If You Don’t See These Movies Now, You Never Will (2024)

You can’t step in the same river twice, but you can watch the same movie as often as you want. We say a movie has aged well, or poorly, but we’re the ones who do the aging, growing and decaying while it rests unchanged. The world moves on, but movies stand still.

Sam Green’s movies aren’t like that, though. In fact, they might not be movies at all. He didn’t invent the form, but Green has become the foremost practitioner of what he calls “live cinema,” a combination of spoken word, musical performance, and, yes, moving images projected onto a screen, something that he has been presenting, in movie theaters and elsewhere, since 2010.

Green has also made more conventional documentaries, like The Weather Underground, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, and numerous retrospectives have been dedicated to his work. But this week marks the first time that his three feature-length “live documentaries,” 32 Sounds, A Thousand Thoughts, and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, have been performed back to back, as part of a Lincoln Center series called “The Ephemeral Cinema of Sam Green.”

Filling the 1,000-plus-seat Alice Tully Hall is a tall order for any movie, let alone a portrait of the midcentury visionary who designed the geodesic dome. But because most of Green’s live movies exist in no other format, their rare performances create a sense of urgency that has become almost entirely alien to modern moviegoing. When a film slides from theaters to on-demand to streaming without a gap, there’s no particular moment at which you have to see it, which for many people means they simply don’t. You need only glance at your to-do list for a lesson in how easily something you can do anytime becomes something you never do. But Green’s “ephemeral cinema” is part of a growing wave of films that push back against the logic of infinite availability—movies that it’s actually possible to miss.

In 2022 the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Tropical Malady was named one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the last Sight and Sound poll, announced that his new movie Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton as a woman obsessed with a mysterious sound, would only ever be shown in movie theaters and never released to streaming or physical media. (Two years later, that promise holds true, at least in the U.S., where the film’s never-ending tour brought it back to New York’s IFC Center for a fifth weeklong run earlier this year.)

Gary Hustwit’s Eno, a portrait of the legendary musician and producer, is billed as the first “generative documentary,” created anew for each screening by a software engine that draws on hundreds of hours of footage, outputting one of billions of possible versions. When it screened at Sundance in January, my roommate returned from the premiere perplexed that the movie never mentioned one of Eno’s most well-known compositions: the startup chime for Microsoft Windows 95. When I saw it a few days later, there was Eno, booting up an ancient PC to show off his work. For the film’s two-week run at Film Forum in July, a different version will be shown every day: never seen before, and never to be seen again.

Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight might be the most ephemeral of them all. Compiling shots from old movies of actors who have since died, the film mirrors the mortality of its subjects by existing only as a single 35mm print—the idea being that it would visibly accumulate the wear and tear of successive screenings, becoming scratchier and more fragile until it was eventually impossible to show. But in a twist of fate that doubled as a conceptual coup de grâce, the only print of The Afterlight was lost in transit last week, putting those who’ve seen it in an exclusive club whose membership can never be expanded.

Sam Green didn’t set out to change the face of an art form. Before he came up with his “live documentaries,” all he knew was that the movie he was trying to finish, a short documentary about the history of utopianism, wasn’t working. He could explain what he wanted it to say, but the movie wasn’t saying it. So he opted to say it himself, mixing his rough-cut footage with his own narration and a soundtrack by musician Dave Cerf. 2010’s Utopia in Four Movements was also a reaction to the way movies, and especially the way people were watching them, were changing. “It was the very beginning of people sitting at home, checking their email as they were watching a movie, and I was just pained by that,” Green says. Live performance, even one incorporating prerecorded elements, gave an audience something that couldn’t be replicated at home, something that, as Green wrote at the time, couldn’t be “reduced to a digital file.”

Although Green shoots original footage for his movies, he’s particularly obsessed with archival materials. In 32 Sounds, which explores our relationship to the auditory world, he visits the British Library, whose collection of over 6 million recordings includes the mating call of the last male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a Hawaiian songbird unaware that the only surviving female who could have answered him was killed five years earlier. The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller gave Green a chance to dig into the Dymaxion Chronofile, a massive storehouse of bulging cabinets into which Fuller placed every scrap of paper he touched, from scientific notes to restaurant receipts, for 50 years. As he stands in front of a projection of Fuller’s Social Security card, Green exclaims, “I love this sh*t!”

It might seem ironic that Green is so fascinated by the material remnants of past lives, bulging banker’s boxes filled with old datebooks and discarded newspaper clippings, given that he’s chosen to make art in a form that is singularly resistant to archival preservation. You can watch a recording of one of his live movies, shot from the back of the room with a clear view of the stage, but it’s nothing like being in the room itself. Some will argue that that’s true of any movie—that there’s no substitute for the experience of seeing a film in a theater, whether you’re soaking in the roar of a blockbuster crowd on opening weekend or quietly thrumming to the introspective pleasures of an art-house classic. But that experience can be elusive in a world where theaters are frequently half-empty even on opening night and there’s someone two rows ahead scrolling through texts with their brightness on full. With Green’s movies, at least, you know what you’re missing if you don’t make it out to see them: everything.

Although A Thousand Thoughts is structured as a history of the Kronos Quartet, the modern classic ensemble whose 50-year history includes collaborations with composers ranging from Philip Glass to Paul McCartney, it also doubles as a philosophical exploration of music and mortality. At the dawn of audio recording, Green says, Thomas Edison promised that the newfangled technology would allow us to preserve the voices of the dead. And yet music is fleeting by nature, each sound beginning to decay the moment it enters the world. Green and his footage take us through Kronos’ past, ranging from their hardscrabble early years to their emergence as a cultural phenomenon whose footprint includes several landmark movie scores (Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Paul Schrader’s Mishima) and an appearance on Sesame Street. The quartet itself, positioned onstage in front of the screen, plays through that history alongside him, taking us right up to the present.

Although Kronos has built an intensely devoted audience over the years, David Harrington, the quartet’s founder and only permanent member, says there’s something especially intimate about the way crowds respond to A Thousand Thoughts. “It’s a little bit like having a friend over to the house and looking through a family album,” he says. “All of our concerts are, but this, it gives a chance for the audience to step behind the scenes a little bit more. Young musicians have been telling us when they come to see it, they had no idea what has gone into the music. It’s a little more tactile.”

In one extraordinary passage, the film dwells on the death of violist Hank Dutt’s longtime partner and Harrington’s 16-year-old son, the inspiration for minimalist composer Terry Riley’s Requiem for Adam. Instead of playing along as Harrington recounts his personal tragedy on screen, the quartet sits silently in the dark, an extraordinary moment that highlights how much more goes into every performance than we are typically aware of. Initially, Harrington explains, “Sam was hoping we would play, but when I heard my voice talking about losing Adam, the quality of my voice, I said, ‘I won’t be able to play. I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘Well, you could go offstage and come back.’ And I said, ‘If I go offstage, I won’t be able to come back.’”

Green himself faces a similar moment in 32 Sounds, where rooting though a box of old cassette tapes yields a recording of an answering-machine message from his late brother. It’s an acute reminder of what technology can capture and what still eludes its grasp, restoring the feeling of life but not its essence.

The gap between the permanence of recorded media and the fleeting nature of human existence is at the heart of what makes Green’s live cinema performances unique. Although 32 Sounds also exists as a linear movie that can be exhibited in theaters, when Green does the piece live, with musical accompaniment by Le Tigre’s JD Samson, he equips each audience member with a pair of headphones that allows them to listen in binaural sound, a technology that effectively adds a third dimension to the sound. Cocooned in their own sonic universe and yet sharing a physical space with hundreds of others, they are both together and alone, acutely aware of the boundary between private reverie and collective experience.

Live performance heightens our awareness of the moment, which Green underlines in A Thousand Thoughts by cueing a moment of silence so the audience can take in the sound of the space around them, and in 32 Sounds by coaxing viewers to close their eyes and simply listen until he tells us it’s time to look again. But it can also shift that relationship in other ways. In The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which features a live score by the rock trio Yo La Tengo, there are moments when you lose track of time altogether, drifting off to the group’s hypnotic lull while images of Fuller’s trademark domes flicker by on screen. By the standard of a band whose live sets often include 20-minute jams, it’s barely an eyeblink, but it’s the kind of sequence that would try audiences’ patience in a more conventional film. “In the pure movie version, you can have music for 30 seconds, and then it’s like, Hey, you have to cut,” Green says. “But with the live thing, it’s just domes and music for three minutes, and you’ll sit with it because it’s this weird form you don’t have expectations around.”

Focusing on live performance has also allowed Green to establish a sustainable existence in an environment in which many filmmakers struggle to keep at it. “I don’t know any filmmaker who really is able to make a living off their work,” he says. “People make films and make commercials or people make films and teach or people make films and have a trust fund.” But the world of artistic residencies and institutional subsidies is a kinder one, at least for now, than the ever-shrinking universe of commercial movie exhibition. “The performing arts economy is a very different economy than the film economy,” he explains. “The commodity itself is live presence, which is still a valuable thing.”

The flip side is that Green’s live movies won’t be around forever. A Thousand Thoughts won’t be around for even another month. With long-standing members Hank Dutt and John Sherba leaving the group in a couple of weeks, Green is retiring A Thousand Thoughts as well. (He has already altered the film since its premiere at Sundance in 2018, to account for cellist Sunny Yang’s replacement with current member Paul Wiancko.) Green will be filming its final performance, as part of next weekend’s farewell concerts, to see if he can’t approximate the feeling of seeing it live in a different form. But he knows that it will never be the same. “I don’t want to make something that is just a diminished version of the live performance,” Green says, “because a lot of the time a concert film is just Wow, that concert must have been amazing. When you watch it and they’re there playing, you just say to yourself, Jesus, they’re incredible. How to make something that works without that is a huge challenge.”