Rob Rice is a filmmaker and former scientist living in Los Angeles. His work explores the personal and political economies of catastrophe and communion in America. His first feature, Way Out Ahead of Us, produced by Matt Porterfield and photographed by Alexey Kurbatov, just premiered in competition at FIDMarseille. Here he is discussing the politics and process behind the film about a family dealing with terminal illness and change.
As you approach your first film you have to finally literalize, speak aloud and in public, your relationship with cinema, which has likely been brewing ambiently in your head for most of your life. Why do you love it? What are its powers? But also, what are you wary of, and how will you navigate that? Those questions especially, the ethics of truth and representation, slowed my approach to the form, but sitting here on the morning before my film premieres, I will try to sketch out what I’ve been thinking about and how it’s allowing me to move forward.
In an extraordinarily knotted psychic context, such as it is in America, there’s never been more excitement to make work, and yet also never more of this cause for caution. Cinema is such a dynamic form, if not to solve then at least to present our own search for a way through the fray. But our fallen national relationship with rhetoric, strategic presentations of the truth, false expertise here, no expertise there, all presented in place of the voices of the millions of people on minimum wage with far greater social comprehension than anyone on the Supreme Court… it can be difficult to try to navigate these problems without reproducing them. How can we speak knowingly about our limited ability to fully know without contradicting ourselves?
As I transitioned away from institutional science, something I felt was debased by money and then covered up by the easily applied aesthetics of empiricism and rationality, I needed to find a poetic truth that still felt as material and applicable as whatever attracted me to science initially. I think I kept cinema at arm’s length because I was worried about a dematerialized, symbolic relationship to politics; I just didn’t fully buy it — that by abstracted messages alone we were going to meaningfully affect the world. I know that some people have fully poetic, almost mystical relationships to art, and that it can make an unchanged world still feel bigger and more survivable. In fact many of my favorite films carry this kind of spectral transcendence. But I am just a more grounded person, and needed another approach for my own work.
In a word, my answer is process. I have come to view films as having two related but distinct phases of being – in a vulgar way, you could say process and product – and both have a public and a politics. The film is a horizontally produced community project, and I have come to believe that filmmaking can be like organizing. The necessarily collaborative process that any film draws on can easily be reformatted to be a political experience as well, as long as you get rid of ideas of an author’s singular voice, of objectivity, of sympathy instead of solidarity. We made some third thing between fiction and non-fiction. It speaks with many different voices that draw on a fictional, hybridized subjectivity. It’s documentary autobiography by many authors.
The film is about a dad keeping his terminal illness a secret from his daughter so that he doesn’t spoil her plans to move to the city. Mark Staggs, who plays the father, really has this illness. He and his wife, Tracy Staggs, who plays the mom, have been married for 25 years and have helped to raise each other’s kids from previous relationships together, but have never had a child of their own. So in the film we cast an actress, Nikki DeParis, to play the daughter they never had but always dreamed of.
First of all, in order to honor this construction, meaning in order to create a space where a family could safely explore very real questions of mortality, we had to have our elbows locked and be truly in it together. Next, to start lacing in elements of my own biography, my own questions and fears about setting out and leaving my family behind, we had to build a transcendent communal trust. From this mutual recognition that many differently situated knowledges were relevant and equal in the storytelling, we were able to build something none of us could have done alone and then to leave behind a structure that wasn’t there before. That is politics.
As we sublimated that collaboration into film, into a product, the politics of the process prepared me to orient the meaning of the product seen alone, out in the world with only the traces and feeling of the context it comes out of, part of a new context and history now. Approached cold, the film is seen first and foremost to be about the “white working class,” and so is part of a legacy of representing this world. It becomes part of a conversation with the various contemporary currents that try to claim and distort it in different ways.
Right-wing movements, seemingly ever gaining momentum, feel entitled to cast them as inherently symbolic of their cause, intent on organizing them into line behind various policies that will further immiserate and impoverish everybody, people of color first, but quickly trickling down to them, too. (Though I felt it was cynical and prematurely defensive to include scenes about this in the film, I think it’s worth saying now that Mark and Tracy hated Trump, instinctively found him embarrassing and offensive off the bat). On the other hand, dealing exclusively in cliché, sanctimonious liberal elite capturers cast them as irredeemable vulgarians, solely responsible for the Trump phenomenon, without legitimate grievance. This tactic is so transparently working to obscure the profound violence and indifference visited on all working-class people by the no-alternative austerity order that the Clintons and the Trumps preside over together. Of course, there is rampant disqualifying racism in the white working class, but it’s materially nothing like the racism of loans, prisons, borders and wars that reproduce by inertia and consensus in the two homogenizing political parties.
In a landscape of these ideas, and a lot of contemporary cinema set in this world that seems eager to carry water for them, it was our intent and provocation to try to present a left-wing title. But not by didacticism or academicism, because that would have too quickly reverted to false aesthetics of elite knowledge and objectivity that kept me wary for so long. So instead, we chose to present the daily material concerns as they appear – debt, healthcare, the omnipresent threat of prison and the obligations of family – without ideology inscribed, and instead we put our hope and our evidence in the process. In place of my portrait of this place, we’re presenting a testament to the power of our creativity in common. It reads: organizing egalitarian power is possible here and maybe, as the neoliberal project crumbles and fails completely, it’s finally time to trade in the wages of whiteness for some kind of material solution to common experience. I’m not naïve enough to think this is a simple or even likely proposition, but I know that abandoning Debs and A. Phillip Randolph and letting J.D. Vance and Blake Masters be the only people with a story to tell is a guaranteed loss for everybody.
Way Out Ahead of Us premiered at FIDMarseille on July 6. Check your local festival listings for screenings this fall and winter, and the film will also be available to view at home early next year.
Photos from Way Out Ahead of Us by Alexey Kurbatov.
Share:
