Compared to Haneke’s earlier works, Amour stands out for its astounding sensitivity and subtle tenderness, but ultimately, the story, which centres around 80-year-old retired music teachers George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), is no less hard-hitting. As the couple are faced with Anne’s physical and mental deterioration after two successive strokes, the film scrutinises, in a profoundly intelligent and unsettling way, the consequences of life and death, and the role that long-standing love plays when one half of an ageing couple is facing the end. As one would expect from a filmmaker as precise and skilful as Haneke, Amour is finely scripted, superbly composed, and often hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. The quiet grandeur of the film, however, would be lost without its two main actors, whose astonishing, disarmingly honest performances breathe life into Haneke’s formal perfection in capturing the realities of terminal illness in meticulous detail. Crafted with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, Amour is that rare work of genius: an acute philosophical inquiry that’s highly emotionally charged, but also dramatically gripping, incredibly discreet and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour.
Pamela Jahn talked to Michael Haneke after the premiere of Amour at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May to find out more about one of the most exciting films this year, and what makes a great director.
Pamela Jahn: Amour is essentially a chamber play, and the apartment where the film is set feels very much like its own character. What role did the premises play for you in the story?
Michael Haneke: The apartment in the film is based on my parents’ apartment in Vienna, which I had rebuilt in a French studio. We gave it a French atmosphere but the layout is the same. When you’re writing a film it’s easier to use a geography that you know so intimately.
The film describes in a very sensible but precise way how an elderly couple deals with the ravages of old age and looming death. What made you explore that subject matter?
Like I think all of us do, at some point in our lives, I knew someone in my family who I felt very close to and who I loved very deeply. But this person had to suffer for a long time and went through a lot of pain while I had to look on helplessly. This was a very difficult and disturbing experience for me and so it motivated me to write the script. But please don’t think that because it is the apartment of my parents this is also the story of my parents. It’s not.
Was it difficult to get Jean-Louis Trintignant involved in the project? Amour is the first film he has made in years.
Yes, that’s true, but it was not difficult to get him involved. I wrote the part for him, in fact, I wrote the script for him. And he had seen my previous film, The White Ribbon, which he liked, so it was actually quite easy for me to get him for this film.
It seems like you wanted to work with him for a long time?
Yes, I always admired his work. But the problem is always in finding the right part for an actor. I know many actors I’d like to work with, but I haven’t had the occasion to offer them what I think is the right part for them. In Jean-Louis’s case, because of the theme and the fact that you are dealing with elderly characters, he was the only person I wanted to work with in this film. In fact, if he hadn’t been available, I wouldn’t have made it. Hidden, for example, was a very similar situation for me. I wrote the film for Daniel Auteuil because I wanted to work with him.
Why did you choose to make George and Anne music teachers, who have a very particular place in society?
I wanted to avoid the danger of the film coming across as a social drama. I wanted to set aside any financial constraints, because if the film had been set in the working-class environment, people would probably have thought: oh, if they only had enough money, things wouldn’t be all that bad. But that’s not true, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, the situation, the tragedy is the same. Another reason why I wrote the film for a musical couple is because my stepfather was a conductor and composer, so again, it’s a milieu that I am familiar with and it is easier for me to describe the setting with the most precision and detail.
You are widely recognised as a master of film language and the different aspects of filmmaking. What do you find most difficult as a director?
Good question… The hardest part is probably not to feel nervous in the morning when you wake up.
What do you do to avoid that?
Nothing, unfortunately. The difficult thing is getting ready before the shoot. It’s similar to being an actor just before a theatre performance. Usually, the actor is terribly nervous while waiting in the wings but, as soon as the curtain goes up, he’s totally concentrated. It’s that constant stress that you feel on a daily basis and the fear that you are not going to be able to succeed and achieve what you are looking for. But unlike in theatre, where, if you’re rehearsing and something doesn’t work out one day, you can come back to it the next day and try again, you don’t have that luxury in film. You just shoot a scene on one day and if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it, then it’s lost, because you have to move on to the next scene. That’s one of the disadvantages of making films compared to theatre and opera.
There is also this great story about Ingmar Bergman, that whenever he was shooting a film there had to be a bathroom nearby because he was so nervous that he needed to go to the bathroom frequently. I don’t know whether the story is really true or not but I can certainly empathise with this.
You said elsewhere that you work better with your ears than with your eyes. How do you explain this?
It’s because your ears are more sensitive than your eyes, or at least that’s the case for me. Sometimes when I look at a scene, I get too easily distracted by thousands of details. But when I don’t look, I hear immediately if there is something wrong with the sound or if somebody said something that is not quite right. There is also a simple example: if you need to loop a scene, which means if you are asking an actor to come back to the sound studio and re=record a sentence, that for some reason didn’t work out the first time around, people always think that synchronising the lip movement is the hardest part. But actually that’s the easiest part, because, as long as the lip movements match, it is credible for the audience. It’s the scenes that are off-camera, like voice-overs, that are the tricky ones because you immediately hear if the tone is wrong. In the many years I have been directing for theatre, I have often gazed to the ground while my actors were rehearsing on stage, not for the entire time of the rehearsal, but for parts of it, because I thought I could better comment on their performances that way.
You mentioned Bergman before. How much of an influence was he on you, in particular in this film?
I am influenced by Bergman in the same way that I am influenced by a number of different directors. In fact, I think it’s very important for a filmmaker to try not to be influenced by other people and rather find your own language. As an artist, your artistic equation is ultimately the result of all the other films you have seen, all the books that you have read, all the personal experiences in your life, everything really. And you should just try and do what you feel you have to do instead of asking yourself all the time what Mr X or Mrs Y would have done in that situation. But nonetheless, I think it is true that what my films have in common with Bergman’s is that they all focus on the actors, because that’s what interests me most.
When was the moment you decided to become a director?
Well, let’s say when I was 15 I was hoping to become an actor like my mother, when I was 14 I wanted to be a pianist and when I was 13 I wanted to be a priest. But as an actor, I wasn’t accepted at the academy, so I studied philosophy instead and did a lot of writing, short stories and a bit of film criticism. I was a terrible student though because I was in the cinema three times a day. Then, I went to television and became a story editor. I also worked in theatre for 20-odd years and at the same time directed films for television. And then, at the age of 46, I decided to make my first feature film. With hindsight, I think it is almost always very easy to draw some sort of red line through your biography, but I believe that in your life most things are determined by luck and coincidence, and the goals you set for yourself develop, just as you do along the way.
Why do you refuse so vehemently to offer an interpretation to your films?
If I were to explain things myself and offer an interpretation then this would automatically reduce the spectator’s ability to find their own answers. My films are offerings, I invite the audience to deal with them, think about them and reflect upon them and, ultimately, to find their own answers. I also think that an author doesn’t always necessarily know what he intends and what the meaning is behind his work. For example, I am always amazed by the many theses and books I read about myself, all of which reveal what I supposedly wanted to express in my films or was supposed to have dealt with. I strongly believe it would be very counterproductive for the audience if I were to answer the questions I am raising in my films, because then no one would have to think about them.
Have you ever been disappointed by the reception of a film you made?
Would you generally consider yourself a pessimist or an optimist?
I don’t think I am a pessimist or that I have ever been a pessimistic person. If this was the case, I would only make entertainment films because I wouldn’t think that people actually care, and are intelligent enough, to want to deal with the questions I raise in my films. In that sense, I believe every so-called artist can only be an optimist, because otherwise they wouldn’t be motivated to try and ask questions and to communicate with their audience. A pessimist would simply say: it’s pointless, so I am not doing anything.
Has your motivation to make films changed over the years?
No, but that may be because I can’t really say why I am making films in the first place. Probably it’s because that’s all I know how to do.
Cast: Stavros Psyllakis, Aris Servetalis, Johnny Vekris
Greece 2011
93 mins
Yorgos Lanthimos first came to international attention with Dogtooth (Kynodontas), a comedy of obsidian darkness portraying the Chernobyl of nuclear families. Reality is twisted by the parents into a series of bizarre rituals and lurking menaces to keep the children – now adults – under their control. Reality is likewise pliable in his new film Alps (Alpis), co-written by his collaborator, Efthymis Filippou: a small group of misfits – the Alps of the title – offer their services to bereaved families. For a fee, they will replace the deceased and act out scenes with them as a way of alleviating their grief. As ever there is a sense of play but the stakes are perhaps even higher than they were in his previous film as the bending of reality leaks out of the tight claustrophobic family compound and into wider society.
John Bleasdale met Yorgos Lanthimos at the Venice Film Festival in August 2011 to talk about Alps and the elusiveness of reality, dysfunctional families and the Greek crisis.
John Bleasdale: In both Dogtooth and Alps reality is up for grabs, manipulated by your characters.
Yorgos Lanthimos: I don’t think there is reality anywhere. Films are fiction and I’d even consider documentary fiction. When you start filming something it becomes something different.
How did the project start?
We had the idea of people writing letters as if they were dead people writing to people they have left behind to keep contact. I liked the idea but it didn’t seem very cinematic so we came up with the story of someone offering the service of pretending to be someone else. This nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia, who also played the eldest daughter in Dogtooth) works in the hospital so it’s easy for her to find people who have just lost someone. We started writing scenes and dialogue. We also rehearse and improvise on set. When we’ve finished the scenes for the day, we shoot another scene that just comes to mind on the spot or we write something very fast and shoot it, and if it works, it might end up in the film. Also we might cut out some scenes that we’ve written and shot in the editing so it’s always evolving in rehearsals and in shooting.
The Alps take their name from the idea that the mountains are irreplaceable, so they are replacing the irreplaceable. Did you consider using the Himalayas as a title?
(Laughs) ‘Well, the whole thing isn’t very plausible, is it? The name makes sense but you can see holes in it. Just in the same way you can see the holes in what they are trying to achieve and so it was funny and made enough sense, but you ask one question and it’ll fall apart. You asked about improvisation. The scene of the naming of the group we shot for hours with the group asking the leader questions about why and how, and you could see that this could not hold for a long time and it was funny.
You began your career as a theatre director before making your first film. What did you gain from theatre?
What I gained from theatre is how to work with actors. I don’t have the same philosophy for making a film and working in the theatre. They’re two very different things, but theatre gave me time to work with actors.
Your camera is often claustrophobically close to the main character.
It’s really important to be focused on the most important thing in a scene. When you give time to the viewer and you stay with and follow one person it is more profound than when you show whatever is going on around them. It works for me. So, for instance, in this film I felt the need to tell the story through the nurse. So that’s why most of the time we focus on her and we see everyone else around her. If I focused on the other people, then it would become that story and we would have to deal with all of them equally, and it wouldn’t feel right.
How difficult was it to make the movie with the crisis in Greece?
It was extremely difficult even before the crisis. I’ve made all my films with an extremely low budget. My first film didn’t have any support. There is no private funding because there is a huge problem with the laws and there are no incentives for private investment. Films in Greece are funded by the Greek Film Centre, which is government money, and for many years it was extremely corrupt. Very specific directors got the money, no younger filmmakers. That means you do it on your own: you gather money from friends, you put in your own money, have lots of people working for free, ask for favours – that’s how it was for younger filmmakers and that’s how it still is. The crisis hasn’t changed much. I managed to make my second film, Kinetta (2005) with the support of the Greek Film Centre but that’s 250,000 euros, and you have to do it the same way and hope you can pay them back two years later. And then, because of the crisis things became even worse. So there weren’t even the contributions from the Greek Film Centre for Alps. We had to do it on our own with friends and many co-producers who put in 10,000-20,000 euros. People worked for free, we found what we could for free. Now, the Greek Film Centre is supporting the film, but after it is made and without the risk. It was already in Venice and Toronto.
You have symbols of authority and rebellion in both Dogtooth and Alps.
I try to do what is right by the specific story and hope people can link the things that they are watching with their own experiences and make their own conclusions. But I believe that if I tried to do that before putting the story together and thought this should be about this person’s rebellion as it connects to the sociological situation right now, the film would be a mess. It allows people to think this but not by imposing it as an allegory or something.
Your central characters tend to be women and the dominating characters tend to be men.
I do like women characters. I think they’re more complex and intelligent in general. I think there is a clichéd behaviour which tends to be male. I find it more natural to have a woman as a heroine against the stupidity of males, but next time I might do something different. I’m not obsessed.
Do you plan to make movies outside of Greece?
I have the possibility to go somewhere else and I’ll do that. It’s something I’d like to do anyway, not just because of the situation in Greece, but because I like different cultures, and places around the world have a lot to add to the films. I could make the films I make in different countries. It would change the films but that is not a bad thing. I try to incorporate into the film the whole of the energy, the feel of the place where it is happening. I try to accept it. I don’t try and make it more beautiful or shy away from it. I decided not to go against the difficulties we had. We couldn’t choose locations for houses and so we filmed in locations that a friend could give us for free. So whatever it is, I’m going to make it work and make it part of the film. With that in mind, I think it is very interesting to make films with different landscapes and languages. And, of course, with the situation in Greece and since I’ve already made three films in the hardest way possible I’d like to do something with a bit more support.
What about family situations? Families are destroyed in both Dogtooth and Alps.
But these people are very different. If you’re asking why they are troubled in this way, then the greater percentage of families are dysfunctional. It doesn’t have to be so extreme. We put them under these extreme conditions to test them. There would be no point for me to show a happy family being happy. I didn’t want to make an entertaining film – not just an entertaining film. I think the film is quite entertaining, but it’s not just that. And that’s why I choose to look at troubled families and troubled people. Not just families, but every aspect of the film is troubled: that’s what I’m interested in exploring.
Can I ask about the tone? Sometimes it seemed like you were testing how black the comedy could get before the comedy collapsed.
It’s natural for us to do it this way. Both I and my writing partner (Efthymis Filippou) have this sense of humour. And I don’t think we could ever approach it in just a dramatic and tragic way. You experience both feelings deeper if you have the contradiction in the film. Just being tragic is fake, and just being funny is entertaining but it doesn’t go anywhere. So if you succeed in making people laugh but feel awkward that’s deep. They laugh but when they revisit the film they might feel bad about themselves. People feel more engaged when there’s this more complex tone and way of watching the film. That’s also why the film is made this way: it demands that you are more engaged and you make up for what you don’t see.
Based on the novel Jakob von Gunten by:Robert Walser
Cast: Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, Gottfried John
UK/Japan/Germany 1995
104 mins
Colonial Report on Cinema from the Dominion of Canada
Zeitgeist Films Brings Robert Walser via the Brothers Quay to North America
Greg Klymkiw Chats with the Twins
PREAMBLE
There was a time in the Dominion of Canada, on the hallowed shores of Lake Winnipeg, when a group of virile young men, the Drones, assembled at Loni Beach in the village of Gimli to pay homage to the Holy Fjallkona of Islendingadagurrin. After many days of serving the needs of their respective mothers, they looked longingly at the ‘Woman of the Mountains’, who for one of their kind, the mightily domed Magma Head, represented the dream of Icelandic nationhood. For the others, being Mieuxberry, The Love Doctor, The Claw, Squid and Little Julie, the Fjallkona was the Mother of All.
She stood high atop the Fjallkonan Float as it cascaded down the streets – past the Viking Motor Hotel, Red’s Billiards and Tergesen’s General Store. She stood proudly and waved. The Drones were, however, conflicted twixt deep respect for that which was pure and a foul stirring of the loins as they gazed lovingly upon the decades of hardship etched upon her visage, her upper torso hunched over in servitude to the menfolk of her nation and her digits wracked and twisted with arthritic glories that could only represent her ultimate service to man and country.
At day’s end, their bellies filled with Hardfiskur, Skyr and Vinatarta, the Drones retired deep into the bowels of Loni Beach Forest and entered Mieuxberry’s palatial Canadian Pacific Railway boxcar. Mieuxberry took his rightful place in a top bunk with Squid for ’twas only Squid who was amenable to the late night involuntary eruptions of dearest Mieuxberry’s Hagfish – followed often by nocturnal meanderings whilst deep in the Land of Nod.
Though The Love Doctor preferred snuggling against the shapely baby-fat buttocks of Squid, he made do with Little Julie’s belly, which was soft as a down-filled pillow that might indeed have been stuffed by the Fjallkona herself.
The Claw required a place to rest his head that was unfettered by the immediate presence of any others of the manly persuasion. The Claw was, in the words of He who specialised in especially odious diseases of the mind, ‘in denial’. (In fairness to The Claw, however, none of the Drones were likely to admit to the afflictions of urnigism as defined by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in his great work Psychopathia Sexualis.) [Editor’s Note: Greg, are you sure ‘urnigism’ is the right term? I can’t find it anywhere. Greg’s Response to Editor: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA – It is indeed the proper term and is buried deep in Krafft-Ebing and appears in an Archangel voice-over – a joke which is meant to make about 10 people in the world laugh: ‘Head size – normal. No evidence of urnigism in family.’]
Magma Head entered the boxcar and as he did every evening, proceeded to silently and gently tuck all the Drones in. He then took his place upon the tree stump in the centre of the boxcar, moved the oil lamp closer to his proximity and removed a slender volume from his pocket. The twinkle in his eye and an ever so slight pursing of the lips was enough to instil curiosity amongst the Drones as to what manner of tale would be read aloud to complete a most perfect day.
‘Will it be the Huysmans?’ The Love Doctor ejaculated.
‘Bruno Schulz would do me very nicely,’ cooed Little Julie.
‘You know what I want,’ growled The Claw, ‘And I know you will not bestow it upon me, so I shall not profane Him by even uttering His name.’
‘Oh thtuff it, Claw!’ Mieuxberry volleyed with the pronounced lisp that consumed his palate whenever Claw haughtily implied that he’d never hear Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust, his bedtime words of choice. ‘We’ve had to hear that damned Ruthkin tho’ many timeth becauthe of you, I fear we might all become little crythtalths, for Chrith’th thake!’
‘I’m good with whatever,’ Squid opined cheerfully.
‘Will it be the Huysmans?’ The Love Doctor ejaculated once again.
‘Thtuff it, L.D. You’re getting to be ath bad ath Claw. We had the bloody Huythmanth all fucking week becauthe of you.’
‘I’d settle for some Bataille,’ The Love Doctor offered meekly.
Magma Head chuckled and shook his elephantine skull to and fro.
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘I have something very new, very special and very appropriate for you lads – especially in light of the magnificence of this year’s Fjallkona. So rest thine weary heads fellows, put aside thine petty squabbles and allow me to purvey the greatest words I have yet to lay my eyes upon.’
‘Greater than Hamsun?’ Little Julie queried.
‘Greater than all,’ beamed Magma Head and in dulcet tones, he did read:
‘One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life . . .’
The Drones’ rapt attention clearly suggested that Magma Head’s reading that evening would be no mere precursor to slumber. The eyes, the hearts, the minds of all the young men were fixated upon the tale of Jakob von Gunten and the profound recognition they all did feel in the prose of Robert Walser. They would be wide-eyed and silent until the dawn would break over the hallowed waters of Lake Winnipeg and spill into the boxcar, whereupon Magma Head would gently turn the oil lamp down and continue to read as the golden tresses of God’s warm light of morning caressed the remaining pages.
And their lives, such as they were, would be changed forever.
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In 1995, the Quay Brothers unleashed their stunning feature-length adaptation of Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten and I experienced an identical sense of eye-opening to my first helping of their film as I did when I first heard, or rather, read the novel for the first time. Granted, the book and the film are two works that exist separately from each other in completely different mediums and as such, are of lasting value insofar as I believe it is possible for anybody to experience one without the other.
Ah, but what joy to know Walser when diving headlong into the Quays’ magnificent motion picture. Then again, what joy it is to know the Quays’ movie, then dive with the same headlong abandon into Walser.
The tale, in both book and film, is much the same. One Jakob von Gunten (Mark Rylance) enters into the study of servitude at the Benjamenta Institute, a school devoted to turning out the very best butlers and servants to ply their trade throughout Europe.
Alas, the Institute has seen better days – at least it surely must have – for when Jakob flings himself into its womb of servile academe, he is perplexed by its dank decrepitude, slightly surprised over the money-grubbiness of its principal (Gottfried John) and completely, utterly and wholeheartedly enamoured with the chief lecturer Lisa Benjamenta (Alice Krige).
Endless days and weeks are spent in rigorous exercises devoted to subservience. Jakob occasionally attempts to subvert this, just to mix things up a bit, but as he is drawn deeper into the spell of Lisa, her brother, the Principal, draws himself ever closer to Jakob.
Death, it seems, is just around the corner, for the Institute and its spirit – personified in one who clings to rendering all to a supine position of grovelling. Life in the Institute, such as it is, is not unlike a dream.
Like all dreams, however, it must fade.
Some will fade with it.
Others will move on.
I first saw Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life at the Locarno Film Festival in the summer of 1995. The experience was one I shall never forget. So emotional was my response to the film that I finally gave way to a physical need to respond to the beauty and brilliance of what the Twins had wrought from Walser. At a certain point, my elation caused me to emit tears of joy over their supreme artistry, which astonishingly converged with tears wrought from the profoundly moving sequence towards the film’s end when the character of Lisa Benjamenta, surrounded by the mournful humming of her pupils, fights to stave off the inevitable whilst betraying the deep knowledge that resistance is indeed futile.
This is something that has seldom happened to me while watching a movie – an almost spiritual experience of being deeply moved by the filmmaking and its sheer genius just at that salient point when the film’s narrative and themes are equally moving. It was at that point I was quite convinced I was watching a film destined for masterpiece status.
Add to this the fact that visually, Institute Benjamenta is a feast of epic proportions, with both production design and cinematography that have seldom been rivalled (in the years following its release) in terms of originality and dazzlingly sumptuous beauty. Add yet another element of perfection: a screenplay that captures the spirit and key building stones of Walser’s book with grace, humour and emotion. Add to this a perfect cast, a spirit of cinematic invention and last, but not least, a musical score of such power that it haunts the world of the film as equally as it haunts the viewer.
It has been 17 years since I first saw the film. In that time, I have seen it more times than I have counted. My most recent helping was a new re-mastering of the film by the British Film Institute and imported into an exquisite new DVD from the now-legendary Zeitgeist Films of New York for consumption here in the colonies.
The film is just as great and gets richer with every viewing. If that’s not a masterpiece, I don’t know what it.
I had not laid eyes upon the Twins since 1995. My last memory of them was sitting in some reception hall within the British Film Institute during the London International Film Festival and trying to determine on a map where my Ukrainian ancestry originated to see where it lay in relation to that of Bruno Schulz. At the time, my knowledge of my roots was murkier than it is now and I’m pleased to say that Schulz did indeed come from an Oblast next to mine and that he did indeed reside in the same Oblast for a good portion of his life and career.
Seventeen years, however, is a long time to not converse with artists whose work has infused me with such joy, so in honour of the North American release of Institute Benjamenta via the Zeitgeist Films label as well as two major programmes at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) – one being a film retrospective entitled Lip-Reading Puppets: The Curators’ Prescription for Deciphering the Quay Brothers and the other being a historic exhibit entitled Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets – please find below my conversation with the Quay Brothers on Institute Benjamenta.
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Greg Klymkiw: I’m thrilled Institute Benjamenta is now available for home consumption via Zeitgeist Films in North America. I trust you were involved intimately in the process?
Brothers Quay: It was made from a 35mm fine grain and a low-contrast 35mm print both held by Channel Four and cinematographer Nic Knowland, and the two of us supervised the transfer.
I usually avoid watching such extra home entertainment items as ‘On the Set’ segments, as I find they can have the potential to remove any future magic I will derive from the film itself. That said, I trust you both approved its inclusion.
To be honest, the ‘On the Set’ segment is very small, is actually quite all right, and will help considerably in its own modest and informative way as to the location we found and how we worked with it.
Upon watching the segment, I found it moving to witness such commitment, joy and good humour from all the participants in your production, which is so important when one is creating magic. Though this phrase has sadly become a clichéd line from too many who create anything but magic, I still steadfastly hold to the belief that movies ARE magic. I think, though, for that magic to live and breathe on screen it must work its way through every crevice of the picture’s soul, ever forging new waterways and swirling kaleidoscopic tributaries. This is what I see on your set. On a strictly personal level, the ‘On the Set’ segment brought me back so vividly to the production of Archangel where my dearest Mr Maddin and I never once felt the set was anything BUT a secret playground. Am I wrong in assuming you, like Disney’s dwarves, are ‘whistling while you work?’ Is it important to have fun? Are there aspects of moviemaking that bring you back to the joys of childhood? The make-believe? The play? Even to the extent that ‘work’ IS play?
I think we were much too nervous to whistle – literally – but we did have the confidence and the utter loyalty of our hand-picked team. We finished on schedule and under budget and I think we surprisingly proved that our strain of American Protestantism was augmented by Shakerism and Amishism. In the end, yes, everyone was at full ‘play’.
Prior to writing Jakob von Gunten, Walser studied to be a servant and did indeed briefly hold such a position. When not writing, he held several jobs that one might consider to be representative of complete and total servitude. In your film, one of the most indelible sequences for me is when Jakob begs/demands for a decent place to ‘rest his head’. At least initially, this is something that clearly sets him apart from his fellow students in the servant academy (as I suspect Walser himself must have felt like when he himself toiled in similar inconsequential positions of employ).
No one wrote more beautifully about the notion of ‘freedom’, and the un-freedoms within freedom, than Walser. In real life he was a great interloper, a loner, extremely restless, a permanent wanderer and he knew hard and difficult penury but these odd jobs that he so frequently took up were there to protect and keep his writing independent. In Jakob von Gunten, he is both proud and a little defiant, but in order to explore those ‘grey nether regions’ of zero-dom he simply needed a decent place to rest his head and no doubt a table to write on. There was also an enormous element of play-acting, mischievousness, in his role as the servant, but there were lessons he learned and admired and submitted to at the Institute Benjamenta: the renunciations, the strictures.
YES!!! I do so love that notion of ‘play-acting’ in both life and movies. At times, the actors playing the Benjamenta students are infused with a quality of gentle pantomime, certainly not unlike the magical qualities of silent cinema, where performance was rendered stylistically and with a theatrical sense of projection. Granted, so much in those early days of movies came from such theatrical sources as vaudeville, melodrama, and yes, traditional British pantomime. It brought an added magical quality to the medium that, to a certain extent, is lacking in the post-silent era. (There was and is magic, of course, just rendered differently.) However, I am very interested in how so much of Benjamenta is relayed visually – I can even imagine a movie that includes music and soundscape, but where the ‘text’ is conveyed via intertitles. I find your film is so delicately, exquisitely balanced in this regard that while every element of the storytelling is infused with ‘style’ it does not draw attention to itself – you set the ‘parameters’ of Walser’s world in cinematic terms and we go with the flow. To what extent are you consciously invoking elements of ‘archaic’ storytelling and making it your own in order to serve Walser’s vision?
We promised ourselves that everything that we learned in animation wouldn’t be jettisoned just because we moved into our first live-action feature and that the dialogues were NOT going to over-dominate; that Walser’s voice would be heard but only when necessary; and that like in our animation films image/music/sound would dominate first and foremost.
The very exigencies of your production ‘parameters’ (as witnessed in the ‘On the Set’ featurette) seem to allow an even greater penetration into the realm of magic (as cinema and vice-versa). Did making the film in this fashion provide greater freedoms?
No, our first intuitions were correct when we wrote the script. We always told Alain, our co-scriptwriter, that we first had to imagine the setting first, the décor, the light, the music and sound, and only then could we safely permit one single line of dialogue to transpire. AND a lot of them were voice-overs, which allowed even more independence for the image. As you know perfectly well, to do animation is long and patient work, so you think twice and ten times when you have to do a retake. It was so joyous to ask an actor to redo a take and to see how much you could reshape a performance or have them propose something more daring. In that sense we might provoke something and then be there to ‘capture’ that moment. So we were very happy ‘trappers’. We always said that we treated our actors with as much respect as our puppets – which is clearly NOT the same thing as treating your actors as if they were only puppets.
In terms of the flow of both the film and its narrative, there is a clear emphasis on this sequence. To what extent was it of import to establish Jakob’s ‘difference’ at this juncture in the proceedings?
Yes, it was very important that early on there be this sudden unexpected moment of Jakob’s revolt. It’s the moment where he’s trying to swallow the gruel for dinner that he begins to gag and violently shoves the plate away, and then there’s a hard cut to him falling onto the floor and grabbing Lisa’s ankles and begging her desperately for his own room. But after that it all takes care of itself and we don’t make a feast of it.
In terms of crafting a final shooting script, did the process of creating this sequence affect the content that precedes and follows this sequence?
No, it was always there in the script, as it was in the novella, but it allowed for his singular subjective voice-overs to really begin to flow and to comment on the hermetic cosmos of the moribund Institute Benjamenta, the mysterious brother and sister, his fellow students, particularly Kraus, who was all important for Jakob – and for us – in terms of creating the ‘Benjamentian’ perfect zero.
Do you recall the nature of your conversations with Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and Gottfried John regarding this sequence?
No, we don’t, but for sure Lisa has already divined in Jakob the ‘Prince-ling’ who will hopefully come to awaken her from her deep human sleep with a kiss, so she’s already highly pre-disposed towards him as this mysterious interloper who’s just arrived at the Institute. It’s as though at the beginning of the film when she’s bathed in sweat and dream, she’s invoked his arrival. And of course she’s Sleeping Beauty. So there was the whole fairy tale element, which was so important in Walser’s writing, which we overlaid in the film: that Gottfried was the Ogre, the students were the seven dwarfs, etc etc. To this we added the entire fairy tale animal kingdom of deer, and that it was all set in a former perfume factory – musk coming from the deer – that the Institute Benjamenta had moved into and that it had inherited the defunct Deer Museum on the top floor.
As human beings, as artists, was there (or were there) a moment (or moments) when you found yourselves demanding or requesting or proclaiming that you needed something that would allow you to serve either your muse, the art of cinema, or for that matter, anything/anyone else?
No, not in Walser’s demonstrative fashion. But we’re all prepared to!
The Institute’s motto declares: ‘Rules have already thought of everything.’ To what extent, either historically or in contemporary terms, is there truth to this in how the world of man conducts itself?
It’s one of many placards seen on the walls of the Institute but this one so powerfully evokes an implacable dead-end-ness and that it is useless to revolt. So submit!
While I’m sure there are virtues to be found in dominance, it rather seems like an awful lot of work. Submission involves pure innocence (some might say ‘ignorance’) and the exertions of following, of OBEYING, allowing one to drain the exertions of thought and to concentrate on the matter at hand. In this sense, perhaps there’s more potential for a few ‘followers’ (like Jakob) to reverse the power positions as reaction to orders can hypnotize, but just as easily open one’s mind, or at least, open the powers of instinct.
Submission for us – and for a Jakob especially – would not be tolerable if there wasn’t space to breathe with a sense of subversion even if it tests one’s limits, and then the exertion might be so demanding as to make one break down from the negation.
What are the dangers or virtues in this as you see it?
But of course the Institute Benjamenta could easily serve as a wider metaphor, not ONLY as an anti-authoritarian tract but also as a kind of potential spiritual terrain that shapes Jakob’s interior life, and that in all the Institute’s strictures and submissions an immense inner freedom could be located.
Are Jakob’s submissive qualities those that allow him to move more gracefully from reactive to active?
Walser and Jakob pre-exist in that open state already. They merely have to test the boundaries.
German sociologist Max Weber describes a bureaucrat as someone who faithfully, almost blindly, exercises delegated duties in strict accordance with rules that are completely impersonal. This, of course, seems to describe the servants-to-be in the Institute and their ultimate ‘fate’ upon graduation. So, that said, I feel that the universality of Walser’s work and your film is a key element in their place in the world as art – as a reflection and perhaps even a commentary upon mankind.
Only indirectly in so much as we were fascinated, as was Walser, by how one might navigate such a closed and seemingly hopeless and negated realm; that the suppression of freedom makes it possible to experience freedom. We felt we knew and understood that realm quite intuitively.
Beyond Walser’s indelible style, are the aforementioned thematic elements things that have drawn you to him? Were they key elements that infused you with desire to make the film? And if so, to what extent did they drive the film’s story and style?
We chose this novella by Walser because it was like an intimate chamber work and as it was our very first venture into feature films and working with live actors, we wanted to be cautious and not take on something too grand and beyond our scope. We read our first article on Walser written by his translator Christopher Middleton and it was called ’The Picture of Nobody’. Naturally, that appealed instantly to us and we slowly started to devour all his writings – what was available at the time. But whilst first reading Jakob von Gunten we realised at once at just how cinematic it could be. And we also felt very close to the ‘diary’ form so we embarked on writing the script without really knowing if it would ever get financed. We wrote the script with Alain Passes, a writer friend, but we also wrote it visually with great detail, always including the quality of light and the décor.
When writing with such attention to visual detail, to what extent do you think you consciously (or even unconsciously) tie these details into the ‘actions’ of the characters?
We must have had some intuitions how an actor might handle that scene but that was for us the only ‘unknown’ quantum in the equation we were trying to create, but whatever the actor created, it was all bonus because everything else we could pretty much control.
The use of black and white, aside from its inherent aesthetic beauty, seems to enhance a sense of a world where blind servitude is the most logical pre-requisite to unquestioningly follow impersonal rules. At the same time, the medium itself (as I believe, life itself) is replete with ‘colour’ in so far as there are literal shades of white, black AND grey. Why did you see the movie in black and white? Did any of the above have an influence and/or were there other reasons? (Perhaps even practical ones?)
From the very beginning we intuitively knew that the film had to be in black and white, that all the inner rhymes would be found in the classroom blackboard and chalk, in the ethereal dimension that only black and white can give and we asked our cinematographer, Nic Knowland, to exploit the full range of the most intense whites, to the richest of blacks and the most beautiful and mysterious of greys, to shoot with wide open f-stops, and that light was one of the main protagonists and that Lisa knew precisely the hours where and when the sun would journey through the Institute and her rooms.
The idea of light as a protagonist is such an inspiring one. Would you say that the importance of light to the medium of all visual arts – particularly cinema, where the images, the story, the world of the film must be conveyed THROUGH light (whether it be a movie projector or HD monitor) – is something you as filmmakers are keenly, if not always, aware of? It’s been said great filmmakers (and specifically cinematographers) often paint WITH light. How in this context does it inform your work, and specifically, the world of Institute Benjamenta?
Well, since with animation you have to learn ALL the metiers: to build the décors, the puppets, to give them their ‘climates’ and ‘stimmung’ through light, to know the camera and what lenses could give you, to animate the puppets, to learn how to edit, how to do sound – and we’ve always ALWAYS had music first before the film even began. So when we asked Nic Knowland to come on board to be our cinematographer we had a lot of experience about how to light – although very amateurish by comparison. And the element of ‘choreography’ in its widest sense appealed to us not only in terms of literal movement, but because the ballet doesn’t use dialogue but for the most part music only and it tells its stories via gesture and music and décor.
I cannot imagine anyone other than Alice Krige as Lisa Benjamenta. What was the process behind casting her?
Initially we had Charlotte Rampling on board – she was a name and we thought it was a coup to have gotten her for the production. But at the last minute Channel Four refused to insure her because she’d walked off a previous film set. Our lovely casting agent had been pushing Alice all along and suddenly we had to pitch the project to her and she wasn’t initially terribly convinced by the script, saying she didn’t know what she could bring to it. So in a panic, we sent her a snowdrift of faxes explaining what we were after and she said yes and jumped on a plane and arrived on the weekend. The filming started on a Monday for six weeks in an old country house near Hampton Ct on the edge of Richmond Park where deer grazed next to the house.
I am in serious love with her performance. It’s impossible to take one’s eyes off her. In that sense, was this notion of her magnetic qualities ever a consideration in shots that involved her? Did her natural qualities ever force you to block and/or shoot anything to maintain the perspective(s) necessary to the individual dramatic/thematic/artistic beats of the work?
It was the great unknown blessing to have gotten Alice to play Lisa and she was a dream to work and collaborate with, as were of course Mark and the wonderful Gottfried John. She would keep asking for further takes and you could see she was searching and taking her character deeper and deeper. She kept a flow chart in her hotel room and as we shot the film out of sequence she would always consult us to where emotionally she had to be on such and such a scene.
What was Ms Krige’s understanding and appreciation of Walser, the work itself and her character?
It wasn’t necessary for her to have read beyond the script as we talked to her about Walser and Lisa, his real sister, and all that might help her but she also really responded to the décors and the space we created for her, the climates, the quality of light. And she loved working in black and white. Even after the official shooting ended she came freely to our studio to shoot some extra close-ups that we had devised.
In recent days, I’ve imagined some Ruskin-like Ethics of the Dust transcript involving Ms Krige presiding over a ‘tutorial’ involving yourselves and the other cast members.
No, alas nothing like this.
Well, one can only dream, then.
Of course, Alice was never more beautiful than when she was dead.
From the first time I saw Institute Benjamenta and through almost every time I have seen it, I’m reminded of how beautiful death can be on film. The actor, of course, is infused with the quality of life and no matter how great they can be as actors, this natural quality is especially useful in making characters in death look ‘never more beautiful’. The shots of Ms Krige in death are right up there in my personal pantheon of gorgeous screen corpses, ESPECIALLY in Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. In fact, Dreyer is an artist whom I’m pleasantly reminded of when I see Institute Benjamenta. (In fact, I sometimes imagine a Dreyer adaptation of Benjamenta appearing in his canon – probably between Gertrud and his never-made Jesus.) Is he someone you yourselves admire? Might there even be a conscious or unconscious Dreyer influence on your work?
When we were in Copenhagen to do work on the décors for a ballet with Kim Brandstrup, our choreographer on Benjamenta, we visited Carl Dreyer’s grave. He has been one of the most important influences on our work and we have watched and re-watched his films.
One thing I suspect I will never forget, and indeed, think of often, is the young saplings sequence where the men rock back and forth humming, almost chanting, and you favour Lisa in those exquisite shots where Ms Krige evokes both desperation and heartache.
Before the scene was filmed she told us she’d wing it, that she wasn’t sure what would happen but to stay with her. But it was this slow swaying of the students, their backs to her, along with their mounting humming, that of course started to slowly and implacably swamp her appeals, but it is all so dreamlike and strange and troubling, with Jakob helplessly standing off to the side holding pinecones, watching Lisa become undone. But it’s true that by the end of the scene, when Lisa sees Kraus writing the giant zero, you can see that her gaze has seen beyond this life into another one.
From the first time I saw your film in that huge indoor sporting complex (or whatever the hell it was) in Locarno so many years ago, and upon each subsequent viewing, this sequence has moved me to a combination of tears, trembling and physical sensations of tingling and gooseflesh.
Yes, initially this scene was placed much earlier in the script but because of its emotional strength we moved it further back in the film.
The young saplings sequence inspires me with many levels of meaning and emotion, but I will keep them to myself and ask what this sequence means to you, what you wished to achieve with it and how you prepared for it, shot it and rendered it in final form?
The sequence was a premonition of Lisa’s emotionally becoming undone, that she could no longer reach her students, not even her preferred one, Inigo, and that a darker and more disturbing and bleaker finality loomed before her.
Ever the optimist, I suspect we all have a ‘darker and more disturbing and bleaker finality’ looming before us. And speaking of finality, I have one final question for you. Are there things in Benjamenta you’re not completely sold on these many years later or, if given a chance, things you’d do differently (and if so, what they might be)?
No, you couldn’t have really thrown any more money at the production and we didn’t need famous actors. A six-week shoot seemed perfect although how could we have known. We had a very experienced first assistant, Mary Soan. We stayed small and it was beautifully in control and it was a unique and moving experience for us. We actually lived in the top floor of this old abandoned country house during the entire shoot. But there was one scene where I wished we’d been a lot braver, and we’ve talked about it much later with Alice, and that was the scene where she goes upside down and guides Jakob to her. She should have been boldly naked beneath her gown and as Jakob was blindfolded he would have been so disoriented by this unknown region of flesh and pudenda, but we as an audience would have gasped at her erotic boldness.
From the northern most point of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada, I bid you: Bon Cinema!
Best known internationally for his chilly, haunting melodramas Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), Christian Petzold has yet again teamed up with actress Nina Hoss for his latest film Barbara. Hoss gives a mesmerising performance as Barbara Wolff, a doctor who has applied for an exit visa from the GDR only to find herself transferred from Berlin to a provincial hospital in the countryside, spied upon by the Stasi while her lover in the West is secretly preparing to help her escape via the Baltic Sea. Like all Petzold’s films, Barbara is informed by the director’s background in literature and cinema history, and yet it stands in its own right as a subtly balanced, emotionally restrained and elegantly shot drama crafted by a real auteur, with a style, vision and worldview entirely his own.
Pamela Jahn talked to Christian Petzold at this year’s 62nd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival in February where Barbara premiered in Competition and earned him the Silver Bear for Best Director.
Pamela Jahn: Your films are often inspired by literature. In Yella, for example, you are borrowing your genre conventions from James M. Cain’s cult pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Your new film Barbara, however, feels more like a classic novella.
Christian Petzold: There are two books that served as an inspiration for me this time: Hermann Broch’s novella Barbara, which is set in 1928 and tells the story of a female doctor who takes a job in a rural hospital in order to hide her communist activities from the police, and Werner Bräunig’s novel Rummerplatz. In Bräunig’s book a doctor’s son is consumed by physical work for the first time in a uranium mine. He defines himself through this work, which is interesting because work as a theme had almost completely disappeared from the literature and cinema in the West. Another aspect that appealed to me was that the book tells how women replaced the workers who had been wooed by the West, which somewhat gave those women a new purpose and self-understanding, and I wanted to tell a story about this.
Barbara marks your fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss. How would you describe your work relationship?
Part of the reason why we work together so well is because we help each other develop and, at the same time, with each film our work relationship grows stronger. For example, when we were shooting Jerichow I felt that I had to do something different in my next film, especially with the ending, because I realised that I kept pushing Nina into tragedy every single time; like a writer, who keeps killing his heroine at some point so he can finish this book and get on to a new story. I got really annoyed with myself for always working within that same pattern. When Nina and I talked about the final scene, I told her that, next time, I would like to make a film with an open ending and we ended up having a very long conversation about what this means for my work, for our work, and for what we’re trying to achieve, which helped me a lot. And that’s the great thing about our collaboration: that we can have those conversations and support and inspire each other. That’s what makes it so exciting for me.
Aside from working with Nina Hoss, you have developed a very special way of casting people.
Yes, when I start casting for a new film, I first listen to the voices of actors. If you ask me, all these talent agencies should send out CDs instead of DVDs; there is much more to get from listening to voices. But if you find an actress like Nina Hoss and you work together for so many years, your attitude towards the character changes in a way. I don’t really describe her anymore in the script, which means she somewhat appears out of a situation; I don’t need to support her literarily because she already exists. But at the same time, I also need to keep a sort of respectful distance from that particular character.
Barbara is set in former communist East Germany in 1980. What fascinated you about this particular era and how did you approach it, since you grew up in West Germany?
My parents fled the GDR when I was still very young, so I grew up in the Western part of Germany. But my parents kept travelling back to the East part quite regularly and they took my brothers and me with them, so East Germany was not so unfamiliar to me. The problem is the kind of stuffiness that exists in Germany, that narrow thinking that only someone who has lived through a story has the right to tell it. But if you look at the great works of world literature, many of these stories are actually told from the perspective of an outsider. Like in The Great Gatsby, for example, the narrator is the only character who is dead. With Barbara, it was very important to me that the actors understand my particular perspective. Before I start shooting, I always watch selected films with my team in order to get everyone in the mood and, this time, one of the films we watched during the rehearsals was The French Connection. There is a scene in the film in which Gene Hackman’s character, [Jimmy] Doyle, wanders back to his apartment after a long shift and suddenly gets attacked by a sniper. What makes this sequence so fascinating and one of the most frenetic moments in the film is the perspective. Normally, any director would cut from Gene Hackman walking down the street to the sniper and then follow him through the reticle just before the gunshot to build up tension and suspense. But the film doesn’t do that: instead the camera keeps at eye level with Hackman during the entire chase. Only after 15 minutes of chasing the sniper through the jammed streets of New York, only in the very moment when Doyle seems to have caught himself in a dead end, when he struggles to stay in control, that’s when the camera changes its perspective and points at him. What I was trying to explain with this sequence was the importance of my viewpoint in Barbara, which is similar in terms of the camera position. I wanted everyone to understand why the camera has to be in a certain spot, why can’t it be anywhere else because that would change my perspective on the story.
It is your first historical film. How difficult was it for you to reconstruct the setting of the GDR in the early 1980s?
What I wanted to achieve with Barbara was to make a historical film but without evoking history merely through the setting where you have the hammer and sickle symbol in every frame. Instead, I tried to create an open space. There is a nice anecdote about François Truffaut and Jean Renoir having a conversation about Renoir’s The Golden Coach [1952]. Truffaut was of the opinion that you could only do history in the studio, you couldn’t show any sky, because the sky is always the sky of today. Renoir disagreed. In his view, you had to use both the studio and the sky, as in the historical and the present. If you pretend that the film was only about the past with no relation to our present time, then the film itself would be a lie. And I thought I actually agree with Renoir, which is why in Barbara, you see lots of sky, lots of wind, and lots of colour. But there was another aspect that was important to me in that regard: I watched Chinatown [1974] again because it’s a historical film and I kept wondering why the Los Angeles of the 1930s that is recreated in the film never feels like a German historical film, for example. I realised that it is because of the different aggregate states at play such as heat, drought, and male and female sweat, and I think all this is linked together. Or, take Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons [1971], he also managed to create a sense of the historical atmosphere with very little means, but still to great effect. It’s almost like a childhood memory, like with Proust, you smell something and history begins to unfold. The only other option would have been to go with Bresson, cool and distanced. Those were the two options I considered and, ultimately, I decided to go with The Merchant of Four Seasons.
Looking at your previous films, they seem to be strongly informed by the fundamental cracks in German society.
I find it very difficult to think about why this is, but it seems obvious that I am interested in people who don’t feel comfortable in their skin. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that my parents fled the GDR and when we first got to West Germany I spent quite some time in transitional housing and never got the feeling that I arrived anywhere properly. I always felt more like an outsider myself, whereas my parents desperately tried to adapt to their new surroundings but, at the same time, it made them become even more estranged. All these are themes that worry me in a way but I think that, one day, I’ll just pay for a psychoanalyst to get to the bottom of it all (laughs). That said, my next film also follows a similar line – I just can’t help it.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your new film?
It’s set in Berlin in 1945, so it’s a historical film again. In short, it’s about a woman who survived Auschwitz and she now wants her life back.
Do you feel you had to go through different steps in your career before you could approach that part of German history?
No, it was not quite like that. The story almost fell in my hands in a way. My long-term co-author Harun Farocki and I read a crime novel from 1946 which had a similar plot line. That was about two or three years ago and for some reason it stuck with me. But it’s true that, back then, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. A Jewish woman, Berlin, the Holocaust, it felt too charged, too close to me then.
How do you explain your particular interest in female characters?
Good question. To answer that, I probably have to go through at least 10 years of psychotherapy (laughs). No, honestly, I think some filmmakers have a preference for male characters and then there are others, who are more interested in female characters. David Lynch, for example, is a ‘women director’ in that way, and John Ford is a ‘male director’. That doesn’t mean that one is better than the other, it’s just how you project yourself into the world. And the way I look at women in my films is not like a pure Hitchcockian look, where the woman functions as an erotic object for the desiring look of the male. I am not fetishising anything. Especially with Nina, it’s more like there is someone whom I don’t know and who I can’t be, who is something completely strange to me. It’s like these female characters are somehow caught in a different world, like in exile, and they’re trying to get back in touch with the world I live in, the world we all live in. On the other hand, with my camera I am somewhat in exile too, and from there I keep trying to get to the core of the story. This is how it all correlates.
Nina Hoss has said elsewhere that she would love to make a comedy with you one day. Can you imagine yourself doing that too?
Of course Nina said that, because she is great in comedies (laughs). And I would love to make a comedy too. But it’s incredibly difficult to make a really good comedy and so I keep putting it off just as I keep putting off to quit smoking. I guess I am just not ready for it yet.
Cast: Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier, Kevin McDonald
Canada 2011
94 mins
Keyhole is Guy Maddin’s latest and by far most ambitious film to date. Trying, as usual, to make sense of the memories and feelings from the past that haunt him day and night, Maddin this time has crafted a heady amalgam of sinister black and white 40s noir-gangster flick, Homer’s Odyssey (loosely adapted), Hollywood melodrama and haunted ghost story. Like all of Maddin’s work, it’s a perfectly twisted, dark, dreamlike cinematic encounter that stays in the back of your mind long after you have re-entered reality.
Pamela Jahn met with Guy Maddin at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in February to talk about dreams, light switches and wolf heads, the importance of giving movies a second chance and the horror of watching your own films with an audience.
PJ: Let’s start with the obvious: do you actually believe in ghosts?
GM: It’s funny, I don’t believe in ghosts at all and I am not scared of the dark or things like that until I hold a movie camera in my hand. Then I believe in ghosts. Maybe there is some sort of natural selection at work but it’s just so convenient to believe in ghosts when you are a filmmaker, either as a metaphor or a way to get your sense of a story airborne, or even just to make yourself suspend disbelief. It’s all sorts of things, but the truth is, when movies are working well people start believing in things they wouldn’t normally believe in. So I am quite comfortable with that little camera-generated adhocracy. It’s just like when you’re a little kid and your grandmother is telling you a bedtime story. There are all sorts of things at play, and at least for the time being you believe in what she’s telling you. And it feels pretty good. But on the other hand, I feel very haunted all the time. Maybe I am far more than average a backward peering guy.
What are you haunted by?
Well, we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, but for some reason the past seems to have a stronger demand on my emotions than on most people’s. Sometimes I’m haunted just by the way things once were and by a longing that they could be that way again. But it’s also quite simple in the way that I’m haunted by a love that is gone. Don’t get me wrong, I like these hauntings. I have a dream life that is cramped with sadness for some reason. I don’t get nightmares, instead I get these kind of emotional injections. But I like them in the same way people like, say, listening to Billy Holiday.
What happens in your dreams?
I see people and places. Places are very important to me, especially homes that I once lived in and which really mattered to me. Or people that have already gone reappear with a vibrancy of recollection that I can’t master while I am awake. But I like these experiences. It is my way of keeping these old relationships alive. I even got to know my father better in my dreams. He is a much nicer man now and we agree a lot more on things. I remember I had a girlfriend once who had a very ‘New Agey’ attitude towards it and one day she told me: ‘You really shouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff. Next time someone reappears from the past in one of your dreams, just tell them you love them but that it’s time for them to go. So you can say goodbye to them and then they won’t reappear in your dreams anymore.’ Basically, after that, we just broke up.
What is the strongest memory you have had that found its way into the film?
That’s an interesting question because I haven’t had the courage to assess what insistent memory made it all the way to the final cut… I’m not sure. There are a couple of little mentions of things. For example, when Jason Patric, who plays the father in the film, enters a room – even though he is not sure who he is or whether or not he is alive – it’s just the fact that his hand knows exactly where the light switch is. I had a few very uncanny dreams about that in the past. I normally have no control over my dreams otherwise I would just stay in bed all the time, dreaming. But I had one or two dream experiences in my life where I could literally stay in a dream on purpose. I found myself in my childhood home, which for some reason I miss very badly. About four or five years ago I think, I stopped dreaming less and less about people and more about architecture, precisely, the architecture of an empty home. Sometimes there seem to be people present in the next room or so, but it is mostly architecture.
I had one dream where I was just in my old bedroom and I opened up my drawer, and that’s a scene that made it into the film, where I could actually see everything exactly the way it was in 1968. And it wasn’t me bullshitting myself, it really wasn’t uncanny. I remember looking into the drawer and seeing a razor and a pencil sharpener and a little ink pot that I hadn’t thought of for some 40- odd years. Things that I had forgotten all about were in that drawer. Then I decided to look up from the drawer because I couldn’t exactly remember what was on my shelves. When I looked up, I saw exactly what was there, and I started walking around in the room and I could remember where the light switches were and what the plastic plates around the light switches looked like. I do remember that, as a kid, I knew exactly were all the light switches where. At certain doors there were on your left and at other doors they were on your right when you entered the room. Sometimes you had to switch the switch upwards or you had to remember to switch it downwards. It took me many years to figure that out, lots of trial and error, but in my dream it was all clear. Then it became an issue not worth remembering at all because the house was sold. But in this dream it all came back.
I have heard that you don’t really forget anything and that your brain is full of all the memories you’ve ever had. It’s just a matter of accessing them. I had a similar dream that was not as good but where I could access everything as well and it felt like maybe I was dead. It felt like I was literally haunting. At first I was thinking: ‘Jesus, I’m haunted by this house.’ But then I realised it felt more like I was the one haunting the house, because there was no one in it except for me wandering around, trying light switches and looking in drawers. And while I don’t believe in ghosts it gave me gooseflesh to think that maybe in those moments I am just a ghost myself. Since we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, maybe I was living in the future as well, I don’t know.
Do you wake up and make notes immediately after you’ve had a dream like this?
I do find that if you write a dream down afterwards you will remember it forever, but if you don’t, you sort of forget it. But that one was so vibrant that I couldn’t forget it anyway. It hasn’t all stayed with me though. But then I arranged for a visit inside my old childhood home, and a lot of the light switches were still there. Also, I had my own bathroom as a boy, and there was a little chip in the plaster above the heating that you could only see when sitting on the toilet. You could see this little dent, someone had put some scotch tape over it and then painted it but, to me, it looked like a wolf’s head. That was the first thing I checked when this guy gave me permission to look through the house. I went straight to my old bathroom to see if the wolf’s head was still there, because I also had a couple of dreams about it and I was very worried that someone had chipped it off or fixed it but, luckily, it was still there. After that visit, I often wondered whether the guy who bought the house maybe also sees a wolf’s head in the tape, or if he sees something else because his childhood was so different to mine. He is exactly the same age, a My Lai survivor. So, when I was 12 years old and looking at Playboy magazines in my bathroom, he was in My Lai going through horrible things. Now he sleeps in my bedroom and I often wonder what he’s haunted by. It must be the most unhealthy way of planning one’s future, but if I ever get enough money, I would just buy the house back from him, or live with him. It’s a big house. And I love my childhood, so it would be a way to sort of slide back with perfect symmetry into my second childhood.
Keyhole is more than just a childhood memory though. There are many different elements coming together, and critics have talked about your films before as being impossible to grasp and to classify. Do you like that idea, or do you sometimes feel disappointed that audiences and critics don’t get what you are trying to do or say?
I always thought that it was great when people told me that my films are impossible to put in a drawer. So I’d say: ‘Oh, thank you’, and they’d respond: ‘No, that’s terrible. You would be doing yourself a big favour if you worked in a genre.’ And then they’d tell me I should work in science fiction, a genre I don’t find much of a connection with for some reason, even though it has so much potential. To some extent, science fiction and horror seem so close together as an element of fantasy. But I still like my horror films scary yet slightly allegorical to a degree where I’m not sure whether I can figure out the allegory. If I can’t figure it out, that’s even better. But it has to be rooted in something that we all feel, whether we believe in saucers or vampires or not. We all feel those things but they are dressed up in the horror genre garb. I like that.
Lately I’ve been trying to work in genres a little bit as well. I accidentally worked in genre, or more a hybrid genre, in 2002, when I accepted a commission to make a ballet version of Dracula. I was shocked, because it was originally just made for Canadian television broadcast and then it ended up getting a theatrical release. Then I realised that this genre advice was actually pretty good advice, because I think what enabled people to go and see this movie was the fact that they knew exactly what they would be getting. It’s Dracula and ballet, it’s two genres but at least it’s only two and you could see how they fused together. I think it gave people a point of reference from which to approach it. And it just made it easier on the picture and on myself that the public could figure out what it was.
With Keyhole, I thought again I would make a kind of hybrid genre film where gangsters meet ghosts. A bit like cowboys meet aliens, something you understand right away! But I’m actually not very comfortable with the gangster genre, because gangsters have guns and I didn’t want the script to get bogged down with all the technicalities involved with this, things like who is carrying a gun and who is not, and fill it all up with a lot of gun shots. I just wanted a story about gangsters. the protagonist’s father should be a gangster, some sort of alpha male hero that a boy could admire in the same way that Homer’s Ulysses is a soldier and a hero. I am not even sure why I picked a gangster, I just wanted something that looked right in black and white for my one last fling, or love affair, with black and white before I move on and try to challenge myself to colour.
Given the positive audience reactions it seems to have worked fine. In fact, Keyhole has been described as your most accessible film to date.
I think that when I set out to make Keyhole I wanted it to turn out a little more accessible. I was enjoying the fact that for various reasons my last two pictures have been increasingly accessible. I am used to really low ratio shows, like down to zero. But still, I do want to reach people with my movies, though maybe just more like an author wants to reach an audience rather than a member of the film industry who needs to reach people to be able to make another movie. But I do want to reach them, because I love the feeling of understanding how an audience feels when they are watching a movie. I was forced to watch My Winnipeg and Brand upon the Brain many times because I was narrating the films behind the stage, and I really began to feel more like a showman than a filmmaker, which was nice, so I’ve tried to keep that attitude going while making movies. That said, in a way, I never felt closer to a conventional filmmaker than when I was making Keyhole.
What inspired you to base the film on Homer’s Odyssey?
To be honest, that story was just an excuse for a structure and I am glad I found one that really fit in well with what I was trying to say. I was looking for any sort of narrative, because I’m not quite formal and crazy enough to make a movie about an empty house without any characters in it. So, I knew I wanted it to have a plot and certain characters and things that matter, even though my dreams are mostly about little objects. But those little tokens and objects and wolf’s heads, they all matter because they have soaked up a lot of people before they became precious to me.
At one point, I was tempted to use a plot structure suggested by Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. It’s also an unrealised film by Leni Riefenstahl: just a couple of gangs holed up in a house fighting and then a gang of Amazonians come in and start hysterically tearing both fighting parties to shreds. But then I realised that what initially seemed a good excuse to explore every piece and corner of the house with all that war and fighting going on would probably just get derailed into gender politics in the end, so themes that I am nowhere near qualified to explore – at least not yet. I think I’ll wait until I’m a veteran of another war before touching on that.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on what really matters to me about the home, and maybe I also tried to sum up what I hope is the first half of my filmmaking career, and I realised that The Odyssey had a lot to do with my dream life. For instance, my very first movie was a short film about my father who had died, but actually in my dreams he hadn’t died. In my dreams, he just went off to live with a better family. He would come home almost every night just to get his razor or pick up some glass eye that he had forgotten, and every time I had about one minute to convince him that our family loved him and really missed him and that he should stay. But he never did stay. Nevertheless, they were still wonderful dreams because I got to hear his voice, a voice I couldn’t remember properly. And those dreams generally left me with a slowly dissipating pleasurable feeling until lunchtime and then a dream might return later that night or in a week or so. The years went by and, one day, I read Homer’s Odyssey and realised that it was just that dead father dream. It’s the ultimate ‘dead-beat-dad’ story, and I came to the conclusion that this is the story I should use for my storyboard structure. I like using a very durable structure and then abusing it as much as possible by overburdening it with my own concerns and seeing how much of it can survive.
Is it easier for you to develop your own story if you base it on a work of literature or a play?
Yes, if I just use it as a framework. For example, Cowards Bend the Knee is very loosely based on Electra, but totally debased from Euripides. I even changed a brother of Electra into a boyfriend. What I mean is that I am willing to change things so that it is all already psychologically a different thing all together but, on the other hand, it’s good to know that it is a pretty sturdy structure of a centuries-old story and still reads like something that has happened to me yesterday. So, yes, I am happy to make adaptations, I just happen to make them of ancient texts and in such a surreal way that no one can complain that I have messed with the original shape of the text.
Do you sometimes feel that, as a filmmaker, you’d have been better off living in the early days of cinema?
Naturally I went through a real biologically driven love affair with the 1920s when I was in my twenties and thirties and felt I needed to sexually possess the decade. But now I just think it looks nice. I have mellowed out about it, and I am happy not to be considered an impersonator, that I am not doing complete adaptations, that my editing style is different and that I am using digital tools. I am happy to eventually having graduated from being a false pioneer to a real pioneer.
What is also very unique about your films is that you seem to use music and film as interrelated languages. Is that something you do deliberately, or is this a natural process for you while making the film?
No, it is actually a goal of mine to shoot a film where I write the script and have the score written at the same time. That would be ideal. I had the chance to do this once on a short film called Glorious that I used as a rough sketch for Keyhole, because it is also a gangster story. The Netherlands-based British composer Richard Ayers and I worked on this by writing the script and writing the music back and forth in a series of emails and that was really amazing. Generally, most composers are given a somewhat flawed movie and then it is up to them to kind of fluff up scenes that are somewhat sagging, or they are supposed to really underscore something that needs building up. Famously, even with Vertigo, although that’s not flawed of course, Hitchcock apparently said to Bernhard Hermann: ‘Reel four especially needs your help’, or something like that.
But actually I think music and imagery are working together in a more occult way. It’s something that mystifies me and no amount of thinking about it can get me closer to an answer. I often have a piece of music in mind for a scene, but almost never does that piece of music fit in the end. I remember when I was making Archangel, I had special music picked out for certain scenes and when I got to edit the film it didn’t work at all. So, I tried switching scenes around, because I had it on magnetic tape and didn’t feel like recording new music altogether. But when I switched the scenes, the music I had picked before worked in exactly the different scenes that I had originally intended it for. I even thought that they worked very nicely, so I kept it like that. That’s when I realised that it really is witchcraft how these things work. But again, it is and it isn’t, because composers know how to create such visual sounds.
Thank you for mentioning music. It had been a long-term goal of mine to get people to trust their feelings about film as much as they do about music. When you listen to music you either like it or you don’t but, mostly, you don’t even know why, you are just letting yourself go. But when people are watching movies they get nervous if they don’t quite understand something. Even if they are enjoying it, they don’t know why, so a lot of them are shutting down saying: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t get it’, because they can’t just let go. But with music it seems so natural and I just wish we could all watch movies the same way we listen to music. So I try to fuse the two together as much as possible in my films, just in a desperate hope that somewhere along the line they take up and weld themselves in some sort of occult union and really work in ways that no one can explain.
It also seems more difficult to give films a second chance in the same way that you would listen to a song again until you get used to it and, eventually, you start liking it.
Yeah, absolutely. I have given some films a second chance. For example, the first time I saw L’Atalante, which is now one of my favourite films, I think I expected it to be a bit more like a Buñuel picture. I wanted it to be more surrealist and so I was disappointed in it the first time round. And then it just stayed with me, submerged in my memory for about five years until I found myself thinking more and more about it. And when I watched it again I fell totally in love with it. I think that’s the way we know it works with music, for example, when your favourite artist puts out a new album and you resist it first, but next thing you know, you realise that you have to put that thing back on and listen to it again. For some reason, it is just easier to do so with music than it is with movies.
Do you go back to your own films a lot?
No, not much, not if I can avoid it. I remember reading in Buñuel’s biography that he only watched his films once and then he knew what they were like and he never watched them again. At first, I didn’t believe him, partly because he was such a fantastic liar, but now I can understand him better, because I really don’t need the agony of watching my films with an audience more than once.
Why is it so horrible?
Because when you watch your films with an audience, you can poke your ear drums out and still sense the audience reaction. It’s just the fact that you know the audience is there and you can no longer kid yourself and tell yourself that it will all be OK. Instead, total objectivity is brought to you by the presence of an audience and, trust me, one experience like that per movie is enough. You give yourself a report card and it’s written in indelible ink, so you don’t have to go back again and again.
Do you dream about your films before, while or after making them?
Sometimes I do. A couple of times I have had dreams while making a movie in that I see myself watching it and it is obviously way better than in reality. But luckily, on some occasions, I had these dreams in time that I have actually been able to add things to the movie and improve it slightly. But that’s happened less than 10 times in my whole life, and if I dream about my movies then it’s almost always that they look better in my dream. So, when I wake up I mostly regret that I didn’t think to make those scenes.
You said elsewhere that you felt Careful was the only film that turned out exactly the way you wanted it to be. Is Keyhole coming close now though?
I think I have also come close with shorter film, for example, my short Heart of the World turned out to be exactly the way I planned. But, of course, with longer films that is less likely to happen. I think with Keyhole I did get the feelings right and also the levels of confusion which I was willing to have anywhere between perfect clarity and complete abstraction. But I also do care about Keyhole a lot for another reason, not even so much because of the dreams but because of the conversations I had with my mother about some of the years I drew my inspiration from for this movie. I have to say, my mother has got a kind of really sweet grade of dementia right now. She has become this lovely, sweet and agreeable old lady but she just told me the most brutally frank anecdotes about my family and my childhood, stories I had never ever heard of before. She has filled me with enough stuff that would have fit into the Keyhole universe to make another movie all together. I won’t do that though, I am leaving that subject behind now. But, God, it’s killing me that I didn’t get my mum to open up just half a year earlier. The movie could have been so much better. I mean, I don’t think anyone else would have noticed it, or people would have liked it more, but it just would have meant more to me. I think I would have managed to get my whole family in one piece in that house.
Do you feel that now that you have made Keyhole and that it turned out the way you wanted it to be you can eventually put your childhood memories to rest and move on?
Oh no! Thank God no! I don’t want my memories to rest, because I like them way too much. I won’t let that happen. Never!
The follow-up to the acclaimed, Berlin prize-winning rape-revenge drama Katalin Varga, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio is a remarkable achievement. The accomplishment is amplified considering that it is a second feature. Among the most audacious European works in recent memory, Strickland’s film draws on his love of experimental film scores, sound effects and analogue recording equipment to create an elliptical, nightmarish tale that pays tribute to the Italian giallo genre and the Gothic horror of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Dario Argento‘s Suspiria. Juraj Herz’s The Cremator and Peter Tscherkassky are also acknowledged influences.
Set in a beautifully replicated 1976, the film hones in on Berberian Sound Studio, the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened there. Gilderoy (Toby Jones, incredibly game in a discomfiting role), a naïve and introverted sound engineer from England, is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro Santini (Antonio Mancino). Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. Obliged to work with the hot-headed producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), whose tempestuous relationships with certain members of his female cast threaten to boil over at any time, Gilderoy begins to record the sound for ‘The Equestrian Vortex’, a hammy tale of witchcraft and unholy murder.
Only when he’s testing microphones or poring over tape spooling around his machines does this timid man from Surrey seem at ease. Surrounded by Mediterranean machismo and, for the first time in his life, beautiful women, Gilderoy, very much an Englishman abroad, devotes all his attention to his work. But the longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s Vortex.
The violence on the screen Gilderoy is exposed to, day in, day out, in which he himself is implicated, has a disturbing effect on his psyche. He finds himself corrupted; yet he’s the one carrying out the violence. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.
Named after the yellow (giallo) covers of the trashy crime novels used for storylines, this period of cinema in 1960s and 70s Italy produced numerous thrillers and horror flicks that privileged style over script. As Berberian Sound Studio makes clear, key ingredients of a typical giallo tended to include girls, daggers, blood, witchcraft and chilling screams. At the time, directors such as Dario Argento (Profondo Rosso) and Lucio Fulci (The Black Cat, Zombie Flesh Eaters) commissioned composers including Ennio Morricone and prog outfit Goblin to score their slasher films. The title of Strickland’s fictional studio, Berberian, refers to Cathy Berberian, the versatile American soprano who was married to the Italian electronics pioneer Lucio Berio, a giant of 20th-century composition. Peter Strickland himself has dabbled in sound art and electronic production as part of the trio The Sonic Catering Band.
Sound, and Gilderoy’s umbilical connection to it, is the heart of the film. To that extent the creation of the sound studio was pivotal and the film was always likely to stand or fall on the authenticity of the hermetically sealed bunker and the equipment on which Gilderoy toils. Production designer Jennifer Kernke (who worked with Berberian producer Keith Griffiths on Institute Benjamenta) has worked wonders, constructing a sound studio as it might have appeared in 70s Italy by scouring the UK for original vintage analogue sound equipment. For Strickland, an aficionado of vintage sound recording apparatus, amassing all this out-of-date gear felt wonderfully anachronistic. ‘I had to question myself. I thought, are we riffing off what these films did back in the 70s or are we taking cues from the spirit of those films? It seemed rather perverse to celebrate analogue within the digital medium.’ But it is precisely the fetishistic nature of Gilderoy’s relationship with his beloved machines – perhaps the only objects he truly understands – that Strickland is celebrating. ‘I like the idea of filling the whole frame with these strange machines as we celebrate this period when these things looked so futuristic and alien,’ the director comments.
The film’s general arcane sensibility is also enforced by the tape boxes and papers the film lingers lovingly over, all of which are designed by Julian House. A record designer whose work recently graced CAN’s The Lost Tapes box-set, House also envisioned the fake title sequence, one of the most arresting and genuinely thrilling moments in the film.
Giallo movies frequently had exceptionally advanced accompanying soundtracks that meshed free jazz with the avant-garde and high art with sleazy exploitation. The score for Berberian is courtesy of James Cargill of Broadcast (whose sleeves House has also designed), who conjures an ethereal soundscape in which sound and music cut back and forth from the reality of the studio into the giallo Gilderoy works.
Santini’s ‘The Equestrian Vortex’ may be a schlocky giallo slasher, a classic horror, but Berberian Sound Studio has a more absorbing, hauntological bent. ‘Horror was the starting point but I would never call it a horror,’ says Strickland. ‘I guess the rule was to bounce off that genre – to immediately say, no blood, no murder – but still make it scary. What was exciting about that genre was it has its own history, rules and regulations that you can manipulate and mess around with. There’s something very gratifying in taking a template and turning it into something very personal.’ While avoiding didacticism, Berberian Sound Studio also explores the fascination with violence and the potentially corrupting nature of graphic imagery. Gilderoy’s exposure to the sequences he is forced to endure slowly erodes his levels of tolerance. In the end he is quite literally ingested by the images and psychologically broken.
Despite its willingness to engage with complex and prescient issues, there is also a deep vein of black humour, most clearly during the foley sequences in the auditorium when sound artists hack watermelons and stab cabbages to imitate the sound of heads being split or witches being bludgeoned in Santini’s movie (images that are seen to be projected but which the viewer, crucially, never sees). The disconnection between the effects Santini is trying to generate and what’s causing it is often knowingly comical. As the film is so much about sound and the creation of it, Strickland was careful to bring in characters involved with exhibitions of sound and figures involved with making music. Experimental artists Pal Toth, Josef Czeres and singer Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg all appear, another example of reality imaginatively blurring with fiction.
Film4 FrightFest presented a preview screening of Berberian Sound Studio on August 26.
Cast: Clive Owen, Andrea Riseborough, Gillian Anderson
UK/Ireland 2012
101 mins
‘Tell me the truth and you’ll live,’ says IRA investigator Kevin Mulgrew (David Wilmott) at the climax of Shadow Dancer, a fretful thriller set in 1990s Belfast. A simple question, yet in this film there are no simple answers; the truth isn’t depicted as a shining light illuminating the dark, but rather as a series of shifting shadows that shrink or swell with every new emotion and gradually dissolve with time.
Directed by documentary-maker James Marsh, the film prudently suggests that in this kind of conflict, there is no truth, only representations of it. And yet to achieve this complex portrayal, Marsh fought hard to seek out truths, and strove, in everything from his research to his casting choices, against any kind of misrepresentation.
Shadow Dancer, which hits the UK’s screens on August 24, focuses on single mother Collette McVeigh (played by Andrea Riseborough), a Republican living in Belfast with her mother and hardline IRA brothers. She is arrested during an aborted IRA bomb plot in London, and MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen) offers her a choice: go to prison for 25 years or return to Belfast and spy on her own family. With her son’s future in her hands, Collette chooses to betray all she believes in and return home as a tout.
The characters and story are fictional, but were written by journalist Tom Bradby during his time as a TV correspondent in Northern Ireland. Bradby wanted to dig deeper into the heart of the conflict, and it was fiction, not journalism, that enabled him to do this. ‘Writing this was an opportunity for me to inform people about some aspects of the conflict, like the world of running informers, that you couldn’t put on the TV news at night, so I built the story as a way of telling what was really happening in this war and the real intensity that lay at the heart of it,’ says Bradby, who used his contacts on both sides of the conflict to research his subject thoroughly.
Marsh’s documentary background (he won an Oscar for 2008’s Man on Wire and picked up the Best Director award at Sundance for 2011’s Project Nim) brought an investigative approach to the material. In preparation, Marsh read the history of Ireland, from William the Conqueror to the present day: ‘When the actors had questions I was able to answer them and give them contexts about the politics. Ireland is a place where history really matters and I felt it was my duty to understand that and to offer advice.’
In order to find an authentic cast, Marsh was not nervous about stepping off the beaten track. ‘The first person I cast in fact was BrÃd Brennan,’ says Marsh. The fact that Brennan had grown up in West Belfast during the troubles was significant to Marsh: ‘A lot of our actors were Irish and that was important firstly because it felt like they knew this world better than I did and I felt they could help me and guide me.’
When English actress Andrea Riseborough, who plays lead Collette McVeigh, came on board, she moved to Belfast and spent time with some people who were at the centre of the conflict. In this way she was able to really inhabit the part. ‘Once you understand all the things [Collette] might have had to sacrifice, you can start to instinctively feel what characteristics she might need to survive,’ Riseborough says.
This detailed research and dedication to the facts can be felt in the profundity of the performances, but the one thing that doesn’t ring true with this film is the fact that, although it is set in Belfast, it was shot in Dublin – a seemingly major inconsistency, both politically and visually.
However, cinematographer Rob Hardy explains that Shadow Dancer is set in the 1990s, at the end of the troubles and the beginning of the peace process: ‘It was a tired world, a place where people were wanting to start anew. You sense that idea of transition and that longing to move on.’ Shooting in Dublin meant they could avoid the classic red brick estates that are associated with the Falls Road and the Troubles films. Shadow Dancer‘s distinctive grey tones seem to more accurately capture what it felt like for the people still living this worn-out war in the 1990s. ‘We tried to create a Belfast that was a Belfast for our story and so we were quite cavalier with our choices,’ explains Marsh.
But it is the choices such as this, where fiction is allowed to speak more freely than fact, that furnish this film with a reality that is more compulsive and, in a sense, truer than bare facts can depict, and that enables us to really feel what it was like for people living through the conflict. ‘You want to make the details of the world convincing and to pass the test of those who lived through it, but at the same time, I think the bigger imperative here is to make something so we can all understand what it is like and something that is true to itself,’says Marsh.
Based on the novel How I Fixed My Hair after a Rather Long Journey by: Norman Wilwayco
Cast: Timothy Mabalot, Marife Necesito, Palito
Philippines/Germany 2012
75 mins
Although Filipino director Khavn de la Cruz has made 33 feature films and 100 shorts, British festivals have tended to ignore his prolific and provocative output. The Edinburgh Film Festival rectified that oversight in June, providing the opportunity to see de la Cruz’s latest, Mondomanila, as part of a welcome focus on the vibrant cinema of the Philippines.
A joyfully outrageous slice of life in the slums set to a punky soundtrack, Mondomanila is a slap in the face of Western expectations of politely miserabilist depictions of the downtrodden. A hyper kinetic, super stylised wild carnival of the destitute, it follows a midget, a one-armed rapper, a ‘day-glo fairy’, a disabled pimp and their friends as they try to get as much sex and drugs as they can (‘the only solution to their problems’, we are told by main character Tony at the beginning) and tackle a racist white paedophile. A toothless showman opens this exuberant bad taste spectacle, promising something horrible and creepy, but the Mondo-style shockumentary aspect is underpinned by the crude reality of life in Manila, making the film vital and energising.
Virginie Sélavy talked to Khavn de la Cruz at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2012 about joyful poverty, black comedy, midget bars and Filipino cinema.
Virginie Sélavy: The title seems to refer to the Mondo films of the 1960s. Is that why you called it Mondomanila?
Khavn de la Cruz: Initially it was just a sound. I’ve always wanted to make a film with the word ‘Manila’ in it in homage to the two films considered the best in the Philippines, Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980) and Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975). And that was the best combination I could think of.
But there is an element of the Mondo films in your own work.
Of course, yes. The Mondo films want to show what’s supposedly real, but also play on that, what’s real, what’s not real, what’s surreal. So there will be expectations and some will be met and some will not, and I also like to play with that.
You start and end the film with images that appear to be real.
Yes, they’re from YouTube. The first images are of floods. There were horrible floods in Manila. That was pretty hardcore. And the images of the epilogue show the demolition of a slum, which happens quite often. That’s the way they dispose of the people and the houses when they want the property. More often than not, with the demolition there’ll be arson, they get rid of the community, but then the people come back. It’s quite absurd.
You bookend the film with those two sets of images that are real, but after the flood images you start the story with a toothless showman that seems to imply that what follows is not real, but a spectacle about the slums.
Yes, it’s like a circus. He’s also like a tour guide.
What’s the relationship between fiction and reality in the film?
The film is based on a novel by Norman Wilwayco, but it’s very different. Originally it was called How I Fixed My Hair after a Rather Long Journey, but I used Mondomanila so it’s also called Mondomanila now. It’s very naturalistic, very realistic.
Is the novel famous in the Philippines?
Cult-wise and critically yes because it won the main literary prize.
You have a lot of characters who are deformed or disabled in your film.
In the novel they’re not like that.
Why did you choose to have those characters in your film? Does it reflect reality or is it an exaggerated version?
Yes, it also reflects reality. I think both physically and psychologically, they’re all amputees and midgets in some way – we’re all freaks. It’s the whole circus vibe, the whole black comedy perception of reality.
Where did you find the actors?
I had wanted to make this film for 10 years. At some point a casting director was interested in helping me, so I gave him my cast of characters and he said, ‘you don’t need a casting director, you need a pimp and a circus man!’ A few of them, the one-armed rapper and the breakdancing pimp came from a TV show in the Philippines called ‘Talented Filipinos’, which is a freak show. It’s like Britain’s Got Talent, but freakier. I saw a clip later of the armless rapper, Ogo X, he was actually not just rapping during the show but also painting with his feet! I could have made a great poster. I had cast midgets in my other films, I get them in this place called Hobbit House. It’s a bar in Manila, in which all the workers are midgets, the waiters, the cooks, the bouncers, everyone, it’s like a family business. That’s where I auditioned. The lead actor was in another of my films, a collaboration with Copenhagen called Son of God. It’s about a midget Christ, and at one point he was interviewed by a paper about the setting up of a midget colony in the Philippines! I don’t know how that progressed.
Obviously, there are a lot of shocking things in the film, sex with animals, a paedophile, etc. Is it your intention to shock or is it part of the comedy? How do you intend your audience to react?
I don’t know. What did you think?
It seemed to me that the shocking aspect of the film was a way of dealing with the shocking realities of the slums and I liked it because the characters are not presented as victims, instead they appear full of energy and life and they are interesting because they are so unique. And I also liked the dark comedy and found it very funny.
Yes, I have to say that I’m really into black comedy. To answer your question, it’s all of the above. It is to shock, to inspire, to have fun, to cry, to be moved, every possible reaction, in any which way. It’s the same joyful poverty in Squatterpunk. It’s a documentary we made it in 2007. It’s a black and white silent film with an 80-minute punk soundtrack. There’s been a slum sub-genre in Filipino cinema started by Lino Brocka, and most of the films are depressing tear-jerkers, but Squatterpunk is saying, this is life and we’re enjoying it, we’re managing. It doesn’t just deal with poverty, it also deals with happiness, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have money in your pocket, you can still be happy.
Is it for the same reason that you end Mondomanila with a brightly coloured musical sequence?
Singing in the Rain! The original plan was to have a really happy ending. They are able to escape the slums with all the money that they got. And we wanted to end with a very colourful musical mob dance type of show.
It’s a bit like a dream.
But it’s also real. Physically, literally they’re getting out.
The music is very important in the film and you wrote and performed the soundtrack.
I compose most of the soundtracks in my films. Originally with Mondomanila, I wanted to make a Bollywood film, a rock opera, a musical. I composed a libretto, but we decided not to make that kind of version, with a complete song and dance after each major sequence. So it became this soundtrack.
Some of the music is quite punky. Would you say Mondomanila is a punk film?
Yes, but maybe not intentionally. People have always labelled me punk, and in terms of spirit, definitely, but it’s not literally punk.
Visually it’s very stylised, you use colour and black and white, photo-montage, split screens, etc. Why did you decide to use so many different types of images?
It’s like acupuncture, you want to hit all the points! Of course, you can appreciate a film that is plain, simple, one tone throughout. But with this kind of film it needed something very eclectic, a mash-up aesthetic, as if each sequence was made for a different film by a different director.
You also have brilliant animated opening credits.
It’s done by the production designer, Dante Perez. He’s a cult comic and visual artist. He’s a friend but I didn’t know he made those crazy comics. When I saw them I said he should make the opening credits. And sure enough he made a terrific credit sequence.
You’ve made a documentary about the Filipino new wave, subtitled ‘This Is Not a Film Movement’, which also screened at the festival. Do you consider yourself part of this new wave?
Yes, because it’s not a movement! We can all be part of it!
Do you feel there is a common sensibility, spirit, or style?
It’s inevitable to have overlaps, we live in the same country, most of us are based in Manila, at some point there is definitely some intersection. The Filipino new wave is more like the digital revolution. This definitely didn’t happen before, even though the spirit and the talent were already there. In the 80s, there were wild, crazy films that were made, but just shorts. No one was able to make a feature. And they were very limited in terms of budget, they could not really express themselves. With digital, they can shoot anything and really take risks.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy
For more information on Mondomanila and Khavn de la Cruz, please go to his website.
The multi-talented Khavn de la Cruz also performed at the Edinburgh Film Festival with his band The Brockas, which included fellow Filipino Emerson Reyes and festival director Chris Fujiwara on that occasion. They scored Manuel Conde and Lou Salvador’s 1952 Gengis Khan, which was one of the first Filipino films to be shown in the UK (and was shown in Edinburgh in the 1950s).
An austere film, and a hard watch in some respects, Belá Tarr’s The Turin Horse is also extremely rewarding. The film is an oblique take on an anecdote about Nietzsche, which recounts how the philosopher protested at a man who was beating his horse in Turin. The story has inspired many interpretations; Tarr chooses to focus on the horse, the man who owns it and his daughter. Set in a bleak, constantly wind-swept landscape, it is a soberly apocalyptic tale, a sort of creation story in reverse, as the characters’ world is gradually diminished and restricted over the course of six days until total darkness engulfs them. Tarr has said that it was his last film, and the disappearance of light at the end makes it a particularly poignant farewell to cinema.
Virginie Sélavy talked to Belá Tarr at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2011 about slowness, simplicity and Nietzsche.
Virginie Sélavy: The constant wind in The Turin Horse made me think of Victor Sjö;strö;m’s The Wind. It makes everything very claustrophobic. Was that the effect you wanted to create?
Belá Tarr: No, we just wanted to show you something about the power of nature. Since The Damnation, I’ve always thought about the questions: what is the power of humanity, what is the power of nature, and where we are, because we are a part of nature.
The Turin Horse has a very minimal set-up: a man and his daughter in hostile nature.
We were thinking, if God created the world in six days, what is happening now, and how we should destroy the world during those six days. We just wanted to say something about the six days, about the horse, and what is happening with the coachman if he doesn’t have a horse anymore. He will die, like his horse, because he has no work, he has no money, he has no life.
You said in the Q&A that it was the reverse creation of the world, the end of the world: every day the two characters have to give something up. There is an ominous, apocalyptic feeling about the film.
For me, the apocalypse is a big TV show, it’s a lot of things happening, it’s a really big event. And the way I see it, the end of the world is very simple, very quiet, without any show, without fireworks, without apocalypse. It’s just going down and getting weaker and weaker and by the end it will be over. The problem is, we have just one life, and when you get to my age you will see very clearly how the rest is shorter than what is behind you, and in this case you have to think about what you have done and what will be and what else you can do.
There is very little dialogue in the film and the longest speech in the film is made by a neighbour who comes round to get more pálinka. What he says is quite oblique, but he repeats, ‘they’ve debased everything’ and seems to be connecting ‘debasing’ and ‘acquiring’. Is that something that reflects your personal feelings about the world?
No, he’s an alcoholic guy, he’s run out of alcohol and he needs some more, and while he’s waiting he’s talking and this is his vision: how we touch something and how we can make it dirty because we are dirty. He’s repeating the words in a crazy way and saying nearly the same thing but it’s not the same.
You said in the Q&A after the screening, and this is something that emerges from your other films too, that there’s something that has gone wrong with the world.
It’s not as simple. At the beginning, when I was 22, I had a lot of power and I had big ambitions, I wanted to change the whole world. I was not just knocking but beating on doors and my first movie was full of energy, like a hurricane or a big storm. And it was absolutely against society. As I grew up, step by step, film by film, I had to understand that the world is a little bit more complicated. And the problems are deeper, maybe they’re not just social problems, maybe they’re ontological problems. And then I had to understand that it doesn’t only depend on people, maybe they are cosmic, universal problems and the shit is much bigger than I believed when I was 22. And I understood that it’s really hard to say something about the world and I learnt I have no right to judge anything. I cannot say anything is good or bad because I have to accept the world, and of course I have to accept and respect people. And that’s what we created, this is the world, it’s our world. And if we want we can change, but if we don’t want, nobody will change. That’s why it’s so complicated. And I’m just a poor filmmaker. We just wanted to show you something, some pictures, just some human eyes, something that is close to you.
Is it because the world is so complicated to talk about that you’ve made your film as simple as you could?
Yes, sure. I learnt and I wanted to make a very simple movie without judging, just to show really clearly what could happen and what has happened with the horse, because that is the main question.
Apart from the horse, are there other connections with the Nietzsche anecdote?
The Nietzsche story tells me very clearly about our limitations. We create some theories, or we create something, it doesn’t matter what, maybe just a table, and we believe so much in our creations and then we are faced with something like Nietzsche was, faced with the horse and the coachman beating him. And all of his theories were gone, he just stood next to the horse and he was protecting him with his body and hugging his nape, and that’s it. And you should see very clearly that all of our theories may be fake, may be wrong, and we have to understand and get closer to the real things. Of course, I was reading Nietszche and I know his theories very well. And the main issue when he says that God is dead is quite clear and really simple. I understand why he’s built this übermensch theory but we just wanted to show you that the world is maybe simpler, maybe richer.
Why do you prefer to work in black and white?
Because it’s very stylised. When you see a black and white film you don’t think you’re seeing reality. It’s not. You see immediately that it is a creation. I really don’t like colour movies because every colour is too naturalistic: on the one hand totally fake, because the green is too green, the blue is too blue, the red is too red; and on the other hand, you get a very naturalistic picture at the end. It’s far from you, it’s not my style.
Your work is also characterised by a very slow pace.
In the last 20 years, what I did was I was just destroying the stories and I tried to involve some other element like time, because our lives are happening in time, like space, natural elements – rain, wind – animals – street dogs, cats, horse – and lots of things which are a part of our lives. And when I go to the movies and I watch some real movies, what I see is a really simple thing. They are following the story line – information/cut/information/cut/information/cut, or action/cut/action/cut/action/cut. But what do we call information? What do we call action? Maybe dying is also information. Maybe a piece of wall, or when you are just watching the landscape and it’s raining outside, is also a part of time – and also part of our lives and you cannot separate that. And when we only give information, which just connects human action, we are in the wrong. I wanted to look at things and say this is also information, and if somebody is listening this is also information. And if I just see someone’s eyes, it’s also information, and not everything has to connect the primitive story line together, because anyway, the stories are not interesting anymore. If you read the Old Testament, everything is in there: how it started, Cain kills Abel, and then someone fucks their mother, and then there’s the holocaust and the mass murders, everything is in there. You cannot create new stories, it is not our job to create new stories. Our job is very simple, just to try to understand how we are doing the same old story; because we are repeating the same old story but of course everybody is different and everybody has some power to influence their own lives, and this could be interesting – because the differences are always interesting.
You show similar scenes day after day but with small variations, and it seemed to me that the film was about the incremental, almost imperceptible way in which things change.
Yes, it was very important to show the differences. Daily life is always monotonous, you wake up in the morning, you get up, etc. But every day there is always some difference.
You co-wrote the screenplay with László; Krasznahorkai, on whose novels your films Sátántangó; and The Werckmeister Harmonies were based. Can you tell me more about the way you work together?
We met in 1985. A friend of mine gave me the manuscript of Sátántangó; and I immediately fell in love with this book. I called László; Krasznahorkai and we met at Easter and from that day until the end of this movie we had a strong relationship. He didn’t come to the locations, sometimes we showed him some rushes, or the rough cut, but in our case the rough cut is nearly the ready movie. It was simple because we never talked about art, we always talked about life and real human situations, what happens to different people in reality. I had to find a way to make a movie about his novel, because if I missed anything I’d be in the wrong. I had to understand his novel and then I had to go back to reality and find the same thing that he was watching when he was writing the book. And this way I can have my point of view, which is mostly the same as the book, and then I will make a movie about this reality. I’m not working from the book directly, I have to go back to his reality and then I have to build up the film language, because literature is one language and film is another, and you cannot do a direct translation.
Sion Sono’s latest film, Himizu, is an urgent and topical film. Located in the midst of the devastation caused by the 2011 tsunami, Himizu shows a society which is not only physically destroyed but also falling to pieces socially. Fifteen-year-old Yuichi Sumida (Shôta Sometani) lives with his neglectful mother in a boat hire shop. His drunken father only lurches into view when he needs cash. Sumida is also the object of a school girl crush on the part of the hyper Keiko (Fumi Nikaidô), to whom he is (at best) indifferent. The boat house is also a gathering place for a disparate bunch of refugees who serve as a Greek chorus and attempt to help Sumida in his troubles even as he hopelessly pursues his wish to lead an ordinary, normal and boring life.
John Bleasdale talked to Sion Sono at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011 and asked him about adapting a manga, incorporating the tsunami in the film, and softening his trademark violence.
John Bleasdale: When did you decide to adapt Minoru Furuya’s manga?
Sion Sono: It was before the earthquake: what we refer to as 3/11. Actually, I had already completed the screenplay when 3/11 happened, but I had to adapt the script after 3/11. The original screenplay was very faithful to the manga, but I could not ignore what had happened and continue to make the film.
The film is very different from the manga, especially the ending.
The manga was published 10 years ago, when Japan was a little more peaceful, and a little milder compared to now. Minoru Furuya wrote about a life of boredom and peace and the endless continuum of those days, but after 3/11 we were in a situation where we were living the unordinary, and the unordinary became our daily lives. The unending unordinariness is what we’re living now. The time has completely flipped. The manga is more depressing, because it was written in a more peaceful time. Now we’re not living in a peaceful time; we’re not secure enough to show these depressing things. That’s why it changed.
How did Furuya react to the changes?
He is very jealous, and he said, ‘I’m not going to read the screenplay because if I do, I’m probably going to give lots of notes, but as long as I don’t read the script I won’t feel I have to make any suggestions. So I’m just going to wait until you finish the film and then watch it.’
During the production was there any difficulty shooting the film?
The schedule for the principle photography didn’t change that much, as it was a low-budget film, and my crew wasn’t too open to incorporating the events of 3/11 into the film. But it was what I wanted to do, and so I very hurriedly rewrote the script because we already had a date to begin shooting.
In the film the protagonist seems to become a comic-book superhero, a masked vigilante, but that seems to be a parody almost, an idea that fails him.
[SPOILER] Looking back I agree, but he was in no way trying to be heroic. By committing parricide, he actually wants to kill himself, but in the time that he’s deliberating, he decides he wants to commit one good act for society, for mankind, before taking his own life. And he felt that to find and kill somebody who is obviously evil would help others. [END OF SPOILER] So it’s not like he’s a Kick-Ass type of character – he’s not a geek, he doesn’t read superhero comics – it’s not as if he’s emulating those heroes.
Like the anti Kick-Ass?
Maybe not even that, because he doesn’t have the reference.
Can I ask about the use of music? What influenced you in choosing Mozart’s Requiem and Samuel Barber?
When I was in editing, there was a melody that would haunt me. I wanted to be faithful to that, and I thought Mozart’s Requiem would be too easy a choice, but it’s just the best. It’s not about it being a requiem – that’s not the significance. It’s more about the melody. And I had seen a couple of films where there is a main theme that is repeated with variations, and I found that effective, so I always wanted to try that with the Requiem.
Were the ruins used in the beginning and closing of the film real?
I did actually go on location to a place that was hit by the tsunami, but I didn’t shoot the location like a documentary at all because Himizu is a feature film, a drama. I wanted to film the place in an un-documentary way, which is to say we had a different way of shooting. We had a very long tracking shot that showed the rubble, which is something a documentary film wouldn’t do – it will give you an idea of how vast that landscape is. It is very dramatic, as nothing in particular is going on, but it just shows you the scope of the devastation.
How did the actors react to being in a ruined place?
We actually shot the scenes very quickly, right before the light failed, so maybe three hours, four hours tops, and within that time frame I didn’t want to make it a big production, so we just had the actors and the cameraman. It was beyond a director directing it. The actors hadn’t been there before, they hadn’t seen the place where the tsunami hit, and so I was just filming their raw reaction.
What is the film’s relationship with violence? Is it an aesthetic choice?
In just this film?
In all your films.
I haven’t really compared them to others, and I can’t really talk in relation to other people, but it is quite normal for me. Say you have a Francis Bacon painting, and you go to Francis and you say: ‘Francis, you have very violent, grotesque expressions – why is that?’ He’ll probably just say, ‘that’s the way I draw, that’s the way I paint’. It’s like a tick. Like a tendency, or habit. It’s not that it has come out of a place of intent, it’s not planned in a conscious way. Like you see the sky, and some people will see it red. They don’t see the blue in the sky, and you might say where’s the red. I don’t see that.
There is much less violence in Himizu than in your previous work. The film is softer.
Yes, you are absolutely right. I think I was more restrained in my expressions of violence, but it’s funny because people keep asking about the violence in the film. I feel that it is much tamer than my previous films. Violence isn’t a theme of the film, and there are so many violent films, so why do mine stand out? I didn’t want to show the murder too graphically, because it is such a sad scene. I didn’t want to emphasize it.
There is poetry in the film. Do you still write poetry?
Before I started making films, I wrote poems. One day I realised that I had started making films instead of poems, and now I don’t write films any more, but all the impulses and passion I put into poetry, I now put into my cinema. It’s like making films is like writing a book of poetry.
The adolescent point of view is very isolated. The parents and the schools are not there, and the kids have to do it themselves. Were you influenced by any films told from the child’s point of view, for instance The Tin Drum?
The Tin Drum is one of my favourite films, but this was an adaptation of a manga. Within it, there was the character of a policeman who showed understanding for the boy. I didn’t put him in the film, because I wanted the boy and the girl to be (as you said) isolated. I wanted them to work things out, to drive the story; the world’s most isolated and alienated characters.
On TV we see that everything is in order now in Japan, but in the film there is chaos.
Journalism, I think, may not reflect the truth, so maybe it shows only a part of what the youth in Japan are going through now. Some journalists will say that the smiles are returning to the faces in Fukushima, but actually I went back a week ago to where we shot, and I didn’t see anyone smiling. Everyone is living in misery, and you can see the disparity between what is being reported and what is happening. In this sense my film is truer than the journalism.
Throughout the film we hear the sound of the earthquake, giving us the feeling that the earthquake is about to happen again. Could that be a social earthquake?
Yes. Absolutely, the apprehension of not knowing what is going to happen at any time. Ambiguous worries about what will happen in the future. To visually or cinematically convey that sense, I used that sound.
The community act as a second audience in the film. They seem to be the only community that works…
Yes, those characters had suffered so much. They had hit rock bottom and so they are able to bond. I went to the area that was hit most by the tsunami, and there were many bonds that were created as families lost members.
Is this an optimistic film?
I am going to make a film about Fukushima next, which is going to be much more about dealing with reality. This film in a way doesn’t feature radiation leakage issues that much, because if I delved into that, it would be too much. But with my next film I’ll deal with it. Talking to people, interviewing people, investigating – that is not optimistic or hopeful at all. The process itself… I am doing it so that I will find hope, but it isn’t optimistic now. To cover your ears isn’t good. You have to have the clarity and everything out in the open in order to find hope.
Interview by John Bleasdale
Watch the trailer:
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
