Staff Pick Premiere: "An Occurrence at Arverne" by Robert Broadhurst

When Jeffrey isn't busy curating the best videos to watch On Demand, you might find him watching more movies, biking to movies, or painting distorted Where's-Waldo-esque landscapes. He's programmed for the Tribeca, Hamptons and Rooftop Film Festivals.
Jeffrey Bowers

The recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others have reignited Black Lives Matter protests across the world. These moments have refocused attention on systemic racism. The outrage has forced many white people to look inwards and reexamine their own values and actions regarding the BIPOC community. For filmmaker Robert Broadhurst, it felt essential for “An Occurrence at Arverne,” his first film as a writer-director, to scrutinize his own white privilege.

The film opens with little context besides the obvious: a young Black man in a hoodie is sent to an unknown house to complete an unknown mission. However, this is where Broadhurst subverts expectations and his film shines. Instead of creating tension through plot and dialogue, he takes the novel approach to create it through the audience’s own biases and baggage. “I wanted to make a tense Rorschach of a film by nixing the usual white proxy character and putting interpretive responsibility directly with viewers,” says Broadhurst. When contextualized with audience expectations and prejudices, the film transforms, and has the power to expose subconscious biases that help perpetuate the issues Black Lives Matter stands against.

Ahead of this week’s exclusive Staff Pick Premiere release, we reached out to director Robert Broadhurst to learn more about how this fascinating short film came together.

On the film’s inspiration:

“I wanted my first film as writer-director to scrutinize white privilege. I was sick of seeing white savior stories where Black characters only served to redeem white ones, reassuring white audiences and letting us off the hook without challenging any assumptions. No matter how artfully these films were made, no matter how well acted, they always perpetuated the delusion that things were basically okay except for a few bad apples. Instead of going anywhere near the visceral truth of racial bias or structural white supremacy. 

I wanted to experiment. To see if I could tease out racial bias in a compact runtime using a short film’s unique capacity for dramatic reversals, where the reversal happened in the viewer’s mind instead of through plot or character. This approach risked provoking a range of reactions based on each viewer’s type and level of bias and how strong the need was for traditional storytelling. Some might discover their bias, feel the consequences, and experience a powerful film. Others might find the story to be a tragic or even tedious statement of the obvious.

Finally, I spent a lot of time one summer in the Rockaways at the house where we shot the film. There was a rule about closing the curtains and blinds when leaving the house. One time I had to go all the way back to the house from Brooklyn just because I forgot to do the curtains. As I went through the same basic beats the character goes through, I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily things could go wrong if I didn’t have white skin.”

On playing with audience expectations:

“The mandate was to keep things as neutral as possible in order to allow room for the audience to project and interpret. For me, one tendency of good storytelling is to withhold as much as possible for as long as possible at the beginning of a story. Which is why this film starts the way it does. An argument could be made that the opening baits the audience a bit, but my counterargument is that an identical opening with a white character would prompt a much different response from a lot of people than it does with a Black one.

The trick, as always, was to create a cycle of presenting and then answering questions for the audience where each answer would deliver a new question in order to continually renew interest and raise the stakes. Creating suspense meant regulating whether the audience or protagonist had more information than the other at any given moment. That’s where a lot of energy went while writing and figuring out blocking.”

On using POV shots and teasing drama with white passerby’s:

“Not to be flippant, but I wasn’t exactly setting a precedent by kicking things off with a white woman misjudging the actions of a Black man and everything getting worse from there. In truth, there’s no evidence that the woman does anything about what she may or may not think she sees. But it’s plausible that she does something and it provides a racial lens for the story in the event that the viewer hasn’t already. The exterior shots with the character closing the curtains serve to widen the overall threat established by that white woman. Because those exteriors are POVs without any ties to visible characters, they also implicate the viewer in the character’s peril. Between the white woman, those fake-not-fake POVs, and the alarm, the cops’ arrival should feel like a natural, plausible escalation regardless of whether or not the viewer feels complicit in it.”

On the film process:

“We wanted the film to work for anyone who’d watch it, but the stated goal was to try to turn the white gaze on itself. Viewing it through the lens of Hitchcock’s model, the bomb under the table in this filmor at least the thing lighting the fuse for a lot of people will be the viewer’s own bias. Absent any bias, as far as American viewers go, I felt there would be more than enough cultural context to deliver on suspense. 

I had developed a modular directing plan, which meant that beats and shots within the basic linearity of the story could be removed without derailing it. For example, I knew there would be a sweet spot when it came to the number and placement of exterior curtain-closing shots, so we shot more of them than we needed with the intention of finding the right balance in post. There was also more character development that felt essential in the script but extraneous in the edit. The modular directing plan meant we could cut that stuff out without affecting the flow from shot to shot and still deliver the intended experience. With viewers being ahead of the character, the only move to make at the end was to withhold the explicit conclusion they expected and instead let them sit with something more spacious and subtle.”

On if this film could work using an actor from a different race/gender:

“Given the pervasiveness of the white gaze: yes. As it stands, this film was written specifically for a Black man. While it might work with a Black woman or a trans or non-binary Black person, it would work very differently, or not at all, with someone of another race.”

On challenges faced:

“Given its subject matter and where culture was in late 2018 / early 2019 when we set about making it, more obstacles than usual got in the way of making the film. A lot of incredible people believed in and supported the film from day one, but for a lot of others, the basic question held against it was: What’s the point? That angle persisted even after the film’s completion in March 2020 and only changed after the murder of George Floyd.

From a nuts and bolts filmmaking perspective, I thought I was being pretty clever and economical by writing a one-character story for a single location. I also wanted to see if I could even pull it off. Could I get an audience to invest in a character’s fate over so few real-time minutes while he does such a banal activity?

Given the mandate to stay objective, it became clear as soon as I got into blocking just how few of the usual filmmaking fallbacks would be available. The pre-determined rules of subjectivity meant that I had to stick to a third person camera. I couldn’t use any true POVs and couldn’t use inserts because they’d be unmotivated. I also couldn’t cut away to other characters’ reactions because there were no other characters to cut away to. Creatively I couldn’t indulge in fancier, more expressive shots than I otherwise might. Every individual shot had to deliver the goods from both a technical and performance perspective. There was no safety net of coverage.”

What is your best piece of advice to aspiring filmmakers?

“Skip film school. Avoid debt. Do the work to become self-aware. Filmmaking these days can be mistaken for owning a camera and some LEDs and knowing LUTs. It’s not. Do the work to go beyond all that. Study films and film history. Read scripts, read books. Nurture passions outside of filmmaking. Be true to yourself and don’t chase trends. Be tenacious. If you build it, they will come. If it sucks, build another one. Do the hard thing that scares you or it’s not really worth the pain. There will be pain either way.”

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