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| Jem Cohen: the former ice-cream seller chronicling an overlooked America | Jem Cohen: the former ice-cream seller chronicling an overlooked America |
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| Jem Cohen hates indie films. “Indie is like a bin in a record store that people can reach into and go through to find Arcade Fire.” He winces. “It’s the work of people who want to make big movies, but don’t have the means. There are a million fucking indie films out there – all recognisable and comfortable. It’s actually easier to stand out by making something weird and idiosyncratic out of necessity, rather than through trying to please some establishment.” | Jem Cohen hates indie films. “Indie is like a bin in a record store that people can reach into and go through to find Arcade Fire.” He winces. “It’s the work of people who want to make big movies, but don’t have the means. There are a million fucking indie films out there – all recognisable and comfortable. It’s actually easier to stand out by making something weird and idiosyncratic out of necessity, rather than through trying to please some establishment.” |
| Independence in film: that’s a different matter. Over the course of 30 years, Cohen, born in 1962, has built up a striking body of work – intuitively edited, sonically rich assemblages that evoke places and the ghosts of places, spots and fragments of time, the stolen and sometimes subversive poetry of daily life, snapshots of social defiance, visions of ragged beauty. It is the aesthetics of salvage, often made using supposedly obsolete formats such as Super 8 and 16mm, that preserve the traces of memories, dreams and communities that are often overlooked in the American mediascape. | Independence in film: that’s a different matter. Over the course of 30 years, Cohen, born in 1962, has built up a striking body of work – intuitively edited, sonically rich assemblages that evoke places and the ghosts of places, spots and fragments of time, the stolen and sometimes subversive poetry of daily life, snapshots of social defiance, visions of ragged beauty. It is the aesthetics of salvage, often made using supposedly obsolete formats such as Super 8 and 16mm, that preserve the traces of memories, dreams and communities that are often overlooked in the American mediascape. |
| Cohen is sitting in the kitchen of his ground-floor apartment in what, when he moved in 16 years ago, was Brooklyn’s scruffily industrial Gowanus neighbourhood. Outside his window, where until recently homes for low-income locals stood, a 14-storey condominium is going up. “The light is blocked and I find that very bleak,” he says. “But I can’t respond to that with defeat or only sorrow.” This is typical Cohen: blending grief and defiance, elegy and quiet resistance. It’s understandable coming from someone who found his stride “when I realised I had nothing to do with the film industry and they wanted nothing to do with me”. | Cohen is sitting in the kitchen of his ground-floor apartment in what, when he moved in 16 years ago, was Brooklyn’s scruffily industrial Gowanus neighbourhood. Outside his window, where until recently homes for low-income locals stood, a 14-storey condominium is going up. “The light is blocked and I find that very bleak,” he says. “But I can’t respond to that with defeat or only sorrow.” This is typical Cohen: blending grief and defiance, elegy and quiet resistance. It’s understandable coming from someone who found his stride “when I realised I had nothing to do with the film industry and they wanted nothing to do with me”. |
| Cohen brings to his films the sensibility of a rueful outsider. Lost Book Found was made in 1996, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani had begun slicking up New York into the brandscape it resembles today. It is a ghostly, supremely atmospheric series of images that capture faded deli signs, local shopfronts, and the shadows of old neighbourhoods. Assembled from footage shot over a number of years, and looking as if it has been exhumed from some archaeological mound, the film boasts a narrator who declares: “As I became invisible, I began to see things that had once been invisible to me.” | Cohen brings to his films the sensibility of a rueful outsider. Lost Book Found was made in 1996, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani had begun slicking up New York into the brandscape it resembles today. It is a ghostly, supremely atmospheric series of images that capture faded deli signs, local shopfronts, and the shadows of old neighbourhoods. Assembled from footage shot over a number of years, and looking as if it has been exhumed from some archaeological mound, the film boasts a narrator who declares: “As I became invisible, I began to see things that had once been invisible to me.” |
| Chain, from 2004, is a moody hybrid of documentary and fiction about two women: a motel-cleaner getting by on a minimum wage and a Japanese scout travelling through the US in search of potential theme-park sites. Influenced by Nickel and Dimed, undercover journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about her attempts to get by as a low-wage worker in America, the film is a highly recognisable evocation of the loneliness and centre-less nature of post-industrial life. | Chain, from 2004, is a moody hybrid of documentary and fiction about two women: a motel-cleaner getting by on a minimum wage and a Japanese scout travelling through the US in search of potential theme-park sites. Influenced by Nickel and Dimed, undercover journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about her attempts to get by as a low-wage worker in America, the film is a highly recognisable evocation of the loneliness and centre-less nature of post-industrial life. |
| The more recent Museum Hours, meanwhile, starred the singer Mary Margaret O’Hara as a Canadian tourist visiting Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It homed in on details in famous paintings to create a luminous meditation on art, friendship, Vienna and even palliative care. While recognising that it sounded “impossibly rarefied”, the Guardian called it “one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world”. | The more recent Museum Hours, meanwhile, starred the singer Mary Margaret O’Hara as a Canadian tourist visiting Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It homed in on details in famous paintings to create a luminous meditation on art, friendship, Vienna and even palliative care. While recognising that it sounded “impossibly rarefied”, the Guardian called it “one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world”. |
| Cohen’s earliest years were spent in Kabul, where his father worked for the US Agency for International Development. “Theoretically, I don’t have any graspable memories of Afghanistan, yet I think the landscape you initially encounter is imprinted in some special way. I always felt like someone who moved around a lot. I depend on travel because it throws the eye into a state of constant discovery. | Cohen’s earliest years were spent in Kabul, where his father worked for the US Agency for International Development. “Theoretically, I don’t have any graspable memories of Afghanistan, yet I think the landscape you initially encounter is imprinted in some special way. I always felt like someone who moved around a lot. I depend on travel because it throws the eye into a state of constant discovery. |
| “Later, when we settled in Washington DC, the Vietnam war was constantly in the background. I was going to peace marches and feeling dubious about what my government was doing. It was the Watergate years. I had none of that, ‘My country: love it or leave it.’ I went to a DC public school. Most whites had abandoned them and I’d watch the white kids who were left getting the shit kicked out of them. But soon I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. My mom set up clubs. She reported teachers who were blatantly racist to the school’s governing body, who shared her letter with the teachers. They immediately tried to sue her for $250,000. The American Civil Liberties Union defended her. Only at the last moment did the teachers drop their case.” | “Later, when we settled in Washington DC, the Vietnam war was constantly in the background. I was going to peace marches and feeling dubious about what my government was doing. It was the Watergate years. I had none of that, ‘My country: love it or leave it.’ I went to a DC public school. Most whites had abandoned them and I’d watch the white kids who were left getting the shit kicked out of them. But soon I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. My mom set up clubs. She reported teachers who were blatantly racist to the school’s governing body, who shared her letter with the teachers. They immediately tried to sue her for $250,000. The American Civil Liberties Union defended her. Only at the last moment did the teachers drop their case.” |
| Music was as important as film for the young Cohen. He grew up listening to the Beatles and the Stones, then later to John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, in whose experimentalism he gleaned “an idea of American possibility that had to do with radical individualism”. DC was a stronghold of punk and hardcore – and home to the band Fugazi, about whom he made Instrument, filmed over 11 years and released in 1999. Their DIY ethic, zine networks and inclusive ethos (they insisted on cheap tickets and shows for all ages)has informed his own film-making. In recent years, he has collaborated with other independent bands such as The Ex, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Dirty Three for whom, he says, “the common denominator is some kind of dedication to freedom”. | Music was as important as film for the young Cohen. He grew up listening to the Beatles and the Stones, then later to John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, in whose experimentalism he gleaned “an idea of American possibility that had to do with radical individualism”. DC was a stronghold of punk and hardcore – and home to the band Fugazi, about whom he made Instrument, filmed over 11 years and released in 1999. Their DIY ethic, zine networks and inclusive ethos (they insisted on cheap tickets and shows for all ages)has informed his own film-making. In recent years, he has collaborated with other independent bands such as The Ex, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Dirty Three for whom, he says, “the common denominator is some kind of dedication to freedom”. |
| Despite making 70 films to date, and boasting an ever-growing international profile, Cohen has received only one American grant since 2004. “There’s little governmental support for what I do in the United States,” he says, citing as a possible explanation his lack of interest in “a dominant strain of the so-called documentary movement that’s based around advocacy. Foundations want to be able to turn to their boards and say, ‘We changed something. We proved somebody was innocent. We rallied this community.’ There’s an increased pressure to have documentaries conform to certain formulae regarding three-act structures, character, satisfactions of the storytelling arc.” | Despite making 70 films to date, and boasting an ever-growing international profile, Cohen has received only one American grant since 2004. “There’s little governmental support for what I do in the United States,” he says, citing as a possible explanation his lack of interest in “a dominant strain of the so-called documentary movement that’s based around advocacy. Foundations want to be able to turn to their boards and say, ‘We changed something. We proved somebody was innocent. We rallied this community.’ There’s an increased pressure to have documentaries conform to certain formulae regarding three-act structures, character, satisfactions of the storytelling arc.” |
| Cohen, who is the subject of a season about to launch at various venues across London, prefers the slanted and enchanted approaches of the essay film. “The essay film is the name given to the unnameable and undescribable. Its wildest strength is that it takes you to the edges of cinema where something simply can’t be pinned down. One of my favourites is Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black.” In this acclaimed short documentary from 1962, Farrokhzad examines life in an Iranian leper colony, while quoting from the Old Testament, the Qur’an, and her own poetry. “It’s a collision of poetry and the industrial that opens up into an extraordinary hallucination.” | Cohen, who is the subject of a season about to launch at various venues across London, prefers the slanted and enchanted approaches of the essay film. “The essay film is the name given to the unnameable and undescribable. Its wildest strength is that it takes you to the edges of cinema where something simply can’t be pinned down. One of my favourites is Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black.” In this acclaimed short documentary from 1962, Farrokhzad examines life in an Iranian leper colony, while quoting from the Old Testament, the Qur’an, and her own poetry. “It’s a collision of poetry and the industrial that opens up into an extraordinary hallucination.” |
| Streets – as spaces of flaneurial drift, sites of exchange and encounter, antidotes to the tumescent verticality of modern cities – feature prominently in Cohen’s films. “My family had a deep connection to street photo–graphy. My half-brother, Adam, was the son of Sid Grossman, who taught at the Photo League of New York before being blacklisted. I grew up seeing these pictures from the Depression by Lewis Hine. Later, on my own, I began investigating the work of Eugène Atget, before falling full-bore for Robert Frank. So I have a deep dedication to street life and to that tradition.” | Streets – as spaces of flaneurial drift, sites of exchange and encounter, antidotes to the tumescent verticality of modern cities – feature prominently in Cohen’s films. “My family had a deep connection to street photo–graphy. My half-brother, Adam, was the son of Sid Grossman, who taught at the Photo League of New York before being blacklisted. I grew up seeing these pictures from the Depression by Lewis Hine. Later, on my own, I began investigating the work of Eugène Atget, before falling full-bore for Robert Frank. So I have a deep dedication to street life and to that tradition.” |
| Lost Book Found, his haunting ode to a non-gentrified New York was inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, but also drew heavily on Cohen’s own time as a street vendor – selling, among other things, ice-cream – on rough-and-ready Canal Street. “I didn’t do it out of any anthropological curiosity. I just couldn’t get a job. It was both deadly dull and utterly fascinating. Working as a pushcart vendor, you realise that this is my street, too, that it’s an organism that is hopefully eternal. It’s where democracy is enacted, where protests happen, all kinds of shitty and illegal commerce unfolds. It’s where you’re in the weather and in the light, in a way that is exciting.” | Lost Book Found, his haunting ode to a non-gentrified New York was inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, but also drew heavily on Cohen’s own time as a street vendor – selling, among other things, ice-cream – on rough-and-ready Canal Street. “I didn’t do it out of any anthropological curiosity. I just couldn’t get a job. It was both deadly dull and utterly fascinating. Working as a pushcart vendor, you realise that this is my street, too, that it’s an organism that is hopefully eternal. It’s where democracy is enacted, where protests happen, all kinds of shitty and illegal commerce unfolds. It’s where you’re in the weather and in the light, in a way that is exciting.” |
| Since 9/11, filming the tempos and textures of everyday life has become more difficult. In 2005, while shooting landscapes out of the window of a train from New York to Washington, he was told to stop by a conductor. “At the next station, five cops got on and took my camera away. I got it back – but without the footage. In retrospect, it was a joke compared to what [Citizenfour director] Laura Poitras has had to face. What wasn’t comic were the reactions of people on the train who looked down at their magazines or at their laptops, not wanting to recognise there was a civil liberties problem.” | |
| Counting, Cohen’s latest film, is his most palpably personal and affecting. Made “very privately as a homage to Chris Marker”, the cult director with whom he corresponded for 10 years, it’s a voiceless and gorgeously photographed drift through cities as various as Moscow, Istanbul and Sharjah. These travelogues are intercut with footage of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in New York, mysteriously funny images of a bin-liner inflating in a wintry gust, and glimpses of his elderly mother, who had a stroke a number of years ago. | Counting, Cohen’s latest film, is his most palpably personal and affecting. Made “very privately as a homage to Chris Marker”, the cult director with whom he corresponded for 10 years, it’s a voiceless and gorgeously photographed drift through cities as various as Moscow, Istanbul and Sharjah. These travelogues are intercut with footage of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in New York, mysteriously funny images of a bin-liner inflating in a wintry gust, and glimpses of his elderly mother, who had a stroke a number of years ago. |
| Although his mother is in a nursing home now, he still cares for her with his brothers. He describes her home as “decent as these things go”, but the experience has opened his eyes to how the elderly are treated elsewhere. | Although his mother is in a nursing home now, he still cares for her with his brothers. He describes her home as “decent as these things go”, but the experience has opened his eyes to how the elderly are treated elsewhere. |
| “One has no idea, until one deals with nursing homes and hospitals for the aged, how the old are tossed around like shipwreck victims. The horrors of capitalism are made so clearly manifest: there’s money to be made by keeping people alive, and no money to be had in dying decently and respectfully. That has been a terrible, terrible revelation of the last few years.” | “One has no idea, until one deals with nursing homes and hospitals for the aged, how the old are tossed around like shipwreck victims. The horrors of capitalism are made so clearly manifest: there’s money to be made by keeping people alive, and no money to be had in dying decently and respectfully. That has been a terrible, terrible revelation of the last few years.” |
| Yet Counting, like all Cohen’s work, glows with bruised lyricism. It feels like a temporary shelter in the face of an imminent storm. “So much is disappearing, but we can’t live in a constant state of defeat and mourning. I want to demonstrate that, in spite of all our problems, the world is extraordinary and fascinating and beautiful.” | Yet Counting, like all Cohen’s work, glows with bruised lyricism. It feels like a temporary shelter in the face of an imminent storm. “So much is disappearing, but we can’t live in a constant state of defeat and mourning. I want to demonstrate that, in spite of all our problems, the world is extraordinary and fascinating and beautiful.” |
| • The Jem Cohen film season is at the Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery and Hackney Picturehouse, London until 28 May. Details here. | • The Jem Cohen film season is at the Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery and Hackney Picturehouse, London until 28 May. Details here. |