New York Film Festival’s 58th year includes 45 short films. Seven of those shorts are part of the New York Stories program, returning this year with a mix of narrative fiction, documentary, dance, and more.
Drills (Sarah Friedland, 2020, USA)
Drills is directed by Sarah Friedland, a choreographer and filmmaker whose two fields converge in the short. An adult (Hayward Leach), dressed in a boy scout uniform, practices drills as outlined in the 1917 Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys. A group of young students sits huddled together in the corner of a classroom, as silent as possible. Adults sit around a glass table, meditating, looking every bit like they belong in a MUJI commercial. These movements – boy scout drills, active shooter drills, corporate meditation – are choreography. They are all premeditated movements, but rather than being enacted with performance or expression in mind, they are done in anticipation of or preparation for something.
The film is largely quiet, eerily quiet, save for the rustle of the students’ clothing or the crunch of earth under the Boy Scout’s feet as he walks through the forest. Then, there is the decisive interruption of the quiet. The Boy Scout quotes Donald Trump’s speech at the 2017 Boy Scout Jamboree. The students speak about their preferred spot during a drill – the corner – and mention their hyperawareness of the architecture around them, avoiding windows and doors. The Boy Scout sings “Duck and Cover” from the mid-20th century educational film that advised Americans to “duck and cover” – like a turtle hiding in its shell – at first sight of a nuclear bomb plume. The film, with these intersecting choreographies, seems to ask what all these drills are for. Does all that practice actually prepare us for anything? These are compelling ideas and questions, but the film’s runtime stretches them out until the message becomes muted.
Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday (Ricky D’Ambrose, 2020, USA)
The first shot of Ricky D’ambrose’s Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday is of a death certificate issued in New York for one Dean Ott, born September 1st, 1950 and passed on February 12th, 2019 at the age of 68. It’s a very convincing fake, at least in the eyes of someone like me who is not trained to spot fakes. So is the news clipping concerning the murder of Kimberly Steinway near New Paltz, New York on Dean Ott’s undeveloped property. These deaths, while fictional, are created to weave a story about opportunism and white supremacy that is completely believable because it is what we see every day.
The film feels like a walk through an immersive art exhibit. Large blocks of text function like museum labels. The shots are like photography one observes while walking through a room. The sound accompanying each shot (birds and wind for a pastoral scene, gavels and murmuring for a magazine article about an art auction), immerse you in the where and when of each moment, even if the shots do not reveal much. A shot of far-right leader Lee Hidell (Caroline Luft) disappearing behind a doorway is strikingly unsettling. Towards the end, “Into Yam” by South African soul singer Miriam Makeba plays. Using a song by Makeba, an advocate against apartheid, was certainly a pointed choice, but one wonders what the end goal was.
Shots in the Dark with David Godlis (Noah and Lewie Kloster, 2020, USA)
Less a short history of CBGB and more a snapshot of the thrill of experiencing the venue in its prime, Noah and Lewie Kloster’s Shots in the Dark with David Godlis is charming and wistful. Godlis’ black and white photography is transformed into maneuverable cutouts that help bring to life a stitched together approximation of what CBGB was like during the seventies.
Godlis’ narration vibrates with excitement. As he describes his process in achieving the right exposure for his nighttime photography, the emotion is infectious, helped along by the lively animation of the images. The Klosters’ puppetry of the pictures seems to sway and move in time with the happiness in Godlis’ voice. It makes for a sweet seven-minute eulogy to a time and place that died, in Godlis’ estimation, when Reagan was elected.
Wild Bill Horsecock (Oliver Shahery, 2020, USA)
Wild Bill Horsecock focuses on Hayes Johnson, a Nashville musician and sex worker who lives in cowboy cosplay. The visual texture of the film is mostly soft and sun-faded, except for excerpts of Johnson’s videos posted on PornHub, which are presented in their original digital format. The film shows us Johnson playing guitar, singing, loading up magazines with bullets in a Walmart parking lot, and only halfway through the film is it revealed that he has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. A bar owner calls him angrily, asking about the complaints she’s received from several women after booking him for a music performance. Johnson explains them away as a lie spread throughout the internet. She doesn’t buy it and chews him out for four minutes before banning him from her venue.
This scene is the centerpiece of the film, which otherwise wanders into other areas: Johnson complains about the plastic straw he gets with his vegan smoothie but uses it anyway. He shoots watermelons in the woods. A tatted up Barbie doll on Johnson’s dashboard, tied in a bondage position, catches the camera’s attention for some time. There isn’t any interrogation of these accusations, but a detached observation of how Johnson tries to work around them and carry on like they aren’t real. Now, after this phone call, Johnson seems less like a lone wanderer and more like a man playing pretend in his hat and vest, unwilling to admit he has outcast himself with the harm he’s done but won’t acknowledge. Still, the cool gaze of the camera leaves something to be desired. However weak his excuses, however objective the film may try to be, all we end up with is Johnson’s side of the story.
The Chicken (Neo Sora, 2020, USA)
The Chicken, directed by Neo Sora, is shot on beautiful 16mm film that lends the film a fable-like quality. Hiro (Junshin Soga) starts off the film by killing a mosquito, and the smear of blood left behind on the windowpane is unusually large. His cousin Kei (Taiju Nakane) arrives from Japan and gifts Hiro’s wife Anna (Sandra Maren Schneider) with a furin wind chime. Unaware that it is a part of the windchime, Anna rips off the paper hanging from the bell. Later, Hiro tells Kei about the English word “gentrification.”
Not long after, he takes Kei to the Chinatown apartment he’s just bought, where he burns white sage to “purify” the space and orders Kei to throw out a piece of red paper left behind by the previous tenants. White Sage, sacred to several Native American nations, is endangered, and certainly not for him to use inappropriately. The red paper is repurposed by Kei to replace the paper strip on the furin wind chime. Kei and Hiro call an ambulance for an elderly man (Geoff Lee) who has fainted. They give him water and assure him he will be fine, but Hiro is disconcerted after the man chokes out “No ambulance!” These details, all small, fit together like puzzle pieces in Sora’s beautiful, curious film. Without even mentioning the titular Chicken, the story is rich with thoughtful symbolism. Concerned with what it means to be parasitic and violent, the film leaves a lasting impression.
In Sudden Darkness (Tayler Montague, 2020, USA)
Having worked on In Sudden Darkness as a production assistant, and being a former classmate and current friend of director Tayler Montague, I cannot provide an objective review of the work. I can provide an endorsement. In Sudden Darkness is a time capsule of the New York blackout of 2003, and it feels like finding a box of memories wrapped in silk. Love and tenderness emanate throughout every scene. The chemistry between all the actors, the attention to period-accurate detail, and the thoughtfulness of the writing are all remarkable.
My favorite scene is when Erica (Raven Goodwin) sits out on the terrace with her daughter Tati (Sienna Rivers), doing her hair and greasing her scalp. It’s a quiet, intimate moment, charged with nostalgia. The blackout reveals to Tati the loving bonds that tie the people around her, and In Sudden Darkness reveals Montague’s love for Black, uptown New York. I think it is extremely lovely and a very exciting directorial debut from a promising director.
The Isolated (Jay Giampietro, 2020, USA).
Jay Giampietro’s short The Isolated begins as a document of one man’s isolation, and then becomes a story of two parallel worlds within New York City during April, May, and June of 2020. Over shots documenting the comings and goings of New Yorkers during the start of the pandemic, the audience hears voicemails left for Giampietro by one Keith. Keith is chatty and lonely and calls frequently.
As the days pass by, visions of random Manhattanites in masks give way to shots of boarded-up storefronts and graffiti left by protesters in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Still, Keith speaks of his loneliness and how he avoids his apartment. He’s thrilled by an email from a friend, threatens suicide if the pandemic goes on much longer, and walks around with his mask on his forehead. He only mentions the protests once, describing the rioting as “horrible” in a voicemail, and seems unable to cope with his isolation. Giampietro, with smart editing of Keith’s voice over images of protest, points out his friend’s isolation from the world around him exists on more than one level.
