Jem Cohen: Unusual But Accessible Filmmaking
How did you first become familiar with Cape Breton? What about it left an impression on you?
I first went to Cape Breton in the late 1990s. Fugazi, with whom I was working on the documentary, INSTRUMENT, was playing in Halifax at an old hall and I went to see them and then headed North to explore on my own. I had impressions of the place from the work of June Leaf and Robert Frank, and I’d been to Scotland, which it immediately reminded me of. I just fell in love with it and began returning when I could over the next 10 or 12 years. On the surface, much of it is very, very beautiful, and very secluded—so initially I was drawn mostly by the wilderness. Of course, Cape Breton can be a tough place too; it’s faced a lot of rough times, economically, and can be very insular, but it’s really special.
You often collaborate with musicians; how involved were you here in the composition of the score?
The score is pretty tightly composed to the images rather than improvised, though the musicians have some room to move and each performance is different. It was a very collaborative process. I’d been gathering scraps of material for years, mostly in film, and once I got the original commission to develop the piece (from EMPAC in upstate NY) I came to the musicians with footage in rough sketches. I also found elements of traditional music as well as environmental sounds that I wanted to incorporate, albeit in a very loose way. I couldn’t afford to bring everyone, but we took a smaller group—Guy Picciotto, T.Griffin, and Jim White, to Wreck Cove in the middle of winter, to hole up and soak in the atmosphere and come up with music. I’d give guidance and talk about how I wanted certain sections to function, but mostly I let them be and they’d work while I was out shooting and then we’d listen and hash it out a bit. Then the other musicians got those results as well as their own assignments and we’d go back and forth until eventually everyone came together for intensive rehearsals done directly to the edit. Since ANCHOR is a kind of documentary, with interviews and stretches of natural sound as well as music, the musicians have to have a set map and pretty tight cues.
We Have an Anchor sounds more in line with the kind of work you usually do, whereas Museum Hours felt more anomalous as it was more-or-less a straightforward feature film. What had inspired you to do something relatively conventional?
I see all of my work as all part of a continuum. I make shorts and long-form, feature-length pieces, as well as installations and still photos. I do films about and in collaboration with musicians and I do films with no music in them at all. CHAIN, which has characters and extensive voice-overs and combines elements of narrative with documentary, is very much a precursor to Museum Hours. I’m glad Museum Hours has been able to attract a great distributor, Cinema Guild, and it’s definitely being seen more widely than a lot of the work I’ve done before but it was part of a natural progression. If people want to assume that Museum Hours is a “more or less straightforward feature film” and that makes it less intimidating and encourages a wider reach, that’s good. But in truth, I had no interest in doing even a relatively conventional film and it’s strange to me to hear it referred to as one. I can’t say I agree with the description, but then again I’ve always felt that I generally make accessible work—it’s just that commercial forces are so dominating that it’s hard for most unusual work to get seen, even if it actually has something to offer a wide range of people. That said, there are a few brave venues, including the IFC, Anthology, and BAM, that we need to be very thankful for.
What neighborhood do you live in?
I live in Gowanus, have been here about 13 years. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for about 29 years. Never lived in Manhattan. I wound up in Gowanus because I wanted to live in an unassuming, affordable Brooklyn neighborhood with a wide range of inhabitants, and some friends made that possible by offering me a rental. I’d lived in Williamsburg for a long time, from ’84 to ’92, when it was still very quiet and very mixed. I then moved to Park Slope because I lucked into an affordable room there for a while. I love my current neighborhood but since the zoning changed it’s been devastated by seemingly endless displacements of regular, low-slung Brooklyn housing and businesses in favor of one generic, 12-story, “market-rate” tower after another. Now we’re about to get one dropped right in our backyard, which means losing a number of other old houses and their yards, as well as a laundromat and small coffee place and so on. And of course, it will entirely block the light, which is heartbreaking. Fourth Avenue increasingly looks like any row of terribly designed, monolithic condo high-rises anywhere on the planet. Soon there won’t be anything “Brooklyn” about it at all and meanwhile, all of the rents in the area are sky-rocketing. Of course, the issues are complex but I can’t help but find the greed and insensitivity behind these changes sickening.