“I don’t know what this is,” said Jem Cohen, in his introduction to last night’s screening of his new work Empires of Tin at the IFC Center. He went on to call it “a documentary musical hallucination,” which really only chips the surface of this astounding, frustrating, one-of-a-kind piece.

Here’s my go at further explaining it: Empires of Tin the movie is an expanded documentation of Empires of Tin the performance, commissioned by the Vienna Film Festival in 2007. Collaborating with musicians like Vic Chesnutt (who Cohen described last night as “a great American”), Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, and T. Griffin, Cohen put together a song cycle of sorts to be performed live under the projection of a feature-length image collage, a loose city symphony musing on Western militarism from World War 1 through post-9/11 New York. In between songs (pre-existing pieces by Chesnutt folded into electric klezmer and ambient noise compositions, all of it heavy with feedback and distorted violin), an older man reads aloud in German from Joseph Roth’s writings on WWI. The edited film shown last night cuts back and forth between footage of the performance and the imagery produced by Cohen for the projection.
Much of the imagery — ranging from somewhat conventional contemporary 16mm film to archival photos and drawings lit with candlelight and shot through a magnifying glass, distorting the images into grainy chiaroscuro — is gorgeous, but also unsettling. Moonscapes, skyscrapers, mass graves, the Gowanus Canal, sarcophagi in an Austrian cemetery all flicker by. Matte black and white footage of anatomical models of humans elegantly depict, as Cohen put it, “what happens to bodies in war.” Chesnutt chanting phrases like “he’s not the devil, he’s just a capitalist” over red-tinted photos of the Bushes and Clintons are … well, uninterested in elegance. Sometimes the Cohen’s political messages seem too pointed and heavy-handed; at other moments, I wished for a more concrete structuring statement. On the whole, Empires of Tin calls to mind a certain kind of avant-garde personalized protest film that we probably haven’t seen enough of since the thaw of the Cold War.
The Q & A after the screening, billed as a conversation between Cohen and Jim Jarmusch, was … unconventional. Jarmusch readily admitted that he would not be ready to speak articulately about Tin without a few days to process it. And really, what could he ask? It almost doesn’t make sense to ask Cohen specific questions about his work — how he made it, where images came from, how he came up with the unifying concepts — because the answer is always the same: “I just stumbled into it.” His process, as he describes it, involves traveling around the world with a Bolex and/or small video camera in tow, intuitively collecting images which then go into a storage for use in future, as-yet-unconceived projects.
But just as the work is the product of intuitive stumbling, while trying to answer a question about craft Cohen stumbled into articulating the film’s thesis statement: “They keep starting the same wars.” (Similarly, it was in apologizing for his lack of insight that Jarmusch spat forth one of the key insights of the night, saying that Cohen’s work reminds him of a line Jack Kerouac wrote about Robert Frank: “he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”) Cohen admitted that in editing, he had wondered the film’s section on WWI was too long, but then decided that his audience should be forced to watch many more hours of the material if it’ll get his point across, “just a little bit.” He went on to dedicate the evening to military deserters and draft dodgers — “at least they’re trying to break the cycle.”