Red Bucket Films: Joyful Abundance
There are people for whom filming is like breathing. People who can’t avoid doing it and, who, while most of us are sleeping, reading, strolling and cooking, are shooting all sorts of films. The Safdie brothers are this kind of people, and they were destined to be filmmakers from the moment their father gave them a video camera for their birthday. Their accomplices are the creatives Alex Kalman and Sam Lisenco.
Red Bucket Films is a young New York collective, whose profuse production occupies its web page, on which, like a notebook, one can see the films produced by its members since 2004. It could be said that its own films have functioned as a school for these filmmakers. Despite working in different “genres” and with a wide range of stories, they demonstrate a personal and inimitable modus operandi, an unmistakable touch which they apply to everything they produce. In the section “films” we can see shorts of different levels of quality and complexity, from simple humorous sketches (like the banana escaping from the supermarket in Banana Scapes) to surrealist evocations –like that of the man in Gone Tomorrow, who is drawn with a beard: he dreams about it, he has it or doesn’t have it; or the man in The Story of Charles Riverbank, who loses his home and finds it in beds parked in a car park–, animation films (the hand-pinball in A Game of Pong), or visual experiments, dramatized documentaries or happenings, such as selling dollars for fifty cents (Making Sense) or telling a (false) baby to shut up on a crowded bus (There is nothing you can do). Formats range from the immediacy of video to super 8 and 16mm.
The most prolific are undoubtedly the Safdie brothers (the stars of many of their shorts), who exhibit a dishevelled air and a world with a logic of its own which brings up the beauty of the dirtiest New York streets. The extremely young Ben and Joshua, despite being indebted to the forms of Cassavettes and Pennebaker, under the influence of Gondry, Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, always take the spectator to places which belong only to them, garbed in strangeness and comical melancholy, halfway between child and adult. Kalman tends more towards experimentation and superposition, in the form of hands, as in The New Handshake, through improvisations by rappers all over the world (Around the World), or by staging dreams about piano tuners (Piano Tuner) connected with the cinema of Maya Deren or the (beautiful) films of Man Ray.
As an example, a button
One of the most fascinating aspects of Red Bucket Films are the “buttons” on its website, which are literally buttons sewn to a notebook which one clicks to reveal fleeting moments of the life of the city. Taking advantage of cameras which can be carried in a pocket, sublime everyday moments are registered here. Cameras in a Latino fast food locale, in a paper bag or hidden on the street, testify to the movement of a city without the tyrannical distinction between relevance and triviality. A boy jumping on the ice, somebody working or sunshades flying over Coney Island, are the kinds of staged candid images that can reveal the emotion of a community, and the things that incessantly capture the collective, like an entomologist who adds unusual examples to his collection. Rare creatures that he can obtain without leaving the confines of his garden.
Coming-out
The hyperactive Safdie brothers, not content with making shorts and “buttons”, have also tackled the feature film format. We can only see trailers and information about the film on the website, but the fact is that their two feature films, The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Go Get Some Rosemary have been shown on the festival circuits, forming part of shows like the Directors’ Fortnight of Cannes, Sundance, the Berlinale, and the official section of the Gijon Film Festival. Again, homely (or street-wise) fictions, evoke, to a certain extent, children playing until the sun begins to set on the streets of Brooklyn. It happens with Go Get Some Rosemary (aka. Daddy Long Legs), starring the filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein and the children of Lee Ranaldo (from Sonic Youth), for they convey the sense of their own childhood with a story in which they summarize the memories of the two weeks a year they spent with their crazy and irresponsible father, who introduced them to cinema and gave them their first camera.
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