kagablog

– London, April 4th, 2008.

Aryan KAGANOF : I just want to thank Max for organizing this event. Then I want to thank my collegues from the Universtity of Malmo : gunnel, Lotta and lajos for being here. And very special thanks to my friend from Paris Dionysos Andronis who is here tonight with an extraordinary man who is the father of the independent filmmaking not only in England, not only in Europe but also in the universe : Peter Whitehead.

Peter Whitehead : «Je détruis donc je suis ». It’s about renewal, it’s about anarchy.
Dionysos Andronis : The destruction will lead to reconstruction.
PW : Absolutely. At the time when I said that and wrote it, it was scandalous. People where not supposed to admit it. There were the auteur destructivists, there were the destructivists in England and then there were the American destructivists that I used in my film « The Fall ». But my choice of title was very much in relationship to the french «Je détruis donc je suis », comme « Je pense donc je suis ». Well the essence of « the Fall » is a chalenge to rationality and to objectivity, but it was also obviously linked to the essential theme of « The Fall » which is the collapse of protest. The legal protest, which you could say and argue, is rational because it is within the legal space. It’s condoned and accepted. The point that protest as it did started to become illegal and to push it beyond, to the point that it became anacrhy, to the point that it became finally terrorism. Because the people at « The Fall », who were in the Columbia University and on the streets, were within 4 months of becoming the Weathermen who were terrorists, not even anarchists.
DA : Mark Rudd ?
PW : Mark Rudd, Rap.H Brown, Tom Hayden. All these people were associated in one way or another to what happened after May 68. And all of that came ahead to Columbia. Columbia was at the point this whole developping thing because it wasn’t just the University that was occupied by the students. Some were students but it drew in all the other radicals who were on the point of making that break saying : « Listen, legal protest isn’t going to work. They condoned us, we’ve been conned. Protest has become fashionable, you can read all about it in the magazines and dress up and look good on the Aldermarston march. That isn’t politics, that’s public relations, that’s consumerism ».

A point was reached clear to me. That point at that time that there had to be violent confrontation because we were being violated. You talk about political correctness. Political correctness was an act of violation of the freedom of individuals, not just women, which is why if you’ve been acted upon violently, if you’ve been violated, you do not have the moral right according to the laws of the state to stand up to it and fight back. You’ll bloody well have and if they are working out a strategy……..
DA : Ahh…here is Aryan !
AK : My apologies for being so late. We had a real crisis. There was no machine to play the DVD.
PW : Ill met by moonlight, well met by sunlight or by any old light.
AK : It’s a great, great honor to meet you.
PW : And for me to meet you too. And seeing your films and knowing what you’re up to and reading your poerty. Come and sit down now.
AK : You know, « The Fall » is one of those documents of the 20th century that defines kind of everything that went crazy and mad for the last 30 years.
PW : Well I didn’ look at « The Fall » for 40 years and having been forced to do it now in all those festivals and retrospectives and hear the way people talk like you do now, I look at it again and say : « yes, I did capture something at that moment, it was made at the spur of the moment but I captured it ».
AK : Everything in that film is so !…. You look at how media will develop after you and I think you are operating outside of yourself.
PW : Everybody says it could have been shot last year which is true, I assume it. I look at it now. Where did it come from ? It was a fascinating moment, it was in a transe. The whole thing was made as a long hallucination. Now I like «The Fall » and I try to make a sequel at the moment. The film I’m making now – I have not made a film for forty years – is in a way a sequel to it, it’s not a sequel, it’s developed from it. I just hope to get recognition with it.

PW : « The Fall » starts with the TV screen, the white dots, and it ends with it. It’s as somebody has been sucked. I’ve taken that idea and I’m making it the whole way. This is why I like what Dionysos brought with him. It reminds me of Yves Klein’s blue and I’m actually using it in « The Fall ». In the « Fall » you’ve got the little portable Sony recorder with me sucked in the image at the beginning and ending. It is really about being transformed. It is pure Debord.
AK : Before Debord. (Note : AK means before the film « The society of the spectacle » which is a 1973 production, 4 years after « The Fall »)
PW : Before Debord. It’s all about spectacle according to one persona, loosing touch with authentic experience. I’m trying to take one step further and deal with the idea of death, psychic death and that deep profound self-murder. If you are exposing yourself on that.

PW : Ah, look !
AK : It seems they are talking a lot ! They talk the English.
PW : About you !
AK : No , they talk about the future.
PW : You are the future ! ….. I’m going to start walking up. It’s going to take me twice as long. Might as well start now.

PW : I didn’t get the recognition I wanted at the time. So I thought it doesn’t matter, there are some things I much prefer and I decided to give it up. And I gave it up. But now it’s giving me the desire to start again. I’ve been very introverted for 30 years or so. Living in the desert is very introverted but using mountains as part of my scenery is good but I’m alone. I’m on my own. So it’s a little bit of a threat to feel that I have to communicate. If you write novels and you do like I’ve done for 30 years, its about that kind of solitude. I think it was Kawabata who said : « I write novels because I’m learning how to write novels », or something like this. I have my reasons, it’s not a big problem. The advantages I suppose outweight this. I don’t know whether I said that to the others. The chalenge of making a new film is to say : « Right, I wanted to relate to my novels. So I’m making now a film from my last novel ». Now the language that I had on my films in the sixties, you talked about it in « The Fall » which I abandoned and went off, I had developed in my writing, not in my filming. So now having got to the point where I’ve been writing french novels for fifteen years and getting no recognition, at last people are looking at my old films and say : « they are french films ». So I can say «Right it’s the french thinking, it’s Debord and Derrida ». It’s not writing in the english way. They are neither canadian novels.
So it gives me certainly a certain confidence. What I try to do now in my new film is quite openly and obviously to use some of the techniques and things I discovered and developed from the writing into the film.

PW : That’s the new film.
AK : It’s a good idea to go through the different chapters or sections.
PW : That’s what is going to happen. This was originally a novel or three novels on the website. The first one is called « Terrorism considered as one of the Fine Arts » which comes from the play by Thomas De Quincey « Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts ». The second novel is called «Nature’s child » which is about eco-terrorism and assassination. It relates the eco-terrorism and assassination and various things. The third novel is called «Girl on the Play ». It’s a pastiche and plagiarism of Kawabata’s novel «Snow Country ». Do you know it ? You must know it ! He made an amazing film in Japan. This film is a version if you like of the original novel which was put on the internet as a kind of interactive novel. All the things of the novel were developed in the satellite website. You could click on one of them and go on each one of them. So, in fact this one is related to the japanese Noh play. If you want to know more about the Noh play, you can click on the Noh play and say « it’s an assassination ». So, you go in the assassination thing and it opens actually « The Old Man in the mountains and the Hashishin ». You can develop the myth, you can read about the mythology of the Hashishin. There’s also another website called « The Absent Father ». I relate it to the myth of the assassination. So if you want to explore some of the themes that are in the three novels, you can do so. That’s all words. This is now going to be a film.

The novels are about largely one single feminin character called Maria Lenoir. She is the girl to commit an act of assassination. It’s like an eco-terrorism and she is part of the revolutionary cell called The Rainbow Warriors. The person she is going to assassinate actually turns out to be someone now considered in the french nuclear industry, working for the « Echelon Network ». He turns out to be the guy who set up the operation that sunk the Rainbow Warrior boat in the New Zeland harbor thirty years before. I’m taking the idea of that original state terrorism and now dealing with a young intelligent sophisticated young girl who is prepared to become an assassin. Because she has the perfect victim. Because by killing the Satin Woman she brings all the things together. So, the original novel was set in Cumbria and was about a nuclear plot. It’s actually about selling fake plutonium to Japan which is why the three novels are about. It starts in Cumbria and goes to Nature’s child. One is about the murder. The assassination involves the guy Michael Schlieman. It’s much closer to «Daddy». It’s actually a novel that explores that sort of sado-masochism, sexual sado-masochism, which can put in this particular character. That’s the novel’s characterization in a certain context. This is how a particular woman has been pushed so far. She is snapped. She is prepared to sacrifice herself. The word « sacrifice » comes from the latin « sacrefacere » which is to be related to what the muslims are doing with their suicide bombings. I’m not related with that specifically but it’s there.

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Each and everyone of us as an individual as a body, especially women, much better or different or more extraordinary sacred attitude to the material world and my feeling is that all this is about this transformation. The idea if you like is about this total transformation into virtuality, into severance. « Sévérance. Différence comme sévérance » or whatever. Actually it’s about how we are destroying the environnement. This is our environnement, this is the food we eat, this is the air we breath. So in fact it’s about this gap opening up now, at such extraordinary speed, between the human being who no longer feels himself or sees himself an authentic part of nature.

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PW : What’s your next film ?
AK : I think we have to make a documentary about your film ! It’s so extraordinary ! The dots are joined for us because I picked this book this morning at the Tate Modern. It’s an essay called «The sick man » and it is about pollution. «Pollution is in fashion today, exactly in the same way as revolution. It dominates the whole life of society and it is represented in illusory form in the spectacle ».
PW : The two key words are here : « spectacle » and «fashion ». When things become totally fashion, you’ve lost everything. This is why in «The Fall » you have Alberta dressed in the fashioners and you have Gloria Steiman saying : « Protest has become fashionable ». Once again, it’s easy to protest. You’ve been conned. You’ve been brought out. That is not the spectacle of the violent revolution but the spectacle of the State and of the whole thing called consumerism.
AK : It was in 2000 when I discovered the mobile phone and made this film in 2005 (note – he means « SMS Sugar Man »). Since then it has become fashionable, an example is this conference. And I realized that the moment when the mobile phone was actually subversive, it was then actually a vehicule. The film hasn’t been released yet. I don’t have a cellphone. I came to this conference with the film but I refuse to be part of the banalification of what was a subversive moment.
PW : Just there the difference is between the banal and the anarchic being subversive and being submissive and being enslaved in it. I’m just going to it now. People forget that for this cheap cellphone is why the Americans are bombing Iraq. Because they need the economy and the energy to sustain the technological advance. To «feel » it litteraly. Yes, to feel it ! I said that to my novels.

PW : You see, Schlieman who writes novels and writes for MI6 is sent to Vienna to infiltrate the Rainbow Warriors and find out who Maria Lenoir is. His front is that he is making about subversive culture in Vienna. So, they are filming him. There are two films. This film ends with the death of Michael Schlieman and him being interrogated. It is an imaginary interrogation, 90 minutes of film, with your soul being weighted by agony. It’s the moment of truth. And everything is in his «memoirs », his memories. He is remembering the real time. Is it filmed or no ? So the film is an interrogation. It starts from the very beginning with him being interrogated, being chalenged, by those two people, the male and the female, that he will never see. Because the guy, when Daumal is finally murdered with his gun (it’s Michael’s gun and his bullets that commit the murder), it is possible that he fell in love with Maria Lenoir. He conducted her assassination. When they got the computer in front of him, in front of them, when you click on this now its not going to eclipse. That’s the key. When they, depending on the question, when they are asking a question, but what does he answer ? Then they might think. They go on and they may look at it to say anything because he is drugged on morphine. Because his time is opium or whatever (Thomas de Quincey, etc). We are quite sure about it. Deliberately. Telling lies obviously to cover up his Maria’s murder. As I was saying in a way, once you’re into this website, which it’s really going to exist, those satellite websites in clip of his film, which - I suppose it - Michael Schlieman wants to put together. These two people who are asking him questions are finally editing the film. And they might go back, but we pulled the rug. Finally and absolutely and utterly. From one objective truth. It is actually about pure Debord or Baudrillard. Everything has become this diaspora or fragmentation and fractal kind of disintegration. So I’m now in Baudrillard rather than Debord because Baudrillard’s the one who said «Nothing dies anymore ». Michael Schlieman cannot die or he doesn’t want to die because he wants to tell the truth about what he did for MI6.
AK : He wants to tell the truth, what truth ?
PW : Well, he has to tell it in his memoirs on the internet. This is the Michael Schlieman memoirs. This is the truth about what really happened with him working as an agent. His truth, his version of the truth, his memoirs. And he has to be careful because MI6 can erase them. So the memoirs have to be fluid, protean, they have to be forever moving around from one place to another. From one different website to another. «Fiction becomes infinity ». We don’t know, nobody ever knows what will happen next, the story that Michael Schlieman tells in his memoirs which are on the website. And in this film is the truth about the real event. « Fiction becomes infinity » is a great chapter. It was in fact the subtitle originally of the Nohzone.com website.

PW : And the «in-terror-gation » goes on. He has to be «in-terror-gated ».

AK : I have one more quote here for you (he writes with his pen on a piece of paper ) :

« Just say NO to the war on terror »

Transcribed by Dionysos ANDRONIS
Transcription par Dionysos ANDRONIS