Working Artist's Statement

Three Core Values:
1) Organization
2) Recognition-people liking my art/performance, telling me I'm good
3) Feeling of productivity-getting things done, sense of accomplishment

Issues:
Heritage/ethnicity-I've always wanted to belong to culture or ethnic group other than "American." I'm jealous of people who speak another language at home and eat ethnic food and visit family in their home countries. This pops up a lot in my work and in my life. It is probably why I study/speak French and Spanish and desire to learn other languages, like German, Portuguese, and Russian; it's also why I want to study abroad and eventually live in Europe, so I can feel like I'm a part of those groups. I always use accents in improv; they're a good way to find a character. I'm also drawn to ethnically based arts. For example, I just saw the musical 'Ragtime' which hit me really hard; it even made me cry...coincidentally, it is about the stories of different ethnic groups in the early 1900s, such as Latvian-Jewish immigrants, WASPs, and African-Americans. Fiddler on the Roof is another favorite musical of mine...it's about Russian Jews, and I happen to be half Russian/Jewish. I listen to ethnic music; one of my favorite bands is Gogol Bordello-a multi-ethnic gypsy punk band, composed of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Jazz, the thing I'm pursuing, is totally ethnic; it's the music that African-Americans made for themselves. I also have a fascination with organized crime and the mafia, another group based on ethnicity and tied together by it; two of the works I've helped write this year involve it...in the movie "I Know a Guy," a girl asks the don of the mafia for a favor. In the children's musical Cassie and I have been working on, Vivian, the pigeon-girl, gets involved with the mafia when she has no other choice. So what does this say about me? I suppose that I want those feelings of closeness, support, love, and acceptance associated with being "ethnic"...nobody likes Americans anyway.

STAC Live

My last STAC Live has me feeling a bit nostalgic. For the four years I've been in STAC, all four STAC Lives I've participated in have been completely different from each other...some more successful than others, some more fun, some more disastrous. This year's is giving me mixed feelings...in a sense, it was very successful. This group works so great together, so we got a lot done and had a lot to present. However, the only negativity I can think of is the audience; as Luke said to me, they were flat-out hostile; it was really a challenge to get them to laugh or even have any kind of response at all...I've been in front of audiences a countless amount of times, but this is the first time I've gotten such a negative energy from them. Luke made an observation that never occurred to me before: STAC Live is kind of like a dog-and-pony show...we're just there to prove to a bunch of people who don't care that we're not a waste of time and that we're actually very productive and intelligent, when in reality, we shouldn't have to prove anything to anyone. Regardless, STAC Live has always been fun to me, and I personally like the performance version of it better than the participatory version we did last year. In summation, this year's STAC Live: eye-opening, surprising, and a little harsh, but enjoyable nevertheless.

Steve's Workshop: Day 2

We went over a bunch more scripts. I guess it comes from experience and education, but it's amazing how Steve can take any script and say "fix this, this, and this" and it's automatically better. Even a few scripts where I thought to myself, "this is a little bit of a cliched student film," Steve was able to give the exact right advice to make it better. In Jack's script, he actually called for a bus blowing up, and obviously that's unfilmable, so Steve suggested that he illustrate the character's hostility in a different way, so he would be able to film it. And I suppose that's what a professional artist of any discipline should be able to do: point out what doesn't work and suggest ways to fix it in order to make the art better. I can't wait till I'm able to do that with songwriting, or improvising.

I only have one session left, since I won't be here on Tuesday, so hopefully we'll have time to go over the script for Children's Theatre. Then we can get a jump on it as soon as possible, since the play is over.

Steve's Workshop

Workshop day 2. We did cold reads of four people's scripts, which were, for the most part, successful. Steve wanted the scripts to have that sense of not directly saying or illustrating what you are trying to say...just letting the audience figure it out. Nearly all of the scripts we hashed through succeeded in this.

In my humble experience, it seems to be a recurrent theme of student films to try too hard to be overly clever or make a joke just for the sake of doing so. It was so refreshing to hear dialogue that was necessary and legitimately whimsical. Once again, to make a connection to other disciplines of art, I find this to be true in songwriting. I heard a song today called "Butterly" by Jason Mraz...ugh...that was just uninteresting and cliched because, rather than writing lyrics that were suggestive but still left room for the listener to figure things out, he wrote foolish, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever lines like "I'm taking a moment, just imagining that I'm dancing with you. You're the pole and all you're wearing is your shoes"...why don't you just sing, "I want to have sex with you. I really want to have sex with you"..it would fulfill the same level of interest. The same goes for a film; we never see much violence in Kontroll, but we know it has happened. We never see Laci slit a man's throat, but we know he did, and that's what's important. Even take Psycho-supposedly one of the scariest movie scenes in history, but we never even see the girl in the shower get stabbed. Brilliant.

I am fortunate to be in STAC, in a group of more advanced artists who won't make generic student films. I am also fortunate that we have the limitations of time, location, budget, cast, resources, etc. because limitations are what makes art good. If you can have everything you want, then you can make episodes 1, 2 and 3, of Star Wars instead of episodes 4, 5, and 6...which ones are better?

On a sidenote: I hoped to be working on the children's theatre script with Steve. Will that be possible at all in this workshop or should Cassie and I just talk to him outside of it?

Kontroll...again

Luke, you were right; the more I learn about Kontroll, the harder it is for me to talk about it. After seeing it a second time, I'm finding it harder to wrap my mind around it. The setting of Kontroll is a world that combines and crosses boundaries between reality and fantasy, and it is hard for any human being to just go ahead and accept the fact that this movie is a blur; not everything is real, but not everything is an imaginary impossibility. And rightfully so; we live in a world where we, for the most part, know what is possible and what is not, so giving that up and living in an ambiguous fucked up "reality" for 105 minutes isn't easy at first.

Maybe Kontroll is so hard to talk about because Nimrod Antal has exposed a side of us that we don't really like to think about: the darker side, the troubled side, the side that maybe pushes innocent people in front of trains. I like that Bulcsú can both be the killer and not be the killer. If he is, then that shows just what a negative environment or a negative situation can do to a humans; it can break them. If he isn't, then there's the hope we're looking for, that there's some good in all of us, even though there's some evil too. We all have this moral conflict. We just don't want to admit it because it makes us look "bad" or "vulnerable." Should I do the right thing or the thing that makes me happy and gives me catharsis? Should I look out for others or take my needs as the most important?

Bulcsú isn't your typical underdog hero. He is more like the ancient Greek definition of a tragic hero. He is flawed, seemingly doomed to an unavoidable fate, forced to suffer, and is faced with a serious decision. He is not entirely a tragic hero because he doesn't die in the end, but perhaps the bitter, evil part of him does when he finally ascends out of the metro and into the next phase of his life.

Kontroll

I have not been able to stop thinking about Kontroll since I saw it. It's been built up in my mind for the four years I've been in STAC, and it was certainly worth the wait. Why is Kontroll such an incredible film? Sure, it won 17 awards, the cast is fantastic, the cinematography is stunning, the subject matter is unique, and the whole thing in general is funny, sad, and dark all at the same time. But it must be the combination of every amazing element that makes Kontroll one of those movies that just won't leave you alone. I've done a bit of research and read plenty of interviews with Nimrod Antal since I saw the film, and it's interesting how the more I find out, the more questions I have.

I can't even settle on whether or not I think Bulcsú is the killer. On one hand, I think it would make complete sense that the killer is a dark part of Bulcsú deep in his subconscious that hates his job so much that he ends up killing innocent passengers who never give him the respect he deserves. On the other hand, I think that conclusion might be too obvious, too predictable, too generic, and I don't think Nimrod Antal is the kind of director who would go for the obvious choice. In fact, he most probably wants us to tear our minds apart over whether or not Bulcsú is the pusher, only to never give us a definite answer. In one interview, Antal said he doesn't necessarily consider himself an artist, but for all intents and purposes, I'll consider him one. Like most artists, perhaps he wants us to wonder if there is a little bit of evil in ourselves. Roland Barthes once said, "Literature is the question minus the answer." Perhaps film is too.

This movie also has a killer soundtrack. Music can make or break a movie. For example, Watchmen was a mediocre movie, made even worse by a terrible soundtrack, full of songs that were neither good individually nor as a whole. The movie could have been made better if the soundtrack included music appropriate to the time it was set in, and especially music appropriate to the moods of individual scenes (No one should ever use "Hallelujah" for a sex scene). But I digress. The distinct sound of the band "Neo" perfectly suited chase scenes, murder scenes, comical scenes, and love scenes with their ominous, ambiguous, and one-of-a-kind style.

Now that I've seen Kontroll, all I want to do is watch Kontroll and talk about Kontroll. Basically, I want to live, breath, sleep, and eat Kontroll. I can't wait to watch it again and unravel more of the mystery. I dread the day any American tries to do a remake of it!

Making Movies the 'Be Kind Rewind' Way

I know I'm being shallow and redundant when I say it was really fun, but it definitely was. Now that that's out of the way, on to the deeper stuff!

Working in Groups:
I have always been a fan of group work and it has always been my instinct to take the lead and direct the group; that's just the kind of person I am. However, this time, Jessica was the camera-woman, so she was the automatic leader. At first it was a challenge for me to sit back, just go with the flow, and not try to lead, but eventually I got used to it. It's good to take a different role in a group every now and then.
I'm so grateful for the group I worked with. We all seem to have a great artistic chemistry in that we build off of each others ideas in order to develop a finished product. It was a curse and a blessing that we are also all fun-loving, chatty, silly people, because at times, we did let joking around get the better of us. Still, when it came time to shoot the film, we utilized the time to the best of our abilities. I don't think our film would have been as successful as it was had our group been different.

The Time Constraint:
On filming day, the time limit became very stressful, especially because 15 minutes were wasted on a fire drill. We even had to cut a scene because we wouldn't have had time to go from the basement to my car and back to the basement again. The whole time, I kept glancing at my watch, thinking about how little time we had left. But in the end, we got the job done without any petty fights or arguments between the group members, which always wastes time.

The Film Itself:
I think we approached shooting pretty well. We always rehearsed the scene we were about to film a few times before actually shooting it, which was nerve-wracking. There was a lot of pressure not to mess up. Like Ed Wood, we always accepted the first take and moved on. We almost made it through the entire film without any glitches or mess-ups until Nick came in as the blind prophet and made Doug and Cassie crack up.

I would love to make another movie like this, perhaps with different limitations and requirements. It's certainly a valuable experience for artistic, technical, and every-day life situational purposes.