• Icon Feed
  • Icon Twitter
  • Icon Facebook
  • Icon Print
  • Icon Mail

Double bill of sex and art

Two films by Director Joe Swanberg are screening in the Berlinale Forum, and there's no shortage of controversy in both.


ART HISTORY

Joe Swanberg is no doubt a name that raises eyebrows in film circles for the explicit sex scenes in his movies. SILVER BULLETS (USA) and ART HISTORY ( USA), shown as a double bill in this year’s Berlinale Forum, do nothing but extend the discomfort among audiences who are already bored with the mumblecore movement in filmmaking.

As is common in his work, the two films contain a lot of sexually explicit moments, but their storylines differ considerably. In SILVER BULLETS the young actress Claire (Kate Lyn Sheil) has gotten a role in Ben’s (Ti West) low budget horror film as a werewolf. But the film is basically about Swanberg himself, who is playing a second film director, who focuses more on personal filmmaking. His struggle with the work is at the core of the film.

Unlike its title suggests, ART HISTORY isn’t really about art history. The film is structured around Julliette (Josephine Decker) and Eric (Kent Osborn) who have to perform an intense sex scene in the new film of director Sam (Joe Swanberg self-cast as a director once again) who appears to have a crush on Julliette. He is overwhelmed with jealousy about the developing real life affair between Julliette and Eric, to the extent that he completely destroys the mood of the characters, which obviously leads to a poor performance.

In a conversation with Dana Linssen, which I sat in on, Detroit-born Swanberg states that many have a misconception about his work that is basically about “the nature of America as an emotionally not so open country.”

“ART HISTORY is about the distillation of my personal art. I believe sexual attraction is and has always been a great part of any art”, explains the filmmaker who says that while working on ART HISTORY he did not have a fixed outline.

It’s not only with audiences or critics that he has experienced problems. Though the films are about America’s inability to communicate their real emotions, he has experienced this with his actors as well. Most of them were his personal friends, which made him think about where to draw the line in involving personal feelings.

Optimistic that things will work out in the future with festivals finally selecting his films (he had a double premiere in Sundance and Berlin, with different new films), his true fear is that the distribution of independent cinema will be a bottleneck. With some kindred filmmakers he is therefore exploring Do-It-Yourself-forms of distribution.


301 Moved Permanently

301 Moved Permanently


nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)