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Talmage Cooley
The idea of kids wreaking havoc in Buffalo, New York, hardly raises an eyebrow. But blind kids wreaking havoc — now that’s interesting. Or so thought Talmage Cooley, who heard rumors about a blind gang of teenage criminals and made them the basis of a two-sentence music video pitch for Interpol. The band was intrigued, and soon the L.A.-based filmmaker was on a plane headed east to the outskirts of the blighted city. He spent three days searching for the gang’s leader, who had recently been arrested for riding a dirt bike in a field. The result — which won’t be airing on TRL anytime soon — was a short documentary titled Dimmer.
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Cooley first gained notoriety at Sundance 2004 with his short comedy Pol Pot’s Birthday, which chronicles an imagined surprise party thrown for the grim Cambodian leader. Filmmaking is an unlikely career choice for the West Virginia native, a former Morgan Stanley bond trader with an MBA. (His resume does include co-writing, with Andy Spade, Public Love, a photo-driven account of sex in public places.) Cooley taught himself film production by taking night classes in New York City; he made Pol Pot’s Birthday in part to experiment with comedy. “When you make somebody laugh,” he explains, “they trust you.”
Humor returns in Dimmer, which is powerful because the kids have such a wry take on their situation. Indeed, Cooley says
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| Talmage Cooley |
he gradually realized his film wasn’t about blind kids behaving badly. “The story is about all the things that go into being any teenager," he says. "Rebellion, isolation, longing, frustration.”
These themes resonate most for the main subject, Mike, who breaks up with his girlfriend halfway through the film because she’s been cheating on him. To purge his misery, he and a friend whale on empty barrels with sticks in a vast, abandoned steel factory. The hollow, ringing cacophony perfectly embodies teen angst, as does the image of the kids, dwarfed by the gaping architecture of ruin. Before long, though, Mike’s back to normal, riding his bike along a bumpy sidewalk with his friend on the back. Musing on his unfaithful ex, he says, “I’m blind, so I don’t judge people by looks, but that bitch was ugly, dude.”
Jacqueline Salloum
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Cutting up and rearranging the demure nudes clipped from of a 1975 issue of Playboy, media artist Jacqueline Salloum discovered the pleasures not of retro porn but of the pop remix. “I grew up watching music videos and Hollywood films and I know how effective that form is,” says Salloum, who didn’t know how to use an editing machine before starting the project. “I just knew what I wanted to do.”
And what she wanted to do was radical: Salloum juxtaposed the collaged and digitally manipulated bodies of Playmates with a reworked version of a twenty-page interview with ex-CIA agent Philip Agee from the same issue. That year, Agee had published an account of the agency’s various transgressions, expecting public outcry. What he got instead was silence, except for the attention paid by Playboy. “I came across the interview when I was researching U.S. policy in Latin America,” says Salloum, who was intrigued not only by the intersection of naked women and foreign policy but by the total erasure of Agee’s revelations. “I wanted to take the piece and recontextualize it.”
She ran the interview text through the translation function on AltaVista, creating a relatively incoherent Spanish version. Then she had several people read the text in perfect Spanish, and this jumble became the voiceover. “So you think you’re hearing what you’re seeing,” she explains. “You’re seeing these beautiful women, but then they get distorted. This fits how I see people taking in information.” Interview, the resulting twenty-four-minute collage, questions American pop culture and its relationship to history and politics.
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| Jacqueline Salloum |
Salloum’s latest piece also reconfigures pop imagery toward political ends. Titled Planet of the Arabs, the video plays like a high-octane trailer for an action film; its sequences, all borrowed from Hollywood movies and TV shows, depict Arabs as terrorists, murderers or monsters. Initially humorous in its over-the-top pacing and choice of excerpts (including those of a jingoistic Chuck Norris and a dagger-wielding Ali Baba), the piece grows increasingly horrific as the stereotypes pile up.
Salloum, who is Palestinian, says the video has obvious personal reverberations. “Growing up, I was ashamed of being an Arab and tried to look more American,” she says. But after reading Jack G. Shaheen’s scathing book Reel Bad Arabs, Salloum was inspired to respond, and with Planet of the Arabs, she strikes back with humor and well-deserved fury.
To see Planet of the Arabs, visit www.sundanceonlinefilmfestival.org/2005/
Maya Churi
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In John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer,” it occurs to the hapless Neddy Merrill that he can travel the eight-mile distance between his friends’ house and his own by swimming through one neighbor’s pool to the next. But the whimsical journey is ultimately exhausting, and Neddy’s banal, middle-class sensibility dissolves into unhappy chaos.
This is the foundation for Maya Churi’s interactive film Forest Grove, in which a fourteen-year-old boy named Charlie decides to sample each of the alluring pools in a gated community. Churi, a filmmaker, screenwriter and media artist based in Los Angeles, was partly inspired by her own childhood fantasies of suburbia. “I was raised in Philadelphia, so I grew up longing for the suburbs and the idea of a pristine life,” she says. “I knew there were things there that I didn’t have in the city — it’s that idea of looking over the fence and thinking the things you see at a distance are so perfect, when in reality, of course, they really aren’t.”
Churi had already created one online project, Letters From Homeroom, in which she took a linear story about two teen girls, broke it into sections and placed it within the classrooms and hallways of a typical high school. Viewers gradually piece together a story by reading the girls’ letters, watching short film clips and listening to audio segments. Completed in 2000, Letters From Homeroom was heralded as a progenitor of "interactive narrative," a form that has yet to fully take shape.
With Forest Grove, Churi pushes things further in terms of design. Each segment of the story unfolds in one of Forest Grove’s houses or pools. In the final sequences, Charlie finds himself outside, dealing with the fears that come with a lack of control. The project’s visual metaphors are densely layered, mixing simple characters, animation and graphic design into a deeply affecting story about our longing for security in an uncertain world.
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Maya Churi |
To make the forty-five-minute piece, Churi wrote a feature-length screenplay loosely based on Cheever’s story, hoping to turn it into a film. “But as I was writing the script, I began to think about how episodic the story was,” she recalls, “and how it would lend itself to being online.” Using the idea of a map and an architectural scale model of the community, Churi created an interface that captures the essence of her project. “Things that are small seem so perfect,” she says. “You can’t see anything bad in something that tiny.”
View Forest Grove here: www.forestgroveestates.com/