Community/Theatre
“What does it matter? All is grace.”
—Curé d’Ambricourt, Journal d’un curé de campagne
The question in any cinema that aspires to be devotional is this: where can we locate the spirit, the soul, the love? More specifically, where does grace become concrete? For Dreyer, it was in the face; for Scorsese, in the individual’s conscience, in one’s will to do good; and for Dorsky, in the medium itself—revealed only by makers who acknowledge and remain sensitive to its formal situation. For Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone, devotion—a religious observance of God, yes, but also the fervour and allegiance we feel for other people—is a matter of community. It’s in the fact that we live amongst other beings, that we share space with those who desire and believe different things than we do, and that who we are—the essence of our being, of our souls—is predominantly shaped by and inseparable from the place (i.e., the community) that we come from.
Cone has expressed this sentiment—implicitly, explicitly, religiously—throughout his filmography, which has, over the last ten years, quietly produced eight exceedingly underrecognized features (not to mention several dozen shorts, most made between 2012 and 2016 in collaboration with students at Acting Studio Chicago’s Cinema Lab). Which isn’t to say that his movies are all doing or saying the same things. Despite a certain consistency of themes and subjects—the psychology of repression, the blossoming and transience of passion, and the dignity of ascetic living (all more or less observed from the perspectives of young adults)—Cone finds fresh and distinct forms for each universe he creates. Black Box (2013) observes the behind-thescenes angsts and flirtations of an undergrad theatre troupe as they rehearse a stage adaptation of a cracked young adult novel, while the even more Brechtian The Mystery of Life (2014) takes on the scattered form of a found audition tape—the production’s scenes crinkling at the seams, cut against each other at random, while hints of an unnerving, veritably Lynchian narrative bleed through.
Those two projects were abstractions and refractions of Cone’s first festival hit, (2011), which is also one of the most realistic and wrenching representations of Protestant America I have ever seen. Set amongst a community of Baptist churchgoers in South Carolina, casts its Altmanian net over no less than 11 prominent characters, many of which are involved in the church’s upcoming Christmas pageant. In scene after scene, members (2015), in which progressive impulses, id-saturated euphoria, and seething melodrama cause a teen’s backyard pool party to practically implode under the weight of its own rapture.
