“Dog Movie”
Henry Hanson is a Chicago activist-filmmaker-programmer who’s self-producing and self-distributing their own work, starting with 2022’s raunchy, poppy, Araki-esque short “Bros Before,” which played internationally before becoming established as an online success, including viewer commentary on Letterboxd. (The nineteen-minute picture is around.) Their medium-length feature, “Dog Movie,” has its local debut Monday, April 22, at the Film Center.
Full Spectrum Features’ director and events manager, Hanson and others, have a stated goal of legitimizing short videos as a serious art form with viable commercial potential, making media accessible to different followers, and reimagining equitable compensation structures for filmmakers. (They appeared in the 2020 Newcity Film 50.)
How would you define the difference between “Bros Before,” your earlier short that made the film festival circuit, with this longer, less assertive film?
“Bros Before” is highly stylized camp comedy, whereas “Dog Movie” is like, basically, transgender “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” With the movie “Bros Before,” I worked with a full crew and wrote out every line of dialogue and planned out every detail of each shot with extreme precision. The sole crew member on the set of “Dog Movie” was a sound person, and the film was entirely improvised and shot on consumer cameras with auto options.
“A passive-aggressive tender queer couple (Marten Katze, Jesi Gaston) send their household into a quiet tailspin when they adopt an elderly dog (Blue) with the same name as the unemployed couch surfer (Bloo, played by Milo Talwani) they just can’t seem to confront” is your synopsis. “Dog Movie” is but small, shot virtually completely in two locations in one room, around a kitchen table and in clothes-filled chairs, with almost everything happening. Is it a “hang-out” movie? It doesn’t have that dynamic of the earlier, more aggressive film.
That’s a great question! I hadn’t really thought of it as a hang-out movie. I think it’s not because the characters are too high-strung for that. To me, a hang-out movie implies a lot of fun. I mean, I think the movie is really funny, but I think it also kind of makes you kind of clench your asshole the entire way through. Due to the constant tension, I’ve heard from a number of people who have said it almost resembled a horror film.
In a small way, it’s almost more like the Kuchar brothers, especially Mike’s diaristic video work, than, say, your prior influence Gregg Araki you cited—the slow burn of being too close. I find it interesting that the ending “celebrates” the free-spirited, annoying figure rather than the dithering couple hoping to be more… Conservative? Coupled?
I hadn’t thought of the Kuchars as an influence here, but that’s a cool comparison! I can see the connection to the sort of heightened home movie phenomenon. The ending was supposed to be an homage to the end of “The Novelist’s Film” by Hong Sang-Soo (2022). When I was making this, I just saw that and it completely blew my mind.
Although I didn’t initially believe it to be Bloo, I can see how it might be interpreted. Every character in my films should be both flawed and sympathetic. I believe I did that in this case. I believe that people have a variety of opinions on who is being celebrated and who is being criticized. Or who was most in the wrong. And it actually concludes with much more information about that particular viewer than about the movie’s contentment.
The ending has the power to take whatever they want out of the film, but the character has actually learned nothing and has not changed at all. It’s supposed to be kind of a weird delusion. Like, they have never been able to play this song well on a broken guitar, but when it plays over the ending, it plays a competent, well-recorded piano version. We see them making snow angels in a field in the Midwest despite their claims that they were going to a farm in Tennessee. Like, what’s going on there? It’s supposed to feel a little unreal.
What inspired you to be that minimalist? Just to measure the dynamic of the roommate, perhaps? How many people in your network of acquaintances are archetypal?
I wanted to make more movies but didn’t necessarily see a way forward in terms of funding, so the motivation for being minimalist came less from any sort of aesthetic idea. So basically, I was just trying to figure out how to make movies as cheaply as possible, and I started working from there. Hong Sang-Soo gave me a lot of inspiration, both because I enjoy his films and because his production methods are so effective. What he accomplishes with very little is incredibly inspiring and fascinating. In essence, he first picks his actors and locations, and after that, he arranges a number of boozy dinners with the actors, who are just sort of shooting the shit. Then, every day at 4 am, he wakes up and drafts the scenes he will film that day. When I learned about this, it kind of opened my eyes to the possibilities of what filmmaking might entail.
With a similar process, I was aware that I wanted to create something with a low budget, but the story had to fit the aesthetic constraints. I originally had the idea for this premise with a couch surfer who had the same name as a couch surfer in another script I left behind, but when I tried to come up with a low-budget, improvised idea to test it out, I remembered that premise. The Dogme 95 movement also gave me some inspiration, though not really the movies themselves, but rather the production methods. The movie adheres to about 70 percent of the Dogme guidelines; I chose to be inspired by them but not dogmatic about it. —and the title makes a sideways mention of that.
You’re programming around Chicago. What kinds of movies do you want to promote, and who do you hope will be the viewers?
Yes, I’ve gotten some amazing opportunities over the past year to program at Facets, the Music Box, and the Leather Archives. My main area of focus has been on underground queer movies, and I believe that many of my films have pornography in them. A significant component of my perspective has always been to fight against the sanitized “queer representation” that fuses gay characters with mainstream aesthetics. Instead, I want to draw attention to the distinct, rich tradition of underground queer film, which has existed for decades (including but not limited to porn), as well as contemporary work that I believe is rooted in those traditions. So that’s what I’ve done so far, mostly, and it’s attracted a lot of other people in my general social milieu (queer, mostly trans twenty- and thirty-somethings) as well as a crowd of older gay men, plus some straight-ish transgressive film fans. So that’s who generally comes to my screenings, but I hope more kinds of people show up in the future. I want to entice as many different cults as possible! I always try to add something extra that makes it feel like a place where you can socialize, whether that be a reception or a live concert or just an open call on social media
to hang out at the bar afterward. People tell me my screenings feel like “community” events, which is a word that I don’t always understand the meaning of but take as a huge compliment.
How do activism, programming, and filmmaking intersect? They seem to be inseparable from one another.
Absolutely! It all just goes through various ways of making a different world out of the options that are available to us in this one. Film producing, event organizing, and political organizing all require you to maintain good relationships with a bunch of people, understand how and when to tap those people for their different talents, make connections between people/places/resources/institutions… No matter what I’m doing I try to bring the same set of principles, which of course I’m always refining as I learn and grow.
Henry Hanson’s fifty-one-minute “Dog Movie” has its Chicago premiere at the Film Center, Monday, April 22, 8pm.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He serves as a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
The publication of Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is scheduled for the following year. Twitter and Instagram have the project’s reviews available. More photography on Instagram.
