The Target Shoots First

Here's an interesting idea: Take the brand new Hi-8 camera your parents gave you upon college graduation with you to work EVERY DAY. Sounds ubsurd? Well that's just what Chris Wilcha did. In 1993 he took a job with mail order giant Columbia House, and recorded at least one thing every day! The viewer recieves an interesting and humorous look into the workings of a large company. Wilcha edits down the 200+ hours of aquired footage and puts it into this film. The film goes from funny to brilliant in one blink of an eye. If you're scared of non-narrative films, this one's sure to bring you around!

Chris Wilcha has made a small home movie with, it seems, deceit and bitterness as his guides. He paints a bunch of professionals who are minding their own business, trying to get their jobs done the best they can, as a bunch of morons. The unintended result is the depiction of Wilcha's insecurities, jealousy, and general sour grapes. What he doesn't understand is that not everyone in the corporate world is a sell-out, and not everyone who can't make a living is a noble artist. Is it really possible that besides Wilcha's boss Rick Hunt (the only good guy in the whole movie), no one at the company has both a brain AND a heart? Columbia House allowed Wilcha to aim his camera at the company every day, so it seems to me that they had nothing to hide. Wilcha obviously does, but wasn't successful.

The two things that separate 'The Target Shoots First' from the rest of the Cinema Verite pack are it's content and it's form: the content is basically an expanded, clever home video and it's form is well, home video. Christopher Wilcha takes his college graduation gift, a hi-8 video camcorder, and uses it to document his life in the corporate world at a job at Columbia House, the world's biggest mail-order Music distributor. His inner conflict of converting from being a college music scenester, to making choices at a clueless, corporate business, is well documented in the everyman's format of video. Not only was the format of the film do-it-yourself, but so was the struggle of the director during the course of the film, stopping at nothing to fight to make the most insignificant of changes at the all mighty juggernaut of a business that is Columbia House. What shows through the film, is a compassionate attempt to show the persistence of the working man, Christopher Wilcha and his band of colleagues against the evil empire that is constantly thwarting them. To put it musically, Wilcha 'Rages Against the Machine' in the most calm, cool and clever way ever to be chronicled in a film.

Perfect. The most important documentation of the generation x paradox: the wish to be a revolutionary free-spirit and yet having to earn money in a regular job, regular city with regular people. It is an entirely temporal piece, perfectly preserved as a slice of cultural history, impossible to recreate at any other place, at any other time. The documentary is the study of office politics in a Columbia House record club office. Wilcha took his camera into work with him everyday. He quickly becomes the guru of alternative rock within Columbia House, in parallel with the rise of Nirvana, (Nevermind had just exploded in America,) because of his 'youthful' record collection. His promotion after promotion is in direct opposition to his intention to be a creative mind and to increase artistically, not financially. There is certainly an intention to demonstrate this interior battle, but it is his appreciation of people and emotion that makes the documentary so much stronger. The studies of office parties or pregnancies are superb. The film looks beautiful. People and urban landscapes are considered throughout and Wilcha's reality-directorial talent shines through in a fly-on-the-wall experience of the true nature of multinational business. The editing is excellent and unbelievably, the camera's sound is used, no other dubbing was necessary. The film has a naivety similar to Douglas Coupland's book 'Microserfs', and the frustrations of office environments are familiar to both. Coupland fans should definitely strive to see this. I had the honour to meet Wilcha at a viewing last month, he talked of incredibly exciting new work for which I cannot wait. His own experiences within the company share a sad and spooky correlation to the rise and fall of Kurt Cobain within the music industry. Part of the film's genius is this play on reality and fantasy. Whilst speaking to this phenomenally easygoing culture-journalist, I was sure I saw something of Cobain in his eyes. There's a quote which says something like "Nirvana were the band that told America how unhappy it's children were." Perhaps Wilcha is the director that will tell them about their office workers. Paul.

I really enjoyed this film when Chris Wilcha presented this movie to me and my class recently. It was a creative concept, well shot, and succeeded in finding what it was going for. Special kudos to Chris for editing that much footage into about an hour and a half long movie. ****, 10/10