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Reluctant feminism
Film still from Renata Gąsiorowska's Pussy; courtesy of goEast
The Symposium section of goEast is often seen as an opportunity to include academics and researchers in the festival dynamics, yet their work in Wiesbaden seems to occupy a layer of knowledge that goes beyond the interest of the typical event coverage. Without the historical comprehension of the processes that led to the rise of so many artistic and political waves in Central and Eastern Europe, though, one cannot really comprehend what moves these waves, and where to. This is why we are so thrilled that Rohan Berry Crickmar had the time and the courage to delve into the Reluctant Feminism sidebar, and came back with an amazing exchange on Hungarian cinema and feminism with Beata Hock, one of this year's Symposium speakers.
What makes goEast such an intriguing fixture on the film calendar for any enthusiasts and researchers in the region is the fact that it combines a film festival and industry set-up with an academic conference. This year’s Symposium was a real labour-of-love for the triumvirate of German-based academics Barbara Wurm (Humboldt-Universität), Borjana Gaković, and Christine Gölz (GWZO). The working title for the Symposium was For a New Axis – Affirmative Action Now! and once again highlighted one of this year’s festival themes, namely creating a critical opposition to the divisive and regressive ascendancy of chauvinistic and patriarchal politics globally. However, this title was then superseded by Reluctant Feminism: Women Filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe.
A primary critical touchstone for the Symposium’s re-visioning and revaluation of potential “feminist film and film practices” within Central and Eastern Europe could be found within Dina Iordanova’s 2003 study Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. Many of the speakers over the course of the Symposium had to deal with the critical specter of Iordanova’s term reluctant feminism: “leading female directors from the region have distanced themselves from 'feminism', a situation that leaves us facing the curious phenomenon of clearly committed feminist film-makers who are nonetheless reluctant to be seen as such.” The term is freighted with the complicating baggage of state socialism’s need to criticize concrete social issues over more abstract or elusive matters. Filmmakers such as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, and Agnieszka Holland were all caught between a clear adherence to some form of feminist critique within much of their work, but also a dismissive attitude towards feminism, at least within its Western constructions.
Wurm, Gaković, and Gölz's clear desire with this Symposium was to probe precisely what was at issue for many of these female filmmakers within Central and Eastern Europe, as well as looking at a forgotten, or overlooked, legacy of female filmmaking, particularly amongst documentaries, within the region. There was also a committed aim to try and examine how feminist thinking has developed within Central and Eastern Europe, and how this has impacted upon female filmmakers within the region, especially with regard to how feminism may have developed and formed a more coherent socio-political counterweight to the regressive political tendencies of Europe’s largely right-wing governments.
In her introduction to the section in the goEast catalogue, Wurm talks about “the dual shadow existence” that is the lot of female directors within Eastern European cinema. In sketching out the growth of the idea for the Symposium, Wurm recounts the victories for Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland at Berlin this year, as well as giving anecdotal evidence from a visit to Moscow of just how much skepticism Central and Eastern European filmmakers and practitioners have for any idea of a politically-inclined feminist film practice. The Symposium’s line-up of speakers and screenings was very much aimed at provocatively engaging with some of these issues.
That said, I could not help but feel that the presence of filmmakers like Holland and Mészáros somehow inserted a little more caution into critical stances that otherwise might have been far more questioning of how ideas of feminism have been constructed and why so many female filmmakers within the region seem to deeply mistrust what they view as Western feminist constructs that are not coherent with Eastern experiences and realities. Wurm and Gölz put together an effective survey of women filmmakers within Soviet and post-Soviet cinema that laid out much of the groundwork for the other speakers to move out into their narrower areas of focus.
Among the strongest of the Symposium lectures that I attended was the engaging look at feminist film practice in Hungary by Beata Hock (GWZO) entitled I’m the Woman of My Life – Feminist Perspectives on Eastern European Cinema. From the outset Hock established that her paper was not merely about female filmmakers within Eastern Europe, but also about practices within the female creative arts in the region and how they have a pan-European, or global reach. Referring to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, as well as to Kumari Jayawardena, Hock described gender as an analytical category that changes over time and space, and is by no means a stable critical construct. By deploying this formulation, it then enabled her to critique the inherent normative effects of applying historical formulations of gender, entirely inattentive of contemporary developments, nuances, and critical shifts.
Her referencing of Jayawardena extended this idea of gender as an evolving analytical category by applying a radical commitment to a feminist awareness. For Hock, it is problematic to consider feminist movements as having an original location, particularly if that location is as nebulous as a large nation state. By highlighting that US' Second-wave feminism was essentially a liberal, middle-class, white, heterosexual movement, and by establishing how this has been then critiqued by activists, scholars, and theorists lying outside of this narrow strand of US experience, it could be suggested that a similar approach should be taken to what constitutes an engagement with feminism in the Eastern Bloc, where socialist-sponsored emancipatory movements undoubtedly exert a regional effect.
Where Hock’s talk became particularly intriguing was when she turned her attention to looking at the Hungarian situation. The post-WWII film landscape she briefly painted was one in which the bulk of female involvement with film in Hungary was to be found in “traditionally female” areas such as the Costume and the Editing Department. Hock describes Márta Mészáros as the first significant female feature-film director in Hungary, making her debut in 1968 with THE GIRL / ELTÁVOZOTT NAP. Prior to that feature, Mészáros had worked for over fourteen years on short films and documentaries, which may suggest a degree of difficulty for women transferring to feature filmmaking in Hungary, considering the much shorter apprenticeships that male directors of the period serve.
Rather boldly, Hock suggested that Mészáros was an instinctual feminist filmmaker, with a frequent commitment (especially at the start of her career) to making films about woman, but with a question mark over her output in later years. For Hock, Mészáros was a female filmmaker who could, in some cases, stray into misogyny that makes it hard to classify some of her films as feminist. Also, as Iordanova diagnosed earlier, Mészáros frequently expressed her skepticism towards being singled out as feminist filmmaker and also saw no contradiction in her ambivalence about feminism, the ostensible focus on women in her praxis, and her undeniably activist stance. The chutzpah of Hock’s argument has to be placed into the context of goEast’s related Homage program that was showcasing a cross-section of Márta Mészáros’ work, and had actually invited the legendary director to speak at this year’s event.
I caught up with Beata Hock for a short conversation about some of the issues within her talk, her wider research, and Mészáros:
Rohan Berry Crickmar: I found your talk yesterday to be a fascinating and provocative overview of the development of female-focused film in Hungary, and I was wondering if you would be able to expand upon this a little.
Beata Hock: So, I had these analytical criteria, tools identified from feminist film theory. Then I took Hungarian decades, as in overviews of Hungarian film history, it seemed more or less that decades worked fine as a means of periodization. Not only can you characterize decades as mechanical apparatus, but in the case of Hungarian cinema decades really do seem to be distinct passages of time.
RBC: I guess there is something comparable in Polish cinema, where the major events of Polish post-war film history tend to come together in decade-long passages of time through to about the 1990s, when things become a little more complicated.
BH: Yes, it is the same in the 1990s in Hungary. The 1950s are certainly when “the women” appear in Hungarian cinema, working women. [laughing] Now, yes, they are ridiculous from our present perspective, but again, in comparison with pre-war mainstream cinema, where women only really had these decorative side roles, this is a big step forward [the working-woman film]. However, all of these films were still made by men. At the time there were simply no female directors in Hungarian cinema. By the time we enter the 1960s, then there are male directors who are placing women characters at the centre of their historical-set narratives, because – and I have to say this is not my finding, as I was joined on the study by another Hungarian film scholar who proposed – through women characters you may be able to convey more critical positions. This is partly because women are still not taken as seriously as male characters at this point. They are seen as feeble figures, and I point to this because in the talk this morning on the GDR films, Kornelia Klauss was reporting the same thing. In quoting a male GDR director, she showed that he worked with female characters within the framework of contemporary parable narratives, in an attempt to critique the system. In this way women were still being depicted as “immature” political subjects and somehow still being interpreted rather offensively as naïve and feeble. These characters were then allowed to voice more daring critical positions.
RBC: It is almost like they are ciphers or caricatures, ways of getting at authority without suffering any significant censure.
BH: Yes, they are not taken seriously because they are women. Whereas, if a man criticizes something, then it means something, it has more weight. So this is one of the reasons that you get female-centred narratives emerging within the Hungarian case, especially during the 1960s. Then in the 1970s, Hungarian cinema begins to return to, and focus upon, more contemporary issues, especially social issues. There is the major theme of the crisis of the intellectuals, which is one of the areas where you still see male figures predominating. The 1970s was a period when filmmakers were a little freer to express criticism against the socio-political structures of their society, so women within these films are less important as a means of conveying critical positions. What does emerge during this period, however, is a different type of female look. In the 1960s, female characters in Hungarian cinema were still obligatorily pretty figures, but by the 1970s these female faces are converted into a more realistic and everyday appearance, deliberately undermining their previous glamour. However, it is interesting to note that in the 1970s this kind of conversion of female glamour into “realism” is seen as happening throughout global cinema through a feminist intervention into filmmaking. In one of the Hungarian films of this period (Péter Gothár’s A PRICELESS DAY / AJÁNDÉK EZ A NAP from 1979) there is a direct reference to one of Scorsese’s films of the early seventies...
RBC: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974)?
BH: Yes, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. This is shown within the Hungarian film as a film that the central couple go to see at the cinema, a rare direct reference to Hollywood. This is all the more striking, because the lead actress is shown as a rather dowdy and unglamorous everyday woman, even though in reality she was a quasi sex symbol of Hungarian cinema of the period. In that film she isn’t portrayed as being in any way glamorous, and by the end of the film she – her character – and her lover’s wife end up having a long and hearty night together, drinking, and trading confidences.
RBC: So what you are saying here is that there was a conscious effort to downplay the glamour of actresses who would have otherwise been seen as, for want of a better term, sex symbols? I suppose this would favorably compare with the journey of Hollywood actresses like Jane Fonda during a similar period.
BH: Yes and this is where it becomes interesting, as suddenly in the 1970s you can no longer talk about isolated filmmaking practice, because, especially through things like festivals, film begins to become far more transnational.
RBC: I understand this entirely, because this is what I argue you see happening with Polish filmmakers who are exposed to a much wider array of film influences through film school environments and the international festival circuit, and thus take things out into that sphere, whilst simultaneously incorporating elements of other cinemas back into their Polish work. You are also seeing things change at a practical technical level, with state socialist filmmaking practice being mixed with Hollywood studio practice and other complex production structures, which blurs any discernible boundaries between national film industries to a large degree.
BH: Certainly the way creative workers operate is through ideas an images, and these things aren't really restricted or confined by such borders. Returning to my timeline, I would say it is only really in the 1980s that we see female characters emerging fully-formed, within their own right, in Hungarian cinema. This is really the first point where these characters are of interest in themselves and not because they are a site of other narratives. Yet, even at this point, still a great number of these films are made by male directors, as I mentioned in my talk yesterday. That said, it is telling that there are such a number of films that emerge out of Hungary during this period dealing with social issues that may broadly be described as being of significance to women. So even though you have a film being made by a male director within Hungary, it is still a film that looks, say, at the problems of aging for a central female character. Now, these films may increasingly exist due to a greater presence of female figures in all fields of Hungarian society, or may be because of a greater influence of women upon Hungarian filmmaking of the time, or it may be because the state socialist system funds a film based upon the issue it is examining rather than the amount of profit it might make at the box office. So, ultimately, what I am trying to explain here is that there were other ways, rather than a grassroots feminist social movement and the theoretical insights emerging from it, to arrive at a very similar kind of critical film language. So I would argue that this kind of state socialist-supported film culture could quite easily arrive at the same sort of film production and consumption practice as feminist “counter-cinema” of the period advocated. It is also worth remembering that state socialist governments would have implemented female-targeted policies that could have helped promote such an atmosphere.
RBC: If I am right, in your previous research, you were also looking at the role played by performance artists within state socialist societies. Now the question that was gnawing away at me, as I was thinking about your talk yesterday, was do you see any overlaps between that female performance art world and the state socialist filmmaking world, in terms of women from the former making films within Hungary at an underground level, that then came to prominence? So what I mean here is female performance artists making films of their art that dealt with female issues and was for a predominately female audience, as you broke it down in your talk yesterday.
BH: Performance art is a bit difficult to discuss in a Hungarian context, as it was heavily male-dominated.
RBC: This is what I was suspecting...
BH: Women, if they appeared within the Budapest performance art scene, were less the central performer and more of a prop. An exception to this may have been Katalin Ladik, but she didn’t make films, she was more like a sound artist. Then Orshi Drozdik, perhaps the one unproblematically feminist artist in Hungary, she also made performance art, but it was rather captured through photography. But there was a textile artists workshop in rural Velem, where a group of Hungarian women artists came together and started to make performances, amongst themselves. However, almost all of these performances would only remain within the memories of those who experienced them. These kinds of workshops were really sites for spontaneous action, especially when it came to performance. The most you could hope for in terms of documentary evidence was that someone happened to photograph an event. I must confess that textile art is rather interesting, in other countries as well, but especially in Hungary, because it basically became a place of experimentation, as it somehow fell outside of the purview of state censorship. It was just textile art, you know. [laughing]
RBC: I hadn’t actually thought about it in that way!
BH: Again, this was a sphere that wasn’t taken seriously as a site of political critique. It is actually interesting how textile art develops during this period, as it becomes increasingly abstract, and a greater number of male artists begin to become involved in it, taking part in textile art "symposiums" (which you would call today residencies or workshops). These events would really push the limits of what constituted textile art. You might have a television exhibited, for example, with a series of colored lines on the screen, and this became textile art as in weaving. This was just the kind of geometric, abstract experimentation that was otherwise excluded from the official exhibition spaces. These textile art symposiums, or residences, became increasingly important, as a result. They are also important, as it was a medium that was still female-dominated, even if many male artists began to participate. My proposition in this regard would be that in Hungarian textile art, woman artists were among themselves, and the gender relations were toppled, so to speak, in comparison with the mainstream Budapest art scene. I think this is also where women really begin to play around with performance, but those performances are pretty much unrecorded. There is one other performer I should mention, but she isn’t a filmmaker either. No, wait! She turned into a filmmaker, but only really when she left Hungary. She left Hungary in 1980.
RBC: What is her name?
BH: Her name is Judit Kele. Kele left Hungary in 1980, and then a few years later she took to filmmaking, predominately television filmmaking, in France. This is perhaps why she is almost entirely forgotten in Hungarian art histories. The performance work of hers that I discovered is really exciting, but also, alas, not film or video based. She auctioned off herself as an artwork at the Paris Biennale, and that is how she got married and how she got to leave Hungary.
RBC: Now that is most definitely a performance piece. This has really interesting historical resonances I suppose, because certainly within the UK context – rewind 100 years and you have a common social situation of women, in effect, being sold off into marriage by their patriarchally-dominated families.
BH: This would have been the exact same situation in France as well.
RBC: Just to wrap up, can I ask you a specific question about an issue that you raised with Márta Mészáros in your talk yesterday. I felt you were about to make a fantastic criticism of her work, but you appeared to not have the time.
BH: Or maybe it just wasn’t the place. In my book [Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-socialist and Post-socialist Hungary, 2013] I go into this issue in more detail. In FETUS / A MAGZAT (1994) – a superficially similar film to the one showing here ADOPTION / OROKBEFOGADAS (1975) – a woman who cannot have children decides to look for a surrogate mother. Now, the way the woman who cannot have children is portrayed is as if she is almost demonized, and the way in which Mészáros chooses to photograph her suggests almost a moral dislike for her flesh. This was very hard for me to watch. I also think that in her later films, such as her diary films, I am not sure they offer too much in the way of a female perspective or sensitivity. In their portrayals of working women and “non-natural” mothers, these films seem to be recalling the sexist stereotypes of the heteronormative cinema that Mészáros was seemed to so directly challenge. These are films in which the possibilities for female solidarity are violently crushed. Other than given a pathologizing and demonizing portrayal, the childless woman is also a representative of ill-used “worldly” power in other films by Mészáros (political power, higher social standing, or wealth, inherited or acquired through marriage), while the natural mother is “always-already” and morally superior. The overall comportment of the non-natural mother or the woman seeking a surrogate mother is pitted against the self-contained femininity of the natural mother.
I as an eye
“Las Palmas” usually evokes associations of sunny beaches and decadent tourists, pretty much like in Johannes Nyholm’s cult short of the same name. Yet with Andreea Pătru as our Canary Islands insider, now we know that this happens to be a wonderful place hosting an exquisite festival, with an Official Competition for shorts that could satisfy even the most demanding taste. So we invite you on a slow journey through the ocean of the self!
It is the second year since Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival restored its international section of short films after a long pause, so such a welcome addition to the Official Competition depicts the current state of this less (re)viewed cinema. The 2017 selection consisted of 16 works coming from a wide diversity of countries, continents, and authors, also displaying a pro-feminist curation by including no less than 50% titles directed and co-directed by women. In terms of genres, styles, and working formats, the approach was a diversified one – fiction, documentary, experimental, and animation, even if the preference inclined towards a contemplative cinema that offers unique perspectives on the world. To me, the most appealing proposals were the short films that went beyond our immediate reality to distillate meaning about ourselves as observing subjects of the world.
One of the possible perspectives or strategies to navigate this selection is through the meditative take of Chris Marker’s SUNLESS / SANS SOLEIL (1983) on the trivialities of daily life and how personal memories affect the perception of history and politics. In this respect, Ico Costa's NYO VWETA NAFTA (2017), shot on 16mm, begins from a personal, almost documentary point of view that is blended into fiction. The director started shooting in Mozambique without a predetermined purpose, searching for a friend called Nafta – an episode that serves as a fictionalized search for a girl in the crowded market of Maputo. This search, giving name of the film, develops into a sharp exploration of society through a bunch of funny and unexpected stories told by young men. Just like Marker depicts Guinea Bissau, Ico Costa shows the contemporary face of another Portuguese colony, Mozambique. Instead of an idealistic view on post-colonialism, Ico Costa lets his characters voice their political views on the world, views that are surprisingly more universal than one expects.
The youth of Inhambane, where part of the shooting takes place, dreams of the capitalist goods. Baobab fruit pickers court girls by promising commodities such as houses, cars, clothes, or pursue amateur singing while others discuss on the lack of freedom of rich people who cannot genuinely drink in an ordinary tavern. Apart from funny moments born out of the discovery of Snake, the cult mobile game and a technology that the West already looks down to, NYO VWETA NAFTA intertwines these shots with a contrasting poetry of the youth's curiosity in the face of modernity. In a memorable scene, one of the characters recites pretentious terms that supposedly relate to the baobab fruits they are picking. The camera pans vertically as if climbing the enormous tree while the boy naively brags how this wonder fruit with superpowers, trendy in the West, would change his life. The contrast between those who collect the raw material and those who exploit the posh market of organic foods is disheartening, yet the boy’s innocence reveals a vibrant image of humanity.
Case in point, an even more distinguishable social commentary is being exemplified in NIGHTFALL (2016), co-directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Tulapop Saenjaroen. Again, like Chris Marker, the filmmakers resort to the tool of exchange as a voice-over to accompany the fictionalized images. The cinematography focuses on a nameless woman that crosses impersonal modern spaces versus her aimlessly wandering in luxurious parks. However, she does not gain enough weight to be a protagonist, the camera showing undistinguished people walking pedestrian tunnels that seem to lead nowhere. The vocal exchange plays out between two legendary figures in the Southeast Asian politics, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore (responsible for the country’s miraculous transition from a third-world economy to one of the Four Asian Tigers) and Thanom Kittikachorn, a notorious military dictator of Thailand's past ruling over a military coup. The two share diplomatic cordialities that are in fact empty words, general statements about each other’s politics.
Both politicians praise each other’s historical achievements, like Thailand being the only nation that Western powers could not colonize, or Singapore’s augmented financial growth. Apart from a sculpture of an elephant, symbolic animal of the Siam culture to remind of this political encounter, the image focuses on the extreme contrasts of Singapore today. The directors resort to dream-like imagery, like a door opening to a lush vegetation only to swap to skyscrapers and cable railways overlooking to the modern city landscape. Like in her highly praised feature BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK / DAO KHANONG (2016), Anocha Suwichakornpong uses the historical facts as a means to explore memory, blur the lines between time and space, and confer a subtle social critique. The confrontation with urban spaces is being examined as a part of past decisions' consequence that produces contemporary realities.
Once more, following the SANS SOLEIL first-person heritage, the festival screened some works that highlighted the power of the self in constructing our actuality, like Jacqueline Lentzou’s Berlinale selected HIWA (2017) based on the architecture of remembering. The Greek director, awarded last year in Locarno for FOX / ALEPOU (2016), continues to explore family constructs, yet this time she employs the means of dreaming. In HIWA, a Filipino man called Jay tells his wife as an off voice about a dream he had about their daughters. The dream soon turns into a nightmare set in a fictionalized Athens he had never visited before. The director depicts familiar places in an enigmatic manner, with a floating image that contributes to the feeling of evanescence. Avoiding the postcard scenery of the city, the dad (re)constructs Athens as a venue of suffering and decay, where his daughters are innocent victims without knowing it.
Similar to Konstantina Kotzamani’s depiction of Athens in her 2015 short YELLOW FIEBER, Lentzou renders an exotic apocalyptic setting that has little to do with reality. However, in HIWA the city is a traumatic place due to the personal experience of feeling rootless and lost in a foreign country. To recall the fuzziness of dreams, the short has a grainy image that reminds of found-footage video essays. For Jay, ordinary places like the meat market become the perished hospital, and the girls' turtle-shelled backpacks remind of being trapped under one’s own home. This sensitive story is portrayed with a directorial aesthetics close to documentary, although there are a few artificial reactions from the mother’s side that let slip this feeling. Meaning “wound” in Tagalog, HIWA is indeed the consequence of an open wound, a subconscious father’s worry for his daughters supported by an ambiguous depiction of time and space that are suppressed like in a vacuum. While this psychoanalytical approach reminds of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s transformation of realistic images into an esoteric reflection about our usual surroundings, Jacqueline Lentzou chose the dream-like imagery to depict a fleeting manifestation of trauma.
An interesting addition to the competition, NO'I (2016), directed by Aline Magrez, explores an exotic place like Vietnam, precisely a crowded little street of Hanoi, through surprising links based on the protagonist's personal interaction with the space. The author avoids a Westerner superior perspective about a place she is not familiar with, yet she embraces her condition of a visitor trying to connect, to discover this small community. The film is built around slow-paced travelings along the rails that cut through an impoverished neighborhood. It is a very peculiar space, with the rails almost glued to the damaged improvised houses. At the end of this maze, curling continuously from the outskirts of the city to more inhabited areas, the viewer gets a glimpse of a contrasting cleaner and more modern version of the city. Like with Jacqueline Lentzou, the camera of Aline Magrez focuses on a dream-like sensation set in a single space.
Still, NO'I accomplishes this feeling with a clever editing that connects the city’s wires with the railway lines and imaginary threads which the camera dolly draws through movement. Avoiding dialogue and direct sounds, the ties between the inhabitants of this atypical street are almost impressionistic. The editing is intuitive, associating surprising interior with the routine along the exterior of the houses. Like the people who build their little habits around the passing of the train, the camera organically waits for it to pass and keeps rolling. Appealing even to multiple exposure, NO'I relies on an inner perception of the surroundings. In a scene where the neighborhood’s children express curiosity and look directly into the camera, while the dolly passes by, the camera blends with the landscape like a pulsating vertebrae.
Furthermore, THE I MINE (2017) by Emilio Moreno questions memory through a complex archaeological digging not only in personal experiences, but also in the context of history itself. The short is the closest to a film essay, lending the first-person POV to a biographer, John P. Roquentin, who intends to write a novel about a deaf-blind auctioneer, Valerie Louise Ellis. The director mixes real-life historical characters with his own stance in a multi-layered experience of writing and discovering the personal self. These biographical stories blend with images of digging either in mines or with palaeontologists looking for human relicts in a sort of searching for the narrator’s real self in the past, being it historical or personal. Emilio Moreno’s interest seems to revolve around the idea of language as the mankind’s attempt to define the world. In this respect, the presence of Ellis is almost like a ghostly figure, like a myth, her image being superposed and identified with archival images of the deaf-blind American activist Helen Keller. In some of them, Ellis is depicted caressing the throat of another person, trying to decipher the vibrations of the sounds. The film shows images of Helen Keller with First Lady Grace Coolidge or President Eisenhower, thus fictionalizing her past and attributing her a constructed identity of the auctioneer Valerie Louise Ellis.
This false diary guides the viewer through Roquentin’s own struggle to separate his experience from Valerie’s, while questioning her experience with communication due to her mediated form of knowledge (by touching somebody else’s mouth). We do not know if the inspiration for Roquentin is not the fictional historian with the same name that is the leading character of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, or an alter-ego of the the director himself as a narrator of somebody else’s experience, neither if the book Ellis wrote is Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. The similarities are striking, and Emilio Moreno manages to build a faux documentary only to question how identity is shaped. Similar to Chris Marker’s practice, he turns to tracing biographies that are supposed to reveal how history is made.
Moreover, this experimental documentary showcases images taken in a South African archaeological site in contrast with showcasing them in museums. In an attempt to find our ancestors, the past justifies the present. With the help of the auctioneer and images of displayed objects, either contemporary art or palaeolithic exhibits, questions of value arise over our culture and accumulation of knowledge. These objects are not just things to be marketed, yet they carry the value of the stories they contain. It is astounding how through this filtered information and (de)constructed narration dispersing in various interests, the footage becomes auto-referential, questioning how stories themselves are developed. Ultimately, THE I MINE brings to attention a provocative debate in the philosophy of language, wondering if Wittgenstein’s assumption that our words describe reality is true or not. The layers of coding and decoding the spoken language must be different for someone who perceives reality through foreign bodies, as well as for historians who investigate the past through the perception of the other. How can one find his/her own voice and trust history as a gathered experience of others?
Last but not least, the jury gave the award for Best International Short Film to the Canary-born filmmaker David Pantaleón and his THE PAINTED CALF / EL BECERRO PINTADO (2017), a work that has passed before by IFFR. A regular in previous Canary Shorts editions, Pantaleón’s film was the only exponent of the Canary Islands in the Official Competition. The short uses the biblical imagery of the Golden Calf that Moses’ brother Aaron built for the people of Israel while they gave up waiting for their leader to return with the 10 commands. However, the filmmaker's adaptation does not look like a faithful representation, yet more like a carefully composed installation. Pantaleón works with the local environment to make a sharp statement against the hypocrites who state they venerate God / Yahweh, yet their only idol is money. He pays respect to the oral culture by using a choir resembling ballad singers and points out de-spiritualized spaces. Abundant in fixed shots, his short film resembling oil paintings is a poetic allegory rooted in the Canary islands cultural heritage that along with other proposals appealing to mystic imagery, such as ABIGAIL (2016), DUEL / DUELO (2017), or DADYAA (2016), constituted the section’s provocative exploration of spiritual crises.
Dissolution, transformation, coagulation
Scotland in spring is a place of magic, especially when you add the enchantment of the moving images. Back from Hawick and Alchemy Film And Moving Image Festival, Rohan Berry Crickmar shares his lush “alchemical visions” in an equally lush travelogue. Time to put your film-walking shoes!
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival has been bringing an excellent selection of artist and experimental film and installation work to the Scottish Borders since 2010. Initially founded through the co-operation of the Scottish charity Alchemy Film & Arts, the Creative Arts Business Network, and the council-run arts venue Heart of Hawick, the festival has been presided over by its Creative Director Richard Ashrowan, who is also involved in Scotland + Venice for this year’s Venice Art Biennale. The event seeks to showcase as wide a selection as possible of contemporary artist and experimental films, and also organizes residency programmes at the Moroccan cultural retreat centre Café Tissardmine. This year’s theme was fixed to the idea that informs the name of the festival itself – alchemy and the alchemical. Ashrowan and his programming team were expressly interested in films that explored the idea of alchemical vision in film and moving image. To that end the selection that they put together reflected a full range of creative possibilities and approaches embodied within the flux and mutability of the alchemical.
Despite having been back in Scotland since 2013, and living in Edinburgh (just 90 minutes, or so, from Hawick), since mid-2015 this was the first opportunity I have had to get down to Alchemy. It has always fallen a little too soon after my annual visits to Rotterdam and Berlin, and even with its relatively close proximity it has felt more difficult to get to somehow. Being one of those carbon-footprint-conscious souls who has resisted the pull of the private car, public transport would become the sole dark cloud to hang heavy over the weekend. My original plan was to attend Saturday and Sunday of the festival, staying overnight to maximize the later Expanded Cinema events on Saturday night. However, some work issues meant that I had to look at Friday and Saturday instead, returning to the festival on Sunday in time to see the Scottish premiere of Karolina Breguła’s minimalist opera THE TOWER / WIEŻA (2016).
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Erin Espelie, Joost Rekveld, Semiconductor; images: courtesy of Alchemy
Still, due to the kind offer – the first of many little kindnesses over the course of the weekend (a press pass from the Festival Producer Harriet Warman) – I was able to also attend the Artists’ Filmmaking Symposium on the opening Thursday of the festival. The festival programme was full of intriguing material, with over 120 films screening in some capacity or another over the course of the five days. I was able to see barely a handful of the things that were on offer, yet even the small selection that I saw left an indelible mark. Undoubtedly, the Symposium event was a crucial way of opening out the festival and its thematic concerns. It introduced me to two artists that I had not come across before: Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (a last minute replacement for Violaine Boutet de Monvel) and Erin Espelie. It was also an opportunity to reacquaint myself with Joost Rekveld’s singular works of machine-mediated matter, as well as the tangentially related digital-noise experiments of Semiconductor (with Ruth Jarman giving the final talk).
I knew what to expect with Rekveld, as I had just seen #67 (2017) premiere in Rotterdam, accompanied by two substantial talks about his work and working practices. In December of last year, at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade, I had been able to enjoy a short showcase of Dutch experimental film curated by Simona Monizza of the EYE Filminstitut, Amsterdam. This was my first encounter with Rekveld in over a decade, and it had made me eager to gorge myself on his most recent experiments with analogue computers and how they can help to capture externally produced sound as visual data.
Likewise, with Semiconductor, I had first come across them at the International Festival of Contemporary Arts in Slovenia in the summer of 2003, where they performed a piece called STRATA (2002), a 3D animated real-time landscape, replete with sound effects triggered by the animation. Since then I had not kept abreast of their (Joe Gerhardt being the other half of the partnership) more recent output. Ruth Jarman’s Symposium presentation, focusing in particular on EARTHWORKS (2016) and BLACK RAIN (2009), made me acutely aware of what I had been missing. Over the past decade, the duo had found their work increasingly taking them into science labs “to make films that help us to explain the material world.” For example, on EARTHWORKS they were utilising seismic data and the way in which that data is visualized to create beguiling animations and soundscapes that seemed to evoke the slow and powerful frictive shifting of the Earth’s surface. Jarman also drew attention to work that they had been doing at the Smithsonian in recent years, where they had come across films that scientists had been making about their experiments and discoveries, going as far back as 1915. What really struck me about Jarman’s talk was the way in which she talked about Semiconductor’s approach to the scientists themselves. The team had become increasingly interested in the language of the scientific, and how that niche tongue could be untied and made more discernible through artistic experimentation and expression.
Colorado-based Erin Espelie came as something of a revelation to me. Her precisely structured and engaging presentation took the audience through her back-catalogue of film work, hinting at her scientific background and drawing upon a reservoir of memories linked to her father’s career as an entomologist and her own youthful experiences of the natural world. What was most striking about her work was the way it melded together expertly poetry, science, film aesthetics, and personal emotional responses. This was film as a truly promiscuous and polyvalent medium, and nothing seemed to capture this better than her 2014 collection of short films THE LANTHANIDE SERIES. In this series, Espelie wed together the idea of rare Earth elements (which are found within the Lanthanide grouping of the periodic table), contemporary digital technology, how we see, and the ecological impact of this seeing. By filming upon portable digital screens (all of which are made possible through the the industrial use of rare Earth elements) and obsidian mirrors, Espelie was explicitly demonstrating how the image is founded in material reality, even when digitally rendered. I have not come across a more impressive image-maker, and one whose images possess, or are possessed, by a world concretizing depth and density.
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s seeming reaction against the new digital dominance within the moving image took on an extreme materiality, subtly masking a remediation as digital artefact. Her installation work for the festival IN MEDIA RES (2015) was composed of photogrammic images of bodies down through centuries of art, structured in such a way as to form a larger mosaic image. Thus, the fragmentary is foregrounded within the presentation of the whole. This material presentation was accompanied by the capture of 16mm spooling film into glass-encased instant sculptures. Then video projections adorned both walls, with the edit of the image creating a glitchy sound design. The photogrammic images were actually constructed via digital means, thus presenting within one space an extensive media archaeology (mosaic, photogram, celluloid, video). As much as I enjoyed her work, the presentation was perhaps the most difficult to fully comprehend.
Thought Broadcasting, Omen, Swings and Roundabouts, Buccleuch Church on the Kirk Burn; images: courtesy of Alchemy
After the Symposium, the festival team put on a series of tours of the various installations within the town. I was fortunate enough to be in a group that had the affable Gateshead-born film critic and programmer, Michael Pattison, taking us from the various snugs, shops, and industrial spaces that housed the works. Hawick has a lot of woolmakers and old industrial architecture associated with textile production. Some of these buildings are still very much in use, whereas others have been abandoned (in a few cases – quite recently and possibly reflecting the economic downturn felt in many parts of the UK since 2008). Each of the spaces had been adapted and modified by the artists whose installations were located within them.
In its most effective manifestations, this meant that the space was transformed into something entirely different, such as in the case of Nick Jordan’s THOUGHT BROADCASTING (2016), in which some of the bureaucratic blandness and industrial sterility of British clinical spaces and British broadcasting studios were suggested through careful arrangement of projected image, found object, and archived material. Similarly, Nazare Soares piece OMEN (2016) converted an upstairs factory room into a darkly ritualistic space of shamanic séance, replete with reclining, hammock-style chairs, that left you lying close to the ground in a strangely transfixed state of readied receptivity.
I must make brief mention of two other delightful installations. Jessie Growden’s playful SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS (2016) presented a room with Spirograph elements dangling from the ceiling and a film looping round on a small television set. The film was entrancing, as it found circular patterns in nature (whirlpools and eddies), then had the artist carrying out cyclical activities (the drawing of a spirograph images) and disrupting these cycles through the reversal of the image at points where this initially goes almost unnoticed. The puckish quality of the work was a neat juxtaposition against Soares’ more fugue-like installation on the part of the festival organizers, as both artists inhabited the same space, but with entirely different energies and effects. Finally, Jacques Perconte’s mesmerising loop BUCCLEUCH CHURCH ON THE KIRK BURN (2016) was a layered video image that played with the colour distortion possibilities of video to create an intensely psychedelic and ruminative experience of place, with Ettrick Forest and the Buccleuch Church forming almost fractal-like compositions at the loop’s most expressive moments.
Non-Places: Beyond the Infinite, On a Wing and a Prayer, Second Hand Daylight, Maelstroms; images: courtesy of Alchemy
Getting back down to Hawick for the main closing events of the Sunday, I was able to catch an assortment of shorts, screened in the makeshift cinema / screening room in the office spaces of the Heart of Hawick. There is a real pleasure to be found in the dexterous way in which the festival organizers infiltrate and modify so many different parts of this complex and the wider town. I was pleased to note that the programmers had picked up on Péter Lichter’s masterful NON-PLACES: BEYOND THE INFINITE (2016) from Coos & Chemicals that takes Marc Augé's essay Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity plus Cioran’s philosophical obsession with decay and uses them to underpin a minimalist inversion of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). I had seen this film at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade and wrote about it (for another publication) as one of the standout films of that festival.
ON A WING AND A PRAYER (2016) by Alia Syed from Uncertain Territories was a timely intervention into the discussion about UK asylum laws. It is ostensibly documenting the journey that Abdul Rahman Haroun took, on foot, through the Channel Tunnel. The filmmaker chops up this journey into disorienting and seemingly repetitious POV tracking shots that convert this passage into some looping nightmare of fear and paranoia (tellingly, the footage is so dislocating that the fact it is actually shot within the Rotherhithe Tunnel does not really matter). All the while a voiceover reads out the procedures of the UK asylum policy and extracts from The Malicious Damages Act of 1861, which Haroun would be charged under on gaining asylum in the UK. The inhumane language of legal protocol is foregrounded by the emotional immediacy of Syed’s tunnel footage in a trenchant critique of our border controls.
Simon Aeppli’s SECOND HAND DAYLIGHT (2007) was another powerful political work on display in the from Uncertain Territories strand. An exceptionally well edited digital film approximation of a scrapbook, replete with collage effects and the filmmakers’ actual scrapbooks, it explores the paranoia of the Northern Irish troubles in a way that was vacillated wildly between moments of sharp humor and moments of unsettling portent. Another work that complemented these politically charged pieces was Lana Z Caplan’s MAELSTROMS (2015) from Reasons to Be Anxious, Part 3 – a harrowingly intense look at how modern surveillance imaging creates a dehumanizing gaze. The film cuts between US border-patrol footage, drone footage, and various other forms of surveillance, all of which are presented in disconcerting shades of grey, like a negative transfer. I was lucky enough to be sat beside the filmmaker at Aeppli’s screening, and in our brief conversation afterwards I was not surprized to hear that she found his film to be particularly powerful.
The Tower, Fluid Dynamics, Performance, Incident Reports; images: courtesy of Alchemy
The final day neatly brought together proceedings with three presentations in the main auditorium of the Heart of Hawick. Karolina Breguła’s stunningly simple and surprisingly effective experimental opera THE TOWER has gone through various different versions since its first appearance in early 2016. The version screened at Alchemy was the 79-minute edit, that features the rather abrupt ending and tactile post-credit coda. Breguła is a film artist increasingly aware of Polish film history, and her decision to film an opera in a style comparable to the state-funded documentaries of the likes of Jacek Bławut or Krzysztof Kieślowski gives THE TOWER a curiously contradictory atmosphere of specificity and universality, the quotidian and the magical. As a residence group within a block of flats seeks to build a new space from sugar, their dreams range from utopian living quarters, to a model modernist city, to the eventual reconfiguration of the human body through a realignment with the crystalline structure of sugar. The music is composed by the Oświęcim-born, Glasgow-based electronic musician Ela Orleans, who was present for a Q&A.
Later in the afternoon, the Nature Spirits collection was a fascinating showcase for the diverse talents of artists such as Robert Todd, Jason Moyes, and Charlotte Pryce. Todd’s film FLUID DYNAMICS (2016), which was receiving its world premiere, was the perfect way in to this programme. Through the meticulous use of different aspect ratios and types of shot, Todd creates an apprehension of a natural environment that, first of all, calls upon the viewer to be attentive to the image, in a way that drew me closer to the filmmakers’ actual experience of that environment. Later on, the film begins to fall in to a reciprocal relationship with the natural flows of water and plant matter, the rhythms of the place fuse Todd’s camera into a dance with nature. This exhilarating interlude is then recontextualized when the filmmaker places himself into certain sequences, turning the attention away from the immediacy of our relationship, as viewers, with the film, and placing back upon the filmmakers’ relationship with seeing and feeling the environment he inhabits. This approach was echoed in minimalist fashion in Lea Petrikova’s PERFORMANCE (2015), wrapping the Nature Spirits screening. A camera captures a landscape twinned in the reflection of a lake. It is a stunning natural vista, caught in the lowlight of the gloaming. Petrikova moves the camera so gracefully that it creates a beautiful tension when human figures begin to pull in front of it. Gradually, it is revealed that an audience is gathering upon the lakeshore, and as Petrikova pulls the shot steadily backward over the crowd, a faint murmur of melody and drum can be heard, but the real performance has been in front of our eyes all along.
The closing feature of the festival was the wry Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s deeply humane feature INCIDENT REPORTS (2015). Ostensibly a film in the form of a series of reports to an unseen therapist, Hoolboom dissects the contemporary Canadian culture that he inhabits, mourning the disappearance of books and bookstores, embracing the joyous and life-affirming street performances of naked cyclists or revellers at a downtown music festival. Hoolboom consistently interrogates our contemporary notions of a trans-postmodernity that has gone beyond affectation until it inhabits a genuine permissiveness, that is both honest, non-judgemental and accepting. A bit like the films of Roy Andersson, Hoolboom tends to lock the camera down in a fixed position and let things play out in front of the camera. In so doing he is extending the inclusiveness of his vision, failing to privilege or preference any one figure within the frame. This framing also enables him to use a characteristically deadpan voiceover narration to create gentle comedy from what is being observed. The entire film is shot in a color palette that makes reds, yellows, and greens dominant, the final joke of the film comes with the musical revelation of this color scheme.
In the immediate aftermath of the Hoolboom screening, as Richard Ashrowan closed off proceedings by bringing all the members of the festival team and volunteers up on stage to receive a standing ovation, I was made palpably aware of what kind of space this festival had managed to create here in a quiet, predominately working class, Scottish Borders town. Perhaps, I had been trans-fused with inclusive warmth of Hoolboom’s alchemical vision, but it really felt as Alchemy had created a warm, safe, and open space, in which creativity could be shared rather inspiringly. This was truly palpable, and then palpably political, as with all of the myriad divisions, ruptures, and ructions that had taken place globally over the past eighteen months. With a resurgent bigotry and chauvinism seeming to gird the political ideologies of governments within Europe and North America, here was quietly assertive countering of these hostile energies. A demarcated space that was only demarcated because it chose not to traffic in exclusivity. All of this came as a shock to me, for my own prejudices have probably read an exclusivity within such festivals based upon a failure to see them reach out and bring experimental film to a wider audience.
Yet at Alchemy, at the close of the festival, it felt like they had got so much right. From the close proximity to artists and filmmakers, through to the innovative ways of engaging audiences with such works, through to the festivals relationship with the town itself. On leaving the Heart of Hawick. I happened upon a few groups of kids and teenagers killing time in the quiet of Hawick’s main shopping street on a Sunday evening. The kids were huddled in disparate groups, chatting, messing about, having a laugh. I could not help but think that they were missing something, though, something right on their doorstep. I did not want to let go of the blissful feeling that had come over me, but I could not ignore the nag at the back of my head, were the kids missing something, or was there still something more that Alchemy could do to truly realise its vision(s)? Perhaps, Andrew Kötting’s Monday film-walk to the nearby Hermitage Castle would interrogate this gap unseen, now revealed. The space between what was, what is, and what could still be. Or maybe that is asking far too much of Andrew.
The Chinese dream
Still from Have a Nice Day's press conference in Berlin; credit: Berlinale
We cannot wrap this year's Berlinale coverage without looking into on one of the most epic happenings in the festival history – the inclusion of a Chinese title in the Main Competition section, and an animation one. Our insider Jia Xu talks to the person behind the industry success of HAVE A NICE DAY / HAO JI LE (2017) plus this year's Panorama gem GHOST IN THE MOUNTAINS / KONG SHAN YI KE (2017) – the young and aspiring producer / cinephile Yang Cheng!
I first met Yang Cheng at the 5th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing, where we both were volunteers. It was the age of MSN, Olympics, and global financial crisis. Over the years, Yang wrote film reviews, organized screenings, took film projects to pitches like HAF and Golden Horse, and then attended a train of festivals with his steady productions. This time, he brought to Berlinale the animation feature HAVE A NICE DAY / HAO JI LE (2017) directed by Liu Jian. This film won appreciation from critics and programmers, and ranked #2 on the Screen jury grid, next to Aki Kaurismäki's THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE / TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN (2017).
In this interview, Yang expresses his profound affection with the Berlinale and his opinion about filmmaking, about the Chinese society, as well as an ambitious plan for his newly founded production company NeZha Bros. Pictures. I believe he is one of the young filmmakers who are reshaping the Chinese film industry.
Jia Xu: What is your impression from Berlinale?
Yang Cheng: I like Berlinale quite a lot, and it is my third time here. I first came to Berlinale in 2013 as the producer of DON’T EXPECT PRAISES (2012). In 2014, I came to watch films as a guest reporter of a Chinese film magazine. This year, I am back with director Liu Jian’s film HAVE A NICE DAY. The festival is special. First, because the city of Berlin has both a rich history and young vibe, it is not so crowded, and there is a lot to explore. The festival’s wide selection of programmes and films means you have plenty options. And the cinemas are generally huge, so seeing a movie here is like attending a ritual, especially in the Berlinale Palast. Watching films like PARADISE: HOPE / PARADIES: HOFFNUNG (2013), NYMPHOMANIAC (2013), and BOYHOOD (2013) at the Berlinale is really unforgettable. To sit in the Palast and hear the audience’s laughter and applause when watching HAVE A NICE DAY feels special.
JX: What is your take about the Chinese society?
YC: It is chaotic but vigorous. A lot is going on.
JX: So will you emigrate?
YC: At the moment, no. I don’t have such a plan, but I would love to go exploring another culture, for example, to live in New York for half a year. There are cultural exchange programs that offer such opportunities. My friends like Pema Tseden and Liu Jian have taken the offer and went there, but at the present it is a pity that I don’t have that much free time to go. Back to the society question, China still has social mobility. It is still possible to change one’s social status.
JX: What would you say to younger filmmakers in such an environment?
YC: Try your best. Try your best till the end. But I think one has to be able to change his tracks at any time and don’t be exhausted by filmmaking, because filmmaking itself is not important. I think watching films is important, but making them is not. Many people say that the reason they make films is because they love films, but why? If you love movies, you go and watch it. I mean, you don’t have to make a film just because of that. What a joy to watch films! If you love movies, you can keep watching them, unless you find a direct and genuine connection between your life and moviemaking. When I first fell for film, I decided that I would like to be a director, so I wanted to make it to the Beijing Film Academy. I chose to apply for the Screenwriting Department instead of the Directing Department, because I thought that was a more approachable goal, but of course there are a number of directors who read Screenwriting at the BFA. When I arrived at BFA, I found people around me were merely talking about films and felt good about themselves just because they were BFA students. I didn’t want to be like them, and I thought to myself “Did I want to make movies out of my heartfelt passion, or out of blindness and vanity?” I also thought about whether I had something to say. And whether I needed to express what I wanted to say via filmmaking, a long and arduous process. What if I just write an article to express myself, or use Weibo. These are all ways of expression. Why make films when you can use other, much easier ways to express yourself? So I thought about what I could do with film, and what I wanted to do. I then met a few directors and found film production is what I am capable of and interested in, since I love films. More importantly, I thought to be a producer could help my character building, because at the time I was quite introverted and a bit depressed, to be honest. I found a need to open up and interact with people, and that is what requires of a producer. This would be difficult to me, but it shall be helpful for my personality. This decision was based on “a more genuine connection between life and film,” not vanity, so I think it is grounded and generates determination. All in all, I don’t think one needs to make a movie just because he likes watching movies. I detest the slogan hanging on BFA during freshmen recruitment: “This is where your dream begins.” I think, as an education institution, BFA should encourage people to lead a true life with reason. Filmmaking is just a job, a thing. Don’t glorify it so much. To younger filmmakers I’d say “Beware of those who always talk about dreams: they probably just want you to be a cheap labor, so they glorify a distant business plan.” I’ve seen too many big bosses in this business who would sugarcoat their manipulation and exploitation with so-called dreams: “Don’t only think about your salary. We are fighting for our dreams, and you are the future of the Chinese cinema.”
JX: So, do you have a dream?
YC: Sure. My dream is that everybody can live a happy life.
JX: You sound like Jesus Christ!
YC: [chuckles] The word “dream” is so grand that it should be something much bigger than daily pursuits. It should not be so trivial like to make more money or to make a better movie – these are just too small undertakings. It doesn’t have to be filmmaking or watching films. Besides film, there are so many beautiful and touching things to appreciate. You can always go back to reading.
JX: Could you talk about the directors that you are working with?
YC: I am open to any possible collaboration, and I don’t sign directors. I think lasting cooperation is based on similar ideals and beliefs, agreeable profit sharing and complementary proficiency. My current collaborators like director Liu Jian – he is quite a pure creator with one goal only: to make quality films. Also, his films always have originality. His films are not only special in China, but also look special in a global context. His film amazed festival audiences: “Oh, it is from China!” So different from regular festival movies from China. A director’s originality is what I value the most. I say to my collaborators that we have to make artistic contribution to China’s cinema, find new possibilities in the art form and style of cinema. Originality is quite high standard. Director Yang Heng’s films [GHOST IN THE MOUNTAINS / KONG SHAN YI KE (2017)] are also original both in terms of storytelling and art form. On one hand, his films are about the reality; on the other hand, they have surreal moments and very stylistic, too. He finds a good proportion between reality and what is beyond. So what I find most valuable in a director is not his / her theme or genre but originality. Also, continuous creativity is vital.
JX: Do you watch lots of movies nowadays?
YC: Not so much. I now actually watch much more bad movies than good ones, you know, the commercial films at the cinema. I have not found time to watch the much talked-about films like MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2016) and MOONLIGHT (2016) yet. I will watch them for sure. But I have always had this idea that one does not have to watch too many movies, because the depth and the perspective of thinking about a movie matters more. If a movie evokes a resonance in you, it is much better than you watch 100 movies without feeling anything.
JX: So what are the movies you enjoy watching?
YC: I actually love COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY / TIAN MI MI (1996) and those made by Stephen Chow. In daily life, I often unconsciously think of PARADISE: HOPE. Films made by Michael Haneke. HOOLY BIBLE II (2016) made by Li Hongqi. ARRIVAL (2016), not a sci-fi film routine, I think it feels like THE BOURNE IDENTITY’s innovation in spy/agent movies. Larry Charles’s films never fail to make me laugh.
JX: And what is your plan for your company NeZha Bros?
YC: I plan to make small-budget films based on fun, original scripts in the next two or three years. After all, a company needs to make profit to ensure the creative flow.
If you are a film industry professional, you can watch titles from Berlinale Panorama, Berlinale Generation, Berlinale Forum & the previous work of directors selected at Berlinale Co-Production Market on Festival Scope
The Erlprince
In the last several months, Polish cinema has been making waves again: THE LAST FAMILY / OSTATNIA RODZINA (2016) has been conquering world festivals since Locarno, THE LURE / CÓRKI DANCINGU (2015) is being shown in US theatres right now, Agnieszka Holland won big at Berlinale, and Kuba Czekaj's second feature THE ERLPRINCE / KRÓLEWICZ OLCH (2016) scrored two very important festivals – Slamdance and Berlinale Generation 14plus. Fortunately, our new contributor Rohan Berry Crickmar had the opportunity to interview Kuba Czekaj in Berlin, so now you can read all about the independent filmmaking community in Poland, and risks.
The young Polish filmmaker Kuba Czekaj is a very busy man. In the space of eighteen months he has completed and promoted his first two feature films, BABY BUMP (2015) and THE ERLPRINCE / KRÓLEWICZ OLCH (2016). The latter has received its European Premiere in the Generation 14plus Competition here at the 67th Berlinale, after having won the Young Jury Award for Best Film at Gdynia Film Festival in 2016.
Czekaj is very much at the vanguard of an emerging generation of exciting young Polish film talent, alongside the likes of Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Tomasz Wasilewski, Katarzyna Rosłaniec, Bodo Kox, and Krzysztof Skonieczny. Born in Wrocław in 1984, Czekaj studied Directing at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Radio and Television Faculty at the University of Silesia in Katowice, graduating in 2010. After this initial training, he then attended the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw during 2011. He initially produced a series of award-winning short films between 2009 and 2014, including the highly original DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK ROOM / CIEMNEGO POKOJU NIE TRZEBA SIĘ BAĆ (2009). BABY BUMP, his first feature film, premiered at the 72nd Venice Film Festival in 2015, winning a Special Mention in the Queer Lion Award category.
Having been impressed by the hyper-excessive inventiveness of BABY BUMP when I saw it at the 2015 Gdynia Film Festival, I was keen to see what aesthetic developments, if any, Czekaj had made during the shoot of THE ERLPRINCE. Little did I know just how difficult it would be to assess this director’s progress between first and second feature. This was nothing to do with the quality of THE ERLPRINCE, as I think it is a bold film that builds upon and expands the scope and ambition of BABY BUMP. Rather, it was difficult to talk of progress due to the surprising revelation of how both films were produced.
On meeting Czekaj in Berlin after the premiere of THE ERLPRINCE, I was immediately struck by the seeming contradiction between his physical timidity, as if his wiry frame was desperately trying to discreetly disappear from view, and the genuine warmth and openness of his character. The resulting interview is peppered with candid details about the production histories of his self-described “informal diptych,” as well as some clear insights as to his working methods and the importance he places upon collaboration. Although, some areas of the interview have been slightly amended to facilitate clarity and comprehension, I have tried to preserve, as much as possible, the idiosyncrasies of this director’s English, as I believe it best captures his engaging and self-reflexive personality.
Rohan Berry Crickmar: Before this interview, your publicist was telling me that you effectively produced BABY BUMP and THE ERLPRINCE simultaneously?
Kuba Czekaj: Yeah, mostly at the same time, because, you know, we started shooting at the beginning of, I think, 2015, this was the first part of the shooting. Then I had a break, after which I started shooting BABY BUMP, and after that I immediately came back to the set of THE ERLPRINCE. Then, in September 2015, there was a premiere at the Venice Film Festival. So it was a crazy year for me, but also a wonderful and very unique lesson, especially for someone, you know, who is a first-time director. So, yeah, I think it was a very important time for me.
RBC: Before you did these two features, you had a quite considerable body of work in terms of short films?
KC: Yeah, I made several in my school, and you have some opportunities after you finish your education. There was a program for young filmmakers to make a professional audition film. Normally, something like thirty minutes. My film was called DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK ROOM. It was just after my education that I made this film, and after this film the same studio offered me the chance to do THE ERLPRINCE. But, of course, as you probably know, because everybody knows, it is very difficult to get the financing and to have the money for these sort of films [laughs].
RBC: Indeed! Am I right in thinking that Venice helped to develop the project?
KC: Yeah, Venice has some program, It is called Biennale College Cinema. This is a program for first or second-time filmmakers. They help, supporting productions, because they give you money with just one rule that you can only spend 150,000 EUR, no more. It is a kind of competition. At first, twelve production teams are invited. You just apply with a treatment and some additional materials, and then they choose the twelve teams, and you have some workshops. This helps you in talking about and pitching your film. After all the workshops, you return back home and write up the first draft of the script, send it, and then they make the decision based on: your stay in Venice, the pitch, the quality of the script, and, I think, trust. After all, they don’t know the people who are applying, so it is a kind of risk for them to just give anyone the money. After receiving the money, you have only one year – for us it was nine months – to make the film and be ready for the following year’s Venice festival, where the film will receive its premiere. So after all, when I had the decision that BABY BUMP would be financed, I also had the decision that THE ERLPRINCE would begin shooting. This led to a very difficult decision as to whether I could do both films. I had a lot of feedback telling me “This is too much, you should just concentrate on one film.” But I just said “Come on guys, I have to film these, as it will be my most important lesson, and I will have a film in Venice, so I need to test myself, I need to take this risk and fight for my dreams!”
RBC: So, with BABY BUMP that was partly funded by the Venice Film Festival?
KC: Yeah.
RBC: With THE ERLPRINCE, funding was coming from?
KC: From Poland. It is a public fund. The most amount of money came from the Polish Film Institute. There was also investment from the Polish public television, as well as one of the regional funds in Poland, the Wrocław Film Commission.
RBC: And that is where you are from?
KC: Yes, this is my hometown. And we had involvement from a post-production company, as part of this funding arrangement, which meant that we had to use their services to complete the film.
RBC: So the post-production is locked in to the funding arrangements?
KC: Yeah, yeah.
RBC: Now you retained a few people over both films, mainly amongst the actors, first and foremost, and then also within two areas of the technical crew that I am particularly interested in. In terms of the actors Agnieszka Podsiadlik and Sebastian Lach seem to reprise quite similar roles. Was that a deliberate choice on your part? Was it a very obvious thing to go “Right, once we cast in this film we just continue on to the next film”? What was your rationale behind this?
KC: You know, Agnieszka and Sebastian were on this film [THE ERLPRINCE] from the beginning. At this stage I could not have imagined we would have had the chance to do something else. I really believe that you should be making films with your family, and this family is made up of your cast and crew. You need to work with people you trust, people who trust you too. To say it simply, we are really just very close friends. It is really important that you have this kind of relationship, as when you are on set, you really don’t have any time. You have so much to do, and you are really fighting with your schedule. So beforehand I had a lot of meetings and conversations with actors, but also with the likes of Adam Palenta (he is the DoP of the films), or the costume designer. So after all of this preparation, we felt ready to do these two films in a very short time. As I said at the beginning, I could not plan that we would be doing two films, but I felt “Come on, I have wonderful people right in front of me, so I need to invite them on to the next project!” For me this was so natural. I think this is a good way of filmmaking.
RBC: What was it that drew you to Agnieszka? She has such strong and interesting roles in both films, so what was it that drew you to her when you were casting? Prior to your films, I had only really seen her in quite minor roles in things like ZERO (2009) and BABY BLUES / BEJBI BLUES (2012), but I hadn’t actually seen her in a significant major role?
KC: It is kind of funny, or strange, because we met a few years ago, when I was the second director on, maybe you know this film, IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE / Z DALEKA WIDOK JEST PIEKNY (2011). It is a film by Wilhelm Sasnal [co-directed with his wife Anka], a very famous Polish painter. She [Agnieszka Podsiadlik] was playing one of the roles and I was just the First AD. After the shoot, we met in some bar, or restaurant, and just started talking. Also, then I met Sebastian, and even then I had a script of this film [THE ERLPRINCE]. So after talking with them, we just kept in touch, month to month, and remained friends. I am talking about this, because this was the casting. I realized at a certain moment that I had wonderful people right there in front of me. Of course, I knew both of them as actors, but for me it felt more crucial to know what kind of people they are. It was easy for me to ask them to join me [on the project], as I loved them and believed in them. I could trust them, because we shared similar tastes, we liked the same films. Of course, sometimes we were fighting, but it is like I would do with a friend. A friendship should be sometimes heated. It is really nice in this way, because the relationship is really honest. Sometimes we have a difference of opinion, but that is the relationship, the way it is.
RBC: It is interesting that you say this, because I think that is something that you are getting in the dynamic between son and mother in both of the films. There is a dynamic there that is really warm and tender, on the one hand, but very quickly and very easily flies into a moment of, as you say, heat, or anger that flickers up, and then gets suppressed.
KC: Yeah, for me it is very important for the actors to feel like partners. Also this extends to my kids, and by that I mean the kids who are playing in the films. After two films, I am sure that there isn’t any difference, as a director, for me to direct them. It is always the same, we are talking about trust and spending a good time, being close and having fun sometimes. Obviously, there is the need to fight if the situation requires it, but the actors being my partners is crucial.
RBC: I think a lot of the best filmmakers, the kind who have a real identity early on, establish a core group of people that they work with.
KC: Yes, this is your community.
RBC: Exactly! I am seeing this often in the current Polish situation, and correct me if I am wrong here, but I think this is a very good time to be a Polish filmmaker, because there seems to be a lot of these little communities popping up around young filmmakers.
KC: I think we have a lot of good signs that it is better than the past. Of course, I think there is still a lot to do in terms of film opportunities, but you have the likes of Agnieszka Smoczyńska, whose last film [THE LURE / CÓRKI DANCINGU (2015) ] just had a big opening in the US, which has already enabled her to start work on a new film. There is also THE LAST FAMILY / OSTATNIA RODZINA (2016), so this is wonderful. There has also been a great change as there are now a lot of new faces in the film industry in Poland – and really young. You know, in the past a first-time director would have been something around forty-six or fifty. Now it is more like thirty-something, so it is wonderful, but I am really waiting for someone to come along who is twenty-one, as cinema needs young energy. Film needs to sometimes be told “Fuck you!” So I am really waiting for someone to do that.
RBC: I would agree with that, definitely. You talked about Adam Palenta. You have worked with him a long time. I just would like you to give me some insight into the importance of this working relationship to you, and how it has helped you to shape what, I think, is a very unique visual style, and, perhaps, how this relationship has developed over time?
KC: It is a very simple answer. He is like my brother. We met at film school. I was in the first year, and Adam was already in his final year, in the Cinematography department. He taught me a lot of things. I remember when we first began to collaborate together on my first filmmaking exercise, it was done using film stock, and I was so nervous because I knew we only had one reel. So I was not thinking what we were shooting, I was thinking about how much film we had left. He got me to concentrate on each shot. This is a very simple example of how he helped me along this wonderful journey of making films. And now we don’t really talk too much about what we are trying to do. It is very similar to my relationship with Agnieszka and Sebastian, and the rest of the crew. We have the same taste. For example, if we are talking about how BABY BUMP was shot, we both really liked the idea of simple cinematography. We do not use sophisticated tools. Yes, we are toying with various things, but the shots remain very simple. Mostly, the characters are in the centre [of the shot], and we mainly work in close-up. Of course, we used close-up to build this very intensive atmosphere, especially in THE ERLPRINCE.
RBC: It is all very insular?
KC: Yeah, yeah, we like this way in which actor’s look into the camera. Of course, it is not an instruction for the rest of our films, but in this case we thought it was necessary to help describe these two different universes. Also, when we knew that we would be making two films at the same time, it was crucial to think of two ways of storytelling. I am thinking here of the form, both of the picture and the sound. This became crucial, because if you are making two films about one theme, there needs to be formal difference. BABY BUMP is more about sexual transformation and body transformation, it is more like a body horror. However, in THE ERLPRINCE we are talking about mind and soul, and all of these naive moments you have when you are around fifteen.
RBC: I thought about the films as being one about prepubescence and one about puberty. So one of the films was about that transformation of a child into this awkward, in-between stage, where they are neither child, nor adult. Whilst the other film was mapping out that departure from the uncertainty of puberty into adulthood. I really liked this thematic continuity between the two films, and it was interesting for me to find out you were working on both films at the same time. You also worked with the same sound designer and sound recorder, Radosław Ochnio and Filip Krzemień. The sound design in your films is a real marker of your identity as a filmmaker. I think it is something very different to any other filmmaker I have seen in recent years. So first of all, I was going to ask whether you have a musical background yourself?
KC: No.
RBC: That’s interesting, as you seem to display a very good ear for how elements of your film can be made to operate like music, I am talking about the way you layer dialogue and sound effects here.
KC: It is always about intuition and working well with the people I invite onto the film. When this comes to sound, that relationship is extremely important. Picture and sound have equal importance in my work. I really believe that you build a film so that it breaks through the screen. I want the audience to feel something under their skin. This is much more important than any A+B=C thinking, because in my opinion this is how we build our memories. If we are talking about our childhood, we easily remember sounds and smells, and these recollections may make us laugh or cry, or everything. These stories are so simple. In THE ERLPRINCE and BABY BUMP the form and the connections between sound and image are much more, I would say maybe not difficult, but it is a…
RBC: Unconventional?
KC: Yes. Also, Radek and I met some years ago, when I made one of my shorts. We share a similar sense of humour, and obviously he knows the importance of sound. As I was trying to say before, sound is almost like another character within the films. If we have done it right, then you feel the film through your whole body, and it brings out the emotions.
RBC: It was really interesting what you were doing in both your films with sound and image, which is that you are using them, not necessarily in an interconnected way…
KC: Contrast is… Contrast, I love it.
RBC: This is an amazing element of your films, as you have these two things, sound and image, that are operating in tandem, yet somehow they aren’t married together.
KC: Yes, the first impression could be that it is not combined, but in the overall context of the film, and its characters, its emotions, it works. It is correct. It is right.
RBC: Yes, it gets right under the skin.
KC: Well it is also about talking about risk. I am a guy who loves to take risks. I love risk in films.
RBC: Well you are taking healthy risks, I think.
KC: [laughing] I am aware of it.
RBC: I like it, I like what you are doing here. Right, I am going to go out on a limb here, as this is something that I have an obsession with, and I think you are a very clear example of this, along with a few other people that you may not like being associated with (such as Lee Daniels, The Wachowskis), but nonetheless I think you are a clear example. I find the excess in your work really fascinating, and I would also describe your cinema – using a label I have coined – as a “promiscuous cinema.” It is a cinema that marries together all elements of culture, without giving any single element a greater degree of importance, or a preferred cultural significance. Schubert and Shostakovich rub shoulders with Mano Music on the film’s soundtrack, with seemingly no distinction, no cultural bias. You have English, German, and Polish being used freely and interchangeably, without any immediate sense of their usage being attached to separate ideas of national culture. The scatological goes hand in hand with the scientific and philosophical, with little sense of these things being culturally detached. It is as if all elements of culture are acceptable and you are free to choose from any of them. Does this echo with your conscious approach to the film, or am I reading into it what I want to read into it?
KC: Yeah, well my answer is so simple. Making films, sharing films with others, is an invitation to a different island, or a new planet. In my job, I would say, I am always trying to create a new universe – something that is unique for me, and it would be great if someone else tells me it is unique. Basically, I am trying to create something new, a new place, a new island. I have my toys, so to say, and from them I build a new house. BABY BUMP is a good example, because in BABY BUMP, if you are making this kind of film you need to make some kind of instruction. So the first twenty minutes of the film is building the language of the film. Now, of course, I know that after twenty minutes some people just go out from the film, saying “I don’t understand, it’s not for me.” But the people who stay, clearly say OK, and stay till the end. In this case, it is very important to teach the audience the flora and fauna of the film. I am always trying to build something like that, as I really adore the audience. Come on, I don’t do this only for myself or my friends, I would like to share these films, and I am really wanting to open up discussion. If someone doesn’t like these films, then I hope they would tell me. I also have some observations that even when people don’t like, for example BABY BUMP, even when they don’t like it they still have a lot of emotion about it. This is a success for me, because even when someone hates my film, I still have a feeling, I can see in their face, that the film has had an effect, that something is going on. This is cinema. I don’t want my films to be OK. I don’t want the last two years to have been OK. I hate OK. I don’t want to be OK.
RBC: That is how I have always thought about the role of a film critic, and I know that often critics are seen as very negative individuals. But the role of a film critic surely is one defined by things loved and things hated. Those are both good, valid responses to a film. The worst kind of scenario is to see something that is unaffecting and bland, and feel no strong emotion one way or another towards it.
KC: A lot of films, so many films, are produced, and we don’t care about them, we forget about them by the end credits. Or we just can’t remember what they are about even twenty minutes afterwards. You don’t remember one shot or one scene.
RBC: When talking about your two feature films I would say that you are a real poet of this tumult in the development of a teenager. You effectively capture the craziness of that particular period. Why do you find this age so rewarding, rewarding enough to visit not once, but twice?
KC: I think I will start from the end here. Now I feel like I am closing these kinds of story. I am finished with stories about childhood. In some ways I am maturing like my characters, especially in THE ERLPRINCE. This isn’t about me exactly, but about my filmmaking. If the film is about fighting for your independence, as a filmmaker I have been doing the same in making the film. By finishing the film I am saying “Look guys, I am ready, please listen to me, give me a chance, give me the money, of course, because I have a good story, I am well prepared to make it, you can trust me!” But, of course, it was not so simple. I was full of naivety. I remember this very important moment when we received a large amount of money from the Polish Film Institute. Now this was a lot of money, but it was not enough to begin the shoot. I remember crying when I heard we had got that money, as I thought tomorrow we will start making the film. However, my producer called me and told me “No, Kuba, this is just a little part of the cake, we still need to find more and that will not be straightforward.” For me this was so painful, really. I am telling you this, because now I am working with a different set of characters. My next project will be about older characters, although they might not necessarily have a different point of view. I truly believe, and it is maybe nothing new to say this, that we all have a little child inside of us, and so we should have. When I think about my job, where I need to be really open, listen, and smell, and feel many different things, then that is really the best way. Growing up for me is about an increasing awareness of shame: shame about your feelings, about your body, shame about what we really are. Growing up is about becoming ashamed.
RBC: That came across very strongly in BABY BUMP. With this next production you have mentioned is it likely to be Polish based, or will it be another co-production?
KC: It should be a co-production, because this next project will largely take place between Poland and one of the Asian cities.
If you are a film industry professional, you can watch THE ERLPRINCE on Festival Scope