December, 2003

Two important anecdotes about David Barker:

1. As the director of an important, but struggling film festival in Texas, Barker was charged with fundraising to make the festival solvent. The problem was there was no promise of assistance from the university the festival was affiliated with, the same university that took a great deal of credit for the event in its PR materials. “Instead of fundraising, I really just wanted them to know how hard it was to be a film festival and appreciate us more,” he laughs. “So I just didn't really put effort into it. But, after a ride in the car, I went to them and told them the truth, why I hadn't raised the money, and things got better.”

2. “I've had a difficult relationship with my father throughout my life. He always wanted me to be a salesman for some successful company, and I wanted to be an artist, and I didn't think he really knew me or wanted to. Then I realized that, because of my assumption, I hadn't shared myself with him at all. That he didn't know me because I didn't let him. I called him up and told him, and we had a good laugh about it. And things got better? 'Things got better,' he smiles.”

Barker's films are about truth-telling. They are also about exploring the culture we create in our lives that prevents us from it. It is this paradox that fills what he calls “the frame” of his films.

“These days, the idea of the 'frame' in film is missing. Film used to be about what the 'in-between' was; what was going on between people in a frame. Now, everything is just an object, including the people. The visual language is not there. I believe the reason you make a film [over writing a novel, for example] is because you can't tell it. In film, [the frame] has to appear as if nothing is going on but something is still happening.”

Barker is adept at offering up themes and scenes that illustrate the held-breath action of non-action. In Afraid of Everything, his recent feature that traveled the festival circuit, including Sundance, the cast of characters consists of a married couple and the wife's younger sister who unexpectedly moves in with them. The husband and wife are in a figurative paralysis after the wife's accident, which has left her with an amputated leg, a sidelined acting career, and acute agoraphobia. The husband, an architect, constructs an airless environment around her, stifling their conversations and intimacy. It's not just that there's no room to breathe in these frames, it's more like a waiting game to see who suffocates first. When the sister arrives - a teenage pixie with discord to sprinkle - all the repression, lack of communication, and longing crash against unencumbered youth. With everything put in relief by the mischievous sister, the frame of the film becomes like a staring contest - at first amusing, then increasingly disturbing. The viewer is likely to hope that one of these characters - any one of them - will act à la Barker and get in his or her car, take a drive, and come back and blurt out the truth.

That wish is somewhat granted. The last scene in Afraid of Everything provides a hopeful case for resisting the easy but asphyxiating patterns of ignoring the truth. In Barker's other film, Seven Days, the frame is once more suffused with a garish inertia. In fact, these frames are so taken up by visual language that they are barely peopled at all. Barker has taken on the perspective of Richard Nixon's dog King, and the dog's-eye view only gives us hands, knees, and waist-down shots of Nixon and his associates. The act of governing is only a backdrop to the incessant quest by Nixon to have King show him affection. It could be seen as a parody, of course, but there's something undeniably tragic about the former president's zeal for love and the megalomaniacal way he goes about soliciting it. Nixon besieges King with pleas to come to him but also barks insults at him. “It's about trying to get unconditional love,” says Barker. Unconditional love fit neatly and upsettingly alongside a narcissism that crowds out the rest of the frame. Here again, Barker offers us the duality of the unspoken with the spoken.

But unlike Hollywood movies, which are very much about favoring the spoken over the unspoken, Barker is willing to let his films seep into our awareness. In fact, plot-seekers should seek elsewhere since story is not really Barker's trademark. In choosing to frame visual language, the work is literally a moving picture, made up of a series of frames that pitch what we display as truth against the truths that operate independently of us.