Red Hook Streetscape Embodies Paranoia in Local Short Film

On January 9, the NewFilmmakers Series at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan screened Followed, a short by local filmmaker Georg Schmithüsen. New York’s longest-running year-round film festival, NewFilmmakers holds weekly events in the East Village, showing hundreds of movies a year by up-and-coming directors.

A cryptic, visually expressive portrait of psychological instability, Followed begins at night at Pier 44, where a man (Vincent Sicilio) spots a woman (Tia Andriani) and follows her through the shadowy streets of Red Hook to a bar. In the midst of their subsequent romantic encounter, a violent memory or hallucination of an older man, played by Barry O’Meara, invades the mind of the protagonist, who increasingly feels stalked by this enigmatic presence.

“I just kind of let my subconscious write,” Schmithüsen described. “I just used notes on my phone. I kept it very simple on purpose and wrote whatever came into my head without judging it or trying to make a ‘screenplay’ out of it.”

According to Schmithüsen, the story reflects the vulnerabilities – the self-doubt and buried trauma – that can surface during physical and emotional intimacy, but much of the film, which has the quality of a dream or nightmare, is left open to interpretation, including the identity of its unreliable narrator and, especially, the reality of O’Meara’s character. Local viewers will recognize O’Meara as the former owner of the Bait & Tackle, of which the movie, shot shortly before the bar’s closing, provides one last nostalgic glimpse.

A no-budget production, Followed has style and atmosphere thanks to Schmithüsen’s editing and his camerawork, for which he used a Sony Alpha 7 II. With only one other crew member (who functioned as the director’s “bodyguard” and “helped schlepping stuff”), he utilized available light like streetlights and bedside lamps and filmed several scenes inside his own Van Brunt Street apartment. The absence of a sound mixer necessitated some dubbing in postproduction.

“A lot of times, it was just me and Vincent on the streets. We just kind of waited till nobody was around and shot wherever we wanted to go,” he recalled. The filming of the 18-minute short took almost a year.

None of the three cast members had had extensive experience in film acting. Sicilio, who works at Pioneer Works, was the brother of Schmithüsen’s former upstairs neighbor. Schmithüsen met Andriani while eating at Mimi’s Hummus in Ditmas Park, where she waited tables. “I never saw any of these guys act before I hired them,” Schmithüsen admitted. The score, composed by Jeremy Blackman (who, as a child actor, appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia), borrows from Blackman’s 2014 album Verstiegenheit, recorded under the pseudonym William Irish. Blackman worked with Schmithüsen’s wife at the local cafe Rita.

A native of Aachen, Germany, Schmithüsen came to the United States as a ballet student but, after a back injury, embraced film. He’s worked primarily as a location scout for movies like Café Society and Wanted and TV shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Person of Interest. In 1991, he earned his first professional credit, as a camera assistant, for the crime drama Straight Out of Brooklyn, which, coincidentally, was shot in Red Hook.

A few years later, he directed his own self-financed debut feature, shot on expensive 16mm film stock. Unable to recoup costs, he retreated temporarily from directing, focusing on writing scripts. To save money, he also moved from the West Village to Red Hook, where he’s now lived for 18 years.

Followed had its first screening at Hometown Bar-B-Que, with a crowd of about a hundred friends and neighbors. Schmithüsen has submitted it to a number of film festivals and is now waiting on responses.

Brett Yates