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.

Indepencia, Raya Martin

Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin has established himself in recent years with a complex body of work that employs a reflective use of media in order to explore the colonial past and fraught national history of the Philippines. His sixth feature film Independencia,  premiered in Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, is the second part of a proposed trilogy following his debut A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or, The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) (2005). Each film in the trilogy will be set during in a distinct period in Philippine history related to Spanish, America or Japanese occupation and each will adapt a cinematic aesthetic of that period. Indio Nacional was a made in the style of a silent film and Indepedencia, which is set prior to the second world war carefully reconstructs the style and techniques of this early sound cinema made in the Philippines, a film history which survives in only a few fragments and articles.

When I met Raya Martin during the International Film Festival Rotterdam I asked what drew him to recreate this period in Filipino history and how he developed a style and narrative that would work in that context yet also have currency today and allow a fresh understanding of Filipino history and the American occupation in the 1940s?

Well first I started thinking of scenes, generalised scenes from today that can be situated before in the past, like someone going to sleep or travelling, walking around alone, basic things like that but put in a different context and the history of before. Independencia naturally had to be narrative because of the demands of the films of that period, if it is a studio film it had to have a story. I was interested in Satyajit Ray during that time, not really reading up on his work and not really watching the films but reading up on the synopsis of all of his films. I thought that he was one of the most plot-full of all the filmmakers. So I just travelled along that idea and built this mother and son tale around the idea that during that time people moved out from cities and villages into the jungle. I wanted to move away from the coverage of the battlefield, so it was literally moving out of the centre. So you have the mother and son in the jungle and then the appearance of the girl who operates as an outside element that disturbs the situation. Developing the story was also about dealing with the whole basis of the project which was about history in cinema, and how the narrative could be influenced by that history and vice versa.

In that sense the historical style of the studio set is really crucial both in terms of re-creating that period aesthetic, but also the set allows you to create a micro-climate within which this drama takes place?

Yes, on a superficial level the idea was to create a specific environment for real people. The way I cast is also part of the concept. Here I really wanted actors from cinema and television because their tradition of acting is very flamboyant and showy and it fits in with the style. At the same time I was really interested in how dioramas work in the museum and how if you stay in one spot and just stare long enough things come alive. Also there is the concept of the box, in terms of cinema during that time where literally everything was done inside a box, inside a studio and also metaphorically it is inside the system that was built by Hollywood.

Film history exists through material in archives but just as importantly in the way it is recounted and retold. Can you tell me how you approached Filipino film history for this project and what sources you drew upon?

Well it’s corny for an artist to say ‘I just want to trusted my gut’ but in a way it was kind of like that, most of it is based on imagination. Imagination of course has a lot of bases and you take references to build it up, for me most of it comes from photography which is or could be the basis of cinema but also it is a universe away from cinema. At the same time I relied on the history of the American studio films of that period which has also influenced me in a way in making this film. It’s tricky because when you are trying to rebuild a national cinema, a film from your country which doesn’t exist anymore can only be done with a heavy hand, as it’s also going to bring back the colonial ghosts even though we are trying to move away from them. We need their help again to order move away from them, that is the irony of it.

It seems that Independencia is as much about films which might have been made, or which you wish would have been made, as those films that actually existed?

Exactly, which is why I would be scared if a real film from that period suddenly came out of some archive and people could say, ‘This is what it really looked like.’  Which could be totally different from what I did. The same time as historically it is not trying to be accurate, factually or aesthetically, it would be bad if it were totally invented. It’s really dealing with what we have now or what I have now and sharing it with people.

What draws you to appropriate distinct forms both from the history of cinema or other media in your work, from the use of early sound film aesthetics in Independencia to the recreated home movies that make up much of Now Showing (2008)?

I don’t know if it’s still correct but I really believe that the medium is still the message and especially in filmmaking. At least for me I start with what material I am going to work with and it’s often brought about by economics. Okay I have this certain budget, can I use 16mm or do I only have to borrow a camera from this person, and which type of camera, if it is digital or analogue. If it’s analogue okay, things will definitely look old because it is all about perception and so then we have to make the story about that. So if it looks like its from the nineties or eighties then it’s set during that time. The urgency of creation really is based on economics.

That’s an interesting way of dealing with those restrictions and the economic conditions that surround filmmaking.

They even become the starting point of an idea, yeah. It’s all in the process. For me it really doesn’t matter what the film would look like or where it was screened and what people would think, it’s really more about the process. Especially now in the Philippines there are a lot of people making films, I guess also in the rest of the world, who just pick up a camera and just do their own thing. In a way creation has become instant. I don’t have anything against that, instant art is also very beautiful. There is also a danger of romanticising the way people can spend years and years to create just one thing, maybe something as little as this or something as huge as this building. I’m against the idea of art as hard work but investment in artists adds to the soul of the work or spirit. On a superficial level when you work on a larger scale everyone has fun and there is more work for more people ­­– again it’s economics.

Can you tell me how the middle section developed in Independencia? Where did the idea for this fake newsreel footage came from?

Well you know how they used to screen films in the past, at the end of part one they had a short intermission and they showed newsreels commissioned by Pathe and the like which were essentially propaganda films. The films often talked about the heroism of American soldiers in the Philippines, so that was the idea for the film in the intermission. It’s a true story, there was an American journalist who said that this event was the greatest atrocity ever done by the Americans during the war, which is basically the story in the newsreel. In the scene a soldier just kills a boy who was  playing around with an egg. They also had this policy in the past to kill anyone who commits a crime under three years old as then it would be easier to manage and educate the rest of the population. So this scene is also about the population control during that time but centred around this dramatic incident. Also you have the boy who is in the fiction part and then the boy in the fake newsreel, but it’s a fiction based on a real story, so there’s this whole play with fictionalisation too.

The propaganda material makes explicit the issue that history is told from the perspective of dominant powers, and that puts the story of these marginal people removed from the cities and removed from the centre into a different opposition position.

I was also unsure about this initially because there are some obvious techniques used ­– like the newsreel – but also that it’s a melodrama and it’s in a studio, but I don’t think there is any other way. History, at least our history was built on that so you really have to take it and retell how it is but in a different framework. Have you seen John Gianvito’s the new film Vapour Trail?  There is the idea in the film that obviously history has always been written by the ones who have the voice and the ones who could inscribe it. Everyone has a history, but history is really about people who have a means to express it.

I’m interested in your relationship to visual arts and how you think about your work in relation to that area?

From the onset I really based myself in cinema. When I made this film called Auto Historia, which is ninety minutes long, but there is only ten or eleven shots in it, a lot of people said that it could be shown in a gallery as an installation. Of course I see exhibits and installations and I’m aware of it and aware of the dynamics of creating visual art pieces. But my understanding of creation is really based in the cinema. With my films, I insist on showing in theatres because the responses are really different and the experience is different. Cinema really, in the romantic sense, is sitting in a box of darkness with a projection and not leaving until the end. I think because cinema is about commitment. I believe in committing ninety minutes or ten hours of yourself to a work. Whereas in a gallery you just come back and forth, so the perception is totally different.

There are these great moments of humour in the film despite the seriousness of the historical period it is depicting. How do you balance these elements?

It really annoys me when people say that the film is so serious. I find parts of it really funny. Filipinos really have a strong sense of humour with other Filipinos, but when it comes to artistic expression everyone is so serious. When you see Filipino films in general they are devoid of humour. I guess it’s reflective of the effects of history and we try to laugh everything off but deep down inside it’s a history of sadness. So I wanted to move away from that and just show us on a superficial level but also to see inside of it, inside of a Filipino.

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He is currently collaborating with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Institute Benjamenta, The Quay Brothers

Or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) is a darkly beautiful and unsettling feature by The Quay Brothers starring Mark Rylance and Alice Krige. Institute Benjamenta is one of the first three releases in the BFI’s new Dual Format Edition package, containing both a DVD and Blu-ray disc.

This striking first live-action feature from the master animators is a beautifully-realised anti-fairy tale, adapted from Jakob von Gunten, a novel by Swiss writer Robert Walser. The Quays’ visionary style, stunning monochrome photography by Nic Knowland and Larry Sider’s rich soundscapes breathe life into every corner of a fragile world, which shimmers with repressed energy and hypnotic beauty.

Click here for information about how to buy a copy.

The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, Zatorski & Zatorski, image courtesy of the artists

Angela Kingston considers God and the importance of seeing small things.

I’m now an atheist, but I’m nostalgic about one thing in particular from my Sunday School. On the wall, mounted in a frame, were the words: God sees the sparrow fall. Meaning that, no matter how insignificant something might seem to be, there’s an all-seeing, all-caring witness of it. (The phrase is from Matthew in the Bible; the idea of omniscience also features large in other religions.)

When I went to the preview of the Whitechapel Gallery Open in 2001, there were hordes of people watching a video called The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, by Zatorski and Zatorski.  It was of a wasp, in close-up, in its dying throes – and it was 60 minutes long. But people could not tear themselves away. Everyone was transfixed as the wasp twitched its legs in the air and then became quite motionless, over and over again, until finally it moved no more.

My point is that in our hard-bitten secular society we at some level still crave a sense of the existence of a witness to the smallest of events; we also want to think that everything matters. And I’m proposing that there’s a ‘witness’ type of filmmaking that can serve, in part at least, as a substitute for the idea of God. In the case of The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, while we’re watching the ‘witnessing of the camera’, we’re temporarily relieved of the limitations of what we as humans will ordinarily notice and care about.

Think of all the single-screen artists’ films that are comprised of one, or just a very few shots, in which very little happens, except that something that’s at first glance insignificant becomes meaningful – eventually. For example, there’s Cobra Mist (2008) by Emily Richardson, involving long, slow footage of a decaying ex-military base that: ‘records the physical traces of its often secretive past using the photographic nature of 16mm film and time lapse to construct an impossible experience of the landscape and expose its history to the camera’. Or Mark Wallinger’s Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), in which a static camera is trained on a steady flow of people coming through the arrivals door of an airport. Or Rosalind Nashashibi’s Hreash House (2004), a film of the domestic interior of a Palestinian home, during the preparation and eating of a meal.

In such films, time is captured and stored, and sometimes slowed down or speeded up: thanks to the supra-human capabilities of the camera, the unexpected happens. The otherwise meaningless death of a wasp is invested with the purpose of making us care (Zatorski and Zatorski); some tumble-down buildings cause us to reflect with concern about chilling aspects of human behaviour (Richardson); we find ourselves ruminating on hope and innocence, and on our fears, compassionate and guilty by turns (Wallinger); we have a privileged view of distant strangers, and we learn something essential about them by watching every detail of their lives (Nashashibi). The camera’s singular eye invests us with a conscience, and the world with meaning.

Jeff Keen, Marvo Movie (1967). Image courtesy of the BFI

Daniel Fawcett on the great artist filmmaker, Jeff Keen.

I met experimental filmmaker Jeff Keen this week; he is now 86 and sadly ill with cancer. I went to his house and met him and his wife Jackie. We talked for several hours about art, Brighton, their life together and of course his films.

They have found themselves in a difficult position; they are being evicted from their house and have nowhere to go. Jackie talked about this a lot and it was clear that the situation was causing them a great deal of anxiety. Jeff’s films have never made any money and due to his uncompromising nature he has never worked in the industry or made films for any other reason than personal drive. This is both admirable and a warning to younger artists.

It’s a big issue that needs to be addressed at the start of your life as an artist. At what point do you compromise? Why do you want to make art? And who are you making it for? Where do you stand in relation to art and economy?

It is only this year that Jeff’s work has become available on DVD. The BFI have released a nine hour overview of his work.  He has been making short films, drawings, poetry and books since the 1960s, and now that I’ve come to know about him and his work, I am shocked that he isn’t better known.

His films seem to have two strands. One is a kind of home-movie documentation of places, people and events from his life, often edited in split screen with two or four reels playing alongside each other with a nostalgic rock and roll soundtrack. The other is an extension of his drawings and collages. In these films, with titles such as Irresistible Attack, Instant Cinema, Flik Flak, and Omozap, images are energetically created and destroyed constantly. They feel like they could and should go on forever. There’s never a resolution, just a point when they end. With these films he is more than a filmmaker: he is a painter or illustrator who uses film to bring his images to life.

Jeff comments that the BFI have been “going around catching interviews with old filmmakers before they die, just in case they are important”. He has had recognition in fits and bursts throughout his career. He thinks this is because he is not commercial enough. Jackie comments that it’s because Jeff is the isolated artist in the most traditional sense, with no desire to network or suck up to the people in the industry. I admire this, but wonder if the gains of ‘playing the game’ might be worth the small amount of compromise. For me, at the start of a life as a filmmaker, this is a very relevant and immediate debate. I see in Jeff’s philosophy a reflection of my own, and I wonder if I believe in myself enough to risk poverty and the anxiety that comes with it. I am as yet at no resolution.

What I like so much about his films is the feeling that they have been made so energetically, without hesitation and with instinct over intellect. There’s such great spontaneity and honesty. Little time is spent on analysis; he just gets on with it and creates. He starts with an image or a single idea and everything grows from that. One image becomes the next and in turn each film leads onto the next. The greatest compliment I can give a film is that it makes me want to do something. It inspires me to action, to make, create and go out into the world. Jeff’s films have this effect on me. If you haven’t seen his films I urge you to do so.

For more information on Jeff Keen, visit his website at kinoblatz.com.

GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen is out now on DVD & Blu-ray from the BFI and is available via the BFI filmstore. To be in with a chance of winning one of three GAZWRX box sets we are giving away, visit our latest APEngine competition.

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

Jeff Keen, Marvo Movie (1967). Image courtesy of the BFI

Jeff Keen began making films at the age of 37 when his art school film society needed things to show. And so began over forty years of unique, imaginative, irrepressible filmmaking.

The BFI has published this delightful four DVD retrospective of Keen’s work that contains over nine hours of films and videos by the visionary filmmaker from his 60s beatnik movies to his multi-layered videos of the 90s.

We have three GAZWRX box sets, courtesy of the BFI to give away. To win one of these marvellous box sets send us the answer to the following question – What’s the name of Jeff Keen’s alter ego?

Email your answer to engine@animateprojects.org by 7 January. The winners will be selected at random after the closing date.

Be sure to check out Daniel Fawcett’s article about the instant cinema of Jeff Keen here on APEngine.

Elephant, Alan Clarke

There is a remarkable cadence to Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) that makes it difficult to define as a television drama, extended short, short-form feature or artist’s moving image piece. In differing contexts it could be read alongside films such as Culloden, Partie de Campagne or Meshes of the Afternoon. The film, a circle of violence, near silent with no thematic context provided, other than three lines of dialogue spoken in a Northern Irish accent, provided Clarke an opportunity to focus his camera in a manner akin to his more conventional roots in social-realist docu-drama.

Produced for BBC Northern Ireland and originally broadcast on BBC2 in January 1989, at a time when the corporation had been recently forced by Thatcher’s government to impose a blanket broadcast ban on loyalist and republican organisations with supposed links to the IRA, Elephant makes no attempt to explain, contextualise, glorify or denounce the succession of eighteen murders, played one after another, the only recurring feature a lingering single shot of the murdered man at the end of every sequence.

By shooting almost entirely on a steadicam on the streets of a Belfast free of passers-by and stacked along with empty buildings, gives Clarke the opportunity to determine the pace of the film by its characters and allows it to unfold as if it were a documentary. Clarke’s narrative arc is episodic and its beats are natural. We follow, literally, each assailant or victim as they go about their daily business, playing football or taking a stroll in the park, at work in factories and offices, even chatting with friends in their own homes. Our field of vision is as limited as the man which we trail. Every area we are led towards, indoor or out, feels claustrophobic, inescapable of violence that we are aware is imminent, that we will to stop but are never given the respite.

Alan Clarke’s final film, and after Contact (1985) his second to deal with the political situation in Northern Ireland, Elephant has it’s antecedents across a broad range of the arts. One can draw a direct thematic line between Shadow of the Gunman by Seán O’Casey to the plays of Frank McGuinness or Richard Hamilon’s The Citizen to a legacy that has been recently well established by works such as Gus van Sant’s Palme d’Or-winning homage (with the title, for example, a direct reference to that well-worn phrase of ‘the elephant in the room’, in both cases the history of a violence that goes unremarked upon) to Willie Doherty’s recent multi-media installations Ghost Story and Buried. The latter works draw upon Clarke’s distinctive and purposeful use of the steadicam to trace a character’s bearing. In both instances, we are led by paths well-trod that hold the weight of a violent history.

Clarke as a film director was an anomaly, in that he was a filmmaker who made only four features (all of which were highly acclaimed and even underwent, like many others, a short and unsurprisingly unsuccessful R&D period in Hollywood), but who spent almost twenty-five years making films for television, which at that point, along with the theatre, was traditionally a writer’s medium. Drawing on experience of theatre, feature film and television, Clarke was one of the leading proponents of the social-realist movement of Thatcher’s England and Scum (1977), Made in Britain (1983) and The Firm (1989) are all held as exemplary models of reflection of England in this period. The evolution of his modus operandi culminates, artistically and literally (this being his final film, broadcast six months before his death) with Elephant and its candid, fluid and unobtrusive camerawork and sparing mise-en-scène. Add to this themes and content that hold wide: general examination (violence in this instance, politically-motivated or otherwise, or drugs in Christine [1987]), Elephant is a work of drama; whether each episode has its roots in reality or otherwise. It works separately as a piece of art because of the lack of a moral bias that distances the film between political accuracy and emotional sub-/objectivity. It is not overtly political, we cannot say with any conviction that the murders that we witness are specifically republican-led, yet the wider significance of each action cannot be understated. There may not be a rigorous interrogation of the actions however the focus remains, this is clearly not an ambiguous film.

In the end the motivation for the actions are unnecessary, we as viewers will bring our own interpretations to the occurrences, a difficult feat for an artist to achieve when dealing with potentially highly-politicised subject matter. Played on a loop on a television set, this is the art film in your living room.

About the Author: Ajay Hothi has written and produced broadcast documentaries on dance and visual arts for television and radio and is a regular contributor to NY-based arts publication Artwrit. He is currently Visual Arts Officer at Arts Council England, London.

Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl’s Tale. image courtesy of the artist.

In her 1998 film, A Bunny Girl’s Tale, Sarah Miles explored the story of the British Playboy Bunny and how the ‘Bunny Girl’ persisted in the collective imagination. The film included references to the 1975 murder of Eve Stratford. Ten years later, the cold case was reopened, and Sarah got a call from a detective…

The serial killer is nowhere and finds the objective correlative of the nowhere land.

Violent intercessions of the unconscious in arresting the conscious self.
The dead will speak, the truth will out.
The serial killer needs to annihilate the other to give relief by projecting all the badness. The act of total destruction only occurs in extreme circumstances, as the need to project unwanted parts necessitates survival.

It is this defence against the death instinct, which has primary envy at its source, that lies at the heart of all perverse activity. And primary envy is always to do with the creative potential of the other. – From Christopher Bollas.

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep
Mac & Katie Kissoon

Where’s your momma gone
(Where’s your momma gone)
Little baby bird
(Little baby bird)
Where’s your momma gone
(Where’s your momma gone)
Far far away far far awayayay…

REFRAIN
Last night I heard my momma singing this song
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Woke up this morning and my momma was gone
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp

From Nina in Ecstasy, the song chosen by PJ Harvey to perform in the Nightclub scenes.

Polly Jean Harvey as Pocahontas.
The name means Playful mischievous, she was a promoter of peace.

And died at 22 the same age as  Eve.

Polly did one take as Pocahontas but wanted to be a Bunny Girl,
she looked more like a little black hare.

Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl’s Tale. Image courtesy of the artist.

On serial killers:
Christopher Bollas suggests such individuals seek to induce in others their own experience of an early total traumatic breakdown of trust in the adult world, enacting a revenge against the mother and a defence against the knowledge of the need for love from the other.

Such a person goes on living by transforming others into killed ones.

What cannot be thought about is acted out, which leads me to free association and how murder is incomprehensible and there is an inability to think about it.

The detective referred to this when he described unreliable witnesses and detective blindness.

What is endangered is that, knowing something about the world, the killer sets off a chain reaction and there is a fascination with these crimes because we have all experienced betrayal and trauma.

Perhaps the appropriate form of action against violence today is simply to contemplate to think…. – Slavoj Zizek.

Last but not least, the creative illusory space of pleasure and the feminine in the scene with PJ Harvey singing.

‘In the dark times will there also be singing
Yes in the dark times there will also be singing about
The dark times,’ Bertolt Brecht.

I lay in wait for you sweetheart
To kill me
I watched the carpet grow between my toes
The net lift
I ran from you my ears flapping in the wind
Inside I can hide
Sex sex
Is it safe?
Hungry can’t find the right food
Love I can’t find the right love
Without a body I feel like a country I can’t return to
Lost in dreams dream me kill me love me
It’s a bunny girls tale

(original lyrics for the film)
Copyright Sarah Miles

Sarah Miles is an artist filmmaker and writer based in London.

Bunny by War Memorial, John Miles. Image courtesy of Sarah Miles.

In her 1998 film, A Bunny Girl’s Tale, Sarah Miles explored the story of the British Playboy Bunny and how the ‘Bunny Girl’ persisted in the collective imagination. The film included references to the 1975 murder of Eve Stratford.  Ten years later, the cold case was reopened and Sarah got a call from a detective…

“You must remember A Bunny Girl’s tail is her most treasured possession,” The Bunny Manual.

“Her head was almost severed,” Detective J MacFadzean.

The film was originally inspired by Bunny Image, Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S by Donald Barthelme,  the master of fragments, in which a woman is fired for loss of bunny image.[1]

Channel 4 wanted a drama documentary. As I gathered material memories of my teenage years in the seventies of interrupted joy and feeling like a failed bunny (symbol of fertility and play) began to insinuate and the fragmentary form developed.[2]

Life and Death
Kathleen, a light in the film, invited us into her home and showed us all her memorabilia while her daughter watched and my son looked a bit bored. Poignant and funny, an independent mother with a glamorous past, fluffing her tail, she told me a lot of stuff off the record…

Kathleen and her tail, John Miles. Image courtesy of Sarah Miles.

The further into the burrow I went the colder it became, until I was with another ex-bunny sharing the past experiences that haunted her, like waking up in hospital laughing with hysterical paralysis after the news of Bunny Eve’s murder. “She had long blonde hair,” she said.

My identification with this was a way of accessing buried parts of myself, and we discussed how extreme acts of violence lead to terrifying blanks and about finding a way to express grief never expressed at the time.

The lead detective on the now cold case agreed to an interview. He told me that since his retirement he had been haunted by this unsolved murder[3]. And then one day I received a hand delivered copy of the closing case report.

It was snowing on a Tuesday afternoon in March 1975. Bunny Eve was no longer an allegorical figure. She was born Eve Elizabeth Stratford on the 28 December 1953. How did someone get away with murder in broad daylight on a residential street? The jury at the inquest gave the verdict: murder by person (persons) unknown.

When what pursues you is internal there is no escape
Ten years later, I’m getting ready for the crime season, on the couch, remote in hand, when I’m contacted by a journalist who has seen A Bunny Girl’s Tale on the net: a degraded copy, wrong temperature, all content and no beauty, no truth, but enough to make me of interest. There has been a major breakthrough in the case.

Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl’s Tale. Image courtesy of the artist.

“DNA link in murders of schoolgirl and bunny girl,” reads the headline in the Evening Standard, 25 September 2007.

“Someone out there has kept a dark secret for thirty years.”

“You think the memories are buried.”

We meet, and against my instincts, I let him make a copy of the case report.

Mens Rea
And the next thing, I get a call from the lead detective on the reopened case.

As we sat in my kitchen, I had to resist confessing to all my ‘crimes’. He wanted to know why Detective J. McFadzean had given me this report… it went against all protocol. He thought it might have been self-aggrandisement, as he had also sent me his autobiography, Life of a Policeman.

Maybe. He has since died so we cannot ask him, his death bringing the new detective to my door. But I recognised that it was his gift to me as a woman and a filmmaker – he wanted me to look, to do justice to this girl, to these girls, and in the process, to myself.  To tell stories that examine patriarchy requires agency and cultural power.

Or, in the words of James Ellroy, writer of My Dark Places, “after a while it just has to be about consciousness.”
After three fascinating hours with the DI we parted. I had to promise the report would remain in my possession.

“I hope one day the bunny girl murder will be solved,” Detective J McFadzean.

Sarah Miles, A Bunny Girl's Tale. Image courtesy of the artist.

As for the murders, they are under investigation. My treatments are… longing…. ghostly….

One film executive said to me, “I’d give you the money for a script, but the sadist in me says ‘no.’” I left Channel 4, returned home, and watched Cold Case.

[1] Loss of Bunny Image: the case of Bitsy S, Donald Barthelme, 1974 collected in Guilty Pleasures

[2] She goes to pieces; she does not know to whom her hand belongs, or her shoulder; she has lost her ‘I’. Fragmentation has a way of suggesting the repressed. The voice of an unseen presence is trying to put the pieces together and fails, but the failure is the point. See what a world we have been given, the voice says: in pieces, some of them missing, others from the wrong set, and no instructions. Barthelme’s last essay was called Unknowing and this is where I ended not knowing.

[3] Untold tales: As a traumatised teenager, when filling out the form to become a bunny girl, I got stuck when it requested a medical history and the secret of my abortion left me feeling that my tail was soiled.

‘The ghost is the fiction in our relationship to death made concrete,’ Helene Cixous.

Sarah Miles is an artist filmmaker and writer based in London.

Watching Paint Dry, Jo Ann Kaplan

Jo Ann Kaplan: Self-Portrait… or… Watching Paint Dry… or Watching Dorian (become) Gray. A Diary… or… A Film…

A film about what?  About watching myself get old?  Yes, certainly.

In which of these artefacts is the “watching myself get old”? In the paintings of me? I look old in all of them, or so I’m told. Or is “watching myself get old” in the shots of me? There aren’t many of those so far, and none of those is full-face. In fact, I haven’t yet come up with a ‘standard’, singular or full-face form for doing this. YouTube is full of this kind of thing – would mine be any different or more interesting?

A film taking how long to make? Until I die? Will it never end and never be a ‘film with a shape’ but just an open-ended document? And what’s wrong with that?

And speaking of YouTube, would it be boring?  What is ‘boring’?  ‘Tiring, uninteresting or dull’, my dictionary says; qualities which may induce ‘impatience’. Well, boring is as boring does, and impatience is not a virtue – it’s a creature of advertising. Anyway, open-ended, shapeless and boring is hardly new. Call it an Oldie Screen Test.

So should I accept the Warholian ontological leap? Make a Lifetime Empire State? Well for a start I’m not shooting real time – a figment of the 25fps imagination in any case. Anyway, Andy projected @ 16fps – the old romantic.

I’m shooting bursts of fixed lengths at fixed intervals – a form of very crude animation or time-lapse. I don’t want to think too much about the filming whilst I’m painting, so I let the camera run for an entire day sometimes because it’s troublesome to turn the camera on and off and re-set the interval rate, the shutter speed, the exposure etc. And mini-DV is cheap. So I was always going to edit – remove and re-arrange material after shooting. I can’t help it – I’m an editor – it’s what I like doing best. What governs my choice of what to drop or what to leave in? By and large, some perception of there being a change, or else some suspense in waiting for a change which may or may not come. Sometimes just curiosity.

What about sound? I’m shooting sync sound as I go along just because it’s there and I can. So that means it’s the radio over the air, as I almost always have the radio on whilst I’m painting or drawing, almost always tuned to Radio 3. Sometimes there is the sound of the washing machine, or my own walking around or washing brushes, or talking to myself or cursing or shouting when something goes wrong or doesn’t work. But all of it as short discontinuous bursts, like the picture. Is it boring the have the sound rhythm always match the picture rhythm? Is it boring to always have the picture rhythm the same.  Yes, probably.

In any case, sound is mysterious, and it modifies picture in unpredictable ways. And yes, definitely, I want to play with it but haven’t yet very much.

And text? Text in vision maybe more than text as heard, and considered as part of potential graphic playing with picture material in post-production, along with continued ‘painting’, as in Photoshop or After Effects.  And of course, as a way to keep asking questions in the course of editing. Another way to keep the film open-ended, in progress, experimental, if you will.

Do I care if this film is never finished? Not really. After a long period of not making anything, the desire remained to make a film of my own choosing and within my own means – financial, temporal, technological. To make a film or films in the time I have, with the money I have and with the machines I have.  As simple as that.

Does it matter if anyone sees it? Well, yes of course, but no, not really. I please myself first in any case, and I am my own most critical audience.  Nothing really worth it has ever been made in any other way.

About the Author: Jo Ann Kaplan was born in New York City and had a fine art training at Hunter College, City University of New York (BFA, MFA). She began making films in 1969. She has been living and working in the UK since 1974, and has directed films and TV programmes across a broad range of subjects and formats, including a documentary about Maya Deren and an arts programme written by Angela Carter. Editing work includes animation, dance and experimental films, as well as documentaries and arts programmes. She draws and paints on Sundays.

She is currently working on a long-term project which involves self-portraiture in transparent watercolour and time-lapse filming on mini-DV, and is revising a dance film with Dana Caspersen of the Forsythe Company.

She teaches film editing at The National Film and Television School, The Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College Department of Media and Communications, and other art and media colleges in the UK.