Alejandro Adams is a writer and filmmaker whose pictures include Canary (2009) and Babnik (2010), both about the buying and selling of body parts. (The latter involves sex-trafficking, the former organ-harvesting.) He is also the director of Around the Bay (2008) and Amity (2012).
Though Adams is an Anglophone filmmaker—most readily understood by his audiences in terms of a broadly New World sensibility—it does not follow that his films are Anglophone or monolingual: they comprise substantial Russian, German, and Vietnamese in addition to their English. Of interest to the Asymptote reader in Adams’ work are the complex translation dynamics involved in their trans-linguistic performance and production; Adams writes in English for multilingual casts and asks them to reproduce iterations or facsimiles of certain script segments in their respective languages. Then, returning the recorded dialogue to English in post-production, Adams subtitles with at least as much attention to his cinematic vision as to denotative content. (He discusses this process in more detail in an interview with Vadim Rizov, explaining, “We agreed from the beginning that I’d subtitle it however I wanted—the whole thing is fiction, why should I have any fidelity to translating dialogue?”) I originally recruited Adams for a conversation about the forms and functions of this multilingualism in his pictures, but when we actually spoke, the conversation expanded to include a broader range of visual and sonic signification in narrative cinema.
Rachel Allen (RA): I thought we could start by talking about your second feature, Canary, which features long passages of untranslated (unsubtitled) Russian, Vietnamese, and German. There are also these long, garrulous scenes—I’m thinking of the workplaces especially—of undifferentiated dialogue. The parallel I see between those two kinds of scenes is in their seeming disregard, at least from a narrative or expositional perspective, for the semantic content of language, suggesting that the narratively relevant stuff isn’t in individual propositions. But the dialogue in those scenes is also so specific to its context, and to the individual characters within them, which suggests to me that someone is attending very carefully to the language, even at the level of individual words. I wondered if you see or feel that tension in Canary, between attention to and disregard for language. Or words, maybe: is this a film that sees distinctions between “words” and “language” and “communication”? Does Canary distrust words? (Do you?)
Alejandro Adams (AA): You’re asking if I believe in language, or words, and I’m reminded of another interview I did where the first question was “Do you believe in morality?” It was about one of my other films, but the idea that I don’t put stock in some fundamentally human aspect of existence is troubling. These questions stop you in your tracks, but they also demonstrate that these films are made by someone who obviously can’t handle water cooler talk so let’s go for the throat, no appetizer.
About words themselves and the way words are used to create a texture in the film, the hyper-specific dialogue is extremely scripted—even the overlaps, like the litany of things one can do with a partial organ. Other material is entirely improvised but orchestrated down to how many times an actor touches a child’s toy or picks up a phone. So it would seem that I have all this vision around the sonic impact of human speech, trying to make an office lobby feel as chaotic as the beachhead in Saving Private Ryan, but what I really wanted was silence.
I cast the lead role in Canary—the mute surgeon , if you will—from a couple of photographs online. I said to this actress over email, look, I want to have this silent figure of mundane but mysterious horror at the center of this film. So really a desire for overbearing silence was the first impulse for what this film would feel like.
You used the term “garrulous,” which reminds me of something I was just reading in an old Larry McMurtry essay about Altman’s Nashville, and he says the characters talk and talk but communicate nothing. McMurtry thinks that’s very much the point. Someone called Canary “Altman-esque” and I imagine it was probably this quality, the thing you’re driving at.
I’d say the most fun to be had with your analysis though is actually more in monologue than dialogue—the bit with the quasi-whistleblower in the woods near the end of the movie. Again, it’s this dance between tightly scripted and improvised, with a sixth-grade geography textbook from the ‘80s as an essential prop. Like, think of that level of decay. The decay of meaning there. That book is useless. Politically, geographically, ideologically.
And I’m going everywhere at once to answer your first question, and that’s probably symptomatically an answer. Like I’m more of an epistemological truffle pig than a filmmaker with a clear sense of my goals.
RA: I did have the thought, watching Canary, that there was something musical—tonal, in several senses of that word—about the “garrulous” scenes and the non-subtitled, non-English ones. The actress (Carla Pauli) in her white jumpsuit, with her sort-of Clara Bow haircut, operates in silence as these not-entirely-(semantically)-intelligible conversations happen around her; those conversations function like a live organ might’ve in a silent film, establishing certain emotional rhythms, as if you managed to stick a silent picture inside a talkie. You say you can’t handle water cooler talk, but you obviously have an ear for it: I wonder, how do you listen to the world when you’re in it?
AA: You’re the first person, as far as I know, to equate the soundscape to an organ accompanying a silent film, and of course now you have me thinking that the mute surgeon’s stalking plays a bit like Nosferatu.
A lot of this is about the work itself. As in how I work rather than how I think about work. The practical circumstances and application of tools and resources, as opposed to creative decisions. When I wrote a couple of novels in my twenties—ambitious but unpublished—it was by longhand in those nondescript spiral-bound notebooks kids buy at drugstores before school starts. But crucial to actually filling those notebooks was my environment. I was writing for eight hour stretches in mall food courts—in an oppressive amount of noise all day, and naturally bits and pieces of conversation would work their way into my process, but that was infinitesimal, really, considering the density of people and voices and dialects. And in more recent years I’ve needed a fan or white noise app to sleep. So now you have me thinking that this is like Nicholas Wendig Refn being colorblind and packing his films with vivid tableaux that he can see and enjoy with his particular range of sensitivity, and maybe I’ve done that too. I can only sort information or narrative by mining it from explosive noise, but on the other hand, I need the noise as a sleep aid, as a source of comfort.
I have another personal limitation called to mind by all this—I find it nearly impossible to process or retain anything like an intertitle on screen, specifically something that sets the stage for action, like “Prague, 1846.” I will not see that at all. It’s not how my mind takes in information. Instead I’ll be looking at what is effectively the visual noise—buildings, faces, clothing. It’s not a deeper engagement, it’s adjacent, and probably plays into how I position information, character details, and narrative in my own work.
RA: You mention novels and it occurs to me that perhaps I should back up a bit. Could you tell me how you came to write ambitious novels and ambitious films in the first place? Where you and your work come from?
AA: My films and fiction writing come out of notes and ideas that are rooted in this raucous inner life, this biological story urge. I recently finished a feature screenplay, and before starting it I’d cultivated a research-heavy notebook to track the particulars of this milieu where the story was taking place, but the notebook had other ideas in it too—fleeting inspirations. Yet when it came time to write the script proper, I failed to even open the notebook or refer to it, and the whole hundred pages just dumped out. Of course nearly nothing in the notebook made it into the script. So what was the notebook for? It was really just energy management. I think all creativity is energy management.
I referred to storytelling as an “urge,” and that’s a striking word. The etymology is shared with “urgent,” and these various narrative leavings of mine are certainly urgent. But they’re urgent for me, as a reflex; they aren’t an urgent cultural matter. I can’t ask others to embrace or condone their urgency. We’re permitted our private passions, to throw ourselves into hobbies, but to confess a sense of urgency around matters of self-expression tends to look narcissistic and deranged. That’s why someone like Henry Darger fascinates me, because doing the urgent self-expression thing in private always seems nobler and more dignified somehow. Then you can bounce to Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography and see him confess in the most plainspoken terms to building a public persona around an urge. He has no hesitation when citing that desperate energy over and over again. It’s all energy management. That’s where the work comes from.
RA: It’s interesting to think of your work in relation to Darger’s. You both present visions of the world that have been considered morally troubling in specifically bodily ways and that are, in both cases, simultaneously protective of children. Springsteen is really the stranger comparison. I’m not sure your work or your urge-driven personae invite us to pretend we know you as his do. What kind of relationship do you see between your work, your fantasies, your inner life—your mind—and the world? Do the two (inner world and outer) feel in tension?
AA: I didn’t mean to compare myself to Springsteen by any means, it’s just his candor in his autobiography—that desperation—is given a name over and over again. It isn’t limited to “I gotta get out of this town” or “I’ve got important things to say as the voice of the proletariat.” It’s just urge, whether he tries to pop-psych it away or give it an identity. But as you point out, you’re not invited into my psyche in my films, and if you’d interviewed me in closer proximity to the completion of Canary, I would likely be aggressively closed to these questions. If Springsteen is sculpting avatars of labor or outlining the mating process among underprivileged whites, [though], you may think those are “him,” but it’s [also] just a hyper-sensitive rendering of something he doesn’t fully grasp.
In Canary, we have an ambiguous coda in which a toddler briefly expresses concern that her mother is lying dead next to her. Then, welp, there’s this other person offering to play with her, so maybe the fate of the mother isn’t that important. That shifting allegiance and sense of infinitely configurable “family” or care network intrigues me to no end. I’m glad you made the Darger connection. I might be putting kids in dangerous situations, but they have agency. Twice in Canary, another toddler and a teen, still a minor, are told how to care for their organs in what is essentially a contract negotiation.
Sorry I’m bombing your actual question here. I can’t speak to any curtain between outer and inner life. I’m against the ivory tower and have chosen menial jobs over and over again in order to remain connected to life but I’m so consumed by intellectual curiosity that I lack certain basic social skills. Inner life as impediment to outer life.
RA: Rilke tells the young poet not to sully himself with journalism or any other critical half-art: they’ll be too close to the thing he actually cares about. I think Joey Ramone pumped gas, maybe not for exactly the same reason, but in the same spirit. It’s a tradition, one based on a purity model and a kind of dualism: wreck the body to live through the mind, wreck the body so the soul can remain untouched. Physicality and the labor of physicality, sexual and bodily and menial labor, and the dream/dread of distancing ourselves from our minds through them—these things aren’t absent from the films, especially not from Babnik and Canary. What have you been working on physically and/or psychically these days?
AA: Among other Joey Ramone-approved endeavors, I drove Uber for a year. It was addictive, like speed dating combined with a scavenger hunt. For someone who wants to develop an affinity for small talk, it’s a little too perfect. If you have a gambler gene, it can be hard to turn away from that constant sizzle.
I had a long, intentional break from creative practice. When I tried to jump start it again, the only thing that made sense to me was to shoot a languid acid western. Cooler heads prevailed and that project is on hold until more viable projects can flourish. I’m fortunate that some titans from the A-list side of the tracks expressed an interest in my talent, so I’ll be able to apply for a “vulgar auteur” license any day now.
But returning to the director’s chair is complicated by plenty of other factors. I’ve recently found a surplus of stimulation and reward in writing as an exclusive undertaking. Whereas directing? Well, you have to keep in mind that the job description has always been a barely-disguised form of middle-management, keeping people on task, nothing necessarily related to artistic hand-wringing. It involves more perspiration than inspiration as they say. So it feels comparatively luxurious just to write, and more uninhibitedly creative as a process.
Moreover, directing requires a certain interpersonal intensity, which means, yes, an intensity between actual corporeal beings in a shared space, not intensity channeled into a lens or a light or how the steam looks coming off a cup of coffee, and not fiery texts and emails that are meant to communicate “vision” in bulk. You have to be intense in the moment, while surrounded by people who are expecting answers and awaiting instructions.
The kind of intensity I’m describing has been disincentivized in recent years. What you see instead is that people who are in command by design, by job title, will give the calculated appearance of flexibility and openness and a gentle team spirit, but will be much more viciously exclusive in their thinking and brutally disloyal without batting an eye. I live in Silicon Valley, where this kind of leadership style is pervasive—it’s cartoonishly Shakespearean at this point.
Whatever that is, the quality that makes someone a fleet, nimble, responsive, accelerated, decisive creature—that’s required if you want to direct films, and even if you feel compelled to mask it or obscure it, you have to possess it, fundamentally. The problem for me specifically is how to commodify that animating force if not as a film director. I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to answer that question and now I’m starting to feel that poignant T.S. Eliot bit: “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
I think what I mean is that I’m about to find out if filmmaking is a calling.
Alejandro Adams is a writer and filmmaker based in Silicon Valley.
Rachel Allen is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Full Stop, The Fanzine, and Guernica, of which she is an editor. She is also an assistant blog editor at Asymptote and a graduate student in philosophy. In 2019 she was in residence with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
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