Kentucker Audley’s hour-long feature, “Holy Land,” has great and conspicuous hinges. Few films have any, but Audley’s self-enfolding construction, with its discrete parts—one, about a young writer and his voyage to do research for a novel; another, the into-camera monologue of the actor whose departure ends it; a third, glancing at the filmmaker himself; and maybe a fourth, about what becomes of the actor (who is not a professional actor but an aspiring writer) after his departure (and which, in retrospect, casts the first section as the remains of an unfinished film)—is assembled with intelligent and emotionally jolting connections between the panels. Cole Weintraub plays a young writer very much like himself, who heads for Holy Land, Virginia, by way of a nearby college town and there gets involved with a young woman, Bunny (Bunny Lampert); their relationship, as possibly fictionalized and surely realized, is the film’s backbone; the affair is both tender and harsh, and Audley depicts it with brisk, sure, sketch-like strokes.
He’s a loamy filmmaker, a regionalist who gets at extended connections, involving friends and work, family and money, with rapid decisiveness and conjures webs of involvement that entangle characters like cinematic kudzu. His sense of landscape and texture suggests the heavy weight that comes with a sense of place, the connections that are also ties, the certainties that are also constraints. Audley’s other features, “Team Picture” and “Open Five,” do something similar; “Holy Land,” with its more intricate construction, is a disarmingly simple and clear film that, in its mere one-hour running time, offers a remarkably full and novelistic sense of lives being lived, of a world and a worldview.
The film is available online, at No Budge, a Web site founded by the filmmaker to showcase independent films. (I haven’t seen any of the other films available there.) (He discusses it here, at Filmmaker magazine.) It’s apparent that theatrical distribution will become of less importance to a generation that’s accustomed to watching movies on a computer, and I’ve noticed, anecdotally, a practical effect of this habit. When I started going to movies attentively, in the nineteen-seventies, before the rise of home video, I noticed that the bell curve of seating choice in movie theatres swelled around a third of the distance from the screen—and that, over the years, as people became increasingly accustomed to watching movies at home, via VHS on television, they tended to sit farther back in theatres, with the greatest crowd density being found around two-thirds of the way from the screen. In recent years, viewers, and especially younger ones, seem to be migrating toward the screen again—because when they watch movies on their computer, with their faces near the screen, the image occupies a large angle of vision and makes for an experience akin to sitting up closer to my very own cinematic field of dreams, the front row.
