by Barbara Sternberg
Cinecycle, Toronto, Winter 1993
Opening Series: an interview with Philip Hoffman (by Barbara Sternberg 1993)
Category Archives: Films
Philip Hoffman’s passing through/torn formations
by Mike Hoolboom
Cinema Canada (magazine), July 1988
The most important Canadian film made in 1987 will not be playing in a theatre near you, neither subject to those journalists charged with turning images into verse or to an audience whose unflagging allegiance to American stars has so recently nurtured Mulroney’s latest sell-out of Canadian theatres. Instead this brilliant meditation on violence must be relegated to the backwaters of Canadian expression, unwilling to con form—to change the how of its expression to suit Telefilm’s turning of Canadian light into American money.
A turn of a different sort has been negotiated by a group of filmmakers belonging to the Escarpment School, so named by Zone Cinema founder Mike Cartmell. Born and raised along the steep slope of the Canadian escarpment (or else subject to its looming beneficence in Ontario’s Sheridan College) the filmmakers are technically adept, well versed in experimental film (most are teachers), inclined towards autobiography and landscape, work in 16mm and have joined the formalist traditions of the international avant garde with the Canadian documentary tradition. Their works have moved from a lyrical formalism to a concern with the nature of representation and the reconstruction of the autobiographical subject. Central to the emerging mandate of Ontario’s Escarpment School has been the work of Philip Hoffman.
Hoffman’s sixth film in ten years, passing through/torn formations is a generational saga laid over three picture rolls that rejoins in its symphonic montage the broken remnants of a family separated by war, disease, madness and migration. Begun in darkness with an extract from Christopher Dewdney’s Predators of the Adoration, the poet narrates the story of ‘you,’ a child who explores an abandoned limestone quarry. Oblivious to the children who surround, it is the dead that fascinate, pressed together to form limestones that part slowly between prying fingers before lifting into a horizon of lost referentiality. The following scene moves silently from a window drape to enfeebled grandmother to her daughter, patiently feeding her blood in a quiet reversal of her own infancy. Over and over the camera searches out the flowered drape, speaking both of a vegetable life cycle of death and rebirth and the literal meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’ which means the tearing of the veil or drape. The film’s theme of reconciliation begins with death’s media/tion—and moves its broken signifiers together in the film’s central image, ‘the corner mirror,’ two mirrored rectangles stacked at right angles. This looking glass offers a ‘true reflection,’ not the reversed image of the usual mirror but the objectified stare of the Other. When Rimbaud announces ‘I am another’ he does so in a gesture that unites traveller and teller, confirming his status within the story while continuing to tell it. It is the absence of this distance, this doubling that leads the Czech side of the family to fatality.
Each figure in the film has a European double, as if the entry into the New World carried with it not only the inevitable burdens of translation (from the Latin ‘translatio’ to bear across) but also the burden of all that could not be said or carried, to all that needed to be left behind. There are two grandmothers in the film—Babji, dying in a Canadian old age home and Hanna whose Czech tales are translated by the filmmaker’s mother. There are likewise two grandfathers, Driououx married to the dying Babji in Canada and Jancyk, shot by his own son after refusing to cede him land rights. This son is returned to the scene of the shooting by Czech authorities and asked to recreate the event for a police film three months after the shooting. Unable to comply he breaks down instead, poised between death and its representation.
Hoffman’s imaging strategies recall the doubled tracks of American avant gardist Owen Land. An avowed Christian, Land posits a simultaneity of expression as the precondition for conversion, parodied in Land’s own Wide Angle Saxon. But while Land’s conversions transform the institutional settings of auto shows, instructional films and supermarkets into sites of individual revelation, Hoffman’s turning is a movement away from the violence that has marked past generations, using home movies to reshape the way history reproduces its truth within the family.
The darkroom, a ceremony of mixing potions, gathering up the shimmering images, the silvery magic beneath dream’s surface. In the morning Babji would tell us what our dreams meant, and then stories of the ‘old country’ would surface, stories I can’t remember… now that she’s quiet, we can’t hear about where it all came from, so it’s my turn to go back, knowing at the start the failure of this indulgence, but only to play out these experiments already in motion. passing through/torn formations
This connection between things made in the dark: doesn’t this aspiration lie at the heart of every motion picture? We can say this for certain: that this darkness has occupied the centre of Hoffman’s film work since Somewhere Between Jalostotitlian and Encarnacion (1984). While Somewhere Between moves around his real life encounter with a boy lying dead on the Mexican roadside the boy is nowhere to be seen; Hoffman relates his death in a series of printed intertitles that punctuate the film. Similarly, midway through ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986) an elephant’s heart attack is related in voice-over while the screen remains dark and the voice explains, somewhat abashed, that showing its death would only exploit his subject.
Hoffman searches out the reasons for his wanderings in the home he never had, in the place of his conception, in a Czechslovakia ravaged by plague and occupation. That he should bear the stamp of this history, without a glimpse of the death camps that would claim his ancestors or the soil that had nourished thousands of his forbears recalls for us the movement of this film around a figure that is hardly seen. The filmmaker moves in his place—drawing his camera over the places ‘he’ could never go, looking for reasons ‘he’ could never guess in his restless quest for a perfect game and the delirium of the accordion.
He stares out. Fingers pound the keyboard. Magically. Melodies repeat. Again and again. Fingers dissolve into fingers. He was past the point of practice. The music was a vacant place to return to. Over and over. His playing gave him passage. passing through/torn formations
Bodies of Death in the House of the Word
by Mike Hoolboom,
Vanguard, Summer 1988
CKLN Interview
with Cameron Bailey
(March 1988)
CB: ?O,Zoo!; what’s the intonation on that?
PH: You have to say with with a question ….
CB: ?O,Zoo?
PH: Something like that.
CB: OK, that was a film written on top of a film called A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway. Anyway could you just describe the new film passing through for us?
PH: OK, I can talk a bit about it. It revolves around my mom’s history; she’s from Czechoslovakia and her family came over before the war, the second world war. And it’s sort of a collision between the old world and the new world, also it’s a collision of form and texture. Also a different genre of experimental film, I think is also included in the making of that.
CB: You say a collision between texture and form and also different genre of experimental film. What exactly do you mean by that? What genres does it use and what’s the experience of watching the film?
PH: I try to make it so that it’s, you know, not on experience but you live it when you watch… anyway I guess what I mean is that my background is experimental film and the films of the 60s and 70s …the films that I studied and grew through film with…but I am making it in the present moment, so in same way the form is being further developed in my work…
CB: What about Stan Brakhage?
PH: Brakhage and Snow and Wieland and you know, a lot of those experimental filmmakers. And I think, in a sense, my film covers a lot of styles. Yet I believe it has its own style, its own way of speaking.
CB: From your other work that I’ve seen, you tend to work very much with your own history; your family history, your personal history, and with your memory of say growing up or what your childhood was like and that sort of thing. How is that treated in this film and how is it different from what you’ve done before?
PH: Well I think it would be good to compare it with my first film On the Pond, which was also about family in which I was trying to somehow represent my part. It was the first film I made, about eleven or twelve years ago, in 16mm. I don’t think this film tries to represent a past, but find a future. In passing through, I work through film to, I would say, I don’t try to represent a past but whatever I come upon, as I put myself in the midst of this filmmaking, looking into my mom’s past, I sort of discover as I go along and I guess put everything into a big pot of stew, and what comes out is the film. So I’m not consciously trying to remake my mother’s history but, you know, the film is very much about what’s happened to me right now and how I experience my mother’s history and the things that are happening both in the old country and Canada.
CB: What does your mother think about this? I know you make films… your films are very much involved with your family. What does your family think about having a filmmaker sort of filming them all the time? How do they react to it?
PH: Well that’s not too unusual because I’ve always had a dark room in the basement and I’ve always, you know, when I was young, they were used to a camera being around. It’s not that unusual. But I also don’t think the film comes off as someone’s personal life. I think it could be anyone’s. And I try to create the characters in a way that, even though I’m using people around me, through film I recreate different types of characters, using their voices and images to match. I try to get away from this thing of having to grab onto a character. There’s no way you can in my film, passing through. And in this way it sort of takes it out of the realm of simply personal, but its about family. Hopefully then, more people can get involved in the film.
CB: I noticed as well that, you talk about emerging techniques, I noticed that you have a certain resistance to the conventions of any particular form; in ?O,Zoo! I remember there’s a sequence where you tell a story and then you say-you show an image of the site of the story after the actual story has happened. You say, “This is what it looked like after everybody had left.” And that sort of resistance to showing a narrative or just sort of getting caught up, as you mentioned before, in character. And I was just wondering what’s your relationship to filmic conventions, conventions of documentary or narrative or whatever? How do you work within and outside of them?
PH: Well I think, especially with the example you gave, it allows a viewer to participate more in the making of the film and whether I use a black screen and have a narrator talk about a scene and you know maybe I might not give you that scene in the image but really I am, because you can imagine it how you wish. I think the new film, passing through, is just a labyrinth of those kind of exercises, which I started with in maybe ?O,Zoo!… So how I feel about the conventions is, even in experimental film there are conventions and they must be continually broken. And so I think I’m interested in that always; to try to at least display a convention and then turn it upside down a little bit. That comes from making in the moment.
CB: Another thing I wanted to get your opinion on, the whole idea of ethics in filmmaking. It’s an old question, “What can you film and what can’t you?” We were talking earlier about your grandmother who is in the film and who is now in a nursing home. And your, sort of, initial reluctance to film her and also the state that she’s in now-she doesn’t necessarily know that you’re filming her. So it’s not a case of getting permission. What can you film and what can’t you?
PH: Well if we’re going to talk about my grandmother, that would be Babji, that’s the Polish translation of Grandma. The film’s dedicated to her, I remember her fondly from youth…she made perogies in the kitchen and taught me how to shoot a camera from the hip, not looking through the viewfinder…. I have to somehow deal with those memories. But yet I still have to deal with her and the experience that she and I are going through during her sickness. I have to deal with it right now with the bolex. And she happens to be in a nursing home and I know that can be taboo but I want to bring these real experiences to the screen, not just hide them away in the nursing home.
CB: OK, I’d like to ask one final question and that’s about the process of collaboration. In this film you have used a Christopher Dewdney poem and an excerpt from a work by Marian McMahon at the end. I know our relationship with Marian and I want to ask how do you work with each other? How do you bounce off each other?
PH: Well Marian gives me a bigger picture of things. To me that’s important. Its the other half. I took the poem she wrote and had her read it for the end of the film. She talks about skipping a stone “across the smooth surface of Lake Kashagawigamog”. So after this tumultuous interweaving family story, I end with a reference to the land we are on…First Nation Land…it’s a small gesture to a very big question of land rights, but I wanted the film to end with this simple act, referencing the land…. throwing a stone… Marian’s lovely voiced poem.
Passing through
by Gary Popovich
It is from the Canadian tradition of intuitive gathering of sounds and images (partially indebted to the documentary and realist traditions)—their tireless re-working, and, ultimately, sublimation into an aesthetic experience—that Canada’s boldest works of film art have come. It is a process that is distinctly different from scripted, pre-conceived image structuring methods. One abandons literature and theatre and uses the microphone and camera to define the shape of experience. This legacy of Canadian cinema is situated between a European (most conspicuously, but by no means exclusively British and French) and American sensibility—the area ‘in-between’ the American technological imperative and a lament for what that suppresses. This is what Arthur Kroker calls the Canadian discourse on technology:
… it is our fate by virtue of historical circumstance and geographical accident to be forever marginal to the ‘present-mindedness’ of American culture (a society which, specializing as it does in the public ethic of ‘instrumental activism,’ does not enjoy the recriminations of historical remembrance); and to be incapable of being more than ambivalent on the cultural legacy of our European past. At work in the Canadian mind is, in fact, a great and dynamic polarity between technology and culture, between economy and landscape.
— Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind
It is in our films, predominantly from a group of filmmakers who are becoming known notoriously as the Escarpment School, that this discourse has been evolving its most fascinating and forceful arguments. I can think of few more powerful reflections on this discourse than Philip Hoffman’s seventh film passing through/torn formations. In it, he synthesizes a quasi-romantic European journey, home movie-like segments, enigmatic family stories, poetic narration, and some of the most beautiful and harrowing images he has recorded to date. Through a fragmentary landscape of familial ties that criss-cross the continent of memory, Hoffman orders the generation and re-generation of images passed down, passed through, a life’s becoming. And it is in the study of his own cultural legacy that this obsessive weaver of tales exposes the dark heirs which loom in camera.
passing through opens in darkness, while poet Christopher Dewdney recites a child’s archeology. A young boy, oblivious to the others playing around him, becomes enraptured by the image of a rock whose layers come apart easily, freeing moths that “flutter up like pieces of ash caught in a dust devil.” This transformation of darkness into the light of reflection, from darkness to speaking the image, from word to the mind-image evoked in a word, creates a spell where history is released, admitted, and set free. It is in this equivalence between layers of stone and human generation that passing through discovers its own logic of layering.
The image is formed of the words which dream it.
— Edmond Jabes
The next six minutes of the film comprises a silent colour sequence (one of only three in this otherwise black and white film) where the camera hesitates, draws, and re-draws a scene, in search of some way to record the filmmaker’s institutionalized grandmother (Babji) as she is being fed by her own daughter. Moving from mother to grandmother, Hoffman draws a painful trajectory before inserting an intertitle “To Babji” cut on the look of his grandmother to reaffirm, to us, that here the rock, the family, and the film are what holds and cares for generations before they too flutter up like ashes. This release is also about letting go—dying.
What these ashes wanted, I felt sure, was not containment but participation. Not an enclosure of memory, but the world.
— Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
It is in these first two disjunctions, sound without image, then image without sound, that the film exposes the goals it sets for itself. It strives to return a fragmented history to a present-day unity and wholeness.
Hoffman travels to the old country, bringing with him tapes and photos of his family here in Canada; there he collects sounds and images of his Czech relatives that he brings back to Canada. Hoffman’s family has been severed, with one half remaining in the old world, and the other coming to Canada in an effort to escape Nazi persecution during WWII.
How often will I die, yet go on living?
this sequence unearths a host of images as if inspired to generate its own reproductive force. Representation becomes resurrection. Over her face, in a return to colour, we advance with the camera over lilting waters towards the face of a rock wall where we detect the outlines of Indian petroglyphs etched into this stone. As we draw near, the surface of the film itself emits scratches of colour which break into further superimpositions which appear to emerge from the stone. We see cascading layers of home-movie images, the filmmaker perhaps, his siblings, other family members, Babji in her hospital bed, pouring out of the cut stone/film in an epiphany that magically joins the film’s many threads in the eyes of its beholders.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
— White Noise, Don DeLillo
From the fissured video image of his mother translating messages sent from Czechoslovakia: “We hope that God will somehow make us get together again and we can talk some more.” And then we hear the family cheering, as if they have survived a mortal test of their being. Hoffman’s journey ends on a train ride through Czech landscapes. There he recounts the tale of his Czech uncle, killed by his own son over a land dispute.
Life is lived forward but understood backward.
— Kierkegaard
The camera sweeps slowly past large rock fences which fragment the countryside, predominantly blue in colour—recalling the rocks of the epiphany sequence, the institutional blues of Babji’s hospital room and Babji’scraggy blue-veined hands peacefully folded into her lap. The blue blood that surges through her body finds its mirrored image in the rock formations of her homeland, where her grandson now makes his pilgrimage. Here in this dream landscape to which he awakes he finds the final pieces of his project, a dreamer’s reverie which draws together dispersed generations, recalled again in an image of the land.
Am I the sleep walker who does not tramp along the routes of life but who descends, always descends in quest of immemorial resting places?
— Gaston Bachelard
While technology’s path has so often been a horizontal movement, a progression, where chronology, history and narrativity unfold as if in unbroken chains, here the intrusion of the poetic unlinks this endless procession of zeros, opening a view to the vertical, where being falls in a slow suspension out of time and into a configuration closer to the spirit of experience. Hoffman conjures another ‘I’ whose being rests in the peace of imaginative reconstruction. Using the power of film he generates his incantations, and plunges us into meditations on our own generative powers. To make and unmake the past. To pass through.
A Reading of Philip Hoffman’s ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) and Barbara Sternberg’s A Trilogy
by Gary Popovich
Originally published in New Directions Catalogue (ed. Richard Kerr)
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Saturday 19 April 1987
Films, whose natures defy easy description or those whose structures clearly break from the traditional narrative formats, would seem to break wide open the possibilities of writing on film. It is in the space between the potential viewer and the film in which writing, especially this writing, posits itself—writing for the viewer so that the viewer, in consequence, accordingly reads the film. When the writing is precisely ad hoc writing, no amount of editorial freedom can liberate the writing from the already imposed strictures that tend to find their purpose outside the film, so that writing is actually produced as a third element coming between the film and the viewer. So that ‘title,’ signifying recognition, does not pass directly to the viewer but is passed and mediated by the writing to the viewer, In effect a trilogy is established, the structure of which is apparent whenever two things come together and something is passed between them. The third element is always present, be it this writing, language in general, or films; and the third element always finds its roots in desire.
It is at the title and the passing of the title that the film itself begins operating. ?O, ZOO! and A Trilogy both veil and reveal; both actively produce some other element which situates itself as an absence in the discourse of the film and is nothing less than the film itself as an expression of desire attempting to satisfy that absence.
“I’ve come up against this problem before,” so goes one of the lines from Philip Hoffman’s ?O, Zoo!. The responsibility of the film maker and what he should and should not film occurs again and again in Hoffman’s work. In an earlier work entitled Somewhere Between, he decided not to film a dead boy lying on a Mexican road, rather to capture evocatively the spirit of the event by footage structured to suggest the absence and the loss and the truth of the event without sensationalizing it. In fact it is by cinematically putting into the foreground that absence, by selecting images or discussing their absence, that the absence becomes a presence, a presence outside of time—fictionalized, represented—re-presented.
In ?O, ZOO! absence, loss, and truth undergo a series of transformations from playful fictions concerning the film maker’s newsreel, cameraman grandfather, and the National Film Board, weaving into the ostensibly truthful documentation of the shooting of a fictional feature film in Holland, to a story on a more serious tone about an elephant—the veracity of the story remaining questionable till the end of the film.
The full title of the film, ?O, ZOO! (The Making of a Fiction Film), derives from the title and making of Peter Greenaway’s Zed and Two Noughts, the fiction film set in Holland. Hoffman’s title acts as a sudden recognition of the British cipher for Z-0-0. As an observer on the set of Greenaway’s film shoot, Hoffman takes the opportunity to make a film which questions documentary truth and raises questions about the place and function of his own footage. He prefaces his film with an introduction outlining Grandfather’s two styles of shooting, fictionalizing and blatantly and humourously revealing his fictions as the film progresses. Camera report sheets are transformed into the film maker’s daily journals, Grandfather’s black-and-white footage transforms into Hoffman’s colour footage of Greenaway’s film shoot. The strands of truth, fiction, the responsibility and integrity of the film maker, all come together in the elephant story. A voice-over describes an elephant’s struggle to get back on its feet while zoo keepers, onlookers, and other elephants try to give the fallen animal encouragement. The film maker ponders whether to process the footage he has shot or to leave it in the freezer. The entire scene is played without images—entirely black.
The film and its internal logic seem to be calling itself into question here. Structured on absence, the film (as desire) moves to fill a hole. Earlier in the film the film maker wonders whether Grandfather had hoped that someone would find his footage one day. The making of Hoffman’s film, his own fiction film, which in its final section propels the film maker through a cinematic ricorso, brings him back home to a home-movie image to grandfather and grandson together, to his innocence, his present wishes, dreams, as if Grandfather had passed title of the footage to him, to his desires sprung loose by the spring of his camera – to a calculated fiction which aspires only to poetic truth.
Although stylistically different, ?O, ZOO! and A Trilogy are remarkably similar both thematically and in the codes they use. In A Trilogy the film’s focus is on the relationship between the film maker and her son, structured both to allow and to refuse easy dissection, whence is generated the main tension of the film.
Breaking down A Trilogy into three separate pieces or even searching for parts of the trilogy as distinct sections is misleading, for trilogistic elements abound in the film (three sets of rolling titles, three seemingly distinct ages at which the young boy is shown, the three days marked out by CBC’s “World Report”, the three distinctly separate letters read by the mother, et al.). Furthermore, the film has three major distinct sections which weave in and out of each other throughout the film: (I) a woman diving into a swimming pool and a man running down a road; (2) a narrative section in which a husband and wife are having breakfast; (3) a collection of personal images, home-movie footage, and memories, most of which are optically printed and most directly evocative of Sternberg’s emotions visa-vis the themes of the film.
Each of these elements constitutive of the whole is always separate and distinct, yet always resisting separation. As if the active voice of the film maker was everywhere trying to assert its presence amidst the roar of emotion which has already denied the voice these easy delusions …the absences joined together by a fiction situated outside of presence representing loss… two movements—one always moving inward toward some unity of expression, an offering from film maker to viewer; the other a visual and aural representation of the coming apart… the recognition of hole in whole; the parting of mother and son. The opening shots record these very movements. A woman poised at the edge of a swimming pool hesitates to dive into the water. A man runs down a country road, his panting breaths are broken by occasional remarks about water, sinking, love, and giving. A breakfast scene depicts the habitual ritual reducing emotion to empty gesture: a kiss, a spoken good-bye, while “World Report” talks about disaster at sea. And throughout the film a mother and her young son are together or moving apart, at beaches, in or near the water. As images race by and emotion comes to a pitch, the now submerged swimmer from the beginning of the film breaks the surface as the loud cry of a new-born baby and the subsequent cutting of the umbilical cord mark the re-presentation of the first significant separation.
As the boy is always running or moving away from his mother, so in the end does the running man keep running. But the camera no longer stays close to him. It stops to watch the man disappear in the distance, then it returns to the woman poised at the edge of the pool to capture her dive expressing its affinity with her, situating itself in the water with her.
A Trilogy begins unveiling itself at the title so that ‘title’ is passed from the film maker to the viewer and from the film maker to the son by means of the film. The two movements then (moving together and coming apart) both unite and separate film maker and viewer, and mother and son. As the film maker passes the title to the audience she also passes it to her son—title as a form of recognition, title as film—the emotion into which both must plunge.
Philip Hoffman / Mike Hoolboom / Festival of Festivals
by Dot Tuer
Vanguard, December 1986/January 1987
?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (script)
?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) script
(HI-CONTRAST BLACK & WHITE FILM)
A LION LAYS PEACEFULLY INFRONT OF A ROCKY FORMATION IN A METROPOLITAN ZOO. IT LOOKS ABOUT WITH ITS HEAD HELD HIGH.
(VO)
The footage was found by my sister in my grandfather’s storage loft. Having been at one time a newsreel cameraman, my grandfather knew to keep the film canister well sealed, and since the loft was relatively cool and dry, there was no noticeable deterioration.
I wonder where he had to go to get this exotic footage.
(HIGH ANGLE)
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE OF THE QUEENS VISIT TO CANADA. A GROUP OF PEOPLE STAND BENEATH A BALCONY AND GAZE UPWARDS WAVING.
(PAN UP)
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND PRINCE PHILLIP STAND ATOP A LARGE BALCONY LOOKING AT THE MASSES THAT HAVE FORMED BELOW. THE PRINCE IS IN A DOUBLE BREASTED SUIT WITH GOLD BUTTONS. THE QUEEN IS WEARING A WHITE GOWN. BOTH ARE WAVING AT THE CROWD.
(AERIAL VIEW) (ELS)
A SEA OF HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARE GATHERED ON THE STREETS.
(LS)
THE CROWD STARES UP AT THE ROYAL FAMILY ON THE BALCONY
WHILE THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE WAVE TO THE CROWD
(VO)
I recalled seeing my grandfather’s old newsreels but could never connect the pictures he made, to the old man I got to know on our summer fishing trips. There was a marked difference between the repetitive nature of the news film and the footage found in the loft.
AN ELEPHANT STANDS STILL IN A 45-DEGREE ANGLE WITH ITS HEAD FACING TOWARDS THE LEFT OF THE FRAME. IT LOOKS DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA.
(VO)
I wonder whether he had hoped that someone would find the film one day.
There was something peculiar about grandfather’s footage: Watch, wait until the flash marking the beginning of the shot and then start counting.
(WHITE FLASH ON SCREEN)
A CAMEL CHEWS IN A PROFILE VIEW. IT FACES THE LEFT SIDE OF THE FRAME.
45 DEGREE ANGLE OF A CAMELS BACK … TWO HUMPS ARE HIGHLIGHTED BY THE SUN.
(PANNING)
AN OLD CAR DRIVES ALONG A STREET (RIGHT TO LEFT) THAT IS LINED WITH MANY SPECTATORS.
(WHITE FLASH ON SCREEN)
(VO)
Most of the shots are exactly 28 seconds in length. I was impressed by the precision and self-control my grandfather expressed in shooting this unusual material, as compared to the erratic camerawork displayed in the newsreels. More clues as to the nature of my grandfather’s discipline were found on a piece of paper secreted in the film can.
A FULL SHOT OF A CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT WITH DETAILS
(WHITE FLASH ON SCREEN)
A TIGER LAYS ON THE GRASS INFRONT OF A SET OF PILLARS THAT LINE THE WALL OF OLD RUINS IN A METROPOLITON ZOO
(VO)
The footage was found in the winter. That spring, I went to the Netherlands to make a short film around the making of a fiction film. I had met the director of the film at a seminar in my native country in the fall before my grandfather’s footage was found.
(HIGH ANGLE)
A SEAL, WITH HEAD ABOVE WATER, SWIMS IN A REFLECTIVE POND.
(WHITE FLASH ON SCREEN)
WHAT LOOKS LIE A FLOWER, UPON MOVEMENT, SUDDENLY TRANSFORMS INTO THE HEAD OF A PEACOCK. IT LOOKS ABOUT THE AREA.
(VO)
This seminar, an annual tradition since 1939, is devoted to the documentation and categorisation of all types of wildlife species, which have ever been captured on film.
(LOW ANGLE)
A TREE ENCOMPASSES THE RIGHT HALF OF THE FRAME WITH IS BILLOWY LIMBS AD LEAVES. THE LEFT OF THE FRAME IS COMPSED OF THE CLEAR BLUE SKY. AN OSTRICH ENTERS FRAME LEFT (SEEN FROM NECK UP) AND LOWERS IT’S HEAD OUT OF FRAME.
(WHITE FLASH ON SCREEN)
AN OSTRICH HEAD LOOKS ABOUT A FORESTED AREA.
(VO)
The seminar grew out of the same institution for which my grandfather worked as a newsreel cameraman. I can still hear my grandfather’s remarks about the founder of the institution, as he put it “that old battleaxe.”
SHADOW OF A CAMERA MAN IN BRIGHT SUNLIGHT. THE SHADOW OF A MONKEY ENTERS FRAME RIGHT AND WALKS ACROSS THE WALL ONLY TO JUMP DOWN OUT OF THE SHOT.
TWO OSTRICHES STAND IN A GRASSY AREA, APPEAR TO BE KISSING, BUT THEY ARE LIKELY CLEANING EACH OTHERS FEATHERED FACES.
(OLD SOUND RECORDING)
Grandfather: “That old battleaxe, what the hell does he know abut this land anyhow? All he knows is whoring about in cramped up pubs.”
(ENTER MUSIC)
A CIRCULAR, GRASSY, CLEARING IS SURROUNDED BY A SHALLOW POOL OF WATER.
ACROSS THE CLEARING IS A SPRINKLER THAT RAPIDLY SHOOTS BURSTS OF WATER FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, TOWARDS THE CAMERA.
(VO)
Though the director was from the same country as “the old battleaxe”, I couldn’t see a connection; I couldn’t see why he’d been invited to the seminar. I thought I would try and incorporate this footage with the film I would take on location in Holland. As usual, I would keep a diary of the whole affair.
TELEVISION FOOTAGE OF PEOPLE CARRYING UMBRELLAS GATHER TOGETHER ON A SIDEWALK.
(VO)
This, the first entry, taken off the television set, describes details surrounding the papal visit to Holland.
THE POPE TALKS INTO A MICROPHONE ON TELEVISION. A JET TAKES OFF DOWN THE RUNWAY.
(VO)
Day 1 . . .I arrive in Rotterdam at 7:55pm, May 21st . . . a new moon.
(SLOWMOTION)
A SWAN TAKES OFF FROM A POND.
TEXT ON SCREEN (white on black):
?O, Zoo!
A FENCED-IN POND, HAS A SWAN TREADING WATER BEHIND THE BARS.
TEXT ON SCREEN (white on black):
(The Making of a Fiction Film)
A SWAN SWIMMING BEHIND BARS IN A POND COMES TOWARDS THE CAMERA AND PEEPS ITS HEAD THROUGH THE BARS. A TRIPLE TAKE OF THIS IS SEEN. THE THIRD TAKE OPTICALLY REVERSES AND THE SWAN PULLS ITS HEAD BACK THOUGH THE BARS.
( MUSIC ENDS)
(COLOUR FILM)
A STATUE OF JESUS (`THE SACRED HEART’) STANDS IN A PARK ACROSS FROM A SERIES OF TOWNHOUSES THAT ARE THREE STORIES HIGH.
THE STATUE NO LONGER HAS A HEAD, THE HEART IS THE MAIN FOCUS OF THE SHOT.
(VO)
Day 2 . . . In an Amsterdam square a young boy explained to me that during the Pope’s visit to Holland someone had defaced this statue of Christ,” The Sacred Heart.” When I started to climb over the railing to take a close-up shot for editing purposes, there came a loud rapping sound from the houses, camera left. I had spent a long time setting up the shot and must have attracted a crowd from behind the windows.
CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT WITH CIRCLED TAKES AND DESCRIPTIONS
(VO)
Day 2
A BARREN LANDSCAPE OF FARMLAND MEETS A LIGHT BLUE SKY WITH PATCHES OF CLOUDS. THE CAR IS MOVING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT.
(VO)
Soon after I arrived on the shoot, the film crew went on a two-day break, and so, as there was little activity, I took a short trip to visit some friends in the province of Zeeland.
A CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT DESCRIPTION OUTLINES 5 SCENES WITH SWANS.
(VO)
Day 3
(ENTER MUSIC)
A PAIR OF SWANS SWIM IN A POND WITH A SET OF BABIES SURROUNDED BY A GRASSY MEADOW. A WINDMILL AND FARM HOUSE STAND IN THE DISTANCE. THE SKY IS BRIGHT BLUE AND STREAKED WITH STRATUS CLOUDS.
(VO)
My friends had been watching closely this pair of swans that had come to roost on the bank above a small pond. At night the family of swans would sit on the road, which passed by the pond. I went to the pond at dusk to film the scene described by my friends, but the swans were nowhere to be found. I put my hand on the pavement and found it still warm from the afternoon sun. I walked to the other end of the pond – perhaps they were there. *(1)*
A MAN IS HOLDING AND WINDING A BOLEX CAMERA. THE MAN STANDS NEAR A WATERS EDGE THE RIPPLES MOVE SOFTLY TOWARDS THE SHORE ON WHICH HE STANDS.
DISSOLVE TO: A BUILDING SITS ON TOP OF A TRIANGULAR SHAPED HILL THAT TOWERS
OUT OF A CRATER LINED WITH GREEN TREE TOPS AND BUSHES.
A CAMERA CREW DOLLIES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA.
DISSOLVE TO: A CONSTRUCTION PLATFORM SHOT FROM THE GROUND, TOWERS INTO A DEEP BLUE SKY. ITS SAFETY RAILINGS HOLD A LARGE REFLECTIVE BOARD THAT GLISTENS IN THE SUN.
DISSOLVE TO: THE SAME CONSTRUCTION PLATEFORM NOW CONTAINS A MAN HOLDING THE LARGE REFLECTIVE BOARD. HE MOVES IT AROUND AND IT CREATES LENS FLARE IN THE LENS.
A MAN IN WHITE (D.O.P SACHA VERNY) HOLDS A STILL CAMERA FACING THE CAMERA IN THE CENTRE OF THE FRAME. HE STANDS IN THE GRASSY FIELD THAT LEADS BETWEEN TWO LARGE TREES TO THE TRIANGULAR HILL WITH THE BUILDING ATOP OF IT. HE SEEMS TO CATCH THE LIGHT COMING FROM THE REFLECTOR BOARD.
HE LOWERS THE CAMERA AND TALKS TO SOMEONE OFF SCREEN.
(SLOW MOTION)
A CAMERA CREW LEAVES THE FRAME (LEFT TO RIGHT). ONE OF THE CREW MEMBERS (IN THE FOREGROUND) WALKS TOWARDS THE BUILDING ONTOP OF THE HILL AND POINTS TOWARDS IT.
(SLOW MOTION)
THE FRAME BEGINS EMPTY AND THE TWO CREW MEMBERS WALK IN TOWARDS THE RIGHT OF THE FRAME FROM THE LEFT SIDE.
AN OPEN FIELD SQUEEZES BETWEEN TWO LARGE BILLOWY TREES. THE PATH IS BLOCKED BY A FENCE WHICH A CAMERA CREW DOLLIES INFRONT OF (LEFT TO RIGHT).
THE CAMERA CREW DOLLIES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT INFRONT OF THE GRASSY FIELD THAT LEADS BETWEEN TWO LARGE TREES AND TO THE TRIANGULAR HILL WITH THE BUILDING ATOP OF IT.
DISSOLVE TO: THE SAME SHOT SET UP AS ABOVE, ONLY THIS TIME, A LADY WRAPS AN XLR CABLE AND EXITS THE FRAME.
THE DIRECTOR (PETER GREENAWAY) ENTERS THE FRAME TO MEET THE CREW, WHEN HE IS A THE CENTER OF THE FRAME, THE SHOT FREEZES.
(END MUSIC)
(VO)
Day 5. The director told me that the production was a slow massive wheel. All you could do was get on it, and let the momentum of the wheel carry you where it would.
DISSOLVE TO: A MAN STANDS INFRONT OF AN UNDERGROUND AQUARIUM. DARKNESS SURROUNDS HIM EXCEPT FOR THE LIGHT COMING FROM THE TANK. HE PEERS INTO THE TANK.
(SOUND RECORDING)
Oliver: where’s pipe? He is supposed to be the keeper of fish.
Boy: Does he keep Red Herrings?
Oliver: No.
CLOSE UP SHOT OF FISH SWIMMING IN A TANK.
Boy: Do you keep lots of black and white fish?
Oliver: Yes.
Boy: Zebrafish?
Oliver: The also have Parrot fish, Rat fish, Elephant fish, and Tiger Sharks , but there are no Swan fish. We have Angel fish.
Boy: Can I have one?
(ENTER MUSIC )
A MAN STANDS IN THE CENTRE OF THE FRAME LOOKING UP AT THE BUILDING ATOP THE TRIANGULAR HILL THAT LIES BEYOND THE TWO TREES ON THE GRASSY PATH.
A CAMERA CREW DOLLIES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT AGAIN, FILMING THE HILL.
A CAMERA CREW DOLLIES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT INFRONT OF GATE BLOCKING THE GRASSY PATH BETWEEN THE TWO LARGE BILLOWY TREES. THE ACTORS (OLIVER AND OSWALD), DRESSED IN WHITE ARE APPROACHNG THE GATE
(SOUND RECORDING)
Oliver: It’s beautiful, Does Zelba know what she’s really got here?
(END MUSIC)
BLACK SCREEN
Oswald: Come on Oliver you’ve done enough.
Oliver: This tiger walks ten miles up and down this cage every day.
Director: Action
CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT READING: DAY 7
(SOUND OF TIGER GROWLING. ENTER SOUND OF CHILDREN)
(VO)
Day 7
A TIGER BEHIND BARS PACES BACK AND FORTH.
(VO)
Today the production moved to the zoo for scene 68, in which one of the twins has locked himself in the tiger cage
(SOUND RECORDING)
Dutch Boy: Strange sounds…grrrrr…horrible beasts
BLACK SCREEN
TWO TIGERS ARE IN THE CAGE. ONE IS URINATING ON THE CAGE FLOOR, WHILE THE OTHER PACES AROUND THE CAGE. EVENTUALLY THE SECOND TIGER BEGINS TO PACE AS WELL.
(VO)
Since the enclosure was overcrowded with actors, crew and on-lookers, I went over to the other side where the tiger was waiting patiently for it’s call. Two curious Dutch boys asked me if they could have a look through the viewfinder to see what I was filming. The boys came to the zoo quite often, and they knew all of the most interesting places. They decided it would be best if they became my guides. I agreed.
TWO DUTCH BOYS STAND ON EITHER SIDE OF THE FRAME GAZING INTO THE MUDDY POND. A SWAN SWIMS TOWARDS THEM AND BOTH REACH DOWN TO TOUCH IT.
(SOUND RECORDING)
Dutch Boy: Most of the animals are two, like Noah…you have a woman and a man. When you have a woman and a man you get children…so when you get more beasts you get more people come to look
LS OF TWO BOYS AS THEY LOOK AT THE CAMERA AND GIGGLE. A PAIR OF SWANS GLIDE BY BEHIND THEM.
A CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT LISTS 6 SCENES THAT ARE ALL OVER EXPOSED.
(VO)
Day 12
OVEREXPOSED IMAGE OF A STREETSCAPE. AN EASLE-LIKE STRUCTURE ENCOMPASES THE LEFT SIDE OF THE FRAME AND IS PLACED ON A 45 DEGREE ANGLE EXPOSING A SIDE OF THE EASLE THAT IS DECORATED WITH POSTCARD-TYPE IMAGES. PREDOMINANT IN THE FRAME IS VERMEER’S `HEAD OF YOUNG GIRL’. THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FRAME CONTAINS A PAIR OF OVERSIZED WOODEN SHOES NEAR THE EDGE OF A ROAD. TWO CHILDREN BEGIN TO PLAY IN THE SHOES BUT LEAVE WHEN THEIR PARENTS CLIMB INTO THE LARGE SHOES.
(VO)
A young boy and girl were playing by a large pair of wooden shoes in front of a shop in the Delft Square.
BLACK SCREEN
THE MOTHER AND FATHER OF THE CHILDREN STAND IN THE SHOES AND FACE ACROSS THE STREET, PRESUMEDLY, TO HAVE THEIR PICTURES TAKEN BY AN OFF-SCREEN PHOTOGRAPHER. THE MOTHER AND FATHER STEP OUT OF THE SHOES AND WALK AWAY, LEAVING THE CHILDREN TO RETURN TO PLAY IN THEM AGAIN.
(VO)
They were shooed-away by their parents, presumably, who were having their pictures taken with their feet in these oversized shoes. After the photo was snapped, the kids returned. Do you see the Vermeer painting in the midst of the Delft blue pottery? The painting is called “Head of Young Girl”, and is the only picture on display where the subject is looking back at you.
BLACK SCREEN
THE YOUNG BOY AND GIRL CONTINUE TO PLAY IN THE OVERSIZED SHOES. THE BOY STARTS TO TAKE HIS PANTS OFF.
BLACK SCREEN
THE FRAME IS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR THE EASLE AND THE SHOES.
(DURING THE PRECEDING, SIMILARILY FRAMED 4 SHOTS, THE EXPOSURE GRADUALLY SHIFTS FROM OVER-EXPOSURE AT THE START, TO NORMAL EXPOSURE BY THE END OF THE SEQUENCE)
BLACK SCREEN.
LATE IN THE EVENING THE TWINS (OLIVER & OSWALD) STAND AT EITHER SIDE OF THE FRAME AND LOOK TOWARDS THE CAMERA. THEY ARE NEATH A PILLARED ARCHWAY. A CORRIDOR LINED WITH PILLARS GLOWS GOLDEN IN COLOUR FROM THE SETTING SUN.
A PHOTOGRAPHER TAKES A PICTURE.
Oswald: I cannot stand the idea of her walking away.
Oliver: What is the 1st thing that happens?
Oswald: The first thing that happens is the bacterium goes to work in the intestine.
Oliver: What sort of bacteria?
Oswald: Bisocossis Populi. There is supposedly 130 000 Bisocossis in each lick of the human tongue…. 250 000 in a French kiss.
BLACK SCREEN.
Oliver: Suppose Eve kissed Adam.
CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT LISTING 5 SHOTS ABOUT THE BOY AND GIRL, MAN AND WOMAN AND THE ROTTERDAM PARK.
(VO)
Day 16
A BOLEX CAMERA IS WOUND UP AND THE HANDLE LOCKED BACK IN PLACE.
A LARGE WOODEN APPLE SITS IN A PARK, INFRONT OF A MUDDY POND. THERE IS A BRIDGE OFF TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FRAME, WHICH HAS A LOT OF PEOPLE CROSSING IT. ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FRAME A COUPLE PLAY FETCH WITH THEIR DOG.
(VO)
I walked through the park past the large wooden apples. From the other side of the river I could see two lovers taking advantage of the shade of a birch tree. A young boy parked his bike behind the apple and snuck around to see what the couple were doing. A teenage girl, perhaps the boy’s sister, came from the other side of the apple and put her hand on his shoulder – they stepped down to the river for a talk. Meanwhile, ten boys and a German Sheppard had gathered at the far side of the park. The boys were tossing sticks toward the couple so that the dog would disturb them. Soon the boys surrounded the apple and the couple left. Shortly afterwards the young boy and teenage girl left as well. I crossed the river and this is what I filmed after they all left.
(ENTER MUSIC)
A DINING ROOM SITS JUST ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF A PAIR OF OPEN DOORS WITHIN A ROOM. THE DINNING ROOM TABLE SITS IN OPEN SUNLIGHT AND IS PREPARED BY DIFFERENT WAITERS. ANOTHER ROOM SITS DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM THE TABLE, ALSO WITH ITS DOORS OPEN.
Director: Action
A SERIES OF DISSOLVES SHOWS A LADY SITTING DOWN AT THE TABLE AND A GROUP OF WAITERS ENTERING AN EXITING THE ROOM FROM ACROSS FROM THE TABLE TO SERVE HER. AS THE SCENE PROGRESSES, THE ATTIRE OF THE LADY CHANGES UNTIL
SHE IS FINALLY WEARING A RED FEATHERED HAT AND A RED DRESS. AS THE SCENE PROGRESSES VARIOUS PEOPLE (CREW MEMBERS, D.O.P, DIRECTOR) CONFRONT THE LADY AS THEY SET UP THE SHOT. SHE IS LOOKING AWAY FROM THE CAMERA.
The Twins: And the ostrich eats anything at all…and buries it’s head in the sand when it is afraid… and the elephant lives to be 100 and never forgets a face. So, you see, between us, we know everything.
Boy: You don’t know everything.
Oliver: Between us we do.
Boy: Alright then, you see that woman over there? What color knickers is she wearing?
Oliver: Ah. Red ones.
Boy: No s e doesn’t.
Oliver: How do you know?
Boy: I know.
Oswald: Well, Oliver, you could always go over there and find out.
Boy: Go on. Ask her.
Oliver: Excuse me ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. I think we may have met before. Um. May I trouble you in the interest of that child’s education? Could I ask you a few questions?
Woman: If you like.
Oliver: Are those Ostrich feathers?
Woman: Who are you exactly? Do I know you?
THE LADY IN THE RED DRESS LOOKS BACK OVER HER SHOULDER DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA WHICH HAS UNTIL THIS MOMENT, BEEN VOYEURISTICALLY VIEWING HER FROM BEHIND. AS SHE TURNS TO THE CAMERA, THE LIGHT CATCHES HER EYE.
BLACK SCREEN.
(END MUSIC)
A CAMERA NEGATIVE REPORT IS TAPED TO A SINGLE PIECE OF LINED PAPER. A PAIR OF HANDS WRITE: “DAY 17”
(VO)
Day 17
BLACK SCREEN.
(VO)
From a distance I heard the scream of a beast. Moving closer to the source of the sound, I saw that an elephant had fallen down and was struggling to get up. Outside the enclosure, I noticed that a group of people had gathered to watch and inside some elephants and zoo workers had surrounded the fallen animal, trying to give it encouragement as it rocked its huge body in the sand. As I watched I tossed over and over in my mind whether to film the scene or not.
I’ve come across this problem before.
Like the crowd that had gathered, I was feeling helpless; I wanted to assist the beast and filming would make me feel that I was doing something constructive. Maybe the television network would buy the film and show people that tragedy is right at their doorstep.
I took out the tripod, set up the camera and looked through the viewfinder.
The compressed image caused by the telephoto lens intensified the sounds coming from the huge rolling body. I pulled the trigger: listen to the spring slowly unwind, and watch the elephant’s painful rhythm. I wind the camera tight and press the trigger for another burst of 28 seconds. Now the zookeeper is shoving bales of hay under the elephant as the others surround it. This only gets the elephant more aroused. The heat is intense and in its excitement the elephant plunges back into the sand and with one last scream, stretches out its body… and then it stops moving. The attendant says that the elephant has had a heart attack. My throat is parched, and sweat pours off my body; I watch the dust settle. I go looking for a drink, pushing through the crowd, fixed on the image I’d filmed; as if my mind was the film and the permanent trace of the elephant’s death was projected brightly inside. Somehow it’s my responsibility now. I wonder why I took the film. There seems to be no reason to develop the negative; my idea of selling the film to the network now seems just an embarrassing thought, an irresponsible plan.
I decide to put the film in the freezer. I decide not to develop it.
(ENTER MUSIC)
THE TWINS STAND ON A STAGE WHICH IS DRAPED IN FLOWING PLASTIC
WASHED BY COLOURED LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT. THEY PEER AT THE CAMERA.
A CUL-DE-SAC, WITH A MONUMENT AT ITS CENTRE, IS SURROUNDED BY A SERIES OF FLAMINGOES THAT PASS BY THE CAMERA. A GROUP OF PEOPLE SURROUND THE BASE OF THE MONUMENT AND TRY TO CONTAIN THE BIRDS. THE BIRDS RUN AWAY, LIT BY TWO FLOOD LIGHTS ACROSS THE ROAD.
A MAN TRIES TO WRANGLE THE BIRDS BY MAKING A ZIGZAG PATTERN, LEADING THEM TOWARDS THE MONUMENT.
DISSOLVE TO: THREE MEN TRY TO GATHER ALL THE BIRDS INFRONT OF THE MONUMENT. AS THEY STEP BACK, THE BIRDS RUN IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
A SERIES OF DISSOLVES SHOW A FEW CREW MEMBERS/ACTORS AND BIRDS CROSS IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA. THE CREW AND ACTORS ARE LEAVING. THE BIRDS REMAIN, UNABLE TO BE CONTAINED BY THE PEOPLE.
IT’S DAWN. ONE OF THE BIRDS STANDS ABOVE A PAIL AND FEEDS FROM IT, IT’S HEAD BOBBING (IN RHYTHM WITH THE MUSIC).
BLACK SCREEN
A MAN WINDS A BOLEX CAMERA.
IT IS DUSK. THE CAMERA LOOKS DOWN ON A PAIR OF SWANS WITH THEIR BABIES, BATHED IN BLUE EVENING LIGHT. THE POND REFLECTS THE COLD BLUE SKY.
(VO)
Day 3. From the roadway I could see the other end of the pond, and the moon moving arced bodies of the swans, silver silent in soft evening moonlight. I walked cool summer night remembering, my grandfather and his grandson laid quiet in lakecalm, star counting: fishermen; heroes.
Weary walking, I cranked the camera until it locked tight
Tightly, the taunt spring wound tightlytight…. tight…. *(1)*
(SLOWMOTION)
(DISSOLVE TO) A SMALL BOY AND HIS GRANDFATHER WALK SIDE BY SIDE TOWARDS THE CAMERA. A BLACK HALO SURROUNDS THE EDGES OF THE FRAME.
BLACK SCREEN
END CREDITS
(HI-CONTRAST BLACK AND WHITE FILM)
ELEPHANT STRUGGLES TO GET UP. ZOO WORKERS PUT BAILS OF HAY UNDER ELEPHANT. ELEPHANT RISES. ZOO WORKERS PAT ELEPHANT ON TRUNK. RESURRECTED ELEPHANT IS GREETED BY ANOTHER ELEPHANT.
BLACK SCREEN
END
*(1)* After Ph left Zeeland and his Dutch friends, Ignace Verlaan told him by letter what became of the family of swans. A gang of boys cornered them, chased them onto the bridge, beat them, leaving them to die on the hot wooden planks. The story sprung a return to `Day 3’, at the conclusion of the film, and the `out-of-order’ telling of the tale. The shot of the evening swans on the pond, seen at the end of the film, was shot, then held out to the light of the full moon, which accounts for the overall blue wash. – Ph
With Genie-nominmated under his belt, filmmaker now hopes for recognition
by Debbie Wattier
O Zoo: The Making of a Documentary Film Music
by Tucker Zimmerman
I want to take you into the actual process of working on music for a film. I want to do this with a piece of music that I am not so pleased with. This is intentional. I had a lot of trouble with this film music. The film was made by Philip Hoffman, a Canadian filmmaker. In Canada, Phil met Peter Greenaway who liked his work and invited him to come to Holland to make a documentary on the shooting of his new film which was A Zed and Two Noughts. Phil shot his documentary in the summer of 1985, and at the end of that summer he came to me from London, where he had met a mutual friend who told him of a composer living in Belgium who writes a similar kind of serial music that Greenaway used in his film.
At this point Phil and I didn’t know each other. This was our first meeting. One of the things I sensed about Phil was that for me to write successful music for his film I would have to become his friend. This was not as drastic as it may sound. We did become friends—and not only because of the work we did on the music for this film. However, everything that Phil does is personal. And in many ways, at the start at least, this was a difficult situation to be put in. It is much easier if the relationship between filmmaker and composer is detached. Then it is simply a transaction.
As it turned out, Phil had four days to spend with me. And for the first three days I think I drove him crazy because I refused to talk about music, film music, or even the specific work at hand. So we had conversations about other things. I had him doing other things, such as playing baseball (he is not the first filmmaker I have subjected to my baseball test, nor will he be the last—I can tell a lot about a person once I get him or her out throwing a baseball). Later Phil told me that he had serious doubts about my own sanity, about my capabilities—whether I knew how to write music for films at all.
Finally, on the last day we got down to talking about his film. We went to the RTB in Liege where I had the use of a Steenbeck, and I saw the unedited footage on the small screen. After the screening, I was not sure I could do the job. I must say that when I look at most films the first time, I know what needs to be done and how to do it. With Phil’s film I didn’t know what I was looking at. I’d never seen this kind of work before. It was not just a question of what kind of music I would write, but if I could do it at all. I wasn’t sure I was the right person for this job.
One of the first things we discussed was the music of Michael Nyman, the composer of Greenaway’s film. Phil thought that my music should somehow connect with Nyman’s. He wanted something with a mechanical nature to it. My first reaction was that Phil’s film did not need minimal music, that it was not a ‘minimal’ film, that it needed another kind of music.
Another element that became important was that this was the first time that Phil had worked with a composer. He had used music in some of his previous films—one features a saxophone solo— but it was done without a great deal of preparation. This new film would demand a composed score.
So understandably, Phil was a little nervous about this new adventure. And he reacted by wanting too much control over the music. He had these elaborate charts. Music should be here and music should be there. Which is OK. If a filmmaker says he wants 37 seconds of music at this point here, and another piece of music over here for 13.5 seconds, that’s no problem. But if he gets too specific about how all these various pieces should be related—and not only in musical terms—then the job becomes too restrictive. The composer is shut out of the process and his input is denied. This is a trap that Phil fell into with his unbelievable schemes which I couldn’t decipher. And this is getting back to what we talked about before about trust — learning to trust the composer and letting him get the job done. Phil couldn’t trust me, and as it turned out, he found he couldn’t trust himself either. In any case I agreed to do the music, still unsure I could, thinking maybe that I was jumping off a cliff.
Phil returned to Canada and then began a series of long telephone calls. The plans kept changing and the phone bills kept going up. We exchanged letters with a lot of conflicting decisions. We were wasting time. He told me later that he was confused about the music. He admitted it.
(Later, when I did the music for his next film, he gave me total freedom and the music came out quickly and we were both pleased with the result.)
Anyway—concerning the film we were working on back then—the film presented certain problems to me that I wasn’t sure how to solve. It was supposedly a documentary about the making of a feature length fictional film. It’s called ?O,Zoo!, and subtitled: The Making of a Fiction Film. But what Phil did was a lot more than that. He created a fictional documentary. A documentary is one thing, but a fictional documentary is something else. For example, let’s take the opening sequence. The old footage that his grandfather, who was a newsreel reporter, had shot a long time ago and which Phil discovered in his attic. As you quickly find out, there is no grandfather, there is no attic and there is no old footage. You begin to see that this is all something that Phil has created himself. It is imaginary. Then you start realizing, you say “What’s going on here?” And what is going on is that he’s playing around with the documentary, with its traditions, while making a fiction film.
Now for the music. Phil is saying ‘mechanical’ and I still don’t know what to do. I’m struggling, trying out this and that kind of music and unsure of what I’m doing.
Another problem was that Phil had shot some of the same things Greenaway had shot and would probably use in his film—from a different angle and not all of the time—for as you will see, Phil spent a lot of time with his camera doing other things, which at first sight might appear to be unrelated to the Greenaway film, but which in fact are not. You have the scene with the tigers. What does Phil do? He goes around to the back of the cage where the tigers are waiting and gets into a conversation with two boys. Those scenes Phil shot on set were the same as Greenaway, and to which Nyman would probably write his own music. So the problem here is twofold. First, I don’t know what music Nyman will compose, and second I must compose my own music for a different ‘angle,’ just as Phil’s camera was shooting that scene from a different angle.
Finally Phil and I established the idea that we would start with ‘source’ and move away from that and progressively deeper into the illustrative (or a non-real music). I was talking earlier about sound effects and how music can be mixed with good result with natural sound. So we started with the water sprinklers. Tapping and making a spraying sound. Of course this is not the real sound of water sprinklers. This is the noise generator on my synthesizer making a ‘false’ sound effect. This tapping allowed me to establish the pulse of the first piece and I moved on from there, inwards, into the illustrative. The plan was then to get progressively deeper into the illustrative until you reach the end where the boy is walking with his grandfather, coming home from a fishing trip, and you’re hearing music that is almost straight out of a Hollywood film from the 40s or 50s, if not in colour at least in style and gesture. It has the same nostalgic, or sentimental type of feeling to it, but of course its function here is quite different. Its function is to make you aware that I’m fooling around with these emotions, that the music is almost a parody of itself. So I am playing around with ‘false’ music in the same way that Phil is playing around with a ‘false’ documentary.
So I hope you get the idea. It’s a very complex thing. Let’s look at the film.