In Conversation
Richard Sylvarnes interviewed by Ray Privett and Scott Newstok at The Pioneer Theater in New York City, September 18th, 2005.
Ray – So Richard tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m an artist that works in various mediums that relate to sound and graphics; depending on the journey, sometimes they are enmeshed as in film work, other times they are singular as music, photography or painting. My first feature film was The Cloud of Unknowing. I’ve recently made a short film for the band Interpol called Landscape After The Battle and right now I’m in the final stages of editing my second feature.
Ray – What is your second feature?
My second feature is a film called HCE.
Ray – And describe a little bit about what the film is.
It’s a dream. It’s the colossus of Western History presented as a dream. My original impetus came from reading Finnegans Wake many, many, many years ago, or trying to read Finnegans Wake or spending time with Finnegans Wake let’s just say. A lot of time and actually I took a course in it although to this day I have never read the book in its entirety. I remember John Cage had a statement saying it took Joyce seventeen years to write this and it should take the reader seventeen years to read it but, you know, I don’t have seventeen years to read it. Nevertheless the idea of the structure, using history as a medium and structuring history within a dream and having it correlate to this banal event that happens in Phoenix Park in Dublin, a sexual encounter that represents the “fall of man” if you will, I was really taken by that. I just thought it was great way to look or view history as what history means to the individual…. to me. What historical events mean to me, indirectly or directly, made me wonder how to personalize history. As to what history means to the individual not the collecive, to me personally. And also having a young daughter and trying to talk to her about who and what she is. She’s in a class with different kinds of people. And she asks questions, who am I? Why do I look this way? And that starts the ball rolling. I can answer by saying everyone in the class is American but that you come from a Scandinavian heritage and so on. But I wanted to flip the coin in the movie, in a sense, where in the dream she is telling me who I am through these historical events rather than me telling her who she is. In the end HCE is an elaborate self-portrait.
Ray – So she appears in film as this girl who in a way is almost the narrator of the dream or like the angel supervising the dream.
She’s our guide.
Ray - She’s our guide through the dream and through history. Before getting into the specifics of how the quotations function, I think the texture of the film is a very crucial thing from the beginning to grasp what’s going on here. Is the motion within the film entirely through putting still images together or did you record them as a sequence and drop frames or was it picture, picture, picture and also talk about the layers, the different layers you’re putting in the background.
Figuring out how to do it, just shooting on film or video in a way that made it look modern I felt was the wrong approach. It’s taken from stills. Every shot. Essentially it’s a 120mm camera which is 6cm x 7cm. The negative is quite large. And the movement would be that I would ask somebody, if they were going to move their hand, let’s say, to move a certain amount and then I would take the picture and then move it again this certain amount and I would take another picture, then another 1/2 inch or whatever. Although sometimes there was more mayhem involved. For instance, shooting the Marquis de Sade sequence or Nero’s Feast, in those sequences I would create the action for each person and they would do it in real time then I would just shoot as fast as I could. I’m reminded of the early silent era when each cameraman was cranking the camera. Think of the human error involved in the early days of cinema. Maybe you crank too fast at a certain moment. But this human error created a look. Making HCE is not that dissimilar. And there are advantages to working in this way; for instance, we shot silent. Not working with on site sound recording I could direct the actors while shooting or I could create the proper atmosphere for the actors to work. For instance, shooting the Marquis de Sade I was playing loud dance music. This created a rhythm, a pulse, and the energy for the actors to whip into the proper frenzy of activity that the Marquis sequence needed. All this is probably similar to dance and choreography. The essentials of movement. Shooting stills and then sequencing them is essentially the birth of cinema itself. It’s Eadweard Muybridge. The first real experiments with cinema were carried out at the latter half of the nineteenth century. It actually starts with a bet. This philanthropist, Leland Stanford, wanted to know if a horse leaves all of its hooves off the ground when it is galloping. Eadweard Muybridge had this concoction made where he had cameras lined up with these trip wires and every time the horse ran through and knocked off one these trip wires a camera would take a picture. So he had these series of images and he had the means of showing them with a mechanism, a special kind of magic lantern, and it had a rather jagged sort of movement. I’ve seen facsimiles and they’re always very funny. Naked people doing something really silly or mundane. And then there were other experiments. There was the gun invented in France. This sort of periscopic gun that recorded sequential movement on one image. They didn’t have the sewing machine mentality yet. But particularly Eadweard Muybridge, that type of look really excited me. There’s really not much difference. It’s quite similar. Move and I’ll shoot as you move and create this jarring non-fluid kind of movement much like a flip book. Then we skip all the way through the twentieth century and come into the twenty first century where all of the sudden we have digital means. I think of the aesthetic as a bridge between the late nineteenth century and the early twenty first and missing the twentieth. Because the idea of film itself or the type of motion picture that is defined by the twentieth century is completely skipped. So it goes back to making pictures like Eadweard Muybridge but then digitizing the images, putting them on a computer, and laying them out on a timeline in Final Cut Pro. And also the density, the transparency that you spoke of is another aesthetic aspect of the film because I felt that as in a dream these images should be bubbling up from somewhere deep in the psyche, sometimes transparent, sometimes be fading in and out of sharp relief, sometimes other things seen underneath. Always this sense that there are layers of things happening at all times, whether it be layers of stains, these are stains made in the darkroom, or more concrete subject matter. Essentially just to give a look of something that was found or dug up in the basement of someplace in Holland.
Ray – It reminds me of two things. One being Decasia, the Bill Morrison film, where he takes old prints that are decayed and he decays them even further and puts them together. And also Stan Brakhage painting on frames.
Stan Brakhage definitely. Decasia is more after the fact. But certainly Stan Brakhage is a major influence as far as the look of the film. Decasia, yes, I’ve seen that and other pieces that Bill Morrison has done but only after the process of HCE had begun. But the one film that had a direct influence would be The Forbidden Quest, a film by Peter Delpuet made in 1993. This film was very influential and is also a film comprised of footage discovered. Footage from 1905 to 1930. These are images from an expedition to Antarctica and the artist put these images together along with newly filmed material and archival photographs and created a story around it. That for me is a touchstone because I would like viewers to have the sense that these images from HCE were found perhaps in a similar kind of way and put together. Also I'd like to call attention to the megacolossus of Intolerance. This film, particularly the ending whereby all these different epochs are cut together without title cards, is of profound influence. The editing of this film is extraordinarly modern and "cutting edge" in its approach and I think a number of recent films that play with the timeline must recognize Intolerance as a srpingboard let alone Kubick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with its legendary jumpcut.
Ray – So it’s like early stop motion images that were actually there when Don Quixote was fighting the windmills, when Dracula was biting the woman, when Sleeping Beauty was being woken up by the man. Obviously the film is packed with quotes and reenactments and illusions, how do you see the flow of those from the beginning of the film to the end of the film? What is the organization of the film as it goes through?
That’s an interesting question because the organizing principle changed several times and I would have to say at this point in time that the organizing principle is closer to an abstract painting. It’s not like a Jackson Pollock with an overall construction. It’s more like a Kandinsky where there are discernable forms but there is no center. The construction is not hierarchical. There might be sensations or general feelings that are happening but they are bubbling up and then descending under the surface. HCE begins with a Prologue that ends with Satan, Milton’s Satan I should say. The Prologue ends with him and the apple. The movie proper starts with The Egyptian Book of the Dead. There’s a trilogy there in the beginning with this striving for knowledge beyond your death. Egyptian mythology concerned itself with immortality. Ba is one of the souls and the journey of the Ba is to reach immortality, which is treacherous and difficult. Then we go into Dante and crossing the Styx. More knowledge from beyond. And third is Odin, the head of the Scandinavian gods and the thing that really excites me about Scandinavian mythology is that they perceived the end of the world. The end of the gods. So if you’re a god you are mortal and they know this Gotterdammerung is going to happen. So Odin’s job, essentially, was to stop this from happening or at least to prevent it as long as possible. He’s on a relentless quest for knowledge that will help him. One of the things he does which is very funny is that in order to obtain certain wisdom he must give his eye in return. He doesn’t hesitate and plucks out his eyeball only to learn from the received wisdom that you need both eyes wide open to see the dangers that lie ahead. Needless to say, from there on the gods are in trouble. But we learn a great deal from this about what kind of god Odin is and he continues his pursuit of knowledge to stop this inevitable end. What is depicted in HCE is the crucifixion myth. Odin crucifies himself on Yggdrasill, the tree of life. It’s the tree that connects the underworld, the earth, and heavens.
Ray –Brakhage actually made a movie about Yggdrasill.
Yes, so, anyway, Odin crucifies himself in order to enter the land of the dead to find out more information. Those three are the beginning. That starts the film proper. This search for knowledge from beyond, knowledge from the other side. Then the film immediately depicts punishment, the punishment of Prometheus. A lot of this film is about searching for knowledge and some knowledge is prohibited, prohibited by the gods, as you will, because the gods are always in fear of their position in relation to humans. They always have to have one up on us so whenever we found out information that is, let’s say, god-like in nature then they send down upon us some punishment or banishment. So when Prometheus gives fire to human beings which makes humans more god-like, he is punished and so are we for the gods send down Pandora who opens the box that releases the ills of the world. So there is this sense of forbidden knowledge. But I needed a hero and with all the wealth of heroes one could choose from in all western history to defend us and fight against the gods I chose Don Quixote who follows Prometheus in the film. This is one organizing principle. There are others. There are moments that depict the destructive forces that lie within us. For instance, when Sonje, as the angel, says “if you believe in God then you must believe in the Devil” and then there follows this whole sequence which starts with Neville Chamberlain declaring war on Germany and ends with the Enola Gay and the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. But intermixed in this tragic sequence are very complex ideas about violence, like the killing of Caesar. The people who did this felt his death was necessary. It was necessary to get rid of Caesar in order to enact change within the government. So sometimes violence is deemed necessary. Sometimes its just violence, rage. There’s always this play within the film between the act of creation and the urge to destroy. And when I say the act of creation I mean love, story writing, building the Empire State Building and on the other hand there is murder, rape, flying planes into buildings and the urge to do that. The World Trade Center is also part of a sequence. The sequence that starts with Joan of Arc and ends with Brynhild and Sigurd in the flames. So there are overriding moments, forms, but there is no general three act structure. HCE is broken up into five sections with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Each part is separated with this piano sequence but these breaks, these parts are there more to give a breather rather than defining the end of a section or part one or something.
Scott – What’s the role of the sectional titles that occur? Are those introducing each of those five sections?
No, it’s just to use words as another image. It is true that title cards start each section and the words chosen may pertain to some of the images within the section but I see them more as another color. They are not there to introduce a theme.
Ray – It’s a punctuation.
Yes, thank you. But to say that now this is the war section and this is the love section, it doesn’t work that way.
Ray – One of the sections you mentioned that I think is probably true of the others really seems to go from the beginning of creation starting from “we came from the stars”, begins with this birth, creation section and then you go through Little Red Riding Hood, then this whipping, this sado masochistic reference, then you get to the Devil, Chamberlain, Hitler, Caesar, and finally you get to Matthew going into heaven. It’s like this creation, destruction, and then the end of time. It’s almost an apocalyptic flow. The entire encompassing of everything, in a way. This creation, “we came from the stars”, then all this war and destruction and then at the end it seems like this apocalyptic scene with Matthew going into heaven.
Well it is. It’s Matthew going into heaven but it ends with the Enola Gay. Actually it ends with the narrator quoting Nietzsche, “Is God man’s mistake, or Man God’s mistake” which I just love. I think this quote is fabulous. Whose creation is wrong? What’s undeniable in that quotation is the admission that something is wrong. But who is wrong? But it’s true. There is an arc there but it’s not a steady arc. It’s jumping around. Little Red Riding Hood is in there and I chose the one where Little Red Riding Hood is eaten because there’s a later version where the hunter comes in and saves the day.
Ray – You have this “we came from the stars”, this creation and then, with the Little Red Riding Hood that’s where the plot really starts to flow in that section of the movie.
Yes and trust betrayed. This child is completely innocent. Where’s the fault? Little Red Riding Hood means don’t talk to strangers. The thing about fairy tales that I love is that they are really violent but we still teach them to children and children love them so much. I remember hearing someone say that the reason kids love them is because the parents aren’t around or that the children in fairly tales have to survive by there own wits. But when the parents aren’t around the kids always seem to be eaten or put into an oven or something. But it doesn’t matter because they are on their own and they have to figure out things for themselves and that’s what makes a fairy tale interesting. The other side of Little Red Riding Hood is the wolf taking advantage of innocence and human beings that take advantage of innocence. That to me is the beginning of the end. When one starts taking advantage of innocence it triggers the end and everything can spiral out of control. That and when imagination and power come together. There’s Hitler. He started out as an artist. What havoc he created. It’s true, there are overriding themes within sections.
Scott – It seems that the sections cluster in a way but one of the things that breaks up any clear arc would be the return of images or particular snippets from previous sections and that, to use the word punctuate, to use that word in a different way, that sort of punctures through the sections when all of the sudden you see superimposed an image that you were associating with something else.
Part of the idea of sleeping and dreaming or the structure of a dream is that the further you get into the dream things are going to get weirder and weirder. That’s also part of the structure. At the very end of the film they’re all starting to come back and overlap and punctuate. Sometimes they’re punctuating a line that somebody says. And I want you to think that these are connected.
Ray – Like the apple. There’s people and things. The apple comes back. The angel, your daughter, comes back, Sleeping Beauty, “we came from the stars” as a statement comes back. It’s punctuation but it gives a resonance.
The apple and Don Quixote are the two elements that sweep through the whole film. It’s like Don Quixote is on this mission to save us, to defend us against whatever it is that lies beyond. He’s on the moon, he’s riding through that strange blue light, he’s there at the end of Hiroshima. I think of him as the guy that’s going to save us all and in the end it’s all a trick, an illusion. We’ve been deceived or perhaps we deceived ourselves. The god’s, the windmills, it’s all one big, well, grand collective hallucination. The apple is the McGuffin. So much of mythology uses the apple as the prize. Not just Eve and the apple but Paris and the apple. “Give the apple to the fairest.” You know that whatever Paris decides he’s doomed with the revenge of the other two breathing down his neck and in the film I never finish the story, although it’s quite obvious whom he is going to give the apple to. But at the very end of HCE you hear them all, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, fighting for the apple coupled with Nero provocatively saying “come join the feast” and it’s not resolved but at the same time it’s something that will never really be resolved. The idea of the apple will continue on throughout all history. And, of course, it’s there in the beginning with the creation story of Adam and Eve, which is brilliant. It’s a story that answers so many questions like who we are, why do we die, why is there so much evil in the world. This is a great myth and it centers on that apple but that apple doesn’t give one full knowledge, the knowledge of the essence of things, but after one bite of the apple one certainly understands the knowledge of good and evil. Then, here we go again, they even they get punished. They get banished from Paradise because humans are not allowed to become like God. You can’t get that close to God and be in Paradise and live forever. If you have this knowledge then you have to leave. You have to get punished. These are the things that start the ball rolling and this apple is going to be there throughout all history, whether it be Greek mythology or Semitic wisdom. And what are the differences about the apple of Paris and the apple of Eve? What are the differences? It’s simple to write it off but I think a certain type of knowledge is gained in both events.
Ray – Another theme that comes back which is related to the apple but perhaps in a slant is this computer, this Robot, which is singing a song which is very obviously a reference to Hal and 2001 A Space Odyssey.
That’s a quotation.
Ray – But it’s not a direct quotation. The Robot was singing a different song.
The Robot is singing a different song because that is a copyright issue. But the words of the Robot are a direct quotation from Kubrick’s film. Hal, the computer. There are a number of films that are quoted. Johnny Guitar comes up a couple of times.
Scott – James Bond.
Yes he’s there. Also Gone With The Wind as a quotation.
Scott – The word that kept coming up for me was superimposition as a kind of quality of what was going on in much of the film and that goes back to the earlier comments about the visual quality, the surface, images being put on top of one another and then what we were talking about earlier, images coming back and punctuating the latter parts of the film and then you were just talking about those clusters; Eve and the Judgment of Paris with the apple. There’s a theme or a crossing of superimposition, both on a material level and a thematic level. Seeing that as a consistent pattern what came to mind to me in regard to Finnegans Wake, does the superimposition imply mostly that there is a similarity that comes out when you put something on top of another in that way or is there such a thing as historical difference between these stories. The clusters, to me, were leaning towards the similarity of these events. It’s this story over and over again or it’s a version of these stories over and over again.
I wouldn’t put it that way. I want you to look at the relationship. It’s not an eternal return. All I want to do is bring up the idea that there is a relationship, which could be tangential, or equivalent, or opposite. It’s a possible relationship. For instance, the crucifixion. How many crucifixion myth’s are there? If one looks objectively at the story of Jesus and sees that he has to die, how is he going to die? And he has to die. Somebody like Jesus has to die because he has to make the myth of Jesus relevant and powerful and to do that, well, what better way than crucifixion. But the idea of crucifixion goes back thousands of years. The crucifixion of Odin as part of Scandinavian mythology is not transparent here. It’s a relationship. It’s a spiritual quest. Sometimes I’m talking to the people who believe in the dogma of the mythology. That Exodus really happened. Jewish mythology is based on a pseudo history and that’s why it lasted so long and influenced so many people. The wealth and knowledge one can gain from Scandinavian mythology or Greek mythology is lost because they did not recognize the immortals as being present in their sphere. Well maybe once in a while, like the battles in the Iliad, but most of the time the gods of these mythologies were outside of our history. Whereas the God of the Jews was contradictory but very involved with human events. And which makes him more valid today. Then there’s the Easter Bunny and the resurrection of Christ. Pagan holidays that blend in with Christian holidays that made the burgeoning Christians able to assimilate into their religion. In fact I have a Thor’s Hammer necklace that I wore as a kid but back about 900 years ago Christians came to Scandinavia and said to these people that they didn’t even have to give up their jewelry. All they had to do is turn it upside down. So instead of Thor’s hammer you have a cross.
Ray – The Bible is simply an assembly of books and it seems that in a way this film is a similar assembly of books to create a sort of religious, historical, spiritual consciousness which draws on the Bible but also draw on events from current history.
I don’t want to use the word religious.
Ray – Spiritual.
Yes, And if one can think of Casanova as the spirit in action and the quotation that he says in the very end, “I laugh at those morose philosophers who deny that complete happiness can be found on earth”. That’s wonderful and it almost ends the film. I once, earlier in the editing, wanted to end the film there but I think that was a little short sighted. At the same time, that type of living, or take the Marquis de Sade, that could be taken to a philosophical or spiritual level. What is the most mundane thing one does? In the Sacrifice by Tarkovsky they plant a dead tree. But you water that tree every day at exactly the same time every day then this becomes a spiritual act. A reasoning. A meditation. What is not the spirit? All these stories in HCE, you know, it’s stories but it’s trying to transcend story telling. To look at why do we tell stories? Why are we fascinated with these characters? What do they have to tell us? Why am I fascinated with them? Why did I put them in this movie? Why am I fascinated with Napoleon? Here’s this egomaniacal barbarian who essentially tore his way through Europe killing countless thousands of people and disrupting so many lives but at the same time he’s this esteemed general and we’re all fascinated with him. Even where he spent his time in exile. Is he more important than the baker that lived on the Boulevard Raspail at the same time? I don’t know but he’s the one that countless books have been written about.
Ray – Why did you juxtapose him with Che Guevara?
That’s the thing I don’t want to get into. I don’t want to give exact meanings as to why I juxtaposed something. I could walk up to the doorstep but the minute I cross that line I will destroy the movie for other people.
Ray – You’re doing the spectator’s work for them.
Yes and I think the richness of the film will die.
Scott – Can you talk more generally about the principle of juxtaposition and why, in particular, that it appeals to you in this dream as an element.
It’s simply Eisensteinian montage. It’s creating a third meaning from the juxtaposition of two elements. For instance, the one that everyone wants to talk about is Joan of Arc juxtaposed with the smoldering World Trade Center. People ask why I did that. It’s so disturbing. What was I saying? The World Trade Center is so deeply connected to all of us. We all have very strong feelings about that. I, myself; I was there, I saw it. I was down on Canal Street. It was a devastating moment. I remember I saw a number of my friends on the street specifically this one friend who is actually Greek although he’s lived here for about fifteen years and we were talking, he was standing right next to me as all this was happening and then the first tower came down and I turned and he wasn’t there. It was such a powerful moment that he ran away. He just had to run. It’s that sick gut feeling. That empty feeling. But the juxtaposition with Joan of Arc burning at the flames, well, let me put it this way, there was something about it that just felt right at a gut level. I knew right there that it was right because it brings up that feeling. That empty feeling. Sometimes it’s more of an intellectual montage. Other times it’s more of a reference. An obvious example is when Casanova quotes the nun saying that he reasons better than Socrates and then all of the sudden I cut to Socrates drinking the hemlock. Or it might be something somebody says and there’s a cut to an image that is the exact opposite of what this person is saying. There are others. It could be a shape. A circle. For instance, the earth spinning around turns into the circle of Joan of Arc. That’s a visual juxtaposition.
Ray – That’s another of your recurring motifs, the earth. The sculpture out in Queens.
Well I grew up out there and I know that statue quite well. In fact it is one of my earliest memories. That to me is an icon and it is a recurring motif in the film. It’s the earth. Where we live.
Ray – It’s all encompassing. It reaches into so much, the globe, the earth is so enormous but there is the universe beyond. Similarly you have this all encompassing, omnivorous, consumption of texts and legends and myths in the film.
But they are all me. I didn’t use any Asian myths or African myths and they are rich and wonderful and probably could teach us all the same things. But I really wanted to say this is my dream. I had to make it essentially Western. Europe and The United States. It had to be the West. There is Che Guevara but as far as I’m concerned he’s a pop icon from the sixties. I remember an episode of the Brady Bunch when one of the kids had his poster on the wall.
Ray – You do have Miho Nikaido saying something in Japanese.
Yes, she’s talking in Japanese saying that she hears something. Something in the wall. It’s straight out of the horror genre. But that’s only in reflection to Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. That’s the connection. There is Chuang Tzu. That is the one that I take from the East. The dream of the butterfly quoted over Noah who is sleeping by the Arc. I gave myself a license there. Actually I debated whether I should do this but it felt so right. There are some great Asian wisdom writing. So let’s use it. It is my dream anyway, I’m allowed. But essentially they are all from the West. And it is a giant book, this collection of stories. So I usurp texts from the bible, usurp texts from Shakespeare, legends, the Poetic Edda, Greek mythology, comic books, newspapers, actual history, tales from science fiction, Hollywood, western literature and this giant amalgam becomes another book in and of itself that could be a bible, a type of bible.
Ray – So what is the relation to Finnegans Wake then?
The title HCE comes from Finnegans Wake. HCE is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker also know as Here Comes Everybody. Then there’s the original impetus, the idea of presenting history as a dream. But after that there really is no connection to Finnegans Wake. In fact I had a quote from James Joyce, which was actually from Ulysses, but I can’t use that till 2012. It’s a copyright issue. And Stephen Joyce, the grandson, is an interesting feisty fellow. The copyright law changed. You could have done it in 1992 but then the law changed to 75 years after the death of the author. I’ve heard so many contradictory reports about how this man operates so you don’t really know. I think, in the end, money talks. I mean he tried to stop the centennial celebration of Ulysses in Dublin. That type of behavior really freaks me out. Stephen Joyce has every right to act this way but one has to look and see what the reasons are. The centennial was a celebration of someone and their work by a country. Why halt the usage of the text?
Ray – Did you have other issues regarding copyright?
I did have Beckett quoted but I changed that. I had Mickey Mouse spinning with Christ on the Cross. But I can’t use Mickey Mouse till 2022 and I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. Disney is a tough costumer.
Ray – So what is the irony of creating a book of books, a bible, or a collection of great stories in trying to explain this to yourself and your daughter to you herself that this is the tradition that you come from and not being able to use certain texts. How do you feel about that?
I get angry about it. There’s this understanding that if I’m shooting a documentary film if I’m out on the street and somebody walks by with a Disney t-shirt I might be able to get away with it. It comes down to time and usage. How long is it on screen and where is it in the frame. That unnerves me. I’m trying to say who and what I am through these stories and Mickey Mouse is certainly part of my life. I was up at the IFP talking about it and I probably could have gotten away with it if I used Mickey Mouse for less than four seconds and if I didn’t have him spinning with Christ on the Cross. I was told that they would probably string me up by my thumbs. It does unnerve me because using these quotations, in one sense it’s reverential and in another sense they bombard me with this advertising and how dare they say it’s not a part of me now. That I can’t use it. Literally, if I’m shooting a feature film in the streets I have to be careful of advertising whether it be on taxicabs or billboards. Does that mean that they own that space?
Scott – And it’s unidirectional that you can’t reciprocate and take it in.
And having a daughter, God knows how much money I’ve spent on Disney paraphernalia. The irony of it breaks my heart. So I had to change part of the film. Sometimes I came up with a better answer but maybe in 2022 I’ll recut the film.
Scott – But in a way that means you have this curious gap of the twentieth century, I guess not all of it, but in terms of some texts and you also said that in the beginning you deliberately leapt over the medium of twentieth century film.
I think the twentieth century is well served. There’s Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Johnson boxing, James Bond, Franz Kafka who I am allowed to use.
Ray – You have Hiroshima.
Yes, that and the World Trade Center. So I used imagery to supplant the lacking texts.
Scott – So are the texts more of a problem than the images?
I perceive it that way but I certainly had to get rid of Mickey Mouse as an image. I think where Disney is concerned everything is a potential problem.
Scott – So there is a lot of textual quotation that we’ve been talking about but there’s also a type of visual quotation and I think this is something that some of the early Victorian photographers did on purpose, pose people and it looks like it’s meant to recollect Renaissance or Medieval compositions.
You hit it right on the head. Much of the aesthetic derives from tableaux photography. In the birth of photography, probably around the twenty fifth year after its discovery they began to think of it as an art form more than just a recording device and one of the first things they did, which usually happens in a newly discovered medium, is they copied another medium that was already perceived to be art. Cinema did it with theater with the proscenium shot. Photography looked to painting, specifically the Renaissance painters. That’s exactly where the aesthetic of this film comes from. The idea of what were the photographers doing at that time, around Muybridge, the 1880’s. A number of the compositions in HCE mirror paintings. Some directly like David’s painting of Socrates. But the later ones, the more modern one’s do not. Like Dracula or Madame Currie. They have a more modern approach. I would say that probably sixty percent of the compositions use the aesthetic of tableaux photography imitating Renaissance painting.
Scott – So what are you doing imitating them who are imitating their predecessors? For them that kind of transition is a way to gain authority or a way to gain perspective as you say you’re moving from one medium to another. So what’s going on as you’re making that kind of secondary or Meta imitation of them? You’re recalling them recalling a previous medium. Photographers recalling painting.
It’s really just aesthetic. It’s where to set the aesthetic. I could have shot it so that everything looked very modern with acute angles, close ups, dramatic lighting but I wanted to pull back and use their aesthetic, a rather phony aesthetic really, but at the same time what I find interesting about it is that’s when they are starting to look at photography in a different way. They certainly don’t quite know the medium that they have so they copy another medium but eventually by doing things like this you begin to discover what photography really is and you find out that that is not photography as theater is not cinema. But that is still part of the process of becoming photography. I love Mélies. I find his films charming and wonderful but it is an imitation of theater. It is not cinema. There is no cinematic language in his films.
Scott – So is there an analogy for what you were discovering what film is or what film can do as you were absorbing their aesthetic or drawing from their aesthetic?
Ray – Or video?
No. It wasn’t something that I found. It’s more the case of using their aesthetic to present this film. Although after awhile you shoot so many of these things that you want to move on. I shot this film over a number of years and my own aesthetic changes or let’s say over the course of time it’s not that you forget the original impetus for the aesthetic it’s more that you want to move away from it. And I think it helps to move away because if all the compositions were done in that way I think the film would have suffered. Also how do you shoot Marilyn Monroe that way? You can’t shoot her like Socrates. I didn’t want to shoot modern elements looking like the Renaissance or like tableaux photography. That would have been a bad choice. But certainly mythology, the ancient world, these were well served with a tableaux aesthetic. With all of this I did not concern myself with any sort of Meta narrative.
Ray – We began the conversation that you were making the film in part to tell your story to your daughter, to explain yourself and explain her to you together. What have her reactions been to the movie and how have you talked about it together.
She hasn’t actually seen the movie. She’s seen parts of it, quite a bit of it, but she hasn’t seen it in its entirety. I believe she’s too young to fully understand the film.
Ray – So it is like a collection of books explaining herself to you and you to her that someday she will discover.
Yes, one day in the future. It’s just over her head right now. She was also Little Red Riding Hood and in school she drew a picture of me photographing her as Little Red Riding Hood. That’s about as much of an understanding that I want her to have at this point in time because it’s deeper and perhaps more personal than a child can handle. There are parts of this film that I’d rather not involve a seven year old child. It’s an elaborate self-portrait. But one day she’ll see it. One day.
Scott – Could you just make a comment on that quotation “don’t look back” which comes up a couple of times. It seems a curious quotation given that a lot of this is about looking back or reprocessing in retrospect.
The whole film is about looking back. Far back. The act of seeing in many respects is required for proof because you lack faith, you don’t believe, and you have to see it, like Doubting Thomas or Orpheus looking back and Eurydice is gone. That’s the same thing here. We are looking back right now and maybe we shouldn’t, not that it’s forbidden knowledge but maybe we’re losing faith. We’re looking back but maybe we shouldn’t be looking back. It functions as kind of a warning, “don’t look back”. Plus it references a great documentary by DA Pennebaker.
Ray – We’ve run out of tape.
Good. I was about to lose my voice.