Jack Kellogg has been fascinated by the arts for most of his life, beginning as a painter before moving into theater, installation and performance art, sound design, and animation. But it wasn’t until he first saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s TheĀ Sacrifice that the two-time Madisonian realized cinema was his singularĀ means of expressing vast interests.
Naturally,Ā Kellogg did what anyone interested in film does; he moved to Argentina. Kellogg recently finished his cinema studies at Buenos Aires’ Universidad del Cine and one of his projects, Father & Son, is a part of this year’s apparent wave of Spanish language submissions at the festival — so many were submitted in fact, that there’s a “Wisconsin’s Own en EspaƱol” program to exclusively showcase them. Father & Son builds slowly, with exquisite cinematography that emphasizes its actors faces, while remaining broadly conceptual; its characters have no names and are only credited via their relationships to one another. For all of their anonymity, the “Father” and “Son” still tap into a deep and extremely strained relationship that’s elongated over the course of a cab ride and an uncomfortable lunch — and that ends with a coda of abject humiliation.
Jack Kellogg, who currently lives in Brooklyn, talked with me via email about a relationship’s point of no return and directing when English is the secondĀ language.
1. The suggestive phone conversation in the cab, the wandering eyes in the restaurant. I get the feeling that this isnāt the first day this kidās dad tried hitting on anythingĀ that moves?
The way I see it (and the way I directed the actors) is that the Father is constantly on the hunt and the boy is treated like dead weight. Not a pretty picture, but certainly not uncommon.
2. Ricardo Carranza has this terrific hint of scumbag entitlement in his performance, but I think itās easy to paint him as a bad guy. Heās condescendingly practical, but the son is also passive to a fault. Are there two sides to this relationship or am I just playing devilās advocate?
I can see what you’re saying about the father and in some ways, I agree; I really wanted the father to be a “porteƱo hijo de puta” (a “Buenos Aires son of a bitch”). But my hope was to eventually elicit some amount of compassion from the spectator for someone as shitty as him while showing the cold side of the boy, who was very clearly meant to be the focus of the viewer’s identification from the beginning. This is the moment where the boy starts to become more like his father. I don’t paint a pretty picture, and I’m not interested in a Hollywood ending; hence the reason I went to Argentina to study filmmaking. I think the fact that he leaves the restaurant only when he feels ready to leave, although spurred on by the whispers of the other patrons, shows that he will no longer be the passive child that he was in the beginning of the film.
3. You alternate aesthetic choices in āFather & Son.ā The car ride over is strained but with a relatively still camera, but lunch turns very anxious with faster cuts and hyperbolic sound mixing before you strip it all away and return to just the father and son. It works, but why did you make this humiliating moment so structurally chaotic?
Although I had various goals in regards to making this short film, mostly technical, for my own growth as a filmmaker, my overarching narrative goal was to show a moment of irrevocable change in the relationship between the Father and the Son. In my mind, the Father will continue on a downward slide in terms of his authority over the boy, and the Son will be more and more assertive and distant as they move forward. This is, of course, how things go in almost any family, but I chose to use the Father’s attack as a type of gateway: after they pass through it, things will never be the same. And so, to answer your question, I planned the camera movement and the pace of the edits to be like a spring being wound as the attack approached, and then released, eventually returning to a relatively stable state.
4. You leave it ambiguous as to whether this has happened to the father before, but your camera keys in on a particular part of the table setting several times, once during the credits. Do you see the son as having any agency in his dadās humiliation?
I want to leave it ambiguous as to whether it’s happened before, but the camera’s focus on the plates and the glass was very deliberate, particularly on the boy playing with the glass, and of course, his writing/scratching on the plates. The boy is full of anger and he’s writing what he’s feeling; he wants to hurt his father. Did the Son cause the attack? I can’t say, but he certainly will feel that he did and that plants a seed that’s both empowering in a very unhealthy way and debilitating for the guilt it will engender. One of my favorite moments is when the camera focuses on the knife still in his hand during the Father’s attack. The way he clutches it, one sees that he’s fearful and yet menacing.
5. Thereās a funny rib in here about the importance of learning English, but you’re an American studying film in Buenos Aires. Whatās it like directing en EspaƱol?
During all my pre-production meetings with the actors and the crew, I spoke Spanish (Castellano), but I made it very clear to everyone that during the shoot I would be speaking English. In production, there is just too much to do, too many decisions to make and I want to be very clear when I’m directing. It worked out fine, really. On a shoot, a director is dealing mostly with the DP/camera crew and the actors, so I would say what I wanted in English and they would respond in Spanish.
- Father & SonĀ plays as part of “Wisconsin’s Own en EspaƱol” on Sun Apr 12 at 11:00a at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. At the time of publication, tickets were still available.