The formal structure of Manakamana is easily described: passengers in an aerial tramway are filmed for the length of the trip from one end to the other. What is miraculous about the film is the way this simple structure is used to create a cinematic experience that is both challenging and intensely pleasurable. The tramway in question is found in Nepal, where it ascends to an ancient mountaintop temple to the goddess of wish-fulfillment whose name gives the film its title. Manakamana grew out of the many years Stephanie Spray has spent living and filming in Nepal, and her collaboration with Pacho Velez, some of whose previous documentary work screened at the HFA in 2011. After meeting at Harvard’s Film Study Center, the two set off for Nepal with the same 16mm camera Robert Gardner used to shoot Forest of Bliss. Manakamana is a brilliant mash-up of early cinema, ethnographic film and Warhol’s screen tests.
Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists
John Quackenbush 0:01
March 29 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened Manakamana. This is the audio introduction and Q&A that followed. Participating are filmmakers Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez and Harvard Film Archive Programmer, David Pendleton.
David Pendleton 0:17
Good evening, everyone. I'm David Pendleton, and I'm the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. It's a great pleasure to welcome all of you for a very special evening here. We're showing the film Manakamana by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez—two filmmakers who are near and dear to our hearts, both here at the HFA, specifically, but also as part of the Harvard community.
Let me just say one word of instruction, which is to ask you to turn off any device that you might have on your person that might make noise or shed light, make sure that it remains darkened while the house lights are down. If you feel a pressing need to communicate with somebody who's not in this room, the lobby’s right there during the screening.
Also, I want to give a word of thanks to some of the people who made this screening possible. Not only Stephanie and Pacho, who took time out of their busy schedule, now that the film is sort of on the tail-end of its theatrical life, after being one of the most acclaimed documentaries to be released theatrically last year. I'm grateful to them for coming here so that we could discuss the film in person. I'm also thankful to the Film Study Center for their help in making this screening possible. And particularly because of our joint fund, from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities at Harvard, that supports filmmakers who come to present their work to the public and also to interact with the student community here at Harvard. And so, at the Film Study Center, I'd like to thank Peter Galison, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ernst Karel and Cozette Russell. And this film has close ties to the Film Study Center because it was there that Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, when they were both fellows, got to know each other and began to collaborate.
The two already had begun establishing names for themselves as filmmakers. Stephanie Spray has been working as a filmmaker and a photographer in Nepal for many years now. We featured just a couple of years ago, one of her single-shot films Untitled in the program that Scott McDonald put together for us on Cambridge documentary, and her previous feature is called As Long As There’s Breath. We've also featured the work of Pacho Velez here previously, his two films, very participational documentaries about political activism, called Occupation set here at Harvard and Bastards of Utopia filmed in Croatia. But the film that we're gonna see tonight, is their collaboration made in Nepal. It's on the one hand, a bravura example of the ability of the film camera to make portraits of humans. And on the other hand, it's a brilliantly structured, conceptual film that manages to fuse early cinema, ethnography and structuralist film—especially in my mind, Andy Warhol’s screen tests—but lots of other allusions really, in the way that the film is made. And we'll talk about all of that afterwards. I don't want to spoil the experience. And I also want to welcome now to the podium, to say a few words of welcome, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez.
[APPLAUSE]
Stephanie Spray 3:54
Hello, thank you for coming to our screening this evening. It's very exciting for me to see all of you. I've actually just come in from Austin, Texas. And so it's exciting to be back at the Harvard Film Archive. And I guess we won't say too much other than: thank you for coming and we'll be here to answer questions afterward.
Pacho Velez 4:14
Yeah, thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 4:25
And now Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez.
David Pendleton 4:35
Please welcome Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez!
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much for the film, and for coming. Before we take questions from the audience, maybe I’ll start by asking a few questions. And maybe the best place to begin would be the usual place, to talk about the origins of the project. I mean, I know that you've been working a lot in Nepal, for many years now filming and getting to know people there. What was the origin of this film, a desire to make a portrait of a certain place? Tell us about how the project came to be and also how the two of you decided to start working together.
Stephanie Spray 5:45
Sure, well, so I've been working in Nepal since 1999, and I started making films there in 2006. And a lot of the people you see in this film had been in previous works that I had made. During the time that I'd first seen the cable car in Nepal was while I was shooting for another project, and I was struggling a lot with trying to figure out how to– Well, I’d worked in a lot of same places time and again, with people and trying to make interventions, taking people to other places to see what might come from that, and also trying to work against trying to structure around films around narrative. And so I took two film subjects, one of whom you see, and who ended up in the second shot Bindu Gayek, she and her son, I’d taken them on the cable car. And while shooting, I realized that this could be a film in and of itself that you could have people riding up and down on the cable car, and you wouldn't need any other kind of narrative structure. It would provide a structure in and of itself. And this was just percolating though as a nascent idea. And I remember that Pacho and I met and we talked about some of this and as our conversation built, it became more clear that we could, you know, Pacho proposed the idea of working in 16 millimeter film, and this gave a kind of structural integrity to the whole structure of the film, to shoot a ten– Or we didn't quite know. We thought it was a fixed amount of time for the rides. We thought, “oh, presumably, it's going to be ten minutes throughout. Well, this works perfectly if we shoot 400 feet of film, this is going to be a correspondence between the material the celluloid and the time spent on the cable car.” Well, as we were shooting, we came to find out that in fact, it vacillates because sometimes it's running on an electric current, but sometimes there's a generator, you know, so... But anyway, conceptually, though, it seemed like an interesting idea. And we both had several films in mind. So through the conversation, it became... Well, we met at a pub in Cambridge and talked about this and then later started shooting.
Pacho Velez
Do you remember which one?
Stephanie Spray
It was The Field.
Pacho Velez.
The Field, that’s right. [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 8:23
You can give it a plug. But so to back up, and just to make it clear, then that what happened, one of the fortunate coincidences is that the trip up the tramway that you were interested in, ended up being about the same length as a 400 foot roll of film that you would typically put into a 16 millimeter camera.
Pacho Velez 8:42
And we figured that out, actually, via YouTube. If you go on YouTube, you'll see people shoot tourist videos up the tramway, and that was one of the ways in which we measured the length of the trip, I remember early on.
David Pendleton 9:08
So well, that's fascinating, too, though, in a way that you found that by by looking on YouTube, because I feel like there's a subtext to this movie, which is a sort of a look back at many different kinds of filmmaking traditions that I tried to sort of hint at in the introduction, which may may or may not have been at all conscious on your part, but I'm interested, first of all, by the fact that you chose to shoot on 16 because I think you guys have both already been making films digitally before this, yes? Had you also worked on film before this?
Stephanie Spray 9:42
I’d only in the classroom context, but I think Pacho at the time had been teaching filmmaking here.
Pacho Velez 9:48
I was actually here teaching the intro to 16 millimeter course, the filmmaking fundamentals course. And I'd also previously been at art school studying with James Benning—who is now working in video quite a bit, but at that point was entirely working in 16 millimeter film—and sort of thinking about some of these long-take ideas, this sort of serial organization, and this structural, conceptual approach to a subject.
Stephanie Spray 10:26
Right, and then I’d also seen James Benning’s 13 Lakes and another of his later films, and that was a very important filmic experience for me, as well as Screen Tests. So we were talking about this. As we were having this conversation, we had these shared experiences in terms of as viewers, and also pedagogically as students. And it seemed like this exciting opportunity to explore the confluence of a lot of things, like ethnographic filmmaking, for example, when we were able to borrow the Aaton that Bob Gardner used to shoot Forest of Bliss. And we were thinking a lot about, well, his legacy in his filmmaking, but also the ethnographic film tradition, and trying to, in some ways, work against that grain. So Forest of Bliss, I mean, it's this gorgeous, magnificent film, but there's a lot of portrayals of ritual, and you know, people aren't subtitled…. And so what would it be then to make a film where people are subtitled, but you never reach the temple, and you never see the fetish side, you know, the exotic, the ritual, but you see people on this journey and a lot of it's banal, and it's literally time passing. So we were thinking about playing against and with these different traditions and pulling them together, so structuralist filmmaking, avant garde, ethnographic...
Pacho Velez 12:01
I think also, on top of these sort of hybrid references, we're also thinking about things like, this film feels very much to me, like Star Trek, where you have the shots where they're going into space, and there's sort of the green screen behind them. [LAUGHTER] And sort of that weird sort of combination of portraiture, and starscape/landscape, whatever it is. There's a quality of a green screen to this, this film as well.
Stephanie Spray 12:40
Well, there's there's that but there's also we have a regard for the people riding on the trip, and this is what's great about a collaboration is we bring with it different perspectives. And for me, I was in this quagmire; a lot of these people had been in previous pieces that I finished or didn't finish, and struggling with this problem of representation of working in nonfiction, maybe not in standard tropes of documentary. But then thinking about, well, what is it, inherently if this is meant…? Because they are brown, and because they're Nepali, and we don't understand the language and within their homes, they're perceived as extremely poor and marginalized people. And so how do you deal with this? But maybe not to make the audience feel comfortable with that anymore, to not give them the sense that they leave the film knowing necessarily, “Oh, I got through this film, that there was this problem, they worked through it, or the problem remains,” but then you leave the theater feeling like there's some kind of narrative thread, but what is it instead, to still want to portray the humanity? But again, it's an open question, and it's not going to be perceived that way throughout. But to leave that as an open question. What is it to then think about the voyeurship inherent in cinema? So that was there, but also, you know, we jokingly call it “ethnographic sci-fi.” Thanks to Ernst Karel, there are certain frequencies that we wanted to have highlighted to make it more alienating, especially in the first trip. So all of that's there, but again, it's an open film.
David Pendleton 14:38
But that's what I think is so remarkable about the film is that in a way, it can be explained very simply: eleven trips on this tramway, but you managed to pack so much—both conceptually and visually—into the experience so that you're right, because of the lines of the other tramway, there's this abstraction that we see out the window at the same time with these straight lines, for instance. And the fact that the window itself becomes another frame. So there's kind of like this stack of frames, right? I mean, we look at the people in the car, but then we're also looking over their shoulder at whatever is unrolling before or after them. And then you play with the frame itself, right? The chickens that pop up and things like that, I mean, I'm assuming that you had many different shots to choose from. And that part of the selection, the editing process,is different from your typical editing process, unless you're making structural film where it was a matter of selecting shots, I'm assuming, that actualized the potential in the situation that you set up in different ways. Is that fair to say?
Pacho Velez 15:45
I think so. And also we knew from an early point that the film needed to have a kind of dynamism or opening, a movement throughout. That one of the risks of the film was that it would feel statically like you were seeing the same shot over and over again, with a different face. And that somehow things and information and character moments, the world needed to be revealed piece by piece slowly. I think of it as a kind of flower. And the petals needed to unfold in such a way that by the end of the film, a viewer had a more complete portrait of this place, and how to give the film that kind of sense. So we spent a long time thinking about what is just the right moment for people to start talking in the film. And what should that first line be. Should it be a funny line? Should it be a serious line? What should that information be? When should we reveal that we're headed to a temple? You know, at what point in this journey is it important to see young people? At what point is it important to see people in western dress? At what point is it important to see the goats?
And also thinking about tones. So I think there was a sense of this film speaking of it in terms of this flowering, that had to flower in a kind of emotional way as well, so there had to be moments that were quite serious moment, that were sort of fearful, but also moments that were funny moments that were touching, you know where to where to put the ice cream. That was a long discussion. You put it too close to the end, and that becomes too much the meaning of the film; you put it too close to the beginning and your funniest moment happens, and suddenly you still have an hour of film to watch. So this was key. And so there were a set of larger concerns shaping the film, but at the heart of it, I think it was also very important to give the audience a sort of pleasurable, cinematic experience.
David Pendleton 18:24
Well, it has an interesting rhythm, as I was mentioning a little bit earlier, which is that there's this moment of suspense between each shot where we go into the dark. After you've seen a couple of shots, you kind of figure out how it works, and then like, there's this moment, we go into the darkness, and it's like speed dating, it's like, “okay, who's going to be the next person that's going to be across the table from us for the next ten minutes?” And there's not really a question there. I guess I'm asking you to explain a little bit more how you were thinking about how the audience would react to these things. And the sort of the rhythm. I mean, did you see it as having a narrative tug? But not in the sense that there was a specific story, just in terms of thinking that certain things need to be sort of light-hearted and other things could be a little bit more serious or somber.
Stephanie Spray 19:08
And this is what's difficult, though. I mean, some things are directed in some ways, but a lot of it we don't have control over. I mean, a lot of it's nonfiction and documentary, but so we have these long chunks of time, and a lot of what arises, it comes– You know, this was a problem for us editing, in other words. We had a sense of there are many things within the an individual shot. And we could try to orchestrate certain things to happen at certain times. But, there are many things happening within a shot and as soon as we move it, that changes the whole experience of the entire film. And so for us, it was a balancing act. Within the ice cream shop, for example, yes, it may be funny, and maybe even heartwarming… There are all kinds of things that happen within the first five minutes, but then, where traditionally it might be cut, because that feeling peters out, and then you have to sit for the rest of the ride down, and that was structurally important for us not to cut within our shots. So we had to carry on, and then how does that affect everything that you perceive in the following shot? And so we were trying to orchestrate both, you know, the kind of emotional responses that could be possible given what you see on screen, but also there are all these references to the landscape. Again, a lot of what you see is not visual. You imagine much of what is outside of the frame through what they say. And so trying to negotiate all that. You wanted to say something though.
Pacho Velez 20:54
Oh, I was going to say that in terms of thinking about this question of what was set up versus what wasn't, my sort of shorthand for explaining that is that we did in fact, buy the ice cream cones, although we did not tell the women how to eat them.
David Pendleton 21:19
Or when presumably, because there was this moment, like “Not yet.”
Stephanie Spray 21:23
That's an interesting– So we have someone, a close friend of mine and ours named Ram Krishna Gandharba, who we hired to help, because we were both in the cable car with the people that you see. And so it was the two of us and then Ram Krishna, we were the crew. And then the people who you see, and so someone had to help get them onto the cable car, because there's a long line. And so we found out later that there were these little instructions that he would give people very directly, and we suppose that he told them to hold it and wait. And so they're all kinds of things that were out of our control. But there were directions that maybe we gave that were more bluntly given later. And so...
Pacho Velez 22:14
Yeah, there's a way that I think it's very much a sort of– Watching it, I see all these sort of handmade moments, or these these artisanal touches inside the film, these very quirky, idiosyncratic things that were a result of this film being made by me and Stephanie being in the space without any kind of support, you know, with a camera from the 70s, that we'd shipped in my luggage with a bunch of film that we'd sent accidentally through an X-ray machine. Maybe it was damaged. We didn't know for six months, because there's no developing facility in Nepal. All these really small stories that were actually possible, because there were zero expectations on me and Stephanie at that point. I mean, three years ago, I was anyone in this audience trying to make a film. And, so... where am I going with this? Just that I think the experience of watching it in this room without knowing me and Stephanie is one of a fair amount of control and maybe expertise. That's a scary word. But in fact, this was really a kind of a wing-and-a-prayer film for us in many ways.
David Pendleton 23:44
Are there questions in the audience? I have a list of more questions, but I'm sure they'd like to hear from you.
Let's go to the woman back there. And then the man right in front of her after that.
She'd like to hear more about the sound design. In general, if you can wait for the mic, just so that we can all hear, but I can repeat the questions.
Stephanie Spray 24:03
So sound design… I don't think we used the word “sound design,'' even Ernst Karel who did the post work on the sound. There's not much. So I'll tell you how it was recorded, and I'll tell you what we did in post, rather than talk about sound design. So it was recorded on a stereo microphone that's an excellent microphone. And, there were two channels of sound. And when it was mixed, in this case, what you heard was a stereo mix. In the end, though, in some contexts where they have surround sound, it was mixed so that you heard the stereo mix whenever you were in the cable car, but as soon as you came into the wheelhouse… I think we used that space as a kind of a space to play both in terms of what you see, you know, it's not that dark in the wheelhouse. That's something we use as a way to transition between shots. And also the sound at that point, if you're in a theater where there are surrounds, it enters into the surrounds, a full soundscape emerges and so in the two and a half minutes that you heard where there's a sound piece and there's no image, that's a full immersive sound experience where you hear this. It's a creative space, it's not a literal space, it's the space of both the wheelhouse and the temple, that space doesn't exist in reality. I mean, you're either one place or the other. And, there's a rhythm to that. And Ernst Karel worked on that with us. So what you hear though, when you're in the cable car is pretty much– I mean, there's no foley with the exception of a little bit of wind when you are with the goats, and then there's some tweaking with different frequencies, and there's a little bit of work in that way, but there's not much sound added, in fact. I don't know if you have...
Pacho Velez 26:04
Just that we knew that this was another element, or a structuring element, or rhythmic element that we had in the film. And so one of the ways in which the film works is by means of opposition. So you have portraiture and landscape, you have East/West, old/young, all these sorts of classic binaries, and one of which is a kind of movement between looking and listening. And those moments of black– I had a friend who's a musician who saw this film in Los Angeles and was like, “Oh, I loved it because there was this time where I was just supposed to listen in the theater,” and that's such a rare thing. I think it's a relatively rare moment in films where it's like, “Don't worry, don't look, there's nothing to see. Just use your ears.” In fact, there's a space of black in this film for two and a half minutes. You're in black, which is kind of unprecedented. I mean, I don't know, probably other people have done this. I see Ben Rivers back there. Ben, you must have an example of a film that has two and a half minutes of black in it!
David Pendleton 27:17
[INAUDIBLE]’s Snow White, which is all black.
Pacho Velez 27:18
[LAUGHS] There you go. Yeah, so it happens. But it's pretty rare. Coming from a kind of observational documentary place myself, that was a really sort of bold gesture.
Stephanie Spray 27:31
Yeah, there was some stress about this before we first premiered it.
Pacho Velez 27:39
My dear teachers here, I think said that you can't do that.
David Pendleton 27:46
And yeah, there was another question.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Stephanie Spray 28:16
Very perceptive. Not everyone–
David Pendleton 28:18
I’m not sure I entirely understand the question. You mean, in terms of a symmetry of shots where we're facing up and shots where we're facing down?
Stephanie Spray 28:28
Well, you mean A/B/A? We referred to it as A/B/A: facing inward or outward and inward and outward? Is that what you're referring to, whether you're seeing the mountain at a closer proximity versus the–
David Pendleton 28:44
Because each trip is one complete trip up the mountain, right? There's not waystations, right?
Stephanie Spray 28:48
We’re talking about perspective, right, within the frame?
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Stephanie Spray 28:54
Oh! Yes.
David Pendleton 28:57
Well, one trip up, and others are one trip down.
He was thinking there were maybe like stages. You go into another wheelhouse, and then you see other people but you're going further up the mountain…
Stephanie Spray 29:09
Oh, okay. No, no, no. So maybe you're not perceiving what I thought you were. [LAUGHS] What I thought you were saying was, whether or not you were– Yeah, he wasn't saying that. Okay, so we might as we'll talk about this, then! So we knew that we would show the complete—yeah, there are six trips up and five trips down. The question we had was—and that we debated at great length—was whether or not it would have to alternate between whether you were facing the mountain, or facing outward. And we thought, well, maybe it's very important if you're following a structuralist model to face inward and outward and inward and outward and do we break this model? In the end, a lot of people don't even know if you're going up and down.
David Pendleton 29:52
I have a hard time with that. Because I'm like OCD. I'm trying to discern a pattern, especially when I was first watching the film. And so yes, I was paying very close attention to whether we were going up or down. But there's also there's like, you're going up, but you're looking over the shoulder of the person that was receding versus, you know, you're going down, and you'd be looking over the shoulder.... So there's like four different possibilities, as far as I saw, and I kept trying to see if there's some kind of symmetry. But as far as I can tell, there's no symmetry.
Pacho Velez 30:22
You just need to watch it again, David.
[LAUGHTER]
David Pendleton 30:26
I've also seen a couple of different versions. So then, the symmetry that I think is gonna be there has like, vanished.
Are there other questions in the audience? There’s a question over here. Just wait for us to get a mic. And then I saw a couple in the middle there, and then you.
Audience 1 30:43
Yes. It was kind of a follow up on that, because you sort of answered some of the questions I was gonna ask anyways, but you could say something about all the ups were done one after another, and then all the downs were done... as opposed to an interleaving. I was almost expecting… the very first thing I expected, well, you're gonna go up and you're gonna go down. So if you could maybe say something about that. And the other thing is, I don't know if he had the resources or not, but did you actually do more than eleven, and then sort of pick and choose? Or how did that work?
David Pendleton 31:24
And did you have something you wanted to add to that question?
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
David Pendleton 31:36
Right, the cable. Well, you're more practical than I am. You're a better observer than me.
Stephanie Spry 31:42
Your question is more about the logic, the entire arc of the piece. Why go up six times, have this interlude, and then come down five, right? A/B/A/B… Yeah.
Pablo Velez 31:53
So the film was shot over two summers, actually. I know that the experience of watching it, you feel like it was shot in an afternoon. And I wish it was.
[LAUGHTER]
Stephanie Spray 32:09
I was there. I was happy to shoot.
Pablo Velez 32:13
So the way that it worked was, we brought this camera over in luggage, and we had two suitcases. And so we had two batteries, and we had two film magazines, so we could shoot two shots, and then we had to unload the camera, unload the magazines, recharge the batteries, switch out the film in the magazines, get back into the cable car. And so imagine this right, so you're at the top of the hill, and you want to film a ride coming down, but you can't get into the cable car and set up the camera and start filming, because you want to get the person getting into the cable car. So you have to get into the car with the camera, and then you have a ride down, which is eleven minutes, and then a ride back up. So twenty-two minutes to set up your equipment before you actually pick up a rider. So then you pick up the rider, and you want to get that person getting into the cable car. But then you also want to get that person getting out at the bottom. So you have to ride with that person and stay in the car as they get out of the car. And then you have to go back up the hill. And then you're at the top of the hill and you want to actually be at the bottom of the hill. So you have to go back down. So it works out to something like sixty-five minutes in the car for every ride that you're shooting. Something like that.
Stephanie Spray 33:37
Right, but the question is really interesting. I mean, practical arrangements aside, why not structure it going up? You know, we were not trying to represent our experiences filming it, right? What we were thinking was “Okay, what's the experience of these people? Why are they going there?” There's a journey and where are they going to? And it's supposed to unfold… They talk about the temple in the third shot. Narayan says to his wife Gopika. “Going to temple is fun,” and she kind of, you know, grunts or something. But it's a mention, it's a hint. And then in the next shot, you have three women talking about... So there's this unfolding. And so what we were thinking was, if you have a trip going up and coming down, you don't know yet where they're going or what the purpose is. We tried all kinds of different structures, but we thought, well, we'll have these trips going up—we didn't quite know the number—but again, we needed to have this balance, both the full duration of the ride and all of our desires to have this unfolding. You use the metaphor of a flower unfolding, you know, until you get to the center. Well, what's the center? It’s the temple for a lot of these people. And so you go up and then... so we don't have five/five, we have six/five. And the reason is, well, the last trip up there—goats—is not an enclosed car, it’s a crate, and they're sacrificial animals; they're not going to return. So for us, we thought, well, one way to rationalize an uneven number here—if we're really worried about this—is that they're never going to come back down. So they go up, and then we don't attempt to represent the temple because, well, for a number of reasons that we talk about now, but you know, we can talk about this versus what's the best way to structure the film, the strongest possible film that we can make? But also what's a way to respectfully kind of give a distance to something that we don't feel that we can visually represent? If we show you an image of the temple, or of the Goddess, I mean, that might deflate the whole experience, in fact, so we have this soundscape. It's an imaginative space, a mythopoetic kind of soundscape. It’s supposed to evoke the conflation of both the machine and the temple, and then you have five trips down. And you know, we this is something we struggled over. It's like, well, once you've come up, I mean, maybe it's anticlimactic to come back down. But then for a lot of people, I mean, you have this return trip, and the experience will be different. So did we ever seriously consider going up and down and up and down? I mean, I think we pretty early on–
Pacho Velez 36:18
We looked at it that way. I mean, the other side to this is we're sitting here rationalizing a set of choices, but at the end of the day, it's a matter of what works on the screen. And we spent a year and a half putting together different kinds of edits to make certain that it was a kind of satisfying experience for the audience. And the rationalizing, I think, very much comes after the fact.
Stephanie Spray 36:38
But these were conversations we constantly had, you know, what's the best rationale for...? We tried...
Pacho Velez 36:47
In total, we shot thirty-five rides over those two summers. So there was a fair sort of pool from which to choose.
David Pendleton 36:59
There was another question in the center.
Audience 2 37:08
Actually following on this idea of finding a rationale, I found that one of my early experiences watching the film was of the camera and the location of the camera. And then soon after that, their avoidance of the camera—your subjects—and then my need or desire to find a rationale for this, and ultimately had the experience of their avoidance, interacting with their other expressions, or emotions, or events or whatever it was, it's kind of like it became a foil, that initial avoidance of the camera for other ways that they were thinking or feeling. Sometimes it was ambiguous to tell if they were avoiding the camera, or each other or... I really, ultimately enjoyed this element, which was so present and kind of stuck out at first. And I'm wondering what your intention was, how you decided to locate the camera where you did if you had a choice? And what your various rationales were, or are now, thank you.
Stephanie Spray
Well, the first choice was mostly aesthetic, I think, in terms of the position of the camera. We talked about having it at the direct center, at eye level with the film subject. Of course, it's a large camera, and it's a confined space. It's five feet across, and we have benches, and we're seated across one another, and there is this camera right there. And we wanted the position of the frame behind the window to be constant throughout. I mean, that was one decision. Ot was more of an aesthetic kind of choice. But that seems different from the question that you're asking about. From what I understand, it's more about the relationship of the film subjects with us and with the camera and with this whole setup, is that what the underlying...?
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]
Pacho Velez 39:19
I think there's also something to be said for different proximities that a subject has to a camera. They connote different meanings. The same way in our daily lives. You get closer to somebody who you're familiar with, or you're comfortable with, than you do with a stranger. And so there's a kind of social distance, but then there's also kind of intimate distance and I think it's very important to the effect of the film that the camera is a little too close for documentary. And that kind of intimacy is something that is a function of proximity. And isn't necessarily there in all documentaries.
Part of how I think of that... you know, Stephanie has a different kind of relationship to some of the characters in the film. For me, many of these people I've met two or three times, some of them I had met once. And for me, you know, I think about my own upbringing in the Catholic Church and thinking about it's like a feast day for saints,people are wearing their best clothes, they're dressed up, they're going to the temple. This is an important, auspicious event. And they're proud of how they look. And that's sort of a key element to the film for me that these are people looking their best. And that there's a kind of pride in the portraiture, which relates to my own comfort with the kind of intimacy in the imagery, which I think is getting at what you're talking about. Maybe you disagree.
Stephanie Spray 41:23
Oh, no, but I think what you're talking about is this negotiation between this intimacy, but also, a lot of people perceive this as very alienating. I mean, whatever, we have no control over how it's perceived, necessarily, but there's a lot of discomfort, not only with maybe the camera—and obviously, the feelings unfold through the duration of the trip—but also just being in the cable car can be frightening. It was frightening for me. I'd actually not been in a cable car before. And so the first cable car I was ever in was this one in Nepal, which is notorious for all kinds of natural disasters. And so I had a lot of apprehension. And a lot of these people were fearful about that. And then, on top of that, there's this camera. But on the other hand, a lot of the people I had already filmed with previously, so there was a kind of contract—spoken or unspoken—which is interesting in terms of how things unfold in some of the shots. So in the second shot, Bindu, the woman who's riding alone carrying this basket full of flowers and things that she'll offer to the Goddess as part of her worship, she scoots to the middle. She actually repositioned herself on her own, but what happens is, at one point, she smiles, she looks down, looks up and smiles at the camera. Well, what happened is she had accidentally kicked me, and I was recording sound, and I was right across from her. Both of us are right there, but she smiles because what she would typically do is apologize for touching me or touching anyone with her feet. But because she knows we're filming, she's not going to and it's this beautiful smile of, “Well, actually I don't have to do that now.” Or “This is so awkward,” but so there's a kind of agreement between us and them. And we're participating in this. And so there's all kinds of awkwardness not only on their part, but ours and all of that's in the film. But it transpires differently in each shot.
Pacho Velez 43:33
I don't know that– I mean, it's interesting, our awkwardness in the film. I don't know, I've never thought about that.
Stephanie Spray 43:40
I mean, maybe not that you see it, but it was hot, you know, there was kind of a– Well, maybe we've never... I don't know, if you think about that articulation of that experience.
David Pendleton 43:54
But that's one of the great things about long takes is that you know, things mutate over the course of the shot or oscillate or whatever. And so there is in some of these shots where you go from feeling a connection to the character to suddenly realizing, “Oh, I'm actually watching them look at a camera,” and look at people that I don't know who she's looking at behind the camera. And so what I find fascinating about these films is the way that your experience of the shot changes as the shot continues, you know what I mean?
Pacho Velez 44:23
And that was definitely key in terms of our selecting these eleven out of the thirty-five that we shot. We wanted material that took a right turn in the middle of the shot or somehow changed or shifted. That there was a kind of a way that the dynamic developed over the course of these ten minutes was key.
David Pendleton 44:42
I mean, I noticed that a lot of the people have the same last name and I'm assuming this is an extended family that you worked with for a while or maybe it's a common last name in Nepal.
Stephanie Spray 44:51
It's not a common last name. What's interesting about this question, though, is so a lot of the people that you see are, yes, from the same caste, and you see Gayek, Gandharba Gandhari. And they have different last names, but much of the people are from the same caste, and for us, we didn't feel that we needed to represent or give a representation of, a dissection of like, say the caste system in Nepal. We're not trying to represent even the experience of every type of pilgrim that might come here. That wasn't a concern for us. So in this way, it's also working against certain kinds of ideals, or ideas about representation and that way as well, that has come up. Sometimes there's this expectation that there is some kind of representation cross-culturally, but that wasn't our project.
David Pendleton 45:55
Right? Well, I'm wondering if you anticipated that people might see it as some sort of Family of Man kind of thing or allegorical? Because I mean, there is a temptation... Like, I remember when I was first watching it, there's the grandfather and the boy, you know what I mean? And so that's like, “Oh, we're seeing these different stages of life, etc.” I mean, again, I think one of the great things about the fact that it's a long take is that after a while, whatever sort of allegorical label you wanted to put on that person kind of burns away or it dissolves, because you get much more of a sense of their particularity.
Stephanie Spray 46:29
Do you?
David Pendleton
Yeah! For me...
Pacho Velez 46:32
We’re definitely teasing those kinds of allegories. I mean, that was also part of this discussion. That's not how the film works. It's not a simple journey through a set of categories or types at all. But we were aware that in certain shots, we were referencing types.
David Pendleton 46:55
Actually, I think the first shot draws people in because the boys seems a little frightened. And the relation between the grandfather—I'm assuming, it’s a grandfather and a grandson. Well, that's the other thing is a game that you play as a kid trying to figure out, “Okay, that's too old,” like “That kid's too little. He’s got to be his grandfather.” So his grandfather's taking him to the temple, and then you sort of notice the relationship between them that's unspoken, and there is something that's very touching about that, and that also draws one into the image, I think. Bravo. [LAUGHS]
Yes, there's a question right here in the middle.
Audience 3 47:32
I'm just curious how many of your subjects have seen the film and what reactions they gave to it?
Stephanie Spray 47:40
Well, the only person involved in the film in Nepal who has seen it is Ram Krishna Gandharba. We have been in conversation with… We've wanted it to be seen in a film festival context, and the last time we were in contact with people there, we were trying to negotiate that instead of you know, oftentimes, you'll get some kind of small amount of money in return for the screening to us the filmmakers. Well, in this case, we want to use that money to have the people that you see in the film brought to the film. This would take some, you know, we'd have to choreograph that. And then we never heard from them again. So in fact, it has not been screened in Nepal. I mean, you haven't had a reason to go back, I guess, since was it two summers ago, when we shot something else that we never finished? [LAUGHS]
Pacho Velez
2012.
Stephanie Spray
Yeah. And I haven't been able to go back. I had a child and I am still wanting to go back. So we haven't been able to personally take the film there. And it hasn't screened in a film festival. There were a few in Nepal and in Kathmandu. We've sent DVDs over. I don't know if they've seen them or not. But it hasn't had a proper screening in a public context.
But Ram Krishna had seen the film and had seen also some of the different cuts of it. And I mean, in terms of what they might think of how we've made this film, that's an open question. Previous films that I've made with some of them where they were longer takes, there would be responses like... Well, I think they expected a different kind of film, maybe something like a documentary that they'd see on television. A lot of these people watch television, even in villages, and they watch documentaries about life in Nepal. So yeah, who knows what they would think, but we would like to show the film there.
Pacho Velez 49:55
We sent copies back to the cable car company as well, but haven't heard anything.
David Pendleton 50:03
Maybe they're using it in their advertising: “As seen in Manakamana!”
[LAUGHTER]
Pacho Velez 50:06
I hope so. I really hope so that was actually one of the jokes was that this film was gonna make the Manakamana temple like a destination for Brooklyn hipsters.
[LAUGHTER]
David Pendleton 50:18
Well, was it a surprise to you What happened with the film?
Pacho Velez 50:22
Oh, no, we were predicting it from the start. [LAUGHS] No, it was amazing. We had no idea. We were making this film for five people, for ten people. It was a sort of wonderful experience.
Stephanie Spray 50:35
Returning to your question, we have had a lot of—not the film subjects—but Nepalis come to screenings. And it's really interesting to see their responses because their response is often enthusiastic, maybe for the film, and a lot of people have been on this trip. But what's interesting is the last time we were together and we had a Q&A—we showed the film at Chicago. The Film Study Center there sponsored us to come there and show the film. And the Nepalis there, their questions... Later, I talked with them. I think you had left. They wanted to talk at great length, not about the film itself, but the conversations that happen after the film, because they're not about Nepali culture, and they're not about life in Nepal, they're about the structure of the film, the way it's made, about the time of cinema, about, you know, all of the things we've been talking about. We're not talking about the things that are meaningful for them when they watch the film. When I was getting in a taxi with Dominique later—who used to teach here—we were getting a taxi and there was a man whose mother was Nepali and his father was from England. And he got in the taxi with me and he continued this conversation. He said, “You know, what's difficult for us is for us, this film is about Nepal, it is about Manakamana. But the thing is you guys never talk about that.” So, you know, I don't know why that is. But that might be another way of answering your question. Our film subjects haven't seen it. That would be a different perception of the film, clearly. Because their memories, and their experiences are folded within it. But in terms of Nepalis and their reaction to the film, it's quite different.
Pacho Velez 52:23
I definitely also have had the experience showing it in different venues, you get different kinds of questions. I showed it at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC, and all those questions actually ended up being about sustainability and development. It's interesting, yeah, the film can play in these different contexts, provoke different questions with different audiences.
David Pendleton 52:49
Well, can you say a little bit about what the Nepalis– I mean, when they say it's about Manakamana, I mean, the temple or the goddess or the place or…?
Stephanie Spray 53:01
I mean, they felt that… [SIGHS] No, this is great! This is useful to talk about. I hope that you guys are along for this ride.
David Pendleton 53:11
People can people can drift out if they need to.
Stephanie Spray 53:12
Well, a lot of this is also pushing against– So the way we talk about this, we're not talking about this as a– It comes out of and from fruitful conversations within the Sensory Ethnography Lab, but it's not an anthropological film. It has ethnographic qualities, and it gains a lot from, say, the work that I did in Nepal that might be described as ethnographic, but also much of the strength comes from a purely cinematic perspective. However, this is a struggle, right? So, this film doesn't do as well in an anthropological kind of context, because we're not giving you an educational kind of descriptive version of why they're going there and describing all of that, and yet–
David Pendleton 54:11
There's no text saying what the temple is, there's no voiceover narrators...
Stephanie Spray 54:15
So for people who aren't familiar with that, that meaning is not accessible to them. But for those who do live there, and who have been on this trip, all of that is already there. But we don't decode that. We're not there to play that role. I mean, we are interested in that, but we feel like this is an open space for all kinds of interpretation. So they have all kinds of insight into the images and into the destination and their own—all kinds of, you know, their own understanding. And so for them, it's already there, but we haven't given them that. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's there but not everyone can perceive that.
David Pendleton 54:58
Right. The lay person’s eye or ear may not hear it or see it, but it's there. Well, I mean, we get glimpses in the conversations with the old women, for instance, the three older women. But no, it's an interesting question. It's the same question as we were talking about earlier with Forest of Bliss where if you're trying to avoid a kind of ethnographic filmmaking that somehow objectifies the people that you're filming and explains them and labels them. And you want to make it something more experiential. But then that also sometimes means there’s a certain amount of information that drops away,
Pacho Velez 55:30
Which isn't really particular to ethnographic film, I don't think. Yeah.
David Pendleton 55:38
I mean, I think it's a trade off.
Are there other questions out in the... Oh, yes, you had your hand up earlier.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
David Pendleton
“Were the conversations spontaneous?”
Stephanie Spray 55:55
You mean in terms of what they say, and when? Yes.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Stephanie Spray
Well, it had been sacrificed. [DAVID LAUGHS] They were bringing back the meat to eat.
David Pendleton 56:12
Right. Right. Right. That's a little bit of closure in the film, actually.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
That's right. People don't eat the goat meat?
Stephanie Spray 56:20
Well, they're not sentient. I mean, they may come back down as meat.
David Pendleton 56:24
Right, right. Right. But that's not the same two people in the last shot that we see with the chicken earlier, or is it? I thought it was them, but because of the list of names in the credits. I guess I outfoxed myself and I–
Stephanie Spray 56:36
[INAUDIBLE] It’s a list in order of appearance.
David Pendleton 56:40
So I guess I miscounted. Alright, alright. Okay, good. Because I kept thinking, “I thought those were the same people!” And they’re bringing the chicken down. Alright, good.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
David Pendleton
“Was the music spontaneous?”
Stephanie Spray 56:57
Sort of.
[LAUGHTER]
David Pendleton 57:03
Are we talking about with the musicians? With the rockers?
Pacho Velez 57:07
Yeah. So we knew that they had their instruments. We asked them to bring their instruments. We said, “It would be great if you guys played at some point.”
Well, it wasn't like, you know, “Wait five minutes, play your instrument, do this, play that song, we really like that song, that song means this…” And in general, the film is happening in such an uncontrolled environment. As I was explaining, we're not talking to people for twenty minutes before they get in the cable car. And the the gifts are what make the film: the unexpected, the random occurrences, the sort of the things that aren't... You know, the way that we were working, we had to have some amount of control over what we were doing. The things that really, for me, bring the film to another level, are the things that you can't plan.
David Pendleton 58:06
But this goes back to Andy Warhol’s screen tests—which I’ve been dying to get to all night, too—where he'd bring people into the factory, and he kind of had some sense of who these people were and what might happen. But he didn't often give them very explicit instructions. He would just say, “I'm gonna turn the camera on and leave. And the roll will last this long. You can do whatever you want.” And there's a similarity, I think, in a way to what you guys did.
Pacho Velez 58:30
Yeah, we definitely love those films and were thinking about them.
David Pendleton 58:35
But you started making these long takes, like the film called Untitled that we showed here. You’ve made a couple of films that are long takes that you made in Nepal. Can you talk about the origins of first deciding to do that?
Stephanie Spray
I mean, maybe call it a lack of imagination. For me, I'm so connected to that moment of shooting. And it also comes from my training or maybe lack of training. In the Sensory Ethnography Lab, we talked a lot about the work of, say Jean Rouch—even if we only watched a fraction of it—but talking about the “ciné trance'' and really experiencing fully through the frame and through the image. And so whenever I had been shooting previously, I felt very connected to that moment, and was trying to think, “Well, how do I not shoot for a specific type of cutting? How do I shoot so that I'm editing while shooting?” and so a lot of the earlier the first couple films, a lot of them are more handheld. Later, there was more tripod work, but again, a lot of it was because my interest was in this unfolding and these conversations and these digressions that aren't directly related to the kinds of interests that I had or that I could control but that I felt were spontaneous and and revealed a lot about how time passes in these places. And also a lot of these people don't have jobs that are scheduled. They don't live by a strict schedule. So what is it to be in a place where a lot of time isn't structured? And there's this concept of time passing, and time moves differently. So how do you portray that? And how do you portray that ethically and, f course, seeing a lot of films here at the Harvard Film Archive—I guess, later people talked about slow cinema—but even before that, I'd seen fiction films by Pedro Costa and then of course, you know, we both were interested in Benning’s work. And so anyway, all of these things you've seen, and being there and then for this film, it really made sense, because we were shooting on film, there was a whole other layer there that added integrity to the idea of the take. Before, you know, you just–
David Pendleton
Shooting digitally, you mean. You can just–
Stephanie Spray
Yeah. And also then it was governed by other kinds of logics of what happens within however long your take is, but here, the logic was different. It was like, “Okay, we have this ride,” and who knows how things will be paced within that, so...
David Pendleton 1:01:21
This is my last question: can you say a little bit about the decision to make the film two hours long? As opposed to say, ninety minutes or as opposed to three hours?
Pacho Velez 1:01:34
Yeah, we had a three-and-a-half-hour version at one point. George saw it. He’s in the back. He's shaking his fist. [LAUGHS]
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]
Pacho Velez 1:01:48
Yeah, I mean, in some in some perverse way, I think that the ambition was to make a film that was a crowd pleaser on some level. I mean, there's other things going on. But it's a film that obviously, in certain ways, is challenging to the viewer, but it also it needs to meet the viewer halfway, and part of that was about figuring out a length at which it was doing that. Yeah, I think that’s how I explain it.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]
Pacho Velez
Great! [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 1:02:29
Thanks, George.
Stephanie Spray 1:02:30
But in terms of why did it– We weren't thinking this needs to be two hours; we were thinking, “Okay, at what point does it make sense for the rides to have…” You know, again, we were dealing with these chunks of time that were ten or eleven minutes. So we had to find an arc going up, and then we had to balance that with coming down. And so, we tried five or six trips up and then what would it be to have three trips down. But then as we went along, we almost considered ending with the music. And that would have been a reference to all kinds of you know, cinema—and we were thinking about music within cinema—but then that didn't quite feel right. And so ending with riders who had gone up—not bookending it—but still you have a return trip down. That felt like the appropriate ending. And then within that the roll; you're left without image and there’s sound. And so there's a reference to the very material that we were working with, and so it just ended up being two hours. But we waffled in and out about a couple of shots here and there. That and maybe one shot shorter, we were kind of going in between, you know, do we do ten and eleven, ten and eleven…?
Pacho Velez 1:03:49
We were concerned about things like it having a feeling that you had an arc, like it had a kind of forward movement, just all these things that I think are part of why we come to the cinema, we're looking for in a good film.
David Pendleton 1:04:05
You guys care for a couple of other questions? There's one there and one there. Are you guys exhausted?
Stephanie Spray 1:04:12
I am but I can keep going. [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 1:04:14
Two more questions.
Pacho Velez
Sorry, Ruth. [LAUGHS]
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Pacho Velez 1:04:17
There are three additional rides on the Blu-ray and I think on the DVD. At one point, somebody was talking to us about making an installation version of the film that maybe would be a different length. But they'd have to pay us, I think.
Stephanie Spray 1:05:14
Yeah, I think, in the end, they showed our film. They just installed it. And I think we were so tired by then we said “sure!” [LAUGHS] “We're not gonna rework this!”
David Pendleton
Show it in a gallery and call it an installation!
Pacho Velez 1:05:28
I mean, the thing that's strange is we finished this film almost two years ago. And so we're both on to other pastures in some ways. I mean, it's wonderful to still be talking about it and sharing it with people. But I think our day-to-day headspace is in very different places right now.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Stephanie Spray 1:06:24
I think that was something that... Not that we chose a location for that, but it attracted both of us for that reason.
David Pendleton 1:06:32
But let me just summarize the question. If you didn't hear in the back, the question was, to to this gentleman, the location shows the positive aspects of development, that people can go up this mountain in a matter of minutes, when it used to take days, if I'm summarizing correctly, and so therefore was that part of the attraction of choosing the space to make that point? And then also, the second thing was, how long was the whole process of making the film?
I'm sorry, go back to what you were saying.
Stephanie Spray 1:06:59
So as Pacho had said earlier, we shot it over two summers, and it was only a few... how many weeks total?
Pacho Velez 1:07:08
I think I was in the country for six or seven weeks.
Stephanie Spray 1:07:11
So yeah, there was six or seven weeks that we were actually shooting there, but the editing took quite a long time. That took a couple of years?
Pacho Velez 1:07:25
I think, a year and a half. Yeah.
Stephanie Spray 1:07:28
But we weren't always together, and we weren't always looking at the thing.
Pacho Velez 1:07:31
There was actually one edit every forty days.
Stephanie Spray 1:07:38
But that was something that interested us in the place, yes…
David Pendleton
Development.
Stephanie Spray
Development, that's right. It wasn't the reason that the place was chosen, but it was a part of the logic of how it was edited. So at what point are they going to mention... So it ends on this note of nostalgia. He says, “What's the name? You can't even remember. You’ve been to Kathmandu, but you can't even remember the name of this river.” She says, “I forgot. I forgot.” And this is a reiteration of a lot of what has been talked about in that shot and previous shots or it’s referenced obliquely. So the changes, you know, so she sees the roofs there now. “Oh, they're slate, like in my village.” “But a lot of them,” he says, “are tin, even in your village and below.” And so there's this conversation, there's this debate. And this is something that comes out naturally. We were thinking about it, it was something we wanted, we wanted to end on that note, but it's something that arises naturally through the conflict of what you imagine that you're seeing. You know, a lot of people talk about, like, “ethnic attire.” I mean, this is what people wear. But we categorize it in that way here. And yet they're riding in this state-of-the-art cable car, and so that contrast is already there. And that was something that we were thinking about, especially as we were editing, and while shooting as well.
Pacho Velez 1:08:55
I think one of the animating questions is “What happens when you take the effort out of pilgrimage?”
David Pendleton 1:09:05
Well, on that note... Maybe the last thing I'll say, do either of you want to say anything about what you've been doing since then, or the other things that you're working on?
Pacho Velez 1:09:12
You know, I think we'll be up here and if people want to talk...
Stephanie Spray
This has been great!
Pacho Velez
...because I'm seeing some weary faces out there!
David Pendleton 1:09:19
I'm sorry to wear you guys out! Thank you guys. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
©Harvard Film Archive
