Still Film
An Interview with James Kienitz Wilkins
Seeing James Kienitz Wilkins’ STILL FILM at TIFF Cinematheque was one of the more beguiling cinematic experiences I’ve had in some time. Surprisingly dense for a film composed entirely of still imagery, I knew I hadn’t apprehended the half of it, and knew I’d have to see it again to reconcile THREADS disparate as:
Is Tom Hanks really making people dissapear?
Who owns a memory?
Why is Madonna’s nude scene missing from DICK TRACY while underage nudes of Thora Birch remain Overton windowed into the latent Spacey (that convincing old Friend of the Devil) of AMERICAN BEAUTY.
Wilkins kinly granted me this interview and provided me with a screener that I watched enough times to rouse VIMEO’s algorithmic suspicion as to my own shifting IP identity.
Wilkins’ artist statement describes STILL FILM as
a fictional audio deposition of a “non-party witness” who testifies to the past forty years of cinematic exposure (a period aligned with my lifetime), with promises made and broken. The multi-generational characters include the witness, the lawyers, and the recordist. While no character is specifically me, all are performed in voiceover by me, addressing memories, biographical details, conspiracy theories, and ideas I’ve wrestled with for years. The script has been written as if an actual legal deposition.
The visuals are 35mm publicity stills from Hollywood movie press kits: a “carousel” of 140 slides chosen from the hundreds I’ve collected since 2019 that hold some associative meaning, however arbitrary, in my memory. Publicity stills are distributed by film studios to promote upcoming releases. 35mm film transparency slides were the standard until the early 2000s, when digital press kits took over (a turning point that happens to align with my legal coming-of-age). As objects, each are unique photographic prints subject to the ravages of time and handling, now preserved through scanning into 4K digital cinema.
In their review, The New York Times adds that
The film posits that Hollywood, through a reliance on existing intellectual property, indulges our desire for an uncomplicated past, imposing suffocating limits on artists and crushing audiences’ collective imagination. Wilkins demands that we make new cinematic memories, lest we lose ourselves.
Without further adieu, then, an interview with James Kienitz Wilkins:
MIKE SAUVE: Running the dialog at 1.25 speed overwhelms the viewer with more ideas, images, anecdotes, and old Entertainment Weekly head lines than can be reconciled on a first viewing, and yet everything does seem to connect in some sinister way: Covid, YOU’VE GOT MAIL(ICE), pedophile islands, presentiments and ressentiments, malignities perceived and malignities misperceived. And then when I returned for repeat viewings to try and put the puzzle together, it quickly expanded beyond whatever boundaries I’d anticipated
Was there a balance you aimed to strike of scrutability vs. inscrutability, opacity vs. clarity, immediate vs. long-term viewer engagement?
JAMES KIENITZ WILKINS: Everything is connected because everything is connected. And if it wasn’t before, it is now, by dint of being strung together within a Feature Film. STILL FILM has its logic(s), but it’s also responding to the times and asking its own questions. In terms of balance, I’m always after some equilibrium between emotional experience and intellectual engagement. That’s the starting challenge. Most of my movies begin with this challenge—here’s an idea, can I sustain it (can I even make it), can I make it work on different levels, which is to say, holistically. That’s the puzzle. This might seem like an obvious pursuit when it comes to the act of creation, but it’s different than being a craft-person executing a script or story. Movies these days are put together so easily. You can really follow a paint-by-numbers process as taught in film school. It’s why I’m fundamentally uninterested in being a “Director” even though I am good at it. To direct a movie, in my opinion, is just a necessary act. A job. There’s nothing special about it. Making a movie is where the adventure is at. Like, can something be made from something resistant? Can I make opposite approaches coexist (the “versus”). I think people respond pretty positively to this type of adventure, this pursuit. People tend to engage with work that is trying to engage even if they don’t know whether they like it or not.
MS: While possibly quelling a viewer’s fear of being doompilled on adrenochrome for 70 minutes, the following quote is hardly the rote denunciation typically affording the consensus-consoomer a refreshing draught of moral and intellectual superiority; rather, it denigrates regressive suburban normativity four-channeling even the floridly-patterned garments of the conspiracy fiend.
Maybe I’m a little nostalgic, for conspiracy theories. They used to be kind of edgy and fun, right, like tap into your sixth sense, shit talk the man. It was supposed to be good for you like the sign of a beautiful mind. Now it’s all Qanon and PLANDEMIC and Suburban Mainstream Vanilla.
And soon your deposee issues claims only the most discerning tinfoil headware afficionado trafficks in: Tom Hanks making people dissapear, for example, is a fairly deep cut into the conspiracy iceberg. And while adjacent lines of thinking don’t relate to capital-C conspiracy per se, they are evocative of troubling through-lines, e.g., “Thing is, we’re talking about children here. Children remember strong stuff.”
The mischievous tone makes it clear you aren’t presenting the WEST MEMPHIS THREE of Tom Hanks exposees, but even ‘platforming’ such claims is a creative risk when we’re warned with increasing INTOLERANCE that transgressing the bounds of polite discourse has a 1:1 correspondence with shootups at the ping pong parlour. Thing is, Tom Hanks does Tweet cryptically of stranger’s missing gloves, and was the first celebrity to contract Covid, and Covid was what killed the theatrical experience! (Allow me to add the suspicious element of TENET, a movie about a cataclysmic time rupture, was the only cultural product available for several months at the tail end of Covid’s first wave!!!!)
The arrangement of publicity stills layered atop of this lends an associative credence to these claims. Just as connections between Tom Hanks and Jeffrey Epstein are spoken of, there’s serial sex offender Kevin Spacey gazing malignly at Thora Birch, both framed in a window one floor below the window that was left so open that her nude 16-year-old torso could be seen for months in mall multiplexes without a word of warning, generating buzz and revenue, entrenching this “beloved satire” and “comforting critique of conformity” that is “actually child porn” into our HEARTS AND MINDS.
Finally, enveloping all these disparate conspiracies is a sort of unified field conspiracy theory that our memory has itself been stripped bare by conspirators engaged in a systematic “serial harassment of nostalgia.”
“A memory of a memory”
“A memory of a memory pertaining to…”
“How did you steal the memory?”
Can you speak about your desire to challenge the epistemics of conspiracy in this fashion, and any pushback or critiques that have emerged?
JKW: I’m not sure what’s left for us but conspiracy. The final line of the movie is a pretty direct pinch and re-fashioning of a line from Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (your dear reader will have to watch the movie and/or read the essay to know what I’m talking about). Another line from the same essay states that “style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.“ I think it’s fairly obvious how this resonates today. I don’t believe I’m platforming conspiratorial style more than Movies already do, and have done since their conception. I mean, look at how the Lumière Brothers insisted on reshooting because their workers leaving the factory (aka unpaid actors) appeared too grumpy… or so the legend goes. I guess the only pushback I’ve received so far is people expecting STILL FILM to be more acceptably about conspiracy (in the documentary ethical journalistic sense), than wallowing in the muck itself. To be or not to be.
The spooky thing is that, at times, the text for STILL FILM almost wrote itself. For example, I’d already developed my own dark machinations about Hanx before I’d started production (by production, I mean the concurrent slide collecting, writing, recording and editing that took three years), and before the Q-Anon obsession with the man wasn’t really a thing yet. Then suddenly it was. In situations like this, I found myself backtracking to incorporate the proofs of concept (if not truths) that society kept vomiting at us, especially during the moist and fetid span of 2019-2022. Remember when the Alt-Right guys marched in Charlottesville in their Best Buy uniforms? And that was 2017! Stylistically, we’re still reckoning with so much. Processing so much. When I started this movie, I thought it would be done by 2021. Time had other plans.
MS: While a very different movie, this reminds me of the plot of UPSTREAM COLOR, which I’ve written about in typically eye-wearying fashion.
“You say it was yours.”
“You say his memory was yours.”
“And it led to a fight, an argument?”
“I thought it was mine. The memory.”
Can you discuss what films influenced you in the making of STILL FILM, and the feedback loop involved in making a film about film using only promotional stills as its imagery, while also relying heavily on film titles and recollected film dialog as your own dialog?
JKW: I never saw UPSTREAM COLOR. I like PRIMER a lot. Didn't that director kind of lose his mind and get canceled? That guy seems like a cautionary tale. Like when he finally got the chance to break into the world he always thought he wanted to be part of, it turned out he was too grabby and unstable. Maybe his mind changed. Is that what UPSTREAM COLOR is about? Its promotional material always struck me as a little fishy. But I don’t know. I only read about it, and I know very little about the guy.
MS: Carruth seemed all too prepared for the big time. As an autodidact he was developing his own FX system to get his major project A TOPIARY made, but the industry fumbled it. While A TOPIARY is still grudgingly considered one of the great unmade screenplays of all time, perhaps more interesting regarding Carruth’s descent into darkness is the film he made instead, UPSTREAM COLOR, about a daemonic sampler mixing up the subject-object medicine, causing all of memory, consciousness, and Sight and Sound to be shared collectively, as though everyone were the viewers of the same internal film. As Carruth and his then partner Amy Seimetz played the leads, it had been a uniquely cinematic metaphor for the unifying properties of love, but his subsequent offenses have retroactively recontextualized the film as a sinister self-portrait of obsession and control.
JKW: I will say knowing about movies can be just as inspirational as seeing movies. Movies as cultural products; non-consensual exposure and all of that. It’s a bit of a miracle for me to get around to regularly watching movies these days because I don’t have any spare time. Adult life has swamped me in many ways. So whatever movies break through feel like small miracles. The rest of the time, I’m left with my memories of movies. The memories of once having time to watch movies with impunity and no expectations and no restrictions and as a pure receptacle.
All this is to say yes, the feedback loop is a real thing.
MS: During the TIFF Q and A you mentioned using a slide carousel, and also (I think…) that you wrote in response to the images rather than ordering the images based on the writing.
The way the film titles interact dialogically with the publicity stills fosters an uncanny sense of repetition. The words RENAISSANCE MAN are heard in such a way that they’d only prompt those familiar with the film that imagery from it may be forthcoming, and then soon after, there’s Danny DeVito in RENAISSANCE MAN, offering an unexpected catharsis.
Other associations are more oblique. When TOTAL RECALL, a film about implanted memory, is referenced we see a still of Madeleine Stowe in 12 MONKEYS, based on LA JETÉE (also referenced in passing), itself a series of still frames in which post-apocalyptic scientists choose candidates “able to perceive or dream of another time” because then “perhaps they were able to live it” and in which “images begin to ooze like confessions” from a narrator “caught in some waves of the world to come.”
Can you discuss the interplay of consciously-constructed patterns with those arising in the unforeseeable combinatronics of the stochastic?
JKW: Order and systematic patterning over the “stochastic.” I’m not sure if I believe in the random. Then again, I don’t go out of my way to create 1:1 combinations. I think gleeful associations and synchronizations should be earned through luck, predestination, and hard work. By this I mean, I knew (as the creator) what images the movie contained, and I could write to them all, but I was very OK with unexpected connections. This is how life works, no? The number of movies I was exposed to between 1983-2001 (my first 18 years) is at once very many for an individual and very few in terms of the history of cinema, not to mention what’s reflected in STILL FILM, further reduced to what I recall seeing, and then what I could locate as residual objects (film slides for sale), and then even muster the thoughts to write about, and so on. The random and the intentional are deeply intertwined.
The actual structure of the movie reinforces this. To make it, I imagined a “virtual slide carousel” with a maximum capacity of 140 slides that could move in only a few ways (forward/rewind/overwind/further still/fast rewind/reorder and start again/seemingly chronological/truly chronological/speed review/some direction I’m forgetting I’m sure). The order makes way for a kind of freedom for image and text to interact. This structure was then reinforced by the the preferred order of a legal deposition proceeding, the purpose of which is to wear down a witness and get them to state useful facts later submitted as evidence and for the opposition, contradict themselves. It’s a process of attrition and narrowing often described as a funnel. Since completing the movie, I’ve come up with a fairly pretentious term for what STILL FILM may be. I recently learned the French word for funnel, which is l’entonnoir. I wonder if STILL FILM is a film l’entonnoir.
MS:
Logline for THE HAUNTOLOGIST: Tom Hanks is THE LAST MAN STANDING who can dissapear every last child on THE SANDLOT. Can his just-in-time re-livery system re-eschew Disneyfied imagery to timeshore a decoying culture before its too late? And at what absorblatent cost?
I won’t spoil the film’s powerful closing speech, but “And here we go again” suggests the past 30 years of popular movies conditioning our collective psyches until they’re just another standing reserve was not an anomalous or nascent undertaking, and it’s safe to assume the practice of producing “facts that haven’t happened yet, IP, intellectual property, THE NEVER ENDING STORY” will continue. The only difference seems now we’re being brainwashed by brainwashers taking scant pride in their craft compared to the Halcyon years when the feedback loop was fed with “Recession, trauma, insurrectionist 90s nostalgiac David Fincher”-aesthetics.
Maybe this laziness will give rise to the next heroic personage for Tom Hanks to co-opt, DER LETZTE MANN who “takes every one’s good deeds and he makes them his own. And he makes them dissapear” in order to unapologetically delude us in just the way we’re nostalgic for, but not quite yet, in due time, the way that the time was ripe for Mr. Rogers in 2019.
DJ Spooky describes, “Symbol and synecdoche, sign and signification, all at once, the digital codes become a reflection, a mirror permutation of the nation…” DJ Spooky asks, “Where to go? What to do to get there?”
If the carousel is beginning a new cycle, eagerly seeking not Susan but the distilled essence of new Brad Renfros or Brock Pierces, is there an egress point?
Have Nietzsche scholars ever decided if there is a way to repeat the same, but differently?
DJ Spooky again, to end on an optimistic note, asks, “Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them?”
You also mentioned your desire that your motivation in making the film become immaterial. Can you expand on that?
JKW: Thank you for reminding me to revisit the DJ Spooky of my youth, cruising late New England nights in an/the old Volvo. I think I’m on Spooky’s side — not entirely pessimistic. I truly think it’s a very exciting time to be making movies if we can drop a lot of the baggage of the past few decades. Stuff that we take for granted, ranging from the star system (the conniption fits of SAG and the studios, so annoying), and perhaps even cameras(!), but especially Cannes and Oscar winning movies that are applauded for gently “critiquing” the very class that is doing the awarding.
Anyway, I’m taken by your qualifications to your questions, and delighted to see you spin off with these ideas. I don’t have much to add in terms of answers except to explain what I like about the word “immaterial.” It’s a layered word:
Legal - not adding to pointPhilosophical - the spiritualPhysical - not existing (by implication)
Movies seem to add to life, but aren’t life. They require much physical labor, yet are most successful when the labor is scrubbed and condensed, and lightly distributed in multiple shapes and forms across continents. Connected to this idea of access, movies are capable of creating nearly spiritual experiences in people — memories and phobias and value systems and so on. While at the same time, movies don’t fully matter — that’s part of the fun. They aren’t the most serious things. And that’s why you can’t sue a movie, right? You can’t take it to to court. We’re seeing this play out with Alec Baldwin shooting case — who or what is responsible for this desire that ended up killing a person. The plot? The story? The trigger finger? The actor’s finger? Was the actor’s finger coerced? Coerced by the producer’s finger, which was the same finger?
Here’s a new conspiracy for you: I suspect disturbed people are beginning to cut off their fingers to prove they are real. Very recently, I had an off-putting conversation with a Crypto enthusiast who was missing a good portion of his fingers. I was distracted by this, as well as how absurd it was for him to be so enthusiastic about whatever dumb coin he was talking about, given the recent history of crypto instability. He either has his head way deep in the sand or is searching for new ways to believe. As you’ve probably have read, images currently rendered by A.I. have trouble with human fingers, usually adding extra digits. Internet people are already adding fake fingers their pictures to sow confusion, so why not the opposite? Grand and brutal gestures to prove you mean business. That you actually exist.