A new film by Gina Telaroli: "Here's To The Future!"

Water and script pages, Here’s To The Future, Gina Telaroli, 2014

The young film­maker Gina Telaroli has a new pic­ture premier­ing this upcom­ing Saturday, December  13, at the Migrating Forms fest­iv­al at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Here’s To The Future! is both an imme­di­ately enga­ging and con­sist­ently (play­fully) chal­len­ging piece of work; I char­ac­ter­ize it below as an essay film dis­guised as a pro­cess film. The premise of the movie is simple: Telaroli assembles a small crew and vari­able cast to enact a scene from an obscure Michael Curtiz-directed melo­drama from the early ’30s, The Cabin In The Cotton  (which cost­arred soon-to-be-casualty-of-the-talkies Richard Barthelmess and not-yet-ascended star Bette Davis), and gives her­self a single after­noon to get it done. (It occurs to me now that there’s also some­thing slightly OULIPean about the enter­prise.) All of the folks assembled have their own devices which are shoot­ing the shoot­ing and the fin­ished fea­ture inter­cuts foot­age off devices ran­ging from a Blackberry Curve to a Canon 60D. Where Telaroli’s pri­or fea­ture, 2012’s Traveling Light (which I wrote about here) made a kind of abstract nar­rat­ive out of an aban­doned attempt at a dif­fer­ent nar­rat­ive film, Here’s To The Future! adopts an inter­rog­at­ive mode from the get-go. But because it gets so close to the people who are part of it, the movie nev­er feels her­met­ic or the­or­et­ic­al. It’s both as uncon­ven­tion­al and access­ible as film­mak­ing gets, in a funny way. Go see it. 

I engaged Gina, who’s a friend, in an e‑mail inter­view, and here’s how it went.

GK:  Your first fea­ture, A Little Death is, from all appear­ances, a pretty con­ven­tion­ally con­ceived and pro­duced nar­rat­ive film in that it seems to be the work of act­ors and a crew work­ing from a script, etcet­era. Traveling Light is a movie that aspired to be one thing, and ended up as some­thing else due to cir­cum­stances of shoot­ing and then again with respect to edit­ing. Here’s To The Future! is some­thing else yet again: a kind of essay film in the dis­guise of a pro­cess film. Was that what your con­cep­tion was from begin­ning to end or, as with Traveling Light, was that some­thing that changed along the timeline of the production?

GT: Like Traveling Light, HTTF! isn’t con­ven­tion­al in terms of its con­cep­tion and is very much a product of cir­cum­stances, some in my con­trol and some not. The scene we are shoot­ing was actu­ally sup­posed to be part of a short film I was mak­ing for an omni­bus pro­ject that was centered on the theme of ‘proof.’ I was going to make a film com­prised of doc­u­ment­ary foot­age I shot in Ohio and have that trans­ition to the nar­rat­ive scene we shot on that Sunday in September.  The omni­bus pro­ject fell through, so that film nev­er got made, but even before that pro­ject turned to dust, I knew I was more inter­ested in the doc­u­ment of the shoot itself and the repe­ti­tion in the per­form­ances of the scene, that that was the real “movie.”

GK:  It looks as if, in the films where you work from foot­age you gen­er­ate your­self and/or with the col­lab­or­a­tion of your col­leagues, your role as dir­ect­or is less that of a tra­di­tion­al auteur and more as a con­duct­or or prompt­er. You’re cre­at­ing a set of cir­cum­stances for cre­at­ive people to enact and record­ing and digesting—via editing—the res­ults. Is that an accur­ate characterization?

GT: I don’t dis­agree with what you wrote, though some­thing about your ques­tion feels like it dis­cred­its my voice as the author a bit?  My films are 100% the res­ult of cir­cum­stance and they are def­in­itely depend­ent on col­lab­or­a­tion and the people I work with, which I love, but I still put all the ele­ments in the room, if that makes sense. For HTTF!  I chose the scene, the people, the day, and I did dir­ect a lot of the foot­age, even if it’s used in a dif­fer­ent con­text.  Also, while it isn’t dir­ect­ing exactly, I have to ima­gine the mood, the gen­er­al feel­ing of the day and thus the pro­gres­sion of events was due in part to the envir­on­ment I cre­ated and sustained. 

Also, in Classic Hollywood (and even in the cur­rent iter­a­tion of the stu­dio sys­tem) dir­ect­ors didn’t neces­sar­ily have a lot of choice about con­tent or col­lab­or­at­ors but of course the entire idea of the auteur was developed around them.  The main dif­fer­ence here is that instead of dir­ect­ing a tra­di­tion­al story with the cre­at­ive ele­ments giv­en to me (script, act­ors, crew), I’m basic­ally dir­ect­ing the story in the edit with the cre­at­ive ele­ments giv­en to me (foot­age).

I do like the idea of com­par­ing myself to a con­duct­or although I think a more accur­ate meta­phor­ic descrip­tion might be that what I do is like being a con­test­ant on MasterChef dur­ing one of the Mystery Box Challenges. Ultimately I have to use the ingredi­ents giv­en to me (foot­age) but at the end of the day I’m still the author, the recipe pre­pared is mine. 

GK: Why did you want to reen­act this par­tic­u­lar scene from The Cabin In The Cotton?

GT: The simple and prac­tic­al answer, which always factors into my no-budget film­mak­ing, is that I needed some­thing that looked and felt like a movie scene and I needed that scene to be a simple one with min­im­al char­ac­ters that could be shot in an apart­ment in one after­noon.  After those prac­tic­al con­sid­er­a­tions came the fact that in the months lead­ing up to that shoot, Film Forum was hav­ing one of their pre-code series and I was going nightly and rabidly email­ing with friends about the films we were see­ing, which were prov­ing very inspir­a­tion­al and also timely, with August 8^th’s Black Monday. Of all the movies at Film Forum, The Cabin In The Cotton really hit home in terms of its strange and com­plex ideas about eco­nom­ics and solid­ar­ity polit­ics. I was also drawn to the baff­ling com­bin­a­tion of a fresh-faced Bette Davis and a soundly con­fused and tired Richard Barthelmess.  So, as per usu­al, the choice was a product of cir­cum­stance and prac­tic­al con­cerns, as well as them­at­ic appro­pri­ate­ness and my own bizarre interests and fixations.

I will say that I am get­ting a lot of joy from the fact that every­one who talks to me about the movie is ask­ing about why I chose this scene. That is, I really really like the idea of people being curi­ous and pla­cing all this import­ance on a pretty ran­dom, mostly for­got­ten, and by all accounts insig­ni­fic­ant movie from 1932. That doesn’t hap­pen very often any­more. It’s actu­ally going to be on TCM on January 21^st at 8:45, so inter­ested parties should set their DVRs.

GK: “I just think it needs to look really real,” an off­screen voice is heard say­ing at the begin­ning of the film. The mul­tiple frames con­tained with­in the movie—the cred­its list sev­en dis­crete record­ing devices—in them­selves sug­gest dif­fer­ent stand­ards of real­ism, but even so, oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions come into play. The per­son­al­it­ies of the play­ers kind of mutate as the movie moves along; a view­er might find cine­ma­to­graph­er Eric Phillips-Horst a little uptight and wonky at the out­set, and his sheer joy at the end is kind of unex­pec­ted and infec­tious. Was illu­min­at­ing the conun­drum about cinema—that it both shows and with­holds, and can be very cagey about giv­ing what one might call “the whole picture”—part of your scheme?

GT: I’ll start with the spe­cif­ics here and then get a little more gen­er­al.  With Eric, who actu­ally is the per­son who speaks the line you ref­er­ence, I think this is par­tially due to pro­cess. For the first two acts of the movie, more than any­one else, he’s work­ing and has a very spe­cif­ic task that requires a very spe­cif­ic focus and energy, espe­cially when there’s a time crunch because your tal­ent has to fin­ish at spe­cif­ic times to get to their day jobs.  The third act is the first point in the movie where he is actu­ally able to relax and just be him­self, and in the case of Eric, him­self is very much some­thing I would asso­ci­ate with joy.  In any case, I really like that his “char­ac­ter” worked that way for you—in terms of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment but mostly in terms of a doc­u­ment of labor.

Something I often thought about while edit­ing was how the movie would change or work for people that knew the people in movie per­son­ally and those that didn’t.  Ultimately, I think it’s (appro­pri­ately) a lot like pre-code cinema, which fea­tured a round-robin of rotat­ing char­ac­ter act­ors. That is, if you are famil­i­ar with (know in a sense) Ruth Donnelly, Guy Kibbee, Allen Jenkins, Emma Dunn, Ned Sparks etc.,you’re giv­en a key to go deep­er with those films. The rhythms of those movies change and the jokes res­on­ate in a dif­fer­ent way and in some cases the jokes only exist because of know­ledge of the act­or and their pre­vi­ous roles. That being said, obvi­ously Blessed Event isn’t any less of a movie if you don’t recog­nize the act­ors, it’s just a slightly dif­fer­ent one.  Fassbinder’s films func­tion similarly.

In terms of with­hold­ing and show­ing, what’s been very inter­est­ing and sur­pris­ing to me thus far has been people’s dif­fer­ent inter­pret­a­tions, not of what things mean so much as what is actu­ally happening—who is say­ing what, who has the cam­era, where the sound is com­ing from, what’s on pur­pose and what isn’t, who is act­ing and who isn’t.

GK: There’s also a sub­tex­tu­al inter­rog­a­tion of the mech­an­ics of desire going on in this movie. At some point each of the female act­ors who’s por­tray­ing the Bette Davis role com­ments upon, or makes a phys­ic­al adjust­ment to, her front­al present­a­tion, so to speak. Giving dir­ec­tion to one of your male act­ors, you are heard say­ing, “But…you’re a man…”  There’s a brief mont­age, three shots I think, of unlaced female gar­ments. Whence does/did this arrive from?

GT: I’d almost rather hear you talk more about this than answer the ques­tion myself because I’m always think­ing about gender and its rela­tion­ship to cinema on and off screen but I’ve nev­er thought of the movie that way or seen those images in that con­text when I’ve watched it.

That being said, I think there are a few prac­tic­al answers to this ques­tion.  In terms of the front­al adjust­ment, I think those shots came to be because 1), people were not think­ing about being filmed 2), it was a no-budget set and every­one is wear­ing many hats, with the act­ors pretty much tak­ing care of their own ward­robe 3), the micro­phones were being dif­fi­cult.  My decision to use those shots likely also stems from many places—the rhythms of movie at those moments, the light­ing, the per­son in the frame, what was being said etc..

I do think the women totally stole the show though, which is due to both the scene itself and the spe­cif­ic people I gathered to per­form the scene.

GK: I seem to recall read­ing some­where that you were con­tinu­ing to move away from con­ven­tion­al nar­rat­ive in your work. Which, I’m sure you’re aware, is kind of inter­est­ing giv­en that so much of your crit­ic­al work is devoted, in sev­er­al respects, to great nar­rat­ive film­mak­ing of clas­sic­al Hollywood. I’m not sug­gest­ing there’s some kind of dis­crep­ancy in that, but there are folks who’d say it’s a shame that someone of your obvi­ous tal­ent and vis­ion is work­ing at a remove from the main­stream when the main­stream could use more vital young female film­makers. Does this sort of con­cern ever cross your mind?

GT: Well, before my pre­dict­ably prac­tic­al answer, thank you! The main thing here is that I’m a work­ing class woman, that is, I have to sup­port myself.  Short of people com­ing for­ward to offer their pro­du­cing ser­vices and someone hand­ing me enough cash to make a more tra­di­tion­al movie and also sup­port myself in this obscenely expens­ive city with shel­ter, food, and health insur­ance while I made that tra­di­tion­al movie in its many stages (research, writ­ing, cast­ing, pre-production, shoot­ing, edit­ing, pro­mot­ing) that isn’t look­ing like some­thing that is going to hap­pen any­time soon.  My last two films are very much the product of my hav­ing a day job, a day job I take very ser­i­ously and care about.

Do I think it’s a shame that mak­ing movies isn’t my job? I don’t know. It seems an unpro­duct­ive ques­tion for me. I do think hav­ing a job keeps me groun­ded in and con­nec­ted to what it means to be a per­son liv­ing in this hor­rif­ic cap­it­al­ist sys­tem, which provides a ten­sion in my work that I think is miss­ing in a lot of cur­rent film­mak­ing, espe­cially art house and “inde­pend­ent” fare. It also forces me to con­stantly adapt, to think out­side the box and chal­lenge myself and I like that. In the­ory I guess I’d love to not have a tra­di­tion­al job and to make movies and travel around the world with them but also who knows, I’m a Taurus and I like sta­bil­ity. Plus, I mean, I’m always bloated and tired when I travel and it would suck to be bloated all the time. And I’d really miss my friends.

In terms of Hollywood and women dir­ect­ors, I of course agree that I’d like to see more women in the main­stream. I am cur­rently obsessed with Beyond The Lights and [writer/director] Gina Prince-Bythewood kind of said it all when she told NPR that she’s offered tons of work but that she isn’t able to make movies that she writes, the stor­ies she actu­ally wants to tell. 

So, in a way I guess my answer to your ques­tion is that you’re ask­ing the wrong per­son because ulti­mately it isn’t up to me.