Paperboys and Deformer, two shorts by Mike Mills

Mills: So, Brandon, what do you think it's going to be like in ... twenty or fifty years for paperboys?
Brandon: I think that there probably ... might be a paperboy, I don't know. 'Cause th-you might, you might find out all the, like, defying gravity, and then there'd be like, cars that would be in air. So, I don't know (with shrug). That's kinda hard to tell. Um ... I think it'd be cool to have a car that could float in the air, 'cause then you could, (shrugs), I think it'd be cool. Um ... 'cause I've always wanted to know what it'd be like to fly ... and ... float in the air. Um ... I think ... that ... in fifty years ... the paperboys would probably have their, (shrugs), their own system, where you could just deliver to the houses by mail or something like that.

I found a lot to relate to in Paperboys, the 40 minute Mike Mills documentary about paperboys in Stillwater Minnesota. It connected with some of the things I'd been thinking when writing about Fear City, and it reminded me that I view the problem of conformity and the death of personalities from my perspective, and Brandon and his paperboy friends view it from a totally different perspective.

The paperboys, in the 11-14 age range, want to talk about their bikes, favorite sports, movies, television shows, videogames, cars they want, and the money they can earn. They're into rap music, gangster rap, like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Corporations they probably wouldn't list as enemies. They're trying to be good kids. They're wrestling with growing responsibilities and self-awareness, and Mills tries to allow them to speak for themselves (though he asks some of them the same leading questions).

Paperboys is curious about how we become ourselves and how our society becomes our society. Or, as put by Gary Davis, writing about Ed Templeton for the short Deformer, "Ed is a bundle, a bundle of nerves, feeling life. [???] all the slivers are bound together into a complete person: happy, sad, friendly, mean ... straight, strange, and of course supremely messed up. Like all of us. The way it's supposed to be. The way it is. Reality."

Mills was recently interviewed by Gus Van Sant for Filmmaker Magazine (Beginners press). In the interview Van Sant broached the matter of Mills being both independently minded, and a creator of corporate advertisements. Mills replied that he's sometimes torn over the issue, but it's complicated for him, and doing some advertisements allows him to continue to live the life of an artist.

"You go to Huntington High School and there's just - half the kids are fuck ups. They're all - tweaked in some way," Templeton says in a voice over. "It's more like: my life's supposed to be normal, I'm supposed to be a good kid, but I'm ditching. There's like, a full ... blanket, of like, secrecy."

Mills strikes me as a genuine person, someone concerned about the people around him. I like that he has more questions than answers. I think he tries to discover people, instead of making judgments about them; he tries to see them for who they are instead of who they're supposed to be. I worry that his reluctance to draw bigger conclusions inhibits the scope of his narrative films, as in Beginners, which I thought was flat, but that's not a problem in these two documentaries.

An Evening with Bill Morrison.

A girl from the back rows begins to ask a question. Everyone turns around to see her. She asks Bill Morrison what Bill Morrison's contributions are to the films of Bill Morrison. Her phrasing is slow and awkward and she stutters a little bit. Her hesitance amplifies the tension the question creates. A multilayered tension. Bill is even kind of defensive about the question, the question of why he claims authorship over his found footage, and after he explains his involvement he asks her if she has a problem with his art. She says no, she thinks it's a creative approach, and then refers to the second of the films shown, Morrison's 2001 Ghost Trip, a live-action film that's a quasi-documentary about Morrison and some friends renting a hearse and driving it across the country. Ghost Trip plays exactly like any other Morrison film, including a hypnotic soundtrack (I'm lifting the description from Morrison's own Hypnotic Productions), repetitious sequences, sequences which literally reuse frames, and a non-verbal narrative.

She dodges a confrontation I don't think she intended to instigate. What compelled the girl to ask the question? The other films shown tonight featured archival footage that Morrison reprocessed, re-edited, had scored, and to which he applied new structure. He didn't shoot anything for them, he wasn't in contact with actors, and, except for 1997's Film of Her, he didn't write any narration. There's no dialogue anywhere. Maybe that's confusing, but I don't think so.

When Morrison says that if it wasn't for him the footage wouldn't be seen I think he's referring to the restorative aspects of his work, and he means that we literally wouldn't see these lost or damaged films if he didn't rejuvenate them. He's right, but that's not why I think his work is important, personally, except for the already mentioned Film of Her. Film of Her is explicitly about the sadness of film degradation and the voices that are lost to time and history because of improper handling or direct lack of concern. Aside from the factual, the tangible, what I wouldn't see without Morrison, and what is Morrison's true contribution, is the beauty and sadness of a woman being engulfed in flame-like filmrot in his 2004 Light is Calling. Nowhere else do I experience the airplane-like images toward the end of his 2006 The Highway Trilogy, a truly provocative moment that Morrison slowly builds, not inherent to the original footage.

It's kind of hard to tell someone that you really connected to the airplane-like images in the film you just saw. It's not usual film speak. There's a lot that's unusual about watching Morrison's films. The rot is sometimes illuminating, sometimes distracting, and sometimes confusing. Morrison relies on a portion of the emotional force to come from his famous scores, which he edits the films to, sometimes even the music coming first. As a filmmaker he uses music in a traditional sense and to great effect. If sometimes as a viewer I lose track of the film's pulse, or lose myself in the obliqueness of the image, the music guides me back in.

L'arroseur Arrosé.

The first fully staged film of course (of course!?). It's also the first film comedy. What happens when you re-enter an academic or instructional view of film is that you find yourself watching early short films again. And it's very exciting, because here you are in this classroom where all love is being directed towards the one great thing you love. And everyone wants answers to basic questions like who is the gardener (he's the gardener!), and "What do you think people felt when they saw this?" The latter question being the most elemental emotional question, and the fulfillment of the question starts everyone down the path to the necessity of filmmaking and the privilege of narrative and the versatility of the human mind and heart.

I remember why I love film when I am in a room full of people wanting to rewatch L'arroseur Arrosé. Giggling over L'arroseur Arrosé.