kagablog

A discussion with Simon Field, Aryan Kaganof, Awee Prins and Ed Tan

Re:mixing the world

Prins: First of all I would like to ask our guests to give short comments on Greenaway’s prophecy which he apparently happily embraces, that traditional filmmakers are a dying race, on the verge of extinction, voices crying in the wilderness.

Field: It is very clear that traditional film making is thriving, it is still dominating most people’s sense of what cinema is. No matter how much we move into an era of new media, its quite clear that cinemas, televisions, and other forms that carry cinema are going to be dominated by conditional forms of cinema. Peter is one of those admirable utopians of what I hope - but I’m often not quite so optimistic - is a growing trend in modernist cinema.

Prins: So you would not suggest that the title of the International Film Festival Rotterdam should be renamed IECFR: International Exploding Cinema Festival Rotterdam?

Field: The idea that exploding cinema will become the sole form of cinema is very unlikely, if not out of the question.

Prins: And not just for economic reasons? For artistic reasons?

Field: For all sorts of reasons. We should look at what cinema is, and what forms it takes. A lot of the films we have shown and will continue to show in the years ahead, will for instance come from countries where cinema is not exploding in the same way. There people are finding ways of talking about their lives and their cultures in relatively conventional film forms.

Kaganof: I live in South Africa at the moment, and given the distribution of films in that country, I would say cinema is more imploding than exploding.

Tan: I agree with Simon. I think that the traditional film form will be here to stay, but perhaps in a digital form. But that does not mean that cinema practice will change very much. You can have multiplex theatres, for which films are all rendered and distributed in digital form. If the projection is all right, you couldn’t see the difference. We will also get other forms of cinema, but I don’t know whether we will still call them ‘cinema’: short movie images that one already receives in the email or a very short animation made by a friend. And in between these two ‘extremes’ there can be numerous other forms. There will be a multiplication of forms rather than replacement of one traditional form. The traditional form will be more expensive, as we have seen with the theatre of live music. When some purists want films shown in cellular projection in 2040, it may cost a hundred thousand guilders to have The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in a Pathé cinema, just as it is costly to have Cosi fan tutte in the opera right now. If you want to preserve your old cultural forms, they will be more elitist happenings in the theatre. But for people who want to see everything, there will be absolutely more choice.

Prins: As an introduction to this evenings debate, recent work by Aryan Kaganof will be shown: Nostalgia For The Future. The work is part of the remix project Sonic Fragments: the poetics of digital fragmentation. Sonic Fragments, presented at IFFR 2000, depicts itself as a unique visionary project that pioneers a new way of watching, making, and producing what we know as film.

Prins: Two days ago, on the first day of this congress, art critic Anna Tilroe pointed out to painter Ronald Ophuis, that the use of different media in artworks has a therapeutic effect on older people. Replacing paintings on the wall of pensioners homes by more innovating video art and such, would increase the memory ability by 17 percent. I reckon that installing Nostalgia For The Future in old peoples homes all over the world would make every old pensioner remember every single day of his life. But it is not from a neuro-physiological perspective that we merit this remix. I have two introductory questions to you, Aryan. Nostalgia For The Future is without a doubt an impressive example of the possibilities of digital cinema. Could you tell us what particularly fascinates you regarding the possibilities of digitalisation of cinema. I know it is a stupid question because we have just been seeing it but I would appreciate if you would just point out some specific characteristics that motivated your shift to this medium.

Kaganof: I always hated the production system. I was trained in analogue cinema where I had to be the slave of a master, called the producer, who was basically a combination of a lawyer and an accountant, but a bad lawyer and a bad accountant for that matter. He was there to steal - in the Netherlands - money from the taxpayer through the government, who steals money anyway from everybody. So I found the whole system completely bizarre. I didn’t understand why I had been trained for four years to be a slave, when I could have stayed in South Africa and just been a master. And then digital cinema came along. Suddenly I didn’t need this strange perverse person called the producer anymore. In fact I didn’t even need the government or the taxpayers anymore. I just needed a camera and a computer and I was free. I felt liberated, the day I first felt a Sony dv 1000 in my hand. It was an incredible kind of connection between the machine and myself, and I felt like Marvel comics’ The Mighty Thor. I had my hammer in my hand and I literally flew across the universe and back very quickly. The camera literally changed my life overnight. It cut through the entire disgusting, lazy, slow, corrupt, mechanism of film making that we for some reason just accepted as normal, perhaps because the machines are big and somebody told us that it will have to cost lots of money. But it is just lots of people growing fat on the system. And probably digital cinema will be taken over by the same disgusting people. That is just the way of the world. But it is a possibility of a liberating medium.

Prins: As to the rationale of this re:mix. It also contains serious propositions alluding to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, although the numbers are in reverse order. What do you mean with the title: Nostalgia For The Future?

Kaganof: The title came from the Dutch artist, philosopher, essayist Dick Tuinder. It is a concept he brilliantly describes in his short book Terug Naar De Oersoep, the finest Dutch writing on aesthetics since the second world war. But of course, the notion is pregnant in the writings of Walter Benjamin, and there is also a sly nod to Max Horkeimer’s famous essay, Nostalgia For The Totally Other. English readers should demand a translation of Tuinder’s book – it’s fabulous.

Field: There are many things I find interesting about this conception of remix. I also like the title’s paradox: the wonderful clash of nostalgia and future. They don’t make sense together: you can’t have nostalgia for a future. It is a film in which meaning is, in lots of ways, thrown up into the air, through the process of remixing. For me it is a very intriguing sort of war of sounds and images. It is remixed largely from films by a whole group of different filmmakers, documentaries about musicians and composers. In a way the nostalgia seems to be there with the future simultaneously. You have these moments of some very classical music - little pools of calm - against very heavy disco sound and computerised sound. You get these clashes. The overall experience of the film for me is like a sort of rapid rush through what Ed was describing earlier. A fantastic mixture of images and media that we’re going to get in the future, possibly with images. So it is this funny combination of something that is meaningless and full of meaning. It is a very odd and paradoxical piece. It also brings to mind a question as to whether we in future are going to be able to have – or experience any nostalgia.

Kaganof: Nostalgia is a thing of the past. Unfortunately Simon doesn’t quite get this. The point is, we are in the future. This is the dystopic future horror predicted throughout this century by all the visionaries. My piece is an audio-visualization of the attack on human consciousness that the technological revolution has in fact been – we’ve had a total onslaught on meaning, our cognitive abilities and perceptions are at once vastly enhanced and entirely diminished by the ecstacy of the speed at which technological advances have been made and introduced into our lives. We are bludgeoned by progress. Knocked helter skelter by the momentum of the future. We are so locked into the frisson of the “new” that we simply don’t have a clue what life is about anymore. “Digital” is merely the latest way of selling us the nails in our collective coffin. At a huge profit, that is!

Field: Exactly. I mean, in this ‘film’, there is no space for memory. This also is interesting, I mean there are images but you can’t, in a way you almost can’t make anything of them. You are thrown out of the piece all the time. And there is no space for us to process the experience, no time for meditation. It rushes past us.

Kaganof: There is a painting by De Chirico from 1911 called: “Nostalgia of the infinite”. This was very inspirational for me in conceptualising this piece. But has the infinite of 1911 something to do with the infinite in 1999? For me there is a sense of loss. I understand that paradox. But I find the lack of space for memory not something I’m a kind of morbid about or depressed about. De Chirico’s painting is really gorgeous. This remix is like an addendum to that painting in this new medium. I didn’t become a painter, although I was always very interested in art and paintings. I agree with Bresson when he says that “painting is over. There is nowhere to go. I don’t mean after Picasso, but after Cezanne.” But for those who still have something to say, the RE:MIX is tomorrow’s writing or painting, with two kinds of ink – one for the eye, one for the ear. But I was more interested in looking at the frame of cinema. In the way I came from painting and not from theatre, which I always found very tedious and very boring. In a sense maybe this is the problem with my films: they were supposed to be cinema, but had much more to do with painting. At least for me, with digital cinema I was able to move further and further away from boring nineteen century theatre and more and more into interesting twenty century visual art and non-narrative painting. In a sense this piece, which is the latest piece that I have done, is the piece I am most happy with. It leaves story telling behind, more clearly than everything I have done.

Tan: The title Nostalgia For The Future made me think of the phrase “History of the future”. If you read a book in the 1920’s about the house in the next century, or if you see Playtime by Jacques Tati you get the feeling that people had a very naive idea of the future. This is something of all times. But it seems to me that in our time things are going so fast, that you often have the feeling that you are already living in the future. That the future has somehow collapsed with the present and that we are here to change the present for an eternal future. And when I saw your film I thought that this is precisely what you wanted to show us: “Well, this is it, this is the future that you are longing for. And your longings have gone out of hand completely. This is all there is. All these years of your funny ideas about a better future were very romantic, but I want to wake you up. This is the future and now you only have left nostalgia for your ideas of the future.”

Kaganof: I hope you will write that down somewhere Mr. Tan because it sounds pretty good. I suddenly think of Leonard Cohen. He wrote this lyric which reminds me of what you just said. He says: “I’ve seen the future and it is murder.”