Hello to the 15,000,

Particular welcome to those of you who signed up during the Mill Valley Film Festival and during my stay at Hollins College, in Roanoke, Virginia. I’m grateful that you trusted us enough to come to you via e-mail. There is so much dreck you have to contend with on-line these days I feel honored that you committed to be a part of our cinema movement, or at least a fellow traveler. Please be sure your spam filters are properly stroked and cajoled to let us through. Leave the light on for us because what we want to see is new honesty, new truth seeking, new commitments to art as a vehicle for inspiration in the key of life.

We have our particular mission and it’s not the only one around. But we don’t want to follow the usual ruts leading to either mainstream triumphalism or Indiewood preaching to the choir. We don’t think Art is a political tool or a harmless bagatelle for Saturday night dates. We want lovemaking in the theatre of course, love everywhere it can flourish, but we don’t think adults are children who don’t know it when they’re being sold old news. We like our search for truth unvarnished and raw. And in a world of contradiction and mystery, all it can ever be is a search. We can probe and poke and maybe get closer but we don’t want to tell you what to think or what the movie is about. Cinema is an experience to be gone through. It doesn’t mean something. It is something. And you assign the meaning. You take it home and run it through your system. If it doesn’t stir in you, you discard it. If it bores a hole in your head and sends shivers, or slivers, then you can’t help it. You have a memory of something different, maybe troublesome, maybe delightful, maybe secret or triumphant, it doesn’t matter really as long as it has a burr and it sticks.

So when we go to the cinema let’s support people like Jason Garnett from the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke who supported NEED for a Monday night and tries to program cinema which matters. And let’s remember filmmaker/teacher Jake Mahaffy who looks to invite filmmakers who work out on the edges of society where the great artists have always been initially rejected and the lesser lights stubbornly committed to what they see, whatever that is, and however it is received.

So for the rest of this letter I want to let you see, in their entirety, some inspiring quotes which we have gathered from our first showings of NEED, film #6 in the 9 @ Night cycle.

“If there were any justice in the world, Rob Nilsson’s actors from the Tenderloin yGroup would be as widely recognized and hailed as any of the current crop of nobodies gracing the pages of People and US magazine. In Rob’s new film, NEED, the latest in his nine-picture series, the performances are every bit as bold, daring, unremittingly true and startling as they have been in all the others. Do whatever you have to do to see these films and these actors. Done for less money than the ‘perk packages’ some stars receive they are gritty, true and moving. But, if there were any justice in the world John Cassavetes would still be alive and recognizing Rob Nilsson as his long-lost heir.”

– Peter Coyote Actor/Writer

“Watching Rob Nilsson’s film ‘Need’, I became aware that I was watching an entirely new kind of film. Shockingly new the way cinema verite was new in its time, the way ‘Easy Rider’ was new, the way the impressionists were outcasts because no one had seen the world through a painter’s eyes that way ever before. And new in the way that once these new forms of art were seen, nothing could ever be the same again.

“One is not watching a scripted movie and so one doesn’t watch actors doing their lines, achieving their emotions well, or very well, or not so well. We’re just not watching actors at work. And one isn’t watching an improvised movie. I’ve seen them and I’ve been in them. In an improvised film, one knows somehow that the actors feel a camera directed at them and that they’d better come up with something. We’re watching them improvise.

“In Rob Nilsson’s work, there is no script, yet this is not really improvisation. So what is it? Well, it’s life. We seem to be watching life unfolding as it will, without a prompted direction, without any given path.. As if we could, for these precious moments, stand inside the rooms and touch the very skin of these people, mark the walk they take to the window in the night. For Mr. Nilsson has created a technique that makes it possible that the stories can be inside the players and the players aren’t playing, it seems. They are just living.

“This is historic film making in the true sense of the word. Historic, because if everyone suddenly began to make movies the way Rob Nilsson makes them, Hollywood would vanish. The world of filmmaking would be an entirely different one. When something truly great is spawned, there is always the obvious question: why didn’t anyone ever do this before!?

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to become invisible and follow an interesting stranger down the street and into his apartment, to be able to watch him and wait inside his room to find out more about him? Now you can. Great movies have changed: now they don’t have to be dandified, orchestrated mirrors of life. With Rob Nilsson’s work, they are life.”

– Karen Black, Actress, Writer, Singer

“The film was a real art piece, masterful! The acting was superb, the filming gut-grabbing and evocative and hypnotic; tough material for me, (especially after a week of hospice patients’ suffering), but really gritty.”

– Audience Member Mill Valley Film Festival, October 2005

“Wow, I am still in awe of that movie last night. I have never seen anything like it. In my opinion it is exactly right–the acting, the lighting, the sound, camera angles, etc.”

– Jocelyn Sanders Hollins University Staff, Roanoke, Virginia, Nov. 2005

“Atmospheric and powerful…it is hoped when the last film (NEED is the 6th in the 9 @ Night series) is finished (possibly next year), all nine will get the wider appreciation due them. Major fests might wisely begin jockeying now for the splash that premiering the complete series will create.” — Variety, November 2005

Now, I don’t think there is any reason to get complacent about quotes like these. One of the great things about Art is that it is different for each person, and for every compliment there is probably great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But another related truth has to do with the need for self belief and strong expressions of preference. None of us are to be blamed for being passionate about what we believe. In fact the opposite is true. Democracy means nothing as a bland hash of conformity. Our society needs strong opinions to fight the current trends where art is determined by academics and practiced by people who don’t want to offend anyone.

This may be one of the only periods in human history when artists are encouraged to be safe, bland practitioners of an art which can be defined, but not felt, the product of theory but not the result of wild surmise, powerful hunch, amazing insight, unruly flight and missing landing fields. Even when art was commissioned by entitled royalty it could be overwhelming, but obscene, epic, but filled with the minutiae of delicate human observation, promoting the reigning politics or religion while filled with secret transmissions of resistance and transgression.

So we need to fight professional establishments in all the arts, both those who promote and exploit the edges of human experience and canonize sex and violence and those who seek to make art into a coffee klatch of right-on signaling with a program to avoid the contradictions of humanity altogether. Human seeking is our reason to get up in the morning, undergo our 10 minutes of despair, and then get going. Let’s build an art for vigorous, living minds, and seeking spirits. Anything else is deadly boring and worse… it destroys what it purports to create. Like any human activity which shoves its paradigmatic ideal past the point of reasonable achievement, it creates the opposite of what it intends. I think great art is the peak of the possible, almost beyond achievement or description, but tangible, complete, ethereal and mysterious, but with blistered feet inside boots worn rough with work.

Talk to you next month.

Rob

PS- We’re offering our yearly Xmas deal on the titles available from http://www.robnilsson.com/store.html. From now until the first of the year we’ll be selling each title for $11.95 plus shipping. Get them for unique Xmas presents. You’ll be investing in the collector’s items of the future.

You may want to display your dislike of current Hollywood fare or your admiration for drama that lives closer to grass roots and muddy boots. It doesn’t matter. We work out here on the edges for a reason. We think current American cinema lacks energy, passion and an inquisitive eye. To work inside the industry you have to “choose to be changed” and those accommodations often mean films which either rely on exploitative sex and violence or its opposite… good timey, well intentioned, conformist pablum which lines up on the right side of all issues, daring nothing while avoiding every human contradiction. To us paradox is the beginning of learning. This is a tough idea in a currently polarized society where everyone knows what’s wrong and how to fix it. Until it’s up to them.