excerpt of Cinemad interview with Ronnie Bronstein:
I first heard about FROWNLAND from Scott Macauley, the editor of Filmmaker Magazine. He was on the jury for SXSW in 2007 and was compelled to fight hard for an award for the film and tell others about it. I first saw the film on DVD as a submission to CineVegas, with its weird handdrawn cover, scrawling pink-and-white image of a family at a dinner table, as if an underground comic book artist re-imagined Bunuel’s EXTERMINATING ANGEL. The movie inside was unlike any other film of recent times. Director Ronnie Bronstein packs a lot of punch in the film with realistic dialogue instead of snappy lines. Main character Keith (Dore Mann) is not your typical leading man. He is unlucky in life and love, as a girl that’s just a friend (Mary Wall, Mrs. Bronstein) comes to him to cry about other guys, and his day job takes him out of Manhattan to peddle coupons door-to-door in the ‘burbs, only to leave him far behind on bills with a hostile hipster musician roommate, who may spit more verbal abuse at him than Kinski did at Herzog. The atmosphere of the film recalls the grime of 1970s’ 42nd street glory, shot on film, projected on film, with unknown actors throughout New York. When you see the end credit of “2007” it’s bewildering.
After a long festival run, no distributor would take the film on, receiving a stint at the IFC Center in New York and various one-off shows around the country at small art houses and universities. Frequently interviewed by websites and mags already, we concentrated on recent days, with the film starting a 4-day run at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, a double-feature screening with Josh Safdie’s THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED, and with a DVD release of FROWNLAND coming this summer, the first release from the new label Factory 25.
CINEMAD: For a film without distribution or even indie stars, people seem to be finding FROWNLAND.
RONNIE BRONSTEIN: They’re finding it. Thing is, there’s not so many people out there that should find it. That’s what it comes down to. I just have to say that off the bat. The disclaimer before we get down to it, whatnot, especially since you told me that you could post this also at the Filmmaker Magazine site. Because they already have done a pretty extensive interview with me.
Yes but this is a follow up.
Not to be egomaniacal about it, but it sounds humiliating, because the world is constantly turning out new product, new movies are coming down the pike all the time, and like this douchebag, this dipshit, is talking about the same thing, he’s treading water. Running on a treadmill. Fuck, man, ya know?
I wanna make it clear: my process is a long one. I got this new project I’m working on. FROWNLAND will finally come out on DVD and I’ll be done with it. You know what I mean?
Completely.
All sorts of tasks will be behind me. But at the same time, the fact is that anybody who shows up and sees this thing in LA – This movie will not occupy any real estate in their skulls until they see it, so ya know, I need to effect some kind of freshness when I talk about it. It’s only old to me.
Did you think of having a film festival life rather than a theatrical life when you were done making it? As a projectionist for places like MOMA, you understand non-traditional theatres and films discovered long after they are finished editing.
I don’t know, man, that’s a good question. It's hard to access what my hopes for the movie were. Because the struggle behind the movie was not a commercial one, you know what I mean?
All I can say is I kind of nursed a nitwit notion that there were other people like me with the same itch they wanted scratched. And this movie would scratch it. If anything, what’s unrealistic is you imagine that there is more people like that. And you have to maintain that false pinheaded assumption all the time you’re working, otherwise, why would you work?
You are not bitter about the process.
Not disappointed by any means. That sort of critical approbation in whatever cult it is that has sorta coagulated around the work has been so strong, and the connection to it has been so deep and matched my connection to it that I feel pretty successful with it in that sense.
I don’t know. Filmmakers these days need to look beyond the short-term fortunes of finding a place in the industry. Even the margins of the industry. It’s just not where my head is at. So it doesn’t disappoint me that the film wasn’t, like, picked up or something.
I mean, the time for me to worry about this stuff was when I was coming up for ideas for my movie. You know what I’m saying. I didn’t think about those things, I didn’t worry about those things. And they weren’t my concerns, it wasn’t my struggle, so now I can’t just sit back and be bitter about it.
In general, the people that have responded to the work have responded so strongly that I lose sight of the fact of the most people that have never heard of it. I mean i think it's a success.
More than expected?
By the time I was editing it I was so emotionally invested in it and my self-esteem had been so bankrupted that while – whatever. It was not on my radar to judge its success on financial terms. It wasn’t like I made it to get the money back, the same way you don’t go on vacation thinking you’re going to get the money back. It was money I spent and whether it was a success or failure was gonna be based on how people felt about it.
Let’s make it clear that you haven’t just been sitting around doing nothing since you finished the film.
My process for my own work is painfully slow. I mean, it’s not something I’m embarrassed about. I work slowly, and I’m comfortable with that. The first sort of step, after the thematic scope of a project is mapped out, the first step for me is to create a central character who will become the anchor of the work. For instance, with FROWNLAND it took four months of heavy collaboration with Dore until Keith was alive and breathing, so I could sort of wind him up, and spin him around and toss him into any situation and he could respond in character. This new one is taking a little longer. I’ve been working for about seven months with this my lead. And now finally the character is there, he's alive.
Did you go to film festivals before you made FROWNLAND?
Nah, I was just working in an air-sealed vacuum environment. But i don't know. I feel like it’s such an anemic time in cinema right now…and like if somebody makes a movie, and the struggle behind that movie is not a commercial one, and their goal is not to make their money back, but rather to just try and make noise and affect the culture.
I think it’s a really empowering time because there’s very little competition. It’s a very good time to make a lot of noise with a very little bit of money. If one has the sort of tenacity, go for it.
All these Q&As that you’ve basically done for over a year now. Do you think you find audiences that way?
Yep. You do. I think there’s probably many people who think the Q&As are more interesting than the movie. I just have a personal disinclination of the kind of niceness that seems to define most screening Q&As. Where people are talking about their budget, or finding nice anecdotes, funny anecdotes about the making of the movie. And thankfully, I was spared that. No one even asked those questions, ya know? I guess the movie, at its worst, upsets somebody. It upsets them the way a molecule gets upset. And then they hold me personally responsible for that. And then I’m on the hot seat – I don’t know. It’s a nice place to be.
This has nothing to do with your question, but I guess if I had to attach FROWNLAND to an established genre, the genre I find most personally irritating is the trope of the loveable loser.
You’ve got that in spades.
Somebody who just can't hold it together. His infrastructure is a wreck. He can’t get a girl, he can't move ahead at his lousy job, that kind of thing. Movies that focus on nerds are the most superficial example. But whether it’s REVENGE OF THE NERDS or SIDEWAYS -- these movies use all sorts of insidious tricks to make it easy for the audience to sympathize with the character. They make it so that this character will appeal to the loser in everyone.
And there’s something disgusting about going into a movie theatre and being made to feel, for two house, that you're more tolerant towards weakness than you will be the second you leave the theatre. I was going out of my way to avoid that trap. What does it really mean to spend time with somebody that you might instantly dismiss, and what does tolerance really mean? And tolerance and compassion, the nature of tolerance, maybe it only has value when you don’t feel it. You know what I’m saying?
Yeah.
Being considerate of somebody who is different from you and maybe weaker than you. Again, the value of that comes into play when it’s a fight inside of you to get it.
Your characters portray that struggle we can relate to, they can’t deal with each other.
Maybe that’s what bugs people so much. I mean, my relationship with you is the most sort of extreme example of people getting upset, at the movie during CineVegas. What’s more common is someone will raise their hand in the audience and will ask a question in which the subtext is hitting the text over the head with a mallet. They aren’t really asking me a question. They are just disguising a very negative statement. Like a question like, ‘What do you think you were gonna achieve with this movie?”
That’s the kind of hostility I’m used to. In Vegas it actually erupted into screaming. Like something that is physical. And in a way, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that.
The guy who was booing, did he actually ask a question? Did he stick around?
He didn’t just boo, he booed for several minutes. I mean, jesus, to drain the air out of your lungs and then re-draw new air and then drain it out again and again. That guy was committed. I kind of respect that. But when I addressed him, well, I didn’t even have the chance because somebody else got up and started screaming at that guy.
In defense of the film –
I value confrontation. I feel like our culture has become so unconfrontational that I’m happy to play a role in that. Like my own little turn of the screw in the vice of our culture. And make something that is creating that kind of conflict, or that kind of dialogue, makes me feel good. Makes me feel successful. And not in some cheap punk way. Not looking to punch buttons for the sake of doing so, that would be valueless.
No, you gotta go all the way. If you make a film about teenagers, let’s find the truly uncool kid. Not just somebody that has acne and wears black.
Well, just what I was trying to get at. And again, I wasn’t sparing myself in the sense that the whole movie for me was the struggle. I want to create work where that struggle is embedded inside of the work. Where it feels like the guy that made it isn’t just standing on top of everything judgmentally. I wasn’t trying to preach about tolerance. I was trying to expose how difficult it is.
Fuck, man. Whether you’re a student working in the dorm or whether you’re working retail, or walking around the city, like in any environment, you come across people once in a while that are just off. There is something off about them, ya know? Are there is a kind of mindset that one instinctively adopts when they are around someone like that. It’s like you are walking down the street and the somebody asks you for directions, and just because of the vibe they are giving off, you find yourself saying, “Sorry, I don’t live around here.” Even though you know exactly where they want to go, you just wanna push that person away. Or if you’re working retail and some guy comes up to you, you find yourself answering questions very strategically that will preclude any follow up. You just want to push that fucker away.
And in reality, what does it mean to dimiss somebody that isn’t doing anything bad per se but is just off? In life you can do that so easily and never think twice about it. There is no real reason to question it. You force someone away from your little territorial bubble, and go about your business and never have to question whether or not that dismissal was justified, you know? So, wow, a movie theatre is a really good place, I’m thinking, to sort of confront people with people. It’s that old adage of ‘the captive audience.’
And they paid for it.
And the thing is, why can’t people just leave the theatre the same way they can dismiss someone in real life. Why is somebody staying through the end and getting that upset? If you wanna dismiss this guy, you can easily do so by getting up and leaving. I’m not gonna mind.
He booed through the entire credits.
That makes the film so much more powerful. Because it’s easy – you can watch distributors. They fucking file out of films after 10 minutes. And that’s their job, to watch movies. It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be good at releasing this.” Then you got a film festival goer: ‘Well, there’s something I might like better…” so it’s easy to skip. Then you got somebody who doesn’t like the film and they stay all the way through. When they have an incredible amount of opportunities right outside the door. Especially in Vegas.
My film always plays better when people have to buy tickets. In a festival, where people buy badges, and you're not laying out money for each screening, you don’t feel like they have to justify sitting there if it's not your thing. You can just get up and leave and see something else. But once somebody slaps down that $10, they feel like they have to sit through it to get their money’s worth.
For it to work, FROWNLAND relies on that commitment. Which is why I’ve turned down every offer to have it stream on the internet. I know what internet culture is like, and I know how flaky and flighty people are in their internet search habits, ya know? And the way people jump from page to page on the internet is the way people watch movies on the internet. It’s one and the same, I think. I don’t even want to enter into that. Because I know the movie cannot succeed in that way.
Has Dore Mann done anything since?
Not acting-wise. You know he’s going through life. My relationship with him is really complicated, and in a way, it’s really possible that I cannot separate my personal relationship with him with my working relationship with him. They can’t exist independently. We just got so deep into it…Oh God, it’s almost like we accidentally stumbled into the field of psychodrama without the therapeutic knowledge of how to deal with it. But he’s moved into kind of a different line of work. He’s not doing acting. He’s doing social work.
He didn’t do that before?
No. He was always interested in politics and history. That’s what he studied in school. Now he’s working for a needle exchange program. He was working for a suicide hotline at some point, and now this is what he is doing.
So for the film world, he will only be Keith from FROWNLAND, making it stronger.
In general, I really like seeing new faces in moves. I like the lack of baggage. I feel like those are the ones you can really project onto.
When the actors are unknown, it doesn't make it a documentary, but it definitely adds the level of a real world, someone's real experience to a viewer. You are introduced to the characters instead of a favorite actor doing things.
Look, this idea of realism, at face value, this belief in camera as truthteller. The camera is an idiot. The camera is a fool. It doesn’t have anything to say. And some of these movies substitute verisimilitude for discernment. There’s a mistake in that. This idea of realism that all you have to do is sort of capture the external world as it is, as it unfolds, and this is enough to capture how reality makes you feel. And it doesn’t require any sort of heightening and prodding, and getting underneath with the crow bar. I just don’t have a relationship with that, you know what I mean? Because I know how the world makes me feel doesn’t necessarily show up on my face.
But I get so serious when I talk about it. I think the movie is really funny. It’s just that—Maybe that humor reveals itself on repeated viewings. Maybe more than the first screening when you’re so disoriented of where it’s going and who your sympathy should be anchored to…that being in that state of unrest, being in that state of not being sure, isn’t a state that works in tandem with laughing. The second viewing you know where it is, where it should be, and where you stand on watching it…and you can sort of get into that texture of what’s funny about it.
There is an endless discussion about when somebody is laughing at, and somebody is laughing with, a film. And at times something is so extreme I need to laugh in shock.
Exactly. Or just laughing at pure nuance. It’s not even what you’re seeing is funny. But you’re seeing a detail and the case of FROWNLAND you’re seeing his neck contort and his veins pop out of his neck at a moment of such supreme discomfort. That in itself, those details, you wanna react to it. You wanna feel something rolling up inside of you. And you want to let it out, it’s like a steam pipe, ya know? And what are you gonna do? You’re not gonna yell, and you’re not gonna cry in anguish, so the laughter just ends up coming out like a bark.
Absolutely.
Again, I don’t want to use my own movie as an example. Because that implies that I think it’s successful. I’m just saying that these are things I’m attracted to, you know what I’m saying?
We are talking about audience reactions to your film, though. And what you think about them.
I didn’t want to the coddle the audience by orienting them to a fixed point of view. I didn’t want to make a morality play in that sense, where there was good and bad. I wanted to pivot around these variuous viewpoints and allow people to sort of feel both ways. Like the roommate. You can say that guy is sort of an arrogant prick. At the same time, when you think of the random lottery of possible living arrangements…who would actually want to be living with Keith? Nobody! No matter how tolerant you are as a person, ya know? I don't care how much compassion you have for the human race. I mean, sure, Keith doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. But his total inability to read social clues is hardly a saintly quality.
The saint is someone who can deal with him despite all that.
Right. That’s not realistic. The idea is that by the end of the movie you can find grounds for compassion. I hope so. But it’s through a constant process of chewing him over and regurgitating him. Maybe the compassion comes through the backdoor. First you feel good watching the roommate cruelly bitch slap Keith, and then you feel good watching the roommate get bitch slapped himself. Maybe guilt that sits at the root of compassion. I don't know.
----
excerpt from Cinemad interview with Kevin Jerome Everson (above photo from Lead):
Completely proficient in a variety of mediums, KEVIN EVERSON has been the recipient of numerous awards including a 1999 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in photography, and the Peter Wilde Award for Most Technically Innovative Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His films are personal, distinctive studies of his working class background and surroundings. He is incredibly down-to-earth. After a number of shorts, Everson finished his first feature, SPICE BUSH (2005).
CINEMAD: How did you get into art? Is it what your parents did?
KEVIN EVERSON: No, no, I got into art because I couldn’t do anything else.
Why, what did you try to do? Well, nothing. I wanted to do botany and shit, but in high school I didn’t do anything other than play sports and chase women. But I had a camera, so I decided to do photography. I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was journalizing or that it had to be art. I started liking that art so I kept doing that art.
So you didn’t ever want to go to college? I did want to go to college so I wouldn’t have to go in Reagan’s military. It was either that or work in a factory, but the factories were closing up in my hometown.
What was your hometown? Mansfield, Ohio. I wanted to go to college because I just wanted to be around stimulating people and meet people from all over the world, although I did go to Akron University, which is the global mecca. [laughs] But there were a lot of Nigerians and Angolans that were going there, so that was cool, meeting cats like that. They had a good engineering program, so I think they were all dealing with that kind of stuff. I just wanted to get away from home, and for me, driving an hour away to go to school was faaaarrrrrr.
Was Mansfield just basic small-town America? Yeah, small industrial town, and then the factories closed. But then when I went to Akron University and started doing all that art… You know, I was never a really good student. I mean, I was smart in high school, I just didn’t know how to study, but then something clicked in college. Well, first of all, I came home and worked in the factories for a summer. That sobered a motherfucker up hardcore. After that, I was on the Dean’s list every year and I really liked learning. I figured out how to study, started taking art history and philosophy, started making art, started working hard. Using that working class background. And then from there, they had just gotten this new art building and they were trying to put it on the map, so they said, “Hey, don’t you want to go to grad school?” I didn’t know anything about college. I really liked school and I didn’t want to stop, so I just went straight through and got a Master’s of Fine Art in photography. But I did films as an underground. I did a lot of artist books, and I thought the pace and the regimen were the equivalent of short experimental films. I did a lot of Super 8 junk and flicker films, film installations, too.
So was this all at the same school? No, I went to Ohio University for my master’s. Ohio University is in Athens, Ohio. It’s like a state liberal arts school. I didn’t really start making films until like five years after I got out of college because I was just showing a lot of art around the country, and around the world, actually. I had a couple of international exhibitions by that time.
What kind of art were in the shows? Photos, I want to say street photography, in the genre of Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank. Then I did a lot of sculptural work, and that’s how I got into film, because I liked making all this stuff that looked like it belonged in a black American working class kind of home. I would always relate to things in an art manner, like whatever I’d see was art and then I’d remake it and present it on a white wall, like at a gallery. What I really liked was the fact that I knew people, like my parents or my uncles or neighbors or whatever, would go down to Bing’s Furniture and pick out frames for family pictures and assemble them in their house. I really liked the task of selecting and putting stuff up. For me to portray that task, I had to use a time-based medium, so I started making films in like ’95.
What’s an example of the kind of stuff you do for the artist books? I’d make all my covers and my bookbinding. It would be photo-based or some drawings or prints or transfers. Just kind of image-based stuff. I also did a lot of sculptural things out of wood. I had some power tools, so I could make art outside. My strategy was that if I had an idea, I had to make drawings of it in several different mediums. There’d be a short film version of it, a photo, an artist book, whatever, and whichever one was cheapest at that time, that’s the one that would get done. All that stuff is the real world when it comes to that art. That’s what I always tell my students. This shit is not the kind of stuff you’ve got to prepare yourself for. In ’95 or ’96, I started doing more films because I could kind of afford them and do them on the cheap. Then it was all digital editing, started cutting on Avid in Columbus, Ohio.
You’ve got a thing with numbers as far as the work goes, like you’re obsessed with numbers in your films. Is that something like what you were doing in the art, too? Yeah, I was always into lottery and chance, permutations, that kind of thing. But mostly like the working class thing, the relentlessness of everyday life.
Like wanting to win the lottery? Yeah, which is a poor people tax. When I show that stuff to an academic art crowd, they don’t know what the fuck that is. It’s totally exotic to them. I showed a rough cut of SPICE BUSH the other day and people were asking me all kinds of questions about the lottery.
SPICE BUSH (2005).
What’d they ask? Well, first of all, the neighborhood black folks that came, they were actually happy that nobody died. [laughs] I think that [the art crowd] were waiting for a narrative to pop at ‘em. But then again, it’s slightly a documentary, so they got comfortable with that, and then it just switches on these people forty-seven minutes into it. They were slightly impatient, but they actually kinda liked it, I guess.
They can relate to the “characters” at least. It’s not even that. It’s how they relate to cinema and cinemaspace and what they anticipate on screen. If you position African-Americans in a way that you weren’t used to seeing, people get either intrigued or annoyed or impatient or whatever. It’s just a different kind of language.
So the academics were more interested in the lottery. They were into the political aspect. They automatically see black as political. For me, I’m a formalist. I try to make things look handsome straight up and down and have art references in it. There’s social issues going on in it, too, but that’s something that I think about very late in the game, when I’m designing films.
Right, you don’t go into it like, “Oh, I’ve got to show this so the crowd thinks that…” No, I’m not that kind of didactic when it comes to that. SPICE BUSH is set up as, no matter what you think it is, it’s not a window, it’s a total film. It’s like a language. It’s got narrative, it’s got documentary, a little experimental, it’s got all these collages… Hopefully, you never think that you’re not watching the film.
webpage for the film we are watching scenes from, Cinnamon:
