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Geriatrixploitation: Privacy, Sentimentality, and the Ethics of Spectatorship
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Elliot Greenebaum
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After one year at NYU, Elliot Greenebaum returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky for two years in order to make Assisted Living, a feature film set in a nursing home and featuring a cast of actual residents. Despite the controversy created by Greenebaum's approach to his subject matter, Assisted Living won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance Film Festival, the Best Feature Award at Woodstock Film Festival, and both Jury and Audience Awards at GenArt Film Festival. It was immediately acquired by Cowboy Pictures and set for a February, 2004 release. But Cowboy, which owned the rights to much of the work of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, filed for bankruptcy before they could honor their deal with Greenebaum.
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BRAINTRUSTdv: How did you take the news of Cowboy's bankruptcy when you first heard?
Elliot Greenebaum: We were doing the festival circuit under Cowboy's umbrella while secretly the company was falling apart. It was easy enough for them to keep a poker face and fly us around. We were at the Mill Valley Festival when we heard the news and, strangely, we were energized. Since Cowboy had picked up the film, it had won three more grand jury prizes—GenArt, Woodstock, and Savannah. We believed that companies would take us more seriously. We forgot about the legal maze that was going to unfold. Fortunately, I have a good lawyer.
BTdv: Speaking of the legal maze, I've inferred from some articles and reviews that you didn't have permission to use the images of Alzheimer's patients and others in the nursing home who were incapable of understanding that they were being filmed.
EG: Everyone signed releases. Those who needed a guardian to do so—the five or six of them who were recognizable—have been removed from the film. Even if they had not been removed, it would have been legal to use their image because dead people who are not celebrities do not own their image. But, again, all identifiable people signed releases.
BTdv: Have you made any changes to Assisted Living between your success on the festival circuit and the current release version?
EG: I am a perfectionist. And not in a good way. I'm obsessive and haunted by a desire to refine or do U-turns. I have shortened the film by thirty seconds—twice—and one week before the release I took out the close-ups that made certain sick people recognizable. Mostly the changes are intended to move the narrative. Some were intended to protect the privacy of people who are in the film but were captured in real moments.
BTdv: What gave you the idea for the Assisted Living script?
EG: There was no script. Only a treatment about a janitor who is confused for someone's son. I wanted the tone to be improvisational and naturalistic so that the fiction could have the same flavor as the documentary material. This is why when I shot the interviews with the fictional characters on DV, it was important that they speak about their real lives and be unscripted. That way the tone maximized the viscerality of non-fiction.
The story I wanted to tell is a story of how we hide from the world, and we have techniques— personalities—that act as an insurance policy for keeping us safe. Each of us was hurt in some way growing up and, furthermore, we were hurt by being alive at all, feeling pain, etc.— and we develop techniques for managing those situations. The film is about one young man who abandons one of his techniques, namely emotional distance. The environment of a nursing home acts as an amplifier to this theme because all of us feel imprisoned in our lives and wish we were different. Nursing homes have a sense of imprisonment and determinism.
BTdv: You've claimed that the movie has the oldest cast in filmmaking history.
EG: The fact that old people live there makes it the case, accidentally, that the film has the oldest cast in filmmaking history.
BTdv: One critic accused you of lingering morbidly on tragic aspects of the nursing home environment. How do you answer such criticism? Do you think there are any exploitive elements in the movie?
EG: Tsunami victims are shown crying with their dead children. They are not being exploited because the purpose of showing the image is to arouse empathy and compassion in the viewer, not to entertain. The morality is contingent on the context.
[For a more detailed reflection on this point of controversy, see the supplement which follows this interview.]
BTdv: Your movie boasts more than its fair share of comedic elements.
EG: Comedy and irony are ways of telling stories about cases where sacred events or things were profaned. Like if there's a serious music concert and someone gets into a fight in the middle of it and disrupts the music, the audience will feel anxiety and sorrow. If the person is led from the theater and the musicians resume, the audience will not enjoy the rest of the concert if they play things that are serious. If, on the other hand, the musicians
play something wacky and ironic, the audience will laugh and perhaps enjoy the concert more because comedy has been embraced.
Comedy is the way film should handle profanity. As [a friend] once pointed out to me, ironic artists are actually, deep down, the most naively idealistic and childlike in their love of sincerity. The irony comes from an anger at how these ideals are fucked up in life and an anger because they can't stand how this happens.
Anyway, comedy is a method of handling the fact that all that is divine for us will be defaced and impure somehow. Comedy is perhaps a way in which we mourn these losses and grieve for them. Laughter is how we cry in public.
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Michael Bonsignore and Maggie Riley
in Assisted Living
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BTdv: It's also been said that Assisted Living has a slick "music video" feel, which, along with the comedic element, could be interpreted as inappropriate to the material. Do you feel that your stylistic sensibility suited the movie's subject matter?
EG: I wanted to show as much neat stuff as I could. A lot of times the story was not the neatest stuff that I had captured so I would package the neat stuff with music. This allowed me to show more neat stuff.
BTdv: I imagine most viewers are unable to distinguish between "real" moments and "staged" moments in your movie. Was this your intention?
EG: It was absolutely my intention. We have very primitive ideas about what counts as documentary and what counts as fiction. Everything in a film is a picture of a physical event. How those physical events are edited either creates an account of something that really happened or something that didn't really happen. I think that the words "documentary" and "fiction" are context-dependent words, like "good" and "bad" or "hot" and "cold."
If the artist's personality is critical in both fiction and documentary, then the most important question is, why? What is the personality for? As with everything, the individual is empty. He or she is nothing without a context. There is freedom to define oneself relative to an infinite number of contexts, and Buddhism is the further claim that no context is objectively more real or important than another. So when an artist is making a film, he or she must always know that the personality that is being manifested in his or her work is important because of the relationship with the audience. Once you start moving away from that into "objective" truth about films and art and that nonsense, you start to have a private language, which is impossible.
You must keep in mind that you are in a relationship when you make a film. It is a relationship with the viewer. You should be incredibly respectful of the viewer—the same way you would be in person. You should give them something. Most films are not very good relationships. Nothing from the filmmaker is given. It's all surfaces, even if they are pretty. Going to a film like that is like hanging around one of those guys who won't stop doing magic tricks long enough to talk to you. Or someone really smart, like Todd Solondz, who is so filled with anger at you for judging him that he hits back. In the Western world, the artist is seen as someone who rolls in his own shit and neurosis and then expresses his neurosis in a particular style. Then people like this style of expressing neurosis and pay lots of money for it.
BTdv: Assisted Living was conceived and shot as a fifty-fifty solution of DV and film. In the release version of the movie, only six minutes of video footage remain.
EG: There was originally more DV material, but there was always going to be a mixture and there still is—just less DV. Not because DV is bad; because those interview sections contained less narrative elements.
BTdv: Did you re-cut the movie to reduce the DV footage after an audience reaction or a negative review? Or was it just your instinct?
EG: I showed the film to six smart people who I had never met. They said the interviews on DV were boring and I didn't need them. My instinct was that since they all agreed about that, they were probably right.
BTdv: "In filmmaking," you've said, "there's a simultaneous degradation of one's intended outcome combined with the magical specificity that the real world brings." Can you elaborate on this idea?
EG: The world is strange and bewildering. Things we invent in our heads are impoverished and dry and cliché because we are just trying to get a grip on all the bewildering stuff around us, and failing—or formalizing—again and again. Cameras are good because they can let us see stuff as it really is. Sometimes this is healthy for people who think they understand anything. Films too often stabilize, rather than destabilize. We can live in a happy cocoon with our eyes shut or in a big desert with our eyes open. Not sure which is best. Probably both are okay.
Lacan said that knowledge is a paranoiac response. Film is a way of managing the world. For example, I was going down an escalator, and there was a homeless person at the bottom with people passing him. He looked bad and was in a wheelchair with a cup and I thought to myself during the ride down, not about homelessness or suffering or how that man felt, but instead about how effective dolly shots are, and how cinematic that moment was. Instead of being unguarded.
BTdv: On the one hand you're very high-minded and express yourself in elevated, hoary terms which reflect your philosophy background, but on the other hand there's this energetic, down-to-earth side which values grass roots marketing and feels "gross" after watching modern movies. How do you balance these two parts of yourself?
EG: I am very confused about who I am, and I change minute to minute like everyone else does. I try to be nice to people and brave. I hate making films so much that the only possible reason I could generate that could fuel that sort of process would be the idea that they could make people happy to have been born and raise consciousness. I would like to do something nice for people. I began this because I wanted to be loved—or liked. I felt that if I were a filmmaker this would happen. When I became successful I felt worse and more unsafe than before. So now I try to think about other people more, and hopefully the fact that I'm good at what I do is something that can be used for good things. At this stage in my life, I just want to be sincere and accepting of my flaws, and I think my cinema should have that same kind of calmness and sincerity that I hope to have and want to share with others. Hopefully I can make them see how I think we should live and interact.
BTdv: How is Assisted Living different from the kind of movies that make you feel "gross"?
EG: It is excited about the potential of moviemaking. It's exuberant and playful and very serious and honest, too. It's about accepting pain rather than accepting a distraction from pain.
All classical narrative is a structure for desire. Therefore, if the desire is completed, the person feels completed and fuller than before. But because completion is not part of our lives, classical narration risks leaving an audience member un-grown. Therefore, solutions to conflict could best be helpful if they are non-classical. Non-classical narrative gives viewers incompleteness, but invites them to accept a tool. You have given them something: a potential for their own lives. An experience that they can use as if it were their own. Non-classical films are gestural, non-literal, expressive, tool-giving films.
BTdv: In a previous interview, you said that the most important films of the 1990s are Todd Haynes's Safe, Harmony Korine's Gummo, and Emir Kusturica's Underground. I'm curious if you see any correlation among them.
EG: Only that they are good.
I don't want my movies to be about taste in movies. They should be about taste in the world. I can help people's taste in the world. Not craft but content.
BTdv: One review suggests that Assisted Living "starts out like Christopher Guest and ends up like P.T. Anderson." Do you feel any affinity with those two filmmakers?
EG: P.T. Anderson is a much better director than I am. But we're similar because he's trying to hard to be loved and forgiven for being imperfect. He strikes me as someone with a lot of shame. The effort to be sincere in his films, as a way to be loved, is something that we have in common in our films.
Christopher Guest was a big influence on me as a kid because I had an older sister who watched Saturday Night Live a lot and he was always an amazing actor. People forget what a strong actor he is. Spinal Tap is a comedy so it is not given credit as one of the best movies ever made, but even in snob mode, I think it is one of the best films. Period.
BTdv: You've said that you like "rigorous, perfect filmmaking." That seems like a tall order. What films or filmmakers fall into this category?
EG: I think Todd Haynes works like this. I am also reminded of Joseph Cornell's boxes, which aren't films, but I like that idea—that a film could be like one of those.
BTdv: It has been said that experience is the best teacher, yet after making Assisted Living you returned to NYU. Did you think the film school environment still had applicable things to teach you?
EG: There are some very intelligent instructors at NYU and also some very inspired students. Tons of the students there are a hundred times better than I am at all kinds of aspects of this art form. Assisted Living played to my strengths. I still have an infinite amount to learn.
BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.
EG: The celluloid material used to mechanically register light reflecting off objects will no longer be the primary means of image making. It will be a primitive relic, part of an inefficient past, grouped with things like steam trains and record players. This I take to be somewhat uncontroversial because I have said nothing of how soon or how dramatically such changes will arrive—only that they will. I think, however, we have a sense of the new domain, and at the moment this domain is referred to as the digital domain. And like the outdated record player, which carries a sound far richer than any compact disc or digital tape is capable of, the spectrum of creative possibilities offered by the new digital image medium will overwhelm and dismiss film technology with a smirk.
I make no predictions about what this new world will look and sound like, but I consider it rather uncontroversial that a rapid evolution is soon to begin. Just as it was impossible to predict how sound technology would change motion pictures, just as it was impossible to predict how color film stock would change the way filmmakers practiced their art, the computer-age revolution will be equally unpredictable in terms of its effects on the image aesthetic. I will not weigh the pros and cons of digital technology, nor will I discuss the economic and aesthetic shifts that will surely find traction in the new technical community. Instead I want to explore what we can expect from the old medium, the film medium, once it has been replaced by the new, more precocious ones. I want to explore how film will be used and what it is likely to mean to an audience when the images deployed are composed of celluloid rather than digits.
Old films are good in part because they look bad. This is why High Definition cameras are bad for fiction films. They are antithetical to what makes films effective and universal-feeling. Detailed images are less expressive. The reason that hand-held camera work is in vogue right now with MiniDV is in part because it brings an organic element to something that is still clearly pixelated. Throughout film history there have been many such cases in which a technological evolution has reconfigured the entire aesthetic domain of its predecessor, and it is important to understand how such cases work if we are to understand and attempt to extrapolate the future of film.
I think everything is going to dissolve into lots of different niches. I used to think that there was going to be a story of cinema. I think what we're seeing is a vast, cold diffusion rather than a narrative. There's no predicting the future—not because there is no future but because the future will be too many things. We used to go to a special room to see pictures that could move. Now we can see them anywhere, anytime.
What's the future of DV? It seems like a strange question. Like being concerned with the future of telephone wire.
Interview Supplement
As a supplement to the interview above, Elliot Greenebaum provided the following letter in order to elucidate his moral and aesthetic positions in relation to Assisted Living. The letter was originally written to a journalist who deemed the movie both legally and morally amiss. The text has been substantially reduced, but its feverish moral inquiry and earnest circumspection remain intact.
Dear J.,
In the wake of our conversation I've made a few changes to the film and I want to discuss why.
I'm not making these changes for legal reasons, I'm making them for moral ones. I want to do a better job of addressing your questions and concerns on those issues. Unlike the legal issues, these moral issues are really hard for me and I want to talk about why—in detail—rather than superficially. So please forgive the length of this...
In Assisted Living, the documentary material is not documentary style. It's just physically factual—like a tree, a sunset, or a pedestrian. Because the documentary is shot in the same style that the fiction is shot—and indeed much of the fiction is shot like a documentary—it's sometimes confusing (in an exciting way I think) what kind of moment one is watching. This not only heightens the impact of the story, it also problematizes the viewer's trained notions of what counts as "real" versus "fake." Although editing mixes documentary and fiction all the time, rarely are single shots themselves a mixture...As consumers, though, we want films to be like other products. We want to know whether we're buying a scarf, a sweater, a romantic comedy, or a documentary. This is fine if you think film is merely a craft, but it's not fine if you think of it as art. Assisted Living's layers extend into the audience's safe zone because of the documentary material. The film achieves an arresting quality, in part, because it punctures the fictional glaze.
Your worry, I take it, is that we still have moral questions to ask. It seems wrong to take documentary material of elderly people who could not give permission and then to show those pictures to people who desire to be entertained. Although it seems like the fictional context has something to do with this discussion, I think I have shown it doesn't. All of the moral issues that are alive here are alive in a documentary about this same subject. If I had gone into a nursing home and filmed residents without permission for a documentary, the same concerns would exist. The context of how those images are used is indeed critical to whether they are used morally, but whether or not the film is a fiction is irrelevant.
Roughly speaking, the claim is that it's immoral to go into a nursing home and film people who were sleeping or watching TV or eating meals without getting release forms signed. It's also immoral to show those images to other people. And it's even worse to profit from them. Without written releases from individuals or guardians, the filming and/or showing should be illegal.
Was it immoral to film them? No. Because it is not immoral to look at them. Residents of nursing homes are seen by visitors all the time. Visitors to nursing homes see other people aside from family members. If I went and visited people in nursing homes, that would be a good thing. If I show other people what they look like, then I am a bad person?
So let's stop right at the act of taking a picture. Taking a picture merely allows for the potential for more than one look at something. It stops time. Its essence is an act of looking. If you think that no one should be able to look at people in nursing homes without permission, then I consider your view extreme and we don't share a basic intuition. I do not believe there is anything immoral about looking at people in nursing homes...If you're looking at them in order to make fun of them, then it's bad; if you're looking at them with empathy, then it's good. So if you grant that it's not bad to look at someone with Alzheimer's in a nursing home, in and of itself, then merely taking a picture, in and of itself, isn't bad either.
We live in a society where privacy is important. In many societies past, current, and probably future there are no notions of privacy, let alone privacy law. If I asked people in one of those societies if the film was mean for filming the people without written permission, they might even wonder why I would ask permission in the first place, or why someone would think being old and sick was embarrassing. But since we live in a society where this is our framework, it's possible to talk about it sensibly. It's our context.
Even within a work of art, the context issue is necessary to make sense of things. Take, for example, the documentary/fiction distinction. Context is what determines if shots are considered documentary or fiction...A tree on its own doesn't express a thought or idea but if you show a close-up of Tom Cruise looking out a window and then you show a close up of a tree, the thought "Tom Cruise is looking at that tree" is expressed. Since the events being expressed didn't happen and the characters are fictional, the audience experiences this as fiction. But until I introduce Tom Cruise, there is no fact to the matter about whether the tree expresses a "fictional" tree or a "real" tree.
The way something is used, in fact, is so important that it overrides consent. For example, the mere the fact that Michael Moore and "Reality TV" get prior consent to showing people doing terrible things doesn't in my mind absolve them of responsibility just because consent forms were signed. Reality TV asserts financial pressure to make poor people confess love to each other or eat spiders...I think it's crazy to have the words Assisted Living and MTV Spring Break in the same sentence when we're talking morals. Yet one [production] got signed releases, the other didn't.
Furthermore, there are lots of cases where consent is not given that we believe are justified because they are either news or because consent is unimportant...There are anthropological documentaries that show people who don't understand what cameras do. I think we agree that if Americans should get a right to privacy, then natives of another country should also. If it's necessarily bad to film people in their home, then ethnographies and even important films like, say, Nanook of the North, would also be invasions of privacy. The same is true of the great works of Frederick Wiseman. And indeed these films invade privacy. But are they bad?
If I film a hut with tribe members in it and they don't know what a camera is, am I hurting them?...If the documentary is about preserving their environment, not cutting down rainforests, then it's good to film them even if they don't understand what a camera is. My film is using documentary images in order to show, powerfully, what is going on so we don't destroy a rain forest.
Therefore, the question of the morality of including real people has to do with what kind of damage is done to them...The reason we have a spooky sense that there are damages but find it hard to articulate what they are is that we're superstitious about life...It's also interesting to note that we feel no haunting sense like this in the case of real people like the Eskimo Nanook, being shown trudging through the snow, struggling for food. The reason we don't mind showing Nanook is because we think old age is embarrassing and that walking in the snow is not.
Criticism of showing old people is not based on complicated notions of privacy or of exploitation or of hybrid filmmaking. It comes down to something simple: aversion. Attacks on the film's morality only make sense because we live in a world that is averse to aging. Here, aging is seen as not only embarrassing but as something that should be embarrassing. This is not just a trivial fact about our psychology; it's a religious fact and it makes us feel like the universe is fundamentally hostile. This unconscious sense of a hostile universe makes us feel deeply sad and alone. It's a very sad thing to feel.
Do I want my movie to cause pain? No. Is that something to consider? Yes. Indeed, I'm extremely concerned that showing the film to people who knew the individuals who were filmed will make them feel sad...In recent days, I made the decision to cut out almost all the shots of suffering people who can be recognized and identified, making the nursing home section populated by people who operate as general people, not individual ones. Still, there's no guarantee that the film will cause zero pain to all viewers. And there's still something spooky about the film. Even if we imagine that there were no relatives and no living people, it would still feel strange to look at this material. It touches something scary in us...
Now four years later, everyone is dead. Should I still pixelate all faces? Should I still cut them out? The decision isn't easy. Different people have different opinions and my mind changes from day to day. In the end, though, I've decided to cut some of them out but not all. My decision to do this has nothing to do with my responsibility to them or my moral sense of the movie. It's simply based on the desire to not hurt viewers who, like me, have wrong-headed views about aging and illness. In other words, because I hate making people upset.
There's one final note I'd like to make. The themes of the film are so much about this issue that the story self-justifies using material that may be threatening in this way...When I arrived to shoot the film, I only had comedy ideas. Like Todd [the central character in Assisted Living], I imagined people sitting totally still while balls are thrown to them. I imagined them watching funny TV shows. I imagined them in church sitting just the same, watching a crazy service. I pictured them listening to Todd talk from heaven. I thought of the monkey scene. And maybe my humor is what's strongest. Most of the time, audiences laugh so hard during the first twenty minutes of the film that lines are drowned out. Intellectualizing the world and seeing it as comedy are ways we defend ourselves against it, and I did that, Todd did that, and audiences do that too. And then things change.
The film traces my journey. I got the courage to make a more mature film, not just an intellectual game. And Todd made the same journey...[Old people] are not game pieces. They are real. And that's the story of me making the film. Todd loses his job in order to do the right thing and I face criticism in order to do the right thing. I also am taking some people out of the film in order to do the right thing.
I wish I could make a different version for all the different viewers so I could calibrate things just right. But I can't. Should I make the Alzheimer's area [of the movie] worse-seeming for the young audiences? Should I make it more beatific for the old audiences? Should I pixelate the faces for the families, ruining the experience for all the others? Who knows. But I think I'm doing the best I can.
Elliot Greenebaum
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