Crime Scenes: Robinson Devor’s Police Beat and Travis Wilkerson’s Who Killed Cock Robin?

By Tom Charity

”It was a long title, I wasn’t going to deny this, but accurate. With each additional crime it became clear which kind of crime we were talking about here, the kind that was independent and elusive. The kind you have to say five times.”

There is a short, whimsical radio piece by artist Miranda July in which she clings to the dream of a new category she invented in the middle of the night. Consider a new genre, like spaghetti westerns, or mysteries. She calls it, “Independent Crime Crime Crime Crime Crime.” For July, this is genre beyond the justice system, beyond conventional morality; “You can’t be sure if it really happened or if it was really criminal.” The scene of the crime is “a familiar journey backwards,” a locus for psychic misdemeanours, imaginary infractions and infringements. As morning breaks, the dream recedes: “The Independent Crime Crime Crime Crime Crime as a category, a place, and a way to get to the place is getting strange. It might be a metaphor for feelings. This is incredibly depressing.”

July’s first film Me, You and Everybody We Know was one bright spot in the mostly uninspiring Sundance 2005 dramatic competition, and came away with a special award for “originality of vision.” But I was reminded of her Independent Crime x5 genre by two other movies in the 16-strong competition, both of them ignored by a jury that found something nice to say about eight of the other films in contention.

The first, Robinson Devor’s Police Beat, is built around true crime bulletins—a stack of police incident reports ranging from lost cats to domestic violence and murder. Yet this is a crime film in absentia. It’s only tangentially concerned with attributing guilt or innocence. Instead, the long litany of everyday brutalities and betrayals counterpoints and concentrates the introspective melancholy of the movie’s central character, a Muslim West African-born bike cop mooning over the disappearance of his American girlfriend on a camping trip with a (male) friend.

The second, Travis Wilkerson’s Who Killed Cock Robin? is based on a newspaper report about a young unemployed man who, in the space of a week, went from a shoplifting charge for stealing a case of beer to murdering his landlord. Yet with a decency that seems almost perverse, the movie itself suppresses this last incident, and transforms it into a sorry and inconclusive scuffle. What sort of crime movie is this, with its unwarranted aversion to bloodshed?

Maybe July was on to something. How else to classify two films that are, for all intents and purposes, anomalies on the American film scene? Who Killed Cock Robin? and Police Beat aren’t easy bedfellows—in some ways their artistic strategies are polar opposites—but they share significant points of departure. Not least, the wholesale rejection of Hollywood narrative and aesthetic models, including the true crime genre to which they are both so loosely related. Experimental in conception and execution, funded cheaply outside the LA/NY axis, featuring non-actors in scenarios too open and diffuse to become anything as reductive as stories, these are resolutely uncommercial, truly independent endeavours. According to the diktats of the industry press, neither is a readymade success (neither has a confirmed distribution deal), but if anyone went to Sundance looking for new directions in American filmmaking, as opposed to the next flavour of the week, these would be considered real discoveries. Elusive and inconclusive as they may seem, these films know exactly where they’re coming from. It’s just that to get back there, they’re determined to venture into the unknown.

Police Beat

”Where is this movie from?” my friend Stephen whispered to me five minutes into the screening of Police Beat. His confusion was understandable, not only because American movies don’t generally feature voiceover narration in Wolof, but because the verdant urban-Pacific topography of Seattle, playing itself, remains unfamiliar terrain for moviegoers.

Shot in anamorphic, and immediately insinuating a dreamy, ambient vibe which has inspired some critics to draw comparisons with Wong Kar-wai’s romantic reveries (or maybe there just aren’t that many films about lovelorn cops?), Police Beat casts a quietly dismayed, ruminative look at New World decadence from the perspective of an African immigrant, a bicycle cop called Z. In Senegalese soccer player Pape Sidy Niang, Robinson Devor has found a giant screen presence, solid and soulful, graceful and incongruous in his police shorts and knee socks. Z gives the film its moral centre, but it’s telling how alone and apart he is. Underneath his outward composure, he’s riven with emotional insecurities, more susceptible to corruption than he would like to think.

Devor moved up to Seattle from Los Angeles with two films to his name, a well-reviewed but little-seen noir parody, The Woman Chaser (1999), and a documentary, Angelyne (1999), about the billboard queen. Developing a screenplay about an African child soldier, Devor turned to Zimbabwe-born Seattle alt-weekly writer Charles Mudede for input. And when the financing for that project failed to materialize, he and Mudede came up with Police Beat, inspired by the writer’s regular crime column.

Cinema Scope: Tell us about your co-screenwriter Charles Mudede, and his relation to the film’s hero, Z.

Robinson Devor: Well, Z is him, except that Charles is Zimbabwe-born, and Christian, while Pape, who plays Z, is West African and Muslim, so that required some rewriting. But we downplay that aspect in the movie. It would be easy to hock it as a Muslim bike cop in America, but to us it was more important that he’s a decent person with a moral centre, while all this immoral activity is swirling around him. And that’s Charles. He writes this “Police Beat” column for Seattle’s The Stranger magazine, and he brings a very philosophical, poetic tone to crime reporting. He doesn’t go for the bloodiest crimes: he finds the sad, mundane things. Like, you might read about a woman who throws a birdcage at her lover, and he writes about the bird: for those few seconds going through the air, does it feel like it’s flying?

Scope: The film has an enormous range of exterior locations; it gives it an unusually open atmosphere.

Devor: When you work on a low budget film you’re never going to have a big art department, but you can’t build anything that tops what’s all around you in Seattle, so we tried to let the undressed landscapes do the work for us, and filmed as much outdoors as possible. I lived in Los Angeles for ten years and you forget what it’s like to walk outside and feel the region rising up around you.

Scope: When and why did you decide to shoot in anamorphic?

Devor: The minute I met Sean Kirby. Originally it was going to be a quickie three-chip camera thing, which was really not my style at all. Obviously anyone who directs wants to do something cinematic. So I sat down and pitched the thing to Sean, and he said, basically, have you ever thought of going in the opposite direction? Obviously there are challenges associated with anamorphic. It’s usually good for groups, but we had one individual on camera a lot. We decided to put him further back in the frame, and maybe centred him up more, so that he’s a figure in the landscape and you can feel the space on either side of him, his isolation as an immigrant.

Scope: The subjectivity of the movie is interesting. We’re seeing what for us is a familiar culture, but you make it strange through Z’s eyes—even though we’re looking at him. It’s unusually introspective, too.

Devor: That was one reason I wanted it handheld. I think you don’t feel like you’re inside someone’s head as much if the camera is locked, static. Somebody said they liked the film because it wasn’t a traditional three-act structure character arc. It definitely isn’t that. Let’s face it, it really was an experiment. I’m a big fan of crime films, and you think to yourself, “How do I compete in that genre?” Compete with Kubrick, Aldrich, Wilder? What we came up with was, let’s not have crime be the literal, prime story source, let’s have it be representative of the protagonist’s inner state, reflecting his inner turmoil. Let’s have a cop who is rarely thinking about crime. If ever. He sees a dead body, but he’s thinking about how he’s going to touch his lover.

The tricky part was keeping the audience interested in the story. But my best moviegoing experiences are rarely narrative-driven. For me, if you can put me in a new place, an atmosphere, I can be there for a long time. The stuff I like most in the movie is the protagonist thinking or moving around the city, which I think is more European in feel. The crimes are probably more American. But I didn’t even dare show this script to anybody in Los Angeles or New York. I knew I would never get financing there.

Scope: Some people have mentioned Wong Kar-wai.

Devor: We laugh at that. Probably because of the voiceovers, right? To be honest, I’m not a huge fan. He’s extraordinarily gifted, but his films are antithetical to what I want to do in films. I can’t stand glamour. He’s a very sexy filmmaker, no doubt. I felt if this movie was going to have any chance, it had to have Charles’ voice, his thinking. So that’s why the voiceover is there. What impact the language has on the audience is hard to say. I think it’s a new kind of voiceover.

Scope: Wasn’t it tempting to do the voiceover in English?

Devor: It was tempting to maybe help people to get to it. But we thought it was a chance to do something that had not been done before. English is Pape’s third language after Wolof and French. You hear Z’s fractured English, but then you hear him thinking fluently in his own language. It gives a bit of exoticism, true, but we don’t hear Wolof being spoken too much. I think it’s a pretty thing to hear.

Scope: Which brings us to the score, which again, might strike many people as counter-intuitive.

Devor: When I moved to Seattle, I started listening to KEXP, which is an amazing independent station. A couple of nights a week, from 10-2, DJ Riz plays a lot of ambient music, electronica, and classical piano; Debussy, Eric Satie, and this quiet, lush electronica, and it just lets your mind open up. Basically, we copied that. We didn’t want this to be a socio-political film about an immigrant, so we didn’t go for African music. It’s an editorial thing, to create a more dreamlike mood. Charles is not afraid to say he’s a lover of beauty, which I guess was the old definition of an aesthete. To be devoted to beauty is a great thing to be. I think the music is devoted to beauty.

Who Killed Cock Robin?

Travis Wilkerson first related the sorry history of Butte, Montana in his searing agitprop essay An Injury to One (2002): how coal made it a mecca for immigrants 100 years ago, and it became, in the 20s, the radical cutting edge of the American labour movement. Then the mining companies got heavy, bringing in the Wobblies and Pinkerton detectives (including Dashiell Hammett) to break the strikes. The union’s most charismatic advocate, Frank Liddle, disappeared for his trouble. Eventually, decades later, the seams ran out and the money went with them, leaving behind only toxins and the citizens who grew up there—Wilkerson among them.

Returning to the scene of the crime, Who Killed Cock Robin? is vastly different in style, and not just because it’s dramatic fiction. Where An Injury to One consolidated the punchy dialectical juxtapositions of sound, image, and text Wilkerson learned from Cuban newsreel firebrand Santiago Alvarez, Who Killed Cock Robin? is shot on DV, handheld, and seems wilfully, dizzyingly ragged and abrasive. Sitting on the shoulder of his three principals—but with less deliberation than the Dardennes—and constantly cutting ahead of the beat, Wilkerson accentuates the rough-hewn nature of the project, its naked short-fusion of facts and fiction: what some cynical soul dubbed “a public access aesthetic.” The film’s narrative trajectory is headed straight for that old miner’s sore, the pit of despair. But Wilkerson finds some solace in songs of resistance and solidarity—the film itself is best seen as an uncompromising working-class protest song.

Scope: How does this, your first fiction film, relate to your documentary, An Injury to One?

Travis Wilkerson: The title itself is a reference to Injury. I was in Butte talking to [musician/actor] Charlie Parr and he told me that Cock Robin was Frank Liddle. The starting point was, what are the consequences of those things that happened? The way the companies pillaged, plundered, and ultimately abandoned the town. The decision to move into fiction—well, I don’t see them as separate. But Injury is obviously to a great extent about the history, and I wanted to make a richer, truer portrait of where Butte is now, with that film serving as a kind of contextualiser. Ideally, they would be shown together as companion pieces.

Scope: In terms of style, it is a marked change of pace. What brought this about?

Wilkerson: I watched it yesterday for the first time in a long time, and it was more raw than I expected. Jumpier. More agitated and elliptical. I was really pleased, but it came as a surprise. I’m very proud of Injury, but I felt it was overly dependent on an aesthetic that was very alien to the town. It’s an exceptionally raw town, abused, almost post-apocalyptic. I wanted a sensibility that was of Butte as much as it was about Butte.

Scope: It’s a style that rejects mainstream film language, but in rejecting that, doesn’t it immediately alienate the townspeople it’s about?

Wilkerson: It’s an absolutely valid question, and I’m not sure what the answer is yet. I guess I feel like the United States forgot about Butte, so I was ready to forget about their aesthetic sensibilities and try to find a new one. I wanted to abandon the ways in which I’d grown comfortable and see what would happen. There are times when I’m ambivalent about that, because my own sensibilities are for those long, formal takes, strong graphics, beautiful images, and so forth. I hope when I screen it in Butte people find an entry point, but they might not. If I wanted to make a film the people of Butte would enjoy I would make a romantic comedy, a thriller, or an action picture. Which I may do some day, if I could find a way to do it right.

Scope: To what extent was the style premeditated?

Wilkerson: In so far as the process was going to produce a certain result, a great deal. I decided I had to make this project on video, and without a tripod. There are zooms in it, but when I was shooting I limited myself to a prime lens with a single focal length, so I had to physically follow the actors wherever they went.

Scope: It sounds similar to the Dogme rules.

Wilkerson: These weren’t vows of chastity for me, they were more like guidelines to open up the process. I think, at their core, my previous films were anti-social films about socialism. Anti-social in that they were made by a single person, doing everything, in an empty landscape. So the most important thing for me with this process was that I wanted to create a highly social working method. For instance, we wanted everybody to shoot and people to rotate their positions on the crew, so that improvisation wasn’t just limited to what went on in front of the camera. People were shooting all the time. Some of the most beautiful moments were things I didn’t even know were being created.

Scope: You had this scenario from the news story of the killing, but did you have something people would recognize as a script?

Wilkerson: I don’t think people would recognize it, even though I numbered the sequences, and every sequence would have a description of the action, and if there was dialogue there were some descriptions of that. Generally, the written dialogue didn’t tend to find its way into the film. The treatment was only three or four pages long, but the number of scenes corresponds quite closely to what we ended up with, even though we moved away from it before coming back.

But to go back to how the people of Butte might receive the film, I would very much like people there to feel proud of it, but I fear they’ll be ashamed. Even though I wanted to show all aspects of life there, including joyfulness, and a certain kind of street life, bar culture, all this social dimension to life there, I do think they will probably feel it’s an overly bleak reality. It isn’t. In the true story he murdered someone, and we changed that to a fight, which seemed more truthful. There are many negative aspects to Butte life that we avoided. We had wonderful material with one woman talking about her days as a prostitute, but she expressed concern that her grandchildren would see it and be ashamed, so we couldn’t use it.

Scope: What’s your own affection for the town?

Wilkerson: I have a profound sympathy for a place that gave everything of itself. And that is a cultural reality still. People are that way: giving, friendly, gregarious, open. You get a flat tire, and within five minutes you’d have seven people pull over to help you. So there is a real solidarity. But there is also a tremendous weariness, and an agitation there, an ominousness, which I think is reflected in the film. Butte was the place of possibilities. It was a place people emigrated to, to create a new life for themselves. It was the place radical labour was at its peak in American history, so there was this possibility for real social change. I feel the presence of that possibility and its loss. Even though I don’t live there anymore, I still spend a lot of time there.

Scope: The music is obviously very important to you—you give it so much stress. Do you think film can achieve that purity of a folk song?

Wilkerson: I had that in mind: a film equivalent to a folk song. I was really influenced by Julio Garcia Espinoza’s essay “For an Imperfect Cinema.” That was the guiding text for this film. It was something I read after I finished Injury, and it led me to want to change direction. One of the things he says is that the future is folk art. So I was drawn to that essay, and music. I think a lot of people think music is a cop out—the Dardennes for example—but you’re not obligated to use it badly. To me music is so important to my life: it seems impossible not to use it. And here all three actors are first and foremost musicians, not actors. So the shoot had a quality of music to it that I didn’t plan. Charlie gets up at eight o’clock in the morning and starts playing his guitar and plays it until he goes to bed. Almost everybody in the cast and crew played musical instruments, except me. So the music was everywhere. And of course music is a tremendous medium for improvisation, which was a big part of what we were doing. I wanted to improvise as well, to unlearn. Which is always a bit of a game, because it’s impossible, but that was the goal with this film.

Scope: Do you plan to distribute it yourself?

Wilkerson: I hope that someone who has the ability to get it shown more widely than I can picks it up, but we will be all right if it isn’t. We’ll be in a little bit of debt, but not too bad. And obviously we didn’t make it to get wide distribution—unless we’re idiots. But I still have this fantasy of an American new wave. Everyone else has had theirs, why can’t we have ours? I just hope that people in out-of-the-way, forgotten places will start picking up cameras and start telling different kinds of stories in different ways.

Police Beat

Articles in this Section

Heart Attack: Lukas Moodysson on A Hole in My Heart
By Jason Anderson

Crime Scenes: Robinson Devor on Police Beat and Travis Wilkerson on Who Killed Cock Robin?
By Tom Charity

and in the magazine...

Walk This Way: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller on Ghost Machine By Mark Peranson

Who Is Killing the Great Wines of Europe?: Jonathan Nossiter on Mondovino
By Mark Peranson

---