The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg

Joe Swanberg as Tim in LOL, Swanberg, Bewersdorf, Wells, 2006

I: Apologia

Why Swanberg? Why now?

Blame it on my snark.

In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed “Mumblecore") are noted for their improvisational “realism” and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the “interest” in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: “I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.”

Now, those who know me even slightly, or read this blog with some regularity, probably understand that when it comes to cheap jokes I pretty much have no superego. And my Swanberg joke was pretty cheap. But it elicited some impassioned defenses of Swanberg’s work from, at first, Craig Keller, a cinephile of great passion and erudition and one of the more forceful and tenacious arguers I know. I hadn’t been aware that Craig was such a, as I put it, “Swanbergian.” I was aware that at least one other formidable film writer on the Internet, Dan Sallitt, held Swanberg’s work in pretty high esteem. With Keller on his side, a potential front was coalescing. My post also received some intelligent comments from Tom Russell, a young independent filmmaker who’s both a Swanberg fan and associate.

If I’m going to come out and say that I for the most part reject the work that Joe Swanberg has put his name on thus far, it occurs to me that individuals such as Keller and Russell are entitled to some fuller accounting. I also wanted to take up a kind of formal challenge: to construct a rejection of Swanberg that would avoid the sort of snark I used in the above-mentioned Sundance post, and steer clear of the too-easy ad hominem attacks that Swanberg (some would say rather bravely) leaves himself open to. Before doing so, it’s incumbent on me, with my old-school journalistic ethics and all, to lay some cards on the table.

II: Caveat

I’ve only met Joe Swanberg on one occasion, and the encounter was not unpleasant. But I have never found his public persona particularly appealing. (We’ll get to his performing persona soon enough.) Like several of the main characters in his films, he seems to sport a perpetual half-smirk that’s rather grating. He always struck me as a bit of a, well, fraud; a smarter-than-average collegiate jock, perhaps, who figured out that picking up a camcorder was a good way to meet hot art chicks. I understand that the facts of his biography don’t support this perception, and some might argue that his work ethic (he’s put together five features in as many years; done two web-based video series, one still ongoing; he acts and does technical work in seemingly scores of micro-indies) obliterates the notion he’s a fraud. Still. There's my bias.

Other things you might believe germane to the spirit of full disclosure: I did have something of an on-line dustup with Swanberg over at the Spout blog; I made some remarks about what I considered the irredeemably insipid nature of his web series Butterknife, and he responded by naming a post “Glennkenny Glen Ross.” (Which, like, you know, really blew my fucking mind, because, you know, I’d never heard THAT one before.) I am friendly with Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant, who run Benten Films, which released the DVD of Swanberg and co.’s LOL. (As it happens I believe that LOL is Swanberg’s strongest work; that assertion, I allow, might look funny next to the above admission.) I appeared as a performer in a short film that Hillis directed for an abortive web anthology of shorts initiated and subsequently, I suppose, abandoned by Swanberg. Please believe me when I say I don’t care about that, to the extent that it took me a good amount of brain-racking to even recall it.

I once attended a party that was also attended by Greta Gerwig, who has collaborated on three films with Swanberg. Swanberg and I have 51 Facebook friends in common. (Man, Bosley Crowther never had these kind of issues, did he?) That is all, I think.

III: Non-Theoretical Phallus: Kissing on the Mouth

Swanberg’s first feature, 2005’s Kissing on the Mouth, made shortly after he received a BA in film from Southern Illinois University, is the most sexually explicit feature Swanberg has made to date, and hence, a good place to take on one of Craig Keller’s points. Keller insists that Swanberg’s  “sex-scenes have something true, honest, funny, brash, and sincere to say about sexuality on film,” and that the heat he (Swanberg) takes for them stems from “some My Phallic Camera sub-theoretical basis.” Keller believes that Swanberg’s work in this area could fuel “an entire panel discussion [pertaining to] what/how/when/whether that camera or the cinema can or should show with regard to sex/violence, with regard to a narrative-construct around it.”

“It’s a question,” Keller insists, “that Swanberg has been implicitly posing from Kissing on the Mouth to Young American Bodies…which I find has much, MUCH less to do with ‘provocation’ for its own sake than plumbing down to the well of an aesthetic question that, as far as I’m concerned, has barely anything to do with any morality beyond the emotions of the actors.”

Pace Keller, but one doesn’t need any theoretical basis, “sub” or not, to detect the presence of a phallic camera in KOTM. It’s right there, trying to make an abstraction out of the way Kris Williams’ character trims her pubic hair with a scissor, then trying really hard not to lose it as it lingers long and hard on Kate Winterich tending her sparser thatch with a razor in the shower. Yes, people trim the hair around their private parts, and why shouldn’t that be something we can show in cinema? Point taken. On the other hand, just what the fuck are you looking at, buddy?

Things come to a head when…okay, okay, sorry, I said I wouldn’t resort to such cheap shots. Ahem. Let's continue.

The film’s centerpiece is a shower scene in which Swanberg’s character, Patrick, masturbates, alternating fantasizing about having sex with his roommate Ellen (Winterich) and her friend Laura (Williams, later to become the real-life Mrs. Swanberg). Most of KOTM is shot in handheld from a relatively objective perspective, such that, without the sex, the film could pass for a documentary about a particularly dull group of post-collegiates. But in this scene, its masturbation unsimulated and performed to completion, we are actually taken inside of Patrick’s mind. We see him pawing and kissing Laura’s breasts, then Kate’s, and we see him furiously beating off. What all this is for, we don’t know. The sudden switch from an objective to subjective perspective doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know; that Patrick is strongly attracted to Ellen and more ambivalently attracted to Laura has already been established. It doesn’t create suspense; the picture, up until this point, hasn’t been about whether Patrick will end up with Ellen or Laura; it hasn’t really been about much of anything. So what’s this scene for/about? Even if we discount whatever personal motives Swanberg had for conceiving, shooting and editing the scene in this fashion, the inevitable conclusion is not encouraging.

Is the “implicit question” Keller mentions posed here? Yes. But it’s inextricable from a literally balls-out assertion of male privilege. Why anybody would find this off-putting I have no idea. (Another such assertion, more cannily played, occurs at the climax of 2008's Nights and Weekends, wherein Swanberg's character withholds sex from Gerwig's.)

IV: The Slackness

Keller says he often finds the performers in Swanberg’s pictures “magnificent.”  Tom Russell cites a scene from Hannah Takes The Stairs as particularly moving, indeed, “the best moment" in Swanberg's work. “The scene in which Gerwig’s Hannah and one of her suitors are discussing his medication for his depression, and then Hannah explains that she doesn't want to use him, that he's a person and so she doesn't want to use him (or something along those lines, I'm paraphrasing)…the self-consciousness on display, the acute self-awareness, it's palpable and moving. 
”

Here is a case where agreeing to disagree just won’t do. I particularly do not see what Russell sees, and the reason I don’t see it is, I insist, that it’s not really there. That is, the self-consciousness is there. But not of these half-formed characters. It’s of the actors. The fault is not (particularly) with Gerwig, a potentially appealing performer (see her work in The Duplass Brothers’ Baghead) whom I believe is ill served (not to mention ill-used) by Swanberg. The fault, in this particular scene, is with Kent Osborne, as the suitor, named Matt. Rarely, if ever, moving any body part below the neck, Osborne sleepwalks through the picture with, yes, a perpetual half-smirk; it only disappears for one scene, when he goes into a petulant sulk, by way of expressing his displeasure that work colleagues Hannah and Paul have taken up with each other. Otherwise, the smirk is always there, along with a smug near-monotone. It never leaves his face even as he describes some of his most perhaps painful secrets, such as his use of medication for depression. I don’t know Osborne at all, perhaps he is one of the finest people on this earth, but I could not watch his face in Hannah for more than two minutes at a time without wanting to do violence to it. Not that I ever would, mind you. Just so you know.

Kent Osborne, Hannah Takes The Stairs, Swanberg et. al., 2007

Andrew Bujalski’s depiction of Paul is also smirk-laden, which by rights ought be even more annoying, as the unprepossessing character would seem to have little to smirk about. Pretty much every performer in Hannah, save for Gerwig and Jay Mark Duplass, is some kind of slack disgrace. So too, is Hannah’s dramatic argumentation, such as it is. Every other scene in the picture has the air of an acting workshop improv exercise, right down to the way the furniture is arranged. Below is a shot from one of Hannah’s “office” scenes; note the chair in front of the door. Rather than any coherent idea of production design, Swanberg invariably works with consideration only for whatever he needs/wants for any given scene. So, here, Hannah and Paul need to be sitting down and facing Matt, which means…putting a chair where it would rarely, if ever, actually be in an office. But that’s okay. Contingency rules.

Bujalski, Gerwig, Osborne, Hannah

The slackness reaches an apogee of sorts with Butterknife, the series Swanberg created with Ronald Bronstein and Mary Bronstein for Spout. Butterknife’s eight episodes have a structural similarity to the very, very many episodes of Swanberg’s other web video series, Young American Bodies. Bifurcation is key here. In Young American Bodies the bodies in question dissemble and stammer about their desires while they’ve got their clothes on, and…have sex with their clothes off. This—the contrast between modes, that is—is a little more interesting than it sounds, at least for a couple of episodes, and possibly speaks perhaps more eloquently to Keller’s above quoted concerns than KOTM does. But…it gets real old, real quick; the repetition of the idea doesn’t reap any benefits. As for Butterknife, its episodes toggle between the workaday travails of an inept private detective (or whatever he is) played by Bronstein, Ronald, and his relatively blissful domestic existence with his loving wife, played by Bronstein, Mary. Only without showing the couple having sex, because I suppose the actual Bronsteins were a little shy about that (although we are treated to the sight of Bronstein, Ronald, negotiating a bongo board in black briefs).

The half-assedness of Butterknife’s dramatic conceit—there’s no other way of putting this—practically reeks of the contempt in which Swanberg, the Bronsteins, and pretty much every other participant in the project, would seem to hold their putative audience. Bronstein, Ronald, plays a private investigator of sorts, who both hates his work and is bad at it. Now I recall that Phillip Marlowe had his off days, and quite a few of them at that, but my understanding about investigative work is that it’s kind of an elective. Or an avocation. Or, you know, not likely a job that one gets roped into for lack of other employment options. So there’s that. Bronstein can’t even get the vocabulary of the profession right; trying to discourage a would-be client, he tells him that he’s read his “disposition.” That would be “deposition,” and it would be a deposition only once lawyers had already gotten involved. But, as they say, whatever.

The bits of business involving marital bliss are not much of an improvement. In one attempt at, I don’t know, maybe an I Love Lucy homage, Mary (the characters played by the Bronsteins are putatively unnamed, but that particular conceit isn’t held on to for terribly wrong, as Mary lets drop a “Ronzo” at one point, and then…well you get the idea) finds herself stuck under the couple's bed and calls for her husband to help her out. He responds by getting a camera to take a picture of her predicament, and then proceeds to pull at her feet. Ronald Bronstein is a pretty skinny fellow, but I think he’s got it in him to, you know, actually lift the bed. Those who consider Swanberg and his cohorts to be little more than self-infatuated circle-jerkers will find ample evidence for their argument here.

 IV: The Imagery

Occasionally a Swanberg picture will offer up an image that is memorable in itself, and Swanberg’s supporters sometimes cite him as a “director of moments,” moments in which the performers will hit upon an emotional truth that we may find discomfiting, or unusual to see in a film at all, or whatnot. While I’ve never perceived the emotional temperature in a Swanberg movie to rise above lukewarm (which is one reason I find Dan Sallitt’s comparison of Swanberg to Maurice Pialat frankly ridiculous), I will grant that there are such moments in his films. Sometimes they come across awkwardly, as if they've just been stumbled across; sometimes there’s a modicum of wit in their delivery, as in the texting-in-front-of-the-girlfriend scene in LOL. That said, I insist that this doesn’t happen enough to make Swanberg worth my time and faith. Put another way, he gives me more grief than aesthetic bliss.  And while I agree to some extent with Russell, in that I don’t exactly think Swanberg merely shoots a bunch of stuff and then throws it up there, I do again insist that there’s something largely, sometimes overwhelmingly, contingent about Swanberg’s cinema. The image quality is always in the hands of whoever’s holding the camera. And it ratchets up, or down, from there. LOL, I think, works as well as it does partly because of the quality of Swanberg’s collaborators; something in the aggregation was pushing him, albeit ever so slightly, out of his claustrophobic world of close-ups and medium close-ups, out of his almost infantile refusal to ever use the camera to evoke a sense of space beyond the immediate proximity of his characters. I have not chosen to attack Swanberg on the grounds that his work does not, in Kent Jones’ phrase, allow for a sense of experience beyond its own parameters, but it is of course guilty of that, and it looks as if it will continue to be. But attacking it on those grounds is just too easy. 

I do, however, take umbrage with attempts to tie Swanberg to filmmakers much, much greater than he, citing some affinity by way of circumscribed circumstances, or of, say, a putative eschewal of pictorialism. Swanberg defender Tom Russell wrote in the above-cited comments thread: “Take the last shot of Ozu’s Late Spring; it's just Chishu Ryu peeling an apple. Take a still frame of that, and it's not particularly "beautiful"-- put it at the end of the film, though, and it breaks your heart, it's Beauty Par Excellence.” Well, exactly, except I take issue with the assertion that a single frame from that scene would not be particularly beautiful:

That aside, the shot/scene works the way it does because it’s a culmination to a series of sequences and shots that have been precisely calibrated by director Yasujiro Ozu. There is never any sense of such calibration at work in a Swanberg work. Swanberg likes to cite Herzog and Dziga Vertov as theorists who’ve influenced his own vision of film. But putting aside the fact that the collectivism espoused in Swanberg’s credits (it’s rarely a film by Swanberg, but rather a film by Swanberg/Wells/Bewerdorf, Swanberg/Gerwig, and so on) points to a Vertovian ideal, if we’re talking about cinema as a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s not (as Scorsese so memorably put it), what’s in gives zero indication of a masterful sensibility at work. This is what makes Swanberg so suspect to me: the fact that a good three-quarters of what he puts on screen could have been coughed up by somebody who only got through half of Camcording For Dummies, or some such. A particular moment in Hannah stands out for me, in the scene in which Hannah’s soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Mike (Mark Duplass) slathers Hannah with ice cubes in a putative attempt to ease her sunburn. Gerwig's Hannah squirms and jerks in discomfort; before the camera zooms in on her, she jerks up her head and for a split second looks at…what? Something to her left, a reasonable distance away from the space described (clumsily) by the frame. It’s clear, in that split second, that Gerwig is no longer registering the character’s discomfort, but that, instead, she’s trying very hard not to look at the camera. Some might argue this is one of Swanberg’s moments of truth. I see a bad take, one that should have been discarded in the editing room.

And, yes; the final shot of Hannah, in which Hannah and Matt share a bath and play inept trumpet at each other (I presume that any correspondence this has with the last lines of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point is entirely coincidental), is something of an ironic fillip, a nose-thumbing at conventional happy endings. But as the sole piece of directorial commentary in the entire film, it sticks out like a sore thumb in much the same way as KOTM’s shower scene does.

V: The Insipid

Swanberg’s characters really do talk a lot of shit. That’s the whole point, I’m told. Still. Gets numbing after a while.

“Don’t you hate that guy? He’s a fuckin’ prick, right? Whatever…”

“You should come out here. I’m really bored.”

“I get really frustrated because I love things so much and I feel that what I do is so trite and so small.”

 “I feel like I been, I dunno, I dunno, just didn’t know.”

“I’m not ready to kiss people.”/“You’re not people.”/“Yeah, okay, yeah, okay; I just don’t want…weirdness.”

This is real? I don’t know. I know a fair number of men and women in their twenties, early thirties, and all of them are far more stimulating conversationalists than this. Maybe I’m lucky. And even allowing that this is real; well, just because something is real doesn't exempt it from being twaddle. 

And speaking of twaddle, I haven’t even gotten to the music in Swanberg’s pictures yet. But I believe this will do.

Understand, please, in taking issue with these films, I’m not trying to make any kind of blanket statement about the putative ethos behind such works, or tar all of Swanberg’s associates with the same brush. I certainly don’t want to put across any kind of “you damn kids with your digital video and your casual nudity” vibe here. Just trying to answer a particular set of queries and concerns.

UPDATE: I incorrectly attributed one Swanberg-praising quote, specifically citing a scene from Hannah, to Craig Keller, when it in fact came from Tom Russell. I have corrected this. Both Keller and Russell have informed me they are preparing responses to this piece; I am not being in any way snarky when I say I look forward to them. 

FURTHER UPDATE: Craig Keller posts an "overture" to further thoughts on Swanberg here. More to come.

Comments

[bill]

Don, I assume this...

"Or worse, same commenters haven't even SEEN any of Joe's movies, got sick of reading about him and just jumped into the backlash for shits n giggles and some misplaced issues of inadequacy or artistic frustration."

...was a reference to the comments made by Keith Gow and myself. Have you ever commented on a blog post about a filmmaker with whose work you were unfamiliar, wherein you stated how you believed you would react to it? Never?? Really??

And I can't speak for Keith beyond this: his comments were hardly mean, and neither were mine. And we BOTH said that we were curious to check out Swanberg's films, despite what Glenn had to say.

Meanwhile, you throw out your own insults, based on what? What did I, or Keith, say that was so incredibly out of line? And use our words, don't try and tell us what we "really mean".

[Oliver Drakeford]

I don't understand why people should be given kudos for doing the minimum amount of work, as Swanberg does. He films improv acting exercises and then edits them together. So he works fast. So what? Maybe he shouldn't work so fast. That these movies are even talked about speaks to something larger that has happened in our culture, because movies like these have always been made. Most of them were ignored, though. And then something happened about six years ago, a democratizing of the means of production and distribution, which I think is wonderful. It's just that the people who are benefiting from this confluence are not really deserving, artistically. If Swanberg goes on to become a better filmmaker, someone who cares about the possibilities of the medium (as opposed to just caring about Joe Swanberg and Joe Swanberg's place at the table), then I will be happy for him. But I don't think he will, and why should he want this, when, in some circles, he is already spoken of as some kind of master filmmaker. Pialat? Ozu? I mean, okay. That's kind of like placing Ariel Pink in with Dylan and Lennon & McCartney. My biggest problem with Swanberg's and Bujalski's and The Duplass' (I haven't seen anything by the Bronsteins [Glenn: I know you are referring to Ron Bronstein when you mentioned John Connoly and Mark Ebner. I've heard the stories.]) films is the acting. I went to NYU, graduated with a degree in Dramatic Writing, worked with plenty of bad, mediocre, good, and great actors, and I can't believe how truly awful and just plain lazy the acting is in these movies, and how unaware the actors are of how bad they are and how smug they come across. If there was some acknowledgement of the smugness, if the subject of these movies was the smugness, then okay, now we have something. But these movies are not about that. These movies are about people who figured out a way to make movies. And that's not enough for me. That shouldn't be enough for anybody, but I guess it is. At least I take comfort in knowing that this type of cinema has been named, and as such, will eventually fade away (only to be reclaimed by cineastes in, what, 15 to 20 years, give or take?). Hopefully the next proponents of Minimum Exertion Cinema will take a little more pride in their work. Swanberg gets a lot more from making movies than the audience gets in watching them, which, to me, is just greedy. But when I think about it, that seems to be apropos for the time we live in. Maximum profits for almost no work.

[craig keller.]

Let me diffuse a couple milligrams of unbridled contempt for the Commenters on this thread who would believe that a still frame-grab, divorced of context or, y'know, movement and sound, can settle the case once-and-for-all for bad mise-en-scène, or the demerits of a filmmaker.

One can capture frames from any film, even one by a revered studio-based master like Ozu, which look like shit — F.Y.fucking.I. Setsuko Hara with her eyes half-blinky, maybe; Chishû Ryû seemingly captured mid-seizure but actually on the cusp of pronouncing, "Kono thread de hihan-suru hitobito wa, Kurosawa no hakuchi da yo." I suppose the points-scoring rejoinder to this will be, "Heh-um, [snark-expulsion of air from nostrils, accompanied by half-smirk similar to that castigated by GK above], of course, it's one thing to pull out an ugly frame from a film with so many beautiful ones, but try finding a single beautiful one in a place where there ARE none." To which I would respond that they exist in the films of Swanberg — who, by the way, shouldn't be induced to formulate a body of work that only justifies its existence by its degree of proximity to Ozu, any more than should Hollis Frampton, or Bob Clark — and I'll be presenting the evidence when I write about each of the films over the next week or two at Cinemasparagus + the Indiepix blog. At that point, feel free to take the — not a defense, but an elucidation — or turn and walk away. Just know that your glib little crowing on Internet comment threads smacks about five times more envacuumed, implicitly-'superior', and self-conscious+totally-unaware than any of the persons/characters in the films under discussion.

Let me also register my disgust at the prevailing viewpoint, which clearly exists, no matter how much you people (yes, YOU people) deny it exists, that the aesthetic value of a film is directly proportional to its budget or — how I coat this term with such bile-relish as I pronounce it — "production values." The entrancing waft of Mammon creates the thrall to everything from short works being considered "supplements" (or: "bonus features"), to the U.S.'s most popular films being reported by way of ticket-grosses, rather than number-of-tickets-sold. (The tallying itself being, obviously, absurd to begin with.) Couple completely independent filmmaking, shot ON OCCASION in spaces with white walls and dumpy furniture, like the kind that wasn't at all art-designed (because it's fucking REAL) (I would love to see any of you "art-design" that office from the temp scenes in Bujalski's 'Funny Ha Ha' and in thus attempting even get NEAR articulating both the warp-and-woof of the suburban world beyond New York City or metropolitan exurbs, AND a very particular and soul-crushing pathos of the American lower-middle-class) — with portrayals of sex, and the American public — those Pragmatic Purveyors of Proportion — really, REALLY get their dander up. The thought process, which might be titled "The American Anxiety Over a Perceived Discrepancy in Levels of Commitment to the Diegesis on the Part of the Filmmaker, or: The American Anxiety Over Perceived Way-More-Than-Any-of-Us-Had-Been-Expecting-Commitment to the Diegesis on the Part of the Filmmaker," goes something like this, as I see it:

-Look at Joe Swanberg's fuckin' FACE. With that fuckin' GOATEE. And his fuckin' MOUTH OPEN.

-Yeah. That dumb fuckin' MOUTH.

-I know. And he's getting written about (ugh, and by the way seriously I could do what he does and get written about, ugh it's so depressing), because there was like, this scene, where he came, right. And it was coming to other women.

-Other women who were IN the FILM? Oh my god. That's so phallocentric.

-I know. He must have had them hypnotized to agree to it. Didn't they realize they were being, essentially, RAPED?

-They were TOTALLY being raped! By proxy. Which is to say by the camera. Which is to say by what it filmed, which is what I was watching. Which is to say Joe Swanberg is making me feel like I've committed the raping.

-Ugh. What a creep. And he keeps puppeting them into doing this again and again in his movies. And you know what, if they're not, okay, being puppeted, let me just go on record and say that, if that's NOT the case? then these women are just LOOSE, I'm sorry. It's like, anyway, I'll take my movie-sex simulated next time, thanks, where it exists to mechanistically keep the story moving. Proxy-rape is only for behind the door of my own bedroom.

-Seriously. And okay, I'm all for "more mise-en-scène than there is story," I mean, SOMETIMES, but it's gotta have some punch — y'know, 'cause mise-en-scène as I understand it is really just vividness of colors, epic'ness of scope, and busy-ness of the flower-arrangements in the frame. Gloss.

-I don't want the dull-matte-finish that Swanberg's selling.

-I know. I want something saleable. Something that makes me feel like I'm getting my money's worth — I want to see a car-chase or at least some fuckin' velvet curtains, y'know, so I have SOME evidence that the filmmakers respected my spending my money on the price of the ticket/rental — which car-chase or velvet curtains would evince their concern and that they did put forth some effort here by at least finding SOME funds. If not ideas.

-Exactly. At least have the courtesy to give us signifiers.

And so on and so on. Hey, Commenters, we can agree to disagree — one man's Gerwig-looking-away-to-avoid-looking-at-the-camera-is-an-amateur's-botched-take, is another man's Gerwig-looking-away-to-avoid-looking-at-the-camera-is-touching-human-and-real. It just comes down to two different ways of looking at movies, to two different ways of looking at the world. And, apparently, to a difference in opinion over whether such twains as movies and life, must ever, ever meet — whether there must ever, ever exist a Cinema of Contiguity.

Since his name was mentioned once in a (tangential) comparison Dan made between the filmmaker and Swanberg, I'll shut off my vent's diffusion by reciting the words of Maurice Pialat: "Si vous ne m'aimez pas, je peux vous dire que je ne vous aime pas non plus."

[Joe Bowman]

I think you're right about Gerwig as well, Glenn. By association, I assumed that I disliked her (almost) as much as I disliked Swanberg's films, but in fact, after seeing both Baghead and Mary Bronstein's Yeast, I found that she's actually quite good. I guess it's about time for her to start working with some better directors.

[Emilio Perez]

Yeah. I agree with Craig Keller. It's all the commenters' fault.

By the way: Who is Craig Keller?

And, Craig Keller: the though that you may have hitched a ride with the wrong crowd is kind of scary, isn't it?

[bill]

Jesus. A lot of people are putting a lot of words in the mouths of other people around here, aren't they?

[bill]

Also, Craig, your forgot to add "I don't like Joe Swanberg because I like Michael Bay, or whatever!"

I can't believe you forgot about that one.

[Bernard Lurie]

Craig: who says we want car chases? I think you're at the wrong site. No one here wants car chases. But we do want something other than 90 minutes of auto-fellatio. But I guess that's really too much to ask, huh? How dare us. And it sounds like you're about to lose your shit, bro. Calm down. It's only movies. Go get a latte and read some Willa Cather. Jeez. You'd think we all just took a collective dump in your mouth. Are you that invested in these movies that you have to throw a public hissy fit when people don't like them, and for reasons that seem entirely, well, reasonable? Let's see:

1) The movies are ugly.
2) The acting is amateurish.
3) The production design is nil.
4) There is no script.
5) The "director" likes to show his cock. (Which isn't a bad thing per se; I think Brown Bunny is a great movie for precisely that reason, because Gallo exposed himself in honor of his characters sorrow and desperation.)
6) Everyone involved seems exceedingly pleased with themselves.
7) The only audience for the films is the people making the films, and their friends, thus leading to charges of hermeticism.

I don't know, Craig. Maybe people just don't like these movies because they don't think they're very good. Is that a possibility? Of course not. Because what the fuck do we know. We're just a bunch of losers living in our parent's basement.

Your contempt is palpable.

[Alex Gregorianis]

I think I can boil Craig Keller's rant down to this:

I HATE YOU AND I HATE YOUR ASS-FACE!

or

YOU'RE SO STUPID!

Nice.

[bill]

Well...to be honest, occasionally, I DO want car chases.

[don lewis]

I'm out the door and haven't fully caught up here but I will say...

bill- none of what I said was directed at you man. I respect you and your opinions and you're not an anonymous internet commenter either, So...sorry for the confusion. If I take issue with what you say, I will say "bill...I disagree" or what have you. I was talking to the anonymous trash talkers.

[bill]

My apologies, Don.

[Alex Gregorianis]

Don: I don't see any anonymous commenters in this thread. I see a lot people giving their full names. Do you mean to say that because you don't know who any of these people are, they are somehow anonymous? That seems kind of snobby. Plus, I have no idea who you are, or if that is even your real name, so should I consider you anonymous too? My email is agreg200@hotmail.com in case you think I am an "anonymous." News to me.

[craig keller.]

@Emilio Perez: Is that like being on the wrong side of history? (And @Emilio Perez's Withering Snark: Who is Emilio Perez?)

@Bernard Lurie: We look at movies in two different ways. To wit: Any of your first five points could apply (a) in any combination; (b) as a whole; or (c) individually, to any given film — but in any of these hypothetical examples, this would have "nil" to do, at least for me, with contributing to how good or bad I think the film is, and whether it succeeds as cinema. Beyond that, "the director likes to show his cock" and "everyone seems exceedingly pleased with themselves" aren't even insights. Here's something else I find contemptible, since we're engaged in a serious stretch of cataloguing: The rhetorical 'tactic' of: "It's just movies, man, calm down." "They're just IDEAS, bro -- chi'zill out!" "It's just LIFE, dawg!"

Wake up. The cinema is as real as your latté. (Thought-experiment: What are the implications of pitting Plato's Cave vs. Lurie's Latté?)

[Tony Dayoub]

@ Craig,

I'm surprised by your reaction. Other than a few trolls trying to foment a snark war (and it's pretty obvious that they're being ignored), most of the commenters here have expressed a desire to check out Swanberg's work despite (and maybe even because of) Glenn's criticism.

The fact that Glenn is giving Swanberg such a long analysis (I've rarely seen a post as extensive as this one since he left Premiere) signifies that he recognizes that Swanberg has had some kind of impact, even if he doesn't agree with the nature of it.

And it looks to me like 1) the commenters who haven't seen his work are still open to viewing it, 2) those that have seen it either dislike it and are saying so, or 3) like it and are defending him.

So I think we all need to chillax a little bit. One can argue passionately without losing their grip on reality.

[Alex Gregorianis]

Craig, you should work in government. You say everything and nothing at the same time. That's quite a talent. You should put it to better use.

[krauthammer]

@ John Felice "I'm sure he's sitting in Austin right now, shit eating grin on his face, a UT sophomore pre-med hottie sucking his balls, saying to himself, Yes, yes, I am Joe Swanberg, motherfuckers, that's right, uh huh."

I love you.

[Ray]

I for one enjoyed Craig Keller's rant. The dialogue was a lot of fun. But I also liked this statement: "It just comes down to two different ways of looking at movies, to two different ways of looking at the world. And, apparently, to a difference in opinion over whether such twains as movies and life, must ever, ever meet — whether there must ever, ever exist a Cinema of Contiguity."

I think we're in the middle of a never-ending discussion of exactly how much "realism" we want, and how we should define it. There are vacuous people out there, and they do speak in vacuous ways and mouth cliches, and sometimes eliminating the "mise en scene" can give us the exhilarating sense of looking in on the real. But as Mr. Keller said, any two of us can vigorously disagree about whether the result is worth watching, let alone whether it qualifies as art. I haven't seen any Swanberg--and argh, after reading these descriptions, I don't think I want to--but I do think it's entirely possible that the filmmaker who makes us angriest could turn out to be the one the next generation will find to have been the trailblazer.

As for the non-simulated sex aspect, I would have thought there was no way to make that work in any serious film--until I watched Breillat's "Romance." But then, Breillat doesn't put herself in the scene humping anybody...

Thanks to all of you posters--this is the most stimulating exchange I've read in quite a while!

[Claire K.]

Actually, Craig, there's nothing much fucking REAL about sticking chairs in front of doors. It's not the absence of art direction or staging, it's an embarrassing staging *mistake*.

Unless, that is, we're supposed to infer from that small context clue that HTTS is actually secretly a movie about a bunch of people trapped in a room together, not through any catastrophic circumstance, but through their own tragic failure to recognize that they need only scoot a chair a few feet in one direction in order to achieve sweet freedom. God, Joe Swanberg is just like a po-mo Samuel Beckett, isn't he?

[Alex Gregorianis]

Ray: "I do think it's entirely possible that the filmmaker who makes us angriest could turn out to be the one the next generation will find to have been the trailblazer."

Uwe Boll?
Michael Bay?
Brett Ratner?
Or maybe Joel Schumacher? He makes me really mad.

I would argue that Swanberg's films aren't realistic at all. As a matter of fact, I find them totally artifical, and this is mainly due to their shoddy construction and aesthetics and acting, etc., etc. I never not know that I'm watching a movie, if that makes any sense. I find that I can't lose myself in the movie because there is no movie to lose myself in. I do think they're pretty good home movies, though.

Listen, this whole Austin/SXSW/Mumblecore thing has become a little industry unto itself. I totally get why the people involved are so adamant about hositing themselves up the art pole and proclaiming their worth. I would too if I was them. It makes financial sense. And they have the platform to shout those down who call them out as frauds. In the end, the only thing that's going to matter is whether or not the movies were any good, and I am of the school that believes that those who care, who pride themselves on attention to detail, who are specific, are the ones who will last. I have seen LOL, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends and a few episodes of Young American Bodies, and I would say that attention to detail and specificity are not Swanberg's main concerns. I think Swanberg will be an inspiration to those seeking a business model for how to make a film for nothing, quickly. But artistically? There's nothing in the movies to inspire anyone to do anything. And I find that the subject matter of his movies, how young people deal with each other in relationships, to be kind of quaint and inconsequential. But that's just me. Is there really any difference between Nights and Weekends and He's Just Not That Into You? I don't know. Part of me thinks no. But then again, I'm probably wrong because I don't have a blog.

If any of you are interested in watching a movie by a young filmmaker who does care about these things, and whose pretty humble to boot, you should check out Kentucker Audley's Team Picture. He's been lumped in with the whole Mumblecore crowd by some, but he shouldn't be. He's too good, too funny, and too humane. I think he stands on his own.

[don lewis]

First off, I'm dying to say, if I read Cinemasparagus will my pee smell funny after?

Claire-you absolutely can decide if you like a filmmakers work after 5 years worth of it. But when a comment like Glenn makes such as when he hears about a new Swanberg movie he wonders if he "shows his schlong in it?" as a means of pre-judgement, I find that trite and kind of lame. Are you telling me that a comment like that implies Glenn (or whoever else says that) won’t “dislike Swanberg’s films for infinity?” Or only if he shows his schlong will they dislike them?

All I was getting as was, Joe is exploring as he goes. I never meant to imply this was the correct thing to do for him and perhaps he should take his time. But, he's doing it this way. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Has anyone seen his doc on Ellen Stagg on IFC.com? It’s really good. That being said, I gave up on “Young American Bodies” into the second season and “Butterknife” after 2 episodes.

Alex- I agree that what I said about the perceived (by me) anonymity of people here could come off as snobby. However Swanberg has a bunch of bitter Betty enemies so I do tend to take names I've never heard of with link-free 'net handles with a grain of salt.

As for that "office scene" Glenn pointed out, those people in the film work in an advertising firm and the chairs and that room was set up for these brainstorming sessions they'd have. While I totally concur with Glenn that things have been set up in order to placate the scene and how the camera will be placed, it's a bit disingenuous to say he sets up “all” his scenes that way.

And along the lines of how his films look...the dude is shooting what he knows within the budget he has. Does it look like shit? Yeah, sometimes. The photos I’ve seen of his new one look a lot better and he has real actors in it (Josh Hamilton, Jane Adams, Jessica Weixler) so maybe the “acting” will impove.

As for the thus far “poor acting,” ummm….I could be wrong, but they aren’t acting. Aside from Gerwig, none of those people are really actors. I think that’s Joe’s point in a lot of ways (and I hope I can pull my later thoughts back to this) in that the camera is only capable of capturing truth and maybe the truth is, the camera makes you lie? Is it possible to NOT be conscious of the camera? I mean, isn’t this the question posed by several people over the years?

[jon]

The case of Joe Swanberg is an interesting one, if only because the guy has had the balls to publicly show his films in the first place. As far as I can tell, KOTM was his first foray into filmmaking, period, and it's actually available on Netflix. As someone who went to film school, I couldn't imagine wanting to share my student films with anyone now. I'm 28, and it's hard to imagine what life would have been like if something I'd made at 22 premiered at SXSW.

I think filmmakers, compared to, say, songwriters or novelists, are at a disadvantage in a lot of ways, because once you make a film so much time and sweat has gone into it (often the product of many, many more brows than just your own) that you feel a sense of obligation to submit to festivals and the like, when maybe the best thing to do would be to just put it in a drawer and move on to the next one. In Swanberg's case, he got into a fairly major US festival his first time out of the gate, and I wonder what might have happened if the only people to ever see KOTM were his cast and crew.

The only reason I bring this up is because, largely by choice, it seems like Swanberg has really had to learn as a filmmaker in public, something I both admire and feel sorry for. It used to be, back when you had to shoot on film and get together a fair amount of money, that you'd already had some successes and failures before you made your debut... now with digital and the Internet, that's all changed.

I think the real enemy now is access - specifically, there being too much of it (and, yes, this is coming from someone who would one day like to make a film he'd let other people see). I also think, by and large, the only people really interested in Swanberg's films are other filmmakers (and I'm grouping critics in with that).

I'd also like to add that I don't think his films are entirely without merit, but that's not really my point here.

[Jim Grau]

My point here is this: there are scores of young filmmakers who put a lot more effort into their craft than Swanberg does, yet none of them get a fraction of the attention that he does. Why is that? How come the critical community hasn't rallied around the films of Travis Wilkerson? Or Jenni Olson? Or Mark Kneale? What is it about Swanberg and his cohorts that drives some of you to soapbox on his behalf? That's what I'm curious about.

And the whole, WELL HE HAS LIMITED MEANS SO YO CAN'T REALLY FAULT HIM FOR HIS AESTHETIC POVERTY is a cop out. Plenty of filmmkaers have made totally independent films with miniscule budgets that aspired to be more than stretched out student films. And how many movies is the guy going to make before he stops getting the benefit of the doubt? Learning on the job is one thing, but he's not in his apprentice phase any more. That seems kind of disingenuous. "Treat me as if I don't really know what I'm doing, but then, you know, treat me the other way when it serves my interests."

And Don: None of these people are actors? I don't understand. They're in front of a camera, making a movie. It's not like they work at the carwash and Swanberg has ambushed them, forcing them to act on a dime. That seems kind of like a strange thing to say. "They're not actors." My question to you is: who ISN'T an actor?

[Ray]

@Alex Gregorianis: Good point, and you made me wish I'd expressed myself better. I'll try again: I wasn't commenting so much on Swanberg--whose work I haven't seen, and so, I grant, maybe I ought to shut my fat mouth--but instead was commenting on the quality of reactions people seem to be having. Michael Bay et al. make some of us mad for very different reasons, I think. What I take to be Swanberg's drive is a greater realism--and that often involves seeking out an anti-aesthetic, some idiom that dynamically opposes itself to the prevailing one. Many times, that impulse leads to total failure, but sometimes it changes the aesthetic altogether. I do NOT want to suggest that Swanberg is some great artist like Ibsen, but Ibsen's work provoked reactions similar to what we've seen on this long thread--and we can all think of similar examples from the past. And I thought that was an interesting point. (And I apologize to the ghost of Ibsen!)

[don lewis]

@Ray re; actors..

Now you're getting it....

(I'd go on, but have thus commenced my Friday night beer drinking in which I pretend I write for an awesome site that makes me a comfortable living and allows me to go to film fests every weekend pro bono and behave like Jeff Wells while all the while not living in suburban hell ala April Wheeler sans blood)

[John M.]

@ don lewis: "As for the thus far “poor acting,” ummm….I could be wrong, but they aren’t acting. Aside from Gerwig, none of those people are really actors. I think that’s Joe’s point in a lot of ways (and I hope I can pull my later thoughts back to this) in that the camera is only capable of capturing truth and maybe the truth is, the camera makes you lie? Is it possible to NOT be conscious of the camera? I mean, isn’t this the question posed by several people over the years?"

This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of terms. What do you mean, Don, when you say they "aren't acting"? Of course they are. (Should I give you the benefit of the doubt with your "I could be wrong"?) They've been charged with forming characters, right? And those characters are not themselves, correct? Just because lines might be improvised doesn't mean this isn't "acting." It is. You say that Greta Gerwig is the only actor here--well, then what, pray tell, is Joe Swanberg? What would you call him? Andrew Bujalski? Kent Osborne? What are they doing here? (And now that we've brought these alleged "non-actors" up, if Swanberg has no interest in mumblecore labels, he sure does try hard to keep certain people in the fray--and for no discernible reason. Why cast Bujalski? Because of his emotional range? His training? Might there be, and I know this is SO CYNICAL, other motives?)

And your choose-your-own-adventure theories here--that it might be Swanberg's point that the camera "makes you lie" and maybe it's impossible to not be "conscious" of the camera is a kiddie's pool of sophistry that even Craig Keller, in his spitting-mad and semi-coherent voodoo diatribe, didn't bother to wade into.

I mean, after all is said and done, Joe Swanberg's films are really reflexive commentaries on the impossibility of a filmed reality? DO YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THAT?

Wow, I really should take another look at Butterknife. And bookmark Film Threat.

"Isn’t this the question posed by several people over the years?" Well, I should say so: how many goddamn filmmakers over the past 110 years have questioned the role of the camera, and its "reality"? Yeah, I'd say a lot. Porter, Godard, Maysles, Fred Wiseman, Straub-Huillet, DePalma, von Trier, Fincher, Dogme, on and on and on. So, I guess one more voice couldn't hurt? Except...he's not really doing that, is he.

Honestly, I'm trying to put my finger on the value here. Why one might find him a great filmmaker. Or good. Or particularly groundbreaking. And it's hard.

And as others have said, it is absolutely 100% bunk to defend a director's lackluster mise-en-scene--and such a thing exists, guys and gals, some directors have better eyes than others, please compare, say, Scorsese to Sam Mendes when you have a moment--by arguing that, well, all five feature-length films had limited means. "The dude is shooting what he knows within the budget he has." Well, thats a terrific defense. I won't even go into the obnoxiously narrow endeavor of "dude's shooting what he knows." (That is, five fucking films' worth of white people...in their twenties...who...are...really into their relationships...and don't, for some reason, stray from their own director-imposed demographic... Along with Cinema and Reality, Unmarried White People in Sexual Relationships is really an untapped region). But a budget has NOTHING to do with mise-en-scene. Yes, if you're making THE LEOPARD, there are certain, shall we say, requirements, but who couldn't instantly come up with films made on shoestring budgets that have a carefully considered mise-en-scene? (Let's start with, say, IN BETWEEN DAYS.) Staging don't cost nothing--angles don't cost nothing.

I should say, by the way, that I'm a huge fan of Bronstein's FROWNLAND, and find Bujalski's films pretty interesting. I'm very much looking forward to seeing YEAST and MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY and QUIET CITY. I have nothing against Realism or Truth.

But to be blunt about it, I don't think Swanberg's a very intelligent dramatist, and his visual style approaches worthless.

And I sincerely hope--and kind of believe--he'll get better.

[Erick]

I've always thought of Swanberg as someone who ripped the pages straight from Henry Jaglom's playbook - someone, basically, who has created their own personal, psycho-sexual playground and whose work ends up foisted on the world as "the epitome of indie auterism." However, even Jaglom has his editing work on Easy Rider in his back pocket. Swanberg's brief footnote, if he ever warrants one, will be that his work coincided with and epitomized the height of American narcissism in filmmaking, however accidentally it occurred.

[Nick]

Where's Swanberg or Ray Carney's defense?

[Jared Fogel]

in spite of my own misgivings, i can't seem to get as up in arms about swanberg's work as most. the movies, in their unabashed commitment to looseness, may not be built to withstand the kind of criticism directed at them. it's odd. critics want to keep calling him out for the lack of depth and incisiveness, even though his whole modus operendi seems to be the celebration of pure offhandedness for its own sake. does this approach yield anything of value? hard to say. at the very worst its just a harmless experiment standing at the very far end of the traditional mise en scene vs. verite spectrum. at the very best, he might manage to capture fleeting moments and gestures that a more structured approach simply could not. in the end, he's completely abandoned something that is considered essential to creating art. namely, premeditation. some people find that exciting, liberating, others think it a lazy walk down a dead-end. but either way, what he's doing is so specific and so small and so utterly bereft of attitude or pretense that it's hard to see getting too upset about it without projecting onto it. he'll keep working and mining this narrow territory, his output a reflection of his lifestyle more than anything else. good for him. it definitely seems more like an intense personal preoccupation than a careerist strategy. and maybe that's what bothers people so much about him. he's so hellbent on following this questionable path that he comes off as being arrogant. i get the sense the whole world could tell him he's wrong and he'd still be cranking these things out. i like that about him.

also, there seems to be a contradiction in the way you disqualify swanbergs freeforall approach while simultaneously tearing into the performances themselves. if swanberg has the audacity, confidence, balls, idiocy (you decide) to ignore the very notion of preparation then he's the only only one to blame for the appearance of "perpetual smirks" and "petulant sulks". it seems you are attacking the work from all sides at once and that's what gives the impression of a fuming rant.

[Alfred Sloan]

I don't give a fuck about Joe Swanberg. He's a fly buzzing around the shit-pile of lousy cinema that gets dumped into the street every year.

Let people start a fan club if they want. There are a million fan clubs for a million different people.

It's funny that some of you are talking about "honesty," as if there is such a thing and as if that is somehow higher up in the hierarchy of viable ways to represent the world, as if the possibility that Joe Swanberg is full of shit shouldn't even enter the conversation. Maybe Joe Swanberg already knows he's full of shit. Maybe that's what his movies are about. Maybe it's one of those things where you have to watch his movies over and over to parse the delicate touches. I'm sure someone will eventually do that and explain to all of us why Joe Swanberg matters. It sure isn't going to be me. The thought of watching his movies over and over does not sound like fun to me. It sounds like a job.

Maybe it's a job for Craig Keller. Probably won't pay very well, though, Craig, so you might want to really think about it before you agree to do it.