The Heart Machine
Directed by Zachary Wigon

At the start of The Heart Machine, the debut feature of local writer-director Zachary Wigon, Cody (John Gallagher Jr.) and Virginia (Kate Lyn Sheil), are doing the long-distance thing, him in Bushwick, her in Berlin; having met on an online dating site, their relationship, though exclusive, is based around chat and funny, sympathetically bad Skype sex. But even though the two never cross paths on “Blender” (the film’s Grindr/Tinder hybrid), Cody has, by the beginning of the film, developed a dossier on Virginia, who, he suspects, lives not abroad but at the other end of the post-NYU axis, in the East Village. The paradoxes of intimacy and distance in the current age (and in an equally current New York City, featuring many familiar locations) play out intriguingly, aided by pitch-perfect performances from Gallagher and Sheil, in roles that demand a superreal degree of relatability.

Zach did his undergrad at Tisch Film, graduating in the late aughts, and has written for The L, along with a number of other local and web publications with a focus on independent film. He answered some questions of mine via email prior to the film’s theatrical opening on October 24, at Cinema Village

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How was it directing Skype conversations? The camera is always in either one room or the other for the characters’ chats, which we see unfold in at least somewhat real time. I’m picturing you and your whole crew in a room with John Gallagher Jr., and Kate Lyn Sheil off in her own apartment across the city, with you occasionally directing her via webcam. Enlighten me!

Thanks to the ingenuity of the film’s producers, we actually were able to create a situation that was a lot more conducive to building a dynamic between John and Kate. Each apartment location had a space built into it that we used as a mock-up for the other apartment—so for example, the apartment we used as Virginia’s apartment was actually a two-bedroom, and the second bedroom, which we hid in the Virginia scenes, was mocked up to look like the bedroom in Cody’s apartment. So when we shot those Skype scenes from Virginia’s POV, John was actually just on the other side of the apartment. This was great because we were able to have John and Kate interacting in between takes and whatnot, which really helped them (I suspect) foster the intimate dynamic that is expressed in their Skype scenes. Of course, it’s a challenge to have to film a scene where two characters are relating to one another on a significant emotional level while only one character is in the room, but John and Kate are very talented performers and they were able to bring the emotion necessary to the scenes to supercede the limitations of the technology. Like two people who are really in love might do while talking over Skype, communicating that emotion across the digital divide. It also probably helped that we rehearsed those Skype scenes before the shoot, giving John and Kate the chance to read through them face to face, and hopefully develop some emotions while unimpeded by the mediation of a screen.

Let’s talk about the film’s technological hook, and the embedding of things like Grindr/Tinder, Skype, Missed
Connections, Facebook, Twitter into the fabric of the narrative. How do you think the film will play in a decade or two—or even, given the speed with which these things change, in a year or two? Do you worry that the film will date, or do you hope it will date?

I like the idea of the film being a timestamp of what it was like to try to fight the loneliness that is such an integral part of existence in a specific time and place. I have no doubt that humanity’s relation to technology will continue to dramatically evolve as time goes on, and so the way this film is viewed in two or ten or twenty years will surely be impacted by those changing ideas, but I also like the idea of this film, over time, preserving anxieties and concerns about technology that were visible to a generation of people, such as myself, who are old enough to remember a time before these technologies dramatically changed how we socialize and form intimate connections. My generation is the last to be able to recall growing up without smartphones, for example, and I am certain that future generations will not instinctively observe some of their flaws or contradictions in the manner that people my age do, because, as Marshall McLuhan said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish”—that is, technology’s characteristics are invisible to those for whom those technologies are all-enveloping. So my hope is that the film will date insofar as it will preserve some anxieties and thoughts about technology that may otherwise die out, for a younger generation of people who might otherwise have trouble accessing such thoughts and therefore have trouble seeing some of the complications or understanding what is lost with respect to allowing technology to dictate how one creates intimacy. That’s not to say I’m a Luddite—I think the film also displays the manner in which technology can be a really beneficial force in creating intimate connections, like the one forged initially between Cody and Virginia—but these beneficial aspects of utilizing technology may be taken for granted in twenty years.

Additionally, though, I hope that at its base the film will play as something that utilizes contemporary technology as a conduit for investigating some very old, very human concerns—what does it mean to be loved? How does one fight the loneliness that one feels at every step without putting one’s emotions at risk? And so on.

How concerned were you with the plausibility of the story? I think, for the record, that it is plausible, but there’s a pretty high degree of difficulty…

I was as concerned with plausibility as one could be without being interested in making a work of
realism, if that makes sense. You know, there’s this great Hegel quote I absolutely love, which Slavoj Žižek referenced in an essay about Children of Men—the quote goes something like, “A good portrait of a subject looks more like the subject than the subject does.” Meaning, art takes the essence of a thing and distills it into a powerful, compact form, a form that is more concentrated than how that thing is perceived in real life. I was interested in doing that here—I wanted the story to be plausible for the sake of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, but I was interested in a kind of heightened story, a story that felt a little bit more like the world we live in than the world does on a day-to-day level. I wanted to take the defining aspects of what it feels like to live in a world dominantly mediated by these technologies and enhance those aspects to a greater degree, so their effects are a bit easier to see. There’s another good quote that comes to mind here, which is that Picasso quip that “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.”

The halfway point of the movie, when Cody arguably reaches his nadir, finding a possible friend of Virginia’s on social media and contriving a flirtation with her outside The Levee, is important for the film structurally and in terms of how we feel about each character; it’s also a very striking sequence of, well, cyberstalking. Did you intend that sequence to be at all alarmist, or were you more interested in using Cody’s stalking technique to explore current realities?

I did not intent it to be alarmist—I don’t think we’re all in danger of being stalked in real life because of the information we share over the internet, though of course it is a possibility and sometimes things like that do happen, but that wasn’t the crux of what I was interested in. I was more interested, in that sequence, in exploring, through Cody’s behavior, the obsessions that the internet, with all the information available on it, can foster. We’re all familiar, I’m sure, with the sensation of seeking out information via the internet with a deep hunger and desire—googling a potential date, trying to do research on a co-worker, etc. I wanted to explore what it might look like if that internet-generated obsession carried over into the real world, so as to better manifest and depict the kind of desire/obsession that these technologies engender.

Talking to Hellaware

Director Michael M. Bilandic

In Hellaware, which opens on September 26 at Cinema Village, Nick (Keith Poulson), a lethargic but ambitious art photographer living in North Brooklyn, is messing around on YouTube when he finds the video for “I’ll Cut Yo Dick Off,” by the Young Torture Killaz, a bunch of ICP-wannabe teenagers from Delaware. After he visits them with his platonic roommate (played by the Brooklyn-based indie filmmaker Sophia Takal), they become the subject of a photo series, as Nick, promising big-city exposure and Purple Drank, angles for a solo show at the new Bushwick space to be opened by Chelsea gallerist Olivier LaFleur (Gilles Decamps, never without sunglasses). A pointed satire of both insider and outsider art, Hellaware is the second feature from its writer-director Michael M. Bilandic, who lives in the East Village; he worked as a clerk at Mondo Kim’s while at NYU’s graduate film program, and as Abel Ferrara’s assistant after that. He answered some of my questions over email.

One element of the film, for me, is the newfound visibility of oddball subcultures in the digital age, and the protective diffidence or condescension with which young, hip urbanites shade their engagement with anything outside their own demographic. So I’m curious about your own knowledge of or interest in Insane Clown Posse, “rap-rock,” et cetera prior to this film. Was this kind of music always on your radar (say, prior to the Great NYC Media Juggalo Frenzy of the early 2010s), or did it fit into the project later in its germination?
I grew up in downtown Chicago and that culture was something that was always around. The midwest has a special knack for abject horror rap and scorched-Earth home-brewed entertainment. I’ve actually seen ICP a million times and even attended two of the earliest Gatherings of the Juggalos, one in Peoria, Illinois and another in rural Ohio. I always wanted to tell a story set in that world. The initial seed was planted when [the ICP song] “Miracles” came out and every art student and their brother started making these faux-ethnographic or super-aestheticized documentaries and art pieces with that backdrop. Like, “check out these exotic freaks.” Some of these projects were legitimately great, honestly, but it was that culture clash that provided an interesting and humorous jumping off point for Hellaware.

So, the process of actually writing the Young Torture Killaz songs, and shooting the standalone video for “I’ll Cut Yo Dick Off.” There is a very lo-grade, backyard feel to the video which is different from the film, and the music, for as much total shit as Nick talks about it, is pretty compelling in a sort of unfiltered terrible primitivist way (as distinct from the terrible faux-primitive drawings at the Brooklyn gallery show in the opening scene). Was the process of writing the music, and shooting the video, in any way different from the process of writing and shooting the rest of the film?

It was completely different. While the movie was shot by Sean Price Williams, an accomplished cinematographer, the music video was filmed and edited by a high school kid, Hunter Zimny. He came to us after being street cast as a robo-tripping druggie for an anti-cough syrup abuse PSA (no joke). He’s kind of a prodigy and has been consistently working on a bunch of indie movies since. I wrote the song and did the music with my friend Louie Miller, who is a bartender at KGB Bar. We premiered “I’ll Cut Yo Dick Off” on WorldStarHipHop instead of through traditional film outlets and it had a very strange life of its own.

Early on, Nick mentions Diane Arbus; I was also thinking of Larry Clark’s Tulsa and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as photographic projects which seem to depend on a mix of participation and intimacy, on the one hand, and artistic intervention and possibly exploitation, on the other. Is photography an interest of yours? Did you do much reading or thinking about the processes and ethics of “ethnographic” art photography?
Absolutely. Those names you mentioned would definitely be in Nate’s pantheon. People are obsessed with this notion of authenticity. They can never seem to get enough of the “beautiful loser” concept, the attractive misunderstood social outcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about the JT LeRoy scandal recently. Laura Albert, the woman behind it, is a total genius in my opinion. Everyone desperately wanted to believe the character she created was real because it was like a composite of all things “authentic.” Who could resist an underage, HIV-positive,West Virginia-birthed truckstop prostitute, petty thief, drug addict, with a sensitivity and proclivity for literature, who also parties down with Courtney Love and goes to the opera with Winona Rider? The whole story got kind of forgotten, or swept under the rug, because it was embarrassing in its implications.

Rusty, the head of the YTK, is a tricky role, and correct me if I’m wrong, but this would appear to be Brent Butler’s first movie. How was the casting process for the YTK crew?
Casting the rappers was definitely tricky. All the arty characters were basically friends or friends of friends who were completely familiar with that world. We didn’t have any Delawarean white rappers in our immediate circle so we had to reach a little farther. Brent is actually a talented musician in real life. I was impressed with his ability to rap poorly for the movie.

Keith Poulson brings a very distinct affect, sort of a mix of haplessness and bitterness, which I’ve noticed before in his performances (particularly in Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me). Was the role of Nick written with him in mind, or did it evolve much once he entered the frame?
Keith’s awesome. He’s really funny, generous, and not like the Nate at all in real life. The part was not written with him in mind, though. And with different casting it could have gone a much darker, sociopathic way, which I’m glad it didn’t. His natural demeanor added a lighter, more humorous quality that actually made the character more complex.

By his own admission, Hou Hsiao-hsien was not a promising youth. In interviews such as in Olivier Assayas’s HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hisen (1997), the filmmaker has recalled arriving in Taiwan in 1949 as a two-year-old when his family fled mainland China; his father, a low-level bureaucrat, died when “A-ha” was quite young, and the director came to filmmaking after an aimless adolescence spent gambling, fighting and running from the cops. But the semi-autobiographical films Hou made in the 1980s are proof that no life experience is wasted on a great artist. The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), about four scrappy provincial lads killing the time before their compulsory military service, and A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), with its alternately tender and rambunctious childhood vignettes, mix spirited indulgence with passages of introspection; in both, a disabled or dead father stands as a reminder of expectations and responsibilities deferred, for now at least.

The comprehensive traveling Hou retrospective hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image traces a satisfying career arc, from Hou’s commercial apprenticeship, through the reminiscences and muted recent-historical backdrops of the 80s Taiwanese New Cinema movement, and then an opening out from the personal into the political (and beyond). In fact, it’s a nation that we see maturing, as much as the director: A City of Sadness (1989), released at the end of a decade of gradual reform, and the year following the death of Chiang Kai-shek’s son, was the first Taiwanese film to deal with the nationalist violence of the 228 Incident and the White Terror. A family-scaled, epic-length drama, the film renders the anguish of historical trauma in dispassionate, elegiac long takes; it took the Golden Lion at Venice, announcing Hou as a major auteur on the international festival circuit and at home. He and his enduring screenwriting collaborator Chu Tien-Wen followed it up with two progressively more complex layerings of past onto present, and memory onto cinema: in The Puppetmaster (1993), the eponymous “national treasure” Li Tien-lu narrates lovingly re-staged scenes from his young manhood during the Japanese occupation, while Good Men, Good Women (1995) features a far more contemporary guide, an actress preparing to shoot a historical drama, whose private ghosts guide her reinterpretation of the past in ambiguous ways.

Hou was compared by critics to Ozu before he’d ever seen an Ozu film, but the placid, fixed master-shot style he developed with his cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bin, evolved throughout the 1990s into the virtuousic drift often imitated by Jia Zhang-ke and others. Hou’s explicit Ozu tribute, Café Lumière (2003), a Tokyo-set story with echoes of Late Spring, most strongly echoes Ozu by dramatizing profound family ties self-effacingly, with restrained characters and an elliptical narrative. Hou’s films are not plotless (though many of his best ones are blessedly light on incident), but character motivations and causal connections are often swaddled in hypnotic rhythms and rapturous surface textures. In a signature Hou shot, the camera slowly circles characters eating and drinking together, savoring the moment as it stretches out, while challenging the viewer to take the emotional weather. (Much has been written about Hou’s enveloping long takes, rather less about his editing, though it’s often astonishing in its breadth and directness: one of the boys from Fenkguei, restless in a movie theater, suddenly remembering his father; or a cut in A Time to Live and a Time to Die, from a misty windowpane to school picture day, bridging ephemerality and posterity.)

Hou’s most conspicuously beautiful films, to opposite ends, are probably Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Three Times (2005). The former, set entirely within a 19th century brothel, is an extended opium trance—with the typical scene lit by candlelight, covered in a single three-minute take, rounded on either side by a fade to black—running against the grain of an anti-nostalgic inquiry into political and sexual freedom. In the latter work, Hou rewrites three phases of his career, with more self-reflexive, movie-movie photography, production design, and people—Shu Qi and Chang Chen play lovers in all three parts of the triptych, from 60s pool-hall puppy romance, to a period piece, to a study of urban post-everything inter-/dis-connection a la Millennium Mambo (2001). The film also features perhaps Hou’s most sentimental use of music—a noted karaoke devotee, the filmmaker uses genres from traditional to techno to match his films’ languid pace, and provide an outlet for their sublimated crescendos.

Three Time was followed by Flight of the Red Balloon, made in Paris with French money, and starring Juliette Binoche as a frazzled single mom (“I asked Hsiao-hsien, ‘Do you like the idea of me being blonde?,’ and he said, ‘Yes, great, with the roots showing.’”) and master of Chinese-style puppetry, whose Beijing-born nanny is filming a digital remake of Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon. Cross-currents of longing for people and places are suspended in the solution of the everyday; and a ticket to the movie is cheaper than therapy.

When Flight opened in New York on the same day as My Blueberry Nights, few would have predicted that Wong Kar-wai would finish his follow-up martial arts epic before Hou. Following a Wong-like gestation period, The Assassin (2014? 2015?) is a film to be eagerly anticipated: to see what Hou, having crossed eras, generations and borders, does in a new genre; and to dissipate whatever air of the valedictory has gathered around this retrospective (though who knows how many of its featured 35mm prints will ever be projected here again).

Among other things, Hou throughout his career is one of the all-time great directors of trains. (And the history of trains in cinema is also the history of cinema.) In Café Lumiere, the sounds of Tokyo’s commuter trains cocoon the characters in a hum of routine, while the play of light on their windows makes for a daydreamy alchemy of transit and serenity. Dust in the Wind (1986) opens with the view from the front of a train as it climbs a verdant mountainside, the world flowing towards and around you; the second shot of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) is the reverse-angle, gazing backwards from the rear platform for a full minute. An open-ended visual reverie, it’s Hou in his purest form: the individual consciousness borne through space and time.

I’ll give another example of what I mean. Two thirds of the way through Dust in the Wind, the culmination of Hou’s semiautobiographical new wave period, the young protagonist returns to the mountain village he had left two years prior, to work in Taipei. At night, everyone sits in the town square—or wanders in and out of it—to watch a scratchy, rose-faded print of an old movie, projected against a sheet billowing slightly in the wind. For about a half a minute of frame-filling close-up, you have time to watch the movie-within-the-movie and wonder about it; to think about the day-to-day life of the village, and this momentary intervention from a concrete cultural history that’s perhaps as remote to them as it is to you or I; to marvel that the protagonist has left this behind to live in an urban loft where movie posters are painted, and is young enough, unlike his parents, to be carried along into modernity by a country on the cusp of it. And maybe your mind also wanders to the last movie you watched outside, on a summer night grown unseasonably chilly by the end credits.

A decade ago, the city’s last big Hou retrospective, at Anthology Film Archives, marked my first exposure to the filmmaker, very early in my career at the L, a period I remember now as a jump into the deep end of film culture. Thrashing around with The Puppetmaster, I grasped for “history as call and response,” a phrase which I’m more confident in today than I was then—now that I’m quoting my 20-year-old self, I actually know what I meant. If my own personal moviegoing history is hardly the point here, I at least understand a little better the simultaneous distance and intensity with which Hou contemplates these sorts of passages; and have seen for myself the way his films work over time, like memories forever remembered and inhabited anew. These are movies to live your whole life with.