In his excellent article 'Anywhere but the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8', Exploding Cinema's Peter Thomas argues that the adoption of Super 8 by successive generations of filmmakers "cannot be rolled up as simple nostalgia or dead technology fetishism." The article was reproduced in the first issue of My Obsolete Future, a zine produced and edited by Emmaalouise Smith to accompany her mayday screening programme last year at The Shoreditch. It's easy to see why she found a resonance with Thomas' contention - her films validate it entirely.
Working almost exclusively on film, Emmaalouise's shorts are hand crafted - self exposed, processed and cut alone in dark rooms and on editing desks. She fashions her images and sequences from the idiosyncracies and anomolies that the medium throws up: hair, overexposures, black frames, scratches, so that we are aware when watching her work that this is film as film, a self contained object, a capsule. But it is not nostalgia, the past nor longing for it. Instead the grain and skipped frames come from a hazy present, midnight conversations and daydreams shone through the projector gate.
Séance on a Wet Afternoon opens with a manifesto effecting that there are experiments but no mistakes. The film has a historic air in its depiction of a very Victorian pastime and grainy monochrome tones but the period feel is offset by a pop soundtrack and hectic editing of the image and the elements that comprise it. Shadows swell and bathe the frame, unfocussed lights dance across the séancers as they place their skinny hands in a circle. The film is contemporary London gothic, creepy and immediate.
Emmaalouise's films are interested in bringing out texture, both using the physical film (employed particularly well in her collaged Brakhage-esque stage projections for Kate Nash, appropriately titled It Looks Like...) and in the images recorded onto it. The Midnight Pen Pal opens on a dimly lit room where a woman is using a typewriter. She walks ot her kitchen in half-light, her shadow moving across the textured wallpaper and onto the flat white lino. The sound of the typewriter mixes with an ambient synthesizer and a faint echoed voice reading, perhaps from the letter we're seeing composed. Another woman is shown, writing in a notebook. The camera moves towards a front door basking in early hours shadow, later revealed from the outside to be a striking cerulean blue. The paint strokes are almost touchable. The film is a psychodrama, full of hints at connections between the women that inhabit it and the images of communication between them. The camera finds the ephemera of their lives - pink cigarettes, plastic telephones, shoes. There are echoes of Vivienne Dick and, in these objects and affections, a sense of make-believe, of dressing up to assume roles and identities. The past is recalled but remains past, transformed into new expressions.
As well as producing films herself, Emmaalouise is also a curator, having incisively programmed the monthly Short Film Sessions at Rich Mix last year and launching the less regular My Obsolete Future - "a film concept which re-introduces long lost aesthetics as well as welcoming the future of DIY ethics" - a perfect summation of Emmaalouise's own work.
THE PICTURES: You work almost exclusively with analogue materials and media. What do you prefer over more modern techniques? Could you describe your production process?
EMMAALOUISE SMITH: I think a lot of people forget that modern techniques aren't really techniques in themselves - we wouldn't have the majority of the technology we have nowadays if it wasn't for the traditional approach and obsessive development of classic film and photography, and I think modern-day/everyday are really lacking in any speciality and emotion when it comes to visual mediums - especially with the mass-produced 'look' both amateurs and professionals seem to strive for... it's so easy for people to pay a couple of quid and get a 'vintage' iphone app, or to to use Photoshop. Colleges and Unis love Photoshop because it gives them something to teach, you can't teach kids how to take good photographs, but you can teach them about Photoshop. I've been there, I've learnt Photoshop, and almost been brainwashed with the 'skills' they say every photographer should have. But looking back, at any photo I've taken in the past where digital manipulation has been involved - and I don't like it - it's not me and it's not what I was trying to do when taking the photograph. I guess Photoshop is for people that have always wished they could draw.
I don't want to be one of these really dismissive people that will completely swear by either film or digital, I think I've been that person before and it's not healthy in a creative way - you end up too angry, argumentative and in rants most of the time... I can 'work' digital and see the ease that some people would enjoy, but for me now, I wouldn't choose anything less than film - both moving image or stills. I work alone most of the time, and in the dark. With the types of equipment I use (or want to learn to use) I often end up working a complete bodge job to get the look I want. Working with film is one thing, but I'm completely fascinated in making things completely by hand (mainly because I find it hard to pass my work over to someone else to finish or rework). I much prefer to see something from start-to-finish and know that it's mine. I work with a lot of Super 8mm equipment, I hand-process my own rushes and telecine my own footage on a 70s toy projector (because I can completely control the finish) or I work with a man in East London who also spends a lot of time in the dark. I've specialised in 16mm film, and love the history behind the stock - particularly old Bolex films and European cinematography. I've recently started working in a colour stills darkroom, and again, seem to be working against-the-clock to develop my own style with it, before paper becomes too hard to come by, but overall I just work at a constant rate of personal experimentation - a lot of people that want to be artists these days want everything given to them on a plate, and it's those people that never get anything done... I'll spend a week trying to order some rare camera batteries just to use a particular camera I've got my hands on, or spend hours hand-drawing on film stock for my own amusement, and a lot of my work will never be seen by anyone's eyes apart from mine, but I'm not going to stop.
TP: A lot of your work centres around issues of idenitity, particularly self-identity, when you yourself feature in the films, or when there are monologues or external music on the soundtrack. Would that be correct to say? Is that a conscious thing, or is it more an organic thing coming from your process?
ELS: It would be correct, and I am quite aware of it, but when I look back on my work I see it as more of a scrap-book or diary into the past few years, and I don't think it's either deliberate or indeliberate, because I don't particularly like my image being recorded in a pretentious way, I just think I can learn a lot about observation and image capture if I can experiment with myself or my 'image' on a particular day - and I know how to look into a lens as well as staring down the barrel myself. It's like when writers say 'write about what you know'... Another reason is because it's sometimes very hard to get things done when relying on other people, or being let down by people with no lasting motivation. I love collaborating, and have found people (although very few) that I can instantly 'click' with to make something 'work' and I really enjoy the strictness of working together with someone. But I'm completely happy to write, direct, shoot, model, edit, record sound and produce if I need to...and then face the decision of how to write my name in the credits when it comes to it...
TP: What is your favourite moment (or moments) from your films?
ELS: For me, there are actually very few. When enjoyment comes along it's the most amazing feeling, but most of the time I'm completely terrified, whether on a very miniscule personal scale or on a larger platform... I try not to let it get in the way and rarely show it, but someone once said a similar thing to me that completely made sense, the wanted to be a cinematographer (and were probably a lot closer than they thought) but they would always say they were scared of 'the camera', and I think it's true of a lot of great artists - there's definitely a difference between pretending to be cocky and actually being an idiot. There are good moments though, on a rare occasion when I can honestly say I'm completely happy with the result of a film or photograph, or at least happy with what I've learnt, it's mostly just a very short term feeling (until you sit down and look back at what you've done and nostalgia kicks in) because the next day you'll probably be working on something completely new and starting the cycle again...
TP: Why did you approach Rich Mix to run the Short Film Sessions, and how have you found curating a film night?
ELS: Rich Mix actually approached me at the beginning of the summer last year, I had some ties witht he place for some work I was trying to apply for, but the Short Film Sessions were really just given to me as 'a free monthly film night in the new bar,' that I had the chance to transform. I was lucky to mainly be given the freedom to do what I wanted - again on my own, but in quite a professional space, but it was so much hard work looking at film from the curator's point of view as well as the maker's. I've stopped for the summer months to finish off some work I did for the East End Film Festival, as well as tie up some loose ends with some of my own work (including some new pieces!) but I did really enjoy the work I put in for the sessions and met a lot of film-makers I would never have had the chance to meet, including a very talented friend, Miss Ellen Rogers. And I was really lucky to be a bit cheeky and get in contact with some of my favourite influences, including Stefanie Schneider, Tony Hill and the really exciting premiere I programmed for Tim Walker.
TP: What are you working on next? And where do you hope things will head?
ELS: I'm getting a lot better, but I find it quite hard to go from start to finish with a project in a broadcastable sense. I experiment with so many ideas and techniques that I often happen to turn into very mixed medium pieces which can work out, but at the same time I'm trying my hardest to work on one project at a time, as opposed to 3 or 4... I love visual scrapbooking, cine-collage and archiving so I always have lots of little ideas that I'll develop into short films or stills projects; at the moment I'm working on another audio/visual project with musicians Goodnight And I Wish*, a personal narrative film about an old lady with lucid dreams of her past, and a short film about a magical fish that lives in my sink. I'mm getting quite a good response from entering films into festivals and screenings, particularly my shorts The Midnight Pen-pal and Who Would Have Guessed? and festivals have always been a good step into the future for me. I'd relaly like to begin to work in more of a broadcastable and exhibitive sense. I'm very excited about a nerly finished set of colour prints and short, starring Princess Julia, and shot in Dungeness, which I'd like to exhibit in the next few months. I just want to make films, and make the films I want to make, I'd be really unhappy working as a focus puller for many years to come, to then regret working as somebody else's eyes...
I always imagined I’d grow up to be a lounge singer or a B-movie femme fatale – louche, bitter – and I watched those scenes over and over till the VHS tapes wore out, till I had to wind the cassettes gently past the ruined parts each time. To suffer was the thing, I decided; preferably to suffer so much even before the action started that you’d be hardened, glittering damaged goods, ready to exploit and avenge from the opening shot to the last frame, or your death scene, whichever came first. Movies taught me before I was five that being a woman was dangerous, painful and complex. That’s how it was, and only the glamour and excitement of it could begin to compensate. I also knew that that kind of woman, my kind, always got punished in the end: assuming you survived the film at all, you certainly wouldn’t get the guy, and at the least you could expect to be run out of town. For me, the vamp was what made sense – it was the sweet, soft, open ingénue who seemed exotic, and in the 1980s of my childhood that meant one woman and one film above all: Daryl Hannah, in Splash.
As soon as I saw her I knew she was the fantasy girlfriend. She appears, naked, silent, long golden hair barely covering her breasts, a gorgeous fish out of water in New York City. And she’s perfect: she knows all about sex – insatiable but monogamous – and yet the big man gets to look after her, to explain about traffic or revolving doors. Isn’t that a little too good to be true? Perhaps we’re all born with some instinct for sex, and not so much for machinery, but then most of us are not born with a tail. When at last she talks (since it’s ’80s Manhattan, her first word is ‘Bloomingdales’), there’s a rasp in her voice: it’s never been used for speech. She seems untainted – no former lovers, no history of any kind. Even as a gauche, anxious prepubescent, I got the point: what makes Daryl/Madison the ideal woman is that she isn’t one. We, watching, know she’s a mermaid; her man can help her choose a name to replace the untranslatable dolphin-screech, and he can teach her whatever he likes. She is brand new. Any signs of strangeness that escape her have a focus and a justification: the lady is not from around here.
Splash has some affinities with the genre in which a devoted but untameable pet – Beethoven, let’s say – causes chaos and must be rescued from villains who want it locked up or destroyed. ‘Why don’t you keep her on a leash?’ someone yells, as Madison bounds across the street after some treat or other. And people keep trying to get her wet, so that her legs will fuse back into a tail and leave her thrashing on the ground. The dreamgirl isn’t so different from the sad vamp, it’s just that she protects herself differently. Naked, Edenic Madison doesn’t look as if she’d frame you for anything, she appears to have nothing to hide (a winning trick – they had wholesome Daryl wandering undressed at the start of Roxanne, too).
The bathroom scene in Splash marked my adolescence; it frequently replays itself while I sleep. At night, the beached mermaid creeps out of bed, pours salt in the tub, shuts herself in, spreads her tail out, serene, alone. It’s the next sequence that lodges in my psyche: the man at the door asking what’s wrong, wanting to come in, the escalation in seconds from concern (‘Are you all right?’) to anger (‘Enough is enough’), and her fear of exposure or violation, her look of utter, animal panic. The struggle between them felt so real to me, even as you watched her heave her Disneyfied joke-body out onto the bath-mat, her absurd, frantic efforts to dry the tail with a towel, then a hairdryer, as the hammering on the door grew more insistent.
The exhausting charade of femininity is being forced open – turns out the conventional beauty is a scaly monster who must transform or conceal or reveal herself unceasingly, only just getting away with it each time. Not even those closest to her know what she is, but they sense it, they want to catch her in the act of freakishness somehow, and this applies especially to the man who supposedly loves her: he wants to know and see everything, to be the only one privileged to see it, he wants to catch her out, to hold her captive, and what a fine line there is between ‘Darling, you can trust me, tell me your secrets – I will take care of you’ and ‘Open this door, you bitch, before I break it down’.
Indeed, he does it – even as she delays, distracts, pleads, sobs ‘No!’ – he smashes in the door, and there she is, tail dried away just in time. Now she must bridle on the floor like a little girl and explain herself: ‘I was shy’. ‘After the car and the elevator and the bedroom,’ he asks, ‘and the top of the refrigerator, you were shy?’ It’s as if, having fucked him, she has forfeited any right to privacy, to her own body. She’s his now, wide open, and if she says nothing’s wrong she must prove it (‘Everything’s fine’; ‘Well then let me in’). It’s striking that the bully behind the door is not one of those ‘scientists’ eager to cut her open and see what’s inside – he’s her boyfriend, played by Mr Plodding Decency, Tom Hanks, no less.
Even later, when he knows the truth, he asks ‘Is your secret that you’re a mermaid, or is there something else?’ ‘That’s it,’ says the fantasy girl. No more secrets, no interior self, nothing he can’t access. No wonder this movie made Daryl a star. She was never really a cheerleader blonde – the signs were there in Blade Runner, and it wasn’t just make-up. Her features weren’t meant for softness, despite that halo of hair and lighting they used to surround her. The hard bones of jaw and cheek and brow have emerged more strongly with time: Tarantino could see she was a warrior, and she is one still, getting arrested again last month outside the White House. I wanted her, long ago, the way I imagined a man would, but my warring impulses confused me, and I still feel that heartsick mix of lust, aggression, empathy and envy. Passion, because she’s an irreducible mystery, hiding in plain sight; empathy, because the dark, alien part of her so often has to stay submerged; and envy most of all, because she doesn’t have to make do with a flimsy locked door and a tub-full of saltwater – she can run to the pier, dive back into her element, and vanish.
We first encountered the work of music video director, artist and animator Lucy Dyson when she moved into our flat a couple of years back, having travelled to London from her native Melbourne. In the past half decade she’s produced scores of music videos, working with acts like Gotye, The Drones, Still Corners and Lanu, and in a variety of mediums. But whether film, straight animation, collage or a mixture of all three, her work is marked by a talent to take these disparate elements, bring them together and animate them not just in the sense of making them move, but imbuing them with life, polemic and meaning rarely seen in the medium of music video.
Her video for Gotye’s Thankys For Your Time starts with mild satire, kitsch workplace elements that suggest lighthearted smalltalk complaint at the world of work. But as the video progresses, concentric circles of telephones and macabre dancing co-workers reveal something altogether darker and harder to dismiss. As the images on screen dance uncontrollably around our field of vision we enter a state of Kafkaish panic. Similarly, Pussy Got Your Tongue is a Hitchcock Blonde nightmare presented at first as harmless retro fetish. The bright colours and every day objects given mischevious rule on the screen often reveal a hidden darkness. In many of Lucy’s videos, the inanimate objects and cut-out characters take full control and gleefully steer us into discomfort.
Lucy has mixed film and animation throughout her work but has recently produced videos for fresh Sub Pop signings Still Corners and Australia’s Teeth & Tongue that are based almost entirely on film and video image. Wish by Still Corners was shot on 16mm Bolex, double exposure to allow singer Tessa Murray to wander as a ghost amongst her bandmates. The video for Teeth & Tongue’s Sad Sun kaleidoscoped colour-rich Canon 7D video of singer Jess Cornelius across an animated group of yetis on a mountain quest.
Narrative features heavily in Lucy’s work, be it effectively simple as in Wish or with a sense of historical storytelling as in her Laika the space dog animation and the video for All India Radio’s Persist, which tells the sad tale of Topsy, a circus elephant condemned to death. Her narratives are imbued with a keen attention to detail and particularly design that is found more often in cinema than music video.
The world of the videos is meticulous, cut out and built from Lucy’s far ranging and enthusiastic influences – encyclopedias, soviet ephemera, the space age, retro interior design, children’s partworks, Hammer Horror, advertising, How And Why books. Her videos explore feelings and issues using the visual grammar of these influences, revealing their ideas through the metaphors and implications of those influences when placed in a modern context – the 50s housewives, the astronauts. There’s a naivety to these metaphors but Lucy’s work is all the more striking for it – for all the depth and complexity, her videos are no less entertaining, funny, bright or energetic and, in that sense, she is pushing the music video format forward into something more and more interesting.
THE PICTURES: How did you start out as an animator? Did you always intend to make music videos?
LUCY DYSON: When I finished highschool I really wanted to study painting, but my parents (an artist and highschool art teacher) persuaded me to do a BA in Media Arts instead, which was basically art school but with a focus on animation, video and sound art. I guess thinking it would possibly lead to a more lucrative career than a fine arts painting degree. So at uni I specialised in experimental animation. There was more of an emphasis on conceptual development than how well something was technically executed. I didn't initially set out to make music videos, I recall that during semester reviews at uni, if you presented a music video, and it had any "band shots" it would rarely be well received by the lecturers, but a confused video art piece would fare much better, and I'm not at all critical of my art school experience being that way, it pushed me to make considered and interesting work.
I started making music videos towards the end of my honours year at uni. I've always had a lot of musician friends, and that's pretty much how I got started. My early experiences shooting live action was that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I didn't even know how to properly operate a video camera, these days I know the value of a good DoP.
Music videos do take up most of my time, but I don't feel like I've had a breakthrough with any of them. I don't see myself making a career exclusively from music video directing, but it works with my art practice at the moment. It would be great to be repped by the right company, work with a good producer and have more money to work with, but most of the time I'm too busy to be phased by these things. As long as I'm busy and there is interest in what I'm doing, I figure I'm on track.
TP: What would you say the influences on your visual style are? Would we be right to say that you reference movies a lot? And maybe aspects of interior design?
LD: I spend a lot of spare time collecting and poring over 1950s-70s Home Living magazines, then taking out all the elements I like the best and collaging a new room from these. I'm obsessed with mid 20th century interior design, but over the last few years, having moving from Melbourne to London and now Berlin, my own home interiors hardly reflect this. I've owned and have had to leave behind a lot of nice furniture. When I start collaging interior scenes together for my animations or art, I'm creating rooms I would love to live or work in. Which is often how I feel when watching Hitchcock films. I think I'm also influenced by Richard Hamilton's work and Dexter Dalwood's painted interiors, I love how they both play with perspective, I struggle with interior perspective, I usually tend to frame animation scenes as though they are being presented on a stage, I'm working on loosening up this approach, I'd like to make some future work exploring really warped interior spaces.
TP: Do you often work with collaborators? How important is collaboration?
LD: I love to collaborate when it comes to executing a concept. But I like to come up with initial ideas on my own, and then when I feel excited that I have a strong idea, I like to bring it to someone else, (usually more skilled than me in either animating or filming) and work out the logistics. I don't think I'm technically skilled enough to pull off everything myself, though when you have no money to work with you sometimes have to. I think it is important to learn from other people. I'm not a natural animator, I find animating really difficult, but I love it and I have been lucky to work with other people like Isobel Knowles and Joseph Jensen who are naturals. Like with any medium, if you're inspired enough to hone it, in the end your own hand is all over it and that gives it your touch, people can pick my work. I'm not too uptight about my own wonky animation style these days, I've worked hard and long on it, but it is so good to work with a really talented animator who with a deft hand, can bring naunce and emotions to characters and scenes.
TP: There's often a strong sense of narrative in the videos. Do you hear the song and find an appropriate story, or do you choose the story before finding a song to illustrate it?
LD: It depends on the song, with the Topsy animation, I had been researching that story before I was approached by the band (All India Radio) about making an animation for them, it was something I was thinking of making a short animated film about. The band said they wanted something animal themed, and I thought the Tospy story was a good match for the sombre tone of the song (Persist), luckily they agreed, and it worked so well that US animals rights organisation Born Free, used it as the central focus for a campaign against circus animal cruelty. It also worked so well that when it was first screened at Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago, unlike with every other music video screened in the program, when the video ended, not a single person clapped, I guess they were too sad too (I hope).
With Still Corners, the song itself (Wish) inspired the music video concept. The band had said from the start that they wanted the film clip to be shot on film, so with a bolex camera and a couple of rolls of 16mm as a starting point, I came up with the idea of shooting double exposures based on the specific lyrics from the song; "I had dreams I can remember and you've had them too". It was such a fun experiment, I don't think the narrative was very clear though, it wasn't obvious if they were all just sleeping and dreaming or actually dead, but we structured the edit that way on purpose.
I'm always filing away stories that I feel could be told in an interesting visual way, but mostly they are sad stories, I'm drawn to pathos, when it comes to narrative. Sometimes I adapt these stories for music video concepts, but it all really depends on the song, and often what the artist wants. I've had a few treatments knocked back on the grounds that the concepts I've put forth are too sad for an indie-pop music video. I have a short list of stories I'm waiting to turn into short animated films.
TP: Do you have a favourite way to work?
LD: I like to mix it up as animating can be such a tedious and boring process, and I like experimenting, it's a given if you're making something with next to nothing. At the moment I'm really happy with the animation style Joe and I are developing, combining his animated illustrated characters in my collage scenes, my strengths lie in background art and directing and Joe's in character animating. This has been a great development, it looks slick and smooth, yet still retains the idiosyncratic qualities of my work.
TP: What's next?
LD: At the moment I'm working on a crazy animation for an ipad App, and Joe and I are also completing a music video we started last year, that was initially dropped due to time contraints, but has since been picked up again, we are really excited about it, it's all illustrated and a lot of work, it will be nice to see how people respond to it. There is also a mysterious experimental film clip featuring a wonderful LA actress, it's a love project, it's taking ages to pull together. Later this year hopefully Joe and I will get on with the short films I mentioned, we'll have a long winter in our studio in Berlin, I'm looking forward to it. Also, I have a new video for Still Corners ready to drop anyday now, it's a bit sexy, and creepy, I can't wait to share it.
(too) long-promised but finally almost here, that's the cover for Pictures Zine #5, David Wojnarowicz drawn beautifully by Tom Moore. the issue has interviews with Angelique Bosio, Lawn-Darte & Steele, Bruce LaBruce, Emmaalouise Smith & Lucy Dyson, plus a piece by Tom Moore on Wojnarowicz, awesome artwork, new releases, society pages and the usual. It'll be winging it's way to the usual locations (and a few new ones) over the coming weeks or you can contact us. Plus...
So we're completely thrilled to announce that we'll be presenting a pop-up cinema short film programme at this year's Yes Way, the ever fantastic Upset The Rhythm weekender which this year is at Peckham's Bussey Building (incidentally, one of the filming locations for this here masterwork). it's an amazing lineup on any or all three days, with our film bit running on the Saturday and Sunday. bring a date!
We're all sold out of all back issues of our Pictures zine, but hope is not lost.
Issue 4, the Documentary Issue featuring Frederick Wiseman, Ondi Timoner, Rita Ribas and loads more is now online in succinct PDF form here: Issue 4 (11MB - right click, save as)
You can already get Issue #0 (6MB) and Issue #1 (10MB) too, for all your ancient history needs.
has produced some of our favourite documentaries of the past decade. You’ll most likely know her from DiG! (2004), the odyssey of Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre and their friendship and jealous feud with The Dandy Warhols as both bands struggle to make it (or struggle against making it), and from last year’s We Live In Public, the story of internet pioneer Josh Harris.
Harris was one of the first to cotton on to the potential of the internet, and set up a series of pre-broadband web TV channels, before launching an auspicious Big Brother style project called “Quiet: We Live In Public” in which 100 artist residents were denied all personal space save an open bunk, filmed around the clock on myriad webcams and able to watch eachother 24/7. The results were chaotic, fascinating and occasionally depraved, as self-control was abandoned, positions of authority were abused and the experiment began to disintegrate under it’s own conditions. Harris followed this by rigging his own house with hundreds of cameras and putting his daily routine and relationship with his girlfriend under constant surveillance, broadcast to the world via the internet, and allowing the world to interact and chat with the couple. Harris’s relationship collapsed under the strain, his fortunes soured, and eventually he fled the country to avoid his financial woes. Ondi’s film follows Harris from the glory days at the turn of the millennium to the present, ultimately asking powerful questions about our use of the internet and the extent to which we share our private lives online.
Ondi Timoner’s documentaries are very much about time, accompanying their subjects through years of their lives and witnessing these lives unfolding. Join Us (2007) follows the intimate story of a group of families as they grapple with the emotions and crises faced when attempting to leave a small-town cult and un-do years of brainwashing. The families are candid in revealing their experiences – their horror at their own blindness, their feelings of loss and loneliness, their compulsions to return - and Ondi’s camera is open and sympathetic, yet when meeting the cult leader, the Pastor of their church, the film does not assume a position of judgement, allowing the Pastor to voice his own seemingly heartfelt, if delusional, side of the story with equal emotion. The disappointment and confusion of the Pastor’s faithful wife is particularly affecting.
In spending such lengths of time with her subjects and immersing us in their world in such a direct and honest way, Ondi has created a series of unique and fascinating films, each one bringing to the fore the larger questions and implications of the story, while remaining at the same time intimate portraits, films about groups of people who are at turns lost, obsessive, misguided, driven, destructive and brilliant. We recently had the pleasure of speaking to Ondi about her own journeys and obsessions.
The Pictures: How did you get into filmmaking and what did you make of your early work, did you enjoy it?
Ondi Timoner: My early work? What do you mean, do you want to talk about the very beginning?
TP: Yes, I do.
OT: Starting at the very beginning. OK, well I was 19 and I asked my parents if I could have a you know little consumer video camera for Christmas or the holidays and they said yes and they gave me a camera that I ended up calling Flo, that was her name, and I took her on the road and first thing we did, me and my brother was go across the country and we interviewed people in toll booths and convenience stores about what makes them happy and what they fear the most and what they think of gays in the military cos those were sort of the questions of the day and I quickly learned that my camera was this bridge into worlds that I could never otherwise enter, and that it was in fact you know, a way to learn, and, in an extraordinary way that I had never had access to before and I’m not the kind of person that, I’m not like a book learner you know? I’m a, more of a people learner, I learn from other people and from interaction and, even at Yale where I was, at Yale at the time, I would get so much more out of the lectures you know than I would out of the books and so this camera became like this way in and by my senior year I only took classes where the teacher would agree to let me make a film instead of write a paper for my final project.
TP: Oh cool.
OT: So by the end of school I was making a film about women in prison called Voices From Inside Time for a class called Transgressive Women in American Culture and it was really quite, quite an incredible way to learn and so when you know I graduated, a lot of people graduate from Yale and go on to these very high paying jobs and everybody was kind of looking at me when I said I was gonna go be a documentary filmmaker but I felt like it was just the perfect yin-yang because I would go out into the world, say I went to the prison, I would have this access to speak to these women you know and really humanise them and find out why they were in there and that they loved their children and break down the stereotypes you know? And learn myself and be there for as long as it took and give myself over to the muse, and then I got to go to the edit bay, and Yale had no production facility so we did everything at this public access station, ha, and you know, thank god for the public access station but I would go to the edit bay and be in this quiet room, in all that I had learned and sorted out and figure out a way to communicate it for other people you know? So that they could learn and so it was like to me a perfect yin-yang and to this day you know the editing process is where the writing happens and you know I followed these films, these stories over a long period of time and it’s absolutely incredible to… to give, to basically work for 21, you know the first time on my movie Join Us I showed up at the cult treatment centre and shot for 21 hours that day, and I was blown away that these people who had just been through a mind control situation where their lives and their privacy and money and everything had been taken, their children had been beaten and yet they were opening up to me, and I just followed the muse you know and then you just, you put yourself in these situations where it’s not about you at all, it’s totally about life and capturing the serendipity of life and capturing the nuances of human experience and then, you know, then you go to the edit bay and it’s all about private time, quiet time, sorting it out and figuring it out and that’s where the revelations come a lot of the time, and so anyway it’s just been a beautiful process but I’m also moving into narrative films now.
I hate the word narrative, I’m sorry. Documentaries, my documentaries have narratives, ha, they have stories and they’re also dramatic so what I say is pre-scripted films with actors is what I’m moving into.
TP: Yes, fiction? So you mentioned that the films have very long stories and you have all the time to get to know the subjects, and I think that makes them really satisfying as well, that you can see everything unfold over such a long period… How do you tend to choose subjects, and is it always the case that the story goes on for a long time and you’re around for a long time, or does it sometimes cut short or… do you tend to try and find stories where there’ll be that length to it?
OT: No these stories find me. I can’t even take credit for finding them per se, I just have a strong intention, like for Dig I was really intent on exploring the intersection of art and commerce cos I’d made this film about this one woman in prison after the one I mentioned to you and that was called The Nature of the Beast and I had this woman’s life rights to go try and get it… I realised that people weren’t watching documentaries in the early ‘90s, and so I tried to get it to you know a larger audience by turning it into a TV movie or what have you, something to get 2 million housewives to write letters, and I quickly realised that you know the integrity of the story was being threatened by the industry, you know so here I am 21 years old and they’re like ‘this is a great story, you’re a producer, now get out of the way’, basically and so I started filming bands on the verge of getting signed to look at what would happen to me, and I was filming 10 bands over a year, that was my goal, and then I met Anton and he’s like ‘forget about those other bands, I’m taking over your documentary’ and I thought yeah right, and then he did, he did you know because I had my eyes open and he was, he was so compelling because he had such an antithetical relationship to the business and he was much more of a hyperbole than a lot of the other artists and musicians that were cowering in the shadows of the industry, do you know what I mean?
So he was quite, you know quite exciting, and then he actually said go meet the Dandy Warhols, we’re gonna start a revolution together, and I thought well I’ll go meet them and I did and they had no idea that he was planning to head up there to make a record with them and I thought well this is incredible, here they are, totally on the verge of getting a record out on Capital Records, ready to play the game, comfy cosy, totally stable band in Portland and this guy’s coming and they don’t even realise it, he’s coming to like start a revolution with them, haha, so… So eventually really I realised that I could look at everything I was looking at with the 10 bands with these 2, and then the story just kept going you know, and it’s not like I chose it as much as I just sort of you know stuck with it, I have tenacity and a sense of you know, I have tenacity and a sense of where to show up.
TP: Do you see yourself as… How involved are you in what actually happens in the films, like do you see your role as kind of a journalist-investigator, or are you more of a participant, or do you think it’s somewhere in between?
OT: I believe I’m an Interloper, it’s like what my company’s called.
TP: Oh, I see!
OT: Yes, I’m in the group but I’m taking notes at the same time.
TP: I didn’t notice that, the name of the company.
OT: Heh.
TP: But you’re in, briefly, a couple of the films, I think you’re in..
OT: Yeah, I’m in the bunker.
TP: What was it like staying in Quiet? Were you there the whole time? It looked pretty crazy…
OT: It was somewhat like playing dress up or something, it felt like this totally artificial community where we were supposed to be, you know all of us together and friends and you know it just kind of felt really, I don’t know how to describe it. It didn’t feel real and it felt uncomfortable and then it also kind of felt fun sometimes, like cereal bars, I expressed in the movie, but it was uncomfortable to be around these people that you didn’t know who they were, what was gonna happen or what they really were thinking about, you know like that woman attacked the other woman and there were people there, there was not a feeling of security to the place. It’s kind of amazing that it came out, that Josh got off as easy as he did.
TP: It looked like it had the potential to be pretty disturbing…
OT: Haha, it was, it was loud too, it was anything but quiet. He called it Quiet: We Live In Public and it was, you know, loud.
I was only there to direct it more than anything. I do believe that I should try to experience and be a part of what I’m filming to the extent that you know it’s good for the film, so I was there and I had a pod but I also had a hotel room and I also, you know, my thing was I had a walkie talkie and I had four camera people besides myself and I had a multiplex system where I ran the 110 surveillance cameras into one machine and then recorded to 12 different VCRs so I could record 12 different individual cameras and then one that I could do 9 screens or 4 screens so that was part of the art to me, was to record the pod situation or the virtual box situation as a metaphor for the virtual boxes that we’re all sort of in now and also use that as a way to monitor the place and know where the action was and be able to deploy real digital cameras with people behind them, you know what I mean?
TP: Going back to the way that the stories are very long and also that they have a lot of different film formats within them- I don’t know if that’s done in post, or if you experiment along the course of filming, but it gives a collage effect to the whole thing. Is that conscious and were there any particular influences on that style of filmmaking, or is it more just about experimenting with it as you go along?
OT: What was the original… experimenting with what? I think I missed…
TP: The look of the image, and the different formats that things are filmed on, like I don’t know if that’s done during filming or it’s a post-production thing.
OT: In all my films?
TP: Maybe not so much in Join Us, but in DiG certainly and in We Live In Public…
OT: Yeah, well in Dig, what happens is you end up filming over time and then technology changes, so you know I was filming on Hi-8 cameras and then me and my brother, back when my brother and I were following the bands in the early, mid ‘90s we had those kinds of cameras, then I remember the Hi-8 camera got stolen and it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me probably because it forced me to upgrade to digital and thank god because the avid wouldn’t read Hi-8 and we always had to transfer the Hi-8s to digital, and when we transferred the Hi-8s to digital they went through sort of an effect where they started to look different and then you know we had Super-8 which we always loved to shoot and then we had 16mm and 35mm by the end, so there was just a lot of time going by and the ability and financial resources changing and technology changing and then at a certain point with Dig you know it’s all about putting it in a washing machine basically and making it look like it sort of fits together, like a quilt or something you know? And I love that, I think it’s totally appropriate because I think the goal of any film that, I mean certainly a documentary film and probably any film, but it’s easier with a pre-scripted actor film to create an environment that makes people feel like – people meaning the audience – feel like they’re there, they’re immersed you know. When you’re doing a documentary my whole thing about filming stories over time is that time provides the greatest narrative, and because suspense, even the slightest not knowing what’s gonna happen next, allows people to interact with a film in the way that a historical looking back film cannot do. Just does not happen. So that’s why... Hang on that’s my phone. Hold on OK? … OT (returns): …I had to talk to her, she’s my producer.
TP: Oh don’t worry about it. Umm…where were we? Talking about a quilt, and Dig, and….
OT: Quilt? Oh yeah yeah yeah. So it’s a very organic process of just kind of you know, whatever works. The form should follow the content. It’s very important that the film feel like what it is, so with We Live In Public it’s more of a silver bullet kind of film and even though some of the footage may look degraded cos it was recorded on a VHS, it’s still put inside a graphic motif that looks like today, it looks like our lives with the internet today and it feels like you know the music and the images and the graphics all feel like a combination of the cold steely technology and the kind of warmer humanity breaking through or trying to break through or how the virtual and physical worlds interact, you know I feel like all of that is in the look of We Live In Public, and so I’m quite proud of that and I feel like, or you know not proud but I’m happy that that’s how it turned out, then Join Us, same thing, Join Us feels very pastoral and is slower and quieter and it’s not as many formats because all that worked for that film was digital because it had to be extremely low impact because we were in on these therapy sessions, we were running into the cult leader’s house or we couldn’t really do anything more than that and then there was some surveillance when they go to the church, and then there’s Super 8 because it’s appropriate for them, you know?
But as soon as I put John Lennon – God in, on the credits, it was like no way, no way that the film could, the story could handle a big song, it needed like you know, it needed to have Iron and Wine and it needed to have Sufjan Stevens, whereas We Live In Public could have Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails and needed to have that, so, yeah, hope that makes sense.
TP: It does, and I think it’s a good parallel to draw between the music and the type of film it is cos in that type of documentary it can often feel quite musical, the image and film itself can feel quite musical, I mean especially in your films I think-
OT: Yeah, music’s really important, to me music’s the most powerful art form, hands down. It has the power to infiltrate your soul and your mind and your subconscious in a way that even film can’t do it in the same way, any visual medium can’t, you know it’s just, you’ll be able to listen to a song and the lyrics will go into your brain because of the beat, because of the rhythm of life and how that interacts and how the music actually is that, you know?
TP: Yeah, it’s really personal, it’s talking to you as you listen…
OT: Yeah and so you don’t even realise sometimes, you can be asleep and listening to music and wake up and have the lyrics in your head, that just doesn’t happen with any other art form, so it has the power of osmosis and it’s crucial to film.
TP: It is… I had three more questions, um, two of them fairly heavy, one nice
OT: Uh-oh.
TP: So… it seems like a lot of the subjects in the films are really driven people, but a lot of them in two directions at once, so they’re looking for very positive creative and producing very creative things, but often in a very self destructive way.
OT: Yeah.
TP: Like somebody in Join Us mentions their paths leading to death, I think the people in Dig talk about Anton’s house smelling of death.
OT: Yeah, well that’s cos he was on heroin you know?
TP: Yes, not so good.
OT: Haha.
TP: So is that dual path something that interests you in particular, or is it something that just tends to exist in the types of subjects that you look for?
OT: Um, you know… I’m not clear on why it is that I have been sort of swept up, I mean Josh Harris called me and asked me to document the bunker, Anton said he was taking over my film, you know with Join Us it was more of Bush won the election and I thought there was some kind of mind control in America and I ended up at a cult treatment centre and once again sort of a megalomaniac male, person who can’t help himself at the crux of the story. I don’t know why that is but I think the films are really all about us, and not only because these people are hyperboles of characters that have some relatability to all of us, you know whether it’s feeling like, it’s really man vs. system you know as a central conflict, even my film about prison and about this woman in prison it’s just kind of like, they’re all like that, and right now my first scripted film, pre-scripted film is about Robert Mapplethorpe and him like you know, busting through with this imagery that made people go crazy over here, freak out and say oh it’s pornography, is it art? And he couldn’t help himself. He was a catholic and he couldn’t help himself. I don’t know if that’s just what appeals to me but I wouldn’t make, really I wouldn’t have made for example the film about Josh if it wasn’t about us. We Live In Public is really only in existence because of Facebook because I saw the Facebook status updates and went holy shit, I get it now, I get why this is, as opposed to Josh being Bill Gates or something, he’s not. So it wasn’t like I was like let me make a film about this crazy man who sets up this bunker, who’s like a web pioneer, I didn’t think it was that important for the world to know about Josh Harris until I realised that he was this big huge walking cautionary tale and also had some visions that have, that he created, whether he knew it or not, a physical metaphor for life online that is, you know granted, a fun house mirror but still food for thought for all of us at this crucial time, and so yeah, I don’t know if I’ve answered your question but… there’s more information haha.
TP: Yeah, you kind of answered the next one as well, it was, I put it in different terms, but it was about how the kind of male, almost religious leaders tend to be these central characters and they do tend to get people following… I mean obviously the most literal example of that would be Join Us, but in Dig there’s that bit where they go up and somebody says “are you in a cult?” and they say “oh, I don’t know” and, yeah, I think you kind of answered that.
OT: Well there is this idea, it’s about what we’re willing to give up to have our lives matter, that’s what the films are all about, every single one of them. They’re not about those leaders because- I mean they are to some extent but the real, the real point of interaction between the audience and the material is around the person’s life themselves… Like, I make these films for all of us, not because I think those people are extraordinary, not because I’m obsessed with cult leaders, but what these kinds of charismatic leaders do and you know charismatic and conflicted and misguided and inspiring and you know gruesome characters do is they somehow compel people to give up their privacy, their freedom, their you know whatever the hell else they were doing to follow them you know? And it’s like what are we missing that we need that, and why, and what are we doing every time we go and post something on Facebook because that’s not one person but we’re giving stuff up all the time now, cos we need our lives to matter, we need to feel significant, we need to feel like we did something on this planet, even if it’s post a digital photo and have somebody say “you look so cute!” you know?
TP: It’s true.
OT: It’s like a phenomenon that I think is pretty compelling.
TP: You really don’t realise who stuff is going out to either, I got an e-mail this afternoon from someone working for a TV company saying that they’d read a story that I’d posted on a forum about two years ago about almost being mugged and fighting the guy off, and they wondered if I’d be up for being interviewed on camera and I thought how the hell did you track me down from a post on a forum two years ago? It never crossed my mind…
OT: It makes you wonder if Josh was right, that actually the computers are gaining consciousness. I’ve got to admit that I’ve wondered this myself now because I have this Google alert on my name and on We Live In Public and literally the internet generates these stories, it’s pretty wild, like they’ll come up with something from two years ago and re-post it and it’s like who’s doing that? I can’t imagine someone sitting there doing that you know?
TP: No, it’s strange. OK, the last question – what are you working on next?
OT: I’m leaving for the Sundance Lab on Tuesday to workshop my first feature film about- hold on I have to write one thing really quick… OK. So I’m taking my film, my first pre-scripted film that I intend to make, that I’m producing and directing and writing with another writer Bruce Goodrich who generated the project originally like 8 years ago, and we’ve been developing it ourselves for two years and me and Eliza Dushku are producing it together, and it got into the Sundance Lab which is an incredible workshop for directors that is just amazing, it’s highly competitive but it’s just incredible, they’re basically investing in my film school education and I’m going there and shooting a bunch of scenes and it’s gonna be awesome.
TP: Sounds like a lot of fun.
OT: Yeah, doing it on Tuesday, I’m going to Utah for three or four weeks, they’re flying me in and putting me up and we fly in actors and we shoot, we then work on the script and you know make a movie, so we’re doing that and that’s gonna help a lot and then also I’m completing a documentary right now about climate change and the climate change debate and that as the sort of debate around it and then Bjorn Lumberg the very controversial climate or political scientist-economist who is sort of at the centre of a lot of this climate change debate, and I’ve been shooting that for a year and that’s what I was on the phone about and we’ve got editors here, and I’ve got to get off this Skype thing and start paying attention to that, but that’s gonna come out in September, October, so another documentary. One last one for now and then my first pre-scripted actor film which I’m just absolutely thrilled and excited about doing. I really think that you know I’ve taken documentary about as far as I can right now, We Live In Public, and that it’s time for me as an artist to stretch my wings and tell stories in a different way and I think I can bring all the authenticity and all the knowledge that I gained from these incredible 17 or 18 years in documentary to really help me with the narrative films, or the pre-scripted films, and then motherhood, I’m mother to an incredible young man named Joaquin who is six years old, and it’s a full time job. So I’ve got three full time jobs, haha.
TP: Ha, that sounds exhausting.
OT: Yeah, it’s very exhausting but I live a very rich and full life, I’m honoured and glad and please send me a link to this when you have it done, I do have to run Garry but I wish you the best of luck.
makes mystery documentaries, short time capsules of clues and artefacts that unfold enigmatically through the duration of the films, arriving at the spectres of answers to their own intuitive questions. They’re full of ghosts and and family tales captured on video for posterity. They feel old in the sense that they feel wise, rooted in family history and old painted portraits and maxims from generations past. The films are about religion, ritual and affectionate details of living, death and memories and relations.
Rita’s first film Tia is about her Portugese grandmother, shot in her home as she lays in bed recovering from an unspecified operation, then goes through her house singing, reflecting, telling stories. There’s a sense of wonder in the house and in Tia, as she eats from a box of chocolates named for planets in the solar system or sings about suffering. You get the sense that these details we see and the tales she tells are at the surface of a much deeper pool of memories, and that the house is filled with old and hidden things. Tia opens a secret door and enters a dusty room where a locked case contains her mother’s wedding dress. She takes out the dress as if it’s the answer to the riddle of the film, and holds it to camera - a still portrait that feels more like a painting than a photograph. It has that much more weight.
Both Tia and Being Mother revolve around women in Rita’s family, and both films are composed of interviews and observations. Both films look at the details in the way their subjects live, picking out decorations and crockery, the routine of making tea. Being Mother begins with a wall mounted painting and then Rita’s mother discusses the purpose of her life. She jokes about being constantly busy. Both films are touchingly affectionate, light-hearted even, but at the same time in both there are hints of illness and inescapable reminders that time is passing away. The family dog needed an operation to remove a giant tumour. The father is prescribed pills. Rita’s mother talks about a ritual in which wax replicas are made of a person’s body parts where afflicted by disease or injury, and that the wax models are then kept so that their bearer is healed through faith. She presents a pair of wax hands, but whether these are esoteric curiosities she has come into, or that they belong to herself or her husband, is left open ended and unknown. We get the impressions of stories and of the past through pieces of evidence that speak only for their own existence and their being kept, held on to. Like the wedding dress, the hands feel like an answer, but it’s a subtle and intuitive one that completes the portrait of the film’s subject, and not a central point or big reveal.
The Fire is Rita’s longest film to date at 15 minutes, building on this technique in a much more ambitious way. Through fractured, non-linear footage of a family gathering at a farm in Rita’s Portugal home town, the film tells the story of a huge fire that tragically led to the death of a baby. The film opens again on an object – a lamp that has a small burn hole on its shade. Shots of the generations of the family are again suggestive of painted portraits – in The Fire, some of the family are filmed next to old family paintings (this paralleling of the film screen and canvas is revisited in Rita’s Still Films series of atmospheric landscapes). Photographs and heirlooms are picked out around the house. The rich sense of history lying in the individuals in Tia and Being Mother is multiplied into a whole extended family with pets and children and reminisces. Elderly relatives take turns at telling the story of the fire as children play outside. The film fades to black frequently so that often only their conversation or laughter is heard. The story can only be brought to life when all are assembled here. There is a strong sense of ritual – the family are very religious – in the atmosphere, storytelling and the invocation of the shared memory of that traumatic night. The documentary captures and evokes it perfectly.
Religion and belief are central to Heaven, Rita’s first film not to focus specifically on a single family, although it is equally funny, personal and emotional. It was inspired by the death of her family dog. The film was made in Abney Park cemetery, and is a series of snapshot portraits of dogwalkers and their dogs. The owners speak in voiceover from separately recorded interviews about whether they believe pets go to heaven, how they feel about their dogs. Almost all say they feel like the animals are family members, and their loss would be just as devastating. They meander off into reflections on lost loved ones and life after death, made all the more poignant by the Hackney beauty spot graveyard setting. As with all of Rita’s films there’s a sense of loss, things passing from physical, familial presences into stories, memories and video.
THE PICTURES: What drew you to filmmaking, and documentary filmmaking in particular? Would you say you have any strong influences?
RITA RIBAS: My earliest connection to filmmaking were my father's home-movies and slideshows. Whenever we went on holiday he would make these strange films that were more like experimental/art videos - they always focused on random details, and didn't make much narrative sense - but managed to capture the moments, that often go unnoticed, in a very special way. I guess this is where I started to form my appreciation for observing the world around me and understanding the camera's power to capture the sensations of atmosphere and memory. Other influences: Werner Herzog (his choice of subjects and approach to documentary), Ulrich Seidl (his juxtaposition of real-life comedy and horror), Errol Morris (specially 'Gates of Heaven' and 'Vernon, Florida') and David Lynch (what would a documentary look like in his hands?). And one film that's recently stuck in my mind is Nikolaus Geyrhalter's documentary 'Our Daily Bread' (for its hypnotic depiction of industrial food production and surreal Kubrick-esque cinematography).
TP: How do you choose the subjects for your films? Do you have a concept in mind and then find a subject, or is it more organic than that?
RR: The film itself is rarely clear in my mind when I'm starting out. It's always a process of feeling in the dark. It starts with an interest in a subject, place or person (things I come across in my everyday, on travels or on the internet), and expands through observation and interaction. Often I only start to make out where the film is going and how it will be shaped after I start interviewing people. So in a way its a bit of a scary process but also very rewarding - I like feeling like a detective, connecting bits and pieces together to make a story - and learning along the way. There is a good quote by Errol Morris; "If you know exactly what you're going to say before you say it, why bother?"
TP: There's a lot of humour in your films, as well as a lot of quite touching elements. They're a lot more emotional, in a very personal way, than a lot of documentary films can be. Where do you think that comes from? Would you say that personal element is really important to your work?
RR: My films explore subjects that are close to me and represent my own perception of the world. I am less concerned with creating an accurate representation and more with evoking the subtleties of lived experience - the sensations and emotions - so this is quite a personal take on documentary and sometimes means 'reality' is treated in a malleable way. I think there's a lot that documentary can learn from fiction. The process of filmmaking is also very personal - discovering new places, meeting people and observing different ways of life - this is what I enjoy the most about making documentaries and I think it shows in the type of films I make.
TP: Your films started off quite small (i don't mean this in a negative way at all) and intimate and have expanded in scope. Was this your intention? Do you find it comes naturally? Where do you hope to take things in future?
RR: My work has definitely evolved - previously I made films that only involved my family, but now I've been engaging with other people - people I don't know. There is so much you can get away with when you're working with family - you know they'll forgive you! Those earlier films were almost like my 'training ground' - I felt safe to experiment with ideas and now I'm ready to go out into the world. But I don't want to loose that sense of intimacy - its something you have to work harder at when you don't initially know someone, but I think its something that comes across when you really care about your subject.
TP:What are you working on at the moment?
RR: I've just received funding from IdeasTap to make a short documentary in my hometown in Portugal. It's about people's devotion to a 'saint' that is not officially recognised by the Catholic church. I will be spending a lot of time in the small shrine where the saint's body is displayed and where people go to pray and to give offerings. Amongst many other things the shrine has received over 6,000 wedding dresses donated by people praying for happy marriages. I'm interested in why they feel the need to pray to the saint and what they get out of it, and I'm also interested in the atmosphere of the shrine.
With the opening of the new Bardens Cafe (above the old Boudoir), our Underground Film Club is going above ground and following a far too extended summer break, we're rearing to go...
THIS MONTH (it's our second birthday but shhhh)
special feature documentary: ...INTO THE NIGHT with HARMONY KORINE and GASPAR NOE (Bruce LaBruce, 2010, 45 mins) See what happens when Gaspar Noe visits his friend Korine in Nashville, Tennessee and the two embark on a night of mayhem - visiting a firing range, bothering tourist boards, digging through junkyards and wandering through the Nashville scene. We meet and are treated to performances by all manners of musicians, comedians and local talent, including some familiar faces from Korine's films, but the real attraction is the hilarious rapport between the two enfant terrible directors - a great comedy double act if there ever was one.
As an added bonus, we're chucking in one or two rarely seen HARMONY KORINE SHORTS too.
live music! SHAPE WORSHIP A miasma of geometric colour. "Dwelling in South London, he admits to an affinity with the hauntalogical / glowave that currently gets blogs writing themselves, but hopes it is less 80s in inspiration. He’s not wrong – as titles like ‘Old Garlands’ suggest, his music is darker than mere whimsical nostalgia to a life imagined in faded Polaroids." - theQuietus http://aeo.noise.org.uk/
ZINE This night marks the London launch of issue 4 of our zine, a documentary special featuring interviews with the legendary Frederick Wiseman, the lovely Ondi Timoner (DiG!, We Live In Public) and the amazing Rita Ribas, plus new releases, art, society pages etc. FREE COPIES FOR FIRST 5 ATTENDEES, half price thereafter for tonight only!
DIY Movies, musicals and musings with and by RITA RIBAS JASON LARAY KEENER BECKY LAWN-DARTE MOLLY ALLIS CHARLES CHINTZER LAI HALO HALO GARRY SYKES TOM MOORE XIU XIU JACK BARRACLOUGH & more
plus FREE GAME with PRIZES TO BE WON as ever, FREE POPCORN and the new cafe serves food too
Wednesday 3rd Nov, 7.30-11 BARDENS CAFE (above the old Bardens Boudoir), Stoke Newington Road, Dalston N16 7XJ Doors at 7.30, films start at 8pm PROMPT of course FREE ENTRY
From The Pictures #4, available now / photo by Gretje Ferguson
“The end result has to feel like a gift to the public that they can receive without explanation.” – Executive Committee Member, La Danse
Frederick Wiseman is the greatest documentary maker in film history. If you don’t believe us, that only means you haven’t seen his films. In his almost 50-year career he has trained his film camera on institutions ranging from mental hospitals (Titicut Follies), welfare departments (Welfare), courts (Domestic Violence I & II) and hospices (Near Death) to New York Central Park (Central Park) and the Paris Opera Ballet (La Danse, UK released last month). In each film, through a series of stripped down, self explanatory scenes, he explores the minutae of life within an institution or system, taking in the activities, conflicts, distress and triumphs of the people who reside in and occupy the place. His films are marked by their complete lack of narration, title cards, interviews to camera or discernable characters, but are filled with situations, stories and drama and fragments of lives. In the same way the ballet dancers in La Danse are taught to place all significance on every minute movement of each individual muscle, each movement contributing to the dance as a whole, these fragments and scenes build up into a complex, immersive portrait of their subject. The presence of a filmmaker in any of these scenes is invisible, and the openness and intimacy on display is almost unmatched in documentary. No-one is acting up, nothing is staged, no complexities are removed for the sake of offering explanations to (patronising) the audience. The films feel honest and disarmingly real in a way that few documentaries (any film even) ever do. A film by Frederick Wiseman is a perfect document, taking the viewer inside the subject matter, letting us experience a place first hand as if we’re standing at his side.
In spite of his relative obscurity, Wiseman’s influence is widely felt. He is often called the godfather of documentary. The Wire/Treme co-creator David Simon describes himself as “working in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman”. Wiseman’s film about the marine corps, Basic Training, was taken, near shot for shot, as the basis for the first half of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
His first documentary was instantly banned. Titicut Follies (released 1967) is bleak, a study of an American hospital for the criminally insane, the title taken from the macabre annual talent show put on by the residents. The film opens at this talent show as a group of patients, on stage and in marching band uniforms, wave pom-poms and sing “Strike Up The Band” in nervous flat unison. Wiseman’s camera moves in to look at the faces of the singers and each man is revealed, conflict written on every fascinating face. One is a mixture of nerves and distraction, nodding to himself as he counts his choreographed dance moves, still practising the dance as he performs it. One is a dead ringer for Fred Astaire, putting his heart into it. The sunken eyes of another man beam with pride as the song concludes, he smiles, oddly childlike with his cap tipped backwards, and the singers take a bow. A suited man, presumably one of the wardens, takes the stage and tells a couple of jokes before the next act, to roaring laughter from the crowd. The film cuts to a patient, skin and bones, undressing for examination.
The talent show is a sorry sight no doubt, but the men performing are not shown up as a sideshow spectacle, nor are they our characters - this is not the beginning of their journey to rehabilitation, we learn nothing more about them. This film is not their story. We see the men as part of the institution, and we can both identify with them and feel repulsed in this moment but, denied any continuity or development and onto the next one, moments are all we have, moments collaged by Wiseman into a deep and lasting impression of the film’s real character – the institution itself. We’re not here to pass judgements or draw conclusions on individuals, we’re here to experience every intimate corner of the big picture. There’s no linear progression and no talking head justifications distract us. Through his alert and wide open eyes, Wiseman simply presents us with the reality of the situation as he observed it, and that is enough. His great talent is in making us feel that we’re right there with him. This is documentary in its purest form.
So we see the abusive guards, the overworked doctors determined to help, the inmates masturbating in corners, the scores of sick men wandering in circles around a gym hall, mumbling, shouting, ticking nervously to themselves, building in one seemingly endless scene into something unbearable. Wiseman’s films have a musical quality – the filmmaker handles all of the sound design, and the editing is very deliberate. Hundreds of hours are often lost to the cutting room floor as the director shapes the material into what he considers a fair and authentic representation of his experiences, each film the story of a place. In this way his films are diaries, not unlike those of Jonas Mekas, chronicling his observations of each place or institute and the people within.
For Titicut Follies, these observations were deemed unseemly by the nervous medical and judiciary authorities of the time. Their concerns over the privacy of the patients were matched by concerns (particularly on the part of the institute used in filming) that the material in the film would cause a public outcry. However, while kept from the public, the film was screened in elite academic circles and to professionals with interests in the field, themselves not immune from the feelings of shock and anger that Titicut Follies inspires. The film played a large part in the wide ranging reform of the mental health system in America and, in 1991, by now a historical document, Titicut Follies was eventually cleared for public broadcast.
The film, like all of Wiseman’s documentaries, has been screened in the United States on the publicly funded PBS channel, which is also a frequent funder of his work. From Titicut Follies onwards, all of his films have been rigidly independent, all rights owned by Zipporah Films, his own production company (who kindly granted us the use of their stills archive for this issue) who also sell DVDs and distribute prints of his work, the takings from which fund future films. This strict independence aside though, Wiseman refuses to be drawn on the potential political implications of his films, preferring to present them as self explanatory and leaving any inference to the viewer.
This is an unusual position given the impact of Titicut Follies and the definitive way that many of his films, from his second feature High School onwards, are presented. They are named as definite articles – Law and Order, Hospital, Juvenile Court, Domestic Violence – so that this High School stands for any high school in the country; this Hospital is a representative, almost scientific, example for study, analysis and conclusions to be drawn. Within this wide variety of places, themes and situations often recur – injustice, abuse of power, poverty, suffering and sickness. So in Juvenile Court we’re party to back room barrister discussions and offender’s family conferences. In Law and Order we see police authority misused. Muddled beaurocracies and deliquents in High School. Equally though there are insightful, determined teachers and energised students. There are comic OTT hippies freaking out and vomiting on their first acid trip. There are repentant criminals and tireless nurses and loving marriages, all seen as moments within any system put before the camera.
To see only the altruistic, protest side of the films is to misunderstand Wiseman’s grand project and to ignore the fact that for every Domestic Violence there’s a Model, for every Blind there’s a Central Park. Any sense of discomfort and outrage arising from the films occurs only because it exists to be filmed in the first place, living under and on the surface of any situation or system, waiting to be manifested by a documentary lens. To call Wiseman a political filmmaker would undermine the scope of his work. Just as each scene in his films builds the larger picture of an institution, each of Wiseman’s films is a piece of a much larger picture and a much larger project, to experience and observe civilisation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by way of its institutions, its shared rituals and its rites of passage. In Near Death, the terminally ill say their last goodbyes. In Department Store, baby boomers flock in their optimistic thousands to buy their own little piece of progress. In Belfast, Maine, an entire town is put in front of the lens.
Often when audiences see his films for the first time they mistake the keen observation and quiet camerawork for something approaching objectivity. But watching Wiseman’s films in a linked light, the similarities and connections become all the more apparent, not just in the rhythms and style of filmmaking, but in the conversations and ideas picked up and noticed by the camera in every situation, in the values that he finds in each location. Seeing the films in this way, Frederick Wiseman is betrayed as the second character, after the institution, in all of his films. We experience his documentary through his eyes, his subjective observations. The fact that these observations are so nuanced, so insightful and relevant is testament to his skill and the harmony between the man and the medium. Wiseman is the silent storyteller, totally dedicated to his grand project. It’s why we call him the greatest documentary maker in film history. The man and the films are indistinguishable - Frederick Wiseman is documentary.
Re: Questions from British journalist
1. Having trained as a lawyer, what made you change course and become a filmmaker? Was it a longstanding interest, were you inspired by any particular contemporaries? Do you see parallels between documentary work and legal work?
I HATED LAW SCHOOL AND REACHED THE WITCHING AGE OF 30 AND DECIDED TO DO SOMETHING I LIKED. ABSOLUTELY NO PARALLELS FOR ME BETWEEN LAW AND FILM-MAKING.
2.Do you consider yourself a political filmmaker, in the sense that many of your films present places and situations that many people would not otherwise experience, and so would remain unaware of the issues affecting those places (Titticut Follies being perhaps the most obvious example of this)? To what extent do your personal views influence the context of the films?
I DISLIKE OVERT IDEOLOGICAL AND/OR DIDACTIC FILMMAKING. MY FILMS ARE COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE (WHAT ELSE COULD THEY BE?) BUT I TRY TO MAKE THEM FAIR REPRESENTATIONS OF MY EXPERIENCE AT THE PLACE WHICH IS THE SUBJECT OF THE FILM. I DISCOVER THE FILM IN THE EDITNG AND USUALLY ONLY TOWARD THE END OF THE EDITING.
3.Stylistically, your films are often labelled 'objective', 'cinema verite' and so on. Would you agree with this? How do you feel about the huge trend in modern documentary making for message-led films?
I BELIEVE IN THE WISDOM OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER SAMUEL GOLDWYN WHO SAID "IF YOU HAVE A MESSAGE SEND A TELEGRAM." THE POINT OF VIEW OF MY FILMS IS EXPRESSED INDIRECTLY THROUGH THE STRUCTURE.
4.You retain the rights to all of your films and use public funding to make them. Has this ever affected the content of the films, has there ever been an outside, funding related influence in the filmmaking process?
NO ONE SEES THE FILMS UNTIL THEY ARE COMPLETELY FINISHED. FUNDING IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT. I RETAIN THE RIGHTS.
5.How long does a film typically take? Is there usually an adjustment period for your subjects to become comfortable with the filming, or is it an instant thing? Is there anything you yourself particularly do to make people more comfortable with filming?
FUNDING MAY TAKE UP TO SIX MONTHS. IT VARIES FROM FILM TO FILM. PEOPLE ADJUST WITHIN NANO-SECONDS TO BEING FILMED. I AM ALWAYS VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD ABOUT HOW THE FILM WILL BE SHOT, EDITED AND DISTRIBUTED.
6.Have you ever had a negative response from potential subjects, even a dangerous reaction to your enquiries? Do you find that, in the modern, internet influenced world, with a lot of people projecting personalities onto social networking sites, image consciousness, that the people you film with are any more self conscious than they used to be, or make any more effort to project something other than their everyday selves?
IT IS NO DIFFERENT THAN WHEN I BEGAN 44 YEARS AGO.
7.Do you ever develop a relationship with your subjects that continues once the film is completed? Where does Frederick Wiseman's experience end and the film begin?
THE FILM DOES REPRESENT MY VIEWS OF THE PLACE AND IS MEANT TO BE A FAIR REPORT ON WHAT I HAVE LEARNED.
8.Many of your films, including your latest, are made on 16mm.Is this purely an aesthetic choice?
I LIKE FILM BETTER THAN HD. IF I CANNOT RAISE ENOUGH MONEY TO SHOOT ON FILM, I WILL USE HD.
9.What prompted your interest in the Paris Opera Ballet?
I LIKEALLET AND I LIKE LIVING IN PARIS. THE PARIS OPERA BALLET IS ONE OF THE GREAT BALLET COMPANIES OF THE WORLD.
10.What are you working on at the moment?
I JUST FINISHED A MOVIE ABOUT A BOXING GYM IN AUSTIN, TEXAS. "BOXING GYM" WILL HAVE ITS WORLD PREMIERE AT THE DIRECTOR'S FORTNIGHT AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL IN MAY.
NB: Wiseman clips are difficult to locate online, owing to his reliance on takings from Zipporah Films' releases of the DVDs to fund future productions (Zipporah is Wiseman's company). Visit www.zipporah.com for details of how to obtain Wiseman's work.
Garry's films are like home video artefacts, implicitly viewed from some future (or past) perspective. Dated lo-fi collages of found footage, home documentary and noise, their narrators speak in past (or future) tense and talk in eventualities, influences and paths taken that led to their present, off camera and invisible state. The films display an obsession with recording things that will fade and documenting disappearing moments, be they literal as in 21, contrasting photographs of his grandmother at age twenty-one with footage of his sister at the same age, or more figurative, mental states of optimism and youth that give way to compromise or are abandoned as time moves on. Parallels are often drawn between the characters and movie stars, stars that age and fade and are remembered by their blank younger portraits. The narrators of Karaoke and Camera Lucy are absent presences, talking of the times before they fell away and of the idealism they knew they'd lose.
The elements of the collage conspire to give the films the impression of memory. The soundtracks, noisy adn layered with static become elegaic and warm. Esoteric, fast cut images pinpoint details of locations and times while the larger picture remains evasive. The video itself is aesthetically cheap and constitutes a conscious recording. Garry also produces a poster to accompany each film, again highlighting each as an artefact, an object. The narratives are only related in fragments and incomplete consequences of some unseen relationship or encounter. These narratives are often dark, dealing in power plays that start as romance, acceptances of inevitabilities and defeats and addictions, seduced into losing control and failing to hold on to the very things the film is trying to document and preserve. A frequent reference point is Invasion Of The Body-snatchers. "Here lie some failed revolutions" says Alice Saint at the close of Karaoke, "buried by love".
But they are not necessarily despairing. The elements that compose the collages - dances, fireworks, parties, balloons and magic tricks - are celebratory as well as fleeting. The unstages sequences in the films are often affectionate home movies of friends, diary footage. The staged set pieces feature dancing and costume. Time passing is a constant feature, but even as the characters lose themselves, something is preserved in the images and their repetitions. The dream of city romance never dies even when most efforts towards it fail.
The narrator in Ecstasy, who had a dream about the future, relays a message from that time - that when everyone tells you things will go wrong, they go wrong. In instructing not to listen they voice a rare note of defiance within one of the films while so much else is submission. This defiance is always externally present, in the act of recording moments and in the characters and images as they dance into the dark.
THE PICTURES: What made you want to make films? When did you realise you could do it yourself?
GARRY SYKES: i wanted to be a photographer or writer or in a band, all that stuff, but i'm a mediocre photographer, i have difficulty writing at any length, nothing ever gets finished, and i can't really play any instrument or sing for shit, but making films, these kinds of films, maybe combines what i like about those other things, and just seems to fit. when i saw films by people like Vivienne Dick or Jonas Mekas, the whole thing suddenly seemed really accessible. i liked how you could say things in your own way, like there were lots of possiblities maybe.
TP: What influences your films?
GS: i like lots of those older underground filmmakers. i like how film is a lot like music, the way you can keep digging and find new things, there are always new things. i really like Harmony Korine, Bela Tarr, i like Godard a lot, especially the 60s films, like girls and politics. i like music a lot too, maybe that's more influential than films. maybe i'm just frustrated to be such a shitty musician. and just little things you pick up on that have resonance. all the moon landing stuff lately, and how sad it is we didn't go further. i'm starting a campaign for a manned mission to Mars.
TP: Why the interest in stars?
GS: i really want to have a star system! a better star system. a star system of my very own. i've always really liked the Hollywood star system, maybe when it was a bit more interesting, and Hollywood Babylon is one of my favourite books. and it does still throw up the odd Lindsay Lohan. like, i'm usually not affected at all by celebrity deaths, and haven't even listened to Michael Jackson much since being 15, but when he died it seemed really powerful. he was the most famous man in the world, up there with Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola, and before all the scandal and everything that was just for being an entertainer. that's worth something i think.
TP: How important is music to your filmmaking?
GS: it's really important, but usually the soundtrack is the last thing that gets added, and it's a case of asking a friend who makes music, and lots of my friends make really great music, so there's always something that'll work and then it becomes a part of things. except for Karaoke, we recorded a whole soundtrack for it with the actors and some friends and Daniel Jones producing it. it's a real shame a lot of it got cut out when i realised the film needed to be a lot shorter. we'd recorded three songs and everything but only one ended up in the final version. some people got to see the long version, with all the songs, but in the end i didn't like it. i'd really like to do more original soundtrack stuff in future. i want to make more musicals.
TP: What's next?
GS: there's a couple of things when this zine is finished. everything i've done so far has been a bit limite by the equipment to hand, just a crappy DV camera, which is fine, but it sort of puts a restriction on the number of people who can stand to watch. i'd really like to borrow a better camera from work or somewhere and make something that looks a bit better. i've got a couple of super 8 cameras i've been playing with too and maybe make some proper documentaries, and maybe something longer would be nice too, but maybe that's a couple of years away. there's definitely a lot of work to do.
