Can you tell a bit about the background for the project?
Más Se Perdió (we lost more) is the latest in a series of short films called ‘Afflicted States’. The series began in late 2001, a time when exploring the relationship between the individual and state seemed to take on a new urgency. The short films relate the present to the past, through an exploration of political experience within consumer society, and react to a perceived historical amnesia and erasure of the preceding decade.
Before Más … I made Great American Desert (IFFR 2008):, this film was a development of the themes inThe Whale (IFFR 2004). While finishing Great American Desert I resolved to check my own biases as a filmmaker. These two works seemed to me to present an very ‘anglo’ version of the ‘Afflicted States’ theme, so I resolved to try to break out of this loop. I wondered if I could put a different frame on the theme of my series of films.
Of course I was interested in Cuba because it is often positioned as being explicitly in opposition to the ‘anglo’ vision of the world. The relation between the individual and the state is a very relevant question there. Finally, Cuba also has an extremely interesting and vital film tradition, in which political questions and themes are very important – this I could relate to and wanted to find out more about.
First I went to Havana as part of a school group to help out a little, but also to research and look into the possibility of making a film there. With contacts made and some funding, I was able to return to shoot what you see now.
I didn’t have this in mind when I started, but by co-incidence, 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution! Recent events may also have an impact on Cuba - Obama has said he may change US policy towards the island. These changes may give my little film a contemporary resonance.
- Is the way you worked on this film similar to your other works?
I was interested in making a film which contained shots in sequence, continuous shots, and shots in loop or repeated form, and combining all of them into a work that visually and sonicly developed in quite a planned way. The editing structure of Más Se Perdió has similarities with that used in previous works, but in Más….. the structure is more clearly programmed – which is important I think, as the subject and place is perhaps less familiar to a European audience.
- In what way do other filmmakers inspire you?
Of course I am inspired by the work of the European arthouse tradition – and those continuing this mode of working - filmmakers like Michael Haneke, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Claire Denis for example.
Godard is still making film in his unique way and his work I really think is a touch- or lode-stone for me. I’m inspired by the density of reference and quotation in the late work, the sculptural modelling within his images, the independence and layered qualities of his soundtracks, and last but not least: how moody and bloody-minded he can be, and incorporate this attitude in the work!
A recent discovery for me is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea of Cuba – his Memories of Underdevelopment is astonishing and I hope will inspire my work in times to come.
- Could you tell about the more important choices (aesthetic or otherwise) you had to make during its conception and production?
I don’t generally use conceptual rules that govern the way images are created or what they depict - I think addressing the provenance of images and exploring formal pictorial issues is the terrain of a previous generation of experimental filmmakers such as John Smith and William Raban. Instead, general guidelines are generated, before and during the shooting of the film. The guidelines are expressive in intention and effect, and very much govern how places and things are presented.
Colour and tone are also used expressively in Más Se Perdió. In the images of the ruined ballet school that form the major spatial world of the film, inside is shot in black and white, colour is used outside. This simple system is deployed to put in suspension, to put on hold, ideas of past and present that we may apply to the depiction of a ruin. Naturally, a ruin invokes the place of the past in the present. The use of two systems of depiction, with their temporal ‘colour auras’, cancel each other out.
‘Colour aura’ is also foregrounded in the repeated sequences of workers building a road in Más Se Perdió .These images have a punchy super 8 home movie feel - a ‘colour aura’ that date-stamps them as from the past. However, each of these sequences is prefaced by an inter-title, announcing the date and time of the shot (12.35am, 16 February 2008) - the temporal location of the film is the same as it’s production - in contradiction to the ‘colour aura’ the images possess. This mis-match of ‘colour aura’ to image document suggests clues as to the ‘fitness’, or relevance of the representation, to the time of production of the work.
I must say something briefly about ruins as they relate to Más Se Perdió (we lost more). The city of Havana has many architectural ruins. Much of the fabric of the city dates to the pre-revolutionary period (pre 1959), and a lack of capital investment since then has led to decay and dilapidation. It follows, that albeit the filming of colonial or pre-revolutionary Havana may document an aspect of the city, the depiction of decay brings with it a political charge. In a Cuban context, without qualifying material, creating the conditions for an empathic relationship in an audience with the undoubted aesthetic qualities of these ruins, may amount to equating the last 50 years of the life of the city, in the revolution, as decay. This is not the project of this film.
Thus Más Se Perdió very particularly documents a modern ruin, and a ruin of the cur¬rent political regime: the Ballet School, part completed 1965, is an authentic ruin of the revolution. The question of why the school was not completed by the revolution is unanswered, and as discussed above, a central lacuna in the work.
- Could you explain more about the film's sound and score?
As the films are personal and solo efforts, in practical terms, it is tricky to shoot 16mm picture and record sound at the same time. So recording sync sound - captured at the same moment as image - is a problem of practice, but I’ve tried to turn this difficulty into an expressive advantage.
If the sound for a film is conceptually split from image, the sound track can be treated as a composition in its own right and subject to its own independent rules, patterns of generation, and development through the temporal run of the work. The sound track can be thought of as a soundscape. This also means that, within the process of making, although the content of the picture may set off a journey to find analogous sounds, the distance between the suggestion of sound from an image, and the actual sound acquired and used, creates critical possibilities. Expressively, this distance can contribute to generating a degree of tension in the soundscape......
Más… presents something of a sound quiz for the audience – it contains a repeated sequence (of workers repairing a road) with three different sound treatments. There is no correct answer of course ! – the three sound treatments suggest possible meanings that could arise in combination with these images. This arrangement of images and sound was inspired by the well known repeated sequences of road builders in Yakutsk, used by Chris Marker in his Lettre de Siberie (1957), and featuring three different voiceovers.
Up until recently, my film soundscapes don’t generally include music, so the classical music sounds in Más Se Perdió mark a new departure. During the shoot, I became conscious of how classical music in a Cuban context took on a certain rhetorical quality - a classical band accompanied the May 1st parade in Havana for instance - and I wanted to work with this. There are historical links between classical music and nationalism – the soundscape of the film makes the suggestion these links are present in the discourse of the ‘apparat’ in Cuba.
The music-like sounds in Más Se Perdió are extracts from a ballet - Sleeping Beauty - in keeping with the visual exploration of a ballet school building. This sound was sourced from LPs ‘played’ by hand, thus de-naturing their musical qualities and rendering it as ‘sound’.
- Is it important for you that your film will be screened in competition
at IFFR?
The IFFR presents a really broad and comprehensive range of short films – it takes shorts quite seriously – so I’m always pleased to take part and happy to come to Rotterdam and see what my peer filmmakers are working on.
- What was the audience you had in mind?
I don’t have a particular audience in mind other than that they come to a screening with an open mind! By this I mean an audience not coming to the film with strong narrative expectations, and allowing the sound of the film to be an expressive element in it’s own right – my aim is for the sound to equally contribute to the work of the film in making meaning,
- Could you tell us something about current projects you're working on?
I’m starting work on a bigger film essay project containing elements of biography but it will be much less about my story than things which have touched or been in proximity to my life. It’s enough to say that it could involve the US, the sixties and space.