Director Jessica Hausna's short film Flowers
Jessica Hausna, who was shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival with "Little Joe" in 2019, is one of the outstanding representatives of contemporary female filmmakers. The third master class of this year's Beijing International Film Festival was fortunate to invite Jessica Hausna to bring a special master class in the form of remote recording. During the one-hour master class, Hausna reviewed in detail her experience from short film to feature film and finalist for Cannes, interpreted the themes and aesthetic explorations that she had always been in her films, and taught her film-making techniques.
From her own experience, Hausner said, "I think all movies are about how people try to figure out what is happening around them, what reality is, what is the truth behind a person or an event." But they all lost themselves in the labyrinth of opposition to truth and multiple realities, and the cinematic aesthetic reinforces that feeling. ”
Start by searching for the truth and never try to give an answer
Born in 1972 in Vienna, Austria, Hausna grew up in an artistic family, which laid a solid foundation for her future career in film. While studying directing at the Vienna Film Academy, Hausna shot several short films. Most of these short films are explorations of the meaning of life and visual representations of women's inner worlds. For example, in the short film "Inquiry", the protagonist uses the form of fieldwork to randomly ask passers-by on the street what is the essence of life, although the people and things encountered are uncontrollable, but she finally finds the answer she wants. In the short film "Flower", Hausna reveals the heart of a seventeen-year-old ignorant girl with a rich and delicate lens language.
In 2001, Hausna made her feature film debut, Wayward Angel, which was shortlisted for the "One Kind of Attention" section of the 54th Cannes Film Festival, and she has since become a regular at the Cannes Film Festival. Speaking about the crucial transition from short to feature film, Hausna said: "I will try to study whether there is a missing link in the truths that everyone believes, and what questions are hidden behind this missing link? Maybe the truth we all believe in is not the truth. So that's how I was working on Wayward Angel, and that's how I took to make the film. ”
Hausna's feature film work not only continues the feminist issues she has been concerned with since the short film stage, but also the two works of "Wayward Angel" and "Ghost Hotel" in 2004 also explore the new language of film. "Wayward Angel" is about the violence of daily life experienced by Lida, a fifteen-year-old girl in the rebellious period, in front of Hausna's camera, although the heroine's performance is clumsy and not smooth and natural, it is the original performance of this non-professional actor, coupled with the high-definition DV shooting a home videotape-style image texture, so that the original fictional story has a kind of horror from the real world. This creation of horror is also further demonstrated in "Ghost Hotel".
Hausna's feature film work continues the feminist issues she has been focusing on since the short film period
Hausna believes that the film is also the first time she has adopted a certain genre as the basic structure of the film, "At the end of the film, the audience is left with a lot of questions, and many viewers have mixed feelings after watching it because they have not found the answer." And for me, as a filmmaker, it's a very important moment in my life, because I have to think hard about this question: the films I want to make are about incoherent truths, about missing links and about questions about not having answers, but on the other hand, some of my audiences just want answers. How to solve this problem became the core of my thinking for a while. ”
In this genre positioned as anti-horror, Hausna reinterprets horror in the conventional sense with Grimm's fairytale imagination. The audience is able to follow the heroine Irene's perspective in searching for the whereabouts of the missing waitress at a mysterious Austrian hotel. Hausna's white light on both sides of the hotel's corridors enhances the sense of depth of the corridors while giving it an endless visual experience. At the same time, Hausna abandoned the spooky music of horror films and only used live sound effects to set off the atmosphere. The narrative structure is to abandon the reasoning and analysis in the suspense film, use minimalist static composition to express alternative emotions, Hausna provides rich psychological details of the heroine in the film, the audience can not see the complete story clues, this waiting process coupled with Hausna's artistic treatment of claustrophobic space makes the horror effect of "Ghost Hotel" pushed to a new level.
Towards surreality, towards women
Hausna's father was a painter who is considered a "supernatural realist" and "the first psychoanalytic painter". Hausna's recent work has often moved between reality and fantasy, and we can glimpse the shadow of her father's paintings in the aesthetic style of her films.
Lourdes, winner of the 66th Venice Film Festival's Fabisi Prize, attempts to explore religious and theological issues. When Hausna shows the heroine Christine's "miracle", we can see that it is similar to the surrealist director Buñuel in "Simon in the Desert" Simon shows the miracle. In response to the film, Hausna said, "In my film Lourdes, I tried to further refine my film style and tell a story that did not establish the truth, and in the end we did not know which was right and which was wrong. But on the other hand, I have reinforced my view that no one knows what is right and what is wrong, and that there is no such thing as black and white truth. I try to be blunt about this point, so you can find some relevant dialogue in Lourdes. Lourdes was arguably the first film to make me fully aware that what I was telling was a contradiction in the story, and it was with this awareness that my film could express this contradiction bluntly. I'm happy to find that it's possible to make a film with contradictory or ambiguous truths, and it's possible to find an audience that understands such films, because I believe that these feelings are common to all of us, it's just that we're not used to seeing them in movies. ”
Hausna's approach to character transitions is her consistent flattening approach
Nevertheless, Hausna still adopts her consistent flat performance method when dealing with the before and after transformation of the characters, the actors have no superfluous expressions, and are more like models in paintings (which coincides with Bresson's "model"), including the composition and setting of the picture, which refers to a large number of oil painting materials. The composition that is good at using oil painting texture has been further developed in her third feature film "Crazy Love", the hero and heroine end with "martyrdom", but the motivation for this act is not given a more specific reason in the whole film, and the causes and consequences of the two people establishing a connection are not more accounted for, in short, Hausna is not interested in how to construct the story, what she likes and is good at is to use exquisite compositional aesthetics to narrate, and to explore the inner world behind the characters with flat performances.
In general, female directors tend to be better at dealing with the inner world of their characters. They can visually expand reality and imagination with sensitive and delicate expressions, and at the same time, their choice of subject matter will be more personal. Early related works, such as the French avant-garde Sherman Durac's "Shells and the Monk", used a surreal approach to portray the priest's bizarre fantasies; American director Maya Deren's "Afternoon Confusion" depicted the inner world of the girl with visual externalization.
In Little Joe, in Hausna's own words, her experiment with cinematic aesthetics is more abstract than previous films: "How do you judge that your current emotions are real?" That's the question that the film "Little Joe" wants to ask. "The fantasy world in the protagonist's heart has become a man-made world. Although the choice of scenes is a real place such as a greenhouse and a laboratory, Hausna uses the different ratios of mint green and red and white, Alice's red hair, exaggerated skirts, and oversized suits to create a movie fairytale texture that is completely different from the real world. What Hausna is interested in is based on a certain transcendence in realism, questioning reality through her aesthetic framework and providing the audience with a different perspective. Because in her view, the picture that is not framed in the film frame is a kind of hiding for the audience, a certain degree of uncertainty, what is hidden behind the screen, those unspoken parts, is the real charm of the movie.