I was thinking about abrupt endings in writing, and that made me think about Jonathan Demme and Rachel Getting Married. There is a moment I remember where Robyn Hitchcock is outside playing, everybody is having a great time, the music is going, and then—boom—it just cuts to something else. No transition. Like a razor blade splice. I loved that.
Looking into it this morning, I found an interview with Hitchcock where he talked about being on set and how real the whole experience felt to him. He said his memory was basically of being at a real wedding, and called it “as real as it gets.”
That was exactly how I felt watching it. I remember telling Giselle that it didn’t feel like I was watching people pretend to be at a wedding. It felt like I was at the wedding. Even when people are giving speeches and everybody laughs, the laughter feels like they are hearing those things for the first time. They probably were.
I think this is part of why I’m suddenly thinking about filmmaking again. I watch the Criterion Channel all the time, and when they had the Jonathan Demme collection I finally had a chance to look at a bunch of his films together and really think about him as a filmmaker. Same with Jem Cohen and the way he approached music films like the Fugazi film Instrument. So much of that work feels like it is trying to find a way to let something actually happen in front of the camera. But also, these really dreamy things he did with Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith.
I was making films before the pandemic too, and again during my thesis. So maybe this isn’t really coming out of nowhere.
And it makes me wonder what a Coctails "film" could be, if there ever were one. Or Mudhead.
Maybe you just put four people in a room and create a situation where something might naturally happen.
Or not.