Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus

by KUBOA

C:Because it’s more of an abstraction to an audience member to become Miles Davis than it is to just become a trumpet player—yes, I see that.

  A:Anyone can be a trumpet player, anyone can be the eyes in a trumpet player’s head—but to realize one was just the eyes of Miles Davis—it’s a kind of trickery. But, it only really works when the series of things we experience as Davis are themselves made of pure expressionism—wasps and disappearing fathers, being slapped in the face by a furious, devastated woman, wisps of light and colour.

  C:Fine—I don’t want to talk exclusively within the confines of this film, for a moment, because it has to be pointed out that while what you’re saying may be applicable here, to this film by this filmmaker, certainly it is not universally a move-toward-abstraction or inversion-of-audience-versus-subject to depict an actual person in cinema. You would agree, right?

  A:I don’t want to bulldoze you, so I’ll withhold response for the time being.

  C:You’re a sweetheart. In fact, I would say that maybe this film—for the sake of cinematic dialogue saying I agree with your take—might be a rarity. Just because a filmmaker says This is about Miles Davis or whoever does not mean that it is a depiction of actuality—no, it is an expression of some large idea filtered through an attempt to distill some essence of said person, and so, in that respect, abstract. But nine times out of ten, it is a richer experience to depict a person as a person and that cinema might suggest an audience turn their attention to actual world events or the actual life or history of some figure rather than to solipsistic, interior banter is not a deplorable thing, right?

  A: Well…

  C:Or wouldn’t it be the same thing with an abstract concept? This is a film about Art—should that make one contemplate only one’s own view of art, to twine what is depicted around one’s own finger until it resembles what they, themselves, already think and feel, regardless of the stimuli of the actual cinema? Or should it be to get one to step out of oneself, to view Art as something elsewhere as something that exists regardless of personal perception of it?

  A:Fine questions. But this film—and in general the cinema of Reedus’ that has been displayed in these three films—is a cinema of inducing solipsistic regard. I don’t think any of the films we’ve discussed have much concern with actuality and, indeed, as a set, I think they are just rotations of a single set of observations. I think, really, I Thought Of You—written and directed by Reedus—is the sequence of all three films reduced in to one, distilled: the cinema of all three pieces is an expression of shedding Reality for Artifice then re-shedding Artifice for the original Reality which can never be original, again, for the very fact that it has been undone and reassembled.

  C:I honestly don’t know what you just said.

  A:Reedus, with his films, does the equivalent of standing someone before you, all dressed, polished, nice, then unclothing them so their unadorned, un-self-conscious nudity is displayed, then putting the same clothing back on them, with great care, retuning the person to their original appearance—but, for the very fact that the audience has now seen the denuded individual, the clothing loses its surface, it no longer cloaks anything, anyone looking at the dressed person now sees the nude underneath. But now take what I just said and make it about Ideas—that is this cinema.

  C:I agree in as much as I think the finality, the blunt finality (whatever emotion it may evoke) in all his films is a reshuffling—the audience thought X was being depicted but now must come to terms that really Y was being depicted, yes. But in the case of I Thought Of You, even as you say, Reedus begins with formlessness (the first moments are characterless, are just motion, just elements of perception) then moves into environmental identity (we know the eyes we are watching the film through belong to a musician not because of anything in-referenced, but because of outward shots of the other musicians practicing) then moves into personality (the memory, the story to the boy) then into particulars (the trumpet waiting, the microphone) then into Actuality (Miles Davis, seen as part of the physical environment, performing). That is the film—building a man from nothing, taking atoms, relationships, fragmentary aspects and assembling them through a simple, linear depiction. No one is undressed and then re-dressed so that we can see the nude body beneath the artifice—that simply isn’t this film, no matter how nicely you speak about it out in some maybe land. This film is one of as literal a depiction of the formation of an individual (in this case Miles Davis) as could be. And so, therefore, I think it would only benefit to examine it, to try to know the film more by leaning about the actual Davis—this is the momentum, the beauty, the aim.

  A:Look at it this way—take the same film, but remove the title cards, the credit sequence, the outside of the film part of a packaged piece of cinema: you would have no way of knowing it was a depiction of Miles Davis, one way or another. I mean, I kind of agree with what you’re driving at, but see it as a footnote, moot to the actual pulse and blood of the cinema, not what the cinema is built of. Admittedly it’s largely my own fault, but we’ve danced away from the first cut of our conversation here, namely is it essential or vital to the piece that it’s Miles Davis? I say No and further say that to really, honestly interpret the film in your way is to dismantle the act of cinema—you make it not just happenstance that Miles Davis has some touch of focus in the film, you make the actuality of the real Miles Davis essential to what is being displayed and it’s just not.

  C:I know what you’re trying to get at, but as much as cinema itself is an observable reality it is a meaningless one without some stamp or the tangible, the historical. Even in these three films, the reason I find I Thought Of You so imperative is because, by including the actuality of Miles Davis it allows that it isn’t just a riff, isn’t rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric—it fuses Expression with Actuality. If it were just about a rhetorical musician even if it were filmed the same and etc. etc. it would lack—artfully it would be nice, but it would be reduced to a kind of superficiality, the kind of superficiality (a word I use in a non-pejorative way) that Reedus’ other films have.

  A:Expression is a reality in itself—Davis, you know, he was just as much expressing wasps in grandmother’s mouths as he was expressing some spat he had with a lover. Art isn’t connect-the-dots from this happened to me to here’s a song I wrote about it.

  C:I totally agree—but, come on, that’s why the film depicts both, right? The memory of the fight with the lover and the invention of the surrealistic encounter between boy-and-grandmother/relatives are the two expressive realities that fuse into an artwork.

  A:Mmn.

  C:‘Mmn’? What’s that?

  A:I just—as much as in some mild way I’m with you—can’t get comfortable with any sort of thought that Art—reaction to art, I mean, not creation of art—isn’t about introspection, isn’t about the fact that the very notion of reaction is to reveal oneself to oneself, that one observes to give themselves a blunt of pertinence, not to remain in the position of audience. And at the same time, I don’t think that the artist creates to reveal to others, but simply to reveal themselves through the act of revelation, that the result is the act and the act is, must be, solipsistic. If we’re audience to art and audience is meant to remain audience, mute and unconcerned of itself, why would audience be desired?

  C:Do you think we are?

  A:Well, I think I might be—I’m not so sure about you. Always nice talking to you, though.

  C:Always nice listening to you talk.

  Thanks…

  …are certainly due to the following parties for helping make this volume an actuality. Firstly, to Dilshan Bonage and Ranga Chandraratne for introducing me to and welcoming me into the family of the Montage: Cultural Paradigm, for allowing me such free reign, and for the earnest spirit of cross cultural literary and artistic dialogue week after week. To Norman Reedus, for not just labeling me a nutter and ignoring my oddly phrased communiqués. Way back when
this project was a half formed inkling. And enormous gratitude to Wendy Shepard, for not only showing interest from the get, but going so far above and beyond in helping spread word about these articles that this little volume got enough inertia to take care of itself.

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