Studio > Not Me, Murphy

Created in collaboration with filmmaker Jason Yamas, Not Me, Murphy is an experimental, feature-length film which grapples with the complexities of both queer sociosexuality and psycho-emotional instability. The film premiered at MIX NYC: New York Queer Experimental Film Festival in 2013.

According to MIX:

"Production has delivered stunning, mind-bending hallucinations...Shot on popular amatuer medium, Super VHS, Not Me, Murphy feels as if we are watching some other family’s home movies, edited together with an avant-garde sensibility. The cuts are jumpy and disorienting while we overhear improvised conversation often vulgar, repetitive, or incomprehensible."

Now This Is What a Film Festival Venue Looks Like: Inside MIX NYC’s Lair
Bryce J. Renninger
November 15, 2013 4:18PM

The 26th Annual MIX NYC, New York’s Queer Experimental Film Festival is taking Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood by storm all week. After opening earlier this week with a program of the best in queer film and video work and some performance and installation pieces, the festival rages on into the weekend.

The festival, which was started by the filmmaker Jim Hubbard and the writer Sarah Schulman, has a long indie film history. It’s been a part of recent indie film history as the launching pad for Jonathan Caouette when he was finishing up “Tarnation.” Caouette will be back with two new shorts before the Saturday screening of Jason Ryan Yamas’s “Not Me, Murphy.”

Every year, the festival’s venue, all dressed up with decorations and installations, is part of the allure, and this year is no exception. And the festival has Andre Azevedo (Installations Coordinator) and Diego Montoya (Venue Designer) to thank for the beauty that is their converted warehouse space, which takes on the body as its theme.

Check out photos of the venue at IndieWire.

How Jonathan Caouette Protege Jason Yamas Is Following His Mentor’s Lead with His Debut Feature, ‘Not Me, Murphy’
Bryce J. Renninger
December 6, 2013 11:18AM

Jason Ryan Yamas debuted his first feature, “Not Me, Murphy,” at New York’s Queer Experimental Festival MIX NYC last month. The film, shot on a professional VHS format, Super VHS, depicts the life of a young man who decides he may just need a break from his everyday life. Murphy has what doctors would call Dissociative Identity Disorder, and his personality and temperament change at various points throughout the film.

All throughout, Yamas (who also plays Murphy) creates scenarios that provide a glimpse at Murphy’s mindset — decentered but also caring and endearing — in a style that is at once influenced by Caouette’s work, but also stands on its own as an incredibly compelling, often funny, thoroughly kaleidoscopic film about one man’s experience of the coming apart of the things that make up his personality, his motivations, his inner core.

Indiewire caught up with Yamas after his MIX NYC screening of the film, which in addition to being inspired by the work of Caouette, was preceded by two new shorts from Caouette himself and marked the 10th anniversary of Caouette’s breakout film “Tarnation” making its world premiere at MIX a Sneak Preview.