For more than 25 years filmmaker Jem Cohen has been creating highly personal portraits of renegade musicians and evocative, history-laden places. He first visited Hallwalls in the mid-1980s to screen two shorts as part of a group show: the first a city symphony film called “This Is the History of New York,” the second what he terms “a kind of ethnographic document” of the Butthole Surfers. From the beginning of his practice until today, Cohen has consciously made work almost entirely on his own, utilizing the DIY politics that he shared with his friends growing up in our nation’s capital. “When punk rock hit DC in the late ’70s, that became the template for me as a filmmaker,” he says. “Super8 was my punk rock, my way of finding a means in which to work outside of the system” of traditional, profit-motivated filmmaking.

Cohen’s most recent feature film, Chain, which he will present in person at Hallwalls Cinema this Friday (March 31) at 8 and 10pm, may seem a radical departure from his other work. Unlike his feature films Instrument (1999), made in collaboration with members of the DC-based Fugazi, or the portrait Benjamin Smoke (2000), Chain is a hybrid feature that blends documentary and narrative elements instead of relying solely on observational footage or fiction to tell its story.

Shot over a period of seven years and incorporating images from more than a dozen different locations in the US and abroad, the film forms a sense of suspended, half-inhabited environments and public, plastic places like amusement parks. When he had finished it, Cohen recalls reviewing his first 16mm film, “A Road In Florida,” made more than 20 years before, and being shocked by the similarity of his oldest and latest works. “It’s the same film!” he says. “That’s kind of interesting and terrifying; even the idea of having a documentary/narrative hybrid and using a character who is a non-actor to embody certain things—that was already there” in his first short.

The two central characters in Chain never meet, yet their stories shift and wend, creating a sort of dream-like narrative from two ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Tamiko is a young Japanese businesswoman sent to the States to research public spaces such as theme parks and hotels for her company; Amanda, a runaway, lives a hand-to-mouth existence on the periphery of a suburban shopping mall. Their reflections are linear but subtle, especially in contrast to the usual high drama that mainstream film characters act out.

“One of the best things that can happen when people see this film is the confusion as to whether or not it is documentary or narrative, and to me that’s the ideal situation,” says Cohen. “There was never a script that I could have handed anyone as the script for the film Chain. There are parts of the film that are very carefully scripted; it’s not an improvised film. I’m often working backwards, where I’m looking at footage that may be entirely documentary shot years ago and I’m seeing something in it that works into the lives of these characters—so it’s an evolving, organic script and much of the actual shape of the film is found in the edit room.”

In fact, this feature began as “Chain x 3,” a three-channel installation commissioned in 2000 by the Australian Center for the Moving Image for The Screening Gallery in Melbourne. The installation incorporated music by God Speed You! Black Emperor, who also contributed to the feature film. Cohen, who shot hours of footage documenting his travels to international film festivals throughout the 1990s, quickly noticed that whether he was shooting in the States, Australia, Europe or Canada, all the cityscapes looked eerily similar. “Essentially, regional character was disappearing because of the same chain stores, the same corporatized spaces,” he says. Cohen felt that, presenting this footage together, he could draw attention to the ways in which the long arm of capitalism has fundamentally changed our landscapes.

“As I made the decision to explore that as a subject, I just asked myself the question: How are people living in this new world we’re creating? I started to do a lot of research just by reading the newspapers, reading the business pages, which I had generally ignored up until then, and found that they were actually very rich in terms of potential narrative. For example, I was reading a lot about the class-action lawsuits against Wal-Mart or I was reading about the way that corporate executives were increasingly concerned about ideas of synergy, combining restaurants with theme park ideas—tying everything together in that way that corporations are so fond of doing these days.”

Cohen also found inspiration from texts such as Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, which explores the ways in which the new economy is affecting the everyday lives of working women, and Pandemonium, a portrait of the Industrial Revolution by British documentarian Humphrey Jennings told through scraps of poetry and written accounts from the 1660s until the 1880s. As with the end credits for all his films, Cohen acknowledges other artists who have inspired his own work; in this case both Jennings and renowned French film essayist Chris Marker, who Cohen refers to as “a renegade outside of the normal systems of filmmaking…who saw filmmaking as a means of inquiry into the world in which we live which encompasses history and politics, architecture and people in their everyday lives.” As Cohen stresses, both Jennings and Marker “are collage artists more than anything else,” using fragments and disparate clips over long periods of time to draw connections. In much the same way, the specific pieces of sound, image, music and reflection that make up Chain coalesce to form what Cohen calls “a broader picture of our age.”

“It’s a bit of a crackpot, ambitious notion,” Cohen adds, “but I was curious to give it a go.”

Cohen’s visit and the screening of Chain has been organized by the Central NY Programmer’s Group and is co-sponsored by Hallwalls, Squeaky Wheel, the Experimental TV Center and UB’s Department of Media Studies Graduate Club and Programming Committee.