Partly influenced by the work of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, Jem Cohen (b. 1962) entered into filmmaking at street level, documenting the discarded objects, invisible people, accidental art and oddly beautiful moments hard to spot if one is not looking for them. He meditatively investigates the uncategorized spaces, grey areas, hidden undersides and accidental messages that may not be often recorded for posterity but may contain the essence of places and people and this modern, hybrid existence where plastic and concrete are as likely to form a visual poem as a bird in a tree. Recording and privately ordering these abandoned, forgotten remnants somehow reverses the commercial food chain. By removing the sign from its original economic purpose, Cohen manages to uncommodify the commodified.
 
Cohen’s work is deeply political and inherently compassionate in its observation and selection, yet his gaze remains unsentimental and nondidactic. His films are born from the particular freedom experienced by working in the margins with a small or nonexistent crew—not allowing commercial interests or industry standards to dictate his work. Instead, he explains, “I just like to roam and shoot with the guiding principle being to look and to listen. Don’t feel you have to pre-decide what you’re making; let the world itself tell you what you’re making.” A Cohen film may not seem too constrained by any narrative, medium or industry concerns, yet it does appear bound by an endless fascination with this mortal plane and its material creations. Whether a portrait of an individual or a “city symphony,” his films impart a sense of rambling, wandering, looking and listening, being present. Naturally, his films take shape in a genre less territory—usually a mix of documentary, narrative, essay, poem—and occasionally manifest in a non traditional theatrical format: a multi channel gallery installation, visuals accompanying a concert, or as newsreels of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, played before features at the IFC Center in New York.

Both celebrated and critiqued, cities are often in Cohen’s watchful crosshairs, for they “are always on, more or less, and they’re also places where notions of democracy or the lack of it are readily tested in very visible, public ways.” He scours the city streets, malls, museums, parking lots, plazas, airports, often shooting in places without permits, literally testing and challenging the idea of public and private as he is making a film. In 2005, his film was confiscated by police when he was simply filming landscapes from a train. Afterwards, he wrote an open letter imploring filmmakers and artists to carry on regardless of “national security concerns.”

I believe that it is the work and responsibility of artists to create such a record, so that we can better understand, and future generations can know, how we lived, what we build, what changes and what disappears.

If his city symphonies seem more like collaborations with his environment, Cohen’s portraits of individuals or groups usually involve the participants in the making of the film, as with Fugazi and the diaristic documentary Instrument. And when working with musicians or actors, it is an intimate, organic, evolving relationship between equals.  Museum Hours was half-scripted and half-improvised, with some dialogue written after spontaneous events had occurred. Drawn to people, places and sounds that do not fit easily into a commercial category or elegant algorithm, Cohen respectfully introduces those who are fiercely independent, radical, passionate and distinctly uncooptable, like Fugazi, Patti Smith or Benjamin of Benjamin Smoke, into his living cinematic anthology—on and off screen.

It’s all work that asks viewers to find their own way, their own themes, their own anchors, work that refuses to separate the thing made, the making, and the world itself.

Cohen’s lyrical dérives are ultimately reclamations of space, land, objects, ideas from the alienated corporate monolith. Without overtly stating it, his films call for a deeper engagement and presence in the world. Leaving a Cohen film, your eyes don’t need to adjust to reality; it is as if you can see reality more clearly: the wonder, the beauty, the strangeness, the sacredness, the ugliness, and all of those difficult-to-name areas in between. – Brittany Gravely

We are honored to welcome Jem Cohen to the HFA for the two opening evenings of this retrospective.