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Stavros Tornes manifest

“Cinema is not the spectacle of multinationals.
Cinema is not the dictate of specialists.
Cinema is not video recording.
Cinema is not films with beautiful photography, perfect frames, gorgeous scenography, immaculate and conventional sonorisation.
Cinema does not exist without films. But a film only exists on the basis of the visceral decision of who’s making it, regardless of the idiocy of programmers, cultural operators, stupid producers, government officials, bankers, auxiliaries, bureaucrats. Cinema is our films.
Cinema is the negation of technicism, semiologism.
Cinema is a place where you and I recognize each other, “me” and others embrace.
Cinema is all the films not made, yet contemplated in the explosion of existence.
Cinema is the domain of fragile and impossible films.
Cinema is the liberating application of the margins in search of the proper world (cosmos).
Cinema is the space of the accursed and the inebriated.
Cinema is the eternal proposition of being.
Cinema is the social taking place on one condition; let the being and the temporal (cosmic) transpire behind the facade of the cogito.
Cinema is the point of convergence-divergence between the real and the unthinkable, the imaginary and the impossible.
Cinema is this promise-threat, the return of the inconceivable, the audacity of the unexpected.”
– Stavros Tornes, 1977

Figures of Dissent: Nagisa Oshima

2 May 2013 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane event.
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere

“Rather than being our own, the labors of our days are merely a series of things we are made to do by those outside ourselves. We live lives that are even more evanescent than the bubbles floating along the stream – and even more meaningless. The reason we show an abnormal interest in crime and scandal is that a life, which usually drifts by, thereby appears caught up by a pole in the river’s flow. A drowning man grasps at straws. For we find, in crime and scandal, a tiny trace that reminds us of human dignity.”
– Nagisa Oshima

Kôshikei (Death by Hanging)
1968, 35mm, b/w, Japanese with English subtitles, 119’

“I must cultivate this painful bitterness and make it explode”, wrote Nagisa Oshima (1932 – 2013) in 1965. And so he did. The filmmaker who would later gain worldwide fame with films such as Ai no Korīda (In the Realm of the Senses) and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, witnessed with great disquiet how postwar Japan, under the guise of nationalism and conformism, rendered itself increasingly guilty of imperialism and racism. His boundless outrage resulted in a series of fiery cinematographic accusations, in which he mercilessly dispensed with the hypocrisy of the Japanese “police state”. The eternal recalcitrant hardly found support or congeniality within the bastion of his native cinema – which he despised – but it didn’t take long before he was taken in by the movements that were emerging in the European film landscape. No wonder Oshima was called the “Japanese Godard” (a platitude he wittily countered by calling Godard “the French Oshima”) and his films were catagorized as part of the Japanese “New Wave” (a label he obviously rejected). However, he himself rather found inspiration in the Japanese underground theatre (“Ungura”), which tried to reconcile the politically engaged ideas of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertold Brecht with premodern Japanese traditions. The majority of Oshima’s films from the 1960s are the result of his efforts to translate the characteristic game with constrained space and dynamics between language and form, to cinema. Of these films Kôshikei (Death By Hanging) is undoubtedly his most “Brechtian” work, not only by implicitly refering to the Threepenny Opera, but also in making extensive use of “Verfremdung” techniques. Not for nothing this radical and complex indictment of the Japanese legal system, based on the so-called “Komatsukawa incident”, was called “the most fantastic scenario in the history of cinema” by Luc Moullet. Oshima described the stakes of the film as follows: “As long as the state makes the absolutely evil crime of murder legal through the waging of wars and the exercise of capital punishment, we are all innocent.”

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

About Ana

Interview with Yann Lardeau. Originally published as ‘A propos de Ana’ in Cahiers du Cinéma nº 350 (August 1983). ‘Ana’ will be shown during the Courtisane Festival (17-21 April 2013), as part of the programme “Once Was Fire”.

It took António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro six years to construct and collect the images of Ana in their minds, and to finally make them into a film. Both Tras-os-Montes and Ana are the work of a lifetime, in the sense that all its experience is the summarization and culmination of a solitary creative experience, unlike anything else, entirely linked to a region, a land – an insular creation. If a couple of artists such as Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis are so important to us today, it’s because at a time when the industry seems to unanimously choose for a blunt return to serially produced films, they admirably maintain the exigency of an artistic creation, of the production of a singular language, an exigency unmistakably inherited from the great tradition of painting and the Renaissance arts, one that can hardly be found anymore in the film industry, except for the Straubs or Bresson. They are undoubtebly the last ones to sustain this history, to testify to it in a lively way. This interview has been conducted in Berlin, after the screening of Ana at Forum. More than an interview, it became a conversation in which Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis responded to each other, echoing one and the other.

It is not easy to talk about your film: it’s not a narrative film, nor is it a documentary, and there are not so many films in the history of cinema that can be compared to it, except for singular films without antecedent, such as Vertov’s Enthousiasm, Eisenstein’s Besjine Louj – which doesn’t exist – or Murnau’s Tabu. It’s a film about a defined region, Tras-os-Montes, but also an inner look at the self of this region. Perhaps we can start with the way the films was concretely made, how you chose the actors, the costumes, the places, how you found the locations, with its color and light.

M. Cordeiro: I can not answer your question. I can only say that we ended up with this result. The moments of choosing, of working, I don’t remember at all. It has been a bit difficult, at times a bit rough, at other times calmer – but I don’t remember those times. The result is close to what we dreamed of making, but sometimes, often, we are far from what we intended to make.

A. Reis. Very far, although not really in the esthetic sense, I think… There are some things that we expected. There have been problems and then we arrived at other things that were as important and intense as those that were foreseen. And we have never tried to block off whatever mistake. We are terribly demanding. What has surprised us, is that when things were transforming, we found something else as powerful as what we expected, something that could replace it completely. And for us it was fantastic because this was the life of forms, a spiritual movement that was very genuine and profound. We have never been blind, but we have never felt programmatic either.

M. Cordeiro. We were guided by what we did.

A. Reis. It was terribly painful because we shot new and intense things, things we have lived through, that had to function as an articulation, a construction between what we had already shot and perhaps other things that we knew we could shoot as well. So, something like a real montage had to be found on the spot, in an attempt to relate all the dimensions: affective, chromatic, temporal, spatial, etc. It’s actually hard to find the words to resume and explain the cinema and the creative moments that we have lived through. Sure there are sequences that have been completely developed, but they are integrated in function of the subject. They were so rich that at the moment of shooting, we reconstructed them again. The editing was for us like an a priori architectural plan that was subject to moments of creation.

There are similarities, analogies, or even a progression positioned inside the shots. The red light inside the house, the peppers, the stain in the landscape, the strawberries the villagers are eating at the entrance of the church, the drapes covered with blood… There seems to be a very rigid progression of colours, notably of the colour red.

A. Reis. You have pointed out something very important for us. The ellipses in the film are constructed with simple colours, complementary to the interior of the shots, to what starts or what is before. Or else by the extraordinary leaps in the space. And if the light is universal, it sometimes introduces an elliptical movement. You know when it is spring, summer or winter because of the light. In regards to the decors and the light, we very much like the plastic arts, but we consider them as our enemies in cinema. These elements have to be bound with an umbilical cord to painting. Because I think that cinema technically doesn’t represent a different approach than what happened before in painting, for example. What would be absurd is that painting would come to look for the colours of cinema. There is all the same a family in regards to the figuration of colours, but our images are not plastic or pictural, because we think that painting and the plastic arts – just like the social sciences raise questions about the factory – are our enemies. We like them, we integrate them in our films, but as other materials and without subjecting ourselves to their expression.

The modern world is completely absent in ‘Ana’. Its features are not imposed on the landscape. The people never talk with others of the same age, it is always a generation addressing another, and in general, adults addressing children, like Ana with her little girl.

M. Cordeiro. It’s a modern reality because there are currently not many people in Tras-os-Montes, and there are a lot of elderly people.

A. Reis. We can almost say there’s a sort of geological reservoir in regards to the habitants of Tras-os-Montes. There is a wealth of different types. The different ages are like geological sediments. It’s a sort of cut in the geology of a social terrain. It’s very violent. Not as information, but as an expression. Things are gently marked by seasonal modulations. There are not many people. Immigration has in fact redefined the density of ages. But it subsists just as if one makes a cut in a terrain. It’s a fantastic wealth. At the same time it’s a desert. We have pushed the mise-en-scene to its extreme because we know the social life there very well. There is a sequence in which we push what we just spoke about to the extreme: the scene where they come out of the church. It’s sunday. The men are eating strawberries. There are three generations in the shot, sitting or situated in the space, in a composition that is not artificial. They see for us. But what do they see? I think that this shot is very meaningful. One day the sun made a sort of eclipse, it disappeared. And in counterpoint to this there is the eclipse the grandmother is talking about, creating a legend, appealing to the memory of the child. And we wanted exceptional conditions for this shot – looking for the location has caused us many problems. For three days we had all the equipment installed to shoot this panorama with that particular light, very clear, very limpid. For three days we stayed up there with the equipment, the whole team, and the actor. We filmed a few clouds in the sky, it was nice, but we found that it was not the spirit of the scene, despite what the cameraman said. For three days, in the terrible cold… It was only after three days that we managed to find what we wanted.

M. Cordeiro. You forget that we had tried to shoot this scene before.

A. Reis. A few months before, we had not managed to shoot this scene. So we went back. According to the camermen we had to shoot anyway, and we’d say, “No! No “. When the old woman speaks about the eclipse, it’s amazing, it’s so unique, because there is a very violent dialectic. We have never given up on this point. Working like we do, this inevitably brings very painful costs with it. Like when we stop for three days to wait for an image.
This is not to talk about ourselves, but just to give an idea. We supported the whole organization. I took 50% of the production on me. I kept all the clothes in our room because we couldn’t afford mistakes: in the mountains, we could not afford to forget anything. We received only 12,300 contos from the Portuguese Institute. It is very little, about a third of what they are giving to a movie these days. And the Gulbenkian Foundation gave us 1,500 contos. 14,500 contos for a two-hour movie filmed in the mountains for three seasons, with interruptions and inflation, I think this is a movie for free. With professional actors, can you imagine how much it would cost to play the grandmother Ana? She herself doesn’t earn a penny. We paid the professional technicians of course. But the actors did not get anything. And what we have personally earned we invested in the work we did for five years.
All what we earn, we spend studying. Studying for us is to live as well. For English or Americans, this is incomprehensible. Everything you see – fabrics, clothing,… – all this has been researched, designed and purchased by Margarida. Margarida sought out the extras. All this was done without money. We have spent nothing for the decor. This is a job that usually pays very well. But pellicule on the other hand, that we used at will. The film has one hundred twenty-five shots. However, for night shots that were complicated, we did six or seven takes. We usually do two takes just to be sure.

So you worked with a very small team?

A. Reis. A cameraman, an assistant and a sound engineer, a boy who gave a helping hand here and there. We had this huge advantage that Margarida could rigorously control the composition of shots. This is the first time we had the possibility. It was possible to frame as if the camera was a microscope – me with my eyes, Margarida there, on the spot. So, immediately after we would exchange impressions about what we felt, about the effect of a shot. Luckily there is some terrible complicity between us. We could not see the rushes there. We only saw them fifteen days after. We didn’t have any script or photographer. We did all these things ourselves. I do not say that out of megalomania.

M. Cordeiro. Instead, it was misery.

A. Reis. It’s misery. Those are the working conditions to be accepted. Never give up, accept to make bread with sand. Even if the film is stopped, better a film that is stopped.
We shot for seventy days. We did our scouting during the holidays. Knowing about these forms and events there beforehand helped us to advance a lot in little time and in bad conditions. Margarida has a very precious memory. Other filmmakers who go there serious risk to fail because they do not have our background. They may behave a bit like bad anthropologists: they arrive, they shoot, they return. When we are there to work, we do not survey, we do not waver, Margarida and me. Margarida was born there and I have known the province for thirty years. It’s as if I was born there.

This is a project that you have been carrying with you for several years. Shooting concretisises a period of research. In regards to the conception of the film, it represents very little time.

A. Reis. We consider ourselves as maniacal and slow. But in fact we are very incisive and very fast in creating. As we have complementary sensitivities, we act as one person. But we are working with two. We do not know what we will find or what we want, and I mean that in the positive sense. But we still have some certainty, we are certain of ourselves in the course of filming, so we are very fast. We can have doubts about the form, never about the team.

M. Cordeiro. We are not very rational while working. We are very sensitive. We work with our sensitivity. We were forced to work quickly because we had a very low budget.

A. Reis. There were days when we did 500 km to make only one shot. The shot of the prairie, you remember, that day, we had to do 600 km. In the course of the whole film, we did about 80.000 km.

M. Cordeiro. Tras-os-Montes is a big province!

A. Reis. Well, for example, there is the fox. We got him when he was small so that the child could familiarize with it for four or five months. For the ducks, you know, we had brought eggs from the village, me and my friend. They were placed in an incubator, but one day when I was in Lisbon the electricity was cut off to the north, and the eggs, pff … I had to drive the two thousand kilometers all over again with my friend to buy two ducklings of the same mother. We gave the ducks tot a shepherd who could prepare them to do what we wanted. And the most complicated shot was when the grandmother comes to the window at the end of the film, just like in the beginning. This shot was made in the first take.

M. Cordeiro. It was a family affair. The girl really lived that scene. She was a little shocked too.

How is the work divided? What is the share of each, and is this visible in the final product?

M. Cordeiro. There is no leadership, I think we start from dissimilar places. Sometimes. But when we start shooting, we have already agreed. During the work itself, we never disagree. We debate a lot, we talk about. But when filming, we have already reconciled – even when there are widely divergent positions.

A. Reis. When there are small differences without consequence, we have enough awareness of the creative activity of each other, so we don’t need to explain our point of view.

M. Cordeiro. We are very different. António says that we have very different personalities, very complementary. When we work, it is as if we were a single individual. But our sensibilities are very different.

A. Reis. There is a contradiction that defines us well. In Portugal we say: “What in me feels, thinks.” I think Margarida and myself think what we feel, feel what we think.

M. Cordeiro. We made two films, I think if there will ever be a third film, the conditions would be the same. Because we won’t be alone, fortunately. I would not be able to work alone. We have the same goal, the translation of the same emotions, the same memory, so we work together.

A. Reis. It remains stable up to the grading. The complicity continues during the montage. Sometimes when I think about it, I do not know how other filmmakers, like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, work together. But I think in a sense, it is a collective creation that reunites. If we can speak of collective authors, it is in this sense that they become one for a collectivity.

M. Cordeiro. I think it’s stronger when you’re with two.

A. Reis. And when you see our films, you can not say that this is Margarida, this is Reis, this is masculine or feminine. The synthesis was carried out there.

There are many children in the film. I’m thinking of the scene in which we see a little boy playing with a prism and projecting light on the wall, as if it were a movie screen. There is another shot in which we see him explore an image, a reflection in the mercury. As if it pointed out a privileged position of the viewer, a priviliged look on the story of Ana, which is the one of childhood.

M. Cordeiro. I do not think so. Those scenes also have other meanings. These are simply children’s games. A privileged viewer can see other meanings in it, in cinema, in the light itself. But I think those scenes are worth only what they are worth. These are fragments of time, moments of childhood, first and foremost.

A. Reis. It is also, I believe, a development of the popular imagination. Because children, in a certain historical period, were amused or delighted with vegetable things and extracted a particular poetics from this. And we ourselves have the same fascination for other objects that are equally magical. We find it amazing that children enjoy seeing a burst of light in the water.

M. Cordeiro. Same thing in dark houses with a ray of light.

A. Reis. We believe that these children who discover the world like trees growing, may then have the same astonishment when discovering a new substance, such as mercury, or a prism decomposing the light from the sun. But these elements always have an independent existence for themselves in the film. Because precisely in this scene the father cuts glass with a diamond. There are also oppositions in the materials: wool, silk, mercury, milk, outdoor light …

M. Cordeiro. All that was on purpose.

A. Reis. And … the inner light. Even in the scene with the prism, there is a cinema screen. But there is a tableau in the dark. The final light is brought in by the father, when he opens the window. However, there is a dialectic of light. That of physical light, the light of the school, when that light is imposed on the child who has to learn. There is something living there, a poetic phenomenon. Upon hearing about Mesopotamia, children are delighted with this distant history – which for us was imposed, but there it isn’t. There is a tradition that continues in a good way. Progress in a good sense means that a worker can marvel at a form that he doesn’t understand, like a tractor, just like he marvels at a horse, when in reality he can not marvel at all: it is impossible because he has to pay the debts to the bank. Children have the chance that they have nothing to pay. They prefer that parents to take care of that. It is so beautiful only to enjoy the earth during the first years on the countryside. But Margarida’s right, these scenes are only worth what they are worth.

Mr. Cordeiro. I think we are giving literal images, images of a vision that is at immediate and sufficient. Then the viewer gives back what he has in him.

There is no continuity from one scene to another, as if there is no action fully developed. There are rather fragments and moments. At the same time each of them is full, whole. It seems to me that this kind of emotion is more specific to a child than to an adult, that these images belong rather to the time of memory, then that of the present or the past, that this really inherent of cinema and that narrative continuity stemming from a scenario is an effect derived from literature.

M. Cordeiro. This also what we wanted. There certainly is continuity, there are many continuities which Antonio has already spoken about: shapes, colors, fabrics. But there is no classical narrative continuity.

A. Reis. All of this is deliberate. You know very well that, in that sense, there is a liberation of cinema. There are narrative masterpieces, but always with something else as well.

M. Cordeiro. Things are never situated on the level of events.

A. Reis. There is no psychology in the film. There is no symbolism. All that is in the frame forms a texture. If we consider a narrative as a tissue, then our film is narrative. If we consider that there is narration only when there is a history between people, then our film is not narrative. Yet we have narrative sequences. Obviously for the construction of the final sequence, we chose a dramatic register because a tree like Ana can not fall like that.
The film actually only speaks about succinct things. In this sense, the colors, the trees, the light, the time of the film, the duration, are narrative elements just like the things that people do, their attitudes.

M. Cordeiro. In real life, I also believe that events do not involve linearity or occur linear. I think they overlap. For me, it’s like that and, to simplify, we just summarize a line among others, and I think the film has to do with how we look at life.

A. Reis. Obviously we are in a microcosmic world. Men, women, etc. But personally, Margarida and myself, we try to compose a dialectic between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic in cinema.

Mr. Cordeiro. It is always a way of investigating, of understanding for us. Why are things like that? Why did things in our childhood happen like that? There are many issues that you and I have encountered in our childhood, that we are still searching for. Cinema is a means of understanding for both of us. The film is a result that others can see, can love or not love. It’s secondary to me.

Cinema as a method of deciphering the world and ourselves?

M. Cordeiro. I believe that if we make more movies, we will continue on this path.

A. Reis. I thought we had a kind of trauma of beauty.

M. Cordeiro. Not beauty: intense things that have affected us.

A. Reis. It’s is still a trauma. The shot that seems to be the calmest is sometimes the hardest to shoot because there is no defense, and for us it’s a terrible responsibility. It is terrible to be there with the camera at this time, because the usual defenses vis-à-vis the viewers are just not there. And yet, we want that when the viewer sees this shot, that it is so important … It is difficult to explain. Even now, while speaking, we are seeking. We still learn a lot from our film, Margarida and I. And during the tenth vision, we saw things of which we thoughts that they are perhaps the most important in the shot, as we did not see it at all before… There is a huge reservoir in the forms, in the organization of the shots. We believe that our film is composed of a partition of images and a partition of sounds. During the screening here, the sound was amazing … I could hear it like never before. I told Margarida: “Finally, we have our sound in the film.” The images are changed, just like we wanted, by the intrusion of the sound, and vice versa. If we fail to obtain this result during projection, we feel that the public can not love our film.

Who are the filmmakers who influenced you the most?

M. Cordeiro. Me very little. Because I don’t go to the movies, because I have a life a little more difficult.

A. Reis. I can not say that we were influenced. There are filmmakers that we like, as we like many things in life. There are filmmakers we love intensely, but who are so contradictory, like a haiku or the Odyssey, and who we love primarily as filmmakers, not because they are close to us, to what we do.

M. Cordeiro. Because they have very strong personal visions.

A. Reis. Because, for example, for us a haiku is as fantastic as the Odyssey or the Iliad. We have no particular influences, but what we feel is that there is poetry with shapes of varying complexity. It’s like music. For example we like Pierre Boulez, but we like the contemporary dodecaphonic music as well. What is important for us is that these musicians are creators. I just think that for cinema it’s the same. We like the most contradictory filmmakers, in regards to genre, by style, form. In this sense, if you want to talk about influence, we are influenced just as everyone is influenced by the things one likes. As a direct result on our work, I think we have no influence, because, for us, it would deprive us of any reason to create, if we think of one person or if we are to do as others. We create precisely because it is a desire and a risk. And to provide to others the pleasure of seeing original creations living.
Perhaps because of this, we create very little, very slowly. But time for us is not a matter of chronology, it is a matter of enunciation. When one speaks of our relationship with the Portuguese contemporary cinema, we absolutely refuse this kind of categorization. It is normal to say it or try it, but it repels us so much. There is a requirement of cataloging everything.
I think we are crazy filmmakers. You have this saying in France: “une personne alambiquée” – “a person convoluted.” Our relationship with cinema is more or less disturbing and especially convoluted. It is obvious that we are alone. We have already said that when Tras-os-Montes came out. Not because we are egocentric. It is also true for historical reasons. We do not feel like isolated individuals, but we feel that we are not heading in the wrong direction with the fashion and the big crowd. It is a historical situation and not egocentric.

You spoke earlier of geological types, which presided over the selection of actors. There is also a a geography of names.

A. Reis. Names are especially euphonious. They were chosen for their euphony. Their musical expression is, let’s say, their first expression. The euphony is luckily a source of enchantment. For example, “Alexander” is a Roman name. And it is obvious that the Romans were there. “Ana” is a name with a deep etymology in Europe, with specific connotations.
In this place, there is a crossover from civilizations as you know. We did historical research on very distant names. It’s nice to have spoken about Mesopotamia in opposition to Ana or Miranda. These are very pretty names. Miranda means “see”, “look”, in Spanish. In the film, the name of Miranda, when it is pronounced, should create a sense of expectation. When the grandmother is at the lake, the name Miranda resounds a bit like a muffled cry rises, in a form of an opal. There is an intellectual direction in that choice, but they are, as Margarida said, common names. These are names that you find in Portugal, so mixed, with this great historical weight, and so far apart. The names of Tras-os-Montes, you will see that some are of Celtic origin, other Arabic, other Roman, etc.. and that they give a historical topography of occupation of the region. That is why we have a kind of pride – “le cheval d’orgueil” – not in the rural sense of Bretagne, but Tras-os-Montes is copper, tin, salt. The words in the film, it is music first, already by their absence …

M. Cordeiro. They stand out better.

A. Reis. And the name of Ana is the balance and imbalance. A-A is the balance and the N is not yet imbalanced, but it can already make everything unstable. N is the dialectic return of plants back to the beginning.

M. Cordeiro. It is one thing and its opposite.

A. Reis. It is not a symbol of course. It is a very small, quiet name. The journey with words, speech – you remember the processing of words, speech, names, and it’s always different, and I think we pushed these means to their final end in this film, with all their possible wealth, without indication, and this in a very rigorous construction.

What are your plans?

M. Cordeiro. Starting for us is always a bit slow.

A. Reis. We do not sit at the the table and make plans to make our films, it’s material from our own daily life.

M. Cordeiro. So far we have not adapted any book. It is easier to adapt a book and working on it. It is a little more difficult for us.

A. Reis. Margarida does not mean that it is easy to adapt a book. But it is customary to do so. I think maybe it will happen to me one day, but for us it will be a very serious problem. The imagination works on a foreign experience. This is so the opposite of what we are constructing.

Mr. Cordeiro. It is a work without a net. For me, it is more difficult.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translations).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Leslie Thornton

In the context of the Courtisane festival 2013 (Gent, 17 – 21 April)

Our culture is a culture of fear, or so it is said : the fear of uncertainty, of otherness, of everything that stands in the way of consensus. It is a fear that is not least cultivated by the mass media, driven by a logic of anticipation and premediation. It is a culture that was already anticipated a few decades ago in the form of a remarkable science-fiction parable: Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell. This consecutive series of films, whose first episode dates from 1985, portrays the lives of two children, the only survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape, who create their own imaginary world in the midst of the debris of the 20th century. The relationships between technology, identity and subjectivity that characterize today’s media culture are no longer applicable here, but they shimmer and reverberate in the form of shadow images and echoes. In the meantime, the children have grown up, the future has become part of the past, analogue became digital: reality seems to be catching up with Thornton’s fiction at an ever increasing rate, but it continues to steadily mutate, ceaselessly assessing the remains of a human culture in an expanding body of raw data. It is this critical perspective of the relationship between society and technology that forms the consistent thread throughout the entire oeuvre of Leslie Thornton, whose father and grandfather both worked on the development of the atom bomb during World War II. The awareness of the ambivalences between the personal and cultural, the local and the global, forms the basis of her far-reaching and profound investigation into the aporias of language and media, one that moves on from where the tradition of the American avant-garde left off.

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20 April 2013 20:00 Paddenhoek

Leslie Thornton
Peggy and Fred in Hell
US, 2013, 16mm, video, b&w, colour, 95′

A unique screening of the completed cycle of Thornton’s epic serial, ending with the world premiere of the closing episode, The Fold. The presentation will include both film and video running simultaneously, in a recreation of its original form as a multi-screen, multiple format event.

“Peggy and Fred in Hell is a very strange project. I don’t think there’s anything else in the world quite like it. From the beginning I knew I was doing something strange. I was very turned on by the two children when I first met them. They were my new neighbors and it was love at first sight. I had already conceived of the project but intended to shoot with two adults, an eccentric couple actually named Peggy and Fred. Meeting the children changed my plans and my approach. With the adults I would have developed a loose script. But with the children that wouldn’t work and I needed to invent a motivation that would allow me to shoot freely, to capture whatever might unfold between us. I saw myself as the eye of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) entity. They were the sole survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, and I was observing them, studying them, to learn about this thing called “human,” this thing that made both “me” (AI) and them (…) Then one day recently I just woke up and wrote the end, in which the entity reveals itself. It explains that it has been studying human emotion. It tells jokes and is its own judge and jury. It is completely alone, except for these children, these images of two children. It may even know enough to realize it is alone, lonely, because it has been teaching itself how to learn. So it is the-robot-that-feels, in the end, a common science fiction pretense. What is different, though, is that you don’t know it was there all along, running the show. This final episode will provide closure for Peggy and Fred, in a twisted, self-reflexive act of revealing “the maker” who is also the fictional audience or voyeur, an audience of one.” (from an interview with Katy Martin, 2011)

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21 April 13:30 SPHINX cinema

The Most Impossible Work

Leslie Thornton
((((( )))))
US, 2009, HD, colour, 9′

“((((( ))))) derives its title from the obsessional punctuation of Raymond Roussel, the parentheses within parentheses, worlds within worlds, housing a tunnel space of endless imbeds. (((( ))))) — reflections in a golden eye. The glass menagerie of the vitreous humor from both sides of the glass, an active gaze “on location” that cannot be penned… ((((( ))))) is a cycling of regenerative ingestion, devouring radiance. A porthole, a portal, mimicking wellspring. In this terraced lapidary setting where any object could substitute for another we sense the governing madness in the ordained order. Or in reverse, a lucid logic wormholing through quotidian chaos. Every habitat rendered into Dioramas of the natural world, an accordion expansion of consciousness and the cosmos, all under observation by something, somewhere, sometime… As in Peggy and Fred in Hell we feel the operations of an artificial or outside intelligence, a god machine dealing shuffled hands from the infinite playing deck, as indicated by the Upanishads: “Wise intelligent, encompassing, self existent, it organizes objects throughout eternity.” (Mark McElhatten)

Leslie Thornton
Sahara/Mojave
US, 2007, HD, colour, 12′

Thornton describes Sahara/Mojave as a “little trip to Hollywood via North Africa, circa 1900. I hone an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ to question our understanding of the real.” Here Thornton pairs two disparate media sources, a collection of vintage erotic North African postcards and video footage that she shot at Universal City, Los Angeles. The images are overlaid with a dense audio collage that includes the narration from an archival documentary on the Sahara and the Bedouin people of North Africa. The result is in an elliptical inquiry into culture, history and representation.

A reading by Leslie Thornton of her text, “Philosophers Walk On The Sublime” (2013)

Andy Warhol
Vinyl
US, 1965, 16mm, b&w, excerpts

Warhol bought the rights to Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange six years before Stanley Kubrick made his Clockwork. Warhol’s film features Factory star Gerard Melanga as a juvenile delinquent who undergoes “reprogramming” by the welfare state, a process that reads as a metaphor for trying to convert gays into straights. Edie Sedgwick, added to a tableau for compositional balance, steals the movie.

Leslie Thornton
SONGS One Two Three
US, 2012, HD, colour, 14′

Orientalism, photography, and “unknowing” are recurrent obsessions in Leslie Thornton’s work. SONGS One Two Three embodies all three in what seems at first a cinéma verité style toss-off of a strange touristic site in Western China, at the massive sand dunes near Dunhuang. That it also looks like a set for a science-fictional thriller, but not quite, adds to the mystery. A woman leaps into the frame, poses, and others show up, also posing, all wearing neon orange boots. Everyone is in neon orange boots, some are wearing cowboy hats, and soon the camera is surrounded by others with cameras and more people in boots, posing, yelling, laughing, indifferent to the camera through which we see this spectacle—”our” camera. As this strange choreography unfolds the camera begins to make noise, to compose and correct itself, but it remains no more than an ignorant eye, stealing a show. Our camera retains its distance while it is swallowed up by indifference, until finally the most beautiful woman there (she must be the most powerful) looks back. She asks our camera to film her beauty and power. We walk away afterwards, caught in the suspension of invisible thoughts.

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21 April 21 15:30 SPHINX cinema

What Helps

Werner Herzog
Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner)
DE, 1974, video, colour, 45′

“Most documentaries set out to represent reality, but Herzog, as the best of all non-fiction filmmakers, understands that a documentary must transform reality and present it to viewers in a way they had never before imagined. The protagonist here is Walter Steiner, Swiss ski jumping world champion. Herzog uses high-speed cameras that slow down the action to one-twentieth of its normal speed. But this isn’t a sports film; it is rather a film about isolation, about human limitations and obsessions. Herzog watches and films Steiner jumping 179 meters (ten more than the previous world record, and ten short of what could have been a certain death), but what Herzog really sees a lonely visionary artist (a woodcarver) and a curious Human phenomenon that simply must be explored. The film’s images beg the question of whether this man turns away from society because of his passions, or has instead chosen his passions as a way of isolating himself from the rest of humanity. There, floating in the air, with his feet far off the solid ground, the look on Steiner’s could be one of horror or ecstasy. A mere sports film becomes a mystical experience.” (Carlos Reviriego)

A reading, by Leslie Thornton, of a short piece on Steiner and Herzog

Les Blank
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
US, 1980, video, colour, 20′

German film director Werner Herzog made a bet with fellow director Errol Morris (a film student at the time) that, if Morris finished a movie on pet cemeteries, Herzog would eat his shoe. Morris went on to film Gates of Heaven so Herzog kept his promise. While eating the boiled shoe, Herzog carries on a dialogue on film, art, and life with the film premier audience. The shoe was boiled with garlic, herbs, and stock for five hours. He did not eat the sole of the shoe, however, explaining that one does not eat the bones of the chicken.

Johan Renck
Pass this On (music video for The Knife)
SE, 2003, video, colour, 3′

It is the annual meeting for the local football club, yet the entertainment turns out to be not quite what was expected.

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Binocular Series

Selections from Thornton’s gallery based installation series will be running during the festival.

“It makes sense that today a number of artists and writers are examining the animal world and our relation to other living beings. Animals are the new “Other” and the new victims, post multi-culturalism and globalization. But it’s all the same thing in a way; discourse on power, vulnerability, the unknown, the oppressed, difference, loss, growth, resilience. For me, there is just so much to learn here, so much to care about, and I approach my new subjects in complete and utter awe, with a sense of heightened awareness.”

A Secret to be Shared

Talk with Pedro Costa. 2 February 2013, Brussels. In the context of the DISSENT ! series. Moderated by Stoffel Debuysere.

Some moments are there to be cherished. Moments that brim with a sense of wonder, of affection, of truth. This was one of them. The setting could hardly have been more modest: a small space, some chairs, a table, a screen, and an admixture of people, a few of them talking, all of them listening, wrapped up in that singular moment of tenderness. The proposition at stake: cinema. To be more precise, the cinema of two filmmakers who have crafted one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the history of cinema: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The principal talker is not only an avid admirer, but also a friend, a soulmate, a colleague, who in his own way has shaken up the world of contemporary cinema: Pedro Costa.

First, a film: Umiliati by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

And a single quote, written by Jean-Marie Straub.
“The spoken text, the words are not more important than the different rhythms and tempi of the actors, and their accents are not more important than their particular voices, caught in the instant, struggling with the noise, the air, the space, the sun and the wind; not more important than their unintentional sighs or any other small surprises of life recorded at the same time, like particular sounds which all of the sudden assume meaning; not more important than the effort, the work done by the actors, and the risk they take, like tightrope walkers or sleepwalkers, going through long fragments of a difficult text; not more important than the frame in which the actors are enclosed; or their movements or positions inside the frame or the background in front of which they find themselves; or the changes and the leaps of light and color; not more important in any case than the cuts, the change of images, the shots.”

Pedro Costa:
For me, every experience of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is the same as now, because this doesn’t change. It never changes. It’s difficult to talk about, because this very special film you chose is a very sad one. Especially for me, or for people who are experiencing what we are experiencing in the South, now with these austerity things happening — coming from here, from Brussels, actually. It’s very simple, and nobody does this kind of work today. So this doesn’t change. This kind of work is never done. I discovered that these films existed when I was younger. Now they do not exist anymore, period. And when I saw this for the first time, for me it had this amazing energy and sensuality….
The quote you read seems very concrete to me because I work in this field: I work with cuts, with this kind of rhetoric, so I know the procedure and sometimes I’m afraid. I do not take the risks that he speaks about, but sometimes I’m a little bit afraid. Whenever you do a cut, an infliction or an intonation, whenever you decide something, you have to assume that thing completely. And then I’m afraid. I think everybody’s afraid. More than before, more than yesterday. People do not take that risk anymore. So if we are here to talk about politics and ethics, I think that’s the main issue.
It is as if we are in the position of one of the people in this film, Ventura: “What can I say, what can I do?” Either you are charmed or seduced by something, or you quit and you are left alone. That’s what I feel, I’m really feeling alone. Not because I’m doing something special. Absolutely not. But I’m feeling alone. There’s no more people working in this way. When I was younger this seemed to me a way to make politics… not to make a film, but politics. And it’s the most beautiful thing for me. I was not at all seduced by the idea of making films or charmed by the guys with the guns. That’s not the charm for me, it never was. The charm was to do something as violent, as gentle as everything that Straub says in this way. Against the language of cinema. Because this is not cinema, or rather, this is not the language of cinema.

I never believed in working inside the system. Because this happens outside the system. I Always believed in the outside. It’s a position, and then you have to live with it. But you cannot turn the system around. I don’t believe in that. I’m not that kind of person, I’m not that kind of citizen, I’m not that kind of filmmaker. You cannot work inside the language, you have to invent something else. There are some things in this film, and I’m sure you all know more films by Jean-Marie and Danièle — if you don’t, I hope this one gives you some appetite — there are some things there that you have never seen before in your life, I’m sure of it. The guy knocking on the table: you have never seen this, never in this way. So it’s a way of saying: let’s cut the crap, we are trying to invent, we are trying to work, to search, find another way of pulling something from someone who doesn’t know yet what he is going to do. You have to pull something out that he doesn’t know he is capable of. That is the work, for me, that is the politics. To give appetite to the other one, so that he can go say something to his boss, his friend, his employee, his lover. He can say it in another way, not in the same old language.
They are the guys who have never let me down. I’m a fanatic. They are fanatics. I think it’s the only way to talk about this kind of work. There is no other way of working in cinema or art. Did you see these mysterious shots of wood? It happens two or three times in the film. It’s very strong. When you do things like that, you’re done for the rest of your life. It’s over. You cannot work in this town anymore. You have no more job in this town, in cinema. It’s going very far. Sometimes if there is no reason to do it, you have to go beyond your fear. I tell you, I cannot do it. It’s not a matter of talent. It’s just that I don’t work that much. It’s that simple, there’s no secret here. It’s not a question of being well practiced in the ways of writing scripts, it’s not the number of films that you have seen… It’s life, it’s taking a risk that has nothing to do with cinema. Because we’re not talking about cinema now.
It’s a tension that is very hard to maintain because it’s not in the films, it’s in life. We all know it’s very difficult to be in love all the time. At least, that’s how I feel. I knew Danièle and I was very close to her, perhaps more than to Jean-Marie, and I know they were in love all the time. I’m not saying that you need to be in love to make art, or to live, to be alive, but it helps. Again, there are things here that you have never seen in your life. It means that they try to keep this tension at the maximum level. It’s very young, very alive, very political, very resilient. All the words you want. But it’s in life, not in cinema. Actually this is one of the least visual of their films, I think. Everything is what it is. Like one of them says, “it’s here, it’s what it is”. So it’s not film, it’s something else. The difficult part is not making the film, it’s believing in the film. It’s believing that this is material, that this is more than material, that we can represent it in another way. The strength to believe in going from saying something to doing something. It’s like Ventura trying to get up. You cannot get up nowadays. He can’t get up, because he was seduced, charmed.
This is a film that has death in it, that’s why it’s a sad film. There’s something very “there”. You die. You die for some things, you die seeing certain films. When you go to films today you don’t die. But you have to die a little sometimes. Me, I died a thousand times. And I was not reborn immediately. Today it’s only ghosts. I’m tired of them. There’s no ghosts here. There’s no tricks. It’s something Jean-Marie always says, “you should never ‘faire le malin’ — play the smartass”. These films never do this. They don’t play the smartass. You choose this or you don’t. I’m also very sad because we didn’t win this. We lost.

There was a film before this one, called Workers Peasants (Operai, contadini, 2001), which is about what happens before. These people tried to reinvent everything: this village, this life, this commune. In this particular film they quarrel, they discuss, they fight, there are some love stories… This is the sad epilogue. It felt so sad today. But it’s so well done. There are no metaphors here. In films, there are usually constantly metaphors for everything, but they are the only artists I know who are beyond metaphor. It’s all crystal clear. It is as sad as — when I think about them in a historical context — the last films by Eisenstein or Vertov, they have the same effect. I see them dying, lying down, giving up, taken down by the forces of progress and power. So it’s a very sad film, but it’s a film that has to be done. It all comes from Italian writers who were very important — Vittorini, Pavese and others. They didn’t give up, but they were forced to stop writing. Pavese ended they way he did, Vittorini cried for the rest of his life. And we, we are still crying.
What they are saying is that they are a bit lost and don’t know their way. That was in the original text and it’s done perfectly: actors, camera, direction, flowers, rivers, things that pass… And ourselves: we are perfect in this film. When I saw From the Clouds to the Resistance (Della Nuba Alla Resistenzai, 1979) when I was younger, I fantasized that the movement in a film was not only there on the screen, but up here, in our head. So the work you have to do is not an intellectual work: if you understand, you understand, If you don’t, go home, wait, grow older or forget, go somewhere else. It’s a balance: you have the movement in your head, as if the camera is your head. For me, the camera was always in our eyes. That’s why I say that these films are the fastest for me, because they make me think so much. This never happens to me with other filmmakers. Sometimes even Godard seems very slow. When I was younger I was a lot into music, and this was for me the exact correspondence to the music I was listening to, which was very noisy rock music, very simple, tense, nervous. Even Godard seems a bit more rhetorical, more stuck inside cinema. Even if he appears to be more revolutionary, more of a genius than this couple — which I do not think — sometimes I thought he was slowing down because of the rhetorics of the language. It’s like poetry: they are poets. You’re stuck if you’re into language. Everybody knows that. At the same time you cannot do poetry with poetic words. You cannot write a poem with poetic terms. You have to escape, work, work a lot.
For me, work is, or at least it was the only thing left for me. I came a bit too late, at a very bad moment. The people I liked and the things I wanted to do were very “underground” — but not in the marginal sense, they were not fancy or elegant or making money: they were really despised. They still are, by the way: recently I tried to help produce a film of Straub, but I didn’t manage. Anyway, at the same time Godard was in that very political moment, so nobody cared about him. Those were the things that inspired me. I was never into the avant-garde or experimental film, I was never seduced by it, I always thought it was too easy. It’s my Capricorn side. When I go to museums and I see those videos, I always say “it’s too easy, let’s work a little bit more and be a bit more provocative.” To go beyond, you have to respect some things. It’s hard to say, to confess, but you have to observe, and not forget things. For me, in experimental cinema, they forgot everything: Chaplin, Griffith, … not the angles or the shots, but the spirit. I’m talking about politics. Experimental cinema pushed for a kind of politics that was not interesting for me. Guy Debord, for example, I was never into. Far from it.

When I started I was confronted with a big dilemma. I worked as an assistant for about ten years. It was a nightmare. I recently read some biography that said “he worked as an assistant and he gathered a lot of un-useful and traumatic experiences”. It was exactly like that. I realised I did not want to work in this kind of thing. But it’s not like I’m going to try to change the industry or the rules. No, I just don’t want to work this way. But it took me three films and a lot of years to really get out. For them, it was a bit easier. I shouldn’t be saying this, but in the 1950s and ’60s, it was somewhat different. Me, I had to spend the 1990’s trying to figure out how to get off this train. I had to find the people, the place, the story, the narrative, the politics, everything, to be able to start again. It’s about production, in the Walter Benjamin sense. It’s the nights you spend thinking about production. The mornings you think about the art mean nothing. Or the nights when you think about the shot, or the girl, or the flower. It’s not like that. It’s a little bit abstract sometimes: it’s money, it’s cars, aspirin, social security, going up a stair, making a phone call, those kind of things that have to do with real fear. Should I call, should I explain, expose, should I go — like in the Clash song? That’s the risk. I think today it’s very difficult and I’m not really sure if the best way is not to work inside the system again. Not for me, but for young people. I’m outside, I’m retired.
I work alone too much, that’s my problem. I would like to work a little bit more with the people I usually work with. Not with technicians because that’s not really possible for me anymore. One thing Godard once said is that you have to have people around you who do the same things, someone at the camera or the sound who are really working with you. I could be here telling you that I have some partners, but I just don’t. It’s not that no-one knows what I’m doing, that it’s a secret or a mystery. It’s just because film has become economically very violent. I can’t find anyone to stay with me every day for six months. It’s not possible in my situation. I really want to make films that compete with Tarantino, I’m not kidding. I will always try, just like Jean-Marie, to put my film in the same place as Tarantino’s: in the cinema, in the multiplex. To make the same kind of objects, tell a story, more or less in a kind of rich way. We want to do the same thing, we want to be judged or appreciated in the same marketplace, even Jean-Marie wants that. But I can’t find people from the industry to work with me. Jean-Marie can’t, because he doesn’t have the money or the patience. I have a bit more patience, I think, but I spend more time. I can still have someone for the sound, because sound people are more sensitive, more here on this planet, as sound is more concrete. But a lot of others I can’t have. They want to be somewhere else, make films in Africa or in Brazil, they need the planes, the cars, the girls, the small talk. It’s the mythology of film and it’s very difficult to fight against that.
When I’m saying I don’t work enough, it’s perhaps because I’m working too much “on the other side”. After my years working as an assistant and doing a lot of terrible things, I thought of only one thing: I have to demonstrate that film can be done in that place – Fontainhas. I have to tell these guys that film was born in this place. And it was so evident, so simple. Just see a film by Chaplin or Griffith: it was born there, in the street corner. So I spent a lot of years trying to explain ”this is a tripod, this is a camera, pointing there. And there’s a guy passing. We can go from here to something else and then there’s the sun and we can invent a scene…” Just telling a lot of people, friends, people that I like, that I wanted to do something with them. But in order to do that I needed them to understand. So I was making a transfer of everything that I knew to that place. We did two or three films that way. But I invested a lot in the production side of things, and perhaps that’s the good side of those films that I made. That they are made there, with those people. Something is felt, something comes from them too.

Everybody has one’s own secret awards, and mine is not the artistic value or compensation. It’s much more the work we did there — a lot of people worked for that. I don’t really like documentaries, I never liked them, but there is a certain documentation in what we did. And now it’s done, and people see it, they think and they reflect. And that has a value. It’s like Jean Rouch’s work: something that has value. It was important. But now it has become something else.
It’s the stupidity of me thinking that film was supposed to record human life. I did that, and now I’m stuck. I’m no place. Because I don’t like documentary — and it’s not that anyway. And I can’t go on recording something that doesn’t exist anymore. Fontainhas doesn’t exist anymore, physically, but most of all the soul is missing: they are broken, as broken as Ventura. So it’s too much for me to pull them back up again. I don’t know how. And now I’m into artistic deliriums, I’m afraid. I talked with Jean-Marie about that: we are doing things to forget, not to remember. First I was doing things to remember, now I ‘m doing things to forget. That’s my feeling. I cannot explain. Every time we get to something like the film you saw recently — Sweet Exorcist — I have the feeling we are doing films to forget a lot of things. Forget the life that went before, forget what we did, perhaps forget to start again. We have to start something new, but what? It has to be done, but I don’t see anything new in films.
I do not have the sets, the houses, the skies, the forest, the sea. They — Straub-Huillet — have taken that away from me. I cannot do a shot of the sea. I can’t. Even if the script says: “and then he looks at the sea”, I will never shoot a sea, I promise you. I don’t even have text to work with anymore. Because they, the people I’m working with, are forgetting. They have so many problems. Do you see what I mean? How do we start from here, alone, everybody alone, if there is no possibility of a collective thing. I don’t see it because I don’t talk with anyone. I don’t want to be in the film-film thing. I can’t. I can’t do a film like Olivier Assayas. I don’t know how. That mythology of film, for me it doesn’t exist. It never existed.
In Umiliati you saw the soldiers, the guys with the red scarfs. They say they come to charm, to seduce. I’m not seduced by that. I was never seduced by cinema. It’s so beautiful I have to tell once again the story of Rossellini. It was Truffaut — he made some nice films but his texts are really wonderful — who was talking about Rossellini, who he knew very well — he was his assistant for a while. He said: “you see, there are people who are not born to make films, Rossellini is one of them. Because he’s not stupid, he’s not an idiot. He hasn’t got the naivety to make a film. Because you have to be a little bit stupid.” When Truffaut says “stupid” I know exactly what he means. Anyone who has tried to be behind the camera knows what it means. Faking, being stupid faking, faking being intelligent, faking a lot of things. Rossellini couldn’t do that, he couldn’t say “and now you kiss each other and you say I love you”. He just couldn’t do that. He did several films like this. And Truffaut said that his work goes from the city of Rome — in Roma, città aperta — to a lot a little cities — in Paisa, a film shot all over Italy, from Sicily to the North — to an Island — Stromboli — and a continent — Europe 51, a very beautiful film. And then he wanted even more. Because he was loosing his beliefs, he was loosing it completely. You can see that in Voyage in Italy: It’s a magnificent film, but he’s completely nuts. You see him going away. And then he literally goes away to India — which is an amazing film. And after India, he goes to the abstract planet of ideas: Socrates, Jesus… He was out of his head, saying things like “TV is the future of democracy” and so on. What is nice about Truffaut is that he said: he was too stupid to be in this business. He never said he was too intelligent, too kind, too gentle. He never said that, but that’s what he meant. This kind of people, like Jean-Marie, are too kind for this world, for this cinema. Too gentle, too intense to make films. So we should say that films should be something else. But what?

I felt it was important for me to look for something new, just for me, privately. Which means a little place on this planet to put my camera, and for that I had to convince the people around me that it was possible. Because they were saying “don’t film this, this is ugly, this is poor, there is nothing to see. If you put a pistol, it will look much better”. My work was to try to convince them that we didn’t need a pistol, or somebody saying “I love you”. It was very difficult, it still is. It’s because of the mythology I was talking about. So when I did this part of the job it was obvious that I had to work with what I had, with what they gave me. One of them told me he wanted to do his text like if he was dying in the hospital. He really wanted to say his text that way. I resisted a bit, already thinking about the email or the fax stating “dear sir, we are doing a film … we want to ask your permission… etc.” I was already dying! I’m very lazy for this kind of thing. That’s the kind of work I don’t want to do. Because I think there are great things in not doing this work. If you don’t do it, it’s resistance. Even more so because you have to pay if you want to shoot in a hospital or a museum. For example, I wanted to film a painting in an art museum. They asked for 300 euro, I said “no, I won’t do it”. So I bought a book — from Taschen — and with a friend I cut out the thing and it’s exactly the same. They will see it, of course. I’ll probably put “museum” just to annoy them, but I won’t pay. Because it’s never used for the right purposes, it’s going into somebody’s pocket. To come back to the hospital scene: the guy had this idea to shoot the scene in a certain way — you never get this from professional actors or technicians — putting the bed in a certain position, putting something under the mattress so that he was bending a bit and so on. The shot is there, everything is white and there’s a big window with white violent light. And it’s a hospital. That’s what we’re doing now, trying to do something between extreme laziness and getting the things that are there.
Of course it’s more complicated than this, there is always some kind of fight. Of course they want to go to the real place. It’s part of our job to resist the institutions, in this case a hospital, or the government, the police. But it’s not that, It’s more about making them think about another kind of language. That’s what I want. It’s not a language, it should be something else. The experience should come from this kind of experience. This worked because he wanted to say something to his mother, it’s part of a very long process. This boy was in bad shape, because of drugs and so on. And me, I make films, I make something that people see and believe. So he took me as a postman to post a letter to his mother. “I’m going there to tell something to the mother. You will help me say that, you will put me in the right position. The best way for me to tell my mother some things: she didn’t help me”, “I’m dying. It’s your fault…” Very difficult things. This art direction comes from there, from a much more violent and difficult place. It always comes from a very serious thing. It’s not about faking, imitating or fantasizing. He believes in this, I don’t and when we get together, it works because he believes. That’s why I work with this kind of people behind and in front of the camera, because professionals do not believe. It’s always technological, technical, artistic. It’s never political.

I do not know anyone in this room who has seen more films by Andy Warhol than me, I mean completely. I challenge anyone. I always liked him, I really like the filmmaker, even more than Jean-Marie. He’s my kind of guy, as serious as Rocky, as strong, stubborn, as mellow as Straub. When he makes you cry, he makes you cry. I’ve seen Warhol’s films in film theatres, and I’ve been waiting in cues to buy a ticket and 10, 20 minutes after the film starts, everybody goes away, just like for a Straub film. And I stay alone with two or three guys, one of them sleeping… In the same way that when you say “Straub”, everybody goes away, screaming “marxist, terrorist, boring!” In the case of Warhol they say: “Rock ‘n’ Roll!”. Nobody has the patience to really see. They see a picture, something from a catalogue from a museum. They never see the complete film. Like they have never seen this film and sometimes they have never seen a Charlie Chaplin film. It’s that simple.
I made a film called In Vanda’s Room. I was suffering to make this film, thinking, dying, I really worked a lot on this film, editing for two years. The suffering was very material. Two or three years after the film was made someone asked me, “have you ever seen Warhol’s Beauty 2?”. When I finally saw it, I had the feeling that he did it just like that .. “let’s make a film”… he did and it was exactly the same as my film. So it took me two years, it took him in real time about one hour. It’s a beautiful film, it has the same thing that I tried to do. I keep seeing the film again and again. It’s a dilemma. I killed myself to do this and he doesn’t give a shit and he does it. He doesn’t give a shit, but he’s a great filmmaker. The core of what I and him wanted to do is the same. What he says is on the bed everything is sexy, even peeling a potato. I write 50 pages about my film. That’s the difference. Sometimes you have to go to the basic simple thing. There’s more examples, but you have to see it, experience it. First you have to see the film. I am convinced there is a cloud of fog and dust surrounding a lot of film art aspects.

I met Antonio Reis when he was a teacher at film school. I went to this school because of him. He made me stay because at that time I was more into music. It was a difficult moment in those years. It was the moment of Straub of Godard and there was nothing more exiting than that. There were a lot of things coming from Europe: this kind of poetic cinema from Budapest or elsewhere, the kind that still exists today: guys with raincoats in places where it rains all the time. And I hate that. But it’s also in music: I was into the Sex Pistols and my friends were into Joy Division. You have to choose. And at that moment film was like Joy Division. Very profound and artistic and philosophical. I’m joking of course, but I’m trying to define something that was awful for me. Everything that I didn’t want was there in that school, and this guy was the only one that saved me, pulling me through. Because I was only saying this kind of bullshit “I hate this and that.” I was just against. And he said “keep saying that, one day you will be tired of it and you will do something.” And I had to do something one day.
Antonio Reis was very important, also because he was the only one in my country who gave me hope. More than hope: he showed that it was possible to make a film in the Portuguese language. For me, films come a little bit from when I hear the words, what people say, the tone, how they pronounce. I hear a lot of things in films. I wouldn’t say “class”, but money. I hear how much they were paid: I see a film and the girl says “I love you” and I say “oh, 200 euro”. I know how much it costs. I’m joking, but there’s a segment in the film I made with Jean-Marie and Danièle in which they speak a little bit about this problem. Which is why sometimes when you work with non-professional actors — people who have other jobs in life and come to do this job as an extra thing — you get more, you get an accent. Accent is always a good thing. You get an imperfection, you get something less to get something more. And you fight with your imperfections. It’s like the guy in the hospital: “I don’t have to be in the hospital to tell you this. So I’m even more intense. See, I’m completely naked”. What you get is this naked rawness. It’s difficult to have this with an actor. I prefer this kind of surprises or accidents. I’m always challenged, amazed, surprised. It’s a life I want, a life of surprise.

I would like my films to be shown as much as possible. Why not in a museum, a gallery, a video on the wall? It’s all the same audience for me. When I started to make films as I’m doing them now I really wanted to have an audience. Now the people I work with are the audience. Each time I make a film, if it doesn’t come out on DVD, I have to make 5000 copies. This abstract neighbourhood I’m always talking about exists. The houses are not there anymore, but the people exist. Some died, some are no longer there, but they have sons and cousins. Again it’s this fascination for film: “I want to see my cousin, my dad’s house, …” So we make a film and we show it among ourselves. Some colleagues… I don’t know if they want this kind of thing. They are content doing the film and showing it in Rotterdam or Berlin. At that moment, ten-fifteen years ago, I needed this response. It felt incomplete if I was doing that kind of work to stop there. Now it’s even more difficult because there are no more theatres in that place there. No more neighbourhood, no more film theatres. When we showed the films there’s was still a theatre. It’s been torn down, it’s a supermarket now. Like I told you, I lost.
Jean-Marie and perhaps Godard — I don’t know him, with Jean-Marie and Danièle there’s also the sentimental thing — I think they belong to an age, time, moment when this kind of work was for you and me. It was for a lot of people at the same time. It could be philosophy or poetry for all young boys and girls. Me, I cannot go beyond “the one”. I can only attract one sad boy. Yes, There’s quite a few of us here, but we’re not a lot. If we pick up some sticks and fight, we will loose. Back then filmmaking and film experience still had some fascination, this kind of mystery that it always had: this emotion, this secret emotion just for you, when you see something and you think “this is made just for me”. People shared the same secret. Everybody thought “this is mine”, but actually it belonged to everybody. Me, I cannot belong to everybody, although I wanted to. Tarantino apparently manages to be shared.

This kind of work — I’m not talking about commercial success, not even critical success — is not there anymore. It’s not the same world. That’s my experience, from my mother and father and grandfather and what they told me and what I saw when I was young. The films I experience now, I feel the difference. Yesterday somebody asked me “how is your workflow?” Workflow today means: the film you’re doing. Just the word makes everything different: “flow”. In my time it didn’t flow, it just stopped. Today the work flows. Workflow today means you shoot something and you go to the end and you show it on DCP. It’s the movement you make from the moment you say “action” to the moment you see it on the screen. No more shooting or editing. Something specific is lost. There’s no more shots, the work or the intensity you have to put in something to be a part of you. It’s no more. It’s something else.
There is a part of work in film that is gone, because of the workflow: the part “flow” is fake, the part “work” is fake. When I go to a lab today it’s completely phony: to change the shot, it takes you ten seconds. It’s not the speed, there’s just no work. The guys working in the labs are not working, but just pushing buttons. Again, they have a language inside them, a digital language in their brains, their hands, their eyes. I’m afraid in their hearts, already, and that blinds them a bit from what I’m trying to tell them. So what I’m trying to say is that there’s not enough work in the films that I see. There are films here and there, the problem is that they’re not seen. Never in the theatre. I’m afraid of things getting exactly the same. If you see a Thai film, all of them are exactly the same, they’re all about ghosts in the jungle. If you see a Portuguese film, they’re all the same. Everything is becoming the same.
This kind of work, the kind that stops: it puts obstacles in front of me every time. But with these obstacles, you jump or you don’t. If you don’t, just go away. There are some films that I admire, but I don’t jump. This kind of work that I like is very useful. Jean-Marie and Daniele never liked it when we talked like this, but I think it’s very useful. Like I think Jean Rouch was very useful. There are no more works like Jean Rouch being made in the world today. No more. Perhaps on TV, but how can you see that when there are 100.000 channels? Somebody has to tell me where. If someone goes somewhere with a camera it’s always for a different purpose. I’ve seen that so many times with young people nowadays, they take their small camera, go to a small island or a desert and they come back with a desert. That’s what I’m pessimistic about. This workflow, this language. The battle that is won is saying that cinema is a language. I fought against that a little bit. Not enough. The Straubs have fought a lot, Godard fought a lot, Rouch fought a lot. It was supposed to become something else than a language. Breaking the grammar. But again: I don’t believe in working inside the language. I don’t even know if it’s possible anymore not to. I think it was, this film we have seen is the proof. Even today some other filmmakers, very few, prove that it’s possible sometimes. But it’s not possible to be seen. I don’t see how I can make a film and go to a theatre and people will come and pay a ticket to see it. No one will come. I know there’s the Internet, streaming, downloading, I get a lot of things from different places, but it’s a different kind of work… perhaps it will make me change something again. I don’t know.
Actually, this digital revolution saved me a little bit. I did films with 35mm with big crews, producers, the normal things. When I got fed up and didn’t know what to do, one of the things that saved me was those small digital cameras. I thought of doing something on 16mm with two or three friends, but even that was very expensive and technically too difficult for the thing we wanted to do. I did Vanda in 1998, a long time ago, and I guess I was one of the first to use those cameras. It’s a bit pretentious to say that the small camera was just the same as the others, but it was. I thought about it like the others. At first I didn’t believe in the digital thing, I thought it was very poor, but then slowly it became part of the day by day work. It dissolved everything that was technical, all the ambitions of having something else dissolved in this routine. What was good about it was that I found a routine that I never had in cinema. Every day, more or less, when I didn’t shoot I was doing something else. But it’s now been twenty years, and I see digital replacing the oldest ghosts of cinema again. Everything that I thought was over is coming back. Ghosts, projections… You have seen films by Murnau or Lang: it’s very different. You cannot fake it. You cannot do it again, you have to do something else, but you have to break a little, be a bit violent, not gentle. You cannot be gentle with Murnau or Lang. The way people are, speak, act: they are from today. This is today. That woman: I know her. And I don’t see that in today’s cinema. Films by Warhol or Straub: that is the revolution. Proof is: nobody sees them.