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Rebecca Shatwell in discussion with Ben Rivers after the screening of Two Years at Sea at the
Star & Shadow Cinema, during the Slow Cinema Weekend, AV Festival 2012
(Photo by Michael Pattison) |
The AV Festival 2012 took place in March 2012 in the North East of
England, in the UK. That year, it held its most adventurous edition to date as
it run for an entire month, and that it held 22 exhibitions, 34 films
screenings, 15 concerts, 6 walks, and a 744-hour continuous online radio (you
can see the whole programme here http://www.avfestival.co.uk/).
In January 2012, I talked to festival director Rebecca Shatwell about
the film programme, but also about her curatorial work for the music and
exhibition programme, and in general about her experience as a festival
director.
The theme for this year’s festival is “slow”. Why did you pick this
theme?
There were various reasons for it. We
always select a theme that isn’t just art industry-speak, and that might have a
wider relevance to issues in contemporary society. At the moment, in journalism
and popular culture, people talk not having enough time to be in the moment or
to really experience artwork. So I wanted respond to that, and also I was very
aware that this festival was going to take place in 2012, so I wanted to make
some creative response to the Olympics without alluding to it so directly.
A lot of the way artists work with
technology now is about making things quicker. For example, in cinema, the
speed of Hollywood films is increasing, with very fast editing techniques. I
don’t think that all art that’s slow is good, but I think that there’s a lot of
durational work that demands a different attention from audiences, and that if
you want to go on a journey with it, it really can really change your life and
be transformative. You’re transported outside of your routine, you forget your
worries and you’re in a different space.
The film programme of the AV cuts across between “artist film”
(generally shown in galleries), and “traditional” feature films (shown in
cinemas) – was it important to you to programme both types of films?
My background is from the visual art,
more than film, and I don’t really make a division in terms of the different
types of contemporary culture. I think that it’s a shame that the different
ways of producing films (artist film and traditional film are not funded by the
same authorities, and obviously artists make work in a different way to
filmmakers) eventually affects how these films are brought to audiences.
Artist films are shown in galleries
only, and commercial films are shown in the cinema, but that’s an artificial
distinction. There’s a perception that artist films can’t be seen by people who
go to a cinema and see a mainstream film. I think there are cross-overs between
all these films and that people can relate to both types of film.
Also there are lots of blurry divisions: a lot of artists are now making
feature films, and I don’t just means films like Shame by
Steve McQueen. There are artist filmmakers that are making feature films within
their own parameters and controlling it a lot more. So the festival actually
has 3 feature films that are made by artists. I’ve made a point not to call
them “feature films made by artists” - they are in the feature film programme.
The films are Ben Rivers’ Two Years at sea, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Lung
Neaw Visits His Neighbours, Ken Russell’s Let Each one go Where he
may.
Because of commercial pressure, some
cinemas are fearful of showing artist work. But I think that that narrows down
audiences’ choice before they are given a chance to experience a wider variety,
and there are just different ways of presenting artist films to audiences so
that people aren’t afraid by the lack of narrative in work, and just take a
risk with it.
How did you pick the films? Most of the films that you have programmed
are from the 2000s, while “slow cinema” is traced to a few decades ago…
It was a very difficult process. In
the early stages, I was very keen to present a historical perspective on slow
cinema, starting from the 1960s onwards. For the feature films, we would have
shown Bresson and Antonioni, and in terms of artist films, it would have been
Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman, Michael Snow or Hollis Frampton. I was keen to
reflect the fact that this is not a new phenomenon.
But then one of the difficulties was
that it was too many films. I do find it criminal that Chantal Akerman isn’t in
the programme – there are so many directors that should be there. But at the
end of the day, I decided to focus on films that people wouldn’t be able to get
anywhere else. Obviously watching a film on DVD and on 35mm is not the same,
but at the end of the day, I thought that maybe we should look at films that
aren’t distributed, and that was really the starting point to the slow cinema
weekend. Lav Diaz’s and Fred Keleman’s films - they are not easily
distributed, and unless you go to film festivals, you can’t see them.
So what do you think about the slow cinema movement? And about the fact
that some people say that it’s a new “festival trend”, that it’s a new
“conventional” style?
[There’s been a massive debate among film critics since 2010 about this,
about the existence or the growth, or not, of “slow” films since the 2000s,
about what the term would mean, about whether this category is relevant, and
about whether film critics and festival programmers might have bought into
“slow cinema” too easily without being critical enough]
It’s difficult, and like with any
kind of new movement or trend, one has to be wary of it. But personally, I’m
almost more interested in individual filmmakers and in their own development,
and in making sure that their work is shown. Although obviously, contextualising
work in critical writing is very important, and some really important questions
have been asked in the slow cinema discussion of the last 2 years.
Also, I was interested in the fact
that, apart from being “slow”, a lot of sub-themes or commonalities cut across
between the films. For example James Benning and Sharon Lockhart – they have
collaborated previously, and they have a clear vocabulary, exclusively focussed
on a single shot, almost static takes of American landscape. There is a whole conversation
on the American landscape, the change in normal ecology, the change in urban
landscapes in America in that period.
Also some of the sub-themes within the festival programme are around
architecture, decays and architectural landscapes. For example in Colossal
Youth, Pedro Costa has made films on the collapse of a housing complex in
Lisbon. And Still Life is about the decay of a certain area in
China, which was submerged as part of a dam project.
I don’t think that all slow films are
about the landscape, nature or change, but there’s definitely a thread there.
Certain techniques in cinema, like the long-take and time lapse, can actually
help to convey certain stories and certain themes.
There’s also some alternative political films, and different ways of
depicting ethnography, so Ben Russell’s Let Each One go Where He May, and
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours both have a
documentary style, in the way that they are following people in their own
indigenous environment for a few days or weeks, almost as a journey. In a lot
of slow films there is a sense of a journey, and the road movie comes up quite
a lot, so I don’t know if that’s just because road movies are durational in
their nature as well.
If people see more than one of these
films, there is going to be emotional relevance and meaning that go from film
to film, and they will get different ways of seeing the world. Definitely for
me, after watching several Pedro Costa films, watching Albert Serra’s films,
watching the Lisandro Alonso films, a couple of weeks watching those
films, you just start thinking about your daily routine in a different way and
how you look at things.
The festival is there to kind of
question and to explore, and the reason why I wanted to bring in filmmakers
over is to have a dialogue with them. The reason why we’re showing a lot of
films is to communicate that slow cinema isn’t a particular genre or a
particular thing, it cuts across different types of filmmaking, different
techniques, and we want to question whether these films are part of the slow
cinema movement or not.
The festival is based in the North East – is this important to you?
For me that’s really important. I
think it’s really important to work where you live, and live where you work.
The North East is not really seen as being at the forefront of
avant-garde art - you could be working in bigger cities like London or Berlin…
I know, but for me that’s part of the
challenge, because I’m interested in how festivals can help develop audiences
for work that’s more experimental. A festival can be more risk-taking than a
venue that has to put on stuff year-round. I play across different spaces, and
I can encourage audiences to take a particular route. When you programme a
festival, you’re curating / marketing / designing something to make it easy for
people to take a risk, so maybe you show an installation at an establishment
like Baltic but you also encourage people to see something else at the same
time.
So for me a festival in somewhere
like the North East, I think there’s actually a lot more opportunity to be
experimental and to be broad in the way you think about it, because you are
genuinely bringing work to a place that doesn’t normally see this sort of work.
I don’t know what a festival like AV would look like if it was in London or in
Berlin, where, for example with the BFI in London, maybe you can see films more
regularly. So for me I’m interested in the response, I do feel very strongly
about the responsibility to bring work like this to a region like the North
East where there is curiosity and an appetite. I don’t think that international
festivals only need to happen in the main metropolises. I think it is a bigger
challenge, but I think it’s really important to take that challenge, otherwise
experimental work is even more segregated just to happen in areas of the
country that has a population that can deal with it.
Also, we do have a
lot of people who come from outside the region, and I love the fact that if the
festival brings 20% of people from outside the region into the region, then ,
if you work in events and you talk to people, you’re being introduced to new
people, and hopefully new collaborations can start and new things happen, so
that’s interesting as well, the social side of the festival.
