Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/711111
42 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2016 It's a film that revels in Americana — but a fading, creepy, consumerist Americana — where the vastness of the desert landscape competes for attention with Millie Lamoreaux's (Shelley Duvall) recipes for tuna melts. There's a friendship between two young women in Southern California who are sort of social embarrassments to those around them, though the film doesn't mock them. The third woman is a painter who enters their circle, injecting their dynamic with a kind of pagan spirituality that is arresting, and they all end up living in a kind of quasi-feminist enclave. It was queer in a way that wasn't about homosexuality but about aesthetic boldness and non-narrative techniques. For instance, the ending is a total non sequitur. When I was in high school, I discovered a copy of Ephraim Katz's The Film Encyclopedia [1979] in the school library and was floored that under the entry "Ambiguity," he cited the ending of Three Women. It validated the intentionality behind that kind of anti- narrative, a method to the madness. There was no Queer New Wave for me to attach myself to — I wasn't in that world yet — but the idea of exploding narrative into more experimental forms was kind of a version of queerness that I started to love. CM: It sounds like you don't feel pigeonholed by the work you've done. BK: I don't, because the identity stuff is a prism to understanding all different kinds of storytelling. The brilliant Andrew Dominik hired me to edit Killing Them Softly [2012], a violent crime drama starring Brad Pitt, because he saw the no-budget queer documentary Tarnation on my resume and wanted to meet me. Tarnation depicts a co-dependent relationship between a queer kid in Texas and his ill mother, while Killing Them Softly takes on another "outsider" world of contract killers and gambling rackets. I take little credit for Tarnation because a lot of it was constructed before I came on; I acted as a kind of dramaturge with producers Stephen Winter and John Cameron Mitchell. But it's a great film and takes many experimental risks to which Andrew was drawn. So, in a way, that's the opposite of being pigeonholed. CM: What kind of projects tend to attract you? BK: I gravitate to films that are exciting on more levels than one, and I think it's opened up doors for me because great filmmakers respect that. I want to have more of that in my career. Great directors encourage me to be bolder in my choices. After many years of editing, I'm still afraid of letting shots play long and have rhythms that are disturbing because they make the audience uncomfortable. I want to work with collaborators who say, "No, I know you're excited by these impulses, and I don't care what the distributor says; we're holding on that shot and let's do it together." That's a perfect collaboration to me. f "Great directors encourage me to be bolder in my choices." – Brian A. Kates