by KUBOA
C:You don’t think that it so distinctly choosing an actual person as subject leads to our, or any, interpretation of it being, consciously, steered in a certain way? I mean, certainly one can make abstract statements, suggestive, allusive statements and atmospherically frame a film which is about an actual person to also be about things ethereal but I don’t see how it is possible to ignore the choice of Miles Davis as the central figure being depicted, to treat that inarguably deliberate choice as neither here nor there, as just-something-the-filmmaker-did-off-the-cuff. This choice isn’t the same as the merely naming a grotesque, hobgoblin figure Richard Nixon as in the earlier discussed The Rub, it isn’t just a suggestive, psychologically-weighted name, not some symbol, or at least not only some symbol, to make a clumsy phrase.
A:I will never accept—and certainly not in the case of this film, which is done as a combination of loose brush strokes and tempered, intimately realized images—that any sort of historical or devotee understanding of Davis is integral or even important to the viewing. And further, I don’t accept that knowing about Miles Davis (which I don’t and I don’t seem to think you do either) would be anything but destructive to one’s reception and experience of this film. Look at it this way—the film is presented as largely dialogueless and the dialogue (or rather the staccato monologue) that does exist is placed inside of a memory, not even in flashback, but in striped down, suggestive memory—the woman, upset, yelling at Davis, her actions aren’t literal, aren’t filmed in time and place but rather are a presentation of the likely exaggerated elements needed to distill the emotion that rings in Davis’ head based on them. We are introduced to Davis (in every sense) in this film through our being Davis, the camera his headspace, we looking out—so much so that before the Davis/Us character even has remotely tangible things to focus on (memory, present moment events, etc.) we see a blur of lights, freeform indications of fluorescents in shapes and motion—an entirely alienated headspace, the result of the altercation with the woman (which could have happened at any time, either earlier in the evening depicted or ten years prior). So—because I don’t want to get too adrift—I can only see it as being a misstep to investigated Davis outside of the presented, representative Davis, a mistake to try to figure out what, when, and if anything Actual-from-Miles-Davis’ life is being presented.
C:As always, I dig on your repetitive long-windedness, but man do you dissolve things! Even if, as you say, we are introduced to Davis-as-a-headspace, the events of the film are simple, intimate—so very simple and intimate that the film seems, akin to portions of Francois Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould—just a vignette. Davis drives to a practice session; Davis pauses to get into the mood to perform; Davis performs. Obviously, there is also much artistry on display, but I see it more as artistry meant to depict this tangible, actual thing an artist must grapple with—how to move from being a person to being a performance (not even a performer, but the distillation of that—A Performance) how to get shut of (or even how to incorporate) elements of Self into Performance. That artistry, an interpretation of it is in the film, but just because the film is that moment on display and it’s a moment that a camera cannot just be pointed at but that a cinema is needed to evoke.
A:Okay—but now think of the moment where Davis is stood near his trumpet case, microphone at the ready, he looks up to see the rest of the band there mute, immobile, staring at him—just looking, as if expecting something and ill at ease due to it not simply being there—every moment in the film leading up to this has depicted that band having a swinging, jazzy good time, playing, motioning to each other, fully existent as performers-in-performance: then, Davis shows up—Davis who in reality would be someone they know, are intimately acquainted with and so not some larger than life personality—and they become still-life, they become the expectant observers, become waiting assessment. This is meant to depict any moment of actuality, just an actual evening where Miles Davis goes to practice? Not at all, man—so what I mean is it would be totally knuckleheaded to assign the specificity of this really happened to Miles Davis to it. The film depicts something that happens (not happened) to someone, that happens to someone who is expected to come out of himself, to be a thing beyond individual—this is a cinematic realization of a pressure to exists as yourself but simultaneously as something other than yourself, a Sartre-esque nausea.
C:I don’t disagree with any of that—but why would it hurt if there was historical basis to the film? For example, if that woman were some particular woman, if some falling out akin to what is depicted had literally happened between she and Davis?
A:The film is—as we both say—a shedding of some tension of Actual to get at something Ethereal: event must be diffused into memory, memory into mood, mood transmuted into music/art—Identity lost, or identity rearranged to be a new identity, in a sense. We start the film and the focus (the character) is a nonentity, the film progresses and it becomes clear that it is a man-in-a-shook-up-headspace, then the man becomes a musician, then, at the last possible instant, the musician becomes Miles Davis—without clues from outside of the film, this final identity is still nonspecific, the biggest cinematic move being conceptual: the camera now depicts the man, We (audience) are now watching him instead of being him. We—the audience—begin as the headspace, the confusion, the swirl of emotion and eventually We are shed, along with what We are, and the character stands before us, exorcised.
C:Miles Davis stands there.
A:You are particularly one track today. Okay—Miles Davis stands there, but he stands there for Us to regard ourselves, not him, he’s not a bunny pulled from a hat, he’s a representation of an aspect, a collective aspect of Us, made individually manifest So why does this suggest that anything in the film is historically to do with Davis? The fight with the woman, it might as well be an idea for a song an emotion for a song, nothing of identifiable, decipherable import. Or the story/memory he relates to the young boy—that surrealistic vision of grandparents surrounded by cackling wasps, beckoning lovingly, the image of the father at the boy’s side vanishing as the boy walks and the mixture of joy and maliciousness (that eerie, horrific look) on the child’s face, his grinning at a wasp alighting into one of the women’s mouths—certainly this isn’t something that happened to Miles Davis, the boy depicted is closer to Damien from The Omen than Davis, indeed, the young boy Davis is telling the story to seems more proxy for Davis than the boy in the story Davis tells. What do you concretely make of that—not to be aggressive, but if the presence of the actual Davis is so Actual, why this?
C:I saw that as a story Davis relates, just some odd, slightly perverse thing, a displacement of his angsty mindset—telling the story to the boy was a distraction and that the story was obviously responded to favorably (with laughter, with warmth) indicated to me, quite literally, an actual intimacy, an intimacy with this boy, with the studio space, and this acknowledgement of intimacy (safety, control) gets Davis loose from his preoccupation with an earlier upset/trauma with the woman.
A:Sometimes I wonder what film it is you’re watching. But anyway, touching on something I’ve observed of Reedus as a director—when he is a director of other people’s source material—is his often inverse use of progression and it fits that in a film depicting a loss-of-identity-into-artistic-expression that Reedus would move from abstraction (POV film-work) to concrete representation (camera filming subject) and would use the reveal of an actual, identifiable individual to represent the loss of specific, not the stamp of it.