A cursory glance at the BAMcinemaFest program might give the false impression that the festival serves merely as a launching pad for under-appreciated Sundance and SXSW films. To assume so would do a disservice to the New York festival’s tight curation and adventurous vision of independent American cinema. Experimental documentary “Common Carrier” — receiving its North American Premiere — is a superlative example of BAM’s niche, of bringing a challenging film to New York audiences with less commercial stakes. Getting its start at the Danish non-fiction showcase CPH:DOX, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ first feature-length effort certainly lives up to the “challenging” label. Though demanding and decidedly not entry-level, the thicket of superimposed images and sounds in “Common Carrier” is never less than a pleasure to navigate.
The most pronounced quality of “Common Carrier” is its unique visual strategy, in which every shot is composed of multiple images superimposed onto each other: think the more eye-straining shots of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Goodbye to Language 3D,” just flat. With that established, one can begin to investigate the substance and themes of the dense visuals (and the sound, too, which operates in much the same manner). Wilkins’ doc doesn’t offer up any one central narrative to follow over its efficient 78-minute runtime, instead diffusing its themes over a handful of artists living and working in and around New York, who include a screenwriter, an actor, a producer and an art dealer.
Less identifiable by their names, the “characters” can be distinguished by their particular trades as well as their individual crises, which give “Common Carrier” its spine. For example, a director is wholly occupied in his hunt for the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) that FedEx has misplaced; this may be a dramatically inert thread, but feeds critically into larger themes of the undervaluing of art and artists, the circulation of people and objects and general interconnectivity. Heady — perhaps pretentious — stuff, but Wilkins’ manages to keep the ideas accessible by tethering them to the human scale.
There is also a political dimension to the proceedings, mostly communicated by the near-omnipresent radio (tuned in to WNYC and Hot 97) at play on some level of the soundtrack. The personal stakes of the subjects are echoed by the arc of a Verizon Wireless strike and, of course, the last Presidential race, with a twinge of sadness triggered by the unrealized promise of a Bernie Sanders campaign ad.
Godard remains a key point of reference for “Common Carrier,” which at one point settles to a single visual layer for a shot of a coffee mug, likely a tip of the hat to the famous shot from the French director’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.” Wilkins productively weaves this homage into the film’s driving ideas when the director within the film recalls “Lucy,” a movie he found preposterous except for the idea that the whole universe could be contained on the same missing USB drive that contains his movie. It’s a wholly believable concept to stick in one’s craw — the macro contained in the banal — as the scale and function of technology shifts, particularly for a set of subjects who grapple with the abstract ideas in their art at the same time as they work fruitless jobs to make ends meet.
None of the many hip-hop songs that play on the radio are singled out in the credits, speaking further to the entanglement of visual and aural layers in “Common Carrier” — the music (artistic output in its own right) is as invisible as the subjects in the film. Nevertheless, these energetic tracks provide a shot in the arm at ten-or-so-minute intervals, imbuing “Common Carrier” with an unexpected, propulsive energy. Sometimes the tracks are complimentary — the beat of Rihanna’s “Work” syncing up to a hammer repeatedly striking a nail — but more often than not, they’re contrapuntal, and that’s okay. The conflict between image and sound encourage the spectator to parse out the relationship between the two facets (even when it may just be surface sonic pleasure), but unlike Godard’s similar use of pastiche, it’s playful without ever being contemptuous of the audience. There is also the reality that this is simply the music that fills out the sometimes unfulfilling lives of people struggling in the city.
At one point in “Common Carrier,” the question is raised of whether artists are their own clinically distinct group, an idea that is well-expressed by the unique beauty and malaise of Wilkins’ multi-layered approach to the film. It is a philosophical query that may perhaps be overreaching, just like the thread of technology that weaves throughout “Common Carrier” without ever culminating in a novel realization. Nevertheless, it is clear Wilkins’ considered more than a mere visual gimmick in the arrangement of his doc, rewarding the audience with food for thought as well as a constantly transforming labyrinth of intersecting frames. The ideas at work in “Common Carrier” may exceed the scope of this review, but there is plenty of conversation for bold festival audiences (and programmers) who seek it out. [B+]