April 9, 2013
‘Bestiaire’ - Interview with Denis Côté

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Canadian director and former film critic Denis Côté began his filmmaking career with Les états nordiques (Drifting States) in 2005. In the following eight years he released six more features, exalting the critics at Locarno, Cannes and Berlin. His latest, Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear), was one of the few truly excellent entries in the main competition at this year’s Berlinale, going on to win the Alfred Bauer Prize.

From the 12th till the 23rd of April, Arsenal is holding a full retrospective of his work to coincide with the release of his film Bestiaire. Côté will be in attendance at many of the screenings as he is going to stay in Berlin for three weeks to teach a film seminar at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. I spoke to him on Skype and he told me about his plans for the seminar after discussing Bestiaire, his phenomenal, genre-defying portrait of animals at a Quebec safari park.  


To what extent did you refer to traditional bestiaries when coming up with Bestiaire? 

It was just a way to explain to my team what I wanted. In the beginning, when you say want to go in a zoo but don’t have a script, you still need to use some words. So I talked about these books, which were about how not to forget what an animal looked like, because there was no photography at that time, and under that animal there was a moral about life. So I said, “Let’s make it a sort of book, but there won’t be a moral to it.”

Still, it’s impossible to watch the film without having moral reflections.

[Laughs] Yes, that’s true. I wouldn’t say that the film is bigger than what I intended, but it’s certainly surprising to see how much darker it is. I went to that place without any intention of showing someone who is diabolical, or a situation that is shocking, or anything. I just asked myself: what is a zoo? For me, is a zoo a sad place? No. For me, is it a cruel place? No. So, what is a zoo for me? It’s an absurd place. You go there and you pay money to look at animals – it’s like an absurd ballet. So I thought, ‘Let’s make a film that’s going to be a sort of absurd song.’ But for a lot of people the film is sad, for a lot of people the film is shocking, for a lot of people it’s a pamphlet against zoos. Of course here and there you can feel the shots are telling you something, but I don’t want to be the one telling you what to think – as a director I’m ready to take all interpretations.

What are some of the more interesting interpretations you’ve received?

A woman at Sundance said, “That film is a horror film, sir. For 70 minutes there’s a sense of menace and I was always feeling that something would happen.” That for me was an amazing compliment, because the sound in the film has been created as a menace somehow. I told my sound editor, “Can you place a menace over the zoo?” That’s why the film for me is not a documentary, it’s more like a fiction, because there’s a desire for fiction. Another woman said, “It’s not a film about animals, it’s a film about an audience watching a film.” [Laughs] That was very interesting; I remember the second screening in Berlin was on an Imax screen, so I told my producer, “We need to stay, it’s an Imax!” There was a guy in front of us – he didn’t know we were the producer and director – and at some point he stopped watching the film and he started looking at everybody’s face in the cinema, for like two minutes! I don’t know what he was looking for. Maybe he thought, ‘Oh, it’s so boring, are people sleeping? Are people smiling, are they shocked, what?’ But he felt it was time to look at people’s faces. [Laughs] I’m about cinema, and I’m about language, and I’m about viewer expectations, so to me those are all compliments, much more than talking about, “Do we need zoos? Are zoos supposed to disappear?” Still, it’s a film with animals, I shouldn’t lie – these animals are my characters, but somehow I think it’s a film about cinema, about the act of viewing. 

I’ve noticed that animals appear in all your films in some form or other and it’s always in a disquieting relation to the human characters.

[Laughs] It’s very hard to answer that, but you’re right, there’s always an animal somewhere, like a mirror effect, or… I wouldn’t say symbolism or metaphor, because I don’t like that. I think it’s the easiest way to create mirror effects, because we think animals are so related to symbolism, that in the end we do it, consciously or unconsciously – they infiltrate our narrations and we just let it go. But I don’t have a specific definition to give you, maybe I should stop with that animal stuff… [Laughs]

You mention sound, which plays such an important role in Bestiaire. Could you describe how you directed your sound editor?

For me, sound is always very important, to create the off-screen, the hors-champ. With Bestiaire, I told my sound designer, “I want menace. Give me the feeling that something can happen at any time.” He said, “Like, an alien invasion?” I said, “Yeah, why not?” He said, “A zombie attack, something like that?” I said, “Yeah!” He’s been my sound designer for six films now, so we know each other pretty well. 

There are a lot of parts in the film – I shouldn’t tell you where – that are lying to you, big time. Like when you see the lions and tigers being aggressive in the cages, they’re not at all, they’re so happy to see us! Some zookeepers in Salt Lake City said, “You’re lying so much! We know how to look at tigers and lions, they’re so happy to see you and you pretend they’re angry at something.” I said, “Yeah, thank you very much.” I like to create something myself, I don’t want to abandon myself to reality, so I’m pulling the strings – I’m the puppet master. [Laughs] I would say 60% of the sound is totally recreated and I have no problem with that. Some documentary people, they look at me in a weird way when I say that, because for them you should never, never lie about the reality you’re filming. But I’m sorry, I’m a fiction filmmaker and I will always lie about that reality and it’s my pleasure to do so.

This is the second film you make that is in large part a documentary. In Carcasses you blended in a fictional narrative, while here you touch on elements of the art film and film essay, so obviously you’re not interested in strict documentaries. What does interest you in the genre?

When I started my first film, Drifting States, I thought reality was sacred and I should just film it without ever pushing it or deranging it. But then, around the Carcasses days, I thought, ‘We can’t just film that man all day long collecting these cars.’ More and more, I have a desire for fiction that I want to use against reality. Reality is not enough for me anymore, so when I go inside a zoo, I don’t feel it’s interesting to make film number 35 about a zoo. You will probably never see me do a full, normal documentary. I like films to look like reality, but they’re not actually possible. Like Curling: everything looks possible in that film, but not really. People who don’t like Curling say, “Well, that’s not possible. This young girl, she finds eight bodies in the snow and she doesn’t tell her father.” [Laughs] Except it is possible, but not really – it’s just a distorted reality. I like making films that look real, but there’s no real point of entry from a reality perspective. I’m attracted by this ‘one foot outside the world’ relationship with reality.

Although you didn’t write a script for Bestiaire, how did you plan it?

I knew there would be seasons and that would be the minimal structure of the film. Then, I knew I wanted to film energies between humans and animals. I wasn’t sure how to achieve that, but every time I would meet the zoo employees or other humans, I’d try to make them interact with the animals, lying or not, fiction or not. And I knew that I wanted to show the life of the animals, the death of the animals, the representation and the resurrection. But I made sure not to have too much structure, because in the end it’d look like a thesis film, like I’m trying to prove a point. The film is free for the viewer to associate stuff but at the same time you need to make sure it doesn’t look too random. Some people that don’t like the film say it’s random and there’s nothing. People who loved the film too much, they give me so many intentions, it makes it look super intellectual. I still think it’s a naïve film, for viewers that are ready to be viewers. I feel like today you just sit there and you wait for the solution. This film is not about solutions, it’s about being free enough to look for your own solutions. Those are my favourite type of films.

What are some examples of these films?

Sometimes my favourite films are films in which I think about something else – I’m not even watching the screen anymore, I’m thinking about the next film I’m going to make. Sunrise by Murnau – I’ve watched that film maybe 20 times, but I’ve never really watched it. It starts and I’m travelling around in my head and I think about other films I would do. Or when you watch a Claire Denis film, you know it’s not really about the quality of the narration; it’s about ellipsis and how she’s jumping from one sensation to the next. When I watch Beau Travail, I’m not really into her film, I’m somewhere else and that’s a good sign. Or Apichatpong [Weerasethakul], of course. We don’t say he’s one of the best filmmakers around for nothing. He gives you the liberty to be a viewer again. That Uncle Boonmee film, what is that? We can’t really say what it is, we just know it’s fascinating. 

I really like those films where you can’t say, “Oh, it’s a film about this, or that…” I’d prefer for people to say, “You need to see Bestiaire, I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just animals looking at you – you need to see that!” We should find that naïve way of looking at things again. It’s easy now to be cynical when you watch a film, so I just hope Bestiaire is… for kids! Some guy said, “You know that my cat watched your film?” I started laughing and he was like, “Really! My cat stayed there and when there was a human, he would look away, and when it was an animal he would stay inside your film.” That is so stupid to say, but it means something, there is something there – I don’t know how to put it into words, but some people say, “I watched it with my two-year-old and he was completely fascinated.” [Laughs] There’s a desire to go back to something very primitive with that film, I guess.  

So, you’re coming to Berlin for your retrospective at Arsenal?

Yes, I’m really happy about that retrospective. We like to say there’s Paris, New York, London or Berlin, so when it happens, I’m very proud. They also invited me as a teacher at the DFFB, so I’m going to be in Berlin for a full three weeks. In the beginning it’s to show the films and then I start at DFFB to give a seminar to nine students.

What’s the focus of your seminar?

I can do anything I want with nine students. They told me, “They should look at your work, they should attend screenings and you find something to do with them.” So we’re going to do short films – we’re going to sit down and talk about their ambitions and they’re going to do some exercises. I want them to go shoot 90 seconds of anything they want in a fixed shot and explain to us in what way those 90 seconds are interesting. That will be quite challenging for them, I hope. 

Have you taught before?

I was at Le Fresnoy in France. It’s a very elite school in the north of France and it’s very, very intellectual. I wouldn’t say I was fascinated by this intellectual aspect, but I went there and I’m a very concrete and pragmatic guy – I made seven films in seven years, so at some point you don’t have time to intellectualise too much. I don’t want to sit there all day long and hear about Jean-Marie Straub and Gilles Deleuze, you know? I’m more about how to find your leadership and your personality, find a camera and rent a truck and go improvise a story somewhere. When people will look at Bestiaire and you tell them that there was no script, it was shot in eight days over eight months and that’s the film now and it’s travelling all around the world, students are very sensitive to that. They feel it’s possible to make such a low-budget film and have it travel, so that’s what I want to share with them. 


Miguel Gomes, also a critic turned filmmaker, won last year’s Alfred Bauer Prize with Tabu, which was one the biggest arthouse successes of the year. Other than being a nice omen for Côté, who would amply deserve to enjoy the same success with Vic + Flo, I was struck by how closely Côté’s views about cinema and what film should achieve coincided with those Gomes shared in our interview about Tabu a few months back.  

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No Comfort Zone – Die Filme von Denis Côté (12.04 - 23.04.2013) | Arsenal, Potsdamer Str. 2, S+U-Bhf Potsdamer Platz

All films in the original French (Quebec) with English subtitles. Full programme here.

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A shorter version of this interview was originally published on Exberliner.

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Filed under: Denis Côté Interviews Arsenal Berlin Bestiaire Curling Vic + Flo Drifting States 
December 20, 2012
‘Tabu’ - Interview with Miguel Gomes

Miguel Gomes’ first two features—The Face You Deserve in 2004 and Our Beloved Month of August in 2008—piqued the interest of critics through their whimsical filmic tributes and meta-cinematic experiments, with some flagging the Portuguese director as an auteur worth keeping an eye on. This initial enthusiasm was validated by the premiere of his next film in the main competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Standing out as the most stylistically intrepid entry in an otherwise rather timid selection, Tabu was awarded the Alfred Bauer Prize for a work of particular innovation and went on to take the international festival circuit by storm, generating a torrent of acclaim that has consistently seen it ranked among best films of the year.

Split in two chapters—“A Lost Paradise” and “Paradise” (borrowed, along with the title, from F.W. Murnau’s 1931 Tabu)—the film is initially set in present-day Lisbon, where Pilar, a lonely spinster leading an emotionally vicarious existence, spends her days advocating human rights and worrying about her increasingly senile neighbor Aurora. The death of the latter initiates the second part, which is set in an unnamed African colony and is narrated by Aurora’s former lover Gian Luca, recounting their youthful love affair whose tragic end coincided with the fall of the Portuguese empire.

While the narrative, particularly in the Lisbon chapter, does at times tend to meander,  Tabu’s constant supply of stylistic flourishes is truly beguiling. Shot in gorgeous black and white—a velvety and highly contrasted 35mm in the first part and a grainier, almost tactile 16mm in the second—and projected in Academy ratio, the entire film pays loving tribute to a bygone era of filmmaking, adopting and playing with the trademarks of classic cinema to innovative effect. Most striking among these experiments is its revamp of the silent film in the second chapter: Gomes retains the diegetic sounds but keeps all dialogue muted except for Gian Luca’s melancholic voice-over. This device provides a novel manner of representing memory through film, for since Gian Luca is narrating to Pilar and Aurora’s maid Santa, we are never sure whose version of the events we are witnessing.

More than a simple exercise in style, the film touches on deeper issues, for example drawing parallels between one’s inevitable loss of innocence and youth to the contemporary psyche of Portuguese society and its relation to the legacy of colonialism. Still, whether Tabu does more than scratch the surface of these issues is open to debate, which is why I wanted to get the director’s take while he was in town for the film’s screening at the New York Film Festival.


Tabu is a very nostalgic film, not least towards cinema. As it stands out from most contemporary cinema, I was wondering how you would position your own work in relation to that of your contemporaries.

For me it’s very difficult to make a generalization. I know that I’m a Portuguese director making films in 2012. Even if there is a connection—as in the case of Tabu— with a cinema that does not exist anymore, like silent films and like classical American cinema too—even if I know that these films existed, that there is a strong connection with this kind of cinema, I’m aware that I’m doing a film nowadays, a contemporary film. So despite the connection with this cinema of the past, I hope it invents its own way to get there. I’m not just trying to copy formal aesthetics, to reproduce the way that cinema was made in the past. I want to invent a way to get to the sensations that I had watching these old films.

Of course, in contemporary cinema there are things that I enjoy and things that I don’t enjoy, but there is something—because cinema is more than 100 years old—there is something I miss. I think that cinema has lost its youth. The characters in Tabu, in the first part of the film, I guess they are missing their youth; I think that’s what they are missing, really. And I also think that cinema misses the youth of cinema. For instance, in Murnau, in the ’20s and the beginning of the ’30s, I think that viewers were more available to believe in the things that cinema was showing them, and I miss this innocence that was lost. So when I make films, I try to regain this kind of innocence and give it back to the viewer.

In contemporary cinema there is another director whose work I really like: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He’s also very attached to this idea of trying to regain something that in the history of cinema was lost, which is innocence. Cinema is like people: when you get older, you no longer believe in Santa Claus. But cinema, which I think is very linked to childhood, is a way to regain: even if you know that the things that you’re seeing are not true, you can regain—in the space and time of a film—something of this innocence. This is why you get touched by the unbelievable things that cinema shows you.

Is this why you generally avoid realism in your work?

Well, it’s just the fact that we are in a cinema theater: I think that real life is outside the cinema. For instance, I am really attached to musical comedies because I believe that cinema is better at inventing and not at trying to capture or reproduce reality. In most of the films that attempt to recreate reality, I think reality is better, because it’s more real. Cinema will always lose in this attempt, so I think it’s more interesting to have something that is not reality. There are different rules—the rules of a film should be invented for each film. But, of course, there should be a connection with the real world. If it’s only fantasy, it lacks interest for me, but I think that the world, the things that people do, the way they talk, everything that appears in a film should not be the attempt at reproducing reality, because cinema will always be less real than reality.

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This is an excerpt of my interview published on BOMB magazine’s blog, BOMBlog. You can read the full interview here.

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(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: Miguel Gomes Tabu Interviews Berlinale 
December 10, 2012
‘Funny Ha Ha’ (10th anniversary) - Interview with Andrew Bujalski

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As much as the filmmakers whose films it designates may have grown to hate it, the label mumblecore is pretty much indelible at this point. And while their resentment towards the term is understandable (it doesn’t have quite as romantic a ring as nouvelle vague, does it?), it nevertheless refers to the most creative and influential wave of films to come out of the US independent scene since the early ’90s. In this regard, it should be considered a badge of honor.

The film that started it all was Andrew Bujalski’s debut feature Funny Ha Ha. Produced in 2002, it spent three years accruing word of mouth on the festival circuit before receiving a theatrical release. When it finally did, it quickly turned into a small sensation. Shot on a shoestring budget with a cast of non-professionals, the film’s lo-fi aesthetic and highly naturalistic, unsensational portrayal of early adulthood was met with overwhelming critical enthusiasm and helped turn attention to the work of a number of other young, similarly inclined filmmakers.

Bujalski’s following two features—Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, released in 2006 and 2009 respectively—confirmed his early promise, establishing the 35-year-old as an auteur. This year marks the tenth anniversary of his debut and a newly restored 35mm print is traveling across the US to celebrate the occasion.

It’s been ten years since you made Funny Ha Ha. When did you last see the film?

In January. There was a new print, which I’d never seen before. I wanted to take notes on the colors in case there’s any reason to make another print down the line, so I watched it with an audience in Berlin. It was a strange experience, because it had been a few years. At the time that I made it, I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me that anyone would have any trouble finding their way into it. I thought it was a very straightforward story told in a very straightforward fashion. But watching it again this year, I thought, Wow, this is completely personal and completely particular and completely peculiar. It kind of amazes me how lucky I was that people did find it.

I feel that your films are the type that viewers will relate to differently depending on what stage of their life they’re in when they watch them.

Certainly.

So watching Funny Ha Ha in 2002 and 2012 could be a completely different experience. Have you noticed such a development with audiences?

Yeah. I mean, I would assume so; I haven’t done a thorough scientific survey of everybody who’s watched the movie. Although, just last week I was in Boston, and I was having a drink with a couple of old professors of mine and they were saying that they saw it differently now, because now they have kids who are in their early 20s. (laughs) It was a different experience for them to watch the movie thinking it was about their kids.

Obviously, it’s such a particular moment in a person’s life and we made that movie very much from within that moment. When I made Funny Ha Ha there was nothing ethnographic about it: I wasn’t trying to make a grand statement about what I thought it was to be 24, I just was 24. All that stuff was very real to me. So I think, if anything, if the movie resonates, that’s why: because it’s not told with critical distance, you’re really just looking at the Petri dish. So, who knows? I always intended it to be a personal experience for everybody who watches it. I think when you make a certain kind of movie—if you make a thriller, then you want everyone to jump out of their seats at the same time and if you make a slapstick comedy, you want everyone to laugh at the same time, but with this, I wasn’t leading an audience through a preordained set of responses. The movie only works if you bring your own thoughts and feelings to it and everybody’s gonna have a different feeling.

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This is an excerpt of my interview published on BOMB magazine’s blog, BOMBlog. You can read the full interview here.

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(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: Interviews Funny Ha Ha Andrew Bujalski Mumblecore 
October 23, 2012
‘La vie au ranch’ - Interview with Sophie Letourneur

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Released in her native France in 2010, La vie au ranch is the first feature-length film by 33-year-old Sophie Letourneur. Following a number of short and medium-length films that have garnered her awards from festivals across Europe, her debut feature continues her preoccupation with the theme of friendship among young women, frequently drawn from her own experiences.

In La vie au ranch, Letourneur turns her camera to a group of college girls living in a cramped apartment in Paris. A seemingly carefree and tight-knit life of parties and next-morning hangovers quickly reveals a deep-seated dissatisfaction in the protagonist Pam who, over the course of the film, grows increasingly detached from the friends she has had since high school, eventually escaping from Paris’ suffocating familiarity for the bohemian utopia of Berlin.

While the subject matter is hardly original, it is its treatment that makes La vie au ranch stand out. Demonstrating subtle tact and a keen sense of observation, Letourneur gradually constructs a compelling portrait of her characters through highly naturalistic dialogues and situations, which perfectly convey the characters’ emotional conflicts without resorting to sensationalism or ponderous sentimentality. Beyond successfully capturing a very defining transitional stage in a young person’s life, this deceptively simple film also addresses broader issues pertaining to the representation of femininity in cinema.

La vie au ranch is screening through Thursday, October 25 as part of BAMcinématek’s current series on the young French cinema group ACID. Although Letourneur was meant to be present for her film’s US premiere, the advanced stage of her pregnancy forced her to cancel her visit to New York. Fortunately, I was able to speak with her on the phone, learning about the extremely protracted and painstaking pre-production process that lent the script its striking authenticity and about the role gender politics play in her filmmaking.

Interview translated from French by author.

At the end of the credits you included the message “with nostalgic recollection of the group that we were.” To what extent is La vie au ranch based on your personal experiences?

The initial drive to tell this story is linked to events that really happened, that is, to my departure from a group of friends. As for the characters, they’re completely based on people from my life. I was living in a flatshare with my best friend, with whom I had a falling out; we all went on holiday, as they do in the film; and there’s even aspects of the film that I took directly from videos and recordings I had made at the time. The entire script was pretty much constructed around my memories, whether recalled or from these documents that I had made. I recorded a lot of things back then. There’s even whole sequences in the film that are reconstructions of dialogues that I had recorded.

So far you have always worked with highly personal material. Is this crucial for you or could you imagine working on stories that completely depart from your personal experience in the future?

Actually, I’ve just finished co-writing a script, which took me three years to complete, and though I feel very close to the material, it isn’t at all inspired by my own experiences. Ultimately, it is always related to me in some way, I can always somehow identify with my characters, but I think that’s the case for a lot of directors. I couldn’t write something that is too detached from my own personality, about a subject completely external to myself.

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This is an excerpt of my interview published on BOMB magazine’s blog, BOMBlog. You can read the full interview here.

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Filed under: Chicks Interviews La vie au ranch Sophie Letourneur 
October 18, 2012
‘Wake in Fright’ - Interview with Ted Kotcheff

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“It’s a friendly place. Nobody worries who you are, where you’re from. If you’re a good bloke, you’re all right. You know what I mean?” These friendly words offered upon arrival in the outback backwater of Bundanyabba serve as an introduction to hell in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright, an Australian film that despite receiving overwhelmingly positive critical reception when it premiered at the 1971 Cannes film festival has been all but impossible to see for the last forty years. Now, a new restoration by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia offers an opportunity to see this long-lost gem of Australian cinema.

In true Conradian fashion, the supposedly sophisticated John Grant arrives in town full of contempt for its yokel inhabitants—whose life seems to consist exclusively of binge drinking, gambling and fighting—only to be seduced by their savagery and readily turn into as depraved a beast as the worst of them. With stunning cinematography and truly remarkable performances, the film offers an unsparing portrayal of the Yabba, as the residents affectionately call the town, as well as the darkest recesses of the human soul. Though superficially comparable to the ‘hicksploitation’ wave of the 1970s —from Deliverance to The Hills Have Eyes — it offers a far more nuanced and terrifying study of its protagonists than these films with which it is regularly grouped. In fact, if there is one blessing from its disappearance, it’s that — by being re-released now — it transcends and subverts this established genre that the film actually preceded.

Ted Kotcheff went on to direct other, more immediately successful films, such as the first installment of the Rambo series, First Blood. I met with him on the evening that the restored version of Wake in Fright celebrated its American premiere at New York’s Film Forum. In a genial mood and not without manifest pride, he recounted the film’s incredible four-decade journey from distributors’ pariah to reinstated classic before discussing the themes and style that make his film as trenchant and haunting today as it was at the time of its original release.

I wanted to ask about the history of the film. There are various accounts of why it disappeared for so long. What is your take?

Well, you know, when a film fails at the box office—which it did—the people who distribute who are only interested in profit lose interest. The film didn’t do well in Australia, which is where it was made. I think the Australians perhaps took affront to the way Aussie males were depicted in the film. It did well, because of the Cannes festival, in France, but that’s the only country in the world where it did any business. And then they opened it here, but the distributor, United Artists, didn’t believe in the film at all. They said to me, “Americans aren’t going to come see this film. They’re gonna be repulsed by the kangaroo hunt.” And they opened it in New York, at a small cinema in the East Side, without any publicity whatsoever, on a Sunday night, in a heavy blizzard. Nobody came. They were right. They told me, “See, we told you nobody would come.” (laughter) So everybody just lost interest.

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This is an excerpt of my interview published on BOMB magazine’s blog, BOMBlog. You can read the full interview here.

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Filed under: Interviews Ted Kotcheff Wake in Fright 
June 24, 2012
Video Interview - The Family in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos

Earlier this month I posted my interview with Yorgos Lanthimos, published in Exberliner.

I had also made a recording of the interview for Cine-Fils’ series of thematised video interviews with filmmakers, which was published today. Our theme was ‘Family’ and you can watch the video on the Cine-Fils website.

Unfortunately, this time there is no accompanying essay. However, here are two excerpts from Mark Fisher’s excellent analysis of the role of the family in Dogtooth that elaborate nicely on what Lanthimos himself says in our interview:

“ “It’s very striking to see that, as the century draws to a close,” Alain Badiou writes in The Century (Polity, 2007), “the family has once more become a consensual and practically unassailable value. The young love the family, in which, moreover, they now dwell until later and later. The German Green Party … at one time contemplated calling itself the ‘party of the family’. Even homosexuals … nowadays demand insertion within the framework of the family, inheritance and ‘citizenship’” (66). It is possible, despite all the parental cruelty, to read Dogtooth as a satire on the sociological tendency of the young to “dwell within the family until later and later.” But the significance of the film, particularly in the decade of Fritzl, is to highlight what Badiou calls the “pathogenic” qualities of the family. For Badiou, the consolidation of the family has been part of a massive restoration of power and authority; instead of debating alternatives to the family as revolutionaries did during the radical moments of the twentieth century, the family has once again assumed a totally dominant ideological position, a position that the actual collapse of the nuclear family in western societies and the challenges to heterosexual normativity have done little to upset. “The overwhelming majority of child murders are carried out, not by sleazy unmarried paedophiles,” Badiou reminds us, “but by parents, especially mothers. And the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse is incestuous, in this instance courtesy of fathers or stepfathers. But about this, seal your lips! Murderous mothers and incestuous fathers, who are infinitely more widespread than paedophile killers, are an unsettling intrusion into the idyllic portrait of the family, which depicts the delightful relationship between our citizen parents and their angelic offspring” (76).

[…]

What disturbed some about Natascha Kampusch was her moral conservatism; soon after her release, she spoke of the benefits of being kept hostage—it meant, she said, that she could not smoke or fall into bad company. “I hope your kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities,” the father spits at Christina, just after he has savagely beaten her. If you stay inside, you are protected is the slogan of  social conservatism, and it is as if Lanthimos is demonstrating what the ideal conditions for such conservatism would actually need to be. The outside must be totally pathologized: the children have to become literally xenophobic, terrified of everything that lies beyond the limits of their “protected” enclave. Dogtooth’s study of the pathogenic family is also, then, a study of the psychology of captivity.”

- Fisher, Mark. 2011. ‘Dogtooth: the Family Syndrome’, Film Quarterly, vol. 64, No. 4, pp. 22-27


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June 18, 2012
‘Tomboy’ - Interview with Céline Sciamma

In her 2007 debut Water Lillies, French director Céline Sciamma depicted the blossoming sexual experiences of three girls during early adolescence. With her second feature Tomboy, which again tackles issues of sexuality and gender, she has turned her camera to an even younger protagonist.

The story of 10-year-old Laure pretending to be a boy to the world outside her home was a critical favourite when it premiered at last year’s Berlinale, where it also won the Teddy Awards’ Jury prize, and has since gone on to become an arthouse hit worldwide. I met with her in the event of Tomboy’s German theatrical release and we talked about her experience working with children and of her film’s role in the still nascent gender discourse in France.

Both your films explore adult themes through very young characters. What do you feel are the advantages of this perspective?

I like coming of age stories because they’re really strong, you can really identify with the characters. It’s life but it’s kind of bigger than life, you know, it’s the first time. With Water Lilies, I felt it wasn’t adult themes, it was really… the rise of desire and sexual awareness, which fit with teenagehood. Tomboy is much more subversive in the way that it puts that matter at the moment of childhood. But that’s what excited me about it, the fact that it offers a new perspective on that subject and also allows to tell about childhood in general. Childhood is the time of life where everybody pretends to be somebody else for an afternoon. You invent yourself, you’ve got that freedom of fiction in your life. And I think that’s why people really connected to it. In France it was a huge success, they felt they had their childhood back. I like the balance between those two subjects.

The children’s dialogues in Tomboy all feel strikingly authentic. What was your approach in writing the script?

There’s very little improv in the film, it’s all written. I try to write the dialogues as simple as possible, I didn’t try to mimic the way children talk. I wanted the movie to be from the point of view of a child, I didn’t want to have my adult look on things, so that’s why there’s no psychology at all. She’s not thinking about what she’s doing, she just experiences it. So it’s really written as an action movie – kids are always doing stuff. And that was also a strategy in the screenplay, thinking about the fact that I was going to direct kids.

How was the experience of directing children?

I didn’t want them to be waiting to say their lines, so they were always in action. On set, for instance they’re in the bathtub and I’m giving them toys and they are playing just freely, and I’m already shooting. Not to get improv but to get them to be in that natural feeling at the time I need them to say the line. I was shooting very long takes, I was never cutting, because for them it means that they have failed if you cut. I would always talk to them and make it a non-dramatic event, to be making a film. You have to treat them like actors, have them to know their lines to be focused, to understand their character – I didn’t want to be a puppeteer – but also you have to make it fun, which actually is kind of cool, because you start believing it’s fun, though it’s your job, and it’s hard.

To what extent were the children aware of the film’s larger themes?

Well, they read the script and I talked to them about how I was going to shoot every sequence. It was important for me that they know. I didn’t have big talks with them about what it means. I did talk to my main actress, of course. About the character, and about her, because she was kind of boyish in life, so we shared that.

Were they ever hesitant about playing a scene?

The kids that play in the movie, the gang of kids, they’re actually her real friends in life. They hang out, they play football every day, so it wasn’t far from what they’re living. When they had to shoot the scene where they check if she’s a girl, of course everybody was kind of tense. But they weren’t reluctant at all and I felt that they were actually much more educated on the subject than myself when I was their age. Like, they knew the word transsexual for instance, which I didn’t know at all. “Oh, so she’s a transsexual?” “Well, you know, we can talk about it…” [Laughs] But they knew the word, little kids from the suburbs of Paris. That kind of made me optimistic actually.

At the end of the film, the intrusion of the adults back into the story introduces intolerance, which up to that point didn’t exist in the children’s world.

I didn’t want the adult character to be ‘right’, or to be ‘wise’. You know, when movies are about adults, which is 99% of the time, children can be the cliché of children. In a movie with children, I didn’t want adults to be the cliché of adults: “I know what to do.” So I wanted them to be complex fragile characters with doubts and not to give them the ‘right’ reaction but to give them the reaction that would be kind of true to the subject and give the audience strong emotions. And to me there’s a two-step reaction, the first is cruel. and then they talk. You can see that the mother is actually trying to be protective. And I think it’s true to life, I mean, to protect your own child from violence you can become violent.

And Tomboy’s been taken up in the curricula of French schools. Did you originally envisage this pedagogic potential?

No, I mean, I really wanted kids to be able to see the movie, I was really longing for their opinion actually. When the movie came out in France, parents were taking their children, I was really, really happy with that. And I’ve done screenings with kids and I was amazed at how we really connect. They had kind of the same questions as the adults, but they identify super-strongly, of course. I remember when I was a kid there were a lot of movies with kids, there were all those Spielberg productions, a lot of movies where growing up was an adventure. Now the kids have Pixar movies and stuff, they identify with the parrot in Rio, so it was striking to see them moved by the fact that the story’s about them. In France we’re not very open on gender studies, it’s really beginning, you know. When Tomboy was selected to go to schools, at the same time the parliament refused that the gender question was introduced in the schoolbooks. But it’s strongly political that we got there, so I’m really proud of it, actually.

—

Shorter version of interview originally published in Exberliner

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June 11, 2012
‘Alpeis’ - Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos

With his second solo feature Kynodontas (Dogtooth) in 2009, then 36-year-old Yorgos Lanthimos took the arthouse by storm, winning the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes and earning a highly uncharacteristic Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. His next film, Alpeis (Alps, out in Germany on June 14), screened to great critical acclaim in the main competition at Venice last year, taking home the prize for best script. With these two films Lanthimos has established himself as one of Europe’s most promising new auteurs and helped turn international attention to the work of a new generation of Greek filmmakers.

In town for a preview of Alpeis in May, Lanthimos spoke with me  about his signature style, the recurrent theme of the family in his work and his perspective on his films being regarded as part of a ‘new wave’ of Greek cinema.

Like your previous films, Alpeis presents often extreme situations and handles them by mixing humour and horror, tragedy and irony. What is it that appeals to you about this dialectical approach?

I think because every situation – depending on who you are and where you stand – you can see it in completely different ways. Someone can see something and laugh to death, and someone can cry to death in the same situation. It really depends on the state of mind, what has happened before… so many different things. I think what we try and do is somehow replicate this throughout the film, that any situation can be ridiculous, and tragic, and funny at the same time. It only takes a small shift in your perception to just laugh at it or feel awkward with it or feel bad about it or whatever. I find this feeling of awkwardness – of not knowing really, of having just laughed but then realizing that maybe you shouldn’t laugh and it’s bad, according to other people, to laugh about this – this realization, I think, makes you very engaged and aware of what you’re watching. I think it’s a precious feeling to feel awkward about how you react to a film.

With the protagonist in this film infiltrating families as a surrogate member and eventually confusing the limits of her role, you again seem to be making a strongly critical, if not subversive, comment on the institution of the family.

Well, it’s definitely a comment, but I don’t know if it’s subversive. I do question even the existence of family and if it’s right the way in which it’s organized. Obviously it’s different for different families and in regions around the world. In Greece, according to my experience – not personal experience, but what I have observed – it’s this institution that keeps children until they’re very old within its structure. Even if they leave home and they’re old, they still have this kind of – sick in some ways – relation and dependence to the family. So, my experience was of that kind – to me it’s a comment of what I’ve experienced.

In your films then, the family is responsible for the stunted socialization of the characters?

Family should somehow prepare you or help you socialize. I think that’s the theme of one or two of my films, that it kind of does the opposite. When it’s done in an extreme way, it somehow prevents you from being independent, from being able to be on your own out in the world. Sometimes I think that maybe at some point the family would stop to exist, and that’s where the beginning of Dogtooth came from. It was like a science fiction idea: what if there were no families anymore? Do we really need them? Why most families fall apart after a while – husband and wife get separated, the single parent has the kid and it causes all kinds of problems – I’m still trying to figure it out.

You seem to portray authority of all kinds as deeply perverse.

I think authority is perverse anyway. It’s not that I portray it this way, that’s what I’ve observed in general. There’s hardly ever a situation which is authoritative and there hasn’t been some kind of abuse. From any party. Or some kind of revolt against it when authority is abused, in different ways. I just somehow take it as granted – it’s not my way of portraying it.

You mention the influence of your Greek experience – do you regard your films as specifically Greek?

In general the themes and the stories are quite universal. Just because they’re Greek films – they’re made in Greece, by Greek people, in the Greek language, and Greek light – somehow, all these elements creep into the film, all of a sudden it becomes a Greek film. At the starting point, they’re issues that exist everywhere. If we made our film in some other place, it wouldn’t be the same in the end. The philosophy and culture and language of the people and the place would come in, so it wouldn’t be the same film, but it would have the same starting point for us.

Your films have been described as part of a ‘new wave’ of young Greek cinema, which includes your producer and fellow director Athina Tsangari and others of your generation. Do you agree?

No, unfortunately I don’t [laughs]. One thing is, press and journalism in general have the need to label this kind of thing. There are so many different reasons for what’s happened in Greece. The main one is that there’s a new generation of filmmakers making films, so the films are different. There was the fact that a couple of the films became very successful when there weren’t any films shown internationally, so the film community started wondering what’s going on in Greece and trying to find other films that are interesting. But the films themselves didn’t really change. There were always bad films and good films, it’s just that now people are looking into Greece, whereas before they weren’t. And this is something that has happened in many countries, not just Greece – before it was Romania, Iran, and Korea. There’s this need of discovering a new ethnic cinema.

What about the catalyzing role ascribed to the Greek economic crisis?

Greece has been in the headlines now for a while, so that’s a nice combination, a nice package, like: “look, the crisis, the creativity…” Which is partly true, but it’s also by chance. Something that people don’t really look into is that before the crisis all these younger filmmakers – myself included – were privileged to go through a period in Greece where there was a lot of money spent in TV commercials. We don’t really have a proper film school in Greece, so we gained a lot of technical experience through that, and we also made money that we could invest in the films. There is no financing in Greece for films, but I was able to put some money into my films, work for a year without having to work another job, which I usually have to. So that also helped this younger generation make films. It’s so complex, it’s not that during crises you become more creative, and it’s not like there’s a community of filmmakers that help each other, it’s just small groups of people and friends that help each other. And because there’s no financing, people are kind of free creatively – there’s no one telling them what they should do or not do for the film to be more commercial or more successful. They’re free to do whatever they want, which is why they’re more distinguished and individual somehow.

—

Interview originally published in Exberliner

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February 21, 2012
‘Al Juma Al Akheira’ - Interview with Yahya Alabdallah

Al Juma Al Akheira (The Last Friday) has been one of the highlights of this year’s Berlinale Forum section. An understated gem of a film, it follows the story of Yousef, a taxi driver in the Jordanian capital Amman, who after losing everything to his poker addiction has to live a life of isolation and contempt, watching impotently as his son follows in his footsteps (read my full-length review here).

Writer-director Yahya Alabdallah’s impressive feature debut already won him a number of awards when it premiered in Dubai in December and has received widespread critical acclaim. I met with him during the Berlinale and held this short interview.

Do you feel your experience studying in Paris added a Western flavour to Al Juma Al Akheira?

Actually, my three-year experience in France, it added something. When you watch the film, it doesn’t have a nationality. The way I shoot is almost silent, so that will give it more aspects to be internationally understandable. I do think my experience had an impact on that.

How did you come up with the story?

The scene where the guy comes and steals the parking tickets, that actually happened to me. I was downtown and I saw that I had a ticket, so I said, ‘OK, let’s have a sandwich, since it’s already there.’ Then someone came, parked behind me, looked around, took my ticket and put it on his car. Because the policeman will see who has a ticket already and will give another one. So I departed from reality with that scene and then took the drama line with the taxi driver.

Ali Suliman’s performance as Yousef, the taxi driver, is truly impressive.

Working with Ali was one of the really good experiences in making Al Juma Al Akheira. He watched a short film I made called ‘SMS’ at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2008. It’s a silent film and he liked the style and he asked me to send him my script. We talked for four months about the character and how to develop it.

The film works both as a personal portrait and a political allegory. How would you describe this interaction?

The political aspect provided the background, because the main reason I made this film was to talk about social issues. These are the first problems, which then lead the people to revolution, so I wanted to concentrate on them.

So Yousef’s story reflects damaged social relations?

The fair situation for any citizen is to have a majority that’s from the middle class. And when you lose that, the moral system for the people who live together will be damaged: you will have two parts, and that’s not a healthy situation to live in. So the taxi driver is one of those that were in the middle class and then lost everything and became lower class, and the film examines how that will change his relationships with others, including his son.

The women in the film, unlike the men, are strong characters. Is this also a reflection of social realities or of personal ideology?

Actually, I don’t know. I think women are strong human beings, so I guess this idea is reflected in my film. There are a lot of films that talk about women as victims, so I wanted to talk about that from another angle.

The character of the son seems to be following in his father’s footsteps – are you negative about the possibility of change?   

No, I’m positive, but it takes time. The character sees his son going in his direction and he wants to stop that, but he can’t, because the answer is not in his hands. That’s what I meant by saying the background is political, but the film itself is social. Those kinds of people, they don’t want to bring about the same situations for the next generation, and maybe the next generation will start changing things.

What makes the difference?

Knowing that there is a problem, that’s the start.

—

Originally published in Exberliner as part of my coverage of the Berlinale 2012

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January 9, 2012
‘Cold Weather’ - Interview with Aaron Katz

An independent filmmaker through and through, 30-year-old Aaron Katz shot his first two features, Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007), on $3000 and $2000 respectively. These were seen as belonging to a recent wave in US indie cinema dubbed ‘mumblecore’: films characterized by shoestring budgets, 20-something non-professional actors and unsensational narratives distinguished by spontaneous, realist dialogue.

Cold Weather (2010), his third feature shot on a significantly higher budget, preserves all of his earlier films’ trademarks, weaving them into a detective story and creating an innovative and charming hybrid that transcends facile categorization. The 2012 Unknown Pleasures festival (read my pieces for sugarhigh and Exberliner) will provide the first opportunity for many Berliners to catch this gem of American independent cinema and although Katz will not be present, here’s an interview to make up for his absence.

It’s impossible to read up on you without the mention of ‘mumblecore’, a term most Europeans aren’t familiar with.

It may be better that most Europeans aren’t familiar with it. At this point it really doesn’t add a lot. The term was coined, apparently, by Andrew Bujalski’s sound editor [Eric Masunaga] at South by Southwest 2005. He said it as a joke, I think, sort of complaining about how there was a lot of mumbling, people stumbling over their words, which provided a real challenge for him as a sound mixer. I really don’t know how it went from that to being a term used to describe my films, and Joe Swanberg’s, and some other people too. I think the common connection between all of our films is that we all made films – especially our first films – for almost nothing. Not even within the independent film system, but completely outside of it. Most of us made our first films with just a few thousand dollars and made them about things that we knew, people pretty much our own age, or a little bit younger. In that way there is a connection between all of us, but I think at this point mumblecore – whatever mumblecore means – is more confusing than useful. Cold Weather I don’t think fits within the definition of mumblecore very well.

What was it like to move on to a much higher budget with Cold Weather?

It was great to be able to do some of the things that we weren’t able to do on the first two films. The first thing, maybe the most important thing, is to pay the crew. Pretty much the same people have worked on all three films and it was really great to be able to make a film and not have to ask everyone to take off two weeks or a month from their life and work for free. Besides that we were able to work with the Red, which I really liked. The other films were shot on much cheaper cameras, which worked well, but with the Red you have a lot more control over what you do: you have control over the lenses you pick, so much more control over the images in post-production… Also the other equipment besides the camera: we were able to rent a dolly track, we were able to book locations we wouldn’t have been able to in the past. We still had to be really careful with our money, because even $100,000, which was about the budget for Cold Weather, goes really fast. I have a suspicion that no matter how much money you have – be it $10 million or $100 million – you’re always trying to do just a little bit more with it than is comfortable. Yeah, it was great to have it, but we again felt we could have used more.

Cold Weather plays quite interestingly with genre – it’s a detective story, yet offers none of the characteristic sensationalism. What was your intention by subverting genre in this way?

I think that no matter what the genre is, I’d want to approach it in a way where the people within it are real people having real interactions, with the genre serving as a way to explore the relationships between the characters. I think genre filmmaking at its best is exactly that. In this case I started out writing a film about a brother and sister who hadn’t spent much time with each other since they were teenagers, getting to know each other again as adults. I was writing that script, I was feeling OK about it, but it wasn’t coalescing, it wasn’t coming together in the way that I was hoping. I was simultaneously reading detective stories, just for enjoyment, and I got the idea of incorporating the genre element into the brother-sister story. They kind of played off each other and I feel like each was enriched by the other. The brother-sister relationship I found a lot more interesting, them having to explore these things they weren’t really comfortable with. The same is true for the genre aspect, this exploring of traditional genre elements, but through the lens of people who aren’t experts at it. In movies and books, a lot of the time, people are like Sherlock Holmes, crack experts who never make mistakes. So it was interesting to put normal people into those situations and try to figure out how they would react.

Though Cold Weather’s focus is on an interpersonal level, one could recognize subtle elements of social commentary. Do such considerations play a role in your filmmaking?

I don’t set out with any sort of agenda to address a certain social issue; at least I haven’t in any of my films so far. I feel that a lot of films that purport to explore social issues, or relationships between people and how that feeds into social issues, tend to be pretty false. People end up getting used as mouthpieces for certain points of view, or end up being allegorical. As an audience member I don’t enjoy films that are primarily metaphorical, allegorical, address some kind of issue, where people represent two sides of things… For example films like Last Year at Marienbad (1961) or Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) hold no interest to me. I don’t respond well to people as vessels for a message. However, I think that making people real and allowing them to be ordinary people, not necessarily special people – that to me is a social statement. Viewers grow so accustomed to seeing people on screen that are different from them and from anyone you’d ever meet in real life. I’ve noticed that online, the negative comments [about my films] are almost always like, “These people are so boring. My friends are so much smarter than them.” And I think that the reality is, “No, your friends really aren’t so much smarter than this. You’ve just gotten so used to seeing people in movies that are much smarter, and live in expensive houses, and everything like that, that if feels strange to see people that are just ordinary.”

Many films attempt this, to explore human relationships unsensationally. It doesn’t always work, often resulting in tedious, uninspiring films instead. Yours feel authentic and fresh even thought it’s very difficult to pinpoint what it is that makes that difference. Can you describe your approach?

I guess I just try and put the actors in the best possible situation to be themselves, essentially, but in fictional circumstances. For me something that doesn’t work is when you see a film that is trying to address people as people but the performances don’t feel naturalistic, but feel learned and stiff. For me it’s not very important how an actor delivers a line specifically. My feeling is that if we do the work to understand their character, understand their circumstances, and that the actors feel comfortable and are really listening to each other in the scene, that the result is something that is going to feel natural, that is going to feel real. Even if it’s something that has a genre setting, like Cold Weather, if you go through that process with the actors and really allow them to have this freedom, that to me is the big difference. With writing, I try and be pretty loose. On a first draft I always try to write as quickly as possible, always try to think as little as possible, and I just let anything get written down on the page and then later work out what should stay and what should go, and shape it into something that makes sense. Also, in that way, you hopefully get out the ideas from your subconscious, you find things you weren’t expecting, hopefully finding stuff that is more exciting than through planning it all out.

Last chance to catch Cold Weather at the Unknown Pleasures film festival: 11th January at 21:00.

—

Short version of interview originally published in Exberliner

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(Notes: 2)
  
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