Interview. Kentucker Audley.

Exactly a year ago now, New York's IFC Center was running a series called The New Talkies: Generation DIY and, writing in the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth suggested a possible taxonomic distinction: "If Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs are movies about the kinds of people who would watch movies like Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs, [Kentucker Audley's] Team Picture, [Frank V Ross's] Quietly On By and, particularly, Hohokam, are about the kinds of people who consume the kind of culture that Bujalski and Swanberg's films feel like a reaction against.... Audley and Ross are at least as interested as their peers in the social dynamics of leisure, but in Hohokam and Team Picture, work life is as carefully drawn as recreation.... Team Picture is possibly the lowest-budgeted film on the New Talkies schedule, but at times Audley's long shots approach the painterly beauty of pastoral landscapes."

Now Team Picture is the latest exquisite release from Benten Films and Vadim Rizov talks with Audley about the feature and the two shorts that accompany it on the DVD.

Updated through 8/28.

"Without putting too fine a point on it, Team Picture has a narrative that plays out like Antonioni in small city America," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Unlike many films that can can be assessed in one pass, I saw Team Picture once, let a couple of days pass, and viewed the film a second time. Team Picture is antithetical to what currently passes for mainstream filmmaking, and needs to be appreciated on its own terms."

Related: Noralil Ryan Fores spoke with Audley for Short End Magazine last October.

Updates: "Kentucker Audley's Team Picture is a portrait in lackadaisia; rambling, ambling, ramshackle, bashfully modest even as it stitches its intentions proudly onto its sleeve," writes David Lowery, who raises the question, "is it best to consider a film like Team Picture as a work on its own terms, and not distill it to a list of the ways it is or isn't like the films that it happens to vaguely resemble?... It's not so difficult to catalog the difference between those films and Audley's, but let's not split too many hairs: it's just as easy and, ultimately, perfectly valid to liken them. This is something I generally resist doing; I tend to argue for the autonomy of a given film. For once, though, I'd like to take the opposite approach and, perhaps taking a cue from its title, consider Team Picture in concert with its fellows."

"On its own humble terms, Team Picture captures that moment in time between college (or should-be college) and full-blown adulthood," writes Michael Tully. "That it does so without feeling self-absorbed, whiny, or annoying is what makes it feel like such a special little gem. There are a handful of exchanges that had me laughing out loud with uncomfortable recognition."

Update, 8/27: A plug and a story from the cinetrix.

Update, 8/28: Online viewing tip. Over at Vulture, Bilge Ebiri posts Audley's short, And He Just Comes Around and Dances With You, "an intense, despairing look at obsession and the twisted nature of attraction."

Posted by dwhudson at August 26, 2008 2:15 AM