I sat down last night and watched 60 Writers / 60 Places, and got up this morning and watched part of it again. Directed by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, it's a fantastic short film (about fifty minutes), both purely for the readings themselves and also for the glimpses of writerly personality and temperment that emerge even in these short glimpses.

 Lots of great writers appear in 60 Writers / 60 Places--Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Joanna Howard, Kim Chinquee, Robert Lopez, Deb Olin Unferth, Sam Lipsyte, Rick Moody, and Adam Robinson, among many others--and of course it's great to see their work delivered here. In addition, there are lots of faces new to me, including several very young writers and several writers of a more academic bent. It's a diverse cast, and nearly everyone's work was interesting as language and also well-delivered as performance. Some of the standouts include Unferth's reading from Vacation in a laundromat, Fiona Maazel's at the gym, Willie Perdemo's reading at a playground, and Will Eno's reading that closes the movie, as well as those of many of the other writers mentioned above. Throughout the movie, I found myself riveted to the chair not just because I was curious about who was coming next, but also because I wanted to see where they would be.

Each reading begins with the writer staring into the camera, usually with a fairly blank look on their face--the film's website says the movie "begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves." After a few seconds, the reading begins, with the camera static and the scene around the writer often moving as if unaffected by the reading. Afterward, there's another second or two where the writer has obviously been asked to return their gaze to the camera, to stare the viewer down, returning the scene to its static beginning before the film cuts away. This post-reading pause is one of the movie's most interesting features, because while the blankness of the stare before the reading has a performative, "game face" kind of feel, the one after rarely does: Here, nearly every writer's face has changed slightly, even if they've only read a single sentence. The most common occurrence is a brief, almost imperceptible smile or grin, tugging at the corners of mouths pulled tight, one I've seen at countless readings, that I've felt on my own face at the end of my own performances. It's the look of an athlete after a game, a gymnast who feels sure she's stuck the landing, and in the context of this film's conceit it further becomes a sort of recognition of some bigger transformation that has just taken place, where a person is transformed via the mere act of reading their own words, their bodies stepping out of their everyday location--a subway car, a garden, a supermarket--into some space more electric. This is a movie full of such moments, and Kimball and Dipierro should be proud of how many great ones they've managed to capture on film.

You can buy 60 Writers / 60 Places on DVD from Little Burn Films, either individually or with Kimball and Dipierro's previous film, I Will Smash You.