More than talent or connections, success in the tiny Seattle
filmmaking community comes to people who think strategically about
marketing. Some local filmmakers make topical documentaries for niche
audiences (James Longley, Iraq in Fragments and Gaza
Strip), others coax investors to pay for shooting in expensive 35
mm Cinemascope in hopes of attracting attention at festivals (Robinson
Devor and Charles Mudede, Police Beat), and still others cast
B-list celebrities to exploit our provincial fascination with big names
at neighborhood haunts (Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell,
Cthulhu). When the films end up having artistic merit, it seems
like a freak accident.
Lynn Shelton is different. Maybe it’s her 10 years as an
experimental filmmaker: Her thesis adviser in art school was Peggy
Ahwesh, a video artist who has shown work in the Guggenheim, the
Whitney, and MoMA. Or maybe it’s her long stint editing films for other
directors, the role for which we first shortlisted her in 2004. Or
maybe she’s just supremely confident. Whatever the reason, Shelton
doesn’t feel the need to buy attention with money or gimmicks. Instead,
she confines herself to miniscule budgets, largely pro-bono talent, and
picturesque property owned by relatives and friends to stage
productions that put risk-taking above commercial appeal. The financial
investment may be minimal, but the results are astonishing: impeccable
production values, trenchant dialogue, and themes you don’t see
anywhere else.
For the record: Shelton did not curry any favor with the Genius
committee by using The Stranger‘s annual amateur porn festival
(aka HUMP!) as the setting for her new, unfinished film about
heterosexual one-upmanship,
called Humpday. (She was
already the top contender for this award when we learned about the
project.) Nor did she get bonus points for casting former
Stranger film editor Sean Nelson in her boy-bonding saga My
Effortless Brilliance. (Nelson played a needy, egotistical has-been
whose backstory is not dissimilar to Nelson’s own brush with
pop-culture stardom.) In fact, it made our choice somewhat awkward.
The truth is, Shelton is the only Seattle filmmaker to have made two
fascinating narrative features in a row, with her third (I’ve seen
about 30 minutes of a rough cut) shaping up to be her most accomplished
yet. According to Adam Sekuler, programming director at Northwest Film
Forum, “Lynn Shelton has clearly shown her tenacity as a filmmaker,
rolling out a new feature project every year. Her work has been seen
throughout the world, and it rings strongly with the Pacific Northwest
aesthetic we’ve been trying to cultivate for a long time.” Michael
Seiwerath, outgoing executive director at the Film Forum, calls her “an
absolute inspiration to the film community,” explaining, “She does not
wait for big funding or people to approve of her projects. She simply
makes excellent work with a tight group of collaborators. And has found
a way to sustain herself across multiple projects, skipping the cycle
of credit-card debt and depression.” Shelton brings the economy and
inventiveness of experimental filmmaking to the legibility and
attentiveness of the narrative film. She doesn’t mind challenging her
audiences, but she’s not interested in alienating them.
Her first film, We Go Way Back, was commissioned by the
now-defunct Film Company. Aside from Guy Maddin’s expensive Brand
Upon the Brain!, it’s the best thing that outfit produced, and
certainly the most surprising. The come-from-nowhere film won the top
jury prize and a cinematography award at Slamdance, the underdog
alternative to the Sundance Film Festival.
We Go Way Back is the story of an exceptional kid growing
into an ordinary young woman. After reading letters she’d written to
herself at the age of 13, Kate (Amber Hubert), a fringe theater
actress, tries to shake off her twentysomething malaise, with limited
success. The film is about the difficulty of recapturing the drive and
curiosity of early adolescence once real-world experience has dulled
your ego and crushed your sense of destiny. It’s largely
autobiographical. “I think I’ve always romanticized 13 as being my peak
creative year,” Shelton explains. Poetry, painting, music,
theater—she tried her hand at most every medium. By the age of
20, that eager experimentation had dried up. “My secret shame was that
the only thing I could do was be an actor, because I didn’t have to
come up with my own words.”
Lest the subject matter wade too far into the maudlin waters of
Reviving Ophelia—the girlhood-in-crisis book Shelton first
encountered while she was planning the film—the movie has a thick
streak of comedy: Rehearsals for a production of Hedda Gabler spoof the ways a director’s runaway ego and his actors’ sheeplike
commitment can go horribly awry. “I need for you to learn Norwegian…
Hedda must speak Ibsen’s actual words.” No, it is not a good idea for
Hedda to speak Norwegian throughout the play, but nobody is about to
contradict the black-box dictator.
Best of all, We Go Way Back wards off nostalgia by
introducing a bizarre conceit so simple and nonchalant that it seems
doubly strange. Maggie Brown, whom Shelton describes as
“magnetic—with huge eyes and this calm presence,” plays the
protagonist as a tomboyish 13-year-old, and she shows up to hang out
with her future self. At first, you think the kid is just a memory, or
a symbol of Kate’s conscience, but in an understated twist, a third
character greets her out loud—as though this shadow from the past
has been a real person all along. The effect (magnified by otherworldly
songs by Laura Veirs on the soundtrack and the damp Northwest imagery
of the talented Ben Kasulke behind the lens) is uncanny. It justifies
the film.
Recently, Shelton has been moving away from narrative experiments
and toward experiments in composition. For My Effortless
Brilliance, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, the
filmmaker, cast (Basil Harris, Calvin Reeder, and Nelson), and skeleton
crew holed up in a Methow Valley cabin owned by Shelton’s father.
Shelton sketched out the story in advance, but the cast improvised the
dialogue, and the characters bear the marks of the actors’
personalities and habitual gestures. The result has been likened to
Old Joy—another film, set in Oregon, about mossy male
companionship by a female director. It’s supposed to be a compliment,
since Old Joy got a lot of love from East Coast critics, but
that film submitted meekly to the Robert Bly mystique of male bonding,
and was far too awed by the urban mountain-man pose some
Northwesterners like to affect. My Effortless Brilliance isn’t
perfect, but it’s much livelier and more agile than Old Joy. It
has a sense of humor about the choices people make and the ways they
define themselves in relation to abstract notions of nature and the
city. In the end, the cougar-huntin’ wild man is no more or less
absurd—and certainly no more masculine—than the citified
aesthete.
Shelton says the unconventional methods used to make My
Effortless Brilliance and Humpday were an attempt to elicit
more naturalistic performances away from the hustle of a film set,
where scenes are often shot out of order to maximize efficiency. But
improvisation also magnifies the role of a film’s editor.
For Humpday, reality TV editor and independent filmmaker Nat
Sanders volunteered to work on Shelton’s film without charge. But
Shelton has edited each of her previous films on her own. Historically
one of the few film-industry jobs available to women, editing is also
the only component technique of filmmaking that has no precedent in
other art forms. From still photography to theater, film borrows much
more than it invents. But fashioning material from a loose,
improvisational set into a coherent narrative is an act of authorship,
not just assembly. Lynn Shelton’s experiments in method are a tribute
to the one thing that makes cinema unique.
