Hello to the 15,000,

I want to remind you that SECURITY, the feature film we made during a residency at U. of California Berkeley, is going to have its premiere at the Pacific Film Archives on that memorable day, Sept. 11, at 5:30 PM. Our heroes on that film are Chikara Motomura who did everything except manufacture the video tape, and Laura Deutch and Deniz Demirer, who spent three years on the editing. We’re going to have a reception after the show so please come, tell your friends to come. Seats are limited so if you’re coming from afar you will be able to buy tickets from the Archives by calling (510) 642-5249 sometime around Aug. 24. If this doesn’t work e-mail me and I’ll make sure you get tickets.

Secondly, NEED, film #6 in the 9 @ Night film saga will have its World Premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October. Don’t have the date yet but am very pleased and honored to be at Mill Valley again, a festival which has supported our work since the very beginning. Hats off to Mark, Zoe, K.D., and the others for their valiant work in our behalf.

Another reminder: we’re selling DVDs of our films on our web site, http://www.robnilsson.com. If you believe in what we’re trying to do in cinema, both in the films and in the idea department, it would be more helpful than you can imagine if you would go up and buy a title or two. As we develop our up- coming distribution program, we will have more films out there and selling them in more places. But for now, this is how we exist… or fail to. We honor every soul who steps forward to inspire our further efforts.

I went off again and wrote an epistle. Read it in installments if you need to. Sometimes I just can’t hold back.

Aim High!

Rob

THE LESS I LEARN By Rob Nilsson

The less I learn, the more I know. That’s a paradox I’ve been gnawing on recently. So many useless old bone shops between the ears leaking past piles of thoughts once thought, slag heaps of half truth, old curiosity shops of abandoned fiddle faddle. How about cleaning out that musty columbarium? How about sticking with the simple fact that what I think is not the point. Doing is the only being that counts. Ok, but one last fusty farrago before the cleaning ladies come. And then, after that, keep it simple. Make your films, your poems, your pictures and be done with it. I’ve been making films now since the late 60s. When I began I saw lots of reasons to continue. Cinema had been in a revolutionary period for a good two decades due to the French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, Malle), the Italian neo-Realists, (Rossellini, DeSica, Visconti) John Cassavetes in America, Satyajit Ray in India, Bergman in Sweden, Kurosawa and Oshima in Japan, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski… there were a lot of them from many different countries.

In America it seemed to me that Cassavetes was on a path. He was showing those who cared to look at American life back then… what it looked like. What it felt like. Not the surface attitude and conforming exterior. Underneath. The view if you really looked. Not the story. The people and circumstances, which underpinned the narrative. The stuff of contradiction, of struggle, or mixed motives, of “weariness and fault.” This was a good thing. No one could flay back every American soul. But a lot of filmmakers could seek to understand the people they knew and they could put it on film. I was optimistic that many would

But a problem arose, and it became the reason I began to write about film. Those American filmmakers never showed up. Of the many directors who gave lip service to the search, no one stayed the course. Maybe Hollywood was too strong. Maybe the filmmakers were too weak. But since Cassavetes, there’s been no one who has wanted to look life straight in the face. Not for long. Not in America. Not without “elements.” Not without a lot of money which can’t be had without major compromises. Not without the kiss of death… accommodation, to the distributors, the financiers, the critics, the powers of the air to anoint the media mavens, not without political choosing up, not without “correctness” and race/ class/ gender. Film has slowly become a matter of how we ought to see… rather than what we see. Money taught us that. Being on the “right” side taught us that. Being a success… the greatest “teacher” of all, taught us that.

But the biggest factor that has stunted the growth of American cinema, is not the mainstream movie industry in which everyone, even Cassavetes to some extent, had to work. The real problem is personal. The real problem is talent. The real problem is education. Experience. Development, as my grandfather Frithjof Holmboe used to say. The real problem is that here in America, for whatever reason, the soil is arid and forbidding for the growth of real poetry, and therefore for cinema which has its deepest roots there. Not in theatre. In poetry.

But those who have followed my writing in RES Magazine, or on my 15,000 list, or in various other sites and situations, know I think this. Some have thanked me. Some have damned me. Some have ignored me. But it doesn’t matter. Cinema has gotten worse instead of better. No matter how many righteous organizations hold reasoned and right minded seminars, no matter how many previously disenfranchised folks get franchises, no matter how goodly and kindly and earnestly the well intentioned intone their tones… film just gets worse and worse; here in America.

Today, SIDEWAYS and LOST IN TRANSLATION are just about the best we can do… and still get a few screens to go up on. And last night I saw CRASH and thought it had real moments. And last week I saw the highly touted HUSTLE AND FLOW and was sickened by the fakery and cheap caricatures. But any of these efforts up against SHADOWS, FACES, HUSBANDS, MINNIE AND MOSCOWITZ and WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE? Simple cinema for silly people slightly adult.

To me this is old news. I’m tired of hearing myself say it. And when I talk to average film goers they all agree with me. There’s nothing to see. They don’t go to movies anymore. But then they’ll start waxing sentimental about the old Hollywood, the days of Noir, the days of producers who cared, the Zanucks, DeMilles, the Skourases, the old studio system where true talent met with brilliant writing and filmmaking.

And I want to scream. This Golden Age they talk about was as empty as the Plastic Era we know today. I’ve gone there. I’ve watched the films, those I could bear. With few exceptions (I get all goofy around CASABLANCA) they mirror the limitations of American art from our colonial beginnings… sentimental, painfully obvious and over-amped, popular entertainment tricked out with outrageous pretensions to meaning and cultural value.

In America we’re good at expansion. Remember in 1776 we were a seaside country huddled like a latter day Chile along the Atlantic seaboard. We’re good at inventing. Whose space ships are still churning out impossible voyages towards the galaxies? We’re good at economics. In the year 2000 we had 4.65 percent of the world’s population but accounted for 32.9 percent of the global gross national product. At art, at the inner voyages of intuition, vision, surmise, emotion we probably have as much talent per square million inhabitants as anyplace. We just don’t know how to nurture that talent.

Pop culture? We’re the heavyweight champs. But in art that cares to probe the human condition and seriously ask the questions thinkers, artists, seekers have always asked we are about as devoid of affect as ants. And could our present penchant for going around invading countries, making friends, creating loyalties and expectations, and then running out on those who believed in us leaving them to be slaughtered by the people our obliquity has made into victors… could this fickleness of ours have something to do with the fact that we don’t know who our poets are and what they might tell us if they were properly valued?

Can 295 million Americans be wrong? I think we might agree that 75 million Germans once were. And how many Russians during Stalin’s purges? And then how many frightened people who were once wrong ended up trying be right in order to avoid being massacred in their own neighborhoods all over the globe? How many people can be wrong? Well… everyone. And as far as people being wrong about Art in our country today, I’d say that’s just about every one who thinks they’re not.

Let’s just take cinema. My view is that there was only one period when American cinema consistently produced something more than easy entertainment. This period stretches roughly from the production of Cassavetes’ SHADOWS in 1959, to the appearance of his last great film, WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, in 1974. Within this 15 year period we saw most of the great Cinema Verite pieces including SALESMAN, TITICUT FOLLIES, DON’T LOOK BACK, PRIMARY. You had the BBS Pictures EASY RIDER, (1969), Dennis Hopper, FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) and KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972) (Bob Rafelson). You had THE CONVERSATION, (1974) Coppola’s best film, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, (1971) William Friedkin’s, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, (1971) Bogdanovich’s, MEAN STREETS (1973) Scorcese’s. You also had lesser-known features unique to the period from Michael Roemer and Robert Young’s NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964), Jim McBride’s GLEN AND RANDA, (1971) David Schickele’s BUSHMAN, (1971).

But perhaps this watershed period wasn’t surprising because worldwide from the 50s to the mid 70s you had directors like Bernardo Bertolucci doing LAST TANGO IN PARIS, (1973) Lina Wertmuller. LOVE AND ANARCHY (1973) and SWEPT AWAY (1975), Ingemar Bergman with his greatest pieces PERSONA (1966), CRIES AND WHISPERS, (1972), Liliana Cavani, THE NIGHT PORTER, (1974) Costa Gavras, Z (1969) and THE CONFESSION, (1970), BATTLE OF ALGIERS, (1965) Pontecorvo to say nothing of great work from Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa, Oshima, Makaveyev, Glauber Rocha, Godard, Truffaut, Perreira de los Santos, Henning Carlsson, Paradjanov… and without trying you can name 25 other directors an educated person had to know back then.

As I’ve also frequently said there are several reasons why this period died and has been replaced with the absurdities of the last 25- 30 years. Hollywood, the world’s great colonial entertainment master right at that time was suffering from smart people wanting more than the same old con job. But the status quo was soon re- established. In the end, no country controlled by Hollywood studios and TV networks, backed by corporate oil and manufacturing giants can have a healthy cinema and as Peter Biskind in EASY RIDERS AND RAGING BULLS points out most of the directors we counted on back then went the way of dough, blow, and impresario. It’s hard not to want what success provides.

But it’s easy to blame the establishment because there are no consequences and everybody agrees with you. Whenever that happens you realize you’re peddling clichés. So, other factors include the take over of major college departments by disappointed Leftists who maintained the failures of Communist countries around the world were due to those who fought against them not weakness in the ideas of those who promulgated them. The race/class/gender correctness which dove-tailed nicely with the absurdities of misunderstood Dada and Surrealism, bred fear and accommodation in artists and filmmakers who promoted the idea that it wasn’t enough to seek and see and speak. Your first job was either to offend everyone… or to offend no one. And, if you were a gallery or museum artist, the second job was to be obscure… not to say opaque. When those notions take flight, democracy takes a dive, which is one of the reasons we have few high flyers today. I value Mike Leigh, Sally Potter, Tsai Ming Liang, Hou Shiao- Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, and Gaspar Noe but none of them would be able to make their movies in America today.

I would also count film schools as retrograde factors in the weakness of American cinema. I look at them as monasteries where orthodoxy is the curriculum. But real filmmakers don’t follow traditions. They create them. Artists of merit are pathfinders and by definition, past a period of apprenticeship to Masters they admire, do everything they can to fight the status quo. But film schools sui generis are conformist. Their tired slogans about knowing rules before you can break them ignore the fact that EXPERIENCE is the teacher and experience teaches PRACTICES… not rules. Rule makers are the tiresome hacks who have only one purpose… to dull the vision which rocks their sinecures. It is true that their obliquity makes artists have to work harder, and so at least, they have that useful function. But show me the poet who went to poetry school. Easier to point out a thousand hacks with UCLA degrees

Then we have critics. In my experience most of them are people hired by institutions owned by corporations, which guide the public toward current canons of acceptability (read profitability). And since, in the plastic arts and more lately in cinema, current canons either promote the “anything goes” pretensions of an establishment Avant Garde where pop culture is the only culture valued or sentimentalize the Hollywood star system and its imagined and over-rated “magic”, the critics chase their own tails in ever narrowing circles. Remember the 75 million Germans who were wrong? Well, I wouldn’t say that most Americans actually support our current curatorial culture. But most of them go along to get along with Hollywood and the rest just grit their teeth… and change the channel. It has nothing to do with them and they know it. At least they can see that they’re smarter than what they see on TV. And they can stay at home and take a nap and not miss anything.

In museums no one can tell what anyone is talking about or what the work means. Which is often the point. In cinemas the ads are so stupid, the trailers so loud and garish, the Main Attractions loaded with THX and FX and other things which end with X you wonder if they’re not promoted by the medical profession. I feel the need for an emergency EKG after watching 10 minutes of trailers in my local multiplex. Add cell phones and fools laughing to prove they didn’t miss anything, galoots and gallimaufry galore, hooting, hollering, and caterwauling and That’s Entertainment, Folks! Perhaps in just this one area, the agenda of the Jihadi makes a little sense.

But as I said before, it gets boring to be saying the same things millions of others professionals say; particularly since the most vociferous critics of Hollywood are those who profit the most from it. Conservative corporate sponsors and bankrollers don’t care what the Stars do, as long as they continue to hype product. The Stars, often Liberal actors, producers, directors and other pundits who give birth to the co- opted trash they make in order to get the dough to produce “real” work lead the way in biting the hand which feeds them. But for all their noble intentions, somehow that real work never quite materializes.

I think that producers produce, directors direct, actors act. Entertainment is entertainment. But I’ve been brought up to believe that there is something beyond all that. It’s hard to define and often amusing to hear the pretensions of those who try to. Still when you see it, you know it… and the old Greek idea of catharsis takes over and you wander in the snow, or hike up into the mountains, or stand on the sea shore, and you feel changed. Something has been revealed. Some pressure releases its grip on your brain. Something tainted, old and full of sorrow seems to slough away, and you feel cleaner, renewed, transformed for a time… and for a reason. This is the work of artists, which cannot be defined, explained, or even much talked about. Because it’s personal and time based, you might see a film like WILD STRAWBERRIES at the wrong time of your life and turn away. 10 years later film it might remind you of all the wonders you traded in for a secure existence… and cause you to wander naked in a desert, or devote the rest of your life to loving one person. Who knows what art is, or what it accomplishes? No one. All that happens is that we experience it, gasp, tremble, shriek with joy or whisper in sorrow… and look around us. At least for a moment… everything is different.

Aim High,

Rob