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 Underground man At 26, James Fotopoulos has completed sixteen features and twenty-four shorts.
It took only a few pints of blood to start James Fotopoulos' prolific
film career.
The 26-year-old director traces the start of his "fury to do this
work" back to high school. He was given free rein to make videos for
student activities like bonfires or blood drives. No one else was
interested. "I would shoot things so that people would be bleeding all
over a room, and blood would be shooting out of peoples' chests,"
Fotopoulos says. "Guys would be covered in blood, and other guys would
show up wearing masks. These things would be shown, and people would
be
completely confused as to what it was about. And then they would find
out it was about a blood drive."
It was the blood of the poet that was more in question at last
year's annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, a conference on independent
filmmaking held each summer on the Vassar College campus in
Poughkeepsie, New York. Attendees are never told what they're about to
watch, and the event's curator, Ed Halter, showed Fotopoulos' 1999
feature, "Migrating Forms."
"Migrating Forms" is a movie that asks: How few elements do you
need to tell a story? Fundamentally, a man, a woman, a cat, a
mysterious
and migrating cyst, and horrible desire that can't be killed by sex.
For
eighty minutes of muzzy black-and-white imagery, we're trapped inside
an
apartment as cramped as a desolate man's mind. Minimalist and
obsessive,
Fotopoulos' film rejects a romanticized bohemian outlook, gazing
pitilessly upon working-class misery along the boundaries of madness.
That twisted dirge of sexual anxiety may be the most idiosyncratic
feature ever made by a 22-year-old, utterly rejecting both the indie
and
Sundance aesthetic. Critic Travis Crawford wrote in Filmmaker magazine
that it resembles a "1960s sexploitation movie as interpreted by
Alexander Sokurov," the blur-fixated Russian director of "Russian
Ark." Others compare his first three features, released on DVD this
week by Facets, to the austere yet weird early work of the Davids Lynch
and Cronenberg. Fotopoulos, the veteran of sixteen micro-budgeted
feature-length efforts, twenty-four shorts and a sum of
works-in-progress that he won't detail on the record, shrugs off the
comparisons, bluntly rejecting the tyranny of influence.
After the screening, a woman hypothesized that an elaborate prank was
being perpetrated by Halter and that all the critical praise in the
filmmaker's bio was fabricated. "I don't think she really believed
this herself," says Bryan Wendorf, head of the Chicago Underground
Film
Festival, who was there. "But she seemed unaware of how insulting it
was to both Jim and Ed as well as the other Fotopoulos supporters in
attendance. The room was passionately divided about Jim's films and
Jim
was uninterested in winning over anyone. The less he gave, the angrier
and more emotional his critics became. When asked about the attack, Jim
commented, `They didn't break me.'" He's waiting at an elevated stop in Rogers Park, the designated
rendez-vous, with a calm smile, holding a sack with tapes of some of
his
recently completed work. He leads the way to an unmarked tavern on
Sheridan Road called Moody's.
It's a broodingly overcast afternoon, yet the place is lit only by
firelight and candles. It's even darker than one of Fotopoulos' early
films.
The unflappable and articulate filmmaker speaks with engagingly
intense detail about work from Raoul Walsh to Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
and his special fascination for the subversive formal characteristics
of
John Ford's Westerns, overlooked by most critics because of that
director's seldom-questioned place in the pantheon of greats. But "I
was never a film fan," he says. "I started in film so young, I was
sixteen, it was all very much other technical things. I had a very
clear
idea of what I wanted and then it was a matter of executing it. Almost
all of it is technically rooted. I never looked at a film and said, I
want to make films like that person." His high-school filmmaking
career
took an unexpected turn when he had his way depicting a charity walk.
"I had legless people trying to walk, and people on crutches, and
people vomiting. I think someone humiliates one of the people on
crutches because they can't walk. At that point, the physics teacher
complained, and said that what this guy is doing is not proper for the
school. And I was fired. But when I look back, that was a very good
experience. Filmmaking is such an expensive medium, and requires so
much
orchestration. So a lot of people don't start out when they're
young."
Still, there are sweet parallels to the work of others, such as the
climactic pastoral idyll of the punishing, self-lacerating "Zero."
The
images are as gentle as the rain at the end of Andrei Tarkovsky's
"Andrei Rublev," and the use of optical tinting suggests the work of
experimental veteran Stan Brakhage. (A local art critic was offended by
the film, lecturing Fotopoulos that you can't mix exploitation-level
production with experimental technique; the same writer has come over
to
his side as the work has grown more ambitious and divergent.)
These movies are way behind Fotopoulos' constantly evolving--or
mutating--output. Technology makes it possible to shoot an enormous
amount of footage, or to produce a large number of works, but the means
of distribution hasn't caught up with the means of production. It's
strange talking to this young, steadfastly normal-looking and
uncommonly
assured man about "Migrating Forms," 2000's sinister pseudo-gangster
"Back Against the Wall" and 1997's "Zero," a morbid, grating 16mm
one-man descent into a sexually obsessive hell. For him, they're the
distant past. These early movies take what could be seen as "bad"
stylistic practice: a Warhol simplicity or a B-level horror-movie
aesthetic to demonstrate sociopathic, illogic or ritual behavior. The
soundtracks are filled with droning sounds, or synthesizer loops,
making
use of the limited, notoriously muddy sonic range of 16mm optical
sound.
(There's a DVD extra of pages from his notebooks, including one spread
where he notes a budget of $550 and has scribbled a reminder to
himself
to pick up a "gizzard.")
The Chicago Underground Festival has given grants to Fotopoulos, as
well as slotting "Back Against the Wall" as 2001's opening-night
attraction. Festival director Wendorf introduced the work to Facets
Video's programmers, and asserts that Fotopoulos "is by far the most
interesting independent filmmaker in Chicago and one of the most
exciting young filmmakers in the U.S." When asked to elaborate, he
makes a precise point: "Most indie filmmakers are only independent in
terms of their financing. Jim is a real maverick, with a strong sense
of
the history of cinema, from Dreyer to Brakhage to John Ford." What's
different about his work, then? "He approaches film almost as a form
of
psychic alchemy. He's exploring his own interior states and examining
his relationship to the world."
In recent video excursions, such as 2002's ninety-minute "Hymn," a
sexually explicit, luxuriantly colored, multi-layered video work more
suited to art galleries than art-house cinemas, he creates a hypnotic
investigation of conventions of sexual representation as well as
repetition in pornography. The work is painstakingly detailed and
languorous. "The people who like the more narrative films generally
don't like the video work. Very few people like both. They're so
different."
"His unwillingness to limit his audience's reaction to his work by
explaining what it means is what frustrates lazy viewers," Wendorf
adds, which is also the legacy of filmmakers like Lynch and Cronenberg.
"The meaning Jim finds in his work is for him and he finds it in the
process of making it. What others see in it when it's finished is up
to
them, and I don't think Jim thinks there are wrong interpretations. He
isn't dealing with metaphor in any traditional sense. The tumor on
the
woman's back in `Migrating Forms' doesn't represent anything beyond
what it is. What that means to me as a viewer has changed many times
through repeated viewing of the film. I don't think that there is a
correct way of reading his films. Like life, the meaning changes from
one moment to the next."
Ray Privett of Facets calls Fotopoulos' work "uncompromising and
obsessive, with rare power and passion." He admits they're not for
every viewer, but thinks that some will find themselves "in a sort of
devastated awe."
Fotopoulos says that he's had to make unspecified choices in life in
order to devote himself to the work. He bluntly told another Flaherty
attendee that "My purpose is to use this medium to balance my
relationship between good and evil." He believes the actual concept of
"freedom" is seldom practiced by contemporary artists. Much of it
comes from his belief that the freedom to do anything you want can be
mistaken for the freedom to do what you think others expect of you. You
make certain sacrifices, and modern technology allows you to immerse
yourself in a world of your own creation. "The misconception is that I
am doing this stuff blindly, doing this stuff with no sense of a
continuing progression."
Does that mean he's not thinking in terms of a career, that in fact
his work can only become more sophisticated, ambitious and even less
commercial? "You're constantly trying to be involved with producers,
trying to be involved with bigger budgets and so forth," he says.
"You're always doing it, but in the meantime you can't stop doing
the
work. I don't like to talk about that too much, that aspect of it, but
each year things have been getting better. More people have been
hearing
about the films and I've been getting more credibility. It helps your
reputation, getting bigger things going. Developing your reputation is
one of the key things."
To Fotopoulos, filmmaking is as simple as starting a sentence and
finishing it. "You create your own context for yourself. You say,
`This
is what I do, you have to pay attention to it.' It's a little bit
slower
but you just have to give up or go anywhere, just continue what you're
doing. An interesting problem with the film world is that at best, my
work can only exist on the periphery of it. Most films, what they're
about, I find pretty disgraceful."
Fotopoulos is suspicious of film schools, their cost and their dogma.
(He spent a year at Columbia.) He's often made remarks like "The film
world is a very tricky and sometimes evil place." Many so-called
indie
films are as limited in their means as Fotopoulos' more astringent
work, your basic "three-guys-in-a-room" movies, where characters have
lengthy conversations about their romantic or economic failings while
the filmmaker demonstrates very little formal control or innovation.
"Most people shouldn't be making films, it's true," Fotopoulos
exclaims, starting to explain his own concerns. "The indie film thing,
that's been around about ten years, hasn't it? I was in high school.
I
see a lot of those films now on cable and they're really embarrassing.
It's all the same actors, with goatees. It's very simplistic, it's
not
an evolved way of thinking about how things are."
Even at 26, an outside observer might want to consider his work
formative, especially considering his experimentalist bent. It's one
of
the forks the conversation doesn't take. It's not a fruitful concern
for
someone so prolific. He reaches for the universal instead. "The films
that are coming out, I made from ages 18 to 20. These new works, the
video works, to say they're still formative... The thing is, my view
toward the medium is that it's very young--it's only a hundred years
old. Video's probably going to eclipse it. But if you recognize how
complex things are around you and then you understand the multitude of
things you can do with film or video, you can form this very surgical
process on those things you don't comprehend."
So does that make the young prodigy a consummate auteur or an
ambitious filmic shock-jock? One of the young director's most
articulate
champions is Ed Halter, who writes widely on alternative film, as well
as heading the New York Underground Film Festival. He situates
Fotopoulos' fixations this way: "Obsessed with the philosophical
problems regarding sex, violence, extreme psychic states and unnerving
atmospheres... Fotopoulos' films wed a youthful fixation with the
overpowering nature of primal drives to an uncommonly mature certitude
of vision and technique." The day of the interview, dusk falls. The wind bites. Fotopoulos
muses, "I don't know if I'll stay here. I can get shows in
Rotterdam,
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Andy Warhol Museum in
Pittsburgh, at Anthology Film Archives in New York, but I still can't
get a show in Chicago. Chicago doesn't have that kind of interest. Can
you be any kind of filmmaker here? I don't know."
The sky is gray as Ilford film stock. He has more to say. He could
talk all night. The gusts off the lake, a block away, are harsh. He
goes. He'll start work with a new video editor the next day. Three
more
feature-length pieces will be done before the DVDs hit the streets the
first week of March. The future is now. Work, always. "Zero," "Migrating Forms" and "Back Against the Wall" are
available on Facets DVD.
Also by Ray Pride Tip of the Week
Short Runs
DVD Tip of the Week
Whispers in your ear
Tip of the Week
Short Runs
DVD Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
Short Runs
The devil you say
The end of the affair
Short Runs
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