Lying Down In A World Of Tempest – Lav Diaz Publication

On the occassion of the first Belgian retrospective to date of the work of Lav Diaz, produced by CINEMATEK, Courtisane and Bozar, in collaboration with VDFC (10 SEPTEMBER – 26 NOVEMBER, 2015).

How to come to terms with the history of a country that is haunted by memories of colonization, rebellion and oppression, a country that continues to wrestle with itself in search for meaning and identity? The weight of this question makes itself felt in every frame, in every face, breath and gesture inhabiting the films of Lav Diaz. From his feature debut, Serafin Geronimo: Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (1998), to his latest From What Is Before (2014), all of his films are deeply rooted in the history and politics of his home country, the Philippines. They bear the wounds of a troubled past that have never been able to heal, as the shadows cast by the Spanish and American colonization, the conflict between Moro Muslims and Christians, and Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of Martial Law still loom heavily over the country. Even though the dictatorship has come to an end almost thirty years ago, the harms and injuries produced by the past have never seemed to wither away, but have grown ever more inward. This legacy of trauma and disempowerment, of “stifled hands and silenced voices,” as Alexis Tioseco wrote, is what can be felt reverberating in Lav Diaz’ shattering tragedies of sin, guilt and redemption.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that 19th century Russian literature, especially the work of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, has never been far from his mind. Already in Serafin Geronimo, which starts out with a quote from Crime and Punishment, Diaz seems to have established his main theme: the search for redemption, a theme which continues to run through his oeuvre, from the Tolstoy-inspired Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), in which a onetime political prisoner confronts his former interrogator, to Norte, the End of History (2013), which begins with a Raskolnikov-like figure committing murder, but develops into an allegory about Marcos. And just as the Russian novelists sought to depict “the Russian soul” by making full use of the temporal spaciousness of their prose epics, Diaz’ portrayals of the lives and suffering of the Filipino people unfold over epic lengths of time, stretching over multiple hours. This duration gives Diaz a grand canvas on which he patiently sketches painstaking diagrams of the factors and events that shape the multiple, interconnected lives of the people he observes, unfurling into panoramic meditations on morality, violence and death, torn between humanist faith and materialist despair.

Cinema as window onto the troubled soul of the world, as a quest for the inner life of reality in all its mystery and ambiguity: in Lav Diaz’ work yesteryear’s dream of André Bazin appears to have found a contemporary follower, a filmmaker who is not about to tone down his search any time soon. As he himself has said, “I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind’s existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle. I want to understand the philosophy of a growing flower in the middle of a swamp.”

Stoffel Debuysere

DISSENT ! Michel Khleifi

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A conversation with Michel Khleifi, preceded by a screening of Fertile Memory (1980, BE/PS, 104’).

9 December 2015 20:00, STUK / Cinema Zed, Leuven.

“Somehow, Khleifi has managed in his film to record Farah’s first visit to her land. We see her step tentatively onto a field; then she turns around slowly with arms outstretched. A look of puzzled serenity comes over her face. There is a little hint on it of pride in ownership. The film unobtrusively registers the fact that she is there on her land, which is also there; as for the circumstances intervening between these two facts, we remember the useless title deed and Israeli possession, neither of which is actually visible. Immediately then we realize that what we see on the screen, or in any picture representing the solidity of Palestinians in the interior, is only that, a utopian image making possible a connection between Palestinian individuals and Palestinian land.”
– Edward Said

It’s been thirty years since Edward Said wrote this passage, as part of a reflection on the Palestinians’ experience of dispossession and exile. For Said, Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory managed to call up, with astonishing precision and beauty, the painful memory of his mother and all those who had their identity taken from them by Israeli colonialism. In seeing the moment when Farah Hatoum sets foot on her land after having stubbornly refused to accept attempts by settlers to legalize its expropriation by buying it, Said was reminded of how separated he was of the experience of an interior that he could himself not inhabit. “At once inside and outside our world”: that is how he described the exile experience, one that Michel Khleifi himself is not unfamiliar with. In September 1970, the month that became known as “Black September,” he left the city of Nazareth in Galilee and settled in Brussels, where he commenced theater and television studies. It was only a decade later that he returned to his place of birth to shoot his first documentary film, which became Fertile Memory. It tells the tale of two women, one of whom, Farah, is Khleifi’s maternal aunt, a widow in her fifties who was compelled to work in an Israeli textile factory after her land was seized. The other is Sahar Khalife, a novelist whom Khleifi had gotten to know through her writing, in which she examines the struggle of Palestinian women. The intimate portrait of both women reveals the traces of a double occupation in their lives: not only do they suffer from the Israeli domination but also from the restrictions imposed on them by the patriarchal society. By focusing on the land as a symbol of Palestinian identity and taking in account internal contradictions in the fight for emancipation, Khleifi’s film marked an important shift in the history of Palestinian cinema. Rather than offering an image of unity and homogeneity, Khleifi and other filmmakers who would follow in his footsteps endeavored to re-envision Palestine as a heteroglossic multiplicity of trajectories and temporalities. The experience of dispossession is captured in its lived complexity, showing both resilience and diversity under occupation.

Much time has passed and many things have changed in the dynamics of dispossession since Michel Khleifi made Fertile Memory. The film was finished right before the first Lebanon war broke out, several years before the beginning of the first Intifada and more than a decade before the Oslo Accords. It was made more than two decades before the Israeli Security Fence began to scar the landscape and a UN Committee would conclude that Israel is engaging in apartheid practices, in violation of countless international laws. Today, violence is once again on the rise and a solution seems to be further away than ever before. Meanwhile, the land of Palestine is increasingly being severed and fragmented, further eroding claims of Palestinian ownership. As the continuity of their land gradually disappears from the life of Palestinians and the dominant narratives claiming the unavoidability and irreversibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gain evermore traction, more and more activists insist that any move towards possible futures must begin with memory. In a time when all possibilities seem to be suffocated in the stranglehold of an unforgiving “realism”, could those “utopian images” that Edward Said discerned in the work of Michel Khleifi still be of use as prisms to imagine the impossible?

DISSENT ! is an initiative of Argos, Auguste Orts and Courtisane, in the framework of the research project “Figures of Dissent” (KASK/Hogent), with support of VG.

About DISSENT!

How can the relation between cinema and politics be thought today? Between a cinema of politics and a politics of cinema, between politics as subject and as practice, between form and content? From Vertov’s cinematographic communism to the Dardenne brothers’ social realism, from Straub-Huillet’s Brechtian dialectics to the aesthetic-emancipatory figures of Pedro Costa, from Guy Debord’s radical anti-cinema to the mainstream pamphlets of Oliver Stone, the quest for cinematographic representations of political resistance has taken many different forms and strategies over the course of a century. The multiple choices and pathways that have gradually been adopted, constantly clash with the relationship between theory and practice, representation and action, awareness and mobilization, experience and change. Is cinema today regaining some of its old forces and promises? Are we once again confronted with the questions that Serge Daney asked a few decades ago? As the French film critic wrote: “How can political statements be presented cinematographically? And how can they be made positive?”. These issues are central in a series of conversations in which contemporary perspectives on the relationship between cinema and politics are explored.

DISSENT ! Lav Diaz

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11 November 2015 14:00, Bozar Cinema, Brussels.

Lav Diaz in conversation with Stoffel Debuysere, preceded by a screening of Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History) (2013, 250′). In the context of the Lav Diaz Retrospective Brussels/Antwerp (10/09 – 26/11/15).

“The endless search for redemption is man’s gift and curse–because man can’t be relegated to the generic, to being a genre, to being just a dreaded cliché; because man comprehends the need for change, for progress; because man comprehends the perils of retrogression and relapse. And so, he struggles for the ideal. Struggling for the ideal means man will perpetually suffer, and thus, the vision of redemption becoming perpetually inherent to liberate him from that suffering. Hence, his concept of humanity is redemption. And his concept of redemption is great humanism. The thesis of my cinema gravitates to this discourse. Art is part of that struggle. I am trying to be part of the struggle.”

How to come to terms with the history of a country that is haunted by memories of colonization, rebellion and oppression, a country that continues to wrestle with itself in search for meaning and identity? The weight of this question makes itself felt in every frame, in every face, breath and gesture inhabiting the films of Lav Diaz. From his feature debut, Serafin Geronimo: Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (1998), to his latest From What Is Before (2014), all of his films are deeply rooted in the history and politics of his home country, the Philippines. They bear the wounds of a troubled past that have never been able to heal, as the shadows cast by the Spanish and American colonization, the conflict between Moro Muslims and Christians, and Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of Martial Law still loom heavily over the country. Even though the dictatorship has come to an end almost thirty years ago, the harms and injuries produced by the past have never seemed to wither away, but have grown ever more inward. This legacy of trauma and disempowerment, of “stifled hands and silenced voices,” as Alexis Tioseco wrote, is what can be felt reverberating in Lav Diaz’ shattering tragedies of sin, guilt and redemption.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that 19th century Russian literature, especially the work of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, has never been far from his mind. Already in Serafin Geronimo, which starts out with a quote from Crime and Punishment, Diaz seems to have established his main theme: the search for redemption, a theme which continues to run through his oeuvre, from the Tolstoy-inspired Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), in which a onetime political prisoner confronts his former interrogator, to Norte, the End of History (2013), which begins with a Raskolnikov-like figure committing murder, but develops into an allegory about Marcos. And just as the Russian novelists sought to depict “the Russian soul” by making full use of the temporal spaciousness of their prose epics, Diaz’ portrayals of the lives and suffering of the Filipino people unfold over epic lengths of time, stretching over multiple hours. This duration gives Diaz a grand canvas on which he patiently sketches painstaking diagrams of the factors and events that shape the multiple, interconnected lives of the people he observes, unfurling into panoramic meditations on morality, violence and death, torn between humanist faith and materialist despair.

Cinema as window onto the troubled soul of the world, as a quest for the inner life of reality in all its mystery and ambiguity: in Lav Diaz’ work yesteryear’s dream of André Bazin appears to have found a contemporary follower, a filmmaker who is not about to tone down his search any time soon. As he himself has said, “I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind’s existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle. I want to understand the philosophy of a growing flower in the middle of a swamp.”

The Lav Diaz Retrospective Brussels/Antwerp is a collaboration between CINEMATEK, Courtisane, BOZAR, VDFC, University of Antwerp, Cinema Zuid, Jeu de Paume, Paris, Le Festival d’Automne à Paris, Austrian Film Museum, Cineteca Bologna and with the support of the Philippine Embassy in Belgium. On November 10–12 the filmmaker will be present in person to talk about his work, as well as that of Lino Brocka, who has made an indelible mark on the culture and cinema of the Philippines, and to whom Diaz paid homage in Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004).

DISSENT ! is an initiative of Argos, Auguste Orts and Courtisane, in the framework of the research project “Figures of Dissent” (KASK/Hogent), with support of VG.

About DISSENT!

How can the relation between cinema and politics be thought today? Between a cinema of politics and a politics of cinema, between politics as subject and as practice, between form and content? From Vertov’s cinematographic communism to the Dardenne brothers’ social realism, from Straub-Huillet’s Brechtian dialectics to the aesthetic-emancipatory figures of Pedro Costa, from Guy Debord’s radical anti-cinema to the mainstream pamphlets of Oliver Stone, the quest for cinematographic representations of political resistance has taken many different forms and strategies over the course of a century. The multiple choices and pathways that have gradually been adopted, constantly clash with the relationship between theory and practice, representation and action, awareness and mobilization, experience and change. Is cinema today regaining some of its old forces and promises? Are we once again confronted with the questions that Serge Daney asked a few decades ago? As the French film critic wrote: “How can political statements be presented cinematographically? And how can they be made positive?”. These issues are central in a series of conversations in which contemporary perspectives on the relationship between cinema and politics are explored.

Notes on courtisane (3)

What is a festival but a way of being together? Please don’t take this the wrong way: we do not want to rekindle the great flowerings of communalism that came with the era of hippies and bohemians in the 1960s and early 1970s. Holding hands and singing roaring chants of freedom and harmony? No, this is not the time for the kinds of new age utopianism that tend to advance a collective and contemplative withdrawal from the meaningless chaos of the world. Besides, there’s already plenty of European-style Buddhism to go round, whether it is pursued by taking up yoga, birdwatching or botany, or by reading step-by-step guides on how to reclaim the inner child. And there’s already more than enough babbling and blathering on the bliss and comfort of local community lifestyles and the empowerment of citizens as merry prosumers to last us a lifetime. We are not promising you a rose garden, and neither are we claiming to be some kind of bastion of resistance that could offer a safe haven from all the rubbish and rubble that keeps coming our way.

But isn’t cinema meant to be a vehicle for escapism, you say. Isn’t the world of appearances shimmering in front of our eyes meant to sweep us away to another world, where we can dream of being somewhere else, someone other? Perhaps, but not only. We like to think there’s more to cinema than meets the eye. True enough, what is in front of you is merely a surface, it is not some portal to unknown destinies, from which we return with bloodshed eyes and newfangled convictions. The screen is not some membrane that is capable of producing new cerebral circuits and revitalizing the lost link between us and our world. It remains a surface, but one that allows for a process of exchange: between what we get to see and what we come to remember, the sounds and voices we hear and the dreams and hopes we foster, the apparitions before us and the world around us. We all hear, see, feel, “understand” a film in as much as we compose it into our own cinematic poem. Not that it comes easy, on the contrary: it takes work. But the work is yours to do, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. At the risk of sounding too corny: perhaps we can think of a festival as a vast collection of poems. In which case they are yours as much as they are anyones.

Cinema is something else too: it is a place, and it is a culture. There might not be much left, at least in comparison to the good ol’ days of cinephile glory, but what good would it do to drift into the melancholic morass of nostalgia? So we keep treading forward, one step at a time, not really blind but certainly not all-seeing either. Tentatively, sometimes carefully, sometimes impatiently, we’re groping our way towards something that never stops taking shape. Surely, there are various silhouettes and outlines we are imagining while we make headway. One of the things we love to do is to devise associations: for example, between the work of Pedro Costa and Thom Andersen, who come from very different backgrounds but seem to have so much in common; between Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays itself and the films of the L.A. Rebellion movement that feature in it; between Paul Robeson’s singing voice in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and his appearance in Oscar Micheaux’s Body & Soul, which will here be infused with new life by William Hooker; between Costa’s Horse Money and the music of Jakob Ullmann, both of which owe a great deal to Olivier Messiaen. But these are just some of the countless possible connections – or disconnections – that can be made within this festival program. To each one’s own resonances, as to each one’s poem.

So here we are, amongst this collection of poems, amidst this chamber of resonances. And since we are all here, perhaps we can ask ourselves: what is it that we can do together?

Written on the occasion of the courtisane festival 2015

In Remembrance of Shadows Forgotten

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Transcript of a short Q&A with Pedro Costa, after a screening of Juventude em Marcha (2006) during the courtisane festival 2015.

After having just seen Juventude em marcha again, and Casa de Lava yesterday, I couldn’t help noticing quite a few resonances between the films: for example, the reference to the title, the card playing, the letter, … As if there’s some kind of continuous movement of rediscovery, re-imagination, reinvention. Do you consider your films as part of an ongoing work of progress?

More or less. It’s doing something in cinema that I can’t do in life, which is to continue side by side with the same people, loving and caring for them. It’s very simple. It’s being very afraid of people dying and going away… I like being in the same places, in the same spaces. Doing the same work. That’s why things seem to have this continuity or this permanence. The filmmakers that I like also have their own small part of the world. You’re there, you stay there and you remain more or less faithful to that.

Like John Ford going back to Monumental Valley?

A little bit. There’s always a difference between life and cinema. But it’s a conversation, an attempt to balance something. In cinema I think I can balance better than in life.

I remember Daniéle Huillet once saying that the most important aspect of filmmaking is the collective work. Earlier you mentioned that you have no convictions, at least not the kind of convictions that filmmakers like Straub and Huillet have. Is this collectivity, this search for a kind of solidarity something that keeps you going?

It’s one of the things, yes. I had this panic moment in my “professional” life, let’s say. There was a moment when I said: “I don’t like what I’m doing, I don’t like the way it’s done”. I didn’t even like to go to see films, except for the Fords and the Ozus. It was boring. So I said: “something has to change”. So something changed. But it was a very frightening moment. Then I discovered things – or perhaps they were just mysteriously there: a certain place and people and words and colors … They were there and I thought: “perhaps these are the things that I’m here for”. That was twenty years ago or more, and it’s still new every day. My ideas for making films depend on that place. Now it’s not even a place anymore, it’s an imaginary place, because that particular place does not exist anymore. What you see in Juventude em marcha is the moment when the change happened, between the old place and the new place, the transformation to new rules and new lives. But it’s still there, the community is still resisting a little bit. This solidarity between us still exists. Making these films depends on a lot of things that are not the usual spices of filmmaking. Of course it’s money, machines, camera, energy, desire. But then it’s also a lot of different things that I wouldn’t like to tell you about, because it seems very abstract and sentimental. You don’t have to know about that.

Is it still frightening for you? Is the fear still there?

Yes, for everybody. Because it’s very connected to something which is essential. It’s the core or heart of cinema: what’s next? It’s very frightening. It’s always there when you’re involved in making films: what is the next shot, what comes after this? Well, Hitchcock knew about all of that.

Where does the desire for making a new film stem from? If I’m not mistaken Juventude em marcha started with a memory of Ventura.

This came more from me, I think. The making of the film before, No Quarto da Vanda, was very traumatic. It was about a lot of young people, people in very problematic situations: there were drugs, suicidal cases, it was very tough. Some of them never saw the film. Even Vanda held a very critical distance, even though she is, I could say, the co-director of the film – she did almost as much of directing as I did. So after this film, after working with people of more or less my age I thought I would like to see different ages, I would like to see how it started, that place I thought I knew then. So I wanted to do some kind of historiography or anthropology. It still is a bit sociological. I really like sociological films. I really do. Like Thom’s (Andersen) films for instance. Remember: sociology used to have a good name – like shoemakers. I’m fed up with philosophy in cinema, I prefer sociology or anthropology. For me, Ventura was a kind of detective or historian, going around collecting memories and stories. This mysterious, more abstract moment in this shack with his partner, for me, is the past, the beginning of the present.

There seems to be a tension between two approaches, two modes of consideration: on one hand there is what you call “anthropology” or what others might call the “documentation” aspect – chronicling the lives of the people you work with. But on the other hand the films also has this epic, mythological side, something that’s even more present in your new film, Cavalo Dinheiro. Is that what you meant when you earlier talked about the struggle with realism?

I think you can say that of other filmmakers work too. Probably it comes from Straub. But it also comes from filmmakers before Straub, this epic tradition – it’s not even a tradition, it’s an affection. You cannot but try to treat these people with the best lens you can get. I have a very shitty machine, but my lenses I think are ok. They have to be seen like they’ve never been seen before. It’s a bit of a cliché but they have to be bigger than their lives, the lives as they are represented in the papers or on tv. It has to be something else. And it was something else with Brecht, Ford, Straub, Godard, Bunuel, poetry too – the letters in this film come from the French poet Robert Desnos – all these guys… From some it comes visually more obvious, for others it comes from another aspect of their work. For instance this film is really between an odyssey, an epical voyage, and what in music or poetry you can call an elegy. An elegy you sometimes do for past, dead friends, or lovers, people you admire.

You were just talking about the need to search for new approaches, for “something else”. Does this get harder within the limitations that you have set for yourself or do you have the impression that you are getting closer to some kind of “secret”?

There’s no secret. There’s fear, being afraid of what’s next, of what comes up, of what tomorrow will bring. But there’s really no secret. You only get older, your body gets weaker, your mind gets a little bit less clear… In cinema it’s very simple: you get used to something and if you’re serious you get more aware of certain details, like in painting. I’ve always liked routine. Every time I have my camera with someone, It’s like it always used to be, and that’s very reassuring for me. That’s why I changed production mode, let’s say. I hated the variety, the novelty, the newer and the bigger – that kind of ideology and mythology of difference-making. It’s very present in filmmaking today, but I don’t care for it. For me it’s the same old thing, the same old shot, the same old work. Even the people I work with never change. I would like it to be like that forever. But we have to change sometimes and I think it’s bad – I made a film called “Don’t Change”, so…

What do the films mean for the people you work with? Is it just work for them? What happens when you show the films?

Their relation to cinema is different than mine. They work and they act in the films, but it stops there. I don’t believe in this mythology of how cinema can change their lives or how making films is good for them. Perhaps it is a little bit – though not on the financial side, because they get very little money, like myself… But I have always worked with people who are more on the unemployment or retirement side, people who are there, just there. That’s also important because they are people who have a distance, have a way of thinking about or looking at things, like Vanda, Ventura or now Vitalina. They have this, I almost could say “unemployed” look at things. Vitalina is terrible and terrifying but that’s very useful for me, because it’s critical, powerful. There’s a tension, a certain kind of dramatic tension that I could perhaps not get from actors, something that you cannot fake. I’m not only interested in artistic qualities or the tensions that you can see – the eyes, the hands, the words – but I’m interested in the truth of that, doing that kind of work. If you’re a serious filmmaker, artist or teacher you are or should be naturally interested in the question of how we can make things better, how can we solve problems, asking ourselves “what happened? Why is it so bad, so difficult between us, so dark and cold?” There are no good films but these ones. But it’s becoming more difficult – I created my own prison, that’s the problem now. I still believe I have my freedom in this way, but it’s also a prison, a very confined space. I’m more and more making the films with leftovers. Well, it used to be leftovers, like In Vanda’s Room. When I say leftovers, I mean I didn’t have any money to make the film, I made it with the most awful camera in the world – I mean, she’s my adored friend, I owe everything to her, but you can buy it in the Media market. I mean it’s not what cinema wanted. I did In Vanda’s Room with cigarettes and change. Vanda used to say something every day that made me cry. She used to say: “I could have been a girl”. That’s unbearable. So the film was made with those ruins. Now there are not even ruins left. I’m making the films with what they allow me to make the films with. Which is also very good because it reduces my small space even more and that makes me think: how can I solve this dramatic problem, visual, sound, … ? But every filmmaker has his or her own kind of method or working, of moving forward or backward.

I remember you saying that you would like to work more with the younger generations in that neighborhood. Has that proved to be more difficult?

You don’t see them in the films, but they help me. I don’t know what the future will bring. By chance I was drawn to Ventura and then to other people, to this memory lane. Now I’m stuck in this thing, because I don’t have anything else. I don’t have the money or even the desire to do much more than watch people remember. We’ll probably move closer to theater, or to some form of theater.

Or musical, like Horse Money?

Yes, or between both. With music and theater you’re safe, you’re home free. The problem is that cinema refuses a little bit the word and music. I’m not Godard or Ozu or Ford to make those kinds of things. Somebody up there talking or singing or just the music pouring out of there, you don’t do it just like that. It’s very difficult, hard work.

(Then, one of my most beautiful memories of the festival: a young girl comes all the way down from the last row of seats to tell Pedro she loves the way the people in his films move, stand, gesture and touch one another. She asks “I wonder how consciously do you ask them to do this?” Thank you Manon.)

It’s not like there’s only one way. Each person is very different. Because they are not actors, there’s something that they can give me and you and cinema that actors can perhaps not. Mind you: I’m not against working with actors: there are very good ones, I love some. But these people, they give some very small – or large – mainly priceless things that you cannot pay for, cannot dream up. Each one of them has their own singular movement. In Colossal Youth, There’s this scene with Ventura playing a record, while the other guy is drawing or doing something on the table. I thought that scene should have been shorter than it is. Now it sways very slowly with the music and that’s because Ventura felt like doing it like that. It’s not a question of direction or organization. I remember I said that the scene was too long. Sometimes, you get afraid and you don’t really realize what you’re doing. Because I have a lot of things to take care of, lots of things I’m worried about, so many things escape me. Sometimes you think “this is going on forever”, so you try to speed it up. I could never with him. It’s just his tempo, his way of moving, of expressing himself. Vanda is completely different. You can see that. What’s interesting is the shock, the confrontation between them, it’s like movements that collide. When Ventura and Vanda are both on the bed, it’s amazing because she’s always very stressed, nervous, paranoid and he always seems very calm. But I know that he was much more tense than she was. He was really nervous about everything, about her, her state of mind and condition. This is interesting with people who are not actors. With actors it tends to be predictable, here it’s in constant motion – from the first to the second take, everything can change, the position, the speed… if they want to. I’m not the director of everything: moving a finger is something I cannot dream of, something I don’t want to imagine. Those things are always very surprising.

Do you discover these little things while editing? I know you never liked to watch rushes.

Today there’s no more rushes, we have camera’s that have their own lcd screen. I see it immediately, everyone does. In Vanda’s room usually there was Vanda and her sister or someone else, and when somebody got off-screen, they came to sit next to me to see what was happening with the one that stayed. Normally they were joking, making faces… – very “cinema”. They are not actors. Perhaps they are a bit more naïve. Well, not naïve, but more direct. There’s no intellectualization, it’s simple action-reaction and taking care of a kind of movement and – if words are involved – a text. But what I like is the constant surprise of this kind of work. It seems very controlled but it’s really very evolvative – it changes all the time. If you would see the rushes, you would see that the takes are very different. It’s like Chaplin’s method of rehearsing on camera: doing exactly the same thing five hundred times. Then you see the finger or the wrist moving. But there are a lot of things that I cannot explain to you: actors, shots, technical stuff. We can never talk about that in Q&A’s. We can watch the film shot by shot and then it’s a bit more serious, like I did with the film with the Straubs. I always end up saying banalities, more or less.

Audience member: What is your relationship towards the audience? What are you hoping to convey to the spectator?

Lately I’ve been having these weird dreams, thinking “oh, they probably won’t understand”. It’s very recent. For the last film I thought “they probably won’t understand this connection or this jump”. “They” meaning “you”. Because I myself was not understanding certain things I did. Why should I understand everything? Or make it understandable? I don’t mean that I want to make pure poetry or abstract painting or pure philosophy in motion. I still believe that the best movies are the ones that narrate, which is not the same as telling a story. There is something called narration, and that for me is fundamental, it’s crucial. If it’s not there, I give up, I abandon things. But I have a feeling of what it is because I come from the study of history. It’s almost organic, genetic for me. I know that everything is narration, everything. It’s like a huge, immense, subterranean flow. It’s everywhere, but it’s very difficult to control, to organize and to construct. And in film it’s even more difficult than in a novel, especially after so many great narration masters like Griffith, Ozu, Ford, Godard, Straub, Rosselini. There are so many of them that changed things. And the world being what it is today, which has never been as bad… This is the worst moment, I think. Not just because we’re living it. For film it is for sure: just think about the digital ideology. It’s not only about the story: shooting with the cameras I’m using, I need twelve times more time than I used to with 35mm. Because even the camera is designed to do something else. It’s a camera that for instance does not allow shadow. Everyone knows this. Perhaps I exaggerate in shadows, because I like them. But these digital cameras do not believe in shadows, they don’t think about them. So I’m trying to remember, remember shadows.

Yesterday I don’t know if you were here to see Farrebique. I mean, it’s two hours of science fiction. It’s just doors and dogs and people walking. Like you’ve never seen those things before. It has been years since you have seen a baby cry in a film. So that’s also one of the tasks of the filmmaker today, I think: to remind people that a door shuts with a sound and people go through the door and come from the door and not only fly through walls. And that people are kind and don’t kill five hundred guys per second. This is just a cliché, but there’s much more: like the shadows…

I’m very fond of a Korean filmmaker called Hong Sang-Soo. I think he’s doing a magnificent job. He’s a guy who’s working in a field that is much needed: small sentimental comedies. Films that, I think, are much better than Woody Allen’s. Woody Allen used to be good, he’s weaker now… Hong Sang-Soo is the guy who took over an I think cinema needed that, needs that. He does it in a, for me, very wonderful way. He’s reminding people: do you remember these kind of situations between people, how we used to feel watching this kind of things. There’s also the Chinese Wang Bing doing his work and showing some other things. Which is also about reminding people: don’t let certain things happen or watch this closely. If you see something like this, watch out. It’s about warning sometimes. So I’m saying “sociology”, “warning”, “message”. I’m doing the complete no-no Q&A. But I do like sociological films with messages.

Talk with Stoffel Debuysere. Thanks to Lennert for recording, Ruben for the transcript, Manon and Frederik for the questions.