Primitive Urges

In the summer of 2009, director Matt
Porterfield was set to embark on the production of Metal Gods, his
second feature film. With a cast and crew in place, a completed script and a
camera package awarded to them as part of a grant, production was suddenly
halted in suburban Baltimore when the small amount of financing the group
previously raised fell apart. Instead of letting the many creative and
practical elements already in place go to waste, Porterfield developed a
five-page treatment that created a new scenario incorporating a few of the
actors from Metal Gods.

The result is Putty Hill, a
stirring independent film that opens Feb. 18 at Cinema Village. Using a cast of non-professionals—most playing variations
of themselves—the film revolves around a community on the rough edges of
Baltimore dealing with the loss of a young skateboarder named Cory from a drug
overdose. Despite the somber tone, Putty Hill manages never to be
enervating, instead breathing life into the proceedings through a delicate
combination of fiction and non-fiction techniques. Porterfield often interrupts
the logic of the narrative with pensive interviews between himself (off-camera)
and the main characters. A device that can normally be distancing here feels
personal and intimate.

“Putty Hill was a new way of
working for me,” Porterfield says. “We didn’t have the luxury of time to
write a script, and I knew I wanted to incorporate this interview construct
that walks the line between the fictional story we created and the very real
experience of the cast. It made sense to open it up to collaboration and
improvisation.”

Working without a script, Porterfield
often drew on the relationships between characters outside of the film. Most
notable is Sky Ferreira who plays Jenny, a young woman who is back home in
Baltimore for the funeral of her distant cousin and is reluctant to rekindle a
relationship with her father. The tension that builds between the two, and
constantly surrounds Jenny throughout the film, is genuine of her experience
during the shoot. The casting of Ferreira, an aspiring pop singer from
California, seems an inspired choice.

“I knew that
I wanted her to appear in Putty Hill,” Porterfield notes. “I cast her
early on for a principal role in Metal Gods, and I needed to figure out
a narrative way to acknowledge the fact that she was of another place. There’s
nothing about her that screams to me Baltimore. She’s an outsider. So we
exploited that relationship in place.”

The film
actively rejects traditional modes of documentary realism in favor of a style
that highlights contradictions. While watching, audiences are repeatedly made
aware that they are watching a film. Porterfield seemed perplexed that the film
was labeled “cinema vérité” by both
champions and detractors alike. “I think the device we’re using is actually
crude,” he says. “The interview device is something most documentary filmmakers
try to avoid, or get around, for various reasons. I think it’s kind of
rudimentary.”

In this way,
Porterfield shares an affinity with other contemporary filmmakers who straddle
the fiction/non-fiction divide, such as Miguel Gomes and Lisandro Alonso. But Putty
Hill also hearkens back to a more primitive form of documentary. When the
genre of city symphonies is mentioned to Porterfield, he admits to the
influence of Dziga Vertov, especially his 1930 film Symphony of the Donbass.

The various
strands come together in the climactic scene, a funeral reception at a bar, in
which various friends and members of the extended family grab the microphone
for a cathartic and often emphatic session of karaoke. It’s a scene of great
release that builds throughout the film, both for the characters and the
audience. The scene is unsentimental but filled with human emotion, and it’s
the first time the audience sees the deceased Cory (in the form of a photo),
the equivocal ghost whose presence is felt in every frame.

Porterfield
explains that he still hopes to make Metal Gods, but that it will
ultimately become something very different from its original conception.
Whatever happens next, it’s clear Porterfield is an artist we will be hearing
more from in the future.

Putty Hill opens Feb. 18 at Cinema Village; Runtime: 87
min.