During Spring Quarter, the Stanford Arts Institute will be profiling the 2014–15 Honors in the Arts cohort. This interdisciplinary honors program allows students in any major to complete a capstone project integrating arts practice or theory with another field of study, To learn more, visit artsinstitute.stanford.edu/honors.
Set in the backdrop of long stretches of mirrors, and the soundscape of soft buzzing and gentle snipping, senior Luke Lorentzen’s documentary, New York Hair (working title), is the product of a summer in New York, 800 barbershop visits and 70 hours of footage.
“I’m fascinated with the idea of finding one item that people of all backgrounds interact with, and the haircut is one of the most universal aspects of life,” Lorentzen said. “It’s something everyone either has to do—or actively not do.”
The documentary was developed through the structure of Honors in the Arts, allowing Lorentzen to edit the film throughout the year; work with a creative adviser, Professor of Documentary Film and Video Jamie Meltzer, as well as an academic adviser, Professor of Art and Art History Alexander Nemerov; and meet with the Honors Cohort for weekly workshop every quarter.
“Having people from different backgrounds weigh in on how my work speaks to them is fundamental, since film is inherently a medium that deals with communication,” Lorentzen said of the workshop setting. “I think if I were in a community of only filmmakers, the film might end up just being for filmmakers, in a way.”
Just as film is a medium for communication, the haircut in New York Hair serves as a channel into culture. Lorentzen said. “Getting a haircut is this moment when people sit down and converse about what they’re worried about, what they’re hoping for, what happened that week. A lot of who you are comes out in the process—your identity, your class, your community.”
New York Hair depicts five different barbershops from around New York City. Lorentzen noticed the barbershops were cultural pockets within the city, and recalled meeting a Dominican barber who claimed Lorentzen was his first white visitor in 17 years. Lorentzen also recalls visiting dozens of different Chinese barbershops in the city before he found a barber who spoke English. “It’s just really amazing to put yourself out there in these spaces of real cultural purity,” he said.
“I wanted to let real life unfold, rather than extracting it actively,” Lorentzen said.
A critical part of New York Hair is its observational style and episodic structure. The dialects, the topics of conversation, the setting—nothing escapes our eyes and ears in Lorentzen’s medium, static shots, which place us directly in the plush white chairs of the Plaza Hotel from Midtown Manhattan, or with the cheering customers watching a soccer match in Kike’s Barbershop, a Dominican barbershop in Jackson Heights, Queens. We are part of these mundane, yet telling conversations about a family vacation in Yellowstone at the Plaza Hotel, the quality and utility of a wooden pipe at Kike’s, the merits of picking one’s own hairdresser at AG Fashion African Hair Braiding in Manhattan, a Senegalese salon. The return of each barbershop throughout the film reflects the general barbershop setting—a static space of a single purpose, with returning customers and actions.
At the same time, Lorentzen is deliberate about the episodic structure, allowing each scene to flow into another and avoiding the voice-overs and formal interviews that are often characteristic of documentary film. He is careful about letting the events unfold naturally, allowing the footage to speak for itself and avoiding a narrative framework.
“I wanted to let real life unfold, rather than extracting it actively,” Lorentzen said. “Some of these filmmakers I’m inspired by put form and content as one and the same, and for me it’s often about choosing topics that naturally give me the freedom to control the aesthetic choice of the film.”
He names Michael Glawogger as an artistic inspiration, the director of the documentary Megacities: 12 Stories for Survival, a cinematic quilt of urban dwellers’ lives in Mumbai, New York, Moscow and Mexico City. At the same time, Lorentzen also looks to Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, an experimental lab that uses audiovisual media to explore ethnography.
“Film and academics have always been very intertwined for me. It’s really great to be studying film and making film, because they really do go hand in hand,” said Lorentzen about his film and media studies major. “American Studies as my minor has been really important too—I’m taking classes on race, ethnicity and class, and these are contemporary issues I can explore both in the classroom and on my feet.”
