kagablog

Prins: And were you really trying to find a new spot on the art market making this? Isn’t it a very reductive way of thinking. Why do you say that the conversation between philosophers and artists or artists amongst each other can be reduced completely to a marketing happening?

Kaganof: I don’t want to say reductive, because it might actually not be a reduction. I just want to be aware of that framework. Always be aware that the debate is not a free debate. I like this ‘anti-marketing iconoclast’, that is a good three point slug.

Oosterling: Isn’t there a window between philosophy and art, i.e. cinema. I am not talking about your flirt with philosophical books in for instance The Mozart Bird: people lying in bed reading each other Foucault or Baudrillard. You even used Bataille’s Le Mort for The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man and – as we just heard - in Sonic Fragments: nostalgia For The Future you use philosophers as Wittgenstein. Perhaps the relationship between film and philosophy is more formal. In Wasted (Naar de klote) – at first glance a Hollywood film with a shitty narrative – the issue is finding rhythms and framing, dynamizing the frame – your window. You can compare Sonic Fragments and Wasted on rhythm and framing, on using sound and image to create text. The specific mix of these artistic media – image, sound, text and movement - gives your films a reflective tension, that at least makes one wonder. If you want to find meaning in your films, to my opinion one has to concentrate on your use of different media in creating ‘new’ meanings. Ergo: meaning is not produced by explaining from the outside but on an intermedial level. Meaning is created within the media.

Kaganof: In terms of formal experimentation what I was most interested in in Wasted! Naar De Klote! was in finding a cinematic counterpart to Cezanne’s painting style. The breakdown of the pro-filmic, diegetic space was predicated upon that aim. Yes, the story is slight, but such formal gymnastics needed a clearly recognizable fable upon which to flex itself. A more complex narrative would have confused issues too much. I don’t quite see how the film can be described as a Hollywood film – but then I’m not a philosopher. Are we talking about aesthetics? Simon said before, that he does believe in aesthetics. And I agree with Simon. The only reason I make things is not to make meanings, but to formulate them within spatial temporal packages: in my little notebook here or on video. Products or objects I find aesthetically pleasing. I think aesthetics is the reason I work. I think we’re always at war, in a loosing battle against garbage. I believe we are all the slaves of garbage. In fact, we’re the clones of the slaves of garbage. We are so far cloned, and so far in slavery to garbage that we even debate garbage, we even write books about garbage. We have forgotten that we’re actually addicted to garbage.

Prins: What is the garbage?

Kaganof: Garbage is what you call modern culture. Modern civilisation is a disease, and we’re looking for its antidote. That is the therapeutic work I’m trying to do: looking for antidotes. So its beauty that I’m looking for. Beauty in a very classical sense. It’s my beauty.

Oosterling: Aesthetics has to do with the body?

Kaganof: I want you to feel my films.

Oosterling: Don’t we have to decide what aesthetics is? For you aesthetics is a feeling, an experience. It is not a legitimate judgement from outside whether the work is beautiful or sublime.

Kaganof: For me aesthetics takes place before words can be formulated, and philosophy is always the deterrent to aesthetics. It is always the slow, boring revelation that happens after the event. But we’ve already thrown the baby out with the bath water when philosophy begins. Philosophy is the rim left in the bathtub.

Tan: I had a different idea about the relation between sound and image. In Sonic Fragments I found the voices interesting, but the other sounds not so much. There was this cheap effect: the sound was increasing all the time through the film. This distracted me from the very skilful and clever treatment of the images. I like your use of moving fractals. Perhaps you didn’t mean it, but I can relate that to the title. It’s the ultimate form of re:mixing: repeating a pattern within increasing details. A very clever use of a cliché digital icon. The rhythm, that I felt, was even more in the images than in the sound. Perhaps it is also in that respect related to the older tradition of modernist experiments.

Ted Langenbach: It’s all about the effect nowadays, I think.

Kaganof: In that sense, meaning is being totally ironed away. The very notion of looking for meaning in an effect-based world is actually quite silly. Which is why philosophy itself has become entirely redundant.

Prins: But is philosophy only looking for meaning?

Kaganof: Well, what else could philosophy do?

Prins: It could reflect upon the phenomenon that people still look for meaning in an effect-based world.

Kaganof: I’m not knocking philosophy for any other reason than for the jargon that holds the dead corpse of philosophy up like a hot air balloon. To read really good philosophy and to read the philosophy that comes out mainly now. There is a difference between a living being and a corpse. I think jargon killed philosophy. In the same way that jargon maybe kills experimental cinema to a certain extent. And jargon might kill digital cinema.

Prins: Is the word ‘remix’ contemporary jargon, that could become it’s own prisoner?

Kaganof: It’s a nail in it’s own coffin already.

Oosterling: And has ‘sampling’ become jargon?

Kaganof: Yeah, it’s already, sure.

Oosterling: So we are not attacking philosophy, but stereotypes. I don’t defend philosophy as long as it is stereotyped. I prefer lived philosophy as a moving reflectivity, not necessarily restricted to arguments and rigid concept. Is digital film a way of escaping from being stereotyped?

Kaganof: It is certainly not a conscious thing that I was busy with. It really is much playful than that. It has much more to do with the notion of aesthetics that Simon put on the table. It has to do with joy, play, pleasure and with desire. In talking about the pieces I tend to be more depressed than I am while making them. I celebrate the actual machinery of it, by doing it. But I come from the horror of what South Africa is and the horror how Holland and the first world, keeps South Africa what it is, no matter how rich it is. I can’t think in terms of digital cinema for digital cinema’s sake, I just can’t. Even if I sometimes practise it, it is always with the sense of selfcastigation: it is part of the infrastructure of making things in a production system that is iniquitous. So, I will always talk this way, even if the film does not necessarily reflect this kind of thinking. Once I sit behind the editing table, I’m in the future and I just want to do whatever can happen.

Prins: So there is Nostalgia for the Future?