Article and interview by Mike Plante, circa 1999.
Working off an archive of his own film footage, Jem Cohen’s projects have no actors yet interesting characters. They are not documentaries but they generally contain no staged scenes. They have no show-off shots yet use time-lapse, slo-mo and camera movement to create a rich atmosphere.
A friend introduced me to Jem Cohen’s work about three years ago. As a fan of the big city, I loved Cohen’s THIS IS A HISTORY OF NEW YORK (1987), a street-shot portrait of the metropolis done in world-altering super-8 film.
BURIED IN LIGHT (1994) is a document of Cohen’s travels through Central and Eastern Europe. His super-8 captured what it looked like before corporate change would alter it forever.
LOST BOOK FOUND (1996) is shot on NYC streets in super-8 and 16mm, BOOK is a spooky mix of documentary and narrative, telling the story of a push cart vendor’s encounter with a book full of mysterious listings of places, objects, incidents — the key to the hidden city.
At the New York Video Festival I caught Cohen’s newest, AMBER CITY (1999). A portrait of an Italian city, the project continues the filmmaker’s form of city-portrait storytelling yet shows a definite progression of style.
I got to talk to Cohen a couple of times, appropriately enough all around NYC. We met in Brooklyn and caught the F train to Manhattan.
Like most of us, Jem Cohen grew up watching films.
“I didn’t really get insane about it until college,” he says. “My senior year I was watching 10-14 films a week. Maybe that’s why I hardly go to see them anymore.”
A studio art major, he started with painting, moved to photography, made slide shows to music, and got further into film. He took film theory classes, booked screenings and worked as house manager for the film series. But he had to leave this environment in order to do actual film production.
When Cohen was young he knew a couple who had a film company that produced “industrial” projects. Their usual output was training films for pregnant women and firefighters. They taught him aspects of filmmaking including some animation. Presumably this influenced Cohen’s later use of time-lapse photography.
Later, Cohen worked for the company as a shipping clerk in exchange for off-hours use of the film equipment. He made his first film in 16mm rather than super-8.
“I had done some super-8 as a kid but basically I had written it off,” Cohen says.
He basically taught himself filmmaking as he made his first project, A ROAD IN FLORIDA (1983).
“It was a real crude thing but it was kind of unusual. …A weird mix of documentary and narrative already,” says Cohen, hinting at his style to come.
It played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a number of festivals and even won an award.
After graduating college in 1984, Cohen went straight to NYC, intent on doing his own projects. However, he also needed work. He knew someone working on Martin Scorsese’s film AFTER HOURS and got a security job watching the film gear. Being obsessed with film (and therefore Scorsese), Cohen hung out a lot when not working and got to know the other departments on the set.
“It was a paying job as a guard,” Cohen says. “Then a non-paying spot opened up for a prop boy. I took that and quit the paying job.
“For better or worse, I did real well in the prop department and just started getting jobs, one after the other,” Cohen says. “It was good because I was able to make a living and was suddenly kind of fully in the film industry.”
As Cohen worked prop jobs he and his brother were also attempting to get another 16mm film off the ground. The project was stumped when Cohen had problems finding a producer and dealing with the high costs of renting equipment and crew. In a short period of time, Cohen had experienced both spectrums of the industry. He saw first-hand, in the Scorsese production, the ultimate side of filmmaking, and then encountered the harsh realities when he tried to garner equipment and find people interested enough to fund a project. It proved overwhelming. The 16mm project was never made.
Soon after that Cohen decided to play with a super-8 camera for the first time as an adult.
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| This is a History of New York (1987) |
“Somebody suggested that I pick it up and I was like, yeah right,” Cohen admits. “It just seemed like a sure way to admit that you weren’t a real filmmaker. I was kind of embarrassed about it. That didn’t last for very long. I bought the camera, shot a few rolls of film and was really blown away. For one thing, it looked a lot better than the 16 in a lot of respects. It looked more interesting, more visceral. I liked everything about it. Super 8 has a tendency to capture the way things feel, which is often more important than capturing exactly how things look.
“Basically, I went from being an obsessive film viewer to being a failed filmmaker and then suddenly instead of being a failed filmmaker I was making films all the time. I was just showing them on the wall of a living room, but there they were. It was completely concrete.”
Cohen has used a variety of super-8 cameras. Just as good footage has come from low-end, crude ones as from good pro models.
“With 16mm it was, ‘We’ll rent the gear on Friday and we’ll have to return it on Monday and we’ll get just a few shots,’ with the super-8 it was just keep it loaded all the time. I was kind of obsessed with some bands and music stuff back then and that wasn’t very long before I started shooting the Butthole Surfers, which led to that first project, WITNESS, in 1986.”
The 12-minute film, drawn from three or four live shows and a visit to the Surfer house in Texas, included footage shot by his brother, Adam. The band was different in those days, giving much more primitive performances. Disturbing images in the film include things on fire and singer Gibby Haynes having sex with someone on stage. Shot in heavy contrast black-and-white, tinted and slowed, Cohen made film grain become a character in the film.
The notorious piece got noticed, but Cohen wasn’t interested in being bunched in with New York’s then current Lower-East Side super-8 “transgressive” film scene - including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch and others, who made provocative work but with a different vibe than Cohen.
Cohen says the Surfers piece was shocking because the performances documented were so extreme. But he thought of it more as an “ethnographic film that tried to capture an experience so that it really felt you were there. I really wasn’t interested in trying to shock people or be part of the whole rock and roll underworld, or to promote the band. At the same time I was shooting on the street a lot, in New York, gathering the footage that led to THIS IS A HISTORY OF NEW YORK (The Golden Dark Age of Reason).”
HISTORY is a 23-minute piece illustrating the so-called Great Ages of Man entirely with documentary street footage. The title of one section, “The Hunters and Gatherers”, completely describes Cohen and his methods: an image hunter-and-gatherer.
“Once I became hooked on this concept of carrying a little camera all the time,” Cohen explains, “it led me away from the structures of cinema as defined by the industry. It led me toward a more documentary tradition that had more to do with street photography than it did with movies.”
Cohen got into shooting a lot while simply walking around NYC. The real world provided amazing images of kids, birds, street preachers, cops, homeless people and, of course, intense buildings. There are great sequences that look like Cohen was standing on a corner filming, then someone or something interesting went by and he just plain followed it.
Rather than a bunch of home movies, what Cohen chooses to film and the way he frames the images is interesting. Then, by specifically looking for related images and editing and creating unique soundtracks, he gives the photography a new context far removed from a simple travelogue.
“With HISTORY, this ridiculous framework allowed me to categorize the footage and go out and look for certain things rather than shooting completely loose,” Cohen says. “I had a lot of footage and I started thinking of ways to structure it and apply it. Like most of the projects, it’s kind of a 50/50 thing where half of it is a bunch of footage that exists and then as I develop a project I would start to seek out other things that I needed to shoot.”
Cohen’s style makes the film project alive. Nothing against strict scripting and production, but his films actually live, created as they are being shot.
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| Lost Book Found (1996) |
Occasional prop jobs paid the bills, but became frustrating for Cohen. Besides having to stop his own projects completely for two or three months at a time, it’s hard to be around the “just doing a job” attitude on the set and see the various hierarchies and idiocies that make mainstream film run.
“The money being thrown around and being wasted was mind boggling,” Cohen says. “Once you get over that romance of all those weird words like what’s a grip, what’s a gaffer, how do they make that fake smoke or rain or all that…. Once you’re behind the curtain for a long time and all that magic is gone, what’s left is usually not all that much. What I would often see is this incredible mechanism, an unbelievable amount of man-hours, of human wear and tear, usually directed at something that wasn’t of any real worth to start with.”
These observations are from Cohen’s own work experiences. He can still love ‘big’ films, Bogart or Bresson, the Marx Brothers or Tarkovsky.
“There are incredible camera moves that I respect and think are worthwhile,” he says. “I don’t have any real problem with watching that. One of my favorite films is Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV. I don’t have problems with the thousands of extras or whatever mechanisms he had to employ to make his films. Every once in a while someone really needs that level of applied industry, but most of the time the movies would be much better if they were stripped way down and they didn’t even have access to all these toys and gimmicks and clever vices.”
Inspired by filmmaker Jean Vigo, artist Robert Smithson and street photographer Leon Levinstein, Cohen finished HISTORY OF NEW YORK. It got around to festivals, PBS and even screenings on European television. It has a feeling of New York that is disappearing today.
“(HISTORY) was really a way of me getting to grips with New York,” Cohen says. “It was a way of looking at the city and of experiencing the city and of trying to encompass the extreme levels that co-existed here, the beauty and brutality.”
HISTORY also laid down the groundwork for Cohen’s mode of working for the next 10 years.
“I kept shooting on super-8, transferring to video at this place Brodsky and Treadway,” Cohen says. “These amazing, very personalized, in-depth, respectful transfers from people who really were into small-gauge cinema.”
He then edits and distributes on video.
Another form of short film was very popular at the time: music videos. Cohen was a R.E.M. fan and sent them a copy of HISTORY. The band liked it and Cohen eventually made five videos with them. The first, for “Talk About the Passion”, used some images from HISTORY, no footage of the band and a direct political statement at the end: the text “In 1987, the cost of one destroyer class warship was 910 million dollars,” superimposed over a man sleeping on the abandoned elevated train tracks overlooking the U.S.S. Intrepid battleship.
Being an unconventional, non-star-worship video, Cohen thought this would shake things up a little at MTV.
“I was a little naïve thinking it would be subversive,” he remembers. “I lived in Brooklyn where we were spared MTV, so I went all the way to Tower Records when I knew it was going to premiere. I walked in, my heart beating a little bit, and it appears on 15 video monitors. No one even looks up and they’re playing a Michael Jackson song really loud [in the store] and everybody’s just shopping! (says with a smile) ‘Okay, lesson one: this is not necessarily the most important venue for your work.’”
Cohen has made a dozen or so music videos, but all were in some way outside the system rather than the popular ego-fest advertisements. He usually stays away from them. “Music video as we know it became such a formulaic rut. Why would I want to take the two things that I love, music and film, and corrupt them both at the same time so efficiently?”
JUST HOLD STILL (1989) showcases a great Cohen idea.
“I started doing these shorts and collaborations,” Cohen says, “and decided to thread them together in a way that was really like a record album, a visual LP.”
STILL did not turn out to be a huge seller on VHS. For some reason the public at large won’t even try to watch short films although they spend most of their time watching music videos and sitcoms. The visual LP fits perfectly into this realm: short subjects, even 30-second ideas, with beautiful photography and a similar style running through the entire piece.
“BLACK HOLE RADIO (1992) was an installation that I did in Holland,” Cohen says. “It was based on these recordings I was making of this confession line in New York. Weird phone thing where you could confess for free at this number, but if you wanted to listen to confessions you had to pay by the minute. So I would call in and listen to them and record the ones that sounded real to me. Eventually I did this short piece using those recordings. I worked with Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and Fugazi). We did a little mix, pieced it together.”
Cohen says the installation itself “was this tiny, completely dark room. It was only for one person at a time. You had to go in and shut the door and there was a phone on a desk. When you shut the door the phone would ring and when you picked up the phone, if you picked up the phone, it would trigger the video. You heard the confession voices through the phone. It was fun.”
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| Lost Book Found |
Although it wasn’t finished until 1996, LOST BOOK FOUND was being shot and developed years before.
“I started to shoot probably in ’89, ’90,” Cohen says. “And then it wasn’t until I started trying to fund-raise and apply for grants and it came together very slowly over the next six years.”
As with HISTORY OF NY, Cohen carried a camera obsessively and logged endless amounts of street footage.
“All the time I was shooting I was also picking up debris on the street and filing it away,” Cohen says. “I have this really nice archive of scraps of letters, broadsides, leaflets, flyers, all this stuff. Notebooks! Really weird books.
“If HISTORY OF NY was mostly looking around in awe of New York, craning my neck and looking up at these big, crazy buildings, then LOST BOOK FOUND was looking straight down at my feet and starting to shoot real peripheral things.”
After starting to get footage together, Cohen went looking for grants to fund the production. After one had run out, he got tons of rejections between 1992 and 1995. Finally, Alive Television out of Minneapolis agreed to give Cohen money to finish BOOK. He went to Ohio where he could use an Avid editing system, taking his mounds of footage along.
But then Alive dropped out and stopped answering phone calls.
“That sucked,” Cohen vividly remembers, “and was incredibly demoralizing. I was stuck in Ohio with (crates and crates of) footage.”
But he also thinks it was positive because “it really liberated me from any concern about who I was making it for.”
It brought the project back down to Earth. Cohen then added the most interesting pieces: a main character and autobiographical elements.
“The summer before my senior year I came to New York and got a job as a pushcart vendor,” Cohen says. “When I was working on BOOK years later, I realized that was the pivotal job for me because I was sitting there on the street watching the very mundane goings-on. Watching this very hidden sub-strata of behavior and economics. Even though I wasn’t shooting film I had kind of become a camera for a summer.”
Cohen made a main character for BOOK, a pushcart vendor. But this job served as more than a storytelling device. For Cohen, sitting and watching street happenings “really, really ended up leading to much of my work. There was a whole world that could be revealed if you hung in there and stared at it and watched the different surfaces reveal themselves. It seemed like there was a connection of my becoming a filmmaker and that shitty-ass job.”
BOOK’s pushcart vendor is not really seen. Instead, he narrates. One day a sidewalk grate fisherman, who retrieves stuff through those grates you walk over using string and some sort of epoxy, offers the vendor a book made up of handwritten listings of places, objects and things. He looks through it, but doesn’t buy it. Then he cannot forget about the entries, seeing them everywhere he goes in the city.
The film has varied haunting images of small storefronts, people behind glass making mysterious transactions, ‘atomic numbers’ and money themes. All the images are captured from real life.
“The thing about HISTORY and a lot of the other projects is that they sent me on this collision course between documentary and something else,” Cohen says. “None of the films are normal documentaries. None of them are normal narratives. I can’t stand to have the work described as experimental film or avant-garde film. It’s just some hybrid where these are. By necessity and by choice I found myself working in-between those realms.”
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| Buried in Light (1994) |
This confuses some people who want their dramas strict and fake.
“I never bought that definition of narrative,” Cohen says. “To me, the whole point of BOOK as far as narrative was to confront this idea that the world was made of a million narratives, many of which were invisible, some of which were forgotten, some of which were existing but happened and then ended before you could even get a grip on them. Some of which were on going. The street is literally clogged and cluttered with them.
“In other words, narrative, to me, is not attached to actors and to scripts. It’s to life. It’s like life is full of narratives. BOOK was a way of saying that if you walk along the street, you’re going to be stepping on narrative debris. If there’s a cigarette butt, well, somebody dropped it. They were standing on that corner for a reason. Maybe they were waiting for somebody. Maybe there’s a narrative there. It was just important to me to engage this hidden world of what to me was sort of narratives.”
And again, this is not a simple rejection of the mainstream; it is just that other forms of filmmaking need to be recognized as well.
LOST BOOK FOUND made its way around to festivals, Europe, Australia, broadcasts on PBS, the BBC, even Polish television and a few screenings in America.
Cohen says. “I’ve done this thing called the Southern Circuit tour twice, where I go to little theaters and media centers throughout the South and deal with people who never see that kind of thing. I’ve shown it in a quonset hut in South Carolina to a bunch of senior citizens”
Distribution is the second toughest part of filmmaking, primarily for shorts and non-mainstream themes. Distributors, exhibitors and critics very often pigeonhole filmmakers as un-sellable before even watching their projects.
“I want my work to be accessible,” Cohen says. “It doesn’t mean I want it to be predictable. It just means I want people to find something in it that they can get a grip on. Even if it’s just, ‘I’ve seen things like that when I rode the bus,’ or, ‘I had a shitty job like that,’ or, ‘I’ve had weird thoughts like that.’ I feel like every one of my works you should be able to show it in a barroom or in a library or in a film festival and most of the people in the audience ought to have something they can either relate to or grapple with in a way that doesn’t alienate them.
“I do respect some filmmakers who have to make alienating movies. Sometimes I’m really glad those movies exist, sometimes I’m blown away by them. Often, they bore me. I believe in a wide spectrum of different kinds of moving picture experiences, but I don’t like the way that non-traditional films are ghettoized by Hollywood, or isolate themselves as ‘art-films.’”
The toughest part of filmmaking is funding the damn things. Cohen’s survival has been a juggling act. Money came from the earlier prop jobs, some commissioned work, a few music videos, shooting for other people, selling films to foreign television (“which has completely saved my ass”) and getting grants. Non-profit grant awards allow the filmmaker to finish a project without having to concede to some financier’s own dreams, which could take away control.
“I’ve been pretty dependent on the occasional grant,” Cohen says. “The only problem is it’s a real drag to constantly be writing grant applications. I used to bitch about that. But now I better stop bitching about it cuz there aren’t any left to write applications for. Most of them I used to apply for got discontinued. So I’ve been pretty lucky, but I’ve also had a lot of rejections -- up to 20 in a row.”
Travelling Europe to show stuff in festivals was the motivator for Cohen to make the impressive BURIED IN LIGHT.
“When the Berlin Wall came down, at that point I had been in the states for 15 years straight,” Cohen says. “I didn’t even have a passport. I was really concerned that I was going to be too late -- in the sense that, it was about four-and-a-half seconds after the wall came down that they were making horrific Pepsi ads showing people passing sodas across the iron curtain.”
Although change was drastically needed from totalitarian regimes, the answer isn’t necessarily a complete swing to a corporate takeover where people still have no say.
Cohen wanted to capture the culture that would be soon erased by billboards. (A scary one seen in the film shows a cigarette ad that imitates underground resistance graffiti.)
For what became BURIED IN LIGHT, Cohen walked around Central and Eastern Europe, shooting street scenes without knowing a lot about the countries.
“Travelling blind like that is a blessing and a curse, because you have the deficit of a certain amount of ignorance,” Cohen says. “But you also have the benefit of not having expectations and not having pictures already in your head. Just really being able to deal freely with what comes around the bend.
“I feel like, walk down your street and get a good honest shot of every building,” Cohen says. “Particularly if that street’s going to change a lot, you’ve done something valuable. It doesn’t mean that you’ve made a good film. It just means that you haven’t wasted your film.”
When Cohen came back he looked for grants to make a project out of the footage. At first, no one was interested, but eventually the High Museum in Atlanta commissioned the work as an installation piece. But they wanted it faster than Cohen could raise funds to finish it. So the museum found a corporate video place that would allow Cohen to work at night.
Cohen moved to Atlanta for about five months. He would edit all night, sleep, read and then go edit again.
“I may have used some applied ignorance while shooting,” Cohen says, “but when I wanted to put the piece together I spent a lot of time in the library. …It was a great total immersion. And I had access to this pretty amazing gear at the big commercial joint. The people were sometimes a little condescending, because I’m in there doing my super-8. They’re cutting these multi-million dollar Coca-Cola ads during the day, then peeking into the room: ‘Jesus, what’s with that guy’s footage, hey man, what’s wrong with your footage? Something we can do to smooth out that grain?’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s okay.’ (laughs)”
The museum installation for BURIED had three synced television screens running along with various still photos and found objects. The project also showed that strip malls and their mentality erase regional character in Atlanta just as it does overseas. The museum ran the film for three months in 1994.
“It was great because it’s a museum where buses of school kids and old folks go,” Cohen says. “It’s not like an art scene thing; people just wander in....”
Cohen’s soundtracks are as important as his images. For BOOK, as with imagery, he used ‘found’ ambient sounds and created an intricately layered soundtrack.
“For example, I would record things like the sound of money coming out of an ATM machine. Every once in a while it just purrs there on the soundtrack.”
For BURIED’s soundtrack, there are found sounds, music and some creative invented music.
“I got to work with a lot of people I really love, including Vic Chestnut and Ben Katchor, who’s known mostly as a great cartoonist. He played clarinet and banged some pots and pans and made some great stuff. He couldn’t come down to work in the studio with me and Vic, but he gave me his music recorded over an old audio cassette of Napoleon Hill’s money making plan ‘Think and Grow Rich.’ Every once in a while that would bleed up though the tape because it was such a crude recording. (laughs) So we were really excited about that.”
Narration is another important part of the soundtrack. Basically the glue for putting the images together, narration can often serve as a crappy ‘this is what it means’ device. Cohen’s narration and text is never condescending. It lets the viewer think for him/herself and always seems motivated.
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| Instrument (1999) |
Lately, Cohen has been getting a lot of notice for co-making the Fugazi documentary INSTRUMENT. While first shooting for pleasure, Fugazi and Cohen (friends since they were all growing up in D.C.) were making it into an official film for the last five years. Rather than a strict informational documentary, INSTRUMENT is a unique portrait that includes background on the band. Using every format from consumer video donated by fans to sync-sound 16mm film, INSTRUMENT shows that it’s not about breaking down the barriers between musicians and fans, it’s about not putting them up in the first place.
“Working with Fugazi, they are the best example I know of a group of people that stepped out of the ballgame as it is regularly played and still managed to do what they wanted to do and bring it to a large audience and kick a lot of ass in the process,” Cohen says. “I find them to be a serious inspiration. I love their work. I love to watch them work.
“It’s true that editing the project was really hard. I’m not used to collaborating…. INSTRUMENT was tough, but we feel good about it. I had a real lucky thing: I grew up on punk rock and when I realized that the (film) industry as a whole had no room for people like me, to do the kind of projects that we needed to make, I had a readymade model in punk. The industry doesn’t give a shit about you? You don’t particularly like the industry? Well, then you better pick up your guitar and go buy yourself a used amplifier. You better pick up a camera and start making film. So I had a real good thing to look over at and give me some inspiration.”
We run out of time to talk. A few days later I’m lucky enough to tag along with Jem as he journeys to the World Trade Center to film.
The first elevator has two numbers: 1 and 78. Another elevator takes us to 91. We finish the interview as Cohen films the sun going down on Hoboken and the lights coming up in Manhattan.
For Cohen’s newest, AMBER CITY, an experimental arts group in Italy invited him to make a portrait of their city. Although he usually doesn’t take commissions like that, he found it a great experience.
“In Europe, people aren’t embarrassed by culture like often they are here,” Cohen says. “So they actually get money from the municipalities. The money for AMBER came from the state and instead of worrying about grants, I had to worry about whether an Italian left-wing municipality would win re-election....”
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| Cohen filming at a Fugazi show |
The film was shot with a Bolex 16mm camera, which led to a different style, although Cohen notes that his camerawork is getting less and less showy with time.
“When I’m shooting super-8 it’s a little bit cheaper and I’m usually bombing around a little bit more,” Cohen says. “A little more guerrilla style. There are often very short bursts. When I’m shooting on 16, which is really expensive and where I’m often on a tripod, I tend to be much more measured in the shooting. It’s more like breathing. I often do in-camera fades. Just pick a shot carefully, bring it up and hold my breath and just fade it out when it feels right.”
On the other hand, “in the Fugazi thing there’s an 8 1/2-minute shot that was determined by when the camera rolled out of film. (laughs)”
“You can’t just make your camerawork be shitty and boring because you don’t want to be overly stylized,” Cohen says. “But you can find yourself drawn toward a type of camerawork that doesn’t make you sit there and think about how long the dolly track must have been to get the shot.”
One striking shot in AMBER is of tiny human shadows on a railroad yard tower. While he didn’t think it would come out on film, it ended up looking surreal. The train yard looks like a model.
“Every once in a while you get something like that back in the lab and you realize that the whole thing is insane and miraculous,” Cohen says. “One of the things about film versus video is that there’s something different about a mechanical sense of the miraculous versus an electronic one.”
While looking different from the super-8, the photography is still beautiful and framed in a unique way. A mainstay Cohen feature is still there: portraits of people.
At the end of LOST BOOK FOUND there are great portraits of New Yorkers, just standing and looking at the camera. BURIED IN LIGHT has various close-ups ranging from people in public to prisoners’ mug shots at a concentration camp. A tradition for INSTRUMENT was to photograph kids standing in line to get tickets.
Cohen’s films connect with the Lumiere Brothers and the start of filmmaking. Many of the first films were simple portraits: people leaving a factory, a train passing and a baby feeding. It sounds simple, but the portraits are fascinating in what is different from today and what is the same.
In his office, Cohen has an August Sander portrait from 1921 of a bulky man carrying a load of bricks on his shoulders.
“When I stop people in the street now in Italy and I say, ‘Can I take your portrait,’ I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new. I don’t feel like I’m doing, ‘that Jem Cohen’s thing....’ It’s a tradition that I’m pleased to carry forward.”
Leaving the World Trade Center, we talk some more while waiting for the E Train.
Cohen is now heading for a feature, still starting from ‘documentary’ footage and without traditional script, actors, or production machine. For it, he has been collecting landscapes. Most are modern and not easy to place. He is fascinated with how landscapes affect the emotions of people they surround.
“I’m already a third of the way into the feature because I’ve been shooting very particular indeterminate landscapes for years -- I shoot them all over the world but you can’t place where you are,” Cohen says. “I’m already thinking as I shoot them that they are narrative frameworks. It’s the coat rack that I’m going to hang the narratives on. I’ve got to get the rack right first.”
After catching the train and going a few stops we get out to catch the F train to Brooklyn.
With digital video being somewhat accepted by big distributors as something small they will actually buy, more possibilities open for small-budget features. But does film need 10 million more directors?
Cohen feels he has become “sort of a poster boy for super-8. Do-It-Yourself.” Although he adds, “Well, it’s more like a 5 by 7 than a full size poster.... But, anyway, we may have reached the point of over-saturation. It’s the same with zines. It’s the same with music, where ‘alternative’ has become a bad joke. For the most part now, the word ‘independent’ coupled with filmmaking is a bad joke.
“I think that whether it’s with DV or a super-8 camera or a Xerox machine, it doesn’t really matter what you’re using. It’s nice that anybody can get a hold of it, but it doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be thoughtful about what they’re doing. Cuz there’s just too much out there. You have to stop and think, how much more stuff does one want to add to the pile? People think that new technologies will save them, but with video, people just hold the record button down, or they try to replicate the Hollywood game and the work isn’t necessarily vital, connected to life.
“Hey, here’s the train.”
The F train runs from Queens down 6th avenue in Manhattan, then out to Brooklyn.
other links:
official website: www.jemcohenfilms.com
Cohen's hopes for activist cinema:
http://www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=0&id=628
newer interviews with Jem:
http://www.thelamp.ca/film/index.php?id=53
and:
