Glory to the Filmmaker!

Conversations with filmmakers.

[communicants]

Were your professors and classmates receptive to your filmmaking when you began to think about cinema as a mechanism for offering up politicized counternarratives? 

HAILE GERIMA: No.You are constantly dismissed as “political” every time you want to do something different, if you don’t want to go along with the official program. You are considered a troublemaker, just political. Even now, while doing some of the press for the opening of Teza, several times some journalists were describing me as a “political filmmaker,” but all films are political, and all filmmakers are political. My particular form of politicization, not wanting to be subjugated by the mainstream cinema to its mandates and assumptions, has by default made me into a political animal. But my interest in the end is in asserting my cultural identity, which is relatively harmless in some ways. It’s not a violent thing. It isn’t about advocating the violent overthrow of anything. It’s just saying that we all have—our own story, our own way of telling a story. We all don’t come out of the Aristotelian paradigm and the Greek and Roman and Spanish aesthetics. We have our own narrative sensibilities, especially those of us who come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We have our own aesthetics, narrative temperaments that should be appreciated by all human beings. And this has made me be “the impossible guy,” the one who a whole lot of people avoid, even trying to prevent my right to distribute my films. They obstruct my right to access economic opportunities to finance my films, even though I have already demonstrated my skill and creative contribution as a filmmaker. In fact, that’s why even with Sankofa, which is a film thematically about slavery in the Americas, I had to go to Europe and Africa to find the money. I couldn’t raise the funds in the United States. And so, this tells you that it’s not me, it’s the system that describes certain artists and producers as outsiders, as a threat. I shouldn’t have been considered a threat, because I’m using a camera. I’m not using a gun. I’m using a camera to find myself. And then, hopefully, to say something about the collective heritage of our culture, at least for the people who identify with what I do. 

[Decolonizing the Filmic Mind: An Interview with Haile Gerima]

[communicants]

What does the desert mean to you?

Nacer Khemir: There is a Tuareg proverb that says: “there are lands that are full of water for the well-being of the body, and lands that are full of sand for the well-being of the soul”. The desert is a literary field and a field of abstraction at the same time. It is one of the rare places where the infinitely small, that is a speck of sand, and the infinitely big, and that is billions of specks of sands, meet. It is also a place where one can have a true sense of the Universe and of its scale. The desert also evokes the Arabic language, which bears the memory of its origins. In every Arabic word, there is a bit of flowing sand. It is also one of the main sources of Arabic love poetry. In all of my three movies, which form a trilogy, “The Way Makers of the Desert”, “The Dove’s Lost Necklace”, and today, “Bab Aziz, The Prince Who Contemplated His Own Soul” , the desert is a character in itself. This movie was shot in both the Iranian central desert, near Annarak, and in the Tunisian desert, in Tataouine. The desert imposed its law upon us. The temperature sometimes reached 50°C! We used to leave the shelter of the old lead mine, where we camped, at around 4:00 o’clock in the morning. We worked until 9:30-10:00 a.m., after that the sand became too hot and the light became bright like a white screen that wiped out every detail, not to mention the hospitality of the scorpions! We used to spend the rest of the day in the camp, and resumed work at sunset. The scenes were shot only once, because it was impossible to recreate the virginity of the sand after the actors had stepped on it. When we were not satisfied with a scene, we had to move the set to a spot that was unmarked. I will not dwell on the troubles we had during this shooting which took place on very long distances, in Iran as well as in Tunisia: Kashan, Yazd, Kerman, the Annarak desert and of course the antique city of Bam, where the scene of the final gathering of the dervishes was shot. An earthquake destroyed this city a few months later. In Tunisia, we shot in Tunis, in Korba, in Walad Sultan and Tataouine.  In the same sequence, you can see a character walking in a palace in Tunis, looking out of a window at a landscape…in Iran. These tricks are not exceptional and they speak of the pluralistic dimension of the movie, which was co produced by French, Iranian and Tunisian companies among other ones. But they tell the story of the movie better than a thousand speeches, or should I say that they define its territory: Bab Aziz wanders through the Arab-Islamic world. And it is this moving world (moving like the desert, never really different and never quite the same) that stretches between the window of the Tunisian palace and the Iranian landscape. This world is a real parable, if we take on the idea that cinema is the space-time that is located between the point where we are standing and the point that we are looking at. Knowing that this space-time is often referred to as “point of view”, we can also say that the movie is about cinema.

[via]

[onfilmmaking]

African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems.  

Sarah Maldoror

[African Film Festival New York]

[communicants]

Filmmaker: I know that Namour was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriters Workshop and your short film The Maid premiered at competition at Cannes. And yet, you still had a hard time finding investors in the feature. Why do you think that was?

Heidi Saman: I had a hard time finding investors because of the protagonists in my film are Arab and Arab-American and several investors didn’t think there was an audience for an independent film that features Arab-Americans. Other producers told me that they couldn’t back a film that had Arab-Americans as the leads because they weren’t “likeable” enough for audiences.

One producer told me that I should turn the script into something more palatable for audiences – like a family drama or romantic comedy with a wedding. The one that hurt the most was when a potential investor mentioned that I should include a theme about terrorism, because that would be an appealing and recognizable topic for an Arab-American lead character.

These investors wanted me to reiterate and reinforce Arab stereotypes and story lines that were safe, “market-approved,” and not at all connected to the story I wanted to tell. I love films that possess the mark of a filmmaker’s voice and visual style andNamour reflects a story and mood that is very personal to me, my life, and where I’m from.

[via]

[onfilmmaking]

At UCLA in the Sixties, you thought about World Cinema—whether it was films from Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or Japan. It was like your backyard; you were as aware of Kurosawa, Truffaut making films as you were of some local person. You were waiting for the next film by these people. That doesn’t exist any more, for a whole bunch of reasons. At that time at UCLA you looked at film as an art form, as a means of expression. Not so much for entertainment, it was to do and say something. Now, when you go back there, it’s “How can I get into Hollywood? How do you do get an agent? How do you sell your first script?” The whole culture has changed. It’s a business now, and I think people are more aware of it as a business. I wasn’t aware of it as a business.

Charles Burnett

[Film Comment]

[onfilmmaking]

Everything I’ve made, pretty much, being a female filmmaker, my male teachers would say, “Why in the world are you wasting your time on that?” Illusions, Diary of an African Nun… everything was like, “Oh for god’s sakes.” That continues. When I was doing my segment of Subway Stories, I remember a lot of male crew members gritting their teeth when I had the flowers blowing across the subway track. They were looking at their watches like, you know, it’s time to go. That was the ‘90s. It continues. It’s something that female filmmakers, who were working and investigating the culture of women, faced and what we continue to face. There are different cultural set points, traditions, and all of these things that may not even interest the male counterparts and might even annoy them, because they may seem frivolous. Even with Daughters of the Dust, when we won the Best Cinematography award at Sundance in 1991, I would have people look me in the face at times and say, “Let’s not even talk about it. I don’t even know what the hell it’s about.” At that time, Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn was at Sundance, and it won the Special Jury Prize. It was given a standing ovation. Young, urban, male films were the thing in the ‘90s.

A film like Daughters of the Dust, I had one distributor tell me, prior to it being picked up by Kino, that it wasn’t an authentic African-American film. I had another major [exec], after it played 36 consecutive weeks at the New York Village East, he told me it was a fluke. These are the kinds of responses. I won’t tell you who said them, but these are direct quotes. In that same connection, I think I’m the only filmmaker coming off a stage at Sundance having won something that was not given another feature film — and then fast-forward to Ava DuVernay. Thank god she does not have to go through the same ridiculousness of people second-guessing.

Julie Dash

[Flavorwire]

[onfilmmaking]

Film Quarterly: Is memory inextricable from loss and mourning?

Patricio Guzmán: For some it is one thing and for others it’s another. When you think about the absence and the loss of pain. There are many ways to die. Even dreaming is a form of dying. The disappearances are another form of death. To forget is a form of death. All these different deaths are present in these different people, even in the astronomer when he invokes the idea of his own relatives being lost in the stars, or the archeologist who says to me, “Patricio, you’re obsessed with the coup d’état. What about the Indians? Who killed the Indians? We killed them.” All these different deaths inhabit the film [Nostalgia For The Light]. I was actually afraid of being so close to the theme of death in the film because the sequence of the asteroids and the bones, I actually thought of that when I was at home in Paris: to compare the bones with asteroids—because they look the same and are made of the same substance (as the American George Preston explains in the film) and that’s the circle, the circle of death.

[Film Quarterly]

[onfilmmaking]

I always tend to use long shots since I prefer to show what is happening behind the characters, meaning the objects behind the actors, the landscapes. When you use a long shot, you can better capture reality. I am in favour of realism in movies and am against the theatricalisaion of action. I hate explanation in films, especially anything related to psychology, preferring instead that the movie help audiences to bring their own imaginations into the story. I have tested this strategy in my other movies, like Flowers of Shanghai, which is pretty long but contains only thirty shots. I think the long shot is very useful to capture duration in the movie.

Hou Hsiao-hsien

[Senses of Cinema]

[onfilmmaking]

Our world has become more and more dependent on the visual image, though we haven't given it much thought. In the past, images did not play such a crucial role, though we had a rich civilization based on the written word. Rules for composition, word games, narrative genres, descriptions of manners, all were components of a culture created by the application of the written word. The art of the moving image has a much shorter history, but it has expanded and changed at a very high speed. There are many possibilities for contemporary cinema; it will not be confined to what has been accumulated in our repertoires from the past century.

-Wang Bing

[New Left Review]

[onfilmmaking]

“...whenever I’m making a film, I leave a window open to thought and to what the wind will blow in, whether it’s an idea or some interference from reality. Sometimes one sentence spoken on the set was so profound and so much better than prewritten dialogue that I would use it instead.”

-Mohsen Makhmalbaf

[Bomb Magazine]

[onfilmmaking]

Film Comment: There’s obviously a personal truth to it but it’s [Possession, 1981] also one of your most fantastic films. It jumps effortlessly between different genres of filmmaking, with a surprising turn toward horrific science fiction. It’s an interesting way to tell such a personal story.

Andrzej Żuławski: It stems again from the simple fact that I was living in Paris and I went to see Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. It’s an extremely well acted and brilliant film, but I left the cinema feeling empty. I went out and I said, All right, the analysis is perfect. It’s cold, it’s brilliant, like always. But so what? I was walking the streets I remember, it was raining and I said look, the beauty of the stories that we are telling our children is the moral at the end. That is to say that there is always something fantastic by the end of the story. So they walk along the pavement and they go into the house… this is the first floor, this is the kitchen, blah blah, but what’s in the attic? And I was thinking, okay, in my little story what attic does it really have? If I go up the stairs out of the realistic realm and into the fantasy, the science fiction, what is the fairy tale? What is the bad fairy tale at the end? So I went to the attic and I found a monster.

[Film Comment]

[onfilmmaking]

PLAYBOY: There've been reports that you feel what you've called "the great fear" whenever you leave Sweden. Is that why you've never made a film outside the country?

INGMAR BERGMAN: Not really; all that has very little to do with making movies. After all, actors and studios are basically the same all over the world. What worries me about making a film in another country is the loss of artistic control I might run into. When I make a film, I must control it from the beginning until it opens in the movie houses. I grew up in Sweden, I have my roots here, and I'm never frustrated professionally here, at least not by producers. I've been working with virtually the same people for nearly twenty years; they've watched me grow up. The technical demands of moviemaking are enslaving; but here, everything runs smoothly in human terms: the cameraman, the operator, the head electrician. We all know and understand one another; I hardly need tell them what to do. This is ideal and it makes the creative task - always a difficult one - easier. The idea of making a film for an American company is very tempting, for obvious reasons. But it's not one's first Hollywood film that's so difficult - it's the second. Work in another country, with more modern equipment but with my same crew, with the same relationship to my producers, with the same control over the film as I have here? I don't think that's very likely.

PLAYBOY: You're said to be no less indisposed to come into contact with outsiders even on your own sets in Stockholm, from which all visitors are barred. Why?

INGMAR BERGMAN: Do you know what moviemaking is? Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don't come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you're going to get your good ten minutes this time. Everything and everyone on a movie set must be attuned to finding those minutes of real creativity. You've got to keep the actors and yourself in a kind of enchanted circle. An outside presence, even a completely friendly one, is basically alien to the intimate process going on in front of him. Any time there's an outsider on the set, we run the risk that part of the actors' absorption, or the technicians', or mine, is going to be impinged upon. It takes very little to destroy the delicate mood of total immersion in our work. We can't risk losing those vital minutes of real creation. The few times I've made exceptions I've always regretted it.

[Via]

[onfilmmaking]

When I work on a film, I am drawn very intensely to the world of images and sounds. On a basic level, such a state of creative availability and of active receptivity is in itself a “project.” But the making of a film also opens up many doors to other means of creativity. It sharpens the edge between, let’s say, writing for a book and writing for a film—a difference one constantly faces when words are part of the film fabric. Not only does the use of language differ markedly from one medium to another, but working with storytelling, poetry and everyday speech in cinema also makes me aware of music in ways I never thought of before. If a poem is an invisible painting, as Chinese artists put it, then a film can be all at once visible poetry, musical painting and pictorial music. The spaces between image, sound and text remain spaces of generative multiplicity, in which the function of each is not to serve nor to rule over the other, but to expose, in their tight interactions, each other’s limit. What I cannot avoid experiencing at certain moments of the process is both the different strengths and limits of these tools of creativity. So it is in working constantly with these limits and with the circumstances that define them that I advance, quite blindly, actually. Even though in discussions, it does seem as if all my projects are very lucidly thought out, this comes in the making process, not before it. Most of the time I jump into a project blindly, and this is how boundaries are also displaced. 

-Trinh T. Minh-ha

[When The Eye Frames Red]

[onfilmmaking]

I believe that today, in the cinema, when we open a door, it’s always quite false because it says to the spectator: ‘Enter this film and you’re going to be fine, you’re going to have a good time’, and finally what you see in this genre of film is nothing other than yourself, a projection of yourself. -Pedro Costa

[Jaffe, Ira. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. New York: Wallflower Press, 2014. Print.]

[onfilmmaking]

You have to understand one thing. I was making films for more than 34 years and I stopped. 34 years is a long time. I was doing my first movies when just one or two of my friends would be punching me and telling me how fucked up my work was. And how fucked up society was. Then, step-by-step, film-by-film, I went deeper and deeper and I tried to understand more and more. At the beginning when I was 22 I believed our problems were only social problems. But later I understood this was a totally logical problem. And somehow during the making of The Turin Horse, you can see definitely the real darkness and when you are definitely flowing into the light. And that was my goodbye to film-making and that was the point when I decided, 'No more movies. This is the closing event.' Without light in the darkness you cannot make movies. That's simple.

Bela Tarr

[The Quietus]

[onfilmmaking]

Mille soleils is a project that came from far away, born of an introspective quest, from questions about the importance of cinema in my life and that of my family, about the origins of my desire to make films, and also from my relationship with Africa. The project was born in 2008, shortly after the end of the shoot for Claire Denis’ 35 rhums, in which I act. It was an experience that profoundly affected me. It was also the year that marked the tenth anniversary of the death of my uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. It was a period in which I was led to think about and measure this loss, which resulted in long conversations with my father about the life and death of Djibril, on his films, especially Touki Bouki. This is when I discovered the thousand stories hiding behindTouki Bouki—our family’s history, but also the history of the film’s stars Magaye Niang and Myriam Niang. My film project was born in 2008 but I didn’t make it until 2013. It was therefore constructed in stages, alongside Atlantiques, Big in Vietnam and Snow Canon, the films I made between 2009 and 2012. After having found and affirmed my own cinematographic language, I was ready to make Mille soleils and to look Touki Bouki straight in the eye. -Mati Diop

[Cinema Scope]

[onfilmmaking]

Filmmaker: How do you and your wife Ebru work together as co-screenwriters?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: I haven’t worked with many people other than my wife. If they don’t have a very strong personality, it’s difficult because they accept whatever I say. They should force me somehow. Ebru, because of our relationship, knows me better. She insists and she fights. She never gives up, and of course she’s very good. And she’s a very realistic person, which I think is important. Maybe even more realistic than me.

Filmmaker: Do you work together on everything, for example on structure and on dialogues?

Ceylan: No! It’s impossible to work together. We never like the same thing at the same time. Since it’s my film, if she doesn’t accept something and if I insist, the last decision is mine. And she’s still talking to me even after it’s finished: “this was wrong and this was wrong.” But it’s my film.

Filmmaker: You’ve talked about several Chekhov stories being the inspiration for this film, but the long scene with Aydin and his sister made me think of the scene in Bergman’s Winter Light in which the priest destroys his lover by telling her everything he hates about her.

Ceylan: I like Bergman very much, but I think this scene isn’t much like that one. When we see family members eating each other, all of us remember Bergman, of course. He’s the master of this. That sister relationship is based on the Chekhov story “Excellent People.” We extended it and wrote many new dialogues, but this sister and brother conflict comes from that story. It’s not similar, because in Winter Light there is a humiliation. He humiliates the woman, and she accepts it, doesn’t fight against it. Here, there is no humiliation, everyone is trying to protect themselves. If there is humiliation, it is the sister who humiliates more.

[Filmmaker]