I wrote about Ozu's Good Morning and Ida Lupino's Outrage for Perisphere, the Trylon Cinema's blog.
Good Morning will be playing December 6-8. TV Time – Perisphere
Outrage will be playing December 9-10. Photographed Where It Happened – Perisphere
Be sure to keep on eye on the Trylon calendar for more of their outstanding programming!
castratory wound
mechanosphere
Kettering Bug
chiffonography
ontic vagueness
Digital Touching
visual fiction
syncronic possibility
aunties
nuclear taboo
SALT
See Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
DASH
See Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter
MAYO
See Mexican American Youth Organization
NETS
See New English Translation of the Septuagint
ICES
See International Carnival of Experimental Sounds
lunacy laws
space reconnaissance
tampon flute
Museum of Jurassic Technology
policy entrepreneurs
hypermoments
subcultural capital
General Atomics
exogenous shocks
aphantasia
acute perplexity
eternalism
"Wot's For Lunch Mum? Not Beans Again!"
faciality
mad praxis
Anarchy Centre
dividual
Speculative Archive
transient presentism
artificial darkness
Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we've been reading lately.
Donna Miller is in her 70s and, as a writer and artist, feels that she carries within her, vividly, all the ages she has ever been. She enjoys expressing herself from those accumulated perspectives. She attended Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s, but, to her, that is incidental. Her creative education has been largely self-motivated, from an incessantly curious and imaginative mind. Every day is "back-to-school" day, exploring the unknown with relish. She has been a bookworm and artist all her life.
Nate: If I understand correctly, you've maintained an
almost lifelong journaling practice, is that right? What's your practice like
today?
Donna: In a way, I started journaling at
age four—in pencil drawings depicting my ordinary life events. I
still have some of those drawings. This progressed to verbal stories, again
about the myriad little details of everyday life. I told them to myself in bed
at night and to my baby sister, who found them soothing.
Written journals began later. When I was eleven years old, I
acquired a pink plastic Five-Year Diary with a lock and a tiny key. I kept it
securely hidden behind a batch of items on an out-of-the-way shelf in my
bedroom. I wish I still had that diary, as I am intensely curious about what I
wrote, but, alas, it disappeared ages ago. I do remember, however, that from
the first entry, I scrapped the idea of a "five-year" format. I
had a lot more to say each day than would fit in 1/5 of a small page. It became
a one-year diary, and I wrote in it faithfully every day—in tiny script, so I
could say as much as possible.
I went from there to using loose leaf notebook paper (more room and without printed dates), and I kept them stashed in various hiding places—under my mattress, in my closet in a box filled with old paper dolls, or any other spot I thought my mother would not look. These pages were filled with the overblown emotional longings of my teenage years. I identified with orphans, even though I had a quite typical nuclear family of the 1950s and early 60s. I discovered Judy Garland at age fourteen, and her plaintive vulnerability won me over. I did not see The Wizard of Oz until my twenties, as it was always on TV on a Sunday, and, in my family, we had to take a break from tv on that day. Often old movies were shown in the middle of the night, and I would set my alarm whenever the TV Guide announced a Judy Garland movie. I'd sneak down to the TV room, far enough away from my parents' bedroom to watch the movie in the darkened room, low volume. I didn't care if I was tired the next day at school. It was worth it.
I learned about Judy's hard life, and my journal pages were filled with fantasies that I would lose everything, be orphaned and alone, roaming the streets in a thunderstorm, seeking shelter. I would see a house, go up to the door, fall in, begging for sympathy, only to discover that it was Judy Garland's house. In the fantasy, she adopted me and, together, we faced the inevitable sadness of life. I no longer have those pages either, but I remember vividly the satisfaction I got making up those extreme dramas. In real life, I was not a melancholy sort nor a loner, but using this journal format to process my darker emotions was very effective.
I entered college in the fall of 1964, after seeing A
Hard Day's Night eleven times that summer. My journals began to
replicate John Lennon's two books, which I carried with me everywhere and, at
parties, read passages aloud while standing on a table. Existentialism came
next, and that became the tone of the journals.
I was always a voracious reader, and I dove into many authors in my college years, each one leading to a phase of imitation. Even though the journals were about my own life, the author's style and perspectives on life were blatantly represented in those journals. They included Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Proust, Tolkien, and many others.
One Proustian journal entry—long sentences of
meticulous detail—was about the light shining in my bathroom window and how it
affected the folds in the shower curtain, the bathmat, my toothbrushes, and
every single other object in the room, along with descriptions of my own
nuanced emotions as I stood in the hallway. Unfortunately, a few years later, I
was hit with a great bout of embarrassment and tossed that whole batch of
imitative journals in the trash. Yikes! Why, oh why?
Since then, many of my journals are art related, containing collages, drawings, paintings, and also text. They have explored any area of life that caught my fancy, and I still keep this type of journal. I also still do some self-exploration—personal issues and observations—and I have several travel journals, often with drawings or photos included. I sometimes use fiction writing as a doorway into deeper exploration, allowing me to turn various parts of myself into characters that interact with each other. I love that process, and it yields a lot of surprising insights.
Nate: I've always been fascinated by Judy Garland as
well. What are some of early memories of seeing her films?
Donna: The first Judy Garland film I ever saw was
quite unexpected. I was in ninth grade, and in my high school we occasionally
had assemblies for some unknown reason. This was such a day. We all filled the
school auditorium and were told that we would see a movie. It turned out to be
Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in The Pirate. Wow! I was
thoroughly transported all the way through!
In this film, Judy's character Manuela is a young Spanish woman unhappily engaged to the mayor and longing for true romance. Gene Kelly is a circus performer named Serafin who falls in love with her but is unsuccessful at getting her to abandon her marriage plans and run off with him. He hypnotizes her and she breaks into an utterly astonishing song and dance number—"Mack the Black"—about a wild, dashing pirate. In this number, the Judy elements I grew to love show up in spades. She sings and dances (with a whole troupe of performers) in a piece with over-the-top energy and passion, but not without her innate gift for comedy. This wild belting out is then contrasted by a soft segment where a closeup of her face reveals her innocent, plaintive longing for genuine love. Coming out of hypnosis, she forgets the whole thing and again rejects Serafin and sadly goes through with plans for her wedding and a future life with the stodgy mayor. As a last resort, Serafin pretends to be the real pirate Macoco (Mack the Black) and a lot of crazy, topsy turvy events occur, including a comedic scene in which Manuela, discovering his deception, smashes a painting over his head, throws every breakable object in sight, yelling in derisive anger about his being "only an actor." Judy's shows her sense of comedy timing and her talent for making angry rants charming, never losing her wide innocent eyes and rosebud mouth. This made me, as a fourteen-year-old beset with very similar romantic dreams and repressed anger, completely identify with her. They do get together, of course, and the movie ends with Manuela joining Serafin in his circus act, both of them singing and dancing "Be a Clown". The film was directed by Vincente Minelli with songs by Cole Porter and in groundbreaking technicolor (1948), spectacular sets and costumes, and Gene Kelly at his athletic best, so it had many features to capture me, but it was Judy herself who was the draw.
I was entirely hooked! As I watched her other films, I
grew to appreciate her range, but also saw more deeply her greatest
gift—expressing the subtlest, most complex emotions in both her facial
expressions and her voice. Every phrase of a song seemed to come straight from
an unguarded heart. An early example of this was a small bit she had in Broadway
Melody of 1938, when she was only fifteen and sang a love song to a picture
of Clark Gable. Already she was masterful at the musical phrasing and nuanced
tones she became known for. That number made MGM take notice and want to
manage her career—a tale of both success and tragedy, as we all know.
Watching all her movies, I was delighted as well by the brassy bold numbers and the tongue-in-cheek comedic elements she had. I learned later that this quirky sense of humor was a feature of her personality in real life as well. The skill to be funny in the midst of heartbreak was so inspiring to me in those teenage years, when opposites were so wildly at play inside of me.
I could list many movies I loved, but probably the most
influential element of those years was the double album of her comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961. I was fifteen at the time and went out immediately to
buy the album. I literally played it every day, often several times a day. I
sang along with her and memorized every song. Even today, I cannot sing any of
those numbers without using her timing and adaptation. Luckily, my mother loved
Judy as well, so she did not mind my blasting that album each evening as I
washed the dinner dishes and sang my heart out. Knowing much of her history by
then, it was especially poignant to hear her triumphant brave comeback and,
once again, marvel at life's inclination to place blessings and burdens in
close proximity.
Nate: I wonder if you have any advice on how to maintain a writing and art-making practice? I've always been impressed by how you seem to be self-motivated; you're not necessarily focused on public presentation but rather on personal expression, is that fair to say?
Donna: Yes, that's true, but it requires a bit of
explanation. My need for personal expression comes from a strong force within
me for generation—for giving form to something that wants to be born. Perhaps
it's a strong maternal instinct spread out into all of life. I fall in love
with some aspect of life, let's say, shadow and light—ignited by a pattern on
the floor in the morning or by seeing a black and white photograph or a classic
example of film noir. The enticing blend of contrasting darks and brights, along
with the myriad gray tones, may thrill me. I then want to leap into that
quality, explore it deeply, and, out of that, produce offspring—a work of art,
a piece of writing. I may then delve into a stint of pencil drawing with many
tones or a period of working only with black ink or writing a
shadowy short story. It's an act of love, a way of paying homage to
whatever it is that attracts me so much, a way of making concrete something
that exists as a heart-filling and mind-filling feeling. Giving expression to
it through a creative act completes something within me. This is
imagination—the process of entering the invisible realms of life and turning
them into images, something visible. The visible expressions of imagination can
be material—a painting, a film, an article of clothing—or it can be an
action—children saying, "Let's pretend you're a knight and I'm a sneaky
rascal who makes mischief all the time." Another child pipes in, "And
I'll be a wild tiger who leaps out at them in the woods." On and on they go,
giving story form to the floating thoughts within them, acting them out in
their play.
For myself, I'm not content to just perceive, gather, enjoy, think, and learn, although this inner exploration is quite absorbing. I also want to give back, or give out, to declare to many aspects of life, "Yes, I see you. I love you. I want to express that love, and I will do it with this work of art, this piece of writing." The creative expression is not particularly for other people, but for life itself, for my connection with the universe, so to speak.
Occasions of public presentation may come along from time to
time, but I don't seek them out. Even when I owned and ran an art center, my
impulse was to attract co-explorers, kindred spirits who also approached art as
an act of love and a desire to express. The art center's gallery exhibited my
own work along with the work of many others, but mine was often shown under a
pseudonym. I love to create personae that represent different aspects of my
creative impulses. For example, Bobbysox Einstein is that part of me that is
madly in love with numbers, diagrams, charts, grids, with all their
orderliness, but, at the same time, wants to mess with that order, morph it in
a playful way and create unexpected combinations. Scooter Glithorthian loves to
combine photographic realism with elements of utter imagination, often a
blend of a realistic scene with imposed cartoonish forms placed within it.
One persona, Leapin' Lulu, came from an impulse to work within a strict
boundary, to simplify, as it were, and she works only in red and white. There
are many more of these, and they give me freedom but with a direction. And they
release me from the egotistical temptation to care too much what others think
of my work. It is not so much a fear of criticism, but rather the danger of too
much personal attention: "Oh, do more of that! You must do more of that!
Everyone will love you if you keep doing that!" My creative spirit does
not want to fall into the trap of getting hooked by others' admiration, as my
ego might.
It would be difficult for me to advise others about an art or writing practice, because each person's motives are different. Someone who wants to create a practice for the purpose of mastering a skill or a medium—let's say, watercolor painting or calligraphy or writing poetry—might benefit from a disciplined routine, practicing every day, perhaps with a tutor or using a book with a sequence of steps. Someone else, who feels a great need to release pent-up energy or emotions, may need to let loose with no restrictions—write or make art like a child using finger paints or scribbling with wild abandon or making up songs or stories that make no sense but are pure release. Or if they are like me—wanting to explore, learn, and express what they love—they can use catalysts of all sorts. Looking at art books, watching videos, going for walks, listening to music, reading any book or even opening a book at random can all be means of sparking a creative impulse, and then the technique is to just plunge into it, make the time for it. Learning to prioritize creative expression is key to all of these purposes—to not allow the ordinary business of everyday life to gobble up all our time.
I truly believe that the world needs creative
expression, in the spirit of love and genuine appreciation, as much as it needs
attention to the challenges and troubles that are always present.
Nate: I know that you are also an avid reader. What have you been reading lately?
Donna: Avid reader, yes! A young man
once asked Annie Dillard if he had what it took to be a writer. She
replied, "Do you love sentences?" That answer thrilled me, as it
explains not only why I myself write but also why I read. I do love
sentences! And I love phrases, all sorts of wordplay, and the myriad aspects of
words themselves—their sounds, their rhythm, their nuanced meanings,
their vast and fascinating etymologies, and even their look on a page. That's
why I love your blog, Nate—you are a kindred spirit word lover! Now to answer your question.
I'm always reading several books at once—at different times of the day and for different purposes. Currently, I have these books in progress:
At breakfast, I have three that I'm coursing through. Two are nature books—The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl and A Countrywoman's Year by Rosemary Verey. Both are set up to take the reader through a year of changes in nature, especially the plants and animals we can observe in our own backyards. The first of the two has a reading a week, divided into the four seasons. I read that one every Monday morning. The author lives in Nashville, so the ecology is typical of that region. Today (July 28th) she highlights the thick humid fecundity of summer—birds and other critters, flowers, weeds, and, especially, the very abundant bugs—then adds a great sentence: "In the corner of our windows, spiders profit in the damp." I loved that! The other book is British (given to me by Adrien) and it is utterly delightful, in that the author is madly in love with the quaint environment in her corner of Gloucestershire. This book has a chapter for each month, with six or seven anecdotes per month. It makes me crave hedgerows and winding lanes and the charming plants unique to her spot of country!
The main book I'm reading at breakfast is by the renowned astronomer/anthropologist, Anthony Aveni. This one is called Conversing with the Planets and was written in 1992, shortly after he wove the two fields together as his life's passion. He is considered a pioneer of the field now called archaeoastronomy. In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine voted him one of the 10 Best University Professors in the whole U.S. and, since then, he has won numerous awards and written more than forty books. I am just now discovering him, and I'm staggered by the amazing perspectives he points out about how ancient cultures related to planets and stars. Without telescopes or other sophisticated technology, they worked out intricate patterns, largely from viewing the sky's relationship to the horizon as it changed in subtle ways throughout the year. They discovered useful information regarding their crops and crucial weather systems, but they also believed that everything in the universe was in constant dialogue with everything else. Thus, they invested the planets and stars with powerful, influential qualities, their very names used as magic words, truly serious ones to them, and they used them with great respect and care. Aveni weaves this all together with brilliance, much detail, and a deep respect both for rigorous science and the mythologies constructed by cultures through the ages. I am only 46 pages into a 224-page book, densely packed on each page. It will take me a while. Then we'll see if, as is my custom, I want to read all the rest of his books! I love this mix of human culture and objective scientific data. Nothing is isolated.
A number of my books are for dipping into at various times of the day, when I want a break from ordinary activity or just find a curiosity popping up. Two of these, at this time, are The Complete Essays of Montaigne and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and his eclectic journal-like collection, Specimen Days. These are books that lend themselves to opening up at random, as any page within them will bring a smile to my face and send my mind off in an unexpected direction, loosening any grip my everyday responsibilities have on me. They can also easily spark a creative project—writing or art. Their effect is similar to one of my beloved favorites, Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood, a book always within easy reach on my shelf, as its nothing-but-questions format opens up grand mental adventures. I know you also love that one, Nate!
At bedtime, I read novels. I am currently on book three of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, which is six books in all. The first, A Wizard of Earthsea, was published in 1968, and was notable in that the heroes—the wizards with power—were brown-skinned and the main character was short in stature. In the second volume, The Tombs of Atuan, women play a prominent role. Ursula broke into a lot of new territory in the Fantasy genre with these books. I am currently reading the third volume, The Farthest Shore. These books, Le Guin says, were originally conceived as YA novels. The main characters start out as teenagers. Later, though, she realized they have ageless appeal. The six books are often seen as two trilogies, as the first three were written in quick succession, and the last three twenty years later. They have been compared with The Lord of the Rings, but I find them vastly different. I loved The Lord of the Rings and read the whole trilogy four times and was fascinated by Tolkien's connection with Norse mythology, with names and concepts he derived from those stories. The Earthsea Cycle seems to be radically original, even though the stories involve wizards, sorcerers, witches, dragons and the like. In Earthsea, these often have highly unexpected characteristics, even the opposite of cliche definitions.
Finally, I love to go to the library regularly and choose an aisle at random, glance over a section of books, regardless of the topic, and choose a few books that look interesting. I've been doing this since my early teenage years, and it has introduced me to many subjects that did not hold particular appeal, only to discover enriching perspectives, wild or helpful approaches to life different from my own, or just new (or archaic) ways of expressing knowledge. These library books I read in the late afternoon, when I've finished whatever work of the day I had going. This reading interlude is like a self-declared treat to round off a day. I have four current books: Samuel Beckett's Short Plays, two poetry anthologies—one American and one a worldwide collection—and a delightful personal journal Ursula K. Le Guin wrote as a blog, when she neared and reached her eighties. It's called No Time to Spare and it's about her experience with aging. It's witty, profound, and full of humorous anecdotes. It was published in book form in 2017, and she died a year later, so it's a poignant last work for her and interesting for me to read at the same time I'm reading the Earthsea books, written more than forty years earlier.
That's all for now, except for those books that always lean against my reading chairs or the legs of my desk and lure me to revisit when the mood strikes. These include many wonderful children's books, art and creativity books, and one of my recent favorites—The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk. For reliable laughs, I keep a good collection of Roz Chast books.
Nate: So much good reading here, I love the variety!
You mentioned The Lord of the Rings: for the past three
years I've been reading Tolkien aloud to Leo at bedtime, about three pages a
night, starting with The Hobbit, and now we are down to the last
forty pages of The Return of the King. It's been an incredible
journey (this is my first time reading them) and I'm feeling a bit sad
about coming to the end. But already Leo is looking back at earlier books in
the series and revisiting certain passages, so I have a feeling we'll be returning
to this world.
I too have a similar collection of books "for dipping into at various times of the day" as you put it. Well, books and magazines I should say, because I do the overwhelming amount of my magazine reading during in-between moments (eating lunch, waiting for water to boil, taking a ten minute break from work). But there are also a handful of film reference books that I consult almost every day, usually to read reviews of movies I watched in the past couple days, but while I'm in there I always find my eye wandering to interesting titles and serendipitously finding suggestions for future viewing in that way. Danny Peary's Guide for the Film Fanatic, Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide, Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, and Halliwell's Film Guide are probably the books I reference most often but there are a lot more in the mix on a weekly basis too, like essay collections and genre-specific film guides.
And I'm enjoying The Art of Slow Reading (slowly) as well, thank you for bringing that one to my attention. It's been a very encouraging book because I also consider myself a "slow reader" in Newkirk's sense of someone who internally "auditorizes" the written word, taking the time to memorize short phrases or poems, and re-reading sections to ensure full understanding. Like you and Annie Dillard, I am devoted to sentence-level beauty and excellence, that's what I'm looking for as a reader: beautiful prose on a phrase-by-phrase, sentence-by-sentence basis. But I always have a lingering sense of guilt as a reader/watcher/listener because of all the books I've never read, films I've never seen, music I've never heard. And the more you read/watch/hear the more you discover you haven't read/watched/heard! Even just in the realm of "classics" alone I always feel hopelessly behind schedule. So, The Art of Slow Reading is a good reminder that mere accumulation isn't necessarily the goal of reading and that slowing down and deeply internalizing the written word is a venerable creative practice in its own right.
And speaking of the love of words, I wanted to mention a book I read recently called The Dictionary People by Sara Ogilvie, gifted to me by my mother - a retired librarian and a wonderful lifelong reader herself who noted my own fascination with language and wordplay beginning when I was a toddler! Ogilvie's book is about the decades-long global research project that culminated in The Oxford English Dictionary, probably the grandest and most mind-boggling act of scholarship in the history of the English language. I've been interested in the OED for a long time, I used to sit on the floor of the Ames Public Library and open volumes (one for each letter of the alphabet) at random and read definitions and etymologies. And, of course, I was riveted by Simon Winchester's jaw-dropping book The Professor and the Madman about John Minor, one of the most prolific contributors to the OED, who is also profiled in The Dictionary People.
What made the OED different from any English dictionary before it was the effort to locate the first usages of words in print, examples of the changing meanings of words over time, and representative sentence samples of words used in their published context. And to do this for every single meaning of every single word in English. This project spanned generations of scholarship and involved the work of thousands of volunteer correspondents who, like John Minor, engaged in independent research to discover unique usages in print, catalog them according to editorial specifications, and mail them to the Oxford headquarters of lead editor James Murray (who was later knighted for his lifelong efforts in completing this virtually impossible project). The Dictionary People is a group portrait of a few dozen of these contributors organized alphabetically in chapter headings by their professions, interests, or distinguishing features ("C for Cannibal"; "I for Inventors"; "S for Suffragette").
As that sampling of chapter titles suggests, the lives of
the contributors are as interesting, varied, sometimes bizarre, and
occasionally tragic as the example John Minor set. Many were on the outskirts
(or perhaps the cutting-edge) of social standards, including same-sex lovers, first-wave feminists, and a pornographer. Others were specialists in a
particular field, like archaeology, astronomy, or world languages. And they
were located all over the English-speaking world which, in this era of peak
British colonialism, spanned multiple continents. Crowdsourcing is today
facilitated by a world wide web of instantaneous communication; imagine trying
to retrieve sources from a crowd of thousands in an age of ships and
hand-delivered mail. Ogilvie, a contemporary OED editor, conceived of the
project after discovering James Murray's address book in the Oxford archives.
She was able to use the document to discover the identities of some of the
uncredited OED contributors and then build out their biographies from research
into correspondences and contemporaneous records.
She makes a point of stressing that, although the OED is a monumental feat of scholarship, it was largely accomplished by "autodidacts and amateurs rather than professionals." Even lead editor James Murray himself was an "outsider" in the world of academia. This idea had great appeal to me and in a way reminded me of my own relationship to scholarship, and to Oxford University Press in particular. [Disclosure: I am a freelancer for OUP]. As an indexer, I design a tool for scholarly research but am not myself a scholar or a researcher. My work appears in published books that I did not author. Like many OED correspondents, indexers are on the fringes of academia making small but substantial contributions to an enormous publishing enterprise. And, like them, indexers are first and foremost readers seeking usages and phrases and organizing them into a coherent, alphabetized structure.
Donna: I love the fact that you've been reading The
Lord of the Rings with Leo—especially that you're reading it
slowly! They are certainly books whose beauty, to me, is in the long, slow
journey, which was not an aspect emphasized in the movies of the trilogy, where
they merely hinted at the slow parts and jumped from one action
sequence and dramatic interchange to another. As I said before, I read the
whole trilogy four times, each time savoring more deeply the subtler nuances of
the story and the writing. I often do that with both books and films—engage in
repeat readings or viewing in order to focus from different angles. Rewatching
movies, I will sometimes choose a vantage point each time, such as lighting,
editing (visual, sound, and dialogue), camera angles, pacing (consistent or
dramatically varied), sets and props, and so on. It's like a
self-structured film course, which I thoroughly enjoy!
I know the dilemma of being a slow reader, savoring each
sentence and phrase, and also having a gigantic list of books I'm eager to
read. I don't have a solution (the lists fill notebooks and folders), but the
effect is that my rooms are loaded with stacks of books "waiting in the
wings," and they are both comforting (so much to anticipate) and
tormenting (will I ever get to read them all?!), not to mention new
discoveries of books I must add to my lists or stacks!
One of those newly added must-read books is the one
you mentioned, The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. I
looked it up and, Wow, that's my kind of book! And, Nate, what a cool discovery
to find that we both read dictionaries for the fun of it when we were young! I
don't think I have ever encountered another person who shared that habit with
me. I did not have access to the OED, which sounds utterly awesome, but my
family had the World Book Encyclopedia, and it came with a dictionary that
comprised three large, fat volumes—way more intriguing than the junior
dictionaries we had at school. Any page in those large dictionaries was filled
with word-lover delight, and I made many lists of favorite words, especially
the very exotic ones and the ones whose sounds were irresistible to say over
and over again! I also had the habit of opening the encyclopedia at random
every day after school and reading whatever was on that two-page spread, which
then led to further research of discovered topics.
I also loved reading the phone book. They were larger back then, as everyone had a landline and hardly anyone was unlisted, and we lived in good size cities. So many amazing names! My imagination took off like crazy, making up personalities and stories about those unknown people with astonishing names. Both the phone book and the dictionary are made up of lists and, like Leo, I'm fascinated with lists—both delving into them and creating them. And you, of course, as an indexer, create a kind of list none of us avid readers could do without!
Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we’ve been reading lately.
Olga Tchepikova-Treon co-edits the Trylon Cinema’s
programming blog Perisphere and is an incoming Visiting Assistant
Professor in Film/Cinema Studies at NYU Gallatin. The Trylon Cinema is one of
the most important places in her world.
Nate: How did you become involved with the editorial staff
of Perisphere?
Olga: I started volunteering at the Trylon Cinema around
2017, during the first year of my PhD program at the UMN. My connection for
that was Michelle Baroody, who was just finishing her degree in my program and
had been with the Trylon for a long time. Perisphere, at that point, had
been on hiatus for a few years after having operated as an on/off, or ad-hoc
blog. Michelle decided to revive the blog in 2019 and asked if I wanted to do
some occasional editing and write some contributions myself. So Perisphere
came back as a more regular, but still fairly ir-regular venture.
Michelle had always talked about growing the blog into a bigger part of the Trylon’s community engagement. So, when she handed the blog over to me and Matt Levine, another Trylon volunteer, in 2022, we started thinking about how we could make Perisphere a more permanent part of the Trylon, with recurring output. We published an initial call for contributors and tried to establish routines and timelines for publication procedures so that the blog pieces can reach a reading audience before a film comes up in the screening schedule. Finn Odum, our current web editor, came on board in 2023. Since then, we circulated another call for contributors and have continued developing an editorial routine that accommodates, as best as it can, Finn’s and my day jobs, as well as the various needs of the growing community of writers that contribute to the blog. Right now, Finn and I are running most parts of Perisphere’s general organization, and look to friends and co-volunteers at the Trylon for occasional help with content editing, promotion, and IT stuff.
Nate: What's your vision for the publication?
Olga: In our vision, Perisphere is a platform for
anyone who has an affiliation with the Trylon to write about the films in our
programming. Now, this was true for our initial pool of writers, but that truth
has grown to be stretched a little bit—in a good way, we think. Beyond people
who regularly attend screenings at the Trylon and live in the Twin Cities, we
have a number of contributors whose affiliation to our theater is indirect or
by proxy—through friends, or as individuals who contribute to other non-profit
movie theaters across the country, or writers who are expat Minnesotans living
abroad, etc.
As such, we have no “rules” about who can contribute to the blog and what kind of contributions we’re looking for. There’s no particular level of writing expertise we expect. We do expect that writers are enthusiastic or curious about the films they sign up for, but not necessarily in the sense that we want them to only praise the respective film to lure people into the theater. We absolutely welcome and encourage critical pieces as well (those can lure too, after all)—really, anything that can make for a more expansive experience of the movie for readers is fair game. As editors, we also try to be fairly hands off in terms of rhetoric and style—we’re not trying to tell contributors how to write beyond adhering, more or less, to basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling conventions (and even that can be up for debate sometimes). Whichever editor corresponds with a writer about first-stage content edits might send the piece back with questions and suggestions that are supposed to be generative and helpful for writers as they finalize their pieces. Essentially, we’re just providing an additional perspective for writers to consider before the piece is unleashed to the public. But beyond that, Perisphere contributions should be what writers want to make of them. Most of all, contributors are supposed to enjoy writing their pieces—what would be the point otherwise?
Nate: I recently learned about another film organization
you're involved with, Archives on Screen. Can you tell me a bit about that
group and your role in it?
Olga: Archives on Screen is a relatively new venture that
was started by the same Michelle Baroody (who also curates the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival and the quarterly Mizna Film Series at the Trylon), and UMN
Professor Maggie Hennefeld (who works on feminism and humor in early cinema,
and co-curated film collections like Cinema’s First Nasty Women), with
the goal of bringing newly restored archival films to movie screens in the Twin
Cities. The organization’s flagship events were two iterations of the Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour film festival—a weekend-long festival conducted in
partnership with the much more elaborate Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival that
takes place every summer in Bologna, Italy. AOS’s past Ritrovato on Tour fests
took place in May 2023 and February 2024 at The Main cinema, and the next one
is being put together for February 2025. Between festivals, AOS has quarterly
screenings at the Trylon.
Maggie and Michelle are the main curators of AOS’s
programming. The third member of the troupe is Dave Gomshay, who takes care of
promoting the organization and its events to the broad local public. My role in
that group is mostly logistical and administrative. Because AOS has a strong
investment in the idea that film history is world history, and thus, a
generative means of education, we aim to have a strong turnout of students
(high school and college-level) at our events. To facilitate this, I’ve been
mostly responsible for building partnerships with local academic institutions,
promoting the festival program to varying departments with films that might be
of particular interest to the respective student and faculty population. This
involves a lot of language-specific promotion (for example, French films will
be promoted to French departments/instructors), but also creative ways of
recruiting disciplines that tend to not look to film as a medium of relevance
in their curriculum, but harbor strong connections to the topics addressed in
some of the films (for example, we received sponsorship from Political Science,
Sociology, and Global Studies departments in exchange for free student tickets
to David Schickele’s 1971 film Bushman). Ultimately, AOS events are set
to bridge academic and non-academic communities in providing opportunities to
simultaneously enjoy and examine world history through film history.
Nate: So, staying in the academic world for a moment, can you tell me about your research interests?
Olga: Broadly speaking, my research interests are situated
in and across the disciplines of film studies, disability studies, cultural
studies, gender studies, and critical theory. The project that I have been
working on for the last couple of years, for instance, examines how
disability—as both lived experience and formal aesthetic—permeates alternative,
experimental, and underground cinema cultures in the second half of the
twentieth century. Here, I am looking at films created by disabled and
non-disabled filmmakers (using “disability” as an umbrella term for many
different bodymind experiences), considering how these films engage with
disability as a representational and aesthetic category.
I became interested in this topic because there are
significant parallels between the ways alternative cinema and disability
communities (as well as the idea of dis-ability as such) both
self-identify as “different” from the mainstream or a norm (which is a pretty
vexed categorical term in itself), and often are also deemed as such by
external definition. There is a strong sense that “difference,” when it
functions as a qualifier for a perceived norm or standard, carries negative
connotations. Some cultural formations, like punk and new wave for instance,
lean into this negative connotation to generate a sense of shock that, in turn,
relays a specific political (op)position. Others, however, find it more
productive to interrogate the implied binary that the concept of “difference”
caters to, presenting it as a more relational category and therewith rendering
the idea of a “norm”—in terms of film language or bodily disposition—obsolete.
I am looking at the ways the aesthetic setup of alternative films mirrors (or,
in some cases, actually does not uphold) this investment in critical
interrogation.
I am also currently conceptualizing a second/next research
project, tentatively titled “Pathology, Diagnosis, Art: Medical Films in
Alternative Film Programming,” which will examine the integration of medical
and laboratory films into curatorial programs at established art institutions,
smaller exhibition venues, and other alternative/repertory cinema communities
(think Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16). Beyond its focus on curation, this project will
also consider the use and appropriation of medical films by experimental and
alternative filmmakers. As a consumer of such images, and someone who likes
digging around in archives, I’m interested in the tension between censorship
and voyeurism, as well as the overall ethics of spectatorship that come
into play when watching such programs.
Finally, I am also working toward editing an essay
collection on the films and art of Harmony Korine. Korine’s films were very
formative for my research interests (and my love for cinema in general), and I
really think that a lot can be said about his work—especially in retrospect,
when its impact on film history and aesthetics (and non-cinematic culture more
broadly, I would argue) are becoming more and more apparent.
Nate: I read your Perisphere essay on Gummo from a few years ago. I was also profoundly affected by Harmony Korine in my formative years as a cinephile and he continues to fascinate me. Keep me posted on that book you're editing for sure! Can you give me some other filmmakers and films that are touchstones for you?
Olga: Yes, definitely! However, even after looking through my work notes and my film watching calendars, I am sure that I do not have a fully representative list. But it’s a start?
I want to mention, first of all, that I haven’t seen all the
films, not even most films, that exist in the world. The limits to my knowledge
of cinema, despite the fact that “cinema” is the center of my personal and
“professional” universe, become apparent every time a new Trylon calendar comes
out, or anytime I watch movies at a repertory theater or museum while
traveling. So, with that in mind, in no particular order other than the one in
which they appear on this page, here are some filmmakers and films I found (and
find) impactful for completely variant, and sometimes even contradictory
reasons. This is, I should note, not a list of filmmakers and films who/that I
think are “the best” or anything like that. I think “impactful” can mean a lot
of things in the context of cinema. Having said that, one thing that all of the
below (filmmakers and films) have in common for me is that they presented me
with some kind of a cinematic “first”—showing/telling/offering something that I
haven’t experienced or thought about before. “Before” is a little bit of a
fuzzy term in this context, too, because I can’t possibly track the order in
which I have watched movies in life. Also, my “before”s are probably very
different from someone else’s. Finally, there are filmmakers whose “impact” is
so obvious and great that I don’t even think they need to be mentioned here.
I’ll let readers think up their own list of what these might be—that can be a
fun guessing game. Anyway, here they are:
Impactful filmmakers:
Kenneth Anger
Shirley Clarke
Nicolas Winding Refn
Agnès Varda
John Waters
Jane Campion
Stan Brakhage
Mae West
Oliver Stone
Nathaniel Dorsky
David Lynch
Bill Gunn
Wong Kar-Wai
Bruce LaBruce
Annie Sprinkle
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Gaspar Noé
Lotte Reiniger
Jim Jarmusch
Paul Sharits
Dziga Vertov
Ken Russell
Rosa von
Praunheim
Jacques Tati
Paul Verhoeven
Pedro Almodovar
Mary Allen Bute
Mikhail Kalatozov
Lynne Ramsay
Frank Moore (the performance artist who sometimes works in
film, not the filmmaker)
John Carpenter
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Werner Herzog
Jack Smith
David Cronenberg
Impactful films (this is definitely not a comprehensive
list, even if it included the filmography of each filmmaker listed above in
addition to these titles):
Gene Kelly films!
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
David Slade’s Hard Candy
Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter
Roger Vadim’s Barbarella
William Friedkin’s Cruising
Bruce McDonald’s The Tracy Fragments
Spike Lee’s BlackKkKlansman
Edo Bertoglio’s Downtown ‘81
Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy
Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses
Miroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows
Brian DePalma’s Hi, Mom!
Tod Browning’s Freaks
Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth
Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (not Dune 2 though)
Shane Meadows’s This is England
Jordan Peele’s Get Out
Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession
Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies
Satoshi Kon’s Paprika
Claire Denis’s High Life
Bill Morrison’s Decasia
Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
Oz Perkins’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Ti West’s The House of the Devil
Takehide Hori’s Junk Head
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead
Julia Ducournau’s Raw
John Brahm’s Hangover Square
Ari Aster’s Hereditary
Nate: Wow, these are great lists, a lot of these artists and films are major influences for me as well, and there are some that I'm unfamiliar with too so that'll give me plenty of research material, which I'm always seeking!
But I want to turn to writings about film now. I'm sure you
do a lot of reading for work, research, and (I assume) pleasure. What are some
of the better film books you've been reading recently?
Olga: You know, it’s funny to be asked about film books
right now, because this summer (having finished my degree in the spring) I
wanted to make a point of not reading books about film but read other things
for pleasure. The post-graduation reading treat that I had planned to get to
for years, for instance, is Alan Moore’s and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell.
I am finishing it right now and it is truly awesome, as everyone
knows—arguably, also somewhat cinematic. In any case, I had this plan, but of
course things didn’t turn out that way—not entirely at least.
A few months ago, I switched from volunteering at the Trylon’s box office to running some shows as a projectionist for digital cinema presentations, with the plan to eventually run analogue film on 35mm as well. The Trylon is not the only place I get to fumble with analogue film; I have done some very light super 8 and 16mm filmmaking and film stock development, and help out with the Cult Film Collective, also affiliated with the Trylon, whose mission is rescuing and showing analogue films. Whenever I can, I also use 16mm film prints in my film studies-related teaching. Across all these spaces, engaging with analogue film has completely changed my thinking about cinema aesthetics, cinema history, and perhaps also the politics of art and entertainment.
At the Trylon, I’m learning analogue projection by way of
observing this craft from our other projectionists and doing some low-stakes
tasks like film threading every now and then, time permitting. Related to that,
I have also been doing some reading—not the super technical stuff quite yet,
but introductory writings about the stakes and place of exhibiting and
experiencing analogue film in today’s digital age. Specifically, I read The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner’s Guide (2019) over the summer—which is
a book that was put together by the leading staff at the George Eastman House
in Rochester, New York (one of the most important locations for film
preservation in the U.S.). This book is a very accessible breakdown of the
steps that make up film projection, the responsibilities that come with
operating a projection booth (and a film theater more broadly), the
technologies and industry standards involved in showcasing analogue film (and
their evolution), and the role of the projectionist as a “maker” of film
experiences. Every chapter—there are ten—ends with a summary list of the “do”s
and “don’t ever”s relevant to the topic that is tackled in the respective
chapter, with the last chapter being specifically dedicated to the projection
of Nitrate film (which was used for early cinema prints and is both highly
flammable and almost impossible to put out once on fire, and therefore very
dangerous).
I feel like this book was an especially great read for me as someone who is familiar with certain aspects of running a movie theater and has some limited knowledge of analogue projection technology and how to handle film stock. Pretty much all the chapters answered implicit questions that I’ve had at various points of helping out in the projection booth (but generated new questions at the same time). What I appreciated about this book though is the attention it draws to the role of projectionists in the audience’s experience of watching a film at the theater, and how to create a great “capital E” Experience for audiences; all the invisible/inaudible details of designing a welcoming and non-distracting space, manipulating the audio-visual ambience of the theater to best prepare audiences for watching a “capital F” Film (on film). All that said though, this book does not require any prior knowledge of its topic—only a certain degree of curiosity, I would say. In some ways, books like this romanticize and maybe also exoticize analogue film technology/projection/experience, but I feel like given that digital film projection has been the default for quite some time in movie theaters, the rarity of watching films on film makes it difficult to not attribute a certain “special” character to such experiences—even though the distinction between analogue vs. digital film might not be immediately obvious if a print is in mint condition and the show runs smoothly, at least for audiences who aren’t attuned to the differences between these two projection formats.
Another book that I have been reading incrementally, and am excited to come back to for my next research project, is a collection of essays called Useful Cinema (2011), edited by Charles R. Acland, Haidee Wasson. This book showcases research on the use of film (as a technology of production and reception) in non-entertainment, but “useful” or utilitarian contexts—for example, training/industrial films, PSAs, documentaries, etc. I’m fascinated with the topic because “useful” films like training videos—many of them interactive these days—are still a very common thing for us to encounter today (upon starting a new job for example), yet we don’t typically think of them as “films.” This, I think, could largely be because contemporary training films are usually “born digital,” and are often mostly made up of stock footage not specifically shot for the respective topic of the film (which in itself can be kind of jarring, especially if the same footage is used in multiple videos for entirely different purposes). Older films of this kind, however, were filmed on film, and have a lot of features that approximate certain aspects of film-as-entertainment narration and aesthetics. A lot of such older films can be found online these days, and it is fascinating to watch them as historical documents that showcase the cultural, ideological, and social dispositions of a certain place and time. The Prelinger Archives, for instance, has a vast collection of these, and is absolutely worth digging into. In any case, the perspectives and research that make up the book Useful Cinema will help me think about my approach to medical films and their inclusion in curated programs of art/entertainment institutions as well as art projects that utilize these films as “found” footage.
Nate: I agree it's really interesting to look at "useful cinema" of the past, like Something Weird Video collections of health and safety films, for instance. They make you wonder what our blind spots are. When future viewers look at, say, a YouTube video from a nonprofit about how to reduce trash waste, will there be blind spots that will look as laughable to them as telling kids to hide under a desk during a nuclear bomb explosion look to us? Your point about the overlap of artistic Film and useful film is also well-taken. I think about something like the Eames' Powers of Ten, an educational film that also happens to be a cinematic masterpiece. Or about how George Romero funded his independent filmmaking operations by making industrial films; his recently rediscovered horror The Amusement Park was made on a commission from the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, although he apparently strayed significantly from what his funders had in mind. And then there's a film like Mom and Dad which broke barriers by blurring the lines between an instructional health film and exploitation cinema.
Olga: Totally! The connection between cult and trash cinema enthusiasm and affinity for useful films of the past is really fascinating to me. It seems like it grows out of a quite specific position spectators take due to our historical distance to the piece (which, beyond obvious features such as parlance and fashion inside those movies, is often mediated by the format, ie., the fact that they were filmed on film—or even low-res DV at this point, is something that can have a nostalgic bent to it). It is particularly interesting to think about why cult/trash film communities (and a lot of people in general, I feel like) tend to react to these cinematic relics with humor and laughter (instead of worrying about the “bad advice” some of these films give, such as children hiding under desk during a nuclear strike). We’re putting ourselves above the past that way, but WHY does this cultural impulse exist in the first place? There’s a book that offers a quite diverse set of perspectives on those questions, and I find it very helpful for thinking about the hierarchies of cultural production: Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik’s Cult Film Reader (2008).
I also completely agree about Eames’s Powers of Ten and the other educational films you mention, particularly the convergence between exploitation and education cinema. It was fairly common for emerging film professionals to work in either industrial film or pornography before either breaking into studio productions or moving on to do something else (and probably is common still, even though porn has much more DIY ways in these days). My favorite example of the education/exploitation dilemma (or dialogue I guess) is the German Schulmädchenreport series—a genuine sex-ed/narrative film series from the 1970s that was extremely awkward in its explicitness and now is considered one of the cult-iest things that has ever come out of Germany.
Nate: For my own recent reading, I wanted to mention a book that you reminded me of earlier when you brought up punk and new wave in your discussion of alternative cinema. The book is Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film edited by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly. I consult it at least once a week to read reviews and interviews and gawk at stills and posters, but mostly for film discovery. It's incredibly comprehensive, I think the word "complete" in the subtitle is justified. Because not only does the book consider movies that are actually about punk and new wave - although it certainly does that - it also includes virtually every appearance by a punk or new waver in any film, however fleeting. For instance, earlier this year I watched Hal Hartley's Trust - which is not about punk at all - and I noticed a brief shot of a punk carrying a TV into a repair shop. After the movie I went straight to the book to see if they'd caught this one and, of course, there it was (in a negative review). So, it's not just about the punk subculture and its cinema but also about the way that the genre and style was represented - often cartoonishly - in all manner of films from the arthouse to the multiplex, in made-for-TV specials and straight-to-video horror.
But of course, the authors devote special attention to movies that are about punk and punks with longer, more considered reviews often accompanied by interviews with the filmmakers, actors, and musicians involved in the productions. Classics like Rock'n'Roll High School, Repo Man, and Return of the Living Dead receive special attention alongside the work of underground heroes like Nick Zedd and Charles Pinion but with plenty of room left for unhinged 80s teen comedies like Joysticks. Documentaries and concert films are chronicled as well, including a band-by-band breakdown of the eye-popping, globe-hopping New Wave concert compilation Urgh! A Music War and extended coverage of Penelope Spheeris' essential LA hardcore documentary The Decline of Western Civilization featuring substantial interviews with the director plus Keith Morris from Circle Jerks and Exene Cervenka from X.
Spheeris also directed the film that Destroy All
Movies names "the best movie ever made about punks," the
powerful 1983 drama Suburbia. The movie captures Spheeris'
unique role as a chronicler of punk by incorporating documentary elements into
a realistic narrative with great sensitivity to the music, the scene, and the
type of individuals who might need punk community the most. As the book
emphasizes, so many movies identify punks as mohawked buffoons chugging beer
and starting fights, peripheral figures there for a splash of color or comic
relief. Surburbia rejects this image. Spheeris was
well-positioned to know who was actually going to shows and why they were
banding together. The characters in the film are fleeing abusive, negligent, or
dismissive home lives and they instinctively form a found family with punk as
their cultural milieu and shared artistic interest. They gain strength from one
another and there is a lot of sweetness in the film's depiction of their chosen
tribe but it doesn't look away from the vulnerability of young people struggling
in lawless, unsanitary, and ultimately dangerously exposed conditions. The
book's coverage of the film includes interviews with a producer and two actors
who describe Spheeris' casting concept of finding real, non-professional
performers drawn from the local scene. Their naturalistic performances enhance
the movie's documentary quality, certified by narratively significant concert
footage of D.I. and T.S.O.L.
The kids in Suburbia are slandered and eventually attacked by adults in the community who have contempt for the music, clothing, and anti-social intentions of hardcore punk. That aggressively moralistic attitude was epitomized by organizations like Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center. Destroy All Movies includes a review of a tape produced by the PMRC called Rising to the Challenge, a piece of "useful cinema" directed at horrified Christian caregivers, an instance of the prolific "scare film" tradition adjacent to the now-hilarious satanic panic documentaries that proliferated in the same period.
Olga: I’m not familiar with the Punks on Film book you
mention but am certainly interested in works that have the effort and ambition
to compile “complete” guides of any (sub)cultural phenomenon from the bottom
up. So much work and creativity goes into those projects, and Punk in
particular is interesting in this case since that community (or many
sub-sections of it at least) often aims to evade official or “legitimate”
channels of communication, yet, as this book demonstrates, punk is also a
“device” that mainstream film productions use for particular purposes. Guides
like that are a great example of how to retain a grassroots character while
taking control of the subculture’s public image and narrative on its own terms
because yes, even the TV-carrying punk in the background of a scene from Trust
mediates a certain image of the subculture—arguably, one that was imposed on it
from the outside. Spheeris’s movies are interesting in that case because they
are both things, subculturally authentic and accepted as public representatives
of the community. Her movies differ quite significantly from Nick Zedd’s
contributions to the Cinema of Transgression or Bruce La Bruce’s queercore
films—both conducted fairly deeply underground and with minimal budget (at
least in the beginning), and often completely outrageous in their aesthetic and
narrative, in part, I think, to retain a certain oppositional flair just for
the sake of opposition (and that’s quintessential punk in many ways). But even
Zedd’s and LaBruce’s filmic stances are riddled with contradictions, and that’s
fine.
I would really love to see Rising to the Challenge to find out how it compares to films like Dream Deceivers, which follows the aftermath of a very real and devastating incident that happened during, and probably magnified the fears surrounding, the satanic panic. The latter gives you nothing to laugh about because it deals with real tangible incidents bound up in that historical moment, but I imagine Rising to the Challenge primarily deals in hypotheticals—the “what if”s of experiencing “rock’n’roll” performance as a young consumer—and probably is geared toward dealing with so-called moral transgressions first and foremost. Also great that in Rising, Madonna, Prince, Judas Priest, Dead Kennedys, and Rolling Stones seem to be put on equal footing—something that many teens at that time would have sternly opposed I suspect. Is there an un-ironic audience for educational films like that in today’s culture still? In a lot of ways, such messaging got easier and a lot more individualized with social media and the ubiquity of phone cameras etc., so I am not sure there is a “market” for full-on productions that cover these topics anymore. This probably has both benefits and downsides.
I wrote about Ozu's Good Morning and Ida Lupino's Outrage for Perisphere , the Trylon Cinema's blog. Good Morning will be pl...
