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.

Noah's Ark, Sam Meech, 2010

Date: 4 October, 8pm | Location: The King’s Arms, Salford

Experimental filmmakers Jenna Collins and Sam Meech present two new kaleidoscopic short films, made during their Gleaners residencies in the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, premiering here with live soundtracks from cutting edge North West musicians.

Diving into the amateur fiction footage within the archive, Jenna Collins new film, in equal parts hypnotic and disruptive, will be accompanied by a performance by multi-instrumentalist Seaming To, regular collaborator with Graham Massey and Homelife (Ninja Tune).

Using dozens of archive clips Sam Meech, builds up a classic narrative with a dream-inflected twist.  This epic journey will be narrated live by poet Nathan Jones of the Mercy collective with a score by Carl Brown of Wave Machines (Neapolitan).

Tickets: £7.50/£5.50 from the Cornerhouse Box Office: 0161 200 1500.

Starting at The King’s Arms in Salford, these films will embark on a mini-tour of the North West region taking in Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. Visit http://gleanersarchive.wordpress.com/events/ for more information.

Commissioned by AND Festival, Gleaners is a filmmaker-in-residence scheme at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, curated by Kate Taylor. This project has been enabled by Northwest Vision and Media and the UK Film Council’s Digital Film Archive Fund supported by the National Lottery.

Maryam Jafri, Death With Friends (work in progress), production still, image courtesy of the artist

Maryam Jafri is an artist based in New York City and Copenhagen. Her work, Death With Friends was the subject of a lecture that the artist gave as part of the Media Art Bath programme, A theatre to address: a festival of textual form – concrete, material, scripted and performed, at the Arnolfini in Bristol, June 2010. Jafri’s work was also recently shown in London at The Showroom, in the exhibition, Estrangement curated by Aneta Szylak and Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K.

The following introduction to Maryam Jafri’s work focuses on her film, Death With Friends, as well as her recent work Staged Archive (2008) shown at the Contour Biennial of Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium, 2009. It approaches Jafri’s work through three aspects – the script, the image and the document.

The script
In a recent roundtable discussion chaired by the art historian Kathrin Peters on the ‘(re)construction of history in art and film’, the filmmaker Romault Karmaker talks of the term ‘rekonkretisierung’ or ‘reconcretising’ as a process of “making issues and matters concrete again”[1]; it is interesting to consider this point in relation to Maryam Jafri’s practice which starts from something that seems concrete whether that be an archive (such as the National Archives of Ghana) or a written text (such as the diary of Babur, Mughal Emperor) and then disrupts its established form.

So, while concerned with a similar impetus of attention to the outcome of “making issues and matters concrete again” – that is drawing our attention to or (re) consideration of an issue – Jafri’s work takes an opposite tack by entering into a process of fictionalising or transforming a given narrative, that is a process of working outwards from something that is (or was) concrete towards a lesser certainty, working from certainty to contingency.

In the work, Staged Archive, for example, Jafri worked in relation to the National Archives of Ghana to create a film that questioned the archive‘s relationship to knowledge and ‘truth’ by staging the archive through a series of tableaux that referred to the visual and narrative codes of TV and cinema such as the court room drama, for example – as Jafri has stated, it’s a “collage of filmic codes and conventions from film, theatre and photo history”.[2] The result is a kind of mannered or excessive overlaying of visual codes through a process of what Jafri has called ‘fictionalising’.

Jafri’s work deals with this process of fictionalising not necessarily through the making of a story out of an established historical narrative (and thereby replacing one narrative for another) but through a process of puling apart and reassembling narratives so that this reordering of parts (and with the addition of other visual materials and codes) creates a dynamic through which other possibilities can emerge. In this way, Jafri has spoken of her interest in ‘contingent narratives’ and she links this contingency with a methodology in which she favours adaption rather than reenactment in the fictionalising process.

Jafri makes this distinction between the two terms – reenactment and adaption – as that between the process of repetition and that of a kind of contingent expansion and implosion of a dominant narrative or narratives – actualising ‘the need to makes contingent and partial sense of the world’’.[3] This results in the very possibilities of this narrative being called into question through the resulting work, not through a form of didactic address but through a process that has more to do with expansion and excess.

Maryam Jafri, Death With Friends (work in progress), production still, image courtesy of the artist

Death With Friends (2010) takes the Baburnama, diary of Babur – the 16^th Century Mughal Emperor – as its starting point. The Baburnama forms a kind of textual impetus for the work but at the same time it is present alongside numerous other visual codes and styles from the golden ‘bling’ of Bollywood to Fellini’s epic film, Satyricon, as well as textual reference to Machiavelli and Rabelais.

The resulting work occurs as an accumulation of these forms pieced together in a collage-like process so the work is an accumulation adapted for purpose rather than a direct quotation or re-enactment of the material itself. As Jafri comments, on the one hand, the Baburnama ‘eerily parallels present day political realities’ in Afghanistan/Pakistan with bloody accounts of warring tribes and imperial plunder. Yet on the other hand, Babur describes a highly cultured, somewhat hedonistic civilisation replete with “carnivalesque type descriptions of wine and opium induced parties populated by glittering poets and dancers.”[4]

In this way, we could understand the script of Death With Friends not only as the text – Babur’s diary – that forms the basis of the work but as also the visual form, which by being present, inform and structure our evocative response to the work. Therefore, Jafri’s subtle distinction between the strategies of reenactment and of adaption reveals an important aspect of her work and which coalesces with the opening up of spaces and possibilities for contingency through what seems to be at once both an excessive and a reductive strategy.

The image
While, the gathering of different visual codes and references to create a rich excess of style and the simultaneous implosion of these codes and their dominant narratives can be seen as a trajectory running through Maryam Jafri’s work from Costume Party (2005) to Staged Archive (2008) and the most recent work Death With Friends (2010), there is also a strong questioning of the representational function of the image itself.

And so, in the way that a strong preoccupation with Jafri’s work is a working against the strain of a dominant historical, social or cultural narrative, it is also possible to see this action in terms of a working against the straightforward representational function of the image.

While this question of the image’s function has been dealt with recently in some artist’s work through the use of found or low-fi images such as in Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’, Jafri does not comprise the rich visual aesthetic of the image in her questioning of the image’s capacities.[5]

Costume Party (2005). Three screen video installation, written & directed by Maryam Jafri. Photo: jens ziehe, installation view Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, May 2006

The film installation, Costume Party, for example, comprises a large tableaux vivant across which the camera pans pausing on various smaller vignettes within it – a party in which the guests are eighteen archetypes Western cultural history such as a monk, British naval officer, cowboy and so on – presented across three screens. In many ways, the vignettes presented within Costume Party are crude characterisations and the actors play their roles in a mannered overly performed performance yet this seems to be the point here, where role and characterisation are accented, mannered and made excessive in order for their operation as tropes to be made obvious – it’s a strategy of extremes with on the one hand, the accentuated or mannered performance emphasising the manufacture of these roles and on the other, the emphasis on historical tropes so that one addresses (and perhaps undermines the assertions of) the other.

Could it be said then that Jafri works through the image – through its rich visual properties – in order to work against it, or against our established expectations of it? That is to say, that unlike Steyerl’s strategy which equates the rich image – rich in resolution, high in production values – with dominant (and dominating) social values and power and therefore, conversely, the poor image with political resistance and socially utopian possibilities.

And indeed there is an interesting divergence of strategy here as we see Jafri’s investment in the image as a kind of over-identification or over-investment in its capacity – Steyerl of course does maintain this almost fetishistic attention to the image but she does so across its divergent forms, and in works such as November (2004), the visual investment in the image comes almost secondary in concern to the way in which the image’s form communicates to us – that is, whether it has been shot on Super 8 in the trash-aesthetic style of Russ Meyer for example, or whether we are experiencing an image played via video cassette grinding away in a VHS player.

On the contrary, Death With Friends, is constructed and formed through attention to the visualuality of the image from the geometric detailing of ceramic tiles suggesting an Eastern, abstract, patternistic style to the golden Bollywood-esque stage.

Document
In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Archive Fever: Between History and the Monument, Okwui Enwezor connects a current preoccupation with the archive and specifically a concern with the ‘truth-telling’ integrity of the archive arising from the manipulation of evidence that led to the US invasion of Iraq; he cites this as the key moment in which our collective belief in the veracity of the document was betrayed.

Enwezor states that this “manufacture of intelligence … disturbs the integrity of and confidence in the archive as a site of historical recall, as an organ through which we come to know what has been, that is to say, the raw material constituting knowledge and a reference in which to read, verify and recognise the past.”[6] Interestingly, Enwezor begins his text by asserting the relationship between photography and the archive as governed by the camera’s capacity for ‘mechanical inscription’ so that the camera is “literally an archiving machine, every photography, every film is a priori an archival document.”[7]

Yet who and what orders or governs the manner in which this archive is stored, read and produces knowledge? If every photographic image is a priori a recording device – or trace of an action – then there is here an immense investment in the image as a kind of pure entity that is faithful to its origins (that which it records) at all times.

Not only is this problematic in regards to our experience of the ‘manufacture of intelligence’ as Enwezor suggests but also in regards to the investment in the specific ontology of the photographic image based in a faithfulness of mechanical procedure that no longer applies with the advent of digital technology’s ability to manipulate also. It is then at this point in which the image’s status – that is, it’s function as a recording, as a ‘true’ representation of an event or a person that has been – is brought into question.

Staged Archive (2007), written & directed by Maryam Jafri. Installation view, Contour Mechelen, 4th Biennial for the Moving Image, September 2009. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

In Staged Archive, Jafri makes a neat move that plays the archive – in this case, the National Archives of Ghana – against itself to reveal its investment in the image as ‘truth’ and the impossibility of separating this from the role power plays in the production of knowledge. In the series of tableaux that make up the film, black and white images document the use of mobile cinemas by Christian missionaries as an integral part of their evangelising – which is in itself a complex mix of fact and fiction, witness and truth as one of the characters voices in the film, the missionary spoke first and then played films afterwards so that (very literally) the word comes to life.

In Staged Archive, these still images of the missionaries’ mobile cinema are projected on a screen within the film (and as such are staged within the film) as a fictional narrative is built around them. This achieves a double projection of the image – still image and artist’s film – and the image’s operation as the generator of both fictional narrative and knowledge because just as the tenants of Christianity are revealed to the audience of the still images something of the archive is also revealed to us.

Yet it is not only the double projection of image within image, which enables the opening of a space within which the image is questioned and becomes less stable but importantly, it is also Jafri’s use of voiceover. The use of voiceover is important within Staged Archive as it introduces a secondary body of information and reinforces the disjunction between the two types of information – the visual and the sonic.

Indeed, in the text, ‘Having an idea in Cinema’, Deleuze suggests that the uniqueness of cinema as a form arises from the disjunction between sight and sound, that it performs this “disjunction between auditory voice and visual image” and that the creation of this disjunction enables a third entity to emerge or to be produced.[8] In Staged Archive, we very much see Jafri following this precedent through the mannered polarisation – the accentuation of difference – between visual and sonic information, in other words between the image and the voiceover.

Footnotes:
[1] Peters, Kathrin (2009), ‘History and Fiction’ in Texte Zur Kunst, December 2009 / Issue No. 76, p.114.

[2] Reed, Patricia (2009), ‘Through, Around and Against the Document: Maryam Jafri in conversation with Patricia Reed’, Art Papers, January-February 2009, p.32.

[3] Reed, Patricia (2009), op. cit., p.33.

[4] Email correspondence with the artist, January 2010.

[5] Steyerl, Hito (2009), ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, accessed 9/12/2009.

[6] Enwezor, Okwui (2008), ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument’ in Archive Fever, International Center of Photography, New York and Steidl, 2008, p. 19.

[7] Enwezor, Okwui (2008), op.cit., p.7.

[8] Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘Having an idea in cinema’, in Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin Jon, Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p.19.

About the Author: Bridget Crone is a curator and writer based in London and the South West of England. She is the Artistic Director of Media Art Bath – a publicly funded commissioning organisation based in the South West that champions contemporary art and ideas through the development of bold new work collaborating with artists and partners locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Bridget is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea School of Art and Design, University of the Arts London where she has taught on the MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice since 2008. Working both inside and outside of the gallery, Bridget is interested in work that engages with performance, installation, sound, film and video.

A theatre to address was a programme of performances, readings and screenings that explored the many forms of text from concrete poetry or sound sculpture to theatrical script, radio play, voice over or song. Within the programme, text was explored on multiple levels as something to be investigated through reference to an historical document or event, and as a means of address. And in this way, A theatre to address was also about the governing power of language to direct or order our experience. A theatre to address took place at the Arnolfini, Bristol from 4-5 June 2010 and included: Sovay Berriman (with Luis Alvarez, Paul Cordwell, Joe Devlin and Magnus Quaife), Phil Coy, Annabel Frearson, Clare Gasson, Beatrice Gibson, Julika Gittner, Maryam Jafri, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Sue Tompkins and a screening of Otolith III.

The Miners' Hymns, Bill Morrison, Image courtesy of Durham County Council

Dates: 15 and 16 July, 9.30pm | Location: Durham Cathedral, UK

Made with footage from national film archives, The Miners’ Hymns by Bill Morrison is to be premiered in Durham Cathedral for two nights only. Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s original score for brass will be performed live by a specially selected ensemble of musicians, adding an elegiac and atmospheric soundtrack to Morrison’s cinematic images.

Also, from 7-8pm on 16 July at Durham Town Hall: Bill Morrison and Jóhann Jóhannsson meet to discuss the making of The Miners’ Hymns (free with event ticket for either night).

Tickets: £12 full price, £8 concessions. To book, call Gala Theatre box office on 0191 332 4041 or book online.

To find out more visit Forma.org.uk.

Rick Prelinger in the Prelinger Library, photo by Cory Doctorow

APEngine caught up with Rick Prelinger, Archivist, Writer, Filmmaker and Founder of the Prelinger Archives at AV Festival 10 to talk about archives, home movies and iPhone apps.

I recently saw online a screening of your collage film Lost Landscapes of San Francisco where you were asking the audience to respond to the footage – is this one of the many ways you are enabling people to access the Prelinger Archives?

We’re really interested in different kinds of access to cultural material. I’ve always done screenings and I did CD ROMs and laser discs back when those were bubbling hot media. But I had never thought about the access possibilities of the web because when I moved to California in 1999. I was an Internet user but I wasn’t deeply into net culture. But then I met Brewster Kahle who founded the Internet Archive and he challenged me to put my material online, and so I said, “Yes” without knowing what that would really involve, although I knew that it would mean giving it away, which was a twist. But then after that it seemed obvious. And since then we’ve been constantly rehearsing new ways of distributing material.

There’s the online archives, there has been screenings all over the place, my spouse Megan and I started the Library as a means of taking our print collection, which is quite massive, and sharing it, to see whether it would be a lever for other things to happen. We’ve taken the Library around as well – we’ve built specialised libraries, and we take them into Maker Faire in California. We are going to go to Maker Faire in Newcastle, to see what it’s like.

When you start to define one of the highest callings of the archive is consumptive use, really interesting things happen and you begin to relate to people in a completely different way. All these remarks that we were hearing at the Recycled Film Symposium about tired archivists who are alienated Civil Servants, who are not necessarily helpful, this just doesn’t figure anymore. It becomes much more of a straight across transaction with people where no money changes hands. Collaboration I would say.

I was quite surprised when Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) was saying at the Symposium how difficult she had found working with archives, how they would demand money.

But I think Vicki might have been talking about a time she went to a commercial film archives looking for material. There is no perceived advantage for them to give footage to an artist because it’s not going to lead to sales and their time is at a premium.

You were saying at the Symposium that you are changing your collection policy to focus on home movies. Will you be keeping it restricted to US films rather than opening it up to become a worldwide collection?

We’ve always focused a little more on material from the States. It’s not that we are xenophobic or anything, it’s just that it’s what we do better. We have some materials that are produced internationally, but a lot of our international material is image of the world shot by Americans and I think that’s most appropriate. Footage of Japan probably should be archived in Japan. I’m focused on American history, the American psyche, American consciousness and I think that’s where I would like to stay.

Home movies isn’t an exclusive focus, it’s just what’s excited me and increasingly Megan much more than anything else.

You were saying at the Symposium that you are not trying to contextualise or curate the online collection. Have you ever thought of actually putting together online exhibitions of the work?

I have, I just haven’t had the time to focus on it. I’m really interested in just making more work now.

I made a film in 2004 and I’m starting another larger work soon that I’ve begun collecting for and will have to start editing soon.

You’ve made your latest feature film The Lives of Energy for AV Festival 10. How long did the film take you to edit all the archive footage together?

It took about a week of selection from the database. It took about a week of capture time, because I actually captured over 180 films to work with, it’s easier to look through them beforehand that way, and then I spent about a couple of weeks editing according to a scheme that I had established.

It would be different and it would probably be better if I had six months to really reason it over and think about it. In a lot of ways this is a first draft, but that’s the amount of work that’s appropriate and possible for this project.

I imagine with an archive over 60,000 films having a deadline must help you to make decisions…

Right, the liberation that arises from constraint and all that. The other thing is that other interests percolate – there’s this other film I’m thinking about that’s about mobility and Megan’s working on space-related projects right now.

On the Prelinger Archives site there are over 200 mashups that other people have made with the archive footage. How do you feel about the mashups? Is there any quality control about what’s posted?

That’s what the whole thing is designed to encourage.

There’s no quality control. Anybody can post anything to that collection they want, which is great. If I had the time I would actually trawl the web to try to find more. I started doing it, I went to YouTube and looked at everything that credited us and I wrote to them and I said, “Hey, why don’t you also post to Mashups?” and a bunch of people did, but I don’t have the time to do it.

The physical collection absorbs a lot of time. Besides the meta-archival stuff that I do, I’m really hands-on with the collection, as is Megan, who is also the taxonomist and arranger of the Library. This last year has been a huge year for logging, for selecting new stuff to transfer for viewing.

What we do when a film comes in is we evaluate it by watching it, then if it seems as if it is something that we might want to work with, or might support our sales activities, we will transfer it to video, and ultimately we digitise the video. Then we have to log it and get it into the database – it’s quite labour intensive.

So you are still very much involved in the archiving process?

Oh yes, I didn’t touch film for a few years because I got involved with other stuff and our collection had mostly gone to the Library of Congress – it was a relief to get away from this huge mass of material. But now the huge mass has once again descended, we are collecting home movies now and we have in our front room almost 40 cartons of home movies that we have yet to look at.

Where do you find the home movies?

We buy stuff, people give us stuff, and we find stuff…

Home movies, in the same way that people since the 70’s have been collecting vernacular photography and snapshots, home movies have become now something that connoisseurs collect as well.

Is there a culture in San Francisco of people making work using their home movies? With Mock Up On Mu, filmmaker Craig Baldwin combines found footage and live action, but he doesn’t use his own home movies to tell his story does he?

He shoots some footage, but he doesn’t use archival footage of his own, but he shoots a lot. His Mock Up On Mu has tons of stuff that he shot expressly.

San Francisco is one of the world capitals of appropriation and found footage.

So what artists and filmmakers should we be looking out for?

Ask Craig! I don’t know…we like Brian Boyce. Brian helped Craig on his titles. He works with found material from the mass media and he does very beautiful work.

I’m not the person to ask, I’m a little hermetic. I was a big film buff when I was young. I started collecting film in 1982 and it just pushed everything else out. I stopped listening to rock and roll, I stopped going to the movies, there was just too much to focus on. There was a world of 400,000 or more non-theatrical films that hardly anyone knew anything about it, it was all I could focus on.

Do you go to the movies now? Or do you avoid big budget blockbusters like Avatar and focus on the more obscure home movies?

We (myself and Megan) haven’t seen Avatar but we try to go to the movies, we like going to the movies. This year what did we see? We saw District 9, we saw… what was the other Apocalypse film we saw?

2012?

2012, of course, 2012 was great. What else…? We saw Julie & Julia…

I get a little fed up with documentaries because so many of them are just the same, “My incontinent grandfather, on the morning of his eviction…” They just get too character driven and focused on narrative arcs. Though they may treat different subjects, their structure and execution are so often the same.

So with films like Avatar, how do you feel about the whole hysteria around HD & 3D? Do you feel in some ways that the Internet Archive and the found footage is almost the antithesis of this movement?

Not really, because colour was once a move of that seismic sort, movement to sound was a seismic change of that sort… 3D, which goes back a while; there has always been this move towards greater immersivity.

I live in a fairly non-immersive media world, if you look at my stuff you have to make the jump to it; it doesn’t tie you up in its sensory web.

The other thing about our footage is that to a great extent it’s going to be the matrix for building worlds. I know that people have already used our footage as some templates around which other kinds of effects based stuff is going to be done. So I think it’s all part of a continuum really, I don’t see any great divide.

You mentioned yesterday at the Symposium how music videos use found footage in a very decorative way these days.

Increasingly. It’s similar to how graffiti became a fashion accessory. I guess the issue with appropriation-based work is that a lot of times it has lofty aims. It’s supposed to be critically based or it’s supposed to be a revolutionary intervention in the language of representation or the strategies of representation. Let’s ask more of appropriation. If we are going to do it, let’s keep our loftier goals alive.

Do you think there is a line? That there’s some work that is sacred and shouldn’t be messed with or do you think anything goes?

I think most anything goes. We could reject something if we don’t like it, we can criticise… We can have our doubts about where Kenneth Anger stands on the Hitler Youth but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to do that. We can judge his work after he makes it, not before.

And with your collage films The Lives of Energy and Panorama Ephemera, you avoid adding a narrative; you let the material to tell the story…

Not exactly. First off some people can do that really well. Look at Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu. Mock Up is narrativised beautifully and he says that it’s made easier because of his numerical sequencing and because he divided it up. But he actually did something that is beautifully narrativised. It really works; it’s a mature work, smart.

Panorama is different, Panorama is 64 segments and when you put it together there is an implicit narrative. It’s like – you ever listen to a rock and roll album where you build a narrative between the 11 or 12 tracks? It’s kind of what’s happening with Panorama. And actually I think the narrative is present, in some cases I think it’s up front, other cases it’s maybe a little more veiled, but it’s definitely there.

And you would never make a work of fiction with the footage or…?

I’m not against working with fiction; I’m just not smart enough yet to know how to do that. I think it takes great discipline.

My objection to storytelling isn’t inherent or anything like that, it’s to this idea that storytelling is the only way, that conventional narrative is hard wired. A lot of people say it’s the only way to express a thought, an idea, and a tale. I think that’s just bogus, it’s acculturated.

So what other online archives do you like?

I don’t spend enough time on the Internet, but I think UbuWeb is totally great.

Have you thought of an iPhone application for the Prelinger Archive?

Yes, we were very interested in a Prelinger Archives app and it turns out there is actually a few of them. The Weather Underground media player, which is a web-based app, has a Prelinger Archives section. You know how those apps are, they just look at a website or the XML and they just put a nice skin over it and allow you to touch that.

We are interested in historicising the present. One of the things we would like to do with our fast growing collection of historical images, maps, pieces of text is to figure out ways to superimpose them on the landscape, as a augmented reality thin. Tons of people are working on this kind of stuff, so it’s not giving anything away to say this. But that’s the logical direction for us to move.

Then I guess being based in California it must be a great place to meet these sorts of technically minded people.

There are lots of people who are technically competent and interesting. Also, lots of people who are technically focused, who are interested in real world issues as well. That was one of the great discoveries about moving to the Bay area; that you are never terribly far away from geeks who are doing interesting stuff. I think both of us have gotten more technically focused.

And what do you think of Twitter? I see you have an account.

This hasn’t been a big tweeting crowd at AV. I don’t think a lot of people really understand Twitter’s potential. I’m not trying to boost a commercial service here or anything, Twitter is derived from an old Unix shell command called ‘wall’ where you type ‘wall something’ and then it goes out to everybody in your workgroup. So it’s not a new idea by any means, it just happens to be executed in such a way that it caught on. Of course being California and all that, you know in my field which is MLA, Museums, Libraries and Archives, every morning there is just a hefty handful of tweets that point to really interesting work that people are doing.

Do you think there are always going to be closed archives or do you think archives will move to be more generous about how people work with the archive materials?

There will always be both.

So the Internet Archive always has taken this position that we are going to be very open and very flat, and that anybody who wants to build their own skin is welcome to do so.

It hasn’t happened in the moving images sections. A young man made an app for the music collection, which is huge, around 250,000 items, and he built a skin, a web service that fronts for the Internet Archive music collection. It’s a lot better than ours and I wish somebody would do it for our collection.

One of the things that’s actually a burning issue, is that we have these 2,100 films up and there is active participation – the reviewing and the annotation – but it’s all pretty much fan based, and while the collection is used heavily by scholars, researchers and educators, it’s not a friendly portal for them and they don’t participate, even though they use the stuff. I’ve often thought that it would be great to build an educational portal or research based portal onto the same work where anybody would be welcome, that would have a different focus.

Do people who have used the archive for research ever post their essays up or do you just find them out there on the Internet?

No, there is tons of writing out there. I do a vanity Google search every so often just so we can print out stuff for our personal archives, and there is so much stuff that gets written. Sometimes people even post little essays about specific films or filmmakers as part of the reviews but I think the online archive has been written about thousands of times.

I love reading the student blogs about it when they are doing something – a remix in a class or reviews – it’s very interesting for a 19 year old to write about, coming culturally from a very different place. I just love that kind of bridge building.

With the collection in the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, are you trying to digitise the non-media work as well?

Yes, we partnered with the Internet Archive and we’ve done 3,700 items – books, volumes of periodicals, print ephemera, etc. That project is resting right now because there was a lot of excess scanning capacity that we could take advantage of and there isn’t right now because all the Internet Archive scanning centres are very busy. But I am sure we’ll do more.

We did a body of key works that were out of copyright that are part of a bunch of different collections within the IA. So some of them are part of the American Library’s collection, some of them are part of our New Deal/WPA section – all these amazing, regional guides to the USA that were produced, they’re an incredible repository of information about America, we digitised about 40 of those and we’ve done a lot of ephemera that is quite unusual as well.

The neat thing about our library is if you walk through it you will see if a book has a certain bookmark it means that it is digital as well, so that you can see a book that you like and then you can go and actually download a high quality searchable facsimile of it. So the physical collection serves as a set of pointers or a kind of index to the digital collection rather than the other way around.

It’s an interesting place, it’s not about saving print per se, it’s about reframing how print and digital work together. We love it.

Do you get people working on feature films visiting your Library for research for period films?

No. With the film archives we sell footage to everybody because Getty Images reps us.

Lately, we’ve done Michael Moore… we’ve been in many feature… I can’t even remember what feature films we’ve been in. We sell to feature films all the time.

And that’s what supports the Library?

Yes, that supports us. It’s advertising, it’s cable TV documentaries, it’s feature films, it’s interactive, it’s presentations… We always did that and Getty represents us quite well. And we do certain kinds of jobs on our own that don’t fall under the Getty rubric.

Mock Up On Mu, Craig Baldwin

APEngine asked auteur filmmaker Craig Baldwin about Cold War Paranoia in the underground after the UK premiere of his latest feature film Mock Up On Mu at the AV Festival.

Is this your first trip to Newcastle for the AV Festival?

Well, as a matter of fact I’ve been to the UK four or five times. About five years ago I was invited by Eddie Berg at FACT Liverpool to not only show my film but do a workshop like I was doing right here in Newcastle. So when they flew me over then I knew that I should seize on the opportunity to go visit other sites. And I had already heard about an earlier iteration of the Star and Shadow, which was called the Side Cinema, so I booked my own tour, so to speak.

So that’s why I feel comfortable with the people at the Star and Shadow because I met them earlier.  I mean, they’re still young now but like five years ago they were just kids. They have really great energy, and that’s inspiring to me.

The Star and Shadow Is a great space, isn’t it?

Yes.  I love it.  I’ve got my own little microcinema in San Francisco but it’s only one space, where they have three – the bar, the performance space and the theatre.

And how long has your space, the Other Cinema, been going now?

26 years.

And how do you fund the cinema, if that’s not a personal question?

No, it’s okay. It’s not through grants. It’s through earned revenue – ticket sales. The community supports it.

We keep costs down. I’m not paid, I do it for the love of it and maybe if there’s a little bit of money left at the end of the night, then that’ll buy me beer for the next week.  That’s what it comes down to.

And you’ve recently set up your OCD DVD distribution arm of the Other Cinema.  How’s that going?

I can’t claim that it’s making a whole lot of money. But we’re in the black, that’s for sure. It’s more of a personal vision of a small group of people and I’m glad we’re making this stuff available. It pays for itself and it allows us to do certain things, like meet artists.

We connect the publication of the DVD with cinema screenings, and that allows us to have a presence on panels in festivals internationally, and gets us reviews and things like that.

So to me it’s just stepping up to the next level; opening up the space for experimental makers in the US, because there’s not that many spaces, by the way.

Which experimental filmmakers would you recommend then?  Who should we be looking out for?

Oh geez… Kerry Laitala. Although a name you might not recognise, here is a woman who makes 3D films using the Chroma Depth effect, which is where you don’t need 3D glasses and I think that’s brilliant – It has to do with the way the eye perceives colours and their depth. She is so ingenuous to figure out this technique and then shoot with film stock which is no longer made, and that she is so resourceful to save, to make a new genre of film called Chromatic Cocktails. I think that’s particularly inspiring, but you see that’s kind of a local thing.

I mean it could sure play at Rotterdam, in fact I’m sure it has, but what I mean it represents a fertile activity, especially among West Coast filmmakers. Now you might not be as sensitive to this, but as the United States is quite large there are different regional sensibilities, and in San Francisco we have a very active movement. So I tend to support people who I work with, who I know and I like. As opposed to far off worshipping of Chris Marker, who I’ve never really met, but you know I could say, “look out for Chris Marker” but you already know that.

I know a lot of people who are working with projection and multiple projection. I’m very much into that. We always have shows at the Other Cinema on expanded cinema or projection arts. 3D is kind of part of that. Or Live AV, where people create sound and image simultaneously with the Max/MSP system Jitter, which was developed in San Francisco by the way in the school where I teach. Not to brag, but it’s kind of a local thing that’s gone international.

Makers who are interested in developing either photo-chemical or digital applications to allow people to create new kinds of forms and express themselves in different ways. And to do that at the grassroots level within the neighbourhood not at an institution like Google or even in a college, but really coming at it as a communal interest.

You led the 16mm recycled film lab at the Star and Shadow.  Do you similar work back in San Francisco?

Yes I do it all the time. First of all I do it for myself. I worked my way through school by doing light shows. In fact I’m supposedly helping Vicki Bennett’s AV show tonight – I don’t know what that will be, by the way. I have two projectors in my studio and a lot of time they’re both running.  And so someone might come visit or find a film on the street, or I have this huge archive – you know I’ve only seen like one tenth of those films.

Educational films can be very boring, but sometimes they’re really great. It’s like a process of discovery. I have these for free, right?  Either I pulled them out of the garbage or someone gave them to me. Sometimes you can pull a film out of the pile and be like “what is this?” then put it back – never throw it away.

Or you can find a unique film, like I’ve got something made about Pakistan in 1930 by someone like the British Film Institute in a beautiful Duo Tone or some other obsolete process. Now that’s brilliant.

That film could be worth a thousand dollars -not that that means anything; what I mean is there’s true value when you do that kind of digging through. So I do that all the time, not that I have a lot of spare time to do it.

People come over who are making films, and so we actively search. Bill Morrison was just at my house only three days ago. He was doing something on Frankenstein. So we’ll pull from the pile and then he’ll start looking at the stuff and he’ll be editing in one room. Sometimes we’ll have two or three people editing at the same time. And that’s my kind of a lifestyle. Being around film I love to do it, just to have fun and be just playful with film. “Let’s do a double projection… Let’s take it out on street… Let’s take this over to this other party…” That kind of stuff.

So yes out of that comes this workshop: both in school, and also the workshop that I did at FACT in Liverpool and the one I did in Berlin like three/four months ago.

You said that your collection was divided into six categories – what are they?

I drew them from the Dewey Decimal system. So it’s one of the most general divisions that any person, an intern or a busy artist would be able to find useful. So it’s Natural Science, Social Science, Applied Science or Technology, Geography and History, Humanities, and  Language/Arts, which includes Literature and a few narrative films.

I thought it would be more bizarre.

Oh no, no. Not idiosyncratic at all. I just wanted the most ‘normal’ system that anyone would be able to use. Obviously there’s overlap – conservation could be in Natural Science, but then again it could be in Applied Science.

I’m interested in what we were talking about at the Symposium, the Archival and film history. The value of film and the kinds of film, like industrial film. Industrial film is fascinating to me because the makers don’t get the credit. They have just as much imagination, and more control over what they’re doing in a lot of cases than the Hollywood stuff that gets all the credit. And there are vastly more educational and industrial films. Also there’s a found quality which I like, there’s something absurd about them.

So you collect home movies as well? Is there anything you ever say no to in your collection or do you just take everything?

I never say no. Not wanting to seem like such a whore but basically that’s what I’m saying. I will take anything off the street, you know, it could be pop, it could be like a cartoon…

There’s different kinds of archives. I represent one kind of thing which tries to find value in anything – even the lowest most common thing like a PSA or a commercial.  But also even a scrap or fragment.

The narrative films I have––and I don’t generally collect those––are the ‘odd reels’. In other words, if you have a feature which is 90 minutes let’s say, on three 16mm reels and one reel gets separated from the other two, well what happens to it?  I mean just think about that, I mean just conceptually it’s a bizarre idea.

You’re like an animal refuge for films.

Yes, that’s what we mean by orphan films. They’re little children and for the most part they’re just going to be thrown away because they don’t have any value. And that odd reel doesn’t have value because most people want to see a feature with a complete story. It could be the last reel of Godzilla let’s say. Which is the reel you want to see anyway which has all the action on it.

Like with the extra footage of Metropolis that has been found.

Yes, sure. That’s more in the library. The fetishising of film history, and that’s fine but I’m on the other end of that. I appreciate that but I’m on the other side – of not finding something missing but putting missing things together to make a complete thing out of it, like Frankenstein. It’s not so much analysis, it’s more synthesis.

To actually take the footage and take it to another meaning. It has the original meaning embedded, and then is taken to somewhere else creatively. And that’s kind of a way of adding context too – personal imagination.

Which is what you do.

Yes, I do that when I produce. Collage narrative is a new form; maybe it’s not worth living past my life, but it’s an interesting way of making use of this material. I don’t have to go out and shoot an explosion when there’s already five billion explosions in five billion bad movies. So to use that I think is crafty, it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s sardonic. It represents a critique of the original sensationalism and bombast of the film in an ironic pop art way.

And so with Mock Up On Mu you’re taking real people and you’re fictionalising them. Where did that idea come from? Is it a case of truth being stranger than fiction?

Yes. With the sub-cultural stories. That’s a good history and it’s a true history, the kind of history you wouldn’t hear about in schools. So I feel like I’m doing the right thing by telling this story, enriching everyone’s life by telling a story.

It’s really about my own background. My father worked for Aerojet, and the New Age movement came out when I was growing up. So this marriage of Aerospace and the Occult is really the ground against which I formed my own identity. So that’s why I’m close to it and I’m entitled to make that film.

If I’d just got people to act it out it wouldn’t have the same impact. People have already written the story, in fact there’s two or three book out now; one’s by a British guy, George Pendle. I wasn’t trying to write the story and do the research, what I wanted to do is tell a story in visual terms, with creativity. Like the era of Kenneth Anger, 50s LA guys who were making assemblage, they were making junk sculpture. So mine is a junk sculpture, where form and content are married. That’s what I like to do. That what makes it arty and not just a biography.

If other people want to make biography, that’s fine. You know I could do it if I wanted to, but I’m not interested in reproducing a genre.  I’m more interested in smashing genres. In the way that Vicki Bennett’s work is called Genre Collage. Through mash-ups you see what a genre is.

I’d rather do something more surprising than documentary, more like painting. Here’s a painting of Jack Parsons, you know, and then Marjorie Cameron. It has more humour and more spirit and life to it. It’s funnier and more imaginative; it has more creative energy behind it.

But you have mixed the footage – you shot some of Mock Up On Mu?

Yes, I did. I like that idea, of doing something new. I’m adding, hopefully, to the world of fine art film – this idea of mixing found footage with live action.

It’s a storytelling strategy and it takes a certain amount of bravery, but you know I think it works.  I could go to inter-titles in the archive sections. Everybody would say “Great. He has this archive material and he told us about stuff that’s missing through the inter-titles”. But that’s already part of the convention.

But even the so-called re-enactments are part of the convention, too. But mine weren’t really “re-enactments”, they were more like what Anger was doing earlier on – actually creating poetic gesture.

Does Kenneth Anger know that you’ve used some of his footage in your film?

I don’t know if he knows. And the thing is when Rebecca Shatwell said, “Kenneth Anger would like a copy of Mu.”  My jaw dropped, but I gave it to her.

But you know, I shot it off a piece of toilet paper. There’s one shot of Marjorie Cameron.  But basically it was about ten seconds. But I don’t feel sorry or sad that I ripped him off for that. See the great thing is the distance created by the implausibility of the complex collage I created and the fact that it’s really a true story. It’s all based on real history, like Picasso’s Guernica, which was based on a real event. What I like to do is an historically based thing but with my gestures, be it in the live-action or the stock footage.

I couldn’t necessarily tell the story with stock footage because there’s certain things in the story that aren’t in the stock footage. As I said, most people would solve this problem through inter-titles or a shadow on the wall or shooting from behind or a silhouette or it can be total voiceover – there’s other cinematic strategies.  But we’ll go out and shoot in the desert because the desert looks beautiful and it’s a desert story.

All my movies are about the West and the Southwest. O No Coronado! was about a conquistador, a real story, where he was looking for the Seven Cities of Gold. Are there seven cities of gold? No. Did he change the life of everyone? Yes.

His whole history was based on a lie, a fable. So, it’s to contradict the idea that history is a set of rational decisions. It’s a set of fabulous ideas, dreams, fantasies. I like the idea that what really drives a lot of political decisions is based on fear, or it could be love or desire.

What I have to offer is this kind of mad, fantasy, fabulist thing. It’s in a way like poetry or metaphor, you know? And all of a sudden the way that history’s represented has another presence on the screen, and that’s my right. I have the prerogative to do what I want with those images, with that screen, with those shapes.

So this is my version of the story. There could be other versions but no one else would do it because L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology would sue them. But a guy like me could do it because I’m beneath the radar. So that was my opening, you know, it’s a very small window but I got through it.

If not a lot of people see it in a theatre, it doesn’t make that much difference because people into the sub-culture are going to know it’s out there with the world wide web… So I don’t have to speak to a larger mass culture, I don’t believe in it.

The film is structured as 13 episodes. Have you thought about putting the film up online in episodes?

The first episode is online but I didn’t put it there.

I’m not worried about it, I mean I’ll sell the DVD, I do a lot of work to get stuff out. UbuWeb has put up my stuff, but I don’t complain when that happens. That’s just bound to happen.

And it took you five years to make?

More than that, at least five years.

Is that partly due to the vast amount of material?

If you’ve got a production company, usually you’ve got a lot of money upfront, you kiss a lot of ass, get a lot of money and then hire people and get studios and stuff like that. But that’s not my model.

My model is more closely knitted into my lifestyle. You don’t clock in when you’re making an experimental film, you don’t hire certain people and have a budget. You’ll live with it.

So I could’ve made the film in a shorter period of time, but it’s just more of a trace of decisions I’ve made over a long period: looking at, thinking about, reading more and figuring out problems. So there’s weeks that I wouldn’t work on it at all.

It was six years or so after my last film. But all that time I was doing other things, travelling round the world, teaching, running our gallery, etc.

Also, your DoP or Cinematographer might go out of town and then only come back once every few months – so when he’s there you jump on him. Your actress might not be available. All these continuity problems.

Some of the last pick ups were shot literally five years after the original material, only because my actress came back in, and I said, “I have to have a fix here.” I had to have her in the opening sequence; when Hubbard’s lecturing we realised it would be much stronger if she was listening to him. You know, I hadn’t thought that one through. I didn’t have a script when I shot, which is not the kind of way that feature films are generally made.

So I made an experimental film, but it had to be feature length; it has a big story and deserves feature consideration.

But my thing was more exploratory. When I was in the desert, we shot that fantastic location. I didn’t know how it’d be used, but it resonated and spoke of the same kinds of sensibilities that I was trying to express – something weird about the West, something mysterious.

So I shot it, then later decided it would be the lab – it’s not like it necessarily looks like a lab, but in the allegorical state that I have hopefully brought the audience into – people say, “Oh, this represents the lab.” With the film as a whole, I want people to see the whole thing like a puzzle they would put together. It’s participatory and it demands a bit more of people rather than an easy through-line.

Mock Up On Mu, Craig Baldwin

Yes. And are you happy with the final product? You said there were some edits you weren’t happy with.

No, no.

I think there’s some great things – the idea of mixing live action and found footage is brilliant. (It sounds like I’m patting myself on the back.) The idea of putting words in people’s mouth is genius; I call it ventriloquism, and my next film is definitely going to do that.

But, it’s poorly paced, there’s no rhythm, there’s too much talk, it goes on too long… a lot of things are wrong with it.  Any artist would probably admit that he or she sees flaws.

So, no, I would do other things, but there’s things I did in this case that I have never done before. I’m not a professional filmmaker, I’m a curator, I’m an educator. But I made a film that will carry this story further; it’ll do justice for a very small amount of money compared to what other makers would require, even Kenneth Anger.

It was made out of found materials. It’s like when you make a piece of junk sculpture, using stuff from the beach. I redeemed it, I brought the story out of the stuff that I had.

Is it all footage from your own collection is it? Is it all 16mm or is it a mixture of different formats?

Yes, mostly 16mm. There was maybe 10% video.

Yes, and I noticed that there was a few shots zooming in and out of internet maps.

Yes, everybody’s always picked up on that.

Thomson & Craighead, who spoke yesterday, have made work with online maps.

Yes, well you know I saw that at the Symposium yesterday and thought, “That’s exactly what I did.”  It’s not like they or I invented it, it’s just a great idea, obviously. Am I going to worry about Google maps? No, it’s just a beautiful way of using something available and free. In fact it wasn’t even from my laptop.

But that’s the exception. For the most part it was made out of the stuff that I had available. It’s working with the material one has, like a beatnik guy who has no money and yet can do something magical because of the limitations.

And if you can’t solve it, then you can have your friends make these gestures against the wall. In this last pick up sequence we had to have Marjorie Cameron say something and so I just put my actress against the wall and just filmed it.  And then later put the words in. I don’t know if you remember that, but the point is it’s crude, it’s beautiful.  That’s the aesthetic of it.

I appreciate the funky quality. That’s the aesthetic, which is jerry-rigged, cobbled together, like Rube Goldberg. The whole thing is held together with springs and pullies, like a creaking machine, but it actually works. It’s just a punk rock thing.

There’s something nice about the materiality as well. When you can see the wear on the film. There was one bit where I thought you’d animated a butterfly, and then I realised it’s just a scratch…

I felt terrible about that for so many years, but after a while I said, “Well, in fact that’s cool.” It’s like a piece of marble or wood. If a table is made out of wood and there’s a knot in the wood, that’s cool. And that’s what it is with the film, there’s a knot, there’s the grain, it’s the film. So that again is another level of self-reflection, people see how it’s constructed.

You’ve been making films since the ‘70s. Has the internet made things easier for you to collect or do you still stick to collecting celluloid?

Yes and no. The internet has not made a whole big difference to me except in the case of sound, because my thing remains this resolutely Luddite kind of thing. But the thing is the audio – I really have to give a lot of credit to my editor Sylvia Schedelbauer whose work I showed at the Symposium.

Oh that was great. I loved that bit of the film.

You can get the audio all for free; basically it’s a virtual beach to comb. It’s a little bit more difficult for the picture, the picture would look terrible if you got clips off the internet. But the audio’s worked totally, no one could tell. And there’s so many people who’ve given their stuff up for free; there’s a huge range of things. I have to give Sylvia credit for that.

I’ve been able to find movie sound tracks etc., that’s what I’ve always done. In this case the sounds were more individualised, more creative, more experimental, more industrial-drone that just worked so perfectly. You could make 99 versions of that movie, all with different sound tracks, there’s that much material there.

So, I have to give credit to the online resources too. And those people don’t expect any pay, so it’s not like pirating.  Not that pirating bothers me.

I don’t pirate from other artists, Kenneth Anger is the only example there for ten seconds of this movie. But I pirate from the Hollywood productions or industrial films or educational films, which are mostly in the public domain because they’re 50 years old and their producers are dead and they’re orphans, no one’s taking care of them. I’m doing the best thing for them, I’m giving them a new life.

Anything else you want to say about Kenneth Anger showing his films off DVD last night?

No I don’t want to.  Maybe I’m getting over excited. I almost had a tear in my eye at the screening. Should I have yelled?

He probably would’ve loved that.

Well, I’m not so sure.

But it was very much a thing about celebrity. I admit I’m part of that, I was like “Wow, it’s Kenneth Anger.” I was very excited to see him in the flesh.

Well, he certainly looked freaky. Yes, I loved it. Yes, that part was worth the price of admission.

He could’ve been in your film.

Oh, yes.  That’s what I mean, you could find footage of a person, you don’t need an actor, or a found location, that’s what I’m totally into, like that big dome in the desert. It’s a ‘found’ thing that speaks for itself. It doesn’t represent, it presents. There’s so much weight in the presence of it and that’s a story in and of itself.  Every shot in my movie is like that. There’s a story that resonates at so many levels.

I know I definitely need to watch it again because I just felt like so much was happening. You could almost watch it without the narrative, the imagery was amazing, so strong.

Thank you very much.  Well a lot of people watch Tribulation 99, my early film, with the sound off. All these Americans, they don’t want to hear about Imperialism, they want to see flying saucers. My whole strategy is to take the luridness of cinema and yet take it to a progressive, critical point. I don’t want to make a guilt-ridden, hand-wringing film – I’m glad those films are made, but other people can do them.

But my strength is visual art. I have a certain way of putting the images and sounds together that is provocative. I don’t want to do it for the sake of it, which is what you’d call your experimental film, like at Ann Arbor, it’s like one flower film after another, super close-up of little bubbles and grain – and that’s great, I love it. So I said “Why don’t we take these tools for telling – taking positions, not telling stories, proposing ideas towards something other than a pure formal play?” Formal play’s okay, but actually to create an experimental way of writing history, experimental historiography is what’s needed now, not more avant-garde, big, Abstract Expressionist painters.

That’s fine if you’re an expressionist painter. But my point of view is “every image is political.” This conference could be seen as a way of politicising this issue of archives. It’s like, what use do we make of them?

That’s the question that Anger is totally clueless about with Ich Will!, he’s insensitive. Those images have a history and meaning and he could’ve played with the context of it but he just completely drained them of history and just took the gesture, as if it didn’t contain this tale of the 20th Century.

I like this idea of adding context – that’s why I liked A Short Film about War by Thomson & Craighead. You could see this came from this and this came from that. To me that’s so much smarter, and actually that’s why cinema can’t keep it up.

Yes, it’s demystifying, showing where the source is, real people’s experience of war…

Yes, it’s genius.  I really felt close to that project, I totally got it.  I mean, I had that thought too.  With Negativland, the band I represent, at the end of their record they have pages of sources. I don’t do that because I’d have way too many sources. I just name some for about a minute and then say there are many more.

It’s at least a gesture towards this idea that we live in a vast pool of information, of images and sounds. And that we’re made of that, we’re children of it.  And it’s all in our head already, so you just trigger it and the meaning flows out.  And that’s why all this resonates in your head when you’re watching Mock Up On Mu. What I want to do–and this is the problem with the film –is that it gets a little bit too much, all these overtones.

It’s just like noise music, industrial music or punk rock.  It’s supposed to be loud, it’s supposed to be confusing.

Now if you wanted to coddle the audience then you keep everything plain and simple, and it’s easy. I’d rather do something that’s more disturbing. It’s supposed to be aggressive, it’s supposed to hurt just a little bit. That’s the experience.

So what’s next for you? What’s your next film?

My films are not just about gesture even though there’s a lot of gestures in them… it really has to do with this relationship between gestures and identities and histories.

It’s always an effort to create a set of ideas, I’m trying to get behind to the history and the ideas behind the gestures. For example Nazism. Okay, all those guys in Anger’s Ich Will! are dead. We don’t really want to think about that, I don’t know if that occurred to anyone else… But still we have complete right wing arseholes who are destroying the lives of others. So in other words, Nazism is not dead. So the idea outlives the human flesh.

Cinema is not just about beauty. I see the beauty in ideas. So I’m moving increasingly towards a kind of literature – writing with images is what I want to do.

So my next film is really about literature. It’s about the literature of William Burroughs.  Okay now, William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch, which is a cut-up, that’s exactly what I do.

Now there’s been a trillion films made about Burroughs, but not that many films are made about Guy Debord of the Situationists. The films that are made about the Situationists are all made by the Situationists.

But yet if you look at Paris in the ‘50s where Burroughs and Debord were living in the Left Bank, when they wrote their most famous works – Society of the Spectacle from the Situationists and Naked Lunch.

Well Naked Lunch was actually written in North Africa, but they both were published by the same guy, Olympia Press.  So now I have this triangle like I had with Marjorie Cameron.

They’re historical figures but they represent citation of history in the case of the writings of the Situationists or the collage techniques of their filmmakers. And in case of Burroughs, a very cinematic way of writing literature.

So they were both there working in the same literary circle, but all these literary circles grew within a subculture. Again, another sub-cultural story. Yet it changed the lives of every artist, every citizen and every cultural activist on the planet with what was being born in that little cauldron there, of Paris at that time. Just like I feel in San Francisco sometimes.

So what I’d like to do is create a coming-together of these two minds, which represent the post-War undergrounds of both continents, but also ways of working with found material – found literature, found philosophy, and creating their own distinctive body of work, and the idea of their followers. There’s enough drama there – the intrigues and the deaths and murders and addictions…

The whole thing would operate on this level of critique of literary form. Not form for its own sake, but ideas about how contemporary reality can only be expressed in a collage way, because there’s too much going on. It’s not ideal, idealist or naturalistic. No, it’s Constructivist, it’s multi-layered.

My next film will be called Invisible Insurrection, which was the title of an essay by Alexander Trocchi, who was also there at that time. And they were all addicts, they were all bad people, they were gay and they were drunks… It’s got a good human story. I like taking those ideas and working between the human life of these people, which is exactly like mine, impoverished.

You like anti heroes don’t you?

Yes, anti-heroes, sure.  People who are against the grain.

The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth

“This is therapy, not a film competition with yourself. You’ve made the best film, I assume the best was the first. We are using it to go back in time, to see where we can go and examine it.” Lars von Trier, The Five Obstructions

Filmmakers: how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? I wonder how many of us would be strong enough to stand up to the challenges of Lars von Trier, as Jorgen Leth does in The Five Obstructions.

In 1967, Leth made a short film called The Perfect Human. In 2003, Von Trier challenged him to remake the film five times, each time under certain restrictions. What ensued was an intellectual game between two very strong-willed filmmakers.

It seems at times that Von Trier is simply playing with Leth for his own amusement:  he wants to push him, to trip him up. He seems intent even upon breaking him. Leth manages to produce a beautiful and interesting film, no matter how tough the restrictions. But even though Von Trier seems impressed by the quality of Leth’s remakes he is unsatisfied, making comments such as: “I don’t think you were true to what really matters to me”. Let us ask, what does matter to Von Trier? What would satisfy him?

The Five Obstructions is, beyond anything else, a film about the creative process. A key part of the process is dealing with creative control. Filmmaking is always a battle between control and chaos; most often an attempt to impose some kind of order over chaotic elements such as money, people, weather, locations and so forth. We see in many of Von Trier’s films an apparent embrace of chaos. At the very least, it is allowed to run amok inside carefully placed boundaries. Von Trier finds a way to make it work according to the needs of the film. Control is also a personal issue for Trier who suffers from various phobias and obsessive compulsions. He seems engaged in a constant battle to gain control over himself and the world around him. His way of dealing with this within filmmaking is, “to set up limitations like we did with Dogme. By removing some options in certain areas, you’re able to focus fully on other areas and rethink how you go about things.”

Interestingly, Von Trier is attempting to get Leth to relinquish his control. But Leth, in his cool emotional detachment, is clearly a man very much in control. Von Trier sees that there is something that he has lost by taking this stance. He wants something raw and accidental to come through: something human and emotional.  He wants the experience to leave a mark on him. He says to Leth after the first ‘obstruction’: “There is a degree of perversion in maintaining a distance… I want you to move on from there, to make you empathise.”

The final ‘obstruction’ has Leth doing nothing but reading a letter that Von Trier has composed, over footage from the previous Obstructions edited by Von Trier. This is the ultimate submission to the game that is being played. It is not for the sake of amusement that Von Trier is taking this mature filmmaker and asking him to revisit a film of his youth. Von Trier has maintained something youthful in his approach to his work. Leth, much to Von Trier’s disappointment, seems to have lost something.

The film is not an exercise in how films are made. It is a lesson in the importance of breaking out of habits, of constantly keeping oneself in check and of becoming critical of oneself. It teaches that what really matters in art is the viewpoint of the artist, but that this is no easy proposition: to be true to oneself demands constant work. Creativity, to put it simply, is the discovery of new ideas. To find new ideas one must maintain something of youth – an openness that leads one to take risks and not fall into habits. Maybe Leth’s weakness as a filmmaker is his reluctance to take any real risks. This is a trait I admire in Von Trier: his constant experimentation and reinvention is what makes him such an important director. His work goes beyond mere ‘taste’ and ‘style’; instead, it is about searches, explorations, leaps of faith, self-awareness. He uses film as a tool for studying and trying to understand ourselves and all the worlds in which we live.

So: filmmakers, how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? Will you take up the challenge constantly to experiment and to seek out new ideas – and find the strength to bring back what you discover?

“Look at your habits … are they the product of innumerable little cowardice’s and laziness or of your courage and inventive reason?” Nietzsche

About the Author: Daniel Fawcett, Writer/Director and founder of One + One, The Filmmakers Journal.

Night Mayor, Directed by Guy Maddin, photo credit: Rebecca Sandulak, © 2009 National Film Board of Canada

This mid-week movie comes courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada, who have recently posted up Guy Maddin’s Night Mayor in its entirety. In this short, Guy Maddin presents the story of inventor Nihad Ademi, who harnesses the power of the Aurora Borealis in 1939 Winnipeg. Ademi uses the power to broadcast images of Canada to its own citizens from coast to coast, but in the process angers the government.

The quasi-documentary film was produced to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the NFB and was made using footage from the NFB’s extensive archive. Check out this interview with Guy Maddin about the film on the NFB blog too.

savethevideogame.org

Can you remember the first console videogame you ever played? If you’re dreamily reminiscing about the likes of Pong, Dungeons & Dragons, Pac-Man, Street Fighter, Super Mario… you may interested to hear that the National Videogame Archive is collecting, preserving and sharing the nation’s much loved videogames.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about in person, you can visit the newly opened Games Lounge at the National Media Museum in Bradford where you can try your hand at some top games and learn about gaming history.

Otherwise, support the campaign, visit Save the Videogame and register. And if you need further persuading, there’s a nice selection of videos from games developers pledging their support and discussing which historic games they would like to save.

William Fowler

William Fowler is Curator for Artists’ Moving Image at the British Film Institute’s National Archive.

When did you start working at the BFI National Archive and what were you doing before that?

It was June 2005, so I’ve been there nearly four years. I trained as a film archivist at the University of East Anglia and I had just worked at LUX,writing a website giving advice to artists on how to look after their work at home. So there’s a slight irony that I moved from advising artists what to do at home, to working for BFI, encouraging artists to let the BFI look after their master material.

Was there an artists’ collection before you joined?

There was, but mine was a new post, so there wasn’t anyone specific looking after it.  The different sections of the archive tended to have someone with a particular interest in an area. So there had been people actively soliciting artists’ work for the Archive in the past and then at other times, artists were approaching the archive and it would just come in. It was recognised as part of a remit but there wasn’t a dedicated person.

The BFI Production Board had produced a lot of experimental films. Roger Whitney, who was head of non-fiction in the 80s, used to go the London Film Makers Co-op, and there was an acquisition budget at that point. He was very interested in the area, and he knew some of the filmmakers and was bringing material in.

The BFI had been funding artists’ work since the very early 60’s at least, so I guess that work was in the Archive, and are there things like Humphrey Jennings’ films?

It depends how you define the area really. I think you have to go right back to things associated with the Film Society in the 20s, so Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu, and people who are in the orbit of the sort of more Avant-Garde film making circles, international Avant-Garde works – like Viking Eggeling, but also Len Lye, and the GPO Film Unit. If you’re going to talk about the history of experimental film in Britain, then these things are part of it.

But in time they bleed out into these other sort of areas as well, so there’s a lot of that work and it’s in a slightly separate part of the Archive, but the distribution wing of the BFI has quite a lot of experimental work. European work, for example, which isn’t necessarily represented at LUX.

You can’t hope to collect everything, so what decisions do you make… and how?

It’s a hard area to define and to be really clear about, but it’s really a case of there being different criteria. Whether it’s an artist whose work is recognised as being particularly strong and influential, or maybe other work that’s had some kind of public profile, but which isn’t necessarily recognised as being particularly high in value by other artists or by the institution at large. And things connected to the history of the BFI. But it is a hard thing to define.

Has it changed? Now, with the idea of archives as not being simply places where you preserve something, but being places where you get work shown… a different idea of the curator?

It’s a mixture really. It is a sort of new thinking about the archives, so that it’s not just a passive receptacle, and there should be platforms for making the work available and generating discussion around it.  But at the same time you could argue there’s something quite unusual or unfashionable about my role, because I’m a curator of a collection, rather than just being an out in the world curator – there are physical items held in the collection.

But certainly a strong guiding principle is to get material back out into the world. Jeff Keen, for example. He’s a really, historically, important filmmaker, and with such an enormous body of work and it was all solely lying with him. That needed to be addressed – to talk to him about that and whether that was a concern of his.

But then also, a push so that people would be able to access those films.

How, how did you set about that?

There were some films in the archive. The BFI produced four films of his in the late 60s. The BFI produced a lot of experimental work in the 60s and his are some of the ones that have had a real longevity. I got in touch with him a few years ago, just enquiring about what he was doing with his masters, and were there negatives and things and I kept in touch. And then the fact that he was getting older – he’s in his eighties – and wanting to really sort something and talk about his. And there was other interest across the institution, people got really excited and made a commitment – to put out a DVD box set and as part of that, we would do film restorations as well.

We made new preservation material and new prints for – though not everything because there’s about 70 films. And there’s an international touring programme.

I’d watched pretty much all his films with him and sort of talked about his life and his work, and things about the material. Personally, I’m very interested in the historical detail – what happened and whose camera it was, and this kind of thing, which is probably why I’m an archivist! That’s not something that a lot of curators actually appear to be that interested in, that detail and reality of work and people.

In the broader film world, there are lots of people who are interested in that and then there are a lot of writers and commentators who are more focused on contextualisation and interpretation, but I don’t know if those pluarity of approaches are present in artists’ film and video, because it’s the sort of nerdy side of things.

Well, nerdy maybe, but with Jeff Keen especially, there’s a contemporary relevance to that work and to that kind of practice. Artists exploring that kind of bohemian thing..like Spartacus Chetwynd?

Completely. We did these shows at the BFI Southbank and I was curious to see who would come. Initially I was a bit frustrated that there weren’t people I knew, who knew the work from years ago – that they hadn’t turned out to celebrate Jeff. But the screenings did really well and it was predominantly young people – people who weren’t connected to the sector so directly and that was really exciting. People really got into it – I was out on Old Street late one night, and a young girl came up to me and said ‘Oh you’re the Jeff Keen guy’ and got really excited and then said ‘I’ll see you next week at the next screening’.

People are interested and bringing different things to the work. I totally agree his work does make a lot of connections with things now.

One of the things with Jeff, that must be a common challenge with artists’ work, is that while there were some of his films in the Archive, there’s all this other work that he has. You must have to have, if not negotiations, then conversations with artists about what your intentions are. You’re giving the work a particular status.

Each artist brings slightly different issues to bear, or different things crop up. One thing that is a bit of a concern is that people will leave their master materials with a Lab, which makes sense because they can just phone up and say ‘Oh can you make me another print?’ But then that film doesn’t get shown for a while, or you don’t make a new print, then literally the decades go by and you forget it’s there. And a real issue is that the labs are closing down.

A lot of material can come to BFI automatically during this process, but not everything.  It depends on how quickly things happen and the conscientious state of the lab. Only a couple of years ago the original A and B rolls for Malcolm Le Grice’s Emily (Third Party Speculation) came to the BFI.

I was talking to Sarah Pucill, who brought a lot of material to the archive, and a big part of it was her figuring out where things were and following up leads. Some people may be storing things at home, and being incredibly diligent about keeping track of what they have and where things are.  But then, by the same token, there’s having material, but being diligent about its deterioration too and making sure it’s in the best environment it can be in.

And it’s not just celluloid is it, because video is less stable…

After 10 years things can start falling apart, the glue that links the magnetic particles to the tape changes and all the particles fall off – that’s what drop out is. It doesn’t take very long for that to happen.

And if you watch most artists’ video, from the 70s and 80s, nearly everything has drop out, even if it’s shot on relatively high format.

So what’s the broad collecting strategy? Are you looking at individuals or are you looking at areas of activity?

It’s individual focused really, and ideally having some platform to build on, doing something to make work accessible. Often artists don’t want to donate prints, they only want to donate their master material, and that makes it quite limited as to what you can do. But they retain all their rights to the material.

The French film archivist, Henri Langlois, pioneered the idea of film as something that you collect. That if you’re interested in a filmmaker, you should collect everything. Don’t just collect the good bits. With artists’ work, I think that’s different to what a gallery might do.

I tend to think you wouldn’t slavishly make sure you’ve got absolutely everything, but generally speaking, if the material was available, then you would take, I would take it in, as a matter of filling a certain duty really.

With other parts of the BFI, are you feeding in from your artists’ perspective, into other projects?

It depends on how you define things again. I’m very interested in the links between artists’ film and broader film culture. It has its own history, but I’m wary of keeping it completely separate to wider film history. I’m interested in how film can be subversive and how it relates to the mainstream and sort of penetrate the mainstream. I think that’s easier for the film world than it is in the art world. I’m setting up lots of oppositions with the art world here, but so often it’s a sensibility of looking at artist’s film and thinking how I may include it in discussion about some other films that aren’t necessarily art as film.

I programme a series called The Flipside once a month at BFI Southbank and we show material from the archive, but that’s predominantly strange, cult, unknown feature films, which are housed in the archive and because they aren’t part of any formal cannon, haven’t really had very many outings, so it’s nice to show these things. And sometimes there’s an opportunity there to show some experimental work around those kind of films.

I think it’s really important – because that’s the way the world is – we’re not secluded.

Jumping back to your very first question, I worked at LUX before I did the film archiving course and I curated, with Ben Cook, a programme called Visionary Landscapes, which drew on a mixture of feature film and experimental film. And when I was working on the Keep Moving Images website, I was doing some programming at The Horse Hospital and showing quite a mixture of stuff, mainly short films, but quite a  wide variety – drawing on a lot of experimental stuff, but other things as well. I wasn’t being explicit about it, but I was trying to collapse the distinction between the different areas. I don’t really do that at the BFI, because I’ve got a specific responsibility, to the artist and experimental film and it deserves to have its own platform. I don’t want to kind of relegate it and say it’s the same as all this other stuff, but there is an element of a curator approach in there.

Artists’ film and video includes installation and multi-screen work – how do you deal with that stuff?

Well this is a complex and evolving area, but the Archive does have multi-screen work and some installation work, or things that have installation elements. But beyond quite simple multi-screen work, like two screen, three screen, the Archive has to deal and address its technical parameters and the possibilities of what it can do – it can’t really be grappling with installation work essentially, because there isn’t that necessary infrastructure to make sure that those other elements are going to be preserved, or to have that level of engagement and discussions about how those installations are experienced in the future. At this point, there aren’t structures in place to support that kind of activity and it opens up lots of questions – the relationship between  the cinema and gallery and so on…

And there are other institutions involved in the questions …

This is another thing that’s changing in the world of the film archive. In the past, national archives would collect almost in isolation, across all fields and the principle being that if you’ve got one print of a film, then you’ve got to hold on to that, because if you show it, it gets knackered, and you’ve got serious preservation elements to consider.

But now there’s a recognition that other people are collecting films as well. This doesn’t happen so often, but say with a feature film, we might know that Universal have the negs for this film and it’s housed there. So why shouldn’t we show our print. We can be confident that this film is being looked after, and it’s the responsibility of the archive to get things out, to be responsible about what it cares for, but to make it available. It’s the same thing with collecting – there are other institutions who are collecting, and are much better set up to do so.  So Tate or other galleries are far better set up to collect and care for installations or work that should be seen outside normal cinematic presentation.

And there are different preservation issues aren’t there, because generally with cinema, you’re dealing with a much less complicated thing and often…

Working with artists throws up its own particular issues, but there is a broadly accepted cinematic model, which the archive over all is set up to cater for.

Where are those conversations are happening?

There’s the Legacy and Learning Group with representatives from different institutions – Tate, LUX etc – who are collecting and showing artists’ work in the UK. The issues of responsibility and connections between different collections is very much a part of our discussions. Arts Council England is leading the project.

Any other thoughts?

Just thinking about the differences between artists and cinema, and the relationship in the archive, there’s something like The Nightcleaners Part 1, by the Berwick Street Collective. It was founded by Marc Karlin,   who founded  Vertigo magazine and James Scott, and they worked with Humphrey Trevelyan, Mary Kelly and others. The way that film is shot – it’s deconstructed… there’s the slate sometimes included in the shot, there are sections of black between scenes and you know the ‘metadata’ – the information we collate around a work – really has to indicate that these things are part of the film, because someone who is archiving the work, looking at it on a bench, may think oh this is just rushes.

And I think that’s another example of a work I think that has real contemporary relevance. It’s historically interesting, but also from the point of view of artists working in collectives, and it’s political work with a social context…

And a community based art practice – and there’s a lot more of that these days.