ML: Cinema may be dead, but it seems that you are determined to revive it.

PG: The English say: “The King is dead. Long live the King”. In this case it seems more appropriate to say “Cinema is dead. Long live cinema”. If cinema was born in 1895, you realize that it has been the same for a hundred-and-twelve years: films are mere illustrations of a script and film-makers yield to the supremacy of the text. If you think of other forms of art and their dramatic evolution in the past century, for example painting from Impressionism to Fontana, or music from Strauss to John Cage, you can understand what I mean by “death of cinema”. It is time to move on! Every art form needs to reinvent itself in order to survive throughout time. Statistics state it clearly: every year there are less people going to the cinema while more people are watching DVDs, comfortably sitting on their sofas. In the age of multimedia and interactivity, cinema still insists on forcing millions of hapless viewers to sit uncomfortably and passively in an architecturally horrible environment. Going to the cinema today, like a hundred-and-twelve years ago, involves looking in the same direction for two hours, and you can always expect a sequence of images based on narrative, realism and psychologically constructed characters. No smell, no touch, no taste, no real relationship with the audience, and the presence of the screen itself is never acknowledged. It is only a matter of restricted audio-visual stimulation. Which I find extremely boring.

ML: If cinema is dead, how is theatre doing? And what about visual arts? Are they in good shape?

PG: Theatre is perfectly healthy. In theatre, the performance changes every night and the relationship to the audience can be much more exciting and bidirectional. In fact, all other art forms are in perfect shape, they are lively and engaging, always changing and exploring new ways of communication. Cinema is a slave to the market place and to the standards dictated by distribution companies. Cinema, unlike painting or theatre, is imprisoned by fast-aging technologies and large-scale economic interests preventing its aesthetic evolution. But this might only be a prologue to what’s coming next. What I want to do is a present tense cinema.

ML: What do you mean by that?

PG: A cinema which is always different from itself. Ideally, I would like to create a 360-degree event, an experience without closures, an ever-changing work stimulating all five senses, exploring all possibilities offered by new cutting-edge technologies. I think that films like those we see today will become archaic some day, they will be forgotten like silent movies, nobody will watch them anymore.

ML: To refashion cinema, one has to disrupt it. Is that why you became interested in mixing visuals at live events?

PG: My films are based on the superiority of the image. Narrative is overthrown by ideas and themes. Picasso used to say: “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I think”. For my Tulse Luper VJ Performance (for more info on the upcoming world tour see www.notv.com), I perform a live cinematic event, improvising and mixing hundreds of pre-selected sequences from my latest film trilogy, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, on three different screens surrounding the audience, while DJ Radar plays electronic music. Can I call myself a VJ? I don’t think so, but every show is completely different in every venue, and that is what makes it interesting. Another example of present tense cinema can be found in my recent multi-media project Peopling the Palaces, which recently opened at the Venaria Reale palace near Turin, the newly refurbished “Italian Versailles” (www.lavenaria.it). We filmed a hundred-and-fifty vignettes of everyday seventeenth century life at court and then projected them on the palace walls, so that the wandering viewer can have a playful sense of “historic reality”, meeting up with dukes and scullery maids, marquises and cooks, grooms and hunters, almoners and maids-of-honour, who used to people the palace before Napoleon swept it all away. However, I believe there is no such thing as History, there are only historians.

ML: Your last film, Nightwatching, is strictly connected to an extraordinary multi-media event as well.

PG: It all started with my fascination for Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch“. It is by no means one of my favourite artworks, but I find the mysteries behind it very exciting. In 2005 I created a short film in order to give the painting a life and a voice of its own, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam allowed me to project this video on the actual canvas. The viewers would sit in front of it like they would sit in front of a cinema screen, but only for a few minutes. The result was a completely new way to experience a painting. Then, I decided I would write an original script for a feature film, investigating the background of Rembrandt’s theatrical and intriguing “J’accuse”, which covertly posits a deadly conspiracy within the Dutch regiment commissioning the work. This painting ultimately caused the artist’s own death.

ML: What should we expect from you in the near future?

PG: I am working on three new films, a ghost story filmed in Wales, a pornography set in Brazil and a horse story set in the ancient Chinese Empire. My partner Saskia Boddeke and I are working together on more operatic projects. Moreover, I am curating the new Design Museum at the Milan Triennale with Italo Rota, opening 6 December 2007 (www.triennale.it). We are designing an exhibition of objects without objects, inspired by André Malraux’s idea of ‘musée imaginaire’. I often find museums boring, unimaginative and uninteresting places, but I promise you a wholly unconventional museum experience.

ML: We shall look forward to that.

The top photo is by Daniel Malva and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.

The bottom gallery photos are courtesy of Change Performing Arts

Does this limitation have to do with our ability to recognize only a limited number of narrative patterns? Or is it perhaps the result of a particular social condition, that we are able to accept ‘new’ ways of seeing film, yet the our social predisposition stops us from seeing outside the mold? A London cinema audience in 2007 clearly has a different set of socio-economic expectations, ways of seeing and cultural references than an audience in 1930. But breaking these molds and exploring ‘new’ configurations is the hallmark of what we might call the ‘great film makers’ of our time – part of this relies on the artists’ intimate knowledge of the boundaries and thereafter his/her intuitive desire to defy conventions and redefine vocabularies of art.

Of equal importance to the film experience is the ‘meta-filmic dimension’, i.e. the world beyond the screen. Each film locked in my memory, was experienced under a set of unique circumstances; a combination of things that affect the senses: mood, time, place, company, biological state, psychological state etc. And rather than remembering an entire film, my experience has tended towards short ‘Madeleine-type‘ moments where it’s just one scene in particular, sometimes a single camera shot or word – there is only so much emotional material that the brain can absorb without saturation.

Everyone will have their own list of hard-wired pictures, below is mine. I’ve grouped them in chronological order and posted links to clips on YouTube from each film. I suggest pausing each clip on YouTube and waiting for the entire piece to load to avoid a stop-start viewing experience. I’d be interested to find out what your list would be so don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

The Five Obstructions (2003, Jorgen Leth)

In this documentary (released in 2003 as De Fem benspænd) Lars Von Trier criticises his mentor Jorgen Leth, albeit somewhat playfully, for his constant striving to make ‘perfect’ films. Perfect in the sense of being technically flawless and nothing being left to chance, a reflection of Leth’s personal character. The prime example in Leth’s work is his 1967 black and white film The Perfect Human (Det Perfekte Menneske).

In The Five Obstructions, Lars Von Trier attempts to break Leth’s perfectionist mould by using ‘obstructions’ or obstacles as points of departure. Thus he sends Jorgen Leth on five independant ‘missions’ to reconstruct The Perfect Human, each time forcing Leth to work in harsher technical and personally demanding situations. The irony is that as the stakes rise, Leth returns with incredible films. The obstructions seem to work in his favour. Lars’ attempt to make Leth taste the bitterness of failure and by so-doing re-think his approach to art and life, is a failure that ends up reflecting Lars’ own shortcomings.

The Big Lebowski (1998, The Coen Brothers)

Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch)

Dead Man was written and directed in 1995 by Jim Jarmusch. It starred Johnny Depp as the destitute accountant William Blake and Gary Farmer as native Indian ‘Nobody’. Neil Young wrote and performed the soundtrack on solo accoustic/electric guitar. It is the journey of the anti-hero through and through, white man William Blake is already dead, the film is his journey in coming to accept that. In the scene linked to here, William Blake and Nobody arrive at a trading post in search of supplies for the next part of their journey.

True Romance (1993, Tony Scott, Quentin Tarantino)

Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa)

Full Metal Jacket (1987, Stanley Kubrick)

Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio)

Blade Runner (1981, Ridley Scott)

Woyzeck (1979, Werner Herzog)

Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky)

Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu Yasujiro)

Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Bunuel)