Lessons in Liberation: Ephraim Asili on the Films That Shaped Him

When you’re on a tight budget with limited time and space, it’s difficult to feel as though you’re part of a collective. I had this great desire to work collaboratively, but having to tell people every day, “I need you here, I need you there,” calling the shots, and pulling rank was hard. The Inheritance, and many of the films I’ve chosen, show the difficulty of collective decision-making and the time-consuming nature of the process. That’s how governments function, which is why it’s so easy to push for autocratic or even fascist forms of leadership. The biggest critique of Western democracy is how slow and inefficient it is, whereas making a film is about getting to the finish line as smoothly as possible. While shooting The Inheritance, I often asked others for feedback, but then I realized I was never going to complete the film if I continued this way. I gained a deeper appreciation of films like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and Maidstone after finishing my own, because I understood the amount of time and energy required for spontaneity to unfold. This was the kind of film I had intended to make at one point—one with real and fake characters that simply unfolds without a predetermined direction—before I realized what that requires.

It’s all process to me. When I watch a film like Maidstone, I’m not watching it to see how great Norman Mailer the writer can be as a filmmaker. I’m not really thinking about the “quality” of the film. Watching Maidstone is like watching a burning house. Hopefully no one’s injured inside of the house, but it’s hard not to look at the fire and the heat. Is it real? Is it fake? All I know is that it’s a spectacle, and for me that’s what cinema is. There are some cringey moments: the one when Mailer is arguing with his ex-wife and insulting her; the infamous scene when Rip Torn goes at him with a hammer. Is pushing someone to their limits in this way directing? I also find it very beautiful because it’s made by someone who doesn’t know as much about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. It shows us that this is what can happen if you completely let go.

I try not to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction, the real and the fake. We’re always aware, whether it’s at the front of our minds or not, that this is a person representing themselves. John Cassavetes in Opening Night and William Greaves in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm remind us of the materiality of acting. These are human beings attempting to do something, and we’re in a position to judge and relate to it, as opposed to just relating to the actions in the story and who did what to whom. In a film like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm that takes a meta approach, you’re seeing actors struggle with deliberately shitty content while members of the crew debate and work through the construction of the film. As someone who hasn’t really worked with professional actors, I find it fascinating how these films aim to depict internal processes rather than giving us dialogue that arrives satisfactorily from point A to point B.

Whenever I feel discouraged, I turn to people like Oscar Micheaux and Melvin Van Peebles for strength and a reminder of the extraordinary limitations they were working under but nevertheless overcame. I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing today if there weren’t people like them. Part of what makes Micheaux’s films so beautiful is their raw constraints. He didn’t work with the best equipment, and he never had the ability to do multiple takes, but his films were made despite that. Why persist? I’m struck by his burning desire to depict the era and visualize his feelings about Black life. There’s such an urgency to the filmmaking that it devolves into psychological mania and becomes a work of surrealism that shifts fluidly from one event to the next. And he’s also fascinating in the context of the European Dadaists at the time and as a precursor to Black surrealism.

The ’60s and ’70s were the greatest time for filmmaking in terms of the self-identified effort to produce “radical” cinema that bridges the gap between narrative and documentary. So much of the experimental work we see today draws from that period. I’ve been telling my son, who is beginning to make art, that you don’t necessarily want to be influenced by your contemporaries. You want to be influenced by what they’re influenced by. When I was making The Inheritance, I revisited overtly political art like Tout va bien, and I also engaged with films that were more reflective and touched on themes like isolation and personal struggle, such as Opening Night and Sans Soleil. It just so happened that all these works were made during a time in which artists were being given money to make strange work. We’re living in a moment today where people have a strong desire to see and make radical work, and a lot of companies claim to support that, but they’re not necessarily providing the creative space for it to unfold on a formal level. In order to access work that is operating in this way, one inevitably must do a little bit of time travel.