It is some decades later now as I write, almost 30 years. Needless
to say my view now is mixed with the experiences of those many years.
Speaking Directly was an expression, as I think it shows clearly,
of a kind of desperation, a shrieking need to address the America of
those days, an America which has of course drastically changed - though
not in my view for the better; rather it has changed in ways I find
lamentable, and which signal the near total defeat of those things which
I and many others had hoped might happen way back when making Speaking
Directly.
When I think of the background of this work
- its miniscule budget ($2000) and it's large ambitions, the hard-scrabble
realities in which it was made (literally while living in a one room
cabin with no running water, no electricity, no money, edited with rewinds
and a little battery-run Moviescope propped up two feet from a smoke
and ash belching wood cookstove - until the battery gave out and I couldn't
afford to replace it and did the last quarter of the film literally
"by hand," pulling a few feet of film at a time in my fingers,
eye-balling, and cutting without being able to see it any other way),
I am struck with those things, and find it a kind of little miracle.
Or maybe a modestly big one. That it managed to work its way out of
a backwoods draw in northern Montana, and into the world of some festivals,
broadcast in the UK, and some archives here and there still seems utterly
amazing to me. For those things I have to thank Swain Wolfe, of Missoula,
Montana who lent me his camera a few times and did many other helpful
things, not least of which was just being a friend. And Elayne Ketchum
with whom I lived those years. And a lot of other people who helped
out in little ways. And then Peter Wollen who saw it in Canada, and
suggested it to the Edinburgh festival, where Jonathan Rosenbaum saw
it and wrote about it in Sight and Sound. Luck I suppose.
As my first long film, I would underline that
Speaking Directly came after a decade of making short films,
and embodies many of the things I had learned en route. I should maybe
note a few things about that. It was quite deliberate to make a long
film, in part because my shorter works were often in a way too dense,
kind of like compressed features begging for more room; but also in
part instigated by a cynical calculation - that a long, serious, and
kind of willful tour-de-force might crack open a door which a handful
of short films would not. Which, as it happened, it did - though ironically
this film was also a kind of detox program for me, a critique of making
films and the obsessive and self-absorptive nature of such work, and
indeed on finishing it I did not make films for four years, deliberately
and willfully.
As a work intended for serious thinking, Speaking
Directly was constructed, quite intentionally, to play off "warm,"
just-folks, (almost home-movie like) sections against much more dense
and coolly analytical sequences, kind of ping-ponging back and forth
from one quality to the next, knowing that most people would find the
"human interest" sections engaging and fun or titillating
(like gossip) while resisting the sections about economics, politics,
and how they engage the "personal." Back then this idea of
the personal-as-the-political was more or less radical turf, especially
in the arts world which for the most part disdained political things
as coarse and dirty. Some years later of course the personal-as-political
became not only fashionable, but PC, though ironically at the same time
as did the concept of not being "judgmental" which in effect
deletes politics, or renders politics into pure rhetoric. Speaking
Directly unfortunately might be considered a precursor of much
of "personal" filmmaking, though most such work these days
declines to engage the personal place in the broader social and political
world and distills down to navel-gazing.
Of course from this perspective this work has
the smudges of time - the aura of history gone by, for better and worse,
sits clearly on its sleeve, though it scarcely looks as silly as many
films of the same days, and I suppose its sincerity and seriousness
let it wear those marks with a bit of dignity. It makes me think of
early photos by Matthew Brady, the bluntness of its honesty washing
aside whatever errors of youthful thought and stylistic quirks of it's
time it may carry, and still able to confront - speaking directly -
the viewer with things which are never "old" or out of fashion.
Along with its mixture of honest and direct
introspection and political analysis - something certainly in its own
time a rarity and perhaps even more so today - Speaking Directly
retains many instances of pure cinematic power which are to my eye and
experience as vital today as they were 30 years ago. There are sequences
and individual shots which even now seem as radical in terms of mixing
style and content as they were then - I think particularly of the sequence
"Her," and its mirroring counterpart "Me," each
of which use filmic visual qualities to striking effect, the former
more discreet than the latter, but both closely related in their methods
and intentions. A handful of other sequences push the parameters of
viewer tolerance willfully and purposefully, combining a radical (remember
the real meaning of this word: to go back to the sources/roots of something)
stance in terms of content with a parallel radical aesthetic: the sequence
"There" with its loop of a handful of shots of the bombing
of Vietnam, or the sequence "You" which gives the viewer a
five minute blank screen (except for a stopwatch in the corner counting
off five minutes) to fill for themselves.
That this film was made in circumstances of
very real poverty (if only statistical - I was very poor but I did not
feel such, rather I felt in many ways quite rich, in spirit, in learning,
and even in the rough and tumble manner of it, in material senses) and
extreme material deprivation makes it all the more striking, that so
much could be done for so little. It remains I think a good object lesson
for young would-be media makers as to how under the meanest of circumstances
something can be done. Today, with DV, one could do something similar
for even less. But, far more importantly, perhaps it serves as an object
lesson in the compelling force of tackling serious social-political-personal
concerns with the gravity which they deserve.
"The worlds worst film?...This film is best viewed with the
sound turned down and without your glasses. If you don't wear glasses,
try it with the sound turned down and wearing your mothers glasses.
(That will also be a lot better for your mother and you do love your
mother don't you?)"
- John O'Connor, review found on-line. Read the full
review on John's personal Webpage.