The Slow Business of Going introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Transcript

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

John Quackenbush 0:00  

October 19 2014, the Harvard Film Archive screened The Slow Business of Going. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the q&a that followed, participating are HFA programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.

David Pendleton  0:19  

[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] … And if we need more time for the conversation afterwards, we could also move it up to the lobby, but we have another screening in here at seven. So without further ado– Oh! I’ll just remind you to please turn off your devices. And now I turn the microphone over to Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  0:41  

Hello. Thanks for being here. And thank you very much, David, and Haden, and the Harvard Film Archive. And my students will come in late as always. So this is going to be an endurance screening. It's long. The Slow Business of Going is literal. It is a very slow business of going. [LAUGHS] It's actually my graduate thesis film at the University of Texas. And it's a film that myself and my crew were shooting for three years. We started that our second year. And we ended, actually, after I graduated, and during my first year of teaching at UT. So it's a Frankenstein film. It's lots of short films that were shot in hotel rooms, all over the world. So basically, we would travel to a country and shut ourselves in a hotel room for three or four days,

shoot there—based mostly on improvisational work that I did with my actors. And then I would go out in the city with my Super 8 camera and I would shoot more of the diary stuff that you will see. So it's a hybrid, it's a Frankenstein, and it's a mixture of genres. And it was basically my school. So that's The Slow Biz of Going. You know, it was shot on different formats. In the end, we finished on 35mm.

The Capsule is a film that it was commissioned by an art collector who invites one artist per year to curate a collection of of fashion items—which we consider as art,as wearable sculptures—and then take those fashion pieces and put them in a film, or in a photograph or in a poem or—depending on who the artist was—or in architecture.

So that's how I did The Capsule in collaboration with an artist I really admire Alexandra Waliszewska—whose paintings inspired the film—and we wrote the script together. And the drawings that you see animated in the film are based on her drawings.

And then 24 Frames Per Century, which is the first film you will see. It's two-minutes long. And it's one of the seventy films that was commissioned by the Venice Film Festival, for its 75th anniversary. And what they asked us to do is to imagine the future of cinema. And we had seven seconds to do that. But I actually did it in 120.

So that’s it, and I hope you enjoy them—all of them if you stay until the end—and I'll be here if we have any time to answer any questions. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  4:27  

And now David Pendleton and Athina Rachel Tsangari.

David Pendleton  4:33  

We really have very few minutes before we need to start seating for the next show. So we'll have a very informal Q&A and I encourage you to follow Athina upstairs afterwards, if we're not finished, and you can speak more in the lobby. But I'm going to open it up right away, and there's no audience mics either. If you can't hear the question in the back, raise your hand or something, I'll repeat it.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  5:15  

It was a film, and it was a print that was playing, and… I don’t know.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  5:27  

It was subtitles.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari   5:34  

I don't remember it didn't really matter, but it was the Greek subtitles.

David Pendleton  5:45  

Questions? Yes.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  6:08  

What? I'm sorry.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  6:16  

Um, “surrealism”...  I think it was because it was so much a collaboration between myself and Alexandra Waliszewska. I don't know if you know her paintings. They're amazing. She's a young Polish artist who makes one painting every day. It’s sort of like her diary. And I started following her on her blog. And when I was given this commission to make this film, I thought that would be nice to– I'm really interested in in the question of discipline and power and submission and the formation of identity as a woman. So there was something about her images in relation to a Greek film—that The Capsule refers to by Cacoyannis—which is A Woman in Black which was shot on the same island in Hydra. So that was in a way, sort of like what I call a Greek Gothic. It was shot in the 50s.

And I was really interested in making some very interesting exploring genre, a great Gothic film. And what would it mean to talk about—you know, I don't call it surrealism—sort of like borrowing some of her imagery. And then [she] herself borrowed some of the imagery of the film—it was a nice cyclical process—to continue [to] make paintings that were based on scenes that were evolved with my actresses.

They all came from different countries. We all convened for three days in Hydra. So I had the story, but most of this was developed during these three days where their assignment was: who is going to be the best, and the strongest? Sort of like the predator? Who's going to kill everyone else to take the mistress’ place. So they all came out with their confessions. And Isolda came with the one that Ariane saw that was the one worthy of her being her successor.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari

I mean, everyone was acknowledged, I think. [LAUGHS]

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Yeah. I mean, as I said, it's a film that was very much my film school. So, you know, it was very autobiographical. I started when I was twenty-five. I finished it when I was thirty. I had already since a little kid had traveled a lot in my life, because of my family, and then because it sort of like became something that I couldn't get out of. I still can't. So, it’s sort of like cinema and my own personal life was autobiography. And trying out different, you know, all of my obsessions at the time, and especially Beckett. The woman in the rocking chair is a direct reference to Murphy by Beckett. So, it's such a mixture, and so maximalist. And you know, it's a young film, but it was very much a way for us. And it's not just me, it was really a team project. It was all of us, all of the people, they're not actors, they're my friends. We shared the life together for about five years. So everyone—everyone we were watching, everyone we're discovering—was referenced.

[INAUDIBLE COMMENT]

It was, again, sort of like a preoccupation and all of these places are places that we traveled, so it was sort of like a record of talking about cinemas. This business of observation and of compulsive voyeurism and vicarious living. 

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  12:13  

We shot that last.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  12:26  

Yeah. I mean, you know, I watched a little bit. I rarely watch this film. It's almost like this diary that you don't want to open and read again.

But yeah, as I said, we started knowing nothing—like second year at school. And then as we kept working on it, each segment kept evolving. And the interstitial—you know, the story of the Global Nomad project—and the diaries, all the stuff started coming together as a way to connect everything. Somehow I needed to end it, soo a friend of mine and I wrote this segment as the end of that journey. It was really the very last thing that we shot.

So it was a bit more slow and maybe conventional in terms of narrative storytelling. And it was also shot on digital—which was, you know, it was a big deal like small digital cameras in 1999. It's also a record of media because that was between 1996 and 2000. When we finished it, everything was changing. So it was sort of like a format autobiography too [LAUGHS], you know it was like 16, super 16, Super 8, High-8, a little bit of 35 when we got the grant from Kodak, and then miniDV.

Actually, it's really fun because when we finished it, and we wanted to transfer it, and we went to that really beautiful lab that doesn't exist anymore, DuArt, in New York. And we took all that stuff to them and we said we want to make... you know, because e're gonna go to Cannes and we didn't know anything about how to conform or how... Nothing. They had never done a film actually where they would have to transfer all this stuff to digital and then transfer it to 35. So [they] actually almost did it for free because we were the experiment.

[INAUDIBLE COMMENT]

David Pendleton

Thank you, Athina!

Athina Rachesl Tsangari 15:25  

Thank you. Thank you for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

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