If anyone can appreciate putting things in its proper context, it’s Matt Wolf, making a retrospective of his work on the Criterion Channel this month especially gratifying. Specializing in excavating overlooked histories, the filmmaker has made it appear as if he’s found the future in the past, sifting through archives to tell stories that were hiding in plain sight when those once in power have continued to exert control over history in how it was documented in the first place.
The retrospective illuminates Wolf’s dedication to resurfacing stories from AIDS era first and foremost, making an immediate impression with his debut feature “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,” not needing to linger on the ravages of the disease when demonstrating how much we were robbed of when it took the life of the inventive avant-grade musician, and the director put just as much into the shorts “The Face of AIDS,” which traces the conception and reception of a Benetton ad audaciously featuring a picture of the late AIDS activist David Kirby as he laid dying surrounded by family and friends in a bid to draw attention to the disease, and “Another Hayride,” about self-help guru Louise Hay’s controversial congregations of gay men largely shunned by the medical establishment in search of alternative treatments to comfort the soul if not the body.
It hasn’t been enough, however, for Wolf to tell stories of how people have made their own systems of meaning outside a predominant cultural narrative, emerging as one of the biggest innovators in nonfiction film in recent years with experiential documentaries where the filmmaker will often recast images we’ve seen before in an entirely new light with intimate personal testimony. In the short “Bayard and Me,” one can watch the legendary civil rights activist Bayard Rustin challenge the stats quo in public demonstrations while privately, as his boyfriend Walter Naegle recounts, he found a legal loophole in which they could live together the 1980s by adopting Naegle, a relatively standard and covert practice when same-sex marriage was outlawed, and Wolf took on a subject no less vast than adolescence with his second feature “Teenage,” an adaptation of Jon Savage’s tome on teen culture that’s as personal and specific as if reading from a diary, but cuts across borders and generations to look at how the young push the limits of the society they stand to inherit.
What’s particularly exciting about this November’s celebration of Wolf’s work on Criterion Channel is that it comes as the filmmaker can be seen testing narrative traditions elsewhere, publishing his first book “Input,” a collection of surreptitious screen grabs that he made while sorting through the voluminous archive kept by Marion Stokes for his 2019 film “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” to tell the story of the prophetic media watchdog who ended up with a greater collection of news footage than many of the stations that sent reporters to the scene simply by turning on her VCR. In a fascinating process that Wolf detailed on his Substack, “Input” might’ve started out as inadvertently for the director who couldn’t help but note randomly occurring scenes of beauty or intrigue, but as one flips through the pages of it now, carefully curated to provide an engrossing experience not unlike one of his films, it seems as apt an expression of what he’s been building towards his whole career to date, allowing history to unfold in an entirely fresh way to be seen with new perspective.
Recently, it was a joy to catch up with Wolf as his work is all in one place to stream for the first time and there will be a book launch event and a special screening of “Recorder” at the Metrograph in New York on November 19th, and the newly-minted multidisciplinary artist spoke about how looking back has let him find a focus in his work, how much he lets a story find its proper form and keeping his work alive as he actively prevented so many others’ from falling through the cracks.
This may be getting too in the weeds, but given how much you work with archives and seeing what lasts and what gets lost, is it interesting when something like this retrospective comes together? Does your work actually inform how you preserve and present your own work?
Yeah, I definitely think about the future of my work beyond my life and I think about that for other artists and the work that we have to do to make sure that our films can remain in circulation and that they don’t become lost within the corporate shuffle that can happen with different film companies and various rights holders over the years. It’s a kind of labor to make sure that your films remain accessible, and it’s something that maybe I have a little more concern or insight into because I do work with other people’s archives so much.
[For this retrospective] I talked to Ashley Clark, the artistic director at Criterion a long time ago about bringing together my films, and all the various distributors have been so helpful in terms of making it happen because it’s so hard these days to find one single context to show all of your work, and I feel really privileged to have that opportunity. But I do think as I make more films and develop a body of work that I am in a sense creating my own archive and that I hope people can look at it and discover it in the way that I look at other artists’ materials as time goes on.
Is it interesting to look back at all your films in connection with one another?
Yeah, I’m trying always to be mindful about how each project departs from each other, but also point to each other and over time I’ve started to see those threads a little more clearly as I develop more work and have more experience as a filmmaker. I also try to be open to telling stories that seem completely unrelated to others I’ve told before and that’s something I often say when I’m making a film is that I have to find myself in the material. It’s not always obvious to me why something is a story that I would tell, but as I follow my instincts and my gut and get deeper and deeper into the material and forge relationships with subjects, I start to make these connections between things I have done or things I’m interested in. That’s really how I find myself in the material and figure out what my unique point of view is in terms of shaping a story.
It’s been fascinating to see how you’ve maintained that unique point of view well before there was a broader acceptance of the archival-driven storytelling telling that you’re so good at. Was there a moment that you knew that there was a path forward for the type of work that you wanted to do?
Not really. I just did it, and there were many filmmakers who I was following in the footsteps of who have been dealing with large, untapped archives. But I think it’s true over the course of the past 12 to 15 years, that type of filmmaking has become more commonplace and there’s also a new generation of archival researchers and archival producers who are finding work to make these films, so in a sense, it’s the pool of collaborators that I work that has grown, but I often still work with some of the same archivists and researchers. I also think the people who hold these archives are realizing more and more the value of them, so they are more open to the idea of a filmmaker coming in and to working with the material that they’ve preserved. Everybody has become aware of how the enormous cache of footage that they may have saved could be made into something and the thing that’s so strange with me is I keep stumbling on these giant archives. In a way I’m looking for them, but in a lot of ways, I just continue to gravitate to subjects who happen to have saved everything.
And you’re finding new ways to tell those stories – “Input” is your first book, which emerges from a need to screen cap shots from the voluminous archive of Marion Stokes, who saved everything from television. What led to doing something in this form after making “Recorder”?
I have a close friendship with the artist and painter Matt Connors, who started Pre-Echo Press, and I told him a long time ago that while making [“Recorder”], I had pulled hundreds of images, so he said, “Let’s make a book.” We’ve spent years on that book off and on, and I felt like I had material that I could use to tell a story that wasn’t about Marion Stokes and that wasn’t explicitly about the media, but that would utilize images that show the texture of the past and that would resonate with the kind of media ecosystem that we’re bombarded with every day in this present moment. I had originally posted some of these stills on Instagram, but I was happy to look at them all and to figure out how to tell a more abstract story, and Matt has been incredibly supportive and resourceful in terms of figuring out how to make a presentation of that.
Was it interesting figuring out what the experience of this would be? You can’t control the pace as you might in a film, but you use space in the book in intriguing ways.
Yeah, and I collaborated with the graphic designer Ben Tousley in the same way I collaborate with a [film] editor. I sketched out a sequence that interested me and then he did a pass at laying it out and creating a sequencing of images on similar pages across spreads or different sections of the book that helped to tell a story. Then we worked back and forth to adjust that, but like an editor did an incredible first pass at taking these raw images that I imagined in a sequence and giving them a musical rhythm.
I was really absorbed it, and between seeing this book and the Criterion Channel lineup where you have both shorts and features, and knowing there’s a multi-part series on Paul Reubens on the way, is it exciting to think about the different forms these stories can take now?
Yeah. A lot of filmmakers will say the subject matter dictates the form, but as time and time goes on, I think I feel less pressure to reimagine the form of documentaries, but to rather choose unconventional subjects and to take a restrained approach to presenting my unconventional subjects in their full complexity and that unto itself becomes an experiment. So I wouldn’t like to think that my films have become more conventional, but that my approach has become more restrained so at the nucleus of them is the material and I’m drawn towards material that in its nature is experimental and unconventional and boundary-defying. That’s certainly the case with Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee Wee Herman, and it’s the case with other projects that I’m beginning — it all begins with me gravitating in a visceral way to a particular subject and then finding myself in that material and figuring out the most economic and emotionally meaningful way to bring that subject to life through storytelling that is driven by strong visual experiences.
“Directed by Matt Wolf” is now streaming on Criterion Channel. A book launch event for “Input” accompanied by a screening of “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” will be hosted at the Metrograph in New York at 7 pm at November 19th.
