Pieces of Crap
PIECES OF APRIL
dir. Peter Hedges, U.S., United Artists

"It is an innovative digital filmmaking collective financed by IFC to produce ten low-budget digital feature films. InDigEnt is dedicated to the community of filmmakers looking to experiment and expand into digital filmmaking. InDigEnt provides a strong support base for the filmmakers, while allowing them to maintain creative control of their projects. With technical support, state of the art equipment, casting resources, and post-production services, InDigEnt is able to produce smaller scale projects with major production values.” —InDigEnt mission statement

In 1969 Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri issued a slight missive of modest intent entitled Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology. In it he proposed nothing less than the destruction of the practice of architecture. Taking cues from Louis Althusser’s writings on ideology, Tafuri argued the position of the architect as creator was hugely privileged and inevitably compromised, bound up within a system layers of avant-garde architectural flourishes only served to cloak. The more advanced the formal project, the more the fundamental contradictions were masked, the more disingenuous the building. Tafuri argued the only possible escape from the underlying falsity of this arrangement was the abstraction of the architect from the position of designer and the implied agency that the term implies. It was (and still is) a radical stance, and perhaps may have been more a way to goose the critical establishment into doing their Marx homework than any real desire to see the profession flushed down the toilet. Let’s imagine for a second that Gary Winick’s (Tadpole) InDigEnt label is his attempt to take up Tafuri’s call in the artistic medium that has the most in common with architecture: cinema. If Tafuri thought questions of personal style were conceits compromised by their existence within particular socio-economic boundaries and wanted to obliterate them from practice and discourse, Winick’s created an umbrella for this end to be executed, employed in a medium that’s promise seems to offer filmmakers entirely new, streamlined ways of making films. However, if Tafuri’s beef with the avant-garde architects of his time was their use of high-brow tactics to argue their oppositional bent, I’d argue that InDigEnt has proven an equally forceful aesthetic regression is just as disingenuous.

Has Winick read Tafuri? I doubt the creator of Tadpole reads much beyond Page 6 and Faber & Faber paperbacks of lesser Woody Allen screenplays, but the InDigEnt films (including Final, Chelsea Walls, Tape, Women in Films, and the Reverse Shot-disapproved Tadpole, see February/March issue, seem, at least at first, a body remarkably similar to what Tafuri advocated. InDigEnt’s “films” feature the muddy, coffee-stained imagery coupled with herky-jerky camera movement that have been the hallmark of films produced with DV technology. These limitations on the image and in-common camera movement seem to erase all traces of their creators, replacing them with one simple signifier: video. The problem is, that unlike Hal Hartley’s Book of Life, Thomas Vinterberg’s Celebration, or Michael Winterbottom’s lesser but vital entry In This World (inexplicably lumped with two unrelated films into a group of “horrible [DV] movie experiences” by one cantankerous New York critic), we’re not finding a filmmaking practice liberated by the economic possibilities of new technology—its mostly the same old shit. Only uglier and cheaper. (Let’s give Richard Linklater’s curious entry Tape a free pass). Wanna-be’s the world over can salivate at the potential for the democratization of the filmmaking process offered by low-cost 24 fps handicams, but if the end results mean an army of Tadpoles, I’ll proudly wave the banner of cinematic fundamentalism. It’s still curious to me why the revolution is happening now—video’s been around and just as nasty for years, but has always been a potent weapon in the right hands (witness Fassbinder’s fascinating video curiosity Broken Freedom).

Quickly becoming the Roy Rogers (the New Jersey Turnpike fried chicken favorite, not the cowboy) of cinema, InDigEnt’s latest attempt at helping filmmakers “experiment and expand into digital filmmaking” is Peter Hedges’s completely traditional upper-middle-class-family reconciles-on-a-holiday film Pieces of April. As with other InDigEnt films we’ve got a bunch of established actors (Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt) slumming it for two weeks in front of a Sony camcorder for better profit sharing and added indie credibility. Winick would have us believe that these are films by directors with “stories to tell” that give actors more “freedom” than working on larger, longer productions. It’s the kind of rhetoric that always attempts to link back to the films of John Cassavetes, but without actually evincing any sense that those feeding off his corpse have any sense of his work. If April is supposed to be exist somewhere in this lineage, I’d challenge one to find those odd moments of discomfort, strangeness, and off-handed poetry that marked Faces, Husbands, or Love Streams. You won’t because they’re not here—Hedges’s script is airtight, and the narrative and cast feels hermetically sealed inside, struggling to get out.

Hedges himself may not buy into the Cassavetes talk, but it’s not hard to imagine the author/screenwriter behind What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? believing this to be an attempt to really “get risky.” Consider all the rough juxtapositions between Joy Burns (Patricia Clarkson) struggling with cancer and her punk(y Brewster’ed) daughter April (Katie Holmes) struggling with cooking. Laugh as April drops her huge uncooked turkey on the floor (isn’t that always the way?) but prepared to get the wind knocked out of you by the maudlin exhibition of arty B&W photos of Joy’s chest pre- and post-mastectomy. It all feels as measured as drink prepared by a Japanese bartender—each element is carefully proportioned, balanced, shaken, and stirred, though what we’re left with is far from a perfect cocktail. I’d call it almost admirable if it wasn’t so inert. Disclosure: though I found sitting through the first 76 minutes of Pieces of April borderline intolerable, the last few I found inexplicably moving. The expected reunion occurs after a red herring of a false ending, and it’s even sweeter than any of the film’s characters could have imagined, involving a Chinese family, two bikers, and assorted other neighbors in the family feast. As April opens the door to find her mother standing there, music by Stephin Merritt (perhaps the only pop musician who can be more affecting with only four nylon ukulele strings than Timbaland can with an entire studio arsenal) fades in and the film intercuts a series of still images representing photos taken by brother Timmy (Jimmy Gallagher Jr.) with scenes of a utopian New York Thanksgiving where cultures, races, classes intermingle. It’s perhaps the most contrived sequence in the film, but simultaneously the one where the filmmaker’s presence seems most absent—it feels more like a sequence cobbled together from the best of Hallmark than the Writer’s Workshop 101 narrative that we’ve just been treated to. As such a marked contrast, it hits like a breath of fresh air. Maybe I’m just a sucker for ukulele’s.

Were Tafuri a present-day film critic, he’d find much to discuss in the disconnect between the possibilities of DV filmmaking (which I think he’d approve of), and the end with which products we’ve been left. Aside from short flashes of genius to be found among the rising mass of streaming Mpeg and Quicktime artists on the internet, the only film I’ve seen that seems to fully embody the promise of this moment (and what Tafuri was struggling with 30 years ago) is Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume One, which isn’t even shot on DV at all. Managing simultaneously to abstract himself from the basic elements of the film and re-inscribe himself all over every combination of them, he’s somehow managed to sidestep the thorny questions of authorship yet remain in complete control. I think what affected me so much about Hedges’s final frames works in a similar fashion—both the Burns family reunion and Kill Bill reach beyond the identities of their creators into accumulated banks of cultural residue to probe at something larger than what an individual filmmaker is capable of. That Tarantino can channel this impulse for an entire film is a miracle. That Hedges manages one grace note makes Pieces of April almost redeemable. —J. HOLDEN M.S. WHITE