exhausterated-blog - Tumblr blog

exhausterated-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Interview: Terrence Nance on AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY

(note: this interview was conducted for I-D in 2013; they failed to compensate me for it and then took it offline for some reason, so I figured I’d repost here in honor of Nance’s new HBO series RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS, made in collaboration with Darius Clarke Monroe, Nuotama Bodomo, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Jamund Washington and Mariama Diallo. enjoy - SM, 08.07.18)

The first astonishing thing about AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION is that it exists. The second, after talking with filmmaker/star Terence Nance, is how meticulously constructed it is. Produced by Jay-Z, dream hampton, Wyatt Cenac and Joy Bryant, OVERSIMPLIFICATION is some kind of somersault, a shapeshifting essay film (think Chris Marker, or EXTREME PRIVATE EROS) on director/ artist Terence Nance’s undying love for a woman named Namik. It sees him – and her – entangled with his feelings across film formats, years and continents, spanning hand-drawn animation, home video, psychoanalysis, therapeutic (or not) reenactments, CGI, stop-motion…. the works. If ever a film seemed improvised, it’s this one; Nance’s design isn’t just deliberate, it’s obsessive. The movie’s threads of narrative (and myriad narrators) drolly undercut themselves, just a blink of an eye before you get a chance to; even when xeroxing his memories into neat stacks, Nance hands the mic to Namik when you least expect it. Whenever Nance seems at risk of confession-cam wankery, he manages instead to tap a deep vein of psychological insight, toggling between gushing joy and a clear-eyed, bitterly adult remorse. As the velvet-throated narrator says early in Nance’s knockout debut, “a sweetness prevails.” How long have you been working on this? From the day I started it to today, it’s been six years. At one point I wanted it to be the ugliest movie ever made, like, a total piece of shit, shot exclusively on phones from 2005 or Beta Max news cameras. My director of photography talked me out of it. Some of those pieces are still in the final product, but we shot on the DVX100 (miniDV), DSLRs, shot a little bit on film, cell phone footage is in there, just, everything. I mean, I originally approached this as an artist, not as a director. I don’t know if you noticed but the first moment and the last moment are the same – the film was supposed to play on a loop, originally. You use a lot of ancient Egyptian imagery in the movie. Is there a hidden pattern to that, or is it just stuff you like, that you wanted to put in the movie? I grew up in a very African-centric household, so when I’m thinking about timeless images of space – not outer space, just space – I default to hieroglyphs, khematic imagery. I also fall back on art deco, which I think is very sourced in that. There’s a repeated motif, with this stop-motion puppet of yourself, stumbling – letting the girl see you stumble. Isn’t it a compliment if you let someone see you stumble? That’s about composure. I think a lot, specifically in my relationship with Namik, it kinda hinged on this strange dance in which I perceived her to be attracted to my ability to keep my composure around her. Between her and other women I fell in Love with, I noticed a trend, you don’t ever wanna be caught flippin’ out (laughs), or more specifically being needy, or coming from a place of emotional vulnerability. Stoicism makes you seem extremely composed – the whole movie is about that. That moment in the film is like, a microcosm of what’s going on. Actual composure vs. presentation. Exactly. The film is a document of having lost composure, you know what I mean? Within the context of the interaction I was having with Namik, I was still kind of hyperaware of that. In order to maintain whatever it was we had, I could not lose my composure. I had to come off as calm, cool and collected. It seems like a double whammy for you – this is a highly personal, flammable movie, and it’s also your big debut to the world… I think it is, but the movie seems much more personal than it really is. The amount of information actually disclosed about me is extremely limited. The film is personal but I viewed its execution the same as I would’ve viewed any other film about any other subject… I think, I always wondered subconsciously if the effort I was putting in warranted the scope of the final product. That was always difficult but what pushed me through is that I connected the film’s completion to my credibility as a human being. I told everyone I knew that I was working on it so if I never finished people would have thought of me as a flake. It was very strange, definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t imagine raising kids is tougher than making one’s first feature film. Nowadays it’s kind of commonly accepted that distribution, itself, is the final piece of the production process. It’s strange – I’m really against that assumption. On some level it’s obviously a sound assumption given the state of the industry, but including distribution in production hurts how prolific a filmmaker can be. Distribution diverts a whole shitload of energy from making art into getting the art in front of people. Presumably, there should be someone committed to doing that, for whom that is their expertise, but the nature of the economy is such that even if you have distribution, people on your production team, they still need the director to maintain momentum and energy throughout distribution, especially on small art films. That constant day to day involvement in distribution hurts the long-term proclivity of art filmmakers. So you’re pushing back against one set of precedents or another, even when the film is done. Well, at Q&As, people consistently respond in one way or another to the fact that the film tells the story of a not-so-explored masculine character – a young emotionally vulnerable Black male. There’s this socially aware / activist energy present in reading the film for any “activist” intent in exploring that under-explored archetype. I’m aware that you do not see that character often, but I made the film so Namik would fall in love with me, it was an impulsive decision to make the film at all. It had nothing to do with me raging agains the machine and showing Black males cry by any means necessary! So a very small sub-section of the critical response hasn’t been accurate to my headspace when making the film. It was for her, about her, about us. At the same time, at the end of the day, something like this has not come along in a while, and that’s a valuable discussion. Why aren’t there enough films about Black men who are emotionally vulnerable? Why isn’t that a popular image in films? etc. I’m glad that discussion is being had around my film. You mentioned you finished a script called THE LOBBYIST, which you’re now casting, and you mentioned wanting to start shooting while OVERSIMPLIFICATION was being released – kinda as a joke, to avoid the release. There’s a lot of energy you gotta put into releasing a feature film theatrically, and it makes you realize that what you really wanna do with your time is MAKE films. The energy and feedback I get from screening the film is great, but it’s very clear to me that I’m most at ease and in my element when I am at home making stuff, writing, drawing and singing, and no matter how much the world tries to revise what a filmmaker is to encapsulate the process of presenting and distributing the film, this process has really made me learn that, y’know, my purpose is to make things. So I’m really trying to get back into that energy aggressively and conscientiously. Most days, I can’t, I’m still in the middle of this release, and luckily this film’s success heavily influences and enables the next project. So… I can’t, like, slack off.

(photo by Barbara Anastacio)

#terrence nance #an oversimplification of her beauty #freelancing #film

6 notes · View notes

exhausterated-blog · 9 years ago

Text

Interview: Hubert Sauper, WE COME AS FRIENDS

If only for Jafar Panahi’s Taxi and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, 2015 would have been a phenomenal year for documentaries that made no bones about the person behind the camera. To that list, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper’s We Come As Friends needs adding - a video-collage of Sauper’s travels within Sudan in the years before, during, and after its 2011 partitioning into two countries. Sauper zigzags across the two countries in a scrappy biplane wearing made-up military garb, touching down and taking off wherever he sees fit, whipping out his camera and capturing fleeting encounters like he’s on a filmmaking kamikaze mission. From these, Sauper has stitched together a panorama of late capitalism can only be called hellish: Chinese oilworkers living in service-camps at the behest of the government of Omar al-Bashir; children learning to play among smoggy garbage dumps; Texan missionaries intent on converting black villagers into Christians by means of a solar-powered audio Bible; military strongmen and Western “entrepreneurs” who, alike, are figuring out how to profit from the war between the two countries.

If the last 20 years of digital video have seen a mushrooming quantity of social-justice docs contingent on their makers’ relationships (or, to put it more bluntly, access) to their subjects/“characters”, Sauper could not be less interested in this approach if he tried. While describing himself as a “court jester”, he’s also a keen student of great power politics, and duly sees the two Sudans permeated by American and Chinese zones of influence. We Come As Friends takes pains to portray the arbitrary borderlines and namesakes handed down from previous generations of colonizers, simultaneously acknowledging and - in its best moments - deconstructing the privilege of its own undeniably Western perspective. By the film’s end, having borne witness is begets a kind of survivor’s guilt unto itself - and while this approach sometimes runs the risk of tendentiousness or gotcha-journalism, it also represents one of the year’s very most intrepid acts of documentary expression. -SM

So... When you’re shooting hours and hours and hours of footage, how do you arrive at the moments in conversation that you’ll end up including in the final film? How can you tell? Or is it all figured out in the edit?

Well, believe it or not, my movies are quite conceptual; a lot of situations are out of pure coincidence, but they are not a surprise, so to say. A lot of the scenes I have filmed, I’ve seen before, over and over, in other situations - similar situations in similar parts of the world. When I see a western representative, an ambassador, let’s say, talking to the locals, I know in advance what he’s going to say, more or less. It’s no surprise, it’s just an extra bonus when he spits out a line like, “We bring you light, literally and figuratively.” I actually knew he was gonna say that. So I am catching, in my documentaries, impressions which I essentially have already, and which I just try to communicate now, out of these moments in reality.

The second thing is, how to encounter a subject? The idea for this whole film was to mimic the narrative of science fiction, which is basically the penetration of time and space into the unknown, and it’s the encounter of the Other, so to say - right? The aliens, people you don’t know, haven’t heard about. So I was trying to mimic this narrative, so it’s like I needed a vessel, or a little airplane, so to say, a spaceship; so, this is one of the reasons why it’s not a character-driven film. You encounter one character and your journey goes further on.

To build on that a little bit: talk about the conceptual part, insofar as it meant working yourself and your plane into the onscreen narrative.

It’s the second part of the same question, in a way: science fiction narrative is a post-colonial, or even mid-colonial, narrative. It’s like, the journeys of Captain James Kirk into space, in Star Trek, are a direct translation of the journeys of Captain James Cook into the Pacific. The same words are used, by the way, from the actual diary of the real Captain Cook. So again: the little airplane, and me as its captain, I had to introduce in the beginning of the film, in a way that you are, as a spectator, on this journey. With us. You are onboard this plane, so to say. I didn’t want to be a character that is kind of carrying the film, like Michael Moore would carry - he would carry it, right? As the figure going through the film?

Front and center, yeah.

I didn’t want that because I’m not a good performer, and I’m much better at holding a camera and talking to people than I am at being on camera. But I still needed a few shots of myself in the beginning of the film to kind of make the nature of this endeavor understandable, basically; that you understand you are really on board with the thing.

What about instances where your “concept” was challenged, upended or negated by what you found? I assume making a movie like this requires you to be unbelievably quick on your feet.

Well, the thing is: when you go on a trip, a quest of searching, with questions for which you will never really find answers, it’s like, what the hell, really, are we all doing here? What is going on? This is basically the question, and not you or not I would ever have a real answer to that. Right? First of all, the quest itself is a joy, and once you find a certain base, or a certain frequency, of seeing the world or asking questions, a certain sensibility to certain things, then you usually see much more than you would have expected. You hear things between the lines which no one else would hear; no one else would have the same kind of sensibilities, looking for certain things.

When somebody says something like, “Why are the Africans still 200 years behind? Nobody knows,” - and this could be a line heard in any bar, anywhere in Africa, with NGOs, and practically nobody would even hear it. When you think of it, when you hear it, and when you hear the amplitude of it, the history in it. Or when one of the warlords says, “We Africans are too stupid; we need you to bring us tractors and help us develop”, you know, you can hear the echo of centuries in it, it’s terrifying history. Mindsets. Right? It’s not very obvious unless you tune into it - that’s the word, I think: to tune into it. And I can help the audience start tuning into it, and when you are, as a viewer, in the film fully, you also experience something absolutely amazing as an audience. You experience things, you don’t feel like the filmmaker is telling you things. The film makes you feel you are on this crazy journey yourself. That’s my game and my aim. I don’t want to tell people what they should think, or with my voiceover, what they are seeing - I don’t want to impose my sets of analyses on top of what you see, because that’s, in itself, a patriarchal act, so to say.

The film is entirely made of original footage; it’s a confrontational work about a specific line of sight, maybe, on Sudan - and some aspects carry over to quote-unquote “Africa” at large. You seem like the opposite of one of these filmmakers who does a press junket saying, “I wanted the film to feel like a Sudanese could have made it”, or “I wanted to make a film for the people of Sudan…”

No. No. No. I mean, it would be very hard to deny being a white man in this context. (Laughs) To say I’m like everyone else. So I kind of exaggerated this stake by giving myself a pilot’s uniform and four stars on my shoulders. Which is, you know, it’s like the summit of ridicule, basically. And I wanted to ridicule, also, this kind of militaristic, colonial world, you know? I cannot say I want this film to be for anything. I just want the film to be; I have to make it, it’s out there, and I’d love for Sudanese audiences to see it, but the reality is that most people in the film, not only don’t they see it, but they don’t even see daylight anymore because their villages were bombed and burned and bulldozed by soldiers, you know.

A lot of places you see in my film are not even there anymore, so it’s almost…. the people in the film who have a chance to see the movie are the ones who are targeted. Warlords and politicians. Which gives me a certain strange satisfaction. That they may see their hypocrisies laid bare. I’m not an “issue-driven” filmmaker; I don’t say I am making films for the world to be better, you know. First of all, when you say that, you have to be sure what “better” is, and for who? Why? Because that’s the whole dilemma, that’s the essence of the film is: Each player has their sense of values which are so clear, so sure, for them. The collection of all that becomes this mess we are living in, on a planetary scale, I would say. Each one says, this is the truth. This is what we have to do. This is development. It’s like if I were to say, “I know who you should marry, I know how you should live,” etc. “I know that your garden should belong to me, by the way.” Is that good or bad? It’s good for me, bad for you - so this whole dilemma is the essence of my film.

The movie shows people living in complete ruin, yet kind of in the shadow of other people’s high-mindedness, their idealism, their philosophical certainty. A tragic disconnect.

Right. That’s what I want you to feel, to sense. As a filmmaker, I’m very fine if the audience are confused and maybe even angry, getting out of the cinema - puzzled, intrigued, fascinated, ideally, by the many layers of… um, how do you say it? Discrepancies, layers of contradictions. When you’re sure about something and suddenly that certitude becomes overthrown, that’s a very creative moment for you. Then you kind of have to reconsider your thinking, and I think movies and books can do that. Do you agree with that?

I do - of all things, it reminds me of something the screenwriter and philosopher Larry Gross posted on Twitter the other day. He said, “If it’s true, it will appear in the form of an insult to your intelligence.”

That’s a good one.

Your film has moments like that, like the UN employee with his model of the Sudanese town, with the little mock-up of an ice cream shoppe - his daughter’s idea. It’s impossible to believe he doesn’t have a superior who’d advise him against talking about that. And yet… When you’re interviewing these people, do you have to explain to them what the movie is gonna be? Do you have to lie, to flatter them?

I don’t flatter people. I try to be as clear as possible. I sometimes ask naive questions, you know. Because I’m naturally a bit of a clown, or a king’s jester, I enjoy that position a bit, but I also think a certain level of naivety has more truth than a supposed high level of truth or analysis. When I talk to a specialist, like the head of the UN project, I don’t want him to be a specialist in front of my camera, spitting out all the stuff he does all the time anyway, right? I want to go on a different level with him. The ice cream shoppe; there’s nothing wrong with somebody wanting an ice cream shoppe, right? It just becomes amazing in the context of the movie. There’s nothing wrong about a kid asking, “Where’s my gun?” Most kids in the world say that, basically, right? It’s just that place, that point in the film, that point in your life as a spectator in the film, you hear that and some kind of fuse blows in your brain. For me that’s the most fascinating thing about cinema, it’s like a chemical, you know, process - you put two little things together and it goes, BOOF! and blows up.

The specialist in the UN has his little model, you know? Why was I interested in this little model of future Sudan? Because I’d be flying over the “old” Sudan and see these little houses on the outside of the campus in the model, which is kind of insane. So this is what’s left over from the old life, basically. Of course I engage in a conversation about that, because my senses are sharpened to the, you can call it, the victory of the square over the circle, right? (Laughs)

Arriving at a moment like that: doesn’t it require you to spend a ton of time with these people? And the conversations with actual Sudanese people, too?

The question has many answers. One of them is: sometimes, as I meet people for the first time, the camera is running, and I ask if it’s okay for me to record our encounter. I don’t do interviews, just record conversations basically, right? I meet this young man, a westerner, who does de-mining, right? I meet him for the first time, and I can film him all day, but it doesn’t mean I’ve met him for the first time, because I’ve met hundreds of his kind. My brain is tuned into what he’s going to say, more or less, and what he is. So I kind of meet him, but I feel like I’ve known him for a long time, because I’ve been studying his tribe and his psychology for years. Sometimes you spend a lot of time to come to a certain moment of confidence, which is the best-case; other times, you just encounter people and there’s just something happening. It’s like in life: you can spend an evening in a bar, meet a complete stranger, and have the most amazing conversation out of the blue - because you are in the right mood, because you are available for this person, because this person is also open to you - and something amazing happens. You could be a friend forever more, and the opposite too; sometimes you know people for half of your life and nothing really new happens. (Laughs)

Ultimately, what you do in this kind of work, filmmaking, is you record your own fascinations about things and about the world and about, you know, the fact that the world is not what it appears to be, a lot of times. It’s the discrepancy between the discourse, what is behind the discourse, and then what is behind that, even. All these different layers of reality, you know. And fascination goes in many ways - the fascination for the beauty of this woman who sings, “My land, my land…” The fascination of how her mind works, how she tells a story, how she pronounces each word. How she pauses when she talks about her friends in the liberation movement, who have been arrested or killed. How she sings. I’m literally in front of her face, looking at her face, she starts to sing, and I’m almost in shock at how beautiful it is, how her presence is. Because I’m so fascinated, that sparks to the audience, I think.

I’m also fascinated by a warlord who doesn’t know how to sing, just as close to my face. He shares something so terrifying that I almost drop by camera, and that is also fascinating. The spectrum goes many ways.

Cinema is an art of proportion, right? We Come As Friends covers a ton of ground, and includes so very many face-to-face encounters, sometimes very short ones … how do you include such brief cuts of exchanges with people without making it feel like short shrift? Is that a struggle in the edit?

Like in writing, I imagine, the hardest thing is to throw away stuff that’s really good and suddenly makes no more sense, or doesn’t drive the story forward anymore, something like that. When a moment is brief but intense, it is a moment; you’re not left frustrated, you maybe would wish to meet this person again, in the movie or in person, later. Two months ago in Los Angeles, the Sudanese woman in the film, she came to the cinema and I took her onstage after the film, people were standing up and applauding her for a long while. (Chuckles) Which kind of shows that fed into a need to reconnect, which the film cannot provide. The film is about strong encounters before moving forward, to a different planet, so to say. So editing was very difficult, it was really, out of hundreds of hours, you have to choose, and… I edit scenes all the way until they are fine-edited, and only then do I understand that maybe I don’t need it. It’s not very economical, but that’s why it takes so long for me to make a film, every time.

Since you mentioned being so terrified or nauseated that you feared you’d drop the camera: was there an encounter, a landing, that was especially difficult for you to film? As the person holding the camera, I mean - not just logistically, because the film is mindblowing logistically.

Mentally, I think the limits for me were the missionaries. I had my good friend Barney with me, my brother from another mama, so to say, my copilot. And I shoot most of my stuff on my own, but when we went to this village, where the missionaries were distributing white socks to the naked black people, I just lost my mind. I just said, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t film it.” So I gave the camera to Barney, he kept going, and he made a beautiful scene out of it.

It’s one of the very toughest scenes to watch. You’re watching a documentary but it becomes a Bosch painting in real life, or something. There really aren’t proper analogies.

Yeah, I was standing in the corner, just like: “What the fuck am I doing here?” And everyone thinks I am another missionary, in the village, because I am another white dude. (Laughs ruefully) They were “bringing the light”, you know? Bringing the Word of God, with their bloody solar-powered Bible. I was like, really, “this is too much”. Even just to see it was too much. I think it pushes the audiences to a limit of bearability, I think.

Let me tell you a tiny detail about this scene - I have a regret, which is that, had I been in the same village five years earlier, I would have seen the same scene with different interlopers. Because five years earlier, these villages were subjected to a Muslim colonization, from the north. The militias from Khartoum and Tripoli and Oman and whatever, they came not with the Bible but with the Qu’ran, and they told the people of the village the same thing: “You shouldn’t be naked. You should dress up, you should walk in step and wear uniforms. You should learn how to read and write, and wash your fingers, and pray to God,” you know? For the Toposa tribe, they have the same kind of thing from Texas, to Tripoli. People came up to me and asked if I was Muslim or Chinese. I was like “...What?” It’s always interesting, the us-and-them distinction, but ultimately the distinction is not there. The title reveals that: the “We” is the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans, whatever. Whoever “we” is, that’s the whole thing.

#hubert sauper #documentary #we come as friends #darwin's nightmare

2 notes · View notes