As soon as Charlie Kaufman came onstage at the IFC Center Thursday night, he apologized.
“I, I, I first want to say there was a technical problem at the beginning of the film, and I just wanna kinda…there was a black ‘sssss’ moment that wasn’t…in the film. Well, it is in the film now,” he said, before concluding, “Uhhhhhhhh.”
There could have been no more Charlie Kaufman way to present a new work. The existential writer-director (and winner of the best-original-screenplay Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) was in town for the theatrical premier of Jackals & Fireflies—an extremely difficult-to-summarize meditation on being in the moment and finding beauty in the middle of chaos.
The roughly 20-minute short film is, in a way, sponcon for the Samsung Galaxy phone. (The tech company gets a big thank-you, and the projected title card included the phrase “Filmed #WithGalaxy.”) It’s more of a cinematic jazz solo than a narrative, sort of like a brilliant, experimental student short. That comparison is not a knock; the piece, which will be streaming online very soon, has an exuberance and vitality often found in the work of the young.
It is a collaboration with the Canadian poet Eva H.D., author of a poem recited by Jessie Buckley in Kaufman’s 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The two met “at an artist’s retreat several years ago” and maintained a friendship, Kaufman said. Jackals & Fireflies features H.D. reading the piece, a cascade of hazy observations. If I’d been writing down all the remarkable turns of phrase I heard, I’d have been scribbling the whole time: One that caught me early was “All Thanksgiving he was drowning in the gravy of despair.”
As Eva (or the character Eva is playing) speaks these lines, we follow her around her city—a mix of New York and Toronto. At first glance it may seem as if Kaufman and a small crew (equipped with a nifty Galaxy phone) simply hit the streets, captured groovy images, and made a montage stew in the editing room. But in time, you realize this was not the case. Some of what you see is a direct reflection of what’s being said (occasionally with the amusing effect of someone else mouthing the words). Other times, and most strikingly, what you see has a “this doesn’t quite make sense but I still get it” associative connection. That’s when things are really cooking.
According to Kaufman, the production was indeed a mix of carefully orchestrated moments and happy accidents. They needed a shot of a dead bird? Someone from the production team went out and found a dead bird. Other vignettes offered a sunnier story. A helpful dad aided the production by choreographing a group of tykes on scooters; they tried to pay the guy for his trouble, but he wasn’t having it.
Kaufman called the film “an appreciation of the city” that “finds the beauty in various neighborhoods,” but admits that, like all New Yorkers, he has bad days. (Indeed, he said that “someone smacked me in the face the other day, out of nowhere,” then laughed and said he “wasn’t going to tell that story.”)
The filmmaker also spoke about some of his recent output, like his absurdist novel Antkind. He said that the tome’s massive length (720 pages) “wasn’t intentional” and he “doesn’t think he’d do it again.” He said that the project started when someone asked if he’d write a novel and he thought he might as well, since “I didn’t have anything else to do.” Kaufman also wondered aloud if any of the real-life film critics (and some not so thinly veiled ones) that appeared in the book were in the audience that night, to much chuckling.
As for other artistic forms, Kaufman said he would like to return to writing plays, particularly because “anything can happen” since what’s ultimately produced isn’t recorded. He did add, though, that attending theater is rife with anxiety for him. “I worry about people going up on their lines,” he confessed. Some of his friends say they thrive on that kind of accidental spontaneity, he nervously added. “This represents a larger problem in my life.”
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