An Eye for An Eye by Valeria Fonseca

An Eye for An Eye by Valeria Fonseca

We talked to Tim Shore, Head of Animation at London College of Communication about ‘the state of things.’

What is animation at LCC?

We have a range of animation courses but that’s just the courses with the word ‘animation’ in the title. Animation – its principles, techniques, and what people do with them – I think it really has become pervasive. There was a conference called just that – Pervasive Animation – at Tate a couple of years ago, at which Suzanne Buchan, who runs the Animation Research Centre at Farnham, brought together animators, artists, graphics, games and scientists.

And animation is such a fundamental part of games and interactive courses, moving image graphics. Artists increasingly work with animation and it’s a big part of digital cinema, of course. I like what Lev Manovich wrote about how digital cinema is now a particular form of animation – with live action as just one of its elements!

The Evolution of Puppetry by Mariano Melman

I think that’s a view Animate Projects would share, of course. I remember how, when we did the Animate Residencies in the Animate Department, and you suggested we work with the Kubrick Archives at LCC, and that led to Jane and Louise Wilson’s project that ‘animated’ them, albeit conceptually.

But how did you come to teach at LCC? What was your own motivation to work in animation?

I did the diploma course at LCC, quite a few years ago, as a mature student – I’d been a pre-digital graphic designer and illustrator – and that got me a place at the Royal College of Art. I got two film commissions straight after I graduated – an experimental animation for Channel 4 Wales,  and an artist’s film called Cabinet funded by Film London.  I joined LCC to work as part of a job share in 2004.

My personal interest and practice is more from an experimental, art kind of approach. I’d say I use animation in my work, rather than that I make animation films. People that have influenced me come from all kinds of places – the World’s Fair design and technology films by Charles & Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, Peter Tscherkassky and title sequences by Saul Bass and Kyle Cooper.

The Old Tale by Paul Girault

The Old Tale by Paul Girault

What’s distinct about Animation at LCC?

For a start, we’re in central London, and being part of University of the Arts means we’re able to develop connections with others – our students collaborate with sound arts students, for example, but also there’s a lot of common ground with Photography, Design, and Film and Television.

As far as the actual student experience goes, teamwork is very important. I thought what Saint John Walker from Skillset said in his APEngine interview was really interesting – about how internationally that’s the emphasis, and it’s what equips students for the reality of the industry, or industries they will work in.

Working in teams can be hard. It’s a real discipline, but it’s essential and students get experience of working on live projects. For example, we’ve collaborated with MTV and with Channel 4 – our students also made films in response to the Kubrick Archives, which are held at LCC. Those films are on APEngine as it happens! We’re currently working with the National Trust on a project that’s part of the London 2012 cultural programme. (see below)

I think we take a less traditional approach. We want to offer students a space for development, research and experiment. But in tandem with that, help students to understand how skills and experience gained on the course can be applied in the real world.

The courses offer a range of perspectives, and opportunities for different kinds of investigation. We are looking for students who have a drive to experiment and innovate. Artists with different ways of telling stories or making documentary. People who are interested in ways of applying animation beyond its genre constraints – who recognise and respond to animation’s new found centrality and manifestation in disciplines like science, imaging, theatre, and of course mainstream filmmaking, to name a few.

Animation at LCC provides a real space to develop ideas and practice, and to explore and establish new connections. Development space is important – a supported lab for creative development – not just facilities, but time, editorial and curatorial support: a ‘playful’ space in which to take risks and make discoveries.

Slick Horsing, Kiron Hussain

We caught up with Kiron Hussain – winner of the Animate Projects Award for Best Experimental Film at this year’s London Short Film Festival – seeking enlightenment on the inspiration behind Slick Horsing…

You’re currently studying Fine Art at Newcastle – how would you describe your art practice? Have you made any other films during your time there or going by your artreview profile, are you more of a painter by trade?

It all [my work; paint, video, etc,] plays on self contradiction. I try to create beautiful aberrations. I want the viewer’s flesh to creep and heart to lift in the same moment – if you wondered what all of the flashing is about [in Slick Horsing]; I was after a sort of refreshingly disturbing experience… just too pretty to be horrific… paradoxical yes, and possibly the vaguest most pie in the sky modus operandi in the history of film ideas, but it eventually came to be somewhere close to what I wanted.

I come at painting and film in the same way, straight-backed and improvisational [planless nutjob], with the same smudgy back-of-the-brain entities goggling forth out of the dark and manifesting themselves in my work. I just say I’m an artist and it saves the necessity for distinctions [which aren't my strong point].

So, where did the inspiration for Slick Horsing come from? Can you shed some light on the trinity of mankind, girlkind and beastkind…

Shedding light is what I’m best at not doing – the “the trinity of schoolboy terror” [...mankind, girlkind, beastkind...] is a tiny bit of poetry I used to represent childhood fears; I’ll remain a purist of a certain sort by not elaborating beyond that. It’s down to your interpretation.

Slick Horsing seems to me to have elements of the nightmarish lighting and colours of a David Lynch film – are there any filmmakers that particularly inspire you and inspired this work?

Don’t get me wrong, Lynch is a near perfect creature with a gorgeously odd brain [and gets ever so slightly stranger still from the hairline upwards] but I couldn’t honestly say I was directly influenced by him… though, yes he’s inspirational and just maybe there’s a small crossover artistically. I wanted to make a delicate, vivid, unusual piece of art, and consciously all I can reference as an influence is the flickering bulb in my bathroom.

Of course I do actively admire a great number of painters and filmakers, there are several in particular who have been swilling around my head these past months: the directors Ritwik Ghatak [gangly alcoholic, intellectual vagrant and arthouse mega-genius], Shuji Terayama [what Avant-Garde theatre could be on screen – it's happened in Japan] and Alejandro Jodorowsky [drenched in cult hero status, at the cartoonish end of art films, I love him]… and painters Sidney Nolan [a pillar box headed Ned Kelly scorched to charcoal black trots about in an utterly wonked-out Outback... that's my best attempt at an explanation], Goya [effortless master of the grim and brilliant] and the writer GK Chesterton [a Great British hero of immaculate perversity].

I’ve also been watching a lot of Ren & Stimpy, which has compelled me to try to develop a jarring kind of closeup called the Stimpy Cut – I suppose you’d need to see it.

There’s a real 50s Pulp Fiction meets fashion magazine photo shoot feel to the imagery of the film – where did you source the images for the film?

An explicit answer to that question has been smothered by hours of image manipulation – splicing different parts together, an eyeball here, a cuff link there – untangling the mess is beyond me. Also quite a lot of it has been hand painted, and I very much like the idea of keeping people in the dark over which parts are. And your comparison to the aesthetic of 50s Pulp and fashion photography – I love both and agree entirely.

Did you create the unsettling soundtrack yourself? Or do you ever collaborate on your work?

I have a one-track mind, and Slick Horsing was my first film [I do find it difficult using the word film; it's more like just a 90 second shard of strangeness] so there was no question I would revert to type and manipulate every last detail [including the 'unsettling soundtrack'] – you’ll notice the credits are just my name flashed up for three seconds [didn't take long to make that part].

How did you find the experience of showing your work in a film festival setting?

The LSFF seems to have been infiltrated by a tendril of the contemporary art scene, which reassured me I was right at home. I screened two films at two separate events and was delirious throughout both.

What’s next for you? Will there be more films in the future?

I’m working on one right now, scrabbling together the script as I go from a fragmented car crash of a novella I splurged out a while back. Six months ago I was wondering whether I could even make a proper short film, now I’m wondering if I’ll be able to piece together a coherent screenplay. Not entirely sure I’d back myself but the result should at the very least be weird; that being the bare minimum constant in my work; weirdness.

North Canada - English Electric, David Jacques

We talked to David Jacques, nominated for the Northern Art Prize,  about his film North Canada – English Electric.

An exhibition of work by the shortlisted artists (Alec Finlay, Lubaina Himid, David Jacques and Haroon Mirza) runs at Leeds Art Gallery until 6 February 2011. The Prize is announced on 20 January.

Congratulations on being nominated for Northern Art Prize – it’s a different kind of context for art to the one you started out in – you trained and worked as a muralist, and you’ve made a lot of ‘public art’ – billboards, banners…

I’ve tended to move in and around public, community and studio based practices but there’s been a degree of crossover between each, primarily regarding the subject or content. History always loomed large – and because of that the use of narrative. There were constants from virtually day one. But that’s about right, I started out in the ‘applied arts’! Having said that, I think there’s some interesting debate around the notion of design relating to immaterial labour. I’m currently working towards a film/installation about a fictitious experimental arts workshop that reflexively touches on this.

Is ‘public art’ a term you’re comfortable with?! And is there a shift in how you approach work for different contexts?

The ‘public art’ term is almost redundant for me, having seen how and by whom its been co-opted over the past 20 years and I’d probably only use it as shorthand. Anyhow, when I was studying in the mid-1980s, public art and the ‘site specific’ always felt like areas that prioritised the place or physical space over any concerns with sociality. For that reason I was punted towards community art – and that’s obviously another heavily contested area. But from that end of things, I took to engaging with subjects such as oral history, and themes such as social memory. Ultimately, it doesn’t feel like any great shift occurs in approaching different contexts (other than dealing with any commissioning aspect), they’ve tended to merge through pursuing links and commonalities.

North Canada – English Electric is showing at the Northern Art Prize exhibition, and there’s a film’variation’ of the work. It’s a compelling photo essay -  images of bleak, post-industrial waste lands – but that’s also the starting point for something else, isn’t it…

Yes, there’s a fair amount of context to the work – there’s a term that anthropologists use – ‘thick description’ which is a useful reference. It’s a layered work, and maybe there are a few entry points and threads that could be followed, navigating between those might throw up chances for alternate readings. But the intent was to posit a deep lying allegory that deals with the rupture between Industry and Post-Industry or more specifically Fordism and Post-Fordism.

There are two voiceovers – a narrative one, a Scottish man, intermittent works, who took these photos – pairs of photos – of the “toxic edges of the city” – and a second, woman’s voice – considering ‘stereoscopy’. It’s a film about image making, and how the technology of image making constructs views of the world. How did the ideas develop?

The two voices could symbolically point to the Fordist/Post-Fordist question. First off though, I was interested in the issue of waste facilitation and disposal that has been an on-going concern around where I live for some time – “the toxic edges of the city”. So, a fairly immediate response occurred with the attempt to build up a photo essay. Then, with the added dimension of a narrative accompaniment – that’s probably where the ideas started to drop in and the references emerged. There’s an essay by Marc Augé, titled Oblivion – a meditation on ‘forgetting’ that came in useful. He identifies the paradigm in African and American mythologies of the ‘return’, a ritual whereby the protagonist reappears at a significant site possessed by a spirit. The spirit would present as the obverse of the possessed, so a king would host a slave, a male would involve a female – as in ‘North Canada’s’ narrative. The spirit voice took on an added facet as she speaks in the ‘conditional progressive’; the paradoxical tense -“it would have been” – that Barthes related to photography.

It’s also a piece that takes in image making and it deals with stereoscopy or 3D, in its many guises – and specifically thinking of the current manifestation of a ‘3D craze’. I’d come across an interesting description of the stereoscope as a means of representation labeling it ‘obscene’ (disrupting the relationship between viewer and object) in comparison to the ‘scenic’ application of its predecessor the camera obscura. All grist to the allegorical concerns!

As you watch the film, it slowly (or slowly for me!) dawns that the photos we’re seeing are on mounts they don’t belong to – the photos are contemporary Liverpool, but the captions on the mounts National-Geographically describe sights from around the world…

That’s an important aspect – It’s maybe a kind of détournement and one of those moments where the text separates from the imagery and either a frisson occurs or gaps start to open up. Something along those lines occurs in another film work I’m showing at the Northern Art Prize, Por Convención Ferrer, where the narrator takes us through 27 short stories, though the visuals mostly diverge to concentrate on the spaces and architectural details of a grand Victorian municipal library.

What about the way politics operates in the work – and is it different to the more overt politics of your public art?

This might bring us back to what would constitute ‘public art’, the why and where? It’s an erroneous idea that only monumental, didactic statements in ‘public’ places are politically effective. But my relatively amorphous approach that I mentioned earlier, moving around different disciplines, maybe takes in North Canada – English Electric as well. It’s a work that configures in different ways, from the interactive aspect of the installation (viewing the imagery via a couple of stereoscopes) through to the accompaniment of a pamphlet – a hand out containing two pretty uncompromising journalistic texts by local activists relating to the sites photographed and the companies operating there. So it’s probably a work that for me is as public and political as I could expect to produce.

Tor Portraits, Terry Flaxton

We talked to Terry Flaxton on the occasion of his exhibition of high resolution digital works at London’s Ambika P3 gallery. On until 19 December, 10–6, Wednesday to Sunday.

Flaxton has been working as an artist and cinematographer for 25 years, and as a Senior Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at Bristol University, he has been investigating the relationship between the resolution of the digital image and audience engagement.

How – why – did you become an artist, and why moving image in particular?

For as early as I can remember I’ve had to make marks – as a teenager I called it my ‘creative urge’ – an insistent, nagging need to experiment and create images that were pleasing to me. My earliest memory is of being in a high chair, and wondering what I might talk about when I could talk! I suppose this is a cypher for having something to say in the world, about being within the human condition – and that also includes things outside of the human.

I had a few ‘visions’ when I was younger – seeing everything in the same instant – and that had a profound effect upon me – it will do for the rest of my life, in fact. But the sensibility evoked in those visions is effectively what I try to evoke in my image making. Not necessarily in a literal way. Often the ‘literal’ is wide of the mark in terms of essence; all I’m trying to do is utter a syllable that others can recognize, and that evokes the core substance of the fundamental word that is mine to say.

Alongside your art practice, you’ve always worked in other, more ‘industry’ roles, as a documentary maker, cinematographer, and running facilities and production houses. How do you balance those roles – is it a different version of you when you’re doing that kind of work as opposed to being an artist?

When I left college most of my friends entered education to make a living. I wanted to learn my medium. Had I lived in the 12th century I would have wanted to know how to mix pigment and oil. Knowing about the ‘industry’ is about knowing the medium in which I work. Often I ‘steal’ work from my industry self – as in Prisoners (1984). I shot Apple’s ‘Making of 1984′, a record of Ridley Scott’s commercial that brought the Mac into the world. With one hat on I shot the footage for Apple, with another at on I stole it, with another hat on I made the work. In fact this may have been one of my most powerful pieces.

So… my argument is that there’s no contagion, rather a beneficial cross-fertilisation of practices and discourses. I don’t think anyone else from my early generation of video practitioners did this… Now, by the way I no longer deal with ‘video’, ‘analogue’ or ‘digital’ – it’s now data, it’s all in the data – and my project is to bring the immaterial into material manifestation.

You’ve always worked in, and explored, the forefront, high end of video and digital technologies. How do you think of those technologies as ‘material’ – what particular qualities do they have for art?

Data labs are springing up around the world as a commercial response to a societal, industry need. No matter how much academics might contend that the digital is immaterial, all of the signs of materiality abound around them. After all, a roll of film is simply a reference to the experience that occurs when specific things are done to the film – shine light through it, then through a lens – and data undergoes a series of processes to manifest an image too.

In fact, film and data have more in common than film and analogue or digital video – but that’s another conversation. In the show at P3 I realised that having moved cameras around for 30 years on cranes and dollies and tracks, and also having lit extensively (including four feature films), everything I exhibited was a fixed frame with no lighting.

I also felt the need to originate prints, and in one instance I am extruding the lines via a 3D printer to manifest a digital image as a sculpture in aluminium… I find that I am busy creating and harvesting data and making it material. I no longer see any difference between materiality and immateriality in one sense – Duchamp argued for the weight and materiality of the concept, Magritte argued the issue of representation, Warhol argued that all and everything is art when regarded as such – our contemporary artistic aristocracy wrestles with the conundrums derived from all of this investigation – and on top of this we have the immaterial world forcing itself through the cracks of materiality… It is a condition, a continuum that we find ourselves within. Like fish in water we have not recognised the quality of the material we exist within – but now, with the clock set at one second to midnight, it’s time to recognise that art has to change and move beyond last century thinking. The curators are the key at this stage, but they’re bound within the grand curatorial project which limits their vision. Artists intuit the materiality of the digital, it will be a good day when the curators also recognise where we are at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

What are the differences then… what marks the shifts along the continuum?

It’s all about intention. As Warhol noted, it’s in the use of materials and with what intent they’re used that designates their entertainment value, or their value within art.

In Other People's Skins, Terry Flaxton

In your recent works you’ve used HD where you slow things down, or where you must have asked your portrait subjects to sit still… to sort of ‘achieve stillness’. A bit like works Bill Viola’s done, but where he shows us actors emoting and ‘narrative’ scenes, you’ve made portraits of real people or ‘documented’ of real places. And I wondered if ‘fiction’ is something you’re wary of?

Viola dramatises the moment and is very successful in ‘moving’ people. I suppose I’m more Brechtian in my use of all of the functions of the medium. A documentary or documentation is as much a work of fiction as a drama – a friend of mine used to contend that all a documentary documents is the attitude of the maker toward their subject at the time of making – which is of course a fictional gesture when viewed from the present.

People do say, however, that my work ‘moves them’ – that they find it moving – like In Other People’s Skins, which toured a group of cathedrals for a long time – but I’d say that ‘movement’ is empathetic instead of lamentory. I think Viola works with lamentation sometimes (though his fundamental philosophical base seems to be the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination which should of course be understood as being without attachment and therefore emotion) – but I guess he’s an old pro and likes to squeeze people sometimes to get people going. I guess I’m more British about things and also really wish to highlight the fundamental dignity of people (as in all my six portraiture projects from Beijing to Venice, to New York etc)… and I think sometimes, the overdramatic is uncomfortably near melodrama and melodrama doesn’t solve anything.

Your exhibition at Ambika P3 is called ‘High Resolution Moving Image Works’ – and that’s straightforward in one sense, because you’re showing… high resolution works! But it also suggests a purpose… What is the ‘resolution’ you’re in pursuit of?

I had an epiphany at the show. I found a way to demonstrate to people how our eye and mind works with regard to resolution – coining a phrase from Viola which I broadly agree with:

“Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.”

I would add to that:

“Resolution is to consciousness as luminance is to the eye.”

In the first phrase, we’re being asked to have patience and then something will be revealed to us. I’m arguing that with the added quality of resolution, then deeper engagement will occur. So my purpose is to reveal the deeper aesthetics of higher resolutions – because as we travel our timeline, resolution will develop so much more.

It’s a big show – big screens – it’s spectacular… What next?

Quietness and reflection will now be my way for a month. But I’m really interested in exhibiting all of these works in a different context – like the smaller galleries in the East End of London. I want to change the context of its display. I want young gallery owners and art students who’re putting on pop-ups to contact me and I’ll gladly join in with smaller projects because art has to change from the big gallery to the small and become local! These are exciting times to be an artist.

Red Shift, Gunvor Nelson

We spoke to Martha Jurksaitis, Deputy Programme Manager of the Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF) and founder of independent experimental film organisation, Cherry Kino. The Cherry Kino programme at LIFF continues this week with a selection of wonderful shorts, including Sarah Turner’s Perestroika on Friday 19th, Guvnor Nelson’s Red Shift on Saturday 20th and a Warren Sonbert retrospective on Sunday 21st.

How did Cherry Kino come about?

Back in 2007, inspired by helping out at the Evolution Festival in Leeds in 2006 and 2007, I curated a long evening of experimental film during the Leeds International Film Festival. It was such a huge success that I convinced LIFF we should create an entire strand during the festival dedicated to experimental film. They were supportive in this, being a very open-minded festival, and so it was born for the 2008 edition.

It was initially called KiNETIKA!, but I changed the name in 2009, because there is also a Polish film festival in London called Kinoteka. The “Kino” part of the name came about because I wanted to fuse the romantic and germanic terms for film together – I was tired of ”cinema this, cinema that”, and felt that the emphasis on the word mirrored an emphasis on region too – feeling that the cinema ‘of the west’ predominates in cultural discussion. Also of course it relates to the Greek word meaning “to set in motion”, which is the foundation of the word cinema anyway.

So in a way, going back to the roots of cinema linguistically mirrored my interest in the similarities between early kino and experimental kino. The ‘Cherry’ part is both crude and romantic at the same time – “Cheri” (the French for “darling”) makes the phrase a sort of love letter to film, translating, in 2 languages, as “Darling (Cheri) Cinema (Kino)”. It also has the implication that it can be someone’s first introduction to experimental film – i.e. they pop their cherry with it! Cherry Kino has evolved to become an independent film organisation which organises year-round activity, as well as the LIFF programme, because it seemed crazy to me that it popped up during a huge festival where there is so much going on anyway, and then just disappeared again for another year. The year-round activity seems much more conducive to creating community around wondermental film appreciation.

I also run the Cherry Kino Lab, which is a DIY film lab, to encourage the making of film as well as the watching of it. I managed to get a little bit of funding for one year, but after that… I have faith though!

You programme ‘wondermental’ films – where did the term come from and how do you define a wondermental film?

When I first came up with the term it was a bit of fun, stemming from a few things: I felt that ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ were problematic terms, and just wanted to inject a sense of the joy and wonder that I personally experienced (and constantly still experience) when I discovered this type of film.

Then came a sense of anxiety – kind of like “how dare I coin a phrase for such a huge body of work?! How arrogant is that?!”, but honestly, it came from me wanting to be creative with my curation as well – I don’t think that curators are in any way separated from the creative process, and for me, that is part of the reason I adore doing it so much. I actually feel that very often, curators try to remain distanced from their programmes to show respect for the work and the multitude of interpretations they can give rise to, but actually I think often this does the work a disservice because it isn’t conveyed with passion, and it also gives a false impression that the programmes are somehow self-created, which is not the case.

In this post-post-modern situation of “it can mean anything you want it to mean” I think perhaps we have lost sight of the need to make personal approaches organic and visible, not just so they can be appreciated or criticised, but so that people can find a way into the work and so that the programme becomes more accessible, more able to be engaged with, and not put on a pedestal of high concept which nobody really understands but everyone is afraid to say that they don’t. At the same time, I now refuse to dumb it down. Being open is not the same as being vague.

In terms of defining a wondermental film… it’s very very hard to say. Sometimes it’s a combination of technique and approach, sometimes it’s simply an aesthetic (which is in my view very often politically potent without being explicity so). I think my understanding of wondermental film is heavily influenced by the direction my career and interests have taken – I studied English Literature, but finding language inadequate in so many ways, I began working at LIFF, becoming one of the main programmers and responsible for programming a large proportion of the arthouse films (including the Golden Owl Competition) as well as some documentaries.

From there, after I discovered the world of wondermental film, I was just absolutely in love. I refuse to ‘write off’ fiction films, like some proponents of wondermental film do, because I still adore it and I find it a hugely enriching art form, and not as separate from wondermental film as people might think. There seems to be a large amount of snobbery when it comes to defining or standing up for wondermental film.

While I understand that this comes largely from its alternative, marginalised position, I still think that it’s unhelpful, and gives rise to things like the ‘experimental film canon’, where great ‘masters’ of experimental film are recycled over and over to the detriment of lesser known ones (and mistresses…).

At the same time, people do need a way in, and curating for a public festival like Leeds means you have to provide for the ‘virgins’ of the scene at the same time as curating for the more experienced and knowledgable wondermental film lovers. I felt that sometimes I would ‘dumb it down’ a bit in order to get people to come, but I have recently changed this, although I definitely avoid dry, over-intellectualised ‘artist-speak’ too. Hopefully I manage to strike a balance.

I’m very aware that wondermental film slips into the space between definitions of ‘art’ and ‘cinema’, and frequently get annoyed by the art world’s naivety (“ooh, look, this ground-breaking artist is using REAL FILM!!”) and the film world’s ignorance (“that’s not a proper film! What’s it about? Where’s the story?”). I find that a lot of artist’s film that is submitted to LIFF display concept, as understood in the art world, but very little film technique. Likewise, narrative filmmakers making ‘experimental’ work often produce films which are more in line with arthouse.

How did you become involved with LIFF?

I volunteered in 2004, as soon as I’d graduated from the Uni (doing literature), and I felt a really strong gravitational pull towards the festival – I somehow just knew that it was for me. I’d always loved alternative films, and remember a few seminal experiences – my dad showing me Murnau’s Nosferatu when I was 4 (4 years old, I mean, come on!), and also Dario Argento’s Phenomena when I was about 7, and Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups by my French teacher when I was about 12. Also, Channel 4′s offerings (when it was still a good channel), and then a whole range of films like Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and countless others which I saw on the Australian film channel SBS when I lived in Melbourne in 2000.

I also went to loads of events organised by Bio Reykjavik when I lived in Iceland in 2003, who did all kinds of film screenings including epic marathons in empty warehouses and other interesting venues with a sense of passion and fun, which, looking back, contributed to my feeling that this was a wonderful thing to do. But ultimately, the freedom, support, deep friendship and education I’ve received through working at LIFF have had the strongest effect on me and have helped to shape my appreciation of and dedication to wondermental film, both showing and making.

Can you recommend any experimental films that you’ve recently seen that we should check out?

In terms of recommendations, I’m absolutely crazy about Gunvor Nelson‘s work, so I’d definitely recommend that. In terms of recent work, I was very impressed by Madame and Little Boy by Magnus Bartas – a film which would equally have fit into the festival’s documentary strand as well as Cherry Kino. The film won at Oberhausen this year. In fact Oberhausen was a very big inspiration with excellent programming. It was there that I also saw the work of Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta, whose work I hope to programme in the new year at one of the monthly Cherry Kino events.

Children by Paolo Gioli is also a film that really got inside me (I like his approach to filmmaking too), Tunnels by Christopher Cogan is unlike anything I can remember seeing, Looking for Apoekoe by Karel Doing is wonderful, as is Film about an Unknown Artist by Laura Garbstiene, Chladni Scheme by Peter Miller gets more fascinating after every viewing (I think I’ve seen it 5 times now), Cosmic Alchemy by Larry Jordan is wonderful, Forms are not Self-Subsistent Substances by Samantha Rebello is fabulously archaic and new at the same time, Project for a New American Century or Writing and the Art of Persecution by Keith Sanborn is challenging but so rewarding, Li: the patterns of nature by John Campbell just makes my jaw drop, Yves-Marie Mahe’s Relrap Erdnetne Suov Ed Edalam Dner Em Ac (“it makes me sick to hear you speak” backwards) is great fun (as usual), Peter Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions is fabulous (and very Austrian), and Tischk – le Rayon by Olivier Fouchard and Mahine Rouhi is like the missing (wondermental) piece connecting art-house gems like Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates and Pasolini’s Uccellaci Uccellini.

Not all of the films I’ve mentioned here are new – Cherry Kino doesn’t have a strict UK Premiere or new policy, as I don’t see the point.

You’ve recently put together a DIY filmmaking guide, what filmmakers inspired you to become a filmmaker?

Let’s see… In terms of arthouse directors, I remember very clearly seeing Onibaba by Kaneto Shindo and feeling very strongly that I wanted to make work with that viscerality, high contrast, fabulous… Also Lucia by Humberto Solas was a very important film for me, as well as I Am Cuba by Mikael Kalatozov (those wonderful, wonderful shot angles, and the incredible club scene). Paradjanov and Jodorowsky are also huge influences, and Bela Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies too.

Sometimes it’s as much to do with the experience of seeing the film as the film itself – I saw The Werckmeister Harmonies at the Mediawave festival in Hungary some years ago, in this tiny makeshift cinema where you had to crawl through a gap to get to your seat, with just a heavy curtain separating the cinema from the bar, and it was just magical – the perfect setting. Kazuo Hara is also a big influence.

In terms of wondermental filmmakers, Alex MacKenzie, Paul Clipson, Etienne Caire, Sector 16 (a collective I stayed with for a month a few years back), EXP24 (a collective I was part of for 3 years), Eve Heller, Gunvor Nelson, Peter Tscherkassky, and David Larcher’s Mare’s Tail which I’m showing during the festival. There are absolutely loads more too!

You run 16mm workshops and labs – how did you get in to hand-processing film and why do you think it’s important to carry on the process?

I got into hand-processing through 2 friends, Mark and Joanna, who were co-founders along with myself and a guy called Dave of our collective EXP24, which has since disbanded as we’ve all gone on to do our own (still film related) things. We used to meet up at each other’s houses to process film and watch it together, make food, and organise screenings. For me, it’s such a creative process – I’m heavily into the processes, cross processing, and manipulation of the footage, as it is just as much part of making films as what you actually shoot (if you shoot anything!).

I guess there is a worry that it will take over and I’ll get lost in a mess of chemicals and forget about the film, but so far that hasn’t happened. I actually have never finished a film I’d say I’m happy with, but I’m hoping to focus on that once the festival is over. I’m really interested in the phenomenological aspects of film, and I’m looking at the concept of synaesthesia (the crossing over of senses – eg coloured hearing etc), and how wondermental film can bring that about.

I do feel very close to film as a material, but I’m also wary of pigeonholing it, and very wary of the whole ‘arts and crafts middle class leisure activity’ it can often become. I take film very seriously as well as having fun with it, and have far too much respect for filmmakers to just treat film as a thing. I’m interested in how the organic form of film translates the light and colour for it to reach our bodies and our consciousness. I’m not an analog purist – I’m not against digital film – but I definitely feel very attracted to analog film and analog apparatus. Perhaps that’s middle-class retro. I hope not!

In the same way I love non-verbal communication, I also love the x-factor you get from film – it does have an aura. Most definitely. I experience it and I know it is there. It somehow makes room for intuition. Perhaps it’s also something to do with presence – the film physically witnessed the light, and is somehow a testimony of light – its presence. I also like to show people that it doesn’t have to be expensive to make films, and that film is still available! But I do think the fact that film has a cost helps us to learn how to use it with consciousness – all the variables involved, rather than just pressing a single button to catch it all now and edit it all later, mean that we too are brought into the present.

I think that if you are ‘present’ when you film, that often comes through in the film. Perhaps that sounds like hippy rhetoric, but I really do believe that can happen. It intensifies the relationship between looking and creating, and gives an added dimension to the reality of the film and your connection to it.

Would you ever be tempted to go digital?

Hmmm. It certainly has it’s strong points! Perhaps I would one day, yes. But at the moment I feel like I’ve put so much energy into discovering analog processes that to go digital would involve me just learning a heap of new stuff which gets on my nerves – I spend so much time with computers and escaping into true darkness is a deep pleasure for me. I’m at a point where I want to make films intensively for the next year, so it’ll be analog that I use for that, as well as the foreseeable future.

What’s coming up for Cherry Kino?

A screening of Larry Jordan‘s films on 9 December in the Leeds Town Hall, and a black and white reversal hand processing workshop led by James from no.w.here on 29 January.

The Cube in Bristol have also asked Cherry Kino to guest curate an event there in February, and Impressions Gallery in Bradford have asked Cherry Kino to guest curate one of their Intermission screenings too. Happy days!

The Cherry Kino Lab is also open more frequently over the winter (this is based at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, Leeds – thanks ESA!) as I’ll have more time after the festival to do it, and I’m thinking about organising a programme for the Leeds Young People’s Film Festival too, to get the kids in on it.

Personally, making films is my top priority for this coming year, along with researching synaesthesia and keeping the activity and momentum up. The hope with creating the booklet is that people will use it as a manual so they can use the lab independently, and I can get on with some filmmaking. Sometimes, organising lots of film things means I don’t have time to work on films myself, and I think that’s super important if I’m going to keep loving what I do. Oh god do I love it!

If anyone reading this would like a copy of the Cherry Kino filmmaking booklet, just drop Martha an email with your postal address to: cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

Point Line Plane, Simon Payne

APEngine talks to Kim Knowles, about how she first got interested in the avant-garde, her Diversions project, and her programming for Edinburgh Film Festival’s Black Box.

How did your film education start?

My early film education was quite shocking. Those people that go, “Oh yes, my parents took me to the cinema when I was six and the first film I saw was Tarkovsky’s something or other.” Probably the first films I got interested in were Alien and Terminator, and they’re still films that I think quite a lot of. Even when I went to University to do film I was still quite oblivious about more experimental works. The focus was on things like authorship, so I was learning about people like Martin Scorsese. I found it really shocking that we never had any classes in avant-garde cinema.

So, it’s not as if I grew up immersed in film and that I had a wonderful film education at university – I’m not saying that I didn’t have a good education but it wasn’t very broad. It wasn’t until I was doing my masters – an MSc in European Film Studies at Edinburgh – that I got to see non-narrative works. Even then we just had one week on avant-garde cinema, and then even the term was quite obscure for me. I didn’t even know what it entailed and we had just a short screening, maybe 20 minutes of 1920s avant-garde film.

It started with Hans Richter and I thought, “My god, what is this?” I wasn’t impressed at all, and then when we got to René Clair’s Entr’acte’, and I thought, “Oh, ok, this is quite interesting.” It’s been an inspirational film for me ever since.

Had you not seen anything like that before?

I’d seen Un Chien Andalou when I was at college doing my National Diploma and I wasn’t sure what to think because there was no context to it really. I think our tutors deliberately tried to provoke us.

So, they showed us Wild at Heart at nine o’clock on a Monday morning. And Un Chien Adalou on another Monday morning. So, we all had really bad reactions to those films!

I always think it’s odd funny to teach things like Wild at Heart and Scorsese – Ridley Scott, even – without reference to the avant-garde, because all those directors know all that avant-garde stuff and are influenced by it.

Absolutely. This is a big question. Let’s be honest, most universities are focusing on the thing that’s popular at the time. It’s all about world cinema, trans-national cinema, digital media.

So, you don’t really get the old focus on French cinema, Spanish cinema. And when I look at film courses I really have to dig around to find the experimental avant-garde stuff and it’s usually just a token week in a course somewhere.

There’s not really any dedication to that area in the UK.

I think it works the other way round too – lots of art education avoids discussion of cinema and even avant-garde cinema. But places like the University of East London with Michael O’Pray, and Al Rees at the RCA…

But those are people working in art schools not in universities. It’s hard to incorporate the avant-garde into the university context. When I first started teaching film studies, a student said, “Well, I don’t see the point of avant-garde film, I think film could do quite well without it.”

Well of course, not having a point is sometimes the point of avant-garde film…!

I just said it was a stupid thing to say – I didn’t word it any nicer than that, but he was very adamant that film was pointless, it didn’t add anything to film and it was pointless studying it. “Why should we have to look at that crap?”
It’s all supply and demand, isn’t it? If there isn’t a demand for those kind of courses, then what’s the point in offering them. Then at the same time, if you don’t offer them then people don’t get to know about it and don’t know they’re interested in it.

Back to the beginning, you saw those 20s avant-garde films…

It’s all very romantic isn’t it!? It’s true, you know, I’m not fluffing it up, that’s how it happened!

It’s good to fall in love like that, I think.

Well, I just decided that that was it, that that was what I would write on. I wrote an essay on those films and then I wrote my masters dissertation on 20s avant-garde film and then I wrote my PhD on Man Ray. I was very stuck in that 1920s period for a while, but you can’t do anything else when you’re doing a PhD. I remember saying to myself, “When I finish this damn PhD, I’m going to work on contemporary film.”

My knowledge of 1920s and the avant-garde and modernism was very solid but my knowledge of how that then fed into contemporary experimental film was still limited and I knew it. I’d seen the odd film by Sharits and Brakhage but I didn’t really know how they fitted into the history of experimental film and contemporary developments. Also, in Edinburgh, opportunities for getting education oneself in experimental cinema were a bit limited. So, it wasn’t for that reason, but I went to live in Paris while I was writing my PhD. I was going to stay there for about seven months and I ended up staying for just under five years. And that was where I got my education in experimental film history.

Where did you go to get that education?

In Paris you don’t have to look very far. You’ve got the Centre Pompidou, the Cinémathèque and then I would see screenings by places like Cinédoc, the old Filmmakers’ Co-op.

Chasing Waves, Paul O'Donoghue

Then I discovered Light Cone, which Yann Beauvais set up. And I’d met Pip Chodorov in Edinburgh, and then I realised that Pip was this, kind of, god like figure in experimental film. I thought, “Okay, I need to know that guy.”

There are so many godlike figures!

But Pip is the centre. He’s everywhere! He is Jonas Mekas’ right hand man and wherever Mekas is, Pip is. And Pip set up Re:Voir, the video distribution label, and co-founder of the lab L’Abominable with Nicolas Rey.

I started going to all these screenings and then it all started fitting together. I remember going to see Pip in the shop he’d set up- it was called the Film Gallery Paris where they sell books and DVDs on experimental film.

I remember asking him, “How do I get to know what’s going on in contemporary film, experimental film? How do you know what’s coming out?” He said, “You just have to keep your eyes open and go to film festivals.”

Then I went back to Edinburgh and got quite depressed because, “Well now, how am I going to see all of this stuff?” I kept organising trips back to Paris – every time there was a screening I’d go back to Paris for the weekend. I’d always wanted to set up a film festival but it was always this thing in my mind of, god, I’d like to do that but it’ll never happen.

Then I had the opportunity to do it because there was a grant that I could apply for while I was teaching – it was a part time temporary position, but that post enabled me to apply for this big chunk of money. I got that and I got a chunk from Scottish Screen and some other chunks. Suddenly I had all this money.

Was that for Diversions?

Yes, and money is power, isn’t it? If you’ve got money then you can start asking people, you can start getting people to come to you rather than you, sort of, hovering around them. Then I invited over all the people I was interested in.

The main reason for doing it was because there was nothing in Edinburgh. I wanted to create something there. I was frustrated when I came back because I’d gone away not really knowing that much about the area and I came back with this massive knowledge, and I wanted to do something with it.

Those agencies that were supporting you – how much persuading did they need?

Not that much – it was a gaping hole in the market, wasn’t it? And I already had quite a good relationship with Filmhouse in Edinburgh. I was proposing a structure that would be a festival but also historical.

What wanted to do was to create something that give a sense of experimental film history. I was completely blown away in the first year actually because I had no idea what I was doing. Because I didn’t have any idea I just worked with the resources that I had and the resources were the money and the people.

So, I’d already made contact with a French filmmaker Frédérique Devaux, who’s someone I respect quite a lot, and she signed up, Pip signed up, and Peter Rose, an American filmmaker who I’d started working on a bit, and Al Rees and David Curtis. Brad Butler, Karen Mirza and Nicky Hamlyn also helped to put together a programme of new British works.

All those people came on board as guest curators. I think I only put together one of the programmes myself, which was on films from New York – the rest were suggested by other people and I’d work with them. It was a success – most screenings sold out. It was so much more than I’d expected.

How did Black Box start?

At the same time actually. When I came back from Paris I was on a mission and I was going to make myself a spokeswoman for experimental cinema; I was going to be a missionary!

What about having a separate experimental section? For many years – some time back – London Film Festival had an experimental film section, and a video art section – and I remember talking to Sandra Hebron about whether that work should be integrated into the festival, which of course is an useful, desirable thing but unless you privilege the work in some sense…

This year I had two feature films – Perestroika by Sarah Turner, and Mike Hollboom’s Mark. And those films would’ve actually worked in the main programme. But this is experimental work, and I think you need to contextualise it. But at the same time if you tell a people this is experimental work, then they’ll be hesitant about going to see it.

Perestroika, Sarah Turner

What was your approach to Black Box… because Diversions was a broader discussion of ideas, different curatorial approaches. In Black Box you’re programming rather than curating…

They’re very different. Diversions is based on guest curators who bring in their own perspective, so, I don’t do very much in terms of selecting the films. I coordinate the programme and bring those people together. But Black Box is something I personally curate. The first time I did it, in 2008, there were maybe 40 submissions, so it didn’t take very long, and I suggested two screenings. And they did one. And it was quite different to what my vision of it would have been. So really I was only a kind of consultant. The next year, as I’d done my ‘apprenticeship’ they said, “Take it, do something with it.” And so I started pushing for some kind of identity.

And I said three programmes is the minimum and I want two feature slots as well.

Hannah McGill, the Festival’s artistic director, and Diane Henderson, deputy artistic director, have been very supportive, and Diane has been quite instrumental in allowing me to do what I want to do.

So, what is your taste? How do you judge?

Lots of filmmakers are really flattered and quite surprised that I’ve chosen their film because they haven’t managed to get it into other festivals. And some submissions are from filmmakers that are just emerging and just starting to play with the medium, but maybe haven’t really found their style, but that’s a reason to programme their work.

I was about to say I don’t have any selection criteria but I do. There are certain interests and obsessions that I constantly fall back on, in spite of myself.

You’ve talked a lot about avant-garde – there are continuing traditions that are being explored, aren’t there?

That is one of the driving forces behind it.

How strict are you?

This gets into very problematic territory. I chaired a panel discussion recently in Edinburgh, about this issue of experimental and artists’ films, and whether there is a divide between a filmmaker and an artist making films.

I thought it was just me being quite picky about categories but it is a real issue. I’d say about half the films submitted – we have something like 250 submissions in total – for Black Box are artist films, and films that are really not made for a cinema context. So one of the things that I look for is a film that is in some way engaging with a cinematic experience. It’s temporal and it’s spatial.

We have to write a report on all the films we review, and I find myself often saying, “This would work really well in a gallery context.”

This raises important issues of where you exhibit, where you experience, and how you experience film, and the role of the moving image in the gallery space. Some films really work with the immersiveness of the cinema, other films work with that very, kind of, distanced viewing where you can walk in and walk out.

But I think it’s hard to define what that is because it’s not necessarily about structure and form and beginning and end. When I was a child, you paid for your ticket and you went in and started watching the film – even with Carry On films I remember going in and seeing the last 20 minutes and then seeing the film from the beginning, then then leaving when you reached the point you’d arrived.

This is a mode of film viewing now that I really don’t agree with. That’s what the surrealists used to do, isn’t it? Just throwing you in at any old time, which worked then but perhaps not now.

But I’m not saying that this work would only work in cinema, or this work would only work in a gallery – there are films that cross over and those are often the ones that are really interesting. I think Simon Payne’s work, for example, is really important in terms of what it’s doing in terms of colour, form, and also from a historical perspective because in a way it’s referencing those very early films by Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman. And Sharits – that flicker effect relies on an immersive context; it works very much with your senses. But I can see that working in a gallery context as well. Obviously I preferred to see it in a cinema!

Does Black Box have to define itself against the rest of the festival or…

It does that without me even wanting to or not wanting to because Edinburgh is traditionally a festival that showcased independent and experimental film and it’s got that reputation. I think in the past few years or decades it’s shifted – it’s interested in much more popular forms of filmmaking. But everyone at the festival, everyone at the top, acknowledges that to have a good well respected festival you have to have different sections. So, you can have the films that are going to draw people in but then you also have to cater to different tastes.

There is the animation section, there’s the documentary section, there’s the shorts, but Black Box still sits outside of all that. One of the things that I’ve tried to make clear is that there is an experimental community every bit as much as there is an animation community or a short film community.

A problem can be that the clearer the identity of that section becomes, the more removed it becomes from the festival itself.

A Thousand Scapes, Martijn van Boven

Is it popular?

Perestroika sold out before the Festival opened, which was amazing, but Black Box is always a bit unpredictable. Perestroika had more visibility in the brochure – literally – because it was to the left of the calendar.

So, first of all when the brochure falls open, it falls open on that page. Also, when you go to look at the calendar of events you start with that and then, you know, your eye is drawn naturally to ‘Perestroika’. It’s quite simple but also really relevant.

But also it has narrative structure which draws people in, and the subject matter was very interesting for people. It has to overlap then, I’m realising, with more popular interests.

It’s back to criteria of selecting work, isn’t it? It’s not just whether something is in an avant-garde tradition; it’s what else is interesting, what else is, for a contemporary audience, interesting about this work…

That’s easier to do with a longform work but with shorts it’s much harder. Programmes of shorts have to be shorter – a programme of 80 minutes can be quite exhausting.

It’s easy to predict who the audience is going to be for Diversions but it’s harder to say who the audience would be for Black Box. And you have to think about this when putting together the programmes – making them thematic.

This year I had one that was about nature, partly because that might be something people can relate to.

And the most popular one was called Time Travel – an idea of time and of travel in their broadest sense – travelling through time, travelling through history, also, jumping time frames.

It’s also about building the audience, not just within the space of the festival. Things become solid over years. And I think this is going to take a while actually to solidify.

Are you doing it again?

Yes. I don’t want to let go of it!

I hope it’s starting to become somewhere people want to show their work. The last time I went to Rotterdam I was surprised that a lot of people heard about Diversions but nobody really thinks of Edinburgh as having an experimental section. I’m constantly getting this, “Oh, I didn’t know that Edinburgh had an experimental section.”

It’s hard work trying to get word out…

I think word is getting out now.

It is?

My Funeral Song © Breda Beban, courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre

First of all, I just wanted to ask you how you became an artist? It’s an easy question to ask…

It’s a very complicated answer! Because in my life, I’ve tried everything not to be an artist. I always wanted to be something else. I wanted to study physics. I wanted to study mathematics. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be a film director. And all my attempts were always very unsuccessful!

Did you just not have the brain? I mean the right kind of brain..!

I don’t – maybe I don’t. Or maybe it is that I am much more persistent when it comes to art. I don’t give up.

I’m not sure why this is. But whenever it comes to art, I can be very stubborn. And I will pursue projects and I will fight for them and, even if they are completely falling apart, in terms of funding or in terms of working with collaborators, and cast and crew, or whatever I do, I tend to be very stubborn and persistent. And I tend to carry them through.

Did you study art?

Yes I did, but again, by accident. I wanted to study design. And this was in the early 70s, in Yugoslavia, and it wasn’t possible to study design. At the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb, they had a subject called ‘design’. So that’s why I enrolled to the Academy of Fine Art. But it was just like drawing crazy lines. It had nothing to do with design. It was some form of exercise in free-line drawing or controlling the line – I never got what it was about. But I kind of carried on. And that’s how I was trained as an artist.

And what about the moving image?

Again, an accident. I was doing a performance in my apartment in Zagreb. And I moved out my family and the furniture and everybody and the performance was to be for only 30 invited people. And then a young director rang and said that he would like to make like a short, brief documentary for television about it. And I said, “Yes.” And they came along as I was doing rehearsals, to do the camera set up and all that. And they had a monitor and I was looking at that, while doing my own things, and realised that my performance would have been much better if I could have used moving image. Because certain problems I had with the performance would just not be there. Through the means of editing and the means of controlling time and all that.

And that young director was Hrvoje Horvatic. I was very open about the fact that…why am I doing a performance…this would be much better if it were filmed. And next day he gave me a call and he said, “So would you like to make film?” And I said, “Yes, but I don’t know how to.” And he said, “Maybe I can help.”

And that’s how I started working with Hrvoje.

You collaborated with Hrvoje over many years. And he hadn’t been an artist before?

No, he was trained very much in the East European sort of Film Academy, where he had to know everything about cameras and everything – the detail about film making. I came from the art world into filmmaking – so we kind of swapped.

You mentioned Yugoslavia. You were born in Serbia, raised in Macedonia and Croatia. But they weren’t known as those countries then; they weren’t those nation states then. And you leave with Hrvoje, who’s by now your partner, and you move to London. In David Curtis’ book,  he says how the works you made “marked the progress from being internal exiles to statelessness to being an exile in London”. Leaving home, and being in exile, how do you make art and films in those changing circumstances?

The work Hrvoje and I did in former Yugoslavia existed in a sort of self-chosen world. And we were not thinking much about it. We just did what we felt we had to do. When exile came it became suddenly, strangely, impossible to do work like that. And [we were] faced with a lot of impossibilities, even faced with depression, faced with a lot of pain and a lot of anger, for a long time, it was almost impossible to articulate any ideas.

But I think what also contributed to it is that, although our work until then existed in this self-chosen world, we were still relating to the geography. To the shape of the geography where we came from.

When we moved to Britain, although it’s not a culture which is dramatically different, silence kind of fell upon us. Because Britain is coded – or at least England or London – they were coded with completely different, silent codes, which we couldn’t understand, as much as we wanted to, even though we spoke a bit of English. We couldn’t understand.

And then the problems started because there was no way of having a self-chosen world for us. And our effort became about understanding where we were. So the work made at that stage, at that time, became much more direct and through a sort of strange desire to relate to the world around us.

To the new world?

To the new world. But with every attempt, we were crashing against a certain form of misunderstanding or distance or alienation.

But at the same time, they are works about loss and pain and displacement, aren’t they? And they refer to where you’re from.

Yes they are, but more than that. I don’t look at them, but I have seen some of them recently. They are sort of desperate attempts at communication… falling down, the most ultimate desperate attempt at communicating – all the things that I kind of carried on doing.

Yes, you’ve fallen down again more recently.

Yes, I kind of tend to do that.

But in quite a different way.

Even something like your one-minute film, The Lifeline Letter, where a letter floats in water and burns. There’s a lot in those works, I think, about what cannot be, about loss, and being unable to touch and grasp things.

So are you saying that that’s both about being an exile but also being in a new context? Or without context?

I think, that, for example, The Lifeline Letter was made more for our new friends and our potential new viewers than for anybody back there where we came from.

We were faced with the complexity of the situation – of where we came from –  which was a tragedy. Our country separated and destroyed by war. And at the same time, being in Britain, where the media coverage of what was happening there was in complete contradiction to what we had experienced.

And whenever people would ask, “What’s really happening to your country?” we just felt, “Well, do you have three years, three days, or how many hours do you have?”

I can see it now. At the time, I couldn’t see it. We just did the best we could. But the films were these cryptic, slightly hermetic attempts at ‘saying’. We sort of leaped towards poetry. We wanted to be very precise linguistically, formally, about all these ambiguities, with regard to these huge questions that we didn’t know answers to.

I was going to ask you whether they were poems or essays. I saw Geography at Riverside Studios in the late 80s, I think. That was before you came here.

Geography was made just as we knew that the country was going to fall apart.

And I remember thinking that there were a lot of very specific references there that I didn’t understand then. That I might understand better now. But then your work, when you come here, seems to lose that essay quality and becomes more poetic and universal.

I think, yes. I don’t want this to sound too complicated and it’s impossible to speak simply about all these grand sorts of things that are always actually looming in the background of everything I do or that Hrvoje and I did together.

Without going into exile, or without the experience of exile, certain aspects of my character would have remained dormant forever. Because I would have kept on developing within a particular type of culture. Because, you know, when we are born, I think we are genetically coded, but then we become a work in progress.

And I think that kind of work-in-progress aspect has contributed to me becoming a much more complex character. And certain aspects of my character were suddenly illuminated. And I am convinced they would have remained dormant without me moving to Britain, where I had to renegotiate who I am and what it means to be – this notion of the horrible word: identity. What does it mean when confronted with another culture, within or against the backdrop of another culture?

And though you feel like there is a lot of aggression in that process, actually, when you really accept that, then there is this kind of beauty of understanding that who you are is not a fixed thing. It’s something that is not only changing but is unstable. Forever and ever. And wherever you are.

But I don’t think that I would have understood that if I would have stayed where I was, or tried to remain where I kind of came from. However complex that territory is in terms of these kind of cultural references ­– and I think a similar thing was happening with the work as well. It kind of started opening up to themes and formal approaches that were, for us, impossible before then.

And while that’s happening and you’re establishing a new life, you’re achieving success as artists and then, shockingly and suddenly, Hrvoje dies. And as losing a partner, you are losing the person that you’ve collaborated with for a decade. So there’s the personal pain, but what impact does that have on your approach to art?

Well, as we are talking, something crossed my mind. I am someone who has one life and three CVs! I have the CV as an artist in Yugoslavia, which fell apart completely, and a lot of things I did have became completely irrelevant.

Then I have a CV working with Hrvoje Horvatic. Then he’s gone.

And now, I have a CV of working on my own. So there is something absurd there because every time I have to kind of reinvent something.

But it is true that, you know, apart from losing Hrvoje, which was a tremendous personal loss and pain, on the professional level, artistic level, I again lost. I didn’t know who I was anymore. So that, I had to find out.

So how did you find out? What did you find?

The most surprising thing I realised is that throughout all the time I worked with Hrvoje, I was actually making work that I wasn’t showing. Or was never thinking that it was going to be shown. It was like my survival strategy, but used as a purely physical kind of survival strategy on day-to-day basis, which comprised predominantly of taking photographs all the time and writing bits and pieces of text related to them. But almost as if I had amnesia; I wasn’t really aware that I was doing that. So, with the loss of Hrvoje, I never went through old photographs of the two of us or the life lost in that way. What suddenly emerged were all these boxes and boxes of photographs I did which were all about his absence. Because I always did them when he wasn’t around. Almost secretly. Though I didn’t feel like I had to do it like that.

And out of that material, my first solo show in Britain happened, which was called Still at the Site Gallery in Sheffield.

So suddenly, there was all this work that I was making that I wasn’t even really aware of. It’s like I was in living in some form of amnesia.

And it included the video work, Never Only One Time Three, which relates to death.

That particular piece is about offering myself as a material to psychic readers. They had 15 minutes to guess my past, my character, and my future. And they were just edited back-to-back. And it was amazing how accurate some of them were. That kind of shocked me. Because I’ve never had that experience before. They are like machines for telling stories.

But however accurate they were, you’re presenting this as art. So inherent in that there’s a wry humour, and maybe an irony that I think wasn’t in the work before.

Well, that’s true. The last piece we did together is Jason’s Dream. Which is a musical! An experimental musical. And I did it in spite of Hrvoje!

I wrote the script very quickly, and he refused to do it. He chucked it. And he refused to do it because he thought that it was for imbeciles! Quote! And he did everything in his power to sabotage it. And that is a piece which, finally, for me, was about humour and it was about embracing life and it was about certain forms of pleasure. And it was about Britain, post-colonial, post-feminist Britain. And it was about the life I was having in London, so it was something I wanted to really connect to. And that was a way for me to do that. Because sometimes, I use art to connect to life.

And I think your work has continued in that vein. It doesn’t need the same decoding. There’s an immediacy. There’s a humour. There’s an openness.

I’d like to think that. This is the ‘irony’ which I learned in Britain. And I’m so thankful for this. Irony being the sum of all gains and losses. And I’m so grateful for that.

In Let’s Call It Love, there’s an explicit game isn’t there. There’s war on the one side, you know, in battle with love.

With intimacy and love and longing.

Well… intimacy, love and longing have pervaded your work since then.

I would like to think. I constantly try to avoid contradictions but what I do with my work, it just does happens, and now I want them.

We can laugh and cry at the same time..

Exactly, exactly. Which is what the funeral song, My Funeral Song is about, isn’t it?

My Funeral Song © Breda Beban, courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre

Well, what is it about?

It kind of was triggered by shared moments of happiness with friends, where there’s a lot of dancing, drinking and having lots of fun.

Well, that’s not very British!

You’d be surprised!

But there often comes a moment, which is late at night or early in the morning, when someone completely takes over the music. And, you know, you have to kind of hear all the lyrics of their favourite songs.

And they torture you, basically, but you are happily tortured. And then there comes a moment when someone says, “If I drop dead tomorrow, this is the song I want played at my funeral.” That’s what triggered the piece.

So I filmed a number of my friends as they listened to their funeral song. And finally made a selection of five portraits, so to speak, which are part of the exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. And they are all different.

There’s one where someone falls apart. It’s very romantic and sentimental. There’s one where there’s a storm raging in the background. There’s one which is very irritating. And I think my friends’ characters come pretty much across. It’s five portraits because I think five is the first large number – and so the viewer can still remember and relate to each individual. I think when you go over five, you start using people. You start creating wallpapers.

So it was a big excuse for me, this piece, after being incredibly busy for a number of years, where I felt that I had no life anymore, to reconnect with my life and my friends. And see what actually I am all about, in a way.

But there is also this kind of sense, something looming in the background of My Funeral Song, that the party has moved on. It’s not in London anymore. The big party has moved. It’s in Beirut now. It’s in Buenos Aries.

Countries that are not having the financial crisis that we are going through at the moment – that are experiencing different things.

You work as a curator as well. There’s your Imagine Art After project, which is about just that – artists making art in places where they are not from.

Yes, but they are coupled with artists who decided to remain in their country of origin.

And I wanted to look into that. It’s taken place over five years, and now it’s a second edition. So there’s a huge difference between the first and the second edition.

With the first edition, it emerged that the artists working Britain were more confident and had more possibilities to make their work. But now, it looks like that the ones who are, who remained in the country of origin, are actually more confident. And this just happened within a space of six years.

So it’s not like imposing. We don’t know. This is a project which says, “We don’t know.” Let’s allow for this process to kind of happen over a period of time and let’s find out what is really going on. Not only with migrant art but also migration and the geopolitical notion of the local. And what does it mean to migrant artist? What does it mean to be the ones who stayed?  I think it’s a very simple, pure structure that allows for a phenomenal kind of a number of outcomes.

My ambition is big but it’s is a very small team, working and facilitating 24 artists from different countries around the world.

Beautiful Exile, Breda Beban

Now. I didn’t have the courage to ask about this earlier but, back to intimacy. It doesn’t get more intimate than Beautiful Exile, does it… it’s portraits of women… well… you tell me…

Portraits of women before, during and after orgasm all in one shot! Filmed by Robby Müller.

And how did you get them to do that!?

It’s portraits of five women, four close friends and myself. I really felt I didn’t need to be part of it, but it was a condition – two of the women that I really wanted to be part of it said that they will only do it if I will do it. Which I thought it was fair enough.

So, like with My Funeral Song, there is a very old story that is behind all this.

When I was growing up as an artist in Yugoslavia, together with all the younger artists who were part of the art scene, we were very lucky – exposed to films from Russia, European films, American films, the Hollywood films. But to experimental films and underground films coming from America and Europe as well.

And I remember, I always had huge arguments. I couldn’t stand Andy Warhol. I just couldn’t understand what on earth his work was about. People would try to explain to me what this was about and I would go, “I don’t understand it. I grew up in communism. I’ve seen one advert in my life, basically, on the main square.” It was for toothpaste. But we had only one brand of a toothpaste, so it wasn’t about selling. It was reminding people to brush their teeth.

And I remember, we saw Thirteen Most Beautiful Women in a multimedia centre in Zagreb and again, a lot of drinking, a lot of arguments. And I said, “I swear I will inject these images with emotions.” And I forgot about it.

And, actually after I did Beautiful Exile, I was suddenly reminded of that.

But also there’s a lot of sex in those avant garde films and in Yugoslavian underground films.

Yes there was, sex was never a problem. Or any type of censorship, either in Yugoslavia or in our work in general.

But Beautiful Exile is a film about sex which isn’t pornographic.

I focused on faces, because I’m interested in these moments that are sort of the natural elegance of a face, when it’s right here and somewhere else at the same time. When these departures happen.

The other works I was going to ask you about is Walk of Three Chairs and May ’98. So May ’98 is a film about London, Britain, and Walk of Three Chairs you made in Belgrade, and I was thinking how in the work that you made in Yugoslavia, you’re performing in the work, but they’re not portraits.

It’s like, you know, my presence is an ideal

But May ’98 and Walk of Three Chairs – in one you’re falling down, which is slapstick really. And Walk of Three Chairs isn’t quite slapstick.

It is! I hope it is still funny.

There’s a lightness about it. An absurdity about the action.

Well, I’m certainly making a fool over myself.

I cannot sing. And I am making all these attempts at singing. And I want to walk with high heals across these chairs. Floating down a river. On a raft.

Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

Clio Barnard’s acclaimed first feature The Arbor has its UK premiere at the 54th BFI London Film Festival this October, before being released nationwide in the UK from 22 October. A Jerwood/Artangel Open commission, and funded by the UK Film Council, The Arbor won Clio the the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. We talked to Clio about The Arbor, her previous work, and her influences…

You’ve been making work for more than 20 years and I’m trying to think about what subjects and themes are consistent in the work, and I came up with madness… madness, obsession…

I never ever thought of that!

…literally in Bedlam, and then in Hermaphrodite Bikini there’s a compulsive obsessiveness…

If there’s a thematic connection between the work then it’s not deliberate. I think it’s easier for somebody standing outside of it to recognise what the thematic connections might be, that the artist doesn’t recognise.

There are formal things that connect everything, that are to do with exploring the relationship between representation and reality. I know that sounds very broad, but the relationship between fantasy and reality, I think that’s probably common to all my work.

And if somebody doesn’t have a clear grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality, then that’s some sort of madness.

Is that the thing that comes first – the questions of representation of reality – that’s your interest and then you find subjects that fit that?

No – it is usually the other way round, but the subject matter seems disconnected from one piece of work to the next. Interrogating the form is really important to me.

You’ve consistently used a range of different formats – The Arbor is shot on Red, but you’ve used Super 8, digital effects and animation. One of those things that does is draw attention to the form itself and the artifice and construction of film – does that relate to what you were saying… revealing the truth that fiction or even documentary film isn’t the same as fact?

There’s a quote from Errol Morris which I always find really useful, about how truth can’t be guaranteed by style or expression, it can’t be guaranteed by anything. And I think he said that as a critique of direct cinema. And I agree with that statement – and it applies to The Arbor. In using this formal technique – of the actors lip syncing to the voices of interviewees – it’s partly about saying that it’s very difficult to pin down the truth. Non-fiction, documentary films, broadly strive towards pinning down the truth in some way. But that’s an impossibility.

Well… back to what I was telling you that your themes are! Is it perhaps that your characters and subjects are people who have difficulty pinning down what truth, what their truth is, or even what ‘truth’ is?

That’s definitely true. So in Random Acts of Intimacy, which is about sexual fantasy, you don’t know what really happened or what’s fantasy. And Lambeth Marsh is about what people see in their minds’ eye. And I suppose the reason maybe I’d never thought of that as being anything to do with madness is because seeing things through your minds eye is something everybody does.

And obsessions and compulsion are another kind of duality, the public and private behaviour…

That definitely crops up in Random Acts of Intimacy, and in Dark Glass, which is very private, but is all about making the private public. And because of the way that was distributed – across different platforms – it was so public. It becomes about what it means to disclose things that are very private publicly.

Dark Glass by Clio Barnard

And Headcase… where you have people drilling holes into their heads… now let me get this right… you’re saying it’s never occurred to you that you’re interested in themes of madness?!

Alright! With Headcase and Bedlam that’s pretty clear. I don’t think there’s any madness in Hermaphrodite Bikini, though there is an obsession… And you could say that with Lambeth Marsh… because the starting point for that is William Blake who you could say was mad.

Headcase and Dark Glass are both sort of exploring horror genre – Dark Glass is shot like horror movies are shot now, there’s gothic horror in Headcase, but when Frieze asked you about films that have influenced you, you didn’t you list any horror movies, except The Innocents. What’s your interest in horror?

I did get really interested in horror and that was really the starting point for Headcase was getting interested in horror. I read a book called Men Women and Chainsaws by Carol J Clover, an analysis of slasher films in relation to gender. I got an email from somebody who had found Dark Glass online and they’d composed a score for it and it really is like a horror film score. They’ve done this kind of title that says Dark Glass and is in a kind of horror-like typeface, so I’ve never ever thought of it as being like that, but now with you and him…

I love Polanski’s Repulsion, and I really think The Innocents is a very brilliant film, so yes, I do have an interest in it.

You mentioned syncing, and it’s a quite complex thing you’re doing in The Arbor. You have actors mouthing words – miming – speaking other people’s words, ‘speaking’ with voices that aren’t their own. You’re putting words from documentary interviews into actors’ mouths – where did that device come from?

It came from Hermaphrodite Bikini – it came from there being something missing in Hermaphrodite Bikini and needing to include this story about this melting bra!

Having written the story, I got an actor, Barry Wasserman, who had this very deep American voice, to read it. Then shooting something on Super 8… it may have been to do with the budget – I wanted to link together the bits of the animation sequence of these kind of hermaphrodite angel creatures in the garden with – it needed something else.

And I didn’t have any sync sound on the Super 8, so I got this guy to read this voiceover and then got this other guy, who played one of the angels, to lip sync to his voice. And I really liked the disconnection and how it transformed things.

Was that a key work for you then in that – in exploring that disjuncture between truth, reality and representation?

Definitely. For me it was much more of an influence and more successful in that way than Bedlam or Headcase turned out to be.

You mentioned Pasolini and Fassbinder in your list of influences… and there’s a connection isn’t there… in that they’re badly dubbed!

I know you’ve been developing feature projects for many years. What’s it like – on the one hand making short experimental artist film works that get made and get seen, and then with features, you’re writing scripts that get rewritten and rewritten and never get made – how do you sustain that?

Well I did do that with one project that never got made, over five years. It is really tough and I think people do that – who aren’t artist filmmakers – they do that all the time. I don’t know how because I find it really, really difficult and had to make other stuff at the same time because it was too frustrating.

The Arbor was commissioned three years ago, through the Jerwood Artangel OPEN, but how did the project start?

As with anything there were several different starting points that then came together. I grew up not far from Bradford. I’m 45, about the same age as Andrea Dunbar would be if she was still alive, and I really like the work of Alan Clarke, so I’ve always had an affection for Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, partly because I recognise the way those two girls dress!

And I really like the friendship between the two girls and their attitude to sex and the fact that the film doesn’t moralise – they’re 15-year-old school girls having a great time. I really like the writing but I’m not a theatre person so I’d never read her plays. So then I read her plays – they’d been reprinted with this play called A State Affair which I didn’t know anything about, which was a piece of verbatim theatre, where Max Stafford-Clark who’d originally put on Andrea’s plays at the Royal Court, went back to the Buttershaw estate in 2000. It looked at what had changed from the 80s to the 90s. Buttershaw is where Andrea Dunbar grew up and where Rita Sue and Bob Too! is set, where all her plays are set.

What I was really interested in was the idea that you could keep revisiting somewhere and making a new piece of work about that place. And also in the failures of representation – because you know you could go to Buttershaw and make any kind of film you wanted.

And also, the techniques of verbatim theatre – where actors speak the words of real people – related to the techniques that I’d used in Random Acts of Intimacy and in Hermaphrodite Bikini. I was interested in the difference between what happens if you use that technique with film or with theatre.

Because verbatim theatre is meant to be a kind of documentary theatre, but if you apply those techniques to film then it does the opposite. Because in film, it makes it really clear that what you’re watching is an illusion.

In a theatre you already know you’re watching something that’s constructed. But if you do the same with film, if you get actors to lip sync in this case to people’s voices, you’re acknowledging that it’s construct and you’re drawing attention to the fact that it’s an illusion. Though it did work out to be more seamless than I’d expected it to be.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

But the film is not just about mediation and representation – it’s very much about its subject – and working class people. People we’re perhaps much more aware of now than when Andrea Dunbar’s plays were first at the Royal Court, because these people, as it were, are now visible on talk shows like Trisha or on Channel 4 documentaries, in a more exploitative way. Were you thinking about those kind of representation issues?

I think part of the problem with all of that is that there’s an idea about authenticity which is very dangerous. That’s why I agree with what Errol Morris – because there are certain codes and conventions in the way you film. If the camera is handheld and wobbly and the sound is a bit dodgy, it’s a shorthand for authenticity and I think that’s incredibly dangerous because it’s still mediated and constructed and shaped and therefore exploitative, and so I wanted to do the opposite of that.

I really love Alan Clarke’s work but you can’t carry on doing the same thing – what he was doing at that time was very radical – essentially, adopting the techniques of direct cinema and filming in a very particular kind of way. But it’s no more authentic than shooting something in a very careful structured way.

But he didn’t carry on doing that anyway, did he?

No! He made Elephant. And Road, which I think is amazing.

So having found a subject, and the idea of revisiting The Arbor, and critiquing representation, how did it develop?

I didn’t know what I was going to find and I think it was important to go into it not knowing, and with an open mind. I did know that Andrea’s daughter Lorraine was very important to the project because it’s her words that are spoken at the end of A State Affair, and because she links back to Rita, Sue and Bob Too! She says, “If my mum wrote the play now Rita and Sue would be smack heads, Bob would be injecting, probably taking loads of tablets as well.”

She says Rita and Sue would be sleeping with everybody and anybody for money. It’s very succinct, very economical, very direct and very powerful, and so I knew she was important and I knew that I wanted to, if possible, interview her. But what I didn’t know, even when it was commissioned by Artangel, was that she was in prison for manslaughter because her child had died having taken methadone. He died when he was two, and she was in prison when I first went back to Buttershaw to talk to her family and friends.

I found that out fairly soon after I’d been commissioned by Artangel, but it took a very long time before Lorraine became the focus. And part of the reason that it did become the focus was that Lorraine felt very compelled to talk to me. So the focus is the relationship between Andrea and Lorraine, and Andrea’s play The Arbor, which was her first play which she wrote when she was 15.

When I spoke to Andrea’s sister it became clear that the character in the play, Yousaf, was Lorraine’s father and that the second half of the play is all about the difficulties of that relationship and the difficulties of having that relationship on an estate that was very racist. He was very abusive towards her, and what you see in the play is her – the mother, who is Andrea essentially – attempts to protect that baby.

You stage and film scenes from the play on outdoor space on the estate…

Yes. Brafferton Arbor is the name of the street where Andrea Dunbar grew up and it’s also the name of her first play – The Arbor – because nobody ever called it Brafferton Arbor, they always called it The Arbor.

Using the play allows you a kind of window back to 30 years ago and provides a perspective on where Lorraine is now and what’s happened to her in her 30 years – I think it’s just incredibly enlightening, or helpful or revealing, about the complexity of the situation.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

Revealing of what?

The difficulties of growing up in a culture where… well, many, many things! But one of them is dealing with racism and addiction and poverty.

Andrea’s play enables a kind of cross section across 30 years of one family and her plays are very vivid and very direct.

And I think there’s a difference – in those 30 years as well – with theatre – maybe it’s harder for theatre to make that kind of subject convincing, because we have television. I think The Arbor – in your The Arbor – you’re not just revisiting, you’re repositioning and reclaiming that as a subject for artistic investigation, I think.

The staging of the play on the estate – that must have been a funny thing to actually do. And scary… I don’t imagine it’s a great place to live even now?

Well it wasn’t scary, or only scary in so much as I thought it might not work. I’d got to know people very well on The Arbor specifically, because Buttershaw is actually very big,  but on The Arbor I’d got to know people. And people were very interested and involved and supportive. Part of the reason it was strange was that Andrea’s sister Pamela still lives a couple of doors up from where the whole family used to live, and so it was on her doorstep.

And because Andrea’s plays were so autobiographical, you know Pamela was seeing things being re-enacted that had happened in her front room, but being re-enacted on the green, on The Arbor. That was very strange, for her. And also her brother David, who is in one scene and is incredibly racist towards Yousaf, and lives just around the corner. And his son played one of the parts in the play – so it really was putting the play right back into the place that it came out of, and 30 years on.

Natalie Gavin, who’s the main actress who played Andrea, is from Buttershaw and was aware that there were all these people in the audience watching her who knew Andrea very well. So there was a lot of pressure on her to kind of get it right from that point of view, so that was strange.

For the very first scene that we shot there we put these car seats onto the green, and I really didn’t know whether it was going to work or whether it would look completely mad in the film. And I wasn’t really sure until we saw a first assembly, and actually I think those scenes are like someone opens a door and lets all the fresh air in at that point – because it’s quite claustrophobic elsewhere in the film.

And for those other parts, you did lots of interviews with people, then you wrote the script and then you filmed actors synced to actual interviews, yes?

Yes – I went and recorded just audio, there was no camera, just audio interviews with people. That was over a two-year period, going and sitting with people for hours at a time and recording just audio, and then we did an audio edit – and that was the writing of the script. There were no words on the page at that point, it was just audio, which we edited – and I ended up calling it an audio screenplay, for want of a better term. It was a screenplay, but you listened to it.

And then there’s archive footage as well. Did you always know that those different elements would be in it?

At one point I thought I would also use the archive as audio only, and get actors to lip sync. So, we’d have an actor cast as older Andrea, who’d lip sync to Andrea’s voice from the television programme, but it seemed very important that the archive was presented as it is. And also I knew, before I’d met Lorraine, I’d been to the British Library, where they had the Arena documentary that had been made with Andrea Dunbar when she was 18 – but they had just the audio, they didn’t have the pictures. I sat in this little booth with my headphones on and listened to her talking about Lorraine, and knowing what had happened to Lorraine. I found it incredibly moving and knew that in a way that needed to be the end of the film.

You never know whether that’s going to quite work, but it is the end of the film – Andrea’s talking about Lorraine being a good baby and she says sometimes you get to wishing that you hadn’t had a baby, but they’re not as much trouble as people make them out to be, or maybe that’s just Lorraine because she’s a good baby. I found it incredibly moving and not least because, I’m a mother too, and one of my children is almost exactly the same age as Harris, Lorraine’s child who died.

I do think the archive is crucial – it’s important that you see Andrea Dunbar herself, because I think it says, actually the rest of the film isn’t pretending, this is about something real. And also there’s the stuff about her going to the Royal Court and everything really plays up class to me – the Royal Court putting on the plays…

Somebody told me how they saw this story of a 15-year-old girl being kind of plucked out of obscurity and her plays being put on at the Royal Court as something that could only have happened in the 80s, it wouldn’t happen in the same way now. It’s like an Educating Rita story or something; it feels very dated it does make you feel very uneasy I think.

Particularly because Andrea really suffered because of being exposed in that way and she really suffered because she put herself on the line and exposed herself and her family for one thing, but also, she really came under attack from people on the Buttershaw estate. She wasn’t interested in moving away from there, that was her home and it was where she wanted to be. And it wasn’t an easy thing for her to do, and maybe there’s some assumption that she was somehow being helped, by becoming this playwright.

But actually I don’t know that it did necessarily help her; it’s just so much more complicated than that. What I hope – I was going to say above all, but anyway, one of my hopes – for the film is that it remains complex, that it doesn’t make things simplistic.

Isn’t there a possibility that actually it destroyed her?

That’s definitely one version of the narrative that I heard from her family. And in a way this formal technique is partly about that – how you can tell many, many different narratives about the same thing. I don’t think there is one single version that’s right but I do think it damaged her in some ways. I’m sure it brought her good things in other ways but I think it did damage her.

And similarly there are, you know, you can have different responses to Lorraine’s story and life. The film doesn’t judge Lorraine but at the same time it doesn’t excuse her either. You know she’s had a harrowing terrible life but she’s also made terrible decisions and she’s done terrible things. And there’s that thing about how lots of people have traumatic childhoods but don’t end up in that way. You must have talked to her for hours, and I mean, it’s harrowing enough in the film… The film doesn’t excuse the behaviour but was something of an ambition of yours to somehow give some kind of explanation of her life?

Not really an explanation but I suppose an understanding, or somehow trying to understand. But you’re right; people do have traumatic childhoods and don’t end up making the decisions that she made. And so I don’t think it explains it, or that cause and effect works quite in that way.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

And although Lorraine’s very self critical and reflective, at times you know you don’t believe that even she believes what she’s saying.

Yes, and I think for an audience, if they find their feelings about her shift throughout the film, then that’s a good thing. And if their feelings about her are quite complicated I think that’s a good thing.

She doesn’t break down ever, but her foster parents, who feel to me like the moral centre of the film, though they’re not in it that much, but they do break down. Are they there specifically as a hope and respite…

They’re the people that I got to know first and in a way they’re the people that I’ve got to know best I suppose, and spent most time with. They’re there because they were very important in Harris’ life and in Lorraine’s life.

Including that bit where they break down was quite a difficult decision when we were cutting the audio screenplay bit of it. There’s that thing that happens quite often in documentaries when someone starts crying and the camera zooms in.

Because there was no camera there wasn’t that issue, but I did have the microphone and there was a real “Shall I switch it off now?” moment. And I didn’t switch it off, but what you hear on the mic is lots of banging and crashing because I was being so indecisive about it, and going to hug Steve and knocking the microphone!

The intention with that scene, when we shot it, was to reconstruct that sort of interruption. To leave the sound as it was, with all the knocks and the cracks and the crashes on it and the camera would drop, so doing the opposite of focussing on the people when they’re crying.

But because I think you get very absorbed in what you’re watching, that it was too disruptive at that point. And also the performances are so good. The camera doesn’t zoom though; it stays as one locked off shot. And we had to then clean up the sound.

That silence is crucial isn’t it?  It’s a cathartic moment for them and for the whole film in a way. There’s a sense of Lorraine seeking redemption or atonement, because she confesses. But it’s not a film about redemption and it’s not a film that lacks hope. And all the people who talk to you, even Lorraine, have a sense of decency.

There’s certainly hope with Ann and Steve.  They’re now professional foster parents. In a way, out of all of that tragedy, I think that that’s a hopeful thing.

I really wanted to avoid an ending that had false hope. In the edit we tried to create space at the end – we took stuff out so there was more silence and more gaps, so that there’s time to process and to think. And to grieve, in a way.

Because otherwise that doesn’t happen the whole time. Nobody grieves – in a way Lorraine doesn’t grieve when Andrea dies. And an audience is able to empathise through Ann and Steve’s grief.

In terms of the narrative of the film, Lorraine not grieving for Andrea’s death is really crucial.

How hard is it to reconcile wanting to make a film which is fair and just, but also acknowledging the impossibility of that, through film, through artifice?

Impossible really. Someone said that they thought that in a way it was about responsibility. Everybody’s responsibility. The responsibility of the people within the film.  My responsibility as a filmmaker and our responsibility as an audience. And I think that’s right actually.

About the Author: Gary Thomas is Editor of APEngine and Co-director of Animate Projects.

Phil Collins, zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008, 16mm black–and–white film transferred to video and colour digital video, sound, 35 min. 38 sec. Courtesy the artist, © Phil Collins

Phil Collins was born in Runcorn, UK in 1970 and currently lives and works in Berlin. His new work, marxism today (prologue) was presented at this year’s Berlin Biennale, and has its UK premiere at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2 October – 28 November, as part of the AND Festival.

My conversation with Phil Collins took place a year ago in Toronto, when he was visiting the city to give an artist talk. The talk focused on his 2008 work, Why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian), and we also discuss it here. That political conflict can be located in the mother tongue you speak is familiar to anyone living in Canada, with its ‘Two Solitudes’, so called, of French and English. When visiting Kosovo, Collins stumbled across a much more complex situation of a particular language being suppressed in the aftermath of war. The sensitivity of the situation called for use of the film apparatus in its documentary mode, something of a departure for the artist. Shot in black and white, Collins makes film a medium of self-expression for those caught up in history’s wider machinations. He gives voice to a little known consequence of the war in Kosovo, creating in the process a valuable historical document.

Can you tell me the title of your new film?

It’s called zasto ne govorim srpski (na  srpskom) (2008). The title is in Serbian, and it means “Why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian)”.

I have been working in the Balkans for the last 10 years, quite regularly, and have spent a reasonable amount of time in Kosovo. I’m really interested in historical and social contradictions that the conflict has thrown up.  One time I visited, in 2003 maybe, I was with a friend from Croatia. We were at a video conference, and it was really cold. In order to warm up, we said, “Well, let’s go and get a beer.” So we went to the local shop. My friend said to the guy in the shop, “Have you got any beer? Bierra? Beer?” – we were trying to speak Albanian. Then we started miming, the international language of mimes! You know, just to buy a beer. And the guy didn’t understand, he pulled a blank, and my friend asked again “Imate li pivo, molim?” – in Serbo-Croat, a language which isn’t in use popularly or publicly.

And this very strange moment occurred. The guy replied in Serbian, “But I’ve not spoken this language for such a long time.” Not in a hostile way, but in this moment of almost tenderness and wonder, which was then disturbed. The shop door opened, somebody else came in, and the moment was gone.

So we left , but I never stopped thinking about it.

I thought everybody of my age or older would have been able to speak or withhold the language, but it’s a language which had been abandoned by the Albanian majority – for obvious reasons. It was used as the official language, and so it became a language purely of the police and the military, of jurisdiction and repression; or so it was felt.

But I wondered if it  had been, previously, also a language of poetry or academia, or how else had  it functioned? These are powerful impulses, to speak  in a language  which had become taboo. And I wondered what forms of memory are accessible only through  speech? If language describes experience, what happens when we repress this impulse?

And so I went back in 2008 to begin this project in which I asked people to explain, in Serbian, the reasons of why they no longer speak the language. It happened around the time of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, so there was a certain charge to such a proposition. I went around explaining the project  and trying to get the contributors, which was very difficult, because even to perform the language becomes a fraught and troubled experience for most people.

But it also took  me to different places, so I interviewed people like, Azem Vllasi, who was the former head of the Communist Party in Kosovo; Bujar Bukoshi, who was an ex-Prime Minister; journalists, public figures; and then in the second part, I interviewed a Serbian language teacher, which  took the film in an entirely different direction.

I thought it was interesting that at last night’s screening in the Q&A people pointed out; “Oh, this film’s not like your other work…it’s more of a straight ahead documentary” and you said, “Yes, but when it’s screened in Kosovo, that’s its intended audience – it has a meaning there. Outside of Kosovo it’s read as something simpler, possibly.”

And I like this answer, because it was in disregard for these other audiences –  the mainstream art audience – which is, supposedly, white and English-speaking. It’s as though you’re really Globalist. You’ve travelled so much, so you don’t think the audience of ‘the centre’ – wherever that is – is the most important one.

I think that’s true. One of my first videos, how to make a refugee (1999), was shot in Kosovo. And my other works are more rock ‘n roll – about  popular culture, its genres and how we used them. But this piece is about something very specific. It is different, and still it’s part of my continuing investigation into troubled invitations and troubled platforms for certain forms of expression. I don’t think any of the projects are easy in their execution, you know. The Smiths project, for example, always comes under, or invites, certain kind of criticism as well.

Phil Collins, how to make a refugee, 1999. Single-channel video, color, sound, 12 min. Courtesy the artist

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, with a lot of the projects, they revolve around the idea of exploitation, and also around an imposition. On one level, they appear generous, and on another, they seem to be exploiting the subject. And I think they have to – in a way, they must manage these two opposing axes.

So, for instance, with The Smiths karaoke trilogy, people will say: “But why aren’t we seeing a Turkish singer or a Colombian singer, why is it the imposition of English language and an English language group?”

But who’s making that objection – Western people?

No, no – people in the countries themselves. They see it as a neo-colonial exercise, which, of course, is what I am interested in as well. How does an alternative group from Manchester, singing about a very local experience, about Whalley Range, Dublin and Dundee and Humberside – how does that translate to a very far away context?

I wrote down that line from that Smiths song about being “ crashed by a bus” – and in the film, they’re singing it in a cheerful, joyful sort of way.

It’s a very joyful sequence, that sequence of the film. So yes, I think zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) also follows these avenues of investigation, but its strongest dialogue is between Serbia and Kosovo. And if we, as an audience, are placed as outsiders, and if this also throws up our own lack of understanding, then that’s what the film is about as well. It’s not a particularly inviting film. It doesn’t give us all the signage that we need in order to understand what happened there.

And it returns again and again to  the fraught nature of language itself. People are speaking a language which they generally refuse to speak, and explaining how that feels, some of them fluently, some with great hesitance and faltering recall.

In the beginning, there is a moment when a contributor can’t remember Serbian word for ‘memory’. I was particularly interested in these slippages – the way in which we try to find or recall language, or a position. I mean, in the boldest terms – and it’s something which I don’t like to use –  this is “the language of the enemy”. What does it feel like to adopt this position for a short period, and to investigate its tenor, its palate?

Phil Collins, zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008. Installation view, 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Photo: Tom Little. Courtesy the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art

Speaking about the coherence of your project as a whole, I would say that, in contrast to the idea that you’re investigating the exploitative nature of our relationship to forms of representation, there’s the flipside as well, that’s also in your work, in The Smiths film, and even in the Kosovo film…

For instance, the most heartbreaking moment in ‘zasto ne govorim…’ is when the woman shows the photo of her son who was killed in the ethnic violence. This shows how the photo works as a memento. It has very important role to play, a photograph; and maybe now video works this way as well…

So you have a nice coherence in your art, because it contains both sides of the implications of representation. It’s almost as if you’ve discovered this universal theme in the Globalist expanse of your practice, which is this quest for validation through mediation…

I think it’s not universal in that it’s not necessarily similar in different locations. These sites of self-expression – karaoke, the talk show, reality TV, photography – also have very local registers.  But I am interested in seeking out moments of becoming, of temporary transcendence. So within very basic familiar structures, like ‘testimony’, like ‘photography’, especially ‘domestic’ or ‘amateur’ photography, there is an inescapable, ineluctable beauty which appears democratic in certain ways.

Okay, not everybody does have a camera, but with a point and shoot, almost anybody can pick it up and use it. And what’s interesting to me is what information we’re generally not given about a place. People would be surprised that there was reality TV in Turkey in that it’s perceived as an underdeveloped economy, or that the cultural factor of Islam might mitigate against this kind of entertainment.

For me that’s hilarious. Turkey has an enormous range of reality TV, some of it very interesting in the sense that it also has to manage cultural restrictions or specificities. So you have dating shows where a mother-in-law picks for the son. Or Big Brother can be structured very differently in the Middle East to the way it’s structured in the West, because of gender relations and all of the problematic things this can pose.

I’m interested in the specifics of location, and what that might introduce. Because in a city of 20 million such as Istanbul, you’re going to find everything, you know. It might not be enormously popular – if we’d done Metallica or the Stones instead of The Smiths, it would have been much easier because metal and classic rock fans are easier to find. But it really isn’t about easiness. It was about finding this very slim, unrepresentative demographic in order to try and think through place.

And also, of course, my works are very much about performance, about what it  means to speak. Sometimes the question for me is, you know, it feels inhumane to keep recording when we’re faced with distress, but it also feels inhumane to turn the camera off in those moments. Because, whilst we might encounter a surfeit or an excess when we face trauma, this moment can also be very instructive and powerful for the subject. This is where that basic idea of ‘the witness’ comes into play.

That moment when Desanka holds up the image of her son, is something very recognisable, especially from tales of ‘the missing’ and how photography functions in this traumatic scenario. And her language is very beautiful. She says, “This is a photo of my son. Perhaps it will be moving for someone.” It’s very powerful, but reductive as well, this moment of representation for the lost person, a lost family member.

I wanted to ask you about the origins of this project. Your work, how to make a refugee – that was shot when?

In May/June 1999, which was during the Kosovan war. At that point NATO had bombed Belgrade for 78 days.

To stop the conflict.

Well, that’s the interesting question. Because really it was a controversial intervention. It was the first time, I think, that NATO had intervened within a sovereign dispute. So it wasn’t like Iraq invading Kuwait – this was within a national territory. There was a humanitarian catastrophe going on, but that bombing was an intervention the reverberations of which we’re still living with today.

I was going to say, it initiated a new era of international relations.

Yes, and at that time I was at college in Belfast, and I just got a ticket and went to Skopje in Macedonia, and started visiting the refugee camps. I was also looking at how the West was thinking about this conflict – how they began structuring imagery of Kosovan Albanians, which was already very defined. It was largely rural, so you saw a lot of tractors and headscarves. It was about the spectacular, in a way, and the exotic also.

And then I made a piece in Belgrade soon after called, young serbs (2001) which was a set of intimate portraits. So I’ve consistently made work over there…

Phil Collins, zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008. 16mm film in black-and-white transferred to video, and color digital video, 36 min. Courtesy the artist

So at the beginning, your motivation was an interest in areas with conflict zones…to bring another side of the story, through representation – that was your motivation?

The thing is, specifically if you are a British subject – because of course the British aren’t citizens, they’re subjects of the Crown and still live under the tyranny of the Royal Family – there are certain obligations in relation to the  politics of the British Government, on the most basic level, to go and see for yourself. So when I visited Baghdad, or the West Bank, or Kosovo and Serbia, it was also on an impulse simply ‘to see’, to understand a little of what was happening in my name, without the meditation of the BBC or CNN, or the other news agencies, that largely support the ideological parameters of the government. So, in the Iraq War, you hardly ever saw civilians on telly, or comprehended what was their position in the conflict which was being enforced on their behalf. Similarly, the understanding of Kosovan Albanians and Serbs was very much pre-defined in its iconography, and suited, it seemed to me, the ways in which the British government wanted to proceed at that time.

I think, even when someone’s portrayed as a victim, this is also something which becomes a burden, a burden of representation. It’s something which shackles and has a heavy imprint on the psychology of the place…

On that person, on the people…

On a nation, as a whole – and largely in order to mobilise support or interest. There’s very little interest in the Balkans now, in that the news media and the world have moved on to other conflicts. But that becomes a specific harness, a specific shackle, because it embeds a very unitary form of self-understanding and self-representation.

Against, for instance, the global image of America, who looked very progressive when they elected Barack Obama as President…

Globalisation means the so-called Western democracies become nations of outsourcers – to Indonesia, to Turkey, to Taiwan –  and are reliant on slave labour, which becomes endemic and indentured in the Far East. So my projects hope to perform not the sanctimonious idea of the generous Utopian artist, but to show the prickly aspects of the nature of production. Pick up a piece of clothing, take a sip of coffee – at each moment we’re complicit in the web of globalisation which isn’t always something particularly happy and fluffy,  but can be incredibly unfortunate and distasteful and sour.

Hopefully, my work reflects back on this, or loops back on to such modes of production. I am not an artist who offers redemption through these processes, but one who hopes to negotiate in some way  these sticky  networks.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.