INTRODUCTORY CONVERSATION

Lior Shamriz: One thing that draws me to this conversation is that I’m considering the role of liveness in cinema within hybrid, quasi-digital, quasi-recorded worlds. More specifically the kind of fragmentation of liveness—through documentation and trans-temporality—that has become so inherent to contemporary storytelling. Many theoretical conversations on cinema still rely on an older framework based on the intellectual world that existed when the medium of cinema emerged, but as a maker I feel an urgency not to submit myself to that past. I want to give myself over to a different perspective within discourses of performance and community, in order to talk about and with the people I currently share space with, even when I investigate the past. 

Elbe Trakal: Liveness is such a central word in performance theory that I have so many associations in my mind right now. Knowing your films, I associate you with someone who is interested in auteur cinema, because I guess you are an auteur in the sense that you are making very personal and idiosyncratic films that you produce yourself. I'm trying to locate what you mean by liveness in your practice.

LS: What I mean is that I see the recorded camera clips I'm editing into sequences as wormholes that are still attached to the moments in which they were recorded. They don't lose that connection in the editing process. Even when a film is densely edited, each clip brings in some spirit from the shared encounter that was documented by the camera. And since the moments I record themselves are often an intervention within my immediate community, as well as a hopeful intervention on a different register, the film becomes an agent, a fermentation process. I would argue, as many have, that all films are interventions, though some of them pretend not to be. Commercial films pretend not to be interventions but they are in the sense that something actually happens at the moment the audience watches it, as well as at the moment a producer utilizes their capital to influence how people would look at the world. I think that commercial cinema maintains a false façade of non-liveness.

ET: I hear about a certain level of exploitation from friends in the film industry who have to deal with the impact that a film production has on their lives. It's exploiting them and it's eating up all of their personal time as well. They know that’s happening, but still it’s difficult to deal with feelings of alienation, to have time for friends, or to follow other desires in their life apart from work. For film workers of art films, or let's say, filmmakers who engage their own community, the difference there is that they are both exploited by the film industry and by themselves. However, the community involved is also agreeing that a film becomes a social space in and of itself, one that has an impact on their personal lives.

LS: That’s the question of consent.

ET: Exactly, they consent to this event changing their life. For me, filmmaking was a social space before it was an artistic endeavor. Making films was a way for me to find intensity in my community, and to find a type of contact with the people I lived around. A film project offered a connection and a more committed life project with them. At least for a while I thought "we're going places together." Making films, in that sense, engaged something that I revisit today in participatory art and role-playing. Because the way we make contact with others in a game space or in a production space is distinguished from ordinary everyday life, intensity can emerge as a kind of rapture through production. I thought that this immediacy and possibility for another social life was ultimately much more satisfying than it was to see the film that came out of it. The making of the “actual” film, in other words, trying to tell a story in the edited film, was always resistant to me.

LS: That's why we both are, as participants in the world, interested in mimesis and art, because it allows a different level of engagement that society does not offer on a daily basis. What's different with the filmmaking process—and that's also connected perhaps to why we experience film as a performance—is that, similar to theater or LARP, it's a very sensual experience of producing a mimetic space. Film is experienced in a fragmented “realtime,” and quite differently than painting or writing is. Film is unfolding in front of someone’s eyes, at least theoretically. Can a film that’s playing to no one still be considered a film?

ET: This realtime is the liveness? There is a temporal investment in filmmaking that is different, for example, from theater. From my experiences in a theater group, and doing role-playing games, these practices, despite their investment in nowness, are flüchtig, they evaporate.

LS: They are ephemeral.

ET: Yes. However, film is different, there is an image that will remain beyond that "now," that will not evaporate. I think that is a very important aspect of filmmaking, that you devote yourself to this object of temporal survival, that will continue. I have a horror of the social emptiness I feel when I sit in front of the footage after the shoot.

LS: Because the material will be there even if you don’t do something with the raw footage.

ET: Exactly, a lot of my fascination for documented cinematic performances—where the work is taking a documentary approach to looking at the filmmaking process—comes out of that. Ultimately I'm interested in this process, the nowness of this process, and that's also what the film should be about. The Powerhouse (2013), which you participated in, for example, was a project where I was part of a group of students that took over a film set at the California Institute of Arts. We staged a film shoot, theater rehearsals, an art exhibition, and other productions simultaneously on a live broadcast stream 24/7 for a week. What happened was both a performance and a social space. The “house” aspect was the important element. Afterwards, to try to assemble some kind of film documentation of the event totally defeated the purpose. I was alone, I was disconnected from that moment of nowness. I was trying to transform that work into an archival object. My solution for the problem was to speed up the unedited material all at once, to plug back into that moment. I think it was a primitive way of solving the problem. The relationship between the nowness of an encounter and the documentary aspect of the film medium as a specific kind of temporal relation is really at the core of my thought on cinema and performance

LS: Yes, I was asking myself the same question at The Powerhouse, too: How do I relate to what happened? My solution was to journal because I felt that that's the best way to “capture” the experience for myself. Luckily I had the link to your website, and the archive was there, so if I needed references for my journal, they existed. I would argue that the discrepancy you feel, the disconnect, has to do with the question of audience. It's almost like you are making work for the village but the village is burnt after the performance, so you are constantly in this mode of telling a story about a small community to another locale or community that doesn't have anything to do with the village community. So part of the challenge that you are alluding to is this question: What is “community” for a filmmaker today, when the audience belongs to a different context than the makers of that thing, the work that exists as a film? Where is the community? How does it persist? For my work, I kind of accept that my community is fragmented that my community is being reestablished when I bring together people I have previously worked with. For example in the recent film, Estuaries (2022), I worked with performers I’ve been collaborating with more recently in Los Angeles; I also collaborated with people I’ve been working with in Berlin longer than a decade; and I also brought into the film performers I worked with back when I was beginning to make films, almost twenty years ago. Presumably I’m the person carrying that thread, assembling the group through my traveling presence, and eventually in editing the film, but in fact this sort of coming together is beyond me, as people who were part of the project have histories from before they knew me and others establish new creative relationships that I’m only peripheral to. I feel that Basma Alsharif’s Ouroboros (2017) was about that process—the threading of community through time and space. At least that’s how I read it. 

ET: Do you think that our Mimesis magazine project is an attempt at creating and extending a community? 

LS: To me that is the way I'm looking at the medium of film and I want to see that conversation grow. I want to learn from people who have similar questions. I want to hear from all thinkers but especially from film practitioners about what is worthwhile in thinking about film through performance that allows them to talk about and represent or illustrate what they are doing, in a way that other conversations might not allow. 

ET: This makes me think of the conversation that Noor Abed and Bojana Cvejić contributed to this magazine. Abed is working with performance in front of the camera but both are interested in the social functions of performance. When Abed shows wedding dances, for example, in Out of Joint (2018) she does so using videographed wedding videos, as well as mobile phone videos from wedding guests. When ceremonies or rituals are filmed the participants’ address of the camera becomes a fundamental part of the ritual and might become its own form of performance practice, for example the wedding photo. This illustrates one aspect of the mimetic relationship between cinema and performance. Mimesis to me means that not only are social spaces intensified and marked as such through cinematic production, but cinema in general is representing our social spaces in a way that we imitate and learn from these representations. We learn what it means to be social, what it means to be part of a community, how to relate to others. That is also part of the performance aspect of cinema. To copy gestures from watching movie characters is common practice. The representation of images and stories creates a desire for what life could be like, but at the same time it also teaches that desire can be captured in the first place. It can be archived, it can be shown to others. So when we learn from this captured desire of, for example, the Hollywood machine, we may also demand to capture our own desires, and share them so that they can be mimetically copied by others.

LS: The propaganda machine of emotions. Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks about the way cinema represents gestures in his only essay on film, The Film and the New Psychology. 

ET: I think that is the ultimate mimesis—that I want to be able to share my desires, and have others be infected by my desires the same way that I'm infected by the desires of others.

LS: Yes. Or inhabit them for a moment.

ET: I really believe in the democratization of cinema. I want a cinema of personal communities that tell the stories, demands, and desires of their lives. I'm much more interested in that than in watching films made by a machine. Learning from the films produced by the Karrabing Film Collective, for example, that show and teach desires, is very powerful. This mimetic dimension of film is something that I see as utopic, that the medium will change into and can become a psycho-political force in that sense.

LS: I want to say two things. One, is when you're talking about desires of communities, I kind of read it as desires of "groups," so the way a "group" becomes so-to-say a monolithic thing, a homogenous community that relates to itself and is able to channel itself through film. But what are the borders of a group or community and how stable are they really? Are the borders well defined? Is there a danger that we over-simplify and see a community as a homogenous entity which is well represented monolithically? In a community, who gets to have a voice? Who is "the voice” of a community? Who is silenced within that community and what happens to counter narratives within a community? The other questions are related to that of gaze, which is so engraved in cinema and its mechanical apparatus—the camera obscura and the lens. Here questions of community exist as well: What is being captured? For whom is it being captured? Considering how performers, audiences, and agents relate to each other is only the first step towards understanding the medium.

ET: Together with Jack Hogan, I made this film Under the covers, the waves! (2021) about dream enactment. We played on this idea that in a mimetic sense dreams are influenced by cinema, and cinema is influenced by dreams. The way we dream is already informed by various cultures of cinematic dream interpretation. In the project, people brought their dreams to be acted out in front of the camera. Every “dreamer” was paired up with a “director” from the group who would take their dream and turn it into a scene, through discussion. We all performed different roles for each other. Hogan and I knew when people had to talk about their dreams as films, they would bring a lot of ideas about cinema with them. I am interested in how they relate to dreams as always already cinematic. But I am not here to make a Bergman dream sequence. Instead, I am curious about the social relations of dream sharing. Therefore we used a green screen on the set and asked the participants themselves what they wanted added later onto the green screen in post. Anything goes! In reality we never had the intention to put anything there. We just wanted to get people to talk about how they would stage their dream.

LS: It's interesting that you're bringing up dreams to talk about mimesis. I feel that sometimes we have the same expectation from dreams that we have from cinema. When some scientists tell us that dreams are just noise—we don't want to countenance the idea. We prefer the ones who tell us that a dream is something meaningful, with the power to change our brain, our mind—I want them to change me. I want them to change my experience of reality. So even if I don’t believe they necessarily tell the future, which they might, I still want to think that they're changing my presence and my body and how I see the world. A similar transformation happens in regards to performing arts, when performances work as agents within the community and plug into religious theatricality: one witnesses how a community comes together through storytelling in performance.

ET: Like a quasi-spiritual affect that can be experienced on a film set?

LS: Yes, performing stories is something that changes the future, and/or the present, and/or the past. I’m thinking about Victor and Edith Turner’s concept of communitas and rituals of passage. I think that this way of thinking is where people who treat film as exceeding a story that is being told meet. Where they realize they are looking for something similar that brings together  ephemeral presence and atemporality. This is how we even change our perception of time, right? By complicating awareness of how time passes. 

ET: I like this example, possibly we all grew up with different kinds of spiritual affects already in our lives, but then when we come together we find some kind of substitute in the film community on the set, where this affect that we inhabit can be collectively invoked. This makes me think of the interview we did with Mariah Garnett about her work You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of Your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out (2008), where performers Zachary Drucker and Van Barnes throw anti-trans slurs at each other as they simultaneously engage in intimate gestures. For me this work was a lot about heralding a specific affect that is present in society at large, but also may be present in queer communities with interpellations of rejection while performing intimacy. There is something resistant and contradictory between gestural act and speech act. To translate this affect, which is probably not always expressed that clearly in daily life, into a performance for the camera made the work very strong. Garnett who is behind the camera gets directly implicated in what is happening on screen and I personally am very much left wondering about her subjectivity and affect as the camera person.  

LS: That leads us to the topic of this issue—the fringes of resistance. How does resistance relate to cinematic performance, and to cinema as performance?

ET: Freud developed the idea of psychoanalytic resistance in his 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams. There's always a moment in dream analysis when the method of free association doesn't work any longer. At some point the analysand will say "I don't know what more to say," the method of free association will stop working. Resistance. The analyst will try to meet the resistance and is therefore working along the fringes of it, addressing wherever it shows up. In this way resistance reveals what is going on in contact between analyst and analysand.

LS: Who's the analyst in the case of our magazine that is dedicated to film as performance?

ET: Since we are interested in the resistance of the filmmakers, or the film practice itself, I guess the viewer would be the analyst. Resistance takes place in the activated relationship between viewer and filmmaker in cinematic performance and is central to cinema as a relational project. So the question is maybe what is the resistant relationship between filmmaker and participant / viewer.

LS: Is the analyst, on a political level, an oppressor or an ally? Could they be someone who presents themselves as an ally but they're actually on the other side? Who are they working for? I think that's a question that a lot of artists—particularly those who are from some level of marginalization or at some level of alienation from hegemonic powers—ask themselves.

ET: Haitian poet Frankétienne describes the concept of the spiral as a prevalent symbol in Creole culture to signify anti-colonial struggle. The spiral stands for a way to tell a story not directly, but to write the story in a circular fashion, with diversions in order to hide information from the colonizer.. In my opinion you have to consider two audiences. On the one hand we have the colonizer, or aggressor, or we could also call it the censor, who receives the coded message. This audience should be withheld from understanding the message that the spiral helps encode. On the other hand, you also have another audience that is meant to receive the message, that needs to understand the code of the message. You essentially want to talk to this audience through the spiral.  So are there good analysts and bad analysts? By politicizing the role of the analyst we leave something out of the picture, internal resistances for example.  I want to make a certain film, say, about dreams as cinematic performance—yet no matter how hard I try to convey what I want to say about dreams as proto-cinematic experience, there is probably something resisting inside of me, and probably also in the filmmaking process that will not allow for this thing that I want to say to be conveyed. 

LS: I can identify. One of my future film projects is located in Palestine (currently known as Israel) and it has to do with questions of history, especially how we receive histories and how we read sources from ancient texts, archaeology, as well as more recent sources, photography, et. al. I have all these research threads, and yet I'm not sure if I will actually end up producing a film addressing those questions directly. It might end up a completely different film. I can identify with this question: is the film you are going to make the film you end up making. It is interesting how you believe that the failure of accomplishment has a psychological reason. It assumes that taking the barrier off would allow a certain flow. 

ET: I mean, resistance has a reason. Whatever the reason I go to analysis and scratch at the death drive may be, artistically I don't use a Freudian or even a psychoanalytic method; I have my own methodology to make a film. Even though that methodology might be a hindrance, or the way I use that methodology might hold back something that I actually wanted to express, the resistance I will experience is itself fundamentally truthful about an artist’s condition in the world. It is a form of contact with an audience. In any case it will tell me something about my own process, it will keep me curious.  

LS: I understand the psychology behind seeing the creative process as such. At the same time, the task of the film maker is not so analytic but synthetic. In some aspects, the binary segregation of reality from mimesis is a dualist illusion. Some European painters would use the trick of drawing over the projection within a camera obscura. In that case there was a much clearer separation between mimesis and reality. But that’s a shortcut aid at best and really just a cheap trick—that’s not how filmic storytelling works, and honestly it isn’t the essence of painting either. Interpretation is inseparable from perception. This duality certainly isn’t there in the more fascinating works of art. Mimesis and reality as separate is a reductive way of looking at the world, a result of our cognitive limits. That’s part of what Plato’s cave was hinting at.

ET: Some filmmakers are very invested in misrepresentation, or, let’s say in the resistances they're bringing into their filmmaking. I'm thinking of John Waters, Mike Kelley, or Yvonne Rainer, for example. Their resistance points at something unachieved, some decrepit aesthetic or failed storyline, but that's exactly their fascination. A lot of works I appreciate are part of a cultural narrative about the end of achievement, and the affirmation to fail. There is something optimistic in that. I think that your films have something that I connect to: that “failure” in your attempt to remake aspects of your life, that your narrative films would have something ”documentary” about your own life, that you produce situations that you are in, or your friends are in, or your friends playing themselves. There's some kind of a failure inscribed into that since the past could never be reproduced. But maybe this could be related to a fascination with an anti-mimesis. I think the mimetic representation wants to reproduce. But an anti-mimetic representation wants difference, it wants to focus on the difference in the mimetic approach, perhaps it's more interested in whatever is not going to work.

LS: Interesting how you think that the anti-mimetic film wants to be something that is not a documentary, that's not real, but is also not a mimetic representation of the real as in a fictional film about some lived experience. In Matt Polzin’s story, “What is American Neorealism?", the gesture of documenting a process is transformed into literary fiction. A couple is discussing cinematic genres and the representation of a worker’s strike at a U.S university, and the paradoxes of one of the speakers’ relationship to the strike become embedded in the story through that process. It becomes a comedy. There’s the question of what does “misrepresentation” actually mean and whether it simply means to be in alignment with some discursive hegemony. Some viewers need to laugh at a tear-jerker of a melodrama in order to allow themselves to enjoy its other qualities, and I find it important to be able to enjoy the touchy-feely emotional parts of the melodrama without the need to first put it down and laugh at it. While there is a question I have regarding camp—whose failure is actually a success and whose failure is just a failure—I connect that to questions of privilege and empire. If you have privilege, if you’re “in the empire,” when you fail, your failure is a success, while if you’re outside of it, your failure is really just failure.

ET: That’s a good point. But I still prefer filmmakers who talk about their work as an attempt, “that's what I tried. I don't know if I made it or if I failed.” It's a very different gestus than saying "this is a film about that." Such an attitude as embodied in their films allows for surprises and disappointments in contradistinction to the neoliberal discourse where you are constantly informed of the importance of such and such works of art.

LS: Yes, here the film is a documentation of trying to answer a question rather than producing a product. Although I do talk about art as a process—there's still a question of who is allowed to have their art be created as, to be read as, or simply to exist as a process. For example, in music, who has the privilege for their music to be considered a process, who can afford an intellectual endeavor of finding rather than acquiescing to the mundane enterprise of funding? And it's more confusing than it first looks, at least in music—in visual art, it's the heteronormative male whose art is a process. When talking about music—if it's music “for boys” it's taken to be mostly a matter of a process, and if it's music “for girls," a lot of times it is seen as a product. If you're working in a hostile environment and you’re in constant danger that someone with authority will stop you or make you change what you're doing, or even make you second-guess yourself about what you're doing, not having a proper plan might be your best shot. In this situation, improvisation triumphs over executing a pre-conceived plan. I remembered hearing Fred Moten talk about improvisation this way, but I can't find any relevant quote, so it's possible I misunderstood something he might have said or that I've made it up.

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The conversations were held over video phone in multiple sessions between December 2021 and March 2022.  The transcription has been lightly edited for clarity.