ABSTRACT
Despite being one of the most innovative directors from the late 1970s to 1990s, Alan Rudolph has become largely a footnote to this era of American independent filmmaking, remembered as “Altman’s protégé.” Using his most well-known film, Choose Me, Flinn situates Rudolph alongside independent, art, and Hollywood cinemas, stressing on the importance of his exaggerated visual and acoustic style. Its “neon artifice” produces the film’s most compelling realism, one founded on an emotional naturalism that, in turn, clashes with the film’s refusal to tie down, or even present clearly, basic factual details of its plot, character backstories, and its indeterminant diegetic space. Like the vibrant red dresses, flowers, and neon signs that flash throughout the film, Teddy Pendergrass’s soulful, bluesy singing (the film is named after “Choose Me/You’re My Choice Tonight”) is among those thrown into the film in brief phrases, demanding our attention to defy conventional naturalism and focus on atmosphere and feeling. The same sense of being “dropped in” characterizes other aspects of the film, with characters seeming to be refugees from other cinematic traditions. One tough guy appears to be from a film by Melville or Godard –or a Warner Bros. gangster film of the 30s; the conclusion pays split homage to Nichols’s early indie The Graduate and Capra’s studio classic It Happened One Night. Rudolph presents his filmic world with detached but affectionate irony, bypassing any claims on truth or believability in favor of letting emotions pop out.
