Back in December 2020, towards the end of the first year of the pandemic, New York-based performance artist, writer and filmmaker Andrea Kleine and her partner Bobby Previte moved into the city’s Chocolate Factory Theatre. This was where Kleine had been due to perform, before Covid scuppered those plans.
Kleine and Previte decided to live there in quarantine and to make a film of some of the very unusual performances they gave in the empty auditorium. These performances form the basis of The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be, Kleine’s new film, a world premiere at Ji.hlava IDFF this week.
“Those monologues were completely improvised,” Kleine says of the ‘Mrs Maisel’-style stand-up routines that she delivers in the documentary. “I never performed any of that material before. I didn’t even know what material I was going to be performing when we went to live in the theatre.”
Kleine now knows all the monologues by heart. She watched them again and again when she was editing. But, no, she won’t be taking to the stage to deliver them in front of a live audience. “I have no intention of performing those monologues ever again. They were really just for this film.”
Brian Rogers, head of the Chocolate Factory, had sounded out Kleine in the early summer of 2020 to ask if there was any way her project could still happen in spite of Covid lockdowns and restrictions.
“I said to him, OK, what if I move into the theatre and live there for two weeks and did…something. I wasn’t even sure at this point that I would be making a film but he [Rogers] was, like, ‘I love this idea. I am totally into it.’” Eventually, Kleine came up with the idea of performing every night “to no-one.”
The theatre didn’t turn out to provide the most comfortable living quarters. Converted from a factory, it had no proper kitchen or shower.
“The space was very raw and industrial-like,” Kleine remembers with a shiver. There was a small fridge. She and Bobby, meanwhile, brought in an air mattress, a small toaster, coffee pots and an oven.
Like everybody else, they were suffering from the “pandemic malaise,” stuck on their own. There were no technicians to help them other than the lighting designer Madeleine Best, who had been to the premises before they moved in to rig up the lights. However, they had to do everything else – cable the sound and make sure everything was plugged in. “It was quite a lot of work for two people who don’t normally do this. We’re not technicians. It took us a lot longer than a professional would.”
Bobby and Kleine then took turns shooting each other’s performances. “That was the crux of the film. How do you recreate that feeling of ‘live’ when nobody is there…”
Kleine shot several different monologues each night. She and Bobby also shot snippets of their daily lives.
In her monologues, Kleine riffs away on all sorts of subjects. “I went in without any pre-conceived notions of what these monologues would be about. They became almost diaristic. It was very awkward at the beginning,” she acknowledges. “But then, over the course of the two weeks, I became better at doing them. You see over the course of the film they become less and less edited. The final monologue is completely uncut.”
At one point, she talks about her admiration for the work of Belgian feminist filmmaker, Chantal Akerman, whose movies she had been watching with religious devotion. “Her work is such an exploration of the self. That was very inspiring to me. Also, her use of the static camera,” she says of the Belgian auteur.
Neither she nor Bobby were experienced cinematographers. They only had one camera (which was an iPad Pro). Nonetheless, they ended up doing a very competent job.
The performances may have been completely improvised but the film found its structure during the editing phase. “We were thinking about how we were going to communicate what the experience was like for us, to somebody who wasn’t there. What the film really is about is a search for connection [at a time] when we were cut off from almost everything we had a connection to.”
Early next month, the film will be seen in front of an audience at the Chocolate Factory. “It’s a bit bittersweet. It is a homecoming to show the film there.” She notes however that the theatre has now moved premises. She won’t, therefore, be back in the place where she and Bobby loved for those two weeks in late 2020.
Kleine is currently handing the sales and distribution of the film. “At the moment I am doing it all myself,” she says. Sales agents and distributors are welcome to contact her. She notes, though, that this is a very particular project. It was commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theatre with funds from the New York State Council for the Arts as well as a few other smaller grants.
A novelist as well as a performer, Kleine describes writing as “what takes me through the day.” However, it appears the filmmaking bug has now bitten her. She is hatching a new project, a hybrid-documentary that she plans to shoot in “the Cassavetes style. It doesn’t have a title yet but it is about a group of middle-aged state actors who go on retreat to create a new performance.”
And, yes, she will be directing and also appearing.
The artist is speaking to Business Doc Europe from New York on the day she is about to head off to the Czech Republic for her premiere. Why Ji.hlava? “Well, this is just where I landed in one sense. But this is such an oddball film. Ji.hlava has a very creative curatorial platform,” she reflects on a festival she calls a “great fit” for her movie.
