Interview with Tom Kalin, director

In this interview, originally published in Sight and Sound, Kalin discusses his 1992 film, Swoon.

Each year, New York’s Independent Feature Film Market provides a necessary platform for film-makers at varying levels of independence to exhibit their films to the industry at large. In an informal atmosphere, writers, directors and producers meet buyers, exhibitors and schedulers potentially interested in funding or purchasing their work. Unique in that it admits both shorts and features as well as specially prepared versions of unfinished work, the Market has been responsible for providing early public exposure for films such as Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André （1981) and Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986). Norman Rene’s Longtime Companion (1990) also received an early outing, as did Poison (1991), Todd Haynes’ and Christine Vachon’s delinquent take on American society.

Vachon’s and Haynes’ company Apparatus. one of too few such organisations in New York, was set up to fund short films, offering up to $20,000 per production. Later it became a re-granting organisation, awarding less cash but increasing the volume of projects in which it became involved. At the 1991 IFFM, Vachon was back with yet another film-a five-minute edit of Tom Kalin’s debut feature: Swoon.

Kalin, a Chicago-born New Yorker, made a name for himself on the art-house movie scene through the sheer outrage and inventiveness of his video short, They Are Lost to Vision Altogether, an experimental thirteen-minute black-and-white and colour observation of the treatment of Aids information by the US government and media. Before this, the thirty-year-old director had been an associate producer at AIDSFilms, an Aids education company, working on films on issues surrounding Aids prevention and education made by four separate communities in New York.

In 1989 Kalin approached Vachon, through Apparatus. To make the feature-length Swoon he had written to every possible granting organisation in the US and managed to raise $100,000, awarded on the merit of They Are Lost to Vision, Vachon agreed to produce, leaving Kalin free to concentrate on the script, an account of how in 1924, eighteen-year-old Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jnr and Richard A. Loeb, sons of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, purely for the intellectual stimulation afforded by the crime. The young men were soon apprehended, brought to trial and sentenced, each receiving ninety-nine years plus life. Their cold, hard, Nietzsche-driven reasoning somehow led them to neglect the more banal details of their actions: indelible traces were left at the scene of the crime, evidence compounded by their final, pressured mutual denunciation.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is not the first time the Leopold/Loeb story has made it on to the screen. It already exists in altered form, as Alfred Hitchcock’s one-take wonder Rope (1948), in which Farley Granger plays Leopold, the sensitive half of the murderous duo. Eleven years later in Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959), Orson Welles appears as the defence attorney Clarence Darrow in a version marginally closer to the truth. Unsurprisingly, neither film addresses the certain existence of the pair’s homosexual relationship, and to set that record straight is Kalin’s primary motive for making another film on the subject. Disregarding protests about negative imaging. Kalin maintains that the sexual relationship between Leopold and Loeb was an important reason for their behaviour.

At last year’s IFFM, American Playhouse, having viewed a rough cut, offered to carry the film to completion. US distribution rights were secured with Fineline, so helping to lay a number of Kalin’s and Vachon’s independent film-maker anxieties to rest. Shortly after this I met Kalin in a deli on Lafayette Street, on the same block as Apparatus and his own Intolerance Pictures, formed specifically for the film.

How did you start to raise funding for Swoon?

I applied with a treatment called Intolerance, written with Hilton Als. I was originally going to do an ambitious piece that took the structure of D.W. Griffith’s story and produced a reading of lesbian and gay marginalisation in twentieth-century culture by taking specific historical episodes-the Leopold/Loeb case was going to be just one — and attempting to link them up: how what happened in 1913 related to 1924, related to the mid-50s, related to now.

Why did that concept change?

To make a film of that scale with the level of funding and access I had was impossible. And then what I was really compelled by was the Leopold/Loeb case. There was also the English case of the silent twins — June and Jennifer Gibbons-which Hilton had become involved in: they literally refused language and invented their own. totally metaphoric and very beautiful, an interesting idea of twinness and couples. We related Leopold and Loeb to them.

How did you begin to research the story?

I started in 1988, though most of what I know I know intuitively. My grandmother was obsessed by the case; she was a little older than Leopold and Loeb and kept a Leopold and Loeb scrapbook.

What struck you about the legend?

The gay aspect was always reduced to innuendo in Chicago history. I’d see the photographs of these two beautiful boys from the 20s; there was something in the photographs about the relationship. I could tell, but it was always very hushed. In fact. they weren’t gay as we understand it. Homosexual identity in 20s Chicago was different from what we think of now.

After two quite competent films about the case, Rope and Compulsion, why make another?

To state publicly, once and for all, in an unabashed and direct fashion the facts of the case. That’s why the script is very close to the research: almost all the confession speeches and courtroom material is either literally transcribed or condensed, though obviously it’s interpreted.

What’s your theory?

The case is murky and tangled. They did kill a boy, they had a sexual relationship, and they were also involved in an exchange of crime for sex. Nathan Leopold was very much in love with Richard Loeb in a ‘homosexual’ way; Richard was a sociopath, able to seduce people to his point of view, but not very sexually motivated. He used his sexual charm to say to Nathan, “if you’ll go along with me in these criminal activities, I’ll allow you to use me sexually”. In a way it was a classic SM configuration of power and submission, but not so simple as Richard being in control of Nathan, as they both were both the master and the slave. I don’t think the crime came directly out of sexuality, but it was linked to it.

Visually Kalin opts for a contemporary veneer: his acknowledgment of the style of Bruce Weber’s photographs relays what he calls a revisionist aesthetic. There is also reference to the Nazi photographer, Herbert List, and to Leni Riefenstahl: “very over-laboured, you can’t miss it”. To communicate the atmosphere of the period he has reproduced it with a similar extravagance-retro style. “All the original photographs of Leopold and Loeb have that glamour: the Valentino hairstyles, the good suits, smoking cigarettes, sitting just so…I wanted to pay tribute to that element of it”. The film opens with elegant creatures gliding across the screen in expansive, romantic, monochrome mileux — it could be Montauk or the Hamptons, but it’s not. Rather it’s a scene within a scene, and Kalin widens the film from a narrow homogeneous elite to embrace a humanscape of minorities that includes a selection of fabulous, enigmatic drag queens. Why are they included?

Gender is not innate, it’s a performance. We learn gender through a series of codes, and in a subtle way I wanted to gender-fuck, to propose disarray. I don’t believe drag queens are always degrading to women. Later, in the courtroom. There’s a stenographer who is very compelling because she’s played by a black woman wearing a bob wig. She looks like a lot of the drag creatures. I intentionally cast an impossible person in that role: in Chicago in the 20s a black man would never have been a stenographer.

I love the way you have her leaving when the courtroom is cleared of women.

It sets up a paradox: how can you send out the stenographer — you would have no court record? It was assumed that women would be horrified by what was being said, that the discovery of gay sexuality would pollute their ears. But what does it mean on the level of who’s allowed to listen, who’s allowed to speak?

How do you feel about the film’s general representation of homosexuality?

I want us to take to task the feeling in the gay community that representation is instrumental. Certainly heterosexual pornography has a strong role in denigrating women and objectifying them, but an unquestioned link from degradation to rape is presumptive. We’re in a sorry state if we can’t afford to look at ‘unwholesome’ lesbian or gay people. It’s the same thing in the emerging African-American (mainly male) wave of film-making in the US — where are the black women, the gay black men? It’s dangerous if we can’t speak from within our own communities about issues that are politically problematic.

But positive representation does have its place?

It has its pale because it represents many lives, but it doesn’t represent my desires. I’m not going to make myself a slave to a political programme that doesn’t benefit me. I think the solution is to make more images rather than less; if someone hates this movie, they should make something that counters it.

Originally published in Sight and Sound.