Film Club Featurette: Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

On Wednesday, 23 March, the Phnom Penh Film Club proudly presents Spalding Gray’s abstruse and enduringly quirky monologue performance from 1987, *Swimming to Cambodia*—directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Spalding Gray, and starring a notebook, a card table, and Spalding Gray as Spalding Gray. 

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Few creatives in history have proven as polarizing as the man whose set-free, cast-free, prop-free, improvised-from-a-card-table monologues in the 1980s galvanized a usually jaded New York Theater elite. An already-accomplished thespian and improv artist, in 1980 Gray had hired his first venue with borrowed money to present his discursive recitation of travel in a time of love and loss, *India and After*. For one incredible evening, Gray delivered half-remembered yarns and three-layer self-assessments inspired by single words drawn completely at random from a stack of flash cards. The project struck its lucky attendees dumbfounded, even as it flirted thrillingly with collapsing into bush-league poppycock. 

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Gray essentially woke up the next morning the world’s first hybrid cult-superstar: the lone-wolf champion of an exotic minimalist form that, in his hands at least, could manage to work despite having nothing to work *with*. With his instant bona fides and beguilingly personable charisma, Gray found himself hired in 1984 by Columbia Pictures to travel to Bangkok for a supporting role in Roland Joffe’s seismic tour de force about the Khmer Rouge genocide, *The Killing Fields*. As many will already know, nothing about the production or the shoot would go anything like according to plan. But for Gray this only sweetened the compensation package—by gifting him the anecdotal substrate for his next spoken-word performance, *Swimming to Cambodia*. 

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This time Gray was able to secure a film crew and a distribution deal with which to set the theatrical performance to celluloid (taking fastidious care to preserve the de-saturated tonalities of the theatrical original) and in the process he of course blew away an entirely fresh collection of eyes and hearts and minds. Most people have never heard of Spalding Gray; a majority of those who have, and an even greater share of those who love his work, know him for this one, paper-thin cinematic rumination on the issue of just how little it really takes to tell a story. 

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With the benefit of hindsight it all probably seems sweetly archaic and naïve. Many of us, displacing today’s grim reality with today’s often turgid and “spontaneous” cultural outlets, would find Gray’s formula at least predictable and maybe downright cliché. Some of us would find him needlessly pretentious and more than a few of us would bristle at the subversive moxie of his seemingly un-original conceit. 

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But to appreciate the man, and the art form he essentially invented, one must always endeavor to transport one’s self to a time before selfie sticks and YouTube. One must imagine sitting in a small off-Broadway theater and having no earthly idea just how inventive, how fully-formed, how cinematically enthralling, the act of riffing from a jotted notebook on a card table, could prove to be.

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One must imagine this.

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...Or one could simply come and join us Wednesday night at 6:30, and experience it for one’s self. And I really, *really* hope you will.