Film takes arcane turn: glimpsing the culture of freeways’ hidden nooks
Oakland scholar-turned-filmmaker Whit Missildine first noticed offbeat urban nooks during his 15 years as a big-city cigarette smoker. He says, “When you smoke, you get marginalized into these odd little corners of society, so I started paying attention to these strange urban artifacts that most people pass right by.”
The smoker-as-outcast concept led to a short film, which in turn inspired Missildine’s new documentary, “All Contained in Void.” Taking its title from a lecture by Zen philosopher Alan Watts, the movie, screening Feb. 14 at SF IndieFest, explores the hidden world tucked underneath, in between and around freeways.
Working with producer Nathanael Francesco Trimboli and cinematographer Jason Blalock, Missildine made “Void” with $4,000, a couple of Canon digital cameras and a car. “All up and down California, we’d be driving around and any time we saw some random, interesting spot, we’d take our cameras out.”
During one road trip to Los Angeles, Missildine met an eccentric urban explorer who led the filmmakers to a wild tangle of invasive plants growing underneath a freeway. “We met this guy at a bar who said, ‘I'm building a fort inside of this freeway median strip.’ We crawled over many fences, so I guess some of our filming might be technically illegal. But Jason’s really good at it, because he’s shot all over the world for Vice magazine and he loves getting down and dirty.”
Closer to home, Missildine and his crew spent time with homeless people who sleep underneath the freeway. “Oakland is a poorly designed urban environment, because the way freeways cut up the neighborhoods here is very strange and creates a lot of dead spaces that are inhabited by all these interesting people,” he says. “That’s what I was after.”
Missildine, who has a doctorate in social psychology from City University of New York, says he got into moviemaking because “I was tired of academia, where you investigate aspects of human behavior that would then get boiled down to an obscure article that no one reads. To me, there’s something about film that’s so much more engaging.”