Hello to the 15,000 and the Films on Love Screening Series,

On Weds. Night, Aug. 8 we concluded our twelve film series on the subject of love with my film, HEAT AND SUNLIGHT. I was dreading it. I was putting my work up for comparison with the films of the masters I had revered and tried my best to learn from, Cassavetes and Bergman in particular. But we had also shown Lars von Trier, Bertolucci, Teshigahara, Oshima. What would I think when my film played on the same screen? I had to be ready to face my honest responses. There’s not an enormous amount of time left and utter failure was an agenda item I wasn’t relishing.

The screening was packed. We used up every chair in the house, even those which invited collapse. One or two had to sit on the floor. I tried not to be too self- deprecating as I introduced the film. For those who haven’t seen it, you should know that along with directing, I played the lead role, and so was particularly exposed, particularly in the love scene so magnificently cut by editor Henk Van Eeghen.

I watched the screening of HEAT AND SUNLIGHT with all the rigor I try to apply to every work. No point in pretending. I try to tell the truth as I see it, with the proviso that criticism has several functions. First of all it’s a ruthless weed whacker. There are films, and they are in the majority, which just take up space, and they are made with all the honest arrogance of financiers in the pursuit of profit. Or they exist as nifty notions in the minds of the clever who just can’t wait to show us their slick wizardry. Or they are dull, if well meaning, untalented if technically “correct.” I try to see all the pitfalls in my work and I fight the ones I can make out, walking a thin line because without risking expression of every fault I possess I can’t work with candor and take the chances I need to take in order to dig deeper, or push further.

I think that if we don’t work on the perimeter of failure, there’s no way to succeed. “Our path is towards our fear.” Many friends know this aphorism I have used so often in the workshop. Players must risk making a fool of themselves in order to develop all of their interpretive powers. So must directors. So I try to be hard on work which demands our attention but insults our intelligence, which tricks itself out with Stars we’re supposed to like, with “good for you themes” which stroke our prejudices, films which state the obvious assuming we’re oblivious.

But I also think that the purpose of criticism is to make work better. If someone is honestly striving, then a critique should be designed to help, not to demoralize. But in the end, there are few Kurosawas, Satyajit Rays, Oshimas, and Kiarostamis and that should also be pointed out. With today’s penchant for making artistic credibility an adjunct to the rights of politically correct entitlement, fear of the energies and passions of real artists has become epidemic. This has helped to destroy the direct electricity which flows from a powerful artist to an avid audience. This can’t and won’t last in the plastic arts, as much as it is the unavoidable trademark of colonized American cinema which has, in the last few years made an amazing deal with the devil. So-called “Indie” work has been neutered by the orthodoxies of film schools and the right minded bonhomie of politically inspired institutions brought into being to support it and, thusly altered, gene splices pop culture frivolity to the frozen food mentality of the film business. The result: no energy, no passion, nobody home. Much of this pale, anemic work functions under the flags of the same old race, class, gender screed which confuses political imperatives with the high flying of artistic envisioning. Seemingly up to the minute, it actually impedes change because there’s no electricity in it, no hooking up of poles, and no lightning across gaps. That’s what Art does. It occasions and transfixes the weather with you wrapped up in it. Short of that, it’s kind of an old newspaper being blown down a Tenderloin alley by an insignificant little huff n’ puff.

I’d say eat, drink, live and love with all the freedom and abandon you can bear. If they make it, go and see it. Each to his own. However if you’re are trying to seize life by the hair a little lower down on the shaft, why not develop eyes, ears and brains to higher and wilder discourses of art? We end up boring ourselves and others if we don’t and since we all know what boredom does to men and women and their relationships, we might work harder not to be Philistines bred by today’s absurd academies, the result of the long road the European Avant Garde has taken over the last 150 years to become at last… the Establishment.

So, I was sitting in the Edwin Johnson Screening Room, feeling this rough animal, HEAT AND SUNLIGHT, a film about the wrong headed salvos jealousy rains down on an overwrought man, and I could feel it working around me. The structure took turns and transitions which generated both surprise and good sense, an architecture which was not predictable, but not obscure either. With the distance of time, almost 20 years to be exact, I felt that I was in the hands of something built, but also a force which challenged the building, and here and there slipped the noose, avoided the expected, and roared on with its own compelling energy. And I felt it working in the audience too, who saw the absurdity as well as the tenacious idealism of the main character, his own worst enemy, but a man with a plan, a bad plan, but undertaken with all that was in him. And people laughed. A great joy to see that the humor in the film stood the test.

But the greatest rush for me was in the discussion afterwards. I asked for candor as I have in every screening. And I went around the room asking each person to give their most vehement opinion. I always do this to avoid either group think or collective sandbagging, hoping that each person can dig in and find a unique take. Three hours later the discussion ended. No one had asked what camera I used. There was very little discussion about technique, about Direct Action, about the trivia of movie making.

The discussion was about the film. What it was. What it said. Who was Mel Hurley and what kind of a man was he? What was the connection between the violence and death of Biafra and the pain of jealousy and separation between lovers? What were the connections between eroticism and suffering in the human animal. And finally the other whats, wheres, and whys which accompany any good discussion about the mysteries.

I was able to say that I liked the rough hewn look which preceded those created by the Danish Dogme guys by about 10 years. And I was able, to some extent, to express my distrust of gleaming surfaces, pretty pictures, and laudable sentiments. I hope everyone got my point which is that too much polish keeps attention on the surface of things. If you want to get deeper, you’ve got some hardpan to tunnel through. I like to spelunk down through the rough stuff which scrapes against heart and mind and sears and sticks and stays. Embarrassing stuff. And remember we get embarrassed because we can’t handle whatever causes it. And so we know we have something to learn.

After everyone had gone home I sat in my room and felt that our screening series on the subject of “love”, whatever that might be by the lights of those with the luck and the skill to make the films we showed, had been a great success. It made me want to start up a new series soon and after the last two 9@night films, USED and GO TOGETHER, and PRESQUE ISLE have their World Premieres at the 2007 Mill Valley Film Festival in early October and all nine 9@night Films play at the Harvard Film Archives in November, we’ll get started again, this time perhaps on the largely forgotten films which have in their genes, the Neorealist chromosome. This way of looking at the world turned up early in the history of the cinema and has always been one of its great traditions, temperamentally resistant to easy popularity and facile entertainment.

And so what did I think of my film at the end of the series about love? Did it hold up to the other films I chose as examples of the highest cinematic achievement.? It’s not for me to say. The world will eventually make a judgment which will last or will not last. Who knows what that mechanism is and how it works, makes up its mind, and then changes it again? All I can say is that I felt the film pulsing through its own veins propelled by heart and compelled by thought, feeling, architecture, energy, and although black and white, conjuring up the color red: color of sensations, suggestions, surmises, and maybe even lasting visions and epiphanies. Also I had a memory of having been there on the set, 20 years ago, with comrades and fellow travelers, friends and collaborators, participating in a great interchange of juices, jousts, jests, gestations and high sensations. I’ll never forget this film. I’ll always be proud of it. It did what I wanted it to do. To everyone out there with me making it undeniable: Thank you. Thank you.