Interview with Jonah Freeman by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli


What do you mean by the word “building” in The Franklin Abraham video?
The Franklin Abraham is a building in a hyper-real state. It has reached a scale so far from that of a human being it is almost no longer a “building” as we understand the term. It could be called a complex or mega-structure. It started as a conventional construction and then expanded in an almost organic fashion to its current state. In terms of the film - the building is a bracket for an urban civilization –one that is in a period of recession and decline. It acts as a platform or stage for several scenarios to unfold.

You have engaged about forty actors playing the role of the owner-occupiers. Like characters of a novel they interact in the same place. What would you like to say through these characters?
I selected the characters almost demographically. The principal purpose of the film was to show a glimpse of a city enclosed in a single structure- so a cross section of the population was important to flesh out the diversity of the community and also to imply the scale of the building. I wanted to use dialect, costume and decoration to draw out the feeling of a parallel world. In character-based films or stories there often is a clear distinction between the foreground and background. In this film I wanted the characters to be the background and the setting to become the foreground or to put it another way is to say that the characters are there to define the background and so in essence the film becomes only background. Because of this I resist the urge to have a single protagonist or to penetrate any character too deeply. The psychology and motivations of the characters remain intentionally opaque so as to divert the attention of the audience toward a broader subject – the building itself .

What is the importance of your city -New York- in your poetic characterization of the contemporary urban landscape
All the locations we used in the film were in New York so in a sense The Franklin Abraham could be seen as a parallel New York. In my first conceptions of the building I imagined the upper west side of Manhattan condensed into a single structure. The Franklin Abraham is a perversion of our current idea of the city but it is not so far removed that we don’t see the likeness to our present civilization. The scale and diversity of New York were important starting points for bringing out the details of society. When you traveling through Brooklyn or other fringe sections of the city you really get a sense of the odyssey of metropolitan development. You can go from arab communities to Hasidic Jewish communities to Africans commmunities all in the matter of blocks or you find situations where an opera house will be right next to a cinderblock housing project. It is this kind of incongruity and montage that I wanted to define The Franklin Abraham.