Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

April 8, 2017, the Harvard Film Archive screened works by Jem Cohen. This is the recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Jem Cohen.

David Pendleton  0:18  

Good evening, everyone. I'm David Pendleton, Programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a great pleasure to see all of you here on a very special night here at the HFA. One of the more important things I'll say right off the bat is to remind you to turn off any device that you have on your person that might make noise or shed light.

But tonight is a special night because it's the second night of Jem Cohen, Present and Adrift, a retrospective of film and video work by Mr. Cohen, who has been making such work for about thirty years now—during which time he's accrued a varied and impressive body of work that includes everything from music videos, to fiction features, documentary, essay films, and everything in between. All of it impassioned, very poetic and extremely cinematic. Because of he has so much work, we've got nine programs in this retrospective which will continue into May. Tomorrow we’re screening probably Jim's best known film, Museum Hours, from 2013. But tonight is the second and last time in the program that we have Jem with us sadly.

If yesterday's program, on the opening night, was about city streets, cinema as a passage through space, tonight's program is about passages through time, cinema as time traveling. We're featuring four films made between 1999 and 2008, the earliest of which is also the longest, Amber City. It'll be the second film on the program. The name Walter Benjamin already came up last night, and it's in the title of the first film and it inspired the title of the program, Passages, borrowed from the idea of the Arcades Project. And there is a second program, Passages 2, that will take place on Friday night at 7pm that includes Jem's latest feature documentary, World Without End, fresh from screenings at the Viennale and Sundance. But in this program, we feature Jem’s work as a way of providing us sort of wormholes, unexpected passageways through time, experiencing the city, the book, the library, the museum as places that can make us time travelers and of course, the cinema as well.

And I think that one of the impulses behind this theme in Jem's work and what makes it so poignant, is his refusal to give up anything in the world as lost to history. And in that, he's a follower of Walter Benjamin. I was looking at the Theses on History [sic] by Benjamin and I came across this sentence: “The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth that nothing which has ever happened, is to be given as lost to history.” I think that that gives a mysterious and thick dimension to the time in the films, especially tonight's films. We go back and forth between the sort of ground level, surface level, and the present and various levels or strata of past, I think, in these films. In any case, that's all I'll say. Jem is here to talk more eloquently than I can about his own work. So please welcome to the podium Mr. Jem Cohen.

[APPLAUSE]

Jem Cohen  3:39  

Thank you so much, David. And thanks again to this wonderful theater and archive. Thanks to Haden and all the others who work here for making it a special place. Around the country, there are these kinds of little islands. If you're in this racket for a while you realize that there are a few sort of “safe houses” [LAUGHS] that you can visit over the years with your work and always feel that you're kind of coming home. This is an interesting room. There's odd history. I love that these were projection portals. It's not for the firing squad. It's just that they used to screen from there and throw the films over on that wall. Now it's rotated but it carries with it a long history of care and investigation and, I hope, wonder at the mysterious permutations that cinema can take.

It's an interesting experience to travel backwards through one's work, and this evening is kind of an odd one. In a way, I think what it touches, on at least particularly strongly in a few of the pieces, is hopefully a kind of mystery, like things that I jumped into something and made it without really being able to express, at least in words, what I was doing. And then the best part of making it was feeling that I still couldn't really tell you in words, but the thing hopefully carries with it some sort of... trance option. I think that that's one of the most wonderful things about films. I love what the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch got into talking about. He was often doing certain kinds of studies of peoples in Africa who used trances as a matter of course, in their lives. And sometimes when he was documenting those situations, he had the hope that the filmmaker, particularly if the filmmaker was also the camera person, that they might enter a kind of parallel trance with their subject. So that may be a strange thing to say, but I think it's really important. And I hoped in a couple of these pieces to sort of get at that or into that myself.

So the first one is a collaboration. The first two are actually kind of commissions, and it's one of those things where you sort of start out as a filmmaker and you get a couple of gigs where you're asked to make films, or you're in my case, sometimes invited by a small arts group in a city to come do a portrait, which is the case with Amber City. And, I think, at some particularly naive stage in my working life, I thought, “Yeah, that's fine, I'll do that. But someday I'll just be making films completely on my own steam. And it won't be because it's a gig, or whatever.” I've learned that that isn't ever going to be the case. And that I should actually be quite thankful for the gigs and the odd invitations. So there were two. In the case of the first film, The Passage Clock, it was a kind of crazy, crash course collaborative moment with the artist Patti Smith. And we were kind of thrown together in Paris with the opportunity to make some short works. And I very much wanted to do one in sort of tribute to Walter Benjamin, who she was also a fan of, so I got the okay on that and used a very simple formula, which I won't give away just yet. I was shooting 16 millimeter with the Bolex, and there was no way to send it out. And most of the labs were already gone from Paris. But there were some sort of wonderfully crazy people running their own lab on the outskirts, and I rushed the film to them. And it came out looking like it had been buried for a couple 100 years, which was perfect for the piece. And oh, I should just say that it's a tribute to Walter Benjamin, but that was one of the wonderful rare moments where I was in Paris and also got to meet with Chris Marker and visit his studio. And so as I was making the film right then and there in those weeks, it also very much became a tribute to Marker, with sort of secret references to him in his studio. So I don't mind confessing that.

Amber City, the second piece, the longer one, was an invitation by a liberal arts group in a town in Italy, which I chose not to name. They asked me if I would come and do a portrait of their town and I said, “Yes, as long as you know, you understand that it probably won't make the local tourist board happy and you can't vet it. I'll make what I'm gonna make and that's what it'll be.” And they were very fine with that. And so that became a kind of collaboration with university students that were loaned to me, but also really to the city itself. So without further ado, thank you so much for coming. And I'll be back now and again to yammer on some more. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  10:50  

Please welcome back Jem Cohen! So maybe I'll start with just one or two questions, and/or we can say some things about the last couple of films. I mean, watching the program again, it struck me that one of the main themes actually is disorientation, which I think is a profoundly cinematic experience. Maybe not so much Long for the City, although I like the fact that we ended with that because it brings us back to Patti Smith, brings us back to the New York films from last night and points towards the sort of artist portraits film still to come. But I wondered if you had any thoughts about disorientation? Or your desire to–

Jem Cohen

I know it well!

David Pendleton

[LAUGHS] Is it something that you seek to engender in your spectators? I’m thinking about the fact that you withheld the name of the city, for instance, in Amber City.

Jem Cohen   12:03  

I think it's a point very well taken, actually, because I'm lost all the time. I have a terrible sense of direction. And it's a big, big part of my filmmaking. And I've often commented on that. So in an absolutely kind of dumb, literal sense, you're spot on. But also, I mean, if there's a goal, you know, the goal is to make things that people can kind of get lost in. Which is to say, to not necessarily know where the thing is going or where they are going, but have that not hopefully be a disaster, but maybe a kind of invitation. And so, I guess as much as anything else, what I'm trying to do, is to disorient and then orient kind of quietly, sometimes a little under the surface, so that there are some ways to get one's bearings, but that I'm never really telling you absolutely, concretely, this is what you're supposed to be getting out of this, or this is what you're supposed to be feeling right now. And it's done with various degrees of success and failure, but that's what I'm interested in.

I have to interrupt to say, I usually send these things out when I appear with work. I do a little dedication, and I forgot to do that tonight. So I'm going to send this out– Patti lost one of her cats this last year. One of the cats that's in that film is now gone. I'm forgetting which one it is, somebody in here might know. Anybody know the name of that cat? Somebody was here who I think would know, but anyway, this goes out to Patti's cat... in the heaven of cats.

David Pendleton  14:06  

One of the luxuries, I think, of cinema in the theatrical setting, particularly, is the sense of... normally we move around in the world, and then we get to sit and stop and then the world moves around us. And that idea of being disoriented and being in the hands of a filmmaker is such a delicious one. And I feel like Blessed Are the Dreams of Men is kind of a nice metaphor for that, or meditation on that because very often you achieve that sort of confusion that we have when we're on a train and the train starts to move and it’s like, Am I moving or is the outside moving, or are we both moving?

Jem Cohen  14:43  

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's not in this retrospective, but there's another film that kind of gives away how I made that or what the circumstances were, but it's much better if people just don't know and they're just on something moving towards something. And in regards to making rules and breaking them, I usually don't like to have too much emotional guidance from my soundtrack if I use score at all. But in that case, the piece does have this kind of mounting dread to it. And I don't think dread is one of my primary undertones in looking back at my work, but it does come now and again. [LAUGHS] And there's something about that feeling, and then the guy reading the paper, and that's the way I feel every day now. Like, I wake up and if there's a newspaper, or if I'm in a hotel room, and I turn on the television, I'm just like, “Oh god, what's it going to be?” And the other thing is—I walked out and didn't watch the whole thing—but there's a Trump reference, of course, in Long for the City. There's another one in Counting. And it's funny, because I made that a while ago, and at the time, I remember editing it and thinking, “I don't know, are people even going to know twenty years from now who he is? Like, hopefully, he's just some asshole footnote businessman.” And I remember thinking that when I was putting those together, like, “Is it a bad idea to have his name? Then I was like, the guy makes me so sick, I'm just gonna—even if it's temporary—I want to give him the finger.” And so I put it in the movie. Oh my god... [DAVID LAUGHS] Anyway. Which leads me to another bit of disorientation tirade that I like to do when I'm in a good theater or media art center or museum or wherever they're showing my work. The war is on. I mean, it's been on for a long time. But when they're really really specifically talking about eradicating the NEA or PBS, or whatever it is. Usually, that's a kind of minor subtext that they just get out of the way, and then they give it some money, but maybe not so much this year as the other year or whatever, but now they're really serious. And we have to take it really, really seriously. So I often like to make a little spiel when I'm in a good cinematheque about how you cannot take these places for granted. And, in particular, I open up the guide to what is screening here, and half of it I've never heard of, and it's alternate universes of cinema—some of which I might be appalled by or disoriented by—but it's extraordinary that you can access them. I mean, I've been around for a while, and I've heard about a lot of movies, and been to a lot of film festivals, and some of it is just completely... like I'm like, “Wow, that sounds so interesting. I wish I could stick around to see those movies.” But you cannot take it for granted. And, you know, this place may have some support from a particular unnamed, well, institution, but it probably doesn't have enough. And all of the art museums, all of the cinematheques, particularly the micro cinemas, the grants-awarded ones, they are going to be under the gun now like we've never seen before. So I have to take this moment to urge you to, you know, the simple thing to do is just support the places by going to them and going to see the weird movies by the, you know, obscure Japanese punk filmmakers that you're never probably going to be able to see again. But that's one way. It's just to buy the ticket and go, but there's going to have to be other ways we're going to have to get on the phone, we're going to have to write the letters, we're going to have to hit the streets. We're going to have to. You're going to do whatever you need to do, and it may not be what I need to do. But I have to say that tonight because it's really in the air like it's never been. And that’s what Blessed Are the Dreams of Men, it's just about like something being in the air. And at the time of making it you know—I can't remember what year it was—but it's like some war or other that is on my mind. And then I'm editing and it somehow kind of comes forth in this strange journey. And in terms of that film, it's kind of funny because I knew right away that the name of the film was Blessed Are the Dreams of Men. I don't like to be pretentious. And I was like, well, that's kind of a pretentious title, Mr. Cohen. So I thought “I know. I'll fake that it's from the Bible,” because so much, you know, I mean you can do that! [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  20:03  

Totally, yeah. I totally bought it.

Jem Cohen  20:05  

[LAUGHS] Right. So I was at a residency at the Wexner Center. And there were a couple other people there. And one of them was Sadie Benning, who's, you know, quite an extraordinary artist/filmmaker. And, we were joking, and I said, “I'm going to attribute it to a passage in the Bible. What should it be?” And somehow, I think she said, “Chapter 12.” And because that's bankruptcy, I thought that was another layer of kicks. So I put that on there. But then there is actually a passage that is absolutely appropriate to this film. So if you go to whatever it said, Daniel...

David Pendleton  20:48  

I almost did, but I assumed it was real...

Jem Cohen  20:52  

No, it’s perfect. It's very good. About people– I can't quote it; I should have brought it. But anyway...

David Pendleton

Homework.

Jem Cohen

Homework. Next question. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  21:03  

[LAUGHS] Alright, is there anybody in the audience that’s dying to…? I've got a couple, but I keep a couple in my pocket, but if somebody dying to ask a question...? Okay, Steven, and then you there. Hang on, Steven, you know how it works; we got a mic for you.

Audience 1 21:20

With regard to Amber City, my reaction was not exactly that you were trying to disorient but that you were trying to preserve anonymity, to have the point of view of this is sort of like any city, the sort of common denominators of every place. And in respect to that, there was a conspicuous omission, which was where was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is the signature of the city?

Jem Cohen

Right. Oh no!

Audience 1

You know, where are the busloads of American tourists, and so on? So I gather, you were in a sense, trying to conceal the singularities of the place.

Jem Cohen  22:01  

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's a combination of sort of disorientation, and also commenting on that there's a particular vibe—it's a little bit different here, but a lot of college towns kind of float in between. It's a particular vibe that is not a purely urban vibe and not a rural vibe, and it has to do with transient populations, you know, institutions that are really firmly there, and it's just a particular kind of float, an in-between-ness, so I wanted to get at that. And then you know, because it was Pisa, and there's only one thing that everybody knows about Pisa, which is the damn tower, which is very beautiful, actually, and I hope it does not fall, at least before Donald Trump does. But it's a wonderful tower, but it is the only thing that outsiders know about Pisa. So, it was almost like, too easy, but I just decided, “Okay, I'll just leave it out.” You know, it's there, in one or two shots as a sort of souvenir in the background. And some might guess, but that gave me another reason to enjoy the commonalities that run through different places and different histories, and I guess in my own work.

David Pendleton  23:32  

And it's a way of celebrating some of the singularities as well, without making them be like the capital S singularities. Can you say a little bit, by the way, about the title Amber City? I mean, is that part of this idea of these different layers preserved?

Jem Cohen  23:48  

Well, I think that I saw that it was a kind of common trinket there that has some– I don't know if there's a lot of it found near there. It's quite possible but it's just something that you know, you'd see in the souvenir stands and the gift shops as kind of a local specialty, maybe. But I just loved the idea that you have this... You know, there's often like an insect stuck in the middle of a chunk of amber, and so it has that quality of being a thing that you can hold it up and look through it, but it's also a fossil of a particular kind of a living thing. And maybe that has something to do with film? [LAUGHS] You can hold up and look at it but it’s a bunch of fossils?

David Pendleton  24:52  

Sure. Something from a different time that's been preserved.

Jem Cohen  24:55  

Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know, a lot of these things, I don't really remember afterwards, how they came about or why or how I thought of them, but it had all of those connotations.

David Pendleton  25:12  

There was a question… If you want to wait for a microphone, Alex will bring you one from the side.

Audience 2  25:22  

You are talking about disorientation as far as the viewers’ experience, but I was wondering about—as I was watching Amber City—how you oriented yourself? Had you been to Pisa before? Did you do research? I mean, what was your process of discovery?

Jem Cohen

Right.

Audience 2

And then the second question is, some of the faces, were they actually real faces and formaldehyde, or…?

Jem Cohen  25:53  

Oh, yeah, those are cadavers in the university that were part of the medical study department, and again, it's one of those things that it's not clear whether it's true or not, but that did become eventually illegal. So they've got the ones that they've got, but they can't get new ones. And, it's one of those things that it's like, I was given a very limited time that I could shoot in there, because it's a functioning school, but also, some of that stuff is pretty heavy, and I think they were maybe concerned that it... I don't know. They didn't want me to just run wild. They said, “You can have a half an hour” or whatever. And so I shot and I came into that room, and I looked and realized that they were real. And I thought it's one of those things, that is a shock, but it's also very beautiful to me, and it is a great privilege to be able to film something like that. I don't know, it's just one of those things, where I mean, one of the reasons that you make movies is to see things that you wouldn't otherwise get to see if you weren't making the movie. And, every once in a while it opens a door, and you get to look at something and document it because you're there with a camera and you asked. And in that case, they were very supportive, because I was connected to a professor at the University who had sponsored the film, and they were just opening doors all over the place. And, yeah, I don't know, it's just one of those things where I look at it now, and I think, “Wow, this might really freak somebody out.” But I also feel like that is one of the great things about film, is to see something that may kind of knock you back for a moment, but it's extraordinary. And I felt privileged to be able to film it.

Oh, my modus operandi is to wander around without a pre-set plan or script or knowledge of what this kind of film is going to be. And, often what I do is just hit the ground running. I had been to Pisa before, but I surely shot right away, the first time I was there, because that's what I do. I mean, there are some filmmakers who—and I totally respect it—might go to a place and want to spend months or years before they take out a camera. But I like to just not know, and be shooting and have it. And then afterwards, I often do a lot of research to try to make sense of what I've already got. And to say, “Oh, that's that!” and then read about that and then say,”Oh, that leads me to this, and I could write that and connect that to that.” But I often go in pretty blind. So that's what I did in this case. And also sometimes, if you know too much, then you start to avoid things. Like you say, “Oh, well, I'm not going to shoot that because everybody shoots that” or “I'm not going to go there because all the tourists go there.” Whereas I think it's better for me to just sort of not have those kinds of rules too much. I do have them, because there are whole neighborhoods of cities that aren't that aren't just aren't very interesting to me, really. If I went to those places long enough, I'd find something interesting. Or if I got lucky, I'd find something interesting. But there's a lot of things that I'm attracted to and other things that I’m not and alleys that I definitely want to go up and other alleys that just don't look very promising to me. So, it's not like I'm completely aimless or I have no opinion. I have the weight of who I am, and all the stuff I've read and the things that I care about and the things that I care less about. But I don't want to go in with a sort of template that I'm then going to illustrate with my footage. I want it to be a reverse process. Reverse osmosis, whatever that is.

David Pendleton  30:58  

Are there other questions? Yes. There's a question right here.

Audience 3  31:04  

So then I'll ask the next process question, of going into the text or narrative and words, after you’ve shot the film and researched? How does that come together?

Jem Cohen

Well, I mean, I don't consider myself a writer. And I don't do a lot of writing outside of the films except occasional scratches, but very little, and I guess, there are films like Blessed Are the Dreams of Men that just sort of are what they are, and it's all kind of sensation and geography and a feeling. And then the documentation that is the core, which in that case is a bunch of people sleeping on some sort of vehicle going someplace, and I don't really need any words in it. But then there are other things where I want to bounce some ideas around or I've dug up some history that I think is fascinating and extraordinary, and I want to kick it out there a little bit. And so, I make a bunch of notes, and then I just start to write. I was talking last night that people ask me questions, and I sort of wish I could pretend that it's aesthetically or philosophically, my full intention. But a lot of times, things are prescribed by necessity or a lack of other means. But, it's like the one thing that we've all that we've got is like a hand and a pen, pretty much, in some form or other. And that's the core of a certain kind of filmmaking. That isn't the only kind of filmmaking that I want to do, but it is always available.

At some point in the late 1940s, a French writer coined the term caméra stylo—however that's properly pronounced—and he was identifying what he called a “tendency” in French cinema, which was sort of the precursor to the French New Wave. He was sort of noticing this kind of rough-hewn individual point of view filmmaking, which I actually recognize very much in earlier work, such as the work of Jean Vigo, which is exactly that point of view, his point of view. It's documentary, but it's not like some kind of set of established facts or teachings or knowledge. It's somebody trying to figure something out in the way that they can. And so this is a great term in cinema that I've enjoyed thinking about, because I do think it goes way, way back and I think it's very much evident now if I think of the work of, I don't know, J.P. Sniadecki, who I really like, or I think of James Benning or Peter Hutton or Agnès Varda, there's often that sense... You know, The Gleaners and I is an epitome of that kind of work. Like, you know, she made a lot of movies and a lot of big movies, but then she's just so psyched that she has a little video camera, and she can just use it whenever she wants and wave it around however she wants. And it's just her the easiest way for her to transcribe her thoughts and her view, with the simplest means, with the least getting in the way of that. And I often think, you know, I wish that I could make more feature films on a larger scale involving more people, because there are reasons to do that, there are things that you cannot do in this other mode. But I'm so glad that the other mode exists, because it's always available.

David Pendleton

And also, your use of text varies too. I mean, the Patti Smith films are fairly dense with text, but then–

Jem Cohen 

Well, there, I’m also very dependent on her text, because Patti, on a good day—and often on a bad day—can really say it well, and those are extraordinary to me, because it wasn't like I interviewed her for hours and hours and picked out carefully the good sentences. Sometimes just sort of in conversation, it's really quite wonderful and astonishing how beautifully she can get at something. And she wasn't using her own words with The Passage Clock, but in Long for the City, every once in a while you get a dumb, simple idea, and it works just fine. And all I did is we went out for a walk, we came back, and then I just took out the recorder without warning her before the walk. And I just said, “What did you see?” And so she described things that I had not necessarily filmed. And so then I went back into my archive when I started to edit. And I thought, “Well I've got that steeple in the puddle that I shot back in ‘93 that, if I can find that shot, that'll be good with her talking about walking down the street.” You know, anyway, it just, it gave a nice way to do that Emily Dickinson thing of telling it slant, where you have something and you don't want to hit it right on the head. So I don't need the exact shot of what she's describing. I just need something that reverberates with it. But I'm very indebted to what she said.

David Pendleton  38:14  

And Amber City has some nice examples of spacing of text. There are pockets of text and there pockets where there aren’t.

Jem Cohen  38:20  

Yeah. And, I don't know. Sometimes I hear it, and I'm like, “Well, you know, that's a bit much.” And other times I'm like, “Eh, that’s alright…” [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  38:35  

Are there other questions in the audience? Yes.

Audience 4  38:42  

Since this is your last night here, I just wondered if there's anything you might want to say in advance for Museum Hours?

Jem Cohen

Oh, well, I think that, for me, Museum Hours was the culmination of a lot of other things. So, I look at a lot of the other work and I see things kind of rolling in that direction. And I was able to realize some ideas that had been steeping for a long while and to do it with the aid of this beautiful environment and these, I think, very interesting people. One of them is a complete non-actor, Bobby Summer. The other is Mary Margaret O'Hara, who is an absolutely extraordinary musician who has done some acting but is mostly known for her music.

But I don't need to say much to introduce most of the films. I mean, I'm very glad that they exist, but I never wanted to be one of those filmmakers where you kind of have to know something going in or you're really going to be entirely at sea. And so even when the work is, you know, sort of in the experimental direction, I just like to think that there's something in it that you just don't have to know anything, and you don't have to know anything about experimental film or theory or whatever, to just take the ride. There are plenty of things that I could say, and I have, I always have plenty to say, for better or worse, after a screening, but I don't necessarily have much to say before, because it's kind of great when people just go and stumble in and make their way with it.

But there's no question that it has a lot of culmination for me, in terms of my upbringing, and things that I read and things that I've thought about. And it was a way, for me, of interrogating certain feelings, like particularly this feeling that I had standing in front of Brueghel paintings and wondering why it was that I felt a kind of déjà vu standing in front of paintings painted in the 16th century, and something about what was going on in them sparked, rather directly or indirectly, with my work as a documentary filmmaker and someone who shoots on the street all the time. It was that feeling and that question that led to the movie. But you don't need to know that. I'm trying to think is there any other movies that I can set up for you or warn you about...

David Pendleton

World Without End?

Jem Cohen

Yeah, World Without End is another... I mean, you know, I try to get now sometimes these kind of bigger projects off the ground, and it is not getting any easier. And so you know, in between I’ll go… You know, World Without End was a gig like Amber City was a gig. They're not necessarily gigs that I'm actually going to make any money on, but they're gigs that I can break even on, which is something. [LAUGHS] So if somebody invites me to make a little film, and I know that I can at least break even, try to make a little something, and I try to maintain control. And I try to maintain copyright. But World Without End, for me, is not on par with Museum Hours. So if you're going to pick one to go to, I would go to Museum Hours.

It's a portrait of a little seaside town in the UK that I would not have chosen to make a film about but I wouldn't have chosen Pisa in particular either. And I'm glad I had to be there for a few weeks and make the film because now I have a real—not just a fondness for the place, but a sense of what is always the pay off which is that you might think things aren't going to be that interesting, but they end up being pretty interesting. And if that's the luck of the draw, but it's also it's the great gift of being able to to make work is to keep being reminded of that. Interesting, you know, land in a place, walk around, like, “I don't know, this is kind of like New Jersey.” And then you know, I'm like, wow, they carted off most of the interesting architecture and there's the crappy strip mall, like every other crappy strip mall, but then I go in and, you know, I wear a damn hat, so if I see a hat store, I'm going to go into that hat store, try to find one in case I lose this one. And then I end up talking to the head guy and I'm like, “Oh my god! This guy is like the keeper of all knowledge of the hat. And here he is in Southend-on-sea, and I happen to have a machine that can record him. And he's gonna let me do it.” And you may or may not like the movie, but it's worth hearing what that guy has to say about... headgear? Very unpoetic term for all of the things that it can be.

David Pendleton  45:32  

I’d put in a plug for Counting, too...

Jem Cohen 45:34  

Counting is important to me, because there's also something of culmination about it. See, I'm getting just old enough that I start to make movies and feel like they're culminations. But some of them just aren't going to go very far in this world...

David Pendleton  45:57  

In the marketplace.

Jem Cohen   45:58  

The marketplace, which is this world, unfortunately. But it's not the only thing that this world is. Some would like to make this world that thing, Mr. Trump. And so I make Museum Hours, which it's funny, because when I look back on it, it's a ridiculously uncommercial premise that I couldn't, at the time, conceive of any way to raise a dime for it in the United States. “Oh, yeah, I want to make a movie with no known actors that takes place largely in a very old school museum. And really one of the central characters is a 16th century dead painter. And it's not a romance. And I'm really not interested that much in any kind of normal notion of a proper narrative film. So, please, can you help me find my movie?” Good luck. And then the movie did really well. I mean, you know, I applied for a few grants, didn't get them. And ended up getting some funding from Vienna where I shot it, but not the main funding that we wanted. I had a real producer who had never produced a movie before, but was really in it. And then I had a producer that I had to use to apply for funds. And she was like, “Well, you didn't get the main funds, so you got to pull the plug.” And I was teaching; the only time I could shoot it was in between semesters. And I was like, “If I pull the plug, it's gonna take me years to get back on track.” So we were like, “We're gonna make the damn thing.” So, you know, we cut a couple things out, and we made it. And then the weird thing was, I thought, “Well, this is kind of the movie that you wanted to make,” which is a nice feeling. And then I thought, “But you're going to hear that usual garbage about, ‘Well, this is sort of a European-type art film, and you better get it over there. But they don't, they don't really like those movies that much anymore either, because they're mostly like buying into the American model,” you know, or whatever. Anyway, it didn't do that well in Europe, but it did really well in the U.S—I mean, by independent film standards. It's not like it made me money in particular, but it did do well, and it went to a lot of cities, and it surprised a lot of people, myself included. And I thought, “They don't know.” Everybody will tell you, “People don't aren't gonna like this,” or “This is too quiet.” It's a quiet movie, and there's a lot of like, hard looking at something for a long time. And the things that people most expect it's going to be, it's not. But it did fine, and it surprised a lot of people and it was a great lesson for me. Counting kind of sunk like a stone. It didn't cost me a lot of money to make it. And it was kind of a movie that I wanted to make, and I feel good about that. But, I didn't expect it to go all that far because we're not in a world where certain kinds of things even have a shot. But you know, it'll play here, and it'll pop up now and again in a few other, as I said, sort of oases that are, like, comparable in some ways to this one. Yeah, anyway, that was a,.. Goddamn, I can ramble on.

David Pendleton  50:18  

[LAUGHS] Okay. There’s a question here.

Audience 5  50:22  

I feel really privileged to have seen Amber City—I think this is the third time—and I see different things each time. And this time I was struck by—I guess I could turn this into a question—sometimes you speed up the footage, so you'll have like long, long, long, I imagine hours of footage that you sync down, speed up, however you're supposed to put it. And then you have the slow, wonderful portraits of the college students you're working with. Is there any planning involved in that? Or is that just more of an aesthetic choice of when you saw the kids having a party on the roof with the shadows on the—I don’t know if that was a water tower—the shadows, the beginning of–

Jem Cohen

[JOKING] That’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa! Didn’t you recognize it? [LAUGHS]

Audience 5  51:09  

[LAUGHS] Right. But just in terms of time, if sometimes you’re–

Jem Cohen  51:11  

Right. No, I have a confession, and then a comment on another movie that's in the series here. Those sped-up things are shot with an animation motor. They're not time lapse, but there are something kind of related to time lapse. It's holding long exposures on a single frame, so that there's enough light to make the exposure, so it's a kind of magic, but I only really care about it now because sometimes there's just not enough light, and that way, there is enough light. I'm a little bit leery about the sped-up aspect of it. There is a movie where it's very appropriate, which is Benjamin Smoke, because he's a speed freak and it really makes sense to have the time all messed up in the form of the movie, because that's what happens to people who do that bad drug. So it's really appropriate in that movie, because his time is all over the place, [LAUGHS] and that's reflected in those shots. But I see that primarily as a tool. Because I often want to shoot in the dark. And a lot of those situations, like if you saw what that tower actually looked like there, it just wasn't a lot of light on it. But I can kind of suck it out of the air and into the emulsion by sitting on each frame from one to twenty seconds. So, true confessions: I think it's all right. I mean, that's the kind of thing that I worry about when I watch it. I'm like, “I don't know, it's a little gimmicky.” And I wouldn't necessarily choose to do it, but then it's beautiful, and that's okay. You know, sometimes that's okay. [LAUGHS]

Audience 5  53:10  

If I’m allowed to ask a follow up question... So this is funny, I don't remember how Museum Hours ended narratively, which is really upsetting. “How does it end?!”

Jem Cohen

You better go back!

Audience 5

However, what really stands out, it is so similar to Amber City in terms of it's a portrait of a city, and it feels like it's very much a continuation of that kind of filmmaking.

Jem Cohen  53:33  

Yeah. And it also that's where I was first being kind of concrete about the relationship with paintings because I've always had that feeling like, we don't just like museums because we have to know the art history—although it's quite wonderful actually, to know it—we like them, because we see people that we know, from 3000 years ago or whatever. It's just simple. Doesn't that happen to you? You know, or we see something sexy, and it's like, yeah, it's sexy, because that hasn't changed.

So because of the nice people who brought me in to make that film, I had access in a way that I don't on my own, which is to walk into the museum with a tripod and get right up on things. So because I had that access, I wanted to poke at it a little bit. And then there were just things that I had thought that a lot of other artists have thought. Like, you're looking at a landscape, and it's a big difference whether you have a human somewhere in there or not. One of my favorite films of the past ten years is Frammartino’s Le quattro volte. Have you seen that? Don't watch it small. You can't, because there are whole scenes that are dependent on a tiny little figure way the hell in the background. So you must have shown that at some point?

David Pendleton  55:20  

I hope that... We've certainly discussed it. I don't know if the opportunity ever came up.

Jem Cohen  55:25  

Uh oh. The Brattle did? Well, it'll come here someday.

David Pendleton  55:29  

It's come to Harvard Square.

Jem Cohen  55:30  

Alright. But anyway, I like that movie a great deal.

David Pendleton  55:32  

It'll come here someday.

Jem Cohen  55:34  

It's a much better portrait of an Italian city than mine. But anyway, how did I get off on that? Oh, yeah, the tiny person. So that's again, a plug. Big, sometimes necessary. Phone. You know, watching the movie while you're checking email. Really? Come on. We can do better than that.

David Pendleton  56:05  

Well, that might be a good note to end on. I want to thank all of you for sticking around and for your questions and for coming tonight.

Jem Cohen  56:13  

And thanks again to John in the back for helping me out with the tech stuff and letting me–

David Pendleton

Yes, thanks, John!

Jem Cohen

Thank you all so much for coming. Please do enjoy other nights and many other nights that are not of my own making. Thanks again to David, and to Haden, for bringing me in.

©Harvard Film Archive

Cohen finds endless mystery in the real world: on city streets, throughout museums, inside busses on foggy, anonymous highways. Transformed by his camera, some music and some text, these real places become transformed into passages towards a more mystic side of life.