Lisi’s debut feature excels by rejecting all the things expected of a first film
Starting out as a filmmaker is scary. In my own experience, I have spent the better part of my 20s terrified of failure: failure in my craft, failure in my careers, failure in my relationships. But the reason why I and so many other young artists choose filmmaking as our desired pathway is to be able to work through those fears, to codify those emotions into an understandable text to which others can relate. The ability to transmogrify the anxieties of everyday life into something beautiful and shareable is just one of the many pleasures of cinema. So why is being a young filmmaker so scary? The outlet is right in front of us, but so often the pressure of perfecting our emotions on screen is enough to prevent us from making anything at all. At the risk of being conventional, so many artists remain voiceless.
Jordan Lisi has no desire to be a conventional filmmaker. His feature debut, 12 and More Omissions, is a rejection of all the things that a first feature should be. It clocks in at 43 minutes, a runtime that narrowly qualifies it as a feature film, but Lisi makes brilliant use of those minutes to deliver what can only be described as an anthological concept album. It follows three storylines in three East Coast cities over the course of different seasons. Each storyline intercuts seemingly at random — pausing to show a character prepare a full meal but breezing right past a relationship-altering argument — because Lisi is disinterested in merely showing the rising actions and inciting incidents of the characters he crafts. The film is made of scenes that most filmmakers would choose to leave on the cutting room floor. By using understated moments to convey his narrative, the up-and-coming filmmaker creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In each quiet gap between conversation, a world is opened up for the viewer. It is almost an entirely new cinematic language unto itself.
Omissions premiered at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan this past October. I had spent the months leading up to this screening getting to know Jordan. We were a bit of a match made in heaven: two mid-20s Brooklyn-based filmmakers who were currently working in education while attempting to get someone — anyone — to watch their films. We would exchange feedback on each other’s features, talk about the struggles of our respective “starving artist” phases, and nerd out about Cassavetes, Ozu, and mumblecore. When it came time for me to interview him for this article, it felt more like a formality than anything. The conversation naturally started with small talk about current work.
I caught Lisi in the middle of assistant directing four projects, three of which had yet to enter production. He seemed stressed about the scale of these projects but excited to be working on some things that he cared about after an onslaught of corporate work. “What am I getting out of being on a corporate shoot other than money?” Lisi asked. “I need money to pay rent, but there’s other ways to make money.” Like many others, Lisi and I share this sentiment. I left my collateral analyst role in Jersey City when I was 24 to become a high school film teacher at my alma mater and focus more on my own filmmaking career. I had given the corporate film world a shot as well, but nothing made me doubt my own love for the medium more than being forced to produce the lowest common denominator of the artform I loved. Lisi had a slightly more positive outlook on the experience than I did. “It doesn’t always feel that cool, but everything is good experience. You always learn something. But it’s also a battle internally. The fear is being disconnected from film forever.” He had seemingly answered his own question; the thing you get out of corporate work — aside from some useful filmmaking etiquette and a bigger portfolio — is the ability to continue calling yourself a working filmmaker, even when your own ideas aren’t necessarily the ones getting made.
Lisi then steered the conversation in the direction of education. He seemed very interested in my decision to become a high school film teacher, relating it to his own experience working as a teaching artist with a non-profit. “My mentor Shaun Seneviratne, he’s an educator. I’ve been very lucky to have a number of people in my life that really influenced me and they were teachers and professors. When I was in high school, just starting to get interested in film, there was a teacher that lent me some of his Criterion DVDs to take home. That was huge for me at that time.” Lisi instructs documentary filmmaking workshops for public high school students across all five boroughs of New York City. He has found that to be an educational experience for more than just the students. “Half the fun of being a teacher is learning along with the students. In the limited teaching I’ve done, the first thing I realized was I’m not gonna be able to reach most of these kids. But hopefully there’s one in each class that’s connecting in some way, and it might not even be in the way that I want. It might not be because they like film, but maybe the experience of making a documentary gives them something. [Teaching] is a process of letting go of your own expectations.”
Lisi is no stranger to letting go of expectations, which he displayed as our conversation began to focus on the making of 12 and More Omissions. The film is based on a collection of short stories and poems Lisi had been workshopping since 2018. Each of the excerpts dealt with feelings of alienation and distance in the day-to-day relationships of different characters, an apropos topic to be grappling with, especially during the pandemic. Lisi decided to adapt the material into a film towards the end of 2022. “I felt like if I don’t get to making something now, I might never make something again. And further than that, in some existential, spiritual way, I will pass away. It was December and I was returning to some of these stories, feeling like they captured a lot of that angst. Pieces of each story just started coming together and I realized that they were all the same story. They had different characters, different plots, but they were all telling the same story to me.” The commonalities between these stories is what allows them to flow so freely between one another, resulting in a hypnotic examination of the shared human experience.
The first of the interstitial storylines follows John (Vincent Van der Velde) as he cares for his mother (Cathi Swett) in her Hudson Valley home. The routine he follows is broken when his brother Christopher (Jeremiah Wenutu) comes to visit in an attempt to persuade John to work for his company. The second plot sees Boston resident David (Armani Rodin) ambling aimlessly through potential flings and arguments with his roommate before getting high or watching porn on his phone. One gets the impression he stayed in his college town for too long or can’t get over an ex. In the third and final storyline — the most assuredly directed of the three — we are introduced to Melissa (Eva Lin Feindt), a young woman struggling to maintain a strained relationship with Lyla (Ellie Ricker). The editing in this segment stands out as particularly inspired, and the style more confident, as though Lisi had been developing his sensibilities as a director in between shooting each of the film’s three sections. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is one hell of a split diopter shot in this segment as well.
In each of these stories, it is easy to see where the explosive arguments or come-to-Jesus moments may take place, but Lisi refrains from slipping into convention at every turn. Instead, we spend the better part of a minute watching John slumped over in his chair, taking a nap in between what must have been a long day of caring for his mother and what’s about to be a long night of figuring out how to pay bills. Rather than seeing David confess a crush to Imogen (Lizzy Kircher), we see the unbearable aftermath of that conversation — the “I hope we can be friends” followed by an uncomfortable drug-induced hangout. We never even get a full explanation why Melissa and Lyla are forced to be apart other than Lyla’s inability to “see something in the shadows.” These vague representations of deteriorating relationships may challenge a viewer’s need for structure and closure, but Lisi is giving us everything we need to understand his characters and their worlds. He is encouraging us to read between the lines, or rather to subscribe to one of Cleanth Brooks’s articles of faith: that form is meaning.
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The film was originally going to be much grander in scale. “A lot of what’s in the original script we just didn’t get to shoot. There’s a couple more stories. There were going to be little vignettes. It may have been too many different threads to follow.” According to one of the crowdfunding campaign pages for the film, these different vignettes would have followed a little boy in a striped shirt, a drunk asshole, and pigeons; some of the B-roll in the film implies he did get a head start on that pigeon footage. Even if Lisi had been able to shoot all of these extra short segments, odds are they wouldn’t have made it into the film anyway. The first cut of the film originally comprised roughly three hours of footage. Now, I’m an advocate for killing one’s darlings, but even I get squeamish at the thought of leaving 75 percent of a film’s first pass on the cutting room floor. According to Lisi, it saved the film. “There were a lot of different versions of the movie, but I ultimately wanted to get rid of all the expository moments in my stories. I felt like that was what was weighing them down.” In lieu of exposition, Lisi focused on the moments where the performances stood out not because of their grandiosity, but because of their restraint. “That is the most fun part of directing for me: working with the actors and seeing them come together and make something new out of this thing you wrote on the page, seeing what they think about the character. That’s a huge part of why the movie is different from the first script; what they brought to it.”
This collaborative nature is inherent in Lisi’s approach to filmmaking. Aspiring filmmakers tend to try to make the film of their dreams. With Omissions, Lisi made that film, but then he refused to release it. He whittled it down, garnered the thoughts of his peers and mentors, and found the heart of his overarching story in the moments in between. His willingness to listen and to adapt, to see the greater message in the form of the project rather than in the individual scenes, is why we have a fantastic 40-minute feature and not a lackluster three-hour one. So many young directors could learn from his example. Starting out as a filmmaker is undeniably scary, sure, but the worst thing a budding artist can do is succumb to those fears and make something that they think other people want to see. Jordan Lisi knows this and purposefully omitted all of the moments that most filmmakers would leave in. He’s a craftsman unafraid to take chances, someone who rejects broad appeal in search of something deeper. As a fellow independent filmmaker, I find that inspiring.
“We live in an interesting time now where so much art is made to please a fan base or to seem like you know what you’re talking about,” Lisi said as we wrapped up our chat. “You still have those anxieties when you show the film to someone, of course; that’s only human. But you never hear a filmmaker say, ‘Yeah, I tried to make this film for someone else and they loved it, so my job’s done.’ By making the thing for you, you’re putting yourself out there. We’re all human, so someone’s going to find it and relate to it.”
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