Duncan Campbell: Pt II

II.


Still from Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), 35 mm photographic negatives and 16 mm film transferred to digital video, 33 min. All images: Courtesy Duncan Campbell and Rodeo, Istanbul/London.

ART iT: We were just talking about your early film Falls Burns Malone Fiddles. What’s striking about this film is how the narration works against the images, and the subtitles work against the narration, forcing the viewer to choose what to focus on. I think this distance between one function of the audiovisual apparatus and another is consistent in your later works – for example, the whooping and coughing noises that you use in Make it New John evoke Monty Python. They are a Brechtian reminder to viewers that there are multiple dimensions to the “reality” on the screen.

DC: Yes. It’s not a passive experience where you have a teller and the audience sits there and listens. As a viewer myself, I always appreciate things that involve the audience in the process of constructing the meaning. Obviously, there are facts that are more or less undeniable, but history is always subject to revision from the vantage of the present, in terms of what is allowable or not in the present, or what we want things to mean in the present. So it’s important to accept that everything is not known – things get forgotten or are discovered – that it’s a dynamic process.

ART iT: Falls Burns Malone Fiddles follows a structuralist conceit in which the material dictates the making of the film, and with Bernadette you adjusted your narrative to what was available, but then through the staged interview with the factory workers at the end of Make It New John, it seems you take a leap into constructing your own material. Do you have a particular ethos toward the material that you’ve maintained the whole time?

DC: I think in relation to Make It New John, it’s a leap in terms of what I had done before, but the thing about that section where the five actors appear at the end is that the dialogue and the politics also have a documentary source. The scene is based on a printed interview, and most of the political discussion is adapted verbatim from the interview. Of course there is some artistic license with the characters. But even then, for example in the case of the journalist character and the resistance of the workers to her, I surmised that from having sat through hours of footage of journalists coming and trying to impose strange narratives on what was happening at the factory, which they wanted to have confirmed by the workers. The workers could only respond in a perplexed way to these questions, because they were so far from their real concerns and experience.
Even in terms of the documentary form, the idea of the staged documentary has a long history. Robert Flaherty was a great exponent of using real people, but telling them what to do, where to stand and what to say. So there is a precedent for that approach.
I think there’s a kind of honesty in it as well. Again, there are preferences and prejudices that are ingrained in documents or footage. I’m part of this process too, with my own preferences and prejudices. So rather than trying to conceal it, I was trying to make it explicit. It is important to critically appreciate that this is somebody else’s perspective and not something definitive – because it is impossible to condense this sprawling history into a 50-minute film.


Above: Installation view of Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) at Kunstverein Munich, Munich, 2009. Below: Still from Bernadette (2008), 16mm film transferred to digital video, 38 min. 10 sec.

ART iT: How about the filmic gaze that you yourself apply to the material as the filmmaker?

DC: I sidestep it in a way. With the archival material the aesthetic decisions are largely already made, although obviously there is an aesthetic to the editing, but more about establishing a rhythm to the work. With It for Others, although I shot the majority of the film myself, there were very specific aesthetic references guiding it. In the first section I tried to recreate the way that Chris Marker and Alain Resnais shot the objects in Statues Also Die. In the choreographed sequence, my interest in statistics and the aesthetic of statistics informed the realization, but the choreographer Michael Clark was more significant there. And then, in the general object section, there were photos by Stephen Shore, which we recreated and filmed.

ART iT: Do you consider the way you construct films through already existing or quoted material to be a practice of appropriation? Is there a divide between appropriation as it is understood in contemporary art and how it is practiced in film?

DC: I think it would be overstating it to call what I do appropriation. In the films I make, all the footage is cleared, so it is not appropriation in a strict sense. My understanding of appropriation is that it is a principled strategy: the reason you do it in the first place is because you don’t agree with the fact that historical or socially important documents are owned by people who will only allow you to use them if you can pay for the privilege. I have issues with that myself, but when I was making Bernadette, I was conscious of the fact that Bernadette Devlin – or McAliskey, as she is now – is still alive, and I didn’t want to put together something that looked bootlegged, because it didn’t feel appropriate in the situation. That’s why I felt I had to clear things officially.
A more accurate term might be collage. Even when I shoot things myself, there are other visual references, and there are also textual references in the writing of the films. So there is a specific set of issues that apply to appropriation, and purely by the fact of having paid for the material, I believe I’ve excluded myself from entering that debate.

ART iT: It’s interesting you go that route. The archive has potential to serve as a democratic institution, insofar as it offers access to material or knowledge that is not circulating in the mainstream, but of course there’s also an aspect of authority and control to this model, so the question is, how do you negotiate that authority?

DC: When I first started using archival material I was very much of the opinion that if something’s out there, then you can use it. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but having used archives a lot since then, I realize that in many cases – like with the BBC in Britain – they have to put so many resources into simply maintaining the archive. They almost become technological museums, because it’s not just the material that needs to be maintained, but also the technology for showing it. The whole question of migration and the fact that the quality is eroded each time you migrate something from one technology to another is highly vexed. Archives are much more conscious of that now, but in the original analog-digital transition some materials were irreparably damaged or downgraded because people just assumed that digital would be superior, which it wasn’t. So someone has to pay to maintain the original quality.


Above: Still from It For Others (2013), 16 mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min. Below: Still from Make It New John (2009), 16 mm film and analogue video transferred to digital video, 50 min.

ART iT: What’s the process when you develop a work? Do you start with an outline first, or does the process flow intuitively between a meta-narrative and the viscera of the material? I am thinking here of the journal entries in It for Others, which self-referentially document the progress of the film, almost like logs from an 18th-century adventure novel.

DC: The films usually come out of the process of making them. With Bernadette, I was interested in the organization that Bernadette Devlin was involved with at Queen’s University, People’s Democracy, but when I started looking at the material on the organization, there wasn’t much available, so it was a difficult prospect to begin with, and then Bernadette was also frequently put forward as the spokesperson, so I gradually shifted my focus to her.
In It for Others, I was working specifically with Statues Also Die. Statues Also Die ends somewhat optimistically – which is unusual for Marker’s films – with a promise of reconciliation between African and Western culture. But when Marker returned to West Africa and Guinea-Bissau in Sans Soleil (1983), the momentum of the independence movement had been more or less extinguished, and power had become very centralized. The interesting thing about this example – and Marker’s films more generally – is that, were he to have revisited the film 10 years later, his opinion would have changed. That’s what I admire about him. His films are snapshots of a particular moment in time, and if you go forward everything will change again. You get the sense that he’s constantly revising what he’s doing.
The diary entries in It for Others are an attempt to reflect this reality – as a series of notes rather than anything more definitive. They are a kind of homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s notes for his planned film adaptation of Capital. The idea of adapting Capital is such a daunting proposition. The text is so formally diverse: there are sections which are dry and mash together all this statistical information, and others that are highly literary or quasi-mystical.

ART iT: I read that you and Michael Clark formed a reading group and went through the entire first volume of Capital together, but the actual dance sequence in the film was only around 10 or 12 minutes. It seems like there was a tremendous amount of energy applied to what ended up being a relatively compressed segment.

DC: Yes, and there were other vignettes we shot which we didn’t use. It could have been twice as long. Originally, we were planning a stand-alone project, but then it corresponded so much to everything else that it ended up in It for Others. The reading group was actually just the two of us. It was an interesting thing to do in its own right, because it was in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and everybody was confused about what had happened and how. It was one of the things that helped me to understand the trade in derivatives and how that had been amplified beyond any control, as with the subprime mortgage in the US, which developed into a trillion-dollar market with no solid commodity underlying it. I had read parts of Capital in isolation, but I think you do have to read it from beginning to end to appreciate Marx’s dialectical method, and how things move from one to another. Marx never really closes the argument down – it just keeps opening out and out and out. And that returns to the dilemma about how to encapsulate it. It might seem crazy to try to convey it through the medium of dance, but it’s no less crazy than making a film of it in the first place.

Part I | III

Duncan Campbell: Precipitate Relations

Copyrighted Image