The Cornish director Mark Jenkin shot his latest film, “Rose of Nevada,” with a 16 mm Clockwork Bolex camera that he had to rewind by hand every 27 seconds. The film was recorded without sound, including dialogue, which was all added in post-production.
This is not the typical way to make a movie. So why does he do it?
“Working within limitations is everything to me,” Jenkin said after a recent screening at the Coolidge Corner Theater. “If I had everything, all the resources in the world to make a film, all the money, I wouldn’t do anything. I would just freeze. It would be awful.” Later he added, “The more money you have, the more you have people looking after their money, and their opinions.”
The self-imposed technical limitations might be noticeable if you’re aware of Jenkin’s process beforehand. But since the movie looks and sounds good, it makes the film, which Jenkin wrote, directed, shot, edited and scored himself, all the more impressive.
“Rose of Nevada” tells the story of two young fishermen, played by George MacKay and Callum Turner, who return from an excursion to find that they have somehow been transported back in time in their village by 30 years. While trying to make sense of what has occurred, one of them takes up the life of another fisherman who had been lost at sea. The substitution goes without notice by any of the townspeople. The second fisherman replaces a different lost seaman, but he struggles against his displacement, as he had a family in his previous life that he longs for and wants to return to.
That description suggests that “Rose of Nevada” is some kind of supernatural thriller. But in tone this film is far, far away from “Back to the Future” or “The Twilight Zone.” While the plot may include mysterious or magical elements, the movie is more interested in its characters’ dilemmas, their reactions to the timeshift and its implications for their lives and community. Much is shown. Little is explained. For instance, the film’s title is the name of a fishing boat, but no further information is provided. Jenkin wants his audiences to form their own ideas. This is a moody and experimental work.
At the Q&A session at the Coolidge, the film prompted discussion about the role of ambiguity in art and the nature of time.
Jenkin said, “Cinema is the thing most aligned to the way we think. Our consciousness is totally nonlinear. We’re jumping around in time and space all the time in our consciousness, trying to make sense of stuff … we are very rarely in the present moment. We are constantly depressed about the past or anxious about the future. The paradox is that there is no past or future; it’s just a projection of the present. Time as a concept is very complicated.”
Cornwall fishing communities play a large role in the film. As one might expect from Jenkin’s filming process, frequent montages of short takes give a viewer a sense of the location and the life there. Work on the fishing trawler might be depicted by a series of details of the boat, or a cut to fish being gutted, or the look on a fisherman’s face.
“I know that place,” Jenkin said. “I know what it looks like, I know what it smells like, I know what it feels like, I know what it sounds like. And I know that the way to communicate that is through fragments. And the detail tells you much more than a wide shot … and on a very practical level, close-ups are so much cheaper.
“I was in Los Angeles, and I wanted to take a photo of the hotel I was staying in. I was composing a shot of the front of the hotel. In fact, that was not my experience of the hotel. My experience of the hotel was that every day I was stepping out in this Californian heat and I saw this one plant in the front garden of the hotel. So I took a close-up of that. And that will capture that hotel [for me]. I can ‘Google Image’ of the front of the hotel anytime I want, and they’ll be much better photos than I could take … I think on another level, if I show [that] photo to somebody who doesn’t even know where it is, let alone have that experience, there’s something in that that transcends and communicates to people.
“There’s the old cliché: The more specific you go, the more universal you get with it. I always say I can’t control whether people like my films or not, because people might not like the story or the way I shoot or the sound or anything like that. The only thing I can control is the authenticity. And if the film is authentic in its setting, then it’s got a better chance that the story and its theme transcend to an audience who’ve never been to Cornwall. I couldn’t come to Boston and make a film set in Boston. Because the audience would smell a rat. Audiences are sophisticated. They sense when a thing is not real.
“Cinema works on two senses. The best films for me are the ones that provoke the other senses and stimulate the other senses. The best reviews I ever get are when people say, ‘When I came out of that film, I was stinking of fish,’ or ‘I came out of that film with rust on my hands.’”
Speaking of fish, in his run-up introduction to the movie, the congenial Jenkin noted that a couple of decades ago he came to Boston for his first trip to America. He had been obsessed with Sebastian Junger’s book, “The Perfect Storm.” During his stay he made a point of walking around Gloucester. An even more influential moment occurred when he returned to his hotel and saw a show on the television for the first time: “The Deadliest Catch.” He told the audience at the Coolidge that the reality TV program helped him to solve a problem with the effectiveness of a storm scene in “Rose of Nevada.” He still watches the program often and he associates it with his time in Boston.
“Rose of Nevada” opens at the Coolidge Corner Theater and other local cinemas on July 10.
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