The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Unquiet Cinema - An Interview with James Fotopoulos

By Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

Migrating Forms

James Fotopoulos (Migrating Forms, Back Against the Wall, Christabel) is one of cinema's most unique voices, a filmmaker of uncompromising vision. His films explore universal themes of loneliness, death, love, and body-image, though never in a vapid or obvious manner. More interested in putting out quality work than fitting into any pre-conceived ideals of what a director should do, Fotopoulos has established himself as one of the premiere filmmakers of the contemporary underground cinema. I had a chance to chat with him via email over the past couple of weeks.

TFJ: When I first saw Back Against the Wall (at the 2002 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema), the first thing that struck me as unique was the deliberate, almost snail-paced delivery of the actors. Do you generally look for that aesthetic in the audition process, or are you more inclined to guide the performance after you've cast the film?

JF: What I look for with an actor is the way they look, how they sound, how they move. Because the style you are speaking of can be imposed upon those three initial aspects of the person. I explain it all before hand, but in the rehearsals I begin to shape the acting. It varies from actor to actor on how intricate I have to get. Not all of them use that slow-method. I have no interest in trying to reach some type of consensus on what is considered "good" acting. I don't know what that means. I'm more interested in trying to come to terms with reality. Some actors will be on board and will understand this, many do not and fight you.

TFJ: I think that's important to bring up, the whole obtuse dichotomy of "good performance" vs. "bad performance". Because, essentially, what you have in Back Against the Wall, and in your other films, is a decidedly different style of acting, one much more steeped in realism than most everything else out there today. How have you come to utilize that dynamic in your features, as opposed to the more lucid, abstract style of performance in your early shorts, or, say, that of a more experimental feature like Christabel?

JF: In all the films that I use actors in I try to make the acting function as part of the "machine" of the medium. Which plays into the whole large picture of trying to balance the mechanical elements of the medium you are using with what the orchestration of those parts creates, or the ability to elevate the balance machine and what is not physically there into something greater. A balance between the technology and energy. How I see most acting used is that it is treated as something separate from the film. As if it is "out there" someplace and has been captured by a camera. I see it as something totally inseparable from the camera or anything else. And in that it has to function in the most "object"-based way. Because I am not trying to give you a presentation of how I wish the world to be, but trying to figure out how it actually works. I feel that when dealing with film or video everything must be precise and archetypal as possible - so in both the films and video the acting becomes clearing away the excess, clearing away the vulgarity of drama and whittling it down to the most necessary and important actions and sounds.

So I feel that in some circumstances acting can exist in film if "plasticized" (is that a word?) as much as possible. Because this allows the whole of the piece to function as one organism. It also allows people watching to deal with the whole of the work as opposed to identifying with emotions. I'm not interested in creating work of identification. But more so work of "activity".

In the video work like Christabel there was initially more performance, because I was using different tools, which were a video camera and good sound equipment. The nature of the video medium is very intricate. It allows one to work on almost a molecular level right from the start. On a film this has to be dealt with right from the start, because you can go in and change it, without altering the structure. So the ability to go in and fracture and break-up people, colors, movements is something closer to reaching something truly wonderful with audio/visual, in regards to exploration. So the performance in it is going to take the idea of how I use actors in a film and take it further. A more evolved approached, which is nowhere near where I want to take it yet. Also, I feel that there needs to be a synthesis of all the techniques, so I am aware that film on video and vice versa and different formats are all variations in a common pursuit.

Eventually I would like to use robots and not humans at all on some of the films. It is something I am working on.

TFJ: It seems to me that you use the same approach when constructing the sound design of your films. They don't really have prototypical "soundtracks", necessarily. Rather, they are intricately designed "soundscapes", for lack of a better word. That's something that I've noticed in everything you've done, from Insect to Families, that there appears to have been a great deal of work put into the audio tracks to create such layered, multifaceted aural experiences. How do you set about constructing the sound for your films?

JF: Yes, the soundtracks function similarly. Hopefully, like all elements of the piece they exist as themselves and at the same time part of the whole. There is no interest in the idea that "this film is a window to my world" approach. Or "this is how I see the world". What I see in most films is this same problem, that there is pursuit to reach some ideal. Some ideal perception that we are placed in something that already exists. Instead of that we are active participants in created existence. The use of most sound I see leads to the former idea. To get closer to what sound means and what it means in relation to and balance with image and movement.

The sound is conceived as a whole with the images. Not separately. Even the way the synch is recorded, which is different on each film. Like any process things get re-shaped and so forth. But I have a clear idea from the start as to how the sound will be done. I do not perceive the sound and image as separately, but equals. I treat the sound construction with great importance.

TFJ: This all speaks to something that is oh-so rare these days: allowing the filmed compositions do the work of telling the story. I read an interview with Brian DePalma recently in which he was lamenting the fact that so few directors convey their films with the actual audio/visual devices they employ. Most contemporary filmmakers seem content to simply allow the story to sell their films, without putting too much effort into visually framing that story, which doesn't exactly exploit the medium's full potential. Your films show an immense amount of work put into deconstructing that approach. Why is it so important to you to "talk" visually, rather than through the script alone?

JF: Well, I'm not trying to "deconstruct" any approach.

I believe that audio/visual is a incredibly advanced way to explore the world. To not utilize the very basic elements of what the medium is and also in a sense try to understand them and understand changing technologies, but to fall back on something "outside" of the very basic aspects of using medium in which we "see" and "hear" is very de-evolved. A core element of working in any medium is, as far as my impulses lead me to believe, to evolve the way in which we use them to understand why we exist. And this isn't really some plan I developed to pursue. I don't do things to just try them out, otherwise it would just be self-indulgent. It is much more rigorous than that. I don't think a person can set out and say "I'm going to work visually" etc. I'm suspicious of those type of statements.

Without a forward march there can be no growth and education. It can only lead to extinction.

I feel that video is a logical progression from film.

TJF: After quite a few years working with film, you've begun implementing DV technology. As everyone knows, there's been a great deal of debate as to DV's aesthetic merits. Many filmmakers are simply using it because it's cheaper and allows them the freedom to shoot a ton of footage, without having to shell out top dollar for film processing. Others seem to have employed it to actually serve their artistic agenda (Soderbergh's Full Frontal; Kunuk's The Fast Runner; Figgis' Time Code come to mind). As someone who is responsible for every step of the creation process, how has working with DV changed your creative process and how do you see yourself utilizing the medium in the future?

JF: Actually, I used video before I used film. When I was very young around 13-14. I made many videos. But I wasn't really using [them] in any proper way. But I used video in some of the early shorts like Drowning and Escape, as Christabel, which I first wanted to do very young around 16-17 yrs old. I always was going to do it on video. So it wasn't something I recently just decided to use. I don't see film as a thing unto itself. It is just part of the many things people have invented to help use understand the world. So if video replaces it, it doesn't really bother me. Because film doesn't exist separated and greater than life. 100 years or 50 years of its peak really doesn't amount to much time in the whole scope of things. So in a sense the truly important audio/visual work will mostly be made on video.

I see the cheapness and the freedom [as] a truly great thing. And this also goes further into the size of the camera etc. I want freedom - total freedom. Perhaps that isn't ever totally realistic, it hasn't been for me up to this point.

Every film I have made has been a pursuit of freedom. All the technical choices have been about freedom and in a sense control. To be as free as I can be. I don't agree with the thinking that oppression leads to creative ways of doing things. It is more crucial and difficult for people to learn how to come to terms with freedom. How to deal with being free to have the courage to use it for something positive. With any new freedom there is of course ten fold of abuse of that freedom. And it is apparent in video. Perhaps the greatest film work will be the work that translates in to video. But again there are still many thing I want to do, even in video, but can't because of financial reasons. But I still see it as a step foreword.

This doesn't mean that I'll abandon film, it just alters the way in which that mode is seen and heard.Which I think is very important to deal with. Many of my films and new ones I believe are different because of my increasing use of video. The way I see it, because I do other things such as paint, draw, holography and photography; [these] are all tools I use to apply to understanding things. And they sometimes merge with each other. Sometimes they remain separate. But I believe the merger, at least at this point, of film and video is a good thing.

With the work I have in post I have made more video work than film work. It truly has allowed me to explore and ask questions about many many more things, than if I made a film which would take a couple of years. It has allowed a freedom to seize upon colors, shapes, textures, image layering and juxtaposing that I had imagined but couldn't do on film. In a sense allowed me to pursue a very precise balance of what is physical and abstract in a way I probably couldn't on film. And work with imagery and sound in a way I feel the brain functions. Where there is no top or bottom. Where everything is part of everything else. Where all life is part of the same giant energy, the same organism.

Also, to work more impulsively. To seize upon images and movements and sounds much quicker. Which I feel leads to greater growth as a person. Importantly, it has allowed me to work with variations and repetition much more than I have in the films. Variations and repetition of images and sounds. Which I feel strongly is a crucial pattern we as people can use to understand consciousness - the effect something has before and after that we recognize it exists. Mainly because we recognized it exists. Also to increase the length of projects without the cost. Which I think is important - to make work longer and in a sense slower. Also it has allowed me so strain away identification with things that are immediate, mainly dramatic emotions, that the films initially posses.

And work more precisely. Not that the films aren't controlled or precise, but in a much different way. A way where in which a film can spiral out-of-control, the video (at least the way I've been doing them now) cannot. Which isn't all there yet because I have to rely too much on other people's editing and sound equipment. But I've starting making efforts to get my own stuff. I spent a few years getting all my own film equipment, now I have to get all the digital and video stuff. I have a lot of older equipment of both film and video and fuse those things together.

Also the ability to create works that can exist in multiple formats - as theatrical, home video, and installation all at once. About eight or nine of the new DV features are like this. I also find video as very advanced as an anthropological tool. Its ability to break things down into tiny squares and tracks, with minute precision. Applying this "breaking down" to pre-existing historical texts and artworks. I feel is its great asset. Because it allows a surgery or dissection of history and at the same time creates something for a current civilization.

TFJ: Yeah, I think that part of the reason that "film"makers are so wary, or distrustful of video is that it really represents the first medium that has the potential to successfully replace film. Videomakers have embraced DV's flexibility, its ease of manipulation, its wonderful ability to adapt to almost any environment. A number of filmmakers have turned away from film in the past few years. Obviously, techies like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez have taken to it because of its gadget factor, but some pretty reputable filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Ten) chief among them, have approached video in much the same way as you seem to: as the next logical step in visual arts.When you sit down to edit video projects are you using linear or non-linear editing tools? Do you edit on a computer?

JF: Everything so far has wound up back on a computer and on DV. Some of the videos were shot DV and edited on a computer. Some are shot in camera with older 8mm video equipment. Or transferred to VHS and then reshot and transferred to DV. Some are all edited VHS to VHS, or edited in the reshooting and then back to DV, for layering and additional texture manipulation. So it varies. It is all trying reach that "elevated" point above the machine. Find the balance.

As far as people are wary and distrustful - - you can't live your life contained and trapped by these things. Or let your soul be enslaved by a medium. This was one of the ideas behind Christabel, to see if the soul of a writer is enslaved by his medium or lives beyond it and can transform into different modes. As a human you exist above the tools and mediums. These tools are invented, out of a need, and exist to explore that. They should be applied to you, not vice versa. They didn't drop on the earth out of no place. This wariness is just fetishism (on both ends) of a medium. And fear of freedom, responsibility, and death.

TFJ: I'd like to talk a little about about influence, or at least the perceived presence of influence. Many people who write about your work seem content to throw out two names: David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Since, I suppose, they are categorizing your films as "weird", they decide to lump them in with the two most widely recognized craftsman of fringe cinema. I've never felt a very strong link between your films and those of Lynch or Cronenberg. Both of those filmmakers seemingly place their films within largely fantastical environments. Twin Peaks never feels like a real place, nor does the glamorized sadism of Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive seem to be a part of our literal world. Cronenberg, as well, appears to be approaching his material from a more dreamy, lucid place. Though your films, especially shorts like Growth and A Room, do sometimes have the visceral appearance of a Patrick Bokanowski or Stan Brakhage film, the features are much more firmly grounded in a "real world" aesthetic. Watching, namely, Back Against the Wall, Zero, and Families, I'm drawn more towards comparisons to the humanist cinemas of a John Ford or a Paul Schrader. Do such seemingly reductive comparisons bother you, or are you consciously influenced by the films of others?

JF: I really was never a film fan. I watched a lot of film to understand the history and technology of film. But that was like anything else - music, science, literature. I came to film as a medium to use. I never really looked at a film and said - "I want to make a film like that person" or see how someone else did something of reference someone else's work. It doesn't make sense, especially in the small amount of time cinema itself existed, to think that way. So I really can't say other filmmakers "influenced" me, if I said that I'd have to list every element of my life and everything I've come in contact with. Of course there are filmmakers, like any thing else, that I think "got it" or aspects of their work "got it" and understood the medium, Ford being one of them, but I'm not interested or more so - I can't do what they did. Most cinema I see leaves me feeling vacant anyway.

The comparisons after a while become annoying. On one hand in the beginning by certain critics and programmers it had to be done to get the stuff out there or sell it. I totally understand that. But then there is the other side of it, which is just weak simplicity, not even critical thought (or some facade of criticism). Also, many people have been slowly becoming aware of the stuff, so it always seems like the first time again and again and the comparisons pop it. It something that you just have to ignore and keep working. If what you do it worth something, it will take care of itself, because it becomes its own pillar.

TFJ: As someone who writes about film, I find this to be a tremendously detrimental approach to the medium: the desire to always place a new film within the context of what other films it most resembles. Perhaps it's an attempt to show off some kind of encyclopedic knowledge of film history, perhaps it's simply the only way that they know to gauge a film's success: how well it stacks up next to its closest cousin. But critics that do this (as well as those codgery types that insist that cinema died 30 years ago), and the filmmakers that fall into the trap of believing their own hype, seem to be hellbent on destroying the art form entirely. It seems to me that the more you dilute the process of "reading" films into simple the arithmatic of A+B=C, the more complicit you are in the resulting product. Do you think that's why so much contemporary mainstream cinema is so bland and repetitive?

JF: Well, I don't see the problem being isolated to just mainstream films. It is there in experimental and foreign works and in art and music and in the way cars are made and so on. And most criticism I read is part of that too, to me it seems like a wrong turn and I don't even bother reading it. I'd rather read about something else. Of course there are some things that I agree with or like, but that always seems out-weighed by what I see as being weak.

But I can't say that I necessarily believe that there was time when it was better than any other time. That it was relevant at some point and now not. Good and bad things are made now as they were at any other time and will continue to be in the future.

I think that what has to be looked at is the whole picture, not just critics or the films being made now. It is part of the time, the culture, part of the educational system we have, a misunderstanding of the purposes of technology. We could sit here and break down the entire history of film and try to figure out what we perceive as every wrong turn or reason why things are the way they are. But that type of game never ends, you could do it with the history of the whole world.

I think that there always is this balance of very negative things and you have to sift through the veils of it all, figuring it out and find the positive and try to balance the two. To try and be an activist against it all seems to me to a waste of time, but rather function the in the world by trying to answer some question about things that as far as I can see, have always existed. And work continually at putting these objects out there.

To visit Fotopoulos' production company website, click here. James Fotopoulos' first three features, Zero, Migrating Forms and Back Against the Wall will be available on VHS/DVD on February 11, 2003. Visit Facets to order.