BRITNI WEST: TIRED MOONLIGHT (2014)



Tired viewer

The New Directors blurb about Britni West's directorial debut says it "discovers homespun poetry about the good folk of West's native Kalispell, Montana. . . a small town populated by lonely hearts engaging in awkward one-night stands, children with starry eyes and bruised knees, stock-car drivers, junkyard treasure hunters, and bighorn sheep." "Rarely," the blurbist enthuses, "has Big Sky Country ever cast such a sweetly comic and tender spell." The spell eluded me in this sloppy docudrama, which reads more like a poorly edited collection of random footage than a film. West edits as if he had ADD, jumping from one subject to another randomly over and over with no buildup of meaning, though indeed, the kids, drivers, junk hunters, clumsy youthful suitors and oddball couples keep recurring.

"Photographed in Super-16mm by Adam Ginsberg," the blurb points out, "(who shot Alex Karpovsky's Red Flag (SFJFF 2013)and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast (with the exception of indie favorite Alex Karpovsky) in semi-fictionalized roles, Tired Moonlight is a sui generis sliceof contemporary naturalism." That is a nice way of putting it.

This film makes most sense when regarded not as a movie but as someone collecting still images (without yet editing them) using a motion picture camera. There is something of Robert Frank's frumpy but iconic photo classic The Americans here. Something of Stephen Shore's semi-urban, not-quite-random American cross-country, crossroads landscapes. Something of Lee Friedlander. Since this is color, often bright color, there is or may need to be something of William Eggleston. But whether Adam Ginsberg and Britni West are aware of these borrowings or they are unconscious is uncertain. More likely the latter, since aesthetically this film is as ugly as any documentary could be that had the justification this lacks of solid content. In any case, West and Ginsberg have not found a mood or a focus. They have not found a story to tell. Or, to put it differently, they have found too many stories to tell, and needed to narrow them down. This is rural Americana. But what does that mean now? How is it different from the heyday of Frank, Friedlander, or Eggleston? West and Ginsberg need to transcend the traditions in their own fresh way. Here they have given us material for a film, but not a film. Winding up with the Fourth of July and a lot of fireworks does not make a conclusion.

Tired Moonlight, 76 mins., debuted simultaneously at Slamdance and Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.