“Like everyone else, I’m overly on the internet,” says writer-director Ray Smiling, whose latest short film, “kamikaze,” just won best experimental short and best cinematography at the Salute Your Shorts Film Festival.
The film draws on fashion photography and French New Wave, among other influences, to tell a story of betrayal that also interrogates the process of image-making.
But when Smiling set out to add to the visual language of cinema with “kamikaze,” he turned to an influence that some filmmakers look down on: internet meme culture.
“Kamikaze” stylishly tells a straightforward story — during a Coney Island fashion shoot, a model named Knives (Dominique Babineaux) finds herself caught between an egotistical social media star (Waylon Rose) and his domineering photographer girlfriend (Clementine Chalfant) as their relationship combusts.
At one point, a character comes to a realization that feels like a car exploding — so Smiling inserts a shot of one, like a meme, in the middle of the narrative. It’s the riskiest and most experimental moment of the film, beautifully shot by Timothy S. Jensen.
It’s also the moment that most lingers.
“If I’m going to critique image-making, I’m going to use all the tools of image-making in the critique of it,” Smiling explains. “In a lot of the frames, the framing is a straight-up references to fashion photographers. And then the pacing of it, especially in the really quick montages, that’s me replicating when you’re on Instagram, and you’re just like, flip, click, click, click, flip, click.“
The film is skillfully structured and paced — never too fast or too slow — and Smiling credits that partly to his filmmaking sensibilities combining with an awareness of internet attention spans.
“I constantly just imagine, whenever someone’s watching whatever I’m making, that their fingers are drifting up to their little ‘Close Window’ button,” he says. “I’m like, ‘OK, cool: You have X amount of seconds before they close it, so you need to do something in that time to just be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, come back, come back, come back.'”
‘Kamikaze’ Director Ray Smiling on Advertising and Filmmaking
Growing up in Brooklyn, Smiling was a huge movie fan. But being a filmmaker, he says, “always seemed kind of like being an astronaut, where you’re like, ‘That’s a cool job, but I don’t know how one becomes an astronaut.'”
About a decade ago, he started working for the fun, artistic streetwear company Mishka, which bears the motto “wear your weird.” When its video director left, Smiling says, he offered to take over.
“They’re like, ‘We won’t pay you any more money. And I was like, don’t care.’ And they’re like, ‘We love that,'” he recalls.
That led to Smiling becoming an advertising creative. But when he got on sets for ad shoots, he quickly realized that he really wanted to direct.
“And it took me about eight years to make that happen,” he says.
Skipping film school, he instead got paid to learn on the job. He quickly developed a bold, keep-up cinematic style. One of his influences was filmmaker, music video director, and video artist Kahlil Joseph, whose work showed him that “you can kind of do whatever you want to do with editing. As long as it feels right, you can make things work,” Smiling notes.
Smiling’s win at Salute Your Shorts — one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee — is the latest success in a career that is, like the car in “kamikaze,” on fire.
In addition to his advertising work for clients including Adidas, Beats by Dre, Under Armour, and the NBA, he directed the TV show Khaki Is Not Leather and the short “Play This at MY Funeral,” as well as another short he just completed. He’s also just finished writing a feature.
He says that he’s always thinking the same thing as he works:
“Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone?”
The respect for the audience’s time helps him earn the moments when he asks viewers to slow down.
“When I say, ‘Let’s just look at the ocean for 30 seconds,’ it’s very intentional,” he adds. “And I try to deploy that with with precision.”
Main image: “kamikaze,” directed by Ray Smiling