Alan Berliner often paid visits to his much older cousin, Edwin Honig, who gradually lost his memory to Alzheimer’s disease. One day, Berliner asked Honiq if he remembered playing with his son, to which he replied: “I have no night of what I knew in the morning.”
The profound remark is captured in First Cousin Once Removed, Berliner’s documentary about Honig. As the film eloquently shows, Berliner, an acclaimed filmmaker and artist based in New York City, has built an impressive oeuvre around the recurring motifs of familial relationships, memory and identity. His films frequently star his immediate family and himself. Often described as cinematic essays or experimental documentaries, Berliner’s “home movies” are deemed cinematic explorations of the human condition.
Words used to discuss Berliner’s filmmaking — such as collages, found footage and the materiality of film — stem from the realm of American experimental cinema, cultivated and expanded by avant-garde luminaries such as Bruce Connors, Ernie Gehr and Stan Brakhage. His works are something one may find in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Having begun his artistic career as an experimental filmmaker and installation artist in the late 1970s, Berliner has become known for his first-person nonfictional films that are daringly personal and reflect universal emotions at the same time. While some say his unique cinema eloquently illustrates the power of art to transform life, the filmmaker says life and cinema have long become inseparable.
“Every film I make is kind of a chapter in my life. I take all that very seriously and think about the film I am going to make… Where are they going to take me? How will they change me? What kind of journey is it going to be?” says Berliner, who was invited to the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF, 台灣國際紀錄片影展) as a featured director last year and held a master class during his short visit in Taipei.
“If I can’t make films, I wouldn’t be able to breathe,” he adds.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
NATURAL-BORN ADDICT
In Wide Awake (2006), an autobiographical account of Berliner’s battle with insomnia, the filmmaker reveals his tortured relationship to sleep is ineluctably tied to his creativity and productivity as he works best at night. During a tour through his studio in downtown Manhattan, Berliner’s explorative lens also betrays his manic side.
Stacked on towering shelves that line the walls are hundreds of meticulously catalogued film cans and boxes containing found footage, home movies, found photographs, slides and transparencies. Cabinets are filled with discarded materials such as photo albums, flipbooks, toys, wooden objects, love letters and journals, found at flea markets or in the trash. There is also a set of drawers that play sound effects when opened.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Berliner says he realized he was a collector when his was a child. Even a piece of rustic metal found on a New York street can give him “deep pleasure.” But he insists that it is not all about collecting.
“It’s about putting things in an orbit around me, that I can retrieve. I have a way to describe my approach: I want to find things at the speed of thought. I have lots of instincts and intuition about putting things together. I want my process to be fluid, to be able to respond to whatever thought process I have,” Berliner says.
TURNING FAMILIAL
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Having made collages since he was young, Berliner found himself inevitably drawn to producing abstract “collage films” out of found footage when in college. In 1986, Berliner made his first feature-length film, The Family Album (1986), out of a large collection of anonymous 16mm home movies made from the 1920s to 1950s that he bought from an antique dealer. A lyrically constructed found footage film about American family culture, the work was transitional because it moved him away from an abstract, experimental aesthetic and in to a world of humanistic content.
From then on, the filmmaker turned his gaze inward, zooming in at his own family and himself. From the long-forgotten, moldy boxes that contained countless correspondence, photographs and documents which his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, had saved over a lifetime, Berliner created Intimate Stranger (1991), a fascinating profile of his outlandish grandfather.
In Nobody’s Business (1996), the filmmaker tackles his father, trying to get the reluctant man to remember and recollect the past.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Bordering on the solipsistic, The Sweetest Sound (2001) is a work about the filmmaker’s name, centered on a dinner invitation to all the Alan Berliners in the world.
While intensely personal, Berliner’s films clearly manifest an artistic attempt to transform a particular worldview into something universal. The director says he hopes that through the exploration of his middle-class, Jewish-American family history, people might recognize their own lives, experiences, relationships, love and dreams.
“I am conscious from the beginning to function as both a window and a mirror and understand that if I do it right, the details of my stories don’t matter that much. It’s all about transcendence… Hopefully, the viewer can recognize that somehow they are in that as well. I hope that [my films] cut through class, religion and race,” Berliner adds.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
SEEKING MEMORIES
All of Berliner’s works revolve around and navigate through a standard set of themes and subjects that relate in various ways. The quest for what it means to remember and to be remembered is always present, possibly driven by Berliner’s fear of losing his own memory as the filmmaker repeatedly points out in past interviews that both his father and grandfather lost their memory before passing away.
The director has gone on record that his most personal work would be a film documenting his own mental decline. Learning about one’s personal history, he says, informs one’s identity. Without memories, one loses parts of oneself.
Photo Courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
The film that goes deeper into the subject of memory and identity than any other work Berliner has done is First Cousin Once Removed (2013), a quietly poignant and fiercely intimate portrait of Honig, as he copes with his slow mental decline from the disease.
An esteemed poet, translator and educator, Honig gave permission to the film project a few years before he died in 2011 at age 91. The end result is a rare cinematic voyage that takes the viewer into a deep place where moments of lucidity and philosophical musings occasionally make their way through mental fog, providing glimpses into a life unmoored from the past, adrift in the present.
FILM AS SCULPTURE
Poetically constructed through montage, First Cousin Once Removed serves as an example of how Berliner’s training in and affinity for abstract art continues to inform his style. Berliner says he always looks for ways to translate his subject into uniquely cinematic terms. He speaks of rhythmic cutting of images and sounds to create a sense of musicality; he seeks out poetic potential through audio-visual metaphors. Film, he says, is closer to sculpture.
“There are two basic modes for sculpture. You take a solid block and you chip it. The other is that you put two images or two sounds together, and you build. I call them [sounds and images] molecules,” the director says.
Berliner compares filmmaking to molecule-building. There are sounds and images, the relationships between images, between sounds, between images and sounds — as well as layers of the image-sound assemblages and beyond. It is a never-ending, mentally exhausting process, and the filmmaker admits that he can only do it once every five or six years.
“I take a year off ... after I finish a film. I don’t make that many films partly because I need to forget how damn hard it is. I need to erase the bio-computer, the billions of elements I remember in order to make a film,” Berliner says.
“Fortunately, I have the perseverance, the sanity or insanity to do that. It makes you a little bit crazy,” he adds.
For those who missed the screenings of Berliner’s films at TIDF, First Cousin Once Removed will be screened on Jan. 25 and Jan. 31 at Fuzhong 15 (府中15), 15 Fujhong Rd, New Taipei City (新北市府中路15號).
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