kagablog

Prins: Aryan, you included philosophical statements in your manifesto, nostalgia for the future. Can you explain one of them: “Depiction of the remixer: a man condemned in advance”. Why condemned?

Kaganof: In the same way that you as a philosopher are always tragic. I think re:mixing is always tragic, because it is anti-eschatology: there is no final judgement, there’s no Judgement day. It is just an endless hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting the lack of beginning and the lack of end.

Prins: But why is that something to feel condemned about? Why is it so negative? Why is there so much resentment?

Kaganof: I wasn’t brought up in Holland. I was brought up in an eschatologic culture, in a monotheistic culture. The only way that we could justify the iniquity we were living in was because of this day of judgement that was going to come. When I came to Holland and moved away from eschatology, everything fell away and crumbled. But I come from that eschatology. There is something of a sword of Damocles about that, I can not deny that. For the Dutch, born in the nothingness of the secular world, it seems really different. We now have to create our own mobility, on a daily basis continually recreating ourselves. That is what I find very exciting about this digital medium: it is a personal recreation in the context and background of a world that is in a sense not interested in that trajectory. What they are really interested in is the superficial.

Prins: The re:mixer creates an emptiness of cinema. For me there is no such thing as the emptiness of cinema before re:mixing. How do you create an emptiness in cinema? When I look at Nostalgia For The Future I see no emptiness.

Kaganof: The words you see in front of you, and the images and the sounds, are meant to coexist. A manifesto is a medium, it is a separate medium to digital cinema. But I wanted to make a manifesto that appropriated the medium in the same way that I appropriated images and sounds in the remix. So this manifesto is a remixed manifesto. I have appropriated from a number of sources and made a manifesto out of words that are not my own, in the same sense as these words are not my own: I have said them before but I am not going to say them again. The words are just the words. And I keep on writing new ones. It never ends. So to go back to the words and to justify them or to explain them is missing the point. This work is meant to encourage people to do their own re:mixing. All explaining is trying to get out of the bottle.

Prins: In your manifesto we find statements of Barthes, Camus, Wittgenstein, remixed by Aryan Kaganof. The textual part is a remix as is the digital work. How important is the intermediality of literature, philosophy and film in your work? If Greenaway would have been here he probably would have labelled it: ‘a cinema of ideas’. Why all those philosophers?

Kaganof: I wrote some texts today. I could read them to you. I wrote that the prime characteristic of the re:mixer is that he or she does not tell a story. Re:mixers have an auto-hypnotic function. The remix discards the subject: there is no I for the spectator to I-dentify with. The remix maybe lightened to a hall of mirrors endlessly reflecting it’s anti-eschatological celebration of form for its own sake. The re:mixer is what emerges when the machine haunts the ghosts. Re:mixing is addictive. Re:mixes are never finished. Their highest aspirations are anti-judgmental. Re:mixes always beg the question: “When may we begin again?”

Tan: I liked the film as a film. But as a viewer I also felt disappointed. I have the feeling that you could say more about remixing and you will say more about it. This is not the end point that we have seen.

Kaganof: Professor Tan knows more than I do. Listen, whenever I make a piece, it seems like the endpoint, at that point. That is why you make it: you want to make a point. And then you have made your point and you look at your point again. It seems flat because that was your point when you where at that point, but now you are at another point. Which is why you then suddenly start thinking; I have another point to make and then you have to do something else. And the weird thing is that I have made a lot of pieces, a lot of works, a lot of films and I have realised that they are just what they are. I can’t defend or attack them. They are what they are and I have something to do with making them. I love making them. But I have to agree there is a certain flatness. Maybe it is because I don’t live in Holland anymore and I don’t feel so desperate about the future anymore. I now live in the past in a place called South Africa. So now if I was to work on the future, I would work more naively having gone back into the past. Time is a very interesting place to be in and it is a very nice place to get out of as well, if there is enough space.