cineSOURCE magazine

Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master, Part II
by Doniphan Blair

Nilsson in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque with Mikhael Derenkovski, whose Holocaust chronicle helped him make 'What Happened Here' (2012). photo: Victoria Yakubov

Continued from Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie

“It turned out he had recently been taken in by a good Samaritan in Santa Monica,” he elaborated, a few weeks ago by email. “He came up, lived with me for about three years, joined the Action group and appeared in 'Chalk', before he hit the road again.”

Eventually hosted by the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, which does social work in the Tenderloin, the yGroup attracted some stellar actors, from the talented amateur Gabriela Maltz Larkin, who gave a standout performance as a sex worker in "Need" (2005), to David Fine, a versatile Hollywood character actor, who appeared most recently in “Sorry to Bother You”, as it happens.

“[I’d] done some time being a drug cowboy in the Tenderloin,” Fine told cineSOURCE, and “I like dark crime.”

“From Rob I learned the ability to relax or wire up,” Fine explained, “[to be] elated and then devastated... to look within, breathe deeply [and] then reinvent.” For this reason, “[a]ll at once the rag-tag band of merry/melancholy men and women [the yGroup] turned the tables on their demons.”

“There were some in the class who were pretty intense,” recalled Larkin, the actress. “One guy, for example, would scare people. At one point, he had Rob on the floor in a choke hold, with a wooden peg pushed into his eye. It got TOO real!”

Nevertheless, “I miss the camaraderie of those fourteen years," she added. "It clicked the first time. I walked into class one day and never left. I looked forward to coming on Tuesday nights and exploring different feelings—what [Nilsson] calls the six basic feelings: fear, happiness, anger, surprise, despair and love.”

No wonder the “yGroup Manifesto” opens ambitiously, if touchy-feely: “There can be no cinema outside the artist’s inner life... The collaboration of artists... writers, directors, actors, cinematographers and craft people of all kinds is given shape and energy by the kinetic release of the inner fountain.”

But then it turns on a dime: “Whereas the pale and anemic truth that ‘all art is political’ has spawned legions of nodding heads in the exclusive pews of race, gender and class... the living truth is that there can be no art without vision… [o]riginating in shamanic practice, in the ‘wild surmises’ of poets and sages.”

Although a good summary might have been “all art is visionary,” it concludes with: “We pledge ourselves as individuals to the communal circle of risk and protection where we reveal our secrets, power up our energy, open flesh and intuitive mind to received vision... to live with passion and to sing at the top of our lungs,” (for full text see "yGroup Manifesto").

“I am not interested in the predictable,” Nilsson noted, in the same cineSOURCE article I've been quoting.

“Today avant-garde is really another name for the establishment. Life is too dangerous and fragile to be exhibiting urinals while claiming to be anti-bourgeois. We have environmental problems, political meltdown, a proliferation of madmen who want bombs.”

Nilsson receiving yet another lifetime achievement award, this time from the Love is Folly Film Festival, in Bulgaria, where he also headed the jury (2012). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

“Give me ‘the Aprés Garde’ with creators who astonish us with skill, vision and the freedom to rediscover new songs of the open road," Nilsson continued. "[H]igh wire walkers who dare the unknown and accept the consequences if they fall... Sunburnt souls finding their themes and saying ‘This is worth pursuing all the way around the bend.’”

No matter where you cut the cinema cheese, whether letting your guts hang out in front of the camera, or slicing away the tripe in the editing room, or wringing out your soul in your own private wilderness—writing—film is about self-realization, about becoming hyper-present enough to show your true self or that of your characters, in a manner sufficiently comprehensible, at least to the viewers who count.

An actor’s director, if there ever was one, Nilsson rehearses aggressively but leaves onscreen performances almost entirely to the individual, precisely so they can concentrate on achieving that epiphany. Because the performance is so intense, he generally makes do with minimal takes. While he rarely arrives on set scriptless, it is usually only a few pages, listing situations, characters and themes.

Nilsson’s remarkable skill is how he helps his actors develop those characters, in his Direct Action workshops, and inspires them to perform their hearts out, drawing on the full gamut of his poetics, insights, film theory and viewings, and his wildly-diverse life.

As a director, he’ll sometimes seize the floor, but almost always with a gentle hand. In the middle of a long, improvised set piece, for example, he will tip-toe up behind his director of photography, take hold of their back and slowly shift them to a different shot.

Mickey Freeman, who’s shot some twenty Nilsson movies, tolerates such mid-scene intrusions begrudgingly. A seeker of what he calls “the beckoning,” the perfect alignment of character, camera and vision, Freeman "knows I can’t do without him and that we are brothers," Nilsson told me.

Having seen over half of Nilsson’s oeuvre of the last decade, I find the films largely excellent, if markedly looser than his first decade, of which, with my viewing of "Prairie Trilogy" in August, I’ve seen almost all.

Another recent film of interest was “Next Week in Bologna” (2016), made in collaboration with the International Filmmaking Academy in Bologna, Italy, run by Owen and Christine Shapiro, founders of the Syracuse International Film Festival. In 2015, after screening his remake of "Heat and Sunlight", "Permission to Touch", to loud applause, the festival presented Nilsson a lifetime achievement award.

“Next Week in Bologna” opens with a male-female meet neat in the street, followed by a rambling, fun-photo-ed pursuit through the city’s old quarter. It ends in entirely different neighborhoods, however, cutting in black-and-white bits from the infamously-slow-if-brilliant art film “Last Year at Marienbad” (Resnais, 1961), or having the happy couple encounter a remorseful pedophile priest (Nilsson, naturally).

Nilsson's actors for 'Maelstrom' (lft-rt): Ed Ferry, Samantha Vansteen, Dan da Silva and Deniz Demirer at its Mill Valley world premiere in 2012. photo: Victoria Yakubov

The same year as "Bologna", 2016, Nilsson did “Love Twice” about a screenwriter—evoked nicely by Demirer—haunted by two lover characters, who refuse to obey his authorial commands. Nilsson started the film in Mexico, on a road trip with his Citizen Cinema Players, as he sometimes calls them, to the tropical paradise of Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun, where he occasionally retreats to write.

Edited by Kremer, “Love Twice” finishes in Richmond, California, hardly a beautiful beach town, although the film emerges intact, given the story as well as the telling are loose. “Love Twice” has some great romantic and physical moments—outright acrobatics, in fact—and strong performances by Jeff Kao and T. Moon, as the lovers. It also features The Velvet Underground's John Cale, as the film-within-the-film’s producer, who is trying to get "a little something" off the gorgeous lead actress (Moon), and the well-known television actor Carl Lumbly, playing another producer, who both acts in the film and criticizes it.

That very same year—Nilsson generally has two or three films in production at any one time—there was “Devised”, which I didn’t see. Filmed entirely in Marshall Spight's green screen studio, it included Demirer again and a host of other CC Players, like Allen.

Another notable film, which I did catch, was “A Leap to Take” (2013). Not only does it take place in one night, as is Nilsson's want, it was SHOT in one night, by the human tripod Freeman, in a gravity-defying, nearly-continuous, three-and-a-half hour take.

“A Leap to Take” starts at a birthday party for a mob boss, portrayed with gusto by FABA director Kayalar, who can also easily conjure a grizzled, old Nilsson leading man. With 21 speaking parts, it features a host of FABA actors, most delivering incisive performances as they leave the party, board a double-decker bus and descend on another watering hole, as well as each into their own delirium of love, regret, anger, what have you.

Just before that, however, Nilsson made two films completely outside—yet again!—his previous work. Another fiction-doc pair, like “Northern Lights” and “Prairie Trilogy”, “The Steppes” (2011) addresses Stalinism while “What Happened Here” (2012) concerns Stalin’s partner-turned-enemy Leon Trotsky.

Shot in one of the Tenderloin's fantastic old buildings, “The Steppes” follows the elderly Ukrainian owner of a flop-house hotel. Although I haven’t seen it, Irit Levi, who also produced, is said to deliver a stunning performance as a woman haunted by the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine which killed as many as five million Ukrainians in the 1930s. Evidently, it is also augmented by a powerful score by longtime Nilsson sound-person and -designer, Al Nelson.

For “What Happened Here”, which also features an excellent soundtrack (by Daniel David Feinsmith, this time), Nilsson traveled to The Ukraine where a local television producer, Olga Zhurzhenko, helped him find Trotsky’s home town and his mother’s grave, both in ruins. Returning later that year with Freeman, Nilsson interviewed the people in the area about Trotsky, the Holodomor and the Nazis, who seized the town in 1941 and annihilated its Jews.

Nilsson spent almost year on research. After discovering, in the archives of Washington DC's Holocaust Museum, an eye-witness testimony about the Nazi atrocities there, Nilsson located its author, Mikhael Derenkovski, with the help of young Israeli filmmakers, and interviewed him in Israel.

Nilsson (rt) and co-director John Hanson introduce their 40-year-old 'Prairie Trilogy' on its recent world premiere tour, at the Metrograph in Manhattan, July 2018. photo: D. Blair

When an Israeli film organization gave an award to “What Happened Here”, the elderly Derenkovski “spoke with such humility and power, it was as if he’d been speaking before the public his whole life,” Nilsson recalled. “It brought everything full circle—an event I’ll never forget.”

Nilsson was inspired to make this film pairing by reading a biography of Trotsky but also his own interest in socialism and its breaking point, where it crosses into fascism, an investigation which started with “Prairie Trilogy” and “Northern Lights”.

“You can’t eat the rich,” Nilsson told me, matter-of-factly.

“I always felt the doctrinaire side of the Left has been its Achilles Heel. They got to have everyone equal, which cannot happen in any sense. You aren’t as good a piano player as that guy; you can’t shoot [film] like that guy. No, there’s differences, and we should love the difference, praise it, give it everything it can get.”

“Equality of opportunity is a goal we should work towards, but after that there is no equality. Let’s celebrate personal differences and nourish it. Let’s not send philosophers and ballet dancers out to harvest rice. The Cambodian farmers just laughed at them.”

“Once you read and find out what happened to the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Cambodians, the French Revolution—something cracked. [They] didn’t maintain the level of empathy that organizations like that need.”

“At Cine Manifest,” Nilsson told me back in 2008, “I argued to avoid ideology. I opposed the thought that there is any single idea that solves the human issues.”

“All humans have to be judged on a case-by-case basis," he said, in our recent interview. " Other members of Cine Manifest were Marxist-oriented lefties... but I was more of a populist/anarchist,” in the good sense of those words, he hastened to add.

“When you read Madison and Hamilton,” he elaborated in a recent email, “you realize they were very wary of human nature. They thought it was… more realistic to trust appealing to people’s interests, rather than relying on what they claimed were their values. Your biggest enemy is often in the family or the state next door.”

Consuela Faust and Nilsson in a love scene from 'Heat and Sunlight' (1987), a film esteemed highly by the critics as well as, in an odd synchronicity, Nilsson himself. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

But what could compel people to be more generous—fiscally, emotionally, philosophically—great films, perhaps? In this time of blockbuster-ruled box offices, even as tiny cameras and YouTube access attempt to revolutionize cinema, visionary films are few and far between. Some have magical moments, brilliant lines and honest portrayals, but all at once, or film as a form of poetry, not so much.

“I happened to watch ‘Fugitive Kind’ [1960, director, Sidney Lumet, writer, Tennessee Williams] again,” Nilsson admitted, as if confessing a secret Hollywood habit.

“I watched Anna Magnani and [Marlin] Brando and it transcends…” he waved his arms broadly again. “Anna Magnani is one of the MOST present actresses I have EVER seen! Her emotions are so raw and Brando is Brando. God knows where he came from—that is just a personal gift.”

“But those who don’t have that charisma, who are working from the belly out, because they don’t know how to do anything else, because it has an element of honesty, of being truthful to oneself," Nilsson explained, "that’s what I care about.”

“The intermediary of a script and all of the paraphernalia of a set—go here and turn left and make your mark—that to me is just horrid. Even when it is done by... Bergman OK, Bertolucci OK, you can’t argue against those geniuses."

“It is not a business, the ‘film business.’ That, I think, largely leads people astray, away from the ‘ore.’ Which isn’t to say the ore will always be fashioned into something elegant and beautiful, or rough and savage—a wonderful piece of art.”

“But if you don’t start with that, or there are too many people telling you, ‘You can’t do this, there’s a union regulation and all this stuff,’" Nilsson said, drawing to a close. "You can’t do what a poet does or a painter does.”

Nilsson certainly mined ore during the 2000s, when he was mostly working with the yGroup on the "9 @ Night" films.

It was an intense period of creativity, we can assume, given the titles, which are almost all stark, single words: “Used” (2007), “Go Together” (2007), “Pan” (2006), “Need” (2004), “Attitude” (2003), “Noise” (2003), “Singing” (2000), “Stroke” (2000), all kicked off by the highly-heralded “Chalk,” (1996), which included Harvey Mandel as a surfer.

Sadly, cineSOURCE's per article budget, which we've already overdrawn by a factor of a fifty, precludes us from extensive old work review and I've yet to see a single "9 @ Night" film. To fill in the gap, however, here's an article by Ray Carney, a film scholar who's written books on Cassavetes and Dryer the "Surviving on the Margin", concerning Nilsson's Harvard Film Archive show. Connected to his alma matter, Harvard, the Archive screened all nine "9 @ Nights”, around 15 hours worth, one weekend in November 2007.

According to Carney: "Nilsson has been serving as the conscience and agent provocateur of low-budget American independent filmmaking [for thirty years]... He has devoted his cinematic career to presenting the sorts of sociological realities, interpersonal interactions, and emotional transactions that have been screened out of big-budget, mainstream American film."

(lf-rt) John Cale, of the Velvet Underground, Carl Lumbly, the well-known television actor, and their director Nilsson in 'Love Twice', at its premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, 2016. photo: D. Blair

If "serving as the conscience" of American indies through nine "9 @ Night” films was not enough, during the same period Nilsson made “Security” (2006), about life after the 9/11 attacks, “Winter Oranges” (2000), a collaboration with a Japanese cine-tribe (Hiroshima’s Studio Malaparte), and “A Town Has Turned to Dust” (1998), an utter anomaly.

“A Town Has Turned to Dust” is Nilsson’s most Hollywood production—even more than “On the Edge"—given it was made for the dreaded TV monster and from a full screenplay, albeit one penned by the respected Rod Sterling for the BBC, forty years earlier, oddly enough. Within this utterly un-Nilssonian scenario (he updated the original to a post-apocalypse future), a racist merchant accuses an employee of rape and robbery. When the sheriff is unable to stop the vigilantes, a reporter visiting Earth from New Angeles—a megalopolis far, far away—does.

Somewhere in there (I can't find the date—it's missing from Nilsson's IMDb page) was a film even more outside Nilsson's geographical zone but very much in his cultural one: "Samt". Shot in Amman, Jordan, under the auspices of ZENID, the Queen Zein Al Sharaf Institute for Development, "Samt" probably emerged from a week-long Direct Action workshop and intimately addressed its participants issues.

So what is next for the Bay Area’s not-well-known-enough painter, poet, filmmaker and visionary, who pioneered an entire cinematic genre, especially now that he's supposedly doing his last major film, "Nomad Trilogy"?

“I'm now writing my take of my life,” he told me by email on July 25th. “You had a lot of it well organized [in previous cineSOURCE articles]. I'll certainly credit you if I use any of it. But I'm using my writing as a test of memory. What continues to read... what small moments continue to inspire or rankle.”

“Not sure who would want to read this," he continued. "I'm going to put in my poetry, my paintings, fragments and things I never let anyone read, and... free associate myself through my thoughts, beliefs and convictions. It's a kick to go back there, sometimes a boot [to the rear]... sometimes a bittersweet cut.”

Naturally, Nilsson’s urge towards autobiographical compilation and contemplation is not limited to text.

“I have my movies; I have my poetry; and I have my paintings,” he reflected, at the end of our interview. “I just had an art show at Spark Arts,” in San Francisco.

“I am trying to think: How does my painting integrate with the movies, which I have also shown in [the Sparks] gallery? How can I pull all three things [including the poetry] together and have a single show? I have been wracking my brains.”

“I have come up with this: I am going to call the whole ‘gallimaufry’, if that is how you pronounce it [meaning confused jumble in Old French], ‘Tenderloin.’"

Nilsson, in front of the 'Love Twice' poster, chatting with film and film school director Christopher Coppola, who cast him as a vampire in his 'Sacred Blood' (2015). photo: D. Blair

"I am going say: ‘The Tenderloin is a place in San Francisco. It is a major place for South East Asian families and small businesses. But it is also a dumping ground, a place for homeless, a place for graft and vice and drugs and suffering.”

Earlier in our interview, Nilsson told me that his interest in suffering was sparked by the recent bestseller, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2014, English), by the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari. “I love one of his aphorisms,” he said, “which is that the closest thing one can find as an identifying characteristic of people is suffering.”

“I am going to show the suffering of the paintings; the suffering of the ‘9 @ Night’ films; and of my poetry. And I am going to say that a percentage of all the proceeds will go to the Faithful Fools Street Ministry,” which hosted the yGroup, and “that it is helping the suffering people there.”

“Suffering, so that’s the final upshot,” Nilsson concluded, looking like nothing less than—in his gaunt but vibrant old age—a saint from a Dreyer film, “a lot like what the Buddha has been trying to tell us.”

I looked around. The majority of our interview transpired in Nilsson’s downstairs screening room, where I had once crawled on the floor to prove a long-forgotten point; where he had shown so many fantastic films, his own and by others; and where he had shot not a small number of them.

It was now a ruin, torn apart, the big screen in the front as well as the fixtures in the back—gone. There were dozens of boxes, filled with endless flotsam and jetsam. Nilsson will soon be moving on, moving out of this fantastically-utilitarian house/studio he's inhabited and worked his ass off in for over two score years—completing that circle.

Nilsson had also paused and was looking around.

“What do I own? These paintings? These films here?” he said, banging a film can. “This is the only thing I feel proud of.”

“I have a skull—you see that skull up there, the baboon’s skull? David Schickele picked that up on [Mount] Kilimanjaro. He gave me that when he was dying [in 1999, age 62]. It was totem of his and he knew I knew that—that is why I value it.”

“When we went together back to Biafra in the ‘70s [in part to show Schickele’s “Bushman”], we found that the last hippo in the Cross River [local name: Oyono; location: southeastern Nigeria] had been killed. From then on we had this name for each other, ‘Hippo.’”

“The two of us were hippos. I’ve got a couple of hippos around here; once in while he would send me one. Animal totems were part of our friendship,” he said. "David was a big influence in my life.”

A self-portrait painting by Nilsson, circa 1985. image: R. NIlsson

I felt like crying. Rob was a big influence on my life. When I first met him, in 1986, I felt so enamored because I, too, was making an improvised film "Sammy Delerium" (sic), with my own cinema tribe (see "Brief History of Modern Lovers Commune and Ancient Currents Gallery".

Unfortunately, within two years, the group had disbanded and "Sammy Delerium" was abandoned. I doubted Nilsson would recall my unfinished feature from forty years ago, during which time he has made fifty films, so I didn't mention it.

Moreover, he had told me, on our way to see "Blindspotting", that he doesn't brook much depression. Yes, severe existential angst does enter his mind on occasion, he admitted, but after a few minutes of indulging or exploring it, you have to buck up and get on with the production of life at hand, he admonished.

Nilsson suddenly stepped out of his own introspection and turned to me—yet another one of his abilities: intense empathic interest in the other, which obviously fuels his filmmaking.

“What do you think? You suddenly seem kind of down.”

“It’s kind of heartbreaking, you know, Rob,” I said, choking up, “The fact that cineSOURCE couldn’t support you enough, that the Bay Area cinema scene couldn’t support you enough, that you have to move out of your place in your old age—to what, a retirement home?”

“Who told you that?” he retorted.

“This room is full of moving boxes; that was the impression you gave; that is what your contractor was saying right outside; that was—“

“This sounds good for some sort of life cycle bullshit you were hoping to put in your article, but it isn’t true.”

“I’m not leaving. I’m renting out one unit and developing this one to better create and show the work. I’m also creating new financial arrangements, which are personal business and not part of the article—so please don't mention it," he concluded, glaring at me.

And so Nilsson snapped me back to the beginning, Schickele and Nigeria, while jamming me forward with his ascetic discipline to make movies and other art at the highest level of creativity, as well as to treat each other equitably, all exemplified by his massive, multi-disciplinary oeuvre.

The sum total of this he hopes to bring together in one last show. Although he warrants a floor at SF's Museum of Modern Art, its curators are probably not adequately or at all aware of his inordinate work, innovation and world-wide influence, so he will have to settle for a smaller institution.

On the plus side, that will allow him more of his highly-coveted independence in precisely how he curates his sun-drenched paintings, his cooler visionary poems and his 51 films—54 with "Nomad Trilogy".

Obviously, he will need multiple screening rooms: one for the early achievements, one for "9 @ Night", another for the little gems, like the one about the mother and son reunion—which still sits burnt into my mind's eye, despite its production flaws. "Another room will have nine large TV screens, each playing one of the 9 @ Night films on continuous loops, with headphones available for an audience to hear the sound on individual screens," he told me.

This will probably happen when he finishes “Nomad Trilogy”, which I would guess will be in 2020—hopefully a good year for hindsight.

Wrong again, as I have been so many times in this moving target of an article. Indeed, this just in:

"Marshall Spight, my old friend and constant collaborator, has agreed to host 'Tenderloin' at Meets the Eye, his cutting edge green screen studio in San Carlos," Nilsson told me, via email on December 19th. It will feature an eighteen-foot tall "temple," designed by Spight, to show all nine of the "9 @ Night" films simultaneously, just as Nilsson imagined, plus extensive wall space for his paintings and drawings and a poetry reading—now scheduled for the spring of 2019!

Sure, "The Tenderloin Show" may not earn accolades equal to "Heat and Sunlight” or "Prairie Trilogy", which is still touring the indie circuit, let alone bring in sufficient funding for the Faithful Fools Street Ministry or his needy comrades-in-arts.

Nevertheless, it will undoubtedly “smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot” and crack open the multiplex wall or smart phone screen enough to rouse from slumber a few child-prodigy cinema brats—like Michelle Anton Allen, long ago in Los Angeles—to the oft-hidden fact that:

There is liquid light, there is honest feeling and there is revolutionary poetry in moving pictures.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Nov 13, 2018 - 08:31 AM