The Unheard Voice of a Confused Generation

If the voice of a generation speaks and nobody’s around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

It’s the kind of question that might cause filmmaker Andrew J. Bujalski ’98 to grimace—the phrase is the sort of empty cliché his films refuse to embrace and a label he won’t take seriously. “Go out and poll my generation and see how many of them feel like I embody their voice,” he says in a telephone interview with The Crimson.

But despite the well-deserved critical accolades heaped upon him, not many people of Bujalski’s generation are familiar with his name or work.

Like the student who chooses a Philosophy degree over an investment-banking career, Bujalski has made commercial viability his last concern and doggedly pursued his artistic vision wherever it may lead.

As his second feature film, “Mutual Appreciation,” makes its rounds to theatres across the country, one thing seems clear—whether or not he ever achieves mainstream success, Bujalski has become one of the most interesting and intelligent young voices in American cinema.


FROM THE BRATTLE TO THE BIG SCREEN

“I could never have made the films I’ve been making if not for the background I had at Harvard,” Bujalski, a former Currier House resident says. He cites the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Department’s emphasis on the basics—how to run the camera, how to run the sound, how to edit on a flatbed—as indispensable.

“They really make it clear that that’s all you need to make a film, that everything else, technically, is bells and whistles,” he says.

And if there’s a defining feature about Bujalski’s aesthetic, it’s certainly not bells and whistles. “Mutual Appreciation” is filmed in a grainy black and white with almost no background music and full of nuanced scenes with partially improvised, wholly naturalistic dialogue.

It is a talking picture in which “not much happens”—that is, the type that’s difficult to synopsize—but, unlike the pleasantly rambling street philosophers who populate Richard Linklater’s films, Bujalski’s characters speak in the faltering cadence of everyday life.

It has a sense of being organic, populated by characters who continue to exist off-screen well after the few moments the audience sees. There is a surface of apathetic calmness that belies a deep anxiety always present in the jittery handheld camerawork. As in everyday interactions, the significance of the film is in the subtle implications.

This style can make his films difficult, but for his adherents, this is part of the appeal.

“I think these films in some ways are built to be open to interpretation,” Bujalski says. “They really need an audience to meet them halfway, and you have to see your own truth or falsehood or whatever you see in there.”

AN ELITE POPULIST

But such an audience has had to go out of its way to find Bujalski’s micro-budget films, which have limited runs at small theaters across the country. Locally, it had an eight-day run at the Brattle before moving to the Coolidge, where it will show at least until October 5 (it could stay there longer, depending on how well it performs).

Students who managed to see the film at the Brattle reacted in much the same way as their critical counterparts, but they’re the type who regularly read film reviews and check the Brattle’s website—or at least the type who have friends that do. This helps to ensure that, for the near future, Bujalski’s films find only a limited audience of cinephiles. The influences film critics have said they see in his work—John Cassevetes, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer—link him with other brilliant artists whose work is largely unnoticed by the casual filmgoer.

But that’s certainly not what Bujalski intends. “My biggest fear at the moment is that my films might be elitist, which I never intended them to be, and I don’t ultimately think that they are,” he says.

Indeed, just as important as his VES degree was the time Bujalski spent simply hanging out at the Harvard Film Archive or the Brattle. His tastes are broad: ask him what the last good film he saw was, and he’ll tell you “Predator”; ask him about the impact of studio “specialty divisions” like Focus Features, and he’ll tell you that a great film can come from anywhere—the streets, a specialty division, or a big studio.

Despite their more complex features, his films are, at their core, simply enjoyable to watch. Hearing the characters in “Mutual Appreciation” discuss death by “ass cancer” or watching Alan (indie rocker Justin A. Rice ’99 of the band Bishop Allen) play a small yet immeasurably passionate show provoke laughter without needing intellectualization.

ZACH WHO?

The indecisive post-collegiate wanderers in "Mutual Appreciation"-combined with Bujalski's great talent-make the “voice of a generation” label only too easy to throw about. But self-proclaimed generational spokesman-cum-indie-pop guru Zach Braff has the one thing Bujalski lacks: omnipresent marketing.

For now, Bujalski says his only concern is to get people to find “Mutual Appreciation” in theatres or to put his first feature, “Funny Ha Ha” at the top of their Netflix queues.

“I’ve had the opportunity to say, ‘Well, let’s make marketing the last priority,’” he says. “So what do you get? Well, you get our campaign, which has been difficult for us to craft and has not been the most successful marketing campaign in the world. But, it allows me to make the film the way I want to make it, and the people who have responded to the film, obviously, I think, see something in it that they’re not seeing in other films.”

Bujalski’s voice is perfectly suited for this generation; the only thing that has yet to be seen is if he can get them to perk up their ears and listen.



-Staff Writer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu