So, what's in a name?

Go right for the jugular why don’t you. Well pick a name. Any name.

OK. Why not a name like… Alan Berliner.

Sounds male, white, middle age, probably middle class and most likely Jewish. The name Alan was popular in the United States during the 1950’s, but you don’t hear it used so much as a first name these days. It means cheerful, harmony, handsome and peace in Gaelic. It may also be derived from a word meaning "rock." The last name Berliner suggests some kind of German heritage, with roots most likely — hate to be obvious — from the city of Berlin.

Whether we like it or not, a name is a compressed history, a series of codes that tie us to time and place. A set of assumptions — whether right or wrong -- that form the basis of a first impression. Then there’s also the psychological side of encountering a name.

For instance?

When I meet someone named Alan Berliner, I unconsciously judge him against every other Alan I’ve ever met, and/or every other Berliner I’ve ever known. From the moment I’ve heard his name until the moment I meet him, I’ve already made

many unconscious associations and calibrations based on how it sounds, how it feels and what I already know about it, that will affect how I’ll relate to him.

And so how do you relate to someone named Alan Berliner?

I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I’ve never met an Alan Berliner I didn’t like.

In creating The Sweetest Sound, you searched the world to find other people named Alan Berliner.

Yes, I was having trouble accepting that I wasn’t the only Alan Berliner in the world and wanted to see what I could do about it.

It seems somewhat unusual that you and two of your namesakes – the Belgian filmmaker Alain Berliner and celebrity photographer Alan Berliner – are public figures. Your name has something of a public life.

You might say that’s how it all started. In recent years, I’ve been mistaken and confused for someone else named Alan Berliner more times than seemed normal. I’d been getting phone calls from magazine art directors and ad agencies telling me they needed this or that photograph of Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor immediately. Someone once sent me a full-page photo of Madonna from People Magazine, (the photo credited to Alan Berliner) with a note: "I didn't know you were a photographer as well." But I guess the coup de grace came after Ma Vie en Rose, the extraordinary film by Alain Berliner. It was such a success that people would rush up to hug and kiss me with congratulations on my successful feature film debut. From time to time, before I'd go on stage to present my films, someone would come up to me and tell me how much they loved my work, and then make a casual reference to Ma Vie en Rose. They thought I was him.

The concept of the name is an abstract one, even relative to the subjects you've explored in your other films.

True. I’ve always taken a kind of pride in choosing difficult subjects to make films about. But one way or the other they’re all explorations of personal identity. They’re all tied to family. To an engagement with history. I’d already made a biography about my dead grandfather, whose chief claim to fame was his involvement in the post-war cotton business between Japan and Egypt. Not exactly the stuff of exciting filmmaking. Then I made a film about my father, whose chief claim to fame was that he had none, and said so repeatedly and rather vociferously. Again, not a particularly promising subject for a filmmaker to work with. And so it occurred to me, why not take on another subject "off the radar" of conventional wisdom — the idea of personal names? A subject that had no fixed boundaries, that was essentially conceptual in nature, and (this should have been a warning) that no one had ever tried to make a film about before. I guess I could take some solace from the fact that everyone has a name, and that it would be reasonable to argue their relevance to the formation of personality and identity.

The big problem was that not everyone agrees about the significance of names. For every person who believes the Latin expression, nomen est omen – that names are destiny, there’s another who thinks that names are no more important than hair color or eye color in determining who we are. It’s kind of like astrology. You believe or you don’t believe. Or you believe (only) when you need to believe.

Either way, names pervade virtually every aspect of our lives. We hear and say our names every day. The first words we ever learn as an infant are also the ones etched onto our tombstones when we die. And I think I can safely say that everyone has a name story, a particular read on how their name suits them or doesn’t, how they’ve changed it or would like to change it, how (for better or worse) it’s shaped a part of their identity.

So where did you start? With your own name?

I began where I always begin, with a tremendous amount of research. With a passion to understand the total landscape of whatever subject I’m entering. In fact, over the course of making the film, one of the hardest things I had to do was let go of everything I knew – to accept that the film could not possibly contain everything I had learned about names.

I’ve heard you say this was the most difficult film you’ve ever made.

Without question. Certainly Nobody’s Business was the most emotionally draining thing I’ve ever done, but just for sheer filmmaking challenge, The Sweetest Sound is easily the most difficult, the riskiest. If you think of filmmaking in terms of something like Olympic diving, then I suppose this film has what they call a very high "degree of difficulty." For the first time I’m the fish, the fisherman and the cook. The main subject, the main character and the author. Sometimes I just wanted to run and hide from such emotional and creative pressure.

But the film didn’t exactly start out that way. At one point it seemed as though I was on a path towards making a much more traditional documentary about the subject of names. After the emotional intensity of my two previous films, I felt the need to do something broader and less intense. Something with a more humorous edge. Maybe I just wanted to breathe out a little bit.

That explains the visits to the name societies and the street interviews.

Yes. In fact the opening of the film to a great extent describes the true journey of its making. I thought (naively so) that I was going to make "the definitive film" about names, and set out with that in mind. I traveled to the Jim Smith Society annual meeting, to the National L.I.N.D.A Convention, and especially out onto the streets of New York. I spent a day in Harlem talking about African American names, a day in Chinatown talking about Chinese names… I must have interviewed thirty different women about the issue of marriage and maiden names.

It took me a while, but I realized I was looking for something I couldn't find, trying to solve a problem that wasn’t mine to solve. In any event, outside of some important, fascinating and even humorous information — there are actually some truly provocative anecdotal, statistical and historical things to know about names — no matter how hard I tried to dress it all up — the results were boring. Maybe the subject was just too big? Maybe I’m not used to doing something without having a real personal stake in it? Frankly, it felt as though I was making someone else’s film.

Can you talk any more about the early cuts of the film and how they pushed you in a different direction?

Because I was trying to cover a seemingly infinite list of name issues -- kind of like hanging laundry, piece by piece on the clothesline -- the early versions of the film never really got to the heart of the matter. What a name is. How it means. Where it lives. Its true psychological and emotional dimensions. My disappointment with the first rough-cuts of the film kept reminding me how far I was from my usual approach to unraveling a subject. Kept forcing me inward. And finally, kept pushing me to accept that in order to really work, the film would have to be about one name only -- mine. That only by blasting through the personal, would I be able to find a path to the bigger picture. In the end I had to come back to what I know, to work from who I am, where I come from. To draw from real experience. I had basically recapitulated the inherent argument for the "personal" nonfiction film.

It does seem appropriate for you to turn the camera on yourself – your films have seemed to strike closer and closer to home, from the universal American family in Family Album (1986), to your grandfather in Intimate Stranger (1991) and your father in Nobody's Business (1996).

People have approached those three films as a trilogy. But I want The Sweetest Sound to be seen as a continuation of my ongoing investigations. Make some more room on the shelf and call it a quartet. But you’re right. The trajectory of my work has had its own internal intuitive logic. And its own momentum. Sometimes it feels like it has a mind of its own. After I made Intimate Stranger, audiences challenged me to make a film about my father, his nemesis in the film. And after I made Nobody’s Business, lots of people said, "now that you've done your grandfather, and your father, it’s time to make a film about you." It was in the air. But I was resistant. I thought (as I still do) that I was too young for an autobiography, too young to "do me." But actually, now that I’ve tasted the challenge of a first-person, persona-driven cinema essay, I’m excited about the challenge of tackling an autobiography. I just need to wait another 40 years until I have a full life story under my belt.

And your approach is far from typical in terms of autobiography. You examine yourself through an aspect of identity that not everybody takes so seriously.

Well, one of the many possible (and rejected) titles for the film was Scratching the Surface. My inspiration for this particular title was the idea of tickling something out of this external identifier we call a name, and excavating a deeper understanding. There’s a line in the film, "The label that was given to me the day I was born has now worked its way deep inside my bones," that hints at the dual nature of names as functioning both outside and inside of identity awareness.

You document your struggle to name this film – that seems appropriate.

That was the only reason I was able to laugh at my difficulty finding a title for the film. Otherwise it would have driven me crazy. But I challenge myself in the film, at one point even asking the audience, "What do you call a film about your own name?" As this film evolved, from my first grant proposal all the way through the many different versions and the daily re-writes of my voice-over, the film had many different titles. At one time I even called it, Untitled: A Film About Names. I show 15 rejected titles on screen at one point, but there are hundreds more where they come from. Finding a name for this film was a big struggle. It was actually titled, Confessions of a Name-aholic, for about a month or so! I must have been out of my mind.

That segment seems to embody the playfulness of The Sweetest Sound. You must have had fun making it.

You can't make a film about your own name and not acknowledge the absolute and inherent narcissism of it all. I suppose any project that’s truly personal makes you face the terror of being perceived as self-indulgent. As a navel-gazer. And so here I was, making a film about my own name; you can’t get much more self-absorbed than that. I knew I had to face the narcissism issue head-on. That I couldn't hide from it. I had to embrace it, to play with it, to let the audience see that I’m having fun with it. I want viewers to feel that I’m aiming for a kind of "ebullient narcissism" -- Philip Lopate taught me that – to sense that I’m smiling the whole way through.

But I was also immersed in exploring the form of the personal essay film, trying to find a voice that was informal, vulnerable, somewhat humorous, even a little mischievous at times -- and -- a storytelling structure that was idiosyncratic, spontaneous and somewhat open-ended. Because I live a part of my life through my filmmaking process, the irony of going deeper within in order to tackle such a ubiquitous universal subject seemed like an interesting personal and creative stretch. I guess I should also mention that I was going through a tremendous amount of psychological and emotional upheaval in my own private life. Maybe the humor in the film is a response to that as well. A way of keeping sane.

The film does explore some eternal issues. It's like the end of Intimate Stranger, when your mom says of your grandfather, "He left us a good name."

I love when that happens. When the films talk to one another. When they begin to cross-reference and cross-fertilize with one another. I always intended for The Sweetest Sound to explore the ways in which identity is formed by the fact of a name; I never expected to make a film that would change the way I thought about mortality and memory. As playful as it is, in many ways this is also the most melancholy film I’ve ever made. I try to portray the idea that a name has two lives, or rather two roles -- one when we’re here, and one when we’re gone.

And you've got another eternal monument to your name – you registered alanberliner.com. In fact, the film has a preoccupation with the digital domain. Why?

This isn’t a film I could have made ten years ago. I don't know how I could have gone about trying to find everyone in the world with my name before the existence of the internet. And even with all the incredible search engines available on the web, I really only had access to those Alan Berliners with listed telephone numbers. So I had no choice but to augment my internet search with a snail-mail campaign, sending individual letters to Berliner families all over the world. I even bought a series of CD-ROMS that contain all the telephone books of the United States.

How many letters did you send?

About 800 – each one was signed by hand, addressed by hand, and of course, folded, sealed and stamped by hand. I found an additional three Alan Berliners through the mail, so it was clearly worth the effort. But back to the internet – there are many, many sites and links dedicated to the subject of names -- their histories, etymologies, genealogies -- I’m not even talking about the proliferation of home-pages. So my search for names and the information gathering potential of the internet came together quite naturally.

The digital domain also serves in the film as a kind of visual motif.

I like to think that it resonates with and refers back to the typewriter motif from Intimate Stranger – where the sound of the keystroke was used to rhythmically punctuate -- I like to describe it as adding a kind of musicality — to the flow of shots inside the film. I had spent so much time on the internet looking for sites about names, searching for links to name memorials and especially telephone directories, that it began to intrigue me as a strong visual theme to weave throughout the film.

But The Sweetest Sound borrows images, sounds and stylistic devices from several of my films. I borrowed lots of images from a short collage film I made in 1980 called, City Edition. The home movies come from The Family Album, the cemetery shots from Intimate Stranger… it won’t take people long to recognize some crowd images, home movies and the use of the orchestra tuning from Nobody’s Business. Not to mention the cast of characters running throughout all of them.

The voice-over has a different quality in this film than in your others – it really serves to build the narrative.

This is a narrated film, and I’ve never done that before. I've always had the foil of involving other people in the storytelling -- whether it was my mother and my uncles in Intimate Stranger or my father in Nobody's Business — to keep things moving along. With The Sweetest Sound, I’m on my own. It’s my name. I’m the person obsessing about it. I’m the one who sought out all the other Alan Berliners in the world, who invited them to dinner and decided to build a film around it. I think it’s fair to say I have a lot of explaining to do. There was no other way around it. This was the first film where I was going to have to come out from behind the curtain and reveal myself.

Even though the narrative serves to structure the film, The Sweetest Sound manages to maintain a jazzy, free-flowing feel.

In many ways, this film is less rigidly structured than any other film I’ve made. There’s no lifetime chronology to contend with, no direct birth to death arc. The film is always moving from inside to outside – weaving issues about my particular name -- where it comes from, how I got it, what it means, who else has it, my struggle in sharing it with others — with insights and information about the American name pool -- things like the most common names, or the results of various name studies, or even my final little coda over the closing credits about "alphabetical neurosis."

There is also a lot of text in this film – words are on the screen at almost any given moment. Why?

Names are, after all, words. And that reminds me. There’s a built-in problem with a film based on a topic so abstract and conceptual: what do you use for images? You can’t go to a film archive and say, "What images do you have on the subject of names?" because there are no images of names per se. So I looked for names wherever I could – in the newspaper, carved into desks, carved into sidewalks, in cemeteries, on war memorials, on the AIDS Quilt, on Ellis Island. The internet. This is not exactly an image-friendly subject.

Among the techniques you use is a kind of strobing of images of text – words and pictures flashing so quickly that viewers can't hope to take them all in. It's a technique you've used before, and very effective here as well.

In my film, Intimate Stranger, I had sequences of individual photographs on screen for as few as two, four, seven or eight frames at a time. Some people sitting in the front row said it was like an assault on the senses. In this film, when I tell you that there are about 2300 names in a typical daily edition of The New York Times, I can't show you all of them, but I can show you a lot of them. In all of my work I’m interested in the idea of information overload, of the enormous wealth of possibility contained in my subject, and also of being burdened with the weight of so much stuff to sort through. But above all, I’m always signaling obsession.

Obsession. Maybe that’s the key word in all of this?

I think it’s fair to say that I've turned over every rock in search of the meaning of my name. I’m not trying to make believers out of people, but I am interested in making the audience reflect upon how they might be taking their own names for granted. I also want to make them think a bit more deeply the next time they have to give someone else a name -- and back to the issue of identity -- make them reconsider the sense of individuality associated with just what it is we call ourselves. By the way, do you know how many Jason Silvermans there are in the world?

Jason Silverman artisticdir@ttpix.org is the artistic director of the Taos Talking Picture Festival and a curatorial assistant at the Telluride Film Festival. His writing can be read at Wired.com and in the book Contemporary North American Directors (Wallflower Press, 2001) and the forthcoming English-Canadian Cinema.