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First one comes on, Hatchet Man is the title. It's a murder mystery, invovling corrupt cops and and a couple on the rocks. None of the actors are pros and, since the film was put together without any "fancy" equipment (it's only the third film Chambliss used a tripod on) some of it's ragged charm cauterizes the edges of each cut. Actors start out shots out of character for a split second before they deliver their lines, making each shot feel like it's being pulled from real life to surrealist fiction in the span of fifteen seconds, like watching a painting fall in and out of focus.
However, despite the lack of technological intervention (During the Q&A Chambliss said that he had no intention of starting to use a computer for editing; he likes doing it his way.) the film gets by almsot soley by stringing together great moments. A match cut from a graveyard to a frame dominated by file cabinets foreshadows the killer's identity. A showdown between a man in a gorilla mask and a newly minted murderer provides the film's climax. A hatchet blow is matched with a murered woman's hand pulling open a cabinet door as she struggles for life, splitting open the geography below the countertop as the hatchet splits her open. There's some David Lynch in here, though The Supremes are the closest Chambliss comes to citing an esoteric influence. Simply put, the man is inspired and, because he couldn't explain any of it to you if he tried, thoroughly unpretentious. Even bad editorial descisions get a pass because, honestly, Chambliss only answers to himself.
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Chambliss first bought a camera with $98 his wife had hidden away to buy a new refrigerator. He found the money, hoarded in the old refrigerator, while she was off at church one day over 30 years ago. With a different background, he'd be the equivelant of a graffitti artist or a garage band. He creates because something is brewing in him and, regardless of what it demands of him, he feels the need to see it exist. In the same way Guided by Voices made the fuzzines imparted to their music by their circumstances a part of their aesthetic, Phil Chambliss allows the chunky zooms and undulating pace imparted by the limits of cheap cameras and rudimentary editing to push the aesthetics of his vision. His visual vocabulary is heavy on surreal tableaus and static closeups, stuff that doesn't demand technicality so much as vision. He's become adept at hitting the median between his means and his ideas in a way that very few artists ever are. It's punk rock from a man who's probably never heard a note of punk rock.
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The second film, The Devil's Helper, involves a pair of hunters who meet the eponymous character in the woods. The character in question sits a desk, trash can on his right and bottle of grape juice on his left. It's shot on VHS, giving every motion a zippily abraisive quality as the two men trade their souls for shots at ten point bucks. That's another fascinating aspect, while his films are often incoherent on a plot level, you can almost always see the outlines of a moral universe. Maybe it's just him defaulting to the homogenized, heteronormanative world of rural Arkansas; but there always seem to be scales to be balanced in each film, making them feel morally cohesive, if not always discernable or coherent.
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The first half of the program came to a close with a film who's name I didn't get down (at least not legibly, I was writing 3 drinks deep in a dark room) but who's plot involved a farmer being harassed by newsmen. Eventually, he's interviewed and things turn dark and surreal, like the standoff between the hunters and The Devil's Helper. The farmer gets berated for stealing a riding lawnmower with Bill Clinton and eventually, he gets pissed and turns it around on the newsmen, robbing them as interviewer and interviewee rise to fight.
"I got my Black Belt in Karate."
"I got my Black Belt at Wal-Mart."
A tussle ensues as we fade out.
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Phil comes onstage for a Q&A. Cinefamily (the organization that put together this screening, and puts on several screenings a month at The Silent Movie theater) had him flown up from Arkansas for the occaission. He's miles from being an impressive or insightful speaker. In fact, he doesn't really seem to understand the questions. One person asks him about the font he uses for the title cards in his film, a distinctive shamble that looks like a scale model of stonehenge imitating a horror movie with Impact (the font) as it's only tool. He asks to hear the question again and there's a little bit of patter as everyone realizes that, in fact, this man does not know what the word "font" means. I ask him what influences him outside of film. He responds that he's only read one book in his life and that we'd probably laugh at him if he told us what music he likes. I shrug, since I figure that most of what I like would just sound like noise to him anyways, and he says that he likes 60s stuff; The aforementioned Supremes. People seem to nod approvingly.
Phil comes onstage for a Q&A. Cinefamily (the organization that put together this screening, and puts on several screenings a month at The Silent Movie theater) had him flown up from Arkansas for the occaission. He's miles from being an impressive or insightful speaker. In fact, he doesn't really seem to understand the questions. One person asks him about the font he uses for the title cards in his film, a distinctive shamble that looks like a scale model of stonehenge imitating a horror movie with Impact (the font) as it's only tool. He asks to hear the question again and there's a little bit of patter as everyone realizes that, in fact, this man does not know what the word "font" means. I ask him what influences him outside of film. He responds that he's only read one book in his life and that we'd probably laugh at him if he told us what music he likes. I shrug, since I figure that most of what I like would just sound like noise to him anyways, and he says that he likes 60s stuff; The aforementioned Supremes. People seem to nod approvingly.
The Q&A was, in some ways, the strangest part of the event. The crowd was, and this is overstating the obvious, the kind of people who would turn out on a weeknight to see an almost deliberateley obscure filmmaker who's reputation, such as it exists in scattered raves and alt weekly writeups, is for strangeness, inventiveness, and authorial singularity far more than it is for accessibility or even really craft. In one question, he basically revealed that he can't really even fathom how self distributing a DVD through the internet would work. It's hard, and maybe this is just me, to not feel like there was some element of coddling or condescending involved between us and him. A good number of questions went totally over his head. Not in that "Douchebag-quoting-Godard-to-impress-a-date-way." Of all the Q&A's I've been to, this one left the most latitude for giving an artist shit while almost paradoxically consisting only of friendly questions coming from a place of genuine curiosity. It was like watching a bad algebra student who just can't make "x" equal "x." You'd be a fool to write Chambliss off, because there's such an intuitive brilliance to what he does. At his best, the man surfs the collective unconcsious. However, there's no way to really engage him at the level at which he works, since you almost certainly are going to leave him in the dark with even the most tempered artistic question.
The whole thing sort of makes me wonder what would happen if you were to show him his own work without him knowing it was his. I can't speculate how he'd react, mainly because I don't know him that well, but I have a feeling a good deal of his saving grace is his ignorance and lack of both commercial and critical ambition. If he had any motivations other than simply a desire to realize this whole universe he's carrying inside of his head, in whatever shambolic form circumstances allow, what would that do to my opinion of him? He's willfully ignorant, but how much can that be treated as a strength when it handicaps your ability to even share the art you've made with an audience that's already putting aside a lot of their notions of "good" and "bad" just to attempt to meet what you do on it's own terms? Last weekend, I saw the notorious Lindsay Lohan Torture Noir, "I Know Who Killed Me" at this same theater. Part of the fun of screenings like that is putting aside a few pretensions and reveling in the aesthetic weirdness of that kind of film. (It is, by the way, completeley crazy and highly reccommended.) The other part of the equation with "I Know Who Killed Me" is the raging camp element that nearly every review overlooked, focusing instead of finger-wagging over the exploitation elements. I bring it up because Phil Chambliss's films are even more thoroughly incoherent than "I Know Who Killed Me" and, instead of being nihilistically exploitative they're ineptly moralistic. If we weren't going in with the intention of cutting him miles of slack, or were, quite the opposite; going in with tabloid stoked bloodlust like the critics who saw "I Know Who Killed Me" were, I wonder if we'd have even noticed how many fucking killer moments are in Chambliss's work. Would we, instead, just aim our blue state bloodlust at him and have a Q&A that would devolve into us asking him things like "So, do you identify more as a Hick or Cracker?" and "Is ignorance or indifference a bigger factor in the work you make?"
The answer, then, is that Chambliss is great because he owes us nothing. "I Know Who Killed Me" created a certain expectation. It ended up falling wildly out of line with that expectation, huffing postmodernism like Reagan-era glitter glue to the point where part of the point of dizziness. Chambliss can by, by turns, frustrating and refreshing, since it's as much his perogative as anyone else's. His last film, the epic "The Deacon and the Hobo" might illustrate this most clearly. It's sprawling, ten chapters, 3 or four of which feel like they should be the end of the film. A man folds on himself, trippy ass funhouse mirror style, so he looks like a cyclops standing in a river before a hobo living under a bridge takes him prisoner. A con man escapes prison and kills the hobo with a BB gun that's supposed to be a real rifle. Justice is served.
The postscript to that scene, and maybe the answer to the critical conundrum Phil represents, comes after the Hobo has keeled over in a hail of canned sound effects. After he dies, the escaped prisoner fires off a few shots and we see the creek leap with the reports of bullets tearing through water. It's a "look at me" move, showboating a modestly competent special effect. There's no reason for it to be there. One a plot level, it's as frivolous as most Jerry Bruckheimer explosions. However, it's the kind of almost a-dramatic flourish that ultimateley makes up the charm of what Phil does. It's as much about playing God in the world of the film as anything else. He makes up his own conventions because he doesn't know the ones everyone else abuses. He's able to approach film as a tabula rasa in a way that most people never can.
During the closing conversation of the gilm, the dead hobo wakes up for a second to deliver a line before slumping back into death; Lazarus like a dead man's sneeze in a school play. At this point, I think I realized one last time that the best reason to approach Phil's work to enjoy the singulariy of logic and vision. Like the character in the third film, Phil Chambliss got his proverbial black belt from Wal-Mart. The reason that black belt means anything is because Phil, to extend the metaphor, reinvents film as his own martial art. The difference is that, from his perspective, he's inventing it for the first time. Check him out if you can. (Christ only knows when he'll come around to the tubes.)
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