Wie bei unserer Vorstellung bei Filmfest Bremen gestern versprochen, veröffentlichen wir hier die beiden Email-Interviews, die wir mit dem Regisseur von „The Eggregores‘ Theory”, Andrea Gatopoulos, und der Co-Regisseurin von „Invention“, Courtney Stephens, geführt haben.
Beginnen wir mit Courtney Stephens, die zu unserer sehr großen Freude zusammen mit Callie Hernandez den Preis für „Best Innovative Storytelling“ gewonnen hat.
COURNTEY STEPHENS, „INVENTION“
Who had the initial idea to come up with this movie? Was it you or Callie Hernandez?
The film was a close collaboration. Callie and I knew each other through friends, and after her dad died had some long conversations about daughters losing dads, and the idea of making a film came about naturally, though it wasn’t always going to draw so much on real life.
At which point the archive of Callie’s father came into play and how did it became part of the script. How was the development?
The film is not scripted, it is largely improvised – but the idea of using clips of Callie’s actual dad came about pretty far into the process. There are aspects of the dad in the movie that resemble her dad but the plot of the story is purely fictional, and somewhat more related to my own dad’s profession (he was an entrepreneur).
You often did documentaries and features with a real background. Are that themes, in which you are really interested in or are you also planning a purely fictional feature in the future?
Thanks – I’m also naturally kind of a researcher, and nonfiction is a fun place to work in the world of ideas and form. But it was very interesting to work in fiction and explore emotion more directly. But I think I’ll probably always want to incorporate reality into the work – it brings a specific energy.
Apart from your personal story: Do you think this kind of general distrust is part of American or western society today? Do we all suffer from poisoned nostalgia?
I like the term, poisoned nostalgia! We are in a very strange time, don’t you think? On the one hand, no one believes in anything anymore – and at the same time, people will believe in almost anything. Do you know what I mean? My personal feeling is our experience integrating technology into human life has failed, and this kind of distrust is kind of the proof. We are probably not meant to live so much in fantasy space.
Conspiracy theories are a large part in your movie. What do you think, why people fall for Conspiracy theories and are you interested in or fascinated by those sometimes crazy theories?
Well, I think looking for explanations is very natural and human. And when you can’t get a reasonable explanation for something, like „why does the prosperous American life I was promised seem totally impossible?“ I guess with any kind of grief you either accept the disappointment, which can make life feel smaller, or you kind of reject is and find another story, and that feels, at least temporarily, like a larger space to inhabit.
Both you and Callie were dealing with the deaths of your fathers and it seems from what we get to know in the movie, that they were complicated men, but full of fantasy and enthusiasm. Is this correct or is the father in the movie more a wish, how they should haven been?
We both had dads who were larger than life eccentric men. And this meant that in certain ways they were hard men to entirely know. I think that quality, when you have a parent like that, can open up a lot of space to dream, but it is also painful – especially when they’re gone. So the attempt to keep on knowing someone, to find a way back to them through helping them achieve their fantasy, that is the film’s own fantasy.
About the material you used to shot the film. There are those old video tapes, but also it looks like you used real film like 16mm sometimes. Was this an effected created in post production or did you in fact shot on “real film”?
We shot the whole film on Super 16mm. Most of the archival is video, so we actually felt that the 16mm would separate the „cinematic“ world from the „real“ world of the archival materials. So, in the movie we are kind of in a fantasy of loss and processing grief, and then the real archive is the source of the fantasy story.
What are your current projects?
I’m working on a film about The Wizard of Oz, and I have a new film out about John C Lilly, dolphin and psychedelics researcher. Another wizard!
ANDREA GATOPOULOS / „THE EGGREGORES‘ THEORY“
Please tell us something about your background.
The last few years I have dealt a lot with a sort of primal fear that I have which is very common in our generation and it is the fear of the future. It takes more and more the shape of technology which is being used in warfare, population control, media and politics. That’s why my last films all deal with that. I also come from a strange adolescence, where I had a double life. During the day I was a normal school kid trying to be cool, and at night I was a pro-player, playing tournaments for Italy national’s team. My friends didn’t know about this, and I was always ashamed of it, so at some point I had to bring the digital back into my life and understand why I was so drawn to it. I understood it’s much more intimately connected to my psychology than I could imagine.
I have this sense of catastrophe, of impending doom, because of my family history, because of my fear of poverty, and because of the ramping up of technological control tools, and I try to exorcise them in my films.
How did you get the idea for your film?
I’m not exactly sure because it came to be as a combination of different films I was writing, and it’s very hard to trace back ideas to their origins, but I think that the humus that nurtured this idea came from the post-COVID cancel culture. The fact that an opinion, an idea, can be poisonous, can lead to obliteration of the human dignity of a person. We got hold, during this time, of the first 21st century example of „prohibited words“ or ideas. Like the crime is now in thought, and not in action – which is a sign of totalitarianism. I also have the feeling that the world we live now is already dystopic, and in the most worrysome way, because we think we enjoy it.
The Voice is provided by David Rumsey, an American map collector, with
whom you already did a documentary. Why did you cast him in “Eggregores’Theory”?
David’s voice is very beautiful, deep and melancholic, but also the voice of someone innocent, inherently good. He „gave“ it to me and I cloned it with his consent. The acting is mine and then I converted it to his voice using AI.
Is the “deadly word”, which causes the deaths, a metaphor for misinformation from the social media , which may pollute our minds and is in fact changing culture and societies?
In my take – given that I have never decided for myself which was the epistemological truth behind the story, so you can make your own mind whether this could be true or not – there is no deadly word at all probably. It might be just the scapegoat that whatever government they have is using to keep them silent, to kill and to limit and control their behavior. It’s what the protagonist understands that happened, but not necessarily what has happened. I wanted to deal with an unreliable narrator, which doesn’t understand what happened and clings to superstition. „The Eggregores‘ theory“ is the dominant superstition in this dystopic world.
When did you get the idea to use a kind of “broken AI” for the images and the music?
I already had this project in mind for a couple of years, to use the glitch aesthetic of broken AI images for a film. For a while, it took the form of different, narrative story, but I couldn’t connect coherently the style to the content. But in this case, it really represented to me the idea of a memory archive that has been taken, put into a machine, censored and given back almost unreadable, impossible to really understand. The same goes for sound. Imagine a machine takes all your memories and checks them and synthesizes them before giving them back to someone. That was the idea.
Am 13. April um 20:00 Uhr ist es im Cinema Ostertor soweit – wir zeigen endlich einen der unserer Meinung nach besten Filme aller Zeiten. Andrzej Żuławskis radikales Opus Magnum POSSESSION. Mit grenzensprengenden Schauspielleistungen von Isabelle Adjani und Sam Neill, eine kaum zu ertragende Anspannung und allgegenwärtige Paranoia, die entfesselte Kamera Bruno Nuyttens und extreme Gewalteruptionen – das alles in nächster Nähe zur Berliner Mauer. Weshalb POSSESSION oftmals auch „der ultimative Berlin-Film“ genannt wird.
Der fragmentarisch erzählte POSSESSION kennt keine Regeln. Getrieben von der fantastischen Musik Andrzej Korzynskis taumeln, rennen, stolpern seine Figuren durch die graue Mauerstadt. Für Isabelle Adjanis Ausnahme-Performance gab es den DarstellerInnen-Preis in Cannes und den César.
„Possession“ scheint ein Horrorfilm zu sein und beginnt als eheliches Eifersuchtsdrama, aber von Anfang an ist er viel mehr als das. Die Eifersucht macht bei allen Beteiligten die Tür zum Wahnsinn auf. Sie zerfetzt die Oberfläche und legt offen, was verborgen bleiben sollte. „Possession“ ist das „Theater der Grausamkeit“, das Antonin Artaud verlangte; man versteht, weshalb die meisten Menschen im Leben an der Oberfläche bleiben wollen statt in dieses tiefe, psychische Desaster zu tauchen. „Nicht aufmachen, nicht aufmachen“, warnt und fleht Marks und Annas Kind nicht von ungefähr, als das Unheimliche wieder in ihr Haus will. – Sylvia Szymanski, Hard Sensations
„Possession“ muss man sehen. Nicht bloß, weil er über eine atemberaubende Kameraführung verfügt, die Berlin in erschreckend schöne Weitwinkelbilder bringt und den Zuschauer mehr und mehr in einen ekstatischen Taumel versetzt. Er brennt sich gerade deshalb so nachdrücklich ein, weil sich seine Bilder eben nicht vollständig in Begriffe rückübersetzen lassen, nach ihrer Übersetzung immer ein Rest übrig bleibt, der seine Schatten wirft. – Oliver Nöding, f-lm
„Zulawski verschmilzt in „Possession“ Elemente des europäischen Autorenkinos und des amerikanisch geprägten Genrefilms zu etwas ebenso Neuem wie Fremdem. „Possession“ ist ein Alien von einem Film. Allerdings kein freundlicher Alien, wie Steven Spielbergs fast zeitgleich entstandener Kassenschlager „E.T.“, sondern eher so etwas wie ein früher filmischer Vorläufer zur Musik von Aphex Twin.“ – Gregor Torinus, Filmstarts.de
„In Possession geht es nur oberflächlich um eine erbitterte Ehekrise, mit der Zulawski seine eigene Scheidung von der Schauspielerin Malgorzata Braunek verarbeitet hat. Der Film ist stattdessen ein verstörender Mix aus schleimig-abstoßenden Genre-Elementen, das Porträt einer geteilten Stadt, die immer noch vom Krieg gezeichnet ist, und eine apokalyptische Höllenfahrt.“ – Patrick Reinbott, Moviepilot
„Vor diesem Hintergrund lässt sich Żuławskis großer Trennungsfilm als komplexe Untersuchung der Spaltung von Gut und Böse verstehen, wobei sich das Böse fern jeder Eindeutigkeit sowohl im Selbstverlust durch eine dämonische oder politische Übermacht auftut als auch in den Abgründen zwischen zwei Menschen, die einander nicht mehr verstehen. Żuławski hat in »Possession« zu einer unverwechselbaren Ausdrucksweise für ein vielschichtiges biographisches Leiden gefunden, die sich in Form eines einzigen cinematographischen Schreis vermittelt, der es unbedingt wert ist, noch einmal in den Kinos gehört zu werden.“ – Timo Lindeman, Jungle World
