Last night, Stranger Than Fiction and the Woodstock Film Festival co-presented a screening of Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s 1987 performance document of Spalding Gray’s monologue ruminating on sex, drugs, genocide, “perfect moments” and “invisible clouds of evil.” Inspired by Gray’s real-life experience playing a small role in Roland Jaffe’s The Killing Fields (”I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight,” he swears. “Except for the fact that the banana sticks to wall when it hits. Everything else is true.”), Swimming, the first of three films based on Gray’s monologues, easily eclipses Jaffe’s film in contemporary freshness and replayability. Gray’s stream-of-consciousness style of deeply personal social documentary has never been equalled on as mainstream a scale. Gray may have been great at self-documentation, but it’s the subtle sinematic shaping employed by Demme, cinematographer John Bailey, editor Carole Littleton and composer Laurie Anderson that takes the raw material of a guy sitting in front of a map at a desk with a glass of water and a MacDonalds notebook, and turns it into great documentary.
“I knew that which works in a room would work on a movie screen,” Demme said after the screening, pegging his approach to the monologue as in league with his other performative nonfiction films, including Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold. “I really love to not show the audience. Who wants to see the people that were there [attending the performance]? I want to think that this film is for me, as a moviegoer. You try to provide a shifting best seat in the house.”
To that end, the crew made the most of their whopping two shooting days, filming Gray’s performance with as many as three cameras at once. A 35mm mag would run out after ten minutes, but Gray would keep going, performing for two camera while the other was reloaded. “The way John designed the lighting, we had to flop the cameras,” Demme said. He lit especially for one side for one [runthrough] and then we’d flop the lights around, so that we’d have beautiful images throughout.”
Aside from the rare opportunity to see a fine print of Swimming and to hear its director discuss its making, the real highlight of the night were the insights offered on the creative process of writer/performer Gray, who died of an apparent suicide in 2004. Demme was joined in the Q & A by Littleton and, at Demme’s urging, Judy Arthur, a publicist on the set of The Killing Fields. Describing him as “intense”, Arthur noted she was still surprised to find herself a character in first Gray’s monologue and then Demme’s film. On Jaffe’s set, she said, “We didn’t really realize that Spalding was taking it all down.” No one would realize it until Swimming earned him widespread attention, but according to Demme, that was what Spalding Gray was always doing. “Just to be around Spalding, he was always as riveting, every moment you were with him under normal circumstances, as he is in the film. He was a life artist, at all times. Spalding never got normal — he was always trying stuff out, thinking stuff out in an amazing way.”
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