If you’re trying to place a finger on the true pulse of contemporary cinema, one should look no further than the latest in a screening series held by MDFF, the Toronto-based production company (headed by local filmmakers / producers Daniel Montgomery and Kazik Radwanski) that’s dedicated to bringing the kind of genuinely small cinema (one could say the sort often relegated to Vimeo links) to Canada’s biggest city. They will, in some cases, play at the historic Royal Cinema, which gives a Movie Palace presentation to even the lowest-budgeted and most intimate of films. While this location won’t be utilized for their November 4th screening, a collision of the old-fashioned and the new digital cinema will still be very present with the pairing of Gina Telaroli’s Here’s to the Future! and Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass, two films harkening back while defiantly looking forward.
Of course, both films have the distinction of being made by and starring “figures of presence” within the online cinephile world — a realm commonly (and somewhat pejoratively) referred to as “Movie Twitter.” More specifically, they’re belonging to a kind of New York/MUBI Notebook cinephilia; it’s fair to say almost every person in both Telaroli and Walker’s films is a fan of Vulgar Auteurism Folk Hero Paul W.S. Anderson.
Furthermore, there almost seems to be some pretext that you have some knowledge of their players, at least in the sense of how relaxed and unassumingly they inhabit their respective filmic atmospheres. And so while these two works should be considered quite representational of this liquid-like new cinema, they’re not thesis films. To the contrary, these are works of copious generosity and kindness, ones that, even within the landscape of auteur worship that their cinephilia inhabits, make upfront their sense of collaboration.
Telaroli’s film, set all on one bright, late-summer Sunday (September 18th, 2011, to be exact) depicts her taking various stabs at recreating a brief scene from Michael Curtiz’s Bette Davis-starring pre-code drama The Cabin in the Cotton. The set is located in her New York apartment and the cast and crew consist of her friends; among them is MUBI editor and writer Daniel Kasman, who’s frequently seen holding a boom mic or goofing off on his phone.
The scene in question is centered on the titular statement of “Here’s to the Future!,” an ironic toast to dire financial- and worker-related straits, with multiple actresses trying on the Bette Davis role and giving line readings ranging from the seductive to the melancholic. Being that the content of the very scene takes place around the Great Depression, certain political implications (“still relevant today,” etc.) can be easily read into Telaroli’s film and her work at hand. While, at one point, explaining the motivation to her actors, she gives the blunt reasoning that the poor are being fucked over by the rich and they themselves are (obviously) in a setting of no-backlot-like decadence.
But the film isn’t simply about Telaroli and her need to recreate this scene, or any potential burden of self-importance. While sets are often noted for their tension, the film sees only the lightest conflict of recreation and labor; while there are clearly shifting jobs, such as various actors stepping into the two roles — and, near the end, a female in the male part — the film is equally concerned with capturing the downtime between takes as it is reconfiguring the image of filmmaking itself. Through the number of cameras on set, be they heavy-duty “official equipment,” a DSLR, or a phone — all, of course, of varying picture quality — it gives the implication that dozens of other mini-movies are contained even within its swift 72-minute runtime.
Maybe the most charming of these comes once shooting has ended for the day, and the film doesn’t conclude, but rather gives us images all dedicated to the space we’ve inhabited and people we’ve hung out with. The scenarios vary: whether it’s hanging on an empty room set to Fleetwood Mac or webcam-caught footage of Telaroli and her crew members overlooking the day’s work, the audience seeing just their reactions and not, say, split-screen of the accompanying dailies. Perhaps the one note of despair to be perceived is that not every Sunday could possibly be this fun.
Shifting to slightly younger filmmakers and north of the border, Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass — which, in the interest of full disclosure, this writer contributed a very small sum of money to the production and has his name displayed in the end credits of — also situates itself in the Golden Age. It begins with a direct homage to the studio executive open of Jerry Lewis’s The Bellboy, in this case featuring the manic thespian stylings of MUBI Notebook contributor Neil Bahadur. By then transitioning to the load screen of an ’80s video game, one comes to see millennial nostalgia (or at least Walker and co.’s brand of it) as a complicated mix of eras and modes.
Nostalgia and reviving the past doesn’t end there, though: the film is named after a demolition derby competition in Prince George, British Colombia, a family tradition for “star” Tyson Storozinski, who serves as a wholly natural screen presence. The motion picture’s mission statement, to document Storozinski and his father Dale as they prepare him for the 2013 edition, initially seems like an excuse for formal experimentation, to make some relation of man and machine through all the toys available to young filmmakers nowadays. (Something like a micro-budget Red Line 7000.) While this production is far from inundated with cash, just the shot of a drone hovering above the track makes for something like a spectacle.
Luckily, the film continues to reconfigure its own meaning. Around the 45-minute mark, the race ends; smoke billowing through the night sky is set to the diegetic hum of soulless chart-topper“I’ve Got a Feeling,” only to then cross-fade to Bahadur with his head firmly rested on his desk. The glory has come and gone, and it’s time for nostalgia to rest.
From there, both the film’s depiction of the land and its people extends beyond just traditions of the privileged, as it abruptly shifts to an interview with a young Aboriginal man, Nathan Giede. Walker’s offscreen voice gently probes him about his personal history — how he’s from Manitoba, the mother he’s never met, etc. Curiously, Giede makes note of his objection to the politicization of his race, as seen prominently in the 2015 Canadian federal election.
The film throughout makes a point to afford a variety of perspectives, such as how it begins on crew member John Lehtonen waiting in a driveway to be picked up, or even the way we briefly see and hear the race through what seems like a child holding the camera. But the interview with Giede, followed by a James Benning-like depiction of interior and exterior spaces, and then concluding with various screens from video games spanning years and consoles, reveals that Walker’s work can’t only be seen as being compassionate, but also one of the qualities of most great films: mysterious.
Both films, through low budgets and compact runtimes, may initially seem to have little at stake, but each open up to something truly exciting, and perhaps even difficult to completely pin down. So what can we say other than, “Here’s to the Future!”
Here’s to the Future! and Hit 2 Pass ar available to watch above, for free, from November 9th to the 22nd.