Pub
Mountain , first feature film of John Salaviza resumes with another breath various elements we already knew of his short films, Arena (2009, Golden Palm in Cannes) or Rafa (2012, Golden Bear in Berlin): the look on adolescence, but also its relationship with the urban space, with the discovery of the city, in a confrontation between immanence of those presences – human, such as kids or the mother of the character – and hauntings at that age still can not name -. death, the first manifestations of desire
It’s a film built on a balance between up preparation and forethought and openness to improvisation, to the accident, the energy that comes during the shooting. During the conversation we had with him, Salaviza, while not calling itself a “film buff”, brought several times other films and other filmmakers context – like for him to be inside the cinema that one can find what to do and what not to do, and a director of learning is also a spectator learning. What is something that is in Mountain : the way the film “sees” and how to “hear” is the work of an interested director in exploring the encounter between the apparatus of cinema and a certain reality, given or constructed. In the farewell, when the interviewer told him to wait at least not be required to repeat the same things in several interviews that has given replied: “What I no longer stand are questions about awards, ‘how it feels to win a prize Berlin or Cannes, it is only important because of this system in which we work, but it’s not why I make films. “
To what extent is that their short films were consciously one test, a laboratory, for the first long? It may not be true for Arena or to Cerro Negro (2012), but Rafa had a full-length breathing, could be an extracted sequence a movie that did not exist.
There was something that changed from Rafa indeed. In my early films I think essentially explored a pleasure, very playful, filmmaking. Are films in which I was to discover the practice of film and are very marked by this discovery. In a sense, are far more films about my movie ideas than about anything else. From the Rafa I started in a very conscious way, to look for something else.
What Mountain has in common with Rafa is pursue a relationship with the city, so almost say sexy or sensory:. the sounds, the sights, the environment
I approached from a more precise notion of what really interested me do and explore, and it was very clear the desire to concentrate on that. There is a film of Abbas Kiarostami which is very important to me – in fact the Kiarostami for me is a maximum reference. It is the Mossafer [a 1974 film known in Portuguese title The Traveler ], where all the narrative context It is no more than a pretext for the film is build around the relationship between a kid and the city. In Rafa has been this that I approached, even in terms of the film’s construction, which spends a lot of the relationship between Rafa himself, or the actor who plays him, and the city of scenarios, and this takes precedence over the narrative. By the way, I realized it was possible to do this with very few narrative elements, which could strip the film of much narrative jeans without this essential condition lose strength.
And then there’s the issue adolescence, or the end of adolescence and the passage to adulthood, that even is a classic theme of the first works of Portuguese cinema …
For The Green Years [1963] The Blood [1989] …
What’s more, for example, Joaquim Pinto, Joaquim Thrush, Victor Gonçalves …
[Miguel] Gomes … I do not know if this is a unique thing in the Portuguese cinema, maybe there is something natural in the act of founding the first films in childhood or adolescence farewell …
Surely it is not but say that is a topic that It has an extraordinary impact when we see the first works of Portuguese cinema … In your case, the autobiography is important? There are autobiographical elements?
In the sense that I do not care reproduce facts of adolescence, or my adolescence, no. Of course I care about approaching me of a mythological roots of adolescence.
The moment you leave the house alone, for example. All his films depart from this principle: there is someone who is at home …
… and then leaves. Yes, it’s true, I usually shoot people coming out of your Habitat , at the time they do. But I am interested in building this movement, integrate it and find it within a film structure, not only do a story, walk behind someone with a camera on his shoulder. I seek facts of my teens, but I try to rediscover sensations of adolescence. I grew up in Rome Avenue, a building inhabited mostly by the military. It was the only kid in the building, and that neighborhood there were a lot more people my age. The neighborhood seemed to me as empty as the rest of the city appeared to me as something dangerous and new, exciting. Was what I felt as a kind of architecture oppression of a body that was still fragile, and this was one of the sensations that interested me look.
Do you think a lot on the issue of point of view? Mountain look never plasma, is never “the teenager’s point of view,” but does not arise in an absolute externality.
It worries me find the distance. I think that can be neither too close nor too far. In terms of age, these characters are halfway to me. Have fifteen, I’m thirty. I think it’s the right time, just to the film, and to understand them without imposing an artificial perspective. I’d hate that to happen to me what happened to Larry Clark. When I see Kids I notice a look that is still just about teenagers. But since then it seems to me that this look was being replaced by something else, which made it the projection of an idea of it, more or less romanticized, about adolescence, about what teens are. I think that at this age, I am still close enough to capture adolescence as a process of transformation and not as something static. When I was in film school there was a tendency to what I called “the grandpa of the movies.” People did the course and then would make a film about his grandfather. I never did and never will.
Why do you need another type of friction, friction?
I need what I film offers some resistance . In this case, the Mountain , the kid [David Mourato] never let catch. And I did not want that false naturalism that is seen for example n ‘ Life Adèle (2013), the Kechiche, I did not like anything. Cut all spontaneity. For example that sex scene is horrible, it is false, just seems the embodiment of a male fantasy, see two fine in bed. My concern was to find the spontaneity within a defined structure.
It’s all very prepared?
Very prepared. There is a fictional cover crafted of relatively classic mode, it is important to avoid falling in an extreme simplification. But underneath this cover is an amount of energy and tension that has to be harnessed. There was tremendous stress during the shooting, also in the relations between the actors, for example, and the film was to save, and I think saved, some echoes of it.
The theme of death with the dying grandfather in hospital, seems to arise mainly as a kind of spring for an inner transformation, the first step for entry into adulthood.
I do not need none of We need psychoanalysis to find a turning point in adolescence marking a passage from which things are no longer as they were. A time when an explosion occurs whatsoever. When it is very young it is thought of death as something abstract, but there comes a time when one acquires a consciousness of mortality and death ceases to be an abstraction. It changes a lot. Of course then it does not always generate the same effect, there are many possible reactions, may be the enclosure, may be violence.
Just used the word “classic” .. .
.. I remember one thing in the Vítor Gonçalves insisted a lot in class in film school at the time and that perhaps none of us knew well, perhaps because, in order to one silly little, we did not have much patience for the classics. He insisted much on the idea that, to realize what was the dramatic intensity, the way to build and to work, study the classics was crucial.
And today, sit closer to what? The classic or modern?
My trend has been going back ever further behind. Towards the classics. I’ve never been much of a movie buff, or at least never been a Cinematheque mouse. But when I see the Nicholas Ray movies, or Robert Bresson, or Elia Kazan … saw just the Wild River [ When the River rages , 1960] which is prodigious, it is clear that it is critical to have a relationship with cinema, an awareness of what has been done. Or if it falls into a hollow virtuosity in movies without perspective. And above all learn not to be afraid of mise en scène .
mise en scène , which is the concept that the generation of the 50s French raised to the highest status. And that was all, was not only the specific work with the camera position and movements of the actors. The Truffaut said that even the choice of actors, the casting , it was mise en scène . Identified with this idea of totality?
Fully, yes. I like to think in movies like craft , as a thing that is manufactured, which is built, which produces objects. The classic had this notion perfectly. I was reading that book of Nicholas Ray, I Was Interrupted , which brings together texts and conversations that last time he was to teach, and made that movie [ We Can not Go Home Again 1973] with the students. And one thing that strikes you is he talking about the film as if it were objects made by hand, as well as a shoemaker speak of shoes that do.
in Ray also there, as persistence theme, the issue of adolescence or the end of it …
Having said so may seem laughable, but I think there is something in David James Dean, I think I belong to the same class attendance. I would define as actors we always tell the truth even when they are lying. That there is always the real, true, genuine, which transmit even in a situation of pure representation of pure lie.
He pulled a lot for him during the shoot?
In a way the limits are for him, it was he who imposed or suggested, as far as it could go. But really needed to be addressed. I talk a lot during each take …
… ah, as was done in the silent time. ..
Yes, clean my voice in post-production sound then is a major task. But just helps that each plan has its own life and decide according to what is happening in it. And especially in relation to the actors. There’s that scene where he’s lying and have to get up, but he was tired and left to lie longer than I expected, and then shouted to him “get up whenever you want.”
Work on the internal time of each plan is quite unique.
I believe in scenes and plans to “resurrect”. It looks like they are fading, that nothing will happen, and then passes up anything around the perk. I like to work that, like parentheses in the movies, like scenes containing other scenes in them.
Sound Mountain , that rumor the city is also a sound full of mise en scène …
The sound is fundamental, because I do not know how to use music, do not put music on movies unless diegetic music, nor am very music lover.
But it is a sound very “constructed”, is one of those filmmakers who takes away and adds and is not limited to sound recorded during the running of each plan?
I do not think the direct sound is necessarily more true. I worked with the guy who makes the sound mixes for Garrel movie and asked him for something that intrigued me a lot in the last film of his, La Jalousie ( Jealousy ) , I liked a lot. That moment when, without any direct relation to the action or the narrative, the sound track is taken by the sound of an ambulance passing in the street. And he answered me with Garrel “what is there is what is.” I’m not like, do not care to take things that were there and add others that were not. In scenes indoors often hear the sound of dogs barking outside. These dogs were not necessarily there.
How do you deal with accidents? There is a beautiful formula of Jean-Claude Biette that divides the directors into two groups. Those who shout “cut” is a butterfly come unexpectedly within the framework and continuing to shoot. Which of the two groups include?
In the second, clearly. I want it to appear thousand butterflies … The Arena is full of these accidents – the old lady that appears at the end of the scene with the bike and is looking, for example. And in the end that dove takes flight. It is curious that I had thought to use many doves, I had all settled with a Columbófila society and thought a plane full of doves. Then I found more and yet, unexpectedly, became a dove. Much better than I imagined. We must resist the temptation to put too “salt and pepper” in the movies. Most of the time, if we are attentive and available, appears exactly what is needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment