Interview with Experimental Film Society (Part Two)

Enzo Cillo

September 8, 2015

filmakers

in collaboration with Federica Iodice
On this blog it is available an Italian version, translated by Silvia Tarquini: http://j.mp/EFS_seconda_parte
This interview is part of an Artdigiland project supported by Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, Italy

The Experimental Film Society is an independent collective of people who work in the field of experimental cinema, founded in 2000 by the Iranian director RouzbehRashidi, and based in Dublin. EFS is a project which brings together filmmakers from all over the world, with a common interest in researching "alternative" cinema. www.experimentalfilmsociety.com

In Il disprezzo Moravia writes: «Screenwriting seems a kind of rape of the intelligence»... How do you usually deal with writing?

Le Cain: Speaking for ourselves, we have an aversion to working in such a way that we have a blueprint and we go out and illustrate that. To try to enslave all the various techniques and possibilities, not only of the equipment and the situation but just what you encounter as well. What’s happening on a particular day, what the light’s doing, accidents, the inspirations of a location. We’re interested in all these things, how powerful they can be in themselves. In seeing how we can give them the space to develop into a film. So just the idea of going out and saying, okay, we need X, Y and Z in this scene and in order to do that we need this shot and that shot and we’re going to do this… That’s not how we work. But, for example, someone like Claude Chabrol, who we admire very much, would work in almost exactly the opposite way to us. For him, writing the script was a really difficult, agonizing process and he suffered. And then when he went on set he enjoyed himself and in some interviews he said it almost didn’t matter which take of a performance he used. So when the script was finished, that was the hard work done and he basically went out and very skillfully illustrated it. But also, in the film industry, the way a script is often used is as a way of controlling a film. Like a contract, a way interests other than the filmmaker can maintain control. I guess we couldn’t function very well in that situation.

Enzo Cillo

August 10, 2015

filmakers

Interview with Experimental Film Society (Part One)

Enzo Cillo

August 10, 2015

filmakers

in collaboration with Federica Iodice
On this blog it is available an Italian version, translated by Silvia Tarquini: j.mp/intervista_EFS
This interview is part of an Artdigiland project supported by Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, Italy

The Experimental Film Society is an independent collective of people who work in the field of experimental cinema, founded in 2000 by the Iranian director Rouzbeh Rashidi, and based in Dublin. EFS is a project which brings together filmmakers from all over the world, with a common interest in researching "alternative" cinema. www.experimentalfilmsociety.com

What do you mean by experimental film?

Maximilian Le Cain: On the one hand, it’s sort of a good shorthand way of telling an audience that what you’re going to get is something unusual. It’s not going to be a traditional narrative, it’s not going to be a documentary in the sense that most people understand it. It’s going to be something hopefully unexpected. But, more importantly, the way we work is quite experimental. We take the elements of cinema and we play with them and rearrange them and work on them in such a way that, speaking generally, we really only know what our film is going to be on the last day of editing. So it really is a process of experimentation. And Rouzbeh goes even further, he’s often compared himself to Dr Frankestein!

Rouzbeh Rashidi: If I were to add anything, it would be something like Jonas Mekas always says: if you think narrative cinema is like a novel or literature, experimental film is something like poetry where we have atmosphere, where we have ambiguity and obscurity. Vagueness, I suppose. This is a very straightforward, simple answer but I think it works. But, as Max said, it’s a very complex question.