SHORT CUTS: IAIN FORSYTH AND JANE POLLARD’S FILMS FOR NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS

Alan Vega (Tender Prey)

Format: CD + DVD

Release date: 2009

Distributor: Mute

Directors: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

Titles: From Her to Eternity; The Firstborn Is Dead; Kicking against the Pricks; Your Funeral, My Trial; Tender Prey

Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work is showing in the BFI Southbank Gallery until 11 July 2009.

To mark the re-release of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ entire back catalogue, the band commissioned artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to make short films to accompany the albums. Each film consists of interviews with people who worked on the recordings, music journalists, fellow musicians and fans, edited into a structured monologue. From Her to Eternity, The Firstborn Is Dead, Kicking against the Pricks and Your Funeral, My Trial were released in March 2009. Next up is Tender Prey, which was screened at a special event at the BFI on June 17, followed by a Q&A with Forsyth, Pollard and Nick Cave. Virginie Sélavy talked to the filmmakers about the ideas behind the films and their connection to their art work and their installation Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, currently showing in the BFI Southbank Gallery. For more information on Nick Cave’s re-released albums, please visit the Mute website.

Virginie Sélavy: How did the project come about?

Iain Forsyth: We met Nick (Cave) through doing a little bit of work for Dig, Lazarus, Dig!. Nick asked us if we would do the videos for that album, and whether we could do something in a slightly different way to the way music videos normally get done because he got a bit bored with spending an awful lot of money on those big-budget promo videos, which then never get really shown anymore. So we did four videos for the album with the budget that was set aside for one video.

Jane Pollard: The whole thing came about from that first meeting and from Nick and Warren (Ellis)’s idea that we might be able to approach video making in a different way as the landscape for music videos and what they mean for a band’s album campaign is changing very quickly. We started with this little set of one-minute clips for YouTube, which were really good fun to do and were real ice-breakers in the project. But we also started talking about the reissue collection. Mute wanted to have some sort of video content for each of the albums and Nick said, ‘What would you do? The last thing I want is a standard music documentary’. We told him about this way of working that we’ve been using in our art work, this kind of head-and-shoulders, straight-to-camera, very engaged, very conversational, kind of stitched monologue way of working. So we did a test shoot with about five of our friends who were Bad Seeds fans. We didn’t know if it would work. Most of the work that we make is about a much more abstract sense of what music means to people, so it’s more unusual and surprising and vague, and we weren’t sure whether we could tie it down this particularly, but it worked really well. We showed this five-minute example film to Nick and Warren and they said go for it. I think their fears were that it would seem too self-congratulatory, they didn’t want anything that seemed like they were giving themselves a big pat on the back. People are incredibly passionate about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds so we have hours and hours of footage of people simply saying, ‘they’re the best band in the world!’

VS: How did you select the people that you interviewed?

IF: It rippled out in a way. We started with what was closest to us, people that we knew were big fans. We spoke to the band and they pointed us towards people who worked on the records, they gave us a starting point, and we asked those people who we should be talking to, so that rolled out and out and became this absurdly long list of probably about 500 people in the end.

JP: It’s like a chain letter. We wrote an invitation letter and it was really anybody who had any connection, it could be one song or it could be with a whole album, it didn’t matter to us as long as there was this passionate connection. And for some people, it was because they’d worked with the band so it’d become part of their story as well. Then we put out a call to fans as well, we did that through the forums, using a web page. We got thousands of responses and we were looking for the way in which someone presented themselves in writing to get a sense of whether they would be able to tell their story in an interesting way.

IF: I think also that one of the unique things about the band is that they’ve been to so many corners of the world over the years that almost everywhere you go there’s a pocket of people connected to them in some way – people who knew Nick when he was living in Brazil, people who hung out with the Birthday Party in Australia, people who were in Berlin when Nick was there and were in bands that played with the Bad Seeds. It’s like a weird sort of social network. There’s a lot of really weird connections.

JP: We’re always looking for those kinds of connections. When we’re telling a story in this way, in this abstract, disjointed kind of monologue, it feels to us like a single head, rather than the 40 heads that it actually is, a single voice that is actually a bit schizophrenic.

VS: That really comes across in the Tender Prey film. The way you edited the interviews together makes it feel like all the people talking are having a dialogue with one other, and that there’s one thread of thought that runs through the interview. Was that one of your rules in constructing the films?

JP: Yes, absolutely. It’s a kind of device and structure that we’ve used in our art work before so we’re quite well practised at working with a lot of material. We had at least 40 minutes per person, so we had to go through it all to pick the bits that we liked. It’s quite an intense experience because you have to immerse yourself in all of the footage so that you begin to hear those conversations coming out. When we started making work like this in 2001, we thought it was about finding people saying the same thing. But when you edit it together, people saying the same thing is really dull. What’s much more powerful is when it is about people almost finishing each other’s sentences and taking a point or a word and spinning it off in another direction. So sometimes all we’re doing is listening for the repetition of a particular word or a phrase, like a lot of people would use the word ‘cave’ but as a verb. They would say, ‘it feels like the music is caving in on you’, and suddenly you can go from that to ‘Cave does this and this in his music’, and you’re able to tie stuff together through onomatopoeic and poetic structures.

VS: You’ve had an interest in contemporary music throughout your work. You have recreated musical performances with A Rock’n’Roll Suicide (David Bowie) and File Under Sacred Music (The Cramps). What is it that interests you in creating artworks around music?

JP: I think that our work has always used music as a kind of catalyst, as a device to lead to other things. The reason why we use music is that we think the relationship between the artist and the audience in music is a far more appealing one than the one between the artist or artwork and the viewer in art. That seems quite an odd relationship, it’s often quite distant. But in music, and certainly in the music that we love, that relationship is central to everything. And when we were art students we had this really naive passion about wanting to try and make art that operated in that way. So without becoming musicians or being in a band, without having to deal with what we see as the limitations of that discipline, we decided that we wanted to bring with us in some way the spirit or the attitude or the potential that music has in relation to its audience and the way that the audience takes and owns music and uses it in its life.

IF: We met doing our BA at Goldsmiths in the early 90s and at that time a lot of the work that students were making was quite heavily conceptual. It was just after the Damien Hirst/Frieze generation and a lot of those artists were successful at that time and the students that we were studying with were making work that on the surface we found really uninspiring. But they could talk a good talk. They could talk all day about how the work related to Derrida or another French philosopher. But we were just left very cold. So we’d be going to see our fellow students’ work and being really bored and then going to a gig and being blown away by this most visceral live experience, and there was something about that connection that we wanted to try and emulate in some way.

JP: It was also about understanding that it’s too easy to believe that that connection is about the authentic moment, that somehow that’s more original and more real than the kind of constructed or inauthentic object. It’s not, we all know that bands go out and do the same performance night in, night out, that it is constructed, that it is rehearsed. But there is still something in the way it presents itself that creates an emotional connection with you. Our artwork, at that time, from the mid- to late 90s, looked at that sort of contradiction, and played with it. So we looked at staging gigs in galleries. The thing that interested us the most was the idea of reconstituting something, and the most extreme example of this was the piece we did where we incredibly accurately re-enacted the last ever Ziggy Stardust show from 1973. We did a stitch for stitch, word for word representation, we put together a band, we rehearsed them endlessly. It was about this enormous human endeavour with the absolute understanding that it was going to fail, that we couldn’t transport you back to 1973, that it couldn’t be perfect, that it was going to fall down in so many ways. But there’s something about this kind of endeavour, its earnestness, its craftsmanship in some ways that we hoped would have an immediate and powerful emotional effect on the audience, that it would be like oscillating between this understanding of it being fake, but real, because it’s here, it’s happening, and it’s connecting to you in the moment, and understanding that there’s something nostalgic in it. It was an embarrassing work to make, because it’s also tied up with things like tribute bands.

IP: It was pretty uncool… (laughs)

VS: You’re now exploring similar ideas in your new piece, Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, which is currently showing in the BFI Gallery. Do you feel your interest has shifted from music to film or is it just a way to explore similar ideas in a different medium?

JP: I think part of it is about wanting to reach more people. By using moving image, it can exist in real time for a long time, rather than in the moment for one night.

VS: What was the idea behind Radio Mania?

JP: It comes in a direct line from the very first bit of work we did with moving image, which was the Cramps piece, where instead of recreating a gig, we attempted to remake a bootleg video, like a video document of that gig. With this piece, we wanted to place the audience right inside a moving image environment. Iain had read about Laurens Hammond, the guy who invented the Hammond organ, who had invented this amazing Teleview 3D system in 1922, which lasted for 24 days in a New York cinema and then was completely ripped out and never seen again. We get really interested in this sort of edge science, weird things that people are doing, whether it’s trying to contact the dead or trying to make a transmitter or a receiver that is able to hear sounds from 100 years ago, whatever it is, we love that sense of pointless endeavour. And it was through looking at this Teleview system that we stumbled onto The Man from Mars in the BFI archive, which was the film that was commissioned to show off the system to everybody, and was the second 3D feature that was made…

IF: …which I think was also appealing, the idea of it being the second ever feature in 3D. It’s such a beautifully tragic thing: that would really annoy you, because I think the first was only literally a couple of months earlier, so it wasn’t like there was a huge gap, so there must have been a point where they thought they were on the verge of delivering the first ever 3D feature, and to be the second must be a little bit frustrating.

JP: And the film has within it stories of pointless endeavours, like the guy who’s trying to contact Mars through the radio, and the notion of the dream used to allow a whole set of events to happen and then you find out that it was just a dream. It had so much of this in it that we got excited about this theme of the film, and it gave us the device we needed to be able to stage this immersive moving image environment.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Interview with George Clark: ‘The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema’

Les Jeux des anges

ICO ESSENTIALS: THE SECRET MASTERPIECES OF CINEMA

Special Preview Weekend: Tate Modern, London, 18-21 January 2008

‘Dreams’ UK Theatrical Release: 25 January 2008

Further details here

The re-appropriation of avant-garde ideas and techniques by the mainstream is an old story but the increasing number of artists choosing to work in film and video and the expansion of what is called ‘artists’ film’ have convinced the Independent Cinema Office that it is time to re-assess the influence of these ground-breaking works on the wider visual culture. To do this they asked six young curators to put together programmes of artists’ films around the themes of ‘Dreams’, ‘Modernity’, ‘Expression’, ‘Protest’, ‘Play’ and ‘Pop’. These include well-known works such as Un Chien andalou and Invocation of My Demon Brother alongside rarely screened films such as Walerian Borowczyk‘s Les Jeux des anges or Santiago Alvarez’ 79 Springs of Ho Chi Min. ‘ICO Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema’ will be shown at a special preview weekend at Tate Modern in London from 18-21 January before opening across the UK from Friday 25 January. We talked to George Clark, one of the curators, about the selection of films and the objectives of the project.

Virginie Sélavy: The idea behind the programme of films that you’re curating is to show the influence of artistic, avant-garde films on mainstream popular culture. How do you feel that this selection of films will achieve that?

George Clark: Artists’ films have historically been put at the bottom of the pile, so it’s trying to look at it the other way, actually artists were the first people to do things that were then picked up by everyone else. With this programme we’re consciously trying to open up the debate about where artists’ film is situated and talk about artists’ film as an umbrella for avant-garde, experimental, all those different things, and take a step back from all those little niche groups and look at the bigger picture. It’s trying to re-assert the position of artists’ film and its influence on the mainstream. One of the big areas is the use of music: Kenneth Anger was the first filmmaker to use found soundtracks for his films, now that’s completely natural; and similarly the idea of music videos, you get someone like Peter Whitehead, who really pioneered that form. My programme, the ‘Dreams’ programme, which is looking at the fantastic in the last century, has all kinds of influences on figures like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam or the Quay Brothers. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the mainstream but it starts the ball rolling, which is then picked up by someone like David Lynch, which is then picked up by someone else and ends up in a car advert or on a television show.

It’s interesting that you mentioned using ‘artists’ film’ as an umbrella term because the terminology has always been problematic, you have ‘avant-garde’ in the 1920s, ‘experimental’ in the 1940s and ‘underground’ in the 1960s. Now it seems that the accepted term is ‘artists’ film’. Do you think this is a better term for this?

I don’t know, I think it’s sort of clumsy, especially the Arts Council’s favourite, which is ‘artists’ moving image’, which I think is…

It’s a bit long…

(laughs) Yeah… But I think ‘artists’ film’ defines artists’ practice and in some ways experimental film or those other terms are loaded with an agenda in terms of aesthetic criteria, and I don’t think that really relates to artists’ work with film and video now. I don’t think it can be defined in those strict rules that you had in the 60s, anti-narrative, anti-representational, etc. Now you see artists’ films which could be anything from Matthew Barney’s epic, almost musicals re-imagined with Vaseline to really pared-down, minimal sort of films like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. You get this whole spectrum as well as people continuing to work in traditional hand-made films, DIY films. So I think it’s better because it bridges these different periods and it represents what’s happening now, the proliferation of people working in different areas, not just in the cinema, but a broader cultural range, from artists’ film to feature films, to installations and interventions in the political environment. So in one way it describes what happens now but it also tries to find links rather than create oppositions.

How did the idea for the project come about? Why do something like this now?

It was partly based on the expansion of interest and activity around artists’ film and video, loads of things are happening, especially in the art world, there’s been a huge explosion of artists working in film and video. In some ways we felt that there was a missing link that connected what’s happening now with what was happening historically. A lot of things that were happening in the art world referred back to what was happening in the experimental film movement. We felt that there was a bit of a missing link in the fact that artists are increasingly showing works in museums and galleries and cinemas are becoming more and more restricted in the stuff that they’re showing and there’s no connection made between the two. And people know about the contemporary work but there’s a gap in awareness of the historical work.

There’s a bit of a paradox there because the films that you’re showing were made as acts of resistance or subversion specifically in opposition to mainstream culture but their stylistic innovations have been appropriated by mainstream culture and used to promote exactly what these filmmakers were opposed to in the first place. How do you feel about that?

I think culture is about this mixture and dialogue, and in some ways this appropriation and theft and misunderstanding. It’s part of how culture works and it’s one of the things that’s interesting about it. There’s definitely an argument that you should always try to remember the original context but when things are made they’re out there to be understood as well as misunderstood. And one way of approaching it is how work finds it way within culture. With a lot of these films, people have seen the films that refer back to them, so people might not have seen Maya Deren but they’ve seen Lost Highway by David Lynch that refers to that. They may not have seen Un chien andalou but they’ve seen an episode of the Simpsons that refers back to that. So that’s the other thing we’re interested in bringing back, the original referent.

Did you think of actually screening the films and the works that they’ve influenced, in comics, ads, design, along with the original films?

Yeah, it’s an interesting idea. It sort of turns the project into an essay. We felt that the work was already recognisable to other mediums today. So we were more interested to bring back those works in a way that would be accessible to a broad range of audiences and venues so those connections could be made.

Do you think that if you had screened, say, music videos, you would have attracted a younger audience that might not come otherwise?

I think it’s a balance. People quite often do that, find the hook to get people in, and you show something populist and mix it with something else maybe not so well-known. Putting the programmes together opens up the possibility for other people to make those connections and to contextualise the project by showing the films in the way they want to. But our interest was to look at where artists’ films are positioned and often when things are paired together it can happen that the real event is the feature rather than the short that goes with it. And we were interested in turning that upside down, so the real event is the artist’s film, and rather than bringing people to see music videos it’s about how actually artists’ films were happening before music videos.

Do you believe that people will make the connections?

I think making that connection is one way of approaching the project. And partly what we’re interested in is try and generate a bit of mystery around the programme, it’s part of the title, ‘The Secret Masterpieces’, it’s like the most influential films you’ve ever seen. It’s playing on that proposal; if you think you know cinema, you might know one type of cinema but this is something else.

Things can also work the other way, for instance filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and George Kuchar have taken imagery from pop culture and re-appropriated it in their films. You are showing films by these filmmakers but they’re not grouped together so there doesn’t seem to be a specific focus on this. Why not?

We didn’t want to create battle lines between artists and pop culture, and that’s the good thing about this term ‘artists’ film’ because avant-garde film is against everything else whereas artists’ films have been intimately involved with pop culture and have had this total overlap and leakage with artists going into making feature films and feature filmmakers going into experimental work. So rather than examine that one strand, it’s part of that appropriation that happens, it’s part of a broader range, so you get things like this William Klein film that’s the first Pop Art film, it’s an homage to Broadway, street signs, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and it’s totally in love with these logos, or like George Kuchar, the head-over-heels melodrama but not in the way you’d ever see. We see that as part of what should be on offer. It’s artists’ film but it’s for and it’s against popular culture and it’s about how it intersects with it and it’s about trying to show that sort of spectrum.

The films are grouped into six different themed selections, ‘Dreams’, ‘Modernity’, ‘Expression’, ‘Protest’, ‘Play’ and ‘Pop’. Why those themes?

It’s again trying to take a step back and create a really broad theme. Each of them is curated by a different curator and the brief that they had to respond to was to deal with the idea of essential works, classics works, what could you understand as classic now and try and marry that with the theme. It was quite a challenge because people are used to doing something that is thematic and there was a lot of debate, people wanted to follow up a specific theme and actually you need to look at the broader picture. It’s tempting to look at music videos and artists’ film and get into that one area but it’s important that it’s that breadth that’s maintained. The themes emerged out of thinking of the last century and the different movements within visual culture and art history. I didn’t want to deal with this historically, I didn’t want to do realist films from the 1950s, or post-modernist videos from 1983 but instead try to connect disparate periods. With the ‘Dreams’ programme the rough brief was to look at surrealist films and psychedelia. The ‘Play’ programme was to look at Dada and post-modernism. So rather than deal with any of these on its own, it was about trying to find the connections between the two. The ‘Modernity’ programme is a kind of Bauhaus, early modernist works into appropriated culture, consumerism and the way people relate to modern society. So each of the programmes bridges two different periods and tries and brings those together and looks at different ways of approaching the last century that aren’t historical.

One of the programmes seems particularly wide: ‘Expression’ – you could have everything in there!

Partly that was thinking about Abstract Expressionism to punk or something like that but one thing that was important was that it was that open and that the curators could figure out their own response to it and what ‘expression’ really means. The title is really obvious but [curator Ian White’s] interpretation isn’t so obvious, it looks at personal films and what that means, and the starting point of that, thinking through intimate, diaristic films like Sadie Benning’s, the videos she made in her bedroom, moving back to more abstract reflections on what expression means. And in some way expression is defined by its inverse so it’s also the idea of inhibition, expression that is stopped or channelled. The first film in this programme is called Invitation au voyage, by Germaine Dulac. It’s a silent film and it all takes place in this exotic nightclub and it’s incredible, it has this strange, seductive atmosphere. Everyone has their collars buttoned up and it’s a kind of stiff silent film atmosphere but it’s really potent and evocative because of the fact that no one is expressing themselves.

Will the curators be there to introduce the screenings? Because from what you say it sounds like their interpretation of the themes is quite important.

Yes, all the curators will be there apart from Tanya Leighton who curated the programme on ‘Pop’, she’s going to be in Colombia, but everyone else is going to be there. Rather than do a history of artists’ film from one perspective I wanted each programme to have quite an individual take on what would the history of artists’ film be and what are the classical works because that’s a hugely contentious thing so it’s important that there is plurality. Each programme proposes slightly different things, it’s not really unified, some works that people chose other people hate, it’s part of the project. We really wanted to involve that room for reflection. There is a necessity in some ways to get people in to see stuff, to say these are the best works, but it’s also quite an unfashionable thing to do and a lot of people don’t like that. So it’s trying to find a balance between making that claim, that these are the greatest hits or something, and to have that reflection on what that means to assemble all this and what it means to interpret the histories that have been written which have their own emphasis on certain areas, and the way history is not objective, it’s subjective.

The ‘Protest’ programme curated by the Otolith Group in particular sounds very interesting. Why did you ask them to curate a programme?

We were really interested in getting people who were young curators, or people who have a very strong involvement with contemporary artists’ film now, so not necessarily people who’ve been programming strictly experimental films. We approached them because of their own work, we wanted to bring in the artists’ perspective and people working in a multi-disciplinary way, and also to tap into their involvement in essay film. They are artists and writers as well, and they’re a very articulate, reflective, conscious group. They did this big project around the Black Audio Collective recently, it’s an amazing project that is touring around; it’s still due to come to London. Partly because of their own work they are aware of the history of different movements, the intersection of feature films and artists’ film. It’s exciting the way they’re trying to rethink these sorts of positions now. They came up with some really great stuff.

You curated ‘Dreams’, in which you included films such as Un chien andalou and Meshes of the Afternoon, which are fairly well-known and are screened regularly. Why did you choose to include these films rather than give space to more obscure films?

Partly it’s trying to create a dialogue between different sorts of works. And also Meshes of the Afternoon does get screened a lot but you kind of take it for granted how many people have seen that. It’s probably read about or cited more than it’s seen. And part of the project is pitching into the Sunday classics that cinemas have, where they might show The Seventh Seal or A Bout de souffle, and to try and think how you could package together artists’ films to work in that way, like a repertory programme, things that should be on and should be accessible all the time. So it was really important to have certain works that really stood out and that the venues would feel comfortable with. It’s a way that you could smuggle things in that aren’t so well-known. All of the programmes balance one or two well-known works with less well-known things.

In your programme you also have Les Jeux des anges, Our Lady of the Sphere and Asparagus. They offer very different takes on the theme of ‘Dreams’. Why did you choose those films in particular, because again, with a topic like this, there’s a lot of choice…

I was interested in representing a broad spectrum of works and inserting things that came from different definitions of what an artist’s film would be, works that people might not necessarily see as artists’ films, like Borowczyk who went on to make feature films, and was discredited as an eroticist. He made some fantastic features in the 60s and a series of animations prior to that but he isn’t really classed as an artist filmmaker, despite the fact that he has all the credentials, he was a painter, but because he worked in the film industry he’s kind of left out. So we’re really interested in bringing in someone like that. Same as Švankmajer who kind of sits on the edge, and having those in parallel with Larry Jordan, who’s very much in the canon of experimental film, a contemporary of Stan Brakhage, very much involved in the Canyon Cinema Group, in the American independent film scene. He’s made feature films but people see him as an artist. And Les Jeux des anges is a film that has had an interesting relationship to experimental film. It famously won the Knokke Festival of Experimental Film in Brussels in 1958 where it beat Brakhage and Agnès Varda and it circulated a lot in student film circuits. But it’s been in this terrible, discoloured, beat-up print so it’s been a good opportunity to re-invest and bring back a film that’s been out of circulation for ages. There’s never been a 35mm print in the UK and that will stay here after the project. So we’re also looking a bit strategically at how we can make those works available, balance things that are accessible but also use the fact that we have a bit more weight and a bit more funding with this sort of project to bring in other things that might not have been in there.

And what about Asparagus?

That’s a great film. It’s similarly left out because there’s a lean to animation, and maybe that programme represents that area more than the others. Asparagus is on the border between the indie and animation circuits, and it’s one that makes a really interesting connection back to Meshes of the Afternoon. It’s that elliptical narrative, Moebius-strip style, a circular narration that goes in and out. It’s such a trippy film, it has these fantastic colours and it really acknowledges that; it ends with a scene in a cinema where the woman opens her purse and releases all these fantastic patterns. It’s like an Oskar Fischinger film, an early abstract film. I really like the idea that it’s spectacle but in a way that you never see anymore. People talk about spectacle in cinema but it’s rarely as enchanting or as magical as when artists deal with it. Asparagus really stands out, it’s not embarrassed to deal with colour and exuberance.

What kind of audience are you hoping to attract with this programme? Do you think that this will work towards expanding the audience for this kind of cinema?

We tried to pitch the programme so it can touch different bases and it fills the gap that is not really catered for, which is people who are interested in the cinema and in the visual arts who might not have access to this sort of work around the UK. You can’t get through to an audience until you get through to a venue so part of the project is to try and make an argument about why a venue should show this stuff. The project tries to open up their idea of cinema, to get them to think that actually artists’ film is part of what they do. So we’ve been quite conscious in choosing the films because cinemas are very quick to dismiss experimental films because they don’t really see it as cinema. But as soon as you have someone like Buñuel, Jean Vigo, they’re like, wait a second, that’s a feature filmmaker I know. So it’s trying to make the argument that they can show artists’ films, that it’s not something that they should be worried about, that it appeals to a broad range of audiences, rather than try to go after the experimental hardcore pound. Artists’ film is not just about the ultra-cinephiles who’ve seen every film but haven’t seen these one or two; artists’ film is if you’re interested in cinema, in visual arts, music, fashion and design, it has all of that, it relates to all those areas, and it’s much more open and broader than cinemas necessarily give it the benefit for.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

SHORT CUTS: THE LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL

Philip Ilson and Kate Taylor

London Short Film Festival

4-14 January 2008

ICA, Curzon Soho, Roxy Bar and Screen

LSFF website

This year’s London Short Film Festival is the fifth organised by Halloween, but the first to run under that name. Halloween co-founder Philip Ilson explains: ‘When we started the festival four years ago we were actually going to call it the London Short Film Festival but we thought that by calling it Halloween – because we’d been using the name for a few years – it’d help to have that kind of ongoing connection with what we’d been doing. And also I think the pressure would have been on quite a lot at the beginning if we’d called it the LSFF, which has happened this year. I think there is a certain amount of pressure for us to deliver something that might be considered more mainstream than what we’ve done in the past. But it’s still us, and the only difference this year is that there are going to be more industry-based events because we’re linking up with people like the Film Council and Shooting People.’

Overall the programme follows the same template as in previous years, with shorts gathered into loosely themed selections – comedy, horror, love, experimental, and a Fortean Times-sponsored night of general weird stuff. Turntable Café will be organising a night of British-centric visuals while Darryl’s Hard Liquor & Porn Film Festival are coming all the way from Toronto to present work. In spite of the name, it’s not a porn festival, but rather a comedy event: Darryl’s co-director Jill Rosenberg’s entry at last year’s Halloween was Origasmi, an origami sex film.

Music is again an important feature of this year’s festival with events featuring XX Teens and The Young Knives. Says Ilson: ‘We link up with organisations that we like that are doing interesting things. Transgressive Records are an independent label, they’ve got lots of up-and-coming young bands like Foals, Jeremy Warmsley and The Young Knives. The Young Knives got a few filmmakers to make a video for each track of their new album. We’re going to premiere all the videos – which will be on the album released later that month – and the band will do a live set afterwards.’

As in previous years, there will be retrospectives of directors whose films have been regularly screened at Halloween events. This year, the focus is on Asif Kapadia, who presented his masterful second feature Far North at the London Film Festival in October, and Jes Benstock, who won the award for best film at the first Halloween festival. Benstock gained notoriety for his music videos, including one for Orbital, but over the years he has become more of a documentary filmmaker, though this is not a path he had deliberately chosen. ‘Creative life tends not to work in straight lines’, explains Benstock. ‘I started with a half-hour film called Poof, which wasn’t a documentary as such but was real-life filming in real time. But it wasn’t well received so I thought I’d do something else for a while. I did a lot of interactive art and art installations, and then made videos for live music shows. Then some people I knew were doing an audiovisual programme for ITV with VJs and DJs. I’d been VJ-ing for a while, but this was a chance to create a ten-minute audiovisual work with no editorial control. It was a chance for me to experiment. The first one I did was Baby Dreams, which was a conjecture of what my then three-month-old baby son would dream about. There was a lot of colour and animated toys as well as people and family gatherings. I found it really interesting so I did another called Phosphenes, which are what you see when you close your eyes. It was a ten-minute animation with the music of Professor Oz. I really liked the idea of combining the visual elements of animation with documentary so I moved in that direction.’

This year, the festival’s women’s award will be given by Club des Femmes. Sarah Wood, who won Halloween’s best film award last year with I Want To Be A Secretary, runs Club des Femmes with Selina Robertson, a former programmer at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Wood and Robertson started Club des Femmes to show experimental work by women filmmakers. ‘We use a lot of old artists’ films which we want to re-contextualise. We choose work that is innovative, pioneering and adventurous so we match up well with what Philip does with Halloween’, says Wood. ‘For the festival we wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Kathy Acker. We love her and we thought it would be interesting to show films that pay tribute to her work and combine that with readings of her writings. She wrote about inappropriate and radical sex, so we’ve chosen films with the same kind of sex-positive ideas.’

The festival has always been an occasion to link up with organisations outside of London and to showcase their work. Last year, 7inchCinema came down from Birmingham and this year it’s the turn of Bristol Meth, a collective of artists led by David Hopkinson. ‘Bristol Meth is based around three films made in Bristol’, says Hopkinson. ‘One is my video art piece called Cutting Up My Friends, which is about the mix of people who are part of the Cube cinema. Then there’s a film called Get Good, an extended music video by Frí ní§ois and Rozi Plain, who are musicians and animators. It’s a very sweet love story about the start of a relationship but it’s also very experimental. The third, Don’t Do Tricks, is a skate film by Lady Lucy and James Canyon. It’s a day in the life of a feminist skateboarder. All the films are underground, self-funded indie films made in Bristol around the same time, featuring some of the same people and locations. I put them together as I thought they were interesting as a trilogy. They’re often shown accompanied by live music. They show the cross-fertilisation going on in the underground Bristol scene. It’s all based around the Cube cinema, which is a very important meeting point for creative people in Bristol.’

With such an array of juicy delights, it looks like the London Short Film Festival will live up to its bigger, bolder name: it’s good to see that, despite the influx of sponsoring money, the projector’s teeth are still as sharp as ever.

Lisa Williams and Virginie Sélavy

51ST LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REPORT

Tom Huddleston and Virginie Sélavy report on the hits and misses of the 51st London Film Festival.

HITS:

MISTER LONELY (Harmony Korine)

A pure pleasure: joyous, kaleidoscopic, fragmentary and incredibly silly, Harmony Korine’s return feels almost like the work of a different filmmaker, a man baptised by fire and chronic depression, now returned with a new fervour and passion for film and life itself. That is, until you get to the part with Werner Herzog as a flying priest. Tom Huddleston

FAR NORTH (Asif Kapadia)

With Michelle Yeoh magnificent in the central role, Asif Kapadia’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut feature The Warrior is another stunning epic fairy tale set amid breathtaking landscapes. Against the savage beauty of the Arctic Circle, in an environment where life is a constant, violent fight for survival, an increasingly tense triangle develops between two women and the escaped soldier they have rescued. At a time when there is so much angsty questioning about the state of British filmmaking, it is baffling that such a beautifully accomplished film should still be awaiting distribution. Virginie Sélavy

I’M NOT THERE (Todd Haynes)

Not for everyone, but a pure joy for Dylan fans, this is a bit of a nerds’ compendium, overflowing with in-jokes and witty asides, and some of the greatest music ever recorded (and, in some cases, re-recorded, for the most part very tastefully). Not all of it works, by any means, but what does is so dreamlike and involving, so vivid and original, it’d be a hard heart who didn’t come away feeling something. And Cate Blanchett’s performance is quite simply uncanny. TH

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett)

Newly restored by the BFI, Charles Burnett’s 1977 neo-realist look at life in the ghetto is a beautiful, heart-rending film. Weighed down by his dehumanising job at the slaughterhouse, Stan sleepwalks through his life, unable to respond to his wife’s loving gestures. Stan and his friends’ efforts to improve their lives seem vain, and even though there are some very warm, humorous moments – in particular the scenes of kids playing in the wasteland – all that remains at the end is sheer hopelessness: the film closes with images of Stan working at the slaughterhouse as Dinah Washington’s sorrowful ‘Bitter Life’ is heard on the soundtrack. VS

TALK TO ME (Kasi Lemmons)

Something of a no-brainer, this tells the story of loudmouth ex-con and DJ Ralph Waldo ‘Petey’ Greene, a no-holds-barred man of the people and civil rights agitator who ruled the Washington airwaves in the late 60s and early 70s. Recycling every cliché in the DJ-biopic rulebook, this manages to be totally familiar and consistently surprising, thanks in large part to the passion and drive of director Kasi Lemmons, a terrific period soundtrack, and an extraordinary central performance from the wonderful Don Cheadle. TH

FROZEN (Shivajee Chandrabhushan)

A graceful, elegant film, both visually and thematically, Frozen is a slow-paced evocation of a rebellious young girl’s life with her father and brother in the remote Himalayan mountains. When one day the Army disrupts the desolate peace of their surroundings and erects a camp opposite their house in order to fight some vague terrorist enemy, it is the first sign that the family will be forced to change their way of life. Elliptical and subtly suggestive, infused with thoughtful spirituality, filled with memorable images, it is a deeply affecting, soulful film. VS

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (De Fortabte Sjaeles) (Nikolaj Arcel)

Or, Harry Potter, Danish style. This is a rollicking kids’ fantasy, drawing on diverse sources (Scandinavian folklore, Buffy The Vampire Slayer) to create a dynamic, exciting and enjoyably daft mythos of its own. The special effects are cheap and cheerful and the action sequences may lack pace, but the script is witty and self-aware, the young actors striking and watchable, and the plot moves at a lick. Roll on the American remake. TH

PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud)

Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her own graphic novels deservedly won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes festival. Although the film is a necessarily stripped-down version of the two volumes, which respectively describe her childhood in Teheran and her exile as a teenager in Austria, the film version retains all the elements that made them so successful: the mix of Satrapi’s personal story with her country’s history, the wryly humorous look at the absurdity of political power games, the penetrating observation of both Iranian and European societies and the powerful contrast between cute, simple animation and the complex, tragic events it depicts. Full of life and irreverent spirit, this is a film that is simply impossible to dislike. VS

MISSES:

EXODUS (Penny Woolcock)

Like a bad school play with far too much cash behind it, Penny Woolcock’s latest is a desperately worthy, hopelessly amateurish plea for understanding. The idea is fine – a retelling of the Moses story in a modern context – but the execution is woeful, wildly unsubtle, battering us over the head with its sociological and political parallels, insulting the audience’s intelligence at every turn. The cast are awful, the script weak and the narrative laughable – overall, this is a misjudgement of epic proportions. TH

THE LAST MISTRESS (Catherine Breillat)

I really wanted to like Catherine Breillat’s latest. A confrontational filmmaker who has been unfairly and violently reviled simply for taking a brutally honest look at sexuality, Breillat has always had all my sympathy. A ma soeur was a stunning film; Anatomie de l’enfer was flawed but had the merit to radically question traditional male views of women’s sexuality; even when not entirely successful, her films are usually fiercely intelligent and thought-provoking. Sadly, this is not so in her latest work and The Last Mistress, centring on the character of a nineteenth-century femme fatale, has none of the punchy questioning spirit that made her earlier films so exciting. VS

LIONS FOR LAMBS (Robert Redford)

Interminable at 90 minutes, Robert Redford’s well intentioned but hopelessly toothless take on the war on terror has attracted publicity for its cast and its subject matter, not for the film itself. This is essentially three tedious conversations about the state of America, between Tom Cruise’s slimy senator and Meryl Streep’s disillusioned journo, between professor Redford and his apathetic student, and between two heroic American soldiers stranded on an Afghan hillside surrounded by jibber-jabbering Jihadi insurgents. Boring, worthy, pointless. TH
HIT OR MISS?

FUNNY GAMES US (Michael Haneke)

Michael Haneke has done a Gus Van Sant and remade his own controversial 1997 film almost frame for frame, only in a US setting and with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the hapless couple tortured by two freakily polite young men. Funny Games US offers the same unsettling and provocative dissection of our voyeuristic consumption of violence but adds nothing new to the original. VS

Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

El Topo

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 5-19 April 2007

Also available on: DVD

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Title: El Topo

Title: The Holy Mountain

Title: Alejandro Jodorowsky Box Set (6 discs)

On April 13th the BFI Southbank in London was packed with a motley crowd of Jodorowsky enthusiasts, from old-timers to young hipsters, from red-haired eccentrics to scruffy types in seventies cords. The Chilean-born director had travelled from Paris, where he now lives, on the occasion of the re-release of his legendary seventies films El Topo and The Holy Mountain and his first feature Fando y Lis. A long-running feud with former Beatles manager and film producer Allen Klein meant that for years they could only be seen on poor quality pirate copies – circulated with the help of Jodorowsky himself. The three films are now finally being made available in their fully restored splendour and the BFI season will be followed on May 14th by the DVD releases of El Topo and The Holy Mountain as well as a six-disc box set containing both films plus Fando y Lis and a ton of extras.

At the on-stage interview that followed the screening of El Topo the BFI audience were lapping up every heavily-accented word of the charismatic director. At 78, Jodorowsky bristles with youthful energy and playful humour. A wonderful storyteller, he regaled us with fantastic stories drawn from his colourful life as a filmmaker, comic book writer, Tarot reader and practitioner of psicomagia, swearing on his five cats that it was all true. We heard how he drank blood on stage during a happening in the sixties, how he secured Salvador Dalí­ and Orson Welles for his ill-fated Dune project by promising money to one and food to the other, and how he made a neurotic woman carry boules on her back for a week as psycho-magic treatment. A former mime artist, he even got up from his chair for a spot of moon-walking! This was a memorable evening, not just because Jodorowsky is an artist of such colossal stature but also because his joyfully anarchic attitude to life is so incredibly infectious.

Earlier that day Virginie Sélavy caught up with him and quizzed him about eerie sound effects, Sam Peckinpah and the ‘Conquest of Mexico’.

Virginie Sélavy: In a previous interview you said that when you’re making a film you’re in a state of ‘criminal ferocity’. I love this quote but what do you actually mean by that?

Alejandro Jodorowsky: One day I shouted so hard at a young woman photographer who was there for an interview that she started screaming and ran out. She was interrupting the creation. When you’re receiving something from your unconscious and other people try to tell you that they understand, that they can do it, that they can do it faster than you, you can’t receive the message from your unconscious. You need to stop the person because otherwise they will stop you. You need to be a criminal because you’re making your picture and you want to do what you want to do. Every time a person comes from the superficial world and they say, ‘I have an idea, why don’t we do that?’ I say, ‘shut your mouth, asshole!’ That’s why I say I’m a criminal there.

Your films have been described as ‘psychedelic head trips’, which I’ve always found rather lazy and reductive. What do you think of that description?

I make pictures for myself, I am not influenced by anybody. But in order to understand, some people need to put what they don’t know into something that they know. They know ‘psychedelic’ so that’s the definition they give. But when the year is over they will say other things because the mentality will change and they will see it in another way. For the moment they’re saying that it’s psychedelic because they were showing it at a time in the seventies when all the Americans were taking drugs. But I didn’t make my pictures under the influence of drugs. I made them because I have an imagination, that’s all.

One of the things that your films do best is to convey the strangeness of life – in the dysfunctional relationships, the deformed bodies, the violence – and the strangeness of death – in the surreal scenes where birds, flowers or ribbons come out of corpses. Is this what your films represent, this strangeness of human life?

I think life has two movements. One is the enormous desire of materiality to go to the spirit. And the other is the enormous desire of the spirit to go to materiality, to incarnation. In my pictures you have both: there are things that are dying and there are things that are born at the same time. It’s what I wanted to do at that time. But that was thirty years ago. They are not my pictures anymore. They were my pictures but now it’s a very difficult situation because I am doing promotion for something I did thirty years ago, you realise my situation, no?

Yes, I can imagine it’s quite strange… You have created extraordinary images so reviews of your films tend to usually concentrate on the visuals but it seems to me that the soundtrack is also very important.

Yes, the soundtrack is very important! I always think that I’m making musical pictures. But not musicals as you see here in the theatre. They call them musicals but they’re not, they’re just stories in which they put songs and dance. For me a musical is a construction in which images and music go together. The music is always sacrificed in movies; it just accompanies the story in order to produce subliminal sensations in the audience. You need to forget the music. Every time a man and a woman look into each other’s eyes you have the music, na na na, or they’re killing someone, boom boom boom, you have a strong rhythm. But that is not a musical. What I do is different. The music speaks as much as the image. It doesn’t accompany it; they’re both part of the creation together.

How did you create those soundtracks?

In El Topo I had a person who played the flute. I took a piece by Bach for instance and I took scissors and cut it and re-arranged the pieces in another order and then I made the guy play it on the flute. That was one musical idea. There was another idea that I called ’21 Friends’. I gave a musical note to my friends, do re mi fa sol la si, and then I asked them to come to my house and I was noting the order they were coming and I made music from that. Et cetera, et cetera… I was inventing ways to make music.

What about all the animal noises that you use?

In El Topo, when the second master is killed I wanted the mother to scream, and I wanted the sound of a bird, aah aah aah, but I couldn’t find a really dramatic bird sound. But I found a rat that sounded like a bird. It goes aah, aah, aah, but it’s a rat. When you make a picture there’s a person who sells you sounds. So you buy a sound, ‘which ones do you have?’ ‘I have an elephant, a butterfly, a rat…’ ‘How much for the elephant?’ ‘Ah, no, too expensive. What about this one?’ And you haggle and then you buy the sound. (laughter)

So it also depended on how much the animal noises cost?

Yes. Some noises I had to make myself. Nobody knows that but I made a lot of sounds. When the thieves attack the masters in The Holy Mountain I had a piano and I took a chamber pot and I started to hit the piano with the chamber pot. It was fantastic, the chamber pot made a fantastic sound! (laughter) No one has asked me about the sound until today, but I made a lot of sounds. And I worked with a fantastic jazz musician called Don Cherry. He was a hippy musician, he was always doing drugs, and he brought lots of musicians. One time I had 100 guys! I showed them The Holy Mountain and he made the music as he was watching the picture. Every time I discovered ways to make the music I needed.

One of the most remarkable things about your films is the fact that they go beyond any simplistic oppositions. For instance El Topo is neither a hero nor an anti-hero.

The good and the bad is the illness of movies. In 300 you have the heroes, the 300 kamikaze rugby men who are prepared to lose their lives and the thousands and thousands of monsters attacking them. It’s idiotic. It’s stupid. In all the American pictures you need to have the bad guy after ten minutes. In my comics I have heroes and heroines. In Meta-Barons and Incal I have a fantastic heroine. For the male society a hero is a man, not a woman. A man can be a hero, a genius, a champion or a saint. A woman can be a prostitute, a mother, a virgin or an idiot. These are the four options for a woman. It’s craziness. When you see an American romantic picture you always have a rich man who falls in love with a prostitute. It’s terrible. The industry has a poisonous mind. I think that now because I have nothing to lose. My pictures are there now so I can say everything I think! (laughter)

There is a brilliant scene in El Topo that seems to me to perfectly represent your approach: it’s the duel with the bandits. El Topo is facing the bandits in what looks like a classic Western scene. There should be a sense of high dramatic tension as they’re waiting for the signal to start shooting, except that the signal is given by a deflating red balloon, which totally undercuts the drama of the scene.

And they start to die slowly! Because I was against Peckinpah, because of the violence, and all the people dying slowly, so I wanted to make the bandits die really really slowly, without any movement. (laughter) I liked doing that!

So you were aware of Peckinpah’s work?

Oh yes, I was aware of him because I had no money, I had no equipment, I had no nothing but Peckinpah had a lot of money and he came to North Mexico to film in a village. He built roads to get to the mountain, created techniques for explosions, imported horses… And then he left and I used everything he threw away, the equipment, the horses, everything. I used it all so I was aware of Peckinpah! (laughter)

You shot El Topo

…where Peckinpah made his film. In order to go to a mountain, you need to climb the mountain. But when an American comes, he doesn’t climb, he says, ‘open a way for me’. They opened the way, it cost thousands of dollars, he shot the film and I found the way ready so I used it!

There is a fascination for spirituality in your films, but also at the same time a critique of spirituality, at least in its organised and dogmatic forms. The spiritual quest in The Holy Mountain ends with the revelation that the masters who preside over the world are in fact dummies. You seem to communicate the idea that there is no absolute wisdom, no ultimate answer, and that all masters and organised systems of thought should be rejected, is that right?

What I want to say is this. Humans have essentially four languages: intellectual language, emotional language, spiritual, creative language and material, body language. They are the four worlds. And the solution is not intellectual, it’s something you feel. The problem is that we’re in a society that poses problems to you, metaphysical problems, and there are no solutions to those problems. The solution is to be found in action. In The Holy Mountain, they need to go from the symbols to reality, from the fairy tale to reality. And from there you need to go to the heart, to creativity and to action.

In The Holy Mountain there is an amazing scene in which toads and chameleons dressed up as Conquistadors and Aztecs re-enact the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. It’s a brilliantly irreverent, hilarious scene and a ferocious critique of colonisation. Was this scene inspired by Antonin Artaud’s ‘The Conquest of Mexico’?

Yes, exactly. Artaud wrote a book called ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’ and he wanted to stage the conquest of Mexico. And I said yes, we can do it, but not in two hours, we can do it in two minutes. I will use toads and chameleons and I will make ‘The Conquest of Mexico’. I knew Artaud very well and I was inspired by him there. I wanted to realise his dream.

It seems to fit in quite well with your own ideas because for Artaud it was also a way of showing that Europeans and Christians were not superior to indigenous people and their ancient religions.

When the toads arrive you hear a choir of men who sing ‘Ein Zwei Drei’ in German: it was a Nazi invasion. In that scene I criticise the Spaniards who destroyed the beautiful Maya civilisation. And then I show the American tourists buying and today it’s an invasion of American tourists. It’s always about the invasion of poor countries by powerful countries. It’s the same in Santa Sangre and in El Topo. In South America you have rich people and the Church. The Church was a very big weight, it’s terrible the way they have influenced Mexico.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

For further reading, look out for Ben Cobb’s Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, to be published in July by Creation Books (it can be pre-ordered on Amazon). The book comes with high praise from Jodorowsky himself, who said during the BFI Q&A that he could understand his own work better for reading it!

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: THREE TWISTED FAIRY TALES

The Devil's Backbone

Format: DVD

Release date: 12 March 2007

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Title: Guillermo del Toro’s Collection

Includes: Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Mexico/Spain/USA
310 mins

Praised to death by critics and fans alike Pan’s Labyrinth has become the If You’re Feeling Sinister of the movie world. Both of these may be great works, but the febrile twee hysteria that has greeted them is enough to put anybody off. At least in the case of Belle and Sebastian, that album is truly their most accomplished. Not so in the case of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

Over the last fourteen years the Mexican writer/director has alternated Hollywood money-spinners such as Blade II and Hellboy with more personal works – Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and last year’s Pan’s Labyrinth. With these three films del Toro has created a world of poetic horror that has revitalised conventional genres – the vampire myth in Cronos, the ghost story in The Devil’s Backbone, the fairy tale in Pan’s Labyrinth. What makes the films so compelling is not simply their inventiveness, but the fact that, just like Asian film-makers Ji-woon Kim (A Tale of Two Sisters) and Oxide and Danny Pang (The Eye), del Toro is not interested in cheap thrills or mindless gore but in the creaky doors that a horror tale can open onto the darkest corners of human life.

While Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth each take on different figures of the horror canon, there is a striking unity in the worlds they create. All three are Gothic-tinged fairy tales, with a child’s painful initiation to death at their core. In Cronos Aurora silently witnesses her undead grand-father’s decay. In The Devil’s Backbone Carlos has to face his fear of a young boy’s ghost. And in Pan’s Labyrinth Ofelia has to perform a series of magic tasks to be re-united with her father, the king of the underworld. All three films unfold in the nebulous zone between life and death. All three convey the acute sense of loss felt not just by the living but also by the dead, by the orphan but also by the vengeful ghost, by all those who find themselves brutally thrown on either side of the impassable divide. ‘What is a ghost?’ someone asks in The Devil’s Backbone. ‘A tragedy condemned to repeat itself again and again.’ It is that tragedy that del Toro’s films narrate, again and again.

In all three films del Toro creates an in-between world that straddles fantasy and reality. Cronos’ vampire story irrupts into the daily life of an ordinary Mexican family, The Devil’s Backbone‘s ghost story is set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War while Pan’s Labyrinth returns to that historical period, alternating between the Franquist/Republican conflict and the Faun’s fairy tale world. Poised between magic and rationality, del Toro’s world has an exquisite ambiguity, brilliantly illustrated in a scene from The Devil’s Backbone. Its young hero Carlos, looking for reassurance after a night of frightful ghostly manifestations, enters the office of the orphanage’s doctor, the kindly Dr Casares. Lined with shelves filled with jars of deformed foetuses, this is not exactly the most comforting of places. Nor is Dr Casares’ response reassuring, as he warns Carlos against superstition. Pointing at the gruesome jars, he gently pokes fun at the locals who buy the liquid in which the foetuses are kept in the belief that it will cure everything. ‘If you believe in ghosts, you must drink some of this’, he tells Carlos. Understandably spooked, Carlos runs away. Once alone, Dr. Casares drinks the liquid from the jar he’s holding. Humorously deflating scientific certainties, del Toro depicts a rational world that is just as dark and disturbing as Carlos’ nightly encounters with the supernatural, the preserved foetuses belonging to the same unsettling realm as the ghost.

Each time the realistic background chosen by del Toro features a political confrontation – Mexico’s fraught relationship with the United States in Cronos and the Spanish Civil War in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Yet, del Toro has clearly very little interest in politics. While much has been made of Cronos as an allegory for the United States’ vampiric relationship to Mexico, the plot itself doesn’t really support this. And in the two Civil War films the fantasy world, being only loosely connected to its historical setting, offers no insights into the conflict. But Del Toro’s choice of setting is far from gratuitous: these dramatically charged situations set the stage for the urgent life and death choices that face the characters. Beyond that, what draws del Toro to these conflicts is that they are moments when reality in all its darkest excesses comes closest to nightmare: the monsters of fascism are as unlikely, as sinister, and as real as the terrifying creatures of childhood imagination.

This idea is also at the heart of Víctor Erice’s masterful Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and it is impossible not to think of this film in relation to del Toro’s work. Set in 1940 rural Spain, it subtly evokes the dreamy world of a child faced with death and the unseen horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Confined by censorship, it uses the occasion of a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein in the village to elliptically explore the anxiety and trauma caused by the war. Acknowledged by del Toro as an influence, it is a film whose quiet suggestiveness and nuanced poetry touch places that del Toro’s baroque opulence can never reach. This is not to detract from del Toro’s achievements for he has built a magnificent world. But the comparison with The Spirit of the Beehive reveals his weaknesses, which are most visible in Pan’s Labyrinth. In that film, unfettered by financial constraints, del Toro’s exuberant enthusiasm is allowed to run free, recreating his visions in their most literal, florid details. As a result, there are so many fanciful creatures, fabulous caves and extravagant monsters that there is no room left for the audience’s own reverie.

This is why Pan’s Labyrinth, the most lavishly produced of del Toro’s personal films, is also the least affecting of the three, both emotionally and intellectually. And if it is the one that has been hailed as a masterpiece, it may be because there is some confusion in the world of movie fandom as to what imagination truly is. Magicking up a multitude of bizarre creatures through high-tech special effects or impressive make-up tricks is definitely not what it’s about. And for proof you only need to look at the dismal Lord of the Rings trilogy: it has many weird creatures, all of them rubbish, and the flaccid, pointless world it creates has as much chance of making you dream as a tax return form. I certainly do not mean to place Pan’s Labyrinth on the same appalling level of worthlessness as the J.R. Tolkien/Peter Jackson franchise for del Toro has more magic in his chubby little finger than both of them put together plus the preposterous trilogy piled up on top. But when it comes to imagination, less is definitely more, hence the superiority of Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone over Pan’s overwrought Labyrinth.

Virginie Sélavy

Interview with the Brothers Quay

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 June 2006

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: The Brothers Quay

Cast Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna

UK 2004

95 mins

In the middle of grey, urban Borough the American-born identical twins and animators extraordinaire have transformed an industrial unit into an enchanted fairytale world, a delightful jumble of trinkets and quaint objects where antique clocks chime the hour and classical music plays softly in the background. This is where Timothy and Stephen Quay have been creating their astonishing animation work for over twenty years, including their darkly inventive short Street of Crocodiles (1986) and their feature debut Institute Benjamenta (1995). In 2005 they released their second feature, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. A surreal fantasy bathed in rich golden hues, it tells of a mad inventor who kidnaps an opera singer and takes her to his island to recreate her last performance. In preparation for the concert, he hires piano tuner Felisberto to ‘tune’ his fanciful, monstrous automata.

In an interview conducted in 2005 the Brothers talked to Virginie Sélavy about dream states, Cameroonian ants, Argentine literature and the frustrations that come from being under pressure to make a more accessible film. Their uncanny habit of talking both at once and finishing each other’s sentences made it impossible to disentangle their respective contributions, which is why they are presented here as one voice.

Virginie Sélavy:The Piano Tuner is only your second feature. Why did it take you ten years to make another one after Institute Benjamenta?

Brothers Quay: It took that long to get it off the ground. We went straight from Benjamenta to writing the script for this. We got development money right away from Channel 4 and within a year it was written but they just rejected it outright. They said it wasn’t accessible.

But they’d seen Institute Benjamenta

Yeah, well, they weren’t that crazy about that either… Benjamenta was started under somebody else and when David Aukin [Head of Film at Channel 4] arrived on the scene and was handed the film he didn’t like it at all. But then Terry Gilliam came on board six or seven years later as executive producer and immediately the French and the Germans put money down.

What’s your relationship with Gilliam?

We’ve known him for eighteen years. He’d seen some of our theatre work and he came to meet us and since then we’ve always been in contact. We did some preliminary designs for some of the monster creatures in Brothers Grimm – but of course they got chucked in the bin… We worked on some of his commercials. He’s on your side by his instincts. He just gets bigger money than us! (laughs)

Why do you think he’s seen as more accessible than you?

Well, he goes out and battles Hollywood, like for Brazil when he took out full-page ads and things like that. We wouldn’t do that. We’d just write a little note in The Guardian – or a postcard! (laughs) You have to be philosophical about it. So-called traditional narrative isn’t a huge obsession with us.

Yes, I can see that…

Although we both feel that The Piano Tuner is a compromise of some sort because the brief was to be more narrative and more accessible when the Film Council came on board. And I think it suffers because the script wasn’t written that way. They tried to get the film into a position where it could be shown in forty cinemas. And of course we knew perfectly well that it was impossible. But the sad thing was that the French and the Germans were on board first and they had approved the script as had the Japanese; and the Film Council came on board because the French, the Germans and the Japanese were already there and then decided to tweak the script. We had a lot of interference from everybody. Everybody had their own idea what the film should be.

So it hasn’t been an entirely positive experience.

No, not at all. It’s been a very unhappy experience. Not like Benjamenta, which might be a bit long, OK, but we made the film that we wanted to make. With this one there was a lot of pressure and it’s not something we’re used to handling. Nobody expects anything from animation so they leave you alone – if you want to get down on your hands and knees and move the camera, go ahead, who cares? (laughs)

Although there is no traditional narrative in Benjamenta, I felt that the story went from one place to another. I thought there was less of a sense of direction in Piano Tuner.

Oh, really? Other people have said that Piano Tuner is more narrative. It’s interesting you should say that because with Piano Tuner we were feeling that we were trying to hit certain narrative points which everybody felt were there in the script and therefore should be maintained. But with Benjamenta we didn’t have that, we were sort of cruising very quietly below the surface, like a submarine emitting its bleeps as it moves along. We were very true to Robert Walser [on whose novel the film was based] in that sense. It was sort of a quiet, zero land and we liked that. It allowed so much to be smuggled into the film. But we couldn’t smuggle anything into Piano Tuner because in the end it just got cut.

The subtitle of Benjamenta is ‘This Dream That People Call Human Life’. Could it be applied to Piano Tuner too?

Yes, because in a sense the starting point for this was… do you know the Museum of Jurassic Technology out in Los Angeles? It’s this quirky little museum run by a guy called David Wilson. When you enter and you see all the exhibits you have this eerie feeling that not everything is as it should be. There’s a fine line between is it fiction or is it genuine documentary evidence that he is producing. And one of these things was the Cameroonian stink ant that inhales spores [which infect its brain and cause its behaviour to change] and we used that in the film as an allegory of madness. That anecdote was really the starting point of the film. And we also used the idea of that famous Magritte painting Empire of Light, where in the sky it’s daylight and if you pan down it’s dark. We were interested in that sort of simultaneous in-between world. I think we might have aimed too high for what we wanted and didn’t pull it off, but these were the sort of things that we were using as framing devices for the story. That and South American literature, magic realism, which also adds confusion to everyone’s vision within the film.

Was The Invention of Morel an influence?

Yeah, it was very important. We couldn’t get the rights for it. We actually wrote to Adolfo Bioy Casares and he said, ‘sure, you can have it’, and then he wrote back a day later and he said, ‘I forgot, I gave it to somebody else’. (laughs) We found out that this guy, some Argentinean in Paris who’s had it for thirteen years, never got it off the ground but keeps renewing the rights. So Alan [Passes, co-writer of Piano Tuner]and the two of us said, well, let’s just work around the themes a little bit. So all you really have is the island, the tide, elements like that.

I thought you also kept the idea of people being replaced by their images and living this kind of eternal but illusory, disembodied life.

Yes, exactly. Perpetuum mobile almost, because at the very end the character in The Invention of Morel asks that if anybody should invent a machine capable of reuniting their images, they help him enter into Faustine’s consciousness, which is a little bit what the Felisberto character is attempting at the end of Piano Tuner. He claims to have succeeded – he says, ‘we’re together, buried among the rocks’. In his imagination at least he’s done it. The Invention of Morel was actually a homage to Louise Brooks – Faustine really is Louise Brooks. Bioy Casares was fascinated by her.

And there’s also the character of the mad inventor.

Yes, I think he features less in The Invention of Morel, he’s more like a shadow figure.

Why is the film called The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes?

It was the idea of a character who could hear at the most incremental level. Our whole idea of the Felisberto character was that he should be a kind of medium and earthquakes seem to follow him. At one point Dr Droz says something like: ‘do they follow you on a leash, like a dog?’ Droz wants to have a theatrical earthquake on stage as the showpiece of his opera and Felisberto sabotages it by pulling off a real earthquake. It probably doesn’t quite come off, it’s too abstract, we would have needed much more time at the end.

How did you create the visuals for the film?

We made designs for everything. The whole thing was built. The forest was there, the rocks, the bench, but there was no sea, that was just a blue screen. Actually there was water, but it was more like a giant puddle… (laughs) It was all built up to about one floor and then our model work was grafted and the sky dropped in. We built the whole landscape out of Portuguese cork.

Cork? Why cork?

It makes the best rocks. It’s what’s used for reptiles in museums. All the pet places buy cork for the animals, which is why when we tried to order a few slabs of cork we were told ‘minimum order is 100 kilos!’ (laughs) This giant sled came and we used it all. In fact we had to use another one. We wanted a sort of volcanic island and it gave that beautiful texture.

How do you work together?

We both build the sets, so one’s building the left wall and the other’s building the right wall for instance. You make a list and you say OK, we’ve got to build this, this, this, this, you start on this and I’ll start on that. And you’re always cross-fertilizing so it grows very organically. We don’t bring in other people to help, we don’t have a team of six people doing the mountains. We use one sidekick who helps gear up things technically sometimes but he’s really just a drinking partner… (laughs)

Do you ever disagree?

Oh yes, of course!

How do you sort it out?

Well, you have a firm argument. But also if we’re shooting something, we shoot it both ways, we shoot his version and my version and you decide on the editing table – you’re always much clearer at that stage. You just try things out. But we’re bound to have differences.

And how do you work with your writer, Alan Passes?

The three of us have always worked out the story together. For Benjamenta we’d meet every single day for three or four hours and hammer it out. But sometimes he feels he’s not part of this because the producers never consider the writer as being on board, he’s just invisible to them. Alan is a novelist, he has a novelist’s vision, a broader vision. We have an instinct for the sort of visual world that we want and the way the dialogue should be shaped. So he’ll contribute dialogue but he’ll also listen to our sense of dialogue. It’s a genuine rapport.

But also, I know that some people have said that in Piano Tuner it is as though the characters are speaking in code. Well, for us it’s important that people speak in code and that nobody speaks directly, like, ‘so, would you like a cup of tea?’ and someone responds ‘yes, I’d like a cup of tea’, ‘well, what kind do you want?’ That’s irrelevant to us. When Assumpta goes around Felisberto in the forest and says, ‘shut your eyes’, imagination is at work, and she’s challenged by it as is he. That’s why he says at one point: ‘I like living in somebody else’s imagination’. Things like that are important for us. But if you aim too hard at the state of the dream you can fall flat on your face because you have nowhere else to go. If you start in a more humdrum way, like Buñuel would, and then suddenly the dream erupts violently, it really stands out and it’s powerful. I think we may have misjudged on this one. We did try to aim fairly high right away to get into a nebulous dream state but people might just tire that there’s never a let-up, you never really come down and say, ‘come on, when is someone going to say something normal?’ (laughs) But we’re just fascinated by this kind of dialogue. In Tod Browning’s Freaks there is that amazing sequence when Randian, the guy with no arms and legs, is talking to someone, and you see him take out a box of matches and his tongue takes out a match, closes the box, does that little rotation, then strikes the match. The whole time they’ve had a dialogue and you don’t listen to any of it because you’re so compelled by what you’re seeing… (laughs)

Was Freaks an influence on the film?

No, not really, but it’s just fascinating that the visuals are so compelling. They could just be talking about the most banal things, which is what the guy is basically doing. But in our case we didn’t want to do that… because we didn’t have a character with no arms and legs… (laughs)

But there is an element of the grotesque in your film too, you have the automata, which are those bizarre part-human, part-machine constructions.

The idea with the automata was that there would be a contamination, that they really did infect people’s lives, that there would be a genuine contamination of elements. We wanted more automata but they said, ‘we’re paying all these actors, why don’t you use some of the actors?’ We were told, no excess of animation or automata, just keep the story moving along…

How you would describe your film to someone who has no idea about what you do?

Somebody wrote to us saying they thought it best that you should just wake up as it’s playing and then you fall back to sleep again and then wake up again and you just sort of drift in and out and in that way you would attain a better sense of consciousness about the film… So far it’s been misnamed as Gothic, no way is it Gothic, Gothic is better represented by Tim Burton. For us, a Baroque sensibility, or a mannerist sensibility in the best sense, is something we feel much closer to. The Baroque deals with the cryptic and the infinite and that speaks to us much more.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy