new Will Ferrell movie Step Brothers—which, of course, is just like The Visitor—with John C. Reilly. Then I'm in the new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading that opens in September.

Guillén: I look forward to your performances in both of those and commend you again for your stellar performance in The Visitor. I'm afraid you're going to be put on the rack in the year to come with all the attention, which has its plus and minuses.

Jenkins: [Laughs.] Yes, it does. It was an incredible experience and—as I said to Tom—I waited my professional life to do something like this, to be in a movie like this.

Cross-published on Twitch.

SFIFF51--The Mother Of All No-Shows and the Let's Name Asia's Baby Contest

It now appears that neither Dario nor Asia will be attending SFIFF51. D'oh!! Those darn Argentos (contracted as D'arngentos)! I now need to unload two tickets to the 10:30 screening of The Mother Of All Tears, if anyone's interested. I was only going to subject myself to that questionable experience because I thought they were going to be there. If not, I'd rather go catch The Golem. All this has come about because Asia's going to have a baby. I think we should help her choose a name, don't you? What would you name Asia's baby? I vote for Satan.

PROGRAMMER PROFILE: JOEL SHEPARD

When Sean Uyehara spoke with Yerba Buena Center for the Art's film and video curator Joel Shepard for SF360 roughly a year ago, he described Joel as just "about as understated as it gets." Clearly, a healthy dose of humility helps Joel Shepard maintain perspective. But it only takes a cursory glance at YBCA's upcoming film programs to determine Joel's brave, exploratory if not downright edgy vision. I thought it was high time he and I had a talk so I was pleased when he accepted my invitation for Thai food at Cha'am.

* * *

Michael Guillén: So Joel, you're going into your second decade of programming.

Joel Shepard: Oh God….

Guillén: That's remarkable! Roughly half of that time has been at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ("YBCA")? Where were you programming before YBCA?

Shepard: I moved to San Francisco in 1994. I worked for the San Francisco Cinematheque for three years. I wasn't the programmer there; I was the associate director. I moved from Minneapolis and I was programming there for two organizations for about five years.

Guillén: How did you score the position at YBCA?

Shepard: I was working at Cinematheque and I wasn't particularly happy there. I wanted to get back into more fulltime programming. Yerba Buena hired a new executive director who came from Minneapolis. I knew him from there. We had worked together on some projects. At that time, YBCA didn't have a developed film program. They had the screening room but they didn't really know what they were doing. They had someone who would organize a screening once in a while. When my friend from Minneapolis hired on as executive director, he decided he wanted to have a film program that would be on par with the visual and performing arts programs. So they opened up the job and I ended up getting it. I was very lucky. I got to pretty much build the program from scratch to get things the way I wanted them to be. They didn't even have the 35mm projector yet. It wasn't a proper screening room. You can't do a real film program without 35mm. That was something I had to make happen right away.

Guillén: That was luck! Curatorial and programming positions are in high demand. Your training at the Art Institute of Chicago was in film though, right? Did they offer curatorial training there?

Shepard: No. They didn't have it. CCA now has a curatorial studies department but it's more for visual arts than film. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago because I loved film. I have since I was a kid. My dad was a huge film buff and he passed it on to me, I think. He used to take us to movies all the time. He'd put us kids in pajamas and go to the drive-in, stuff like that. He was one of the first people in Minneapolis to buy a VCR when the BETAMax first came out and they cost $3,000. You could only record an hour at a time. So I studied film in Chicago but I didn't really feel that was where my talents were. I tried to make film but I was really terrible at it. [Chuckles.] But I loved watching film and writing about film and spreading enthusiasm about film.

Guillén: I would definitely call you a film enthusiast, which is a term that has come into its own recently with the advent of internet journalism and the opportunity to distinguish one's writing from more familiar consumer advocacy film criticism. You have certainly gained a name and a following in the Bay Area. You're one of my favorite programmers! You have an idiosyncratic style and vision. What is it you want to offer at YBCA that isn't being offered elsewhere?

Shepard: Well, that's what I want to do: offer what isn't being offered elsewhere. We never really repeat what any other venue in town is doing. I do a lot of detective work, looking under rocks and finding films that have been overlooked by other venues.

Guillén: How do you accomplish that gumshoe work? Do you study other venues' calendars?

Shepard: I do some of that. I go to two or three film festivals every year. I sometimes go to Toronto, though that doesn't tend to be where I discover things. I go to Rotterdam or Pusan where you have a much better chance of discovering something off the beaten track. It also comes from knowing a lot of film history. When I got started, what I wanted to do was celebrate a lot of film genres and areas of film that were considered disreputable. I did a lot of exploitation programming at first—stuff that people were kind of scared to do in the field—and looking at things like educational films, things that weren't considered serious film, but looking at them in a new way to see what the past reveals about the present. That's been a challenge. In my early programming years, I was doing a lot of that. That's all become much more popular but I was a pioneer! [Laughs.]

Guillén: It's got to start somewhere!

Shepard: And I think there are plenty of holes. Even though we have an amazing film culture here in the Bay Area, there's still a lot that has been forgotten in even high level film and major contemporary art cinema. The San Francisco International Film Festival can only do so much and they forget about things or there are things that slip through.

Guillén: Your attention to the careers of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Carlos Reygadas was where you caught my eye, especially through the residency programs where the filmmaker was present to discuss his films. How were those residencies financed?

Shepard: We used to have a grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund for residencies. YBCA got a big grant of a million dollars so for a while there for a few years I was able to program more extended visits from filmmakers. We had other ones too before Apichatpong. We had Jim Hoberman from The Village Voice who came for a weeklong series of programs. We had a great South African filmmaker named Ian Kerkhof [now Aryan Kaganof]. Early on, we had a little more experimentally-oriented filmmakers, and a mix of critics and filmmakers, Jonathan Rosenbaum did a weeklong series.

Guillén: I wish I would have been more into film at that point. I regret missing those programs. I'm certainly looking forward to Hoberman attending this year's SF International.

Shepard: We've had a lot over the years; but, we lost the grant. We ran out of money on the grant and it wasn't renewed. Now I can only do one thing a year. One or two. I try to add an element that you can't get elsewhere; some "live" part of the screening, especially with the artist there, but one can't always do that. I looked at all these art venues around the country and it seemed like they were all doing the same things. They were all circulating the same film programs to each other. No one took any risks. That's what I want to do.

Guillén: And YBCA is a supportive atmosphere that honors your risk taking?

Shepard: Yeah. I'm very lucky in that regard. I'm not sure that the program that I do could work anywhere else.

Guillén: I love your blend of "high" and "low" art—if those categories even apply—and that you test your audiences regarding those categories. You admirably mix art films with genre and exploitation pieces.

Shepard: That's what I try to do. Not privilege one cinema over the other. Find value in all forms of cinema. I think it's there but you've got to pull it out. It makes a difference to be completely sincere and honest with people, with filmmakers. I've been able to get films that the San Francisco International Film Festival wanted by being completely honest with people and saying, "Yeah, you'll get a bigger audience if you show it in the International Film Festival; but, I can offer you something different. I can offer you an intimate screening that will have a bit more meaning to people and be much more interactive. You'll make contacts in a different way."

Guillén: I respect that you say you want to do your own thing; but, doesn't coalition work help in securing and circulating programs?

Shepard: When I was a little younger, I was like, "I'm doing totally my own thing. I'm a maverick!" [Chuckles.] But, actually, you want to share.

Guillén: Especially if you've put so much effort into curating a program and pulling it together?

Shepard: Yeah, and especially if you can help something get screened more. I do have respective colleagues so—if I do show something—it gives it a stamp of approval and people will look seriously at it elsewhere.

Guillén: By example, you've just finished up the Nikkatsu Action Cinema series—"No Borders, No Limits"—which was quite well-received here in the Bay Area. Kimberly Lindbergs provided a great overview at her site Cinebeats and Brian Darr followed through with a fun review of A Colt Is My Passport at Hell On Frisco Bay. I sampled the series via Red Handkerchief. The Nikkatsu Action Cinema series was, however, a program that had been generated elsewhere?

Shepard: Yeah. I chose highlights from a bigger series originally created by Mark Schilling for the Udine Far East Film Festival. I thought the series shouldn't play just in Udine; these films should be screened beyond that festival. So Schilling and I worked together to bring some of the films to San Francisco and the series is playing in a few cities throughout the country.

Guillén: And most of these films are not available on video?

Shepard: None of them are. Not even in Japan. This was your chance to see these films. A lot of what I do is like, "This is it!"

Guillén: Yet, you have done some encore programming, such as with Zidane, which you brought back due to popular demand, and which several folks are still clamoring to see.

Shepard: We still have the print sitting in my office. We had 16 sold-out screenings of Zidane so I thought, "That's enough." But, amazingly, people still want to see it. It's a beautiful film.

Guillén: Can we talk about your upcoming programs? You've got some amazing stuff coming up, not the least of which is Jia Zhang-ke's films Dong and Useless. Following closely on the San Francisco International screening of Still Life and its theatrical distribution at the Roxie, this will get San Franciscan audiences up to speed with Jia Zhang-ke's films.

Shepard: There's so much interest in China now.

Guillén: Absolutely. You're aware that the first film to sell out its screenings at the San Francisco International is Up the Yangtze?

Shepard: It's amazing too because there are so many films on that subject. It's just so timely. Actually, our next residency is a Chinese filmmaker.

Guillén: Really? May I ask who?

Shepard: He's not super well-known; it's Wang Bing.

Guillén: Oooooh! I caught his short Brutality Factory in the State of the World omnibus that Yerba Buena screened a while back. It was actually the most compelling of the batch.

Shepard: He has this amazing film called Fengming, A Chinese Memoir. Prior to the Cultural Revolution in China there was another movement called the Anti-Rightist Movement, which was a similar kind of movement. Basically, anybody with any power to spread intellectual ideas—teachers—were shuttled away and put into work camps. The whole film is very simple. He basically sets up a camera and this woman tells her whole story of getting involved in this. It shows an intellectual, an English teacher, her going to the work camps, losing her children because of this, and then the movement dissolves and these people finally go back into society. It's absolutely frightening.

Guillén: I was stunned by Brutality Factory. Not only did it look great; but, it was truly disturbing. I thought a lot about it afterwards.

Shepard: He's primarily a documentary filmmaker. His style is to stare at something until it reveals itself.

Guillén: That's certainly a residency to look forward to! Now, your program on Queer Satanists—"Homoccult and Other Esoterotica"—first of all, did you come up with that title? Are you creating language for us again? [Laughter.]

Shepard: No, that's somebody else. That's a guest-curated program by some crazy gay guys in New York. I like to do guest-curated programs. There's a lot of talent out there.

Guillén: But you've cautioned me that it's fairly challenging?

Shepard: It's pretty rough stuff, yeah. Some of it. Not the whole thing.

Guillén: There's a sold-out program right there!

Shepard: [Chuckles.] Probably. It's a good title they came up with; but, yeah, it's pretty esoteric; the dark side of male sexuality.

Guillén: It includes bloodletting?

Shepard: Yeah, some of those performance artists who cut themselves.

Guillén: And Asia Argento isn't around to lap it up or anything? [Laughter.]

Shepard: No. I'm not sure she'd like the real thing.

Guillén: One of my all-time favorite filmmakers is "Joe", of course, and so your programs of his short works is highly anticipated. Are these the same pieces that were shown at REDCAT in Los Angeles?

Shepard: Some of them. It's more than what they showed down there. This is two full programs. Three and a half hours of material that he's been making since early in his career. That's his prime inspiration: experimental filmmaking. Filmmakers like Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, and filmmakers like that were why he started making films. He actually went to the Art Institute of Chicago too. It's almost all non-narrative work and it's great to be able to see it together. Some of the films have floated through various film festivals but it's never been assembled all together. I'm not sure if any of them have been shown in San Francisco before.

Guillén: Being that your film programs are situated within an art facility, I imagine that has allowed you to indulge experimental film, which would be difficult to program elsewhere?

Shepard: It's tricky because it's so hard to get audiences. That's my orientation ultimately. Experimental film is the kind of film that's closest to my heart. That's what my education was in. That was the emphasis at the Art Institute of Chicago. That's what opened my eyes to the possibility of cinema and the non-narrative. It changed me forever to see these kinds of films. I remember the first film that changed things was Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls. I saw that in Minneapolis and it showed me that film could be totally different than what I thought it was.

Guillén: In the face of the parade of meaningless and uninteresting product coming out of Hollywood and Indiewood, experimental cinema offers the chance for something fresh. Admittedly, however, it's an acquired taste. I'm still developing my taste for it. I have several friends who have ushered me to programs of experimental shorts and have had to lash me down to the seat for fear that I didn't do harm to myself. [Laughter.]

Shepard: It takes a while. I know.

Guillén: But I'm getting there! Joe was the first experimental filmmaker who really spoke to me. I think the culture has matured as well in how experimental tropes—if that's the right word—have influenced mainstream film.

Shepard: Yeah, that's kind of what Joe's doing, using all these experimental techniques in feature filmmaking.

Guillén: So following the queer Satanists program is a weekend of witchcraft programming. What's going on? Halloween in mid-May?

Shepard: I guess so. I don't know where that came from. I'm not really sure. [Chuckles.] I think it was because I had picked up that Carl Dreyer box set and it had his Day of Wrath in it, which is just so stunning, it has so much weight. So the Witchcraft Weekend was just a little tossed-off series. I think Snow White will look great in that screening room, in an intimate space where you can study the whole frame. I think it's the first Disney film we've ever shown. [Also included in the Witchcraft Weekend will be Benjamin Christensen's Witchcraft Through the Ages and William O. Brown's The Witchmaker.]

Guillén: Another jewel in the upcoming program lineup is Ukranian director Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Shepard: It's never been very accessible and it's a masterpiece of world cinema. It's one of those films that has only been available on crummy 16mm prints over the years and there's now a new print of it that really some place like the Castro should be showing; but, they've gotten a little more conservative in their repertory programming. They passed on it.

Guillén: They're distracted by scoring the new Indiana Jones movie.

Shepard: I heard about that.

Guillén: Indiana Jones and Sex in the City.

Shepard: They're doing that too?

Guillén: Yup. I think Sex in the City is going to premiere in San Francisco at the Castro. It kind of makes sense though. We all know those female characters in Sex in the City are really gay men. I'm not as opposed to the Castro adjusting their programming to include blockbuster first runs as some are because, again, my focus is on the sociality of film culture and the Castro Theatre is one of the City's main social venues. Above all, I want the theater to survive and if red carpet events enable that, I'm okay with it. Yerba Buena is likewise one of the City's prime social watering holes. Along with your consummate film programming, the venue has a social cachet going for it.

Shepard: I wish we could make it moreso. I wish we could add a café or more of a socializing space that people could spend time in after the screenings to discuss them. It would be great. Some of the theaters in Europe have a little bar in the cinema where you can hang around afterwards. We don't really have that. Our institution's kind of cold. We try to do things to warm it up a little bit; but, it's tough.

Guillén: That being said, however, the fact that you have created a social circle that frequents and meets in the screening room has its warmth, which I personally appreciate. It's always fun to run into friends there. One of your past programs that was such a great evening—a memorable social event really—was The Wild Pussycat. That was such a hoot! The audience just ate it up. It was so much fun. Sure, it wasn't a masterpiece, but it had just enough schtick to it and enough cult history to it that it made it just a lot of fun to be in the YBCA screening room that night.

Shepard: There's a place for fun in cinema. That's another thing that bothered me when I first got started in this work; was just how sober and serious everything was these art theaters were doing. I felt there was room for other stuff.

Guillén: Absolutely! Kent Jones in his recent collection of critical essays has a great piece defending the summer blockbuster. It truly impressed me that someone of his stature would accommodate the public taste for the summer blockbuster. Continuing on with your program line-up, what's Yoga, Inc. about?

Shepard: There are no films about yoga that I'm aware of. Yoga, Inc. is a new documentary about the corporatization of yoga. It's about this guy Bikram Choudhury who's so popular. But there's a dark side to what he's doing. He's trying to copyright certain yoga poses. It's really a film about how yoga was initially a spiritual thing and how it's become a phenomenon where people are basically showing off difficult positions.

Guillén: The ongoing hazards of spiritual materialism.

Shepard: Yeah. It's another film that's sort of passed everyone by and I know there would be an audience for it.

Guillén: How about Mike Kelley's Day Is Done? I'm not familiar with him.

Shepard: That's more of a fine art type of film. He's more for an SFMoma type of audience. It's really quite an epic that he's made, nearly three hours. He's looked at hundreds of high school yearbooks and reconstructed many of the corny scenes from high school yearbooks of dress-up days, punk day, and various concerts and proms, stuff like that. He's turned this stuff around. It's a series of sketches and recreations from yearbooks; but, it's more of an SFMoma-prestige program. It's kind of difficult stuff.

Guillén: When you're finding out about these rare overlooked films and placing them in your programs, is the actual screening at YBCA the first time you've seen the films?

Shepard: You don't want to do that, no. You can't do that. I mean, sometimes you have to do that with certain films. Like there were a couple of these Japanese films that I couldn't see in advance, two of the six I couldn't see, but normally, no, you don't want to do that. It could get you into trouble. Sometimes it's necessary, especially if you're doing a whole retrospective of someone's work. There's going to be something that's not available.

Guillén: Philippe Garrel's films have been having a recent resurgence. J'entends plus la guitare (I Don't Hear the Guitar Anymore) has been written up here and there lately. It's made me curious how people are accessing the film. Is it available on DVD?

Shepard: No.

Guillén: Is a new print traveling around?

Shepard: There's a guy working for the Brooklyn Academy of Music that has started this tiny company The Film Desk that's releasing two films, this one and Monsieur Verdoux. So he's making J'entends plus la guitare available. It opened in New York a couple of weeks ago for a meager one-week run there. Garrel is well-known for his long relationship with Nico from The Velvet Underground and that's what this film is about: his very traumatic relationship with Nico. She died of a heroin overdose during their relationship and J'entends plus la guitare is a retelling of that in an oblique way. We're going to pair it with Andy Warhol's film on The Velvet Underground, which is the only sync sound film ever recorded of that band. It's pretty raw.

Guillén: You're also bringing back Cinekink in its fourth year. That was a series that originated in New York?

Shepard: Yes. I had been looking at what they'd been doing for years and I thought, "San Francisco is a natural place for this." Kind of a needed film thing here in some ways. We worked with them to bring a version of it to San Francisco.

Guillén: As we were discussing earlier about mixing "high" and "low" art, I equally admire that you're bringing fringe cultures into a mainstream art space. Don't let YBCA be just for the snobs!

Shepard: That's a lot of what I do: challenging the idea of an art center and what's appropriate to show in the screening room.

Guillén: YBCA seems to have an overall philosophy that veers in that way. They tend to exhibit edgy installation work, performance pieces, musical performances. Almost everything they bring in is a little edgy.

Shepard: That's true. It is. So I'm always aware of that. I'm aware that some people would think, "Oh, a place like that will just show art films." So I'm always mixing that up.

Guillén: One issue that's become a bit controversial in the Bay Area, if not throughout the culture, is digital projection. My understanding is that—if you can—you always elect to show celluloid and not replace it with digital and—if you do screen in digital—you always inform your audiences.

Shepard: Yeah. We have a great digital projection system; but, I won't show something on digital if that's not its intended exhibition format. The only time we've done that is if there's been a shipping mistake. I consider, "Should we cancel the screening or show a DVD?"

Guillén: Kudos to you and YBCA for that policy. I don't mean to single anyone out, but, recently during the SFMoma screenings, they showed The Good, The Bad and The Ugly projected off of DVD. For me, that's unacceptable, especially if the audience isn't advised ahead of time and is assuming they're paying to watch a 35mm projection. It generates bad feeling and is, in effect, false advertising. One of the few times, if not the only time, that I came to YBCA expecting to see a film on 35mm and saw it digitally projected instead was the State of the World omnibus; however, YBCA posted a large sign at the base of the stairs advising that this was being done. It gave me the opportunity as a customer to decide whether or not I wanted to slap money down for a ticket. I become infuriated when I buy my ticket, come into the theater, and only afterwards discover the film will be projected on DVD. That's just not fair.

Shepard: You can't do that. Digital projection is for digitally-produced pieces that are intended to be distributed that way. Everything's leaning more that way; but, a lot of people don't understand that we have to keep both of the formats alive. Just because we have this newer digital technology doesn't mean we should do away with film. I love these new technologies but you can't forget about film. You can't just throw it out.

Guillén: I agree 100%. I'm of the opinion that seeing films projected in celluloid is going to go the way of the higher arts like the symphony or opera. In the future I think you're going to have to pay good money to see a film projected on celluloid, as it was intended. I could see such programming happening at YBCA and—hopefully—SFMoma, if they'd stop being so lazy.

Shepard: Projecting celluloid digitally cheapens the whole moviegoing experience. You can do that at home.

Guillén: Exactly. The Michael Haneke made-for-television films; what's going on there?

Shepard: That's how Haneke started out. Seventh Continent was his first theatrically-released film, but before that he made a lot of television films—10 of them or something like that—and they're just as ruthless as his theatrical films. But they've not been seen outside of Austria and Germany. So we put together a program of four of those made for television films. We could have done more but we chose the best four and condensed the program down. These are very special films. This is another instance where you're not going to see these films anywhere else. We've been working with the Goethe Institute—not the one in San Francisco but the one in Boston—to bring these films.

Guillén: Which leads me to ask: as film audiences are maturing and being educated by what's being made available in film culture, vintage television is becoming more and more attractive not only for their nostalgic entertainment value but for the historical comment on the development of our culture. Do you see the possibility of doing more programming of television product?

Shepard: I would like to, yeah.

Guillén: For example, I've been catching episodes of The Big Valley on the Encore Western Channel and they've been thoroughly entertaining me, not the least of which for having the opportunity to watch these actors at the beginning of their careers. You see them testing their chops in admittedly formulaic scripts and I find it fascinating.

Shepard: There's a whole world there to discover. A lot of that material, however, is very tricky because of the rights issues. The rights were made for television and so to show things in theaters, the rights aren't structured that way so a lot of times they're not allowed. They're only for broadcast. There's also a whole world of crazy made-for-TV movies that's a territory to be discovered. Access is really tough for that stuff. Another issue is that it's hard to get good prints. There's all kinds of stuff from the past that I would love to show but you can't get good prints because there's no economic incentive anymore for these companies to conserve these prints.

Guillén: You've talked about the detective work you do to put together your programs. Are there magazines or resources that advise curators and programmers what's available for exhibition that you review to know where the prints are? How do you find the prints and how do you determine what condition they're in?

Shepard: There's no central resource. There's a good Yahoo programmers group where we share information but even that's pretty limited.

Guillén: So you're saying it's pretty much word-of-mouth?

Shepard: Yeah. And over the years, over time, you develop your network. I'm pretty tied into a network of film collectors, archivists, people like that. That's something I'm actually pretty good at. That's part of the detective work I was talking about. I find things that nobody thought were available. You just keep at it.

Guillén: Thank you for those excavations. That's one of the reasons I feel so blessed here in the Bay Area. Your work at YBCA, Jesse Hawthorne Ficks' work for Midnights for Maniacs, Marc Huestis's stage extravaganzas, Stephen Parr's eclectic programs at Oddball Cinema, they all provide a rich tapesty of effort and outcome. Just the facility you guys have to locate prints!

Shepard: Every two years YBCA does a "Bay Area Now" exhibition that highlights the brightest Bay Area artists of the moment. It's a big deal. It's YBCA's most popular exhibition and I always do a film program. This year I decided—instead of having filmmakers—to do a showcase of film programmers because in some ways I think there's more interesting work going on with programmers. Jesse's going to do a show. Peaches Christ is going to do a show. A number of other programmers will be involved.

Guillén: That's great! I've long thought public programming can be an art form. And yet I know that one of the objectives of The Evening Class was to profile programmers because I feel they all too often are invisible people whose true work isn't acknowledged. It's been fascinating for me these last few years to talk to most of the programmers in the Bay Area to see how they go about creating their programs and—by extension—the sociality of film culture that I ardently believe in. We are a mediated culture and it behooves us to understand how we've been mediated.