CONTENTS

FILM PANIC
ISSUE 4 - MAY 2017
4
Editorial...........................................................................

FILM PANIC magazine is a publication of The Underground Film Studio

www.theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk Interview with Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian......... 6
Follow Film Panic on Facebook: www.facebook.com/filmpanic

Entire contents copyright Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais. Interview with Marnie Weber.................................... 26
This publication may not be printed without the authors’ consent.
All articles are by Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais unless otherwise credited.
All images and reproductions are included under the Fair Use Act,
no copyright infringement is intended.
Interview with Scott Barley....................................... 36
Cover image: Vesmir Peklo (2014) by Susu Laroche.

FILM PANIC title font ‘Zoom’ created by Dave Fabik.

Interview with Atoosa Pour Hosseini....................... 44
Special thanks to Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Experimental Film Society, Janja Rakuš,
Susu Laroche, Sarahjane Swan, Roger Simian, Scott Barley, Marnie Weber,
Simon Lee Gallery, London, and GAVLAK, Los Angeles.
Interview with Janja Rakuš....................................... 52
Contact: info@theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk
Interview with Susu Laroche..................................... 64
The Underground Film Studio News........................ 70
 WELCOME TO ists, who are dotted around all over the world, can learn about each other and exchange
ideas. It is a space of collaboration and to celebrate each other’s visions.

#4 Over the last few decades the critical authority of writing on cinema has been in the
wrong hands, the academic and the critic have been the gatekeepers and the artist’s
own writing seems to have been devalued and marginalised. An unfortunate situation
has occurred where the artist is made to feel a certain amount of shame for writing
about their own work, unless, of course, they adopt the language of the academic. This
FILM PANIC was started in 2013 and has been published somewhat sporadically over is wrong and depressing – the artist should write as an artist, in their own voice and their
the last few years but as we reach issue 4 and begin to publish on a more regular basis, own language. The academic and the critic should serve the art as much as the artist
the mission and purpose of this project is starting to become clear to us. does, their experience is certainly valid, but who better to speak of the creative process
and practice than the artists themselves.
In this issue we interview seven contemporary filmmakers who are all working in very
personal and independent ways and whose work to a certain degree doesn’t fit neatly FILM PANIC is a place for artists to speak about their work in their own words. FILM
into the old categories, genres and movements found in the history books and that are PANIC is our way of reaching out, digging deeper, finding out more and documenting
often presented to us by the art establishment and academic world. our interests and research. We are unashamed and unapologetic about the fact that we
are seeking to join forces with like-minded fellow travellers and that our central drive
Time and again we find ourselves drawn to these kinds of artists, the ones who for var- is to create this space for these artists. It is a selfish desire to spend time with films and
ious reasons don’t quite fit in. I think we are driven by a desire to find other filmmak- filmmakers we are interested in but this selfishness is not a limited act as we also make
ers who create work that relates to what we are doing in our own films, and a need available our findings for anyone who wishes to join us on this journey, anyone who is
to join forces with like-minded people to create a sense of community – we strongly also seeking something from cinema that is currently unavailable through the old chan-
believe that if the situations and conditions that you need for your work don’t exist then nels. So we hope that FILM PANIC can indulge your passion and your interests as much
you have to take matters into your own hands and create them yourself, and this is not it does ours.
something one can do alone, one must find like-minded collaborators. So alongside this
publication we have also been programming a series of screenings called FILM PANIC
Presents, where we give a platform for just this kind of cinema. Thank you for reading,
Daniel & Clara
So, broadly speaking, what kind of cinema are we talking about? These are all films born x
from the artists’ personal obsessions, passions, fears and desires. The films exist in a place
close to the artist’s eye and hand and they beat in time with the rhythm of their step –
maybe at times the work is as surprising to the artist as it is to the audience, because
these are works of discovery, true experimentation and exploration – works that can
only have been made by that particular artist at this particular moment in the history
of human creativity. They arrive from a combination of uncensored expression married
with a move towards rigorous craft – this is not a raw, rough and random punk cinema,
nor is this a highly planned and controlled cinema of fixed messages and statements –
beyond all else, this is a cinema of experiences. A cinema that is deeply and truly art but
not art by education or a stamp of approval by a gallery or critic, it is so because it serves
the primary purpose of art – to create an arena where the imagination can be free, a
space where we can face ourselves and where we can make contact with the deepest
springs of life. In short, what we are talking about is a visionary cinema.

This then is the purpose of FILM PANIC, as a publication and a screening event, to seek
out cinema’s artists and visionaries and to create a platform for their work to be screened
and for their words to be read – uncensored and on their terms. A place where these art-
 AN INTERVIEW WITH

sarahjane swan
& roger simian
Artist duo Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian make digital and Super 8 short films, music
and installations dealing with myth, storytelling and investigations into working with
materials and images. Their films are instantly recognizable for their strong use of col-
our and texture, a certain theatricality to their performances and a personal use of sto-
rytelling which reworks elements of mythology, mythologised history and art history
into their own creative universe.

In their work there are many references to the various art movements of the 20th centu-
ry, with a particular inclination towards Surrealism and Dada, a point of departure that
they acknowledge as being an influence. But rather than simply recreating a Dada or
surrealist style, they utilize the tools these historical movements have given us in their Can you start by telling us how you started
very own personal creative journeys. It is the use of chance, the cut-up, the poetic lan- making films? And how your collaboration
guage and the magical transformation of the every day that they seem to have most began?
responded to in these movements – it has given them the tools, the permission, inspira-
tion and the liberation to use all they have available to them to express themselves fully. ROGER: We’d both already had our own per-
sonal adventures in the visual realms before
While watching their films you can almost sense their pleasure as they discover new im- we met, so, by the time we arrived at each
ages in their experiments, their excitement to find out what happens when they blend other, we were fully formed as individuals,
two images together to create a third or process the film in a new way – this excitement with our own distinctive tastes in visual art,
and pleasure is infectious and inspiring and if nothing else will make you want to pick up moving image, film, style and aesthetics. We
your camera and join them in the play of making films. don’t necessarily like all the same things – Sa-
rahjane veers more towards the perfection of
an image, even if it is quite a sinister or night-
In February 2017 we screened their short film Orphine (2014) as a part of Film Panic Pre- marish image, whereas I tend to gravitate to
sents! in Portugal, and we had the pleasure of meeting Sarahjane and Roger who attend- the grungy, cut up look of DADA or Post-Punk
ed the screening and discussed their work with the audience. The following interview was sleeve art. Our tastes do compliment each
conducted via email in April 2017 and followed several conversations we had had with the other, though, and we like to think that the
artists over the last few months. sum of what we create together out-weighs
the parts.
SARAHJANE: I’ve been a visually orientated
person all my life, and was always a bit unusu-
al: from the make-up and clothes I wear to my
background in Art. I graduated from Gray’s
School of Art in Fine Art Sculpture. During Art
School I got the chance to try shooting a car-
Still from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017)
tridge of Super 8 on a field trip to Amsterdam.
That was probably my first introduction to
working with film. I didn’t have anyone really
showing me how to use the camera (which I
picked up in a charity shop) or any guidance
but I knew instinctively to try to use this to
create something. I guess that tiny moment
in time has stayed with me all my life and has
developed into a full blown interest and de-
sire for film and filmmaking. I filmed the birds
in Dam Square and even then loved the way
the film came out flickering and atmospheric.
I have also explored the performance side of
Art: having portraits of myself shot with my
head shaved and an albino snake wrapped
around me, wearing lizardesque contacts
and a man’s jacket. That was part of a work
where I was using slough, the discarded skin
of a snake. The skin I’m in and the shedding
of skin became a huge force in ideas for me
to create sculptures. I was sewing together
a new Me, a new identity and this took the
form of a masculine/feminine, a full-length
suit. As well as working with snake slough, I
also sewed bucket-loads of fish skins togeth-
er into a 50ft wave and created some very

6 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 7


smelly handcrafted notebooks (which had
to be stored in the freezer to neutralise the
pungency). I have a desire to work with the
unusual or things that are not often thought
of as compatible.
ROGER: My background was a lot more Do
It Yourself than Sarahjane’s. I’ve studied a bit
of 20th Century Art History and also Design
Thinking as part of my Open University de-
gree (which was mostly related to Literature
and Creative Writing) but I’m basically self-
taught as far as the visual arts and filmmak-
ing. If you want to teach yourself you can cov-
er a lot of ground by just following whichever
paths really interest you: become your own
Art School or Film School. Around the age of
19 or 20, as soon as we could get our hands
on a consumer VHS camcorder, my friends
and I were shooting our own zero budget,
LoFi music videos, arthouse/indie film scenes
and Absurdist comedy routines. My biggest
influences were specific films or TV shows I
was watching at the time. Humour-wise, my
friends and I made a fuzzy mock-doc, ear-
ly on, called Son of Dada, about a fictitious
8 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold (2015)
artist called Joseph Joseph who we were
claiming also managed our band, Crunchy
Joseph. It was really daft and it was pretty
much one part Vic Reeves Big Night Out to one
part Spinal Tap to one part Tristan Tzara and
Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. In
our more serious moments we were taking a
lot in from European cinema and American
independent movies. Tom Waits was in Jim
Jarmusch’s Down By Law, so we watched that
and ripped off the long, static shots. We were
watching Twin Peaks and all the David Lynch
films we could get our hands on. Those were
hugely influential on us. I think there must
have been a Surrealist season on TV, because
I was able to watch a couple of Luis Buñuel’s
later films, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the
Beast and Orpheus. I loved the stark black and
white of Eraserhead, Ingmar Begman’s The
Silence and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble-
fish. So I tried to get a similar look by turning
down the colour and tweaking the contrast
on the TV, then re-filming it back into the
camera. I started borrowing books from the
library on filmmaking and read about the
ways the French New Wave had demolished
the conventions of cinema - for example, by
the use of jerky and random looking jump
cuts which were often repeated in odd ways
so that you couldn’t help but be aware of the
fourth wall, the process of making the film as
well as its content.
SARAHJANE: Like Roger I always had a deep
love of the symbolic, Expressionism, Surre-
alism, any kind of experimental approach to
telling a story through moving images: the
way great directors can create a kind of visual
poetry. But I think that most of my influences
as a creator of immersive visual experienc-
es came from Art or Music more than from
Movies. I loved Louise Bourgeois as soon as I
found my way to her work: from her tiny knit-
ted dolls and sketches, through her multi-lay-
ered cell installations to the beautiful, trau-
matic, terrifying, gigantic Maman spiders. I
absolutely love the scene in the documenta-
ry, The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine,
where she turns the mirror on us, the audi-
ence. I was also hugely affected by the story
she told of the way her father taught her at
a very young age that women were inferior.
FILM PANIC #4
Stills from L’Oiseau Et Le Singe (2014)
He mocked her at the dinner table in front of
all the diners by peeling a tangerine in one
go into the shape of a female figure but with
the addition of the pith, which he said was a
penis. He was basically saying that she was a
lesser person, only useful for motherhood or
as a sexual object, because she didn’t have a
dick and balls. As an artist she made a point
of having a dick and balls, literally, in several
of her later sculptures. That story was a bit of
a feminist epiphany for me at a young age. It
made me look at the ways the art world and
music world or film world have so much to
learn about seeing past the male orientation
of culture, and finding women to be collabo-
rators or individual visionaries in all fields and
formats. I’m not sure how much Louise Bour-
geois’ obsession with the mother-seamstress
has played into my own work, but the idea of
being a mother and being able to still create
art, as well as working with very dynamic and
ambitious ideas was powerful. I was also ob-
sessed with Joseph Beuys. I adored him and
even took to wearing a fedora hat. I remem-
ber also being very interested in the work of
Ana Mendieta: the ways she looked at identi-
9
ty, our relationship with the land and the el-
emental forces of nature, the traces we leave
on life when we fade away. Patti Smith was
always an inspiration too, in her look as well
as her words, voice, music and performance:
especially the photographs by Mappletho-
rpe. I know for a fact she was an influence on
some of the works I created at Gray’s around
identity – often involving men’s suits.
ROGER: Yes, films or books about musicians
or musical styles were often a huge influence
on us in our video work. I watched a great
South Bank Show documentary about Sonic
Youth and other noisy New York musicians,
directed by Charles Atlas, and the edgy, cut-
up style of that had a major influence on the
way I tried to edit our videos. I carried on
messing around with several formats of cam-
corder through the various bands I was in
– documenting gigs and rehearsals and try-
ing to edit together music videos with more
or less synched sound, using pretty shoddy
equipment. When I got hold of an iMac and
miniDV camcorder around 2000 it totally
changed my life. I loved how easy it was to
get good quality edits done using digital
technology.
SARAHJANE: Roger and I eventually met
through music and that’s always been an
important part of what we do in all our col-
laborations. His brother, Mike, was my guitar
teacher and he was going away to New York
for a few weeks with his girlfriend, so Roger
took over the lessons. He started straight
away teaching me the blues scale and Now I
Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges! Our first
collaborations were a couple of music videos
we made for singles I’d recorded, I Am Just The
Past and Ghost, which were released on Shark
Batter Records. Roger and I started writing
and recording songs together in 2010 and
almost immediately began making music
videos to go with them. We were prolific. We
uploaded at least an album’s worth of videos
10 FILM PANIC #4
to YouTube within the first year or so. A friend
from Liverpool, Paul Kerr, who runs the MP3
Blog, The Devil Has The Best Tuna, suggested
the band name The Bird And The Monkey, be-
cause of our surnames, Swan and Simian, and
we started using that name for both our mu-
sic and our video work. We made music vide-
os for a couple of years but knew we wanted
to move into short films.
ROGER: It made total sense to us to “sample”
a lot of the material we’d generated making
music videos and we found a way to make
that work in our favour, creating the film In
The Dark I Sat (2012), a fairly non-linear and
strange, Science Fictional Romance, which
draws on the spirit of the ‘60s New Worlds
fiction of JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock.
So we chose a subject – the fluid but hard to
navigate passageways between alternate re-
alities – which suited the fragmented nature
of our clips. In it, Sarahjane sports numerous
looks, making a mockery of continuity. We in-
tended this cut-up style to actually add to the
feeling that these characters can’t keep a firm Stills from In The Dark I Sat (2012)
hold on their own identities.
for us. It premiered at the Portobello Film Fes- I’m interested in the use of mythology in
SARAHJANE: We were really pleased with tival in London. And then Richard Ashrowan, your work – in your films you relate per-
the way that film turned out. It became the director of the Alchemy Film and Moving sonal experiences to mythological char-
something new and quite beautiful and it image Festival, really liked it and, on the back acters and stories, and also mythologise
brings a tear to your eye. of seeing it, invited us to make our first ever historical characters by building up your
installation together, which became Sung To own world around them, could you say a
ROGER: The viewer shouldn’t be able to tell The Crows. few words about this?
that in this film we’ve reconstituted older
material that’s previously been aired in an- ROGER: The process of working we devel- SARAHJANE: I think we are interested in the
other format / context. We’ve also made use oped for In The Dark I Sat is one we’d like to stories and magic that mythology brings.
of a script which we collaged together out visit again on a much larger scale.
of segments of a Science Fiction novel I’d ROGER: Everyone goes back to the Greeks
been trying to write years earlier, so it was a SARAHJANE: It’s our equivalent of photo- and Romans, but to us the much earlier
great way for us to learn how to make a film: montage or musical sampling. Sumerian Goddess Inanna’s descent into the
how to script it, edit it, voice it, soundtrack it, Underworld (which was later revisited in the
structure it so that the viewer is willingly led ROGER: We’ve never made another film Ishtar myths of the Akkadian, Assyrian and
from the first moments right through to the quite the same way again but it’s been a huge Babylonian civilizations) seems to have more
ending. influence on all the others, even on our more relevance for a contemporary audience. It
recent films where we’ve begun exploring has much more resonance for us, here, liv-
SARAHJANE: That film opened new doors analogue forms of filmmaking. ing in the Post-Feminist World. Those stories
FILM PANIC #4 11
come from an epoch, which was no doubt
just as brutal for women as any other period
of human history, but it’s a time before the
Patriarchy had taken such a firm root on so-
ciety, with its insistence on One Jealous Male
God occupying the highest throne in the Hi-
erarchy. In the earlier reign of the Sumerians
and Babylonians, the greatest, most revered
deities were female, because women were
more magical. They had the power to pro-
duce life. They bled in rhythm with the Moon.
Those days were a little closer to the Animism
of the earliest, conscious humans who saw
the strangeness of nature all around them –
the rhythms of the Sun and the Moon, the
growth of crops, the behaviour of the beasts,
weather systems, dreams and nightmares,
sexuality, love, language, the need to eat,
drink, sleep and defecate, the oddness of an- Still from Orphine (2014)
yone a little different, human birth, growth,
life and death – and it all seemed mysterious and chaos but also beauty and strength. I tion. Sarahjane is her own Muse too. We both
and magical, so they projected human at- feel it’s a very feminine(ist) quality to tell the share the responsibility of all roles: direct-
tributes onto all of nature and reasoned that story of women (all women) and their lives. ing, shooting, performing, editing, writing,
there must be spiritual or supernatural expla- The personal often comes into the film to composing a soundtrack, etc, with a certain
nations for pretty much everything. When show that women do have very powerful ex- amount of equilibrium. So either one of us
you look at it from that perspective then it’s a periences in life, love, sex, emotion and the will look at a photograph or movie still of
pretty straight path to the idea that the most outcomes of their personal journeys, which Sarahjane gazing into the lens or performing
powerful deity must be a Woman: She with could be a rebirth or could even be death. in some way, and both of us will edit, col-
the power to create Life from out of nothing Women can steer and have power and play our-correct or effect the face, superimposing
(or so it must have seemed). Well, nobody the roles they want in their lives. But mainly, other images or the same face twice, from dif-
was going to stand in the way of Inanna or I think, to show that women are completely ferent angles, allowing multiple moments in
Ishtar. The Great Goddess was going to love relevant in filmmaking today, both in front time, multiple emotions or concepts to snap
or sleep with whomever she wanted to, have of the lens and behind it, as writers, direc- together into one instant. Both of us will be
adventures, lead armies, wreak havoc on tors, producers. Women are totally capable looking at the image fairly objectively, striv-
any man who had done her wrong, keep the of making films that reflect all aspects of life, ing for a particular look, feeling, style, emo-
Earth fertile so that crops and livestock would as well as showing the lives experienced by tion in the service of our film. Of course, we
keep returning, slap down her ghoulish sister women in ways that are not shown in more can never be fully objective in this – she’s my
in the Underworld whenever she was being Stills from Somnambulance (2016) traditional cinematic forms. partner and I’m in love with her, so I’ll always
a bitch. see a kind of idealized image of a person I
beautiful but troubled birth – through the ROGER: We’ve naturally always cast Sarah- already know very well off-screen; and, then,
SARAHJANE: Even the supposedly strong symbolism of the oldest Underworld mythol- jane as our Leading Muse. She does the when Sarahjane looks at an image of herself,
women in modern action movies don’t have ogies of Inanna or Ishtar and her Deathly sis- cheek-bones and the smouldering far bet- she is partly looking in the mirror and seeing
as much freedom as that! That’s why in our ter. Our films often have a strong female who ter than I ever could! Sarahjane’s not just my glimpses or aspects of her own self. But once
film, Orphine, we wanted to filter some of my is larger than life in character and she often Muse though, in the traditional sense – with you’ve factored those aspects in, we both
stories of life as a woman - the dodgy guy, the commands the visual, like a Witch or Queen Me, The Male Observer, always directing my pretty much become cold, impartial lenses
difficult birth, the near-death experience, the or Goddess. She is there to create anarchy gaze at She, The Female Object of My Atten- when we’re stationed behind the camera or

12 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 13


in front of the editing software. We make our-
selves recording machines.
SARAHJANE: Oh, I don’t know if that’s right.
There’s a lot more emotion than that in-
volved.
ROGER: Do we make ourselves emotional
machines?
SARAHJANE: Yes, that’s better. To us being
experimental has always been something
that grows out of playfulness. I love to dress
up and play in front of the camera but I’m al-
ways thinking like a filmmaker when doing
so and I know what I want visually, even if
at the time I’m not always sure how to come
about it. I do naturally feel comfortable in
front of the camera as much as behind it, so
I feel lucky in that respect, as I know a lot of
people don’t like to be in front of the lens. I
feel it creates a real rounded view of what
you are trying to portray.
You use a great mix of formats in your
films, sometimes mixing footage from var-
14 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Orphine (2014)
ious formats in one film, from DV, mobile
phone to Super 8, can you tell us what in-
terests you about the various formats and
how using each of them affects your crea-
tive process?
SARAHJANE: We use as much material as
possible to create our work. Nothing is real-
ly redundant or unusable. We shoot a vast
amount of footage when filming and we use
whatever formats we want to at the time. We
like to try new equipment and formats to
have more control but also for a sense of new
and exciting processes, which is a sort of out-
of-control. So we often carry many cameras
with us, from phones/iPads to Super 8, GoPro
or DSLR for digital video or stills, or Lomog-
raphy plastic cameras and Polaroids for more
unusual analogue stills. It’s like tasting differ-
ent flavours – we don’t want to just capture
one kind of image. We enjoy being immersed
in all the possibilities. For some people that
mix would be too much of an overload but
for us it’s our way of seeing.
ROGER: We’ve always been drawn to art, film,
photography, music, literature that seems to
show the World back to us as though it’s re-
flected in the distorting splinters and cracks
of a smashed mirror; or, perhaps (in our more
subtle moments), like its likeness has been
ghosted by the mist and the moonlight. In
a lot of ways life feels more like an Edvard
Munch landscape or a Hannah Höch photo
cut-up portrait than like the kinds of pho-
torealist artwork that earned the respect of
patrons before Modernism cracked out of its
shell. We’ve wanted to name this fragmented
and distorted trend in the arts “SHARDism”
but, when we did a quick Google search,
we discovered that Shardism seems to be
something to do with an online Role Player
FILM PANIC #4
Stills from Orphine (2014)
fighting game. “Fragmentalism” has been
taken, too, sadly. We’d love to have an -ism to
work with but we haven’t had that moment
yet: the monumental incident where we dis-
cover a really cool name for it that nobody’s
thought of. Then again, even the Surrealists
had to ask Apollinaire for suggestions. We’ll
need to hit the foreign language dictionaries
to find our own -ism.
Recently you have started working more
with Super 8 and hand processing it your-
self, can you tell us about the processes
that you use and what it is that attracts
you to this medium?
15

SARAHJANE: Super 8 has become of huge
interest to us. We have become slightly ob-
sessed and excited trying to capture images
that are very difficult to assess and require a
huge amount of patience to film. We often use
expired film stock (K40), which can no longer
be processed in a laboratory so we process by
hand in a very DIY way. We use the Caffenol
coffee recipe which often gives us very faint
images that are barely there. The combina-
tion of using a DIY process with the expired
film stock is always going to give a very ex-
perimental and provocative look about the
images, this can look quite otherworldly at
times, like it’s from another dimension or
time. Digital, even with effects, cannot repli-
cate the vague timeless beauty that Super 8
gives to our films. It’s amazing to look back at
what we have filmed in digital and then look
back at what we have filmed in Super 8 and
we can see they really are worlds apart. Some
may argue that Super 8 is too low-fi to regard
as professional filmmaking but I think we
both feel that it’s sometimes too easy to take
what we see for granted, as we are bombard-
ed by today’s world of advertising and an
Still from Orphine (2014)
overwhelming amount of concern on image,
but the magic of truly looking is lost. The act
of looking through a telescope or having to
make an effort to see is what is interesting to
us, rather than being told what a good image
is. It can be a very emotional battle to often
go through lengthy processes to sometimes
find out you have no images or a wiped piece
of film at the end of it all, but when it works
it’s like magic and a huge triumph. I think we
have become addicted to this rollercoaster in
our filmmaking process at the moment. It’s
electric and mesmerising. It can be costly and
time-consuming to acquire the film stock but
we do a usual eBay search to make sure we
get good bargains and we build our stock up
in the fridge. We recently started using 16mm
film also and colour film and we have been
processing with the C41 kit which has had
some amazing results and we will endeav-
our to work more with different film stocks
in the future and different cameras such as
the Bolex camera. We have a love affair with
actual film at the moment, feeling it through
our hands, scratching and mark-making and
beginning to see and understand that film
Stills from Sung To The Crows video installation (2012)
has a history and we can feel it, not just see it,
which if we only worked in digital we would
not have fully understood. Again it’s this mul-
ti-format way we love to work. That’s not to
say we will not be working in digital, because
I think that some shots we have learned that
we really do want to make sure we get. So
with this combination of capturing on real
film and digital alongside, to have the trusty
and reliable formats (digital and TRI-X) as well
as the enigmatic and provocative beauty of
Super 8/16mm etc, we are getting to see and
experience the potential of what things can
or should look like to us. We are getting to
truly experiment.
It’s not very common for experimental
films to use narration but in your films
there are always many layers of both spo-
ken and written words, can you talk a bit
about your use of language and narra-
tion? And do you consider your work to
exist in a storytelling tradition?
SARAHJANE: We use the term “experimental”
because we really mean to experiment, and
anything can be used. We don’t have an issue
with those kinds of boundaries that some
people may place on the filmmaking process.
For us anything goes, if it feels appropriate
or right or sometimes even essential for the
film then we use it and make it happen. Nar-
ration and storytelling have often felt quite
natural, even in Orphine for example a voice
just opens up from nowhere into song at one
point and we feel it really works even though
there are no other singing parts in the film. I
think we would like to explore this more, to
put Music/sounds/voice but not necessarily
have it be a musical or like a music video, or
even be continuous through the whole film.
Text also plays a huge part in our films and
Roger likes to write a lot of the text but we
do both bring to the table and truly collab-
orate on the process and making. Neither of
us has a monopoly on any of the elements
that go into creating a film or artwork. We do
not typecast ourselves. We’re fairly instinctive
in the decisions we make and we always go
with whatever we think is working well for
the film. Layering gives us a way of weaving
or stitching together all these different ideas
and creative forms, and it can make a very
dense but ultra visual explosion that is tex-
tural and immersive and can play on all the
senses at once. We feel this way of working
brings us to the true sense of the word col-
laboration and a true sense of the word ex-
perimental.
In your first short film In The Dark I Sat,
there is a fascinating concept called the
Fluxing, could you explain what the Flux-
ing is and how this idea came about?
ROGER: Scottish story-telling is full of alter-
native realities. In Thomas the Rhymer, True
Thomas, Thomas of Erceldoune, is lying under
the Eildon Tree when, according to Wikipedia:
“the queen of Elfland appears to him riding a
horse, and beckons him to come away. When
he consents, she shows him three marvels:

16 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 17

 Still from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017) Still from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017)

the road to Heaven, to Hell, and to her own
world. After seven years, Thomas is brought
back into the mortal realm.” And he has been
changed by the experience. He now has Star
Poet and the Gift of Prophesy in his tool kit. I
spent my teenage years living in Erceldoune,
now called Earlston in the Scottish Borders,
and my Mum worked in a coffee shop right
next to the remains of Thomas’ house, Rhym-
er’s Tower. You could see these folk tales as
the Celtic equivalent of Magic Realism, where
the dream worlds and magical realms are just
as valid stomping grounds as the hills, lochs,
farmlands or cities of the Real World. It’s the
same tradition of dreamlike storytelling that
led to J.M. Barrie’s Neverland, Alasdair Gray’s
Lanark or Iain Banks’ The Bridge in more con-
temporary fiction. The Scottish tradition is
also obsessed with the duality of the human
soul, often represented as a doppleganger, a
darker or downright sinister clone of the indi-
vidual, as in R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or the Devilish charac-
ter of Gil-Martin in James Hogg’s The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
We’ve also grown up in these traditions,
hearing those folk tales and reading some of
these books. It primed us from an early age
to explore similar territories in English chil-
dren’s novels (C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Nar-
nia or Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisinga-
men); the European fairytales (Beauty and
the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hans
Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm); the
later, more experimental Science Fiction of
Philip K Dick, Roger Zelazny or Samuel R. De-
lany in America, and the New Worlds SciFi of
J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition and Michael
Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories in Eng-
land. As we spoke about earlier, we’re drawn
to Mythology, especially those momentous
voyages into other lands and worlds: Ulyss-
es, Orpheus and our favourite, Inanna / Ish-
tar. That fascination with the Dream Worlds
and strange, other realms has led us through
Modernist Literature: The Theatre of the Ab-
surd; Surrealist and German Expressionist
art and cinema; the Beat writing of William
Burroughs and Kathy Acker’s later Post-Punk
co-opting of those cut-up techniques. I’ve
not really read much Magic Realism, just the
short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, but the
Underground Comix of Los Bros Hernandez,
Love and Rockets, are rich with Magic Realism,
especially in Gilbert Hernandez’s tales of the
fictional Latin American village of Palomar.
I also liked the way that 2000AD created a
world for Judge Dredd, where you could see
any aspect of real life distorted through the
lens of the weird, dark, Fascistic megalopolis
of Mega-City One, which was basically an ul-
tra-exaggerated microcosm of the real Amer-
ica. I’ve gone way off target but, basically, we
love Alternative Realities, the Subconscious,
Mirror Worlds, and Distorted or Fragmented
Selves because in some ways those seem to
capture more of real life and experience than
“Realism”, which doesn’t factor in the weirder
aspects of the Universe and Human Nature:
the spiritual aspects of living, the daydream-
ing and the fantasy, the four to eight hours
each night when we leave the firmness of real
life and float through the illogical streams of
the Dream World. In creating The Fluxing – a
moment of ultra-calamity when the rigid bor-
ders between Alternative Realities implode
in places and become fluid – we were just
continuing on from all of those traditions,
allowing ourselves our own take on those
classic scenarios where, because of a myste-
rious doorway opening – the Rabbit Hole or
Magical Looking Glass, the Wardrobe Door,
the smoking chemical elixir, an “Open Sesa-
me!” – anything from your imagination can
come out to play. We’ve only really scratched
the surface of this idea with In The Dark I Sat.
We’ll definitely revisit the idea of The Fluxing.
Obviously the word is a bit of a nod to the
Fluxus art movement which promoted a flow
between all artistic media, especially those
that had traditionally been divided by ideas
of High and Low Art.
Sometimes in your films it seems there
is home movie footage, it appears that
the line between the world of the films
and your personal lives is very thin, if it
even exists at all – is this something you
have consciously been exploring or has it
emerged naturally?
ROGER: We were trying to remember which
of our films features home movie footage.

18 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 19

SARAHJANE: The addition of home movie
footage or low-fi appearing in our films has
been quite a natural process. We both love to
film and we often have a vast amount of foot-
age. We do wade through it looking for the
edits but at times what we see is exactly what
we wanted to capture and instead of losing
the moment with lots of effects or edits we
put it straight into the film. We experiment
with this as it doesn’t always work out that
way, but when we see it we use it if it’s work-
ing in the film, or even if it might be adding to
the film in another level then we will use it. It
feels good to us to use untouched film. At the
end of Orphine we have a raw, filmed scene,
which I guess you could class as home movie
footage. We’re using total reality, direct auto-
biographical material, to explain Orphine’s
exit from the Underworld. It seemed like the
perfect way to show the journey and the
very different destinations: a juxtaposition
of worlds. The beauty of the simple home
footage, walking towards the sea, Mother
and Son, talks of adventure / future trials and
tribulations to come, but in real life, feeling
everything together in a symbiotic experi-
ence, a wonderful truth.
Could you talk us through the process
of creating one of your films? How does
it come about, and what are the various
steps in your process? Do the words, music
and images come all at the same time?
SARAHJANE: We don’t really have a set way
of creating a film although many common
factors do seem to link things together. I
don’t honestly think we set out to have a plan,
maybe an idea, but not always a plan. Many
different things can set the creative wheels in
motion, or maybe we are always working in
a creative mindset in such a way that mem-
ories, experiences, people can be a catalyst
for our filming. Again on the other hand we
have sometimes been very engrossed in the
subject and have studied and become ob-
20 FILM PANIC #4
sessed and then possessed to make certain
works. We don’t always get what we thought
we would get, or things don’t turn out to be
what we had envisaged, but with passionate
filmmaking I think this is always the way. You
are feeling your way through the film with
everything you’ve got. Our installations have
often developed in this way and a frenzy at-
tack on our senses, and we have sometimes
then made them into films, which is again
another way we work. We do like to recycle
work, reformat and reinvent the work, and
this means we can really play with how we
want to show the piece. Nothing says you
have to stick to films or installations so we
mix them all up and reinvent them in a new
context whilst trying to keep the actual rea-
son or objective of the film the same. It’s very
interesting to watch a film become an instal-
lation, or the sculptural works become part
of the film as if they had actually been made
for the film, not realising they had originally
been made for an actual space in an installa-
tion. It creates atmospheres and swaps time
and space and energy.
ROGER: Sometimes with a film, or with an
installation which we may inevitably turn
into a film, we start off at two separate points
on a map - Sarahjane has become obsessed
with a visual image she wants to nurture and
bring into the World; I’m painstakingly writ-
ing and rewriting lines of verse or prose be-
cause I have a concept or story or symbol I
want to get out there. We have a vast jungle
in between us and we’re not really listening
to each other for the first few days until each
of us has developed our own aspect to a lev-
el that works for us. Then we begin our dia-
logue with each other - we begin to find ways
to make Sarahjane’s image and my written
words or concept compatible with each oth-
er. As soon as we do clear a direct pathway
through to each other and bridge that gap
between two individual creators, everything
snaps together into sharp focus.
Can you tell us a bit about your
installations and how they relate
to your other projects?
SARAHJANE: We have created five
major installations to date and four
of them were for Alchemy Film And
Moving Image Festival which is an
experimental film festival which
takes place in Hawick in the Scot-
tish Borders every year, and the
5th one was at The Haining, which
is a stately home in Selkirk, also in
the Scottish Borders. I have to say
that each installation has been
vastly different from each other.
They take a long time to develop
and can be painstakingly intricate
to create. They can take from six
weeks to three months to prepare
and complete. Again the magic
most often happens at the set-up
when things don’t always come
Stills from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017)
together in reality as they did in
your head or in ideas. This tussle and period viewing work in this way. You are not trapped
of adjustment is the most fun, hair-raising, and are free to leave at any point, and it can
exhilarating, yet frustrating and slightly edgy often be such a joy when someone is inter-
moment. We thrive on this. This is most defi- ested and wants to immerse themselves in it,
nitely the territory we like to work in. With and equally frustrating when someone just
an installation, you can meet and greet your can’t grasp a shred of interest in the work. It
audience in a very different way, especially tells and shows us, us. By the end we are emo-
if, like us, you tend to be the invigilator too. tionally and physically exhausted but left in
In creating an immersive experience like this no doubt that we have been in creation. At
you come to realise that your work is not the moment, or mostly this year (2017), we
being viewed like a traditional film, where have taken a break from installation work to
people walk in and sit in a darkened room be able to feel more relaxed, more in tune
and watch the whole thing in chronological with feeling film. Having all of these different
order from opening credits to the very end. ways of filmmaking may not be everyone’s
With an installation the audience could enter taste but to us it feels essential to be moving,
the room at any point and are liable to see adjusting and fluxing within all the realms of
only a fraction of what you’ve put together. possibilities in the creative process and film-
This makes you think in an altered way as an making.
artist. It has a completely different kind of
immersion but one that requires the want to Both Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys
watch and experience, and we love to see the showed how multi-layered and immersive
human condition at its best and worst when an artwork could be and they’ve definitely
FILM PANIC #4 21
 Still from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017) Still from MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017)

had the biggest influence on our installation
work. We were most definitely tipping our Fe-
doras to Bourgeois and Beuys, thinking of the
depth of their work, when Roger and I creat-
ed the Sung to the Crows installation in 2012.
I sewed around 10,000 sequins to a wedding
dress in the shape of scarlet blood splatters,
and a man’s blue hand-prints left behind on
the dress. Are these the visual memories of
a passionate act or have the Hands of Death
left their imprint?
The Fluxus artist, Nam June Paik, was obvi-
ously at the forefront of Video Art but when
Roger and I went to a retrospective in the
Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh a few years
ago, we were a little bit underwhelmed. We
didn’t think it was the work itself that was
the problem – it was often brilliant – but the
way that it was presented to us didn’t invite
us to be immersed. This also taught us that
the gallery situation is not always the ideal
space for us to exhibit our work. That is how
we’ve built up our installations: by thinking
about being very immersed and involved
with the space itself before even beginning
to develop work inside or in conjunction
with the space. This also led us onto ways of
displaying the moving image. Personally, we
have never seen much appeal in just having
a screen in a space and showing a film. We
wanted to create a space, a living, emotional
and sometimes scary place that people have
to connect with. We have now moved some
of our installation videos onto the big screen
in the form of films and have had the won-
derful experience of viewing our films on a
large screen and internationally, and that has
another dimension and emotion attached to
the viewing. When you screened Orphine in
Porto a few months ago, we were quite over-
whelmed by the sheer grandness and size
and we were portalled into another world.
Roger and I both had tears in our eyes and
were quite emotional. It’s as if we got to feel
that whole journey we’d been talking about
for the first time. It allowed us to view that
film in a way we have never seen it before.
Our love of screenings has arrived and we see
the whole reason for being led into a world
through the screen and our imaginations.
We are thinking that the gallery experience
is something that we would like to revisit and
see if we can work towards exhibiting some
work that we feel would be successful in
this context. Who knows what we can learn
from working in new spaces and diverse
conditions and structures. To feel that we are
constantly working or in work mode seems
completely normal and comfortable to us.
We work in quite a prolific way.
What movies, art, music and books have
influenced you?
Movies: Buñuel, Cocteau, Bergman, David
Lynch, New York No Wave / Cinema of Trans-
gression, Surrealism, Expressionism. Why are
there no women on the list? We’re here to
change this.
Art: DADA, Surrealism, Fluxus, Louise Bour-
geois, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg,
Hannah Höch, Francis Bacon, Ana Mendieta,
Joan Miró, Picasso, Frida Kahlo.
Music: Captain Beefheart, Patti Smith, Tom
Waits, The Fall, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonic Youth,
Kevin Ayers, Velvet Underground, Betty Da-
vis, New York Dolls, Julian Cope, PJ Harvey,
Smiths, TV On The Radio, Syd Barrett, Bowie,
Eno, Joni Mitchell, Pixies, Nick Drake.
Books: We quite like thrillers. We also like bi-
ographies about bands, artists, writers etc.
but, other than that: The Beat Writers, Kathy
Acker, Richard Brautigan, Irish Experimental
Literature (Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, Sam-
uel Becket), Franz Kafka, Graham Green, Scot-
tish writers (Iain Banks, Alasdair Gray, Irvine
Welsh), Margaret Atwood, Philip K Dick, the
New Worlds science fiction writers (J.G. Bal-
lard, Michael Moorcock), the Gonzo Rock ’n’
Roll writers (Lester Bangs and Hunter Thomp-
son), zines by people like Lisa Carver and the
‘90s DIY / Riot Grrrl culture, underground co-
mix (Love & Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez,
various other Fantagraphics titles), graphic
novels (Sandman, Watchmen).
What contemporary films and filmmakers
are you currently interested in?

22 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 23

ROGER: The cinema we mostly consume is
made up of experimental, underground films
created by our contemporaries. Usually these
are short films because we don’t have much
free time. Also, it’s short films we’re current-
ly making ourselves so it’s interesting for us
to see what other people are doing with the
form. We watch as many films as we can when
we attend festivals, such as Alchemy Film and
Moving Image Festival in Hawick, and these
are generally experimental or underground
works. Watching a few programmes at Alche-
my and other festivals gives us a good feel for
what’s happening internationally.
We do watch some independent features
still. We watched and very much enjoyed
several of yours recently, which led to the
double bill screenings in Scotland when you
were touring the UK. We’ve also been check-
ing out some Scottish films by a group calling
themselves Tartan Features. They make more
mainstream films – horror, thrillers etc. – cre-
ated with a full cast and crew but on what
they would class as a micro budget, under
£10,000. They’re wanting to kickstart the
Scottish film industry through low budget
features and they’re committed to trying
to pay everybody the Scottish Living Wage.
One of their number, Grant McPhee, who
has made documentaries about the history
of Scottish Indie bands and labels, liked a
blog post we wrote on our work in Super 8
and home processing and asked us to con-
tribute some of our own brand of analogue
experimentalism to a fictional feature he’s
working on. We were there as the second
unit and pretty much had a free reign which
was exciting, interesting and a bit stressful.
We’re looking to see if there are any points
where mainstream films and the experimen-
tal, weird, avant-garde filmmakers can find a
common ground to create something that
is both popular and cutting edge – a bit like
the European cinema traditions of the past or
the way that the American studios of the ‘60s
24 FILM PANIC #4
and ‘70s allowed the younger generation of
filmmakers to do pretty much whatever they
wanted.
We’re not emphatically against Mainstream
Culture. We quite enjoy some of it when we
encounter it, but we just don’t seem to en-
counter it very often. We have a fairly unusual
lifestyle and, because of that, we tend to live
in an alternative bubble of our own making.
Our son, who is nearly 11, has severe autism.
Most of our week is taken up with dealing
with his needs. We want him to flourish as
much as possible and that takes up a lot of
our attention and energy. We pretty much
spend every waking moment – when we’re
not otherwise distracted by work or other
commitments – creating our own films, art,
music or writing.
What projects are you working on current-
ly?
SARAHJANE: At the moment we are in Ork-
ney and have been filming at The Ring Of
Brodgar. So we are very excited to see what
we have been capturing. A few weeks ago we
were in Perthshire in Scotland and we have
for the first time been invited to be part of a
professional film crew and we experienced
a lot of different aspects of how the main-
stream industry works. It was great to work
with many talented people and with a very
cool director that we really admire. And just
at the beginning of the year, when you invit-
ed us to screen Orphine in the beautiful city
of Porto, we filmed a little short film that is
currently being processed professionally.
We shot this in Super 8, in the higher quality
TRI-X, so it should be crisp and enchanting.
We enlisted the talents of two extraordinarily
wonderful actors and friends for that one.
Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian
(born in Scotland, UK)
Filmography
MERZFRAU: Bloomed (2017 | 7 mins)
Handcrafted (2017 | 3 mins 53 sec)
SuperFly Super 8 circa Nineteen Seventy Seven (2016 |
2 mins 36 sec)
Somnambulance (2016 | 1 min)
Alphonso’s Jaw (2016 | 10 mins)
Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold (2015 | 12
mins 43 sec)
L’Oiseau Et Le Singe (2014 | 3 mins 5 sec)
Atrocity (2014 | 1 min)
Orphine (2014 | 11 mins 46 sec)
In The Dark I Sat (2012 | 15 mins)
Installations
Alphonso’s Jaw (Alchemy Film and Moving Image
Festival, Hawick, 2016)
Yarn of the Forgotten: Tibbie Tamson Unbound (The
Haining, Selkirk, 2015)
Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold (Alchemy
Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick, 2015)
Orphine (Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival,
Hawick, 2014)
Sung To The Crows (Alchemy Film and Moving Image
Festival, Hawick, 2012)
Find out more about Sarahjane Swan & Roger
Simian’s work at
www.vimeo.com/thebirdandthemonkey
Read some of their writing at
www.avantkinema.blogspot.co.uk
 AN INTERVIEW WITH

MARNIE WEBER

The first thing that one notices about the films of Marnie Weber is the wonderful array of
characters. The world she has created on screen is populated by anthropomorphic ani-
mals, living dolls, snowmen, witches and many familiar and unfamiliar monsters. These
characters – which are created with a mix of fancy-dress-shop and home-made costumes
– dance around, play in and explore the landscapes in which they find themselves.

Mostly shot on Super 8 and DV cameras, her short films feel almost like they could be
filmed documents made in a fairytale land, the hazy lo-fi quality of the image evokes the
atmosphere of afternoons of play captured by a roaming home-movie maker. The films
have a delicate softness to them, they seem to drift along as if they have blown in on a
summer’s breeze and then fade out with the setting sun. They don’t drive forwards with
any kind of urgency or plot but instead they intoxicate you with their atmosphere and
entice you to enter into their dream.
Marnie Weber, Destiny and Blow Up Friends, 1995. Film Production Still. Courtesy of the artist.
Even though there is no doubt that the creatures we are watching are artificial, after a
short while of being immersed in these films one is cast under their spell, the conviction How did you start making films? Alongside making films you also make
and sincerity with which they are made leaves you quite certain that this world is one music, collages, installations and perfor-
hundred percent real. It is a reality in which we are reminded that play is a door to the im- I was primarily a performance artist in the ‘80s mances, how do these projects relate to
agination and the imagination is something that is alive, it is untamed and wonderfully and began by making Super 8 films as back- each other? Do you see them as separate
unconcerned by the rules and logic of the outer world. drops to my performances. The films were an- or as parts of a bigger whole?
other way to reflect different aspects of the
With their unique blend of the carnivalesque and the fairytale constructed in the spirit character I was portraying. They would show They are all part of a greater narrative. That
of a school play, Marnie Weber’s films activate these imaginary worlds, they create an the character’s back stories, where they came is what holds all the different mediums to-
arena where we are permitted to access that dimension which was once so familiar to us from, much like personal landscapes. My first gether while I am working. It would feel too
in childhood, where fantasy and reality are one and where through creativity and play two films were based on the character of “Co- chaotic, and I would be psychically scattered
the world around us can be transformed. quette, Circus Girl”. One film is like a Super 8 as if I were juggling too many things. So I start
home movie where Coquette leaves her el- with a loose narrative as a foundation and the
derly mother, who lives in an Airstream trail- characters emerge and then I see where the
In March we screened a selection of six of Marnie’s short films at our showcase Film Panic er, and heads out on a journey. The second is ideas take me.
Presents. The following interview was conducted via email. when Coquette innocently becomes part of a
psycho-sexual circus and rides a giant stuffed Your work is populated by monsters, hu-
pony. After completing these films I decided manoid animals and fantasy creatures,
that they held up for viewing on their own, can you tell us about some of these char-
not just as a backdrops. They became films acters and how they came about?
that could be shown in galleries and have a
life of their own. So many of my early characters were born
from performing on stage. I would come up

26 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 27


Marnie Weber, The Red Nurse and the Snowman, 2000. Film Production Still. Courtesy of the artist.
with anything to avoid performing without
a costume as a solo performer. When I was
in a band during the ‘80s I was fine just play-
ing away on my bass but when I started to
do performance pieces all eyes were on me.
I felt the need to hide or at least be more vis-
ually interesting. A costume wasn’t enough.
I wanted the songs and visuals to be charac-
ter-driven as if written or created by the char-
acter. I started performing as an old woman,
a circus girl, an outer space alien, a butterfly,
a bunny, a deer, many other animals and
birds, all the while considering the stage sets,
props, songs and filmic backdrops. The shows
grew more and more elaborate. Sometimes I
would have guest musicians in costumes as
other characters with props and elaborate
stage sets. Many times I would have to make
several trips in a truck loading and unload-
ing at a venue. It began to feel masochistic.
I would suffer from post show depression. I
decided I should put more of my efforts into
filmmaking as there would be more perma-
28 FILM PANIC #4
away into the story and feel as if
they are entering a dream state.
I do use humans in relationship
with the creatures but they too
are archetypes, such as witches,
clowns, spirits and others to cre-
ate another layer of fiction. I try to
avoid reality as much as possible.
Some of your work seems to
evoke the atmosphere of gothic
horror but one thing that gives
it a unique approach is that it
has a more feminine attitude Marnie Weber, The Forgotten, 2001. Film Production Still.
and perspective, I am thinking Courtesy of the artist.
of the Spirit Girls in particular.
The characters are not victims
or tortured souls, in fact they
seem to be having a lot of fun!
The Spirit Girls are a fictitious all
girl band I created that lived in
the ‘70s and died young and trag-
ically, but came back as spirits to
nence to the work. My interests in character
communicate from the beyond.
development, music, costuming and narra-
Since they came from another
tive carried easily into the medium. I think
reality, they feel as if they are vis-
my years of performing were invaluable in
itors, they don't take themselves
helping me understand how to tell a story in
too seriously. However, they do
a filmic way.
certainly take their message and
purpose quite seriously. I made
Your films exist in a world inspired by my-
four Spirit Girls films, had many Marnie Weber, The Ghost Trees, 2003. Video Still. Courtesy of the artist.
thology, fairy tales and dreams, what is it
gallery shows of Spirit Girls collag-
that draws you to this material?
es, sculptures and installations. I got together I don’t like many contemporary horror films
a Spirit Girls band. We wore spirit type cos- and I don’t like gore. I love the juxtaposition
I work with symbolism, allegory and met-
tumes, had many, many shows and put out of romance and fear that is found in older
aphor and am more interested in what a
a record. I worked about five years on that gothic works. It creates a dichotomy that is so
character represents than what they actually
body of work. The Spirit Girls transformed seductive and frightening at the same time.
are doing. Animals and creatures lend them-
and grew emotionally in that time and then The aesthetic is so dreamlike. I love that Mary
selves perfectly to the creation of mytholog-
ultimately went back to wherever they came Shelley created the first iconic monster in lit-
ical tales and will quickly create feelings of
from. erature. Who better to have the experience
empathy, curiosity, fear or revulsion in the
to create a monster than a woman? We have
viewer. Actors portraying humans bring psy-
Is the gothic and horror an influence? struggles with power all the time.
chological portrayals to a role whereas crea-
tures seem to go deeper into more of a fan-
They are very much so. The older gothic hor- Another influence for me in creating my films
tasy realm. Hopefully the viewer forgets that
ror movies and books are a primary influence, is the “Theatre of the Absurd”. You can see it in
it's a human in the costume and can be swept
FILM PANIC #4 29
the simplicity of the stories and in the charac-
ters that are quite often searching for some-
thing and are at a loss existentially. There is
also a dignified buffoonery to many of them
that is typical of characters in absurdist thea-
tre. They often have meaningless actions, like
dragging props, getting nowhere, wandering
aimlessly or searching for lost items or peo-
ple. They are often trapped or in despair.

And what attracts you to this idea of

ghosts and the afterlife?

I was researching the Spiritualist movement

of the 1840s-1920s and was intrigued by
women’s involvement as spirit channelers.
There were very few opportunities for wom-
en to speak publicly at that time so to be ele-
vated in status by channeling spirits on stage
seemed interesting to me coming from a
performance art background. The prominent
women spiritualists also supported women’s
suffrage so it was parallel to the women’s
movement in America. It is interesting that
when women were given a voice to speak
publicly they were channeling dead people.
Whether it was theatricality or real doesn’t
matter to me. There is a great deal of discus-
sion about “defrauding” the spiritualists but
that isn’t important, whether the women
were really channeling or putting on a theat-
rical display both aspects are really powerful
forms of self expression.
In terms of my life and work in relation to
spirits I have always been intrigued by what I
cannot see and am more interested in what I
can feel or sense. I like to think there are spir-
its around me, sort of like imaginary friends
who help me with my work and give me ide-
as or just send inspiration my way. When I’m
done with this life I’ll just enter into a differ-
ent movie of my own creation and my friends
and family will be there.
The music in all of your films has a very
Marnie Weber, Songs That Never Die, 2005.
Film Production Still. Courtesy of the artist.
particular feel to it, it is generally quite
mysterious, soft and gentle, it evokes a
peaceful state of mind which helps give
this feeling that your films exist in a sort
of dream-space slightly beyond the reality
we live in.
That’s very nice to hear. I think of them as
soundscapes and am inspired by minimalism
and ambience in my soundtracks rather than
songs. However, I’m also not afraid of melody
so there are lyrical moments that can carry
the viewer along. I also love noise music so
I work with that to create tension. I try for a
surreal feeling to the music.
Can you tell us how you go about creating
the music for your films and how you ar-
rived at this style?
In the early days I would record everything
on reel-to-reel eight-track tapes alone in
Marnie Weber, The Sea of Silence, 2009. Film Production Still. Photo by: LeeAnn Nickel.
my basement, using a lot of different instru-
ments. I experimented a great deal and fig-
ured out what audio went with the visuals
later. I previously had gained a fair amount
of experience in recording while putting out
records (when I was in a band) and later with
my solo releases. I took some recording class-
es. So it seemed natural to create my own
soundtracks. Now I shoot the movie first,
edit it and then do the recording afterwards
to fit the images. I know more quickly what
I’m looking for. It’s so much about pacing and
allowing space or silence or adding noise for
tension, or music for emotion. It’s like collag-
ing with audio. Making soundtracks is one of
my all time favorite activities.
In another interview you've said “I think
that an independent movie represents
the conscious mind, when an art movie is
more like the unconscious mind”, I think
Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London.
this is such a fascinating way of looking at
it and a way of understanding the role of
the artist in society. Could you elaborate
on this idea and why you think it's impor-
tant for movies as an art form to express
the unconscious?
Eraserhead was the first movie I saw which
awakened in me the possibility that the sub-
conscious can be the driving force in film-
making. It was a real breakthrough. In an art
film there is a suggestion of surreal imagery,
visual triggers, silences and spaces in which
the creator and the viewer can participate.
An artist is a bit like a tour guide to an inner
space. Instead of simply leading the audience
through their work, they let go of their hand
so they can discover what is inside during the
experience. I do enjoy a good narrative but
not when I’m told how to feel, I’d rather be
moved by visual mystery.

30 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 31

 Marnie Weber, The Day of Forevermore, 2016. Film Production Still. Photo by: Rebecca Tull.
The Day of Forevermore is your first feature
film, what made you want to make a fea-
ture?
I considered making a feature to be a real
challenge and the idea just wouldn’t go
away. I know I have to do something if the
idea won’t go away, even if I’m hoping it will.
I thought: 'Well, it’s just like making three
half hour films, which I’ve done plenty of. No
problem.' I didn’t realize it was like an earth-
quake, it gets exponentially more difficult the
bigger it gets.
And how was your creative process for
making this film different to making the
short works?
It was the first time I actually wrote a script
and created significant dialogue. I usually
just do storyboards and no script since the
characters don’t talk (except in the case of
my ventriloquist doll movie). So I set about
writing a script and casting real actors for the
first time. My earlier films were just a cast and
crew of two, myself as the actor and a camera
person (when I was acting and couldn’t op-
erate the camera). Since it was going to be
an elaborate production I realized I needed
professional help.
32 FILM PANIC #4
Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK, Los Angeles.
I enlisted a few friends who worked on fea-
tures, Will Dearborn for cinematography, Lee
Lynch as AD and Fred Thornton as producer.
We had some meetings to figure out how
to make the ideas come to life and to stay
on budget. My script was short, around 24
pages with plenty of space for improv and
landscape imagery. I drew 224 storyboards
to get the visuals and actions in place. We
first filmed the “tableau vivant” introduction
to the film, which is a Boschian inspired stage
set that slowly comes to life. It took about
six months of solid work to make all the
costumes and props and backdrops prior to
shooting for each phase of the movie. Two
years later, I shot the main body of the film. (I
had to shoot over an expanse of time due to
funding issues.) Again, another six months to
make more costumes.
I wanted the movie to be a bit like the oppo-
site of The Wizard of Oz but in mine, the farm
becomes the main body of the film and the
tableau vivant is like the fantasy. The charac-
ters spring from the Tableau and transform
on the ranch much like when Dorothy wakes
up and realizes the farm hands were in her
“dream”.
Marnie Weber, The Day of Forevermore, 2016. Film Production Stills. Photos by: LeeAnn Nickel.
Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK, Los Angeles.
FILM PANIC #4 33
So I found an old ranch called “Zorthian
Ranch” in the foothills of Altadena and asked
if I could shoot there. There was a great deal
of stuff scattered and piled about, old cars,
trailers, live animals, metal, piles and piles
of stuff as well as a spooky house where the
witch mother and daughter could live. It was
perfect. We shot over a course of seven days
off and on. We used a variety of cameras,
both video and film, high def, 16 mm, Super
8, and an iPhone for take up shots. The entire
film was considerably more difficult than my
short films, in every possible way, yet very re-
warding when the shooting was going well
and of course when it was done.
The Day of Forevermore is about the re-
lationship between a young girl played
by your daughter and her witch mother
played by you, what made you decide to
cast yourself and your daughter in these
roles? And how was it working together?
I wanted the young witch, Luna Crimson, and
the old witch, Baba Muthra, to be different
aspects of myself. I had played an old wom-
an so many times it seemed natural to me. I
slowly realized the character of the old witch
was a bit like my mother. Then I thought the
young witch began to emerge as myself as a
young girl. I was always the naïve innocent.
Colette had been studying acting and was
in plays for years and I knew she could do it
and there was the added bonus she looks like
me when I was younger. The hard part was
she was 13 when we started and 15 when we
finished. Fortunately with a wig and make up
she looks about the same. Colette was a huge
help in writing the script and gave me a lot
of good ideas. In fact she was the one who
initially insisted I even have a script. She said
actors need scripts. Who knew? I might have
been harder on her than I was with the other
actors. During the ritual scene I kept telling
her to buck up, that sometimes actors work
really long days and you have to have a lot
34 FILM PANIC #4
of energy. Turns out she had strep throat and
was really sick and we didn’t realize.
Ultimately I realized the film was like reliving
aspects of my relationship with my mother
but having my daughter play me and myself
play my mother. The monologue that Baba
does while riding off on the devil is my hom-
age to motherhood, the intensity of the lov-
ing and the letting go.
Does making the films have any kind of
therapeutic role for you? I am thinking in
particular because you use yourself in the
films and because you have talked about
how they evolve from unconscious mate-
rial. Much in the same sense as dreams do.
I figure out a loose narrative, make the story-
boards, plan everything out with great detail
and then shoot the film. During the filming
I allow plenty of space for happy accidents
or to simply try things. Afterwards when
viewing the movie I can interpret what has
happened in it. Sometimes it is absolutely
uncanny how it reflects where I am in my life
or where I have been. It is very mysterious
and magical the way the unconscious works
to send messages. It does become cathartic,
movie making or dreaming can heal the psy-
che.
What projects are you working on next?
I’m working on a new psycho-biddy char-
acter (crazy old artist lady this time), a new
narrative and a new body of work. There will
be a movie but I am scaling way back. I am
hoping to have a cast and crew of just one
person this time, that would me.
Marnie Weber, Coquette Circus Girl, 1992.
Performance Portrait. Photo by: Chris Warner.
Courtesy of the artist
Marnie Weber (born in 1959, USA)
Filmography
The Day of Forevermore (2016 | 85 mins)
The Memory Barn (2013 | 5 mins 3 sec)
The Night of Forevermore (2012 | 16 mins 5 sec)
The Eternal Heart (2010 | 10 mins 4 sec)
Eternity Forever (2010 | 3 mins 39 sec)
The Sea of Silence (2009 | 14 mins 15 sec)
The Campfire Song (2008 | 7 mins 55 sec)
Mel’s Hole (2008 | 11 mins 12 sec)
A Western Song (2007 | 7 mins 1 sec)
Songs that Never Die (2005 | 12 mins 26 sec)
The Ghost Trees (2003 | 8 mins 16 sec)
The Forgotten (2001 | 7 mins 15 sec)
The Red Nurse and the Snowman (2000 | 9 mins 4 sec)
The Scarecrow (1998 | 3 mins 12 sec)
Lost In the Woods (1997 | 4 mins 20 sec)
Breath (1997 | 2 mins 13 sec)
I Am Not a Bunny (1996 | 58 sec)
Death Valley (1996 | 4 mins 20 sec)
Quest For Happy (1995 | 6 mins)
Destiny and Blow Up Friends (1995 | 6 mins 23 sec)
Songs Hurt Me (1994 | 5 mins 37 sec)
All Night Movies (1993 | 5 mins 18 sec)
Marnie Weber is represented in London by Simon Lee
Gallery.
Find out more about Marnie Weber’s work at
www.marnieweber.com
 AN INTERVIEW WITH

SCOTT BARLEY

Scott Barley’s fascinating films take place in the last slivers of light just as the sun sets,
the transitional moments between light and dark and between the consciousness of
day and the unconscious world of the night. His films present to us ethereal landscapes
emerging or disappearing into darkness – scenes of rivers, fields and forests shrouded
in mist and shadows – but the natural world here is not presented as a wild and vibrant
living force, it is somehow at a distance, ungraspable, fading away, maybe even dying.

One has the impression that we are looking at this land from far away, as if it is a min-
iature world contained within a glass terrarium and we can only ever look in from the
outside. There is a feeling of melancholy that resonates across his films, a deep sadness
and longing to reconnect with that living presence of nature which has been lost.

I feel that Scott’s films are expressing how in the modern world we have severed our ties
with nature, the rhythms of our lives are out of synch with the rhythms of nature and we
have a desperate need to reconnect. The sorrow and sadness present in his work seem
to me to be a mourning for the world in which we live, a cry of anguish over the guilt
Still from Sleep Has Her House (2017)
and shame we carry for the destruction we have caused to the planet, and the horror
of realising that what we have done to the planet we have done to ourselves. These are
cathartic films of a mythic wasteland and humankind’s soul in ashes, they are a calling The landscape features at the centre of some interviews with you I get the impres-
for healing. nearly all of your films, can you talk a bit sion that your work grows primarily from
about your interest in this subject and if an emotional centre, when you are mak-
As we grasp through the darkness of his films we are often accompanied by the sound you feel your work relates to the traditions ing a film are you seeking to capture or
of a breathing presence and a searching hand – we are lost but we are searching, this of both landscape films and painting? express something in particular or would
is where the hope lies, in this act of going forwards. One of his most recent works, the you say that you are discovering it through
feature film Sleep Has Her House, seems to be the accumulation of all these themes – wa- The landscape is us. It is our history. It has the process of creation? Is the emotional
terfalls, forests and rivers are seen before a storm rages overhead – maybe the coming seen much. It tells tales, not through voice core of the film coming from within your-
rain will wash away our sorrow and pain. The film ends ambiguously within a pulsating or words, but through the markings on the self or from an external source?
whirlpool of shifting colour and strobing light, the light seems to be emanating from a ground, the trees, the water, the wind, the
dark orb which draws us in, helped by the ambient soundtrack. From darkness we return animals, the unknown. I want to invoke a Cinema is catharsis. In some cases, it is an
back to darkness and from water back to water, perhaps beyond this final submersion form of storytelling, a poem, an elegy to lost exorcism. A nepenthe. Sometimes, a hyp-
will be the birth of a new world. things, through the landscape. I don't feel a nosis; a hypnosis for the maker, as well as
connection with landscape films, save for Pe- the spectator. I have lots of feelings, deep,
ter Hutton. But I do feel a deep connection unfathomable feelings that I try to express.
The following interview was conducted in March 2017 via email. with painting. I wish to bring cinema and Sometimes I can not objectify what these
painting together. amorphous feelings are. But that is how the
films are born. And sometimes it takes a long
From watching your films and reading time to feel that I understand, truly, what I

36 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 37


have made. To me, my films are like a light-
house at dusk, far in the distance. We are the
drowning, trying to head toward the shore,
to the light. Yes, there is lots of black, and
things indeterminable, but there is a hope. A
hope of something else, the unknown, a re-
newal, a light, something beyond ourselves.
A saviour. The celestial. The Sublime. There
is something that affirms life, even in death.
A beyond. A Hinterlands. An After. But yes,
there is an emotional core both through me,
and the environment I am in when I film, and
I would add, when I edit my work too. I go
to a strange place in my mind. I stop eating,
and forget to take care of myself. I would be
a terrible professional editor. A terrible crew
member on what I guess you would describe
as a “conventional film”. I would be useless.
I am a perfectionist over the most minute
38 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Sleep Has Her House (2017)
detail. I labour over everything. There are
single shots in Sleep Has Her House that took
14 months to fully realise. I am a slave to my
sculpture, a sculpture, it feels, that I am per-
ennially chipping away at. My cinema is born
of a need, not a want, and I want to feel un-
comfortable in my praxis.
In your films the camera's eye is often
looking up at clouds, sunsets and stars –
what does this act of looking towards the
sky mean to you? What is it that draws you
to this imagery time and again?
The Beyond. The Infinite. The liminality be-
tween It and ourselves. We see it, we sense
it, and yet we really aren't aware of beyond
ourselves at all. The transcendent, the deca-
dent, the abomination, the celestial. As I have
said before, I find it strange how the most
profound things for us to witness in life are
taken most for granted, and mostly ignored.
The clouds passing the moon at night, the
perennial chorus of insects upon a lake in
the summer sun, the weather changing, the
wind that crept, the night cry of an animal,
or a quiet stream in the distance. I want to
give us the opportunity to really see, to really
hear, to really feel, and to fall in love again,
and to be terrified, to be in awe of the nat-
ural world, and how it is uncannily not real.
What mysteries, what qualities of humanness
does nature transcend to me, to us, to the im-
age, to beyond the screen. How can I make
these creatures (the horse, the deer, the owl)
unknown to us again, how can they haunt us
silently? What does a mountainside, deep in
its slumber say about being a human being?
What does a picked flower floating in a star-
lit pond say? How does time pass us, as we
stand rooted, in the quiet wind, mesmerised
by the moon above us? How can we go be-
yond ontology and communicate in discus-
sion through cosmological questions? To me,
the body and the stars are both one and the
same. And the film and the spectator are too.
They feed off each other.
I have also noticed that horses appear in a
couple of your films and I was wondering
if you have any particular thoughts on the
symbolism of horses or personal associa-
tions?
There is an uncanny semblance of man in the
spirit of the horse - the simultaneity of ele-
gance and vulgarity. There is also a pathos in
both – so I am naturally drawn to that crea-
ture in my work. I try to cast a gaze, an an-
thropomorphic reflection on non-anthropo-
morphic things, to show just how vicinal the
ontology of a human being is with the world
of Animalia, and the stars, and the beyond
are. For me, the ontological and the cosmo-
logical are one and the same.
FILM PANIC #4
Could you talk us through the process of
making Sleep Has Her House, how was it
conceived, where was it filmed and what
was your shooting and post-production
process?
The film was conceived in late summer, 2015;
around the time I was finishing Hunter. The
first shot of the film that I completed was of
the horse in the foggy hills. The horse in that
shot was in fact a shot that I originally used
in my short film Evenfall. I composited that
shot from Evenfall in to the shot of the hills.
I do recycle some of my work in newer work
sometimes, but in a subtle way. For the most
part, I do not like work that makes recycling
noticeable. It is very rare that films such as
this do not feel haphazard in some way. Once
I had that first shot, I understood what Sleep
Has Her House was going to be. At least in
my mind. The nature of making a film is that
it should always be two steps ahead of you,
somewhat out of reach, out of your control.
The film was roughly 90% shot on my iPhone,
the rest being made up of some drawings I
did about five years ago whilst studying fine
art, and some more recent DSLR footage in
one shot of the stars through the trees, which
is repeated several times. All of that was then
superimposed together. It is the editing pro-
cess which took the longest. Most of Sleep
Has Her House was shot over the course of
4 separate days throughout 2015 and 2016.
There was one day of shooting in the Brecon
Beacons, Wales (which became the storm
sequence – it was a sublime experience, be-
ing within that storm, seeing trees around
me fall to ground from the harsh wind, as I
gripped my phone tight). There were three
days of travelling around West Scotland (the
mid-section of the film). The sunset sequence
was filmed in Abertillery, which was then
combined with footage I had shot a while
back in Italy of a storm. Between all of these
random shooting days, there was around
sixteen months of post-production. Many of
39

the shots in the film are made up of between
4 – 60 layers of iPhone footage, so naturally,
the post-production took a very long time.
Thousands of hours. Editing something for
that long leads to poisonous doubts. It was a
difficult process.
Sleep Has Her House premiered online
through TAO Films, was the film created
specifically for internet release? And if so
what considerations come into play when
making work for the small screen?
No. It was originally conceived as a film/in-
stallation hybrid. The first cut was four hours
long. I hadn’t even shot anything in Scotland
at this point. It was even more of a tonal
thing, rather than narrative. I did not want to
send it to festivals. It would be events only. I
had this idea of screening it, and people were
encouraged to take a nap during the piece,
and they could wake up later, and it would be
fine. Dream enters dream, you know? Ambi-
ent to life itself in a way. But Nadin Mai of The
40 FILM PANIC #4
Still from The Sadness Of The Trees (2015)
Art(s) of Slow Cinema, contacted me about a
new online streaming distribution platform,
focusing on slow, experiential and human
cinema. I told her about my project, and we
decided together that it would work for the
platform, called Tao Films. I realised that the
film I made was not suitable for online dis-
tribution. I was in my early drafts of the pro-
ject, and I duplicated the project, and began
chipping away at this four hour thing, into
something more workable for the internet. Stills from Closer (2016)
It also made me change my mind somewhat
on submitting it to festivals. It recently won
Best Film at FRONTEIRA, in Brazil, which was Romantic painters such as Caspar David really lost meaning in: awe-some. Martin
an honour. Boris Lehman, a hero of mine, said Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner, is this period showed us the gargantuan chaos and brutal
it was the most beautiful film he had seen in in painting an influence? And if so, is that elegance of it all. He was the cream of the
years, and that it affirmed his reasons to trav- influence purely in terms of the type of im- crop. But I still want to present that idea of
el to Brazil. That meant a lot to me. I still hope agery they created or do you feel a deeper fragility in my films. I thought about Edward
to screen it in different places. There are some connection to the ideology driving these Steichen a lot initially, not romantics. But yes,
plans. We shall see how it goes. artists? certainly, there is a Friedrich quality to some
of the sequences in the film. Maybe Turner for
There are some beautiful moments in My dream is to make a film like John Martin’s the clouds. I don’t know. I don’t really think
Sleep Has Her House that look like they paintings. I wish to conjure images that are about these things when I am making. It
could be paintings, they bring to mind the definition of sublime, or one that we have doesn’t feel like the film comes from me, but
FILM PANIC #4 41
it is born out of me. The films all come out
differently. Most of the time, I am just feeling
my way through the dark. I expel what the
ghosts left that passed through me.
I feel a deep connection with certain artists,
Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Anselm Kiefer, Francis
Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, John
Martin, Constable, Friedrich, and so on. Many
people don’t understand that true aestheti-
cally beautiful art is born out of form. Form
illuminates style, in my view.
The film starts with some text on screen
that seems to impregnate the film with a
narrative core, it is almost an evocation of
a horror film, but then the film that follows
has a quite different tone, those opening
words linger on but are left unresolved, al-
most an echo of another story from anoth-
er time. Could you say a few words about
the narrative form of Sleep Has Her House?
An echo. Yes. I like the thought of that. Like I
said before; form illuminates style. The form is
very unique. Yes there is a beginning, middle,
and end, but ultimately, the film is not a story.
We are simply a witness to the last moments,
before the door closes. It is something more
tonal, more evocative, mystic, and abstract.
That’s what I wanted to invoke anyway. And
then of course, another door opens.
In some ways Sleep Has Her House feels like
it might be an accumulation of the themes
and ideas being explored in your earlier
films, do you feel like your work will move
in a new direction after this film or is there
more for you to explore in a similar arena?
We always make the same films in a sense.
Everybody. But the manner in which they can
be expressed, or the path through this laby-
rinth that we decide to follow changes. Ideas
manifest in different ways. They are all from
within me, but they are also from something
42 FILM PANIC #4
that is not me at all. Something unknown. I Scott Barley (born in 1992, United Kingdom)
don’t know where they come from. And that
Filmography
is where exciting things happen. There will
be changes, but there will always be a kinship Passing (2017 | 2 mins)
between all of my work. The Green Ray (2017 | 12 mins)
Sleep Has Her House (2017 | 91 mins)
What other contemporary filmmakers are Hinterlands (2016 | 7 mins)
Closer (2016 | 7 mins)
you currently interested in? Blue Permanence / Swan Blood (2015 | 6 mins)
Hunter (2015 | 14 mins)
Now that I am making films with most of my The Sadness of the Trees (2015 | collaboration with
time, I do not watch anywhere near as much Mikel Guillen | 12 mins)
as I used to. I cannot watch and make at the Shadows (2015 | 20 mins)
Evenfall (2015 | 6 mins)
same time. It is a distraction from being in Hours (2015 | 3 mins)
a dialogue with myself. It can lead to a cin- Ille Lacrimas (2014 | collaboration with Matthew
ema of pseudo-truths. Cinema is all about Allen, Harry Johnson, Alberto Mangiapane, Amica
deception, but cinema is the place where lies Schiller & Eurion Smith | 20 mins)
transpire to truth. We must lie, ourselves, as Polytechnique (2014 | collaboration with Easychord
| 12 mins)
makers, to find truth. We must not steal other Nightwalk (2013 | 6 mins)
people’s lies, because there is no truth to be Irresolute (2013 | 2 mins)
found in that because there is no real urgen- Retirement (2013 | 3 mins)
cy or meaning. It is simply regurgitating. GLASS | TRUTH (2013 | collaboration with Matthew
Allen, Robert Cairns & Edmund Wong | 5 mins)
The Ethereal Melancholy of Seeing Horses in the Cold
But I did see a film recently, called Still the (2012 | 4 mins)
Earth Moves by Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez. It
is a very exciting prospect. It feels like a new
vision of cinema, in the same way Philippe
Grandrieux’s La Vie Nouvelle was before it. I
Find out more about Scott Barley’s work at
was stunned by it. Pablo is doing something www.scottbarleyfilm.com
new, and he is certainly a filmmaker to watch.
What are you working on next?
I have just finished a 360-minute installation
piece, called Painting (I). I hope to screen it
late this year. I’m working on many projects
simultaneously. Another feature film is in the
works, but won’t be completed for a long
time. As for the less distant future, there will
be lots of short films and installation-based
pieces coming. Mouths in the Grass, Lustre to
Void, Starless, and Fugue – a film I am mak-
ing with my partner, Gabrielle Meehan – and
lots of other things. I hope to release a lot
throughout this year and the next.
 AN INTERVIEW WITH

ATOOSA POUR HOSSEINI

I can’t claim that I have fully got my head around what lies at the centre of Atoosa Pour
Hosseini’s work yet, I don’t feel I have seen enough to offer a complete and informed
analysis. All I can say is that all of her films that I have seen are very compelling and that
there is something about them that draws me back and makes me watch them again.
There is one film in particular, one of my favourite short films of this year, which is called
Refining The Senses – I suspect that in that title there may be a clue to what her central
concerns could be.

In this film images are broken down, drawn upon and distorted through a tactile process
of working directly onto the celluloid film. There is the feeling that there is a world there,
a connected sequence of events in the footage, but it comes in and out of view as our
attention moves from filmed subject to film surface and then back again. I found my-
self piecing together vague narratives, inventing my own connections from the enticing
fragments. For me the film seemed to be in part about this act of narrative making but Still from Refining the Senses Performance at Filmbase Dublin 2016
more so, as the title suggests, the senses that are being refined here are that of looking
and listening as a way of investigating how we engage with moving images. I feel as if a central theme in your work is there. Before that I only worked with DSLR
memory, can you talk a bit about your in- and GoPro. I experimented with many differ-
Sound works with and against the film subject in the same way that the painting and terest in this subject and how you are ex- ent techniques, but I always felt something
scratches do, at times it takes us into the filmed world and at others to the film surface ploring ideas around this? was missing; perhaps because I am coming
and the mechanics of the medium but never does this strategy feel like it is motivated from a plastic background and needed to
by the detached formulas of a scientific approach. There is a deeply poetic sensibility at I don’t think the subject of my work is nec- work with some physical material or more
work here, the editing decisions are clearly that of an artist. essarily memory; I always tend to address or tangible elements. Video is abstract and dig-
play with many elements that help me to cre- ital is even more so; the process of working
Interestingly, the reduction of storytelling elements and the use of footage as artefacts ate a universe that can stand on its own or with these formats is very similar to thinking
for formal experimentation seem to result in images that take on a sharper meaning even float in space. Subjects like memory, al- and philosophy, whereas in my view celluloid
rather than becoming more vague or abstract. We are left with images that are arche- ienation, fear, and displacement are means of is more like clay or canvas. You have to think
typal – a spinner, a mountain, a river journey, mother and child – images that resonate communication in my work. More important- but can also play around and see what comes
with associations. The reduction of the personal brings these archetypal associations to ly I trust images and sound, simply because I out of it. So Super 8, and hopefully very soon
the surface. come from a very traditional painting back- 16 mm, is very suitable for my work and also
ground and it took me a few years to arrive to my personality.
Every image in Atoosa’s films has a beauty to them, they are carefully composed and the medium of Cinema.
edited, the use of colour and the mark-making never feel random or haphazard. These Your early films seem to have grown from
are films created from a strong sense of craft, even if chance elements are used the final Since 2015 you have been working pri- your work in drawing and painting, do
decision making eye is finely tuned to a particular sensibility which results in truly beau- marily with Super 8, what is it that attracts you feel that your interests in those ear-
tiful and engaging films. you to this medium? ly works are still present in your current
films? I am thinking particularly in the way
I started to work with Super 8 in the summer you create marks directly onto the film
We have screened Atoosa’s short films as a part of a programme of work by the Experimen- of 2014, when I was doing a short residency but maybe there are other connections as
tal Film Society. The following interview was conducted via email in March 2017. in Estonia. I shot a few scenes of Clandestine well?

44 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 45


I started my practice as a painter 20 years ago
and worked in that medium for about 9 years
in a very classical way. Then I got interested
in movement and sound, so I worked with
animated drawings. The main subject of my
practice was to investigate the relationship
between drawing and moving images with
sound; I employed drawing and its potential
to be transferred or transmitted into different
mediums such as video installations and per-
formance art. I believe I do still paint, but not
on canvas, I just paint with light in the space,
and my most recent canvas is the filmstrip.
Mark-making on the film strip is very much
like meditation, in a very poetic way, as Stan
Brakhage puts it: “Imagine a world alive with
incomprehensible objects and shimmering
with an endless variety of movement and
innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a
world before the 'beginning was the word’.”
Can you tell us a bit about the process of
working directly onto the surface of the
films, and describe for us some of the tech-
niques and mediums you have been using
to alter the image?
46 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Mirage (Iran & Ireland 2015)
I employ a number of different techniques
such as scratching, painting on film, bleach-
ing and burning or freezing the material in
order to achieve unique textures, colours and
atmospheres that suit my work. It depends
very much on the project: for example, in
Refining the Senses I was very interested in
destroying the footage and experimenting
with what remained, adding some hand-
scratched marks on the film. The mark-mak-
ing all depends on the pressure of your hand
and your mood on the day, so each time it is
different. They are purely abstract; the image-
ry is edited to create rhythmic and visual pat-
terns that evoke a mood of contemplation. I
also hand-built a tele-cine system with glass,
plastic, and other substances to capture
these works using multi-layer craft.
Your recent films seem to mix found foot-
age with scenes that you have filmed your-
self, can you talk about how you gathered
the images for these projects, where did
the found footage come from and what at-
tracted you to using it?
I very much like to invert or even subvert the
footage that I am working on and confuse my-
self to the point of no return. I treat my own
footage as found, and digest the actual found
footage as if it was my own. When you shoot
Super 8 films, obviously there is no way of
knowing exactly how they are being filmed.
Later on you have to send them to the lab
and a few weeks later you receive the rushes.
This process automatically creates a certain
alienation between you and the material and
somehow it becomes found footage in spirit.
When you take the found footage in hand,
put it into the projector and telecine it on the
spot, it’s too real and known to you for some
unknown reason. What I do is marry or collide
these two worlds and create a new universe;
a place where the boundaries are so blurred
that all of the rushes become artefacts and
their origin is not in question anymore, but
rather their enigmatic attributions invite the
audience to absorb them. Like thesis, antith-
esis, synthesis.
Do you make further changes to the films
after they have been digitized or is this
FILM PANIC #4
Still from Gleanings (Switzerland & Ireland 2017)
simply a way to make exhibition copies?
Are the works screened from the original
prints as well as from digital files?
When the rushes are developed and sent
back to me from the lab, I work on them and
process them with various techniques; the
same goes for the found material. After that
I telecine them and manipulate them further
in post-production. The end result for cinema
spaces is digital files, blu-rays or DCPs. But I
also keep the footage and sometimes resur-
rect it in my performances. The films some-
how continue to live in different forms and
ways of presentation.
In the film Refining the Senses there seems
to be a strong narrative at play, even
though there isn't a story in any rigid sense
there is a feeling of a tale being spun. The
images link together and move into each
other with a strong purpose and for me it
evoked a kind of folk tale - the feminine
spinner, the row boat on the river, moun-
tains and journeys through mythical land-
scapes. Can you say a few words about the
47

narrativity in your work? Do you see the
sequences as being a part of a story in the
loose sense of the word?
Refining the Senses presents its themes not
as narrative, but in terms of the abstract
resonances that emerge from poetic combi-
nations of sound and image, following the
inspirations of setting and the expressive
audio-visual possibilities of the medium it-
self. There wasn’t any script in the traditional
sense; the 'story' emerged from the process
of filming and pushing the limits in a con-
stant process of technical investigation, with
the intention of exhausting the mystic poten-
tials of exploring and representing such spac-
es as sites of extreme formalistic experience.
In all of the films of yours that I have seen
there are moments when both the sound
and image are briefly frozen, usually for
a split second – these moments draw our
attention to the machine that creates the
48 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Refining the Senses (Switzerland, Iran & Ireland 2017)
Still from Clandestine (Estonia & Ireland 2015)
illusion of movement and to our process of
viewing itself. Can you tell us what is the
thinking behind this approach, what inter-
ests you about making the viewer aware
of the mechanics that create the images?
I very much enjoy discontinuing or disrupt-
ing the information in my work, and creating
empty spaces. This would usually create op-
portunities for the audience to engage with
the work more intimately or sometimes run
away from it even further. The most impor-
tant thing is to give them the circumstances
to access the mechanics of the work. By this I
mean, like I said, the machine of imagery, or
sometimes revealing the voids for them to
fill in. It is a very indiscernible act but yet also
very frightening and satisfying.
I am really interested in your expanded
cinema performances and how, from the
documentation I have seen, they appear Still from Clandestine (Estonia & Ireland 2015)
to extend the world and atmosphere of
FILM PANIC #4 49

the films into the space where they take
place – can you describe one of the perfor-
mances for us and say a few words about
the relationship between the films and the
live performances?
I started to do performances in 2012 with
a number of amazing and very well-estab-
lished Irish sound artists, and I must say I
have learned a great deal from them. My
initial idea was to recreate the worlds of my
paintings and summon them into the 3D
space using séance-like rituals. I used digi-
tal video and multiple projections. Later on,
when I shifted my practice to Super 8, I used
many elements that this format offered me.
I look at my performances as a continuous
process of learning, exploring, and discov-
ering how space, projections, sound, and
actors can interact with one another. They
are highly stressful and challenging means of
presentation, but rewarding too. As you men-
tioned, creating a very personal atmosphere
and ambience is crucial in a performance. In
the beginning there were many improvisa-
tional approaches, but as I go along they are
becoming more methodical and rehearsed. I
am still forming.
50 FILM PANIC #4
Atoosa Pour Hosseini (born in 1981, Iran)
Filmography
Refining the Senses (2017 | 12 mins)
Gleanings (2017 | 8 mins)
Mirage (2015 | 4 mins)
Oasis (2015 | 7 mins 30 sec)
Clandestine (2015 | 15 mins)
Last Phase (2014 | 1 min 56 sec)
Incubus (2013 | 1 min 30 sec)
Luminosity 2 (2013 | 2 mins 25 sec)
Luminosity 1 (2013 | 5 mins)
Dimensions (2013 | 6 mins)
Silences (2011 | 3 mins)
Reflected (2011 | 2 mins 17 sec)
Then (2011 | 5 mins)
Test (1) (2010 | 45 sec)
Still from studio (Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin)
Find out more about Atoosa Pour Hosseini ’s work at
Who are the key influences on your work?
www.atoosapourhosseini.com
This keeps changing in different periods of Atoosa is a member of the Dublin based Experimen-
time, but to name a few: Agnes Martin, Chan- tal Film Society, you can find out more about it at
tal Akerman, Paul Sharits, Marguerite Duras, www.experimentalfilmsociety.com
Edvard Munch, Hieronymus Bosch …
Which contemporary filmmakers and art-
ists are you interested in?
I am very much interested in filmmakers such
as Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Nathaniel Dorsky,
Claire Denis and Béla Tarr, and artists such as
Tacita Dean, Rebecca Horn, James Turrell, and
Pierre Huyghe.
What are you working on next?
I am working on a new film and sound pro-
ject in collaboration with EFS and sound
artists from Kirkos Ensemble, which will be
presented in September in Dublin. I will start
to work and experiment with 16mm film for-
mat this year, and more collaboration with
performers, composers, and sound artists in
2017 and 2018.
 AN INTERVIEW WITH ^

JANJA RAKUS
In the summer of 2016 we came across an intriguing trailer for a film still in the making
called Alchemy On The Amstel by Janja Rakuš, about a night journey along the river Ams-
tel in Amsterdam. The trailer featured beautifully captured images of lights reflected on
the river’s surface, the effect of the light cast on the river’s gentle waves seemed to turn
its water into liquid silver. We got in touch with Janja and started following the progress
of the project, which was fully completed a few months later.

Alchemy On The Amstel (I-III) is a sophisticated cinematic narrative in three parts that
springs from the thoughts, memories and dreams of the river itself. It takes place in the
dark of night where we see images of coloured light, shop fronts and windows reflected
on the river’s surface as if it is a mirror. The images follow one another in a meditative
rhythm, intercut with fragments of text which speak of alchemical transmutations in a Still from Alchemy On The Amstel ( I-III ) (2016)
poetic and emotional tone. There is a reoccurring shot at the river’s level in which we
are carried along its flow through the reeds, illuminated by an intense red light. As the Can you talk a bit about your background from enough for me, so I decided to study
camera floats swiftly forwards we hear very brief and strange snippets of sound that pop and some of your previous projects, and theatre directing at the Academy of theatre,
in as if they are contained within the surroundings that we pass. how you became a filmmaker? film, radio and television in Ljubljana. It is a
conventional academy for dramatic arts with
There are no other characters to follow apart from the river itself and the scope of time It was a really long-and-winding-road for a focus on dramatic theatre and I was inter-
that is present in the film reaches over centuries, yet what we also see is the echoes of me to become a filmmaker. My first study ested in everything but drama theatre. I ad-
human life that is (and has been) all around the river, imbuing its surface with human was chemistry. This strange idea that I like mired Noh Theatre, physical theatre, rituals,
concerns, both material and immaterial. Along the journey we are taken deeper and chemistry probably occurred from my fas- performances. Luckily I met Enrique Vargas
deeper into the river’s memories and reveries and the film’s form opens up, skilfully mul- cination with alchemical manuscripts, the and his Teatro de los Sentidos in the Exodus
tiplying its layers of meaning and moving from the immediacy of the reflections of light thought-pictures of Michael Maier, engrav- festival in Ljubljana and was part of his huge
on the water to a dimension where centuries of philosophical and spiritual ruminations ings from Heinrich Khunrath, the secret tao- multisensorial project called Oracles. A mul-
on water are suddenly made present. istic language of diagrams and calligraphy, tisensorial labyrinth based on tarot cards.
the blacksmith in Velázquez’ painting Apollo That experience was very important to me,
This is a moving and tightly crafted film in which the river’s flow somehow passes from in the Forge of Vulcan and the mystical light because it was completely opposite to the
the screen into yourself. This magical transference is possible because the film is oper- from Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Medita- western approach to the theatre and poetic
ating on a highly refined level of sensibility and understanding which we very rarely tion, to name a few. With this alchemical re- senses in general. So, it became clear that
encounter in cinema these days. It springs from an understanding that is at the basis of mix in my head, chemistry didn’t fulfil my drama-and-baroque-box-theatre was com-
oriental philosophies, alchemy and also in art, that reality’s physical properties are en- dream-machine of course, but I fell in love pletely inappropriate and too slow a medium
twined with mythical and spiritual qualities, and that there is no question of objectivity, with Mathematics and Friends. It was Math for me, writing not enough visual and visuals
subjectivity, external or internal, all these aspects are merged together at their source and Dance. So I stayed there for two years not enough in-the-move. That’s how I ar-
and are simply different manifestations of an experience too big to be comprehended and in between already started with inten- rived to the cinema. In-between I published
from any one point separately. The magic of Alchemy On The Amstel is that it offers a sive visits to the theatre. I was lucky that I had four novels, made exhibitions (Eros&Error,
journey through which the viewer’s perception fuses with the river’s and the viewer ex- the opportunity to experience the golden Angels&Criminals, Click My Wounds), per-
periences a glimpse into the consciousness and nature of water. years of Slovenian Maribor’s theatre of Tomaž formances (How would you like to die?, Field
Pandur and other great and radical theatre of Aquarius&Van Gogh’s Sky, Shadow Cast-
Alchemy On The Amstel (I-III) was screened at our Film Panic Presents showcase in Decem- makers. I also started to write for newspa- ers, Prayer Machine), to name a few. But the
ber 2016 and this interview was conducted via email following several conversations be- pers and had a “green card” for festivals and biggest visual and cinematic breakthrough
tween us. cultural events in general. Journalism was far happened to me in Amsterdam where I did

52 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 53

 Still from Alchemy On The Amstel ( I-III ) (2016) Still from Alchemy On The Amstel ( I-III ) (2016)

my MD in Performing Arts. There I got a real
kick-and-click-of-poetic-visual-and-cinemat-
ic-initiations. I think that it was in Amster-
dam, where I TOUCHED the camera for the
first time. I mean, I touched it before, but that
DUTCH-TOUCH was a kind-of-revelation. For
the first time I really felt the camera as a pro-
longed version of my brain and hand. Camera
as a synaptic telescope. It was a mini Handy
Cam with tapes, I could put it in my pocket
and dance between canals. I started to film,
to make a no-plan-no-concept-diary in a pas-
sionate, amateurish and even naïve way. My
motto was: “You take a Pen and write a Poem.
You take a Cam and make a Movie.” And even
if I always felt, thought and wrote in cinemat-
ic flashes, I see myself as a cinematic new-
comer, absolute beginner and I don’t feel un-
comfortable with this “tattoo” at the moment.
I know that you take a lot of inspiration
from painting, you mentioned Van Gogh
in particular. What is it that inspires you in
his work and how do these ideas translate
into moving image?
I love painting and it was very important and
inspiring for me from the very beginning. Be-
cause I spent a lot of time in Amsterdam, I had
an opportunity to experience and to learn
something about the Dutch and Flemish tra-
dition that is very much based on the material
itself. Like in Tapiés’ or Twombly’s painting for
example, the Dutch tradition that goes back
a very long way, is a tradition that is letting
the structure of the paint to come through,
not just with colour but with the substance
of the paint. And through the presence of
that substance, it is making the physical work
that created the painting palpable, vibrating,
pulsating. The image is not formed by an idea
that existed in advance. When an idea comes
out of the Image, it is created by the physi-
cal work of the painter. And who is the Giant
Brushstroke of that process? It is Vincent van
Gogh. Terrible Sensibility. Superior Lucidity.
Greek Fire. Alchemical Penetrator with green
eyes that probably transmuted to red as a
result of constant looking and seeing. In the
depths of those fiery eyes, Van Gogh devoted
himself to one of those operations of somb-
er alchemy which took nature as their object
and the human body as their vessel. I think
that there had never been a painter, whose
art appealed so directly to the senses. From
the ungraspable aroma of his purity to the
flesh and matter of his paint, from the brilliant
and radiant songs of his colour to the intense
sensuality of his line. Van Gogh’s canvases
are almost orgiastic extravaganzas. So, how
to translate his flaming landscapes, drunken
suns, olive trees, solar and demonic cypress-
es, sowers, reapers, beds, chairs, pipes, night
cafés, stars and skies into the moving im-
age? It is almost impossible. And that is the
thing. It is my Passion for Impossible. Luckily
enough, the common factor among painting,
photography and film is that they are pro-
duced on a flat, two dimensional surface. In
film that flat surface is the projection screen.
From the very beginning I worked with the
awareness of a certain abstract quality of
cinema, film or pixels, it doesn’t matter to
me, because for me it is a projection of light
onto a flat surface. In this sense the screen
is transformed into a “speaking canvas” and
the images function as pure energy rather
than acting as a secondary symbol. Screen
is a field, membrane of Light, and narrative
is that which takes place between spectator
and screen. It is hard to access reality. With
camera even harder than with brush. But Cin-
ema has that power. Through the possibilities
of sensation, forces, nature of movement of
hand, body, light, to be inside situations, not
outside. To translate Van Gogh’s paintings
into moving images you have to film, catch
sensations, forces. Emotion-sensation-vibra-
tion-narration. No brain, no mise-en-scène.
Not to represent. But to be present and film
what you feel at that moment. Very direct.
Very intuitive. And for the whirling forces of
Van Gogh you have to vibrate and feel a few
octaves higher and more intensely than in or-
dinary-state-of-being. Equipment is second-
ary but not unimportant. I am struggling with
that. Single or hybrid medium? Van Gogh
didn’t walk around at night in a hat with
twelve candles because of delirium, but be-
cause he simply wanted to paint a landscape
from nocturnal nature. If you want to film in
the night you need an appropriate camera.
Not the most expensive, but one that is suita-
ble for specific spacetime conditions.

54 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 55

 It doesn't just require a readership and think-
ership, but also a clickership. Read,think,&-
click.

From Gesamtkunstwerk to Gesamtdatenw-

erk.

It requires an active reader and is a perfect

I have been looking through my window at
a gorgeous pale-pastel-green-yellow willow
for almost two weeks. It is calling me and
dancing before my eyes. But to film the wil-
low in the “Van Goghish” way it is not enough
to see the tree and film it. You have to be-
come a tree. It is not National Geographic, it is
not Terrence Malick, it is actually a Buddhistic
way - you have to “empty” yourself in order to
touch the essence of life.
You have written a book called Voodoo
Waltz for Epileptics. Can you tell us about
this book and also about your plans to
adapt it into a feature film?
VOODOO WALTZ FOR EPILEPTICS / Hypergraph-
ic Pilgrimage in 36 Hours / is my fourth book.
As can be glimpsed from the subtitle, “Hy-
pergraphic Pilgrimage in 36 Hours”, VOODOO
WALTZ FOR EPILEPTICS is a conceptual literary
work. It is a multi-layered cross-section of
transgressive, satirical minimalism and al-
chemical distillation of a word.
Still from Castles of Wasteland (2014)
The (in)visible thread that binds the whole
text into a unified novel is the question of
radical freedom revealed through epileptic
seizures. In the work, epilepsy is sketched
out as the transparency of being, and is ex-
amined as a medicinal, historical and artis-
tic phenomenon; even as an excess. And, of
course, as a borderline condition of the hu-
man existence. VOODOO WALTZ is also, and
primarily, a story about four epileptics whose
fateful encounter brings about the end of
the Old World and the birth of the New One.
Chapters are linked with hypergraphic images
or multiplicities of a digital Self, which I drew
in a drawing-program-Painter, using a com-
puter mouse.
VOODOO WALTZ is also about inventing and
creating, designing and redesigning of hu-
man beings and of what they have in com-
mon, and that is spirit.
It's not insane, it is written in an insane world,
however. Inside this world, inside the neolib-
eral insanity. In a time Bauman named liquid.
Drunk Without Moon
It is necessary to Walk. It is not necessary to Talk.
It can be read as an on-line-diary or guideline
through iOccupy, mythological and sacral
text or linguistic erotism with a drop of noir.
A panoply of images and text are lying some-
where between lineated and concrete poet-
ry, shaped with pictograms, ideograms, and
strings of URL-s.
base for cinematic imprint. A »regular« and
conventional movie usually tells an unambig-
ous story. With the aid of an apparently logi-
cal succession of images in combination with
text or a narrator, the viewer is presented with
a narrative structure that requires one mere-
ly to follow passively. Identification viewing.
I don't want the passive gaze or a narrative
structure in which the story is told without
breaks, if somehow a true-slice-of-reality. I
work in associations, multilayers. In this sense
story and characters are not the main prob-
lem. It is the way of how to approach them.
I think we are now ready for characters as a
microcosmos and not just as psychological
personas. To put it flatly. It is not Freud, it is
Hubble with the lens of Spinoza. So, there is
a kind of plan to distill my first feature from
this book, but it is about searching, exploring,
thinking and not about the exposition of a fi-
nal truth or message. The way I am looking
for the form, in visuals, writing or cinema, is
never the result of a predetermined idea, but
a process that can start from scratch at every
stage. For now I have a cinematic imprint
based on the book, some filmed and other
material, but I still have to think about crew
and the rest. There are still many decisions
that have to be done and come organically.
Can you talk about how your experience
of epilepsy has impacted on your work as
an artist?
First short answer: Epilepsy is Death which
constantly comes and goes. Death is un-
graspable but at the same time, conscious-
ness keeps running after Death. Death is a

56 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 57

 Still from Paesaggio in 9 strokes / dedicated to Cy Twombly (2017) Still from Skyline (work in progress)

Portal for a Seed immortal. The same goes
with Beauty. The same goes with Art.
Your trilogy Alchemy On The Amstel pre-
sents for us a dream of the river Amstel,
what attracted you to using the river as a
subject for this series of films?
The trilogy Alchemy On The Amstel was actu-
ally never planned. It happened as a “side-ef-
fect” of the book Voodoo Waltz for Epileptics.
It was during my stay in Amsterdam when I
was finishing the book. Everything was very
intensive. The process of writing, cold winter,
wild wind, so I had to take a break and start-
ed to take long walks through the city with
the cam in my pocket, just-in-case. I mean,
it is hard not to notice the reflections on the
water in Amsterdam’s canal, so I simply start-
ed to film them. From curiosity and for fun.
But after a week of play I got “addicted”. It was
the river that chose me and not vice versa. I
finished the book, went back to Slovenia, but
the collected material silently knocked on my
brain. In the meantime I discovered a beau-
tiful book from Gaston Bachelard: Water and
Dreams. Water as a pre-Socratic element, in-
ner and outer. Water as a Liquid Language of
Poetry. For Bachelard water is a fundamental
metaphor for depths and past time. It is a pri-
mal milk, a substantial nothingness that help
us die completely. Bachelard is an alchemist
of substantial imagination. Contrary to Jung,
who was searching for forms and symbols
in archetypes of collective unconsciousness
and patterns, Bachelard was interested in
Images that stem directly from matter. In
this sense Bachelard, who was and still is a
big inspiration to me, is much closer to the
cinematic language than Jung. I learned ba-
sic and important lessons about cinema with
the water. Water as a liquid screen, visual or-
acle, eye of the earth, substantial Monastery
that with its prayer improves time’s looks and
beautifies the future. That’s what the role of
Amsterdam city in the universe is. Not every
city has this purpose. The process of filming
was physically very intensive. You depend on
weather, wind, rain, sun, boats, swans, ducks.
They can all be “destroyers” of your images
when there are too many and too strong. I
filmed a lot in the night when Amsterdam
enters its silent almost akashic zone and
learned a great deal about locations, spaces,
locus mundi. At two in the night you hear the
water talking and dreaming. Some locations
are calling you, inviting you, some will nev-
er allow you to film them. In general I made
two types of filming-research. Reflections–
drawing, painting on and with the water and
Painting with light. The last one I just touched
because I didn’t have enough time. I would
like to continue with this research in the fu-
ture. To cast shadows on the surface of the
water. Painting with the Light in the middle
of the Night. Or as John Scotus Eriugena said:
“All there is is Light.”
The film uses not only multi-layered im-
ages but also fragments of text, can you
talk a bit about the relationship between
words and images in this film? Also I'm
interested in hearing about how you ap-
proach the narrative structure of your
films. In some ways, Alchemy On The Am-
stel seems to echo the structure of a book
in the way that it is divided into chapters.
It also seems to bear some resemblance
to the forms of poetry. What are your
thoughts on this?
The narration and structure for Alchemy On
The Amstel in particular came from the riv-
er Amstel and the city itself. The narration is
dictated by the flow of the river, the structure
from the “Danteish” magical semicircle of Ca-
nals. The semicircle is both labyrinth and an
image of the highest order. Amsterdam is the
city of words, the realm of poet, where every
bridge is a poem and every poem is a bridge.
You just have to read the names of the streets
and canals like Herengracht (Gentlemen’s
Canal), Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal) and
Prinsengracht (Princes’ Canal), Huidenstraat
(Skins Street), Berenstraat (Bears Street),
Hartenstraat (Hearts Street), canals of brew-
ers, lilies, the elks. And when you navigate
through the narrow streets you have a feel-
ing that you are walking between shelves in a
library where the addresses of the houses be-
come the titles of the books. So, this is one as-
sociation that the film is divided into chapters
and pages, but that is just one layer. For me
the word PAGE 2 for example, doesn't mean

58 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 59


just a page in the book, but an »independ-
ent« Image. Like concrete poetry in literature,
for example. An Image that is already part of
the editing. I never really cared whether the
editing takes place between moving or still
images, editing can also emerge within one
seemingly motionless image. Because the
editing is the motion of the mind itself, the
thought that moves the matter. It is alchem-
ical distillation. The whole structure of the
trilogy came from repetitive distillation. Tak-
ing the »best parts« from the first part to put
it in the second, add a new one and repeat
the distillation. At the beginning I wanted to
make only a short-15min-piece. But then the
film took over, as usually happens to me in
my work, and started to guide me. In all three
parts the relation between word and image
is non-hierarchical. In the first two parts it is
more like writing that provided a narrative
orientation for all the rest of the montage.
Line that almost evokes an image, where im-
age is built around the words. It is more like
a mental event than illustrated »story«, be-
cause pictures themselves tell stories. There
60 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Flowers of Amsterdam (work in progress)
is a very common belief that language is the
weakest part in cinema. This is true when
words are used only as a mean of informa-
tion or illustration. But it doesn't have to be
this way. There is nothing more joyful than
when you see a good avant-garde piece in-
fused with delicious words at the right time
and space. It simply elevates the cinematic
language. I think that digital tools offer even
more possibilities to work with the text, but
we didn't even touch that. I also believe that
it is time for a new »big story«, »new myth«,
new approach to the characters and to get
rid of prejudice on highway narration-char-
acters-image-text-sound-silence.
What does alchemy mean to you?
There are two analogies that resonate alche-
my for me the most. “Unlimited expansion,
perpetual rising” and the image, icon of a
Sower. Change perhaps comes closest to a
definition of alchemical practice: the science
of alchemy is the science of change and is
concerned with the question of processes,
in cosmos, nature and in man. To understand
these processes and to use them for the
good of mankind was the highest objective
of alchemy. The purpose of alchemical prac-
tice, therefore, was to bring about a change
for the better. Applying this practice to Art
means that the genuine goal of Art is to dis-
till from human consciousness something
infinitely more subtle than what the human
realm can contain. The Art of Alchemy is an
exploration of the very act of creation itself.
Art is also an act of Magic. And magic can-
not manifest without sensitivity to subtle
psycho-emotive resonances. The resonance
cannot manifest without penetrating the po-
etic dream field. The field cannot open with-
out heartbreak. And here comes the Sower.
An Image more comforting that any promise
of Paradise. A “Great Artist” who in the field
spreads the seeds of rebirth. The golden seed
that is scattered all around is the carrier of a
spiritual energy full of transmutation poten-
tial. The sudden change from darkness into
light. Pilgrimage of light through the human
body. We may see sowing as a deed of offer-
ing and purification. Mind and Body purify
FILM PANIC #4
Still from Poem for Loa (2017)
themselves to reveal what is already the case.
In this sense alchemy is not a process of turn-
ing lead into gold. It is a realization that lead
was always gold.
Who are the key influences on your work
as an artist?
Second short answer. Enigmatic stream of
Life-Death-Life.
Which contemporary filmmakers and art-
ists are you interested in?
I won’t make a list in the name of justice. In
the last few years I am more interested in
non-western filmmakers. Not so much be-
cause of aesthetic itself but because of their
natural connections with the Sacred. Asia,
South America. I would also like to know
more about African and Indian cinematogra-
phy. I was really impressed by films of young-
er avant-garde filmmakers from Mexico. You
can see their Mayan roots, their relation to
the Spirits, Language, Poetry, Spiritual DNA,
Death, Cosmos.
61
 Janja Rakuš (born in Slovenia)

Filmography

Poem for Loa (2017 | 3 mins 50 sec)

Paesaggio in 9 strokes / dedicated to Cy Twombly (2017
| 14 mins 30 sec)
Alchemy on the Amstel ( I-III ) (2016 | 53 mins)
Castles of Wasteland (2014 | 7 mins 26 sec)
The Sower (2012/13 | 9 mins)
Dawn of Time (2012/13 | 14 mins 50 sec)
Lust Bath (2012/13 | 7 mins 20 sec)
Google Eyes (2012/13 | 12 mins 30 sec)
Ecstasy of Death 7.0 (2012 | 20 mins)

Find out more about Janja Rakuš’ work at

www.vimeo.com/user4766602

Still from Ecstasy of Death 7.0 (2012)

What are you working on next? ing for us just around the corner. As Rilke said:
“The future enters into us, in order to trans-
I am working on my feature Voodoo Waltz for form itself in us, long before it happens.”
Epileptics, very slowly, from sketches, collect-
ing material, still looking for the “key word”.
Next to this I would like to make a movie, I am
not afraid of Beauty, inspired by Van Gogh’s
words from his last period. He wrote: “I have
no ideas. Finally I can only look.” It is an initia-
tory process that takes years for people to get
closer to Beauty. And by Beauty I don’t mean
sweet-postcard-Images.

I will also continue with my drawings, paint-

ing and installations, I love to work in the
space with different materials, atmospheres
and other sensorial ingredients.

But you know how it goes. All those in-be-

tween-and-unknown-projects that are wait-

62 FILM PANIC #4
 AN INTERVIEW WITH

SUSU LAROCHE

London based artist Susu Laroche creates hand-processed 16mm films. Her monochro-
matic short films scratch, tear and flicker across the screen depicting an archaic realm of
cult-like ceremonial scenes where haunted and tormented figures enact obscure rituals.

Watching the films one feels as if the actions of the performers and the intense screams
and crashes on the soundtrack – which are tightly woven to the image – are directly af-
fecting the material of the film itself. It’s almost as if some demonic force is attempting
to break through from another dimension or maybe that the characters in the films may
suddenly tear through the screen and burst out into the room around us.

These are films of a great emotional force, Susu gives a great deal of value to the irra-
tional and to the taboo emotional states of hysteria, panic and the outpouring of pent
up feelings. The cause of the feelings in the films is unknown but the indication is that
they result from some unseen trauma. I like to think that these films are screams against
the tyranny of ‘coping’ and of ‘not making a fuss’, they spit in the face of those who try to
suppress and control emotional expression of any kind. Still from Vesmir Peklo (2014)

All her films are supremely crafted in both sound and image and their great power Can you tell us about your background
comes from the interaction between the two. The performance on screen moves be- and how you came to making films?
tween the pure expressions of the characters and the awareness that they are perform-
ers who seem to be enjoying the play of making films, this dual consciousness doesn’t I started doing photography at 16, film was a
take us out of the films as one would expect or as it would in a conventional drama, in natural progression from working with pho-
fact it strengthens the feeling that these films are showing us rituals, rituals in which tography and the darkroom.
suppressed emotion is drawn out, an arena where it can be freed.
Your films feel as if they don't quite exist
in the world as we know it, they simultane-
In March we screened a selection of six of Susu’s short films at our showcase Film Panic Pre- ously evoke some ancient civilisation and
sents. The following interview was conducted via email. a post-apocalyptic world – can you talk a
bit about this dimension where these films
exist?
A delusional reality on a smudged border
between make-believe and truth. Everything
takes place on an equinox in 1066 in which
Ancient Egypt’s Memphis collides in culture
clash with Memphis, Tennessee. It is a time of
feudalism without crusade. Inside it’s every-
where and any-time and it smells like YSL's
Opium.
‘Nothing is true, Everything is permitted’ (a
quote from 11th century Persian warlord
Hassan-i Sabbāh) is the mantra.
There is also this sense of ritual taking
place in all of the films we have seen. Even
though we may not understand them, the
actions have a strong sense of purpose
and intent for the characters – could you
talk a bit about the role of ritual in your
films?
‘Civilization’ relies on an endless (support-
ive, tiring, questionable) system of routines
and the thrill comes from straying from
them. People tell you how to do things, and
that this-is-the-way-things-are-done. But it

64 FILM PANIC #4 FILM PANIC #4 65


doesn’t have to be. There are endless rituals
from which instinctual behaviour, energy and
freedom can then follow, rituals into the un-
hinged. These inform the production circum-
stances and narrative content of the films.
The peak is an uncertainty, when impulse
then overtakes. Or as Georges Bataille says in
Eroticism: 'to live for the moment, no longer
to heed these instincts for survival; this is dy-
ing to oneself, or at least it is living with death
as an equal.'
The roles that performers are playing feel
more like archetypal characters rather
than individuals with a personal psycholo-
gy, this further adds to this ritualistic feel-
ing. How do you work with the perform-
ers? What kind of preparation do you do
before the shoot and how much is impro-
vised and conceived while filming?
66 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Vesmir Peklo (2014)
Endlessly hoarding research and ideas for
films until a breaking point at which if I’m not
obsessed then I don’t bother. Actions and
choreography are all written out and filmed
and inevitably new ideas and possibilities are
conceived whilst filming, it goes on until the
film runs out. Performers are always friends,
it's crucial to have an atmosphere of trust and
freedom, which means anything is possible.
Can you talk us through your technical
process of working with 16mm film, how
does the particular camera and film you
use shape the way you shoot and what
is your post-production process? Do you
develop the film yourself? Do you edit on
film or digitally?
I shoot with a Bolex, hand-develop the film at
home, get it telecined at No.w.here, and edit
digitally. I’ve worked out a way to do things
as cheap as possible and utilising as few peo-
ple as possible, sound is the only thing I do
not do (yet). With 16mm the restrictions of
film reel length, money, time and light are
good boundaries to have. Nothing can be
wasted, everything has to count, everything
is one take.
Can you tell us about your Manic Episodes
series and your interest in exploring situ-
ations of conflict, mourning and hysteria?
It's a depiction of ‘irrational’ emotional re-
sponse to situations of crises, and loosely
themed on the 4 elements. The traumatic
events you anticipate most with a dread fet-
ish: loss of home, car crash, death of a loved
one, and natural disaster. I wanted to chal-
lenge the emotional squeamishness that
dominates society, and the structures that
FILM PANIC #4
Still from ‘Quatic Menac (2015)
offer support but dictate, for example, the
length for which someone should mourn or
the manner in which someone should react
to trauma. There is no right way to respond
to this, and excess and the absurd can be the
most cathartic way to go through it. It’s a cel-
ebration of melodrama, excess of energy and
emotion as affirmation of life-force.
For this series you collaborated with per-
formance artists Ellen Freed and Keira Fox
of New Noveta – can you tell us a bit about
your collaboration and how you work to-
gether?
We shot the first film Vesmir Peklo together
in 2014 and exactly a year later I wrote 17:17,
then Widows and Flood quickly followed, cre-
ating and completing this series about cri-
ses and hysteria. They were excellent muses
67
for the circumstances I posed to
them and they adore embodying
different kinds of woman.
The music and sound is an intri-
cate element in your films and
is used in a very precise way,
what is your process for creat-
ing the sound and music?
I get friends whose music I really
adore to make something for me,
with some direction, but mainly
respect for whatever they’ll do.
There are examples of sound
and film together which are SO
sublime, like particular scenes of
Streetcar Named Desire and Blue Velvet, where
it's actually a transcendental experience and
that’s what I want.
I feel that there are some connections be-
tween your work and the industrial music
and performance scene and post-punk
films of the late seventies and eighties,
particularly in their confrontational and
disruptive techniques, their sense of per-
formance as ritual, the DIY aesthetics and
home made quality. Has this been an influ-
ence in your work?
Maybe not directly but likely via the music
and ethos of bands like Einstürzende Neu-
bauten, This Heat and Swans, who I’m a long
term fan of.
Who are the key influences on your work
as an artist?
Occult anthropology, histories of conflict, evil
behaviour, the writing of Georges Bataille
and J.G. Ballard.
Which contemporary filmmakers and art-
ists are you interested in?
68 FILM PANIC #4
Still from Tzars of Eros (2014)
Stanley Schtinter, Carlos Thomas, Ben Burgis
and Ksenia Pedan, New Noveta, Adam Chris-
tensen, Sidsel Meineche Hansen.
What are you working on next?
It will end in tears, based on this quote from
Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood: “confronted with
a catastrophe that had yet no beginning”.
Senseless Violence for Sixteen Journal. Finish-
ing a short film series called 'On the warpath’
about male conflict. And I’m writing a crime
thriller about a moral compass.
Susu Laroche (born in 1988, United Kingdom)
Filmography
It will end in tears (2017 | 11 mins 11 sec)
Senseless Violence (commissioned by Sixteen Journal)
(2017 | 2 mins 22 sec)
Gorequest (2016 | 2 mins 22 sec)
Flood (featuring New Noveta) (2016 | 4 mins 6 sec)
Traumaquapocalypse (for Patchfinder) (2016 | 13
mins 5 sec)
Courtoy (commissioned by Listeners Project) (2016 |
3 mins 38 sec)
Widows (featuring New Noveta) (2016 | 3 mins 15 sec)
Alecto (2015 | 2 mins 22 sec)
17:17 (featuring New Noveta) (2015 | 1 min 44 sec)
‘Quatic Menac (2015 | 2 mins 13 sec)
Body of Work (2015 | 2 mins 22 sec)
Root of all Evil (2015 | 1 min 11 sec)
Sagas Romp (2015 | 3 mins 24 sec)
Salt (2014 | 1 min 9 sec)
Four Humours (2014 | 1 min 50 sec)
Vesmir Peklo (featuring New Noveta) (2014 | 3 mins
10 sec)
Tzars of Eros (2014 | 1 min 44 sec)
Immanentize the Eschaton (2014 | 3 mins 33 sec)
Histoire (with Mossoux Bonte) (2013 | 3 mins 33 sec)
On Faultlines (2013 | 2 mins 56 sec)
With Extreme Prejudice (2013 | 59 sec)
Stenberg (2012 | 2 mins 53 sec)
Byrne (2012 | 2 mins 15 sec)
5354 (2011 | 2 mins 31 sec)
Dread Majesty (2011 | 2 mins 15 sec)
Menwith Hill (2010 | 4 mins 49 sec)
V (2010 | 59 sec)
Find out more about Susu Laroche’s work at
www.susularoche.com
 NEWSLETTER
MAY 2017

So far 2017 is turning out to be an exciting year, one filled with many new collaborations and
projects. The first big project of the year was our first ever UK tour which took place between
28th February and the 11th March. During this time we stopped off at Cambridge, Galashiels,
Edinburgh, Stoke-on-Trent, Farnham and Bristol for screenings and talks. It was an amazing
experience and has spurred us on to do it again in 2018. The greatest pleasure of the trip was
to be able to spend time talking with the programmers and audiences about our films and
to also find out about their own work and interests. We came home energised and inspired!

While travelling we shot footage for a new film called INT. LANDSCAPE. We filmed in the
many rural spots we visited around the country, culminating in a day’s filming in the village
of Avebury, which stands inside a great circle of standing stones. This film explores how the
landscape, a subject that has been traditionally used in painting, can be a subject for a film.
We are interested in what moving images can reveal that painting can’t, but also in how the
language of painting and the rich history of landscape painting might offer ways of investigat-
BLACK SUN
A MOTION PICTURE BY DANIEL FAWCETT & CLARA PAIS • STARRING KAI FI’AIN

ing this fascinating subject. The film is also about trying to find ways to bring the landscape’s
hidden mysteries into the images and reveal something of how we project our inner life onto Films currently available on DVD & VOD:
the world around us. We were immediately attracted more to landscapes that were as free
from human presence as we could find, and started weaving our own narratives evoking the Savage Witches (2012)
strange attraction the landscape seems to exert on visionaries and mystics. A kaleidoscopic adventure in cinemat-
ic alchemy and our first collaboration
Those of you that have been following our work over the past year will already know about which launched The Underground
our partnership with the Dublin based Experimental Film Society. We have teamed up for Film Studio.
a series of collaborations which will include film production, screenings and writing. Recent-
Splendor Solis (2015)
ly they have successfully completed a crowd-funding campaign to fund the publication of a
Daniel Fawcett's epic home movie proj-
new book called Luminous Void, which brings together a collection of articles, interviews and
ect 17 years in the making.
essays relating to the history and work of EFS. We are very pleased to have been invited to con-
tribute our manifesto The Quest For The Cine-Rebis to this publication. The book is currently In Search Of The Exile (2016)
being put together and should be available later this year. A visionary cinematic experience, a
doorway into a dreamworld where re-
We are now back in the studio and getting our heads down to focus on finishing our latest ality morphs and transforms before our
feature film Black Sun. The film was shot in 2016, the editing is now complete and we are eyes.
working on the sound design. This film continues our investigation of alchemical themes in
cinematic form, it is the first of a series of films exploring humankind’s relationship to darkness The Quest For The Cine-Rebis (2016)
and it draws inspiration from the portrayal of female characters in European fairytales, paint- A video-essay meditation on the art of Keep in the loop about all these
ings and literature. cinema and the journey of the artist, ac- projects and more on our website:
companied by a manifesto of the same www.theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk
name.