| No Picnic: No Picnic is the story of a former rock n'roll musician's intriguing search for the woman in a photograph that lands at his feet at the site of a hit and run, and it is also a sweeping indictment of the callous tidal forces of real estate overhaul, harsh against the local history and village pace of the Lower East Side. The film's main character, Mac (played to split tee-shirt perfection by David Brisbin), is tired of his job supplying 45s to the neighborhood bars' jukeboxes and about fed up with his lack of romantic luck and the changing complexion of the downtown scene. While he receives postcards from his brother, on a sexual sojourn across America, bragging of his exploits state by state, the state of Mac's beloved neighborhood is undergoing an exploitation of its own. An illegal alien neighbor (the tenement Ariel, Anne D'Agnillo) climbs through his window while he tries to relax in the tub with a beer and continues her pressuring him to marry her so she can get a green card. Though amusing in her wackiness, she too is ultimately a disappointment to Mac when she succumbs to landlord pressure, leaving Mac the last holdout on the building's rent strike. He heads for a Mets game. The film has the same kind of refreshing energy as the first burst of French New Wave films. Frames and sequences are packed with familiar but rarely zeroed in on details, like a key getting stuck in a mailbox or a sidewalk chat. The interweaving threads of the narrative are just one element in the unfolding investigation of modes and lifestyles. The glamour is in the exposition, the fabric of the passing moments, the character's adjustments to a day's sequence. Each gorgeous black and white frame is a celebration of the moment, not mere build-up for the next shot. The locals are glimpsed. My friend and neighbor, the poet Lorna Smedman, who sometimes comes through my door when I'm in the bathtub, commented: "Doris and Phil have a very strong sense of the neighborhood, an appreciation of what has made the East Village eccentric and human. The film represents our kind of lifestyle that seldom gets represented in mainstream culture. It's like Lynn Tillman's book Haunted Houses. 1980s bohemian. I want my landlord to see this film." The following interview took place as the filmmaker's two year old son, Leon, expounded on the nature of his shirt. Greg Masters: Who are your influences in filmmaking? Philip Hartman: In retrospect, I would say this film seems like a cross between Bresson and Woody Allen. [The Director of Photography] Peter Hutton and I both admire Bresson a lot. No superfluous camera movements. That kind of spare black and white. But there's no comedy in Bresson. There's a lot of humor in this film — smiling in the face of adversity. I think that's one thing that's weird about it. GM: Richard Hell [who supplies two songs to the film and makes a brief appearance] told me what he thought was interesting about the film was that it was a genre search movie that at the same time was a politically conscious depiction of the neighborhood. PH: On the surface it's film noir but it's in this context of the east village neighborhood . That's one thing we're interested in. People's need for community. Doris Kornish: We felt that if we didn't make this film nobody else was going to. Also, it had to be made then. It's already too late. Every location in the film is gone. Street corners have changed. Empty lots are no longer empty. Bars, restaurants are gone. GM: Phil, before making this film you wrote a few scripts for major studios. PH: That never got made. GM: What made you want to direct a film? PH: The fact that we couldn't get any of those others produces. GM: Were they commercial ventures? PH: They're all in the same vein. Commercial with political...political meaning critiquing a social situation and positing an improvement. But all of them, no matter how hard I try to write a normal role they get kinda weird . . . GM: Can I ask you what the budget was for No Picnic? PH: What are we saying the budget is right now? DK: A hundred and ten. PH: We shot it for fifty. GM: And all the post production stuff is another fifty–sixty thousand? DK: Yeh. We made up a budget and figured post-production would cost twenty thousand dollars. That didn't even pay for the mag stock. We sat at a cafe on sixth street and Avenue A and made out our budget on a napkin. We just had no idea. If we had to do it again, I don't think we'd make a first film that had 125 characters in it and dozens of locations. We scraped together the money to shoot the film. Everybody got paid. But we didn't have any money after that. In exchange for the money to complete the film, Grey City has all the distribution rights. GM: So what's holding them up? PH: You have to ask them that. They're very involved in producing films right now. They're doing Doris Dorie's new film and John Huston's new film. And they have a very small distribution arm. They're preoccupied with producing . That's the bind we're in, business-wise . . . We've been to a bunch of film festivals—Florence, Hof (in Germany), Antwerp, U.S. Film Festival at Sundance (where the film won the best cinematography award.) It's going to Brazil and Australia...The film's about a very specific place and a very specific time but it relates to places that are changing all over the world. That kind of wistfulness and helplessness and alienation is found everywhere. DK: A lot of people like this film. I know a lot people won't like it either but we haven't had to compromise all the time to the industry. PH: I think both Doris and I feel that film should be used as a means to expedite social change. Look at the films Doris shows [at Charas]. If I hadn't met Doris, I don't think it would have been as tough and grassroots a film. GM: What's next? Doris, I know you've been working on a film about Rudy Burckhardt. DK: I started it three years ago. I felt like this guy had offered so much to so many people and I wanted to try to capture that on film and show what a great influence and how much he's inspired these poets and painters and dancers and filmmakers. The film has interviews with people who totally worship him. PH: Besides that, our next project is a film about the 60s and the 80s. |