We
like the way your films seem to chew up all of cinema and spit it
back out like the splatter paintings of a deranged Lifer. What's your
intention with this style? Do you want to confuse and disorientate or
is this just the way you see life?
It’s
just my way, the underside of life is more interesting. I don’t
care about formula or pleasing goody two shoes, I'm after Acapulco
gold. It’s fun bringing all the out of control film fans out there
together. Showing them how to lose themselves in exotic tribal
cultures and lurid dark spirits.The films are spells to open people
up to whatever they're searching for; sex, death, love, travel…..
etc.
Tell
us about The Straight Jacket Guerrilla
Film Festival.
It
was the first yearso I was very happy with all the
international filmmakers who came out of the woods to support its
cause. Basically, I wanted to show the most deranged films on the
face of the planet and to encourage filmmakers to not bother using
scripts or professional actors in order to make an interesting film.
Pick a dangerous subject and run with it, see what magic you can
capture.
How did you go about making the documentary Anarchy In The UK (2016) and how long did it take to make? You seem to have interviewed filmmakers and underground cinema freaks from across the whole country. Did you go on tour with your camera with the intention of making this film or did it happen by accident?
Yes, I loved every minute of making that film. It took a year of travelling by coach, train and car everywhere in the UK, talking to all these great filmmakers and cinema groups who I respect and have something pure and honest to say about the magic of cinema. I didn’t want to speak to any government funded cinema organizations, I’m sure you can guess why. The worst are the hipster dishwashers at the Experimental Film Society in Dublin and LUX in London. There’s a lot of hate out there for these limp dicks and they’ve earned every penny of it.
Anarchy was directed by Jett Hollywood. Why
did you invent Jett Hollywood?
Most
filmmakers are so timid and studious it really bores me, you can tell
they only live through their cameras, a bit of mojo goes a long way.
Why should rock stars have all the fun with alter-egos and
characters? Jett was inspired by Ziggy Stardust. He’s a filmmaker
from Mars, he’s got a big cock, and he seduces virgins. He’s also
on a death trip to make cinema raw again.
What
are the differences between Fabrizio and Jett?
Jett
is a godhead, a figure to show people that cinema needs to loosen up
and become more decadent again. Use your wildest fantasies. The
Evolution Of The Earth Angel & Anarchy In The UK are precisely
that. Look at all these people who are now crazy with desire and
ambition to change the world. I'm a loner, I don’t need anyone and
no one needs me. I'm extremely selfish when it comes to love because I
have so much to give. It’s focus that I'm after, and I’ve found it
with cinema and sin.
Why
did Jett commit “cinema suicide”?
Jett
died for cinema. He’s Jesus Christ on the cross. He’s now a
martyr and a legend. Too bad he had to die in order for it to happen.
In
what ways is Fabrizio also a creation? Is the Fabrizio we know from
your films the same person you are outside of film?
I
think the concept of being real has also turned into ‘’a
character’’. Because I’ve been honest from the start I can do
or say everything. After you’ve survived death at an early age,
you’ve got no fear of anything. Let alone of something as trivial
as looking mad. What you see on screen is me confronting my fantasies
and my experiences and putting them together. Life is really a
fantasy and a mirror. It can also be a landslide of shit or stardust,
just get naked and find out.
Which
filmmakers or movements in cinema have made you who you are?
I'm
more about the movements and their energy, especially Italian
Neo-Realism , French New Wave, Dogme 95, No Wave and Poetic Realism.
The Pink8 Manifesto is really the bastard son of all these energies
put together. I guess I’m really the Walt Disney of
underground cinema.
How
do you go about editing your films?
By
accident really, especially Black Biscuit cause I didn’t know what
the hell I was doing so I took LSD and listened to exorcisms and
Smile by the Beach Boys and just went into a visual trance. I wanted
it to be messy. Pregnant was edited at night and I became a victim of
the film’s subject. I wouldn’t leave the house for weeks. Going
on the road afterwards and making Anarchy was a great cure to get
away from social media and all those other home imprisonment
trappings.
What
are the main points of the Pink8 Manifesto?
To
not study film, and to just do it.If
you wanna make a punk film get your ass out there and get ready to
steal in order to make it happen. Don’t beg or borrow, if you want
something just take it. Im sure Aleister Crowley would say the same.
Why
do you insist “Short films are NOT acceptable, it MUST be a
feature”?
Because
short films aren’t a challenge. Where’s the cathartic relief?
Making a short film is the equivalent of jerking off, but making a
feature film is similar to a long steamy love making session. There’s
no comparison, it's either all or nothing.
Do
you stick rigidly to all the Pink8 rules you've set yourself, for
your own films, or are these more of a starting point to trigger
action and creation, like the Dogme 95 manifesto?
Absolutely
not, I hate rigid rules. Just keep it loose. I make my films like this
anyway, so it's no stretch for me, but if someone wants to make a
Pink8 film you can mix and match and even create your own shortcuts.
Just take with you the spirit of the manifesto and that will be
enough.
What
happens next, Fabrizio Federico?
Whenever
I’ve completed a new film the reaction is as if I’ve just
finished abusing the muse. So she needs a baby rest for a bit, but in
the mean time I plan on looking down from the mountain for a little
while. Fabrizio Blog Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival
An
interview with Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian (AvantKinema / The
Bird And The Monkey) by Fabrizio Federico, filmmaker, founder of The
Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival and author of the Pink8
Manifesto.
Please
introduce yourself.
SJS
& RS: Hello, Fabrizio. We are Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian.
We've collaborated together since 2010, under the name The Bird And
The Monkey, on songs, music videos, short films and writing and we've
also had the opportunity over the past few years to produce five
video-art installations, featuring multiple projections, music and
sculpture. This year we've created AvantKinema to help promote DIY
experimental cinema.
I
think it's great that you're encouraging people to believe in the
talent and risk of DIY low budget cinema, plus breaking down the
power and magic of its pure disarming qualities.
SJS
& RS: We think it’s important to find time to Do It Yourself as
far as films, music, art, self-publishing etc. Take control over the
means of creation, distribution and promotion. This gives you more
power in relation to what you do. You can learn for yourself out on
the frontline how the process works. That way, if you ever do decide
to take your work into some more established, traditional systems you
can demand full editorial control and you’ll know what you’re
talking about. You’ll have a body of work that proves you know what
you’re doing. Throughout the history of cinema, each element of the
process of creating a film has been put on its own pedestal and made
to look like Magic by the corporate players. But the Dadaists didn’t
ask MGM, Fox or Warner Brothers for permission they just went ahead
and did it themselves. It’s our job as filmmakers to demystify each
part of the process for ourselves. The technology is now cheap enough
and available enough for anybody to do this. As the Punk zines used
to say: you’ve learned three chords, now form a band!
What
is your ultimate cinematic message to the world at the moment?
Roger:
I think what we do is to bring the world around us into our heads
through our senses and our experiences and that data is stored in
different cognitive hard-drives, consciously and subconsciously. When
we create our films, music, art, writing etc. we’re trying to put
some of that material back out into the world through our own filters
so that other people can get an idea of our experience of life.
Sarahjane:
No, that's not our message. Our message is: be obsessive, be bold,
find your magic and sprinkle it everywhere like hundreds and
thousands!
Roger:
Yes, you're right, that's our message.
What
are your plans for making a feature film, and what subject would you
pursue?
Sarahjane:
At the moment we’re wondering if we can make a feature using Super
8. It’s expensive to do but we’ve got hold of a job-lot of
expired Kodachrome 40 and we’re looking into processing this
ourselves using coffee, vitamin c and washing soda. There’s a good
chance that our subject might be our son who has autism.
Roger:
It’s a total experiment and we’ve no idea if any of this film
stock will actually work, or if we’ll be able to get a handle on
the Caffenol processing, but that makes the whole thing exciting. It
must be how the early cinematic pioneers felt.
Tell
me about what made you want to make In The Dark I Sat?
Sarahjane:
We wanted to see if we could make a Love Story work as an
experimental movie. Up to that point we'd been making music videos
and we wanted to expand this and bring in narrative at the same time
as still using our music. The story of the film meant that we had to
dig deep and get very expressionist with our sounds.
Roger:
Yes, and we were thinking that a lot of the shots in our music videos
looked kind of like scenes from movies, but more LoFi, like something
the New York No Wave Cinema might have produced if they got their
hands on digital equipment. So we wanted to try sampling some of our
own previous work, mixing it up together and making something new:
our first short film.
How
does the concept of improving yourself and hunting down your dreams
like a wild and savage animal manifest itself in your film?
SJS
& RS: In this film we show the layer dividing real life from
dreams as being as thin as the skin between a body of water and the
air above it. There's not much effort in pushing through one realm
into the other but somehow our heroine and her man have ended up in
worlds so distant from each other that they can't even quite remember
who it is each of them has lost. In the darkness between there is
wildness and confusion.
What
are your opinions about the drug culture and its impact on
creativity?
SJS
& RS: It’s up to people to decide for themselves but we’re of
the opinion that the best results usually come about when artists
keep their drugs in the recreational drawer and do the work when
they're straight, once all their faculties are back online. Both of
us have dabbled a bit recreationally when we were young, like
everybody else, but we're now bringing up a little autistic boy, so
we've got the biggest responsibility you could possibly have. We have
quite unusual minds anyway and we're pretty well tapped into our
creative wells so it's not something we feel we need. If we were out
of our faces all the time we wouldn't get any work done. As far as
culture and society, drugs were useful to help expand consciousnesses
and to Open the Doors of Perception for artists, musicians, writers
from the Romantic poets onwards, a way for people to throw off the
shackles of traditional thought. But, in the case of Lennon and
McCartney, for example, it then took the methodical brain of somebody
like the straight-laced George Martin to put it all back together in
ways that really worked. Captain Beefheart always claimed to be
anti-drugs and he and the Magic Band produced some of the weirdest
and tightest music going. You don’t have to be Wired to be Weird.
Having said that, we have written a couple of songs drunk as Pepe Le
Pew and they turned out pretty cool. So, basically: you've just got
to work it out for yourself.
How
did you come to write the film's prose and dialogue?
Roger:
Years ago I started trying to write an experimental science-fiction
novel, inspired by the '60s New Worlds era experiments of Michael
Moorcock and JG Ballard. When we we were making In The Dark I Sat we
decided to thieve chunks of my unfinished novel and mix it in with
some cut-ups from Art History essays and a couple of our unreleased
songs, one by Sarahjane (which gave the film its title) and one by
me.
The
movie’s cast is full of searching characters. Where did you find
your cast and what is their background?Can you explain your
working relationship with your actress and how do you feel about the
primal importance of finding the right muse or misrule in cinema?
Roger:
Sarahjane is the actress and I'm the actor. We decided soon after
meeting to be each other's Muse and that works very well for us.
We're a micro-collective, or a binary auteur and we do everything
ourselves,
Sarahjane:
So far we have used no other actors. When we act we direct each
other.
Roger:
Or we argue about the direction each of us should take and then we
just go ahead and do it whatever way we wanted to in the first place.
Sarahjane:
If we do make a film with our son he'll be our actor without
necessarily knowing he's being our actor. He doesn't communicate
verbally but it's obvious from his behaviour that he's aware when a
camera is pointing at him, so us introducing a camera into our
interactions with him will be as close as we get to directing him.
It'll be interesting for us to work this way, as the issue of
sensitivity will be a tussle for us. We want to celebrate our son and
find new ways of communicating with him, using the language of film.
At the same time we don't want to be exploitative.
What
is your current favourite movie?
SJS
& RS: There are so many films from more than a hundred years of
cinema that we could pick for this but instead we'll highlight two
filmmakers who have recently become our friends and had an influence
on our own work. Walter Ungerer is an American who has been making
experimental films since the early 1960s and Allan Brown is a
Canadian who has collaborated with Montreal's Volatile Works
collective. At this year's Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in
the Scottish Borders we saw Walter Ungerer's short, I Just Don't Get
It – It's My Russian Soul, and Allan Brown's first feature, Silver.
We loved the colour, vibrancy and energy of My Russian Soul, and
Silver gave us the boot up the behind we needed to finally go ahead
and buy a couple of Super 8 cameras and some film-stock.
I
Just Don't Get It – It's My Russian Soul by Walter Ungerer (USA)
If
you could travel back in time what year would you go to?
Sarahjane:
I don't want to go back to a specific time but I'd like to visit an
era: the Black and White era of German Expressionism, Jean Cocteau
and the Film Noir Femme Fatales. I love that look and I like to
perform in our films as a strong female with striking makeup and
lighting.
Roger:
I'd like us to go back a hundred years to 1916, to a specific place,
the Cabaret Voltaire club in Zurich, so we can watch the early days
of DADA unfolding, and participate in that. But I'd want us to come
home again. I wouldn't want us to get stuck in the middle of World
War I.
What
would be an ideal world for independent cinema?
SJS
& RS: Maybe a place a bit like the indie music scene in the '80s
where you had underground bands creating the most experimental music
(the more famous of these being the likes of The Fall in the UK and
Sonic Youth in the States). There was an audience for this, probably
the younger brothers and sisters of Punks who'd grown up listening to
some pretty outrageous sounds. Bands were championed by John Peel and
so you could hear them on his Radio 1 show. As well as the thousands
of homemade zines being sold at gigs and in shops like Rough Trade,
there was an established music press with three papers, NME, Melody
Maker and Sounds, competing with each other, so you could read
reviews and interviews. There was a cooperative distribution network
linked in with independent record stores throughout the whole
country. It was a thriving, fully self-sustained scene. It started
falling apart because BritPop / Blur / Oasis / Creation Records made
indie musicians think they should strive for mainstream success; then
John Peel passed away and Amazon shut down all the indie record
stores. Or something like that. Anyway, so what might the cinematic
equivalent of that look like? You hint at this in your Anarchy In The
UK film. If there were collectives like London's Exploding Cinema in
every city and every town then that would be a great start, wouldn't
it?
How
do you feel about the imagery of the crow and suicide?
SJS
& RS: We're friends with the crow. Crows have helped us and we
smile when we hear their squawk. The same year we made In The Dark I
Sat, with its tale of a crow who controls our heroine, we made our
first video art installation at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image
Festival. The installation was called Sung To The Crows. It was
inspired by an anonymous 14th century Borders Murder
Ballad, Twa Corbies, where two crows have witnessed the slaying of a
knight and, after picking his remains, they spy his hawk and hound
going off hunting and his lover with another man. Our installation
was presented as a Surrealist crime scene with a wedding dress
covered in thousands of hand sewn sequin blood splatters; multiple
video projections; strange music; a macabre figure which was part man
and part crow; and the constant cawing of the corbies. Our slain
knight pleads with the crows to bring him back into the world through
the dreams of his murderers to wreak vengeance. We scared the shit
out of one volunteer who was supposed to be invigilating. She left
after only an hour and never came back!
As
far as suicide. Suicide isn't beautiful. It's sad. It's sad that Ian
Curtis killed himself. If he'd managed to hold on a few hours, days
or weeks he might have realized that he wasn't feeling so bad anymore
and he could have gone on to create great music for decades. Suicide
is also terribly sad for the people left behind.
I'm
a big believer of improvising and continuing to experiment with film
editing. Can you explain your state of mind and tricks at the time of
putting the film together in the editing room?
SJS
& RS: We think we've picked up a feel for rhythm and structure
after editing 20 or so music videos for our songs. There's a lot of
improvisation: trying out different things, messing about with
effects etc. When we were editing In The Dark I Sat, it was done in
one or two long stretches. We spent just as long working on the
sound, music and dialogue as we did on the visuals.
Other
then the Pink8 and Cine-Rebis manifestos I haven’t really heard
of any other new statement of belief in film journalism. What would
be the first outline of your own cinema manifesto?
SJS
& RS: We've been working on a manifesto but it's for all the arts
and it asks for filmmakers, musicians, artists and writers to make
work which breaks down the boundaries between the avant garde and the
mainstream. We have some other demands, including: keeping it DIY and
looking at the world as though you're seeing it reflected in the
shards of a smashed mirror.
Which
thinkers and authors do you admire?
Sarahjane:
There are quite a few women whose thinking has fascinated me through
the years. I always go back to Patti Smith, and the artist, Louise
Bourgeois, and we were watching an interview with the Belgian
filmmaker, Chantal Akerman, the other day which was interesting. I
like to see the way other female artist's thoughts resonate or
contrast with my own.
Roger:
I go through phases of reading all kinds of books: literary ones,
trashy genre novels or biographies of bands. I often like to dip into
experimental books by Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Richard Brautigan,
Flann O'Brien and others, without necessarily reading the whole book.
I think it's ok to do that.
SJS
& RS: As far as philosophical thinkers, Alain de Botton's book
and TV documentary about Status Anxiety seems to explain a lot about
the ways people behave nowadays.
In
what way is the world's cultural zeitgeist affecting your
inspiration?
SJS
& RS: Unfortunately, the current zeitgeist seems to mostly
involve Kim Kardashian's arse, Kanye West's ego and Donald Trump's
tiny little mouth all fighting it out for the spotlight at the
epicenter of a great cultural vortex. We probably filter a lot of
what comes into our minds from the zeitgeist through our own dream
logic. We want to cut-up the world and put it back together like a
Hannah Höch DADAist photomontage! Fabrizio Federico's Blog The Bird And The Monkey AvantKinema
In 2012, Sarahjane Swan
and I set about putting together our first short experimental film,
In The Dark I Sat. We had no budget, so we decided to make a
No Budget Film. The only way to make a No Budget Film is to plan the
thing, write it, film it and do any post-production (editing,
effects, sound etc.) in your spare time, using equipment, resources
and locations you either already own, or can easily beg, borrow or
purloin.
A lot of new filmmakers
feel uncomfortable putting their time and effort into an
under-financed cinematic work, no doubt assuming that quality will
suffer, that there will be a barrage of accusatory snipes from
critics and peers - “amateur!”, “underachiever!” - and that
the finished result will be a shoddy shambles fit only to be seen by
their Mum, their Shrink and the Family Pet. This need not be the
case.
If you do a bit of
research, there are many examples which prove that, with talent and
determination, a filmmaker can create a work of great quality and
merit on the tiniest of budgets. Many of these filmmakers have gone
on to have successful careers in the mainstream, often managing to
keep a modicum of creative control as it is their individual style,
vision, message and/or technique which have put them there in the
first place.
Think of America’s
Grand Surrealist, David Lynch, whose struggles financing the
production of his first feature, Eraserhead, included having
to work a succession of menial jobs, borrowing cash from the cast and
crew and contemplating completing the project with Ray Harryhausen
style stop-motion animation. There is seemingly a scene in the film
where high-haired hero, Henry, walks through a door one moment and
when he arrives in the next room it is several years later. This was
not a Lynchian absurdist plot device designed to unsettle and
confuse. It literally took that long to get the next scene financed.
Eraserhead, which was started in the early ‘70s, following
soon after Lynch’s student shorts, was finally completed and
released in 1977. The project cost very little, in a monetary sense,
but its vision was so original, disturbing, beautiful, haunting and
terrifying that it blew the cinematic world apart and propelled Lynch
into a kind of Alternative Mainstream, if such a category can exist,
of big budget widely distributed movies and media attention.
This example shows
that, because of the hurdles and restrictions in place due to lack of
resources, the No Budget Filmmaker requires huge levels of stubborn
persistence, originality of thought, resourcefulness, time and energy
to produce work of a high quality. You’re right there on the
frontline, soldier, dug deep in your trench and you’re going to
have to improvise constantly, using whatever is at hand to edge your
way forward. There’s sure to be a torrent of problematic shrapnel
flying at you from every which way, so remember to duck.
Here's another example:
The tale has oft been
told of how director, Robert Rodriguez took part in clinical drug
trials to help finance his first feature, El Mariachi (1992),
made for just over $7000. Rodriguez utilised the talents of mostly
amateur actors and shot over the Border in Mexico, using 24 rolls of
16mm film, which he later bounced onto video for editing, as this was
the cheaper and easier option. In his 10 Minute Film School
video, which you can track down on YouTube, Rodriguez basically
advises those starting out to dig around in their own back yards for
the clay from which to sculpt a memorable work: “When I did El
Mariachi, I had a turtle, I had a guitar case, I had a small town
and I said 'I'll make a movie around that'.”
He had intended to sell
his Spanish language Western to the Latino straight-to-video market
to bring in funds towards a bigger budget project, but the Mexican
distributors he approached showed no interest. So Rodriguez took a
different approach and mailed out trailers of El Mariachi to the
larger US companies. Columbia loved what they saw and on viewing the
full feature financed a 35mm print, promotion and distribution which
reportedly led to $2 million brought in through the box office. With
profits like that it is no surprise that Rodriguez was soon seen as a
director who could successfully bring in a project well under budget.
He has gone on to make countless mainstream films, including his own
Mariachi sequels, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in
Mexico, as well as From Dusk Till Dawn with Quentin
Tarantino and the Spy Kids movies.
To some filmmakers,
even the $7000 Rodriguez had at his disposal for El Mariachi
or the ten-to-twenty thousand dollars it took to make Eraserhead
are figures so far out of their grasp that they may as well be
full-blown major Hollywood budgets.
This is where the No
Budget philosophy of filmmaking kicks in. Where is the rule which
emphatically states you can’t create your cinematic wonders with
Zero Finance? If you’re resourceful enough to use what you already
have and borrow the rest you can work out some way of tapping those
visions in your head and releasing them into the world in all their
filmic splendour.
Do It Yourself! That’s
the motto you should pin above your bed so that its message is
engrained into your psyche from your waking moments. Punk Rock
encouraged the DIY gene in all of us to kick into action on a grand
scale but the handmade, self-published, fully autonomous work has
been there in art from the very start: from the Modernist pamphlets
and manifestos of the early 20th Century, and William
Blake's illuminated volumes back through the aeons to the
cave-painters of pre-history. There’s no shame, only glory in
taking full control of the means of production, distribution and
promotion. The technology of today makes creative production and
delivery even more accessible than it was in the halcyon days of home
recording, zine publishing, graffiti and mail art etc.
Sarahjane and I discussed what kind of short we would like to create and
came up with the vision of an avant-garde science-fictional love
story about individuals trapped in alternate realities in the aftermath of a
quantum level catastrophe, “The Fluxing”.
We
wanted our first
film to have a fragmented structure and feel. We've always loved a trend
in the Modernist creative arts which seems to reflect the disjointed nature of the contemporary world and the fractures this causes in the modern psyche. It is as though the artist has glimpsed the world in the shards of a smashed mirror and attempted to piece together a patchwork reconstruction of it.
In
Fine Art this approach can be seen in the early collage work
of Picasso and Georges Braque, the Dadaist photomontages of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, the Frankenstein-like sculptural
constructions of Merz founder Kurt Schwitters and Robert
Rauschenberg's Neo-Dada; or the symbolically cluttered installation
work of Louise Bourgeois's Cells. Examples of literary Shard-ism can be
read in the postmodernist fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, the cut-up
word-collage of William Burroughs / Brion Gysin and Kathy Acker and the hip '60s
New Worlds New Wave Sci-Fi of JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock.
Shard-ist Music? Look to the sampling of early Hip Hop or to Captain Beefheart's collision of early blues,
rock, free jazz, outsider music and Beat poetry.
The easiest way for
Sarahjane and I to translate this Smashed Glass approach into a
cinematic form seemed to be for us to raid our own catalogue of DIY music
videos. By the time we decided to make In The Dark I Sat, in 2012, we had
already produced an album's worth of these under the name
The Bird And The Monkey.
By excising various unconnected
segments from these music videos, which were filmed at different times and in different locations, we were able to piece together a new construction with a chronology which was purposefully
disjointed. In this new narrative we see Sarahjane's character jump between looks, styles,
personalities. To us as filmmakers, this aggressive rejection of Continuity –
which is so prized in mainstream cinema and TV - gives a real
visceral visual indication of just how fractured our protagonists's
identities have become when faced by an absurd and confusing world. For the end of the film
we experimented by dragging hundreds of frames from a segment of
video into Photoshop and “painting” over sections in each of these.
Obviously there were
initial costs in purchasing a camcorder and an iMac several years
earlier but, other than this, In The Dark I Sat literally cost
us nothing to make. It was premiered in London at the Portobello Film
Festival in 2012 and later that year screened in Scotland at the
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
In my next post I'll look at the benefits brought to low budget filmmaking in the 21st Century by developments in digital technology.
