PATERSON - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2016 - Dullsville meets Poetry in New Jersey.

Impossibly gorgeous Iranian women who marry
bus drivers in Paterson, New Jersey NEVER have to work.

Paterson (2016)
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley,
Cliff Smith, Chasten Harmon, William Jackson Harper, Masatoshi Nagase

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Look, I love Jim Jarmusch as much as the next guy, but the fact remains that he really hasn't made anything worth seeing in a long time. That said, I have no intention of ever giving up on him. After all, the man gave us Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law and Mystery Train - all terrific pictures. His new film Paterson, is however, so utterly, mind-numbingly mediocre that it's really tempting to never see another one of his movies ever again.

Here's the deal: Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey (birthplace of the immortal Lou Costello). He lives in a modest post-war bungalow with his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog. Now, maybe it's just me, but do New Jersey bus drivers make enough money to own a bungalow (albeit modest) and support impossibly gorgeous Iranian wives who appear to do nothing for a living? Well, maybe they can. After all, this couple appears to not do much of anything.

Every single day is pretty much the same. (Jarmusch used to be a master of making "sameness" both entertaining and thought-provoking, but in this movie, it's anything but. It is 118 minutes long. That's what it is.)

Bus drivers in Paterson, New Jersey can support impossibly
gorgeous Iranian wives who don't work. They can also be
poets like fellow Patersonians Ginsberg & Williams.

Starting with the title card "Monday" and cycling through an entire week, this is what happens - each day.

Paterson wakes up and engages in his morning ablutions.

Sometimes he talks to his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife, or at least nuzzles her.

Paterson walks to work.

Paterson sits in his bus, waiting for his shift to begin. He writes (supposedly good) poetry in his notebook. His boss comes by and talks about his personal problems.

On the road, he listens in on one key conversation between a couple of passengers.

At lunch, he eats and writes more (supposedly good) poetry in his notebook. (This makes sense, I suppose, since Paterson, New Jersey was the home and/or birthplace of many notable writers including Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. Pretty cosmic, if you ask me.)

When he returns home, he discovers his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura working on some ornate, hand-crafted interior design element for their modest post-war bungalow. They talk and nuzzle. Their conversation usually consists of his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura reminding him that he absolutely must photocopy his poetry notebook and/or the baked goods she is planning to prepare for a weekend market. The conversations are often punctuated with shots of their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog.

After dinner, Paterson leaves his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura home alone and takes their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog on a walk. He stops at a local bar, ties the dog outside, goes in, orders a beer, talks to some fellow patrons and always has a conversation with the bartender.

That, folks, is all there is. Day in. Day out. There is no conflict, save for a subplot involving a bar patron and the woman he loves (but who refuses to love him back).

Impossibly gorgeous Iranian nuzzles loving bus driver.

On the weekend, Paterson and his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura go to a movie. Upon their return they discover that the super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog has destroyed the (not-yet-photocopied) notebook of (supposedly good) poetry. His impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura feels badly, but still manages to chide him for not photocopying his notebook.

On Sunday, Paterson is depressed. He sits on a park bench. An older Japanese man sits next to him. For some reason, he knows Paterson is a poet. He gifts him a brand new empty notebook.

Gee, I wonder what Paterson is going to do next? Perhaps he'll write some (supposedly good) poetry. Perhaps we'll find out if Jarmusch ever bothers to make a supposedly good sequel to this supposedly good movie.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** (Two Stars)

Paterson is a Special Presentation at TIFF 2016. It is a Mongrel Media release.

METAL MACHINE MUSIC ON LITHIUM: Greg Klymkiw's Full Report on the Jim Jarmusch Opera TESLA IN NEW YORK

Here's an excerpt from my Full Report in "Electric Sheep Magazine" on the World Premiere of the Jim Jarmusch and Phil Kline work-in-progress, the opera entitled TESLA IN NEW YORK:

‘Music,’ says Jarmusch after the performance, ‘is the most beautiful form of artistic expression and I sincerely believe film is the most closely related artistic form to music. It’s why I make movies, but it’s also why I feel the need to make opera.’

To say that music is often the driving force behind Jarmusch’s cinematic visuals, if not their very heart and soul, might well be an understatement. Can anyone imagine Eszter Balint in Stranger Than Paradise dragging her luggage through the monochrome warzone of New York without Screamin’ Jay Hawkins intoning his crazed seductive yelps of ‘I Put A Spell on You’, or for that matter as the film’s Greek Chorus of ennui and passion?

‘Music’, Jarmusch elaborates, ‘is my guide into the greater world through the medium of film. There were many places I’d never visited and wanted to get to know because of the music that came from them. The music of New Orleans and Memphis, for example, are what led me to eventually make films like Down by Law and Mystery Train. As for Tesla in New York, I know New York intimately, but I’m hoping the opera will allow me, through fact, fancy and imagination, to get to know Tesla’s New York.’

Music and made-in-Winnipeg-cinema have always nestled cosily under the fluffy blankets of glorious warmth and forgetfulness. To wit: earlier in the evening, while grabbing a smoke outside the Centennial Concert Hall in the -40 climes, I spied Guy Maddin, surely one of cinema’s great working film artists. He was scuttling maniacally up the granite front steps, strewn with sand to prevent icy tumbles, hurtling himself into the balmy ticket vestibule. I sucked back the remainder of my bâton de cancer filled ever so generously with tax-free all-Natural Native Tobacco I secured earlier that day on a nearby reservation populated by my entrepreneurial Aboriginal Brothers. I then made my way to greet the esteemed Mr Maddin who was waiting patiently in line at the ‘Will Call’ wicket...

You can read the full article in my column: "Colonial Report on Cinema from the Dominion of Canada" at ELECTRIC SHEEP MAGAZINE (UK) - a deviant view of cinema. Click on the handy link HERE.

DOWNTIME - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The forgotten, neglected 1985 Prairie Post-Modernist Classic of Canadian Cinema, sprung from the same asbestos-tainted waters of Winnipeg that yielded the legendary John Paizs and Guy Maddin has been lovingly restored and remastered for Home Viewing on DVD.

DOWNTIME

An array of Welcoming abodes offer solace & warmth to the single working man or woman.

From Classical to Moderne: in Winnipeg, the choice is ALL YOURS and WHAT a choice it IS!!!

DOWNTIME
BEER VENDORS in Winnipeg
are friendly & inviting.

Downtime (1985) *****
Dir. Greg Hanec, Scr. Mitchell Brown
Starring: Maureen Gammelseter, Padraic O'Beirn, Debbie Williamson, Ray Impey

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It always seemed perversely appropriate that Greg Hanec and Mitchell Brown's extraordinary 1985 film Downtime should be so unjustly neglected, forgotten and lost to the windy vagaries of imagined memories of time and place. Not that great art deserves to neglected, but cream, no matter how long it takes, always rises to the top. The richness of the picture is how it is a product of its time and reflective of the period it actually represented from conception through to its completion. If the movie was met with the sort of indifference that eventually blots work out, obliterating its very being from a collective consciousness of great regional DIY independent cinema, then Downtime is, I think, on the verge of having the last laugh (so to speak) since now, more than ever, almost thirty years after it was born, it's due for rediscovery and serious consideration.

DOWNTIME - In Winnipeg,
people can be seen on the street.

This is not just because it's an important film, but because, like a lot of great art, it was so ahead of its time. A vivid, haunting portrait of twenty-something ennui, crafted and sprouted right from the bitter depths, the very bowels if you will, of that horrendous period first coined by the legendary photographer Robert Capa and later popularized in contemporary parlance by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in his iconic book "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture", Downtime is, perhaps the first genuine Gen-X picture from the North American consciousness so iconically represented in that monumental international bestseller. (*NOTE* In 1987, the Canadian prairies yielded the second genuine Gen-X feature Wheat Soup by Brian Stockton and Gerald Saul of Regina.)

That Hanec and Brown's picture was made and set in Winnipeg during the heyday of the Prairie Post-Modernist phase, coined and identified by film critic Geoff Pevere in "Cinema Canada", is what makes the movie even more ripe for rediscovery. Made the same year Guy Maddin directed his first film, the hauntingly grotesque short The Dead Father and as legendary Winnipeg Film Group auteur John Paizs was embarking upon his emblematic first feature Crime Wave, Hanec as a filmmaker was also forging his own unique style - a kind of deadpan neo-realistic portrait shot in gloriously grainy black and white, presented in lovely standard frame tableaux, complete with blackouts between shots from a mostly fixed camera position.

DOWNTIME - Winnipeg provides
nice views through windows.

Timing, they say, is everything, but for those living in Winnipeg during those weirdly lithium-infused days, the rest of the world just didn't matter. It DID, however, matter in the case of this particular film. Once it was complete and about to enter the world, the Zeitgeist of the mid-80s delivered another film in black and white, shot tableau style and equipped with blackouts between scenes, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. Though there are stylistic similarities, they're ultimately very different films. The world, however, can be extremely short-sighted.

DOWNTIME - Young Winnipeg Women
are Vibrant.

Jarmusch's film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, then platformed and eventually widened out theatrically as Hanec was in the process of sending his film out to be considered for festival play. Talk about having the rug pulled out from under your film.

That said, Hanec and Brown's movie was invited to participate in the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival's prestigious Forum of New Cinema section. The Berlinale was a perfect place for Downtime to greet the world with its own special howdy-doody from Winnipeg. Hanec journeyed to the festival and found himself surrounded by some of the best in World Cinema: Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, James Foley's At Close Range and Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind were amongst the Official Competition entries.

The Panorama section was unveiling Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man, Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche and Lasse Hallstrom's My Life As a Dog. In the Forum of New Cinema, Hanec's Downtime unspooled alongside the likes of Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts, Jouis Malle's God's Country and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

Not bad company for a 65-minute mid-length feature film by a nice, young Ukrainian Boy from Winnipeg.

Downtime was, however, swallowed to a good extent in the shadow of Stranger Than Paradise and as surprisingly as its original take on contemporary youth culture was, Hanec's picture promptly and summarily disappeared.

Until now, that is.

Recently and lovingly restored for home consumption on DVD, Downtime is out in the world now and appropriately, it's not too long after the major "Forgotten Winnipeg" music and film retrospective presented by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Festival of New Music in collaboration with SPUR. The film might have been forgotten for nearly three decades, but it only makes sense since Winnipeg, named from the Cree words "muddy" and "water" is a city hidden beneath fluffy snowflakes of forgetfulness, swirling about under dark waters of time, the city's amnesiac qualities emanating throughout the world and oft-inspiring repression of that which should not be repressed. Repression is Winnipeg and it rubs off in the strangest places.

And so it is, that Winnipeg is indeed featured front and centre in this graceful ode to slacking when slacking was actually happening big time and no more big time than in Winnipeg, the North American Centre of slacking. Focusing on a quartet of lonely young Winnipeggers, Hanec renders Mitchell Brown's evocative and superbly constructed screenplay using each individual scene as a single shot in tableau. Much of the film plays like a still life, each frame teeming with a kind of laconic intensity as Brown's script deftly confounds all expectations.

DOWNTIME - In Winnipeg,
people like to party, eh.

We meet a young woman (Maureen Gammelseter) working day shift in a depressingly claustrophobic variety store, its windows thick with dust on the inside and outdoors, filmy grime clinging to the same windows - the result of Winnipeg winds pelting springtime dirt from poorly-cleaned streets, piled high with sand laid down in winter to temper the almost sub-actic ice on the roads. Though it seems like the sun is shining outside, it's filtered through the store's glass windows of misery and neglect.

The young woman manning the cash register doesn't even have a name.

Why should she? It's Winnipeg.

As one of the city's sleepwalking denizens, she's pretty much as inconsequential as humanity gets, though she is alive and appears to have some manner of survival instinct within her.

DOWNTIME - In Winnipeg,
there is plenty to think about.

A young man (Padraic O'Beirn), also bereft of a name, enters the store to buy a carton of milk. Though his face bears a kind of Buster Keaton countenance, his eyes have the slightest light in them, which suggest he might not only be a nice guy, but a well-humoured one as well. The film puts this to the test immediately as it leads up to the promise of the kind of classic moments one experiences in the movies, especially those in which lonely young people find each other in the unlikeliest circumstances. He dawdles about the store until nerving-up enough to ask the young woman out. Will she accept? Really? Truly? Madly? Deeply? Why not? Her countenance of blankness suggests she probably has little else to do in her downtime from work.

Alas, she declines and our young man leaves. When she finally gets off work, she retires to her spartan, greyish-walled apartment and sits on a chesterfield. She's been on her feet all day. It must surely be a relief to sit. And sit. And sit.

And - wait for it - sit.

DOWNTIME -
Winnipeg Fine Dining
at Salisbury House

As twilight fills the big prairie skies over the drabness that is Winnipeg, we follow our young man as he begins his challenging night shift as a janitor in a school: mopping, draining, mopping, draining and, when it seems like something else awaits, he attentively mops, then skillfully drains, emptying grey water into the properly chosen receptacle within a dank, dark hovel identified on its door as the "Sink Room".

Yup, it's a barn-burner of a night in Winnipeg.

The young woman does what all single young women in Winnipeg do. She saunters down the street and, with not-so baited breath, enters the Coin Laundromat. The plot thickens. Here, under the pulsating fluorescent lights, a kooky elfin waif with a NAME, Debbie (Debbie Williamson), strikes up a friendly, but almost painfully inconsequential conversation with our heroine. Eventually, the young woman accepts Debbie's invitation to go to a party later in the week.

And what a week doth unfurl. The young woman goes to work. The young man spends his days wandering aimlessly or staring from behind his blankets at the blank walls of his apartment. The young woman stands rigidly at her post behind the counter of the variety store as an occasional customer graces it with their presence. Her conversations with these customers are automaton-like and perhaps even more blankly-stock than those uttered by McDonald's counter servers. At night, she goes home. She boils up the contents from within whatever tin can is handiest to reach within her cupboard.

Meanwhile, the young man is, of course, mopping - mopping floors in the dead of a Winnipeg night.

It doesn't take too long to assume he really needs to go out on a date or something. He'll try to charm the young woman again and one of his attempts truly confounds expectations. (To my knowledge, the wooing attempt employed is perhaps the first time it's ever been unveiled in movie history.) You'll want to give the young man points for this one, but he carries it off so pathetically, you'll be forced to dock a whole whack o' points from his highly original, but utterly botched approach.

On the night of the party, Debbie brings along a friendly, laconic young man who - lo and behold - has a name. Ray (Ray Impey) seems like he's perhaps got the stuff to sweep our heroine off her feet, but she really seems to have eyes for nobody and the plot, as always, must thicken.

And I assure you, it does.

Though this is, ultimately, a movie about slacking, the slacking is completely without aim of any kind. I fondly recall my own slacking period during the mid-80s when goals included randomly stalking young women or going to flea markets in search of Zippo lighters. Not so with the Downtime Winnipeggers. They are truly aimless. Boredom is what ultimately rules the day and even when a male-female coupling eventually occurs, it seems rife with the kind of bliss that can only be derived when propelled to Mount Olympus heights of boredom. If you're looking for a sound-barrier-breaking level of dull inactivity, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen Downtime.

To say Hanec and Brown's film is titled appropriately is probably the understatement of the New Millennium. Our good friends at Oxford Dictionaries, for example, define the word/phrase "downtime" thusly:

1. Time during which a machine, especially a computer, is out of action or unavailable for use.

1.1 A time of reduced activity or inactivity.

Oxford defines, with the aforementioned, the central dramatic action that fuels Greg Hanec's exquisite film - a $15,000 feature that's stood the test of time and that now, seems a perfect movie, for today.

POSTSCRIPT: Greg Hanec finally met Jim Jarmusch during the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival in January 2014. In fact, Hanec, an accomplished musician and composer in addition to his filmmaking talents joined up with Jarmusch as part of his backup band when he performed a special gig at Winnipeg's Union Sound Hall with Lea (Sonic Youth) Ranaldo. Jarmusch now owns a DVD of Downtime.

DOWNTIME has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly from the film's
new website by clicking HERE

IF YOU LIVE IN WINNIPEG, YOU CAN SEE DOWNTIME WITH AN AUDIENCE:
OCC presents "Downtime"
Tues. April 21 - Doors at 8:30 - Show at 9pm
Dir. Greg Hanec | Canada 1985 | 66min.
$5 suggested donation
Fundraiser for WUFF 2014

FORGOTTEN WINNIPEG FILMS - Report By Greg Klymkiw - A final dispatch from the Forgotten Winnipeg series presented by SPUR, the Winnipeg Film Group and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival (which presented the world premiere of Jim Jarmusch's opera-in-progress, TESLA IN NEW YORK). This is a brief report on several films and filmmakers who were part of Winnipeg's Prairie Post-Modernist Wave of Cinema who, like Jim Jarmusch and so many others in the NYC underground scene, created their own indelible stamp upon international film culture.

A similar scene to the one experienced by Jim Jarmusch and others in New York during the 70s and 80s and captured in the documentary BLANK CITY as well as many other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" series was happening in Winnipeg. A very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with was spawned during these halcyon days. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

A great selection of early Guy Maddin, many of which that I produced and were written by George Toles, can be secured directly through the following links:



Another great film from Winnipeg during this period is Greg Hanec's extraordinary DOWNTIME which has the distinction of being a parallel cinematic universe to Jim Jarmusch's "STRANGER THAN PARADISE". Both films were made at the same time in two completely different cities and scenes and both Hanec and Jarmusch premiered their films at the same time at the Berlin Film Festival. One's famous, the other isn't - but now that the "lost" and "found" DOWNTIME has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly from the film's new website by clicking HERE

Perhaps the greatest Canadian independent underground filmmaker of all-time is Winnipeg's John Paizs. It's virtually impossible to secure copies of his astounding work which, frankly, is responsible for influencing the work of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Bruce McDonald and an endless number of great indie filmmakers the world over. Paizs' great short film SPRINGTIME IN GREENLAND is available for purchase in a beautiful remastered edition from a fan website, the inimitable Frank Norman. Norman has Paizs' blessing to provide copies of the film, so feel free to directly make your request to Mr. Norman by clicking HERE.

Visit Frank Norman's CRIME WAVE
fan site by clicking HERE

Alas, it's super-impossible to get a copy of Paizs' masterpiece CRIME WAVE (not to be confused with the super-awful Coen Bros/Sam Raimi film of the same name that was released the same year Paizs' film was NOT released properly by its scumbag Canadian distributor Norstar Releasing, which eventually became Alliance Films (where the boneheads sat on the film and turned down several excellent offers from small indie companies to release the film properly on DVD in super-deluxe special editions because they lazily purported to be negotiating a massive package deal on its catalogue titles with some tiny scumbag public domain company that, as far as I can tell, has neither purchased nor released the film). This truly great and highly influential film is, no doubt, languishing in some boneheaded distribution purgatory within the deep anal cavities of the new owner of Alliance Films, a humungous mega-corporation called E-One. Feel free to repeatedly bug their stinking asses and demand a proper release. In the meantime, VHS copies of CRIME WAVE can still be found with the ludicrous title THE BIG CRIME WAVE. Here's a copy available on Amazon:

BLANK CITY and other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series can be accessed here:

TESLA IN NEW YORK - Greg Klymkiw's Report on the World Premiere of the work-in-progress Opera collaboration between filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and composer Phil Kline at the Centennial Concert Hall, January 26, 2014 during the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival

History is made in Historic Winnipeg,
the Forgotten Winter City of Death, Dreams and Dashed Hopes

JIM JARMUSCH:
"MUSIC is the most beautiful form of artistic expression.
FILM is the most closely related artistic form to music.
IMAGINATION is always the beginning of any
Artistic or Scientific endeavour."

Tesla in New York (2014) *****
World Premiere - A work-in-progress of the New Opera
A Collaboration Between Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Composer Phil Kline
Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival
Centennial Concert Hall - January 26, 2014
Artistic Directors and Curators: Alexander Mickelthwaite and Matthew Patton

Report By Greg Klymkiw

TESLA IN NEW YORK: Metal Machine Music on Lithium

A night sky, an ocean, wisps of white and a blue, so radiantly, yet alternately nocturnal and aquatic, cast a glow upon a stage empty of human figures on a landscape of instruments, music stands, speakers and amps - all standing forlorn in silhouette, waiting to be held, caressed and lovingly brought to life by the warmth of a human touch as the vaguely industrial aural pulsations of an unsettling drone wash over all in its path. It's like Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" on Lithium - so uneasy, so disorienting, yet so lulling - a magnet drawing us closer to either death or rebirth. Or both.

This is the appetizer to the main course of several new musical pieces performed by a myriad of brilliant, talented performers which, in turn reflects the public world premiere of the beginnings of a new opera entitled Tesla in New York, a collaboration between film director Jim Jarmusch and composer Phil Kline. These childhood chums, now well into their august years, have come together, bearing the armament of their mutual love, appreciation and admiration of the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla.

The performance is unveiled in the acoustically rich Centennial Concert Hall and though, in typical Winnipeg fashion, a Winnipeg Jets game proves to be enough of a rival that the 2000+ seats appear mostly empty - save for about one half the capacity of the majestic hall's Orchestra level - those Winter City denizens who are not eyeball-glued to the town's newly-restored-to-NHL-glory Jets are treated to an event of such artistic magnitude that they will carry the memories of it to their progeny and subsequent generations, long before they flutter away to their eventual respective deaths with the sounds and images of a work that seems destined for greatness, dancing across their cerebella and into the warm, white light that awaits us all.

This was, to coin a phrase from one of my mentors, the late, great Meyer Nackimson, the legendary octogenarian film distributor who refused to retire and ran the MGM/UA distribution branch office on Hargrave Street in Winnipeg until he was forced to leave the movie business when the office was completely shut down in the late 80s:

"Kid, Estelle and I saw the picture, the other night and it was ONE HELLUVA GOOD SHOW!"

TESLA IN NEW YORK

Though what we witnessed was indeed one helluva good show, it was not a motion picture in the traditional sense (and the late Meyer and wife Estelle could have only viewed the proceedings from the Heavens), Tesla in New York was most definitely a profoundly moving experience. Like so much great art presented within the picture-perfect magic of the proscenium, it was a visual and aural treat that made expert use of the stage in terms of the placement of singers, musicians and conductor/artistic director Alexander Mickelthwate (adorned ever-so stylishly in a perfectly fitting suit of Winnipeg Grey as he wielded his mighty baton).

The simple, but beautifully focused and operated lighting cast its sweet glow over the renderings of exquisite music whilst, most notably, the aqua-blue screen morphed into an astounding montage of early Edison motion picture footage, edited by Deco Dawson (who, according to Jarmusch, has "liquid hands") and Matthew Patton (the New Music Festival's fancifully chimeric co-curator) and under the guidance of Mr. Jarmusch himself (who self-decribed his own words of directions in this matter as an "oblique strategy").

Oblique or otherwise, it all pays off.

With Mickelththwaite and company, plus the audience itself, being enveloped in the historic Edison footage (stolen for this production on, it seems, Tesla's behalf in a perverse retaliatory act for all that Edison stole from Tesla - and, in fact, what Edison pilfered from pretty much everybody), I simply cannot imagine any subsequent production of this work without motion picture footage.

Though I was somewhat embarrassed to have used the cliched word "electric" to describe the production to Messrs. Mickelthwaite and Patton in their sumptuous Green Room after the show (well stocked with a fridge full of lovely spring water from the majestic Loni Beach in Gimli, Manitoba), I think, in retrospect, that it's perfectly fine to have used "electric" to describe the performance of Tesla in New York. Tesla, the Serbian inventor from Croatia who eventually found fame in the New World was nothing if not the Father of all things electric (in spite of Edison's thefts) and it felt to me like the music and the performance were definitely infused with the very quality of electricity - aurally, emotionally, thematically and yes, at times, even visually.

Take, for example, the stunning, partially improvised Overture wherein Mickelthwate guided singers and musicians alike to provide both melody and a fluffy, comfy bed for the onstage extension of the Lou-Reed-like Metal Machine Music drones in the pre-show. Kline and Jarmusch took to opposite ends of the stage and created some of the most haunting electric guitar feedback I've yet to experience - signalling precisely what this show feels like it's all about - the force and power of electricity and all the ramifications and permutations of its magic as borne from the mad genius of Tesla's mind, and to put a perfectly appropriate fine point to it - Tesla's boundless imagination.

Once the several pieces beyond this staggering overture began, one could, at points, gently close one's eyes and launch into a very private place in our respective imaginations to recreate Teslas's heart and soul, allowing Kline's often heartbreaking and alternately, elatedly-soaring score to take us to those hidden, magical places of what Nikola Tesla wrought for us all, but what, he in fact, wrought for himself. The evening's musicians and singers were all in superb and inspired form, but it would be remiss of me to not make special mention of the stunning work wrought by mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek whose voice took us to places of both darkness and romance.

I must also single out counter tenor David James (of the astonishing a cappella Hilliard Ensemble who so gorgeously opened the evening's program). James feels like he fits this score like a glove. When I think of Tesla, I am always infused with thoughts of madness, genius, passion and an overwhelming sense of the unrequited (in terms of both love AND career). James took me to places I both wanted to be and didn't want to be and I can think of no better approach to a figure as important and complex as Nikola Tesla.

In all, the importance of this event to the cultural fabric of our new century seems clear. This was history in the making and from this point forward, one can but marvel and dream as to what magic will ultimately be wrought when Kline and Jarmusch move forward with this work that will explore one of the great human beings to have ushered us all into the 20th Century.

Now, however, as we face in this 21st Century both the power and danger of manmade resources and accomplishments, Tesla seems even more vital a figure for us to consider. To do so with art, with imagination, with music, with a myriad of multi-media and live performance seems very much a no-brainer. After the evening's performance, Jarmusch cited the following inventions as the greatest manmade accomplishments: "Mapping the human venom, the Hubble telescope, the electric guitar and the bikini." One would like to think Tesla might approve.

Good Goddamn! My appetite has been whetted.

The buffet will follow and it will be sumptuous.

"Tesla in New York", a collaboration between Phil Kline and Jim Jarmusch is currently a work-in-progress for an opera that will eventually take the world by storm. Thanks to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival, the first gold bricks have been laid down to take all of us to the Castle of Operatic Oz - a place of beauty, of imagination and wonder. Nikola Tesla himself would have it no other way.

A similar scene to the one experienced by Jim Jarmusch and others in New York during the 70s and 80s and captured in the documentary BLANK CITY as well as many other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" series was happening in Winnipeg wherein a very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with was spawned. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

A great selection of early Guy Maddin, many of which that I produced and were written by George Toles, can be secured directly through the following links:



Another great film from Winnipeg during this period is Greg Hanec's extraordinary DOWNTIME which has the distinction of being a parallel cinematic universe to Jim Jarmusch's "STRANGER THAN PARADISE". Both films were made at the same time in two completely different cities and scenes and both Hanec and Jarmusch premiered their films at the same time at the Berlin Film Festival. One's famous, the other isn't - but now that the "lost" and "found" DOWNTIME has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly from the film's new website by clicking HERE

Perhaps the greatest Canadian independent underground filmmaker of all-time is Winnipeg's John Paizs. It's virtually impossible to secure copies of his astounding work which, frankly, is responsible for influencing the work of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Bruce McDonald and an endless number of great indie filmmakers the world over. Paizs' great short film SPRINGTIME IN GREENLAND is available for purchase in a beautiful remastered edition from a fan website, the inimitable Frank Norman. Norman has Paizs' blessing to provide copies of the film, so feel free to directly make your request to Mr. Norman by clicking HERE.

Visit Frank Norman's CRIME WAVE
fan site by clicking HERE

Alas, it's super-impossible to get a copy of Paizs' masterpiece CRIME WAVE (not to be confused with the super-awful Coen Bros/Sam Raimi film of the same name that was released the same year Paizs' film was NOT released properly by its scumbag Canadian distributor Norstar Releasing, which eventually became Alliance Films (where the boneheads sat on the film and turned down several excellent offers from small indie companies to release the film properly on DVD in super-deluxe special editions because they lazily purported to be negotiating a massive package deal on its catalogue titles with some tiny scumbag public domain company that, as far as I can tell, has neither purchased nor released the film). This truly great and highly influential film is, no doubt, languishing in some boneheaded distribution purgatory within the deep anal cavities of the new owner of Alliance Films, a humungous mega-corporation called E-One. Feel free to repeatedly bug their stinking asses and demand a proper release. In the meantime, VHS copies of CRIME WAVE can still be found with the ludicrous title THE BIG CRIME WAVE. Here's a copy available on Amazon:

BLANK CITY and other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series can be accessed here:

BLANK CITY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - This joyous documentary celebration of underground cinema in New York during the 70s is an ideal gift to cinema-lovers who celebrate the birth of Baby Jesus H. Christ - KLYMKIW CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEA 2012 #8

Jim Jarmusch on NYC's No Wave Cinema of the 1970s:

The inspirational thing was people doing it
because they felt it.

In this continuing series devoted to reviewing motion pictures ideal for this season of celebration and gift giving, here is KLYMKIW CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEA 2012 #8: The Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray of BLANK CITY, a terrific documentary ode to the beginnings of New York Underground cinema during the punk and new wave period. A perfect gift for the celebration of Baby Jesus H. Christ.

DEBBIE HARRY: OUR LIVES,
IT FELT LIKE OUR LIVES WERE MOVIES.
IT WAS VERY CINEMATIC.

Blank City (2010) **** dir. Celine Danhier Starring: Amos Poe, John Lurie, Steve Buscemi, James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Sara Driver, Lizzie Borden, Susan Seidelman, Ann Magnuson, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Beth B. Scott B., Debbie Harry, Lydia Lunch, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Wayne County

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Blank City is such an immersive, joyous and always thrilling movie experience that a little part of me hopes that audiences not as obsessed with movies, queer culture and punk as I am will get as much pleasure out of it as I did. I think they will, but probably in different ways. The converted will feel like they've died and gone to Heaven while others will either wish their most formative years as young people had been during the late 60s, 70s and a smidgen of the early 80s or, at the least, they'll come away with a new appreciation for the beginnings of truly DIY cinema and the sheer joy from living as art and art as living.

Director Celine Dahnier and Producer/Editor Vanessa Roworth weave a thoroughly entertaining narrative with a tight three-act structure (beginnings, heydays, end of days), truly inspiring, informative interviews and lots of great clips (with driving music that propels us with considerable force).

We hear and see a lot of Amos Poe - and so we should. Poe is, for many, the Godfather, the spirit, the soul of the entire movement of underground filmmaking in New York - coined by the great film critic Jim Hoberman as "No Wave". Poe describes his early beginnings as a photographer and tells a great story about visiting relatives in Czechoslovakia and how he eventually journeyed deep into "Dracula Country" within the Carpathian Mountains to surreptitiously "steal the souls" of superstitious rural country-folk with a long lens.

Returning to New York after Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to assert their Totalitarian power, Poe, like so many young people in America, especially artists, was ultimately gobsmacked by the sheer devastation within his country. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the lies and corruption of government, the civil unrest, wholesale murder and assaults upon Americans, on American soil by Americans.

In Canada, we felt much of the same strife in other ways - firstly as a trickle-up effect from our neighbours south of the 49th parallel, but secondly, the more insidiously and subtly creepy manner in which the Canadian Government preyed on its most vulnerable, its intelligentsia, its First Nation Peoples, its Queers, its artists and anyone not subscribing to the Status Quo.

Artists Ann Magnuson and James Nares respectively note how punk rock was an ideal response to the remnants of post-war Leave It To Beaver blandness that permeated America, clutching on to control for dear life and emitting death gasps that seemed to signal something all together new waiting in the wings. What this movement became was something that the young artists of New York embraced with a fervour (a "fuck you" movement/scene that, in its own way was happening in Canada at the same time in direct conflict with reigning Protestantism in Toronto and backwards, insular midwestern homogeneity in Winnipeg.)

Amos Poe spent endless nights hanging in bars where friends like Patti Smith, The Talking Heads, The Ramones, Wayne County, Debbie Harry and Television played (initially) in obscurity, save for the "scene" in New York. Poe had long since abandoned his first loves, still cameras and the 8mm home movie camera and hung in these joints shooting the bands on silent black and white 16mm and record their music (not synched, of course) on cassette tape.

Out of this came Poe's highly influential Blank Generation. Once he had all the footage, he needed to edit it. He rented an editing room from the Maysles Brothers (Gimme Shelter) for $40, but was only allowed one straight 24-hour period to cut the film. Poe fuelled himself with speed, cut for 24-hours, then premiered the film the next night at the famed punk bar CBGBs.

From here, underground filmmaking in New York exploded and this was TRULY underground. It had nothing to do with the equally cool, but snobby artistes amongst the experimental film crowd, this was a wave of cinema created out of the punk movement and sought to capture the energy of the "scene", but to also tell stories and, of course, with virtually no money.

They wrote the rules and broke the rules.

The city was bankrupt, and the lower East Side of New York looked like a blasted-out war zone. Whole buildings stood empty and while most "sane" people left NYC, the "freaks" stayed and even more descended upon it.

People wanted to make movies. They had no money, but this mattered not. They made them anyway. James Nares describes how artists could, for virtually nothing, secure astounding digs that served as studios: "We lived like itinerant kings in these broken down palaces." This truly became the antithesis to Hollywood and the mainstream. In fact, there was almost the sense that the Lower East Side WAS a movie studio, but with absolutely nobody in charge.

Blank City blasts through these glorious days and it's so much fun that you as an audience member hope, unrealistically, for it not to end. After all, the movie is a Who's Who of great filmmaking talent. Steve Buscemi seems to be in almost every movie, John Lurie not only makes music, but makes movies. Scott and Beth B, Lizzie Borden, Sara Driver, Susan Seidelman, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Nick Zedd and Richard Kern are but a few of those who flourished here (and are expertly interviewed by the documentary's filmmakers).

And, an end to all good things must come. Blank City reveals how the neighbourhood becomes gentrified and the lives led in a particular place and time are altered forever - as are the films. Some stay, others move on. What doesn't change is that for a glorious time, a scene of talented young people raged against the machine and made movies that captured a way of life and (both the filmmakers and their films) happily live on to influence and inform new generations.

If anything, Blank City is proof positive that Waves in filmmaking (or any great art) cannot be manufactured. They must come from the lifestyle, the gut, the artistry and invention of young passionate artists who find each other, support each other, make movies WITH each other, FOR each other and in so doing create a unique and indelible stamp upon the greatest magic of all.

The magic of movies.

Blank City makes an especially great gift for filmmakers, film lovers and/or old punks. Anyone who makes movies, cares about movies and can't live without movies must see and own this film. More importantly, after seeing it, do whatever you have to do to see the movie that started it all, Poe's Blank Generation and after you see that, dig up as many of the rest as you can. They make for great viewing. Blank City on Blu-Ray, looks and sounds GREAT. The disc is also chock-full of some superb supplementals. It's via Kino-Lorber.