Andrew Repasky McElhinney pushes a black-and-white composition notebook across the table. If he were a little younger, or a lot less self-assured, you might take him for a student eagerly showing off the day’s assignment. But actually, the notebook contains something a lot more important: a record of every movie he’s seen so far this year, catalogued by date, showtime, venue, format and aspect ratio. (“I’m kind of obsessed by aspect ratios,” he admits.) According to the running tally at the top of each right-hand page, McElhinney’s seen over 200 movies so far this year, with who knows how many more notebooks, and how many pages filled with neatly printed capitals, filed away in his Chestnut Hill home.

The mania for film doesn't stop there -- McElhinney also serves as programmer for the Chestnut Hill Film Group, whose 28th season recently came to a close, and Features at the Five, a brief weekly series of offbeat features shown at the Five Spot nightclub. (The five-week season begins July 10.) And then there's the little matter of his being a 22-year-old filmmaker who's currently assembling the financing for his third feature film. Magdalen, McElhinney's first feature, screened a handful of times locally, most notably as a Secret Cinema event, and A Chronicle of Corpses, his second, received its Philadelphia premiere over two years ago, and showed most recently as part of this year's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, for which McElhinney served as a juror. But it wasn't until last year, when the film finally secured a bona fide theatrical release in New York, that McElhinney's star truly began to rise. The Village Voice praised the colonial Gothic horror story as "easily the most peculiar American indie to play New York theaters this year," and writing in The New York Times, Dave Kehr called it "a real UFO ... a genuinely independent film ... that immediately establishes a distinctive and promising voice." What's more, Kehr named Chronicle the year's best first film in the Voice's year-end poll (an erroneous citation, since it's not even his first feature, but no doubt a welcome one), and put the film at No. 9 on his top-ten list for the Times (as McElhinney likes to point out, one place below The Fellowship of the Ring: The Lord of the Rings).

"I don't think I realized what a review in the Times meant," McElhinney recalls. "I read that review before I went to bed, and I was like, ŒWow, that's a nice review.' The next day the phone started ringing off the hook, and it's continued to ring. The film wasn't terribly successful for its first year -- our cast and crew screening [in March of 2000] was very mixed. People were like, ŒWhat the fuck is this? I don't get it and I'm not sure I like it either.' [The Times review] brought the film to all these people that had never heard of it, legitimized it." Proving that a prophet is never recognized in his home country, Chronicle is only now getting a proper release in Philadelphia, which begins Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse.

Where Magdalen was a humbly budgeted, quasi-autobio Cassavetes-meets-Duras project, Chronicle is a film of far more grandiose ambitions (if not budget -- McElhinney will only say the cost was "well under half a million). Set on a decaying island plantation at a time that might be the early 19th century, the aptly named movie watches over the island's few remaining inhabitants, the victims of an insatiable but impassive killer who takes them out one by one as they almost willingly go to their deaths. Visually speaking, it's a far more precise film than Magdalen, although at times it's stylized to the point of stasis. But that's entirely as McElhinney desires it.

"I'm interested in exploring transgression within commercial genre cinema," he explains. "In a lot of ways, Corpses is about the transgression of stasis, the transgression of boredom. People get very uncomfortable with boredom, but I've seen a lot of Andy Warhol films -- I kind of like boredom." The film's heightened visual style comes in part from McElhinney's devotion to opera (and Sondheim): "I think if I had any musical ability, I'd be writing operas. I wish I could sit down and play ditties at the piano like the guy in Gosford Park, but I can't. Corpses is like an opera without any singing."

Overtly influenced by the film theory McElhinney absorbed during three years at The New School -- the fact that the killer bleeds menstrual blood is, he explains, a direct reference to Laura Mulvey's essay "The Monstrous Feminine" -- the movie is also avowedly imprinted by the unlikely twin oeuvres of cult auteur Edgar Ulmer and the elongated works of Robert Bresson. And McElhinney's influences don't end there -- over a couple of hours, the conversation ranges from Woyzeck to 24, and from the movie he's got planned next -- The Flowers of Evil, a "nightmarish," "transgressive" but ultimately "much more commercial" story of teenagers in love, with themselves and with slasher franchises -- to the ones that might follow: a musical called A Nymphette in Andrewville, "sort of Reservoir Dogs meets Lolita, except it's all sung," a book he's got his eye on optioning about a hit man and his daughter, "Point Blank meets Reservoir Dogs, but Andrew." Instead of aiming to be the next DV-equipped Indiewood sensation, McElhinney longs for a more mogul-like career, whether it's in the mold of David Selznick or Russ Meyer. "I love getting on the phone and making something happen," he says. "ŒWe need an elephant tomorrow morning at 6 a.m.' It's now Sunday at 9 o'clock. Let's make this happen."

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May 30, 2002
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