Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
April 7, 2017. The Harvard Film Archive screened works by Jem Cohen. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are filmmaker Jem Cohen, and Harvard Film Archive's David Pendleton and Brittany Gravely.
Brittany Gravely 0:18
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Harvard Film Archive. I'm Brittany, the publicist here. And tonight, we're thrilled to welcome Jem Cohen to the theater. Jem's work is difficult to quickly and easily describe. It evades traditional categories and easy marketability. Words like experimental, documentary, essay film or visual poetry may help describe his more meditative, observational nonfiction work, but then he also has created activist newsreels, music videos for indie bands, and feature-length narrative films, which aren't completely fiction or even completely narrative. Within each of these customized genres, there are even further variations and surprises. The marginal, unmodifiable and undefinable formal aspects of his work also carry over to the people and places he focuses on. His human collaborators are often iconoclastic, eccentric, independent and frequently defiant about living life on their own terms. When wandering about a city, Cohen documents the subtle beauty, the fleeting moments and secret messages which go perhaps unnoticed unless you're looking for them specifically. City streets and common spaces feature most often in Cohen's work where the spontaneous collisions of public and private occur, where trees meet the concrete, and layers of information appear in many different forms. Cohen's films feel very present, active, and alert, yet open, allowing for wandering, digression and surprise, and of course, your own discoveries, your own personal interpretations. Rarely didactic, political activism streaks through all of his films—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—ultimately encouraging us all to reclaim that which is ours from a homogenized corporate culture, and to simply be more deeply engaged in our lives on this planet.
So Jem will be here for two evenings this weekend: tonight, and tomorrow night. And even after he leaves us, there's going to be many more screenings of his work. I encourage you to explore the full spectrum. We’ll also be showing his latest film, World Without End, on Friday. And so tonight, it's a series of shorts. Occasionally, Jem will come and talk in between the films. And after everything, there'll be a discussion with Jeremy Rossen and David Pendleton and Jem at the front here. So, before welcoming our guests, I ask you to turn off any of your devices, anything that makes light or noise, and keep them off for the duration of the show. And now please join me in welcoming Jem Cohen.
[APPLAUSE]
Jem Cohen 3:32
Thank you so much, and a special thanks to all the folks here. Brittany, Haden Guest, David Pendleton, Jeremy, and back in the booth, the man behind the curtain, John Quackenbush. It's especially rewarding and calming to have people who care about presentation and projection. And we spent some time navigating the complicated thicket of codecs and formats and figuring out what was suitable and might actually even look good. And it's just really nice to deal with folks who care about that stuff, because I care a lot about it.
So yeah, it's weird to do retrospectives, because you get to look back, see what you did, see what you did wrong. See that you can't go back and fix it. And maybe see that that's sort of okay. And we're going to start tonight with a film that, I guess I made it around ‘96. I'm not quite sure if I got that date right. But that's the one that's going to be scrawled on the box, I guess. So I think I had been making films starting in 1983, pretty much. And so this was about a third of the way on the path. And it's a film that I like to show to start off the retrospective because it's kind of the barest bones of what I do. It's a single, silent roll of Super 8 film, which I like to think, it's not that it's unedited, but it's edited in camera. So all it is what went into the camera and what popped out from the lab, and there's no other mediation. And so it's kind of—I don't know, it amused me to have it just be what it is. It's not exactly what it is because we're actually going to look at it tonight in a 35 millimeter blow-up that was kindly arranged by Bob Brodsky and Toni Treadway, small-gauge archivists, preservationists, artists, concerned film people who I've known for many years, and will be seeing some more of the work that we did together. Many times, I made sort of special trips, pilgrimages up to Rowley to work transferring small-gauge film to video formats, and they were always incredibly supportive and concerned and in the trenches. So I thank them very much.
So I think this is the first time that I've maybe ever publicly shown the 35 blow-up. But it's a pleasure to do that for you folks. And we'll be following it up with two other shorts, Little Flags and a film called NYC Weights and Measures, I like to show those two back to back because they tangle with pretty much the exact same geography in lower Manhattan, and they both deal with parades. One of them kind of unearthing the darker side of a parade, and the other one being a much more benevolent example. But in both cases, there were unusual political implications that didn't really come to the fore until years after the footage was shot. And so I find it interesting to see that, be reminded that you think you're making something and you might be making something else. So I'll show those and then I'll come out and introduce Lost Book Found, which is, I don't know, sometimes it still seems like the film that if people have seen something, that might be the one that they stumbled on. And so I'll come out and introduce that.
Before I forget, I also like to send things out. And the last couple years, we lost an awful lot of great folks, including three filmmakers that were of really monumental importance to me personally: Peter Hutton, Abbas Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, and I'd also like to send this out this evening to Luce Vigo, the daughter of Jean Vigo, who I had the honor of getting to know a little bit, and she moved along just a couple of weeks ago. So thanks again. And I'll be back. And please enjoy. The last thing, I always forget to say, since this is a blow-up from the bare Super 8 film, it has no titles on it, but it does have a title and the title of the film would be Coney Island End of God the Way It Must Be. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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Jem Cohen 9:48
So I shot Little Flags in the so-called “victory parade” for the first Gulf War—1991, I guess that was—and I went to shoot even though I knew would be a difficult day, in part because a great street photographer, an old friend of my family, Leon Levinstein, whose work you should know, once left a message on my answering machine, and said something along the lines to my brother Adam and myself that there was going to be a parade and we should be out shooting because a parade was a good place to do that. So I went to that parade, but it was it was rough. And as you hear at the end, it's an actual quote from somebody yelling out, “Let's all celebrate 250,000 dead,” with apparent lack of irony. And so I shelved the footage. I was with one friend Todd Colby, a New York poet, and he was holding a tape recorder which at the time was a analog Walkman professional that I recorded the sound on for this film and also for Lost Book Found, which it's pretty amazing that you can get pretty decent sound from a cassette tape recorder. But Todd was recording sound and I was shooting the silent Super 8 camera, and at one point we were standing in front of a very tiny group of protesters—who were sort of surrounded by an increasingly belligerent group of people to who were chanting “USA, USA, USA”—and they were holding up antiwar signs, and I made the mistake of commenting to someone next to me, “Well, so much for freedom of speech,” and the was this comment was not taken very well by the person I said it to, [LAUGHS] and I had to take off running. Anyway, I got home, and it was such a kind of depressing day that I ended up shelving the footage for quite some time. And then for reasons that I'm still not sure are clear to me, I pulled it out and very quickly cut the film in 2000. And then, very soon after that, 9/11 happened, and the footage became a kind of terrible backwards mirror. And I had this very dreadful feeling that I could just keep taking the date off of it and putting it out every few years because we'd surely be bombing someplace. And so it was an odd project.
And the other one, NYC Weights and Measures, I think it was actually a little commission by PBS. Kind of hard to imagine that they did things like that, but God bless ‘em. And they had a show called Reel New York, and it was their 10th anniversary and they asked a number of filmmakers if we would make short inexpensive films and I set out to make what at the time seemed a purely you know what I would have what is sometimes described as a lyrical film, a little lyrical city film with no particular political inclinations that I was intending. And then soon after shooting that footage I had that problem on an Amtrak train going from New York to DC where the five cops got on the train in Philadelphia and demanded the film from my camera. And then when I got off in DC, I was immediately met by what I guess were people from the FBI. And that sort of benign notion of just walking around and shooting interesting sights in the city took on a different tone and it was also in this period that I became very involved with a battle in New York to try to preserve the rights of street photographers and filmmakers, which was—I'm very proud to say—a successful fight that took place over two years and ended up blocking what would have been very, very restrictive permitting regulations that would have made it very onerous for people to shoot on the street. And we fought it, and it ended up working out pretty well with the help of the ACLU. So the regulations are actually pretty damn good. We'll see how long that lasts. But it is good while it [lasts].
So now on to Lost Book Found. Lost Book Found was released in ‘96, or ‘97. But it was something that I worked on for maybe six or seven years. And I sometimes forget that it hung over my head as this sort of dark cloud for much of that time, because I had come to New York, and the first film that I made was called This Is a History of New York, and it was sort of looking up and around in a certain kind of wonder. And then Lost Book Found was a film that I wanted to make, mostly just looking down. That was sort of the initial impulse. And but I shot for years gathering color Super 8 footage, but not sure how to organize it or what to do with it. And eventually, well, towards the end of that period, I got into a kind of tangle with a TV station that had decided to commission a piece for, again, a little arts program out of Minneapolis of all things, and then they saw a rough cut and bailed out and pulled their funding and infuriated me, but also freed me to make it exactly what I wanted to make it. Somewhere in that process, I had decided that since I wasn't sure what to do to organize this material that was obsessing me—certain kind of categories of things that I was shooting on the street—that it would be good to just remember what the project came out of, and it came out of a very funny, ridiculous job that I had when I first came to the city when I was a pushcart vendor. So I thought back on that, and that allowed me to know how to proceed. But it also became clear to me that I didn't really want to make an autobiographical film. And I didn't really care about making an entirely truth-oriented documentary of any kind. And somehow, I knew that I had to fall down the hole of the gray area between documentary and fiction, and this was the result. So I think if there's anything else I need to say in advance of that... I guess not. So Lost Book Found. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And we'll follow that one up with another city film without a break. called Night Scene, New York: Chinatown Portrait.
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Jem Cohen
Thank you. I hadn't watched Lost Book Found in quite a while myself, so I scribbled some things in the notebook while I was watching it, and maybe I will read them if I can read them. Filmmaking is the going-out-of-business business. A confession: I don't tend to think of my work as that much interested in reflecting on cinema itself, even though I might occasionally like to do so on my off hours. But there is a scene in Lost Book Found that's quite important. where it goes completely silent, and then there's a little boy with his hand up, and it's silent for quite a while. And it's really silent. Because I learned early on that there's a lot of different kinds of silence, like, if you are working on an analog project and you have silence, it's probably going to be tape hiss, which is a certain kind of comforting silence. And if you're in a digital world, and you really pull the sound out, it's kind of shocking to be that silent. But this was an analog project, so it goes most of the way silent and the boy holds up his hand for a while. And then in comes the sound of a church bell. And I think it's possible, though I'm not sure, that that is a response, an unconscious response to a film that had great power for me, which still does, which is the extraordinary Georges Franju short film Le Sang des bêtes, Blood of the Beasts, which is an astonishing film, strange film, that is concerned with the slaughterhouses of Paris in, I guess, late 1940s or early 1950s. And there's a series of portraits of some of the slaughterhouse workers. I could be getting the exact details wrong, but I think there's one of them who has a prizefighter earlier on, and then he ends up working in a slaughterhouse. And it said that he can slaughter, I can't remember if it's a horse or a bull, in the time that it takes the church bells to ring. And then you hear them ring, and it's just an incredible moment in film history. And I didn't consciously think of it when I was making that scene, but I think it may be indebted. It's funny to me also that when I use the two old blues tunes, the Luther Magby tune in the track by the woman with the incredibly beautiful name of Blind Mamie Forehand, that you can hear the needle drop, because I was using the vinyl records that I had taken out of the library where I found those tracks. And I like that.
I think the film may also owe a debt to the great Helen Levitt, wonderful street photographer, editor, humorist, private person. She did a series of pictures of chalk drawings done by children and it's something that I saw early on, and it struck me as very wonderful that she would document something so ephemeral, and that she would know that that was important to do. And I think that that was a great lesson to me early on. Another reference that I'll make now… there's a moment at the end of Lost Book Found where the subway grating fisher pulls up a coin, which I still, luckily have. I recently moved and found it. Sort of a coin. It's kind of a token. And I think it's a metal tag that would have been on wiring to identify what it was. But anyway, he's using a glop of some sticky material on a heavy piece of metal that he lowers down and then he can touch that sticky material to something that he sees and draw it up. But he catches a piece of cellophane and he kind of delicately releases the cellophane. It always amazes me that something like that can be captured on film. But it reminds me of a film, which I hadn't seen at the time, but I saw years later. A lovely film by a Scottish woman named Margaret Tait. Who's heard of Margaret Tait? Good for you. Anyway, Margaret Tait was kind of a renegade experimental filmmaker... 50s, 60s, 70s, is that right, Haden? And a little earlier too. But she has a wonderful portrait of her mother, a film that I love dearly, called Portrait of Ga, where her mother unpeeled a butterscotch from its cellophane, with the same kind of delicacy. So one reference backwards to a film that I had seen in one to a film that I hadn't seen yet.
It's interesting to me to watch these films because they are archives of a city that's either disappeared or disappearing. And it's amusing to me to do that in an archive, the Harvard Film Archive, and then of course, you know, there's the films. So the films are an archive, and we're in an archive, and then the world is the other, bigger archive. And that's what we do. That's our job.
I’m trying to think of anything to say about this last one, the Chinatown portrait. There was a strange internet cafe that I went into that seemed oddly deserted most of the time, whereas other internet cafes were very crowded. Something was going on economically under the surface that I just couldn't, in any way, know. And they wouldn't let me film in there. But they had this aquarium towards the back of the room. And I begged and pleaded to at least let me film the fish. So I think of that film as a comedy. I always think of them as comedies. But that fish is very good. They're all good. All of the three or so fish that you see.
So we're coming up on two recent digital films, if we can call them that. In the early days, I would sort of try to be fair and say film slash video because I was shooting on film and finishing on tape, and I felt stuck in the middle. I couldn't afford to finish things on film. And I fell in love with some of the translational things that you could do in getting over to tape, speed changes and occasional tintings and things. They were sort of delicate organic effects rather than kind of video artifacts, which I wasn't ever so enamored with. But was there was a long period where like, the film people didn't trust you, because you finished on tape and tape people would look at the work and say, “Oh, no, this is film.” And so there were festivals like video festivals or film festivals. It was a very either/or game with, kind of, tribes that didn't really seem to get along all that well, and I was right in between the two. It was uncomfortable for a few years. And now everyone's kind of over that, for better or worse. So I still shoot film sometimes, but I'm more likely to shoot digitally. And these last two are related to the first, in particular, because they're very much just going out and experiencing kind of either one thing—one of them being getting stuck under an awning in the rain on Sixth Avenue otherwise known as Avenue of the Americas. I'm not sure which we get to call it. But anyway, I got stuck under an awning in front of the IFC cinema. And I shot this film Helianthus Corner Blues. And then there's a few shots from right, maybe around the corner. And then there's another neighborhood portrait which is an odd film that I very rarely show called Real Birds. Which as these things are want to do in retrospectives, it connects to the most recent thing that I finished which is called Birth of a Nation related to the new time of, that we're in, of Trump, which I still cannot say without complete disbelief. But I went down to the inaugural and the subsequent protest, and I made a short called Birth of a Nation, which is relatively unseen as of yet. And that's later in the retrospective. But there's a important scene in it of birds, pigeons, which is foreshadowed by the birds in Real Birds. I’m tempted to say that it's the same pigeons, and then I use them again and again, because like, these pigeons are really good! [LAUGHS] Like, I got to, you know, bring them back for the next film, like some filmmakers have the same group of actors that they continually work with. But I guess I probably wouldn't convince anybody that they're the same birds, but they're equally adept in these projects. So we'll look at these last two, and then I'll come out and we'll have a little discussion. Sorry to ramble so much. I promised that I wouldn't, and now I have, already.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 31:14
And now, David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 31:19
[Thank you] for the films and for the generosity and in talking about them. I might start with just one or two questions, maybe really, with just one observation, since you've covered some of the things that I was going to ask you about already. And I'm sure that people out there have questions.
But I was struck by what you were saying about Margaret Tait's film, and, which echoes something that is said in the narration of Lost Book Found. I think the narrator in Lost Book Found says something like, “Everything can't be important, I suppose.” And in the Margaret Tait film, you're talking about this sort of balance between what's ephemeral and what's important. And it strikes me that that's a real key to your work, that you go out in the world and find these things that may be important or maybe ephemeral, and I wondered if you talk a little bit about whether it's how you find that balance between the ephemeral and the important, are you looking for the important in the ephemeral, or vice versa? Maybe it has to do with the editing process, like how you choose what to include in a finished film?
Jem Cohen
You know, when I go out to shoot, I do what for me is the better work when I'm not really looking for anything in particular, and so, the idea of intention in regards to– Like I did a class here at MIT last night, and then afterwards, we were out for drinks with some of the students, and one of them asked, like, “How do you decide when you're going to shoot something or not?” And I completely blew off the question, partly because I was tired and the class was out. But I really just didn't want to explain to him that it's not really answerable, and that it would be kind of a drag to be out with the camera and asking myself that question. Because what I want to be is out with the camera, and not asking myself anything. And that's when it's good, you know? Is when the intention is erased, and the actuality is looking and listening carefully. And that becomes really plenty.
And yet, you know, of course, there are reasons why we like the stuff that we like, and why do I, you know, put on that record and not that other record? Or why do I like looking out of this window more than I like looking out of that window? We all have that, we all do that all the time. And then there's just the pure kind of brutal practicalities of trying to work on the cheap most of the time, almost all of the time. And so a lot of what I do that I wish I could pretend was dictated by aesthetic, philosophical knowledge is actually dictated by trying to work on the cheap. It occurred to me a long time ago that I really wanted to make films, and I really wanted to shoot a lot, because I enjoyed it. And if I was going to shoot a lot and make films, then I had to avoid constantly having to meet other people and try to get money. And so if I could learn how to take care of most ends of the operation on my own, and I didn't have that dependency, then I could just shoot all the time and make films all the time—not necessarily always the ones that I wanted to make. And occasionally, when I need to reach a little—I don't want to say higher, but different—and hire a crew or have a producer or get permitted access to a location, I'm very happy to be able to do so. But I really feel this need to work as much as possible. And a lot of times, the only way I'm going to do that is if I'm working with the material that is there and free. And some of this was learned by growing up in punk rock days and watching most of my friends learn that in music. That they had assumed that to be a musician, there was an industry that you had to become part of which would bestow upon you certain access and privileges. But then they also found out that that industry didn't care about them at all, and that maybe they could get away with bypassing the industry and actually making the kind of music that they really needed to make by avoiding the industry entirely, and making do with what they had. And so that was a beautiful lesson for me, that I witnessed more in regards to music than to cinema because when I was in college, I didn't have any classes in experimental film or documentary. I was mostly watching classical Hollywood—which I loved certainly 1000 times more than today's Hollywood or the last twenty or thirty years of Hollywood—but I couldn't come anywhere near making those kinds of films. I didn't have the means. But I stumbled upon all this other territory that I had total access to because nobody was keeping me from it. So anyway, a long answer to a short question. So necessity, cheap. And then there's this whole other thing that nobody has ever expressed better than Chris Marker in Sans Soleil, where he talks about– it's a 12th century, Japanese—is it Sei Shonagon? Is that the pronunciation? He talks about this court phenomena of list keeping in, I believe it's 12th century Japan, where one of the lists was “things that quicken the heart,” and Marker reflects, there isn't really a better way to put what we do as filmmakers or photographers, why we shoot this and not that. That's a summation that I've never found any more– There's never been a more succinct or beautiful way to express it than the way that Marker said it in that passage.
David Pendleton 39:00
Jeremy, do you want to jump in here? Or do you wanna throw it open into the audience? Or I can ask– I'm going to throw it open to the audience.
Jeremy Rossen 39:07
Actually, I wanted to follow up because I think you mentioned growing up in the DC punk scene and the DIY approach to creating your own opportunities and taking advantage of having limited resources and things of that sort. So I kind of see that DIY punk soul kind of shine through in a lot of what you do and how you speak and your influences. But I wondered, if we could talk more about going into editing because I think in the beginning when you worked you accumulated a lot of footage for Lost Book Found, which we watched tonight, and Benjamin Smoke, and you kind of drew upon this archive to create work and then maybe the projects that you work on now is more you're shooting as you're working, so I wonder if you can talk about your editing philosophy and approach and working from an archive versus working–
David Pendleton 40:09
And if I could add… You talk about shooting and letting go of intentionality, whereas clearly in the post-production process, then all the intentionality comes back in.
Jem Cohen 40:19
Yeah, I mean, sooner or later, it better or you're in trouble. But that doesn't mean that you can't also have some of the same sort of sense of careful looking and listening again, but to the material rather than just to the world. I mean, the editing is still kind of the great mystery to me, like, it's the aspect of filmmaking that I still find most astonishing in a way, because it's patently ridiculous to me that most teaching of editing is mostly about making a certain kind of sense of things getting from A to B in a kind of concise, logical way, through the use of sort of accepted and classical terms of navigation—that ou can go from this kind of shot to that kind of shot, and you will impart a certain kind of information. It's not that it's without value, because it does allow you to solve certain problems or get from one place to another. But it has very little to do with the core of editing, which I've always thought of as a kind of free association, which is not random association, but it's connecting things through all kinds of things that are at your disposal—rhythm, or movement, or color, or instinct, or memory—all kinds of things that have nothing to do with, like, predetermined logic of how to make a scene function properly, but they have a great deal, I think, to do with consciousness, with how we think. And we think jumping around in all kinds of crazy ways. And we go from this thought connected to that thought, and then things go black for a minute, and then another memory comes out, and then you're distracted by something that you're seeing, and you're not remembering at all, you're just seeing. But then a memory comes into that. It's all very crazy, but it's also very accessible in cinema to get at that actuality of consciousness. And so I never really liked being thought of as an experimental filmmaker. I don't know that I've ever used that terminology to describe what I do, because it just doesn't seem right to me as the term and it often indicates a kind of, I don't know, sometimes cruelly and sometimes self-marginalized community that I don't necessarily feel any more akin to that I did to Hollywood-type cinema. But the one thing that's crept up on me over the years is that experimental filmmakers are often feeling free to get at consciousness through the form that they work with, in a way that's actually much more accurate to human experience, whereas everybody believes the opposite. They think that the experimental stuff is too weird and too hard and they can't understand it and it scares them off. And they accept that kind of more normal moviemaking is sort of akin to reality, and it's actually reversed. And more normal, particularly narrative, filmmaking on a large scale is often predicated on a sort of perfect illusion of reality, which has very little to do with our own experience. And that is very interesting to me. In a way, it makes me understand more why people want to make big movies like that, because they want to do something that is not like their own life, because it's this other grand, magical thing that can be constructed. And I understand that and I value it, but I also value this whole other realm of possibility. And I really like it when people kind of get in the middle and they're doing both. And when I think of Pasolini, The Gospel According to Matthew, like, he really hits it hard…. Anyway.
Jeremy Rossen 45:13
I think you said the magic words to David. Pasolini. [LAUGHS] But no, I think what you're what you're also getting to is like the fact of, I don't know, filmmakers, or artists or society in general, having more of these agendas, and it's hard to kind of be open to things when you have these kind of strict lines and strict agendas. It blinds you to the other possibilities of life or, or shooting a film or editing a film and editing a film as is frequently a very intuitive experience.
Jem Cohen
Yeah. And also, you let the stuff tell you what it might be. I mean, like, I can't ask these birds to appear at this puddle and enact this weird power struggle that becomes... It's kind of excruciating. I don't know if you all felt that way. But every time I watch it, I'm like, the one bird so freaked out the other bird that even though the bird then leaves it to the food, the second bird can't eat because it's too freaked out! [LAUGHS] Anyway, you can't really script that. When I made Lost Book Found, I used to go around and talk with the film and say, “Well, you know, I can do this thing that Hollywood can't do, which is stand around a corner and wait for some goddamn bag to do its thing.” And then this fucking movie came out, which I think is a disagreeable and problematic film that I avoided seeing for a long, long time. Caught half of in a hotel room once. I think it's misogynistic—which is American Beauty. And then I thought, “God damn, they can do whatever the hell they want. They just, you know, have a bag, special effects people, and a wind machine and whatever.” But anyway, suffice to say, I thought for a while that I could do things that they couldn't do, but I can do them cheap at least. [LAUGHTER[
Jeremy Rossen
Well, actually the plastic bag has another dimension in that it's frequently thought of that the originally they got the idea from Nathaniel Dorsky.
Jem Cohen
I read that too. And he's much more generous about it. Dorsky’s like “Oh, well, you know, good for them” or whatever. I don't feel the same way. I feel like “good for them” if they were making a good movie.
Jeremy Rossen
Or at least paid him. [LAUGHS]
Jem Cohen
Or at least paid him, yeah.
David Pendleton
Or you.
Jem Cohen
Or me. I mean, yeah, I don't know that they copped it from either of us. They may well have copped it from him. But nonetheless, you know, I have a lot of these kinds of sort of deadpan portraits of people in films. There's a 16 millimeter series at the end of Lost Book Found where I stopped, after years of walking around the street and trying to be inconspicuous or semi-invisible. At a certain point, near the end of the project, I just had a couple people help and set up a light, I think, and stopped people and said, “Can we take your portrait?” and did that series of images. And they harken back, it's a tradition. It's certainly no invention of mine. I was in the museum next door, and there's a wonderful wall of August Sander photos, and he was one of the great masters of that, as are all of the police stations that have ever taken a mug shot or the high school yearbook photographers. There's something useful about having people look at the camera, maybe not smile—which has an interesting photographic history, but I won't go into that. But anyway, I don't know what kind of filmmaker would see a bag doing that kind of dance and not go for it, or pigeons wiggling in the sky, or many things that a lot of us have shot. And, when I watch a series of my films done over a long stretch of time, I see these repetitions and reflections and reverberations, and sometimes if I'm in a bad mood, I just feel like “God, can’t you fucking get another idea?” and then remember that it's not an idea, it's a response to something in the world and it's a place and it's a resonance and it's okay to come at it again from a different direction in a different movie.
David Pendleton 50:11
And yet there's a great deal of variety in your–
Jem Cohen
Well, you can't make the birds do the exact same thing twice either!
David Pendleton 50:19
I mean in terms of sort of genres within the kind of realm in which you work.
But I'm gonna see if there's anybody who is dying to ask a question, because you've all been very patient. But people are always reluctant to go first. Okay, there's a couple in the middle there. Let's get the guy in front. And then you can pass it back over your shoulder. Yes, yes, I'm sorry. That's you. Could you just grab the mic that they're offering you?
Audience 1 50:45
I would just like to come back– Does this work?
David Pendleton Yeah, we turn the volume up a little bit, maybe…
Audience 1
I would like to come back to what you said about what for you is the core of editing. And it seemed to me that... I just want to confirm what I seem to understand that you were saying, “The core of editing for me is to bypass any predefined logic, and to focus on the functioning of my own mind.” Is that close to what you meant?
Jem Cohen 51:27
I may have said something like that, I could probably refine it a little bit and say, I just don't want someone else's logic. But I need to find a logic. And you need to set up structures, and you need to make rules. But sometimes they're really weird rules that allow you to proceed. You know, I can't say to a student like, “Well, I have a cut in one of my films where a guy's suspenders—it's a man's back and he has suspenders and they're making an X. And the next shot is a building that has an X in it.” And, you can't tell students that that's how they should be editing. It's ridiculous. But in the film, it allows me to get from one shot to the other. And even on a visceral shape sense level, it works because the two shapes are echoing each other and they allow that bridge between one shot and another. So you find structures, you find logic. But what I mean by free association is that the emphasis is on free. The filmmaker should be free to find or devise their own systems. And to occasionally break their own rules. I mean, I do things that I think are ridiculous, like when I made the last film, it was my birthday, August 28. But also we were coming up on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. And I felt an increasing dread. Because I knew that there was going to be attendant—I don't know, just stuff about 9/11—and I was not looking forward to it. And I went out for a walk. And it's a neighborhood that I’d lived in for, at the time, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years or whatever. And it was changing very, very rapidly. And so there were things that I was registering: “Oh, I didn't realize that that was gone. And there's that flapping thing, which is a real estate phone number. And there's these repairs on the bridge that are interesting looking.” And I was just going for a walk. And then I came home and I was still kind of troubled. And I just for kicks, thought, “Okay, I'm gonna make a movie right now with that stuff.” And for better or worse, it’s astonishing about digital, you can walk in the door with the camera and walk over to the edit system and ten minutes later, you're cutting. And then some of the sound was terrible, because—I mean, I wish that I recorded sound properly—but I just sometimes blow it. I go out for a walk, I really wish that I was more careful about it or had proper sound people because it's stupid to go out with a camera mic and come back and you've got all this wind noise and you can't use it. So half the sound I just couldn't use. So I said to myself– I'm increasingly leery of musical scores in films. But this film was not for anybody but me. I was just amusing myself this afternoon and trying to get rid of the dread. And so I thought, “Well, okay, I'm going to just semi-arbitrarily take a friend's record”—sort of obscure independent release from DC from my friend [?Ghee?]—”and I'm just going to make the soundtrack only by stealing little snippets of this record and just seeing what I can do with them.” And some of it is interesting. And some of it, I would not do it today. But I just set out these limitations. And then I found some strange things that happened that I never could have planned on. And some of them are not so good or interesting to me. But occasionally, there's something that happens, and thirty years into making films, I'm so thankful that it just gets weirder when I'm cutting. And I allow myself to be free of even my own rules, like oh, don't use music or whatever. And then I'm like, “Oh, I'll use a little bit of it.” And then sometimes it's, it's wrong, but sometimes it's, it's alright, sometimes it's free. You know.
Audience 1 56:16
Thank you so much for refining what I told you.
Audience 2 56:26
You credited Walter Benjamin in one of your films. I'm just wondering, what of his thoughts and his writings, how did it actually influence your filmmaking?
Jem Cohen
Well, I was well into shooting on Lost Book Found before I knew who he was. And then I ran into a review in the New York Review of Books, maybe. I take that back. In college, I had been forced to read Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That's the one thing that they still like, kind of trot out as This is Walter Benjamin, even though there's this endless labyrinth of other wonderful stuff. But I was made to read that. I thought it was interesting. But I didn't know much about him or pursue it. It was just one of many readings in an art history class. Then I was working on Lost Book Found, and I read a passage from One-Way Street, in which he said—I think it's One-Way Street—in which he said that there should be a close-up study of bank notes because in the iconography of, you know, Cupids and sheaves of wheat, you could encounter the gates of hell. [LAUGHS] I thought, “Whoa! Like, what a thought!” Because when I had been a pushcart vendor, I'd sit there all day staring at money, because I was bored. And so I would sit there and get, you know, this bill was old, or this bill was ripped, or occasionally there'd be a counterfeit bill. And I would really stare at that iconography. And you know, you get all the Bavarian Illuminatus pyramid stuff and eyes. And so I thought, when I read that, I was like, I've got to get into this guy. And then, as I worked on the film, and was also reading more and more, I just thought... I just still can't understand how somebody could be so prescient. It's like he was really looking into the future and seeing with great nuance the world that capitalism was bringing, and he did it with a great deal of poetry and very little jargon. So a lot of this stuff, I still don't know what he's talking about. But a lot of it is just reverberant in a very beautiful, poetic way. And I realized that it was very, I don't know, it was very moving to me to be acquainted with him and increasingly obsessed with him. And, then there was also... I was really messed up because I kept shooting, and I didn't really know what I was trying to do. But I was obsessively gathering these shots. And I knew that for example, if somebody was sweeping that I wouldn't be like, “Okay, you already got four sweeping shots, you're done.” I'd be like [IN A GRUMBLING VOICE] “Get another one!” You know? And there were certain things that I would just know that I needed to keep collecting, but I didn't really know why. And he had been working for so many years on that Arcades Project, but he didn't– You know, people were like, “This is a mess!” and “Stop already!” and “We don't know you're talking about!” and not giving him teaching gigs because they were like, this is too weird, you know. And it was really very intense. And then there are other people who I then connected—certainly, Marker and Sebald, and even Helen Levitt in her way—just certain people who were kind of collectors who were trying to understand things in ways that a lot of other people were not.
I watched it now and there's no the passage is certainly a tip of the hat to the Arcades Project—which was the Passagen Werk in German—and there's a one-way street sign at the end of the film that certainly amused me. I probably didn't see it until I was in the editing room and saw “one-way street” and thought, “Oh, you know, there's a little nod to WB.” And the angels, there's a number of angels, and I think it might have even occurred to me, there's like Christmas lights, and then there's like a crappy, sort of cherub thing in a window. And I thought, you know, send that out to Walter Benjamin. And for a while I was like, his name is brought up so often now, and it's such a major part of so many thesis projects and university studies, you know, perhaps ad nauseum. But actually, I think it's great. The more the merrier, because he thought that he was disappearing. And he thought that his work was disappearing. And then when he lost that suitcase at the border, right before his suicide, it seemed like the Arcades Project was disappearing and it didn't. And it's so cool that it keeps seeping up. And it's become this very wonderful thing that reverberates in so many people's films. I mean, Lost Book Found was how I had an actual connection with Chris Marker, because to my amazement, I sold it to French television, an obscure cable channel that showed it at two in the morning, and Marker happened to be watching and recognized a name in the credits and sent that person a note saying “I liked this film Lost Book Found,” and he contacted me and said, “I got a note from Chris Marker saying he saw your film on French television the one time that it played at 2am,” but Marker liked that I had Walter Benjamin at the end, because Walter Benjamin was so important to Marker. And so that of course, it made my year, or whatever.
David Pendleton 1:03:17
Are there are other questions in the audience? Bruce has a question over there.
Audience 3 1:03:24
What is NCILU?
Jem Cohen 1:03:28
Wai, where is that?
Audience 3 1:03:30
When your footage was confiscated in Philadelphia?
Jem Cohen 1:03:34
Oh, no, the New York Civil Liberties Union, NYCLU, is the local wing of the American Civil Liberties Union of the ACLU. So when the federales confiscated, laughably, my Bolex 100-foot daylight spool, I went to the NYCLU, and they tried to get it back, as it turns out, unsuccessfully, but eventually they got them to say that they were sending it back, and they sent back an empty can with the letters “FBI” on it. And to this day, I think of it as the greatest screening of my work that I was not able to attend, was that one roll of 16 millimeter that they processed! They got it to a lab and processed this roll, but I don't think I'll ever get it back.
David Pendleton 1:04:26
Well, one of the things that I love about these films is the way that you're describing a kind of public space that's increasingly being encroached on by capitalism, and then by the security state.
Jem Cohen 1:04:39
Yep. And little did I know I mean, at the time I was making Lost Book Found I was already kind of like, wow, this city is really changing. And it's like, you think it's changed, man, but the acceleration with Mayor Giuliani and Bloomberg was so mind-boggling what they put in place, which is what we're really feeling. Now. I mean, those two mayors got their real estate buddies what they needed, and then those mayors leave the stage, and then the damage really gets done. And, you know, the thing about that film is that it's really about the palimpsest—the thing under the thing and you peel away the thing, and there's this thing—and the obsession with a certain kind of corporatized idea of planning and profit is to eradicate the palimpsest. It's part of what their project is, is to erect surfaces that have no... that there's nothing–
David Pendleton
No depth, or …
Jem Cohen
No depth. There's nothing to peel away. There's no time, there's no history; it's just a clean, homogenous surface that is replicable in city after city and country after country, and it's an aesthetic damage. That is not the one that's most discussed, because there are other, even more terrible social damages that they're putting in place. You know what I mean? But in terms of being an artist and working on the street, and losing all of this texture, it's very painful. It's very strange. And you know, I tried to take that on in the movie Chain, which is a feature-length grappling with basically that in different ways. I think it's a flawed film, because it's very hard to talk about that without being obvious. Once you start to get into it and look at shopping malls and things like that. It's not a subtle phenomenon. It's hard to be subtle about it.
David Pendleton 1:07:21
But I liked the way that you sort of chart what's in danger of being lost. When you said that Lost Book Found was about looking down, as opposed to looking up. And there's a sense of archaeologically going down into the street level of the city and even subterranean.
Jem Cohen 1:07:36
Yeah, and there were things exactly like I– One of the rare times that I actually I didn't– There were a couple of days where I borrowed a DAT recorder and I was walking on the street with a DAT recorder, I didn't have a camera, and I saw a guy lift a manhole, I mean, not a city worker, just a guy, lift a manhole and lower himself down. And I ran over with the recorder. [LAUGHS] And just as he was disappearing, he said “I got an underground city down here,” and I got that. And then he asked if I would move the cover over because whatever he was gonna go do, he didn't want to be caught immediately. So if I could help him by moving the cover over. And I did. It was a very nice little exchange that I got that fragment of dialogue. And it was such a great thing that he said, and then when I was in the edit room and looking at the footage, and I had that shot of riding the escalator by Penn Station and the light on that guy's hat. It was really like, you know, I got this and I found that snatch of recording. It was great. It was very Dante. It was like, [IN A DEEP VOICE] “Come. Come down. There are things underneath.”
David Pendleton 1:09:03
Are there other questions in the audience? Yes, there's one back there.
Audience 4 1:09:13
Jem, one of the things I really enjoy about your work is the way you challenge me to value the transitory. In your cuts, there are things that passing through a town or a city, we might notice, but probably we wouldn't because we're coming in and we're going out or we're going somewhere. And that's what's on our mind. But your shots are shots of things that are going to disappear. And you give them to us long enough so that we have a chance to decide to value that—whether it's through a doorway or whether it's of a shopping window, or somebody through the shopping window, or the activity of a fish. And every single shot of that nature challenges us to make a decision. And I don't know many other filmmakers that do that. I really appreciate that.
Jem Cohen 1:10:19
Thank you. Thank you. It's very kind. I mean, there are other filmmakers. There are plenty of other filmmakers. I mean, I can't believe that Peter Hutton is gone. But when I watch his films, I'm like, wow, he was a master of that, I think, in ways that I can't touch sometimes. And there are plenty of others.
And I don't know, sometimes I'm completely torn about whether getting the shot of the thing before they knock it down really means anything, because it's cold comfort on a certain level. But on the other hand, it's kind of better than nothing. I mean, I'm glad that there are great pictures of Penn Station before the idiots tore it down and put up Madison Square Garden, but that doesn't bring Penn Station back. So it's an area that I'm not really able to kid myself that I'm like, solving any problems. But on another level, I think it's an important activity to make these kinds of records. And sometimes, I love the fact that when the archaeologists are digging, and they find a shopping list, it's at least as exciting for them as finding like the gold coin of the Emperor. Like the scrap of paper or the graffiti is totally on par and sometimes much more telling than the sort of official record. So it seems sort of an indication that we might be on the right track if we continue in that line.
Jeremy Rossen 1:12:14
I was just gonna add to that as well. I think that your work does an amazing job, too, of capturing these decaying and disappearing things but without the nostalgia or sentimentality you'd see typically with works dealing with disappearing things and decaying things.
Jem Cohen
Yeah, that's a tough one. And that's a really important one. I mean, I'm very leery of nostalgia, although I don't think it in itself it's a bad thing. I just think that somehow, when it's realized in the form of the work—whether it's writing or painting or film—sentimentality diminishes power because of its ease of operation. And so it's very tricky to kind of try to avoid that, but still recognize that there's something very beautiful about the elegy. I don't know, I never quite get that sorted.
There’s a question there in the back. Yes, sir.
Audience 5 1:13:41
So there's the changing of the physical world that you guys have been talking about. I’m also wondering about your experience with your footage being taken away and how I think as a culture with security concerns and what not, the freedom with which you can move about and get that footage. Have you experienced a shift in how people respond to seeing you with the camera on the streets and in the public spaces, or in the spaces that may seem public and private? And if so, how have you responded to that?
Jem Cohen 1:14:17
Well, there have been many shifts. I mean, when I read about the work of still photographers, in particular street photographers, and this sort of crossing over from... You know, there was a time when everybody was out on the stoop and then... like this friend, Leon Levenstein—and he was an older guy— he remembered that everybody disappeared from the stoop because they went into watch television, because everybody got color TV, and it changed the work of a street photographer in a radical way. And then for me, there are things that I could once do. I mean, not just in terms of cinema, I don't know. I went up the cable of the Williamsburg Bridge in my reckless youth, and what was I thinking? I don't know, but I got away with it, and now you’d just be killed! Like they wouldn't stop to take you in or ask you what you were doing or what you were filming, there would just be a SWAT team that would just take you out immediately. Maybe that's understandable, but still, it’s a different world. And I get stopped all the time. And if you go to jemcohenfilms.com, you can download a PDF. I don't know what the rules are in Boston. But it can help you a little bit in New York that you can have a nicely summarized statement of what the actuality is of your rights, because in America, the rights of free expression of an artist are privileged in certain ways that they're not, in fact, in other countries, for example. That doesn't stop the cops, though, from saying “You can't do that,” or “What are you doing?” or “You can't have a tripod.” or whatever. So that still happens. But part of what happened with me is that it became a literal thing where a certain kind of activism came into play. And I fought City Hall with some other people, but I do think that part of the issue is that– When I talk to students, I say, “Be polite, and don't be stupid, because you don't want to waste your time getting dragged down to the station, or have them erase your memory card or whatever.” That's the kind of stuff that happens. But you have to stand up for this endeavor, because this way of working is a tradition, it's a very fine tradition to document the world that we live in. And it's not a trivial thing. And, so that's something that I really think needs to be discussed and expressed. And I mean, I could go on for some time, because it's such a strange universe where they tell you, “Oh, you can't film the bridge,” And you're like, “Go to Google image search, and put in ‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ and you'll get 4 trillion images of every aspect of the bridge. So what good could it possibly do for you to tell me, ‘Don't film the bridge?’” And then actually, I can film the bridge, because I have the right to film the damn bridge. You know, if somebody blows up the bridge, I'm going to feel bad. If a photograph helped them do it, I'm going to feel bad. It's not that I don't think there are bad terrorists in the world, or whatever, but I still think we have to be able to do this. This has a lot of relevance in terms of like tonight's group of films. There are other projects that I've done that are about other things. I mean, I've done a portrait of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia where I didn't have that kind of problem. I did Museum Hours, which gets at other things. And I'm interested in, you know, people and dialogue, and occasionally, even in actors and so I don't like to kind of paint myself into a corner of like, this street thing is my obsession, and all I'll ever do.
David Pendleton 1:18:49
Well, it's only the first night.
Jem Cohen 1:18:50
It's only the first night, but it is home base. And that's why it's sensible for you to put it on the first night. And for you and Brittany to have written what you wrote, because it's home base. And, when I can do this kind of film, that kind of film, I'm happy to do different kinds of films, but I will always go back to this wandering because it's a pleasure and it's interesting.
David Pendleton 1:19:31
I mean, I wanted to end the program with Real Birds because I feel like it's the culmination of a lot of the tensions that run through the films, or rather, the non-culmination, or the fact that there's this tension. So now, we end with empty streets and this wind, and these birds. And it also reminds me of two other filmmakers that we haven't mentioned. I mean, on the one hand, Joris Ivens and Rain, where like you just film like one place at one time, sort of like going back to the Coney Island film.
Jem Cohen 1:20:07
Yeah, and I love that movie. I love Rain. I love Ivens. It’s hard to see his work. That's the great thing about places like this, is that you can see some of it now and again. But for me, it's been very hard to see a lot of it. And he's a very wide-ranging filmmaker, but Rain is so much about... I think that he slept with the camera next to him, so that he could grab it when it rained and go out and get it. And it's very much what is so moving about Mekas, is that idea that there was a whole realm of filmmaking that was like people using cameras just as part of their life, like something at the side. And now all that is shifting because everybody has a phone. And so in a way, for better and worse, everybody's accessing that, and in some regards is quite wonderful. And in others, it's doing some weird things that I'm not sure are so great. But it's great that you brought up Joris Ivens, because I find that film very emotionally resonant, because I can sense it's a very early film for someone to be just wanting to be there when it rains and give that back to people later. And then it's not like that's all... He became a very political filmmaker. But even in a very unpolitical film, there's something political in wanting to do that, because it's very humble, and in its way, it's very anti-capitalist. [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 1:22:17
Maybe we should wrap it up for tonight. There's lots more to come tomorrow and in subsequent nights. And actually, Lost Book Found and Walter Benjamin is kind of like the gateway to tomorrow night's program, which is, I think, a very Benjaminian program. So come back for that.
Jem Cohen 1:22:36
Thank you all again. Tomorrow: round two.
[APPLAUSE]
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