kagablog

Field: It is very clear to me that Aryan’s film “Nostalgia for the future” is actually part of a very long tradition in cinema of anti-cinema, aggressive cinema, which Aryan celebrates in his film “Beyond Ultra-Violence: uneasy listening by Merzbow”. Also in terms of a festival - although Rotterdam is a very large festival and it’s very diverse - you can put together a diversity of cinema to show that cinema can be a number of different things at any one time. Sonic Fragments is part of a strong advanced position within cinema. It is part of a discussion we have proposed in the festival about what digital technology can do. What is interesting about this film is its celebration of the possibilities of digital montage. When Aryan talks about being the unemotional, the unromantic remix kid, then in a way it’s almost as if he is using the digital technology to make the images work for him. One of the things I wanted to say in this discussion is that there are very different forms of remix. A couple of years ago we showed a film by Johan Grimonprez “Dial History”. It is a remix film that deals with terrorist incidents and accidents, and works from enormous amounts of stock and newsreel footage. But it is used in a very emotional and controlling way, whereas Aryan has a very flat approach. There has always been a cinema of re:mixing, even in the 30’s and 40’s. Of course it is a little different now: all images can be resourced and reworked, the meaning is completely transformed or emptied out. Typical of our culture now is the way that images are so malleable.

Audience: This was part of the programme, which consisted of four filmmakers who all remixed material. What was your specific perspective, compared to the other filmmakers?

Kaganof: I took the initial material remix, gave it to the producer and then he got the idea to get the other people to do the re:mixes. So I never compare it. Quite honestly, I’m never really interested in other people’s stuff. I just like to what I do and get on with it. They are a bit similar, but because I did mine first, I can’t be bothered to make those kind of comparisons.

Prins: Is that really the rather cynical way things happen? You didn’t work together, you didn’t look at each others work? Is it all about marketing?

Kaganof: Of course it is all marketing. That is what the free market is about, that’s what democracy is about, that’s what art is about, marketing, It is all about marketing, why deny that?

Audience: I think philosophy has a specific relation to art, and could interfere with it in a more intimate way. There should be dialogue.

Kaganof: You mean that artists should listen to philosophers. In my experience - and I’m not cynical - the film industry listens to philosophers in as much as they can be exerpted and used as sound bytes to sell to a sort of highly educated market, a niche market. To that extent most - I do say ‘most’ not ‘all’ – artists, producers and top film companies have a relationship with philosophy.

Audience: But there are new thoughts.

Kaganof: I tend to agree much more with what Simon was saying in terms of tradition. I think there is a tradition of non-new-thoughts which just look like new thoughts. They are just sold to use the new thoughts. I was very historically educated: I love avant-garde cinema, experimental cinema and Hollywood cinema. I watched enormous amounts of film and read a lot about film. So in a sense, all that I do now is making little compressed encyclopaedias. It is only new in the sense that I’ve found tactics to market it to people who want to buy the new. It’s the new, that sells. Certainly not in the digital domain. It is just an enormous hype, but I’m taking part in that hype. But if you scrutinise it very closely, it might not be that new at all. That is hopefully what Simon’s exploding, imploding cinema is about. There is no window to talk through without the market. The frame of the window, the window itself, the glass in the window and both sides of the room are all fundamentally in the envelope of the market. To deny that, is to deny the political, economic, social reality of the world we live in. You can’t deny that reality. That is my big frustration with Holland: there isn’t any debate here. Everything is totally hooked up and controlled by the government in this country. What does that really mean for the notion of a free debate.

Field: There is a danger of using the term ‘market’ in a brief sweeping sort of way. One of the things that appeals to me in your work is that actually you are an anti-market iconoclast. You say everything is in the market, but you’re doing your hardest to make something that isn’t marketable.