The Anywhere Effect
Jem Cohen’s Chain stars undirected footage of
the real world
By Lisa Selin Davis

From Benjamin Smoke: outside Benjamin's window on Gaskill Street in Cabbage Town, Atlanta [photo by Michael Ackerman]

A couple of years ago, I decided to take a break from New York, and headed out to Tempe, Arizona for graduate school. I imagined I was moving to a quaint little college town perched along the edge of the Sonoran Desert, dotted with vernacular straw bail houses, maybe, or adobe ranches. What I found instead were traditional suburban subdivisions flanked by ferociously green sod lawns (and millions of gallons of water siphoned from the Colorado River to water them), and endless stretches of highway punctuated with superstores: a Wal-Mart on one corner, Target on the next, the recurring ironic presence of Applebee’s (your “neighborhood” bar and grill, available almost exclusively in neighborhood-less zones). Though the Phoenix area was all a big grid and not hard to navigate, I found myself consistently lost, as I could never tell quite where I was. And except for the occasional view of leopard-patterned desert hills, there were no clues that I was even in Arizona. It seemed like I could have been anywhere.

This “anywhere effect” is the subject of Jem Cohen’s newest film, Chain (2004). Shot over seven years in enclosed shopping centers and strip malls and hotels in 11 States, plus France, Germany, Poland, Australia, and Canada, Chain tells the story of two women—one a squatter, the other a corporate drone—who navigates these generic landscapes, devoid of regional differences, compressed into one homogenized reenactment of a place. One of the actresses, Miho Nikaido, is a professional actor (the corporate drone); the other, Mira Billotte, is an underground musician. And while their journeys are conceived by Cohen, the degree to which the film—a mixture of documentary footage, semi-scripted scenes, and recorded oral histories—is documentary or narrative is known only to him. Expect some recalcitrance if you want him to illuminate the formula.

“I don’t really want to talk too much about the nuts and bolts because I think it spoils the experience to a certain degree,” says Cohen. “What I find most satisfying is that people who go to the movie are unsure as to where the documentary slips off and where the narrative begins.” When Amanda, the drifter, rattles off her low-wage jobs in voice-over, very often, Cohen says, she’s just talking to him about her life. And when Tamiko, who’s been sent to the United States by her Japanese company to consult for a steel company considering a transformation into a theme park, quotes the dogma of her bosses, saying, “Without a pure race, it will be difficult to have a pure goal for business,” she’s actually quoting a corporate speech Cohen read about in the paper; he studied the business pages, along with books like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed for both inspiration and research.

He does offer this about his process: “I usually work kind of backwards, partly from pre-existing footage where I find narrative cues, and then I write very carefully, and so some of it is sort of stumbled upon and some of it is very carefully crafted.” He continues, “I shot for years just looking at these places and not really thinking about their narrative aspects. It’s that process that makes it half a documentary film. Half of it is undirected footage of the real world; it’s documentary footage.”

These real-world corporate spaces—regional malls and parking lots—are as much characters in the film as either of the women, who wander through these worlds without ever interacting. And although many of us navigate these kinds of environments on a regular basis, we may not understand their emotional and social impact. How many of us have experienced the disorientation of disappointment upon entering a new city only to find that it looks just like the place we left? As regionalism disappears, and this corporate architectural conformity raises up to replace it, what does it mean for our culture?

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