ARGENTINE CINEMA: LIVERPOOL—The Evening Class Interview With Lisandro Alonso

I was so impressed with Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool when it screened at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival that—not only did I write it up right away for Twitch and The Evening Class—but I actively pursued and scored an interview. Since writing up Liverpool nearly a year ago, I’ve read commentary here and there that has deepened my appreciation of the film. Most noteworthy is James Quandt’s ArtForum essay “Ride Lonesome” (available at Highbeam Research Library). “Ride Lonesome” is an especially impressive piece of criticism, tackling all of Alonso’s films, while specifically noting: “Liverpool seems designed for auteurial legibility.” Praising Alonso’s “dilatory style”, Quandt adds that Liverpool “keeps to [Alonso’s] antidramatic ways, attenuating narrative through empty time and withheld information.” Of related interest: Violeta Kovacsics and Adam Nayman’s interview for Cinema Scope; Darren Hughes interview for Senses of Cinema; and R. Emmett Sweeney’s interview for The Rumpus.

San Franciscan audiences will have a chance to experience the film themselves when Yerba Buena Center for the Arts mounts Liverpool’s Bay Area premiere on September 17, 19 and 20, 2009 as part of the film’s U.S. tour, organized by Adam Sekular of Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum who are likewise hosting “At The Edge Of The World: The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso” come November 11–19, 2009. Further, Alonso’s short film S/T will be featured in the fourth Wavelengths program for this year’s Toronto International. As Andréa Picard has written in her program notes: “Setting up an intense reciprocal gaze, Lisandro Alonso—whose work consistently explores the personal quests of men navigating natural settings—creates a face-to-face encounter with the wild in the beguiling and enigmatic S/T, a moment observed in a seemingly floating abyss.” This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I loved your movie!

Lisandro Alonso: Thank you very much.

Guillén: And—I’ll be honest—I was drawn to Liverpool by way of Kent Jones’ Film Comment essay, wherein he waxed eloquent appreciating your aesthetic. He wrote: “Alonso is a fascinating figure who probably thinks more about form than any other narrative filmmaker his age. His attempts at overall unity are impressive if not fearsome, even when he miscalculates. At his finest, Alonso settles on journeys that accumulate observation (of landscapes and ways of life) that expand along the way into collectively internalized visions of existence and their horizon lines.” Do you think it’s true you think more about form than any other narrative filmmaker your age?

Alonso: What can I say? I don’t know. Maybe. There are a lot of filmmakers who are better at form than I am.

Guillén: Let’s back up a bit. How did you come to filmmaking?

Alonso: I studied in the Film Institute for three years but, before that, my favorite movie was Dirty Harry. [Chuckles.] After I studied a little bit, I discovered older filmmakers. I understood that, maybe, if I was lucky, I could make a film and express myself to other people through the film.

Guillén: Well, you’ve certainly caught critical attention. One of the critiques I’ve read most consistently is that your films achieve the non-dramatic by frustrating narrative expectation. For me, your films seem created by accretion, by the accumulation of many observed moments, that link together into a semblance of narrative.

Alonso: I think I understand what you’re trying to say. My films aren’t narratives. I observe people, different moments, and I put them all together in the film. The audience has to imagine or create something sitting in the chair.

Guillén: You give your audiences plenty of space to make associations. Spatiality, in fact, is a major aesthetic of your work. You use a lot of different kinds of space—not only inscapes, but landscapes—and specific locations like the lumber mill in southern Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, that create multiple environments, different spatial scenarios, for your characters to journey through or temporarily repose. And they always seem to be longing in their movement, or longing to be moving, and that longing is often registered as their looking within themselves as they journey, or looking out at the landscape they’re journeying through: overwhelming snow-capped mountains and bright indifferent skies. I especially noticed your aesthetic of spatiality when you placed Farrel (Juan Fernandez) in the restaurant at a table next to an autumnal mural of a white birch grove. Inside and outdoors, domestic and wild spaces, the autumn and winter seasons, were intriguingly counterpointed.

Alonso: I agree with what you say. I don’t know why, but using many spaces is interesting. I can’t explain why it seems interesting for me. I feel it and then I film it; but, I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s intuition, probably. I didn’t think much about what I should be shooting or not, I just knew I wanted to shoot the film in nature. I really wanted to shoot a movie in the snow and on the cargo ship; but, whatever connection those two spaces have is just a coincidence.

Guillén: But surely you intend the contrast to be visceral? I mean, you feel the confined quarters of the ship cabin empty out into the relief of these immense landscapes. You feel it by way of contrast. In fact, one might say your earlier films looked out towards nature more while Liverpool explores confined domestic spaces: the ship cabin, Farrel’s mother’s home, the restaurant.

Alonso: For me it’s new to film in interiors. As you say, my previous films have a lot of nature, a lot of trees and land; but—during the process of making films—I discovered I wanted to film in interiors to see what would happen.

Guillén: Are you pleased with the result? Have you enjoyed yourself?

Alonso: Yeah! I like it. Making a film in nature is easier for me. If I shoot something in a realistic way in nature, then with sound and editing I can make it not as realistic. For example, if I film this phone for two seconds, it’s just a phone; but, if I film it for a minute and a half, it’s more than a phone. Of course, it’s still a phone; but, the audience is thinking, “Why is this a minute-and-a-half phone?” I don’t know if I’m saying this right.

Guillén: I get it. It’s like Hitchcock with his glass of milk that the audience knows has a drop of poison in it. But where I felt it in your movie was the scene where Farrel is passed out drunk on a bottle of Stolishnaya and wakes up near the empty bottle stuck in the snow. That empty bottle is fraught with implications. It’s also just beautiful somehow and I don’t know why.

Alonso: Has that ever happened to you?

Guillén: Passing out drunk? Of course! [Laughs.]

Alonso: Ah! That’s why you like that scene and think it’s beautiful.

Guillén: Well, if you’re talking about images I relate to, there’s another in Liverpool that comes more to mind. My father abandoned me when I was two years old. I never knew him really; but, one of my few memories of him is when he came to visit when I was about four years old. We spent time together on the front porch of my grandparent’s home—no longer, in fact, than Farrel spent with Analía (Giselle Irrazabal), maybe 20 minutes max—but it was such an intense memory because he had come out of nowhere, unexpected, having won a lot of money gambling in Nevada. My dad was a gambler and a drinker and he had come “home” drunk to boast his spoils. He said, “Hijo, hold out your hands.” And so I did, cupping both small hands. He filled them overbrimming with shiny new pennies. To this day, whenever I see a penny on the street, I pick it up, thank Mystery, and remember my Father. When Farrel gave Analía the keychain—seemingly the only way he could express any kinship, any affection, any legacy—it moved me to the marrow.

Alonso: That’s a wonderful story.

Guillén: With regard to that scene where the gift is exchanged, I have a question: why did she put it in her pocket to hide it from her grandmother?

Alonso: Maybe she just forgot about it? I don’t know. I wish I knew. She’s a little bit retarded and maybe—even though she has the keychain—she isn’t really aware of it? But I know what you’re saying, that little things like pennies or keychains can become meaningful treasures. Maybe. I’m not sure about that. It’s open. I’m asking. Maybe she’s just trying to understand it? What it is? Maybe she’s asking, “Why does it have ‘Liverpool’ on it? What does that word mean in this situation? It’s red. It’s a city. It’s a port. It’s a gift from my father. Is he my father? Who is he? What is this? I don’t know. It’s very cold out here. I’m going to go inside.”

Guillén: In other words, you prefer to keep these moments open-ended?

Alonso: Yes, for me. People think when you are a director that you know everything. I don’t. What I’m trying to say is that I prefer many questions to answers. I don’t have any answers.

Guillén: Since you admit you provide no answers to the questions Liverpool raises, and perhaps because its narrative doesn’t reach resolution, the film captures an emotional authenticity.

Alonso: What do you mean by “narrative”? How I’m telling the story?

Guillén: Usually when I refer to a narrative film, I think of a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end, like an O’Henry short story. A dramatic conflict that resolves itself. But filmmakers are free to tackle new kinds of narratives by subverting linearity, thwarting resolution, and telling the story in unexpected ways.

Alonso: But I tell a story. I think I tell a very sad story about this sailor who’s a father, and this girl who’s his daughter. I didn’t tell the story in a commonplace way, but I think there’s a story there. [I start to protest.] I know what you’re going to say. If you say to me, it’s narrative in terms of making people go into the cinema, that’s another question.

Guillén: A popular narrative; popular probably because it’s accessible.

Alonso: In the beginning, you cry a little bit. Now you laugh a little bit. Now the music swells. No, that’s not my show.

Guillén: So when you’re filming….

Alonso: I don’t know what’s happening.

Guillén: You don’t know what’s happening? [Chuckles.] You just see things you want to shoot and aim your camera?

Alonso: I talk with the people. I talk with the crew. I talk with the actors. I tell them, “We want to shoot this”—I don’t write much; 15 pages is enough for me—but I tell them, “This is what I’ve written.” They say, “What is it? It’s bullshit.” I say, “Maybe it’s a little bit bullshit but, okay, do it.” And we do it like that.

Guillén: But there are images that are so strong in the movie that it’s hard for me to accept they’re accidental or made up on the spot. Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m reading too much into your films?

Alonso: No, no, no. For me, too, the images are strong.

Guillén: For example, I loved the image of the Jesus on the back of the door.

Alonso: I added that because the art director was sleeping off an all-nighter at the bar. [Laughs.]

Guillén: And I love when Farrel is sitting at the battered red table against the green wall. The table’s length, the line it creates through the frame, abstracts the composition. There are many lines and angles in your compositions. Surely, you set up these compositions?

Alonso: I give that a little bit of thought, yes. [Grins.] I like to shoot night imagery and I have to look through the camera and make sure it’s in focus.

Guillén: And what I’m especially happy about is that you keep your camera still so your compositions can be appreciated. Your camera stays put and watches intensely. Your camera is composed as it’s composing. As in that final scene when Farrel is walking off towards the woods. The duration of that scene plunges the audience into a quizzical contemplation.

Alonso: Where do you think he’s going in that scene? Do you think he’s going back to the ship?

Guillén: Yeah. He knew he had to be back by a certain time and had to start making his way there.

Alonso: Walking?

Guillén: He’ll find a way back. He’ll flag down a logging truck and hitch a ride or something.

Alonso: You’re positive? I’m more negative.

Guillén: You don’t think he’ll make it back to the ship?

Alonso: You know why I think that? There’s a little detail that I couldn’t get quite right when I filmed it. When Analía asks her father for money, I noticed—and not everybody noticed—that Farrel takes a moment, looks into his wallet and then hands over all the money in the wallet. Without money, he won’t be able to buy passage. I filmed that scene badly. If I had filmed it better, everyone would have known he wasn’t going to be able to make it back to the ship on time.

For me, he went back home to see his mother and she was already senile so now—having done all he could do—he could rest his mind and drink without conscience, drink better. Also his daughter didn’t recognize him so—after giving her all his money—he feels free. Until he returns to the ship. Maybe I’m just talking about me in 40 years? But I see him at a point where he can leave family behind and just go. He can go with the memory of having done something good. He thinks: “Now I can walk through the snow until something happens.”

Guillén: As someone who has travelled a lot, perhaps I am more hopeful about his returning to the ship because I’ve been in situations where I’ve been stranded with only a dollar in my pocket for days. I’ve learned from experience that if you really want to get from here to there, you can.

Liverpool is a movie longing to move. First, Farrel petitions for shore leave so he can get his land legs back, and then—once he’s been traveling around on the land for a while—he wants to return to sea, or—as you’re insinuating—wherever he ends up wanting to be. There’s a restlessness that impels the film forward. It reminded me of Joni Mitchell’s lyric, “You want to keep moving and you want to stay still; but, lost in the moment some longing gets filled.”

This kind of links back to what I was saying before. He’s a character who gauges his own movement by what he sees around him. He has to see the land. He has to see his mother. He has to see his daughter. And one of my favorite scenes was when he woke up hungover and was trying to see.

Alonso: [Laughs.] He sleeps everywhere.

Guillén: He slept outside and nearly froze to death! One curious omission in all of this is his mother Trujillo (Nieves Cabrera).

Alonso: What about her?

Guillén: That’s what I was going to ask: what about her?

Alonso: I don’t know. [Laughs.]

Guillén: Okay, I get my questions are annoying, but these are the kinds of things I wonder about watching a film.

Alonso: The only thing I can say is that when I “discovered” this grandmother, I asked her, “Nieves, can you act? Do you know that we are trying to make a movie? And that we want you to be in the movie? We’re going to pay this amount of money; do you want to be in the movie?” Then I asked her kids, “Does your mother want to be in this movie?” “Yes,” they said, “She wants to be in the movie.” I asked, “Can she work?” “Yeah,” they said, “she can work.” So I went to her and I said, “Ola, quieres caminar? [Are you ready to go?]” and she said no.

After about a month, I returned to the location, which was now covered in snow. When some of the people from the crew saw Nieves, they couldn’t believe their eyes and they thought bad of me because I wanted her to walk in the snow. Everyone on the crew was looking at me like, “You motherfucker, what are you doing?” I was so nervous, I started to laugh, and then I jumped out the window into the snow. I didn’t return for about two hours.

Nieves was lying in her bed for two days. It’s funny but it’s not funny. She’d eat and go to the bathroom whenever she wanted. I would say, “Now we are shooting” and she would go, “What?” I realized you can’t do this with a professional actor because this little retarded girl and this old woman make an effect, but the fact that they’re real people and not actors has an affect on the crew also. When Farrel asks his mother, “Do you know who I am?”, the truth is Nieves didn’t really know anything about what we were doing there and so she reacted to Farrel’s questions quite naturally. What I’m trying is to say that—whatever the old woman was feeling—the whole crew was feeling, behind the camera as well.

Guillén: So you’re catching a real moment and placing it in your story?

Alonso: That scene was totally for real. I’m not the guy with a professional actor. It was the same with the girl Analía. She made the crew nervous when we were shooting but how else could I capture that? I can’t do it with a professional actor.

Guillén: Several directors whose work I favor refuse to work with professional actors for fear of losing a strived-for authenticity.

Alonso: When I was young, I took some acting lessons. But on the day I had to recite something, I was totally drunk. I decided that would be my last lesson and that—if I wanted to be drunk—I didn’t need to be in acting class; I needed a bar. What I’m trying to say is that I really respect actors; but, I don’t want an actor coming up to me and whispering, “Lisandro, what do you think of my performance? What’s my motivation?” I don’t care for that.

Guillén: Is your filmmaking an attempt to make the image complete in and of itself?

Alonso: There’s no Shakespeare in my movies. I just work from scene to scene, smoke cigarettes, say this, say that.

Guillén: Let me ask you this then: before you make your movie, I understand you explore where you think you might want to film, and then you just hang out there for a while? You watch and listen to the people who live there and you decide once and for all if that’s where you want to make your movie. In this case, you noticed the old grandmother and you noticed the mentally challenged girl and you decided you wanted to put them in your movie because they would have—as you’ve indicated—a particular effect. Despite all your efforts to make the filmmaking as naturalistic as possible, does the making of the movie influence the place and the people? Do they change because you have arrived with a camera to film them? Have they even seen the finished film?

Alonso: No, not this film. My other films, yes. I made a film called Fantasma, which is about the lead actor in Los Muertos going back to Buenos Aires to see the release of his own film. For me Fantasma is very special. But to answer your question, no, I don’t think the making of the movie influences the place or the people. We create an environment of happy moments between the people who live there and the people who have come to film them. We dance together. We eat. We drink. We enjoy the day together and that’s all I want to do.

Guillén: You’re reminding me of Carlos Reygadas and his film Japón where he cast an old woman named Magdalena Flores, for much the same reasons you cast Nieves Cabrera in Liverpool. Magdalena was perfectly wonderful in Japón. No professional actor could have delivered her performance. And then—because Reygadas enjoyed meeting her and working with her so much—he used her in his next movie, much to his regret. He told me that it was one of the biggest errors in casting he ever made when he sought to use her twice because—when she made her appearance in the second movie—everybody knew her, everyone had an association of her with the previous film. Reygadas didn’t realize that was going to happen, but it happened and it impacted the authenticity of her scene. Did you have any problems like that when you were reusing the actor in Fantasma?

Alonso: No, I don’t think so. Actually, I’m not working with some of the first actors in my films and am trying to discover some new people; but, I enjoy working again with people that I know.

Guillén: How did you find Juan Fernandez?

Alonso: I was looking for the location and he was working as a caterpillar operator removing snow off rooftops. I saw him and waved to him and he ran away.

Guillén: I would run away too. “Oh no! It’s Lisandro Alonso!!”

Alonso: [Laughs.] But the good thing is that nobody knows me. So I would keep saying hello and he would keep looking at me like, “I don’t want anything to do with you people.” But after three or four hours of speaking with some of his co-workers, taking photos of the interiors, he finally was fucking freezing outside and came in to the restaurant. I asked him who he was and if I could take his picture? He finally said okay. After two or three coffees more, he had to go. The next day I called him and asked him if he would like to be in my movie? He said, “Okay, but I will have to ask permission from my family.”

Guillén: I hope this is not a stupid question or a disrespectful question, but are these people you meet in these remote locations even aware of movies?

Alonso: No. Absolutely not. Juan Fernandez, maybe.

Guillén: Because he was a natural, as they say and the camera loved him. He has a beautiful face and a noble nose. So what was it that you saw in him that you felt made him eligible to be the lead actor in your next movie?

Alonso: I don’t know. But once he agreed to be in the film, I told him he couldn’t back out or ask for more money or run away. He promised he wouldn’t. I told him he could drink whatever he wanted to drink but he had to wake up in the morning and come to work. He said, “Okay, I will do it.”

Guillén: That’s reminding me of a Malaysian filmmaker Deepak Kumaran Menon who brought his film The Gravel Road to the San Francisco International. Early in the film he had a little boy cast as a member of the family and I seemed to be the only one who noticed that halfway through the film the little boy disappeared without explanation and never showed up again, so I asked him during the Q&A what had happened to the boy. “I was hoping nobody would ask me that,” he answered. [Laughter.] Apparently, the boy decided he simply didn’t want to be in the movie anymore and the filmmaker didn’t have the means to reshoot his scenes. So it’s interesting how you lay down the law with your non-actors.

Alonso: From the moment we begin shooting the film, I know the people who I met from a month previously. I know all of them who live there and I know I can trust them.

Guillén: Do you know Pedro Costa?

Alonso: Yes.

Guillén: I’ve been much impressed with how he lives with the people he films in an effort to more accurately capture their situations, so much so that at this point he allows them to provide input into how the film shapes itself.

Alonso: He’s a good fellow, Pedro. I do understand why he changed his way of filmmaking and why he scaled down from 35mm to video. I understand why he wanted to film on his own and not with a crew of 100 people.

Guillén: Costa told me—and I was wondering if your experience is at all comparable—that he switched from the large moviemaking equipment and extensive crews to smaller cameras that he could handle himself or with one or two other people because coming into these people’s lives with all that equipment and commotion was, in essence, a death eye that killed what he was trying to record.

Alonso: I can understand that. Maybe he can’t raise the money to afford 35mm filmmaking so he has to change in order to survive as a filmmaker? I appreciate that. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just a stupid kid, but my understanding is that for the movies he wanted to make, he couldn’t get the money so he had to use different equipment and shoot in a different way. I might be wrong but I think one of the main reasons he changed his style was because he couldn’t get the funding.

Guillén: He’s admitted to me that funding is an uphill battle. As for yourself within Argentina, as one of the key players in the so-called New Argentine Movement, do you consider yourself that way?

Alonso: The New Argentine Movement? I don’t know. New blood? Ten years ago there was new blood making films but now they’ve become old blood trying to make new films while new people keep making old films. What I do trust about this New Argentine Wave, or whatever you want to call it, is that they were basically people shooting on the weekends, sharing sandwiches, nobody was paid, and they were all just trying to make honest films. Nowadays, that spirit has disappeared because they now have families and production companies, they go to film festivals, they’ve met Viggo Mortensen…. [Laughs.]

Guillén: To wrap up, I simply want to say that I thoroughly enjoy the films you are making. I’ve come somewhat late to your work and am now looking forward to going back and appreciating your first three films, which people have been recommending to me for ages. I wish you the best of luck in the future in what you want to do and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Alonso: Thank you for your time, man.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PFA: IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA—The Evening Class Interview With James Quandt (Part One)

James Quandt, senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto, has curated several touring retrospectives, including the recent "In the Realm of Oshima" currently screening at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive. He has edited monographs on Robert Bresson, Shohei Imamura, and Kon Ichikawa and is a regular contributor to Artforum. His recent published essays include ones on Robert Bresson, Pedro Costa, and Jia Zhang-ke. Quandt was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize for Arts and Culture in 2007.

My sincere thanks to Susan Oxtoby and Jonathan Knapp at the Pacific Film Archive for arranging time for Quandt and I to sit down for a conversation during his brief appearance in the Bay Area to introduce the Oshima retrospective.

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Michael Guillén: James, when Susan Oxtoby first invited me to have a conversation with you while you were in the Bay Area for the Oshima retrospective, I wasn't certain that I was the person for the job, being largely unfamiliar with the work of Nagisa Oshima. And then I realized that I was the perfect person because—in effect—I'm who the retrospective is for.

James Quandt: Actually, that's true. One of the reasons for the retrospective was because—in talking to even what I would call hard-core cinephiles—they'd seen one or two or three of his films at most and the name just didn't conjure any more. It had that kind of urgency to it. For me, it's had that urgency for a long time; but, especially because of that. It felt like Oshima was sliding into obscurity. Luckily enough, Criterion owns the rights to about nine of the films and, in fact, they made nine new prints for the retrospective. They've just released In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion and I expect they'll be releasing some of the others on DVD.

Guillén: I was going to ask if the retrospective encouraged Criterion to canonize Oshima's work.

Quandt: That's where delving DVDs and retrospectives like this form a wonderful nexus. It's happened time and again where companies are willing to make the prints because they know it will raise the reputation of a director and, therefore, make the subsequent release of DVDs easier, obviously. That happened with the Bresson retrospective and to a degree with Ichikawa, though Ichikawa was a retrospective that I thought might have some effect on the director's reputation; but, it didn't at all. He's as unknown now as he was then.

Guillén: I've seen the first two programs in the PFA series and have to be honest that—after each film—I sat there scratching my head going, "What just happened?"

Quandt: [Laughs.] Wait! Wait until you see Double Suicide: Japanese Summer!

Guillén: Truthfully, though, I like that. Oddly enough I appreciate being a little bit lost for words after seeing an Oshima film, which I imagine is exactly what Oshima was aiming to accomplish.

Quandt: My editor at Artforum—who attended the retrospective at the New York Film Festival—sent me notes throughout the retrospective. He said it was so great to see a director that can still rile an audience 40 years on. That also happened in Toronto, frankly.

Guillén: Our's is the opportunity to look back at the retrospective in retrospect as PFA is the final stop of its North American tour before it heads to Europe. Now that it's winding down stateside, how are you feeling about the project? Do you feel you have rescued Oshima from obscurity? Do you feel you've reached the audiences you wanted to reach?

Quandt: Mixed. I'm extremely happy that it happened as, in some ways, it's been the most difficult of all the retrospectives that I've done in terms of securing the rights, getting the prints made, pulling the project together. It took 10 years. That sounds grandiose because a great deal of that was just being told to wait. My colleagues in Japan kept saying, "Now is not the time." So much of that 10 years was spent waiting and nagging, frankly, and then it came together very quickly; in the last year and a half everything fell together. But looking back at the retrospective in North America, what's been slightly dispiriting is that—of all of the Japanese retrospectives that I've toured: Imamura, Naruse, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa—this one has had, by far, the least attendance. That was pretty well across the board. There were very few cities that were an exception: Toronto probably and—it would seem from last night and what PFA recorded from opening night a week ago—Berkeley will also be a major exception.

The retrospective just ended in Los Angeles and there it did actually quite badly. It was split between two venues. Previously in Los Angeles, our retrospectives have been taken in pocket versions, severely cut down in fact. This time I really wanted the whole retrospective shown and so I asked two venues to collaborate—the American Cinematheque and LACMA, both of whom I've worked with a lot—and, unfortunately, I feel badly about this. One begins to feel responsible for the box office of our sister organizations. They both reported averaging under 100 people in attendance.

Guillén: Any sense of why that is? Why the traveling Oshima retrospective was not recognized for being a once-in-a-lifetime event?

Quandt: I think it was one of those events that existed more on paper than it did in the actuality. We got some incredible articles at the outset in Film Comment, Artforum, etc.; but, that just didn't ignite the interest I thought it would. Any number of things could be happening here. One could be that people are waiting for the DVDs. Increasingly, I find that even among cinephiles, oddly enough, who know that events like this create the market for DVD releases. You frequently read in the comment sections on websites people essentially admitting that they're waiting for the DVD releases.

Oshima's a special case though. I've shown him a lot over the years and he's never gotten an audience, perhaps because he has this reputation for being extremely difficult and cerebral, for his cultural determinance, for the difficulty in understanding the politics. Comparatively, Imamura is relatively accessible, I would have to say. There is in Imamura's '60s classics an ethnographic juiciness that you just don't get in Oshima. Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief requires that you know a whole lot about what happened in '60s politics.

Guillén: I was startled and unmoored watching that film. I can't say I knew what was going on but I can say that I appreciated how it was punctuated with absurdist humor. The audience laughed in bursts.

Quandt: Oshima throws everything into that film. That's one of the things I love about Oshima's cinema and what I find so moving. The works feel born out of his being, his psyche, and I can't think of many other filmmakers subsequently who have made films that way. Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief and The Man Who Left His Will On Film—which is another film that tends to alienate audiences—are, to hazard a cliché, Oshima's most "personal" films. They're formed out of his very being and, as a consequence, often seem baffling and offputting to audiences.

By contrast, Boy is probably his most accessible and the film that is closest in many ways to what people would consider a classic narrative. It does include many of his Brechtian effects, etc., but it is accessible. Whereas, with Death By Hanging I'm sure you will totally have the experience most people have seeing the film of not knowing how to take it. It seems from moment to moment to be an extremely black comedy and then it veers into Frank Tashlin-like comedy. Audiences laugh and then immediately the laugh catches in their throat because in the very next sequence they're faced with the question: was it right to laugh? It's an absurdist, bleak, black comedy. It's that discomfort audiences have with Oshima's films that partly explains why there's not a huge following for his work.

Guillén: As if comfort should be required when watching a film. Do you think contemporary audiences have slackened expectations in what films will provide? Do you think they don't want to work too hard to understand a film?

Quandt: Yeah, to a degree certainly. Even in the case of Imamura, in the two times I've done retrospectives of his work, audiences on either side of his early '60s films become baffled and put off when he hits that wild period where he's making Profound Desire of the Gods and then proceeds into that incredibly difficult documentary A Man Vanishes, which many critics—and I count myself among them—consider to be one of his greatest films. I think the whole—dare I say it?—late period of Imamura is inferior. The only one of his late films that is truly great is Vengeance Is Mine. Everything after that is a slackening of his art. Yet, those films were warmly greeted in my experience of the retrospective so maybe you have something there.

Guillén: I consider you the master of the retrospective. [Quandt ducks his head and protests modestly.] Last year when Pedro Costa was here with his retrospective, that was the first time that I watched each and every film in a program. Costa was in attendance to address his audiences. As a non-academically trained cinephile, I would have to say that retrospective was when I finally got Costa. I completely re-evaluated his work because—to be honest with you—when I first saw Colossal Youth at the San Francisco International, I didn't much care for it. It left me comatose. By the time I was through with his retrospective, I had made a complete turnabout, such that I found Colossal Youth absolutely invigorating. What the retrospective afforded was the chance to understand his cinema on his own terms and—after interviewing him for The Greencine Daily—I can honestly say he changed my attitudes towards not only his own cinema, but cinema in general. When I asked him about the retrospective, he answered about retrospectives in general and how important it had been for him as a young man to catch retrospectives of the Japanese masters, to gauge the graduated momentum of their work.

In this instance with Oshima, however, I'm finding the retrospective a bit perplexing because the usual stylistic continuity is absent. You don't really see one film develop into the next. Every film I've seen so far has been uniquely distinct, as if coming out of nowhere. I've had to hold on to your guidance that Oshima's continuity is to be found—not in his style—but in his singular sensibility. I'm curious to know why Oshima felt the need to constantly reinvent his filmmaking?

Quandt: There are three things I want to respond to. I also have never spent a moment in a film class—I'm a total autodidact—so I totally appreciate your comment. I've learned cinema through watching cinema, reading about it on my own, and I've never had any academic training in it whatsoever.

Pedro Costa's retrospective is one of the high points in my 20 years at the Cinematheque Ontario, for the very reasons you say. We didn't have large audiences. It happened in June, which is not an ideal time because school was out and our audiences are usually student-based and they were not in session. But it was the most passionate and intelligent discussion I've ever heard at the Cinematheque. Costa was so incredibly generous. The strange thing is—and I have to be frank about this—is that I had been warned that the opposite could be true about him. We had Q&As after three-hour films where I would have to shut them down after an hour and a half because they could have just gone on and on. I had very much the same experience as you and Pedro probably accounts for that wherever he goes.

In terms of Oshima's stylistic eclecticism, some of what I quoted in my introduction last night when he told Joan Mellen that he never wanted to make a film in the same style twice and his wish to be in constant change is only partly true. You can certainly see through lines of certain devices, certain usages of music, certain compositions of color, that fit an auteurial model of style. At the same time, all the directors I can think of from that period—and, again, one can only compare Oshima to Godard, even though he absolutely loathed that comparison—exhibit this restless intelligence. When you read Oshima's essays, you realize that he responded to every political change of the period. In Japan it was incredible going through that whole period leading up to the protests against AMPO, against the security pact with America. I keep pointing to Night and Fog in Japan as one of Oshima's greatest films where he makes—I don't know if it's his first but it's certainly one of his greatest—films in the tradition of La Chinoise, a couple of Jancsó's films: The Roundup and The Red and the White, essentially about the in-fighting amongst the Left. Oshima was very quickly disillusioned with politics. He never arrived at any point of cynicism but he was certainly pessimistic. That also accounts for part of his stylistic eclecticism. He was constantly searching and questing for a form to express his various forms of dismay—and I would even say disgust—at the state of his country, what his country had done in the war, after the war during the economic miracle before it had been left behind, and its persecution of minorities.

Guillén: As a minority member myself who—in recent days—is feeling somewhat persecuted as a second-class citizen, I'm wondering if you would be willing to address Oshima's usage of homoerotics in such films as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Gohatto?

Quandt: Something that's always fascinated me about Oshima's work is that—from very early on—he treats homosexuality openly. It's a motif all throughout his work and, of course, becomes explicit towards the end of his career with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Gohatto especially. Part of my passion for Oshima came out of the retrospective I did of his work 20+ years ago at Toronto's Harbourfront when I was still programming there. There's a thing that happens when you invite a director. You get advice from your colleagues. In Oshima's case, it was unanimous: "Don't invite Oshima. Don't have him. Save yourself the grief. He's a bastard. He's incredibly difficult. He's not generous with the audience. There's no reason to have him." I won't name those colleagues—they're still around—but, because he was coming to North America to receive an award and had agreed to attend my retrospective, I felt I couldn't bypass the chance to have him in Toronto. As often happens in these cases, it turned out to be the opposite. Oshima was the funniest, sweetest, generous guest imaginable. Again, his generosity with his audiences inspired Q&As that went on and on and on. I remember that he loved his scotch. I worried at times about getting him from the fourth scotch across the parking lot into the cinema to do the Q&A; but, it always happened and he was always completely and wonderfully cogent.

I asked him about his open treatment of homosexuality one night during one of our long discussions about art and cinema. At the time we both deified Theo Angelopoulos. Now when I look back on it, it's ironic because Oshima was holding up Angelopoulos as a god; but—when I look at Angelopoulos' work—I start to imagine that he probably took some things from Oshima? Of course, Angelopoulos denies any formative influences—he didn't take anything from Jancsó; he didn't take anything from Mizoguchi—and I'm not too sure he took anything from Oshima; but, boy, when you look at some of the early Oshimas and how he treats choral structuring, using groups of people as friezes (like in Night and Fog in Japan), it really does feel like Days of 36 and some of the Angelopoulos films. Anyway, I did ask Oshima about this motif of homosexuality because then—when he was at Harborfront—Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was still relatively new. He hadn't made Gohatto yet—that was still a long way off—and all he said was, "It's very interesting, isn't it?" Then he passed on to some other topic.

Guillén: Oshima's usage of homosexuality strikes me as a purposeful representation of marginalized minorities as a romanticized outlaw position. I'm aware that Oshima was quite fond of Jean Genet's romantic criminals and that—as a television host—he had quite a flamboyant persona. Other than for that passing comment, he never offered anything more on the subject?

Quandt: No, absolutely not. He just had this bewitching laugh. Then when he went to make Gohatto, again I thought it intriguing—aware that this might be his last project because of his debilitating stroke—that this is the story he chose. How do you explain that? He's been married for decades and has many children. I'm not saying there was anything there in his personal life; but, it fits with his fascination with all kinds of minorities, all kinds of rebellions, all kinds of refusals of the Japanese way. As much as it can be pointed out that the bishōnen, this figure of the beautiful youth—who you also get in Shiro Amakusa, The Christian Rebel from the '60s—has been very much a part of Japanese popular culture for a long time. Gay samurai, in fact, have been a part of popular culture for a long time. As much as you can make that argument, the expression of it in Oshima is something singular. It fits with all these various minorities that he's explored. The Koreans, also, have been an obsession of his. You can see it in his short Diary of a Yunbogi Boy, in Death By Hanging, and Three Resurrected Drunkards.

Guillén: Are you familiar with the literary theorist Leo Bersani?

Quandt: Yes, of course.

Guillén: In his book Homos Bersani stated that Jean Genet's inflection of homosexuality, his stance, is one of "anti-civilization."

Quandt: The outlaw, yes. Any form of rejection or rebellion of the official culture of Japan was something Oshima was automatically interested in. Yet, in his later years—and this is something that a lot of people outside of Japan don't know—Oshima became more famous as the host of a television talk show where he wore these incredibly flamboyant fashions.

Guillén: I was reading about one particular lavender suit.

Quandt: I had this experience where I took him to the Art Gallery of Ontario—because he's interested in art—and there was a big bus load of Japanese tourists who were visiting the gallery at the same time. They descended upon him, crying, "Oshima Oshima Oshima!", taking pictures, etc. Afterwards, I said to him—because I had always understood that as a filmmaker he was only known amongst the intelligentsia in Japan, that he didn't have a wide audience—and I asked, "What was that all about?" That's when I first became aware of this other side of his fame and celebrity. Apparently he would say the most provocative outrageous things on this talk show.

Guillén: I'm fond of this wry lyric of Danny O'Keefe's where he sings, "It's hard to be an outlaw if you're not 'wanted' anymore." So I'm sure Oshima was dancing a fine line there between wanting to be completely removed and yet relishing in the attention?

Quandt: Also, by the time you get to Gohatto—which roughly translates as "taboo"—the homosexuality in that film is subsumed into a genre and a style that was classical. A visual and stylistic analysis of Gohatto places it very much in the golden age of Japanese cinema. As with Imamura, I hate to say this but I think something really went out of Oshima's cinema in the latter period. Max Mon Amour appears outrageous on the surface and much of the film is spent wondering if Charlotte Rampling as a British diplomat's wife is having sexual relations with a chimpanzee; but, it's all so gentile. It's scripted by Jean-Claude Carrière, one of Buñuel's favorite writers from his late period, but it feels so….

Guillén: Quaint?

Quandt: That's the word. Quaint and gentile. I much prefer the angry and revolutionary Oshima of the '60s and into the '70s.

Guillén: In your poll of the "Essential Oshima", Donald Richie characterized Oshima's Max Mon Amour as a "buried treasure" and yet it has not been included in the PFA retrospective. Why is that?

Quandt: I don't want to speak for Mona Nagai because we went back and forth on PFA's choices; but, in Toronto we did present everything. But there were three reasons why it didn't show up at PFA. First, it was not a great print. It's not well-liked by most of us. I don't care for it myself. And the third thing—which put the death knell on it for many venues—the European rights holder asked for a great deal of money just for the rights; they weren't supplying the print. Thus, Max Mon Amour was shown by almost none of the venues on the North American tour. Why would you pay a lot of money for a film you don't like in a not-very-good print? I perfectly understood why venues chose not to show it. We're currently doing an Otto Preminger retrospective in Toronto and I wrote an essay, just a few paragraphs, about the process of making the selection. We used to do complete retrospectives but now we're being much more selective with someone like Preminger because his career is so erratic. I think that it makes perfect sense. But I end the essay completely defensive—proleptic in fact—by saying that I'm sure the cultists and the completists will find grievous omissions. No matter what you leave out, you get emails from the bloggers, etc., saying, "You've overlooked this" without realizing that there are sometimes good reasons for those omissions.

Guillén: Logistically then, when you've created a retrospective such as this one where you've secured rights and struck new prints, do you woo the venues or do they woo you? Each venue, I imagine, decides upon what they're going to show of the retrospective you've organized? Obviously, that's based upon economic factors, calendar availability, all of that. Do you have any druthers about how the films should be placed in the programs? I've long been intrigued by the friction caused between one film up against another.

Quandt: Ah! There are about 10 things to say about that. You've hit on something that last night we were laughing about at dinner, namely double-bills. Six or eight months ago Sight and Sound asked a bunch of critics and curators to devise their dream double-bill. Of course, sometimes those things work on paper but—when you actually show them—they might not work as well as you'd think they would. Mine was Three Comrades and A Canterbury Tale and I had a long rationale for why I thought the two worked beautifully together. But in producing this I made the confession that as a curator I've often been complimented on double-bills that were completely accidental. [Laughs.] They're accidental because you put them together on any given night because of print availability and—I hate to say this because I should try to maintain the mystique of my vocation—running time, y'know? This one is 72 minutes, which allows me to show the second one of 123 minutes and then it turns out the films go together spectacularly and people think you've consciously devised a double-bill. Our projectionist in Toronto is the most incredible cinephile with a great knowledge of cinema and he always finds these fascinating through lines between the two films. So what I'm saying is that a lot of these double-bills are conscious; but, a lot of them are accidental. I have to say that.

In terms of determining what films get shown, it changes from retrospective to retrospective. When there's a body of work as small as Bresson's, when we did that retrospective 10 years ago, I moreorless dictated that every venue had to show them all, partly because his work had not been available for so long and it had taken so much time and money to get new prints made of all of his films. I thought, "They have to show them all." When it gets to the larger retrospectives like Naruse, Ichikawa and Oshima, you have to understand that many venues have a hard time getting an audience and it's a big financial risk for them. You have to understand that they want to cherry pick. With Oshima, I worked with Janus Films who are the distribution arm of Criterion, and I talked them into making new prints of almost all the films they had rights to. That meant a huge financial outlay and a huge financial risk for them, frankly, because three or four of them are amongst his least known films. In fact, one of them I had never seen. If you go to Maureen Turim's book on Oshima, which is considered to be the classic text on him, she doesn't even mention this film.

Guillén: Which is it?

Quandt: Double Suicide: Japanese Summer. It's really unknown. The other one is Pleasures of the Flesh, which I consider one of the revelations of the retrospective. It's fabulous. That's a roundabout way of saying that—to let Janus recoup their costs—I made their films mandatory to any venue that showed the retrospective.

Guillén: That's fair.

Quandt: It's only fair. They've gone that incredible length to get the prints made and shouldn't be put at great financial risk because of that. That meant, frankly, that a couple of venues dropped the retrospective because they knew that meant they would have to show eight or ten Oshimas and not the best-known ones in every case. They knew they couldn't get an audience for these unknown films and, again, I have to understand them. But at the same time, I couldn't start making exceptions.

[Part Two of this interview can be found here.]

Cross-published on Twitch.