Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

October 14 2014, the Harvard Film Archive screened Attenberg. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer, David Pendleton, HFA Director, Haden Guest, and filmmaker, Athina Rachel Tsangari.

David Pendleton  0:20 

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. David Pendleton here from the Harvard Film Archive. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you to this very special evening. I want to ask you, as always, first of all, to please take a second to make sure that any devices you have on your person are turned off, and please refrain from illuminating them during the program.

Every year, Harvard invites a visiting filmmaker to come and teach fiction filmmaking for their students. And this year were extremely pleased with the selection because it gives us the opportunity to present to you the work of Athina Rachel Tsangari, who is here, as in past years have been such filmmakers, as Dušan Makavejev, Miklós Jancsó, Claire Simon, Philippe Grandrieux. If I mentioned these filmmakers to place Athina in that tradition, it's perhaps because it's not so easy always to place her in other kinds of traditions. She's somebody whose work has a very fascinating relationship, I think, to many currents in cinematic history, but at the same time is really strikingly original.

She's also someone who's not so easily categorized in terms of national cinema either since her practice as a director and a producer has one foot in Greece and one foot in the US. I should mention her work as a producer. Besides producing a number of American films for some American independent filmmakers, she's also probably best known as a producer for working with Yorgos Lanthimos, also from Greece, on his films, Dogtooth and Alps.

Tonight is the first of two programs that we'll be presenting this weekend to give us all the chance to see Athina's work on the big screen, both features and shorts. We moved one short, Fit, from the Sunday program to tonight's program in order to make room on Sunday afternoon for another film by Athina, this sort of medium-length work, The Capsule, which we’ll show after The Slow Business of Going, I think Athina’s first feature.

The film we're going to see tonight is Attenberg, from 2011. And that's the film that is Athina’s best known film to date, in part because it's the one piece that's been actually theatrically distributed here in the US. And I had a lot of notes, but I shouldn’t do this introduction with the filmmaker standing right next to me and I'm feeling totally...(maybe I'll save these for the Q & A before). I just want to say that I think one of the things that's so fascinating about Athina’s work is the way that it positions us as spectators. Because I feel like it puts us in this sort of liminal threshold position. On the one hand, we recognize the people and we sort of recognize the behavior that we see on film, but on the other hand, we also spend a lot of time trying to decipher what exactly it is we're seeing. And I think this speaks a lot to both Athina’s attention to the body and movement in her films. There's a sense of ritual that you'll see, and also a sense of watching aliens learning how to behave as humans, we might say, but also it has to do with a link to genre that Athina has sometimes talked about in her cinema.

That's all I'm gonna say for now. I'll save some of it later for questions because I have Athina right here. We have the opportunity to hear from her and she will be here, of course, for a conversation after the screening along with Haden Guest, who will be here. So, after Athina speaks, we'll go right into the two shorts and then the feature, and then a discussion, but now I leave the mic to Athina.

[APPLAUSE]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  4:36 

Hello, and thank you very much for being here tonight. This feels great to me. Also because I'm here and I see some of my students. Hello, my great Harvard students! I'm not gonna say much other than what you will see first is called 24 Frames Per Century. It’s the last short that I made two years ago. It was commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Venice Film Festival, and it was supposed to be seven seconds, but I wasn't disciplined enough and it's two minutes. And then right after that, you will see the very first film that I ever made as a first-year student at the University of Texas in graduate school. So we're going from the very end to the very beginning, and then Attenberg, which is a film I shot in Greece, in my hometown where I spent the first years of my life. Thank you very much for being here now. I'll meet you afterwards. Thanks.

[APPLAUSE]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Pendleton  6:28 

Please welcome back Athina Rachel Tsangari and joining us, Haden Guest.

Haden Guest  6:40 

Thank you so much, Athina, for being with us tonight. For being with us this year, I should also say. And I thought I'd begin this conversation by asking in what ways do you think this film invites one reading that I think is often given to it—that this is a film, perhaps about Greece, perhaps about Europe, and the sort of different generations. The ways in which we have, for instance, the death of the Father that seems to be mirrored in this decaying industrial landscape, that he perhaps has been one of the architects of. At the same time we have the awkward coming of age of a new generation, his daughter, who seemingly hasn't found her place within this world, and is seemingly disoriented by her surroundings and by even her own body.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  7:42 

Perfect.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton 7:50 

On the other hand, I know that you've also, in interviews, wanted to distance yourself from thinking your work has some sort of political allegory about contemporary Greece, or even again, as I sort of hinted at in the introduction, labeling yourself a Greek filmmaker. I’m wondering if you wanted to bring that up in response to this reading of your film, and I also wonder if you occasionally get a backlash from people saying that you should be making films about contemporary Greece or that you should be encouraging people to think of your work in relationship to contemporary Greece.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 8:33

Yeah, the backlash definitely came from Greece itself, because, you know, my fellow countrymen didn't think that this was a Greek film that was representing Greece in the right way—which I'm not sure exactly what it is. And I think when you get into this whole discussion about national cinema, you have to think whether to deal with the idea of exporting a national image of what's supposed to be expected or fetishized about your own country. I didn't think [about] any of that.

You know, we're a group of people, Yorgos Lathimos and I. When we started working together, I don't think we're concerned at all with the idea of what is Greek cinema?, what is the image that we're supposed to even subvert. You know with Attenberg, it was very physical and very corporeal, and I wasn't actually, I wasn't very much aware, and I didn't want to be aware of what kind of... I hate this word message, you know, what kind of message, what kind of meaning.  And, something that I like to say—because this is exactly how I worked with my actors—is that I never work with psychology and I work with biology. So there were never any questions asked. They were forbidden to ask anything about the character. There was no backstory.

You know, Ariane didn't speak Greek when I cast her. She just knew a few curse words in Greek and that was all. So in a way she embodied her character and she understood who her character is without actually understanding the script just by rehearsing with her and [doing] the script phonetically. So through that phonetic rehearsal, which was for a couple of weeks, she started understanding the script. And first it was just with her, then the father came, and then the lover came. So it was in stages of rehearsal. We're isolating each one of their bodies and faces and then bringing them together and see what happens with the chemistry and see what happens with the dialogue, which changed to a certain extent. And then when we went on the site, it was basically all completely structured. And, you know, we're shooting on film, we had very little money so it was two, sometimes three, takes and when we did three takes, it was like a big deal.

David Pendleton  11:47 

At what point did you bring in the second young woman? Because you mentioned the lead actress, the father, the lover, whom I assume is the man in the hotel.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 11:57

Yeah, she came last because I was still looking for her, and up until maybe two weeks before the shoot I hadn't found the right physicality. Actually, she's not an actress, she's a dancer. So when she came, the first thing we did was to rehearse the little dance scenes, which I had already [done] the choreography [for] because it was a choreography based on, you know, Sir David Attenborough. So it was all movements that I had copied from different animal movements, and then mixing with my other heroes, Monty Python, so it was all like this sort of like Frankenstein that I had choreographed. And then when they came, I gave them a couple of those things to do. And they were just incredible. So I knew that they were meant for each other.

Haden Guest 13:19

Can we talk a bit more about those dance or walk sequences and their relationship to the film? They give an almost sort of a musical idea to the film, and yet, there's an interesting ambiguity of tone, I think, throughout the film. On one level, they are sort of seemingly comic and absurd; at the same time there's a deadly seriousness to the sort of precision and rigor, if you will, of these performances.

Athina Racel Tsangari 13:51 

Yeah. I mean, there was something very structured about this in our interludes, which acted as in my understanding of it, as the chorus of the film. Everything I do is very much drawn from the structure and this sort of strange conflict that there is in Greek tragedy where there is comedy and drama at the same time, and then the chorus comes to comment and illuminate and subvert everything that you see on stage basically—subverting all the characters. You know this is a trope in Greek tragedy that somehow has become sort of like a map for the way I build my scripts. And somehow I wanted them to express that they're freaks and they're outsiders and they don't belong. And, in a naturalist film, maybe I would have them talk about it. But since I was not interested at all in naturalism—or I didn't know how to do it—I just had them physically express that.

And also, I'm really interested in the way a narrative is interrupted or it takes a pause and then it starts again. And we used to talk about Attenberg when we were rehearsing it as a musical without music. Because it's really built in terms of musical structure and with musical interludes, but more in terms of the diálogos. You know the way they deliver their lines. It was extremely rehearsed. The rhythm, the tempo, when they had to be slow, when they had to be fast, when they had to pause. Everything like was so controlled that they would be sometimes very pissed at me. [LAUGHS]

Haden Guest 16:35

I mean these sequences you spoke about the importance of corporality in the body and in this project and this conception and in these dance sequences it is indeed the sort of expressive body. And the fact that these are both outsiders but they're in sync, and this seems to be one of the sort of the things that film is searching for is a kind of language of the body, this amazing sort of movemeant, sort of bird like movement, of the shoulder blades when, you know, the father and daughter... Both animal in a sense, but also this thing about just finding this sort of hidden language within the body. And I was wondering if you could speak a bit about that because it's something that seemed we can see within Fit as well, as perhaps a long going concern and interest.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 17:23

I mean, I hadn't seen Fit in a very long time and it's embarrassing. It's like my first film exercise when I knew nothing, and we had like three rolls of film and day to shoot. But I have to say that seeing that I was like, fuck, I'm making the same movie over and over again. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton 17:47 

That just means you're an auteur.

[LAUGHTER]

Athina Rachel Tsangari 17:51 

David.

[LAUGHTER]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  18:00 

See, it's very difficult to talk about this right now also, because I'm editing a movie, my new movie, which is like talking nonstop. And it's like language, basically. I tried to go further from Attenberg, because I actually would not like to make the same movie, you know. So like my new challenge with Chevalier, which is the new movie, how to turn voice into body...and it's really fucking difficult. You know I'm having the worst time trying to figure out how to edit that.

But, okay, coming a little bit to the idea of national cinema. I come from a tradition which is extremely heavy. You know, it's a huge thing to come from a country with this so-called heritage. It really weighs on you, and in the end, you just want to escape and give it the finger, and say that I don't want to be that.

So I think that in our group (and we all come a lot from theater and contemporary dance), we all kind of started making videos working with actors and and dancers and understanding relations, visual relations, through the body more than films like, you know, Angelopoulos, our master, who is amazing, but he was a huge tyrant for usFor like 25 years, there was no other filmmaker who was representing Greece other than him. So in the end, we ended up hating him. Because, there was one kind of completely nonexistent Greece that was represented from his films, but at the same time we absolutely adored [his work]. I mean, up to a certain point. His first seven, to be exact.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't know, it was not like we got together and we said, “we're gonna make non-Angelopoulos films” or “we're gonna make non-symbolic...” a word that I hate, you know, symbolism in film. It just came in a completely intuitive way. And also the idea of creating drama, but having these injections of humor, which to me is really important, like I can't imagine drama without humor. And it's also my own obsession and education under screwball comedy, for example. Howard Hawks is someone I really studied a lot, how he took the studio system, he took the auteur system, and he created a new kind of cinema and a new way that people would talk with each other, right?

David Pendleton 21:47

No, I mean, I think there's a way in which there's so much talking in Hawks’ films that it does become part of the image. You know that we have this idea, at least in the US, there’s this idea that somehow dialogue is somehow non-cinematic because it's not part of the image, but there's the way in which, I think, the way Hawk stages it...

Athina Rachel Tsangari 22:02

I think he's the first one who did that, you know, he took the voice and he made it part of the image. And you know, when I first realized that, I was just completely blown away. And that's in a weird way in relation to what Euripides did with his prose and the way they were embodied, by especially his female characters, the combination of that created this thing that I'm trying to do.

David Pendleton 22:38

I mean, it seems like there's already some movement towards thinking about language, making the voice part of the body or physical, or making language physical in that scene that Haden mentioned with the young woman and her father on the bed going back and forth between making animal noises and it grows out of language there too. I mean there's a way in which—even though the actress may learn her lines phonetically—the characters do seem to have a certain love of language because they have this game that they play where they do a sort of word association/rhyming kind of thing. So already I think you can see in Attenberg the…

Athina Rachel Tsangari  23:11 

Yeah, it was also actually really nice to work with someone who was not an actor. I mean, Ariane at that point, (now she's a full-blown actress, a beautiful actress) she was a dancer and then I teamed her up with Vangelis Mourikis, who is I think our best cinema actor, who refuses to do theater or TV, which is kind of rare in Greece because actors cannot survive unless they do TV or theater. He's a hero of mine because he has just committed himself to cinema, so he could understand nuances and also really helped me with Ariane in terms of guiding her in a scene. So it was really nice to have two completely opposite actors working on the same scene and me observing that and learning so much.

Haden Guest 24:21

You know, in FIt, I was just going to say one other... This idea of language, those marbles coming out of the mouth too. It's almost like, again, language taking a different kind of form, but I wanted to…

Athina Rachel Tsangari 24:31

And also a tongue that…

Haden Guest 24:32

Of course, exactly.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 24:34

Obsessions. Yeah.

Haden Guest 24:35

But I also wanted to go back… You mentioned Hawks and this idea of a kind of reinvention or recalibration of certain cinematic traditions and I think one of the things with Hawks, he’s often associated with genre and I think that your films are interesting to think about through the lens of genre—whether it be science fiction in The Slow Business of Going, or here, perhaps the kind of coming of age story, or perhaps the kind of tradition of the art cinema of Buñuel or Tarkovsky, the sort of obscure aesthetic object that both invites and refuses meaning. So I was wondering if you could speak about…

Athina Rachel Tsangari 25:17

I mean, I didn't really see... Of course, you know, everyone wrote about Attenberg as a coming of age story. I never really thought what kind of movie I was making when I was making [it], and I didn’t start by saying, I'm gonna make a movie about this girl who's growing up. I thought I was making [a] science fiction movie.

[LAUGHTER]

And by choosing this place, this company town, which is a science-fiction geography, a science fiction part of society that was like the only company town in Europe, at that point, at that time. It was built by a French company, for which my dad was sort of in charge of bringing to Greece. Like this aluminum bauxite company. So it was like a colony. It was a French colony in one of the most rural places in Greece. And for the first time, people from all over Greece and from Europe came to work in this town. So in the beginning of the 70s, suddenly there was this multicultural place in the middle of Greece that was still struggling with trying to figure out what kind of country it was. It was the height of modernism in Greece, the beginning of the 70s. It was deciding that it was becoming maybe a first world country. So for me, it was important to go back and shoot there at the point where whatever promises were through modernism and what my dad was hoping that he was creating was gone and completely... ruined.

And it was a point where I had come back from America after I had left for 12 years and just arrived to your own country. And you know, when you're a stranger, (and I arrived as a stranger because I hadn't been in Greece for a long time) you can really feel that. You have this awareness that people who actually live there and they’re used to it, they don't. So I was kind of devastated, but at the same time I knew that was a time for me to… I hadn't made a move in a very long time because I didn't know what movie I wanted to make. I don't make movies to make movies, I just have to really feel like I have something to say, or if I don't do it, I'm gonna die, something like that. So it was the point where I went back to Greece, and I said, if I don't somehow express what I feel, I'm gonna die. So I should do it. And I went back to Aspra Spitia. By that point it was a ghost town because now the bauxite is completely depleted, the French have left, a Greek company has bought it and it's...I t used to have 20,000 people and now it has like 1,200, so it was sort of like visiting the science fiction of the past. The science fiction of a desire of a country that didn’t become. And it was so vivid to me. It was so clear, it was so clear it was a movie set. You know what I mean? When it's a movie set, it's very clear.

David Pendleton 29:46 

Well it’s interesting, because I feel like this sense of coming back to a place that you used to know, but you don't know it anymore. I think it's communicated actually to the viewer because there's a sense in which we're watching these people and they behave like us, or like people we know, but at the same time they're different, which I think has to do with you directing as a biologist rather than as a psychologist. So, I think, that sense is transmitted really well, in part, I think, through use of the body and these rituals that you set up. I don't think I have a question there. I think I'm just commenting on that. Should we...? Yes, yes. You’ve been all very patient.

Haden Guest 30:28

Yeah, some questions from the audience. And there are microphones on either side.

David Pendleton 30:30

Raise your hand and somebody will bring a mic to you so we can all hear you.

There's one right there.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari 30:44 

Yes, yeah.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

To go to Austin?

Apart [from] that it’s a most fantastic place in general, when I came to the States to study, I did study at NYU performance studies, but you know, I got a Fulbright grant, and when you’re very young—and I was 19—you're not allowed to go to big place like New York to study unless you first go through a small town to get acclimated, and to get some language and history classes. So I went there and I wanted to shoot myself. And I was in a dorm and I had never been in a place like this in my life. And I went out in the street and I bumped into Richard Linklater when he was shooting Slacker. And then, I just basically never went to my language courses or my history courses and I became part of the crew. And that's when I decided that I was not gonna study theater and I was gonna become a filmmaker. So I went to New York and I did my master's, my degree in performance studies. And then after I finished that, I went to Austin because already I had the community there, I had friends. You know, Rick has been my mentor. So I went there, and I actually found a film department that was quite young, but because it was young, it was very renegade and it was a few of us who just basically were sort of in charge of our education and learning on our own.

David Pendleton 33:05

Other questions?

David Pendleton 33:09 

Yes, Generoso.

Gotta make sure that mic gets turned on, Steven.

John, if you can hear me, I think one of these mics isn't on, but go ahead and pass it to Gene and we can hear anyway.

Audience  33:24 

Is it going, I think it is.

I appreciate your use of the band Suicide in the film, and going on your theme about the kind of ghost town feeling that you had in Greece, when I hear Suicide, I think of mid-1970s New York and post-white-flight, and what New York was like in that time period. I'm wondering if that's what informed your use of the band? If you just love them, that's great, but if it was actually done for that purpose, as well?

Athina Rachel Tsangari 33:50

I just love them.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  33:57 

You know, Marie Losier has just made a film with Alan Vega about Alan Vega.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 34:01

Yeah, I heard.

David Pendleton 34:02

It’s great. It’s good.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 34:04

No, I mean that also the use of music in my films is extremely important. It usually comes together with the script. So it's not complimentary. It's not something that comes as an afterthought. The way I write the script is usually like: left side is image, right side is sound whether sound is dialogue, or ambience, or music. So it's completely part of it. And, again, it's very intuitive. I can't quite explain but Suicide, François Hardy were like, together... and then it took a long time getting the rights.

Audience 1 34:56 

Is there a reason why it was a father-daughter story? And if it had been a mother-daughter story or mother-son story, would it have been different?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  35:10 

I guess because I could understand it better. You know, I'm a woman and I have a father. And then, the thought of losing your father is always something that is part of growing up. So in a way, it was a way of preparing for that.

Audience 2  35:51 

Could you expand on the choice of the title, Attenberg, and the reference went by very quickly in the movie. Say a little bit more about the presence of Richard Attenborough in the film and whatever the backstory there was to that?

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:05

Yeah.

David Pendleton  36:06 

It's actually David Attenborough.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:08

Yeah.

David Pendleton  36:09

Who's his brother.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:10

Yeah, he’s the brother of…

Audience 2 36:11

That’s why I was confused.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  36:12 

Yeah, have you seen his series?

Audience 2  36:18 

[INAUDIBLE]

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:20 

How do I describe him? He's a….

David Pendleton 36:27

Well you can start by saying he hosted these nature's series, right?

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:32

These BBC nature series for the last 30 years.

Audience 2 36:37

[Inaudible]

Athina Rachel Tsangari 36:38

Yeah. Which were very popular but at the same time, apart from being the host, he writes most of the takes and he's actually quite involved in the scouting and the choice of the subject. And you know, he was not like Howard Hawks, where I discovered him at like 12, and I was, like, obsessed with him, and I want to make secretly movies. (Although in Greece when you're a 12 year old girl, you're not supposed to want to make movies.) I actually discovered him something like 10 years ago. And there was just something about his series and the way he would look at nature and... Not nature, actually behaviors. Behaviors in plants, and I mean, that's amazing, right? Behaviors in plants. He's actually able to describe that, and in the end it was a very transcendental experience because he approaches nature and behaviors. Very practical, very British, very analytical, and transcendental at the same time. He’s sort of like the Bresson of nature documentaries.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  38:10

And I think it has a lot...There's the scene where he talks about the possibility of escaping being human by looking into the eyes of this animal. It seems like so much of the way that you look at your characters totally encourages us to think, to rethink, what it is to be like human or what it is to behave.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 38:29

Yeah, I mean that's a great point actually, because everyone talks about the animalistic aspects of Attenberg. All this, you know, they're a bit more... I guess, memorable, all this animal stuff, but to me it's all about being human and how you approach being human from the side, not head-on, but just figuring out ways of approaching our senses, our humanity, our lack of humanity, our bodies, from the side. I'm not sure how else to describe this, but this is what I'm trying to do. With Chevalier, I'm trying to do the same thing. It's not head-on analysis or collision with what it means to be human, with ethics or emotions; it's figuring out neighboring systems to approach our own system.

David Pendleton

That’s fascinating.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 

He's 90-something now and he's ready to make a new series. And he, you know, this part, which actually it's a quite famous part. He just looks at the footage and he speaks. Sort of like a rap artist, you know, so he just, his voice overs are always incredible. There is nothing stilted or documentary about it, and at the same time, there is something very soothing because he describes and he explains, but it's almost like reading poetry, you know, so there is again two conflicting systems in the same language.

David Pendleton  40:34 

Yes, Mitch. And then there's some people back there that we'll get to.

Audience 3 40:38

You mentioned the name of a filmmaker, that this film made me think so much of that I was waiting to hear him mentioned. Maybe this is in my imagination. You mentioned Hawks, of course, but this is such a Bressonian film. I mean, I see so much Robert Bresson in this film, and, I don't know...and you mentioned his name. You said, “well, it's almost like Attenborough...”.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  41:00 

I mentioned his name in relation to Sir David Attenborough.

[LAUGHTER]

Audience 3 41:04

Right. But not in this film for you?

Athina Rachel Tsangari 41:07

No, I don't think so.

Haden Guest 41:09 

Bressonian musical…

David Pendleton 41:11

Although it is true that.. I mean when you talked about your actors, you don't deal with the psychology of your actors at all. One could possibly make some relationship at least to his method of work.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 41:21

I would never, never, never do this relationship. You know, talking about a filmmaker who is a mystic and, if I'm ever able to understand what he's doing with his frames and the relation between his frames and the way he has bodies move through the frames, I'll be happy enough that I understood this. And that's all. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  41:56 

There was somebody back in there I thought who may have recanted or changed one's mind or something. Yes, we’ll get the...There’s a woman there in the center.

Audience 4  42:09 

Athina, I just wanted to hear your views about imitation. Because it seems to me that imitation is not the obvious only, the imitation of the movements of the animals and the birds and everything, but even the imitation, the notion, in the Aristotelian sense, it's very [much a] part of your own movie. Even when you mentioned the musical. It is there, all the parts, the quality parts and the quantity parts of the Aristotelian notion of tragedy is also evident. Is this something that is happening from your Greek background or is it something…?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  42:55 

Do you say imitation?

Audience 42:58

Yeah, mimesis.

David Pendleton  43:00 

Mimesis and the tragedies? I don't know what the link is.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 43:04

Yeah, it's mimetic. It's not the same as– Well, mimesis, but it's not the same as imitation. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  43:20 

Yeah.

David Pendleton 43:22 

Well what is the link between mimesis and tragedy? I mean, maybe one [of you] or the other can answer or if you can't you don't have to.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 43:32

Okay, if we have like an hour.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  43:35 

I haven't read Erich Auerbach, so I don't know the answer to that. All right. Well, you can explain.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 43:43 

I prefer not. It's like a ...

David Pendleton 43:47 

There's a question right here. Look to your right. Yeah, here comes Steven with a mic.

Audience 5  43:56 

I'm not sure this is going to be a question that you can answer or are interested in answering. But when you were talking about the idea of a national cinema, and one of the things striking about watching this film as an American was, I mean, except for Angelopoulos I've never seen a Greek film. Oh, [and] I guess, Dogtooth. But one of the striking things about it just visually is how different it is from our kind of imagined idea of Greece. You know, of sunny, beautiful Greece, beautiful Greek islands. And it's especially striking because the setting is obviously so gorgeous. The water and everything, but it's always gray, it's rainy, and then obviously you have this incredible contrast with the industrial setting, which really sort of sets it off. Were you thinking at all of this idea of this is... not this is the real Greece but this is, you know, a real Greece. You talked about how Angelopoulos is creating this sort of, like, non-real Greece basically. I mean, was that in your mind at all? Was that one of the reasons the set, the movie set aspect of it appealed to you? Or is this just where you grew up and you wanted to set the film there and the rest of it?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  45:24 

I guess all of these things were part of my kind of subconscious way of choosing it. I actually went there a few months after I got back. I went there with Yorgos and we just and we had just made Kinetta, which is Yorgos’ first film, which is in a kind of decaying resort. It is a resort. It was a really big-deal resort in the 50s and 60s, but now it's full of Thai workers who work in the offshore oil rigs that are right there outside of Athens. And then, so, you know, we had just made Kinetta, and then I want to do it in Aspra Spitia because I understand this place. To me also embodied the sense that I had of my own country, which was a completely personal sense. So, you know, we're making a joke about going from one depressed little town to the other. Depressed little towns which were like movie sets because they were completely devoid of life. It was life departing.

Another thing, of course, in everything you do, there is an aesthetic fetishism. I'm not denying that, but there is something that really led us to go to these places and we never questioned it. We never thought, “this is the kind of Greece that we want to expose now”. And also there's a practical reason. Shooting in the winter is much more forgiving in Greece because the sun is not so brutal and so pitiless and when you shoot on film, it's actually really beautiful light. We didn’t have lights, and we needed to shoot fast. We didn’t have butterflies, we didn’t have any of that. So it's also a way of using really beautiful light in your environment. And also, yeah, I mean, we've all had enough of either, you know, the Angelopoulos, which I'm not saying it's not real Greece. I think when he was shooting, in the turn of the 70s up until the 80s, that was exactly what he was doing. But you know, after a while, when you your country has been branded to be the tourist destination, basically the tourist industry of Europe and that's the image that everyone is pushing you to make, of course, you're not gonna do that. You're gonna try to run far away. So you don't even have to be super conscious or super smart about it, you know, you just do it because your dad tells you that what you have to do and that's how you have to represent our family, so you did the opposite way.

Audience 6 48:52 

I have a question about your use of extras and your use of the landscape and figures in the landscape was so important, but you have very few other people. You have the guard that she speaks to and, you know, that's about it. But then you have that absolutely beautiful shot in the women's shower, gym, whatever it is. She's just sitting there and we were allowed to look at all these women. And it was very striking and very beautiful but it also made me wonder, why aren't there scenes like that in the hospital? Why did you choose just that scene and then really eliminate kind of extra characters from most of the rest of it?

David Pendleton  49:31 

And could I add something to that, which is to point out there's actually another striking scene with what I assume are extras: the scene where the two women are performing the French song, and there's this great– The two of them are walking towards us, but then there's a curb, and on the side of all these men sort of like staring off screen, presumably at a soccer game or something. So that's the other striking use, but those are two very striking uses of extras. And you might say they're also sort of divided in terms of the gender of the extras, right? One’s the shot with the milling men and one’s the shot of the women in the shower.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 50:08 

Because I was very consciously not making a naturalist film. So, one of the ways that you can control naturalism versus non-naturalism is how you populate your films, how you populate your frames, with what kind of bodies, with what kind of faces and where the eyes look. So, there was a very specific decision that the town would be empty, and then at each place there would be some population that was very... It was selected again as this collapsing and thinning of bodies constantly. I was making a science fiction movie, you know. I told you that's what I set out to do, you know. So sometimes there were like little armies, or little ghosts or... but every population represented a crowd that was signifying the absence more than the presence of humans. And they were very stylized. There was nothing natural about the way they were standing or, you know, completely choreographed to every single detail. There was nothing natural. [LAUGHS]

Audience 7  51:48 

Hi, I really enjoy your film, but I really enjoy listening to how you work. One of the things that I notice, or that maybe has caught my attention, is these two notions of time that were so important for Ancient Greece, was chronos and kairos. So chronos is linear, but kairos is an opportunity to grab something. So when you were speaking about that you picked an actor, but you didn't know how she was really going to act, and then she finds the acting role, or the title of the movie, that it's really a mispronunciation of the word, and I found that really beautiful. But then when I watched the movie, I felt like chronology is dominating.

I feel that in a way your process is really the combination of these two times, or the understanding of two times as you work, but then the movie seems very chronological, even the exceptions of the women dancing and performing, they start building into a chronology. So I was wondering if this process of having two times in the way you find the movie becomes also a process of editing the movie and I don't know if you came across with this when you edited the movie but is there, for example, a mistake that you find in editing that then becomes something that you were not expecting? I don't know if this builds into the process of editing the movie or just making the plot of the movie.

David Pendleton 53:32

If I understand the question, you’re asking about these chance happenings in the making of the film, these moments of kairos, and then in the process of editing is it more process of putting the images in chronos, making them chronologically?

Audience 7 53:48

That's how you were describing how you found the movie. So you were going to do a science fiction movie, but you ended up doing another movie, so there was this chronology expected but then it becomes something else, and I don't know if that will become a way of working also with editing. If it correlates to other areas that we don't see.

Haden Guest  54:09 

Okay, great.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 54:15 

That's a tough one. I’m not sure how to respond to that.

Haden Guest  54:28 

I mean, we could also just point again to the idea of the musical because there is a certain horizontality and then the sort of vertical moments that are kind of freed.

Athina Rachel Tsangari 54:36

I mean, editing actually was a challenge, because you have an idea of a rhythm in your head. I was actually quite precise and specific about it on the set. In my rehearsals and then on the set. And then when we got the film back and we started putting it together, I felt completely disappointed and I felt like I had failed. Because it's something that it either works and works in terms of chronos, or it falls flat, it collapses like it doesn't... so for a while I didn't know what to build upon. I think we switched the walking sequences, we call them “silly walks”. We kept saying like, “What the fuck are we gonna do with this silly walks? What are they doing?” Like, I started questioning stuff that were my very precise building blocks. Or, you know, like, the conversations, like, how the relationship between the father...You know, when would the engineer appear. These were important events, and just by switching the order every time it would become a different movie. And, somehow, after torture and lots of second guessing and feeling like it was not adding up to something, and it's almost as if… You're right, it's almost as if I had to recompose the entire thing with my editor, who's here, Matt Johnson. So he actually deserves a huge applause.

David Pendleton 56:46

Stand up, Matt.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  56:52 

There he is! He's down here in front waving.

Are there more questions? I was gonna ask about surrealism and machines but we can talk about it later.

Yeah. Okay, should we...? All right. I'll tell you what, we'll wrap it up. It's been a long evening, but a really fascinating one. I want to thank all of you for your questions and your patience. Especially. Thank you, Athina.

[APPLAUSE]

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