James Franco’s short film “The Clerk’s Tale” will close Critics’ Week at Cannes. Screen Comment’s Ali Naderzad did a close reading with Franco on the Spencer Reece poem it is based on.
Ali Naderzad - “The Clerk’s Tale” has a hint of sweet hopelessness. It reminds me of Thoreau’s famous sentence “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”I found the following sentence especially striking:
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—and complete acceptance is always bittersweet. And then, there’s the extraordinary. We are changed when the transactions are done— older, dirtier, dwarfed."
Filmmaker Bette Gordon launched her career in early-1980s Tribeca, a world far removed from the designer clothing boutiques, expansive walk-up loft art spaces and quaint eateries bombarding the area today. There were no crowds, there were no restaurants, just an abundance of weed-ridden vacant lots and buildings.
One such establishment, located on White Street, would eventually become the Collective for Living Cinema, the stomping ground for a group of artsy SUNY Binghamton graduates and cinema fanatics which Gordon joined forces with. Armed with a self-financed 16mm film projection system, the Collective began screening a warped variety of films, from 1970s horror schlock like “It's Alive!” to the avant-garde works of Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. The tight-knit group populated what gradually became the hippest venues of their day—the legendary punk rock joint Mudd Club, just down the block; the Performing Garage in SoHo, home of the Wooster Group; the Kitchen arts space on West 19th Street. Connections were formed, ideas were fleshed out, and eventually, with funding aid from the German television station ZDF, England's Channel 4 and other foreign arts-supporting organizations, low-budget films were made.
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