Culture

The Brooklyn-based filmmaker presents his latest cinematic project at BAM's Next Wave festival

Take a band of Brooklyn hipsters. Add the austere landscape of Cape Breton Island, projected on four screens. Raise the volume at the Harvey Theater. Raise it again. You have We Have an Anchor, a new film performance (if that’s even a term) at BAM’s Next Wave festival September 26th-28th. 

The auteur is filmmaker Jem Cohen, who shot scenes over the last decade in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton. He’s not a musician, but says he’ll be “playing” four projectors simultaneously along with the music, to be performed by something of a super-group of indie musicians.

"We Have an Anchor harkens back to the early days of cinema, back to Abel Gance’s Napoleon ... and to so-called silent film, which was never silent."

“It’s about enveloping people in the experience of a place,” said the director of the recently released indie hit Museum Hours (Patti Smith is a producer). Slight and boyish at middle age, Cohen speaks with gentle intensity. Anchor “harkens back to the early days of cinema, back to Abel Gance’s Napoleon, seen on multiple screens in the late 1920s, and to so-called silent film, which was never silent.” If the film references are classic, the musicians are mainstays of indie rock—Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), Jim White (Dirty Three), T. Griffin (The Quavers), Efrim Manuel Menuck, Jessica Moss, Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You! Black Emperor and/or Thee Silver Mt. Zion), plus vocalist Mira Billotte (White Magic).

Born in Afghanistan (“by chance…my father was posted there”), Cohen grew up in Washington D.C., except for a few years in Brazil, when his father was on another posting. He went to Hollywood feeder-school Wesleyan University, but not to film school, although he has since taught at a few. Over a decade ago on a trip to Nova Scotia to see friends in Fugazi, Cape Breton’s mystical beauty and wildness struck him, and he began filming. But he lives more prosaically, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, a trough of a valley along a canal that kept all but garages, struggling families, artists, and the occasional corpse of a mob hit away. Now, Cohen notes with regret, it’s prime real estate.

Jem CohenJem Cohen has a laugh outside near his Gowanus apartment. 

A photographer, Cohen has shown his stills at the influential Robert Miller Gallery and at Camera San Francisco. But the Jem Cohen name—Jem is narrator Scout’s brother in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird—tends to be associated with minimally-budgeted documentaries that are hits among the would-be film cognoscenti: Benjamin Smoke (2000) and Empires of Tin (2008).

Cohen’s latest Museum Hours shadows the bond that emerges from a chance encounter of a museum guard and a woman who is visiting Vienna to share the last moments of a dying friend. A hit, complete with a stirring introduction to the grand scenes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, it is likely to be on plenty of ten best lists by the end of the year (the Post dubbed it “richly enthralling,” the Times “a strangely moving work of art”). Cohen is pleased that the audience can’t figure out if Museum Hours “is documentary or fiction, or if it’s scripted or not.” But independent films tend not to pay everyday bills. So far, Museum Hours has brought in some $250,000 at the box office; minimal, but more than a six-fold increase over the gate for Benjamin Smoke.

Cohen has also made music videos, although none recently. “I did it almost exclusively in situations where I had an enormous amount of control and could basically avoid the parameters of an industry that I always felt was relatively grotesque,” he says. In one instance, Patti Smith “had no interest in lip-synching…so [we] made a little film together, and she told the label, ‘take it or leave it.’” The song was her cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.

"The power of moving image is simply best-served by having people sit down and commit to a temporal experience that they take from start to finish."

But his ambitions are in film and its possible intersections with art and performance. “The power of moving image is simply best-served by having people sit down and commit to a temporal experience that they take from start to finish. That is the heart of cinema, but there’s no reason that it can’t become absolutely a possibility in the art world.”

Sometimes in the art world the genre mix “has been successful, and sometimes it’s been haphazard and half-assed. It’s important to show that this kind of crossover can be done full-bore,” he stresses. “It’s not necessarily appropriate for something to be just seen in a group show on a little monitor with some headphone hanging on the side.” Not that he would rule out an installation version of We Have an Anchor. It’s a way “to make a moving image into a kind of sculpture.”

Altogether, Cohen considers Anchor a kind of “collage.” Performance art is a declaration in the art world that “there’s a place for having people gather together and sit down and let something unfold and stay there until it’s over,” he says. But there’s also something to be said for rock ’n’ roll. “It’s joy, it’s kicks to have people in a room and have this glorious din.”