Dialogue: Jem Cohen

Poem (3)

Chain An interview with Jem Cohen Although nominally fictional, this film seems to use its documentary elements to drive and shape its narrative – a good example being in the piano store, but also the night scene where Tamiko is looking down into the hotel, where some of the footage you just pick up incidentally in that shot is incorporated into her voice-over. Could you to explain some more about your working methods?

Well out of the mixture of necessity and interest, my working process tends to be like working backwards, so that rather than envisioning a situation or a set or a location, I will start with a real place or a moment and then draw it out or make it work as a sort of trigger.

And to me, a lot of it frankly just comes out of the fact that I make do with what I have, and I always have the real world. And then that is coupled with the fact that movies seem a little bit phoney to me, so even if I had the means to create these situations or make these locations or light things in a certain way, I don’t know if I would always want to do it because you just can’t beat the real world.

So I shot for years before I was really aware of my narrative intentions, and then a lot of the narrative intentions are just drawn from looking very carefully at the footage and realising that there are certain narrative suggestions already there or submerged narratives that already exist in the material. It is kind of a haphazard way to work, but it has its moments when it really pays off.

is the real story then there is the B Cam. And I start from the point of view that it’s all ‘A’ camera; a shot of a façade of a building or an office tower can be just as important as anything else. It is just asking people to look carefully at something or to try and see it anew, and that act is the most important thing – it is more important than the story. Anybody wants a story – there is a million of them out there – you never have to reach very far. I don’t think there is any incredibly great gift in giving people yet another little story.

Others would beg to differ.

The dramatic element in these films seems to have been deliberately underplayed – the characters have acquiesced to their respective environments.

Are you suggesting that in a world of such fabrication and ubiquity, the capacity for the ‘dramatic’ is being squeezed out – literally paved over?

I think that is a really good point. Because I am not that drawn toward traditional narrative, and if anybody wants a story, they don’t have to go very far to get one. I am also wary of drama because people tend in the movies to sort of want to jerk people around and the people who see them tend to want to be jerked around. And it’s like there are all of these formulas that work very well for doing that. Life has its dramas, its moments of drama but it is also much more likely to be unresolved than resolved and much less satisfying than most narrative films would suggest.

It is a given now that there has never really been such a thing as a purely objective documentary, and even people like Frederick Wiseman will be the first to say that his documentaries are completely fabricated creations. So I mean given that there was never this pure thing to start with, I didn’t feel like the line between documentary and narrative was such a line anyway.

And then the other aspect is the corporate attitude about entertainment and places for entertainment, all predicated on creating narratives for people – that is the way that they talk about it when they build a shopping mall or when they build an amusement park ride – they talk about generating tension and generating resolution, and how you are going to get people from Point A to B through a series of excitement and releases. And all of these things are really, really mapped out in this incredibly cold-blooded way.

It is not to say that sometimes that distinction isn’t important – just to say that it is more like an alleyway than a ‘boundary’ and things run up and down the alley, and sometimes they dart in one direction or another. I mean some of the best documentary moments in films are where I will get a weird sense of a little bit of a narrative somewhere, and frequently in narrative films the most interesting stuff is the pause where they do a little montage of locations that are essentially documentary, and sometimes I am just disappointed when they get back to the story. I just don’t privilege one thing over another. There is a term that they use in the film business – ‘B Camera’ – there

And they design places and experiences based on focus groups that are really predetermined, and they make theme parks that way, they make malls that way and they make movies that way – it is no accident because it is often the same corporations doing all three. I mean it is like you will often hear now about how, literally while movies are being made there are meetings going on with like the video game people and the amusement park ride people who will actually be making suggestions like ‘Well if this happened to Batman we could generate this kind of game or this kind of ride’, and it seems an extreme example, but it has filtered into Hollywood to an incredible degree.

How would you describe your handling of ‘the line’ between documentary and fiction in this piece?

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And you know, I would say that is pretty fucked! So once again it is like one begins to feel maybe even an obligation to take away some of that pre-determination.

I don’t think it is very respectful of audiences as human beings, to think that they could only be satisfied if things are mapped out for them. So that is one of the reasons why I started to really pull music out of the film and one of the reasons why I avoided moments of high drama. There are things that happen, but they are quietly approached.

If I was a smart-ass French critic, I might say that that film has a very European sensibility … Do you see yourself as an American filmmaker, or are you adapting a continental European tradition?

I think it is really important for Americans to make a stand for American traditions other than the commercial and corporate ones. There is an American tradition that includes Whitman and Thoreau and for that matter, Patti Smith, that has a great deal to do with notions of freedom or self-determination.

I had this slightly odd childhood – my parents are American but I was born in Afghanistan, I was only there for a year, I moved around a lot as a kid. I don’t feel entirely comfortable in any one place in America, but I am totally American. I don’t go to see Hollywood films particularly, but on the other hand, there’s John Casavettes and other strains in American cinema completely removed from Hollywood. So in a way, rather than align myself with like European art/filmmakers, there are American sensibilities that I believe in, like a tendency to be unpretentious, that I prefer.

I felt the opening monologue by the stockbroker, Vic Traynor, somewhat sums up the rest of the film – that idea of ‘buying a promise’.

I don’t tend to work thinking in such broad strokes – they come out of the material and then I am happy when people notice them, but it doesn’t mean I mapped it out that way. But yes, it just struck a chord to me that you have this idea that there is so much based on notional activity – for one it is fascinating because so much of the time in corporate behaviour and growth there are no tangibles, it is just a floating exchange of money that is so abstract and tenuous and yet so world shaping – it is just absolutely bizarre ... it is often just the shift of numbers passing through computers that can entirely affect world trade and then the actuality in some country. But there is no ‘stuff’ in that moment, it is just the idea of money that is so powerful and so global. And on a personal level, usually it is about pricing a product – some little business dream, and they just put their shoulders to the wheel for so long based on some future pay off, which for most people never comes.

People are bandying about these great abstracts about economic systems or globalisation, and I just try to look into them on a ground level, on a street level rather than on an academic level – because I am not an academic. And there are certain cultural critics that

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I do love dearly. I am tremendously fond of Walter Benjamin, but I don’t come out of academic studies, and I think that the films are just a way of like looking into these things in a kind of concrete, down-to-earth way.

You seem to explore a lot of the ideas discussed

by Rem Koolhaas …

I touched on it. He is one of these people, like I think he is brilliant and every once in a while there are book projects that he has done and I think are amazing. I am really disappointed that he is building Prada stores.

It is just such a shame to me that people like him who are really interesting thinkers end up doing this commercial work and then they justify it with this theory that he wants to see if he can find interesting ways to reinvent shopping because it’s the new paradigm ... it’s just expensive clothes!

This is quite a humorous film, if you look hard enough ...

Well for one thing, for all of the focus group care and planning, a lot of modern spaces are not planned well or built well, and so I guess I have a kind of perverse fascination and see a perverse humour in the way they all fall apart, or those little nooks and crannies that don’t really fit in. And I also like to see how people modify these spaces and like find ways to make their own use of them. Take the opening segment, with the skyscraper. I thought it was the big, new, ugly insurance centre, but it turns out that it is three years old and it is already falling apart, so they are covering it with scaffolding to try to patch it back together. To me, it is very typical. And on the other hand the movie is concerned with the degree of control over space that is so extreme, and the control maintained by surveillance is so extreme that public space is really being diminished to an unbelievable degree, and any kind of notions of what public space is and what the commons is (if such a thing can still exist) need to be addressed. So in a way that is always a sub-text in the typography of the film.

A lot of corporate architecture uses two-way mirror windows, so they can look out on you and you can’t look in on them. This idea of constant surveillance is a part of ‘corporate’ culture, and seems to have influenced the way you put Chain together.

I have always felt that surveillance cameras and monitors, they are in many ways ethically appalling that the images on them are actually kind of beautiful.

And it was one of the only places where I thought that video really came into its own, like particularly the old black and white surveillance monitors – I mean there is something like inherently kind of sad and beautiful about it, and you do see people on them who are just at their most natural in a sense. It is kind of an unintended by-product of what is essentially just a means of control. But you know, one of the things about surveillance as a means of control is that there are way too many surveillance monitors for anybody to

look at anymore. That is one of the things that I think is so funny – the cracks in the edifice – you will have one little security guard trying to keep track of 30 or 40 monitors, and it is impossible. And so it is selfdefeating, because when everything is being watched, it is hard for anything to be watched that carefully. It doesn’t absolve it, but it amuses me – a bit of a sideline. I didn’t specifically think about referencing surveillance in the way that I was looking at the characters, except to say that I was certainly interested in erasing the presence of myself as a camera person and trying to kind of get away from a ‘visual style’, which is what a lot of filmmakers are really interested in, having noticeable or groovy camera moves where you go ‘wow, what a camera move’. I really wanted to avoid that – I wanted to erase my own presence as a filmmaker.

The music seems very understated in this film – which seems odd given your past work. It’s also notably religious and devotional in character.

Well it opens with a loud blast of ‘God Speed You Black Emperor’ into a piece that they made for the movie under my kind of primitive guidance. But after that there is very little music in it, except for a couple of little bits of sort of important American regional music from more or less the distant past, although in the case of the shaker song, it was a little bit of … it is not so much – I mean it is the past, but it is an oral tradition that was maintained at least into the 50s and 60s.

But basically what I was saying was that in a movie about the disappearance of regional character, I became really interested in juxtaposing music of the most specific regional character, and

that kind of American rural tradition in music, which is as I said is not wholly American because there is also strains of coming over from places like Scotland itself.

Lonesome Valley is of unknown origin, but it is probably a Negro spiritual that filters into White free country, country music. And regardless of what the exact details are, to me it has a regional character, and so I just love hearing it up against those places, not ironically, but just because it felt really weird and fucked up to me in a way that I thought was interesting. And the ‘God Speed’ music at the beginning – I kind of liked having it, kind of like really loud – and it has the feel to me of sort of barrelling towards some sort of calamity and then the calamity never comes – like it is a slow motion calamity rather than an actual moment of impact. And so I liked sort of … they are bringing in the choppers, they are calling the choppers on us!

So what next for you?

Well it is kind of the first time in 15 years that I haven’t gone from one unfinished project into three others that are already in the works. But I will probably continue to try to investigate that uncomfortable territory of taking footage from actuality and building narratives around it or within it. And I suspect that the next project may come out of footage that I shot during the mid 80s and early 90s – I was documenting 42nd Street, Times Square in New York before it was kind of Disneyfied, and it was a sort of terrifying but really kind of vivid, extraordinary street and had this sort of archetype of bad behaviour. And so I did a lot of shooting there, which was for some documentary that we were never able to fund. But now I am starting to think that I will go back to that material maybe and pull something out of it.

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