Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.
To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.
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It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, and we’re lucky enough to have Barry be big fans of Spout as well. His little film has had a long journey since it premiered in Austin at SXSW earlier this year, and it’s continuing to take him around the world.
We spoke with Barry in Toronto about the genesis of the movie, what has happened since that first screening in Austin, how he found the actors, and if this film represents a love letter from him to the city of San Francisco. Read on for the full interview.
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Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.
Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.
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Steve Rhodes has pictures from the San Francisco set of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic in which Sean Penn plays the openly-gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor who later claimed he had killed whilst in the throes of a sugar rush. Van Sant and crew have apparently dressed a stretch of SF’s Castro district to match its 70s glory. More photos here.
If you like Next to Heaven, Rob Parrish’s found-footage noir web series that we talked about a couple of weeks ago on FilmCouch, chances are good that you’d probably get a kick out of Craig Baldwin. He’s probably best known for his 1995 film, Sonic Outlaws, an documentary which merged form and content by using montages rife with pop culture appropriations to tell the story of Negativland, who were essentially the first band to cause an internationally-publicized legal incident by creating a mash-up. All of the issues that intersect in Sonic Outlaws–piracy, fair use, underground artists vs. corporate interests–are totally current today, and yet Sonic Outlaws documents a world that’s entirely pre-digital.
There are tons of clips from the film on Google Video, or you can buy a DVD directly from Baldwin’s DVD label, Other Cinema Digital.
Or, if you’re in San Francisco, you can also show up tomorrow night at Artists’ Television Access, where Baldwin’s weekly Other Cinema series will include a”sneak preview” of his latest film, Mu. According to Independent Exposure, the still-unfinished film can be described as “a sci-fi espionage compilation narrative that traces the rise and convergence of New Age religous cults, the military/aerospace industrial complex, and modern-day myths from Disney to certain sci-fi overlords.” If that didn’t sound cool enough, there are at least five other titles on tomorrow night’s program, including a film about Nikola Tesla directed by Buffalo ‘66 and Marie Antoinette cinematographer Lance Accord. More info at the Other Cinema site.
[Via Bad Lit]
