city & society | digital resources |
INTERVIEW WITH ALEX MACKENZIE (DIRECTOR OF THE FILM, PORTAL)*
(AUDIO)
BY DR. MARTHA RADICE
Sept. 28, 2012
*Alex MacKenzie website
(AUDIO)
BY DR. MARTHA RADICE
Sept. 28, 2012
*Alex MacKenzie website
INTERVIEW WITH ALEX MACKENZIE (TRANSCRIPT)
*Transcription by Dr. Martha Radice
Dr. Martha Radice [MR]: So tell me about your film in there.
Alex MacKenzie [AM]: Well, when Sol approached me to do the project, I had some familiarity with city symphony style films, but I have to admit that I went and googled it (laughs), and looked at a bunch of YouTube videos of classic city symphony films, and started thinking—I’m from Vancouver, but I’ve lived in a lot of different places though I’ve been in Vancouver for quite some years, but I still don’t quite think of it as my true home turf, I still feel a bit itinerant. So I still feel like I have an outsider’s perspective on that city. I guess what I mean is I’m not thoroughly attached to it. And I feel like the more cities that I travel through, the more homogeneous cities seem to have become. You know, through primarily economic reasons. Every city’s got a “Gap”. And so you start looking elsewhere, other than the core, to look for difference, and it usually comes in architecture and in landscape. But even the landscape of cities is becoming pretty homogeneous. So when I started thinking about this project, I thought about what Vancouver is to me and just visiting the highlights of that city that I frequent, and places that I don’t get to enough, I guess, as well. And realized that that city holds a lot of tension between nature and culture. Or maybe culture isn’t the word, maybe just urbanism. So, nature and urbanism. Because when you sit in the middle of that city, you find yourself looking at a bunch of mountains and an ocean, you’re right there, that nature is right there, but it’s strangely inaccessible. And yet also very accessible compared to other cities. And… circling around it in almost a touristic kind of way, I became a tourist in my own city and realized how much of the interest in the city has a touristic kind of core. In terms of its core economy, Vancouver’s history is fishing and lumber, but that’s shifted radically as capitalism has drained all resources, and is really, a bad idea from the get-go. So we start to see the transformation of cities, all sorts of cities, into places to visit, and places to observe, as opposed to places that are actually productive in that tangible way. And so from a reflection on the economy in the larger sense, we have this falseness of our economy in general, world economy, and we’re feeling that all over the world right now.
So I started looking at the different aspects of the city and came away feeling like I was creating a representation that was both urban and natural, but also reflecting that touristic aspect. But having said all that, I was shooting with what I refer to as a "dark lens," with a sort of a pessimistic kind of view of the whole situation, as opposed to a "Hey, look it’s Vancouver, our beautiful city," and all the rest of it, it was more like, there’s something wrong here. There’s something wrong with this model. And there’s something wrong with cities in general, is my general broader view, in that they’re problematic in a lot of different ways, that our resources are trucked in to support this dense core. I’m a fan of writers like Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan who are proponents of a more anarcho-primitivist approach to living. And so, looking at any city it becomes really evident right away that there’s something wrong here. So that’s where I was coming from when I made the piece, and I think it’s reflected in my work.
MR: And tell me about working with, um, do you always work with analogue, like old film, tell me about your engagement with the technology I guess.
AM: Yeah, my body of work is almost exclusively on 16 mm these days, for the last 15 years, and I do largely performance-based, expanded—what they refer to as expanded cinema, or performance-based, projector-performance based cinema. So the piece that I’m presenting at the festival here, last night, was um I usually take outmoded technologies and reinvigorate them with some kind of new meaning, as well as working with found footage in the past. So in the way that a lot of people work with found footage, they’ll take images and re-appropriate them and give them new meaning, I also do that with the technology. So I’ll use projectors for example that were intended, the ones I used last night are 16 mm analytic projectors, and they were originally intended for use in science and sport, where you would film something at a high speed and then look at them in an analytic projector which can slow it down to like one frame a second, instead of the standard 24 frames per second, so you can slow it down, speed it up, reverse it, forward it, and analyze the film. So I’m taking those projectors that had a completely different intention and giving them a new life in essence, and taking them into a more artistic practice, playing with the referencing but also subverting their intentional shape. So yeah, I tend to work with a lot of those kind of projectors. The last project I did was called The Wooden Lightbox, and it was actually a projector that I built out of spare parts. That was a hand-cranked projector, so I had to actually crank it by hand in order to present the show. So you’re experiencing this labour as you experience the show, there’s somebody actually, you know,
MR: Actioning the parts.
AM: Actioning everything. If I’m not moving my arm, you’re not seeing a show. And that piece definitely had its primary reference point as the transformation of cinema in the early twentieth century into an economy as opposed to a hobby or an anomaly or an oddity. Everything that somebody invents along the way ends up transforming into something that can be bought and sold. So I was interested in examining the potentiality of film, what it could have been, had it not become a commercialized product.
MR: A commodity like everything else.
AM: When film started there were hundreds, literally hundreds of models that people were coming up with. Like, we can do it this way, we can do it that way. We can integrate a projector with a camera, there were lots of those, where it’s like the camera becomes the projector, you just move a few lenses around, and run the film outside instead of inside, and suddenly you’re showing the film, instead of sucking an image in you’re shooting one out.
MR: Wow.
AM: So there are all these different models. And different gauges, you know, 9 1/2 mm, 8 mm, 16, 65, 70, all these different gauges. And you quickly realize, if you’re going to turn this into something you’re going to sell to people, you need to standardize. The minute you standardize something you’re moving into a homogeneous transformation from something that is an invention into something that becomes banal; profitable. It’s like rock songs, it’s like Hollywood movies, you’re trying to reach as many people as possible so you have to water down your story, or whatever it is, your narrative, or the general gist of what you’re trying to get at. And so why are rock songs all about love? Well, because everybody thinks about it all the time and it’s easy to access in people. So write a song, write another love song. There’s a million of them, and there’ll be a million more. And then the same with Hollywood cinema, it’s like boy meets girl kind of stuff over and over and over again. And even the ones that are kind of intriguing and meta or postmodern or transform the shape, if you cut through the layers, you realize you’re down to the same thing again. And narrative by its very nature has a beginning, a middle and an end, and cinema is temporal. It has to begin somewhere and it has to end somewhere. (Unless you’re looping!) It’s going to end, so you have to wrap it up usually, and we tend to, narrativize our lives and turn them into stories. And being an experimental filmmaker I’ve never been that interested or excited about stories as much as I am in shapes and, just visual material. The materiality of the medium and the things you can get out of it and the way you can shape it. They don’t have to always boil down to telling a story.
MR: So for you it’s very material, whether that material is what you are using to make stuff or the final result.
AM: Yeah. And a lot of the people that have been influential to me, especially the group of people who started using cinema in a performative way, are people, a lot of American filmmakers in the 60s and 70s. P. Adams Sitney has written a book called Visionary Film, they’re heavily featured in there. And a lot of these guys were coming from painting and sculpture, they weren’t trained filmmakers. They were interested in the tactility, and the shaping of it, as a material. And instead of this thing that’s hidden in a booth, that is meant to be invisible—you’re not supposed to look back at the booth and think about how that image is coming to you, you’re just supposed to think about the image, so it’s this magic box behind you. And when I’m presenting work I want that audience to be thinking precisely about how that shape has come into being, and usually my projector is in the audience, I’m with the audience and they’re looking at me as much as they’re looking at the screen. So that sculptural aspect is at the forefront. So like I say, a lot of influential people are coming from sculpture so I tend to think of my films more as having a kinship with sculpture or painting than they do to any kind of narrative formation of media.
MR: And tell me, had you seen the structure the other night as well?
AM: Yeah.
MR: And so tell me how you find the structure itself.
AM: I’m really struck by the way they’ve decided to send this beam of light from one end to the other and how to present it. My first thought, coming through the corridor as you enter the cube, is of course you interrupt the beam with your own physical passage through these little squares that shoot the light across the space. And I thought, they could have easily prevented that, they could have sent it around people or just have them come in at the very end and not follow a path. But they’ve come up with a really interesting, architecturally a really interesting shape that does something very similar to what I’m talking about, which is demand a recognition of the formation of the image, and how it comes to be. And you see it twice. You move past the little hole, and then you can see another larger hole, and then you move past that and into another zone, and then finally you’re presented with what almost is like an easel or an architectural desk.
MR: Like a drafting table.
AM: A drafting table, where you sit and watch this show. And I was reminded of a lot of camera obscuras I’ve seen, especially the one in San Francisco, down by the water, I think it’s still around, where they’ve put essentially a periscope with a lens on the roof, and it rotates, slowly rotates and gives you a view of the landscape and then beams down at an angle here and you get again this thing that’s a flat image that you’re looking down on as opposed to looking at a screen on a wall. And it makes it feel more like something that you are participating with and integrating with, almost like you’re going to change it with your hands or something, which I think is great, it’s a really, really nice way of presenting. And it also allows you to get right up to the work and feel its tactility more. And this is where all of this work, all of the filmmakers involved are very interested in the materiality of film. And so it makes a lot of sense in terms of how they’ve decided as a group to shape it. So yeah, I think it’s really nice. And in terms of an object, it immediately strikes me as very familiar, in terms of the way you imagine design schools or, almost like Dutch and Danish, that kind of like clean lines and you know tiny little hexagonal screws, and everything’s incredibly smooth all round, beautiful forms of wood and matte paint. I think it looks really sharp. And certainly draws you to it in a fairly modern way. And um… "Le cinéma est une invention sans avenir," which is great. And that makes people think about its history, and its potentially French roots, even though there’s some question as to who came up with the idea first. There are many varying opinions, some would say the British came up with it first, but regardless, there’s something about the French and cinema that is really, you know, so attached, I think it’s great.
MR: What do you make of the quote, it’s Lumière, I think, Craig was saying, so, “The cinema is, est une invention sans avenir, the cinema is an invention without a future,” for you, what does that quote refer to, mean, do, what’s going on with that quote, for you?
AM: You know, I mean it’s funny because in translation it can be interpreted in a few ways, une invention sans avenir could be an invention without future, but it also makes me think about an invention without precedent. It has a bit of that double meaning.
MR: Yeah, sort of, as if it’s out of time.
AM: Yeah. Um… But my first thought, and it’s because I tend to have a, look at things through a pessimistic economic view, is that, I mean I’ve been to the Lumière’s original factory where they’re leaving the station and the museum there and it’s really something, I strongly urge people who are at all interested in cinema to check it out, and the thing that struck me most when I went there was the realization that the Lumière brothers were businessmen, first and foremost, and they were running that factory, and the people leaving that factory are people that are working for them. It’s not like they were getting a shot of the poor factory workers. These are rich men, who have a certain amount of leisure to indulge themselves in these things and have a sense that they want to, not unlike Edison, who gets a lot of bad press, want to harness something and make it into some economically viable product, with future potential. So it’s in their best interests to film as many things as possible and to strike an audience with something they’ve never seen before. And then figure out a way to make it feasible, economically. And to make anything economically feasible you need infrastructure, you need mass marketing, you need a huge amount of product and you need factories. And it’s ironic that workers leaving the factory, it’s like of course they’re leaving the factory, and they’re heading back tomorrow, over and over and over, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. So in a way, that’s what cinema is. If there’s no future for cinema, in a way it’s saying there’s no future anything, or anybody, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot in approaching life this way.
MR: Coming back to the structure, you were talking about how important the projector is for you. So what do you, what do you make of the projector being visible? Have you seen it through the window?
AM: Yeah, I think that’s great, and I like the fact that when we’re outside the building, in a way metaphorically we’re almost in the projection booth. Because we’re behind, we’re outside of the viewing area, and so traditionally in cinema as in theatre you can say that there’s a sacred space and a profane space. And… you know in theatre that’s the line between the audience and the stage.
MR: Mmm. Which has a name, doesn’t it?
AM: Proscenium?
MR: The fourth wall? I think it’s called the fourth wall, I don’t know, it’s not my um, not my scene, but yeah. [Wikipedia says: “The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.”]
AM: So in a way we get to be in the booth, when we’re out here in the sunshine, which is a weird thing, booths aren’t exactly sunshiney. But yeah, you get to see the mechanism, which is where it all happens, kind of thing, and understand it a little bit. And, interestingly too, it’s behind glass, or plexiglass, and that makes it feel a little like an antique, or something that’s untouchable, something that, you know, is from another time. Like a historical object. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Especially with 16 mm. And then you move inside and you’re in an entirely different space, a space of illusion. The illusion, the image comes to life, and it’s a little bit like Oz in his little curtained room twisting all the knobs, and that’s us out here looking at Oz’s space of creation, and then the trickery that he produces inside. So yeah, I like that it’s divided and we get a chance to see where the magic comes from, and realize there’s no magic in a way, it’s very mechanical and… but it’s a strange relationship that filmmakers have, or that media artists have with moving image making, in that part of our job is to create illusions. Part of our, if you want to call it a job, is to deceive people, which is strange. Even if you’re trying to do something honest, even if you’re making a pure documentary, if there can be such a thing, you are actually creating an illusion in order to give the impression of truth. You’re never telling the truth. If I’m making a film of you and I talking, I’m going to shoot you over here, and then we’re going to get another camera and shoot me over here, and we’ll try and do them at the same time and then we’ll do these over the shoulder shots and if you’ve ever done interviews, you know that someone’s like "Okay, now can you just nod."
MR: (laughs) Look like you’re writing!
AM: Because then you’ve got to, "Oh, it’s very interesting what you’re saying right now," even though you’re not saying it at the same time, and that’s meant to make us feel at ease and comfortable with what looks like a conversation, when in fact it’s a complete fabrication. And most of the time they do it terribly in news, where you’re just looking at it thinking, "I can see his mouth move over his shoulder," you’ve screwed up the timing in the edits there, but most people don’t notice. And I’ve seen it in fiction films too, big Hollywood productions, and that’s pretty sloppy. But as an audience, we want to be lied to, and we’re more than happy to suspend truth.
MR: We want to be lied to in a sacred space.
AM: Yeah.
MR: So the profane space is the projection booth and the sacred space is sitting in those plush seats, is that right?
AM: You know, there’s been a lot written about it and people have talked about reversing those roles as well. The spaces, the meaning of the sacred space could be the space of illusion, creation, and the profane space is the public space, the space where… anything can happen or we’re out in the real world. There’s the untouchable space and then there’s the space… the unrolling of the event.
MR: The process space, or the unfurling?
AM: There’s been a lot written about that, you could write a thesis on that, definitely. … One thing I didn’t mention, as you enter the space from the front door, if people are observant, the first thing you notice is an angled piece of wood that is embedded in the front first wall, and that angle is a mirror. The reason that there is a mirror, and you may not know that at first but, as you observe the way that the whole thing happens inside you might realize that that is the final giant mirror that you’re going to see inside that reflects the final image to enlarge it. And I love that that is exposed right away, right when you enter in, like here is essentially the thing that’s going to shoot the image up to you once you finally see it inside. But we’re not showing you it, it’s like we’re not giving you it right now, we’re going to make you go through this tunnel, this corridor, in order to get to that. That’s kind of great.
MR: You got here just as it was being put together, didn’t you? So you didn’t see the whole process of it.
AM: Of the assembly, no.
MR: Of the assembly. It’s pretty amazing. Because you see it bit by bit, and I didn’t realize because I didn’t see it yesterday, Shannon stayed and took pictures, but the first things to go up are the internal walls, so you get the little box that is the projection booth, that box where the projector is sitting, and then the...
AM: So you get a kind of disassembled, exploded view in a way.
MR: Totally, and then gradually, it has to be built from the inside out, rather than the outside in, which usually, I suppose in many, most projects you’re starting with a — well maybe not if you’re actually an architect. But, anyway. Often you’d be starting with a space that was already there and putting up dividers or something, say in an art gallery. You have the art gallery already and it’s a question of creating the internal walls afterwards, where in this it’s kind of the other way round.
AM: I’m reminded also of, do you know what a Black Maria is?
MR: Yeah.
AM: I’m reminded of that a bit because those things were black, Edison had this incredible building that could follow the sun. So that he could shoot inside at any time of the day, when he was creating films.
MR: Hang on, what’s a Black Maria for you?
AM: It’s a film shooting studio.
MR: Ohhh, okay, so a Black Maria to me is something completely different.
AM: What is it?
MR: A Black Maria is slang for a police van.
AM: Yeah, well that’s where the term comes from.
MR: Oh okay.
AM: Because when they first came up with them, they looked like a Black Maria, the police van. They were, "That looks like a Black Maria," and so they, they coined the term. They were these—I don’t know how many there were, there was probably only one—but there is actually a film festival called the Black Maria film festival. And it’s based on this thing that Edison created, which, back before they had huge bright lights to shoot the film, he created this giant studio that was actually rotatable. The whole thing could move.
MR: Ohhhh! Right.
AM: So, the sun would cast here and he’d have light coming in from above, I mean the sunlight, and as the film was shot, they would move along so that the light would remain consistent, because they needed tons of light. So it reminds me a bit of that too, the black box. And the way we imagine and think of cinema as a black space. It was interesting because the outside is black and the inside is a wood grain, which isn’t typical of cinemas. Usually you want to absorb as much light as possible inside a cinema.
MR: Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s because they didn’t have time to paint it!
AM: Well no because I think it allows you to understand the architecture and the structure more, because you see it. I think if it was black you’d probably be running into walls.
MR: Yeah, probably. You need that minimal amount of light.
AM: Yeah.
MR: I really like the stepping through the beam thing. The fact of walking through it disrupts the beam of light, I think that’s super interesting.
AM: When you’re sitting there looking at it and you see people putting their hands in front of it you’re immediately reminded of being in a cinema and having someone who is coming in with their popcorn late...
MR: Or doing the rabbit ears (laughs). We were talking yesterday, because it broke, in the afternoon the film broke, I mean it broke again this morning, but we were talking about maybe we could put a shadow puppet show on instead (laughs). Rabbits.
AM: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting the… the level of confidence that Sol had when we started it all, it’s like, “Oh yeah, it’ll run” like you know, “solid as a rock, and this looping mechanism is super great.” And, I had my doubts. I mean it’s a loop, and, I emailed him months ago before I even submitted the film and said, “so we’re going to splice all the films together? There’s going to be splices, running through that projector, every 10 minutes? For 5, 6, 8 hours? That’s a lot of splice time. And splices are the most fragile part as they’re running through the projector, because it’s compromised, it’s got tape on it. Literally two pieces of tape that are holding the two strips of film together. So. We’ll see. We’ll see how long it lasts.
MR: And in an unstaffed projector, too. As well, because that’s the other thing, you know if you watch, like Cinema Paradiso is the limit of my knowledge, but you kind of, uh, have uh… Sorry, it’s just REALLY interesting that people don’t go in. They read it but they don’t go in (Someone must have come up to look at the leaflet.) Oops, they are going in.
AM: There’s another one of the filmmakers, if you want to speak to her.
MR: In the… jeans there?
AM: Yeah, Isabelle.
MR: Great.
AM: She is a talker! You think I’m a talker.
MR: (laughs) Excellent! Um, I was in the middle of a sentence there and I’ve completely forgotten what it was.
AM: Cinema Paradiso.
MR: Yeah, the idea that you have a person in the projection booth because projectors are kind of fragile things, right, and the whole process is a delicate mechanism so you have somebody watching it all to make sure that it’s not going wrong or getting stuck. So if your booth is not staffed, then it’s gonna…
AM: Potentially, yeah.
DMR: It’s a risky thing.
AM: And, there’s a science and art to looping mechanisms, that aluminum spinning disc that’s on top...
MR: Right, because usually...
AM: Normally you’d have two rolls of film.
DMR: You’d have two reels of film and they’d both be vertical, right? They would both be, and you’d have one that was spooling onto the other.
AM: Start at the front and it all feeds onto the back, and then...
MR: And then you rewind it.
AM: Yeah, and then you rewind it. Now because it’s a loop, it’s basically like an endless, like a cartridge, like you used to have in radio stations you would have a cart that would run a PSA, a public service announcement. It ends right where it begins, and starts again. And that means that there’s an edit. And so this thing runs, and then it twists and loops around and re-enters underneath and winds up again. And they got this looper from a lab in London called no.w.here. They actually build these and sell them, so that’s where Sol was like, “Yeah yeah, they make great things,” and now he’s like “well I don’t know how great this...” And there’s a science to it, and I know a few people who actually custom build these things, and it’s just a tricky thing, you’ve got to get it right because tension is central, you’ve got a loop, like a little film loop as it’s moving through the projector and those need to be maintained. So it’s a little tricky…
(Biography Credit: https://www.alexmackenzie.ca/alex_mackenzie_bio.pdf)
*Transcription by Dr. Martha Radice
Dr. Martha Radice [MR]: So tell me about your film in there.
Alex MacKenzie [AM]: Well, when Sol approached me to do the project, I had some familiarity with city symphony style films, but I have to admit that I went and googled it (laughs), and looked at a bunch of YouTube videos of classic city symphony films, and started thinking—I’m from Vancouver, but I’ve lived in a lot of different places though I’ve been in Vancouver for quite some years, but I still don’t quite think of it as my true home turf, I still feel a bit itinerant. So I still feel like I have an outsider’s perspective on that city. I guess what I mean is I’m not thoroughly attached to it. And I feel like the more cities that I travel through, the more homogeneous cities seem to have become. You know, through primarily economic reasons. Every city’s got a “Gap”. And so you start looking elsewhere, other than the core, to look for difference, and it usually comes in architecture and in landscape. But even the landscape of cities is becoming pretty homogeneous. So when I started thinking about this project, I thought about what Vancouver is to me and just visiting the highlights of that city that I frequent, and places that I don’t get to enough, I guess, as well. And realized that that city holds a lot of tension between nature and culture. Or maybe culture isn’t the word, maybe just urbanism. So, nature and urbanism. Because when you sit in the middle of that city, you find yourself looking at a bunch of mountains and an ocean, you’re right there, that nature is right there, but it’s strangely inaccessible. And yet also very accessible compared to other cities. And… circling around it in almost a touristic kind of way, I became a tourist in my own city and realized how much of the interest in the city has a touristic kind of core. In terms of its core economy, Vancouver’s history is fishing and lumber, but that’s shifted radically as capitalism has drained all resources, and is really, a bad idea from the get-go. So we start to see the transformation of cities, all sorts of cities, into places to visit, and places to observe, as opposed to places that are actually productive in that tangible way. And so from a reflection on the economy in the larger sense, we have this falseness of our economy in general, world economy, and we’re feeling that all over the world right now.
So I started looking at the different aspects of the city and came away feeling like I was creating a representation that was both urban and natural, but also reflecting that touristic aspect. But having said all that, I was shooting with what I refer to as a "dark lens," with a sort of a pessimistic kind of view of the whole situation, as opposed to a "Hey, look it’s Vancouver, our beautiful city," and all the rest of it, it was more like, there’s something wrong here. There’s something wrong with this model. And there’s something wrong with cities in general, is my general broader view, in that they’re problematic in a lot of different ways, that our resources are trucked in to support this dense core. I’m a fan of writers like Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan who are proponents of a more anarcho-primitivist approach to living. And so, looking at any city it becomes really evident right away that there’s something wrong here. So that’s where I was coming from when I made the piece, and I think it’s reflected in my work.
MR: And tell me about working with, um, do you always work with analogue, like old film, tell me about your engagement with the technology I guess.
AM: Yeah, my body of work is almost exclusively on 16 mm these days, for the last 15 years, and I do largely performance-based, expanded—what they refer to as expanded cinema, or performance-based, projector-performance based cinema. So the piece that I’m presenting at the festival here, last night, was um I usually take outmoded technologies and reinvigorate them with some kind of new meaning, as well as working with found footage in the past. So in the way that a lot of people work with found footage, they’ll take images and re-appropriate them and give them new meaning, I also do that with the technology. So I’ll use projectors for example that were intended, the ones I used last night are 16 mm analytic projectors, and they were originally intended for use in science and sport, where you would film something at a high speed and then look at them in an analytic projector which can slow it down to like one frame a second, instead of the standard 24 frames per second, so you can slow it down, speed it up, reverse it, forward it, and analyze the film. So I’m taking those projectors that had a completely different intention and giving them a new life in essence, and taking them into a more artistic practice, playing with the referencing but also subverting their intentional shape. So yeah, I tend to work with a lot of those kind of projectors. The last project I did was called The Wooden Lightbox, and it was actually a projector that I built out of spare parts. That was a hand-cranked projector, so I had to actually crank it by hand in order to present the show. So you’re experiencing this labour as you experience the show, there’s somebody actually, you know,
MR: Actioning the parts.
AM: Actioning everything. If I’m not moving my arm, you’re not seeing a show. And that piece definitely had its primary reference point as the transformation of cinema in the early twentieth century into an economy as opposed to a hobby or an anomaly or an oddity. Everything that somebody invents along the way ends up transforming into something that can be bought and sold. So I was interested in examining the potentiality of film, what it could have been, had it not become a commercialized product.
MR: A commodity like everything else.
AM: When film started there were hundreds, literally hundreds of models that people were coming up with. Like, we can do it this way, we can do it that way. We can integrate a projector with a camera, there were lots of those, where it’s like the camera becomes the projector, you just move a few lenses around, and run the film outside instead of inside, and suddenly you’re showing the film, instead of sucking an image in you’re shooting one out.
MR: Wow.
AM: So there are all these different models. And different gauges, you know, 9 1/2 mm, 8 mm, 16, 65, 70, all these different gauges. And you quickly realize, if you’re going to turn this into something you’re going to sell to people, you need to standardize. The minute you standardize something you’re moving into a homogeneous transformation from something that is an invention into something that becomes banal; profitable. It’s like rock songs, it’s like Hollywood movies, you’re trying to reach as many people as possible so you have to water down your story, or whatever it is, your narrative, or the general gist of what you’re trying to get at. And so why are rock songs all about love? Well, because everybody thinks about it all the time and it’s easy to access in people. So write a song, write another love song. There’s a million of them, and there’ll be a million more. And then the same with Hollywood cinema, it’s like boy meets girl kind of stuff over and over and over again. And even the ones that are kind of intriguing and meta or postmodern or transform the shape, if you cut through the layers, you realize you’re down to the same thing again. And narrative by its very nature has a beginning, a middle and an end, and cinema is temporal. It has to begin somewhere and it has to end somewhere. (Unless you’re looping!) It’s going to end, so you have to wrap it up usually, and we tend to, narrativize our lives and turn them into stories. And being an experimental filmmaker I’ve never been that interested or excited about stories as much as I am in shapes and, just visual material. The materiality of the medium and the things you can get out of it and the way you can shape it. They don’t have to always boil down to telling a story.
MR: So for you it’s very material, whether that material is what you are using to make stuff or the final result.
AM: Yeah. And a lot of the people that have been influential to me, especially the group of people who started using cinema in a performative way, are people, a lot of American filmmakers in the 60s and 70s. P. Adams Sitney has written a book called Visionary Film, they’re heavily featured in there. And a lot of these guys were coming from painting and sculpture, they weren’t trained filmmakers. They were interested in the tactility, and the shaping of it, as a material. And instead of this thing that’s hidden in a booth, that is meant to be invisible—you’re not supposed to look back at the booth and think about how that image is coming to you, you’re just supposed to think about the image, so it’s this magic box behind you. And when I’m presenting work I want that audience to be thinking precisely about how that shape has come into being, and usually my projector is in the audience, I’m with the audience and they’re looking at me as much as they’re looking at the screen. So that sculptural aspect is at the forefront. So like I say, a lot of influential people are coming from sculpture so I tend to think of my films more as having a kinship with sculpture or painting than they do to any kind of narrative formation of media.
MR: And tell me, had you seen the structure the other night as well?
AM: Yeah.
MR: And so tell me how you find the structure itself.
AM: I’m really struck by the way they’ve decided to send this beam of light from one end to the other and how to present it. My first thought, coming through the corridor as you enter the cube, is of course you interrupt the beam with your own physical passage through these little squares that shoot the light across the space. And I thought, they could have easily prevented that, they could have sent it around people or just have them come in at the very end and not follow a path. But they’ve come up with a really interesting, architecturally a really interesting shape that does something very similar to what I’m talking about, which is demand a recognition of the formation of the image, and how it comes to be. And you see it twice. You move past the little hole, and then you can see another larger hole, and then you move past that and into another zone, and then finally you’re presented with what almost is like an easel or an architectural desk.
MR: Like a drafting table.
AM: A drafting table, where you sit and watch this show. And I was reminded of a lot of camera obscuras I’ve seen, especially the one in San Francisco, down by the water, I think it’s still around, where they’ve put essentially a periscope with a lens on the roof, and it rotates, slowly rotates and gives you a view of the landscape and then beams down at an angle here and you get again this thing that’s a flat image that you’re looking down on as opposed to looking at a screen on a wall. And it makes it feel more like something that you are participating with and integrating with, almost like you’re going to change it with your hands or something, which I think is great, it’s a really, really nice way of presenting. And it also allows you to get right up to the work and feel its tactility more. And this is where all of this work, all of the filmmakers involved are very interested in the materiality of film. And so it makes a lot of sense in terms of how they’ve decided as a group to shape it. So yeah, I think it’s really nice. And in terms of an object, it immediately strikes me as very familiar, in terms of the way you imagine design schools or, almost like Dutch and Danish, that kind of like clean lines and you know tiny little hexagonal screws, and everything’s incredibly smooth all round, beautiful forms of wood and matte paint. I think it looks really sharp. And certainly draws you to it in a fairly modern way. And um… "Le cinéma est une invention sans avenir," which is great. And that makes people think about its history, and its potentially French roots, even though there’s some question as to who came up with the idea first. There are many varying opinions, some would say the British came up with it first, but regardless, there’s something about the French and cinema that is really, you know, so attached, I think it’s great.
MR: What do you make of the quote, it’s Lumière, I think, Craig was saying, so, “The cinema is, est une invention sans avenir, the cinema is an invention without a future,” for you, what does that quote refer to, mean, do, what’s going on with that quote, for you?
AM: You know, I mean it’s funny because in translation it can be interpreted in a few ways, une invention sans avenir could be an invention without future, but it also makes me think about an invention without precedent. It has a bit of that double meaning.
MR: Yeah, sort of, as if it’s out of time.
AM: Yeah. Um… But my first thought, and it’s because I tend to have a, look at things through a pessimistic economic view, is that, I mean I’ve been to the Lumière’s original factory where they’re leaving the station and the museum there and it’s really something, I strongly urge people who are at all interested in cinema to check it out, and the thing that struck me most when I went there was the realization that the Lumière brothers were businessmen, first and foremost, and they were running that factory, and the people leaving that factory are people that are working for them. It’s not like they were getting a shot of the poor factory workers. These are rich men, who have a certain amount of leisure to indulge themselves in these things and have a sense that they want to, not unlike Edison, who gets a lot of bad press, want to harness something and make it into some economically viable product, with future potential. So it’s in their best interests to film as many things as possible and to strike an audience with something they’ve never seen before. And then figure out a way to make it feasible, economically. And to make anything economically feasible you need infrastructure, you need mass marketing, you need a huge amount of product and you need factories. And it’s ironic that workers leaving the factory, it’s like of course they’re leaving the factory, and they’re heading back tomorrow, over and over and over, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. So in a way, that’s what cinema is. If there’s no future for cinema, in a way it’s saying there’s no future anything, or anybody, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot in approaching life this way.
MR: Coming back to the structure, you were talking about how important the projector is for you. So what do you, what do you make of the projector being visible? Have you seen it through the window?
AM: Yeah, I think that’s great, and I like the fact that when we’re outside the building, in a way metaphorically we’re almost in the projection booth. Because we’re behind, we’re outside of the viewing area, and so traditionally in cinema as in theatre you can say that there’s a sacred space and a profane space. And… you know in theatre that’s the line between the audience and the stage.
MR: Mmm. Which has a name, doesn’t it?
AM: Proscenium?
MR: The fourth wall? I think it’s called the fourth wall, I don’t know, it’s not my um, not my scene, but yeah. [Wikipedia says: “The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.”]
AM: So in a way we get to be in the booth, when we’re out here in the sunshine, which is a weird thing, booths aren’t exactly sunshiney. But yeah, you get to see the mechanism, which is where it all happens, kind of thing, and understand it a little bit. And, interestingly too, it’s behind glass, or plexiglass, and that makes it feel a little like an antique, or something that’s untouchable, something that, you know, is from another time. Like a historical object. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Especially with 16 mm. And then you move inside and you’re in an entirely different space, a space of illusion. The illusion, the image comes to life, and it’s a little bit like Oz in his little curtained room twisting all the knobs, and that’s us out here looking at Oz’s space of creation, and then the trickery that he produces inside. So yeah, I like that it’s divided and we get a chance to see where the magic comes from, and realize there’s no magic in a way, it’s very mechanical and… but it’s a strange relationship that filmmakers have, or that media artists have with moving image making, in that part of our job is to create illusions. Part of our, if you want to call it a job, is to deceive people, which is strange. Even if you’re trying to do something honest, even if you’re making a pure documentary, if there can be such a thing, you are actually creating an illusion in order to give the impression of truth. You’re never telling the truth. If I’m making a film of you and I talking, I’m going to shoot you over here, and then we’re going to get another camera and shoot me over here, and we’ll try and do them at the same time and then we’ll do these over the shoulder shots and if you’ve ever done interviews, you know that someone’s like "Okay, now can you just nod."
MR: (laughs) Look like you’re writing!
AM: Because then you’ve got to, "Oh, it’s very interesting what you’re saying right now," even though you’re not saying it at the same time, and that’s meant to make us feel at ease and comfortable with what looks like a conversation, when in fact it’s a complete fabrication. And most of the time they do it terribly in news, where you’re just looking at it thinking, "I can see his mouth move over his shoulder," you’ve screwed up the timing in the edits there, but most people don’t notice. And I’ve seen it in fiction films too, big Hollywood productions, and that’s pretty sloppy. But as an audience, we want to be lied to, and we’re more than happy to suspend truth.
MR: We want to be lied to in a sacred space.
AM: Yeah.
MR: So the profane space is the projection booth and the sacred space is sitting in those plush seats, is that right?
AM: You know, there’s been a lot written about it and people have talked about reversing those roles as well. The spaces, the meaning of the sacred space could be the space of illusion, creation, and the profane space is the public space, the space where… anything can happen or we’re out in the real world. There’s the untouchable space and then there’s the space… the unrolling of the event.
MR: The process space, or the unfurling?
AM: There’s been a lot written about that, you could write a thesis on that, definitely. … One thing I didn’t mention, as you enter the space from the front door, if people are observant, the first thing you notice is an angled piece of wood that is embedded in the front first wall, and that angle is a mirror. The reason that there is a mirror, and you may not know that at first but, as you observe the way that the whole thing happens inside you might realize that that is the final giant mirror that you’re going to see inside that reflects the final image to enlarge it. And I love that that is exposed right away, right when you enter in, like here is essentially the thing that’s going to shoot the image up to you once you finally see it inside. But we’re not showing you it, it’s like we’re not giving you it right now, we’re going to make you go through this tunnel, this corridor, in order to get to that. That’s kind of great.
MR: You got here just as it was being put together, didn’t you? So you didn’t see the whole process of it.
AM: Of the assembly, no.
MR: Of the assembly. It’s pretty amazing. Because you see it bit by bit, and I didn’t realize because I didn’t see it yesterday, Shannon stayed and took pictures, but the first things to go up are the internal walls, so you get the little box that is the projection booth, that box where the projector is sitting, and then the...
AM: So you get a kind of disassembled, exploded view in a way.
MR: Totally, and then gradually, it has to be built from the inside out, rather than the outside in, which usually, I suppose in many, most projects you’re starting with a — well maybe not if you’re actually an architect. But, anyway. Often you’d be starting with a space that was already there and putting up dividers or something, say in an art gallery. You have the art gallery already and it’s a question of creating the internal walls afterwards, where in this it’s kind of the other way round.
AM: I’m reminded also of, do you know what a Black Maria is?
MR: Yeah.
AM: I’m reminded of that a bit because those things were black, Edison had this incredible building that could follow the sun. So that he could shoot inside at any time of the day, when he was creating films.
MR: Hang on, what’s a Black Maria for you?
AM: It’s a film shooting studio.
MR: Ohhh, okay, so a Black Maria to me is something completely different.
AM: What is it?
MR: A Black Maria is slang for a police van.
AM: Yeah, well that’s where the term comes from.
MR: Oh okay.
AM: Because when they first came up with them, they looked like a Black Maria, the police van. They were, "That looks like a Black Maria," and so they, they coined the term. They were these—I don’t know how many there were, there was probably only one—but there is actually a film festival called the Black Maria film festival. And it’s based on this thing that Edison created, which, back before they had huge bright lights to shoot the film, he created this giant studio that was actually rotatable. The whole thing could move.
MR: Ohhhh! Right.
AM: So, the sun would cast here and he’d have light coming in from above, I mean the sunlight, and as the film was shot, they would move along so that the light would remain consistent, because they needed tons of light. So it reminds me a bit of that too, the black box. And the way we imagine and think of cinema as a black space. It was interesting because the outside is black and the inside is a wood grain, which isn’t typical of cinemas. Usually you want to absorb as much light as possible inside a cinema.
MR: Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s because they didn’t have time to paint it!
AM: Well no because I think it allows you to understand the architecture and the structure more, because you see it. I think if it was black you’d probably be running into walls.
MR: Yeah, probably. You need that minimal amount of light.
AM: Yeah.
MR: I really like the stepping through the beam thing. The fact of walking through it disrupts the beam of light, I think that’s super interesting.
AM: When you’re sitting there looking at it and you see people putting their hands in front of it you’re immediately reminded of being in a cinema and having someone who is coming in with their popcorn late...
MR: Or doing the rabbit ears (laughs). We were talking yesterday, because it broke, in the afternoon the film broke, I mean it broke again this morning, but we were talking about maybe we could put a shadow puppet show on instead (laughs). Rabbits.
AM: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting the… the level of confidence that Sol had when we started it all, it’s like, “Oh yeah, it’ll run” like you know, “solid as a rock, and this looping mechanism is super great.” And, I had my doubts. I mean it’s a loop, and, I emailed him months ago before I even submitted the film and said, “so we’re going to splice all the films together? There’s going to be splices, running through that projector, every 10 minutes? For 5, 6, 8 hours? That’s a lot of splice time. And splices are the most fragile part as they’re running through the projector, because it’s compromised, it’s got tape on it. Literally two pieces of tape that are holding the two strips of film together. So. We’ll see. We’ll see how long it lasts.
MR: And in an unstaffed projector, too. As well, because that’s the other thing, you know if you watch, like Cinema Paradiso is the limit of my knowledge, but you kind of, uh, have uh… Sorry, it’s just REALLY interesting that people don’t go in. They read it but they don’t go in (Someone must have come up to look at the leaflet.) Oops, they are going in.
AM: There’s another one of the filmmakers, if you want to speak to her.
MR: In the… jeans there?
AM: Yeah, Isabelle.
MR: Great.
AM: She is a talker! You think I’m a talker.
MR: (laughs) Excellent! Um, I was in the middle of a sentence there and I’ve completely forgotten what it was.
AM: Cinema Paradiso.
MR: Yeah, the idea that you have a person in the projection booth because projectors are kind of fragile things, right, and the whole process is a delicate mechanism so you have somebody watching it all to make sure that it’s not going wrong or getting stuck. So if your booth is not staffed, then it’s gonna…
AM: Potentially, yeah.
DMR: It’s a risky thing.
AM: And, there’s a science and art to looping mechanisms, that aluminum spinning disc that’s on top...
MR: Right, because usually...
AM: Normally you’d have two rolls of film.
DMR: You’d have two reels of film and they’d both be vertical, right? They would both be, and you’d have one that was spooling onto the other.
AM: Start at the front and it all feeds onto the back, and then...
MR: And then you rewind it.
AM: Yeah, and then you rewind it. Now because it’s a loop, it’s basically like an endless, like a cartridge, like you used to have in radio stations you would have a cart that would run a PSA, a public service announcement. It ends right where it begins, and starts again. And that means that there’s an edit. And so this thing runs, and then it twists and loops around and re-enters underneath and winds up again. And they got this looper from a lab in London called no.w.here. They actually build these and sell them, so that’s where Sol was like, “Yeah yeah, they make great things,” and now he’s like “well I don’t know how great this...” And there’s a science to it, and I know a few people who actually custom build these things, and it’s just a tricky thing, you’ve got to get it right because tension is central, you’ve got a loop, like a little film loop as it’s moving through the projector and those need to be maintained. So it’s a little tricky…
(Biography Credit: https://www.alexmackenzie.ca/alex_mackenzie_bio.pdf)
Digital Resources created with the aid of
Dr. Julian Brash, Dr. Martha Radice, Dr. Derek Pardue, and Dr. Sheri Lynn Gibbings
Dr. Julian Brash, Dr. Martha Radice, Dr. Derek Pardue, and Dr. Sheri Lynn Gibbings