In the 2000s, cult auteur Abel Ferrara increasingly struggled to get his projects off the ground. After making eight features in the 90s, beginning with two of his best known films, King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), Ferrara would move further and further into the outskirts of American cinema, finishing that decade off with the The Blackout (1997) and New Rose Hotel (1999), both financial failures and under-appreciated major works. His career has been kept afloat, primarily, by the director’s own impassioned drive and determination, by his refusal to do anything but continue, and his malleability in letting his work and career take shape around what’s possible, what’s available.
Filmmaking is a by-any-means proposition for Ferrara.
“How can we get this movie made?” “OK, let’s go.”
The result is a return to a prolific output of sorts, but one even rougher around the edges than before. Ferrara has segued into a cheaper, digital, smaller mode of production. He has still turned out sophisticated fiction features (4:44 Last Day on Earth, Welcome to New York, Pasolini) but ones noticeably marked by this new approach and the context of their making. Ferrara also has Willem Dafoe to thank for attracting the modest financing they’ve been able to secure. His central collaborator over these years, Dafoe has appeared in each of Ferrara’s last three films, and four others in the previous ten years.
Throughout this recent period, as Ferrara hustles like mad to get his films made, he has impatiently turned to documentary. This movement is informed by the stop-start frustration experienced over the preceding years, born of necessity and urgency. One imagines that if you locked Ferrara in a room with nothing for a month, when you opened the door he’d have a film to show you. Maybe two. Ferrara makes documentaries because he has to make movies, period. That motivation and energy is channelled into the very spirit of his non-fiction works, which are characterized by their spontaneity, of-the-moment curiosity, and admittedly slapdash nature.
Which leads us to his latest film, Sportin’ Life, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past summer. Commissioned by Saint Laurent as part of a multidisciplinary arts project entitled “Self”, Sportin’ Life is an autobiographical look at Ferrara’s art and more specifically his now decades-spanning friendship and working relationship with Willem Dafoe. This makes up the core of the film but it spins out freely from there.
Musings on their collaboration are primarily culled from a series of hotel room interviews when Ferrara and Dafoe were at the Berlinale earlier this year to do press for Siberia, their latest fiction film. Playfully woven throughout, international journalists pose various questions — many of them predictably banal — which are generously taken up by Ferrara and Dafoe, who feed off and compliment one another beautifully even in this artificial context (Ferrara has an instinctual habit of puncturing artificial environments, just look at his infamous spot on Conan).
They each offer thoughts on their approach to film at large, and speak to specifics of directing and acting. “He directs me as much as I direct him,” says Ferrara, who gives his characteristically vague but sincere rock and roll answers. “I’m not thinking psychologically, I’m thinking about the next best move. I’m not playing games with the board. We’re not playing games, we’re trying to fucking get shots off, ya dig?”
Dafoe with his eloquent and thoughtful soundbites that sound somewhat readymade (an inevitable consequence of doing thousands of interviews) and yet equally down-to-earth. And the two of them are giddy just to be there, working together—and later, jamming together on stage as Dafoe endearingly belts “Runaway” at a festival afterparty. As always seems to be the case, Ferrara’s indulgence in performing music works its way in as a focus. So does his family. Or perhaps just about everyone who appears in front of the camera fits into Ferrara’s definition of family. His partner, Cristina Chiriac, and their young daughter, both of whom co-starred with Dafoe in Tommaso (2019) are also a perennial presence in the film. “Family is the deal, it’s what we get the energy from,” explains Ferrara.
For Ferrara, the lines between life and art, collaborators and family, fiction and documentary, have become more and more blurred in the past two decades. So too has the line blurred between films and filmmaking. Ferrara himself states, “we’re making a documentary about the act of making a documentary.” But that’s hardly unique to this project. The film’s own making is foregrounded in nearly all of his docs. The weaving in of the crew’s own presence, the act of filming, and cobbling together of moments always feel distinctly “behind-the-scenes”. Those familiar with his previous docs will recognize both Sportin’ Life’s style and its haphazard relationship to its own subject matter. A film like Chelsea on the Rocks (2008), Ferrara’s first foray into documentary on the Chelsea Hotel, was more organized and focused on its topic. The other docs take aim at moving targets and likewise move accordingly.
And so, this documentary about his own art largely becomes a record of the turns taken during its filming over the course of Spring 2020. Digressions on COVID-19, Trump, the murder of George Floyd, punctuate the otherwise leisurely movement through filmmaking and music. Reality interrupts everything in Ferrara’s documentaries. And isn’t that in part what a documentary should be? Dedicated to reality? His greatest doc, Mulberry St. (2010), benefits from the loose parameters of its setting, moving freely up and down the famous street in New York’s Little Italy, with a series of stroke-of-luck encounters with fixtures of the neighbourhood. The ensuing conversations unfold in such an undetermined way that the document Ferrara ultimately creates is an invaluably direct and unobstructed insider portrait of a partially preserved but ever-shifting immigrant subculture and its history.
In Sportin’ Life, the presence of COVID as well as the Black Lives Matter movement are in part an awkwardly wedged in element. One that Ferrara himself explained in a Director’s Statement, “I could not avoid facing what the world went through this year with the pandemic.” What else would one ask for though, as the emergence of COVID wasn’t one that exactly fit neatly in anyone’s plans. Shots of quarantine-emptied streets, people adorned in masks, news-clips of the growing death count, Trump’s deflections, etc. are discursively placed alongside the seemingly unrelated interview and jam sessions with Ferrara and his kin, and the odd clip from his past films. It’s worth noting that moments from the apocalyptic 4:44 and bleakly philosophical vampire film The Addiction play out in an eerie, uncanny way in this COVID context.
The aforementioned slapdash style of his documentaries, which feel like they are assembled in a kind of clumsy stream-of-consciousness, would probably seem like material for “how not to make a documentary” for a film school teacher. But is that the case? The “documentary” is a genre of cinema, not its own medium, and one trapped in a very narrow conception. In contrast to the polished non-fiction films that clog up Netflix queues, Ferrara’s films actually feel real. Or, more importantly, human. They very clearly come from a point-of-view. Impressions of a life being lived as he’s living. Taking stock of what occurs in your own orbit. Noting it down with a camera, however crudely. An artistic diary mostly made coherent by its relation to time and space rather than subject. And to life itself. There’s a regard for existing and what exists in Ferrara’s films. It’s simple: it’s about looking, living, and thinking. Being. That’s Sportin’ Life.