#wirfelt

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: STINA WIRFELT: John Smith, Unusual Red Cardigan, lightbox text and installation view, 2011, Peer Gallery.

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: STINA WIRFELT: Deborah Stratman, Musical Insects, 2013, video

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: STINA WIRFELT: Thom Andersen, 'Los Angeles Plays Itself', 2003

[amif2013]

CONTEXT: STINA WIRFELT: An extract from a conversation between Deborah Stratman and Stina Wirfelt, January 2011

Deborah Stratman: When I watch your films it seems like Glasgow is like a mini Beijing; everything is in flux, under construction, or decaying.  I think it's the locations that you're drawn to, where buildings have ceased or something has been shuttered off so new building can begin. I have the sense that the city is in permanent transition. The way you introduced the Google maps in Tame Time, where you see those arrows super-imposed onto locations, or how a season will suddenly change if you just go one block over.  It seems related to your editing and your sense of intervention, where one reality can interrupt and insert itself into another at any point.

  Stina Wirfelt: I have thought a lot about Google Streetview and I've spent a lot of time on it, visiting places where I have and haven’t been. I think it has a fundamental effect on how you see time and space because it sets out to map space but it accidently or inadvertently maps time in a really awkward seamless way. And it's this thing about direction too, you'll go down a street and go forward in time and if you turn around and walk back you go back in time because they haven't shot everything twice or from both directions. It is similar to a TV. I used to be very interested in TV and the alternative reality that the TV produces but not so much anymore.

  DS: You've always had that consistent interest in concurrence and coincidence; objects or events that provide a portal or a window to another concurrent narrative, or location, or history... People don't watch TV in same mass collective way they used to. It's not like you can look at an apartment block and see seven windows where people are watching the same program. But you gravitate to other technologies that allow for similar linkage and porosity, like holes that are punched in a temporality or in an experience.   There are so many new things beyond television that do that now, allowing you to be in multiple space/times at once.  Sometimes I feel like I was born 100 years to late! I almost feel like it's an overload for me.

  SW: I think the internet and social networks has such a strong effect on people. It's like you can never get a break from it all.

  DS: It makes me wonder what being alone means to people anymore. People can call and be called on this network of support at any time and it's becoming rare that we navigate through the world without this connection net. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, it’s just taking me a long time to get used to it.

  SW: You do travel a lot in your work.

  DS: Yeah, I love that. Because I am actually a creature of extreme habit and I get really wrapped up in patterns. The only way I can snap out of that and see things, like the dog walker in your film, passive but still alert, is to set myself up to go to a place where I can't rely on tools, like language, or cultural patterns. I really have to be open then and observe and experience.  I feel like my senses expand.

  SW: But in a way you could say that those are two really different methods, where one is seeing something regularly, maybe everyday, and noticing the small shifts in the patterns. Being observational in that way is quite different from throwing yourself into a completely new situation, where you might be more sensitive because everything is new.

  DS: Yeah, that's true, and I'm definitely less good at doing it in my everyday life. So I need to intentionally set up something to stumble on. Tripping, or falling, in a metaphorical sense, gives you this whole other way to experience what's around you. Sometimes searching for something specific is a MacGuffin, it's just a fake reason to go somewhere. It sounds utopian, but it's true: if you're looking you will find something. A lot of times you have to be open to simply sitting with footage for a while. Maybe you've had this experience too, that you don't know what it is that the footage will serve while you're shooting it, but during this process of gathering you hit upon some certain link, or a story, or a person that then makes it come together? At other times I go out much more specifically, "I need a shot of X" and I just go until I find that thing. So it's two pretty different modes of working.

  SW: I totally identify both those in my work, sometimes I have a much more structured idea of what I want to do and other times I’m just searching... and in a way I am more interested in this second way of working because it's almost a way of finding things out through making the film. The film almost becomes a documentation of a realisation of something. But the difficulty then is that the gathering phase could go on forever…

  DS: Right! Indefinitely!

  SW: And you could just end up with a huge pile of unconnected stuff.

  DS: I think that is definitely how I worked when I first started making films, it was pure collection, to the point where I had no idea what I was shooting for, it wasn't until years later, in some cases, that I'd read something, or something would provide me with a structure and I'd be like "Aha!" and almost treat my own footage as found footage. I later became more comfortable with envisioning, sensing a whole in the structure, knowing that I wanted a certain story, or location.  With Tame Time, what came first for you? Is the woman’s voice entirely scripted, or did you base that on a character that you actually know, who had an experience of walking their dog?

  SW: No, it's entirely scripted. I had the character in mind when I wrote it and the voice of the woman who reads it is very close to the person that I was imagining. A lot of people assume that this is her story, I think that has to do with her way of reading it and her voice.

The character is a dog walker because in a lot of these spaces where I've been filming the only other people I’ve run into are dog walkers. As soon as there is a body turning up somewhere it's almost always a dog walker who finds it. Even on Google Streetview, you’ll find dog walkers in really odd places. I knew from the start that I wanted to make a fictional narrative rather than an essay, because of fiction’s power to suck in a viewer. I'd like to expand on that aspect of the process, the writing. I've never written dialogue or anything like that and I think that there's so much potential there.

  DS: The attention of the viewer is very interesting. I've noticed in a film like O'er the Land the way that the audience's bodies shift when story-telling begins. During the section with the clouds and the colonel describing his fall, you can see it physically reflected in people's bodies - they completely change their type of attention.  I am a story teller, but not necessarily with words, and I've never felt particularly equipped to write narratives or voice-overs but I am interested in recognising a good one when I see it, and use found snippets of stories. Those levels of attention seem related to your interest in place, like outside of cinema, the way that places can have these multiple meta-levels. Do you Pere Portabella’s film Cuadecuc Vampir? It's this film where the filmmaker goes to another film, which is a narrative, a vampire film, and Portabella shoots his own film, which is ostensibly a documentary, entirely on the set of this narrative, but then the narrative is also set in some real locations, so there are these multiple layers of fabricated reality vs. documents of reality but they're all happening concurrently in the same place and he's constantly weaving in between... You are mostly removed from being seduced into the vampire story because there’s a constant, maybe ironic, distance.  But within that structure, there are little moments when the original narrative fiction sucks you in like a magnet and you lose your critical distance.  Portabella does an amazing job of illustrating those different strata.  It's like a geology, with these different layers and qualities of attention-paying within cinema.

  SW: Was location the starting point for O’er the Land as well?

  DS: Yeah, for me that’s typically the case, that I start from a place or an interest in geography. The location catalyses the story, which catalyses the events.  Michael Snow says that "Events Take Place,” like literally - they take it. And they do! The way that land or places harbour stories has always been a natural way for me to think about them, to have stories grow. It's never that I start from a story and then start to imagine what the location is. But it's partly that desire to move around too, and to be in different locations.

  SW: Did you think about the wars when you started making the film?

  DS: I remember I read a quote by a pizzeria owner who questioned what we lose in the name of freedom. We use the word ‘freedom’ all the time, we paste it on anything to make it okay. ‘Freedom’ is even used to absolve military aggression. It took a while for me to figure out if I felt okay with making a film about such a broad subject. It was a bit intimidating, but in the end I guess I was interested in iconography and heroics, and how nations rely on these for us to feel a sense of personal history about where we’re from, on a national level. At some point during the film that whole history of manifest destiny and expansionism became entwined with the plot. I was interested in how for Americans, freedom, or the concept of it, is tangled up with ownership and material property in a complex way. If you own things you need to defend them. As soon as the concept of owning material things (and the need to defend them) is sutured together with the idea of freedom then metaphysically or existentially I wonder how it can still represent freedom. In the end, I feel like O’er the Land asks questions but doesn’t really give you answers. It operates as a mirror, in the sense that it reflects viewer’s pre-existing ideas around freedom. People read into the film’s images and sequences based on what they already bring to the film. So those critical of big RVs and the hypocrisy of feeling free with a giant gas guzzler remain critical, while those who love that lifestyle still don’t. I didn’t want it to be some dogmatic defence of what freedom should be. I wanted to present a philosophical questioning of why this word has become glue that holds together the diverse idea of Americanism. All it does is ask questions, I don’t know that I’ve come closer to figuring out what it is.

  SW: It did make me think a lot about the last decade of wars. That is what I see in the mirror, the militarisation. Perhaps it's a consequence of the idea of freedom because, as you say, it is so linked to ownership and seems completely detached to taking any responsibility for the consequences. So a war can be fought in the name of freedom while the devastating effects are ignored.

  DS: Sure. It reminds me of the saying, ‘if you’re carrying an armload of hammers, every problem starts to look like a nail.’ To some degree, the film was a response to my own exasperation with that condition. There is a very palpable ratcheting-up of militarization that happens in the film. You see increasingly technologised versions of defence. In the beginning, it’s just guys walking in a forest with their little guns, and at the end you see a B2 and flame throwers. The film is a product of the times I live in, of getting frustrated with how military funding never gets cut from the budget but everything else will, as if it’s the last thing we’re going to cling to.

  SW: Do you require a certain set of interpersonal skills to gain access to all these almost closed societies, that are comprised of men in many cases?

  DS: A big part of the process is knowing that people like to be listened to. If you come to some Viet-Cong re-enactors at a machine gun festival and tell them you are interested in how people define freedom, they want to talk about it! In America the right to own and bear arms is how a lot of people define freedom. I am purposefully a bit opaque, though.  I don’t say where I’m coming from, partly because I want to get the widest range of responses possible. I’m not intimidating, I don’t make people nervous. You probably know that if you carry a camera, a lot of the time people think you’re making a home movie because you’re a woman. When I was shooting The BLVD, my friend J Cookson would have the same camera as me and people would always ask him what news channel he was working for. People don’t seem to ascribe the same authority to a woman with a camera - they’re less guarded. That works to my advantage.

  SW: In the UK it’s getting more and more difficult to get permission to film in public spaces. I don’t know how many times I’ve been turned away as a security threat. Once I was filming in a huge shopping centre in a town that neighbours Glasgow. I had only just got the camera up on the tripod when a man approached me and told me I wasn’t allowed to film. I managed to find another security guard and begged him to let me record. He said he would speak to his boss and told me to stay where I was. I was standing there knowing that they were watching me on the CCTV to try to determine whether I was a risk or not. It’s just such an awkward phenomenon that we are all constantly being filmed and accept it but don’t have the right to do it ourselves.

  DS: It is the notion of equating the camera with control and authority. It’s the same idea of entering a building with guns everywhere; if you walk in with a gun you’re a threat, an infiltrator. I got stopped many times when I was shooting In Order Not To Be Here. I was filming at a lot of malls and parking lots, places where I was very quickly perceived as ‘suspect’.  In places of commercial activity, security guards are right on you. One guy actually gave me a little card that had the rules of what you could and couldn’t do on premises, and one of them expressly said you couldn’t ‘engage in creative activity that does not promote consumption.’ They actually name it on there! You’re not allowed to be creative unless it provokes people to buy things!