Still from This Action Lies. Courtesy of the filmmaker
Over the past fifteen years, James N. Kienitz Wilkins has established himself as one of the foremost American experimental filmmakers working today. In shorts like Indefinite Pitch (2016) and This Action Lies (2018), his fast-paced, sardonic voiceover charts digressive paths through American society and government, the mechanics of image-making and distribution, and quasi-conspiratorial histories, all linked by his repetitive yet captivating images, an uncommon wittiness, and commitment to rumination and self-reflexivity. He is equally adept in feature-length form, whether it be the four-character deposition (all voiced by himself) accompanied by movie publicity images in Still Film (2023), Common Carrier’s (2017) double-exposure exploration of quotidian life circa 2016, or the fiendishly clever Betacam-shot mise-en-abyme of references and discomfiting situations throughout The Plagiarists (2019), co-directed with frequent creative collaborator Robin Schavoir under the pseudonym Peter Parlow.
Though Kienitz Wilkins’s work often engages with documents and, particularly in his most recent short Moon v. State (2024), real histories, his films resist easy categorization in their mélange of techniques and sources. On the occasion of a retrospective of his work at Metrograph this weekend, we had a video call with Kienitz Wilkins to discuss his methodology, his thoughts on documentary’s relationship to his work, and the festival landscape at large. Public Hearing is also in Anthology’s VERBATIM series this month. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: Your two most recent films in this program—Still Film and Moon v. State—both premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. I was curious about how you see both of those films functioning within the context of an explicitly documentary festival.
JAMES KIENITZ WILKINS: There’s been a great team at Doc Fortnight lately. They’ve been really responsive to my work and had really interesting programming that I think survived the weirdness of the pandemic assault on cinema, and the deep confusion that film festivals are having. I liked how Doc Fortnight was just holding the course but also just showing what they wanted to show.
Then there’s a political dynamic. Every festival seems to want a world premiere, which just completely harms filmmakers who need festivals. These movies that aren’t going to make big bucks in multiplexes, 4,000 screens across the nation, need opportunities to show. If festivals won’t show the work because it’s not a world premiere, that’s a one-way negotiation. It just doesn’t work. It’s a bad contract. While Doc Fortnight shows really interesting work, they don’t do a lot of world premieres. Being able to pull out of the premiere game was really nice for me.
D: Could you talk about the general idea of your films as repositories of documents and experiences in a way that almost might have a documentary quality? I was looking at interviews for The Plagiarists, and Schavoir discussed the idea of the documentative aspect of real spaces. His house and child appear in the film, along with your car; during an interview with Vadim Rizov, your car literally had a flat tire that you had to change.
JKW: Staging and narrative are not techniques or concepts that are opposed to documentary. It’s always been this way. In Hollywood, it’s like narrative and documentary are always posed against each other as if they’re opposites or allotropic, and they’re not. Narrative is present in documentary, it’s a form of telling. The bigger question is how is it formally put together? The Plagiarists is totally scripted, and we have people performing that story. But it stemmed from real experiences and responded to real experiences in its making.
So it goes for every movie, even a Steven Spielberg movie, it’s just that it becomes harder to disentangle at a certain level. That’s what’s weird about movies too: They seem really meaningful when they come out, or super slick and cool. 30 years later, it just becomes this odd kitsch document of that time, but valuable for that reason. Knowing that something is ever-changing in that way is really interesting to me.
I don’t think of myself as a documentary filmmaker, because I don’t think of myself as limited to that, but I do think documentary is always present. I made a piece called “Real Property” for the Open City Documentary Festival talking about whether I prefer the word documentary or the word nonfiction. In a way, I do find documentary to be a little bit more straightforward because it cites the straight-up document in it all, rather than opposing oneself to fiction and fictionalizing.
D: There’s the quote early on in This Action Lies where you say, “When a movie is respectful, we call it a documentary. And when it is disrespectful we call it fiction.” You go on to talk about the strange nature of these terms.
JKW: It’s to frame the way we think about what we’re seeing. Sometimes I think of movies as places where I can put thoughts and ideas and actually revisit them because my brain isn’t working as well as it used to.
D: One of the main aspects of your work is interrogating the ideas or the mechanisms behind film. How do you decide your medium for each work, especially with Still Film and these 35mm slides presented without identifying markers?
JKW: With Still Film, in a documentary sense, I used the slides, which I was collecting, the way that they were meant to be used. These slides are distributed by studios, to be blown up and then printed as photographs as stand-ins, as stills from the movies. For me, it was a very clear decision to use them that way and not really fetishize the frame.
It was about how is this intended to be used, whether I can use it with that intent, and whether I can preserve that intent. The answer is yes and no. The yes is that I can, because I did literally preserve them. I scanned them all to 4K, but they’re still dusty and faded, and they’ve been abused in different ways, sitting in someone’s closet for a decade, 20 years.
But that’s captured in the scan too. I knew that the sign of what they are as objects was already there. You have to look a little closer. They didn’t really need this whole fanfare of object fetishization. I’m as much of a sucker for the nostalgic image, but I like to find a logical way of getting there. Hence, The Plagiarists has the camera built into it and is a really contemporary movie that happens to be shot [on Betacam] because we’re gifted a camera in the same way. It mirrors the story.
D: Another component is how specific, wide-ranging, and contemporary your references are. I’m curious about how you compile them. Do they often come directly from your life, or are they things that you latch onto that are passing by in this digital space?
JKW: I’d be lying to say that it’s not stuff that comes directly from my life to a great degree. But at the same time, this is where it gets a little murky. I suppose the only thing I can really throw out there—maybe this would be helpful to people who are also trying to make work—is to constantly be thinking about making stuff. Then everything becomes fair game, in a way.
I don’t think anything’s really beneath being potential subject matter. This actually gets into terrain that I do think about, which is the ethics of making. Maybe I’m trying to paint myself as more radical than I actually am, but there’s a lot of stuff I feel is totally legitimate and actually exciting to make movies about that I think a lot of people wouldn’t agree with, or maybe find distasteful or something. But at the same time, and I think I talked about this a little bit in “Real Property,” I found it harder and harder to just take seriously the idea of a straight documentary or going out and just capturing the world.
In “Real Property,” I mention being shocked by a documentary filmmaker presenting at a film festival who admitted on stage very casually that they presented this verité character-driven documentary with all this pathos and sense of emotional truth, but they modified the pupils of the actors with CGI so they wouldn’t be looking into the camera. That is 100% a stylistic intervention, and an ethical one too, I would argue. That’s really imposing one’s will based on a template from the past. Like, “This should look like it’s a fly on the wall, and we were able to capture this stuff because we’re such plum documentarians.” I think that’s actually a failure of the contemporary mainstream documentary world, frankly.
D: How do you go about finding central ideas for your films, and researching based on those ideas?
JKW: It’s a process thing. I’ve been thinking about this lately. What does it mean to just generate? Practice makes perfect, I guess. For me personally, I don’t really hunt for material. I’m not incentivized enough to do that, because I just make stuff based on my desires. I think two things come up most often, two motivating forces. One is this idea of the dare. Daring myself to see if something is possible. Can something be sustained in this way? Can two images be superimposed for a feature-length time? Can these scant couple images I found, like the 15 or so in Moon v. State, be a movie?
Part of the reason it’s a short movie as opposed to a play or something else, is because I didn’t know what to do with this stuff. I had been asking the library for more scans, but then there was a personnel change and COVID happened, and I just couldn’t get any more scans. I knew there was more, but they cost money. The dare of the limitation was can what I have become something that is still capacious and contains what I would hope for?
The last thing is just that, I don’t mean this as spiritual mumbo jumbo, but everything is connected in some way. It’s just a question of digging deep enough, and themes abound. I feel like I’m lucky that I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I am interested in that mode of thinking.
D: As constructed as your work can often be, and often very delightfully so, even satirically, they have these strong undercurrents of sincerity. They deal with things that can be verified.
JKW: Thank you for that observation. I do appreciate that because I’ve been called insincere and inauthentic. With certain things, you can look it up. Maybe that really, for me, is what documentary boils down to, more than as a genre or some view on life or something, or a bunch of techniques. It’s not whether it fits into a certain program at Sundance in a specific way or not, or has this tag on it when you look it up in Reader’s Digest or something. The root of the word is docere, to teach. I’m not trying to make works that are aggressively teaching others or didactic about it. The key for me is I’m teaching myself and learning about stuff.
Ryan Swen is a freelance film critic and member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He has written for Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Hyperallergic, and his website is Taipei Mansions.