Film Stew

Monday, September 27, 2004 Email


Filmmaker Vincent Gallo, who owns more than 20,000 CD’s and records, sits down with columnist Todd Gilchrist to discuss his latest esoteric soundtrack.

By Todd Gilchrist

Last month Vincent Gallo’s controversial film The Brown Bunny finally found its way into theaters, surrounded by the bleating of naysaying critics and the declaration that the only thing worse than its infamous sex scene was the film itself.

Ironically, in the midst of all of the defamatory comments and thorough dismissals given to the film as a whole, most audiences neglected to acknowledge that it possessed one of the most haunting and resonant soundtracks in recent memory; more intriguing is the fact that Gallo did not in fact perform his own score, as in films past, but has created instead an indelible pastiche of ‘60s folk music and original compositions to evoke and enhance the loneliness and introspection captured on screen.


"I’m not coming to create comfort for myself,” Gallo egregiously understates, particularly given his recent and very public excoriation. “I don’t purposely make things hard on myself, but I don’t purposefully make things easy on myself.”

With The Brown Bunny, Gallo ultimately did make one element of the process easier on himself by enlisting Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante to compose a modest score to accompany his images, and then collected a number of tunes from the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Jeff Alexander and Jackson C. Frank. The disc, which is currently only available as a Japanese import, provides his viewers with another text to pore over in their deconstruction of the profoundly complex and frequently raw film, and in many ways reveals its purpose - which, as some have claimed - was not to document Gallo getting a hummer from Chloe Sevigny.

As a matter of historical record, Gallo has always performed the scores for his films, even as far back as his independent collaborations in the late 1970’s with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Most of this music was compiled in 2002 on the Warp Records compilation Recordings of Music For Film, and includes the tracks he did for the most visible of his film efforts, Buffalo ‘66, as well as his series of independent projects that as far as I know never saw significant release.

Exhaustively annotated with background information detailing the filmmaker’s repeated struggles to finish each picture, much less retain control of the final product, the collection is a wonderful companion piece to his equally challenging and obtuse films, and provides much insight into Gallo’s dedication to bygone recording techniques, equipment and expression of his singular vision.

Curiously, although Gallo assembles the tracks by film, they are not in chronological or any other discernible sense of order. His music for 1982'sThe Way It Is, which is described in the liner notes as, ‘Best chronicle of New York City’s Lower East Side circa 1982,’ contains a number of guitar-laden cues, was recorded in eccentric fashion in Gallo’s Elizabeth Street apartment, and feels as fresh as if it were written yesterday; even then, the obtuse writer-director-composer seems to have embraced the sense of longing that pervades his more recent film work.

On tracks like “Her Smell Theme” and “The Way It Is Waltz,” his use of disparate instruments, including bass, clarinet, Mellotron, drums, marimba, saxophone and piano follow in the avant-garde footsteps of ambient music pioneers like Brian Eno, but create a moody, evocative tone that one can only expect might have surpassed the emotional weight of the accompanying film. Stranded alone on this disc, however, it serves the same purpose as, say, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two, and generates a mood in between implacable tones and undefined, irresistible melodies.

Gallo, who spoke to Keeping Score prior to the theatrical release of The Brown Bunny, says he doesn’t enjoy revealing his influences (‘Ask those questions to Quentin,’ he rejoins), but finds inspiration in a certain kinds of aesthetic continuity rather than from a particular record or artist. “I’ve got twenty-some-thousand records,” he says. “I have a really weird range of records, very bizarre, difficult to listen to records, but the things that I like in everything that I like is that there’s a certain musical, melodic nature to everything. There’s a certain sweetness or sentimentality or prettiness to everything I like.”

“I’m more interested in a point of view, and I’m real sensitive to things,” he continues. “Not in a stylistic way, but in an aesthetic way; aesthetic and style are two different things. I’m always attracted to aesthetics, and aesthetics transcend. They can be extremely modern, they can be extremely primitive, but they all have something that appeals to me.”

His predilection for beauty is fully evidenced by the recordings he makes, which despite their eclecticism are never difficult to listen to or sound abrasive. Still, Gallo says that he prefers to find that balance between the salty and the sweet that his unspoken forebears discovered while creating their own works: “Even if I’m listening to avant-garde records, I like the passages that are the sweetest. I especially like them coming off of more difficult passages because they’re moving.”

Buffalo ‘66 is an entity unto itself, not simply because it is the most recognized of Gallo’s films, but because it contains the single greatest cinematic incorporation of prog-rock in the history of the movies. The filmmaker contributed eight original cues for the actual score of the film, but it’s his use of Yes’ “Heart of the Sunrise” (itself a manifestation of that hard-soft combination he clearly favors) that stands out long after the movie has finished, particularly given its use during the climactic strip-club sequence.

Seldom has such a perfect synthesis of sound and imagery been achieved in film screen as with that moment.

Unfortunately, to get the full soundtrack for Buffalo ‘66, including the Yes, King Crimson and Stan Getz songs, one must pick up its individual release rather than the aforementioned Gallo comp, but it’s an investment well worth the money; the counterpoint of original and independently-recorded songs contributes much of the film’s dual sense of intensity and intimacy. “Part of myself is to put myself in a corner and to figure ways out, because it aids in my mind’s ability to reason and problem solve and think things through,” he says of both his film and musical efforts, perhaps suggesting more than he probably realizes about himself.

If one isn’t satiated by these compilations and footnotes to his great cinematic accomplishments, his 2001 album When makes for a more cohesive collection of songwriting, even if “cohesive” for Gallo means his trademark eccentricities applied distinctly to one rather than multiple disciplines (that is, to evoke mood rather than accompany imagery or support visual continuity). Opening with a song called “I Wrote This Song For the Girl Paris Hilton”, the disc quickly establishes that it carries over the same themes of his work - emotional alienation, desperate loneliness, obsession with beautiful women - that run rampant in his films.

Here, tape loops make many of the same accomplishments they did before, but liberated from any kind of film text, their rhythmic repetition is oddly freeing, and generates a series of deeply moving passages that, like he explains above, juxtapose hard and soft elements in such deliberate quantities that the overall piece becomes riveting. Following his ode to Paris, “When,” the title track, reveals the guiding principle of Gallo’s relationships, at least on screen – ‘When you come near to me/ I go away; what is not clear for me/ I go away’ - while most remarkably, the vocal performance upends and at the same time perfectly captures what you would expect from Gallo’s sensitive-poet persona.

Transforming his medium of choice, be it film music or photography, seems to be Gallo’s raison d’être, and his motivation for enduring so many hardships in the name of artistic achievement. But he says that he is merely following in a tradition established many years ago, and which unfortunately far too many talented people never quite learned.

“The Beatles could have never imagined in 1966 what they did in 1969,” he explains, relating a particularly potent example. “They needed to let things go through themselves, they needed to be in the moment to experience those things. At a certain point in their profound success they decided not to collaborate any more, not to compromise with one another, not to share passion with one another, not to be intimidated by other people, not to make themselves available, not to go out, not to read things and get out there. And they withdrew a little bit into this safer environment, and their future work was reflective of that.”

Describing why it is that his music and films ultimately seem to invert the audience’s expectations, much less his own, Gallo says that it’s only when you go beyond yourself that something truly great can be accomplished. “You have these incredible doubts and fears and you take incredible risks, publicly, socially and in your work, but what you accomplish can be remarkable,” he says.

“It’s very hard to accomplish remarkable things when you feel like you’re in control of them, when you pander to them, when you don’t have doubt, when you don’t have fear, when you don’t move out side of yourself. When you don’t blow your own mind.”