- Can you tell us a little more about the background of A Necessary Music, from where the impulse came for you to make it and how things got started?
While participating in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program in New
York as an artist in residence last year I invited composer alex
waterman to work collaboratively on a film with me. We had a common
interest in experimental music practice and I had wanted to make a
film that used this area as its formal starting point. I had ridden
past Roosevelt Island on my bicycle and been immediately struck by it.
Ive always been fascinated by modernist architecture, social housing
in particular, and the island completely seduced me. Combining ideas
to do with music, from listening, to scoring, to collective
production, with ideas to do with ethnography people and place we set
about at producing a film about the island
- Is the way you worked on this film similar to your other works or
were there particular points of divergence?
It is similar yes, certainly to the piece that preceded it - a live
performance and musical piece developed collaboratively with 10 taxi
drivers and a string quartet that took composer cornelius cardew's the
great learning as it starting point. that piece also was also to do
with ideas of collective production and experimental music, it was
also to do with a particular urban community and in its specific case
with a particular spatial labor and oral tradition. ( the piece used
the tradition of calling over as its principle instrument - calling
over entails london cabbies calling out street names to one another in
order to memorize in preparation for oral exams as part of the london
knowledge,) where they differ i suppose is that the film, obviously
perhaps, became really also about the act of filming itself, about
cinema. that is to say, one of the main topics of the film is its own
awareness of itself as representation, its partly about the
impossibility of us, the film makers, being able to represent the
islanders through film. the film became self conscious of its own
workings as fiction.
- Are there any particular film makers or artists whom inspire you in
some way (even indirectly)? Who are they and how would you say that
they have had an impact upon you or your work?
Many, Too many! To narrow it down i can say that in relation to the
film peter watkins and jean luc godard were references for us. Peter
watkins' La commune was a big point of discussion for us in that in
its a kind of participatory piece. the actors are non actors and even
more fascinatingly in the film, the left play the left and the right
play the right, so not only is it a re-enactment of a particular
historical event but a kind of re-staging in the actual moment of a
battle between different ideological positions. jean luc godards tout
va bien was another point of departure. in tout va bien godard uses
fiction to approach the problem of representation, in this case worker
representation. instead of giving the camera over to the workers
themselves, he hires actors, builds a set and writes a script. he
does this because the workers role is predetermined. his logic, in
other words, is that the worker may be able to articulate himself but
the apparatus that enables him do to do so in fact renders him mute.
oppression cannot simply be captured or recorded, because the
so-called simple recordings are already part of the problem. i think
this is fascinating and still totally pertinent in today’s context.
- Could you tell us a little more about your film, maybe some of the
more important choices you had to make during its conception and
production?
I suppose the most important choice during the conception and
production was deciding to allow the problems we had be the subject of
the film, or realizing they weren’t problems but formal starting
points. at some point we realized that in such a small time frame, and
with such limited engagement in real terms, we couldn’t possible make a
film that would represent the island or its sociality accurately. we
realized that our interaction with it would always be through a kind
of fictional lens. our encounters in fact with fiction started to
resonate on lots of different levels - there was the island itself, a
site of fiction in the city's imagination, a laboratory for utopian
experiments, there was the island voices, somehow caught up with these
fictions and endlessly repeating them and then there was our attempt
to represent this refrain, itself always already a fiction. so we ran
with it. we cut up, quote and decontextualized the island inserting
fiction into fact. i suppose i found this difficult because i thought
it might take film away from the people making it but in the end it
made for a much more interesting piece of work i think.
- Would you like to say anything in particular about the film's sound
and score - I'm maybe misquoting you here but you write of the film
as "a musically conceived science fiction film"? I'd be curious also
about your working with Robert Ashley... How was this? How did it
come about?
It’s difficult to talk about the film's sound as separate entity
really. there is the score composed entirely by alex that comprises
sound recordings from the island, music found or encountered there and
music found or encountered in the book but really the film is a
musical composition in a fullers. its musically conceived in that it
takes principles from music as it starting point, applying them to its
conception and production process - ideas from experimental music,
such as noise, silence, listening, transcribing, collective playing
and or collective production. the idea when initially engaging with
the islanders was to listen to them, to listen to the island voices as
means through which to get at a sense of place. in this sense it also
conceives of voice and speech as music so i cant really separate alex
soundtrack from say the scripted performances or ashley's narration.
its more like on big composition.
The ideas about voice and speech are where robert ashley came in.
robert ashley is one of the last living american composers from the
cage era. his work was all about the musicality of speech, when speech
begins to sound something like song and just about approximates music.
ashley coined the genre of american video opera; his practice was
really all about the construction of operatic structures from the
vernacular stories and fictions encountered by him in the american
landscape. in his operas 'singing' is storytelling, speech attains the
status of song and it becomes gradually apparent that speech has been
scripted , composed and rehearsed. speech appears theatricalized and
language as punctuated by time. it’s very beautiful, ashley also worked
collaboratively with performers and his orchestration was often added
later. we were lucky enough to have ashley perform our narration for
us because alex is a friend of his and in fact working on a book about
him for his Phd.
- Is it important for you that your film will be screened in
competition at the festival? Why is this?
I' m very honored to have the film screened at the festival, It new
ground for me as i normally operate in a more gallery based context.
Its important new ground though because it gives the film a life
beyond the art gallery and access to other audiences and other
conversations. which is really great.
- What was the audience you had in mind?
I’m really not sure to be honest. i think mostly i was thinking of the islanders as it primary audience, i suppose the art world too if i’m really honest.i wanted to make a film with them and about them, that they might get something from. i think they did. the residents who acting in the film all came to the opening at the whitney and they loved it, i think it was quite special for them. we screened the film on the island as well and had a Q&A. it was an odd affair. some people hated it. they felt it completely misrepresented the island. they assumed that we would make a documentary, although we never said anything of the sort.
I think they felt let down that it seemed to be something else. they thought it was ugly and asked why we hadn’t filmed in spring when the flowers were out. others loved it and defended it, they said that we
were artists and that we had made a film about and against documentary. it caused quite a debate which was a great result, we should have filmed it really, included it. next time.
- Could you tell us something about the next project you will be
working on?
I've got three possible projects that may or may not happen at the moment. i suppose the one that seems most likely is another film. i’m not entirely sure how things will pan out in the current climate but
its a film about a modernist house and the man lives in it. it might be somewhere between architectural documentary, musical composition and fictional biography. but its rather a flight of fancy at the moment. lets see what happens!