CRIMINAL CLIP (2 minutes)
CRIMINAL
1994 16mm Black and White Reversal Film 80 minutes
• Berlin International Film Festival – Internationales Forum des Jungen Filmes
• Toronto International Film Festival
• London International Film Festival
• Taormina International Film Festival
• Stockholm International Film Festival
• Hamburg International Film Festival
• Thessaloniki International Film Festival
• Ljubliana (Slovenia) International Film Festival
• Arctic Light (Sweden) International Film Festival
• Ex-Ground (Germany) International Film Festival
• Galway (Ireland) International Film Festival
• Troia (Portugal) International Film Festival
• French-American Film Workshop
• Long Island Film Festival
MAKING THIS FILM
To earn my Master of Fine Arts degree from Temple University, I produced a feature-length narrative film with Wolfgang Held, a fellow grad student from Germany. Working with a handful of neophyte crew members who knew even less about filmmaking than we did, we shot most of the film during a 5 week period during the summer of 1992. We didn’t have a lot more money than what was needed to buy film stock and pay for processing and work print. Yet we somehow managed to shoot all over NYC, New Jersey, Western Pennsylvania, and Upstate New York. I was definitely wiped out by the end of that period of shooting. But that was just the start. There would be another year and a half of pick up shoots, reshoots, months of editing on a flatbed in a sweltering warehouse in Queens, and then scrambling for the money we would need to create and actual, screenable print of the movie. Back then you couldn’t upload your digital rough cut to raise money, leave alone deliver to a film festival. Especially, when you were destitute. That being said, there were workarounds. You could shoot a VHS video of your rough cut off the flickering screen of the flatbed. And this is what we did for our submission to the Berlin Film Festival. It was a dim, dirty, jumpy version of the film with 2 tracks of sound accompanied by the rumble of the flatbed. So, when I got the call that they wanted to show the film, it seemed almost unbelievable. What a life experience making this film was. I could and should write more about it. For now though, I will just add some paragraphs from an old file I recently came across on an old Zip Drive disk. They come from my attempts to write an introduction for the home video release CRIMINAL received in 1996. It was part of a Hollywood Video Independent Film Series called FIRST LOOK.
Hello, I’m David Jacobson the writer and director of CRIMNAL, which you are about see. I am sitting in a movie theater about to watch on of my favorite films, PSYCHO, by Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve seen PSYCHO many, many times. I guess you could say I am crazy about it. There are certainly other films I am also crazy about, but this one, Psycho, really inspired me in the making of Criminal. Not the storyline. There’s no insane killer in my film. It inspired me – it still does – because it is a film that seems to have horror in each of its shots. To some extent that horror is created by the incredible Bernard Herman soundtrack, but it is also apparent in the compositions of the shots, their lengths, and the movement of the camera. In making Criminal I wanted to express that same sense of horror within a completely banal suburban world, the world many of us live in. Even though most of us never confront real monsters in our lives, we all know a feeling of horror. For some of us, it may just be in our nightmares, for others it may haunt us through our day, while we are at work, sitting in our cars in traffic, or wandering through the aisle of a supermarket.
I grew up in Los Angeles. It is the edge of civilization. It is a late twentieth century city. It is as disconnected from tradition as you can get. It just floats there. I had no religious upbringing. My great, great grandparents came from some place in Eastern Europe or Russia. I don’t know where. I don’t think anyone knows. I asked my parents, but they never gave me a straight answer. So I just sort of sprouted up in this desert basin in what was only a few decades ago a walnut orchard. CRIMINAL comes from this world that I grew up in, a world of big freeways and quiet empty streets and convenience stores. There wasn’t a lot of excessive drama. It was excruciatingly uneventful. Like the weather there. Every day the same. From a certain perspective the suburbs where I grew up are really nice. I’m sure a Medieval peasant would’ve given his eye teeth for a place there. But for me it was a horrifying nightmare. And that’s what is so confusing about it all. You’re in the most secure, convenient, comfortable world in the history of mankind but you feel this dread, and horror. I might just be crazy. But I know I’m not the only person who feels that way. In making Criminal I wanted to show this.
CRIMINAL is no walk in the park. It isn’t a feel good movie. You might say it’s a feel bad movie. But I think those are the best ones. I think of movies by Fassbinder, Antonioni, or Lynch. They are like horror movies, but the best kind, because there are no physical monsters. Just people living in bizarre and terrifyingly alienating worlds. I want to do the same thing in my films. I want to make horror films that take place in everyday life.
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