This essay on Brandon Colvin's A Dim Valley was written by Zachary Zahos, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Brandon Colvin will appear in person at the October 23 screening of A Dim Valley at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By Zachary Zahos

For his third feature, Brandon Colvin has created, with his close-knit team of collaborators, a magnetic, moving, and above all, remarkably sui generis work. The major beats of the plot are clear and unchallenging to repeat: a professor and two graduate students encounter a trio of dryads, or wood nymphs, in the Kentucky wilderness, to lifechanging effect. But the road between cause and effect affords a multitude of bypaths, points of entry, and spots of stunning view. Promoted as “part hilarious stoner comedy and part transcendental meditation on mysticism and love,” A Dim Valley fulfills both of these functions and more, committed it is to genre play and tonal polyvalence, aimed most precisely to the body and, in it, the heart. A film of lingering, bespoke import, whose connotations become less easily identifiable the more you dwell on them, A Dim Valley is also, most immediately, a very funny and sensual viewing experience. Its on-screen action and off-screen meanings revolve around human connection — to one another, through our eyes, voices, and bodies; to the natural world, filled with lichens, singing cicadas, and lapping water; and to some higher power, whose presence in these characters’ lives is most synonymous with the aesthetic.

Filmed in and around Morehead, Kentucky, Colvin’s hometown, A Dim Valley achieves its dreamy effects in part through a novel synthesis of setting, cast, and scenario. Robert Longstreet stars as Clarence, a biology professor devoted to liquor as much as his beloved Appalachian mosses and butterflies at the film’s start. With him in a rural cabin, grad students Ian (Zach Weintraub) and Albert (Whitmer Thomas) collect samples while maintaining a willful distance — though it is clear that Ian has a crush on Albert when he eyes him changing, occasion for the first of several Whitmer Thomas butt shots. Three backpackers, Iris (Rosalie Lowe), Rose (Rachel McKeon), and Reed (Feathers Wise), appear before Albert one morning, and it is quickly, memorably established that they possess some supernatural power. The reason for their appearance is not even initially clear to the dryads, but as the film progresses, the connections, both temperamental and spiritual, between the three nymphs and the three men become more finely etched and gently consequential.

Unlike most other American independent films of its budget or moment, A Dim Valley focuses intently on the ambivalence, beauty, and singularity of the human face. Over 90 minutes, Colvin and cinematographer Cody Duncum toss off countless immaculately lit, iconic close-ups, all of arresting impact. Three suspended, frontal close-ups announce the nocturnal advent of the dryads, each a perfect distillation of Lowe, McKeon, and Wise’s performances. Soon after, a beautiful, tight profile view of Clarence at a bar captures a complicated moment of disbelief and regret. Longstreet should prove a familiar face at this point in his career: he has supporting roles in so many films, from Sorry to Bother You (2018) to Aquaman (2018) to Halloween Kills (2021), and he is a favorite of Mike Flanagan, most recently in Doctor Sleep (2019) and Midnight Mass (2021). Longstreet led Colvin’s previous feature Sabbatical (2014), which explored his sculptural and even grotesque dimensions. A Dim Valley is in large part the story of Clarence’s transformation, and Longstreet channels a spectrum of human feeling to get us there. His mid-film monologue, in which he relates a painful childhood dream involving fairies, taps briefly and powerfully into a well of raw sensitivity, though if pressed to pick a favorite scene, I would choose his acoustic performance of “Bison,” a Neil Young-esque number Longstreet himself wrote. Clarence’s scenes with Ian are also subtle and poignant: both characters are gay and seemingly celibate, and through body language and glances, they skirt around some sort of mutual, mirrored understanding.

In a sweet, key scene involving Scrabble, Ian plays one of the supreme words, “syzygy,” flummoxing Iris. Syzygy refers to those fleeting celestial occurrences, whereby the sun, Earth, and moon align to create an eclipse — more generally, it can denote a meeting of corresponding or contrasting phenomena. The certifiably smart Colvin (UW-Madison, PhD, 2018) invokes the word with intention, for it summarizes the film’s plot, and irreducibility, in miniature. Stepping back, the word could also apply to A Dim Valley’s brief and meaningful production, with its necessary impermanence, clashing signifiers, and monumental results. In this instance, a cast and crew of 25 convened in the summer of 2018 in splendid eastern Kentucky, a region ignored by Hollywood cameras. Virtually everyone in the crew was a filmmaker in their own right, from producer and art director Nora Stone, to producers and editors Pisie Hochheim and Tony Oswald, who — as it happens — directed a fantastic short film, Great Light (2018, produced by Colvin), which was literally shot during a total solar eclipse. I’m tempted to look at all these correspondences and call A Dim Valley “the syzygy to end all syzygies,” but that wouldn’t sell any more copies, and thankfully, the planets keep on turning.

These notes on Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines, were written by Zachary Zahos, PhD candidate in UW Madison's Department of Communication Arts. A recently restored DCP of Between the Lines kicks off our series of Silver movies on Friday, September 24 at 7 p.m., in our regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave.

By Zachary Zahos

The Cinematheque’s sole directorial retrospective this semester celebrates Joan Micklin Silver, one of the most cherished American auteurs of her generation. She died on December 31, 2020, though news of her passing at 85 years old only reached the film community on New Year’s Day. Either way, it was met as a real blow: the cap to a terrible year, and a heartless start to the new one. Silver was a quiet hero to many, from women in the film industry, to Jewish American cinephiles, to lovers of the Lower East Side and other pockets of alternative urban culture. Born and raised in Omaha, Silver met her husband Raphael (Ray) D. Silver in New York while attending Sarah Lawrence College. She honed her craft making educational films, and only found entry to the world of features through Midwest Films, the independent production and distribution company she and Ray founded. Midwest raised finances for her 1975 debut Hester Street, which screens October 8, and Ray’s 1978 directorial effort On the Yard, screening October 1. Before Silver’s most renowned studio films, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979, United Artists) and Crossing Delancey (1988, Warner Bros., screening October 15), Midwest produced one more film, the 1977 workplace comedy Between the Lines.

Joan Micklin Silver’s second feature reminds us of the renewed, fond attention her career received in the immediate years before her death. Between the Lines premiered on April 27, 1977, twenty-nine days before Star Wars. Based on anecdotal polling I have done of family and colleagues who attended movies then, it was a fondly remembered success — it sold a respectable 38,000 tickets in its first two weeks in Wisconsin alone. Unlike Star Wars, however, Between the Lines had been next-to-impossible to watch, in theaters or on legal home video, in the decades since. That thankfully changed in 2019, when Cohen Media Group restored the film and re-released it to considerable appreciation, including an appearance at the 2019 Wisconsin Film Festival. As much as any film under her name, Between the Lines exemplifies Silver’s full-hearted spirit and keen insights on human behavior, slyly weaving several digressive narrative strands into a prescient, end-of-an-era tale of corporate takeover.

Breezy and voluminous, Between the Lines follows the hijinks and intersecting personal lives of those working at the Back Bay Mainline, a floundering alt weekly in Boston. Promoted today for the high wattage of its cast, the film was then filled with relative unknowns, like John Heard, Jeff Goldblum, Lindsay Crouse, Bruno Kirby, Jill Eikenberry, Gwen Welles, and Joe Morton in a too-small role. As penniless rock critic Max Arloft, Goldblum chortles, swaggers, and smirks in a hot red jacket — an enduring star persona fully formed before he turned 25. A good chunk of the film is devoted to humorous character moments, like Max showing the meek classifieds salesman David (Kirby) the secret to his weed budget, by going to a record store and trading in all his mint, promotional LPs. In his quest to become a serious reporter, David gradually moves closer to the center of the film’s plot, yet Silver still finds ways to trace his arc toward legitimacy with bizarre, alienating tangents: At a party, David lurks around a source, quacking to catch his attention. Silver brilliantly stages the awkward pause that ensues, when the source (who is on a date) briefly gives David the time of day, and David somehow stammers himself into a follow-up meeting.

Screenwriter Fred Barron drew from his experience writing for alt weeklies Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper, while Silver’s time at The Village Voice and on planet Earth motivates the anthropological acuity with which the newspapermen’s arrogance and complexes are rendered. In a famous scene, photographer Abbie (Crouse) hits it off with an exotic dancer (Marilu Henner, in her first screen role), irritating journalist Harry Lucas (Heard), who came to the interview with canned, sexist questions. Naturally, Harry and Abbie soon become an item, and Silver charts their relationship with enough peaks and valleys to present it in unidealized terms. The same goes for the relationship between the self-effacing Laura (Welles) and Michael (Stephen Collins), a lapsed reporter with a book contract. Michael’s off-the-charts narcissism drives Laura, briefly, to Harry, yet Michael’s reaction to this turn is surprisingly subdued. As bad as the men are, Silver never overplays her hand by turning one into The Godfather’s Carlo, to pick an infamous 1970s example. It’s just that the women in the newsroom lead when the men fold; office manager Lynn (Eikenberry) embodies this ethic in a crucial, late-act confrontation with the new management.

If Between the Lines epitomizes the J.M.S. sensibility, it balances a behavioral realism, as captured through subtly modulated performance, with a knowing, aesthetic theatricality. Silver loved filming quiet character moments against a sequence of impassioned musical performance, as seen in the extended Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes party scene here, or the beautiful “Some Enchanted Evening” number, set in a Papaya King, from Crossing Delancey. But other scenes in the film, such as the first and last, also find ways to foreground the artificiality of performance without diegetic music. Michael J. Pollard, the baby-faced actor from Bonnie & Clyde, opens Between the Lines hawking the Mainline to commuters, and in one shot he looks directly into the camera lens, an inviting intermediary between audience and story world. The film closes with a satisfying punchline, where Max convinces a bar regular (played by National Lampoon’s now-mythic co-founder Douglas Kenney) to pay for his drink after grokking him a Mainline reader. The credits roll as they hit it off, and a zoom out reveals their shadows cast starkly against a back wall by an off-screen key light. In part the consequences of a low budget, these imperfections peel back the curtain just enough, loving moments uncontained.

Coinciding with the Cinematheque's Charles Bronson series and our 35mm presentation of From Noon Till Three on July 30, this episode of Cinematalk features the Cinematheque's Jim Healy in conversation with the Academy Award nominated screenwriter and director Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler, Roman J. Israel, Esq.), son of From Noon Till Three's writer and director, Frank D. Gilroy. Dan was present for the making of From Noon Till Three and he discusses the film's production, its peculiar and unpredictable screenplay, and his father's work on other Western movies and television shows. 

From Noon Till Three spoilers abound in our discussion, so we recommend viewing the movie first before listening.

Listen to Cinematalk below, or subscribe through Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

After a nearly 16-month hiatus, big screen movies are making their comeback at the UW Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall! Beginning Wednesday June 30, the Cinematheque will commence six weeks of free screenings beginning with Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, a classic tearjerker that was originally scheduled for April 2020. The summer lineup includes canonized comedies, action blockbusters, international thrillers, contemporary gems from Asia, the complete American works of French superstar Jean Gabin, a three-film salute to Charles Bronson in honor of his centennial, and more! 

Summer programming will take place on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings and all feature films will be screened from original or archival 35mm prints. Admission, as always, is free and open to the public. Seating will be limited and socially distanced according to current UW-Madison policies. When possible, additional showtimes have been added to accommodate more viewers. 

You can view the entire summer calendar here.

See you at the Cinematheque!