Experimenta Tumblr exclusive: INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN CONNOLLY
Stephen Connolly's film Zabriskie Point (Redacted) is part of the Cinema Redacted programme.
1. Could you describe the main ideas and or inspirations behind your film Zabriskie Point (Redacted)?
(Redacted) was inspired by a visit to Zabriskie Point the site – it is a small lookout near Death Valley in California. Over a few hours I shot some material, but after pondering on it for a few months, I realised couldn't see it - except through the screen or filter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1971 feature Zabriskie Point. The Zabriskie Point site has achieved the special ‘aura’, invoked by Don Delillo in his ‘MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA’ scene in his novel White Noise, an exploration of the ideas of Walter Benjamin.
Like the barn, the Point is not a place, it is a site – in this case with a pleasing arrangement of rocks and stones - that hosts behaviours by visitors. People come from Las Vegas every hour by bus and look at the landscape and socialise – activities of spectatorship and visualisation.
This prespective on the site was then folded back onto the Antonioni film – which I think sought to investigate linkages between spectacle & consumption, and politics & protest – but struggled with the realist drama form Antonioni signed the contract with MGM and agreed to make.
It then made sense to invoke – as a visitor - the representations of another visitor 40 years ago. My film is constructed around this doubling – through the things unseen or overlooked in the original film – such as the research, the treatments and script, the fiction/fact uses of protest footage, the ‘hows’ of landscape portrayal and so on. And it can address the spectacle and protest themes directly, without drama – they have not gone away!
2. Your work often draws on fictional and factual (or documentary) versions of historical events, foregrounding the mediation of history through cinema, TV and archival footage. How do you position your work in relation to documentary film?
As I see it, documentary Is a very constructed mode of filmmaking - perhaps we have never seen unmediated filmmaking ever. So I foreground this construction - revealling the shape of the representations we make and performing a critical ethnography in image and sound.
This also informs how historical material is deployed - as an informing perspective or background noise – rather than a particular set of events. So history receeds yet remains as a set of frames through which the contemporary is addressed.
With reference to documentary also, instead of overt narrational or expository material, the work deploys very specific visual strategies. The ideas these forms suggest – like ‘the historical frames above’ is as important as the image content. This strategy is very visible in Film for Tom for instance where the form of the archive materials is considered.
3. How does Zabriskie Point (Redacted) relate to or develop themes from earlier work such as Great American Desert, which is also set in the American landscape (albeit a very different one)?
Continuing from the points made above - Great American Desert was a film about a place on a crossroads – Quartzsite, Arizona - that is provisional and temporary. Its population expands from approx 500 to over a million people in recreational vehicles in January every year – so the place has a mutable spatial form.
The representation had to achieve a kind of fixity - a degree of measure and distance – that acknowledeged a paradox in the picturing of this place - its transitory nature is a permanent feature and a state of existence for many of the people who are dropping in; and a pursuit of a kind of individualism practiced on a mass scale. And by and large, the experience of the place is from within a vehicle – so in motion and thus bringing in movement. I’ve moved forward with this in the treatment of urban landscape.
A central question in this film is - how can the medium - with all its indexical prowess - not just observe people / objects / landscapes - but also capture the structuring relationships within which these subjects/objects exist and are apprehended.
It’s a tall order - possibly the new piece achieves this more clearly with a previous representation to bounce off.
4. Are you working on any other new projects or films at the moment?
I'm working on several new films – I’ll mention two.
Firstly, to pursue an interest in the spatialisation of capital in landscape and consider the notion of ‘the collective’ - this is the basis for a film in Detroit, Michigan - I've shot a strategic visual element already.
Secondly, an outsider academic friend of mine is to be in a film - the work may hover between a exposition of his research and a portrait – this piece is currently in development.
steve connolly artist filmmaker
www.bubblefilm.net
Questions by Erica Scourti
