New York Film Festival Dispatch

When I first got up to New York, I arrived with a little less confidence than I had the week before, when I felt like I was pulling a fast one getting a press pass to the New York Film Festival, ready to spend some Amtrak points and squabble together a week’s worth of couch-surfing. The first two nights, I ended up having to fend for myself, though — ultimately opting for a hotel in the Bronx because of easy train access to Moynihan, Lincoln Center, and wherever my friends might be holed up in Brooklyn these days. Unfortunately that ballooned my budget from an initial investment of $0 to almost $500 after all the taxes and fees were accounted for, and my freelance cash-grab just turned into a financial consideration, and pitching became less a fun exercise and instead one of desperation. Lotsa writers will go in and cover film festivals at a loss are right on the line, and even though I make my “real” money bartending so that I can moonlight (daylight?) as a writer, it doesn’t interest me too much to lose hard-earned cash just to rub shoulders or pretend like I’m at the center of the independent film industry for selfies or social media opportunities.

In doing my job at pretending to be a film critic, I failed immediately. I got off the Amtrak in time to take the subway up to my hotel, drop bags, and ride right back down to the Upper West Side to queue outside the Walter Reade with dozens and dozens of Press & Industry pass holders to try and see The Brutalist, the latest by wanna-be auteur (and half decent actor) Brady Corbet. The promise of a 70mm projection and the next “Great American Epic” was too much for me to ultimately get in, even after waiting in line for well over an hour — probably for the best, I really had only planned to write a hit piece.

But The Brutalist is a movie that’s going to make rounds — perhaps not straight to theaters, but it’ll have enough festival buzz to play New York & L.A. in time for awards season and probably become a well-advertised streaming staple on Max or Prime or whoever ends up buying it. I’ll get to see it. That’s how most of the movies are at these big fests, and it seems like half the point here is to sell overpriced tickets of Anora to NYU students and wealthy geriatrics crossing Central Park from their classic sixes. The more artistically important function of these fests is bringing the stuff that won’t play anywhere, be that more experimental, demanding documentary works like Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau’s Direct Action, or projecting the latest restorations of cinema that went to the wayside, waiting to be re-released.

When I got back to my hotel after failing to inject myself into the hot, current film discourse, I opened up my Chromebook and threw on a screener for Nightshift, an underground British film directed by Robina Rose, shot in a hotel where her and much of the cast worked. Starring Jordan (best known for her role in Amyl Nitrate in Derek Jarmen’s Jubilee) as a hotel receptionist, much of the film is shot in static wides from the perspective of the front desk as a cavalcade of surreal and idiosyncratic guests check in for the night, coming in one after the other as if the lobby of the hotel were a stage in Greek play so ancient that it predates dramaturgy itself. Time stretches and pulls, and a routine shift in the small hours of the night reveal an oneiric world that is waking while the rest of us are sleeping, externalized in the confines of a hotel that feels itself completely out of time.

One of the first to approach to the desk is a strange old woman (what we’d now call a Tilda Swinton role) played by Anna Rees-Mogg, and if that last name sounds familiar it is probably because of her nephew Jacob, who was the Tory in British Parliament who was liable to show up to events in top hat and tails. Rees-Mogg came from a wealthy conservative publishing familiar in Britain, but her interest in left-wing politics and experimental film left her estranged from her family. She’d join an adoptive one instead, acting as a mother figure to a whole generation of British avant-garde filmmakers. Rees-Mogg’s work and name, however, remains obscure outside of the UK.

Behind camera on Nightshift is American independent filmmaker Jon Jost, a man who’s work stretches over five decades but too remains obscure, even in his home country (I first found out about him from my bar manager late into the night and I-don’t-know-how-many drinks deep at our holiday party years ago). Jost is figure ripe for rediscovery, both because of his constantly innovative form — of which I can’t think of a single equivalent, at least not in the States — and his staunch, cogent radical politics, which is all the more stunningly articulate in his films from the arch conservative 80s or the liberal psychosis after the Cold War. His work is a window into an America basically forgotten by any mainstream narrative, he’s a part of a counterculture so genuine that the culture hasn’t even noticed it.

Hiding in Nightshift is the spirit of independence that gets talked about a lot in the world of “independent” film, but is much more rarely actually seen. The accessibility of the environment both makes for a cheap production and one deeply informed by the experiences within it of those in front of and behind the camera. It’s pure authenticity, self-expression by any means available. It’s punk, but with the aesthetic inclinations of experimental theater and film form that feels more reminiscent to the dreaminess of silent film than it does to low-budget grit that came right before it in the 70s. It’s the kind of film that I sit and wonder, “Why doesn’t this play in Baltimore?” Do you have to have a festival as big as NYFF to attract the couple of interested parties? Is it true that the only handful of people in America that are really interested in works like Nightshift are the dozen or so that will pile into an empty theater in one of the country’s largest media markets to see it? I don’t think so, but cinema exhibition is such a cash-heavy enterprise that it often feels like a city has to be as big as New York to maintain a healthy microcinema like Spectacle (itself a product of a New York film scene that is dying or no longer exists). Every once and while people in Baltimore pop up a screening at Normals or talk about turning some performance space into a rep theater, but nothing is sticking yet — although that doesn’t mean it can’t.

Alex Lei

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