Hello to the 15,000 and to the Faithful from the Films About Love Series,

The last in our 12 film series on the subject of love will play this coming Wednesday, Aug. 8, at the Edwin Johnson Screening Room, 1418 5th. St., Berkeley, 7:00 PM.

HEAT AND SUNLIGHT won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1988 as predicted by the Hollywood Reporter review below. However, the “bidding battle” it foresaw never happened and thanks to the wisdom of the America distribution system, we (Steve and Hildy Burns and I) distributed it ourselves with Mark Lipsky and Silverlight helping us with our New York opening. We did have distribution in other countries, however, and we made modest progress in introducing an “Open Form” cinema to a cinematic world largely dominated by “Closed Form” work.

When I saw John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS I got my first inkling of what an Open Form movie could be. That film was my major inspiration in creating the Direct Action filmmaking method. In Open Form work the effort is to minimize the distinctions between movie locations and real places, between “players” and everyday people, between film structures and life experiences, and to exchange Hallmark card, set piece cinematography for a “you are there” visual style which courts the rough beauty of compositions found in life as it’s lived.

All art on some level is an abstraction, removed from the life we live by dint of it being an “interpretation”, rather than an un- premeditated “slice.” But if you like the way life looks as it just happens around you, you have a precious resource which has the advantage of being cheap, plentiful, and authentic.

When you put your senses out there to perceive what’s around you, you realize that in Open Form you’re looking at life more like a scientist does. You’re not so much creating a fiction, as you are observing things which happen. You might have set them in motion, but you are often not controlling the outcome. You’re seeking it like a scientist might but, of course, without the obligations of scientific experimentation and definition. By trying to liberate the world’s amazing Persian carpets of sight, sound and human experience from the Closed Form effort to isolate and re-articulate the cinematic playing space, sometimes, in an almost miraculous process, you feel yourself caught up in a slipstream which feels like a heightened version of life itself.

In Open Form you try to eliminate as many obstacles to observing an artistic “life as it is being lived” as you can. You live off the land, welcoming the unexpected moment, exchanging what you know for what you might come to know. All sorts of things happen when you work this way. Sometimes total strangers suddenly arrive and insert themselves into the film with an almost seamless grace. Many cineastes would think of this effort to cozy up to the living, breathing, happening moment, as a documentary impulse, but I don’t. With the exception of Cinema Verite where filmmakers attempt to be a fly on the wall where something IS simply happening, most documentary seems as set up and prone to fiction as fiction itself. My effort is to create the conditions where a fictional sort of proto- existence can flourish in such a way that I can film it, and later, edit it. I want it to feel like it “just happened” and although I might add music and other ingredients, it tries to be one of Yeats’ spontaneous “moments”, even if comprised of much “stitching and un-stitching”.

Anyway, I continue to be more interested in the Open Form road, and find that only a few practitioners of Closed Form interest me, some of whose work we have shown in this series. To me, the Open Form road, when done with close attention to the truth of the human moment and a sharp eye out for false behavior done to impress rather than to express, is more likely to show us moments of truth in the moment, not to be confused with “capital T” Truth, which I mistrust as much as the next guy.

Ingmar Bergman died this week and he is a Closed Form Master who can inspire, teach and delight with the slightest human gesture. But the trick here is, no matter how pre-meditated, when his players perform they are working the same spontaneous sources as Open Form players do, only they often know in advance what dialogue they will use to open themselves to the passion of the moment.

As I look back on HEAT AND SUNLIGHT (1988) I see success and failure, but more importantly I see one way station in a search for something more alive and meaningful than most of the cinema I see around me, particularly in this country. So the path winds out in front of me, and the pilgrimage continues.

HEAT AND SUNLIGHT has to be considered a formidable contender for the top honor in the independent dramatic competition here at the Sundance film Festival. Narratively wild and aesthetically risky, it’s an emotionally gritty and raucously tender film. Strong word of mouth coupled with certain rave reviews should make this a sure winner for the distribution company that wins the bidding battle on this rousing presentation.

Screenwriter/director Rob Nilsson (NORTHERN LIGHTS, SIGNAL 7) stars as a despairing photo journalist who’s lost his dancer girlfriend (Consuelo Faust) to her new dance partner. Never able to edit himself, either his photos or his emotional behavior, he sinks into a frantic emotional tailspin. Withdrawing, lashing out and quickly crashing into self-destructive despair, he’s a swirling maelstrom of contradictions and obsessive energy. To say the least, his vacillating girlfriend is confused by his manic mixed signals: he attacks and retreats from her in a crackling swirl of professed love and stated disdain. She, along with his two idiosyncratic friends (Don Bajema, Ernie Fosselius) are overwhelmed by his frazzled and obsessive love.

Credit to Nilsson, his amazing cast and, in particular, to director of photography Tomas Tucker for shooting straight to the heart and editor Henk Van Eeghen for trimming clean to the bone in the midst of this teeming, virtuoso ensemble creation.

Hollywood Reporter

HEAT AND SUNLIGHT, 92 mins., Black and White- Winner Grand Prize Sundance Film Festival, 1988