It has been a century since the freedom of self-expression in film-making  has been  as open as it is today.  Like the pioneers of the moving picture, today’s camera pointers are operating without any artistic constraints. Film, which only forty years ago was spoken of as the new art form, is devolving  into  a folk art,  taking its place alongside    pottery making, basket weaving, and the composition  of synthesized music on computer programs such as garage band.     For some, this is a bad thing.  For others, it is a revolution in extending one’s personality through a medium that was formerly the province of an  group of skilled craftsmen under the leadership of an elite production and distribution mob.

While there has always been a wildcat underbelly to the motion picture industry, the old school mavericks, or independent, film-makers who got their movies into commercial venues were connected in some way to the studio behemoth, whether as actors (John Cassavetes), cinematographers (Haskell Wexler), or writers (Samuel Fuller), all of whom had  a solid working knowledge of how movies were made before they got  a chance at directing their own film.

It is not so for the new generation of American film-directors, some of whom have twittered out their features in three minute stubs on their cell phones. How does a critic   review something made by   those with no working knowledge of film-making craft? To begin with, one must lay aside the whole burden of aesthetics that one has developed throughout a lifetime of studying film, and search deeply for the individual merit in these works.  More often then not, one will walk away without having found any such merit at all.     Lately, however, something is beginning to emerge from this unfettered generation, something that is closer to what Robert Bresson dreamed of than what he himself was able to approach.

We may at last be seeing the birth of a new art form, one that is far from the combination of theatre, music, and photography that has been passing for cinema for over a century now.  The new film-makers  often work  without scripts, without actors, without photographic skill, and certainly without the ability to underscore their found images with fitting music.  And from this point of nothing, some are creating a new cinematic language based on their own ways of seeing and living the world.

Two films screening at the Northwest Film Forum this week make a strong case for the value of the work being done by these drama-provoked camera bugs.  The first, “Bass Ackwards,”   is the work of Linus Phillips, whose idea of lighting a scene is to turn on the overhead switch, but who, in 100 minutes,  shows  more understanding of and sensitivity  to the flesh and blood reality of daily life in today’s America than  last year’s graduating class of the television academy of the plastic arts will ever come close to in the coming fifty years of their fast-tracked  careers. The second, Nick Peterson’s“ Field Guide to November Days,”  favors composition over content and style over humanity. It is a true breakthrough in a new aesthetics that has its roots in the architectural language of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Phillips, who came across as an extroverted lunkhead in his “Walking to Werner,” has  grown a beard and learned to  talk less and listen more.  He still can’t light a scene. Even in full daylight the screen is too dark, maybe because he insists on  shooting everything too close.  Rampant close-ups are one of this generation’s most obnoxious traits, especially since most of the cast members look like the kind of real people we are used to seeing, not on a big movie screen, but on television’s nightly news.

Philips is smart to keep his camera relatively stationary,  so it doesn’t look like he is trying to get an X-ray of the dental work of a partying group of  weaving drunkards. Instead, it is coolly observant, waiting for the subject, not the verb, to make the first move. “Bass Ackwards” is a road movie, but I can’t tell you how the road trip got started because I fell asleep during the first half hour when Phillips was simply a   guest who had worn out his  welcome  and a suitor whose object of affection did not return his calls.  Now he was a man on the move, and his movie started to come alive. More importantly, the movie was no longer about him, but about the people who were part of that bigger world that was outside the scope of personal routine. But that is what all road movies are about, right?  So what is so special about this one? Plenty.  For one thing, Phillips discovers the small actions that lead to the big things that fill and complete our lives. How strangers become friends through simple acts of kindness, and how the world can change simply by stepping on the gas.

“Field Guide to November Days ” charts the daily routines of  Natalie, a photographer  who possesses a sharp visual sense.  The first image resembles a still photograph.  The second image, appropriately enough, shows  Natalie  pointing her camera.  With clarity and simplicity, we are reminded of how limited is the scope of our individual lives, yet how various the riches are to be found in the most mundane things. Night shadows fall across the exterior of a house.  Inside, Natalie pets her cat,  has dinner, and goes to bed. A shot of her with a book is followed by daylight coming through the window. Natalie is now sleeping, then the alarm goes off.  The soundtrack is filled with   beeps that tell us what to do, as well as the music of birds, cars, televisions, public chatter, private whispers, footsteps, and growling stomachs. 

Peterson has taken a step  beyond the alienated eroticist in the age of anxiety as set forth by Antonioni in   “Blow-Up.”  In this portrait of habitation as a comfort zone,  people are the designers of their own lives. Quilts, coffee, cats bicycles, and curtains are all  a part of this new landscape that is favorable to the person living inside it.   Natalie  moves through time, through, life, through the month of November as the light moves across the hours of a day.  The sunlight against her windows highlights the red of the curtains.

Few films have detailed with such precision the ways in which people live their lives. At one moment, silent, in the next, filled with noise.   Even in its emptiness, there is something to be drawn out.  It is observation without definition.  Life accepted as it appears.  It is a scrapbook of moments, arranged in such a way that her life plays like a piece of music.  Like an American “Satyricon,” Peterson  captures life in the process of being lived, refusing to bookend it with beginnings or endings, preludes or epilogues. 

Natalie goes to a movie, We know she is at a movie because there are a few people in chairs, some eating popcorn, and they are looking at something. We hear the  voice of a child counting in German and assume it is a German movie.  She works at a Xerox machine; she talks to friends at a bar.  A same sex couple embrace, but they are no more important than the bicycle on her porch.  All these images are the small pieces that make up her reality.  The camera generally keeps its distance from the people, rarely isolating them from the surroundings, but keeping them focused in the broader image.  We cannot know what they feel.  Even when they make love, they are little more than figures in light on a dark blue quilt.  We don’t know how they feel about what they do.  The camera does not record emotion, only images.

The film rarely strays from its surfaces.  This is the way to understand life, Not by descending into the emotional lives of others but by observing the surfaces.  In a living space that sometimes accommodates two although it was designed for one, Natalie and her ex- boyfriend Matt, with whom she has recently become re-involved, are fighting.  He leaves the house.  Later, he returns with an apology.   The nature of the fight is not our concern.  The interesting thing is the way the image is at first destroyed and then restored by the episode. In another scene Natalie, wearing a blue top, sits against a red wall.  Matt sits in front of a window and the day is beginning to darken. Then, time being subject to nothing but the duration of the shot, the sky is bright blue and spotted with white clouds.

Natalie  eats and rides bikes with  Matt  but is the same person whether alone or with somebody. They are on the beach.  They are at a house concert. Eventually they are inside her house. Their  activity within is viewed dispassionately from without.  Through the picture window adjacent to an outside staircase, we  see the body language of goodbye.  Then he leaves while  she watches him go.  Much later, while riding her bike, she takes a tumble. The design of her life is destroyed.  She rides home on the train, caught in the blackness. 

In “Field Guide to November Days, ” Peterson captures and communicates the essence of his world through the acute observation of mundane actions.  Both this and  “Bass Ackwards”   are evidence of a New American Underground that is giving voice to a generation that has, for too long,  been  judged  dispensable and inarticulate. 

“Bass Ackwards” screens at the Northwest Film Forum, June 12-17

Field Guide to November Days” screens one day only, June 14, at the NWFF

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