Girl Walk // All Day is a film for everyone who caught themselves dancing in public to the music in their headphones and just didn’t care. It’s also a piece of visual art painted with the colors of New York City, where the residents don’t even blink when a goofy girl in a windbreaker starts dancing like a crazy person right through a park in broad daylight.
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The debut film from director Jacob Krupnick skips dialog, aside from a subtitled encounter between the movie’s star (Anne Marsen) and a Hasidic man who asks her why she’s dancing. It essentially uses nothing but All Day, the latest album from Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), as its narrative force. Being that Girl Talk’s musical montages are inherently random — N.W.A. and Jane’s Addiction? Sure! — it’s not exactly an obvious choice for interpretive dance.
Yet it fit the director’s vision perfectly.
“I knew I needed a piece of music that had an emotional arc to it, that had a story unto itself,” Krupnick said in a phone interview with Wired prior to the South by Southwest film festival, where the film will have its first showing Friday. “At first listen, the album seemed like a godsend.”
Although the director admits it was hard to keep the film’s energy as high as that of the album for the duration — “you don’t have, say, the Four Seasons” — the album worked just fine. And it almost effortlessly gives a soundtrack to 71 minutes of Marsen (“The Girl”), John Doyle (the film’s pop-and-locking “Creep”) and Daisuke Omiya (the tap-dancing “Gentleman”) as they dance their way through New York, from the High Line to Central Park to the subway to Occupy Wall Street and back.
Girl Walk // All Day proves surprisingly infectious, and the film couldn’t be more suited for the party atmosphere that invades Austin for SXSW. At a recent screening at San Francisco’s IndieFest, viewers danced in front of the screen — not unlike fans at the average Girl Talk concert — and it wasn’t the first time (“Most of our screenings have been without chairs,” Krupnick said during a Q&A at the San Francisco showing).
The film started as the director’s long-shot dream project. In December 2010, Krupnick approached Marsen and Doyle with an email that said, as Krupnick remembers it, “I just heard this album that you have to download immediately. Wouldn’t it be wild if we danced all over New York and made a music video to the whole thing?”
“It wasn’t especially sophisticated as an idea. And it definitely wasn’t well thought-out.” “It wasn’t especially sophisticated as an idea,” Krupnick admits. “And it definitely wasn’t well thought-out.”
Since Gillis had released the album under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license, Krupnick figured they were free to remix the album with their dance liberally. So a month later, they took a small crew on the Staten Island Ferry to shoot a teaser trailer for a full-length video for All Day.
Fueled entirely by Marsen — whose open, smiling face when she’s dancing makes her seem like the Bright Swan — that teaser went online and within what seemed like mere hours was popping up on the Huffington Post and other blogs. (Krupnick was on his honeymoon at the time and hadn’t been online much. When he finally saw the Huffington Post, he thought it was some kind of weird joke.)
At the end of February 2011, the team put up a call for funds on Kickstarter and by early April they’d reached their goal and raised $24,817.
Filming began not too long after the Kickstarter money came through. Armed with more cash than they had initially expected, they were able to shoot much longer than Krupnick had anticipated. In all, the film took about 50 days to shoot — 40 of them in the spring and early summer of 2011 and the rest in late summer/early fall, when the Occupy Wall Street scenes at Zuccotti Park were filmed. Aside from the moment when Marsen was kicked out of Yankee Stadium for dancing along a barrier between the crowd and the field, the filming went pretty smoothly (her ouster made the final film).
Originally the script called for passers-by to react to the crazy antics of the film’s trio of dancers but, as Krupnick found out, it takes more than a guy in a skeleton sweatsuit chasing a girl through the streets to get a rise out of unflappable New Yorkers.
“In the script there were cases where I wrote in brackets [Commuter Stares] — it’s like taking that classic ‘Applause’ light that used to be in television studios and applying it to real life,” Krupnick said. ‘[During filming] there was very rarely the reaction that I had imagined.”
The result of Krupnick’s work, minus the intense reaction shots, is a wonderfully fun ride, made for brown-bag-friendly theaters and people who love soundtracks more than plot. It’s hard to imagine it having much of a life out of theaters — at least beyond fans of Girl Talk and dance videos. But to Krupnick, that’s fine. He sees the movie having a future through alliances he could build with independent theaters that hold events where people get together for special parties with DJs or performances.
“I just have faith that while I’m working, kind of around the clock to make all the shows that are coming up a reality, then the answer to that will emerge,” Krupnick said. “I got to have faith.”
Check out a gallery of images from the film above, then watch the Girl Walk // All Day trailer below.
