Pavements (& Videoheaven w/Alex Ross Perry)
Welcome friends.Thanks for stopping by and welcome to the many new free subscribers that have signed up in the last few weeks. A very special thanks to Helen, Bluetrue, R.J. MacReady, & sukhveer kang for becoming paid subscribers. I really do appreciate your support. Postcards should be coming your way anytime (if you haven’t yet DM’d me your address, please do that if you want a little physical media token of my gratitude).Subscribe nowI’m working on a couple of longer written pieces, to be published next week. These are articles that have been on my mind for a little while and I wanted to take a bit of extra time in crafting the argument and furnishing the research.They both speak quite zeitgiesty. One reflects a prevalent cinematic trend, in which form and theme, as I see it, emerges from the “absurdities” of the contemporary socio-political experience. In the other piece, I’m working on putting one element of the emergence of FilmStack in a larger historical context.Yes, I’m being a little enigmatic, but that’s my prerogative. Hopefully, some of you might be suitably intrigued. In the meantime, I wanted to share a recent episode of The Cinematologists Podcast featuring my co-host Neil’s [Indistinct Chatter] in-depth conversation with American indie Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry.Hi latest work - Pavements - is a self-reflexive, tonally playful, and structurally audacious film that might loosely be called a “music documentary,” though such a categorisation feels entirely insufficient.Joe Keery & Stephen MalkmusIt is as much a study of fandom and memory as it is a biographical account of the influential '90s indie band Pavement. Through a collage of archival materials, faux-biopic fragments, split-screen juxtapositions, and full-blown musical theatre sequences the film constructs a mythopoetic portrait of a band whose identity was always wrapped in contradictions: sincerity and irony, virtuosity and nonchalance, lo-fi chaos and lyrical precision.What unfolds in our conversation is a deep dive into:The editorial complexity of telling four parallel stories simultaneously: the band’s rise, their reunion, a fictional musical, and a staged film-within-a-film.Perry’s desire to create a film whose form reflects the band’s sensibility — fractured, contradictory, but ultimately cohesive.The challenge of navigating tone when the project itself subverts traditional modes of storytelling, even as it draws from them.The role of humour, performance, and self-awareness in both Pavement’s legacy and the filmmaking process.Why sincerity can only function when set against the backdrop of knowing absurdity.In an era where the “music doc” has become as formulaic as the legacy biopic, Pavements is a fascinating outlier: elegiac essay film, audiovisual slash fiction, unreliable cultural history and hyper-self-conscious indie experiment. It’s a film that doesn’t so much document a band as contribute a mythological re-staging. In their conversation, Neil and Alex dig into some fascinating terrain: the legacies of Gen X fandom and its oscillation between slacker irony and obsessive authenticity; the cultural fatigue that breeds dislocations between cynicism and sincerity; and the strange condition of loving something while also deconstructing it in real time. What emerges is a compelling meditation on aesthetic form as a kind of fandom in itself, a way of expressing reverence not through hagiography but through playful reconstruction. Pavements ultimately asks: What does it mean to remember a band that never fully wanted to be remembered? And how do you make a film that honours ambivalence without resolving it?There’s also discussion of Perry’s other new release, Videoheaven, a formally rigorous, found-footage love letter to the ephemeral space of the video store - tracing its representation in over 180 films from the mid-80s to the present. The conversation explores how both films, in their different registers, offer meditations on media archaeology, nostalgia, and the ways in which personal and collective cultural memory are shaped through images, sound, and spaces.In our post-interview conversation, Neil and I attempt to deconstruct the meta-textual layers at play, beginning with a reflection on the interview process itself: that is, the inherently performative and constructed nature of podcast discourse, especially when it’s in dialogue with a film already so self-consciously aware of its own artifice. From there, we try to unpack the slipperiness of articulating what makes a film like Pavements “good.” That category, “goodness”, often operates at the level of instinct or affect, shaped by personal taste, mood, cultural memory; it resists codification and certainly defies objective criteria. And this is especially true when the film’s formal strategies seem designed to destabilise conventional modes of storytelling and undercut sincerity at every turn. Yet paradoxically, that very tension, between irony and emotional investment, between knowingness and vulnerability, is what makes Pavements work. It mirrors the band’s own history, their aesthetic ethos, and the contradictions they never resolved and never needed to.Pavements is now available to view on MUBI.Videoheaven, which is available to screen direct from Cinema Conservancy.Neil and I first discussed Pavements on our second 2024 London Film Festival episode, the festival where the film had its UK premiere. As always, thanks for coming back or clicking for the first time on Contrawise. If you like what you have read/watched/listened to, I’d really appreciate it if you can restack/share to your networks.A gesture of human curatorial practice is more valuable than any algorithm recommendation.ShareWe really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show. If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider doing so by hitting the button below. Become part of the network of curious, fascinating people!Subscribe nowThere’s always an unease in asking for financial support, especially when one is competing in today’s oversaturated digital marking. So any support is genuinely appreciated and will allow me to continue to build a resource for those interested in cinema, media and the human experience.A subscription is £5 per month (£50 for the year). You get access to the full articles, podcasts, and film resources I produce. I’ll also send you and physical postcard, wherever you may reside:Become a paid SubscriberOr, if you don’t want to subscribe but think to yourself: “yeah, I’d shout that guy a coffee if we ever met IRL”, you can do that here:Buy me a coffeeMusic Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe
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