in collaboration with Federica Iodice
On this blog it is available an Italian version, translated by Silvia Tarquini: http://j.mp/EFS_seconda_parte
This interview is part of an Artdigiland project supported by Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, Italy
The Experimental Film Society is an independent collective of people who work in the field of experimental cinema, founded in 2000 by the Iranian director RouzbehRashidi, and based in Dublin. EFS is a project which brings together filmmakers from all over the world, with a common interest in researching "alternative" cinema. www.experimentalfilmsociety.com
In Il disprezzo Moravia writes: «Screenwriting seems a kind of rape of the intelligence»... How do you usually deal with writing?
Le Cain: Speaking for ourselves, we have an aversion to working in such a way that we have a blueprint and we go out and illustrate that. To try to enslave all the various techniques and possibilities, not only of the equipment and the situation but just what you encounter as well. What’s happening on a particular day, what the light’s doing, accidents, the inspirations of a location. We’re interested in all these things, how powerful they can be in themselves. In seeing how we can give them the space to develop into a film. So just the idea of going out and saying, okay, we need X, Y and Z in this scene and in order to do that we need this shot and that shot and we’re going to do this… That’s not how we work. But, for example, someone like Claude Chabrol, who we admire very much, would work in almost exactly the opposite way to us. For him, writing the script was a really difficult, agonizing process and he suffered. And then when he went on set he enjoyed himself and in some interviews he said it almost didn’t matter which take of a performance he used. So when the script was finished, that was the hard work done and he basically went out and very skillfully illustrated it. But also, in the film industry, the way a script is often used is as a way of controlling a film. Like a contract, a way interests other than the filmmaker can maintain control. I guess we couldn’t function very well in that situation.
Rashidi: Also, perhaps it’s worth mentioning that it’s a choice you have. You have a choice to make a film like Kurosawa or Hitchcock or Kubrick… You know in advance what you want to make, you have a very clear vivid idea in advance, you have a blueprint. Or it’s something like the early films of Philippe Garrel or Werner Schroeter. It’s like a discovery, it’s about images and sound. It’s about not just the limitations of cinema but of yourself, too. We always prefer to start with image and sound rather than text. It’s not necessarily better than the other way, it’s just another way of making films. We just happen to be like this. I think even if I want to make a film from a script, I can’t. I might write a script if I need it to get funding. But I just can’t illustrate, I don’t have this ability. It’s not a conscious decision for me, I just can’t do it.
Le Cain: I tried and it was a catastrophe! I got funding to make a film from a script and the film turned out completely differently. When we describe the way we make films, many people find it very strange. But Rouzbeh mentioned musicians and music earlier on and if you look at music, at the freedom which musicians have, especially improvisational musicians, that´s what we’re doing in film. It´s not so strange looked at it in this context.
Ten Years In The Sun (2015) by Rouzbeh Rashidi
I read your statement. It begins with a sentence by Jean Cocteau. It says that cinema is death at work. Every film is a near death experience. Is it this concept that pushes you to go on with your work?
Rashidi: I think so. What he’s saying is obviously open to interpretation but for us... Maybe I am just too influenced by horror cinema but for me cinema has a very undead quality. Like a vampire. Something that is half alive, half dead. It´s in limbo. It’s not in hell or heaven, you know. It’s somewhere in purgatory. Like in a constant agony. So you have images, you film something and it’s finished. But when you edit it and you release it, it has a new life. It´s like a strange cycle. But it’s about the medium as well, the way films are screened in darkness. And the strange contraptions and machines that cinema used and even abused, like Zoetrope or the magic lantern to create a phantasmagorical situation. It´s always about horror. There’s like a haunting quality to it. So I think this sort of cinema is very important for us.
Le Cain: And also memory. It´s a memory, an audio-visual record of something. It´s a memory that can be subjective or objective, but it´s something that you can take out and actually work on, manipulate and examine. And I think that, at least from what I´ve read, what Cocteau meant with that expression was the fact that this video which you’re taking of us now [he points at the camera recording the interview], if you look at it in a month’s time we are going to be a month older but in the recording we are going to look exactly the way we look today. And the extension of that is that possibly, if this video survives (we still don’t know what’ll happen to digital technology), when we’re dead and gone this image might still be here. You can see people ageing, you can see death at work.
Rashidi: Yeah. And, also, I´ve been developing some ideas with Max and he once said something which is very important to me as well. He said that I want the cinema to have the same quality as the Lumière Brothers, when people saw the train coming towards the screen in the very first films. The true sense of cinema for what it was. We always try to create this atmosphere for ourselves. It´s very important for us. We make films firstly for us, each person for himself or herself, and than for friends and than for a wider audience. So it´s about our own metabolism, the way we treat cinema. I think it´s very important to establish this fact. We don´t just plan and have like a marketing strategy and do something specific. We do things very organically.
Le Cain: But maybe just to elaborate about the Lumière Brothers and that sort of reaction… I didn´t mean it in terms of the latest Hollywood 3D film. You know, obviously when people saw that train coming they ran and screamed. It’s not like we want that. But for us, it’s the sense of moving images as being still in the process of invention and there still being something quite miraculous to that. Which is something I think a lot of people really find ridiculous. And this is where, I guess, maybe we differ from a lot of artists working in video. What we don´t like is the way that today, with moving images everywhere, they’re so taken for granted. And somewhere along the way moving images became basically a means of delivering information rather than something experiential. It’s just a means for communicating things and often in a way that functions because it´s the easiest and the laziest way of doing so. So we refuse, perhaps quixotically, to take any of it for granted.
Rashidi: Also, I was reading an interview by Fritz Lang and he was talking about his last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, and he said «I am just looking for or trying to conceive an image that stands out for itself». For example, he was talking specifically about the assassination scene at the beginning. It´s so easy to show us assassinations. One person kills another. It´s so easy. Just to convey information. But he specifically created this small pin or needle. And the way he shot the girl… I don´t know why but it stands out. It´s always in your mind. The way he shoots things, when this character with big feet comes into the room. And just one shot that last three seconds. But the way he shoots it, you know, it´s so mysterious… And I love this aspect of Fritz Lang. He´s one of my all-time favourite filmmakers. We try to do this. Try to create an image that can stand on its own as a kind of seperate unique entity.
What reaction do you get from the people who look at your movies?
Le Cain: All sorts! But we say the only one we don´t like is indifference. We don´t like people to be unaffected. If people hate the stuff, that´s fine. If people walk out, that´s great.
Rashidi: Yeah, for us the worst would be if you watch the film and don´t interact at all. If it doesn´t effect you.
Le Cain: Because the audience, involving the audience in the process, is a large part of what we are trying to do. Rouzbeh had a line which might be exaggerating a little bit, but that´s still very nice: We provide the base line and the drum beat. And it´s up to the audience to provide the melody and the lyrics. In that we want people to be conscious of themselves and their reaction and in that way hopefully it becomes a process of co-creation. Because we mentioned it before: we know what our film is on the last day that we finish editing it. Which means that we are like viewers coming to it the first time, we are surprised by it as well. We have to stand back and sort of figure out of what it is that we´ve done. And, in that sense, we hope the audience can join in that process a little bit. And each one of them can maybe come away with something completely different.
Rashidi: Also I think our films, as well as motivating the audience’s psychological and mental capacities, also encourage physical interaction as well. For example the way we use flicker, fast editing, heavily saturated colours… Or like the wall of sound, a sea of sound that we unleash upon the audience. It´s really about the limits of film and audio as well. So it could be a challenging process for them. But I think it is rewarding.
Le Cain: The very worst reaction I ever got to a film was: «I don´t think I got it». As if there was some sort of intellectual key which can suddenly unlock everything and then they’d say «Oh, that´s what you meant!». You know, as if we’ve got a piece of information which we´ve gone away and concealed from people in a very clever way, just as a sort of intellectual game. And if you look at it in a certain way or you have a certain piece of information: «Ah, that´s what you were saying!». We have no idea what we’re saying! (Laughs) You know, it´s experiential. We are trying to, I guess, in some way overwhelm ourselves as well as other people. And then, all together, trying to fight our way out of this experience. It really depends on who and what you are and how that succeeds or fails for you.
And in your statement, you talk about catastrophes. Do you think that’s the only ending for cinema?
Le Cain: Life is a catastrophe!
Rashidi: Yes!
Le Cain: There’s been a lot written about the idea of the end of cinema. And now we’ve gone beyond that. It´s constantly mutating and re-emerging in very strange, surprising ways. Nicole Brenez once said, if I remember rightly, that all art should be a catastrophe. And I like that definition a lot. Looked at in certain respects, I’m not sure how responsible, or even socially responsible what we do is. We’re trying to provoke, not in the sense of childish provocation through annoying people, but we are trying to provoke something. To create something that somehow shakes people. And exactly how that works, we aren´t sure. It´s going back to our films being literally experiments. I’m not sure if they’re safe experiments. And I’m not sure to what end other than just to see what the shock is, to see how the nervous system reacts. You know, it comes down to perception as well. How does anything hit you when you’re crossing the street? You don´t know what you are going to see on a moment to moment basis.
Rashidi: And I think what is important for us too is, for example, when you are watching a film in a cinema or a gallery or a museum. That´s fine. But what happens when you leave? I think we are interested in that as well, in trying to inject something into the audience. Something that lasts days, months or years after they experienced it. And you remember that you lived that image or sound in the cinema or what have you. But also you somehow want to recreate it. To go back to it. I think this is important. To cause unlimited questions that you don´t have any answer to. It becomes like a constant engagement. When you see a film by Philippe Garrel from the '70s, it’s always with you. This image that you cannot escape, always haunting you… This guy on a horse… And this image is kind of stuck. Not like you just watch something and then it´s gone forever. Any Hollywood film can do that. But, you know, what you can do with film… The word ‘experimental’ has so many negative sides. We don´t even necessarily want to be experimental. But we want to do something perhaps different. Something that lasts with the audience. That they can live with.
So what is the real feeling at the end of a film?
Rashidi: It´s a very strange kind of feeling when you start a film and when you finish it. You always have this feeling of loss and emptiness. Again, for me it´s always drastic. You know, because I’m a very drastic person perhaps. I love to look at things in an exaggerated way. Because there are so many things in life you can´t do. And the only reason to be sane is the insanity in filming. It´s a practical way to live for me as well. You know I have so much energy. I am a very energetic person. And I want to do so many things. I want to travel but I can´t, for example, let´s say beacause of financial reasons. I just want to give an example, it might not really be the case. So what you can do is just to bring down all this energy into filmmaking in order to remain sane. But what happens during this process has a very strange entity. And when it´s gone, you perhaps have an emotion of loss and emptiness. To this day, after making so many films, I still don´t fully understand it. But I think that´s the only way of survival for me. The cinema has a very therapeutic quality. It’s like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the great Thai filmmaker, says: «I make films to remain calm and in order to have peace in my life and then I share that with the audience, too». I really strongly believe in that sense of filmmaking. I don’t know if you want to elaborate on that a bit?
Le Cain: Well, I think we are all very personally motivated to make films. Probably to the point that even if no one ever saw them, we´d still go on making them, just as you said, to remain sane. Even if there was no film in the camera, we’d have to pretend, we´d have to do something. I have my own very personal reasons that are slightly different. I guess it has to do with somehow mediating the way one perceives the world and then what one objectively sees outside of oneself. And there is sometimes, in my case anyway, such a huge chasm between them that there has to be something in between. And fortunately cinema has provided me with that. I won´t elaborate!
What projects are you currently working on?
Rashidi: We have some very ambitious projects. For example Maximilian is finishing up his crowd-funded feature film, Cloud of Skin. But we also have a collaborative Experimental Film Society film, a 12-hour feature film being made gradually over time by myself, Max, Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins. It's going to be experimental science fiction and it comes from the video project I've been developing since 2011 called Homo Sapiens Project. Homo Sapiens Project is like a laboratory of experimental filmmaking, full of tests and tryouts and errors and things like that. That’s how I approached it. But it reached the point that I really want to have something very concrete and very substantial emerge from it so we're working on that at the moment. But each member has different personal projects as well.
Homo Sapiens Project (191-199) By Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh and Maximilian Le Cain.
Le Cain: Cloud of Skin, which we shot in last November, also sort of emerged from this collaboration as Dean and Rouzbeh co-produced it and Dean stars in it. I’ve started work on another feature which is going to be shot gradually over the next year or so called The Scorpion’s Stone. I´m shooting with an old mini-DV camera, standard definition. It´s also, purely coincidentally, going to be extremely long. It´s going to be seven and a half hours because that´s the length of a night’s sleep. And I´d like to screen it in a context where people are welcome to fall asleep during it.
Any ongoing projects?
Rashidi: Yes. It's a film called The Last of Deductive Frames. We initiated that project a few years ago and so far we’ve made maybe 90 minutes and it's an open project, anyone can come and contribute a ten-minute section. For the first series of these films, we had one simple rule: each film had to be ten minutes and, as we move along, we’re going to keep that previous rule and add new ones. That´s a side project for us. We also have another project called Cinema Cyanide. It's a sound project between myself, Max and Dean. What we were doing with sound in our movies was the point of departure for the project. We are very much interested in drone, ambient, noise… This sort of sound art. So we do that as well.
Le Cain: We like to keep busy!