For 30 years, San Francisco–based Rob Nilsson has been serving as the conscience and agent provocateur of low–budget American independent filmmaking. Beginning with the award–winning Northern Lights, Signal 7, and Heat and Sunlight in the 1970s and 1980s, he has devoted his cinematic career to presenting the sorts of sociological realities, interpersonal interactions, and emotional transactions that have been screened out of big–budget, mainstream American film.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present the 9 @ Night series, Nilsson's most ambitious and controversial project to date, for the very first time in its entirety. Nilsson has created a master–narrative more than fourteen hours in length, made up of nine interlocking yet independent fictional films focusing on the lives of the drifters, scam–artists, hustlers, sex–trade workers, and others who exist on the tattered fringes of American society and populate San Francisco’s poorest and most deprived neighborhood, the Tenderloin District. (Though the nine cinematic narratives mesh with each other, and contain numerous enriching cross–references, it is worth emphasizing that each film stands completely on its own, so that it is not necessary for a viewer to see the entire sequence to appreciate any one of them.) What makes the project even more daring is that Nilsson developed the stories in collaboration with actual inhabitants of the Tenderloin District, and cast the same individuals in many of the roles, which means that the actors on screen are often playing parts scarily close to the ones they play in real life, as they struggle and compete for survival at the muddy bottom of the food chain.

In line with much of Nilsson’s other work, the 9 @ Night films are not organized around action–centered, Hollywood forms of presentation, but are character studies that chiefly focus on the troubled and troubling emotional lives of men – though all of the films include important female roles, and one of them, Need, devotes itself explicitly to exploring the emotional lives of a group of women. The narratives jump freely back and forth through the space and time of the main characters’ lives as if to demonstrate that what we are is more important than what we do.

One of the questions Nilsson explores is how individuals hold themselves together when every external form of support is taken away. What is left of life when the material rewards of capitalism, the hierarchical relationships of bureaucracy, and all dreams of personal advancement or improvement are withdrawn? “Family and friends” is the usual answer to that question, but the characters in these films don’t even have the safety net of brothers, sisters, children, parents, or close friends to break their fall. Their stints in prison or on the road have estranged them from their own pasts.

The pastoral myth would have it that to be liberated so radically is to become free; but Nilsson’s vision is darker than that. He demonstrates that the rivalries, depredations, and insensitivities of our interactions with others are not imposed on us by persons or systems external to ourselves, but are something we ourselves create – and that these outsiders re–create even as outcasts. His characters’ vulnerabilities and fears reconstitute and repeat the brutalities and cruelties of mainstream society. Pan demonstrates that even the surrogate families the homeless create among themselves repeat the dysfunctionality of the relationships in many biological families. The films are anthologies of inadvertent miscommunication, misunderstanding, and failure to connect with others even when connection is the thing most needed and desired.

Notwithstanding the nitty–gritty “realism” of the street–world Nilsson has chosen as the milieu for his series, it is critical to recognize that his real subject is not externals but internals – not characters’ physical, but their emotional states of loss and deprivation. As Pan (Kieron McCartney)puts it, as bad as “the outside pain” can be for someone living on the streets, “the inside pain … the suffering inside the body” is worse – and far more important. To bring that inner reality into view and communicate the powerful emotional and psychological forces roiling under the shabby surfaces of his characters’ lives, Nilsson employs a striking series of Bressonian poetic images, sounds, and juxtapositions. In Noise, Ben Malafide, played by Robert Viharo, (his last name is clearly metaphoric) has his story warped and transformed almost beyond recognition at moments by computerized forms of image–processing that figure cultural forces that threaten understandings of life (or solutions to his problems) couched in merely personal terms. In Attitude, the Tamburlaine character Spoddy (Michael Disend) is linked to the openness and expansiveness of the sky, birds, and the sea at the beginning of his film, and his subsequent fall is rendered as a descent into turbid, dark realms of mud, bushes, and enclosed spaces. In Scheme C6 (to my mind, the masterwork of the series), Bid’s (Cory Duval) urban–commando image of himself is rendered in a series of visually assaultive, convention–violating forward and upward movements and harshly grating, mechanical sounds, and his state of emotional unavailability is visually associated with locks, chains, doors, interiors, and dead–ends. In Stroke and Pan, the brutalizing on–rush of trains and traffic, and in several of the other films, the scale of the cityscapes in the background or looming over the characters seem to flatten them into insignificance under the pressure of American corporate power and wealth.

The meta–narrative of the entire 9 @ Night series might be said to be the downward spiral of pain and loss that characters who have dropped beneath the bottom edge of the American cultural support system inflict on themselves – even more than on others. The path the characters in these films travel is almost always downward to darkness – or, in the case of Phil (Teddy Weiler) and Johnny (Edwin Johnson) in the final moments of Stroke, to something worse than darkness – to a complete erasure of their identities, as if they had never been born or lived at all. But the wonder of Nilsson’s vision of life is that he shows us that even on the road to hell, moments of soul–saving grace can be offered to us. A blonde “angel” makes a brief appearance near the end of Noise. Viewers are themselves surprised by joy and gifted with grace when the reason for the screams coming from a nearby car are suddenly revealed in Singing. In that same film, a shared song in a bar, or, in Pan, a goofy musical pantomime can momentarily close the gap of fear and suspicion that otherwise separates people. In Stroke (a punning title), the touch of a woman’s hand, the kindness of a friend, or the sound of a voice can give even the hopeless fleeting hope. Several of the films show how something as small as a handclasp or a look can offer the possibility of transforming all of life. Nilsson knows that miracles are constantly happening all around us, and that ministering spirits can offer salvation even as we travel down the path to perdition; but he also mourns that so few are able to receive the proffered gift. – Ray Carney