15 friends, 13 minutes, 7 seconds a pop
All hail Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom
Last Sunday I was walking home in the rain after a delightful afternoon at MoMA, where my friend Jason and I took in some art and impulsively decided to attend a screening of Marguerite Duras’s Le Navire Night. A spartan film, created from the ashes of a failed first attempt, it’s essentially a series of long, often static shots of rooms and exteriors and actors sitting still, accompanied by Duras’s droning voiceover as she tells the story of disconnection and doomed romance she had attempted to shoot in the first place.
The movie literally put me to sleep, and yet I ultimately found its spareness inspiring. While the narration provided a linear if somewhat oblique story, the words and the images in no way served as illustrations for each other - they’re as much ships in the night as the story’s misconnected lovers. But the effect felt far from random. The formal choices underlying the film’s composition created a world of their own that defied conventional notions of time and space. To watch it was to be put under a spell cast by an ice-cold enchantress, as paralyzed by hypnosis as the tale’s deluded lovers.
As the rain pattered on my umbrella, I suddenly remembered an experimental film that Hope and I made 11 years ago, which attempted to cast its own modest spell based on a series of preordained aesthetic rules. If you don’t read any further, I’d still love for you to sacrifice 13 minutes of your life to watch this one-of-a-kind piece of artsy-fartsy weirdness.
“McGovern Weird” came about because Hope and I had just stepped away from doing theater and were hoping to retain a similar sense of community through a series of video projects. Luckily, we had an outlet for our first outing: Our friend Gavin Starr Kendall (who’s featured in the video) was a co-founder of the Bad Film Festival, the offshoot of an equally successful Bad Theater Festival. The “Bad” in the title was meant to be not derisive but inclusive - a license to try things out, take risks, go nuts. Though Hope and I had directed one previous film (which I’m sure I’ll write about at a future time), we were still utter newbies, and so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to make something up in a low-stakes environment.
This was the late winter of 2013, and the hottest new digital toy was Vine. You remember Vine - the short-form video app from Twitter that launched a million absurdist comedy blips, which was unceremoniously retired in 2017 and has now disappeared from the internet? We thought this would be a great way to film something on the cheap - we could use our phones to shoot seven-second clips (the max amount Vine offered) and then string them together into a single piece after the fact.
Having just spent a decade and a half creating plays, we knew a LOT of actors. We put out an APB and ended up persuading a whopping 15 friends to come to our house on a rainy Sunday in February to do… what, exactly? We didn’t even really know ourselves. We had some very loose ideas for how to structure the thing, but mostly we wanted to encourage our friends to improvise and run around capturing the results on our phones. The week before we met, I shared a series of secret prompts to help the performers create “personas” that they could use to get in the spirit. When they showed up at our house that day, they had no idea what to expect - and neither did we.
The “story” that the film tells developed somewhat organically based on a few arbitrary decisions Hope and I made in the days before shooting. We knew that we wanted to film in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, which we lived near at the time - specifically at the statue of Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, that was installed at the highest point in Brooklyn to salute the Statue of Liberty in the distance. We bought a bunch of little plastic preschool letters that we somehow hoped to incorporate. And we wanted to wrap it up back at our apartment, so we could quickly transition into post-shoot pizza and booze. And that’s pretty much all we planned. Everything else that happened was the result of either Hope or I barking out off-the-cuff suggestions between takes or else the actors improvising with each other.
As we filmed, the clips were posted live to Vine and Twitter, so people could ostensibly watch the process of making it in real-time - though I’d be shocked if anyone did. When the day was finished, we ended up with this massive clump of seven-second clips that we winnowed down into the 13-minute spectacle above. I think we used about a third of what we actually shot.
Watching it again for the first time after a few years, it feels like a glorious mess. I can only say this much with confidence: A group of characters comes together for some mysterious ritual, but they clearly know next to nothing about each other and can barely stand to be in the same room together. We didn’t set out to create a solemn, orderly first half and a raucous, chaotic second half, but that’s what happened. I suppose the various artsy flourishes say… something(?) about the limits of language as a tool for wisdom and human connection? The truth is, you can barely hear what anyone says, and the shots are all grainy and poorly lit - which, to our credit, we knew would be the case going in. You can clearly see Hope and I filming in some of the shots, and at one point toddler Dash begins crying offscreen. Anything you can snatch out of the churn is yours to keep.
While on the surface “McGovern Weird” has less than nothing to do with Le Navire Night - and while my sensibility is about as temperamentally diametrical to Duras’s as sensibilities can get - I do think they share some similarities beneath the skin. They’re both love letters to futile gestures, testaments to what happens if you surge forward without knowing what or why or how. They refuse to do what you expect a film to do, operating according to the skewed logic dictated by the obstinately limited circumstances of their creation. They’re highly skeptical of what human relationships can accomplish - but they also know that these relationships are all we have. And, most importantly, they’re both pretentious as hell.
Is “McGovern Weird” a masterpiece? Hell no. But it’s a curiosity that continues to keep me curious. What would happen if we did something like this today? How would we approach it differently? Who would participate? Could I hone the actor prompts for different results? Would we go into it with more of a plan or less?
Who wants to try again?
If you’ve read down this far, it might interest you to know that today is the one-year anniversary of The Jeff Stream - it’s been 82 posts over the past 12 months! This started out as an exercise in starting to write more and to find a way to connect with far-flung friends outside of social media - and I’m thrilled to say that it’s been a success on both counts!
I do want to say that I especially cherish the conversations that occur whenever anyone reaches out to me after reading one of the posts. I’m truly grateful for all of the support you’ve given me, reading all these words week in and week out. Thank you for the indulgence, and I hope you’re still here at this time next year.