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.
