sj ge interview lr

8/9/2019 SJ GE Interview LR

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lot of old books and magazines and use images mainly but also stories,anecdotes, and myths. We also do a kind of research where we tell ourselvesstories and these stories go some way towards guiding how we look throughthe viewfinder.But then when we get the material back from the lab something else takes

over, which is to do with the way you might be able to suggest movement or development without narrative, by moving from one image to another viasomething visual or a movement in the image itself.GE: This is something we thought about very deliberately when we made thelast piece prior to the first 16mm project, which was called Motion Path . Thispiece was exhibited as a synchronised twelve screen video installation.LR: When did you do that?SJ: Three years ago? It was shown at the De la Warr Pavilion in 2006.LR: So it was shown in a modernist space.SJ: Yes, and it was shot in four of Erich Mendelssohns buildings: the De LaWarr, The Metal Workers Union Building in Berlin, the Schocken DepartmentStore in Chemists, which now derelict, and the BNai Amoona Synagogue inSt. Louis.LR: Can I go back to a really fundamental question then? Firstly, when did youstart working together and secondly have you always found that you havebeen working around these ideas to do with modernist architecture?GE: We started working together in 1993.SJ: And no. There you go.GE: No we havent always, but... earlier on we were making quite large-scalemulti-projector multi-screen installations. I suppose the most elaborate wasWall of Death (1999) which was a massive circular screen built like a funfair wall of death about ten metres across, and in the middle were two projectorsthat rotated and projected two images at 180 degrees to one another aroundthis circular space or cyclorama. The sound moved around the space in synchwith the images, and all of the footage was appropriated car chasesequences. We used French Connection 1 and 2, The Driver , and Vanishing Point . But we re-edited the films so that the two components the cops andthe criminals - are separated and projected on opposite sides of the circular wall, tracking around the space one after the other. And it isnt clear who ischasing who.LR: So have you always used other peoples footage?SJ: Well, no we havent. Motion Path was all our own footage and so was

Proposal for an Unmade Film. Wall of Death and Machine on Black Ground use found footage. What interested us in Wall of Death was the idea of aspectator being in the work. Literally. As if you were caught between the twodifferent types of protagonists in these films, the chasers and the chased.When you were in the space, in order follow the action, you had to continuallymove and look back and forth, and the separated sound was circling aroundyou as well. We did a number of pieces around that time in which you wereboth immersed and were aware of being immersed at the same time.

Perceptual Technology

GE: And it occurred to me the other day, the first piece we made together,was a multi-projection piece, of panoramic views of Berlin, Paris and London,

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from the Fernsturm, the Eiffel Tower and Canary Wharf Tower ( Passagen ,1993). And we were interested in the panorama as a part of the pre-history of cinema, and I realised that another kind of strand that has run througheverything weve done together has been an interest in technology film or cinema certainly and its relation to technology.

LR: Perceptual technology?GE: The panorama as a precursor to the spectacle of cinema. And whilstweve worked with video for the most part I realised that the move into film isprompted as much as anything by an interest in the technology of film or filmmaking. Because Proposal for an Unmade Film was based around theconceit of the film material being found footage, it could be viewed as if itssomething dug out of an archive, preparatory work for a film that was never finished. So one of the reasons for shooting on 16mm, and importantly, for shooting the film on a clockwork camera, using a simple set of prime lensesand so on, was to play into that idea, that this footage could have been madeat some point anywhere in the last fifty years.LR: So in a sense youve telescoped yourself back in time to place yourself through those technological mechanisms into that space?GE: And as someone has said, jokingly, we started working with quitecomplex video and electronics and sequencing and so on and have beengradually working backwards, until we are now working with a singleclockwork camera. And our current approach is something, I think, to do withimage making technology and, we hope, not just a fetish for film.LR: And speaking about fetishism, do you think that the distinctive quality of the reproductions in the books and magazines that interest you, as well asyour use of 16mm film, is to do with their associations to a particular earlier time period?GE: Well at the risk of stretching a point, this is actually something weexplicitly referenced in that first work we made together, Passagen (1993),through an interest in technologies that are either redundant, or obsolete or are on the verge of it. And the possibility that they afford the space to thinkabout the past from... via the promise of technology to deliver a future thatwas never delivered where this almost anachronistic technology becomesthe means to rethink the present in relation to the past. So, theres somethingabout the possibility of the simple mechanical camera that somehow providesa different sort of space in which to work, because its somewhat out of step.SJ: Theres also something about the restrictions of using 16mm and a

clockwork camera we have found really productive when we shot Proposal for an Unmade Film in Lanzarote, we used just three types of shot and wewere then working to a regime where you were either shooting for a full windof about 28 seconds, or a half wind, and so on. And out of that comes a sort of rhythm that determines the way that you think about the shot, and then howyou start to put the final film together. That has a very strong relationship tothe process of shooting. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier looking at the world through the viewfinder, but then recognising that it is alsoabout time. We can only look through the viewfinder for twenty eight seconds -the length of time of the wind of our clockwork Bolex. LR: This form of filmmaking does demand a rigour doesnt it?

SJ: In Proposal for an Unmade Film we were marking out the shots in verysimple, elementary ways. For instance, marking out seven second quadrants

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on the tripod head using tape so that, when Graham was making the pan andI was following it with a stop watch, we were hitting the marks at the right timeto get these very smooth single wind pans and you know that at fourteenseconds you should be half way through the pan and so on. So you have thisquite rigid, and in some ways quite limited repertoire of shots, but then you

start to work within that.GE: In video the costs of a high shooting ratio are easily managed, andshooting can be relatively indiscriminate. So, although we very rarely workwith a storyboard that has been prepared long in advance of arriving at thelocation, we are very selective and our shooting ratio is quite tight. So if youreally misjudge an exposure or the light really lets you down, then you donthave a shot. So for us this kind of constraint or condition or discipline: thetwenty eight second wind, the limited type of shots, is a really valuable andproductive structuring principleLR: What it gives you is a framework, but within that framework it allows for improvisation. It demands that of you really.GE: I think that's what the filmmaking process meant for us. And, its certainlythe case that the diversity of material that were moving between in currentprojects such as Machine on Black Ground , is historically all over the place:SJ: We knew that the National Archive had at least two films that were aboutCoventry Cathedral Dudley Shaw Ashtons BFI Experimental film fund filmmade in 1958, and The John Laing Film Unit film made in 1962, both films aretitled Coventry Cathedral. Then the third piece that we use footage from isTony Palmers BBC2 Outside broadcast live recording of Tangerine Dreamperforming at Coventry Cathedral in 1975.SJ: The material in the BFI archive was really fantastic, the Dudley Shaw

Ashton for example is a genuinely odd film.LR: So let me just get this right. There is the film by Dudley Shaw Ashton,which is of the modelGE: Before the Cathedral was built.LR: .which is amazing, because it really, it messes with your mind in terms of scale, which is what you are doing. And the other one is a more conventionaldocumentary.SJ: Its very beautiful.GE: And it was made by the John Laing film unit, so its an industrialdocumentary in a way, all of the people who worked on it are unaccredited(except the director Kossar Tufery). It was no doubt shot over the duration of

the entire construction and its like an enormous thank you to everyoneinvolved. And its 16mm, we think Kodak reversal, so it has this very particular colour. The Shaw Ashton, oddly, is 35mm, and is a short form film.SJ: Produced by the BFI Experimental Film Fund.GE: So were sort of staging a collision between quite disparate historicalsubject matter, but converging it all through a simple material process, which,if not a kind of equivalence, is at least a kind of ...LR: ...simultaneity...GE: ...yes, its possible to entertain the idea that these diverse sourcematerials have relationships to one another, and that their contrastingdissimilarities can be overlooked in the interests of seeing where those

convergences can be, not in any concrete sense but just by using a number of alibis or stories that we tell ourselves; stories that structure the way we look at

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things or sort through our found material. LR: I think thats right, because by working with the medium of film you arealluding to ideas of cinematic fiction arent you? And film allows you tointroduce all sorts of temporal and spatial ambiguities visually: like thedeceptive sense of scale that you appreciated in that shot of the model of the

Cathedral in the film by Dudley Shaw Ashton, which looks like a real building.

Machine on Black Ground

LR: How did the idea for Machine on Black Ground begin?GE: I think it may be something like this...we were in Berlin, shooting MotionPath. I think we were on our way to Chemnitz to shoot the Erich Mendelssohnbuilding there and then back to Berlin to shoot his Metal Workers UnionBuilding, and we visited the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (KWMC). Thiswas the church built around the time of Coventry Cathedral and consecrated

on the same day. The Kaiser Wilhelm was destroyed by the RAF, CoventryCathedral was destroyed by the LuftwaffeSJ: And they both have parts of the old bombed churches left next to the newbuilding.GE: And materials from the previous buildings were incorporated into thefabric of the new.LR: So there was a deliberate sense of reciprocity or a dtente between thetwo?GE: Coventry and the Berlin Church are part of network of reconciliationcentres, one of the chapels at Coventry is called The Chapel of Unity andthey host events with congregations from other churches including Berlin and

elsewhere.SJ: Somewhere down the line we also started looking at a stained glasswindow technique known as betonglas walls or dalles vere , in which wallsized screens of stained glass chunks are set in concrete grids. And thearchitect Egon Eiermans Berlin cathedral is a wonderful example of the visualeffect that betonglas technology produces, we immediately thought we weresubmerged or underwater when we went into the cathedral for the first time.GE: But we went to the KWMC entirely out of a general interest.SJ: to see the betonglas And at some point we began to think about thebetonglas cell and the film frame.LR: But where did you first come across betonglas , was that through your

research into Mendelssohn?SJ: It might have been actually because we bought lots of books on post-war,European civic architecture and as we started looking through these thingsbetonglas just kept coming up, particularly in French and German churches,and we just started to get interested in very simple formal things about thesecells. And then I think we went into the KWMC just to see what it might looklike and as I said before, when you stand in front of a betonglas wall, it feelslike you are immersed in something. And in Eiermans cathedral it seemedthat we were somehow submerged in some kind of liquid world in fact, it feltto us that we were looking out through the windows of a capsule or asubmersible. And I think youre right, I think that was the moment when wethought, OK, well film this.LR: And then how did that connect to the cathedral at Coventry?

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SJ: Well, because of the reconciliation connection and because they wereconsecrated on the same day.LR: So in a sense you literally followed the journey of that link back.GE: In a way, although that historical connection - which is important andinteresting - was never what we were making the film about. We were making

a film there because it was a place in which certain images could beproduced. What actually reinforced the link was the Meeting House at SussexUniversity, which was also by Basil Spence (as is Coventry Cathedral).Sussex University was designed by him and certainly the University campusat that time could, and can be seen, as a kind of idealised community. So, incertain ways at Sussex you could spend your three years studying there,entirely happily, after a fashion I guess, without ever stepping outside thecampus.LR: It was also one of the most radical universities in the 60s, lots of thestudent demonstrations came from there and many of the new courses inHumanities began there.GE: Sussex and University of East Anglia, another complete campus.SJ: Theyre often referred to as the utopianist campuses.GE: So to find the design of the Meeting House, which is very similar in planto the KWMC: being gridded, of coloured glass, as well as being an inter-denominational meeting place where they hold services across the religiousspectrum, that sort of made the relationship stronger, because it was one thatseemed to come out, not just this historical connection, but also out of theform of the space. Added to which, in our lifetime, Coventry has beencontroversial, it was a talking point and a destination.SJ: It was at this moment that the idea of the low-level modernist pilgrimageemerged. When we were at KWMC we started talking about going to Coventrywith our parents. We realised that we had both been on, I guess, a version of a pilgrimage with our parents to see Coventry Cathedral. And then other people who weve met have also mentioned visiting Coventry, if you are of acertain generation of course.LR: So in a sense youre talking about Coventry Cathedral as having apersonal resonance for you, but that a lot of that resonance is to do with apost-war utopia, which you are exploring in terms of where we are now?SJ: I guess so, but also that they are really strange, quite wonderful spaces.Ive spoken to a couple of people who mention that Coventry is second ratearchitecture, but I dont think that at all. And generally, these modernist

Cathedrals have a really odd sense of separation from the outside world,whether it be the cities of Coventry or Berlin, or the open spaces of SussexUniversity, and this is because of the peculiar character of the stained glass.

And one of the things that we got really interested in was the idea of lookingout from within these spaces, through these blocks of coloured glass whichseemed to suggest that you were some kind of capsule and you could befloating through space or underwater, and it produces this sense of everythingoutside being visible but strangely distant. In most traditional churches you donot get a sense of the outside, but in the new church architecture of the 50sand 60s you can get a glimpse of the outside world, but as if through a prismor a gel. So we began shooting directly through the stained glass at the

Meeting House with the glass entirely filling the frame. When we filmed thestudents through the red or yellow glass walking about outside they seemed

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to be floating or weightless.SJ: And when we added Colleens (Ccile Schott) music, which is constructedfrom adapted music boxes, it seemed to us that the students were somehowlittle bubbles, or worlds, moving about out there in whatever it was that youwere floating through in this capsule. So there was something about the way

you were on the inside of something looking out, but looking at something thatyou couldnt quite understand.LR: Its also interesting - returning to what you were saying earlier Grahamabout whether film can effect architecture rather than the other way round. Iwonder if the films that were around then were any inspiration to theseutopian architects? There were so many science fiction films at the time.Perhaps they were playing off each other in some way?SJ: Science fiction for us has always been a really strong influence. Theproblem is that at the moment there are so many people interested in sciencefiction, that its become something of a default position.LR: But I think that science fiction of that period does reflect those utopiannotions.GE: In a way, and maybe to anticipate another question that we touched onearlier: whats interesting about churches? In the current project we areworking on we have found interesting relationships between Italian museumdisplay and interior design of the post-war period, these are places thatoffered the opportunity for certain kinds of architects to make a significantstatement. So, although ecclesiastical post-war architecture would seem to bean unlikely place for modernist innovation, if you think about it in terms of architecture and function, the function of a church is actually largely basedaround spectacle, rather than around operation, or purpose.LR: Youre right. The idea of function has a particularly ambiguous quality inrelation to churches.GE: So you could think of it as a process of directing, image making or stagingscenes. Which is to some extent what the museum display design is about.So why churches? Because perhaps to architects in the post-war period theywere valuable because they were an opportunity to avoid the prosaic andpedestrian they functioned as stages....SJ: the other thing is that, when we went into the KWMC, once we had madea connection between the stained glass cell and the film frame, we started toimagine that we were in an optical printer. In a really simple way we thoughtthis is what it would be like to be trapped in an optical printer.

GE: Its like Fantastic Journey when they inject a miniaturised submarine witha team of doctors into a patients blood stream though their arm, or NicolsonBakers description of clambering through grooves of record as if they were avalley in a landscape.LR: But the fact that youre talking immediately about cinema is becausethose spaces are so inherently cinematic. I do think the shared sensoryquality and experience of expectation that we have when we go and seemainstream cinema is similar to the expectations that perhaps you wouldexperience in a church.GE: In fact we deliberately shot much of the material in Coventry and Berlin toconfuse the scale of things and create illusion; stained glass walls and organ

pipes are filmed to look like cities, light falling through stained glass windowsto look like a constellation in space. The first thing we start with when we

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begin filming is the way things look when you look at them through thecamera.SJ: We should say that pretty well everything we do is driven visually. So oneof the things that we immediately thought about when we saw the foundmaterial for Machine on Black Ground was the visual connection between

the blades of the helicopter as it rises from the cathedral having dropped thespire in place and the tape reels on Tangerine Dreams reel-to-reel recorder rising through Coventry Cathedral in that fantastic bit of early video mixing byTony Palmer. So the start and the finish of the film have these two rising,spinning forms.LR: And that solarisation, did you add that, or was that... that was there!GE: This is a strange kind of diverted technology, this is 1976 live video visionmixing transferred to 16mm, and it just looks really extraordinary.LR: But also think of this in relation to a Cathedral, the idea of visions...SJ: I think that must have occurred to Tony Palmer who shot and mixed theoriginal BBC outside broadcast.SJ: And when we did a simple set of manoeuvres in all of these spaces (inthe Meeting House with the camera locked off on a dolly), the stained glasswindows become like little frames through which you see little events. Each of the windows seems to be describing a very particular world, but of course weare really looking out onto the same space, and thats one thing that we gotreally interested in. Youre looking through a series of prismatic filters.LR: So it entirely changes what youre looking at?SJ: Then in the film we had quite a lot of optical printing done using thismaterial.GE: So we layered a number of shots of those coloured windows. And you getthis fantastic sense of one image floating across or beneath another.LR: I think that this kind of discussion begs the question which came first?GE: Were always at pains to make sure that we make it as clear as possiblethat we didnt know any of this before we began. And actually what we knewwhen we started was at one level, nothing more than, we want to make a filmhere, and at another level that there was grounds to think there wassomething of interest here. So without pretending that it was an utterlyintuitive process, it would be just as inaccurate to say that it was an entirelypremeditated one.LR: I think its so much about particular ideas and ideals materially embeddedin the architecture somehow. So that, as you say, no matter how much youre

interested in the collision of these different ideas in unexpected ways, at afundamental level its about your physical experience of these extraordinaryspaces.

Questions of Equivalence

SJ: You mentioned a moment ago the connection drawn out visually betweenthe stained glass cell and the film frame. Another example of this type of equivalence is the scene we use from the Dudley Shaw Ashton film of Graham Sutherland in his back garden, painting the cartoon for the tapestrythat was to hang in Coventry Cathedral. This sequence was actually refilmed

on a Steenbeck with the optical soundtrack in view on the Steenbeck screen.In fact, it is important to say that the film takes its title from a Graham

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Sutherland painting. We got rather interested in Sutherland, obviouslybecause of the tapestry, but also because of the ambiguity in his painting the black ground in some of his paintings could easily be deep space and themachine a kind of organic space ship.So theres a moment in Machine on Black Ground when you can see the

optical soundtrack on the Steenbeck, and then the optical soundtrack madeus start to think about these vast strips of stained glass in Coventry and so

just as you make the visual association at the beginning of the film betweenthe movement of helicopter rotor blades and the reel-to-reel tape, so you haveassociations between the optical sound track on the Steenbeck and the stripsof stained glass.LR: So what this sequence does is actually flip out from the filmic space of Coventry into the self-reflexive space of your research, and you both becomeother players amongst these strange glimpsed figures that occur throughoutthe film. So youre as much researchers as those men pointing behind thelifted Epstein sculpture in the film.GE: And I think thats also the purpose fulfilled by the audition sequences inProposal for an Unmade Film , where the film, without those cut-always or inserts, would be so much closer to an architectural documentary.LR: So just to clarify, those are the scenes in which you have people speakingas if they are doing a presentation?SJ: Its as if theyre auditioning for the part. So you have an actor playing thepart of [the artist and architect] Cesar Manrique in front of a back-projection of one of his buildings.GE: And at the end of one of the scenes a production assistant comes on witha clipboard and they both look at a script or a call sheet or something. And Ithink that we see these sequences as the points at which youre flipped backor thrown back from what would otherwise be like watching an architecturaldocumentary, admittedly without a voice over, admittedly without captions -without all those anchor points, but I think you could see the audition scenesas operating in a similar way to the Steenbeck sequence in Machine on Black Ground .SJ: Something else I think that happens in Proposal for an Unmade Film isthat in a lot of the spaces there are people maintaining the space. Theyrepolishing the floor or theyre arranging a table layout or just invigilating. Andone of the things that really hit us after we had filmed in Lanzarote, and wewere looking at the footage, was the sense that these people were

maintaining the space but you didnt know what for. And it was as if they weremaintaining a space that no longer had a function.LR: Or waiting for the master to return.GE: Or waiting for someone to return.SJ: And thats something I think emerges in both films, you have theseglimpsed figures who seem to being doing something for an unknown reason?LR: The sequences have a feeling of the eerie or the uncanny. This adds tothis sense of what you were talking about earlier of spaces that havebecome lost or where their purpose has become lost, or theyre out of time or out of step.GE: We actually went to great lengths to be able to film early in the morning

without any tourists present, and when we looked at what we had shot, thewaiters, guards and cleaners seemed to be involved in maintaining something

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that is outdated, or outmoded , but in perfect condition. Almost as if the spaceshave never been used. Its fantastically poignant or even melancholic, theyrestill dressed in the same uniforms that Manrique designed in the late 1970sand it feels like they have been repeating the same activities forever.SJ: What we got interested in Machine on Black Ground , I guess, is the idea

that Sutherland and the other workers that feature so strongly in the JohnLaing documentary, are building something and youre not quite sure what it istheyre building. So the sense is that even Tangerine Dream [a sequence inthe film features footage of the band playing at Coventry Cathedral], whentheyre playing those early synths and twiddling away at their tape decks, areinvolved in the building, but youre not quite sure what theyre doing. However,it seems to be collective.LR: They could be setting up some kind of control system, which again youreright that youre theyre all space ships that youre building in a way arentthey?SJ: We read something recently by Penelope Curtis for a show at the HenryMoore featuring Gerard Byrne amongst others, where she identifiedsomething she called collective aspirational architecture. She was referringto the new public architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, talking about theUniversity of Leeds by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who also designed theBarbican, and this really resonated for us. One of the things that suddenly hitus as we looked through the archive film material about Coventry in the BFIarchive was the phenomenal kind of hope, pride and aspiration invested inthis building not simply in the institutional religious sense, but alsosomething to do with renewal and looking forward this really comes acrossin the John Laing documentary from 1962. This sense of collectivism comesup I think really strongly in Machine on Black Ground .GE: I agree, and thats whats common to possibly all of our film works (thosemade and those currently in production). Certainly the current ones is thatsense of a mission, or a programme or a project, and it existing both at a levelat which it becomes recognised and thought of as such but also existing atanother level at which it was somehow implicit. That it somehow permeatedthe culture.

Graham Ellard, Stephen Johnstone and Lucy Reynolds 2010

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