Dedicated to Edwin Johnson, (1937-2005) an unforgettable actor and a man to remember.

Join Rob Nilsson, The Tenderloin yGroup, Citizen Cinema, and the San Francisco cinema community for the 9 @ Night Film Series SF Bay Area Premiere. The premiere begins with a Pre-Opening Benefit for the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, August 28 at the Delancey Street Foundation. The 9 @ Night Film Series will then show at select Bay Area locations.
RSVP for the opening benefit »
View the 9 @ Night Premiere Schedule »

Sponsors and Supporters

The San Francisco Film Commission
The Mill Valley Film Festival
The San Francisco Film Society

Host Committee: Stacy Keach, Ron Perlman, Cindy Asner, Graham Leggat, Mark Fishkin, Stefanie Coyote, Nion McEvoy, Ahmed Rahim, Numi Tea, Les Blank, Chris Blue, Chocolatier Blue, Andre Carothers, Robert and Robindira Unsworth, Marshall Spight, Reverend Dr. Kay Jorgensen, Sister Carmen Barsody, Anton Jungherr, Sister Susan Knutson, Melissa Fafarman, Denis Paul, Susan Petro, Martha Lorena Morago Garcia, Reverend Kurt A. Kuhwald, Gabriela Maltz Larkin, Dorka Keehn, Marika Holmgren, Quentin Olwell, Nancy Hayes, Richard Kamler, Prager Winery and Port Works

Pre-Opening Benefit for the Faithful Fools Street Ministry

Rob Nilsson’s 9 @ Night Film Series Pre-Opening Night Benefit for the Faithful Fools Street Ministry takes place August 28, 6:30pm at the Delancey Street Foundation. Join us for tastings from Chocolatier Blue and Prager Winery and Port Works. Numi Tea Cocktails will also be served. Special auction items include an autographed original Northern Lights movie poster and a part in an upcoming Rob Nilsson film.
RSVP for the opening benefit »

Special guest speakers:
Mark Fishkin - Executive Director of the Mill Valley Film Festival
Graham Leggat - Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society
Stefanie Coyote - Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Commission

Ron Perlman and Stacy Keach are expected to attend.

In addition, The Faithful Fools will be giving out the first Edwin Johnson Award.

The Edwin Johnson Award has been created by Citizen Cinema and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry to honor an unsung Tenderloin hero. Edwin Johnson was a “once homeless turned homeless advocate” and a founding member of the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble. He appears in several of the 9 @ Night Films and embodies the spirit of this award. Edwin never forgot his life on the streets nor his friends there. His journey out of homelessness to advocate for the people of the Tenderloin is an example to us all. This special award recognizes an individual or group which embodies the spirit and dedication to others which is Edwin Johnson’s legacy.

“If you get the gist of the 9 @ Night movies you get the gist of the Fools. That’s where the rubber hits the road.”
Reverend Dr. Kay Jorgensen, Co-Founder – Faithful Fools Street Ministry

This event is in celebration and support of the 9 @ Night Film Series Openings, RSVP for the opening benefit today. The San Francisco Bay Area wide premiere program is listed below.

9 @ Night SF Premiere Schedule

9 @ Night Pre-Opening Night Faithful Fools Benefit
Thursday, Aug. 28, 6:30pm
Delancy St. Foundation, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA
FREE admission, RSVP on socializr.com today »

Roxie Film Center
Starting Friday, Aug. 29
3117 16th. St., San Francisco, Valencia and 16th.
All 9 @ Night Films will play there for one week, with most films playing twice.
View official Roxie Announcement »
View show times and buy tickets now »

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
Starting Friday, Sept. 5
1118 4th. St., San Rafael.
All 9 @ Night Films will play there for one week, in their intended order, each film playing twice.
View show times and buy tickets »

Cerrito Speakeasy Theater
Thursday, Sept. 4
Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo Ave, El Cerrito
SCHEME C6, 9:15 Show only
cerritospeakeasy.com

Parkway Speakeasy Theater
Sunday, Sept. 7
1834 Park Boulevard, Oakland
STROKE will play at 5:00 PM and GO TOGETHER at 8:00 PM
parkway-speakeasy.com

Additional Details:

By Ana Traynin

Rob Nilsson is an internationally acclaimed film director and Bay Area native. From 1992-2007, he worked with the Tenderloin yGroup, an actors’ workshop recruited from the streets. Recovering homeless, drug users, and street people mingled with professional actors, inner city residents and all-comers. The result is 9 @ Night, a series of nine dramatic feature films chronicling the lives of 40-50 fictional characters living on the edges of society in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Each film stands alone but the 9 together weave a single 14-hour portrait of 21st century urban characters struggling to survive.

The 9 @ Night Film Series had its World Premiere over three days at the Harvard Film Archive. The Roxie Film Center will screen the nine films in their chronological order from Aug. 29 - Sept. 4, followed by the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center Sept. 5 - 11. Rob Nilsson and members of the Tenderloin yGroup will be present for post-screening Q & A’s.

Learn more about 9 @ Night Film Series and view the trailer » 

Additional links:

• View and RSVP for the 9 @ Night Pre-Opening Night Benefit »
• Learn more about the 9 @ Night Series »
• Learn more about the Faithful Fools Street Ministry »
• Details on the 9 @ Night World Premiere at Harvard »
• 9 @ Night Bay Area Premiere page on socializr.com »

You haven’t heard from me much in the last months. But silence on the page does not mean silence in the field. It has been an amazingly productive year. But first things first.

At long last! We are ready to open the 9 @ night film series in San Francisco! The 9 films play in their intended order at both the Roxie Film Center in San Francisco and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael with selected shows at both the Cerrito Speakeasy and the Parkway Speakeasy Theaters.

Now is your chance to support us. Please note down the dates, please send our literature to your mailing lists and ask them to pass on the news.

The 9 @ Night SF Premier kicks off with a free event on Aug. 28, learn more and RSVP for the 9 @ Night Pre-Opening Event »

For the complete 9 @ Night Film Series screening info and dates, visit the official premier page »

Nothing Left to Lose

Our long stint in the Tenderloin, the landfills, the homeless encampments, and other urban battlefields is over. We’ve been working towards this moment since the early 90s and this is our chance. For 14 years hundreds of people came to our weekly free actor’s workshops in the Tenderloin and South of Market areas. Scores stayed the course and became featured players in films which are unique in the history of cinema. They are closer to the ground, more truthful and emotional than most, and have a commitment to life as it is lived, to “the way things seem to be.”

They don’t have name actors (although you will see Ron Perlman in one of them) but they have the genius of engaged characters experienced in the emotional and inventive purposes of the Direct Action way. They have contact with locations and street situations which are filtered out of most movies, and they mine moments lived by players closer to the truth of character and circumstance.

But most of all they have commitment to a cinematic cause. The 9 @ Night Film Series is a 15 year experiment, a collaborative effort with the players of the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble, local filmmaking talent, supporters, backers, fellow travelers and friends of every description from every walk of life from all over the world. This is an ad hoc community of the committed, working to hone cinema down to basic elements: engaged characters and charged circumstances in real locations featuring “a hard run into the muck.”

But along with the muck, there is redemption. No one in a 9 @ Night movie says, “Oh, woe is me.” The characters meet their obstacles, endure their suffering, engage their manias and grapple with their destinies using the same tools as Marin ridge dwellers. There is sufferingin the world’s condos and laughter in its homeless encampments. But there is something to the phrase ”nothing left to lose” which gives the 9 @ Night films its special claim to authenticity. The 9 @ Night films are about survival, featuring those survivors, visionaries, and engaged artists who make up the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble.

Studio of the Streets

What is a film studio? An organization which makes films. Not talks. Makes. Not one film. Many. Hollywood studios spend millions. The Studio of the Streets spends hundreds. But we have a secret weapon: the enthusiasm and passion of players, artists, film technicians, friends and supporters who have decided to take filmmaking into their own hands. These people are the secret and the proof of their power can be seen in our current line up of productions.

FRANK DEAD SOULS, produced by Resfest South Africa and Citizen Cinema
featuring Denny Dey and a multi-ethnic troupe from South Africa, is finally finished. A few music cues and nips and tucks and we’re there. Thanks to Drow Millar, editor. May his tribe increase. Well maybe he doesn’t have a tribe. May his checking account proliferate! And so off to the film festival world with FRANK DEAD SOULS.

PRESQUE ISLE, produced by the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking and Citizen Cinema. We are inching forward with distribution plans. This is a beautiful film featuring the best of local acting and filmmaking talent with a great High Definition look created by DP Mickey Freeman and a beautiful score by Kit Walker. It has a home somewhere in this chaotic world where the Humpty Dumpty of film distribution has fallen off the wall and no one knows how to put him together again,( let alone fertilize a new egg.)

IMBUED was written by Denny Dey and myself, and features Stacy Keach, Liz Sklar and two members of our new Citizen Cinema Player’s Workshop, Michelle Anton Allen and Nancy Bower, IMBUED is a departure from our Direct Action 9 @ Night mode. Although the script was written as a guide for improvisation, Stacy liked the lines. And Mickey Freeman, who created a gorgeous High Definition look, wanted to put cameras on a tripod for a change. So Direct Action, the art of making film with the inspiration and materials at hand, led to a more formal approach this time.. The location was the 32nd floor of an unfinished condo in the Infinity Towers near the Bay Bridge and the film is about one night in the lives of a gambler who can’t bear to take people’s money and a high priced call girl who comes to the wrong room. Stacy Keach showed us why he is one of the best actors in the world and Liz Sklar stayed with him all the way. Now in post production , look out for it in the coming months.

MAELSTROM, SISTERS AND SAND- Our new Citizen Cinema Player’s Ensemble, ably produced by Michelle Anton Allen (also one of the producers on IMBUED) has created three new feature films featuring members of the group.

MAELSTROM was co-produced by Marshall Spight and his company Meets the Eye Productions and shot in HD by Adam Wilt. It features workshop members Samantha Van Steen, Ed Ferry, Dan Silva and Deniz Demirer. A French woman and her Portuguese boy friend who speak a patois of four languages arrive at a Marin County bed and breakfast on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. She has come to confront her father who denied her after the alleged rape which led to her birth. He doesn’t know that she exists. Revenge and humiliation ensue.

SAND, as with all the workshop productions, was co- developed and written by the cast, in this case William Martin and Irit Levi. Zelda, an older woman meets Snake, a younger man who has come to paint her room. As their relationship develops she wants to get a face lift so she can look less like his mother and he likes her the way she is and wants them to escape to New Mexico and live in the desert. Conflicting passions confront limited means. SAND is being shot by Aaron Brown and Deniz Demirer and edited by Michael and Karen MacBroom and Rafael Matos.

SISTERS features Cathy Leritz and Nancy Bower in a story about the good sister who stayed close to home and now takes care of a mother with Alzheimer’s and the wayward sister who has pursued a career in advertising home for a visit. The responsible and the profligate clash, and secrets are revealed. As with all workshop films, dialogue is improvised by the Cast and the stories developed by the participants. Shot by Aaron Brown and Deniz Demirer.and being edited by Arthur Vibert.

And so:

Here are the reasons why I haven’t had much time to communicate. Better to make films than talk about them. Somehow, due to good friends and able collaborators such as Michelle Anton Allen, Aaron Brown, Ana Traynin, Ron Perlman, our friends from Northern Ireland Michael and Karen MacBroom, and stalwarts such as Joel Simone, Chikara Motomura and Mickey Freeman, new comers to our circle such as Stacy Keach and Liz Sklar as well as producers David and Carol Richards and Marshall Spight and forward looking institutions such as BAVC, the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, the Hemmerling Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Cine Source magazine, and others equally important and valued, we have been able to continue with our mission. Don’t ask me how. But I guess the how and the why sort of collaborate to create each other. Amazing, hair-raising, and endless fun.

One more thing:

One would have thought you would have to die to have a highway named after you. Or a bridge. Or an airport. Maybe you could get an alley up in the Mission if you were about to kick off. But surely not an award. To have an award named after you, your ideal state should be pond scum in a swamp, dust swirling over the Mojave, or maggot food in a potter’s field.

But there’s been an exception made in my case. Imagine my surprise when I got a call from Jacques Thelemaque, head of the Filmmaker’s Alliance of LA telling me that they had decided to give me a new award. And, you guessed it, they’re calling it the Rob Nilsson Award. And living or dead, they’re going to give it to me at the Director’s Guild in LA on Aug. 20 and to other filmmakers in the future.

We’re all supposed to be above caring about things like this, but I was not blasé. I was moved to be thought of. Touched to get such notice from real filmmakers. And blessed to have had the friends, collaborators and sun burnt souls to enable me to survive making films all these years. I thank the Filmmaker’s Alliance. I thank every last soul on every credit roll at the end of every film I’ve made. You have made my life difficult, stormy, contradictory and impossible. You have set the creditors on my heels and they pursue, baying like wolves. You have drained my bank accounts and caused my growing baldness. And the joy of it all is just too much to recall in an ordinary 24 hour day. Thank you. Thanks to everyone. And also, thanks to Blind Joe Death for holding off at least until Aug. 20.

View the 9 @ Night Film Series Premiere Page »

As you may know the 9 @ Night films interlock, interact and intertwine in unexpected and dramatic ways and, seen together, constitute a fascinating and completely unique cinematic tour de force featuring 40-50 marginalized fictional characters cast from the Tenderloin yGroup which existed in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco for 14 years (1991- 2005). I want to personally invite you to be among the first to experience the power of the full work, created by the collaboration of so many outstanding local talents.

Last night I went to see NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN which showed me once more how bankrupt American cinema has become. Another Freddy Kruger movie, a Tarantino-esque violent fantasy, a DOA genre film, which might seem doomed to fail but in the bizarre world of the Oscar, is probably a fitting embarrassment. How many of you know where the title comes from?

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
By William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

When you see what Cormac McCarthy and the Coens did to Yeats’ transcendent impulses, you want to cry. But it gives fuel to a view I don’t waiver from. We were doing the real American cinema in the San Francisco Tenderloin with the Tenderloin yGroup, and in the Santa Cruz Mountains with the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. And we’re still doing it. America just doesn’t know it yet.

Here is the full program:

EDIT (04.30.08): I botched up the schedule. Originally ATTITUDE was supposed to play May 5th but we showed it last week instead. So there won’t be an ATTITUDE screening May 5th. Also, I’ll be gone on May 15 when SINGING is scheduled. So the next chapter of the 9 @ Night series will be on May 29 for SINGING. After that I’ll set a new schedule for the remaining five films.

Sorry for the confusion. We’re editing IMBUED over here, finishing FRANK DEAD SOULS and working on three workshop features. Is that an excuse or an explanation? Your choice.

1. MARCH 20, 7:30 PM- NOISE, 9 @ Night #1
2. APRIL 10, 7:30- USED, 9 @ Night #2
3. APRIL 24, 7:30- ATTITUDE, 9 @ Night #3
4. MAY 29, 7:30- SINGING, 9 @ Night #4
5. To Be Announced (TBA), 7:30- STROKE, 9 @ Night #5
6. TBA, 7:30- SCHEME C6, 9 @ Night #6
7. TBA, 7:30- NEED, 9 @ Night #7
8. TBA, 7:30- PAN, 9 @ Night #8
9. TBA, 7:30- GO TOGETHER, 9 @ Night #9
10. TBA, 7:30- PRESQUE ISLE

The screenings will be held at the Edwin Johnson Screening Room, 1418 5th. St., Berkeley. Go to the Gilman Exit, turn right on Gilman, cross the tracks and take the second right on 5th. St. Go a block and a half to 1418 on the right. Come down the driveway to the back house. Donations accepted. Libations available for a modest contribution to the cause.

By the way, it’s free to attend.

Additional links and notes:

• Berkeley’s official website: berkeley.com
  (the movie trailer is on the home page)
• The synopsis
• Steve Burns is the Director of Photography: burns-sf.com
• Original Music by Tom Morello, guitarist from Audio Slave and Rage Against the Machine: nightwatchmanmusic.com

Hello Ray,

Your whole Modest Proposal makes so much sense it kind of … hurts. The rage bubbles up when I think of these people questioning your right to speak a kind of truth that is so obvious it hardly seems like heresy. But heresy is the only direction an active pilgrim can take. No one gets anywhere without questioning authority. Authority is the creation of sinecures. Authority exhibits the fear of the mediocrities who have nothing to go by except rules, regulations, regular recourse to “no” without even a hint of the fervent wings of the high flying ‘yesses.’ I’m writing an essay called ENERGY. I’ll send it to you soon. In the meantime here is what I wrote about the writer’s strike to my friend Bobby.

Hi Bobby,

I found your words about the strike absolutely to the point! All I would have done is dittoed, and re-dittoed your words about the absurdity of these TV and studio writer/hacks claiming that they’re creating American culture. American culture is being created far from the hills, valleys and flatlands of Hollywood. I would even say that we hardly know who is creating it today, because of all the dreadful posturing going on in an apparently dying society unable to speak the truth to money. I find this true in the plastic arts and in the cinema, and probably in music as well. There seem to be some important writers still at work (Phillip Roth, William T. Vollman, maybe, Eggers, maybe), a couple of important critics such as Ray Carney, and some poets, but since hardly anyone reads poetry or prose, they seem tragically unimportant in the total scheme of things.

For cinema, go to Mexico, Inniaritu, del Toro, Cuaron (although they seem to have moved up here) and I would imagine there are young filmmakers down there better than these three who walk the thin line between mainstream and the real thing. But go to Iran, Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf (the father), go to Taiwan, Tsai Ming Liang, Hou Shou Hsien, go to Thomas Vinterberg, Denys Arcand, go to Gaspar Noe, go to England for Sally Potter, Mike Leigh, Mike Figgis. The talent in America has made accommodation to a system which promises to pay, but not for the film you want to make. You make the film with the requisite name actors (who as you say, lord it over you and despise the practice of true collaboration). And then you’re forced to listen to the outrageous notes and “reasonable” changes suggested by amateurs who once wanted to be artists, but who settled for money. And they dole it out providing you understand the meaning of the word compromise. I know what this is because I’ve done it myself and have steeled myself never to do it again. I’d rather fail on my own hook, than succeed with the acclaim of a debased audience, made so by the soporifics of TV and the Hollywood feature.

Anyway, Bobby, here I am fulminating when I intended to praise you for pointing all this out in such a simple, concise and emotional way. You are right to doubt any so- called writer who is not thinking for him/herself, working from the inner furnaces, trying to plumb the depths of “the way things seem to be.” This is what we need from our artists. Courage, candor, a shot at diving deep and coming up with something wet and dripping, unfamiliar, and completely, uniquely cathartic. Instead we have sycophants masking themselves as workers who have always kow towed to the studios like little brothers and sisters but are now suddenly getting all greased and proletarian. “Motherfuckers, increase our percentages of Internet revenue or we will storm the… “. Storm what? Anyone with any sense at all knows that these people are anything but revolutionaries. So who cares? They’ll storm their way into Starbucks. Their Bloody Thursday is a Lakers game. and a late dinner at Spago. They are paid scriveners of big business who want the Robber Barons to cut them in on their swag. It’s comical because their work is trivial, second rate and clearly done for only one reason.

Anyway, you said it better than I did because you’re speaking from the front lines. As your friend, I’d like you to make the money you make from the system because you put it back into your own personal movies. How many others can say that? No one should live in an ivory tower but if you choose to, have the decency to provide your true address. And I think I know where the towers are concentrated these days.

I also admire you for speaking out and making a distinction between real and fake unionism. And how may of these self appointed Wobblies have given a thought to all the pain they’ve caused to the real workers, the restaurant workers, the yard workers, the nannies and security guards, the secretaries, the clerks, the food truck guys and the “olvidadoes” who hang around the ad hoc labor pools on LA street corners, who risked their lives to come here to work in jobs the writers would consider beneath them. How many of them have been fired or their working opportunities reduced because of elitist writers prattling on about their “rights.” I admire you for saying these things in the belly of the beast. Thank you for educating me.

Rob

Here is the second letter between Rob and Ray.

So Ray, good to to hear from you. This battle is an impossible one which is why it must be pursued. The sham of today’s Art and Cinema world points out the failure of social life everywhere. There are few places where real Artists can perform their cathartic work free from those who would turn it into either a political, an academic or an economic exercise. You are right to point people to the artists themselves, but the language of Art is co-opted and its practices so vanilla- fied that people are right to reject most of it. This is the legacy of political correctness and the lunatic Left’s disappointment in revolution as a strategy. So much easier to take over the studios, the museums, the art institutes, the galleries and infect the soft tissue of those who hate real Art because of their failure in it. Hitler was one of these, (by a cute trick of rhetoric a National “SOCIALIST”) but most of them are cowering, small people who work best in little mobs of right-thought and identity politics.

But then there are the middle of the roaders who are mad at you because you identify problems which, if they were solved, would put them out of business. I just think the old distinctions of Right and Left are becoming meaningless. I can’t find colleagues in either direction. And so I guess I’m a monk in the service of ENERGY, human and cosmic, and its greatest expression by the visionaries who continue to inspire me.

By the way I have been recently impressed by Donald Kuspit’s, THEN END OF ART. Do you know it?

Glad that people talk about 9 @ Night. You are certainly right about discerning audiences. They are small but I have been having a great correspondence with Nina Avedon which is one of the perks of a performance for just such a group. And I have you to thank for it.

The Harvard Magazine article is supposed to be coming out soon, as well as something from Film Comment. I hope they’re good.

I wish I could help you with the fools who are plaguing your existence, but their only Waterloo, I’m afraid, will be History. In that regard I think about a project I am preparing about de Kooning painting Woman 1. As it became clear that he was going to be “chosen” to represent an art movement, replete with fame, fortune and world approbation, those who had struggled with him began to see the cost. Some were envious, others sympathetic, others quietly philosophical about the long struggle they had waged for a highly personal, but universally applicable Art from the inner furnaces, which was now going to become popularized. And of course, de Kooning, who never really drank in excess before that, ended up a hopeless alcoholic. A millionaire with every material dream realized. But lost. So material success is no answer. Only an additional problem to deal with in the search for “the way things seem to be.”

Rob

Secondly, I’d like to announce that Mickey Freeman, Director of Photography on many of my movies has just won the Award of Excellence from the Accolade Award Competition for his timeless cinematography on PRESQUE ISLE. Congratulations to Mickey, one of the great cinematographers of our time.

And lastly, below, I’m including this article written by Denny Dey about PRESQUE ISLE. I think it speaks for itself.

Presque Isle:

What did it tell me?
I know that Danny was struck blind by his girlfriend’s attraction to Thor. I know that the realization was, no doubt, the straw that broke the camel’s fragile back. As a result, Danny falls through the cracks of his own mental asphalt into a morass of memories and madness resulting from unresolved issues with his mother, father, aged relatives, and female alliances. I know that Frasier is key to Danny’s search for significance in his past and that Frasier’s story is the shadow of Danny’s story, both revealing opposite images of Danny’s mother. I know that David is passionate and introspective and even though he is swimming upstream himself, he feels the need to reach out to Danny regardless of the outcome. I know that the words spoken by Melody and imprinted on the brass plate before the courthouse are somehow the words which haunt Danny’s present with gut-wrenching realities from his past; his hopes, his desires, his unrealized expectations. I know that the island is without and within. I know that the lake is distance, defeat, distraction, denial, death, and deferment from reality; hence, a reality isolated and, at the same time, reminiscent. Is there more? Should there be?

What did I see?
I saw the single most beautiful black and white film I have ever witnessed; presenting, in its interlocking images, a steady rhythm of visual messages and meanings. Nature and light held tight to each other in every frame. It was impossible to pull my eye from the screen.

What did I hear?
I heard staggered tones of talk and open air sounds surrounded by throngs of sustained notes and gatherings of other notes sometimes mixed with isolated unforgiving voices, the voices of wraiths watching from dark places nearby.

What did I feel?
I felt what the voyeur feels when crouched in the depth of the broken branches and behind the piles of wind herded leaves. I felt like Danny’s eye focused on breasts and falling water, wind blown hair and arched naked backs. I was there in the place of it and yet safely hidden from the pain of recognition and subterfuge. I was ever eager for the next image.

What did I want?
I wanted nothing, except to watch. I didn’t worry or care or plot or placate my own desires for or about anything as it happened. I just watched. I simply wanted to know what is going to happen.

What did I walk away with?
The image of a trap in my mind, a maze with no exit, a path that bends back on itself: the Mobius strip of realities filled with “you can’t” and “it won’t”. Now I can imagine that people watching Presque Isle were prone to manipulation of the visual or story element but let’s figure on two realities apparent to the open mind. One: They, the watchers, have no need to push and shove the visual aspect of the film because it is masterful work. It is one of the best examples of the visual art form to be shot since the post-modern era opened its studio doors and abandoned Art altogether.

They have no right to alter or adjust to the story since they, like me, are only invited to watch unattended in the nearby woods. This is not a tale of identifiable and dependable events designed to appease the appetite of front row popcorn munching enthusiasts. This is an unzipped tent flap, a clean spot on an otherwise dingy window, a space between nearby branches from which only the most patient hunters seek to observe their prey: the moment of the event. So, what is it that Presque Isle brings to the viewer besides a sunrise of cherishable images and mental map of one man’s unraveling? It brings what it brings to each and every other eye, depending on those perceptions which create one viewer unlike any other. It brings familiarity on one hand and strange attractions on the other. It brings questions and answers without directives. It turns the pages of one story intertwined and juxtaposed with many others. It is a peeled back Band-Aid exposing an oozing unhealed wound: one that infects the moment with tainted blood. Presque Isle is naked and cold and wet beneath storm clouds echoing thunder from past and present anguish. It is relentless in its pursuit of a tightening grip on the untouchable elements of human nature created by human nature amid the unpardonable structure of nature itself. It is rain and tears and the vile taste of one’s own failure unchecked; unbridled and unwanted.

And the Wolf?
Why not? Where else if not here? The ancestor of all supposedly loyal obedient hounds is there, in the woods, before us, telling us, with its howls, that we are only momentarily separated from our own savage instincts, only partially free of our own unacceptable needs and urges. Our wild nature is our downfall and, at the same time, our only element of real dignity for as we stand naked on the edge of the shoreline burning our clothes, we also stand at the outer boundary of our hope. So, do I know what the story is about, what it is trying to tell me? Perhaps, but somehow, I didn’t feel that need for conclusions detailed in linguistic symbolism. I felt more comfortable crouched in the underbrush out of sight, watching, waiting, my eyes prowling in search of the next image, my ears fixed on any sound or resonance of the nature of this man, the nature of his past, the nature of his surroundings. And, somehow, it seemed appropriate that way. Presque Isle is the single most succinct example of the re-birth of “film” in the United States. It’s roots sink deep into Bergman, Von Trier, and Cassavetes. There is no film currently under production or playing anywhere in the country which, regardless of its intent or design, beats so loudly on the door of American film archives.

Denny Dey

We are also adding SECURITY winner of the Green Cine Audience Award, to our store. a feature created with a workshop of U. of California students and players from the Tenderloin yGroup. Interlaced stories about “vulnerability in dangerous times”, explore the “fragility of emotional exposure” compared to “the very real threat to life and limb in Iraq.” We are offering SECURITY for the Xmas special price of $15. We are contractually unable to sell the 9 @ Night films yet, but as they become available we will let you know. The other DVDs are available as always on citizencinema.net but for the same Xmas reduced price of $15.00.

The Digiprints taken from my paintings are 8 1/2” by 11” digitally enhanced prints from the originals and will come signed, matted and framed. The cost is $125.00, two for $200.00

The autographed poetry books will go for $25.00.

I also have a small supply of original NORTHERN LIGHTS and ON THE EDGE movie posters. NORTHERN LIGHTS was winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, (1979) and ON THE EDGE, features Bruce Dern and John Marley, (1985). I’m selling the posters, which will come autographed and rolled up in mailing tubes, for $50 apiece. They are both collector’s items and will be available while the supply lasts.

I can also take special orders for posters of more recent films but they would have to be struck as one- offs at this time, an expensive process necessitating a $75.00 price tag. These posters will be on great looking photographic paper however and will be collector’s items before we’re through.

The paintings I’m putting up for sale are much more expensive but I have to price them at value. If anyone wants one I might, if my arm is twisted, go for a payment plan to fit your budget. If you want one of my pictures I want you to have it. Don’t assume anything. Let’s talk.

In considering any of these purchases remember that I make my Art as a calling. I feel it’s needed out there in the world. By purchasing it you contribute to its ability to make people feel, think and search and also, you keep me going. Revenue from any work I do collectively will also be shared with my collaborators and my hope is that sales can soon begin to pay back those who have shared the road. If you believe in the work, please support it. For the last 40 years I have tried to fight the mind- numbing fashions in post modern art and mainstream cinema in favor of a radically human approach to both. I’m sure you know I’m in it for a lifetime.

The products listed below are not yet available for online payment, but you can take advantage of these holiday offers by contacting Rob directly through email or by phone.
rnilsson@robnilsson.com
510-527-7217

ITEMS FOR SALE

1. FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA- the collected poetry of Rob Nilsson. Autographed copies- $25.00
2. NORTHERN LIGHTS Film Poster- winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 1979. Farmers struggle with the banks, railroads and the grain trade in 1916 North Dakota. Featuring Bob Behling, Joe Spano and Susan Lynch. Full sized (40”x 27”) . Collector’s item. Autographed- $50.00- Comes in mailing tube. Ideal for framing.
3. ON THE EDGE (1984) Film Poster featuring Bruce Dern and John Marley- An elite runner, banned from the Olympics, returns years later to run the Cielo Sea Race (based on the Dipsea in Marin County, the oldest cross country race in the US). Full sized (40” x 27”) Collector’s item. Autographed- $50.00
4. FILM POSTERS for other Nilsson films- One- offs on high quality photo paper- Autographed- $75.00
5. ORIGINAL PAINTINGS (Acrylic)- Eventually all my paintings will be available from the Citizen Cinema website but for this Xmas sale I am offering 15.
6. DIGIPRINTS from original paintings- 81/2 x 11” These are high- quality digitally enhanced images taken from the paintings. They come matted and framed. Antidotes to the post modern era. Colorful, expressionistic. As with the paintings I have selected only a few for this sale. $125.00. 2 for $200.00.

PAINTINGS AND DIGIPRINTS

1. PORTRAIT OF FAY, Acrylic, 16” x 12 , $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
2. SELF PORTRAIT, Acrylic, 14” x 11”- $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
3. PORTRAIT OF NORMANDIE, Acrylic, $7500 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
4. PORTRAIT OF NORMANDIE, B&W Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
5. PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER, Acrylic, $7500 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
6. MEN IN CARS #1, Acrylic, 16” x 12”, $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
7. MEN IN CARS #2, Acrylic, 16” x 12”, $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
8. MEN IN CARS #3, Acrylic, 18” x 14” $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
9. MEN IN CARS #4, Acrylic, 16” x 12” $1000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed)
   
10. OEDIPUS & JOCASTA, Acrylic, 48”x36” $12,500 (Digiprint $125 Autographed)
    
11. OEDIPUS & JOCASTA, B & W, Digiprint $125 Autographed
    
12. LILITH #1, B & W Digiprint $125 Autographed
    
13. LILITH #2, Acrylic, “48 x 36”- $7500 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed
    
14. TRIBAL, Acrylic, “102 x 83”- $20,000 (Digiprint- $125 Autographed
    
15. TRIBAL, Acrylic B & W Digiprint- $125 Digiprint- $125 Autographed
    
16. FLAMENCO, Acrylic, “48 x 36”- $5500- Digiprint- $125 Autographed
    
17. RED LANDSCAPE, Acrylic, 18” x 14”- Digiprint- $125 Autographed
    

Dear Rob,

Still not quite sure how to put into words the visceral experience of 9@night but didn’t want too much time to elapse lest I lose the immediacy of the experience. In the interest of full disclosure, I saw 7 of the 9 films. In the interest of full exposure, I had just returned from a most painful and redemptive time following the death of a family member which left me in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion and openness.
This is a long way of saying that I’m not sure how much was me and how much were the films but I suppose that’s the point anyway; about the blurring of inner and outer and the constant of a fluid subjectivity.

I said to you last night that I don’t trust words anymore which I realize is an odd thing for someone who makes a living plying “The talking cure” to say but your films showed the beauty of the unspoken word and the truth of a gesture. Language can obfuscate but the body knows and cannot lie.

Some themes and images have remained with me. I think you capture the dance between men and women very well; how we continually disappoint one another and want the other to “amaze” us as Michelle says about Denny. How vulnerable and hence unforgiving we can be when we feel rebuffed and our fantasy of desire is thwarted like between the German chanteuse and Perry or between Bid and his roommate. You also show how a little bit of kindness goes a long way for example the tender way Perry treats Lu in Go Together. And of course the pas de deux between a wheelchair bound Bid and his beautiful blonde seductress/savior was so gorgeously poignant especially when we have already witnessed the brutal and tragic consequences of their tryst.

Lu’s daughter’s capacity to remain open to love despite what we know of her backstory struck me as one of the many redemptive stories in your oeuvre. Bid’s performance in the scene with her where you see him struggle with the dual reality of current longings that can’t be fully realized and the memory of desire fulfilled was almost too much to bear; but bear it he did and we along with him. I never cease to be amazed at the mystery of how and why some of us close off while others of us remain open after sustained suffering.

In addition to capturing male bravado and gruffness- Spoddy, Malafide (What a great name!) et al. you also highlight the love in male friendships. I found the scenes between the two roommates in Stroke some of the most moving in the series.

So much more to say … but I’ll stop for now. Rob, many thanks to you, Michelle and all the other players in your Tenderloin Group for providing me the opportunity to undergo such a creative, intense journey these past three days. I know that I will continue to digest, feel, reflect and dream about what I experienced in ways that are familiar and hopefully in ways that are not…

Best,

Nina Avedon

PS. I would like to purchase several of the films. When you get a chance, please let me know the price of a DVD and I will send you a check.

Hello Nina,

Thanks for writing with fresh impressions. Very good for me to hear and digest after a powerful weekend. Your comments feed and nourish. Your recognition of the body as the “non-lying” organ, reminds me of the transports I went through in Reichian therapy, a large factor in my distrust of sitting down and just “talking through” roles and relationships. How much better to live them, experience the nature of character, as opposed to defining it with language and intellect. There are plenty of things for the brain to do in all of this, but for me, that’s mainly in creating a workable structure to begin with and then editing and shaping after the voyaging is over. I think it’s Mike Nichols who talks about the relief of the “dark room” where the alchemy can start once everyone has “lived” (my term) in front of the camera.

I will share your words with our close intimates (Michelle, Dean and workshop members) with your permission. I am also wondering if you would object to me posting your letter on our website. It would be wonderful for others to hear the depth of feeling and perception you show in relation to our work. I don’t have to tell you (the size of the audience does that better) how much we need intelligence and sensitivity in our corner. We have staunch allies in the world, but we need inspired witness such as yours. Let me know your thoughts. You could also go up on our new website to see how we right at the beginning of trying to create new dialogue with people.

We are going to create a box for the 9 film box set and I will let you know about when and how you can get one… or purchase them separately if that’s better for you.

Meantime, let’s stay in touch. Thanks for your courage in sticking it out in the face of personal stress. I remember how my mother started losing hope toward the end of her life. One of the symptoms was her unwillingness to watch Bergman anymore. Also, no one could “argue” at the dinner table any more. Couldn’t we just talk about pleasant things? It was a mistake, in my view, and I think you showed me why. Tragedy “opens” rather than “closes down.” Perhaps that’s why films which exhibit human suffering in an honest way are cathartic. This is one of the paradoxes which I try to keep in mind in the face of the crippling insistence in this country on being “positive” at every moment. In my new film PRESQUE ISLE a woman soliloquizes about how she realized she didn’t love her newborn son, and when she did, tried to hide it from herself. She became a “nice” person, and says that a nice person is one who “has to smile a lot, because she has forgotten what the truth really is.”

Thanks for being there.

Rob

Dear Rob,

A while back I called you to ask your advice about starting an acting workshop, following up on the council you gave Dean Hyers. I regret to say I didn’t follow up on it immediately. In fact, it seemed too – not too hard, but too dishonest, given my own lack of knowledge. Perhaps it was just cowardice or resistance. What I did do, was take some classes myself. Out of the blue, I found a remarkable mentor, a guy named Yuri Brusilovsky. He’s an émigré from Kiev, where he lead a few theatre companies and, importantly, was trained in and then taught the Stanislavski System. So I worked with him, and he worked me very hard, being the old school Russian he is, rigorous and devoted to Art with a capital A in way few people seem to be. And, now, finally I’m beginning, with a few actors. We’re working on some one acts as a basis. Partly out of my own lingering doubts about my capacity, but partly to give some shape and to honor, I hope, the work of some great writers.

Anyway, this is a long way of thanking you again for your generosity with your time and your willingness to share your advice. I’ve shot a couple of short films, and in the process, and in their faults, they’ve only confirmed the good advice you gave me. So, thank you, again. It’s the season for thanksgiving, and although I haven’t completely paid off the debt of your help, I’m starting and will continue to do the work. Your example continues to inspire and teach. I’m grateful that you took the time back then, and I look forward to the time when I’ll have something worth sharing with you.

Best, Tim Roessler �

Hello Tim,

Thanks for your words. If I helped, I’m glad. Our media world, our cultural context in both plastic arts and cinema, is sad. We need committed practitioners who realize that the water is poisoned, the air mutilated with fear and false witness and that human joy, rage, despair and intimate connection must be courted to be human, so that we might receive the benefits of a true catharsis. Anything less shoves the animal aside and promotes the idea that there are “solutions” to the world problems. That is what stops us, this false idea that living a full life, fighting injustice and cruelty is like filling in the blanks in a cross word. If this person is elected, if this law is passed, if this criminal is brought to justice then…

Out there in the world there are actions, activities, things to do, things to avoid. Culture can give us clues to the poetry of truthful recognition and only that, I believe, gives us the clues. We have to live seeking “the way things seem to be”. That is the path to empathy and wildness, joy and the embracing of tragedy. Comedy too. Since people turn away from this difficult realm in order to “lean back” into the babble of mainstream entertainment, we have to make work which helps them to “lean forward” into the work of the pilgrim, the questioner, the curious seeker.

Good luck in your leaning.

Rob

View the Harvard Film Archive’s official announcement, 9 @ Night: The Films of Rob Nilsson.

This is the schedule:

NOISE, Sat. Nov. 17- 5:00 PM
USED, Sat. Nov. 17- 7:30 PM
ATTITUDE, Nov. 17- 9:15 PM
SINGING, Nov. 18- 3:00 PM
STROKE, Nov. 18- 7:00 PM
SCHEME C6, Nov. 18- 9:00 PM
NEED, Nov. 19- 6:00 PM
PAN, Nov. 19- 8:00 PM
GO TOGETHER, Nov. 19- 10:00 PM

Please tell Aunt Lucretia, Cousin Jack and the boys, Freddie Freeloader, Conk the Junkman, and all the little Teletubbies to come to the screenings. You will get a reduced rate if you buy tickets to all 9 films and watch them with me. You will also get a free DVD of your favorite film, plus other unnameable and even conceivable aesthetic pleasures and considerations for several generations to come.

In short, please help us to sell these houses out. We did so in our home town, but here we need word of mouth, e-mails to friends, and just generally getting the word out that this is an historic occasion, the first time all 9 9 @ Night Films will be shown back to back, and in order. Please try to come and please ask others to follow suit.

Here, Survival on the Margins, is the excellent essay, written by Ray Carney, author of the major books on John Cassavetes, Carl Dreyer, and Mike Leigh. I feel honored that we have such an insightful and erudite essay fronting for us at Harvard. Well what do you expect from a couple of old Harvard grads, although I’m a little older than Ray (but don’t tell him.)”

For 30 years, San Francisco–based Rob Nilsson has been serving as the conscience and agent provocateur of low–budget American independent filmmaking. Beginning with the award–winning Northern Lights, Signal 7, and Heat and Sunlight in the 1970s and 1980s, he has devoted his cinematic career to presenting the sorts of sociological realities, interpersonal interactions, and emotional transactions that have been screened out of big–budget, mainstream American film.

The “9 @ Night” series, which will be presented for the first time in its entirety at Harvard, is his most ambitious and controversial project to date. Nilsson has created a master–narrative more than 14 hours in length, made up of nine interlocking yet independent fictional films focusing on the lives of the drifters, scam–artists, hustlers, sex–trade workers, and others who exist on the tattered fringes of American society and populate San Francisco’s poorest and most deprived neighborhood, the Tenderloin District. (Though the nine cinematic narratives mesh with each other, and contain numerous enriching cross–references, it is worth emphasizing that each film stands completely on its own, so that it is not necessary for a viewer to see the entire sequence to appreciate any one of them.) What makes the project even more daring is that Nilsson developed the stories in collaboration with actual inhabitants of the Tenderloin District, and cast the same individuals in many of the roles, which means that the actors on screen are often playing parts scarily close to the ones they play in real life, as they struggle and compete for survival at the muddy bottom of the food chain.

In line with much of Nilsson’s other work, the “9 @ Night” films are not organized around action–centered, Hollywood forms of presentation, but are character studies that chiefly focus on the troubled and troubling emotional lives of men – though all of the films include important female roles, and one of them, Need, devotes itself explicitly to exploring the emotional lives of a group of women. The narratives jump freely back and forth through the space and time of the main characters’ lives as if to demonstrate that what we are is more important than what we do.

One of the questions Nilsson explores is how individuals hold themselves together when every external form of support is taken away. What is left of life when the material rewards of capitalism, the hierarchical relationships of bureaucracy, and all dreams of personal advancement or improvement are withdrawn? “Family and friends” is the usual answer to that question, but the characters in these films don’t even have the safety net of brothers, sisters, children, parents, or close friends to break their fall. Their stints in prison or on the road have estranged them from their own pasts.

The pastoral myth would have it that to be liberated so radically is to become free; but Nilsson’s vision is darker than that. He demonstrates that the rivalries, depredations, and insensitivities of our interactions with others are not imposed on us by persons or systems external to ourselves, but are something we ourselves create – and that these outsiders re–create even as outcasts. His characters’ vulnerabilities and fears reconstitute and repeat the brutalities and cruelties of mainstream society. Pan demonstrates that even the surrogate families the homeless create among themselves repeat the dysfunctionality of the relationships in many biological families. The films are anthologies of inadvertent miscommunication, misunderstanding, and failure to connect with others even when connection is the thing most needed and desired.

Notwithstanding the nitty–gritty “realism” of the street–world Nilsson has chosen as the milieu for his series, it is critical to recognize that his real subject is not externals but internals – not characters’ physical, but their emotional states of loss and deprivation. As Pan (Kieron McCartney) puts it, as bad as “the outside pain” can be for someone living on the streets, “the inside pain … the suffering inside the body” is worse – and far more important. To bring that inner reality into view and communicate the powerful emotional and psychological forces roiling under the shabby surfaces of his characters’ lives, Nilsson employs a striking series of Bressonian poetic images, sounds, and juxtapositions. In Noise, Ben Malafide, played by Robert Viharo, (his last name is clearly metaphoric) has his story warped and transformed almost beyond recognition at moments by computerized forms of image–processing that figure cultural forces that threaten understandings of life (or solutions to his problems) couched in merely personal terms. In Attitude, the Tamburlaine character Spoddy (Michael Disend) is linked to the openness and expansiveness of the sky, birds, and the sea at the beginning of his film, and his subsequent fall is rendered as a descent into turbid, dark realms of mud, bushes, and enclosed spaces. In Scheme C6 (to my mind, the masterwork of the series), Bid’s (Cory Duval) urban–commando image of himself is rendered in a series of visually assaultive, convention–violating forward and upward movements and harshly grating, mechanical sounds, and his state of emotional unavailability is visually associated with locks, chains, doors, interiors, and dead–ends. In Stroke and Pan, the brutalizing on–rush of trains and traffic, and in several of the other films, the scale of the cityscapes in the background or looming over the characters seem to flatten them into insignificance under the pressure of American corporate power and wealth.

The meta–narrative of the entire “9 @ Night” series might be said to be the downward spiral of pain and loss that characters who have dropped beneath the bottom edge of the American cultural support system inflict on themselves – even more than on others. The path the characters in these films travel is almost always downward to darkness – or, in the case of Phil (Teddy Weiler) and Johnny (Edwin Johnson) in the final moments of Stroke, to something worse than darkness – to a complete erasure of their identities, as if they had never been born or lived at all. But the wonder of Nilsson’s vision of life is that he shows us that even on the road to hell, moments of soul–saving grace can be offered to us. A blonde “angel” makes a brief appearance near the end of Noise. In Singing, even in the depths of his malaise, Perry can be surprised by joy when he suddenly understands the reason for the screams coming from a nearby car. In that same film, a shared song in a bar, or, in Pan, a goofy musical pantomime can momentarily close the gap of fear and suspicion that otherwise separates people. In Stroke (a punning title), the touch of a woman’s hand, the kindness of a friend, or the sound of a voice can give even the hopeless fleeting hope. Several of the films show how something as small as a handclasp or a look can offer the possibility of transforming all of life. Nilsson knows that miracles are constantly happening all around us, and that ministering spirits can offer salvation even as we travel down the path to perdition; but he also mourns that so few are able to receive the proffered gift.

-Ray Carney

The Introduction to the “9 @ Night” series was written by and individual films in the series will be introduced by Ray Carney, professor of film and American studies at Boston University. He is the author of more than ten books on film and other art, and manages a web site devoted to independent film at: www.Cassavetes.com.