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Haunted Memory and the Audiovisual Essay: |
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In 2019, the journal Short Film Studies devoted half of an issue (Vol. 9 No. 2) to our audiovisual essay on Víctor Erice, Haunted Memory (2016). The dossier included an illustrated shot list with soundtrack transcription, analytical essays by Gracia Ramírez, Libertad Gills, Federico Bonaddio, Mads Outzen and Hoi Lun Law, plus the following interview and “last word”, which we have slightly amended and updated. Excluded from the dossier was other material we re-present here: our short written introduction to the video piece (which also concludes the book Mysteries of Cinema), and bibliographic notes.
Short Film Studies: “Audiovisual essay” is, for some people, a new or unusual term to describe a short film or video work. Why do you use it, and what does it mean? Cristina & Adrian: We consider what we do, first and foremost, as film criticism – whether it’s a conventionally written text, or an audiovisual piece. So, an audiovisual essay is simply a piece of criticism that, in some way, makes use of the images and sounds of the film or films being studied. There is no set format for our audiovisual essays. Sometimes we use a voice-over narration, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we use words written on screen, and at other times we opt for a ‘pure’ re-montage of fragments from the original. And then there are many other aesthetic, technical and analytic possibilities: split screen, multiple screens, variable motion (slow or fast), superimposition, cropping and vignetting … and that is only on the image track! We have a personal guide-rule: to analyse a film, to reveal something new or significant about it in audiovisual terms, we must proceed to break it apart both horizontally (the linear unfolding of its narrative or structure) and vertically (its synchronisation or fusion of image and sound). So, an audiovisual essay (to speak in generalities for a moment) is not a documentary in any standard sense, and nor is it an essay film (or video) in the way that scholars have come to understand that term. An audiovisual essay (at least in our coining of this term) is a work on an already existing audiovisual object (or group of objects): film, TV show, digital artwork, whatever. It is not an essay on the wide world per se. Of course, one can use any work to comment on many things; our focus, however, is squarely on the created, aesthetic, audiovisual realm. That’s already a lot to deal with! Ultimately, we are not terribly concerned with offering strict definitions of the audiovisual essay or arranging some typology of its forms (as many people, at present, are attempting to provide). Quite simply, we are film critics who are responding to films both analytically and creatively. This can be done purely in writing, or it can be done by re-editing and treating fragments of imagery and sound. And, of course, many audiovisual essays mix, in diverse ways, both words (whether printed or spoken) and audiovisual montage. That is the multi-media or inter-media aspect of this type of approach. For each film, director, genre or motif to which we devote a piece, we try to let the material itself suggest to us how it might best be creatively treated and analysed. We never begin from a set approach or format into which a film must be forcibly reduced to fit. What was the origin of this particular audiovisual essay, Haunted Memory? It began as a commission from Sight and Sound magazine in UK (for whom we have collaboratively written articles and made videos) in August 2016 – to craft a video piece for their online page (edited by Nick Bradshaw), coinciding with a British Film Institute film season devoted to Víctor Erice, and the cinema re-release of his great film, El Sur (1983). The basic idea was to provide some kind of survey or snapshot of Erice’s entire work – which is not vast, since it encompasses only three features [now four, with Close Your Eyes (2023)] and several shorts. We ended up using extracts from almost everything he has made up to 2006. The window of opportunity for the Sight and Sound commission was tight: scarcely a month. But we are usually able to make our audiovisual essays (even the most complex ones) within that time frame, so we took on the job. This first version of Haunted Memory appeared online (tagged, as it has remained, with the incorrect title “Haunted Memories”) on 5 September 2016. Only a month later, in October, James Blackford, then working as a DVD/Blu-ray producer at BFI, contacted us to ask about including our audiovisual essay as an extra on the Blu-ray of El Sur. The BFI’s production team was able, for this version, to enhance the overall image quality. It is the version we most prefer people to see. What type of materials are you working with – video/digital masters of the original films? No. For all our audiovisual essays, we try to source the best quality materials we can, but that quality inevitably varies – especially when dealing, as here, with a multiplicity of films. Also, remember that the films themselves are often quite diverse in their initial technical specifications – different aspect ratios, different colour formats, black and white, different soundtrack densities, and so on. We also work at a particular level of technique and technology: we use the domestic software of Adobe Premiere Pro, on a Mac laptop, as well as Garage Band to record sound. This is not high-end professional gear, yet it has, so far, served us quite well in both making work and allowing it to be published and distributed (sometimes with some technical tweaking, as was the case for Haunted Memory on Blu-ray). An important point to add here, in passing: there is no production budget as such for the type of audiovisual essays we make: once you have a personal computer and the basic tools for editing, you are on your way. So, this is a realm of fully amateur production that has, in our digital age, managed to break, to some extent, into the hitherto professionalised spheres of distribution, exhibition, film festival or art event screenings. When Jean-Luc Godard made The Image Book (2018), he didn’t work very much differently to how we do it – in fact, Godard himself still uses, in the initial phase of his editing, an even simpler technological arrangement than us! Do you write a complete script before beginning your re-editing process? Almost never – sometimes an extremely tight deadline necessitates it, but that’s rarely the case. At most, what we to tend to jot down beforehand are snippets, fragments of text that may be used either as voice-over narration or phrases printed on screen. The less linear, less successive this initial block of writing is, the better. It’s usually not a ‘because x, therefore y’ kind of argumentative or demonstrative narration. This is because, as the piece takes shape in editing, we need the freedom to be able to move some sentences (by now recorded as an audio track) around, eliminate others, go back and re-record something extra to add, and so on. This is what we would like to stress: making an audiovisual essay is (for us, at least) not a matter of following or executing a pre-thought plan, but allowing ourselves to discover something as we digitally move around the diverse materials of image and sound. We try to let the film reveal itself to us better in this disaggregated form. Sometimes we find ourselves going in a completely different direction than we originally envisaged. And we also try to approach this process of essay-making in a truly cinematographic way: in other words, where in writing, one can feel (or be told!) that it’s important to provide explanatory hinges or bridges between each point in a structured argument, in a montage one can precisely and literally make a cut which is a bold leap, a sudden reorientation from one plane to another, one mood to another, one context to another. This is a liberating procedure for previously rational-word-bound types! Haunted Memory is notably different from some of your other audiovisual essays in its approach to voice-over narration. The spoken text is more like an abstract story or poetic meditation than a critical or academic account of a director’s work. That’s correct, and it was entirely intentional on our part. In our other audiovisual pieces on the overall work of a director – such as we have done on Roman Polanski or Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Parts 1 & 2), both of which were commissions for cinémathèques or art galleries in Australia – we had no qualms about adopting the typically impersonal, third person position of a critic, beginning with an assertion in the vein of: “In the films of Polanski, a significant pattern can be traced …”. But with Erice, it immediately felt to us as if this wasn’t really the best or most appropriate way to proceed. In order to pay a genuine homage to these wonderful films, and to really enter into their spirit, we were compelled to explore a more poetic approach. We didn’t want to play a facile game of mimicry (a trap we feel many audiovisualists fall into) – i.e., to somehow make our piece slavishly ‘in the Erice style’ – but we wished to invent a type of audiovisual poem that, while drawing upon Erice’s own recurring obsessions and motifs, would also serve as a fitting tribute to his immense level of artistry. At least, as far as we are humanly, modestly able to approach that level of artistry! In this process, a key element was how we used the voice (it’s Adrian’s voice reading the text): it is more performed as a reading, and more treated with reverberation and other audio effects than we generally employ. One aspect of this was wanting our voice-over track to blend with the extract of Erice’s own voice narrating his La Morte Rouge (2006). Your audiovisual piece does not use a chronological or contextual-historical approach to Erice’s career within Spanish cinema. How did you choose to organise it? We often work with what we call clusters – clusters of motifs. In the case of Erice, we had a loose bundle of such motifs at the outset: light, time, memory, and so on. Not only abstract themes or philosophical concepts, but also certain uncannily recurring situations, such as people looking in shop windows, characters going to a cinema, opening or closing doors – things like that. Not all of these motifs are even foreseen by us at the outset: we find them inside the timeline of Premiere, as it were. Over the course of editing, these clusters often arrange themselves into sequences, segments … and then, ultimately, we arrive at an overall form for the entire piece. When we interweave diverse fragments from a director’s work (by the way, we hate the popular term mash-up, since we are not merely mashing these things up!), we never place identifying tags on the screen, such as the various film titles (instead, we list such information in the end credits). We are more interested in evoking or shaping a certain apprehension, an idea or sense of that director’s work. Our motto is: if people are intrigued by the audiovisual essay, then they might themselves go and explore all the films in their full breadth and depth! How widely has this audiovisual essay been screened and seen? What, in general, are the exhibition and distribution opportunities for this type of creative-critical work? As we’ve said, it’s on a BFI Blu-Ray, and also remains online via Sight and Sound – no longer on their own website, but their YouTube link for it has recorded over 14,000 viewings, which is not bad for this kind of piece. It has also been screened at London’s Birkbeck University in an event (affiliated with the Essay Film Festival) devoted to our work, where we were present to talk with the audience (late 2016); at a workshop in Torino (February 2017) where we screened our work and gave a lecture, and the participants developed their own audiovisual essays; and at a specially curated audiovisual essay program at the Ghent Film Festival in Belgium (October 2017). In general, our works tend to be especially selected for screening in this fashion, beyond their online life; we ourselves do not often submit them to film festivals and the like. But the exhibition landscape is constantly changing, and greater opportunities for the theatrical screening of such pieces are emerging. Mainly, we take the various online platforms (including digital sales of our compilations) as the essential home of our work in this mode. Finally, did Erice himself play any part in the making of Haunted Memory? Did he give his blessing to it, or approve it being made? Did he express any opinion of the final result? In
general, we never approach living filmmakers before, or during,
working on an audiovisual essay about them – just as film critics
usually do not confer with filmmakers before writing their articles.
We have been lucky in that, when certain directors eventually
discovered our pieces, online or at a screening event, they liked and
were flattered by what we did – this was the case with Brian
De Palma, Philippe
Grandrieux, and Erice himself (bear
in mind that Erice has his own, ongoing audiovisual essay project
with the working title of Memory and
Dream, previewed in written texts such
as his wonderful piece on Chaplin’s City
Lights [1931]). It’s significant to
us that such filmmakers are not vexed by legal copyright questions;
they are simply happy for their work to be enthusiastically,
sympathetically analysed, and thus, in this sense, well promoted.
Erice – probably typical among the world’s filmmakers – was not
only not aware of us making an audiovisual essay; he did not even know that
the BFI were producing a Blu-ray of El
Sur! The buying of rights and the
releasing of product often bypasses the filmmaker altogether,
especially when the film is not recent (and if the director is not
also a rights-holding producer). So, it was on finally receiving a
copy of the Blu-ray (on our prompting) that Erice saw Haunted
Memory, and he wrote to us to say (in
English, moreover): “It’s a good job”. That was sweet music for
our audiovisual souls! 2. Introduction to Haunted Memory The following brief text was composed to accompany the initial online release of Haunted Memory on the website of Sight and Sound magazine in September 2016. Sometimes, a text of this sort is deemed appropriate or necessary by the hosts/publishers of audiovisual essays; we do not insist on it ourselves. However, when obliged to provide it, we take the opportunity to include material we discarded during the making of the piece (such as the Rohdie quote, which we initially envisaged as appearing on-screen after the final image, but decided was too dense or obtuse to work as a coda in this way), or that provides a general context beyond the bounds of what we were able to indicate in the montage itself. Film clips, especially from old Hollywood films great and ordinary, loom large in the cinema of Spanish director Víctor Erice (born 1940): from Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) as featured in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), to Basil Rathbone in The Scarlet Claw (1944), figuring in the short La Morte Rouge (2006), made by Erice as part of a museum exhibition shared with Abbas Kiarostami. In El Sur (1983), he goes so far as to invent his own, exact pastiche of an imaginary melodrama in black and white, Flor en la sombra (‘Flower in the Shadow’), which his central characters see at a local movie house. In his lyrical writings on cinema, too, Erice pursues a reflection that is close to that of many current practitioners of the audiovisual essay. In 1989, he suggested that it is: … possible to isolate a series of scenes – of privileged moments – that synthesize the best part of the movies they comprise, one which, once discovered, gives the impression of passing over a threshold, as if images revealed life’s multiple truths. (1) For Erice, these truths of life are linked, above all, to memory – the rich, Proustian sense-memory that is formed during childhood and adolescence, and to which his adult characters are virtually condemned to return, whether in rapturous joy or (more often) melancholic regret. Although Erice has made comparatively few films since the 1960s, and found himself blocked from realising several key projects that he extensively prepared, the poetic coherence of his work is, nonetheless, stunning. From film to film, similar images, sounds, situations, settings – as well as an unmistakeable and precise mood – recur, caught in the same entrancing web of haunted memory. (2) In his final book Film Modernism, the scholar Sam Rohdie (who died in 2015) evoked the atmosphere of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) in words very close to those that Erice wrote about this same film when he was a young critic in the mid 1960s. (3) Rohdie: The present, because already a past, becomes nostalgia for what has been lost even as what has been lost comes into being, a future already of the past, that reaches out towards the moments of its disappearance. Sweetness, perhaps something closer to ecstasy, is to seize those moments. (4)
We are grateful to Richard Raskin and to the contributors in the Short Film Studies dossier on our audiovisual essay Haunted Memory. Every commentator – including Richard himself in his initiating choice of our work for inclusion in the journal – has grasped the nature of the strange, hybrid beast that the audiovisual essay form is: it is, like all criticism and analysis, a commentary on pre-existing work, while at the same time being (to a greater or lesser extent, in each given case) a creative, potentially poetic work in its own right. Is the audiovisual format a way for film criticism to overcome the long-held accusation against it that it is merely parasitic on the art of others? Or, as Roland Barthes once asked: “How can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure?” We believe that the audiovisual essay can take that report to another level – to the level of an act, or a gesture. Almost every contribution to the dossier rehearses the by now well-known continuum first suggested by Christian Keathley, a continuum bound by two polarities: the explanatory and the poetic. In the hothouse world of audiovisual essayism (defined, the world over, by proudly independent amateurs online as much as academics or professionals in the field), we have come to believe that too much emphasis is placed on spoken, voice-over text as the privileged vehicle or thread of explanation. It has become the crutch that too many practitioners (and/or their commissioning editors and publishers) fear they cannot proceed without. The voice is (it would seem) where the message or the point of the audiovisual work resides. In a faint echo of this prevailing trend, much of the commentary in the dossier concentrates on (or at least begins from) the voice element of Haunted Memory. We appreciate the fact that the writers describe this voice as (variously) tentative, lyrical, reserved, even fictional in its intent and mode. Perhaps none fully realised how much of it is a weave of rewritten, sometimes cryptic/secret citations, and thus a text in the special sense given to that word in the 1960s and ‘70s by Barthes and many others. (5) We continue to affirm that the essential gesture of the audiovisual essay – at least in our vision and practice of it – is audiovisual montage. The spoken word is only one element in that montage, and not necessarily the most important one. Audio plus visual means image plus sound, fused in a set sequence but heterogeneous in substance: not a detached voice commenting on a distant, separate object (a film or set of films, however organised and arranged as objects of study on which to report). The thread of argument in an audiovisual essay is provided by its flow of associations, comparisons, juxtapositions – all the different registers and levels of montage as Sergei Eisenstein and subsequent fellow-travellers have conjured it, and continue to conjure it. Ultimately (as we have well learned by now, sometimes to our chagrin), this fact of montage-essence is a provocative challenge to the spectators of audiovisual essays, even more than to their makers or present-day theorists. Spectators at all levels, from academics and critics to teachers and DVD consumers, from commissioning editors to film/video festival programmers. As Cristina wrote in her Laugh Motel blog entry of September 2018: I like to write with words, images and sounds. Folding and unfolding what others do. Pushed by the persistence of certain details, lost in a current of infinite quotations. I like to experience the jolt of a good connection, the dive to a deeper plane, a sudden change of rhythm, an unexpected turn of thought. There’s nothing quite as wonderful as the combination of the poetic and the analytical. But try telling that to people … 1. Víctor Erice, “Can You See Now?: A Detailed Commentary About a Sequence in City Lights” (1989), in Linda C. Ehrlich (ed.), An Open Window: The Cinema of Víctor Erice (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2000), pp. 54-55. We have corrected the clumsy punctuation of the translation. back 2. The term “haunted memory” has been used to describe films including The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964) and India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975). We would add (at least) Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) and the entire oeuvre of Erice to this list. back 3. In his City Lights essay (see note 1), Erice makes a connection between intimate subject matter (such as memory, ageing and desire) and a larger, socio-historical context: “An intimate necessity pushes us, undoubtedly to recuperate them [i.e., special images from childhood] – a necessity that is in many instances the symptom of a loss, the testimony of a social failure” (An Open Window, p. 55). This meshing of the personal and the socio-historical is a theme announced as early as 1964 in Erice’s career when, in a review of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), adapted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s classic novel, he discusses “the Lampedusian relationship to the Proustian vision of life” (quoted in An Open Window, p. 73). back 4. Sam Rodhie, Film Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 99. back 5. The opening on-screen quotations of our video derive from An Open Window; the first is from an interview (p. 46), and the second from the director’s 1989 essay on Chaplin’s City Lights (p. 55). The theme of trauma that we pursue was suggested by Erice’s 1999 obituary tribute to the French critic-filmmaker Alain Philippon (see below): “He was particularly preoccupied by questions surrounding childhood, fear and cinema; questions which, in his personal evolution, he had not yet entirely resolved. When he said all that, he seemed to allude to a sort of trauma …” (Philippon, Le blanc des origines, pp. 312-3; our translation from the French translation of Erice’s original Spanish, emphasis in the text). Erice remarks in this piece that Philippon’s critical trajectory revealed “a particular sensibility, a true singularity” that “found a familiar echo in me” (ibid., p. 312). Philippon committed suicide in 1998 at the age of 51. Finally, the line in our video, “Something has already passed; the fabric of things is going to disappear; the story is about to end”, appropriates and rewrites a beautiful line from Alain Philippon’s 1988 Cahiers du cinéma review of El Sur: “Le passage a eu lieu, le père va disparaître, le film va finir” (reprinted in Philippon’s posthumous collection Le blanc des origins, Éditions Yellow Now, p. 288). In the translation by Charlotte Sanpere-Godard in An Open Window, this is rendered (somewhat prosaically) as: “The passage occurred; the father is going to disappear; the film is going to end”. We have made the (secret, cryptic) gesture of restoring its poetry. back
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin September 2016/ January 2017 / May & 30 September 2018 |