Directors

I came across the writing of indie dir­ector Alex Cox about a year ago in Film Comment magazine, where he writes a reg­ular column. I’d only seen a couple of his films and had no real idea of what his film­making prin­ciples were, so to speak. But reading his writing about what films he liked made me want to know more about him. He is also a fine writer, so I knew reading a full-length book from him would be a pleasure, no matter what the topic. But another event occurred recently that made me want to read this even more.

In early 2008, Criterion released his film Walker in a packed spe­cial edi­tion DVD. Though I’ve still not seen it, this pro­ject fas­cin­ated me for many years. Made in Nicaragua with the full sup­port of the Sandinista gov­ern­ment in 1987, Walker was about an American who, in 1855, invaded Nicaragua with the inten­tion of annexing it for the US. Considering the polit­ical cli­mate of the time, with American-backed “con­tras” trying to over­throw the Sandinistas, Walker was never going to be a com­mer­cial suc­cess. But some­thing about Cox’s stead­fast and some­times quix­otic sup­port of left-wing causes made us kindred spirits and so it was always on my list of films to see.

In X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, he recounts stories from the making of ten fea­ture films, including Walker. Beginning with his film school days at UCLA, Cox talks about how he acquired his lifelong res­ist­ance to the big studio way of making films. I espe­cially love that in true indie style he draws inspir­a­tion nowadays not so much from film­makers but from hackers and other cul­ture jammers:

Today, an inde­pendent film­maker is a revolu­tionary fighter, in a pro­longed pop­ular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux act­iv­ists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food move­ment fights against McDonald’s; that inde­pendent musi­cians fight against the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the Apple Music Store; that Fairtrade act­iv­ists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against pat­ri­archal sys­tems of con­trol in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this bat­tle­field, and no pro­spect of a quick and easy vic­tory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sus­tain­able or sane altern­ative, the guer­rilla sol­diers on. In the case of fea­ture films, the battle for an inde­pendent, per­sonal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the stu­dios and their admirers), but irrel­evant anyway.

Irrelevant because the fea­ture film was the ori­ginal art form of the twen­tieth cen­tury. It can’t be the ori­ginal art form of the twenty-first as well. Something that goes beyond it will dis­place it—some medium equally visual and vis­ceral, but inter­active, with mul­tiple nar­rative pos­sib­il­ities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted ter­ritory as the com­puter game, the “read­justed” cor­porate web site, and the home-made CD of “illegal” MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy, and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.

It’s not all quite that pro­voc­ative, but I like where he’s coming from. And in his anec­dotes from a life­time making films, you can see how he’s come to embrace the new tech­no­lo­gies while con­tinuing to believe in the power of a good story.

Liverpool-born Alex Cox’s dir­ect­orial credits include Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Walker. He also wrote the script for Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and has acted in many of his own and other dir­ectors’ films.

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