- Please tell us a little more on the background of Optical Vacuum. How did it start ? Was it based on an original idea by yourself ?
For the past four years I've been working primarily with video material sourced from webcams and I also looked at urban transit spaces in the context of surveillance. The notion of 'Non-place' (Marc Augé) was important to the way I worked with film and I wanted to explore that notion through these automatically generated webcam images. The starting point for "Optical Vacuum" was a website (www.opentopia.com), that filters and collects hidden cameras using particular search tags. Originally those cameras were not intended for the wider public, but rather for the surveillance of work places, university facilities and public places. I'm thinking quite a lot about this ambivalent mix of surveillance, voyeurism, but also of this particular 'being online' permanently, which developed into a new form on the internet. My idea was to use the internet as a humongous image generator with "thousands of eyes". Webcams are permanently feeding images into the web, regardless of whether somebody's watching or not, and they grow into a kind of temporary archive of our time, without any claim to permanency or meaning.
- Why was it important for you to make this film?
I wanted to set a very personal voice against this anonymous, voyeuristic stream of images, and thereby tell a different story, one that is not found in the images. I didn't write a text, but at that time I had asked my friend Stephen Mathewson to keep a sort of a diary on a dictaphone over one year. Stephen is a painter, comics drawer and musician, I knew the way he talks and I knew that he would come up with enough of interesting 'micro stories'.
So he recorded his voice on a dictaphone, and given the bad quality of the recording that sounds like a voice over the phone, I immediately thought: why not use exactly this kind of voice-over in a film. I couldn't remember a case where all the voice-over would come from a dictaphone. There is something like a distant radio voice in a dictaphone recording, as if coming from a space station, at the same time, paradoxically, it is more direct, not as dry and clean as a studio recording. The audio takes were created independent of the images and Stephen didn't know - with a few exceptions - what the images would be like. I wanted the voice and the image to run parallel, not influencing each other, to allow for free associations for the audience.
Even more so, a diary is not something that is usually taped, but is rather something written. I was interested in somebody's direct voice, not in writing, but in spontaneous talking. It's a very particular feeling to talk to yourself into a dictaphone, without anyone else being around. It's not so easy, just try it yourself!
- Is the way you worked on this film similar to Elements or Interstate ?
Quite similar, but way more associative - in these earlier works I had been looking more for a graphic and atmospheric similarity in the images. I wanted to condense the images into an imaginary 'place', concentrating on one motif, such as a street, an airport, or the metro, for instance.
In "Optical Vacuum" the atmosphere of the story was more important to me, that's why the scenes are more associative, and there's also more of a distance between image and voice than in earlier works, where I worked with music only.
- Can you tell us if you get inspiration in your work also by watching work by other filmmakers ? Who are they ? In what way do they inspire you ?
Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Gus van Sant - unusual, slow cinema, only a few dialogues and shot/countershot.
- Can you say something about the techniques you used. The choice between film and video. The relation between the image and the sound.
For two years I watched thousands of webcams and manually downloaded a couple of thousands of stills. Yes, you could say 'manually', which means that I was on the net for up to two hours a day observing these cameras. The selection criteria were always the situations in front of the webcam, as well as the time of the day and the light. Most webcams usually deliver a rather boring live image, with no suspense at all. But sometimes magical moments happen, such as the gradual freezing of a lake. The stills were than animated into video sequences. The quality of webcam videos is rather poor, it was therefore quite a challenge to montage these throw-away images for a large screen.
- Is it important for you that your film will be screened in a competition program. Why is this ?
In this case, yes. 'Optical Vacuum' is about images that were not meant to be presented in cinema. Changing the context from the small, insignificant webcam image to the cinema screen was important to me, because it attracts a totally different audience. These automated, anonymous images carry their own particular aesthetics that we don't know in cinema. These webcam images remind me more of painting before the invention of the perspective.
- What is the audience you have in mind when you made Optical Vacuum?
Well, not the blockbuster crowd! (Laughs) No, seriously, a writer doesn't think of the reader when he writes in his room, but the film industry determines for the filmmaker who the audience should be. "Optical Vacuum" was a very personal and private film from the beginning on, and that's why I'm even more happy that this film has been shown at many big festivals and found its audience by itself.
- Could you please tell us something about the next project you will be
working on.
I just finished the trailer for the Austrian Film Festival Diagonale and did a short film about a psychiatric setting. Should somebody finance it, I would soon like to do a feature film.