I interviewed Pamela Cohn recently about her conversations with the 29 filmmakers. Here is an edited transcript of our 'conversation'.
Did you see or sense something similar to what I did in watching Michael Robinson's The General Returns?
Robinson admits that there were almost extra-sensory signifiers going on for him when he made that video but like much of his work (he's a prolific collage artist as well), he had unwittingly gathered all the elements that would make it work for him in terms of the dream logic he uses to craft story. As you've read in the book, David Lynch is a huge influence for Michael. From the longer version of the conversation I had with him - some of which appears in the book but was edited down quite a bit for space issues: "I wanted the darkness and damnation of the text to build against what felt like an increasingly floral or beautiful background though the images are sort of dark and mechanical too. The weight of that damnation collapses the text and then you have to reckon with how the various parts continue. I wanted this tug-of-war between beautiful image and ominous sound and the text to finally collapse... That helped me a bit with Onward Lossless Follows because like with The General, I sat down to make it with all these various pieces I had gathered and a pretty troubled heart to try to figure out what was going on. It, too, fell into place in a way that seemed like it knew more about me than I knew about myself." So a lot of this is mysterious for the artist as well and that's why his work is so timeless and ineffable, detached from any kind of thesis or strict discipline of logical thought.
One definition of Lucid Dreaming is simply 'being aware that you are dreaming' as a kind of stem reality you can grow stuff from. Can you elaborate on the concept and how it applies to your filmmakers?
These works are about action - memory as action, vision and writing as action. And unending sources of faith in one's voice and vision. In the dream state, there are signposts - mysterious and sometimes uncanny - that cannot easily be directly defined. Allowing oneself to practice the discipline of dreaming while awake is something that takes most of us a lifetime to interpret, to process. For artists, it doesn't stop at the process; it transforms into the slipstream of the physical world, which is more surreal than one's dream state could ever hope to be. There's an open conduit in that liminal space where dream state and interpretation and action swirl around one another. Ever since coming across the term lucid dreaming - a state where the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming - it's always stuck in my mind as the perfect term to describe the cinema experience.
The kinds of experiments filmmakers in Lucid Dreaming are trying out seem so ambitious.
It is ambitious - and so often misunderstood. To attach the moniker of "experimental" to any project is also ambitious - and risky. But what these makers are adept at is creating narrative parallels to what most human beings go through, asking deeper questions about who we are, what our relationships and responsibilities are to ourselves and to one another, and using dialogues between image and sound that create an impressionistic and poetic cinema, creating resonances that can stimulate the mind and heart of the viewer rather than dictate to it or explain complex thoughts in a tiresome and didactic way. It is a time for questioning, a time for seeking, a time for reflection, and a time for deeper connectivity. It is the hardest thing to achieve but so necessary, now more than ever.
Roberto Minervini's work with black southern women feels like something of a mix of Studs Terkel's oral history project and the southern and Caribbean explorations of Zora Neale Hurston. Do they have the same focus? Are their angles the same?
Studs Terkel was first and foremost a cultural anthropologist, in my opinion, and on the surface, you could say Minervini is working within a similar discipline. However, what is vital to Minervini, first and foremost, are the relationships he develops with his protagonists - the individuals he is asking to "re-enact" their lives for his camera - most of whom he's known for a long time as friends. He considers them full collaborators in this endeavor and uses the camera as a conduit of sorts for emotional reverberations to fly back and forth. He is fully invested in the emotional and spiritual lives of his subjects and they work together to create a portrait of their lives, dreams, hopes and ambitions. He invests way more time with his subjects without any camera in the room at all - the work with them is more about developing personal relationships and he chooses subjects for which he feels a deep affinity no matter their race, gender, socio-economic status, etc. He is drawn, as well, to the underbelly of society and wants to shine a light on people who are often cast adrift or live on the margins, individuals with very little opportunity to be seen, heard, and counted, and whom we rarely see represented in mainstream media.
Visit Roberto Minervini's award-winning What You Gonna Do When the World's On Fire? (2018); it can be viewed here.
How would you describe the genre or genres in Lucid Dreaming? Multi-plexual? Phenomenological kitsch? Or some new event in cinema?
The makers in the book tend to generally create their own style or "genre" in the ways in which they put together their work: fiction/non-fiction/memoir/ (auto) biography - steeped in documentary practice. Some, we can say, work in genre-free zones with the understanding that they endeavor to use image and sound as a painter uses color, texture and shape, attempting to lay down on a blank flat canvas complex emotions, experiences, sensations, and stories/myths. The book exists so that I could give makers a platform to talk about the complexities of that and the high level of difficulty involved in communicating this way.
Your section on "Visioning with Sound" was interesting, because we often go to the mainstream cinema believing we are interacting with visual narrative almost exclusively, and we can forget how essential audio is to the storytelling. Music cues us on how to respond, sound effects help us to interpret.
Yes, most makers admit that their soundscapes are there, in essence, to manipulate the viewer emotionally. It is a form of control that makers such as Deborah Stratman, Michael Robinson, Gurcan Keltek, and DÃ ³nal Foreman can discuss so articulately. All agree that sound is powerful and these makers work very hard to master those effects for maximum emotional impact. I agree completely that in much mainstream fare - documentaries sometimes being the worst offenders - music especially is used profligately and irresponsibly - and annoyingly. Meaning the more bombastic the soundtrack or soundscape, the more suspicious I am of what I'm being shown.
Watch Deborah Stratman's Village, Silenced here.
You make interesting observations about the use of black and white over color. You say, for instance, in Lucid Dreaming, that "to shoot in black and white can also be loaded with questions. The texture of everything is more enhanced somehow - mountains, skin, hair, plant and animal life." What are your reflections on the aesthetic/practical differences between b/w and color? Gurcan Keltek answers this partially with: "I used to work in the film-development industry and all the things I used to work with related to getting these highly polished, clean, pristine color images. It started to make me kind of sick. The presentation of beauty in the industry and how people deal with those images made me feel that there's something inaccurate built into how we perceive things, in general."
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