Linas Phillips

In the alleyway that stretches from James Street to Cherry Street
between Second and Third avenues, a rat pokes its head out of a hole,
scurries along a wall straight through two black plastic traps, and
ducks back into the ground.

“This alley stinks!” someone complains.

It’s also picturesque, with twilight pouring in beyond the brick
buildings and a Dumpster adorned with the minimal tag “NC-17.” Linas
Phillips holds up his hand, trying to communicate quiet. “We’re all
here on this earth for reasons, and we’re all here in this alleyway for
different reasons,” he says.

This is all the direction that the actors, who are homeless, will
hear as a group: “When you’re reading this speech, tap into the pride
you have in yourself.” The speech is Bobby Kennedy’s “Ripple of Hope”
address given at Cape Town University in 1966. Phillips refuses to say
“action,” but the speech begins.

Phillips is an unnerving person. Some of this can’t be
helped—he has a broad face, pale but ruddy complexion, and
wide-spaced, arctic-blue eyes that stare and stare and stare. But his
art is disconcerting, too. With both Walking to Werner and his
work-in-progress Great Speeches from a Dying World—both
of which could be classified as experimental
documentaries—Phillips deliberately pushes his audiences to the
point of discomfort, whether aesthetically (is this shot intimate or
just indulgent?) or ethically (is it okay to pay addicts to appear in a
film about their lives—cash that they could then use to maintain
their addictions?).

Despite Phillips’s determination to make his audiences
uncomfortable, he has a strange, seemingly magical knack for drawing
his subjects out of their shells. In Walking to Werner, he
walked all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles in imitation of a
journey his hero Werner Herzog had made 30 years before. The fact of
the stunt—ludicrous, maniacal, edging on embarrassing both for
its egotism and its idolatry—would have overwhelmed the film had
it not been for the people Phillips encountered along the way. Whether
they’re hanging out on their porches or engaging in obsessive treks of
their own, these incidental prophets share their stories and ultimately
become the story itself.

You’d expect Walking to Werner to be about the guy doing
the walking, and in some ways you’d be right. The camera, often held
out at arm’s distance and aimed at Phillips’s own pained or ecstatic
expression, hovers so close it can feel claustrophobic. You wonder why
you’re being forced to keep the company of a madman, someone who thinks
it’s a smart idea to walk a thousand miles to pay tribute to and
possibly meet an eccentric Bavarian filmmaker. Then, starting in tiny
Naselle, in southwestern Washington, you’re rescued from the myopia.
Perhaps “saved” is the better term. An evangelical Christian girl gives
Phillips water and, casting her eyes heavenward, forecasts that he may
not find what he’s looking for at the end of the journey. She’s
incredibly sweet, but she’s eerily preoccupied by a spiritual realm
that doesn’t have anything to do with the mechanics of getting to L.A.
and stalking a filmmaker.

Or does it? In the very next segment of the film, just across the
border in Oregon, Phillips receives a voice mail from Werner Herzog,
via Scarecrow Video’s Norman Hill. Herzog is in Southeast Asia filming
Rescue Dawn and won’t be at home when Phillips arrives in L.A.
“Walk for some other reason,” Herzog tells his disciple. And Phillips
finds one. Throughout his pilgrimage, he encounters people who have
been driven to the margins of society by crimes (their own and others’)
or serious physical injuries or mental illness or merely the California
sunshine, taking refuge in some variety of spiritual belief that
they’re happy to share with a traveler with wild eyes and flowing blond
hair. By the time Phillips reaches Southern California, he’s collected
what seems like a comprehensive catalog of spiritual life on the West
Coast of the United States, from a Christian fitness fanatic to a New
Age beach bum, with more desperate or rigorous variations in
between.

One could argue that Phillips is able to get close to his
marginalized or itinerant subjects because he is not unlike them. He
didn’t necessarily intend to move to Seattle, but he was working with
the beloved local dance ensemble 33 Fainting Spells (Dayna Hanson and
Gaelen Hanson) in New York and they invited him to come out for a
performance. Until he finished editing Walking to Werner, he
was staying in a little sunroom in Dayna Hanson’s house, and since then
he’s stayed with friends and in some other places that weren’t zoned
residential. He lived in his office at Northwest Film Forum for two
months, unbeknownst to the staff. Recently, he tried to relocate to
Boston, but a love affair there didn’t work out. A leg injury has put
strain on his finances (like many full-time artists, he’s uninsured).
He isn’t destitute or homeless largely, it seems, because of his sheer
determination to make art and films.

Also like his subjects, Phillips is spiritual. The film he’s making
now is “a meditation on what homelessness is like,” and represents an
urgent need to empathize with the dispossessed. “I’m not a Christian
filmmaker,” he explains. “But with this film, I guess I’m getting
close.” In part, he’s interested in homeless people because they
represent a form of society that most of us bother to imagine only in
science fiction (such as Children of Men, which he loves).
“What if there were an apocalypse? You would have to start relating to
people you never would have spoken to before. For these people, it’s
already after the apocalypse.” Events in their lives—for example,
Toney Smith, the other guy in the photo on this page and one of the
homeless men in Great Speeches from a Dying World, was
incarcerated at age 15 for supposedly having foreknowledge of a crime,
then was infected with HIV in jail—have been that traumatic.

Phillips explains that a professor in college (he graduated from the
Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU) once told a photographer friend of
his that he should never take pictures of homeless people: “It’s been
done.” In Great Speeches from a Dying World, Phillips is
interested in doing things that have been done—getting
reacquainted with phrases so common that your eyes would normally slide
over them, your ears would barely acknowledge their substance. Speeches
like the Sermon on the Mount (Phillips rented a van and took nine
homeless men and women to Mount Rainier to reenact it) or Martin Luther
King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” are so familiar that they have been reduced
to cliché. Phillips wants to reinvest those words—and the
people reciting them—with meaning.

But perhaps the best thing about Phillips’s work is the methods he
finds to inject humor into the gravest situations. The best device in
Walking to Werner is the use of commentary tracks by Werner
Herzog—from DVDs of Herzog’s films—about the search for
“ecstatic truth.” Laid over the inevitably punier quest of Linas
Phillips trudging to Los Angeles in a floppy hat, the appropriated
commentary vacuums out any trace of pretension, at once exulting and
undercutting the trials you see onscreen. Phillips has cleverly stacked
the deck so that Herzog, unwitting, saves Phillips from himself.