Jem Cohen is a video artist and filmmaker from New York City. He's made short films, documentaries, music videos for artists such as R.E.M., and feature length films. He spoke in AJ Tuesday night and showed a few of his films, including a short documentary of sorts that he made with the musician Elliot Smith. After the presentation, he took the time to answer a few questions.
Q: Where are you from, originally?
A: I was born in Afghanistan, because my dad was working for the government doing education stuff. And I wasn't there for very long, but I grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., and then I've been in New York for 20 years.
Q: Why New York?
A: I went there after college thinking that I would make films and it seemed like a sensible place to do that. I mean, it wasn't sensible, but it's what I ended up doing.
Q: What do you think about Indiana?
A: This is my first time here, so I don't know enough about it to think about it. Except that the strip with all the fast food restaurants looks about like every strip with fast food restaurants everywhere else on the planet. I'm sure there's a lot more to Indiana than that, but that's mostly what I've seen. There's some nice old buildings still up downtown. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I had time to see it properly. I've never been anyplace I didn't think was interesting.
Q: Name three inspirations. And they don't have to be filmmakers.
A: The band The Minutemen, the painter Francisco Goya. Also the photographer Helen Levitt.
Q: In your films, at least in the ones you showed during your presentation, you seem to have a fascination with commercialism. Is that true?
A: An anti-fascination, really. We're surrounded by it, and I'm fascinated with everything we're surrounded by. It's so omnipresent that I feel like I need to try to understand it and that I also need to try to provide a different path.
Q: With that in mind, how does it make you feel that some of your work has found its way onto things like MTV?
A: Well, it isn't much, lord knows. I haven't made music videos since '96. And stuff like the R.E.M. videos that I did, MTV would play them because they were R.E.M. videos, but they'd basically play them once, and that was that. So, I really never had a big issue with it appearing all the time in commercial places, because it never really did.
Q: Speaking of R.E.M. videos, for "Nightswimming," how did you convince the band to let you break the song in half so you could put more footage between the halves?
A: They were totally cool about it. You know, I did the video without that, and then they were releasing the video compilation and I had all this other footage from that project, and I hate to see footage go to waste, and I just felt like the experience of making it was a really nice one. And also, I don't like music videos, so anything I can do to f--- up the format a little bit I was just eager to do, you know? So I didn't know what they would say. I was a little apprehensive. I said, "Can I do that, can I stop it in the middle?" There wasn't any big argument, they were very cool about it. But those videos, with the exception of the last one I did for them, were so low budget by industry standards, that it was all under the radar. I wasn't really dealing with label people, or any of that. I was very lucky at first. They would just say, "Go and make a movie with this song. We don't need to be in it, we don't want to be in it. We don't have that much money to spend." So it was lucky for me to do them cheap, because the "feds" weren't too concerned.
Q: How did you get involved with R.E.M.?
A: I liked the band from their first single. It was a very different world when I contacted them in 1986. I had seen them play before that. But it wasn't that hard, they weren't giant, international pop stars. So it wasn't that hard to approach them and send them some of my films. I sent them a couple of my very first films and they asked me to do the video for "Talk About the Passion."
Q: What has been your favorite project so far, if you had to pick one?
A: I really can't. They're all different, and they all have different meanings for me. They're kind of like scrap books a little bit, in terms of my own life, so I see them and they're sort of markers of my history and places I've been and people I've known. But I don't really privilege one over the other.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm trying to get this feature, "Chain, " out. That's a big step for me, that project, it's a narrative features and it's long and it's kind of more complicated in terms of human stories. That one's really about commercialism. It's about the corporate landscape all over the world and how people are navigating it. So that's the main thing on my mind. I'm also working with a band from Amsterdam called The Ex on a project. I've worked with a composer called Jerry Riley a bit. I just shot a short that I haven't cut yet. I was shooting the old double-decker buses in London because they're phasing them out. I just shoot all the time.
Q: What are you doing 3 a.m. on any given Sunday?
A: Sleeping. Trying to sleep. 3 a.m.? I'm a pretty early to bed kind of guy. Well, that's not true. I'm usually in bed by 2, so hopefully by 3 I'm asleep.
Q: This is a free word association. I say one word, and you say the first word that comes to your mind.
1. Bush.
A: The first word that came to mind was "idiot." That's the thing is that's just the first word that came to mind, but he's not an idiot. He's way too crafty and manipulative and dangerous to just be called an idiot.
2: New Jersey.
A: I guess, "garden," because "Garden State" is what it says on their license plates.
3: Chewing gum.
A: Shoe.
Q: Last question. Where are you going from here?
A: I'm going where I'm taken.
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