The set of The Cathedral. Photo by Michael Kohlbrenner.
One of American cinema’s most singular voices, Ricky D’Ambrose has charted a methodical course from short to feature-length filmmaking over the course of a decade. No mere dry-runs, the New York-born director’s shorts are self-contained marvels of narrative and stylistic ingenuity—brief bursts of urban fiction that veritably overflow with visual, aural, and linguistic information. So while in that sense, a shift to features was inevitable—“a feature was always the end goal,” D’Ambrose told me in a recent Zoom call—the shorts provided a key foundation for what was to come. “I think the shorts allowed me to experiment with a certain way of making films,” he said. “Ultimately, it was a way for me to work through some of the ideas I had been carrying around in my head.” But unlike other filmmakers that might forsake the modesty or nuance of their short-form work when transitioning to longer lengths, D’Ambrose has thus far used his features to tell even more intricate and involving stories, scaling up without sacrificing the personality of the films on which he made his name. The Cathedral, D’Ambrose’s second feature following the beguiling Notes on an Appearance (2018), is the 34-year-old filmmaker’s most personal project to date, a decades-spanning family chronicle told through the eyes of a young boy growing up on Long Island.
Following a 2021 premiere in Venice, The Cathedral recently screened virtually as part of this year’s online editions of Sundance and Rotterdam—an impressive trifecta of exposure for a relatively young director who grew up making VHS shot-for-shot remakes of classic genre films like The Shining (1981). Despite the crude results, it was this early foray into moviemaking that solidified the teenage D’Ambrose’s passion for cinema. “It was when I was planning these remakes,” he said, “that it became clear to me that this was something other kids my age, the ones I was around in school, weren’t as interested in. It indicated to me that maybe this wasn’t simply a hobby.” Copying movies that left an early impression on him allowed D’Ambrose to discover the nuances of film grammar firsthand. “It allowed me to think, for the first time,” he says, “about how filmmaking was able to achieve certain effects. For example, how placing the camera in a certain way, in a particular spot, can have an affect on people.”
D’Ambrose didn’t go to film school—in fact, he was rejected, twice, by New York University. Instead, he got a master’s degree in cinema studies from Columbia University. (Years later, when he was finally admitted to NYU, he double-majored in Cinema Studies and English Literature.) This academic background, combined with his adolescent moviemaking pursuits, may explain the DIY ethos and cine-literate nature of his shorts and features. From the outset, a signature style and sensibility can be gleaned. In his first proper short, Pilgrims (2013), a young man (Michael Wetherbee) is visited in his apartment by a refugee, a political radical, and a priest. With impressive economy, D’Ambrose tells this episodic tale through voiceover, handwritten intertitles, and a succession of static setups that isolate the performers—who speak in mannered, highly erudite tones—against spartan backdrops and at slightly askew angles amongst the domestic bric-a-brac.
This formal approach, which looks and feels indebted to modernist masters like Bresson and Straub-Huillet, D’Ambrose says, came naturally, if not without a conscious commitment to refinement. “It never occurred to me that I had to find or develop a visual style,” he tells me. “That’s not to say I didn’t ever consider the choices I made, but there was an ease to it that I continued to whittle down as I made the shorts.” Indeed, tracing the arc from the compact monologues, unassumingly intricate decoupage, and lengthy passages of narration marking Pilgrims and other early efforts like Six Cents in the Pocket (2013) and Spiral Jetty (2015), to the dialogue-free Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday (2020), which is told through a surfeit of reproduced texts and handmade props, reveals a subtle but definitive evolution in the literal and figurative language of D’Ambrose’s peculiar style of narrative.
Six Cents in the Pocket
That this approach is born of a certain tension with traditional storytelling practices is no surprise. “I always feel like I’m in some sort of combat with narrative,” he reveals. “For me it’s not about inventing things—I wouldn’t want to conflate narrative with invention or fantasy—but about gleaning things from the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had at around the time I make a film, and about trying to figure out how those people and places can be combined in a way that interests me—less to tell a story than to convey some impressions I’ve had about things.” For Notes on an Appearance, in which the disappearance of the film’s ostensible protagonist acts as a pretense for more existential comings-and-goings, those people and that place are grad school students and art world figures in New York. A kind of millennial L’avventura (1960), it’s a film that proved D’Ambrose’s uber-literate characters and hermetic storytelling sense could sustain themselves across a vaster backdrop of violence and urban intrigue.
The Cathedral is D’Ambrose’s most ambitious and fully-realized project to date, due in no small part to a €150,000 grant provided by the Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema program for first or second-time feature filmmakers. Comprising a series of workshops and group screenwriting tutorials, the program, as D’Ambrose tells it, was something of a belated encounter with the finer points of film school. “This was the first time I had people whose opinions I trusted devoting themselves and paying very close attention to something I had written—not to change it according to their own tastes, but to help me develop it in a way that was faithful to the spirit of the film I wanted to make.” Amongst other things, the process imposed upon him “a limit in terms of how many days I could spend on any given thing. I think by having to work so quickly—as well as share things and have feedback so soon after writing them—made me a bit more spry as a writer.”
While part and parcel with D’Ambrose’s prior work, The Cathedral does evince a broader perspective through a wider array of characterizations. Based on the director’s own adolescence, the film follows Jesse, an only-child (played successively by Hudson McGuire, Henry Glendon Walter V, Robert Levey II, and William Bednar-Carter) growing up in the suburbs of Long Island from the late-80s through the mid-2000s. Jesse’s parents (Brian d’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro) are divorced and frequently at odds; meanwhile, deep-seated dramas amongst their extended families play out in episodes of familiarly painful acrimony. Fully embracing the story’s period trappings, D’Ambrose applies his typically meticulous eye to settings, fashion, and iconography of a certain nostalgic vintage. Seen and heard throughout are era-specific news clips, radio broadcasts, and television commercials, marking each period through the hazy sounds and images of war (Operation Desert Storm), tragedy (the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), and bygone consumer products (Kodak Gold film).
Director Ricky D'Ambrose on the set of The Cathedral. Photo by Michael Kohlbrenner.
Working for the first time with professional actors (many of them stage-trained), D’Ambrose points out how this new dynamic resulted in less purposefully stilted performances that maintained the essence of both the collaborative process and the people on which the characters were modeled. “Having actors who could make contributions to a film through their performance style—who could come up with ways of interpreting a scene in ways that I perhaps wouldn’t have considered—was very exciting. And I think it’s to the film’s benefit, because, yes, these people are playing fictional versions or interpretations of the people in my family, but they’re still playing characters that are enriched by the memories I have of how my family interacted. To ask them to speak like the characters in Notes on an Appearance would be dishonest.”
The result is a newfound warmth and approachability that, coupled with the narrative’s more openly emotional dimension and an executive producer credit from director David Lowery (who was impressed with Notes on an Appearance and offered up a portion of the post-production funds for the new film), should help The Cathedral reach a less niche audience. What hasn’t changed is the intimacy and specificity of D’Ambrose’s vision, which he continues to enrich through a dedication to a form of homespun cinema that feels less unfashionable than it does productively out-of-step with industrial filmmaking models. If his trajectory thus far is any indication, D’Ambrose may provide a useful template going forward for others of his generation.