The other end of the wall
Author | Nicolas Elliott
Translation | Xia Lingfei (Shenzhen)
Proofreading | Peter Cat (Paris)
Edit | island. (Wuhan)
The original article was published in the Film Handbook, Issue 718, January 2016
On the other side of the wall in Cahiers du cinéma, 718 (January 2016)
On March 11, 1975, almost a year after the Carnation Revolution, the Portuguese people once again took to the streets to protest a right-wing coup. Pedro Costa, then 16, was among the crowds involved in this decisive victory for the left. He was delighted that he could live this important moment, because these special days would not happen to everyone: a historical change in a good direction.
More than 30 years later, Pedro Costa learned that it was at that time that his future friend and collaborator, Ventura, was just a few meters away celebrating his hopes and the hopes of Portugal. Ventura and the other Cape Verde workers were hiding behind a wall, fearing that they might die under the sticks of the soldiers.
"Horse Money"
Such a presence in the same time and space, but also a disagreement between him and Ventura, inspired Costa's work today, Horse Money. This is Costa's second collaboration with his friend in the slums of Fontainhas, following "Wangda's Room" and "Forward Youth" (his first film with Ventura). The director did not attempt to create a parallel analogy between his actual life and the life of the workers in Cape Verde in the past. He was very satisfied to see what he hadn't seen before: ventura and the life of his friends.
In The Horse Money, Ventura, who was already weak and sick, returned to the hospital. But nothing stopped him—he wandered around the ground in his pajamas, dressed in suits and leather, coming out of the pipe openings of a construction site and traveling through the various periods of his life. We are not witnessing a retrospective of his life: Ventura is not looking back, but bringing us into time through his words and the thoughts in them. What the Path of Ventura determines is time, space. In the forest or in the hospital, what his friend was looking for: always a step forward, then or now.
Ventura
We can also imagine Ventura walking underground in the hospital, those past were only the last dreams, or the light moments that flashed by his death, or he was dead, and the scenes underground were a vague fiction. But this is not the case.
"Horse Money" is a realistic, concrete film, and Ventura is also a living person. Simply put, people are as free as movies. Here, of course, Ventura is a look of fear in her eyes, her hands trembling constantly, and her anxious speed coincides with the solemnity of the image. As a testimony to this pain, the film can be said to be unbearable. But it in particular gives us a chance to see the fact that there is nothing more to stop Ventura. It all started with those walls. It is a kind of existence that cedes time and space. It had been there for at least sixty years, but it had been repeated that he was only nineteen years and three months; it was a man of no age.
There is no age, and so does Ventura, as he travels almost throughout the history of cinema. If the wall-piercing must be presenting itself in time and space, then another irresistible way is cinema.
Through this whispered film, like jacques Turner's classics, Ventura walks through the walls of cinematic history in this way, while leaving her mark. An honest man hopes that one day, the pain of horse money can become incomprehensible to us, but whatever the future holds, Ventura's image will be in the most prominent place. His freedom, his height, will make him an indelible great image on the screen, a ghost of flesh and blood that jumps out of the times.
Ventura crosses all, including walls and time, to the apex of a long and terrifying image, a potential trauma in Ventura's mind that repeats the events of March 11, 1975. He stood in the elevator of the hospital, intimidated by a soldier armed with a submachine gun painted with green gold. But the soldier is more of a statue than a man, it is made of lead, and although the mouth does not move, it emits a monster-like shadow sound inside.
Violence passes through these words, through memories of forty years ago, encapsulated in a song for Olivier Messiaen's organ. Almost no one knows about this, but probably no one can say exactly what hell looks like. We fear that every time Ventura closes her eyes, this series of scenes will reproduce the state in which Ventura came. Faced with this situation, we must insist that he is the king of his movie, that he is in the elevator. Because we have to know that, and so must we.
Lisbon Love
When the movie "Horse Money" was recently released in New York, Pedro Costa revealed some of his favorite movies to us. The first of these is Paulo Rocha's Les Vertes Années, which tells the story of several provincial workers who came to Lisbon in the early sixties to work, living on the edges of the dazzling urban modernity and the sometimes muddy suburbs where outsiders gathered.
An uncle who was a young shoemaker mason took him to a very high-end coffee shop, which was apparently very expensive for them. Faced with his nephew's confusion, his uncle replied, "Do you see these walls?" This is where I built them, here, here it belongs to me.
Forty years later, In Advancing Youth, Costa filmed Ventura, a Cape Verde worker at the Gulbenkian Museum, who was building the museum with his own hands. Ventura didn't have to call herself the mason in the "youth years." The way he exists in this space—the way Costa built around him—there is no doubt that it belongs to him. "Horse Money" takes another step above Paul Rocha's trajectory: the wall in front of Ventura is gradually disappearing.
"Advancing Youth"
Here we touch on the dilemma of Costa, who seized every opportunity to critique the end of the film age, but it was this end that allowed us to develop digital into an elegant technology, an aesthetic and ethical choice. If Costa had used a small digital camera when filming Wangda at the beginning of the century, it was also because he no longer wanted to wake up the workers who drove the van in Fontainha and the people he had aimed at when he shot "Bones" before.
Fifteen years later, he uses his digital camera to present us with golden square images of light and dark, where Ventura, his nephew Ventura, his nephew Vento, or his friend Vitalina are frozen, and these images are not only dazzlingly beautiful, they also show a radically different way of dealing with space, not only to the day of March 15, 1975, but also throughout their lives.
"Wangda"
Here, the world is reconstructed in their own way. This is the sublime shot of Vitalina's face at night outside, where the light illuminated windows in the room form a vague garland of beauty presented by herself.
In these abandoned offices where light is divided, Ventura and this article discuss the money they have owed them for twenty years: the brightness of the light that drives them out of the darkness. Or in this curly brace, Costa reclaims Jacob Reis's camera, filming one by one in the neighborhood, looking at the images, accompanied by heartbreaking exile songs, with a chorus singing: Exploited, one day, I will come back— the songs are gentle. Tenderness, pain, beauty, violence: "Horse Money" is the scene that this song presents to us.
Then, the interview, completed at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2014, was also the day after the world premiere of "Horse Money," just days before the jury awarded Costa best director. The Portuguese filmmaker seems to be presenting in his own way what he brings to us, where his thinking on cinema is always new.
Almost a year and a half later, Horse Money was being screened at various international film festivals and theaters (from Germany to Japan, from Brazil to the United Kingdom and just now in Mexico. And it will soon be released on DVD and Blu-ray, (British publisher Second Run will release it in March 2016), but France still won't see it, although all of Costa's other works will be available on the market.
We are not posting this interview today to witness the film's absence, not to beg for its commercial release. While it rejects this practice in an unexplainable way, we do it to raise the need to make the film visible to us through everyone.
Horse Money is an unbearable film: Ventura survives from the soldiers, the boss, and all those who watch him, but every shot is aimed at those who embarrass him. We see him in red underwear, dipped in the night shots only small dots, but the absurdity of encountering tanks on the country road makes him aware of fear.
We could see his trembling hands the whole time, and we saw that this was a lifetime of trauma. Ma Qian shows us everything but a kind of mourning. Ventura and Vitalina are two extraordinary beings, not because they play their roles well but because the film includes everyone who better understands them.
This is how this film allows filmmakers to think in a different way. A path to future cinema and life. So it's necessary for us to read costa's intentions and present the film. Today our fear of the other has reached its extreme, and we should grasp the experience of those in the horse money to put ourselves on the other side, and follow Costa to imagine what the other side of the wall has experienced. But for that, the French screen had to embrace a film of goodwill, beauty, and infinity.
A moving head
Visit Pedro Costa
Film Brochure:
When Forward Youth was first released, you talked about your relationship with your collaborators like a theatrical troupe, who worked with you on a daily basis in those common jobs. In this kind of work, under what circumstances did you conceive of a film project? For example, like this "Horse Money".
Costa:
There are some conceptual misunderstandings here, I don't know when I used the word "troupe" or "théâtre", and I certainly didn't use the word drama anyway, not because I didn't like theater, but because it meant a very contemporary art.
It can be said that this group of people is almost not selected by me, or more accurately, they chose me. I often say that there are a lot of people in the area who didn't choose me, and they welcomed Luc Besson more.
On top of that, when we were shooting our first film together, we talked about it a lot and they said, "You're not showing our real problem, our problem!" You're shooting another thing, you have to show the police. "After we talked, we shot something and I think it's a lot better now.
Luc Besson, Luc Besson
So I intuitively chose those people, or maybe it was because things just happened, like life, like love, those things are like that. Of course it's like it happened to Ventura, Wangda or anyone else. Because of a certain obsession with work, an attachment to always abiding, a fascination with a state of eternal attention, I was always in a certain pathology, which was also a trait that was somewhat similar to mine in Ventura.
Or maybe it was, I imagine, before he got sick — and there were other workers, the unemployed, the women, and it seemed to me that things in them were hard to define, such as some friendship, some seriousness, some willingness to help, or something done well, whether they were academic or scientific or artistic. All I say is to express that I choose them because everyone is special to me.
The work is not as specific as drama: there is no stage, no curtains, not even lines, almost nothing. So it's more cinematic, it's connected to local reality, sociology, even an anthropology, memory, or vision, focused on vision. I think it's important in that regard.
I'll digress here: I really like the title of this movie. It was outstanding. It wasn't me who coined the name, it was Ventura who told me, "Look! That's my horse money. ”
To this day I don't know if this is true. I can't ask him either, because if it doesn't exist or if it means ambition, to make money or to do something very dangerous, that would kill me. I do not know. Simple, nothing could be more than that. This is almost an obstacle to metaphor.
Simplicity allows us to say what they are, for example, to say in words what many eyes see. To me, it's a dream, or an object. For a dream for people living in Cape Verde, this could be Horse Money. I think this is very important for translators, and the attention to this has helped me a lot. When shooting, or doing other things like this, it needs to be simple, try to reduce, refine, and concentrate.
But I haven't answered yet... That's not how we work. When something comes up, although not always, it's clear I'm going to be there, in the real Fontainhas, even though it's no longer there, it becomes a mystery, and it's clear that we're trying to rebuild it in every movie.
Before this wasn't necessarily the easiest, but probably the most comfortable. It may sound strange to say this, because it used to be a terrible ghetto, but it was good there, and people used to be very close to each other. Me too. But after that everything was lost.
I, just an illusion, a background decoration. They, even more seriously, they lost their homes, their families. We're in a neighborhood they don't love and I don't want to shoot, but we've released a movie about it: Forward Youth.
They and I, we always understood that we should do something else, something more. Probably slightly excessive in this context, which is more dynamic and spontaneous. In a neighborhood full of music and night that doesn't exist.
Ventura's record grew, and the Well of Pain grew deeper. Ventura is a chest, a catacomb where many things are buried, which seems to be sick and unlucky, but it is very cinematic. The film always knows how to work with Ventura.
Ventura, the man we've seen a thousand times, is the last man, nosferatu. Or the Russians: a little bit of Ivan's shadow. Among the many filmmakers I admire there are different Venturas. I'm not shy about saying that there are a lot of things in this film that are just movies.
The film is more about cinema than drama. Very little can be said about the film's preparations, and all that can be said is: "I remember" or "How someday" or "I don't know how to talk about this lady, in 1969, her son...".
And so on. Then there's a construct, an arbitrary construction of cinema, either Hollywood or Jean-Marie Straub and Godard.
But is there a point in time when you know you're going to do a special theme? Or when would you say, "Let's make this movie, Horse Money"?
I don't know that. All I know is that after another movie, the first step is to go on, and I and they each do their part, that's ok. But not in this place, they told us: don't be here with them. Here I know they don't like where they are. Of course, if they had the money, they would have done it. There are a lot of people who come here to make documentaries, even photographers in Magnum. That's what an American did. This is sad, on the other hand.
As for me, I want to work with Ventura on a film. It's about three or four days of our lives, especially the day he specifically refers to.
Ventura told me: "March 11, 1975 – the day when the Portuguese Revolution began to turn around. [Editor's note: On 11 March 1975, the Portuguese far-right army was defeated in a coup d'état. ］
- I'm right there. "And I, to be precise, I'm 240 meters away. But it's like I'm in Australia because I'm on this end and he's on the other. Not left or right. I'm on the good side, he's on the sick side. I'm on the sun, but he's on the moon. He was hidden, but I was exposed. To see where he is hidden may be the problem. That's how I started.
Ne change rien (2009).
)
Ventura fell ill, and he went to the hospital, where he dreamed or thought of something, and he heard the voices of the soldiers of March 11, 1975. Every second I told myself: I was where he was. It was a way to imagine another way, starting with some confusion though. But then we focused, and I told him, "It's time to start shooting, we're going to start with the hardest things." ”
For me, it was the elevator. I have the impression that the elevator is a very important part. Ventura wanted to say something about his wife, or maybe he was afraid of losing her, losing his job. The idea of always being in jail is most likely in a hospital, in a wooden shed, or just from his mind.
We made an elevator and it took three months of tough shooting. In this case, it opens a door that may be allowed to open. That's how some things are getting more and more musical, and that's what I've conceived in my head from the beginning, because Ventura loves to sing. He always sang, he had millions of songs. Music may also have come about because I used to love making movies with Jenna Ballyba. [Nothing Has Changed, 2009, Editor's Note]. This fugue, this rhythm, has been preserved for me. That's what happened to me, from film to film creation.
Jeanne Balibar by Jenna Baribal
So from the beginning you can see, mixed with the fall of music and Ventura. Like those 20 minutes in the elevator, we thought, "Well, we'll shoot this scene four more times and the movie will come out." So we went to the back and right away saw a movie that was going to tell us, "You did these things, you're responsible for these things, you're a dead man, you're worthless, you're dying, that's it, because of these things." "Look at that all.
I told myself not to be too fragmented — because we lacked the funds — and I told myself to focus on the hospital scenario. One hospital is a mixture of hospital-movie-prison, where Ventura wanders, and some encounters that escape in the passage of time.
I told myself that now we can go and allow this. It should be very focused, but there is no past. Should not be afraid, because there is no past. You can do what you want. We couldn't shoot the past with a camera, so we were allowed to do a round trip and invent ways to shoot things. After that, it's a job as a film screenwriter.
Was the script written at the time of filming?
Yes, sometimes that's the case. We can talk about this film, as if with something from the movie "In the Room of Wangda," which points to what we can call possession. Demonic possession – happens to Wangda in another way, but there is a kind of possession. Not only is she possessed but we are also possessed by Wangda (her), and the film possesses us in a powerful way, which is a powerful weapon. "Horse Money" also has such a magic... This is the charm of the nation.
I want to go back to the concept of traveling in time. We cannot feel that Ventura sees the future or recalls the past. It's more like a boycott of time. He travels in time or space but these things are things he cannot keep.
Of course. That's what I feel now when I see the film and I find it very unbelievable, because it's not new, and although no one has told it, there's still an abyss, between the stairs or the elevator to the Metro station in Montparnasse and a twelve-year trip in your life. There's very little that movies can do because those have been done before. The final image is presented in an American and very attractive way, although sometimes a little absurd, but overall good.
Then we started another way. For me the film can present it very well, still in the way Godard or Straub. But it's the same journey, and this journey is "now." Ventura is one of those creatures, the one who is very fortunate to me—like Wangda—because he always asks questions of the present.
In other words: "That's it, I'm 19." There are some writers who are like that, and it's clear that we're going to mention Proust. I came down from there it was 400,000 years, I took a step which was 40 light-years, I did it for a quarter of an hour, and so on. There are really too few movies that can present such a scene. I don't know if it matters here, but Horse Money does leave little time to think. You can't think. And that's the great charm of American movies for me.
Fritz Lang and Jaques Tourneur don't make you think, and then you may suddenly wake up, feel strongly, and be deeply impressed, deeply touched and become emotional, either sad or joyful. But these come from images that are too late to think, that is, the presentation of images is thinking itself.
Thinking is a movement. This kind of movement is something missing for me. I hope it will be presented in small quantities in another way in my films. I used to enjoy working with Ventura in this way because he gave me that possibility.
Of course it's the same with Vitalina, but we express it in a different way. Those sounds are some kind of call to place or space. I don't think we're going to lose that in this movie either. This is a film that doesn't get lost. You entered, and you followed it feeling trembling, following it, forty minutes of presence for this hour.
You say we can't think about it in this movie... Or maybe we don't have time to think. The film itself contains too much.
Yes, that's it. But instead, it has nothing to do with speed. No, no. It's complicated. It's always complicated. On the surface, some critics say: On the screen, there is nothing. But in fact there are things out there. It's a victory that I owe to something else — to Straub, or to Russian or American before him. Especially Fritz Lang. It doesn't matter: it's a table and a guy who doesn't feel well.
"Damn, those eyes, fuck, there's something moving around there." It's those things, and they last 10 seconds. I used to see those things all the time, and when I was with Ventura, it was a physical problem for me. It's a miracle. The same is true when I am with Wangda. But it's more dramatic with her. Strangely enough, Wangda is more dramatic. She spoke loudly and fought. This is more public, more of an oath-based nature, a firm yes or no. More oratory.
But unlike Ventura, he is more cinematic: in the shadows, in the catacombs, or in those subtexts, unspoken words, and whispers... You see, you hear, you know you're going into something else.
Where to put your hidden smile? Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (2001)
They have this mystery. Again mentioned like Straub. You see them, and you'll continue to see it. They have a relationship. You are outside of the same world. There are houses and trees there, and you will make contact from them. It's all going to make you a little lost. But I hope the film can do at least a small part, although it will make it a little indigestible.
But it's all because I'm so vulnerable that I don't believe the things I'm supposed to believe, like what my father told me, Stroub told me, my teacher Antonio Reis told me, or what Eisenstein said. I don't think I can do it, and I practice it every day. I don't like it, I don't believe it, I may not be able to live.
I live every day on the brink of a huge crisis, and I have many people like me. So I should have tried a thousand times more in these 50 years than any director. To this day, almost all photography is digital — everyone tells me, "Ah, this movie is beautiful, how did you make it with a small camera?" "I did it because it was hard, it was a challenge. Otherwise I wouldn't have done it.
A lot of Americans are doing that right now. All horror films are shot this way. Nor do we say that it is extremely beautiful. But sometimes they're really beautiful, and I see a lot of incredible things in them. There may be 400 different ways here, we may only use 4, and we do our best to shoot them to fight against the digital technology that is going to kill us. Here, I fight with my memory.
You say you're fighting digital technology, but you show us a path of beauty. When I watch your movie, I don't think it's beautiful because of digital technology, I think it's beautiful, that's it, not because of anything else. It brings us here, and it's really a win for digital technology, isn't it? The image you take is very precise, with golden light, and the black appears completely black, which gives the image a real sense of abstraction, as presented in the scene where Ventura and his nephew are talking in the office.
But that' is, of course, our job. You have to work hard and concentrate. This is the photograph of Ventura, Wangda and the people who live in that area. I insist on paying attention to this group of people, without which they might have acted as if they never existed. They can't do their own propaganda, and they can't pay too much attention to the things around them.
That's why we go and photograph the slums, the walls, the rooms, the corridors. There needs to be a kind of orientation. We need to be deep enough, focused enough, not to get lost. In Fontainha, no one is lost. In the new neighborhood, everyone is lost. So there's always this limitation, the reduction, this kind of shot —I would say, it's the shot of the movie. A 40 or 32 lens determines a kind of space.
No Quarto da Vanda
They have this quality, this ability, and it's what determines the outcome of the image. I think it's a film that's focused enough. I don't know if it's going to look messy, but to me it's completely linear.
It's the process from A to B. The idea that began to be this little theater was that it could be this fictional drama, that this small fiction could be a factory, a manufacturing organization, or a boss and a worker.
There are no machines here, only walls and a color. Ventura quickly accepted a gesture, which, unfortunately, was a humble and offensive gesture that took place at every moment of his life. So what is here is almost a kind of space hostile to him. Because it was now empty, Ventura and his nephew were able to occupy it.
They are its masters. That's what I want to say, we want every time you can see one of these characters, they're absolute lords, kings of this space and this plane. These spaces belong to us. The film, these present spaces, "I constructed them. Even I don't deliberately build it, but I keep imagining it. I was just one of the people who built this Pyramid of Khufu. "I wanted the film to be solemn enough.
On an architectural level, I became the master of my plan. I go to discuss them without discussing my plans for the film. Ventura would come, he would go and take up these spaces. Even if he was chased on the ground, it was his hospital. He didn't belong to those doctors. He's gone when he thinks—at the end of the movie. I want a movie where they can really talk to their owners.
But these were all too theoretical, and I didn't have time to think about them when I was shooting. Not just thinking about light and sound, but also thinking about food, cars, money, and cleaning. We had to be there, but we were in the process of movement, kind of like a movie. We don't have enough time to think about what they mean and what their consequences will be.
I have a little mysterious trust in the relationship between cinema and the kind of autonomy we have. I think everything will work as usual, and the influence will support this autonomy, this surrealism. But to be precise, this is not surrealism, it is more of a realistic concern for reality.
I had some trust or irresponsibility, I don't know, but I dared to do it. This is sometimes painful. Of course, there's always one thing that comforts me, and I feel like, "It's beautiful enough, what he says, what she does, and the scene between the two is not bad." Wait... But this is just as painful for Ventura as it is for me, and of course for my friends who make sounds, and for other friends who make pictures.
The first time you worked with people in Fontaimha, we saw them in institutions and not in their homes. However, it was Ventura who built these institutions. So do you introduce these places to him, or do he reconstruct them?
For me it's him to build. This is obviously because someone is unconscious... When he walks into a room, into an office, into a church, into a factory or into a museum, these are his. It's more of His than it belongs to us. Belonging to his class, his race, his suffering. The room he walked into was impressive: he didn't feel a hint of uneasiness or discomfort or a similar feeling.
This has already begun in Advancing Youth, when he is in the museum he built. I just did it with my attitude that I didn't have to be too careful: because he had already built it, we were going to shoot a scene there, and something would be presented. The things that were presented were obvious: Rembrandt, those huge things, suddenly put Ventura in, and he was equally enormous.
It's the same thing. This was what he had built, to put Rembrandt on the walls, and the walls that belonged to him were as beautiful as the Rembrandts in his eyes. He looked at them in a state of origin. We never say or say very little, because it's dangerous to say it, but it's true that these people don't have real aesthetic emotions.
They are mundane. Or in another way. I said that of course they share the same temperament, but each refers to a different object or purpose. They don't cry in front of Vermeer or Fritz Lang. But they cry for what they have done themselves.
A wall, a floor tile. It's true. I've seen it. I see it every day. Like a carpenter, a more secular artist, or one of those musicians. Those musicians, you feel that a note is a note. But for filmmakers, a film project might be a good rating for The Handbook, but not so good for Inrocks, even if it's the same thing. Such a note for me and Ventura, it is the note itself and not something else.
In Ventura and others, I saw those visible emotions, trajectories of movement, and almost aesthetic dazzles—yes, aesthetics—but arising from something else. But we need this dilemma of cinema, the dilemma of painting. Ventura, no. For Ventura, that's all.
Robert J. Flaherty
He noticed the very small things. Not reached there in Rembrandt. To him, the gentleman there was beautiful, but if it broke, everything was ruined. I think that's the right way to see things. It's also a way of connecting the poles, connecting high and low, poverty and art, and so on.
I always wonder: But why should we go to great lengths, such as making a documentary in Sri Lanka? That wasn't the case before, even though Robert Flaherty did a good job of it. Murnau is also outstanding: working, building, shooting, writing. Why do we abandon this approach simply because we should reveal more? Eventually, we lost a lot and it was hard to see them back in the movies. I love this claim, it's not just mine, it's ventura and a whole other part of the person: it's a stressful, human journey, because we don't have enough money, the world is unfair, we're dying, we're suffering, we're apathetic, and so on.
But this proposition we present in a cinematic way—if the cinematic way still exists—is my job, the light, the plane, the boundaries, the distances, the sounds, the arrangements and the interconnections, the connections.
You criticize the exposés, which begin with Jacob Riis's photographs of How the Other Half Lives, which is a revelation of the situation in the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century. He wanted to use his pictures to make a difference.
Empire State Building (1964)
Me too. Reese did write a lot of critical pamphlets, and he was also a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, why not, but we always said it at the first moment. It's a bit like Warhol, for example, he's a type of guy I really like. We greeted each other, but I never watched the 8-hour Empire State Building.
Other than that, with Warhol, because it's Pop, we feel like it. Then you show it in the screening hall, and the audience will go faster than they can watch Straub's movie. What I'm trying to say is that unfortunately there is always this kind of thing that is imposed on Reese, the so-called "citizen-photographer", even if it comes from a very beautiful word. He was indeed a great photographer. He has been very special because he has embarked on a new kind of art.
Like the light of enlightenment, he discovered many new things. There is a whole in every photo. You can do a voyage back to yourself, this face, why it's like this, look down, and so on. Far more than any other photographer.
Why put a photo taken by Reese at the beginning of the movie?
I've known Rees for a long time, and two or three pictures have been in my head. They're like movies, there's no difference. One day, I suddenly wanted to make a film about Reese, but then I just decided to apply to the museum and ask them for three or four photos.
I picked some that I really liked, and I thought it might be a guide. On the other hand, the film should end with something else, a painting. I tell you because no one has ever asked me this: it's a painting by Géricault, and it belongs to Lisbon. It's called The Black Man's Head. Like Rubens, Rico, they often practiced painting and these kinds of things: black heads, waiters, slaves. It was unconscious, I felt: Reese, after being a member of Rico, he kept this yellow-black color.
This is useful because today I can see people seeing that the films of the past can be associated with the photographs of Jacob Reese. This situation is not bad.
Jacob Rees
What is the difference between a photo taken by Reese and a photograph taken by a photographer from Magnum who had just finished his new residence in Fontaineha? What makes the difference between the two?
I don't want to say too much about those bad things because there's no problem with the intent and the whole. There are many valid reasons to shoot some beautiful movies, photos, to reveal something, and so on.
It has to do with visuals. There is this indelible view in Reese that the world is unjust, and it is true. An American kind. We know it's American, that's it. We will change, we will change. But these are too abstract. For me, there is a kind of photographic presentation, a kind of distance in Reese's work: part of me is the belief that the subject is sleeping, that it is suffering, that it is dead, or that it is drunk, that it has a knife.
I think Reese once said "Do Something As If You're Away, Out There." He took pictures two or three times. Almost all the photographs have two copies, as the Light of Enlightenment said: "Don't leave from the left, from the right." "The light needs to be recaptured because someone came to the camera earlier or it wasn't beautiful enough.
The same is true for Reese. She said, "We're going to do this for you, I'm here for you, but we're going to do it well, and you're going to do it with me, you're going to do it with me," she said. Sleep, go to it like a dream. Me, I'm in charge of the lens or the flash. ”
The reality of Reese is not so real to me. Realistic in the sense of realism of Reese is not the kind of realism of realistic photography. Even if I could say that it only attracts me when the photo is real, like a movie.
Hou Mai talked a lot about this. He said that film has a lot of limitations, that is, reality, and if it crosses that boundary, it is the end. It was some people who wrote a lot about Maunau, Fritz Lang and Buñuel, so I know what he said. If he gets lost in these secondary places... He needs that limitation. Reese constructed this closed, poetic, and useful art.
Was Reese ever useful?
Of course, and it's expensive, very expensive. He was very discreet, hidden, and I liked it very much. Like Ozu, why not. Ozu never thought "this will be for all Japanese couples". Or maybe he had thought about it. But after that, you still have to get it done, and it's done well.
What do you think your film would be a useful thing?
I sometimes see people's eyes. But not all of them, just part of it... It wasn't that they were crying, but seeing those surprised eyes, I didn't say stimulated, excited, but... Surprised, confused.
I met a boy today. He told me he had thought a lot, that he had spent the whole night thinking about it, and that it was rare to come across a movie that interfered with his thinking in that way. He told me everything was going too fast. This further affirms that the film needs to get faster, leading to something stressful. Let it produce an essence that makes the mind work. I'd love to see people's minds work after this movie.
The interview was completed by Nikolai Eliot in Locarno on August 11, 2014
Translate | Xia Lingfei
He studied English and American Literature at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg
Now living in Shenzhen, watching movies is more complicated, and there is a collection habit of watching according to the director
Inspired by the French New Wave, he fell in love with video art
Proofreading | Peter Cat
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