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“The Film Remains a Mystery to Me — Why is That?”: Nicholas Rombes on the Timecodes Series and Walking with Gus Van Sant’s Gerry
Gerry As the pandemic rumbled on, in early ’22, and with my annual winter sojourn to the Sundance Film Festival cancelled, I took an online course in boredom. With so many customary diversions having been put on hold, I had reason to be bored, I suppose, but in taking the course I was more interested in boredom as an intellectual topic. You see, I have vivid memories of being bored as a kid — the books at the library I wanted to read were checked out, my elementary school’s summer activities were lame, there was not much on TV — but, with more movies and books I can ever take in a click away, I don’t experience that kind of boredom any more. No, today’s boredom is of a more existential sort, which is what that course dived into with its readings of Pascal, Heidegger, Beckett and Benjamin. Very quickly in the course, the concept of boredom not as a negative “empty time” but as a place of possibility was established. As Walter Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project, “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds.”
Amidst the incessant digital tumult of everyday life in the 21st century, with its raft of technologies engineered to make sure that we never succumb to ennui, a little boredom, I have found, can be a good thing. Which is perhaps why I responded so much to Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s film about two guys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) named Gerry lost in the desert, upon its release in 2002, and why, now, I am responding to Nicholas Rombes’s book-length Gerry, in release from Bloomsbury Publishing. Examining precisely how Gerry works and the possible meanings it suggests, Rombes draws from these same thinkers, these master theoreticians of tedium, as well as many others, with a immediate page-one proposal to the reader: “Let’s accept, for a moment, that Gerry is in fact boring. And yet boredom has the potential, paradoxically, to open up exciting spaces for thinking and maybe, even, for ways of being.”
In other words, boredom can be thrilling, which is what Rombes’s book — and the series it introduces — is. The critic, author and filmmaker’s wonderfully erudite and contemplative Gerry is the first volume of a new Bloomsbury series, Timecodes, which brings a uniquely chronometric approach to film writing. (The series is co-edited by Rombes and Nadine Boljkovac.) Diverse writers tackle new and old classics — upcoming titles include Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (Alex Zamalin); Twin Peaks: The Return Part 8 (Jeff Wood); Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (Tobias Carroll); and Saul Williams’s and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost — by breaking them down into a minute-by-minute series of short chapters. Accordingly, Gerry’s 100 minutes of the two Gerrys generates from Rombes meditations on many topics, including the arcs of Van Sant’s career, the long shot as found here as well as in Jeanne Dielman, Touch of Evil and Rope, and how knowledge of industry genres affects the way we apprehend movies. Rombes asks, “If we went into Gerry believing it was an indie film—a feeling confirmed emotionally while watching it—and then learned later that it was, in fact, a Hollywood film, would we have to eliminate our feeling that it was an indie film?” Dubbing Gerry “an incoherent film,” Rombes goes to propose a series of other possible ways to categorize it:
A film that involves a murder and yet that is not a murder mystery.
An ecological film and yet not a film about the environment.
A psychological film absent of any psychological interiority.
A buddy film wherein the buddies might be enemies.
Gerry is all these types and none of them.
(Space for the above musings is afforded by the especially minimal action in minute 15, which consists simply of “the Gerrys walking screen right to screen left, deeper into the scrubby desert, still breathing heavily from their run. They are back in their own heads again, lost in their own interiors, closing us out.”)
Rombes is no stranger to film criticism informed by film time. In his pioneering 10/40/70 project, he analyzed films by restricting himself to the action and images of those three isolated minutes. In his The Blue Velvet Project, published here at Filmmaker, he, over the course of one year, penned weekly essays on Lynch’s masterpiece by focusing on frames 47 seconds apart. In these works, Rombes essayed the whole by means of a radical reduction, his pieces haunted by the absences of their surrounding footage. This longstanding approach makes Gerry a departure in that these 100 entries encompass the entire film; no action is left out. That Rombes is able to not only examine Gerry with such close detail — a cinematic insect splayed out on 100 small spreading boards — but go on so many productive critical side journeys is testament to his deep learning and fundamental inquisitiveness as well as the space opened up by the film itself. As we discuss in our interview below, Rombes rejects a thesis-driven approach, preferring to just watch the film and let his mind wander — a perfect way of approaching what is a very good, and, yes, somewhat boring movie.
Gerry is currently out now from Bloomsbury Publishing.
Filmmaker: I finished the book last night, and I bent down the corners of the pages to make notes of things I wanted to talk to you about. But virtually every corner is bent! The book is very dense with ideas. But let’s start by talking about the concept of the Timecodes series as it connects to your work over the years. You had the 10/40/70 Project, where you looked at films only in the context of the scenes at those minute marks. For The Blue Velvet Project, you looked at just frames every 47 seconds apart in Lynch’s film. Timecodes series embraces a more metronomic model, covering minute-by-minute and ostensibly the entire film. At the same time, even though there are no gaps, you are looking at just those minutes in each entry isolated from the whole, and that seems to me to connect with the earlier series. But you tell me – how is this new project different or similar to the other series?
Rombes: With this one, I was even more motivated by the feeling of, why do you carry certain films around with you in your head? And what’s the best way to tackle that [in print]? I originally wanted to name the [Gerry] book Walking with Gerry, because I feel I walk with the film. It’s one of those films that I come back to, and I don’t know why. So, I pitched it to Bloomsbury as a one-off, where I would go minute by minute through Gerry. The film remains a mystery to me — why is that? Katie Gallof, the [senior] editor there, came back and said, “Let’s think about a series.” And then that changed everything. I thought inviting other people to do a book would be interesting because maybe everybody has a film that they walk around with in their head?
I approached it a little different than The Blue Velvet Project, where I was really interested in the randomness. It feels like Blue Velvet is a jewel with nothing wrong in it. But what happens if you land randomly every 47 seconds? You’re bound to find something that maybe disappoints you or doesn’t fit or that completely surprises you. Is there any flaw in Blue Velvet? With [Gerry], I wanted it to be ordered, chronological. What is it that’s happening in a minute that makes it such a watchable film? Is there a secret, an ineffable thing in the film that’s powering it beyond all the obvious things about it?
The point was to just spend time with the film, and it’s one of the few films I feel this way about. I don’t get bored with the film or ever tired of it. It still has a kind of magical quality that I think I’ve figured out a little bit.
Filmmaker: When it came time to write each individual minute, what was your process? And this question leads into one about all the references, texts and quotations you cite. Did you begin by building a lexicon of those that you’d draw from, or would you watch the film minute by minute, pause, and wait for an idea to form?
Rombes: I knew that I’d have to learn a little bit about more the technical [aspects of filmmaking] and Filmmaker was really valuable for that. And then some of the [references] were just pulled off the shelf: there’s an Andre Bazin book in front of me, he’s talked about long takes, he’s talked about realism, and maybe I’ll flip it open and just be open to chance. I will say that I tried to do [the book] chronologically, but the part that I was dying to get to was that long sequence [Damon and Affleck’s characters] are just almost marching, like military crunching for four or five minutes of no dialogue. It’s a closeup on their head, they’re like two horses and the microphone must be right down near their feet because you don’t even hear them breathing. You just hear them crutching, and it’s remarkable. I was like, “Okay, what can I write [about that]?” Gerry is a film with a lot of contemplative space, so what can I possibly do? Can you write about how a film works where nothing happens and where, for some people, it might be boring? Those minutes were so compelling to me, those quiet moments where I would lose myself in thoughts and in the world [Gerry was] creating, that I didn’t deal with them first. But I was dying to get them. Whereas the boulder scene, to me that one is very comedic and physical — “Mel Brooks-ian” in a way that I knew I could get my head around. So, I could map that one in my head before I got there. But the dead parts of the film were the ones I was excited to get to.
Filmmaker: Writing about Gerry minute by minute creates an interesting flow. Reading the book certainly doesn’t feel like watching a movie, but there is a feeling of narrative fulfillment, of completion, by the end of the book. In the spirit of the film itself, there is no summarizing thesis, or a conclusion that tries to knit together all of your various sub-arguments. Tell me about your decision to end the book the way you did.
Rombes: I come from a film studies background, which is very path-dependent and thesis-driven. You’re going to pull out whatever cultural anxieties are in the film, you make an argument, and you sort of summarize it at end. But there are other [approaches]. There’s an obscure film guy, Robert B. Ray, who has written some really interesting books on film studies, and one of his one of his central arguments is, wouldn’t it be interesting if film studies was as interesting as the films themselves? In other words, what if we use different modes of discourse? So, for instance, he has a chapter in one of his books where he says, what if we subdivided a film like tracks on a CD and looked at it like that?
The academic, thesis-driven approach is historically conditioned. There are very good readings of Gerry that do come to a conclusion. That’s been done, and I don’t know if that’s my strength or even what interested me about Gerry. I wanted to be true to the concept, which is that when the movie ends, the book ends. In all works of true art, like Gerry, there are so many contradictions, so many tensions, and imposing an order can sort of flatten the dimensionality of those contradictions and in the way that you see the film. One day you see it one way, the other day another. So, to settle on [a conclusion] is to to remove all the troubling things that make it something that you return to because you still haven’t figured it out.
Filmmaker: You predominantly draw from the work of film theorists, essayists, philosophers, but not so many film critics who have written about Gerry. There’s a couple, I guess. Richard Brody is in there. But did you read or think about much other criticism about Gerry? Or was it the opposite in that you didn’t want other interpretations in your brain?
Rombes: It’s interesting. Gerry’s even a little bit off the radar for people who have written lengthily about Van Sant’s films. There were often pieces about how Gerry fits into his other work, like Gerry as almost a wayside stop along the way [and after he discovered] Bela Tarr. Most of what I found on Gerry was interviews, short takes and reviews.
Filmmaker: I love that Maggie Nelson quote you have: “all writing, even that which attempts to address the ‘now,’ ends up addressing the ‘not now,’ if only because the moment of composition is not commensurate with that of publication.” aYou write about the book as having a kind of ecological theme, but now that it is out in the Spring of 2025, are there other meanings you see in the film?
Rombes: There’s a show called Adolescence, and each [episode] is one take. I’m thinking about how long takes have become mainstream in a way, whereas at the time of Gerry I think the long take called attention to itself. If I were to write part of it now, I would wonder, will there always be a specialness to the long take? I love the long take. Touch of Evil’s was the first one that I saw, and I was like, what’s going on here! It [looks] so hard to do — so difficult and choreographed. Russian Ark required all of that dancing. If the long take becomes common, will Gerry be a historical artifact, or will [long takes] still be something magical? That would be a question I’d love to ask if I were writing it now, having seen Adolescence and being exposed to a lot more long takes in cinema and series.
Filmmaker: There’s a section in the book where you talk about girlfriend tape recording the film of Purple Rain, and how you taped Gerry to listen to it just as an audio track. But, overall, there are very few personal anecdotes in the book. Why is that? Were you tempted to do more of them?
Rombes: I’m always fearful of nostalgia — you know, “the golden memories” surrounding something. I love the 33 1/3series, but the ones where it’s sort of, “the album is meaningful to me,” even though I identify with that impulse, there’s something in me that rejects it a little bit. There’s something I like about critical distance, and that probably comes from [my background in] film theory. So, I’m a little suspicious of that [personal] approach. But I did have temptations. One of the things I was always going to include was that the first time I really loved Gerry was when I showed it to my son. But that was the farthest I went.
Filmmaker: The word “boredom” has come up a couple of times. A while back I took Samantha Rose Hill’s BISR course on boredom, which discussed our contemporary idea of boredom as being a product of modernity. So, I liked all the parts of the book about the movie and boredom, because it is a boring movie, and that’s not a pejorative.
Rombes: I’m from Northwest Ohio, and I don’t know if it’s a midwestern thing, but there’s a part of from my upbringing that sees a film like Gerry through the eyes of someone like my grandpa: “Well, come on, boy, let’s get going here!” All those snappy films from the ’40s and ‘50s, they’re always moving along. I’ve come to appreciate boredom aesthetically, but I’ve also kind of grown out of it. But there’s part of me that does see Gerry through the eyes of something who thinks this [movie] isn’t very practical, that a lot of money is being wasted here. I wanted to open a space for that, [point of view] so I knew I needed to bring in some theories of boredom.
Filmmaker: How do you think your own work as a filmmaker has affected the way you are writing about films and, specifically, Gerry?
Rombes: A little bit? Growing up I imagined that the director did everything. From reading I intellectually was obviously disabused of that, but it was not until doing The Removals, where the cinematographer’s ideas were better than my ideas for staging and for lighting… And sound was incredibly important too, and I now have a great appreciation for that. So maybe I paid a little more attention to the tech [side of filmmaking], and I don’t know if I would have done that had I not had the experience of seeing it in action.
Filmmaker: Tell me about some upcoming titles in the Timecodes series. All the writers are tasked with this minute-by-minute approach, but is there much variety in the way they handle that instruction?
Rombes: The idea is to have the first two by me and Alex Zamalin [BlacKkKlansman] — film scholar type people — but I’m interested in everybody who loves film, and I want it to be really interdisciplinary. We have a few fiction writers who have signed up to do it, and I’d love a few artists musicians and filmmakers to do it. We all see film from our own personal backgrounds, but our technical and professional backgrounds also inform what we look for and what we see. So, I wanted it to be different than some of the other series, where it’s all academics or professors of film studies. I mean, film scholarship tends to be very historically bounded by how it emerged in English departments in the 1960s. The first film studies classes were adaption studies, like looking at Jane Eyre, the novel, and then the film version. It was very English-y and interpretive and thesis-driven: “I’m going to find an idea in the film and write about it.” I was interested in other ways of experiencing film, kind of like the 33 1/3 series, which draws on musicians and other people. So, yes, it’s up to the [writer] to say, “Here’s the way I approach the film. Yours might have footnotes about technical stuff, mine’s not going to have any of that. Mine’s going to be references to music.” I’m trying to be diverse in the sense of who is writing and that they are not just film folks.
Filmmaker: Who do you envision as the audience for the series? Primarily people who have seen these films and want to know more about them, or do you see the books as standing on their own as literature, regardless of whether a reader has seen the film?
Rombes: I would hope the second. Bloomsbury [books] very much go to the academic market, but my fantasy would be that the [reader] may not know the film but because of the way [the writer] writes about it it will be evocative and meaningful. I could see it being used in film studies classes or creative nonfiction classes. You know, I love Geoff Dyer’s book, Zona.
Filmmaker: I love that book too. You quote from an interview about it in Gerry, I believe.
Rombes: Yes. Seeing him write about [Stalker] in such a beautiful way was an inspiration.
Filmmaker: Is there anything you can say about the upcoming titles?
Rombes: There’s a book by Joanna Isaacson on DePalma’s Sisters coming out, which is kind of a feminist reading — recovering Sisters as a second-wave feminist film. And then Colin Winnette, who’s a fiction writer, is doing Dazed and Confused. He’s from the Austin area, and he’s doing it from a narrative point of view. And then there’s Twin Peaks, which I’m really excited about. Jeff Wood is a really interesting novelist and philosopher. He makes connections in the minutes of Twin Peaks: The Return that are just beautiful.
