As Hannah Takes the Stairs Hits New York, A Mumblecore Primer (And What Joe Swanberg Can Teach Doc Filmmakers)

Tonight was a big night in the indie film world, as Joe Swanberg's HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS unspooled in New York and as everyone gathered at events and parties related to the IFC Center's kickoff of their THE NEW TALKIES: GENERATION DIY series.  As Karina Longworth so hilariously writes over at SpoutBlog,  tonight "is shaping up to be the event of the season for people like me who rarely leave the house."

You'd have to be avoiding film blogs entirely these past couple weeks not to have been inundated with all things HANNAH and Mumblecore-related, but in case you're a doc junkie who is curious as to what the hell is going on in Manhattan and why everyone is getting so excited about a bunch of kids in Chicago and Austin who've got DV cameras and friends who don't mind being naked or looking foolish, here's a mumblecore primer.

In many ways, I'd argue that HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS, as well as Swanberg's previous films, KISSING ON THE MOUTH and LOL, stand just on the other side of the increasing blurred-line that separates narrative and nonfiction.  While there's no question that these stories are fictional (or at least fictionalized), in both style and in some ways content, they are coming closer to a new breed of nonfiction that also relies on digital video, moments of uncomfortable intimacy and an increasing number of close-ups.  Benefiting from the same pro-sumer equipment that has launched a thousand documentary filmmakers, filmmakers like Swanberg focus on life's intimate moments.  And much like Jennifer Venditti's BILLY THE KID, which also debuted at SXSW this year, the camera gets in close and the action happens in small increments.  In Swanberg's films, the sense of reality is heightened by actors who may be writing the script as they speak and who are always straddling a line of comfort between revealing too much and too little.

There's been a lot of press about HANNAH and the other films that have been loosely grouped together under the Mumblecore banner and what follows is a sampling:

First off, Matt Dentler, guru of the SXSW Film Festival and ground zero for all of the Mumblecore movement, asked several film bloggers (including yours truly) to feature his Q&A exchanges with the HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS cast and crew: 

• At Movie City Indie, Dentler talks to Todd Rohal
• Over at David Lowery's blog, it's Kent Osborne
• At Mike Tully's blog, there's Ry Russo-Young
• GreenCine Daily has his interview with Andrew Bujalski
• Kris Williams Swanberg gets interrogated at Cinephiliac
• SpoutBlog has Mark Duplass
• Self Reliant Film features Kevin Bewersdorf
• Here at All these wonderful things, there was the wonderful Greta Gerwig
• And finally, at Filmmaker Magazine was Swanberg himself

Dentler followed all of this up with a lengthy summary at indieWIRE:

In 2005, something was different, but we didn't know it at the time. People have asked why SXSW brought all these films together that year, as if the programmers did it on purpose. We simply programmed what we liked and the rest happened on its own. A new Andrew Bujalski film ("Mutual Appreciation")? We loved it and premiered it. A film from our old pals the Duplass Brothers ("The Puffy Chair")? Post-Sundance, it won a SXSW audience award. An odd, but highly enjoyable experimental narrative featuring hardly any dialogue ("Four Eyed Monsters")? After Slamdance, it won a SXSW audience award. And then, some kid from Chicago (Joe Swanberg) made a no-budget movie on video ("Kissing on the Mouth") where he and his friends get naked, talk, hang out, and explore intimacy? I think Joe's fearlessness about exploring intimacy (and his charismatic nature) made it easy to make friends with some of these other filmmakers when they attended SXSW 2005. After that year, they stayed in touch, and a community of artists from around the nation, started to grow. Thanks to MySpace, e-mail, and blogs, that was very easy. Thanks to MySpace, e-mail, and blogs, more collaboration and films were made.

A graphic view of "the tangled web of interconnectedness," in an image created by Aaron Hillis. Published with permission.  Quiet simply, the intimacy these filmmakers portrayed onscreen (a post-Y2K, post-9/11 "slacker" adulthood) felt all the more vital. This collective of filmmakers (which later included Aaron Katz, after meeting Swanberg during SXSW 2006), whether consciously or not, continued to make very personal films that had the immediacy and audacity of Web 2.0. Because, much like the vloggers or bloggers gaining momentum around the globe, these were films coming without filters and directly from the source. They were rough around the edges, but accessible and honest. Like blogs, some will take to "The New Talkies" films more than others. Most importantly, perhaps, is the realization that they are united by one theme: struggling for inter-personal communication during a telecommunications revolution. This subject would be examined most directly in Swanberg's 2006 sophomore feature, "LOL," also screening in the IFC series.

Over the weekend, lengthy pieces by Dennis Lim and J. Hoberman.  Lim nails one of the things that makes this "loose collective" of filmmakers, this vague movement, of such interest:

Mumblecore is the sole significant American indie film wave of the last 20 years to have emerged outside the ecosystem of the Sundance Film Festival. ("The Puffy Chair" is the only one to have screened there; Bujalski and Swanberg have had films rejected by the festival.)

Which highlights the fact that SXSW is the most important US film festival after Sundance, which is true for documentary films as much as for narratives.

Lim goes on to say:

It can seem like these movies, which star nonprofessional actors and feature quasi-improvised dialogue, seldom deal with matters more pressing than whether to return a phone call. When the heroine of "Funny Ha Ha" (2002), the film that kicked off the mumblecore wave, writes out a to-do list, the items include "Learn to play chess?" and "Fitness initiative!!"

But what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships. A favorite setting is the party that goes subtly but disastrously astray. Events are often set in motion by an impulsive, ill-judged act of intimacy.

From Hoberman's piece in the Voice:

Typically running a compact 80 minutes, these movies are disarmingly pragmatic, full of abrupt cuts and choppy inserts. Acting is mainly a coping mechanism. The characters in Hannah alternate between unconscious and self-conscious and that’s the charm. Embarrassment rules: In one typical interaction, Hannah (Greta Gerwig) contrives to have her ostensive boss (the ever-creepy Bujalski) come up to her cramped apartment where, squeezed in with her roommate on the couch, she fixes him with her pale hazel eyes and asks, “Do you think I’m doing OK at work?”

Thriving on the modest truth of clumsy mishaps and incoherent riffs, fueled by a combination of narcissism and diffidence, Mumblecore reflects sensibilities formed by The Real World (our life is a movie) and Seinfeld (constant discourse), as well as The Blair Witch Project (DIY plus Internet). Of course, Mumblecorps members prefer to cite Dogma or Gus Van Sant, who cast his upcoming mega-Mumble Paranoid Park through MySpace. That the filmmakers often appear on screen gives their movies a psychodramatic edge. In his youthful Flesh of Morning, Stan Brakhage made a self-starring poem on masturbation; half a century later in Kissing on the Mouth, Swanberg presents himself ejaculating in the shower and brazenly flirts with porn. Kissing opens with its heroine (Kate Winterich) and her ex-boyfriend engaged in startlingly naturalistic intercourse—the movie’s premise is her inability to give up these afternoon trysts, much to the discomfort of an adoring male roommate (Swanberg).

The denizens of Mumblecordia are often failed musicians or would-be writers. Joblessness is rife. Hannah refers to her boyfriend’s newly unemployed status as “the step-up of him pursuing nothing.” Without apparent work or ambition (other than to appear in this movie), Kissing’s protagonist is the quintessential Swanberg character. In his 2006, largely-improvised follow-up, LOL, three guys are more involved with various cyber-relations than with any human at hand.

All of this attention has led Anthony Kaufman to caution that we should, perhaps, lower our expectations, and lower the volume on the hype:

If these films are hyped, they may be doomed. One of the joys of stumbling upon a charming or sophisticated or funny low-budget "mumblecore" film is just that, stumbling upon it, whether given to you on DVD by a friend or the filmmaker himself or walking into one of them unknowingly at a film festival. They are so lo-fi, so seemingly slapdash, and many of them so crude in appearance compared to what else people are expecting to see in a movie theater, I'd think they need to come at the average viewer like a pleasant surprise, with as little forethought or anticipation as possible.

All of this seemed impossible when I first met Joe Swanberg in the summer of 2002.  As I've written before, Joe was still a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale when he interviewed me for a piece on his then website Filmbrats.com.  Joe and I stayed in touch over the years and I saw an early cut of KISSING ON THE MOUTH.  Later, in February of 2006, as he prepared to unveil his second film, LOL, at a second consecutive SXSW Film Festival, I wrote a piece about Joe and his nonstop filmmaking method, entitled Joe Swanberg, DIY Distribution and the Wave of the Future. 

It's worth looking back at the post, both to see the things that we already knew and, more to the point the things we couldn't imagine.  For example, I don't think either Joe or I would've speculated this IFC Center series at that time, nor the mad press attention that has accompanied it.  But the heart of the post - the debate over how to get your art to an audience continues:

The whole question of "how do filmmakers, especially those of us who are unconnected or unwealthy, find ways to get around a structure that seems inherently poised against us" resonates continually. And at this digital crossroads, we often find ourselves in the crosshairs of a debate as to whether the new technology will be utilized by filmmakers like Joe or will be exploited by those already with some degree of power...

Four months earlier, in a series of posts about Landmark's Truly Indie initiative, I had written:

Perhaps what is truly needed is a nationwide network of venues, support groups (similar to myspace), radio stations and websites that are solely dedicated to films like Joe's. But like the indie rock bands of the 1980s (see Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life for the definitive look back), this isn't going to be created by Mark Cuban, Rainbow Media or the Weinsteins, it's going to be up to a grassroots network of filmmakers and film lovers, who want to support truly original and challenging work. I'm all for this kind of thing developing, but it's truly up to us to make it happen.

Strangely (or maybe not so strangely), it is Rainbow Media (and their various IFC brands) who are helping to make this series of DIY films and filmmakers, reach a wide(r) audience.  And of course it's people at those companies - the Ryan Werners and the John Vancos - who found something in these films worth supporting.

But as Mumblecore has its moment, I think there are lessons for those of us in nonfiction to learn from.  Here we are, in late August of 2007, with the current unstable state of nonfiction film distribution, and the same prescription that I called for in November of 2005 rings true again.

Particularly if it begins to fall upon us to find our own ways of getting our films to theatres - whether we are working on our own, with small mom-and-pop distribution companies or even with larger companies that may or may not be placing our releases at the front of their queue - it behooves us to find ways to learn from each other, to become our own small businessperson, to create new networks.

Can we be smart about finding new ways to reach an audience, by adapting to new technology and embracing creative solutions like Joe did to reach his audience (as I wrote in 02/06):

(U)tilizing the same technology he chronicles in LOL to get his film out to a growing community of people who aren't looking to the traditional structure for films. Whether it's podcasts of the film's music or myspace pages for the film and for many of the actors...

And perhaps the biggest thing that we should learn from these filmmakers is that we can and should work together.  And I mean that literally.  Although the doc community is a pretty tight-knit bunch, we should  continue to find ways of collaboration, on screen and off.  We should find new ways to build a truly interconnected community.

As Tom Hall, programmer of the Sarasota Film Festival, concluded in an expecially brilliant piece about this filmmaking movement (and some of the criticism it has received) wrote:

If you need to know one thing, know this; If, on any given night in America, there is room on the couch, if someone needs a camera operator or an actor, if a script needs reviewing or a computer crashes and footage needs to be edited, I know that all of these artists would be there to help one another out. In the end, the auteur theory lives on in a collaborative network of very talented people, but each is his or her own creative talent, instantly recognizable.

I think that's the biggest lesson of this day.  Because as talented as Joe is, as fine a film as HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS is, the celebration in New York is about a community.

We can, and should, learn from it.