An Interview with C. Spencer Yeh

C. Spencer Yeh’s 123 Trailers for Spectacle is an epic presentation of movie trailers created for Spectacle, a microcinema in Brooklyn that specializes in cult films and obscure gems. Yeh’s monumental compilation features tightly edited trailers presented back-to-back on multiple screens. Yeh is also a musician with deep roots in noise and improvisational scenes, and he spoke with a TB 2023 editor, William Smith while getting ready to perform on violin at the exhibition opening.

William Smith: Because the exhibition is called “Small World,” I wanted to ask how you think about scale, whether as a musician or a visual artist.

C. Spencer Yeh: Towards the end of the major quarantine, I had been thinking a lot about the scale at which works are created, with specific audiences in mind. In music, when artists achieve a certain level of reach, the conditions surrounding their work become entirely different than if they’re just trading noise tapes with friends. If you’re making any kind of sound-based work, the assumption is always that you’ll want to trade up: to translate from singing around a campfire to Radio City Music Hall. The truth is, large scale requires a different kind of work. When you move up to larger and larger audiences and deploy the work in larger and larger settings, somewhere under the hood, something changes. Sometimes when you make these transitions—even if you’re operating within the same silo you’d always been operating in—you’re not going to be able to hold on to a certain sense of intimacy or engagement.

I think about my friend Dan Lopatin, who does Oneohtrix Point Never. He was able to achieve reach with an audience, and it provided leverage for him to be able to do movie soundtracks. Since he wasn’t coming up from within the movie industry, he had to have something—something to make people wonder what would happen if they asked him to make a movie soundtrack.

WS: What about your own work? Are you trying to trade up?

CSY: I would say something like, “I’d rather perform for 100 people 30 times than 3000 people once.” At a certain size, what I’m doing just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in a big room or a stadium, or even a reasonable theater.

WS: When you say it doesn’t work, do you mean musically? Or is it that the vibes are off?

CSY: Vibes. I think about having some friends over to cook lasagna. You could make a pretty good lasagna. But then if you’re working the county fair and you make the world’s largest lasagna . . . you see what I’m getting at? I feel like a larger venue just doesn’t have all the vibes that I personally feel.

WS: Is that something about the type of music that you perform?

CSY: There’s a certain amount of physicality in the sound that sometimes would be difficult to transmit, even if it’s amplified really loud. I’m trying to think of metaphors to describe what I mean, but they don’t quite work.

WS: The lasagna metaphor kind of worked. You could imagine how dry that county fair lasagna would be around the sides.

CSY: . . .and how unfortunately damp the middle section would be.

WS: I went to the movies the other day, and in the theater next to mine the Taylor Swift movie was playing.

CSY: Was the music coming through the walls?

WS: No, but in the lobby I could see that people had had a profound experience with that movie. And they were one step removed from Taylor Swift’s performance, in a movie theater rather than a stadium. How does an experience like that scale?

CSY: Because of the way that movie was shot. I started watching a cam of it, and even in the very beginning I started getting goosebumps. The camera’s right up on her. There’s a perspective and physicality even big screens during the concert don’t quite have. People have scanned Swift over the years and gotten to know her the way you scan something to make a 3D model. You spend time with it, and when you see it in a way that you haven’t seen before, it could cause a thrill.

WS: So it’s formal cinematic techniques that are mimicking intimacy?

CSY: Formal techniques that mimic intimacy as well as knowing that the audience is familiar enough with the performer.

WS: Could you talk about how the trailer piece came about? What role did they play in Spectacle, the Brooklyn microcinema collective for which you made these trailers?

CSY: Spectacle is a thirty or forty-seat microcinema doing a performance of a movie theater, and a crucial part of that is producing trailers for the screenings. That continues to be a celebrated part of the theater. Back when I was more involved, there would be times when I’d be working the booth and other members of the collective would stop by around the time when trailers would show before a screening. They’d just drop in and watch those; it felt like a mini concert sometimes. 

Certain trailers had an effect on the audience.  Jon Dieringer cut a trailer for Pirates of the Bubaun, a sort-of ethnographic documentary [about a journey to the Sulu archipelago in the southwest Philippines]. But he used that one Skrillex song from Spring Breakers [“Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”] as the music. People started celebrating that trailer and showing up to Spectacle hoping it would play before the movie.

WS: In many of your trailers you mix different cultural touchstones: chopping up Hollywood-adjacent movies or putting pop soundtracks on obscure cult films.

CSY: There’s a certain novelty in the Skrillex juxtaposition, but it also fits into the tradition of standard movie trailers as well. Music used for movie trailers is not always connected to the movie itself. They have really slow, ponderous covers of songs sometimes.  

WS: The Social Network started that trend with the cover of “Creep”.

CSY: There was a trailer for Alexander Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes. It was a moody long-take  of one of the mutants dragging a body across the desert. And the music was Devendra Banhart.

I was also thinking about Sofia Coppola’s movie trailer style. I saw the trailer for the new one, Priscilla, and it seems to have taken this next step into a mood montage, even more so than the trailers of the past. And I personally really dug it.

WS: Trailers are cultural products in themselves. There’s a Situationist approach to what you’re doing, not to take away the underground cultural force by putting it in this avant-garde tradition

CSY: I cut a trailer for a movie called Stunts. I plotted out the shape of it in my head carefully. I cut together all these lines in the movie where people say the word “stunts.” I was working a screening of it and these two dudes stumbled into the theater drunk off their asses, holding a six-pack. We’re here to watch Stunts! We’re going to take a drink every time they say “stunts”!

WS: How many times do they say “stunts”?

CSY: I don’t even know, but those two dudes were fucked up by the end of it. They might have been the only people who came to the show.

WS: How did you start making trailers?

CSY: I kind of forced my way into the collective and insisted that I cut trailers. I just started doing a lot of moves that weren’t being done, like using music from another source. There used to be certain rules to try to follow: the trailers shouldn’t be longer than a minute and 40 seconds; any sounds used in the trailer should be from the movie itself, including the music; and keep yourself out of it.

You could sometimes tell the moment when a movie trailer tipped over into someone making something new vs. chopping up stuff.  Even if you go out on a limb with something, in the end the trailer is still supposed to be in the service of getting people to come out and watch this movie.

WS: How often did you put yourself into the trailers, tipping them over into something new?

CSY: There have only been a small handful of trailers in the past where it’s felt like it’s been too much about trying to be a personal entertainer, even though I feel it to be an exercise that reflected the thoughts I was having at the time.

There was an early Herschell Gordan Lewis movie, Linda and Abilene, that’s just kind of a soft porn. Really cheesy. Incest tales, sort of. It has no plot, but I cut it together to make it seem like there was a bit more substance. A friend came to see the movie and afterwards she was pissed because she had seen the trailer and thought there was a plot, whereas it just ended up being a series of events that involved the same characters.

It's funny for me to say, especially now that I’m presenting the ones I cut as my work in this biennial, because I would always think and ask myself, am I making this too much about me?

WS: It’s inevitable. How could you spend that much time absorbing the movie, having a reaction to it, putting it together again, without it somehow coming from you?

CSY: I have to admit there have been times when I haven’t seen the entire movie, and so that can skew things. But I try to immerse myself enough. I had a rule about not having explicit violence or anything that was sensationalist because I wanted people to see that stuff when they went to the movie itself—you don’t want to spoil the really good stuff. There were times I felt I was leaning toward a more conservative approach. But then it’s ultimately a really debauched thing, to have one trailer after another for hours.