Nobody wants to hear about your dreams.
Not your literal dreams anyway; not the rag-and-bone shadow plays your subconscious puts on in the dark. I try mine out on the dogs; they fold their ears and skulk away.
On the other hand, people will watch a movie, which is the retelling of a dream. You turn down the lights and invite folks into your head.
And sure, it's not your vision only; it's always compromised, infected and improved by myriad and necessary collaborators. To make a movie you have to play well with others. You have to dream communally.
That's how movies function: as communal dreams. And like dreams, they can tell us things about ourselves we mightn't otherwise understand. That's why they're important, why we ought to give them serious consideration. I know people like to say they go to the movies to "escape" but I believe we ought to examine the things we make and consume. Unthinking is unbeing, a kind of self-annihilation.
I was thinking about that Saturday night as we drove home from the wrap party at the end of the third annual Kaleidoscope Film Festival, a nine-day LGBT-themed cultural event that really blossomed this year, and presented some of the most provocative films I've seen recently (including UCA professor and Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival interim director Jennifer Gerber's sensational The Revival). Before thanking all the volunteers, the executive director of the Film Society of Little Rock, Tony Taylor, announced there will be a fourth festival next year and that this year's forays in culinary and literary events would be expanded.
Kaleidoscope isn't the sort of event that seems likely to have a significant economic impact (though I imagine North Little Rock welcomed crowds its events drew), but it is precisely the sort of thing that invigorates our culture and improves the quality of our lives.
And this week marks the debut of an important new organization. The first Arkansas Cinema Society event, Premiere, will be held beginning Thursday and run through the weekend. (Check out the ACS website at arkansascinemasociety.org.)
It appears the organizers have done well, assembling a slate of events with both broad appeal and arthouse credibility. They're showing a Star Wars movie and bringing in Adam Driver, a bonafide movie star who lends considerable gravitas to the villain Kylo Ren, arguably the most intriguing character to emerge from the 21st-century edition of the saga.
Driver seems to approach his work (Martin Scorsese's Silence, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls) with uncommon commitment and intensity. Even if he's acting through a space helmet, you never get the sense he's condescending to the material. (To call him the thinking person's Keanu Reeves, as I'm tempted to, would be a disservice to both guys.)
They're also showing Paterson, a sweet Jim Jarmusch film from last year (which didn't make it to Arkansas during its theatrical run), in which Driver plays a poet named Paterson who drives a bus in the New Jersey city of Paterson. After both of these films, Jeff Nichols, the remarkable Little Rock native who has become one of our most consistently interesting filmmakers (and who, with Little Rock-based filmmaker Kathryn Tucker co -founded the ACS), will have conversations with Driver, who had a supporting role in Nichols' 2016 film Midnight Special.
The events kick off Thursday evening with a screening of Patti Cake$, a crowd-pleasing underdog story (the reductive line would be to say it's like 8 Mile crossed with Rocky, though that would be getting pretty incestuous since 8 Mile has a lot of Rocky's DNA) that features some fine performances and a wonderful specificity of place. It's shot through with downmarket New Jersey, the shadowlands across the Hudson from Manhattan. After the film, Nichols will talk with one of the film's producers, Noah Stahl. (My review of the film and Dan Lybarger's conversation with its director, Jeremy Gasper, will run in Friday's newspaper.)
The highlight might be the screening of David Lowery's A Ghost Story and his subsequent conversation with Nichols. A Ghost Story--which is showing in local theaters if you can't make it to the ACS screening (which may well be sold out by the time this column runs), is one of those odd and beautiful movies that defies easy synopsis. As my colleague Piers Marchant wrote in his review, it's an "epic philosophical meditation on the fluidity of time and the cruelty of human convention" that "doesn't explain well." Most of it features Casey Affleck beneath a bedsheet with cut-out eyeholes.
The pairing of Lowery with Nichols promises to be fascinating; when I saw Dallas-based Lowery's 2013 film Ain't Them Bodies Saints, it immediately reminded me of Nichols' work. Both directors owe an obvious (and acknowledged) debt to Terrence Malick; both are able to invest a measure of calibrated nuance in rural characters other directors might render as clowns or monsters. A laconic rhythm is not necessarily indicative of a slow mind, and even the gentlest touch can be freighted with a terrible potential for violence.
In 2013, I thought Nichols and Lowery might be in the vanguard of a New Southern Cinema, but both of them have already transcended any regional ghetto. Lowery's big-budget Disney remake Pete's Dragon will also be screened by the ACS this weekend, and Nichols' next project could be a big-budget remake--probably a drastic re-imagining--of the 1988 sci-fi buddy cop movie Alien Nation (a quirky film that was generally well-received by critics and spawned a television series).
Nichols and Lowery are the sort of popular filmmakers we need; intelligent and respectful of the audience in a way that Hollywood product increasingly is not. I want them to show us their dreams.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/22/2017