kagablog

Prins: We don’t have time, time has us. However, I want to take the time to understand better what nostalgia for the future means by referring to your other films: Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man, Nice to meet you, please don’t rape me. As many others suffering from “Hollywood-itis” I found your works - if you allow me the physical metaphor - hard to swallow. You definitely show that one does not just go to the movies for fun. I felt bewildered, estranged, sometimes annoyed, I was sometimes feeling as if I was looking at my own life, the boredom, the bad marriages, life sucks. Then I read an essay written by Henk Oosterling in which he elaborates on some of the crucial topics of your works: subversive voyeurism, repulsion and fascination, the limits of experience, to mention a few. He even explained to me how poor the criticism of pornography in your work was and how most of the critics were unable to see the meaning or the intention of the pornographic gaze, so typical a current in a culture in which everything must be revealed. He writes about framing and rhythm. He even came with a definition: ‘pornological acinema’. My problem is not really his interpretation, but the uneasiness of watching your work and feeling a certain boredom to the acknowledgment of a completely different approach of film. What I want to ask you is this: I just might be the only idiot that just didn’t get this intention or this meaning or style of your filming, but if not: do some artworks need a philosopher or interpreter to be understood or appreciated? If you leave the narrative completely behind, is this kind of philosophical text still necessary? And one could also argue that it might be fatal.

Kaganof: It’s very difficult for me to speak theoretically, so I’ll speak practically. During the first feature film that I had shown in Rotterdam (Kyodai Makes The Big Time), at least 80% of the audience walked away, stormed out. Some people were angry, someone tried to hit me. Then the film won “de Gouden Kalf”. Suddenly people stayed longer. They would even stay till the end, but still hated the film. The crucial difference was that they didn’t trust their instincts anymore, because the film had gotten the stamp of high culture: this fucking Kalf. So they sat there hating it and thinking: I must be missing the point, feeling embarrassed. So you get this bizarre situation. That is why I always try to not talk about my films much. I’d rather talk about the teenage girls, the money and the drugs. Which is part of it too, believe me. If you want to make a living out of film making, it is not a good idea to take yourself too seriously in this world. Because our anecdotes and trivia is what gets producers interested in you and gets you earning a living. So I
always took that route, because I am a opportunist. At the same time I do believe in what I am doing. Now I get to a point where I just decided that I don’t care about the drugs and the teenage girls so much. And I am actually more prepared to talk about my films more seriously. As soon as I got to that point, nobody was willing to give me money to make films. So there is a lot of irony involved. The more people read about it and especially the more explicatory stuff comes out, and then the best thing is when people start contradicting each other. With me it took a long time because I think most people were so bored by my films at first that they couldn’t be bothered to write anything about them. I recently had a retrospective in San Francisco, which was really groovy, because the line outs of the films were just brilliantly written. So people went in with this three sentence ‘slug’. No matter how tedious the films were, they could keep on going back to the that slug. I had five nights of full houses and nobody left. And it taught me that if you market your material, no matter what you market, you can market anything in the world, even my films. That is a horror for me as well, because I was as a kid coming up, always interested in going in, not reading the slogan and the reviews, just seeing for myself what the film was about. But that is not how the world works.

Kaganof: Just to briefly add to Awee Prins’ comments about boredom. While I was making my first film Kyodai Makes The Big Time I was introduced to the work of Martin Heidegger by the film’s lead actor, Koos Vos, who was doing his PhD on Heidegger at the time. I was particularly staggered by his remarkable writings on the great event of emptiness – the event of boredom. Rudiger Safranski describes this magnificently “Boredom – that is, the moment when one notices that time is passing because it will not just then pass, when one cannot drive it away, make it pass, or fill it meaningfully. Heidegger stages boredom as an initiation event of metaphysics. He demonstrates how in boredom the two poles of metaphysical experience – the world as a whole and individual experience – are paradoxically linked with each other. The individual is gripped by the whole of the world just because he is not gripped by it but left behind, empty.” You might say that it has been part of my project to replicate in cinema what Heidegger was expounding in those lectures on metaphysics. It is to him and Gertrude Stein that I owe much of my formal orientation.

Prins: I find it very refreshing that you think of philosophical filmtheory as part of the marketing. Of course it is a bit embarrassing to ask an artist if he finds that his work needs explanation. But wouldn’t you say that much of current art works and also cinema, especially in the latest forms of cinema, need a lot of explanation?

Tan: Yes, but I am again hesitant to see this as new. Early film needed explanation as well. There were people from the beginning whose job it was to explain films to the others. And in general audiences are negotiating meanings of even simplest films, one viewer explaining his or her view to the other. So this in itself is nothing new. But perhaps films are getting more complex, just as all art tends to become more complex, as Maarten Doorman argued in Steeds mooier. If a film is new - and I think your film “Nostalgia For The Future” is - we need fresh opinions about it in order to shape our own ideas. What strikes me in your film is that it is very physical. It leaves you with the question “Why can I stand it?” How is it possible that I did not run out of the room? It just occurred to me that an apt title for me would be: “Hit me with your rhythm stick”. In my opinion for instance structure 6 is very effective: it is intimidating and really makes me a bit nervous and fearful. Your montage and choice of digital images are so powerful that at some level I get an idea what you mean. But there is an enormous abyss left between this immediate physical impact on the one hand, and what I just called a flat message on the other. That is something mysterious to me, which I would like to have explained by other people. If a viewer need more explanations, this is a sign that it’s new, to put it the other way round.

Prins: Simon, do you at the IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) have your own ‘house explainers’?

Field: Not really. But it is an interesting question to have to answer. In a way in a festival you don’t have explainers but you have filmmakers, who can or cannot be explainers in certain circumstances. You have means of explaining films through a context. We have shown some of Aryan’s films in the past in a special programme called ‘The Cruel machine’. This section was intended to draw together - through the structure of the programme - ideas about cinema and certain types of cinema, which were very aggressive towards the audience in terms of their subject matter. And towards their own forms, in the way that Aryan’s films sometimes are. A programme can structure films and draw films together in order to provide a context as partial explanation.