A Generational Shift in Independent Filmmaking, at the 2017 Maryland Film Festival (THE NEW YORKER)

By Richard Brody (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-generational-shift-in-independent-filmmaking-at-the-2017-maryland-film-festival)


The Maryland Film Festival, in Baltimore, has long been one of the crucial showcases for independent films. This year’s festival, from which I’ve just gotten back, has a new home, the Parkway Theatre (formally, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Film Center), which is a renovation and expansion of a movie theatre that has been in the center of town since 1915 and that had previously been shuttered since the nineteen-seventies. The main hall is a majestic space, with a sweeping balcony, a dramatic ceiling, and enticing terra-cotta details. Two smaller theatres, plus a spectacular glass-walled lounge that invites the city into the room and opens the room up to the city, have been added. But a festival is made not by its theatre but by its movies, and this year’s schedule was a cornucopia unmatched in my previous years of attendance—one that reflects major shifts in the world of independent filmmaking.

Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, “Werewolf,” isn’t a horror movie in substance but in spirit. It’s a drama about the virtual possession of souls and transformation of bodies caused by drug addiction, and McKenzie’s miraculous filming of two young people in its grip is similarly poised at the boundary of bodies and souls. Filming on her home terrain of Cape Breton Island, working with nonprofessional actors whom she met there, filling out her cast with people she encountered on location or saw in passing in the street, McKenzie tells the story of a young couple, Blaise (Andrew Gillis) and Nessa (Bhreagh MacNeil), who live in an abandoned trailer while attempting to eke out a living mowing lawns and keep their addictions at bay by participating in their town’s methadone program.

Filming in a quiet place of rustic isolation, McKenzie narrows her scope of vision to discern and magnify tremors of an involuntary and unconscious power. She looks at Nessa and Blaise with an urgent intimacy that often bypasses facial expressions to isolate aspects of the body—including facial features, hand gestures, postures, or even tools and articles of clothing—that transmit emotions without declaring them. With the avidity and exaltation of her inventive and probing visual compositions, McKenzie breaks down familiar and overt representations to reveal their concealed and embedded essences. By way of a sure sense of behavior—from Blaise’s exhausted collapse on a stony road to his belligerent negotiation with a mechanic, from Nessa’s determined exertions with the mower to her effort to master the gestures and procedures of a new job— McKenzie fuses a documentary-like observational precision with a creative imagination that endows her characters’ struggles with a quietly monumental grandeur.

In “Sylvio,” Kentucker Audley (the director of five features, including “Team Picture” and “Holy Land,” and an actor in dozens of films, including “Sun Don’t Shine” and “Bad Fever”) teams up with Albert Birney to direct a feature based on Birney’s Vine series about a gorilla in human situations. Birney dons a gorilla suit to play the movie’s eponymous hero, a gorilla who lives in Baltimore and does everything that people do—except talk. Sylvio works as a bill collector, making phone calls by way of a voice-generating computer on which he types, but he dreams of a career as a performer—as a puppeteer—and at home he performs with a bald-headed, mustachioed, middle-class-Everyman hand puppet and records his performances on video for his own pleasure. Heading to a small house where a local TV host, Al Reynolds (Audley), does a sparse talk show, he passes himself off as a juggler, leaves the set a shambles, and heads home in disgrace—until Al discovers that the object-smashing ape has become a meme and brings Sylvio back to the show as his regular performing partner, propelling him into celebrity, albeit in a form that he never sought and that he soon finds constraining, even repellent.

The result is a generous, achingly tender comedy that offers some of the loopiest, most wondrously inventive humor this side of Jared Hess. (It also nods toward the decorative anachronism and muted bittersweetness of Wes Anderson.) “Sylvio” is an ultra-low-budget film in which the seams of scant production methods and threadbare accoutrements not only show but are integrated into the action and, for that matter, are dramatized, at several levels, along with their personal and professional pitfalls and implications. Sylvio himself is an invention of genius—the gorilla-head is a perpetual blank, with a nonmoving mouth and sunglasses that Sylvio almost never removes. With its fixed expression, Sylvio’s face becomes a sort of mirror for the moods around him; with the slightest of shrugs or hunches, tilts of the head or frozen pauses, Birney makes that unchanging face seem radiantly communicative. No knock on Andy Serkis, but Birney is the more subtly expressive artist; if there’s to be an award for actors who don’t show any skin at all, Birney should get the first one.

“Sylvio” is, at heart, a tale of independent artistry and its snares. Sylvio, after all, is a zero-budget solo filmmaker whose achievements are seen by nobody but whose talent and imagination are soon found to have unexpected commercial value—but, as Sylvio develops those profitable arts, he comes to feel alienated from his own inspiration, distant from the very desires that motivated his artistic pursuits. It’s the story of the crisis that the generation of independent filmmakers, the ones who have renewed the cinema with a decade-plus of their innovations, now faces.

Filmmakers such as Audley, Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg, Josephine Decker, Andrew Bujalski, Terence Nance, Alex Ross Perry, Josh and Benny Safdie, and Baltimore’s own Matt Porterfield, who have been making films for a decade, are now in their thirties and are taking their place in the business in a variety of ways. Some have a firmer foothold in it, while others are still edging their way in—but the field that they opened still seems mainly to be theirs. Relatively few of the features on view at the Maryland Festival were made by directors in their twenties. A generational shift is occurring, similar to the one that followed the French New Wave, when a linked group of young filmmakers came quickly to the forefront of the art and opened a vast space behind them that another generation moved to develop. Where that older generation had the benefit of a shared sense of mission that was reflected in a shared sense of style, younger filmmakers following in their wake are venturing out alone and starting more tentatively—with short films—before hazarding a feature. (As I mentioned after last year’s Maryland Festival, short films—coinciding with the new market for them in the form of TV-like series—have a newfound prominence among young filmmakers.)

Meanwhile, the subjects and the styles of the first generation are inevitably changing as filmmakers get older and their personal as well as professional circumstances change. With those changes, divergences appear. The seeming family resemblance of the last decade’s worth of innovative independent filmmaking—founded largely on improvisation based on situations close to the filmmakers’ own and using performers they find in their own circles—is somewhat deceptive. What were formerly small differences of style are becoming amplified as filmmakers go deeper into their own obsessions and cultivate a surer and more complex technique to realize them.

 Yet that wider range of styles and tones can itself serve as inspiration to the filmmakers who follow in their wake. It’s a reminder of the age-old lesson of independent filmmaking: methods and results are equally up for grabs. One of the paradoxes of this age of radical, heterogeneous, and personal cinema—inspired by the accidental wonders of YouTube clips and the intimate resonances of home videos, the readily accessible DVD and streaming treasures of classic movies, and the cheap access to video recording and editing—is that, with time, the very definition of the personal and the right-at-hand opens out to infinity.

 The artistic rise of the veterans themselves, who began their careers at a time when independent filmmaking had nearly closed up, was a revolutionary moment that’s still echoing widely throughout the industry. (The success of “Moonlight,” the stardom of Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg’s Netflix prominence are only three signs among many.) The biggest danger faced by today’s filmmakers, whether of that older generation or a younger one, is the spectre of counterrevolution—the craving for an artificial normalcy that comes at the price of conformism and cynicism, of imitation of oneself or of others. The best films that I saw at Maryland suggest that the danger is, for the moment, being held at bay.