Interview with Jem Cohen, director of Chain
Jem Cohen was in attendance at the Vancouver Film Festival for the screening of his film, Chain.
Catherine MacLennan: Your film Chain is a combination of a fictional story (and characters) and "real life" (documentary) images, filmed shots - such as real people walking around amusement parks and shopping malls. The people appear to be unaware that they are being filmed. Did you hide your camera and was it difficult to film in such public, or privatized-public spaces?
Jem Cohen: Some of the work that I did, I just shot on my own and sort of implanted scenes with the actors into preexisting materials. So, sometimes I think when people think that the actors were really someplace they're not. So I didn't have to go to any great lengths to sneak it. But inside the shopping malls, I was, uh - hidden. I won't say exactly how, but - You're not allowed to shoot in them.
CM: You weren't afraid of being detected?
JC: Well, I hid it very well.
CM: Are the two main characters played by professional actors? What made you choose these two particular people for the roles?
JC: One of them had acted before and one of them had never acted before. The one who had acted before was in a very interesting Japanese film called Tokyo Decadence that I had seen many years ago and thought she was quite extraordinary. She's not really doing much acting any more but she had trained as a dancer and had done a lot of different things, and so she had a lot of kind of different abilities and she knew how to control her movements very well. And then the other woman has never acted; she's a musician who was in some underground bands. White Magic and Quixotic were her bands. And so she was someone - I really didn't want stars or celebrities or even actors. But I knew the Japanese woman was very patient and interested in doing a non-actory kind of acting. And the other woman just had a lot of sort of interesting presence. So it worked out well, for me, I think - to work with people who are not really sort of immersed in a daily way with trying to be actors.
CM: At one point the girl sings something that sounds like a church song "I saw the light of heaven all around..." But unlike a beautiful natural setting or, say the architectural achievement of a gothic cathedral, the setting she is in is quite god-less. Are you commenting on the emptiness of such church songs in the face of this reality, or the emptiness of this constructed society and system that churns out such landscapes and lives?
JC: Well, with the music I was mostly interested in the regional character of it, more than whether it was religious or not. I mean a lot of regional old music is religious, but it wasn't so much the god stuff that I cared about but more the fact that it was music that had a very, very, strong, specific regional character, and I'm putting it into places that basically have no regional character at all anymore. And so I like that juxtaposition and I think it's interesting that people still kind of hang on to religion in all kinds of circumstances, even in ones where there's - where they're stuck in places that are quite far from gothic cathedrals. Although, I think some people probably walk into a really big mall and they feel like they're in a cathedral.
CM: I was reading about your early interest in and involvement with the underground music scene. Do you think the "punk" aesthetic of DIY, no bullshit, being sympathetic for those struggling in society, the pared down style are things that you picked up from that era and will continue to inform your work?
JC: Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's very inspiring to me, to see people kind of make something outside of the industry, outside of the music industry, and it gave me something of a template to work in film outside of the film industry. And there are certainly certain strains of punk that are activist and that are kind of oppositional in nature to the dominant mainstream culture. So that's all stuff that I think is inspiring.
CM: Do you think the generations that followed after that didn't have that sort of framework of integrity connected with that movement - Do you think there is something lacking in their work because of it?
JC: Well, I don't think that movement ever went away. I mean, I think that, like "punk," "DIY" - or whatever - are things like, they're like tools that people picked up and dramatized but then they've always existed, just in different fields and in different realms. And they're not new inventions and they can't go away because people - I don't care whether people call themselves punk or not or whether they sound a certain way or look a certain way, it's just that for me, punk was a movement in which certain ideas were transposed into music that had a certain energy or sound. But it's the same tools, same activism, and the same mode of operating that a lot of people used to use in the 60s or in the 50s, or in the 1400s, you know - it's like a tradition, that, I think it's fascinating to see it be reinvented but I don't think that it ever disappears. And so it may disappear from the view of the media or the mainstream, but even in the context of punk, you've got bands like the X that have been around for 25 years and they're like totally going strong and maintaining their commitments. So it's never gone away.
CM: Is it hard getting your films shown?
JC: Yeah.
CM: Do anticipate it ever getting easier for the truly independent filmmaker to have their films shown?
JC: No, I don't. It might get harder.
CM: How could it get harder?
JC: I don't know. I ask myself that. But, it could get harder because there's more and more corporate control of media and there's more and more corporate control of movie theatres and television stations and things that used to show on public television they won't touch now because they're not, they don't see them as commercial enough or mainstream enough. But, again, I can't really be too bogged down by that - it's like I have a job, which is to make this work, and what the powers that be decide to do with the work is sort of secondary to me because I need to make sure that it exists and then at the very least the people who seek it out should be able somehow to get a hold of it. But I don't expect that it will be a mass phenomenon or that it will be necessarily offered in a big broad way. It's frustrating and unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
CM: Has it changed for the better or the worse in the last 10-15 years?
JC: A combination. I mean, I think if I had made this film 15 years ago, I probably would have had an easier time of it. Partly, just because everybody wasn't so inundated with so much work, but also partly because things like public television were more adventurous before. And the same goes for the BBC, Channel 4 - places that used to be more interested in stepping out on a limb than they are now. But on the other side of the coin, there are DVDs and internet stuff and people trying to start micro-cinemas that they weren't necessarily doing before. So it gets harder and easier at the same time. It probably kind of comes out in the wash, in an even, generally bleak, state.
The Lamp, October 2004