‘…see it anew’
By Mitchell Miller
Screening at MoMA in January 2005, Chain (USA 2004), is the long awaited first feature length film from Jem Cohen. In a career that has made a study of the lapse of time, the meaning of place and the effect of both on the individual, Chain is an essay in cultural critique that pulls strands from previous films such as Instrument, made with the band Fugazi, the indefinable Benjamin Smoke and Lost Book Found, a sensitive portrait of New York’s dissolving cityscapes in the era of ‘regeneration’. When I interviewed him at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cohen explained his approach: "…it is just asking people to look carefully at something or to try and see it anew, and that act is the most important thing, more important than the story… there are a million of them out there—you never have to reach very far. I don’t think there is any great gift in giving people yet another little story."
Cohen is cinema’s equivalent of a ‘grounded theorist’, deriving his narratives from the film stock itself—as Lorca put it in his lecture on "stalking the image"— "an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest." With Chain, Cohen spent six years stalking the mall, the parking lot, the airport and the amusement parks with no set purpose other than to look again at the "junkspace" he usually "framed out" of shot. The resulting archive was sifted in search of "submerged narratives" to suggest themes, ideas and create two (fictional) characters. Miho Nikaido is Tamiko, pathfinder for a Japanese company eager to move into the American theme park business. Musician Mira Billotte is a homeless drifter whose roving is restricted to the malls that line the freeway. Very different women, at opposite ends of the economic and legal spectrum, but we gradually realise their shared predicament. Both have their horizons dominated by, and passively accept the consumer culture in which they live and work, playing out their preoccupations in spaces owned exclusively by large corporations. Like CCTV voyeurs, we follow Amanda and Tamiko drifting through crowds of genuinely unaware and unaffected consumers. And it is Cohen’s contentment to let his characters drift so much that makes his narrative very different from the convoluted, soft-focus plots of Hollywood, which share more with malls than just crass commercialism. As Cohen explained; "…when they build a shopping mall or an amusement park ride… [they talk about] generating tension and resolution, and how you are going to get people from Point A to B through a series of excitements and releases… they make theme parks that way, they make malls that way and they make movies that way – it is no accident because it is often the same corporations doing all three."
Chain thus avoids high drama, moments of revelation or resolution or ‘release’ or anything else to be expected in a ‘little story’. Amanda does not smash the system – Tamiko does not realise her Company has abandoned her. They just carry on existing. And if we are inclined to pity them, we had best remember that those glassy eyed drones who drift back and forth in front of the camera aren’t extras from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but us. Except we’re not working, we’re shopping, and apparently having the time of our lives…
