Wild Surmise: A Dissident View

By Rob Nilsson

This collection of thoughts, feelings, surmises, rants and rhapsodies explores the world of art and cinema Nilsson has watched and experienced over the last 40 years. To him post modern developments in the gallery and museum Arts are largely fatuous and have resulted in market oriented novelties which pretend to significance but depend on profit. Following the lead of the original Duchampian art jokes, (FOUNTAIN or BICYCLE WHEEL) funny only once (in 1917), modern day cultural Sophists continue to promote Warhols sly suggestions that someday, everything will be art by allowing it to happen. Catharsis, transcendence, or anything involving depth of emotion, complex human behavior or intellectual challenge is embarrassingly sincere to these fixers who correct the pretensions of Art in order to create the breathless freedoms of fashion.

His view of the so- called American Independent film movement (1959 to the present) is that it never was what it intended (and pretended) to be. From an indigenous cinema created by early American pioneers (inspired by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave (1950s & 60s) John Cassavetes, SHADOWS, FACES, Lionel Rogosin, (ON THE BOWERY), Morris Engel, (THE LITTLE FUGITIVE), Shirley Clarke, (THE COOL WORLD) and later Robert Young and Michael Roemer, (NOTHING BUT A MAN), and Cine Manifest filmmakers Nilsson and John Hanson, (NORTHERN LIGHTS) an Indiewood variant ended up backing the film careers of directors such as Spike Lee, John Waters and Quentin Tarantino who were really on the road to Hollywood all along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491825525

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2013 Rob Nilsson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/05/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2551-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2552-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918225

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover Photo: Kieron McCartney, Liz Sklar, Carrie Paff, Barbara Jourdan, PRESQUE ISLE, Fog City Pictures, Citizen Cinema, Directed by Rob Nilsson

Cover Image: Mickey Freeman

Photo Management: Gustavo Ochoa

CONTENTS

Dedication

Decide To Talk

Opinion Rules The World

Radical Art

In The Beginning

The Wrong History

The Ayatollah Of The Moviola

Some Things I Like

Opening Up

Cinema Of The Sorrows, 1998-99

The Great American Movie (2000)

In Memory Of David Schickele

Appreciation

What The Cinema Should Do

Storytelling

Epiphanies

Fight The Impressionists!

Exceptions… And The Rule

Transfixed (2013)

Getting Away From It

What Do The Mayans Know?

What Matters?

The Rigors Of Living Out (1999)

The Corner Of Calle 8 & Avenida 5

City Of Broken Roofs

A Skipped Stone

Moscow, 2011

Blue Disclosure

Movies By Motorcycle Ii

What I Do About It

Ygroup Manifesto

Where Did It Come From?

The Relevance Of Direct Action

Where Do We Come From?

Starting Points

A Fragment From Somewhere…

Further Notes On Circumstantial Acting

Additional Notes On Improv

Scripts

What Does It Look Like?

It Might Look Like This

Noise: The Beginning Of 9 @ Night

Last Thoughts On What I Do

Where I Am Today

About The Author

DEDICATION

In this book I said what I thought. I could have tried to say what others think and thereby produced the popular more balanced view. My view is not balanced. It’s just… mine. This is why I could never have done well in Hollywood with its committees of deep thinkers. I always take final cut in my films (with a couple of regretted exceptions) because then I am always sure who to blame… and who to praise. But the praise I’ve come to value most is the joy of the work. That’s always there while you’re a bastard to some, a simpleton to others, a failure to still others, and a saint to your Mother.

But, it’s important for me to acknowledge that I didn’t make my films or write this book on my own. Well, I did write the book, but my opinions have been formed in agreement and in conflict with many; battles won and lost, musings and thoughts I’ve had as I’ve engaged in, and struggled to understand, the art and cinema of my time. As far as the filmmaking goes, if I didn’t feel I was, at best, an occasion for the brilliance of others, I would never have begun, nor could I have made a single film, or written a single article. Many people have come along to lend their particular genius to this cinematic and artistic venture of mine. They are in the credit rolls of more than 30 feature films. To begin to mention them would be futile but as I’m fond of saying, I’m not an independent filmmaker.

I am unabashedly dependent; dependent on a lifetime of relationships, friendships and collaborations with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. My daughter, Robindira Unsworth, my son in law, Robert Unsworth, and their daughter, India Petra, John and Marcia Stout, David Schickele, Mickey Freeman, John Hanson, Bobby Roth, David and Carol Richards, Marshall Stout and Michelle Anton Allen, Chikara Motomura, Joel Simone, the Faithful Fools, Cine Manifest, Bruce and Jean Johnson, Mark Fishkin, Steve and Hildy Burns, Mira Larkin, Tom Bower, Owen Shapiro, Harutyun Khachatryan, Kirill Ravlogov, Ed Ferry, Deniz Demirer, Gail and Train Schickele, Irit Levi, Lauren and Carl Helmstetter, Fred Andrews, Denny Dey, David and Annette Fox, Celik Kayalar hardly begin the list of those I’ve depended on.

But I remember all of you. And you know who you are. I have been blessed with your strength, your vision, your friendship, your opposition, your counsel, your love and finally, your forbearance. Let the work, including this book, be given to the world to do with as it will. To me, what we’ve done together is unique and precious. It comes straight out of the ground and springs from the slipstream, wet and dripping. Let it be known and remembered.

I’ve arranged this book of thoughts, feelings, surmises and rants and rhapsodies with limited reference to chronology. They were selected from pieces written over a 20 year period and if I present them out of order, it’s for personal rather than historical reasons. I’m not trying to write a history of American independent cinema or of the contemporary museum/gallery scene. This is an accumulative coral reef of my thoughts and feelings about both, and other things as well, a collection of outbursts for which a time frame may be irrelevant. The established world of art and cinema I saw 20 years ago is not that different from what I see today, differing mainly in the degree and intensity with which it imposes its agenda. I still like what I like, dislike what I can’t change, and continue to make the films, paintings and poems I consider necessary.

The book is assembled like a meadow to graze in, a reef to explore. No need to follow line by line, page by page. Try a little here and a little there. Let it accumulate, aggregate, and remember to take a break. It’s more important to take action than to write (or read) about action. Don’t take a moment away from your work if you’re making art with the high seriousness of a Mathew Arnold. Don’t read this if you’re exploring the lower depths of Dostoevskian uncertainty. Or the lusty underbelly of a Henry Miller. Or the joy and suffering in Lena Wertmuller or Sally Potter or the disturbing brilliance of Kathe Kollwitz. If your art is wild and unruly, crazy funny or mad-hatter silly, but wound tight as Lawrence Stern, and you’ve got a deadline to make, take a pass. But if you think art should be trippy read on because you’re missing the point completely.

If you want to be entertained, toss this book. If you’ve watched CRIES AND WHISPERS, COME AND SEE and RASHOMON more than once, or poured over the work of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Liliana Cavani drag it back out, dust it off, and do some reading. But don’t forget that it’s more important to be 21 years old on the prow of a freighter under a full moon with the Sugar Loaf and the statue of Christ the Redeemer rising out the sea… as I have. Or to have crept past the guards at the Pyramid of Khufu, climbed it at night, and watched the sun rise over Cairo next morning… as a friend of mine has. Or to have known love won and lost, and in the end, loved a daughter with great heart and talent, and a granddaughter likely to become Nefertiti, Madame Curie, or Jenny Saville. I’m lucky to have survived long enough to put this book together. I’ve had the right teachers, friends, lovers and benefactors. I wish you similar good fortune.

DECIDE TO TALK

Why is freedom of speech the most precious of rights supported by our Constitution?

Because, most of the time, notwithstanding HUAC style eras, an individual can actually exercise it. We have no right to be rich or to be successful. If we choose to use force to assure material, social or spiritual equality, we may think we’ve succeeded until the real contradictions and paradoxes of revolution kick in. Right now we are looking at an experiment in what we hope is a democratic revolution in Syria just as we hope the same for those we recently saw in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Throughout the Middle East and Asia a Democratic idea is struggling with an Islamic fundamentalist one and the outcome is very uncertain. The misfortunes of violence and destruction, one legacy of all revolutions, are already in evidence. Can we go beyond the initial, heady downfall of a Mubarak, a Khadaffi and, maybe, an Assad? Is the first step the best step? And will we like the last step?

Read the writings of those who were dubious about political certainty, high causes supported by war, solidarity enforced by revolutions and violence. Ghandi, Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy. Then think deeply about Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Che, Pol Pot and Robespierre before you choose. If you go the way of revolution you give up individual freedom. The commune rules and whoever rules the commune decides. In the end there is no morality in violence and everyone will participate in the inevitable betrayals that attend it. I’m not saying we can learn to avoid them. I’m just saying that we will suffer them.

In Howard Zinn’s book, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES I found an eloquent quote from Edmund Wilson from his book PATRIOTIC GORE, written after World War II.

We have seen, in our most recent wars, how a divided and arguing public opinion may be converted overnight into a national near-unanimity, an obedient flood of energy which will carry the young to destruction and overpower any effort to stem it. The unanimity of men at war is like that of a school of fish which will swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears, or like a sky darkening flight of grass hoppers, which, also all compelled by one impulse, will descend to consume the crops.

If this is the case, war is a strand in the DNA and leads us to overwhelm the perhaps weaker and more contradictory impulse to love and to avoid violence. And, even so, what do we do about the Hitlers and Stalins? The Husseins and the Assads? Pick a revolution: French, Mexican, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Cambodian. Pick a war, any war. The costs in broken humanity will be enormous and everyone will, in the end, suffer and be to blame. And yet, don’t we have to rid the world of tyrants?

Maybe this is the origin of the guilt, the original sin taught in different ways in almost every religion. We must not kill and yet we must kill. We are violent, in spite of our every effort to be kind. Somehow it always seems to be someone else’s fault. But either way, we can’t help ourselves. This is the human hive: billions, who would just as soon be left alone, a significant minority who are murderous and rapine from whom we must protect ourselves, and another group, about as big, which wants to shape the world into an ideal image of their highest choosing.

The two groups from which we have most to fear: the Criminals and the True Believers. Criminals belong in jail. Idealistic sociopaths such as Stalin and Mao are to be feared and stopped before they take power. Inquisitions don’t work. Faith hasn’t worked. Reason hasn’t worked. Education has mostly meant an opportunity to avoid the truth with more facts at our disposal. Looks like we’re sort of stuck with… ourselves. And we all know how well that works.

So, speak. Speak out. Do it while you can. Stop worrying about who you’re going to offend. You offend yourself by worrying about it. The only way you can help others is through straight talk. Everyone knows the trap of appeasement. We just don’t think it applies to personal situations. We think we’re here to cater to self-esteem. A slap on the back. You’re great, you know that?

Who would argue that’s not a part of the job of friendship? But it’s not the most important part. The hardest truth to tell is the most important to hear. Your fear of telling it is proof of its importance. The fact that no one wants to hear it is the trap. You don’t want to look dumb. You don’t want to fail. So you don’t speak

Anyone can be polite. Anyone can be a good buddy. But not many people are willing to be the friend who sets you straight… whose counsel might hurt but hits home. The beautiful truth might bring us to tears and the ugly to ecstasy. There are demagogues everywhere eager to shut us up. Talk, argue, insist, listen, pontificate, laugh, and tell true. And then, if you’re wrong, you’ve inspired your antagonist to tell you the truth.

OPINION RULES THE WORLD

First impressions. Sometimes you’re fooled. People and situations blur as the focus turns, skewing the image. But a quarter turn more and there you have the sweet spot. Now you see and you can’t get enough.

Most of the time first impressions convey indelible truths. The little town you drive into arranges itself according to some inner diagram and you feel at home there. There are two or three towns that hover in my memory that way and I can’t say why. Taste works its strange predilections and we favor carrots over peas… and that lasts a lifetime. It’s like that with film.

Someone asked me the other day why I am so opinionated about cinema and the arts… holding forth as if I knew everything. Doesn’t every film, every filmmaker, every point of view have its validity?

Yes, and that’s why I want to express mine. Opinion rules the world even as matters of indisputable fact (The earth revolves around the sun, for example) are still routinely debated in our time. So best to get your opinions into play, particularly because there are many smart (and dim) people who have irrefutable reasons why you are wrong. You can stay wrong a long time if your ideas are not popular. Never hamstring yourself and withhold the one avenue open to everyone. Better to be vociferous in favor of your point of view. Styles and ideas change and we don’t really know why. But I believe in stoking the furnaces because heat is the one agent that can melt lead.

So. In movies, my taste runs in two different directions. One is toward the formal, set piece, indisputably built and reasoned out film. This kind of work has no loose ends, no unarticulated mysteries. Its meanings, ironies, epiphanies and overall specific gravity have been fashioned with craft, if not genius. There is a sure handedness in the way building block is lathered with mortar and placed in its inevitable place. The only thing I ask is that the filmmaker be smarter than I am, that he stay ahead of me, leading me to thoughts, feelings and even conclusions which thrill and instruct. In this regard Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Kieslowski and Kurosawa are filmmakers who lead me like an eager student to places I’ve never known.

Other masters of structure and Mozartian aforethought such as Hitchcock, Kubrick and David Lean leave me cold. Maybe I can be brought into states of tension and suspense… maybe I can be entertained for awhile, but in the end they don’t tell me anything I don’t know or already feel and so… no thrill. No instruction. No fatal insight which sends you reeling around the city at 2 AM in the morning with an arrow in your heart.

I guess I’m an extremist. I want to be seized and ravaged by Art. I don’t care for the cross word puzzles of forced significance, the hushed whispers at the emperor’s bare bum, the breathy delectation accompanying the discovery of another Warhol clone who causes bated breath in the academies, galleries and museums.

I already know this earth as a dubious long term proposition, especially for the poor and ethnically assailed, and I know for all that GUERNICA speaks to the slaughter of innocents, neither Capitalist nor Communist knew what to do with Picasso, nor he with them. The best art is a high wire act soaring above the Boschian landscapes we fear to fall into… but do. I’m not interested in either the decent tropes of the cautiously Correct or the Dada abracadabra. I like Art which has no other agenda than nerve and curiosity.

Which leads me to the other kind of film I like even more… open ended, careening, dizzy voyages into the unknown of everyday living. This is the kind of film which just seems to happen… which has intuition and proceeds on hunches, which has energy and brilliance and a sinewy, subtle structure which wells up organically like the triple helix of DNA… a purpose seeded with juices of all kinds… adrenalin, testosterone, serotonin… a shapely chaos which, in the face of the teem and pour of the universe, shows us we’ve not gotten very far in the knowledge department.

There aren’t very many films like this in the world. They can never be popular because they offer no security, no deserved rewards, and no happy fictions with which to hold off the deluge. In fact they ARE the deluge and suggest that the only safety we can ever have is to hold on tight and get drunk on velocity. THE CELEBRATION and most of BREAKING THE WAVES were like that. But they were made by Danish filmmakers tuned into the slipstream. An American from Tulsa, Larry Clark comes to my mind. KIDS, his one terrific film, had the energy and courage to step up to a truth we don’t want to hear about… a truth of not knowing, not having a clue what is happening, why, or what to do… a truth of change, mayhem and of loving the struggle anyway.

The strangest irony is that in the very home of stylistic rectitude, in Hollywood’s colonial enclave with its close-ended and strangled dime store Classicism, the greatest American films which portray life as an unknowable spectacle with impulse and feeling our only guides… have appeared. Made by a dissenter, of course, an undercover agent for the way things seem to be. John Cassavetes was that off beat pioneer with films such as SHADOWS (made in New York), FACES, HUSBANDS, MINNE AND MOSCOWITZ and WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE.

I don’t go to movie theatres much these days. A couple of shots in and I’m bored because the film is canned. The filmmakers take on the mantles of knowers and what they think they know makes that fatal first impression a bad one. When I go, I’ve been there before and I didn’t like it much the first time. And so, I make the films I believe in… and write about the others. I didn’t want to say anything. I had plenty of poems to write, paintings to paint, and film ideas for a couple of lifetimes. But no one else was saying anything and I can’t sit and watch Cassavetes, Fellini, Roeg, Kurosawa, Dreyer, Bergman, early Bertolucci, Wertmuller, Cavani, Satyajit Ray re-runs all the time.

Opinion rules the world and mine is that the young filmmakers of today should follow the contemporary examples set by Mike Leigh, Thomas Vinterberg, Sally Potter, Lars von Trier and the others who work from what they know and experience as observer/interpreters of life… on the pulse and in the streets. Genre films, grateful race/class/gender potboilers, Hollywood hype and movie stars are just so much wasted time to filmmakers with their eyes wide open. That’s my opinion. Long may it rule!

RADICAL ART

When facing the Gordian Knot of the 10,000 things today deemed to be Art, there seems to be only one path for a radical to pursue. And that is Alexander’s solution. Just as the noxious tranches of default credit swaps and toxic re-fis make it impossible for anyone to figure out what fiscal responsibility is in May, 2012, it is equally impossible to fathom the thousand and one Art Forum justifications/obfuscations which accompany the nifty conceptual notions clogging our museums, and galleries. Therefore, it’s obvious. If everything is Art, nothing is. Sharpen the sword and swing!

For some that might be too radical. But it should be remembered that the kind of art I’m referring to is very old news. Marcel Duchamp made the original art joke, an up side down bicycle wheel mounted on a stool in 1913, and a urinal (Fountain) signed by an R. Mutt in 1917. Dada anti-art flourished between 1916 and 1922. Andy Warhol led the parade in 1962 with coke bottles, soup cans and 100 dollar bills. Murakami dolls and Hirst sharks in formaldehyde are un—Ur variations on a theme that was mildly assaultive back when and only tepidly funny once. Marina Abromovic stares us down and the academy continues to insist she’s an artist. I’d rather call her a woman who stares down at us. Maybe truer… and less funny.

Andy Warhol and the other Pop Artists were late-coming emulators of the politically freighted Dada movement. Artists like James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Larry Koons are the hoary grandfathers of an art represented by an appropriate Pop objet d’art I’ve dreamed up: old woolen underwear in a cedar chest smothered in moth balls.

So what do we do with this tired old dinosaur of pretentious hauteur? I propose we nationalize the art museums, cleanse them of their toxic displays and ridiculous poses and install directors with active nervous systems, adequate digestion and poetic inclinations. On their resumes I’d require a grounding in American Pragmatism and the Transcendentalism of Whitman, Emerson and the James Brothers. No, not Jesse and Frank. And maybe they should read Donald Kuspit while they’re at it.

Then there’s the cinema. I would allow that there is an entertainment industry. How could one miss it? It lulls a paying audience to lean back and receive the ministrations of beautiful, clever, and oftentimes glib practitioners providing easy diversion for upwards of an hour and a half. This is done in box like chambers (formerly faux Egyptian or Babylonian palaces) with stadium seating and, these days, the right to receive food and drink during the show. Several times a year there is great hullabaloo about how well this has been done, and who should receive statues of approval for doing it. Then the cycle begins again.

The art of cinema, however, is a different animal the contemplation of which occupies a big part of this book. I’d have it encourage leaning forward rather than back, thinking, feeling, imagining and opening to the magic of cathartic experience. This should also be the job description of writers, painters, dancers, composers, choreographers, et als who are actively questioning in images, words, sounds and movements the mysteries of our existence. It is made by seekers who provide things to think about for those who question. It is the most recently developed art and, as with the other older forms, requires people of developed talent to lead the way.

In a better world than ours, such high flyers would be charged with restoring juice and justice, energy and emotion, craft and cunning, recognizable talent and the sort of vision which brings tears to the eyes, fluttering to the heart, and floor burns to the brain. The curators of these creators would be required to install nothing that requires words to define. Let the eyes, the mind and the senses be the judges. Display nothing which does not amaze or freely pry the scalp from the skull top. And if they wanted to mount a perpetual traveling show of the Bay Area figurative movement (1950-1965) of David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn I would require the US Congress to fund it. Art and Patriotism don’t always have to be polar opposites.

Let no Andy Galsworthy expropriate another frame of film