Living And Looking In The Manner Of Smoke
On Cameron Worden's You're Dancing This Dance All Wrong (2023)
The late Richard Serra once posited that a central concern of his work in sculpture and drawing is to present looking as a creative act. It’s a socially informed one too, in that you don’t look at the world around you in the same way if you live on the street versus if you’re one of those people who make well into the six, seven or eight figures a year and glide through life, bubble-wrapped. This may read as trite but when it comes to cinema, and specifically, one of its most dominant forms, realism and its emphasis on depicting the lives of the poor and disenfranchised, it is a constant ethical and perceptual concern.
The history of cinematic realism brims with many different attitudes and configurations, but it’s striking how often its theorists and practitioners advocate some iteration of film form which prioritises directness, distance and an effacement of style. Cameron Worden’s feature-length work You’re Dancing This Dance All Wrong (2023) is a sterling example of a film which seeks to reflect reality but not through a neatly clear and continuous form, the hiding of Worden’s presence, nor a sharp distinction between a social purpose and an adventurous style. It is a visionary work and that vision is a haze, true to the experience of the people it depicts, as their lives don't run according to neatly preplanned and demarcated pathways or sight lines.
Worden shot the film over the course of a trip he took to Kansas City. It’s a collage of incidents and hangs from his stay featuring encounters and conversations with friends, and friends of friends, all of whom are either low down on or scraping the bottom of society’s totem pole. They range from punkers working minimum wage or odd jobs to homeless people encountered at a local liquor store, a make-do social hub.
Instead of using the most expensive toys that the cinema-industrial complex can buy, to erect a cage-like framework wherein meaning can be ruthlessly dictated, he shoots on Super 8, on 7 different stocks. Listed in the opening credits by order of appearance as if they were his cast and crew. This casualised form of moving images, with stocks that are clearly expired or otherwise rough and ready, allows him to drift along with the people he meets. He shoots handheld, the camera constantly moving and often zoomed in and out of focus, to the extent that it is frequently not clear who is speaking or if the sound and visual tracks sync up. The resulting film doesn’t dominate the locale and its people with the weight and presuppositions of its instruments and formal choices, but is instead steered by them, as a work shot and recorded ad hoc, on ground level. The lack of a single holistic view is filled with a string of glimpses mimicking the shape and mood of a world of disrepair and disparity and the day to day of the walking wounded. And yet with all that frustration and trauma comes vitality, humour and camaraderie; a hive of activity matched by the busyness and diversity of the oscillating grain.
It’s a decentred perspective for a film about decentred human beings. Forced out on the margins, they live with a certain degree of freedom, as outcasts often do, and which Worden represents with his freewheeling style. However he doesn’t shy from the enormous, and potentially fatal, amounts of pressure, on mind, body and time, that deprivation and powerlessness entails. The most disturbing image in this regard is a verbal one–the film is a choral patchwork as much as it is one of visual punk impressionism–from a scene where a friend of Worden’s describes some of the homeless regulars at the liquor store. He describes one slightly isolated figure who requires a colostomy bag. He doesn’t have the resources to get one properly fitted and checked, so he has fashioned a makeshift contraption out of a plastic shopping bag which, the speaker once noticed, crawls with maggots. Precarity is not just a problem for the unhoused of course, gentrification along with infrastructural and institutional decay are constant worries, buzzing in the background and the foreground.
Despite these crushing obstacles, community is a durable force and a great improviser. In the same scene as above, we’re told about one older man who looks after the neighbourhood cats and has a special bond with a younger man called Brandon. Brandon once saved the cat minder from a seizure and makes sure to keep a regular eye on him. They have something like a father and son relationship despite not only the lack of a blood relation, but contrary their actual ages. It’s the older man who acts like the son, and who calls Brandon ‘daddy.’
Worden, both on camera and sound, with some additional filming from Taylor Marchand, is a constant presence but not as some all-seeing yet invisible set of eyes and ears. During one drinking session, someone asks about his sound equipment and he responds, telling them how many hours it can fit and how much he has recorded so far. This and other moments mark him out as someone right there with the people he’s filming, in the same space, toe to toe, who you can talk to, ask questions and joke around with.
Artmaking and creative expression more generally is an ever-present current in the film as something suspicious when hijacked by power or nourishing and subversive when it comes from below. Shitetalking is the most prevalent art in the film. When you’re pushed to the edge and bottom of society, left little with few spaces for and avenues of expression and ownership, it’s one of the few skills and sources of entertainment that money can’t buy or bypass. The people in the film wield their gift of the gab as a way to reach out to others, and to assert themselves with aplomb. It’s an art of self and communal expression, a way to teach others and to learn yourself. It’s a rebellious act, a rare outlet to be ostentatious or magnanimous, when it’s impossible otherwise, and just simply, but fundamentally, a way of blowing off steam and catching some relief.
The film is a work of nonfiction, of (foggy-eyed) observation, but also of pageantry. It’s filled with performances but none take place on a stage, for money or fame. Instead they’re for the pleasure of one’s friends, for the hell of it and to steal a few laughs at the expense of power. One of the liquor store regulars, while waiting in line, mockingly fantasises about making a film called ‘The Day The Diapers Burned’ and the high-flying life of being a film producer. “I dreamed of being a Hollywood producer and all I had was a wet dream.” When one fella, Stan the Man, asks to be filmed, Worden gives us a rare shot presenting a fully framed, recognisable human being. He zooms out to film Stan flamboyantly extemporising about his sexual prowess while waltzing and twirling with an oil drum, like they’re Ginger & Rogers or about to fuck.
It’s a film of impromptu vaudeville skits but also a formalist work. That formalism however never feels fully removed from lived experience. The film’s most abstract and disorientating sequence is also one of its most mundane and humorous, a long scene towards the end where Worden and his friend are tripping. The camera roams and spirals like their minds, spluttering out chewed-up looking images that are indistinct but swim with detail. We are eventually moored with the only clearly presented figure in the sequence, and the object of their fixation, a doll of Homer Simpson dressed as Santa Claus gazing out into the ether, bug-eyed.
A text from another friend asking if they could move a coffee table pushes them into a swelling existential crisis over the ontology of this particular object. ‘Tables aren’t meant to be moved. They’re there so that they don’t move’. As the trip teeters on the edge of going bad, the image suddenly cuts and leaps outdoors, travelling down street after street in broad daylight, while the sound remains with them in the room. Worden’s formal interest in confusing our senses is linked with the very casual experience of tripping. Most movies depict the latter wrongheaded, as a hyperactive theme park ride of forced, hack, surrealist imagery, rather than what it often is, a state of heightened downtime, and disengagement from the capitalist, producerist rictus grip over the clock, which aggressively demands every waking hour must be consciously used, even if it’s for inane or damaging purposes. Worden depicts this not through the construction of elaborate but prosaically ‘weird’ images but by using simple instruments and intuition to tinker with those fundamentals of cinema and perception, time and space.
You’re Dancing This Dance All Wrong is part of a stream of American cinema which takes aimlessness as its subject and model. Many tributaries of which can be found within the avant garde–the diaristic and urban explorer films of Jonas Mekas and Anne Charlotte Robertson, Ernie Gehr and Jim Jennings, just to toss a few names out there–but this also includes narrative cinema. New Hollywood is chocked full of drifters, and then there are more recent groupings such as ‘mumblecore’. In an interview with the blog To Each Their Own Cinema, Worden described the latter scene as an influence but in qualified terms. It encouraged him with their microbudget approach and a lack of professional polish–which made it such an appealing counter to much of the so-called independent scene and its increasing dominance by capital–but found himself working in opposition to many of the films’ narrow field of interests, socially and formally.
Mumblecore films are often dominated by listless, overeducated, white middle-class (and up) personages, and the listlessness of the privilege is matched in the appearance of, and in some cases actual, effortlessness in the film’s construction. You’re Dancing This Dance All Wrong exists in a completely different economic zone and therefore relationship to work and time. It’s filled with people concerned with or finding brief escapes from the time-consuming drudgery of minimum wage work, as one person near the start puts it, cutting through the haze with sledgehammer numerical terms. He talks about a friend who works ’70 hours a week’ and is ‘living off 7 dollars a day’ and that he himself has only had ‘9 days off in four fucking years’.
Experimental cinema is a form which not only sits outside the commercial sphere but is frequently neglected by the state funding, even in countries where public sources of funding are available, or it requires a high price tag, social status and the willingness to risk ossification if it’s to be practised within the academy. Not unlike with punk and noise music–scenes which Worden and several of the people in the film are a part of–if filmmakers are to work, they have to rely on DIY networks of support and exhibition. Communities of mutual aid in which Worden himself has played his part, as a programmer at the Chicago Film Society, the festival Celluloid Now, and as the author and distributor of many different zines.
The film doesn’t just immerse itself in its own aesthetic but actively comments on it by drawing in from other aesthetics from unexpected sources. During an extended scene inside the liquor store, Worden intermittently pulls us out of the dissipated present by swiftly intercutting the blurred-out closeups of people and paraphernalia with close-ups of oil painting portraiture. What strikes, after the initial surprise of this temporal jolt, is how sfumato is present in both Worden’s own images and the paintings. In other words, they attempt to show the limits of the capabilities of regular human vision in an instance of shared artistic intent that bridges the divides between their respective mediums, techniques, social realities and centuries. And yet there are also the stark difference, in that these paintings, in all likelihood, were and are expensive commodities, commissioned by moneyed patrons, while Worden’s work exists outside a system of profit, of supply and demand. Centred not on the highest bidder but people he hangs out with, for which there’s essentially no financial incentive to make films about.
Gradually, these intruding snippets from alien aesthetics are revealed to be shots taken at an art museum. This introduction of a public, but much more hermetically enclosed and predetermined, space is jarring but also Worden stills uses it as a site to draw our eyes to work chime unexpectedly with his own. Some impressionist paintings, for instance, show artists that not only incorporate reality’s appearances but also its sensations, represented not with a clear, figurative line but streaks and splashes. These distorted yet very vivid shapes stem from not just looking at the right moment but with an openness, and then suddenly what intially seemed mundane will shimmer with life. This way of looking fills Worden’s own film, from the glittering halls of the liquor store to cigarettes that light up the dark and the Super 8 surface like the stars that dot the firmament.