Courtesy Static Prods./The Cinema Guild
The indie director Dan Sallitt is a filmmaker who?s slowly crept into my consciousness over the course of the past year. When his new film, The Unspeakable Act, opened last spring, I heard festival-going colleagues saying good things about it, but?as often happens with micro-budget self-financed indies without distribution?it spent such a brief time on so few screens that I wasn?t able to catch it before it disappeared. Months later, the college-age son of a friend, the kind of hungry young film scholar it?s good to have nipping at one?s heels, kindly lent me DVD copies of a few of Sallitt?s earlier films, which perched on the want-to-watch pile for more months while I dealt with the must-watch-imminently pile.
Then, in the course of reading about the complete Howard Hawks retrospective that?s currently (and majestically) unfurling at the Museum of the Moving Image, I came across Sallitt?s film blog, Thanks for the Use of the Hall, where he?s been archiving his thoughts about movies old and new since the mid-2000s. Sallitt?s writing on Hawks, a director he idolizes, was passionate, perceptive, and witty, some of the best criticism I?d read in a long time. (Before he took his current job in the computer industry in New York, Sallitt worked for a time as the chief film critic for the L.A. Reader.) Curious about how a guy who analyzed cinema so well would go about creating it, I headed for the want-to-watch pile, fished out the Sallitt movies, and programmed a little completist retrospective of my own.
It took only a weekend, since over the course of a 27-year career Sallitt has made four films: Polly Perverse Strikes Again! (1986), Honeymoon (1998), All the Ships at Sea (2004) and The Unspeakable Act (2012). (Three of the four films are available for sale or streaming online; I?ve linked the titles to the places you can find them.) They?re all quite different from one another, and even more different from anything else out there. Once you get used to the sometimes wonky production values?Polly Perverse is shot on flat-looking video, with an occasionally visible mic boom, and each subsequent film has gotten progressively sleeker-looking while retaining a certain DIY roughness?Sallitt?s films start to cohere into a fascinating work in progress. They?re all, in one way or another, intimate, small-scale domestic dramas?although ?drama? as a genre category seems somehow too stiff and formal for Sallitt, a slippery trickster who is often wickedly funny and who clearly enjoys messing with his audience?s expectations and their heads. All four films are highly verbal (?talky,? in the unnecessarily derogatory term), with densely written dialogue in which every line matters. And all four have moments of uncanny insight into the behavior of people in closely enmeshed, ambivalent relationships, whether it?s parents and children, siblings, or lovers.
Sallitt is a slippery trickster who clearly enjoys messing with his audience?s expectations, and their heads.