Escape from Boredom and Days of Stillness, Part One: Rouzbeh Rashidi in conversation with Vahid Mortazavi and AliSina Azari
A recorded conversation in Persian, part one of two
Vahid Mortazavi and AliSina Azari in conversation with Rouzbeh Rashidi · Koker Magazine (مجله سینمایی کوکر) · October 2021
«فرار از ملال و روزهای سکون» — Escape from Boredom and Days of Stillness
بخش اول گفتگوی وحید مرتضوی و علیسینا آزری با روزبه رشیدی فیلمساز تجربی
Part One of the conversation between Vahid Mortazavi and AliSina Azari with Rouzbeh Rashidi, experimental filmmaker.
Preservation copy. This conversation was first published in Persian by Koker Magazine (kokermag.com) in October 2021. The recording is an audio work and remains at kokermag.com. What is held here is the conversation itself: transcribed from the Persian recording and reconstructed in full as English prose, so that the conversation, its participants and its date remain on the record independently of the original host, and so that it can be read by an audience who do not read Persian. Persian-language film media is especially vulnerable to disappearance. — Experimental Film Society
The conversation
Translated from the Persian recording. Speaker turns are marked. Where the recording was indistinct, the passage is named at the foot of the page with how it was resolved — nothing has been silently corrected or silently dropped.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · A conversation between Vahid Mortazavi and AliSina Azari with Rouzbeh Rashidi, the Iranian experimental filmmaker resident in Ireland. My name is Vahid Mortazavi, and for this first Koker podcast we have invited our dear Rouzbeh Rashidi — an Iranian experimental filmmaker living in Dublin — to talk with us about his work and his background. Joining me on behalf of my friends and colleagues at Koker is Sina Azari. Sina, would you like to introduce yourself as well?
ALISINA AZARI · Of course. I am AliSina Azari, and I am very glad to be taking part in this conversation with our dear Rouzbeh. I hope it turns out to be a very good discussion about experimental cinema and about the ideas Rouzbeh may have for us on the subject.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · Excellent. Dear Rouzbeh, let me begin like this. Rouzbeh Rashidi, experimental filmmaker. This suffix that we attach to your name — how do you yourself define the experimental filmmaker?
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Thank you. Let me take the opportunity to thank you, dear Vahid, and dear Sina, and everyone involved in Koker magazine, for giving me this chance to speak with you. And let me apologise to you and to your audience in advance, because I feel that my Persian has grown a little rusty; I sometimes reach for English words, and I stumble. You will have to forgive me.
As to your question: after some twenty-two years I have genuinely come to the conclusion that rather than drawing nearer to experimental cinema — to grasping it, to understanding it — I have in fact moved further away from it. At this point I truly do not know what the precise meaning of the term is.
I remember that when I was living in Tehran, in the late nineties — and forgive me, I give all dates in the Gregorian calendar, because I have genuinely forgotten the Persian ones — when I began making films in the late nineties, I did not begin from any great body of knowledge, nor from any serious decision. I never started filmmaking that way. I felt that I had certain preoccupations, and that these were taking shape in the form of moving images. Sound was extremely important to me.
I had no inclination whatever towards paper — or towards the computer as a place for writing — towards text. And then, once you have written the text, once you have written a screenplay, you are required to illustrate it. You are required to turn it into images. I never believed in that formula. From the very beginning, in a very primitive way, a very primal way, from something that was inside me — instinctive, I would say — I had no inclination towards it at all. I could see no logic in writing something down and then reconstructing it. Writing an image. Writing a sequence. Then rebuilding it. I never understood that.
And I think this became a seed. An embryo formed, for the cinema I was to step into. I could say that I began making films in a state of sleepwalking. As though I walked in my sleep and began making the films. It was never a conscious, rational decision.
The second thing is that when I began making films, I understood what kind of filmmaker I was not before I understood what I was. I knew I was not a storyteller, not a narrative filmmaker. And in any case I could not have made such films — there was no budget for it, it required a cast and a crew, a great many people, and I had no budget. So: that filmmaker is not me.
Second, I could never see myself as a documentarian. I could not simply go and document something and remain faithful to a reality that was taking place. I have always believed that art is a lie. A fabrication. A mental construction — far closer to the world of dreams, the world of sleep and of reverie, than to anything attached to reality. I therefore had no faithfulness, no allegiance, no vow to reality whatsoever. I believe the work of an artist is to produce what is not reality, precisely because reality already exists. The reproduction of reality held no meaning for me. So I did not consider myself a documentarian either.
And third, I had no inclination towards the work being produced at that time in the visual arts, the plastic arts — what was happening in Iran then, the events in the galleries, the exhibitions running in the museums, the artists who were using moving image, using cinema, to create images and to create the work they were making in those galleries. That is to say: you take out a loan from the history of cinema in order to come and speak about some other preoccupation, in another form, within art. I knew that I was not that either.
So three things had become clear to me. I understood that I was not a narrative filmmaker, not a documentary filmmaker, and not an artist using moving image within the visual arts.
And here I should also mention that cinephilia — watching films — was the most important thing in my work, from the very beginning. It began with watching films, from a very basic level, and I knew what existed only to that extent. It was like a vampiric relationship. Like a vampire sinking its teeth into the history of cinema and drawing the blood up, feeding on it continuously. A very morbid relationship, a very ominous relationship with the history of cinema. That is how it always was for me, because the images were forming inside me and I was absorbing them.
And when I had eliminated those three options for myself, I understood: all right, perhaps experimental cinema is the closest thing to the work that I am able to do. I took refuge in it, as though there were no other course open to me. There are times when you know what kind of film you want to make and your task is clear. I was never that filmmaker. I was always a sceptic — always a person who doubted the whole question — and then I would go and work the problem out.
As for how I arrived at the term “experimental cinema”, how I fell into it, and how it has taken shape for me over these years: I would say that everything I have just described plays a very important part in how I look at the experimental. And every day, I still do not know exactly what the concept means. I think that at the moment I understand precisely what experimental cinema is, I will stop making films altogether. Because once you know exactly what the thing is, you no longer have any energy left to go and discover. And for me, discovery has been the most interesting part of the whole process.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · There were a great many points in that — and I think several of them are ones Sina and I will want to return to over the next few years, because they are worth opening up properly. But let me put the first question a different way. I asked about the relation of Rouzbeh Rashidi the filmmaker to experimental cinema. Now I want to shift it slightly, and ask about the relation of Rouzbeh Rashidi the cinephile, the student of cinema, to that same word.
Last night I was reading a conversation with Stan Brakhage in which he had been asked more or less exactly this. Brakhage says there that cinema has two constituencies: one is experimental and avant-garde cinema and the people working in that field, and the other is mainstream Hollywood cinema. He said, I take pleasure in both of these, because I understand what they do; but I have never understood the cinema in between. That is the point from which Brakhage begins — and a great deal of what many of us know and love as art-house cinema falls precisely into that middle ground.
So, as a cinephile, I would like to know how you see it. Because it has seemed to me that when we use the term “experimental film” — when I say this is an experimental film — the word can signify on three quite different levels at once.
The first is purely aesthetic: when we look at the word from the side of form, and say experimental form.
The second is when we define the word by the process of its own making — and part of what you have just said brings me closer to this reading — that is, a process of production which defines itself, in various ways, outside the fixed mechanisms by which films are ordinarily produced.
And the third level is the mechanism by which these films are consumed. Consumption in the broad sense: the way an audience watches them, passes them hand to hand, talks about them — which likewise seems to fall entirely outside the settled mechanisms of film-viewing.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · I can answer this in several layers. What follows is of course only my own opinion, a personal one, and very much a matter of disposition, because I do not believe there is any universal law governing the question. These are simply attitudes I have arrived at over twenty-odd years of making films.
First: when we say “experimental cinema” in the most basic and colloquial way, we are handing the audience a category. When the audience comes to see the films, we are telling them — what you are about to see is an unconventional product, a non-standard one. Do you want to go ahead with it or not? Do you want to buy that ticket or not? Do you want to pay to see this film or not? That, at the first level, is what the term does, and it is a very simple thing: it belongs to the manner in which the film is presented.
The next attitude comes from further back. When I started watching films, from a very basic level, I reached a dead end — everything had become repetitive for me — and I wanted to see films that came from outside the bed in which those films were being shown. So I began searching for what I could find, and there were a few books, and I began reading them. One of the most important was Amos Vogel’s — you probably know it — Film as a Subversive Art. That book had a very deep and far-reaching effect on me.
Vogel had founded a club called Cinema 16 in America, which systematically gathered the work of Brakhage, of Maya Deren, of Kenneth Anger, and of other filmmakers active in American cinema at that time; he programmed them and showed them in a very small club. And it was precisely that repetition — the recurrence of those screenings, weekly and monthly — that brought into being an attitude, a moment, within American cinema which we now call American experimental cinema. That was extremely interesting to me, and I can say that it became, at the very least, a ground for me as well.
Because when I looked around me in Iran, I saw nothing of the kind. In Iran, unfortunately, there was a particular habit — I do not know what the situation is now — by which the word “experimental” was always glued to documentary cinema. Even now, I believe, there is an organisation for “experimental documentary”, something of that sort, with its own festival, and everything is shown within that frame. The attitude in Iran for years — and I am speaking of twenty years ago; it has probably changed a great deal since — was this: very well, experimental cinema is like an illegitimate child with no parents, wandering the streets on its own; let us put its hand into the hand of some bigger, tougher, more established genre, namely documentary, so that it can acquire an identity.
In my view that was completely wrong. It had become a kind of compulsion in Iran that this thing had to be taken up alongside documentary cinema, and I was strongly opposed to it, because the two have not the slightest resemblance to one another. They come from an entirely different world, with an entirely different attitude, entirely different works, and entirely different characteristics.
So I tried to turn this knowledge — these readings, and the films I was seeing — back into the thinking behind the Experimental Film Society, which I started at that time. What I did was this. In the parking garage of our house there was a very small room. I gathered the films I was making myself, and the films my friends were making, and some of the films I could get hold of then on Betamax and VHS, and I began inviting people to sit down and watch this work together — every week, or once a month. Friends, and people I would more or less drag in and sit down in that garage, and show them what these films were.
Because I had entirely given up hope of the festivals — the Tehran Short Film Festival, and the others that existed in Iran at the time. We would send these films and they were never accepted. And I said to myself: very well, this is not a problem. They plainly have their own particular products, and these films do not suit their selection. I shall have to do this work myself.
And I remember that around that time I had read something by Jonathan Rosenbaum — an article, I believe about Philippe Garrel and Werner Schroeter; I should find it again — in which he wrote that these were filmmakers who belonged to a culture which did not exist at the time they were making their films, and that they had understood that since the culture did not exist, they would have to build it themselves in order to have somewhere to stand.
That remark became a key for me. It was as though a leech had fastened onto my soul and kept feeding there, and it became enormously attractive to me to do such a thing myself.
When we speak of cinephilia — as Serge Daney puts it — there is always an action and a reaction: towards your own history, towards your own biology, towards the family you grew up in, and towards the history of cinema. There is always a dynamism, a movement between those two poles: the character you are, the personality you have, and the manner in which you consume cinema. That, to my mind, is a definition of cinephilia. And you are permanently entangled with it. What do you do with these images? You have seen these films — what then happens to you? Where do the images go? How do they come out again? When you sit down and watch a film, what happens to you?
It can issue in the making of another film. It can issue in a literature of film — in criticism. Or cinephilia can become a culture for living altogether. When Daney says that cinema had promised him a new world, a world that was going to come, it has something utopian about it, and you spend your life trying to draw nearer to that world, that space. Something happens to you, and there is always a dynamism at work.
For me, that dynamism took shape in filmmaking. I wanted something to happen to me by way of these images I had swallowed and consumed. It was like a condition in which you eat a very great deal, and past a certain point you bring it all up — you vomit completely. I always saw experimental cinema in that way. The thing has happened; you have consumed intensely; you can see a terrifying quantity of film; and then it comes out of the body, that energy comes out, and you have to do something with it — for the survival of cinephilia, and even for the survival of life, for carrying your life forward.
Because this condition — Truffaut has a very famous phrase about it — cinephilia is like a sickness. Like an illness. You must either cure the illness or keep feeding it, like an addiction whose mouth you must keep filling with the drug. It is a deeply ominous relationship, I think, for people caught up in cinephilia, and it grows more severe as time passes.
And for me, experimental cinema was a laboratory containing all the elements I have described: this addiction, this vomiting, this dynamism, the culture that existed in Iran, and the oppression and suppression that existed there — whether from the direction of the family or from the accepted norms of the society you were living inside. Because all of these also hand you a political outlook. For me the political dimension was very invisible; I never introduced it directly into the work. But that ominous quality was always present — as in the films of David Lynch, where in a certain sense a feeling of terror exists but you never see its source. That was exactly my situation.
Because the level of cinephilia, and the way I handled it inside experimental cinema during the years I was living in Iran — all of it served the work. And when I emigrated, I was never able to detach it from myself. The only thing I have been able to do is to perfect all of those senses. To polish them slowly, and to see what is inside them. Like a gem that you work on over years, cutting it: something of alchemy about it. My outlook towards experimental cinema, and towards human beings, has always been of this kind, and it comes out of that ground.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · Very good — very thorough, full of detail. Thank you, Rouzbeh. Sina, before we move on to the next question, do you want to add anything here?
ALISINA AZARI · Yes, certainly. Rouzbeh made several points in passing that I think it would be worth opening up a little further, so that we can speak in more detail about his experiences and pass them on to listeners who are drawn to experimental cinema.
Let us talk about the false distortions of experimental cinema in the festivals, from long ago until today, and about their effects — and about how Rouzbeh and his companions stood against those distortions and against what the festivals imposed from above. That is to say, let us talk about a culture that is fundamentally reactive. This young energy that is drawn to experimental cinema, if it is genuinely and deeply drawn to it, is obliged to react against the dominant current, and it fundamentally describes itself in resistance to that current. And that resistance brings its own customs with it: a culture of watching, a culture of making, of producing, and even a culture of circulating the films — specifically, screenings held at home, in the basements of houses. I am thinking of Rouzbeh and his friends at the beginning of their activity in Tehran: a form of exhibition which is itself a proposal about how films should be seen. A form which, unfortunately or fortunately, is the same everywhere in the world, and which defines itself in small places far from the principal centres of exhibition.
What did that form of experience add to Rouzbeh’s outlook? And later, how did those activities and that way of looking manage to make the definition of experimental cinema more inward, more internal, for Rouzbeh and for those around him?
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Let me first draw attention to something you said which I believe completely: that it is the same in other parts of the world. I agree entirely.
When I left Iran at the age of twenty-three — in a state of despair, of depression, with my head bowed, and in something of a fit of temper — and came to Ireland and England, I said to myself: well, this will surely be paradise. All the clubs will be showing me experimental work, everything will be open. Then I set foot here, and after six months of searching and looking around — and I am speaking of Ireland in particular — I saw that it was not merely like Iran. It was five levels worse. And this is a first-world country with capital, with a very large GDP; there is no economic problem and no problem of censorship.
Seeing that made me think hard. So this culture is not specific to Iran. It is not an Iranian problem, not something peculiar to that particular front which exists in Iran. This condition can take shape perfectly well in a European country.
The only difference between Iran and Ireland or England was this. In Iran they always wanted to treat experimental film as though it were a cancerous tumour: either cut it out, or graft it onto something else — like a Frankenstein’s body, attach it to another creature so that it can at least go on living. Which is, in my view, at any rate an act. A movement of some kind.
What existed in Ireland and England was the category of indifference. These people are entirely cold on the question. They neither hate experimental cinema nor love it; they neither respect it nor disrespect it. Nothing whatever. No reaction, no dynamism, no movement at all — as though the thing did not exist. It simply was not present in the festivals; there was no experimental section. And even when we asked people where one might see these films, they did not know what such a programme would even be.
That had a profound effect on me.
The second point concerns what you asked about the category of production, and I want to make two remarks about it.
The first is that if we go back to the history of cinema, we see this from the very beginning. When we speak of the pioneer filmmakers — Georges Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Porter, Griffith, Frank Borzage — when we speak of them at all, when we speak of the film pioneers, of Buñuel: what does that actually mean? It means that these people had no rule. No book. No rulebook, no chapter from which all the laws issued. At the moment these people began making films, no such thing existed. They came to a medium that had only just come into being, that had only just become available and was beginning to be popular, and they went at it entirely instinctively and experimentally, and began making films — very experimentally, very avant-garde, very instinctively, and I would even say poetically.
Which is to say that experimental cinema is not a separate institution. It is bound up with the formation of cinema itself. The cinema we normally refer to — the narrative feature, commercial cinema — arrives and takes shape twenty years later, because money entered it. All of that forms afterwards. The emergence and development of cinema is fused with experimentation. Every one of the earliest filmmakers, everyone we call a pioneer, we can in a certain sense place within the category of experimental cinema. The whole of cinema is indebted to it.
Fergus Daly — an Irish critic whom I knew very closely, and whose work Vahid knows well — says that the whole of commercial cinema, the whole of industrial cinema, is a material for experimental filmmakers to recycle. To my mind that is a very important observation.
Then again, when we speak of a filmmaker such as Leos Carax, this is in my view an experimental filmmaker who is not at all prolific, but who has installed himself within the frame of a commercial feature director in order to be able to make his films. And yet if we look at that work closely, under a magnifying glass, it is infinitely experimental, avant-garde and advanced. That is very interesting. It is one kind of filmmaking.
The second point is the filmmakers who can work with their own means of production — with whatever is at your disposal, the things you actually own. A laptop. A telephone. The cheap cameras you mentioned. Once you have that equipment you begin to play with it, in a manner very like the behaviour we speak of in psychoanalysis: you begin with these instruments as a child plays, and you see what comes out of them, entirely instinctively, and you produce images.
Then you archive those images. And with images that you created yourself, you enter into the same relationship as with found footage — because although you did indeed make them, you are in a kind of amnesia about them; you are not really conscious that they came into existence, or exactly when they took shape. It becomes a mountain that you accumulate across a filmmaking life, and you begin to work with it. Someone like Gérard Courant, someone like Jonas Mekas, and a great many other filmmakers, look at the question in this way: in the end you form the same relationship with the material you made yourself as you would with found footage. That is another kind of experimental filmmaking.
Another kind is the one that engages specifically with celluloid — that is highly medium-specific. People such as Brakhage, whom you mentioned. It is a chemical outlook: a poetic laboratory you have built for yourself, in which you are continuously engaged with the material, and you begin painting on the celluloid. A painterly relation to the medium.
And another way of being engaged with experimental cinema is to give up the creation of images altogether and turn entirely to found footage. Chris Marker, or Harun Farocki, have done enormous work of this kind.
What I am trying to say is that a great deal depends on how you want to engage with the medium, and that there are completely different routes. You can even abandon cinema entirely — step outside the single channel, step outside, and begin expanded cinema. You can go further and say: I no longer want to work inside cinema at all. I want to dematerialise cinema. I want to expose the mechanics of cinema completely, to break them down and dissolve them, and come into space with light — like Hollis Frampton, like Paul Sharits. I want only performance. These things are highly ephemeral: it happens once, the audience sees it, and it is gone, and only a memory of it remains. The film takes shape in the mind of the audience in that way. The only thing that can happen afterwards is that some documentation of it may survive, like an artefact — like something you have pulled out of a dream.
So experimental cinema offers you an endless possibility. Whereas we might see narrative cinema as a single possibility, because its outcome is entirely determined: since it is so deeply entangled with commercialism, you are obliged to take certain paths and there is no other route, especially if you intend to go towards distribution. But in experimental cinema you do not carry that invisible economic weight; you are functioning by yourself, with whatever means are within your reach, and you can therefore express yourself in a very great many ways, and you experiment.
And I think cinema is a very young art, and that we cannot yet understand its possibilities with any precision. Bresson understood this extremely well. Bresson says: we don’t know a thing about cinema. We do not know at all what cinema is.
Experimental cinema, in my view, has an enormous pull towards — an enormous relationship with — the formation of the seventh art at its very beginning, when those pioneers, the earliest filmmakers, were making their films. It is like an open book lying on the table, in which filmmakers are able to express themselves.
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VAHID MORTAZAVI · Let us come back to Phantom Islands, the film you made in 2018. If I am pulling the film into the middle of our conversation, it is for several reasons. One is that it is my favourite — or rather, it gradually became my favourite. Last night I watched it for the seventh time, and I felt that it is a film I have been able to understand better over these years — to grasp more precisely what it is doing — and one that reveals more of its subtlety on each subsequent viewing.
At the same time — and you must correct me if what I am about to say is wrong — it appears to be a film that has connected with a general audience more than your other films have. I say that purely on the basis of the number of screenings at the festivals it travelled to; my information may be inaccurate, so please correct me afterwards.
And yet the film has also become a very strange experience. It is a film that makes a great many promises, that proposes definitions, and then immediately, playfully, mischievously, contradicts them. It promises documentary. It wants to be experimental. And at the same time it appears to want to be a narrative film. Simultaneously we see the meta-filmic dimension of it: you keep appearing inside the film in playful and peculiar ways in order to expose that dimension — the camera in the hands of the film’s actress, the lenses she keeps picking up and turning towards the camera, and sometimes the behind-the-scenes of the film itself surfacing.
It is a film that refers constantly to the history of cinema, and even those references take strange forms. At times we feel that, just as on the narrative level it is difficult to tell where we are — inside the minds of this man and this woman, or outside them — the film seems to want to play precisely that game: that we are both within their minds and observing them from without. And at the same time there is its mass of references to film history. Epstein — Jean Epstein, the great French filmmaker — a reference that seems to sit at the film’s first level and which the film itself underlines. And then a set of far more delicate references. At the moment the film’s ending arrives, I can see that it is invoking Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert. Except that the green ray here is a red one, and there are a man and a woman with their eyes fixed on it — which opens up yet another layer.
So at this ending we seem to be back inside one of those films: because in the history of cinema there are these films of a man and a woman, films which dissect the relationship of a couple and arrive at the end at a moment of equilibrium, at some kind of resolution — and Éric Rohmer, as a French filmmaker, defines himself in a certain relation to that cinema, and to that ending of Le Rayon vert. Your film arrives at the same ending from a completely different direction. And that is only one of the film’s many layers.
What I want to say is that this is a very strange film, and yet at the same time it seems to define a new thread in your body of work. I am particularly interested — in connection with everything we have been discussing — in whether this film, and Rouzbeh Rashidi’s relationship with an audience through it, might be a prediction of where your work goes next.
And a separate question, which I may as well ask here: how did this film actually take shape? I am curious whether you had all of this as a screenplay prepared in advance, whether these ideas were ready beforehand, or whether things changed a great deal in the course of the filmmaking.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Thank you — genuinely — for those descriptions. In moments like this, when I hear such things, I sometimes think that the work I am doing may matter a little. Thank you.
Let me start here, with something I should have said. I began making films in the late nineties. I started with photography, for two years, between sixteen and eighteen, and then went directly into the world of filmmaking, because I was not satisfied by the still image — by photography — and I wanted to set it in motion.
From the moment I began making films until Phantom Islands, I was — I am, in general — an extreme person, both in my artistic life and in my personal life, which to my mind are not different from one another at all. I want to stress that: my art is my life and my life is my art. There is no difference whatever between them, and wherever boundaries did exist I tried to erase them completely, to break them, and to dissolve the two into each other. That has been true throughout my life; I am forty now.
But there was an extremism, a radicalism. From the moment I began filmmaking until Phantom Islands, I regarded it rather like military service — like a period of conscription. I liked being inside that militarised space, that very extreme space, that space of radicalism; I could even call it fanatical. It was how I could bring the ideas I had into images.
There is a very fine artist whom we all probably know, Brian Eno — an extraordinary avant-garde musician whose work I love very much. Eno says that being in extreme and radical conditions is very interesting, but only in the manner of a traveller: when you go and reach those borders you must leave quickly and come back to the middle. Being in the middle is a very interesting place for an artist and an intellectual, because they have gone out, seen the extreme conditions, made a limited body of work there — and equally they do not want to remain in the commercial and conservative and conformist and entirely safe world. So the middle position is the interesting one.
What happened to me — and it was completely deliberate — is that I imprisoned myself inside those extreme conditions of filmmaking for, I would say, seventeen years. And I had no alternative, because the films I wanted to make had to be produced in that space.
What it gave me was this. I was a very prolific filmmaker — prolific meaning someone who creates a great deal of artistic work — and that rate of production, that sheer output of films, was for me a practice through which I could bring into images the way I looked at filmmaking and at life. Because I believe deeply in craft and in skill. I am intensely interested in the profession of filmmaking, in the technique of filmmaking. A filmmaker such as José Val del Omar, the Spanish experimental filmmaker, has this same relation to cinema.
That is to say: the way you assemble different cameras and different lenses, different filters, different techniques, editing, sound — the way you gather all the instruments and build a workshop out of which the films can be made. That is extremely important to me.
I never believed in a crew. I was a one-man army. In every one of my films, from the beginning until now, I have done all the technical work myself. The only thing I have used is actors. Everything that happens behind the camera is my responsibility. And when I do work with a collaborator or an actor, it is always in front of the lens.
So while I was in that radical space, I was able to strengthen my skill, to strengthen my technique, and to take the filmmaking I had always been so passionate about to a very advanced level.
On the other hand, when you are in an extreme, radical space, you lose the audience. The audience cannot really make contact. It is seized by a kind of dread, a fear, and does not know how it is supposed to connect with these films.
And after all those years I too had arrived at a despair, at a hopelessness — I could even say a saturation, and a fear. How far can I go on in this radical space, this extreme space? It is like the North Pole. How long can I stay in it? Enough. Now I want to go somewhere else, to have a Mediterranean space in which I can think. I am tired after all these years in those conditions.
Phantom Islands was exactly that point for me. I deliberately wanted to make a film that would draw on all the selected techniques I had learned and had at my disposal, so that I could make a film capable of making contact with an audience. And another reason was that I had received a very large budget from the Irish state, and I was to some extent answerable to the Arts Council of Ireland. I would explain to them what I was doing, so that they would give me more money to make films. All of these factors together conspired to make me change the way I was making films.
And when I began making this one, I knew deliberately where to do what: where, if it was running too far into extremism, becoming too radical, to bring the tension down; how to work with other filmmakers; how to work with actors; how to ask a musician to write a piece; and how to work with other collaborators. So it was a reconciliation — for the first time in my life — with a middle space. Many people may well watch Phantom Islands and say how extreme and experimental it is. For me it was not.
When the film was finished I was genuinely astonished at how many screenings it received. It was distributed all over the world; it went to more than seventy or eighty festivals; a cinema in Switzerland gave it a two-week run. All of this was a shock to us. I had never made a film capable of travelling that far.
That is one part of it. The second part is that I wanted to say something about the relationship of a couple, which I had spoken about in other films as well, because I was caught up in it myself. Things were happening in my personal life and I wanted to reflect them.
And I wanted to talk about landscape, and about the presentation of landscape. When you set a camera in front of a landscape and film it — what does that mean? Is it documentary? Is it fiction? Is it fabrication? Is it a lie? What is it? Because a landscape is simply a landscape. How can we — as with Chantal Akerman — establish whether this is documentary or not? Where is that point? Where is the border? I wanted to have some answer for all of these questions.
Because the proposal I had given to the people funding it was that this was a film about landscape. And I then deliberately crammed these actors into those landscapes — as comical, grotesque figures at the very least, carrying very deep references to the history of cinema, to its earliest period, like a silent film.
And I wanted not to remain entirely faithful even to my own idea. Because Raúl Ruiz is another filmmaker whose influence on me is profound, and he says that betraying all the ideas you hold — all your artistic ideas — is the most important thing you can do for your art. If you remain faithful even to your own ideas, that creates a safety around you. And the only way you can come out of that comfort zone, that safe space, that warm and soft and gentle conservatism, is to betray it continuously, and continuously to contradict even the artistic ideas you yourself brought into being.
So I brought these figures, these exaggerated and comical performances, into the landscape. In the first instance you are confronted with landscapes that are like tableaux. I set the camera — a 4K camera — on a tripod for these, and, which may be of interest, used lenses I had customised myself: nineteenth-century Petzval lenses. I adapted them so that they could work with today’s cameras. These lenses go back a hundred and fifty-six years. They are very old, and it was extremely difficult to find the technique that would let me film these images at all.
Then, when you have these tableau-like images and you introduce the actors into them, it produces a duality for the audience — two ideas about a single concept — and with it a tension, two poles, a north and a south. What is this? Are we dealing with landscape and documentary, or with this thoroughly farcical, exaggerated situation of actors who look as though they have come out of film history?
And it keeps forming and moving forward. In that sense it is a documentary film, because it continuously puts its own creative process, its own process of making, into images. As Brecht would say, you keep revealing. Godard did this extremely well. You keep showing what the manner of the film’s making is. So we move away from the suspension of disbelief and are completely engaged instead. And as the space of the film forms and the images move forward, the audience is constantly reminded: this film is being made. This film is being made. The moment I allow a narrative to form, I take a pair of scissors to it, cut it open, and show the audience — no; this is a fabrication, a story in the act of taking shape, and you are engaged the whole time with the medium of cinema.
That was the point at which I managed to create a balance. On one side I could still speak through the radical ideas I had; on the other, I had tried to make something more accessible to an audience. And the outcome genuinely astonished me. I was completely taken aback. The film changed me a great deal, and it reminded me that you can do this work — but that you should now leave that space of extremism, the North Pole, and come out and make films somewhere else. Which is the period I am in now.
My next film is also very extreme, because I already had funding for it and made it afterwards. But now I very much want to make more films in that other space — not in the shape of Phantom Islands, but so that I can build a bridge between the space of extremism and a more accessible one. Phantom Islands is the product of exactly that.
music
VAHID MORTAZAVI · …the way you formulated it. Which, in a sense, as I said myself, begins on one level with the promise of a landscape cinema, and on another layer is also invoking one of those conjugal comedies of the cinema. And the ending — in my own reading, though I do not think it is only mine, because the point is very clear in the film — with that couple looking at the red ray.
Now, Rouzbeh, this path, as I understand it, is a give and take. You begin with initial ideas — as you said, because of the funding you had, and the promise you gave them was a landscape film — but this keeps changing in the course of the making. What I want to know is whether this ending, this idea of the couple watching the ray, is a product of that process, or whether you had it in view from the beginning. Did you know where it would end? It would help me and Koker’s audience to get further inside your process.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Certainly, certainly. Let me first say something about the references. Because of what I said at the very beginning — the way in which I watch films. Others may well share this, or have a way of watching similar to mine. What I do is to focus on a single director and fasten onto that director’s filmography like an obsessive, and work through it to see what I can discover.
For a long period I had been watching Jean Epstein, Marguerite Duras, Żuławski, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette. All of these people gave me a great deal, because I was learning from all of them, and there were certain sequences that lodged inside me and took shape there.
I do not know whether other filmmakers experience this. I read a great deal in the writings of Serge Daney and of Deleuze; they are the only writers I have found who speak about it. It is that when you watch a body of films, it is as though you become pregnant. As though a seed forms inside you and begins to grow — inside you, in your brain, in your unconscious memory a child takes shape, grows, and at a certain point has to come out. And I wanted these images, these sequences, to come out.
So in Phantom Islands there is a very direct reference to Jacques Rivette’s Duelle, in the scene beside the aquarium. That one is entirely explicit. There is a very deep reference to Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, the one you mentioned — again, very direct.
At the same time there are references that are not direct at all, but sit in the manner of the acting: that exaggerated quality, that erotic quality, that frenzied way of performing. That comes from Żuławski. If we look at the performances in Żuławski’s films, he drove his actors into an extremely extreme, frenzied condition, an extremely chaotic and critical condition, and there was always conflict and violence and war and trouble on his set.
And there are references such as Jean Epstein, which go back to the body of the film — to its skeletal structure, and to where the landscape sits inside it. What has always fascinated me is that when I watch Epstein’s films, I feel teleported. As though I am lifted out of the place where I am and thrown into those locations. It has an entirely magical effect on me. I have seen very few filmmakers with whom the effect is not mental — with Epstein I feel it physically, that I have genuinely gone somewhere else. I distinctly feel the change in temperature. I hear certain sounds. And it remains astonishing to me how that man managed to capture landscape in his films. I wanted to do something about that.
At the same time, there is a filmmaker I love profoundly — Marguerite Duras. I love her work without limit. To my mind she is a severely, severely underrated filmmaker, severely unappreciated, never given her due, and largely forgotten by the history of cinema. Because as we know she is a much-loved writer in France and in the world; her books and her literature are honoured and known. Her films are not, in the same way.
I had been reading about Duras’s films in Deleuze, where he says that what happens in her films is this: we have a fixed image, and a narration that is extraordinarily soporific, boring, slow — I would almost say torturous — such that you are compelled to reconstruct all the images, the whole demand of the film, for yourself, out of the voice that Duras is producing for you.
And that is genuinely true. When we watch Duras’s films — that woman’s voice over these images, over this very slow forward movement; and most of her films take shape in seaside towns, small French towns by the sea, in forgotten hotels, hotels without many guests, or I could even say abandoned hotels, or the small villas that stand around them, by the sea, with the sound of the sea coming in — this ghostly, saturated quality produces an extraordinarily haunting space. It produces a very strange and melancholy space, and you have no choice but to listen to Duras’s voice, and it is as though she carries you into a sleep in which you build the thing for yourself.
I wanted to do exactly that with Phantom Islands — but with sound. Where Duras uses literature, uses language, I wanted to do it with sound.
So, to answer dear Vahid’s question: I did write something for Phantom Islands, a set of notes, as a treatment — one could not call it a screenplay. But when I came to begin shooting I tore it up completely and threw it aside, and had no wish to be faithful to it. So I did not work from text at all. I went and took images, came back, edited, and finished the film completely.
And when that was done, I went out to record again — but this time only sound. For several months I recorded sound. I wanted to do the same thing Duras had done with the narrations she lays over her films, and to bring it into being through sound instead. And I did it like a Foley artist — the Foley artists being the people who, in Italian cinema, or in the early Hollywood period, made the sounds for films; someone walks past, and they produce the footsteps with a shoe. I made the sound for this entire film like a Foley artist.
And I did not want it tightly synchronised — I did not want the image bound closely to the sound. I wanted the image to have its own narration, its own quality, its own particular characteristics, and the sound likewise. Every so often they coincide and produce a sensation of synchronisation, a sensation that sound and image have married one another. But very often they are divorced. Completely divorced, having nothing to do with each other: that one goes about its own business, and this one goes about its own.
This is always the case in my films. Sound matters enormously to me, because I have never been faithful to language. Even where I have used language in a film, I have tried to drive it towards destruction — to bring language to an end, to reduce it to a sound. We have given far too much credit to language. I have never had any deep respect for it, and I have tried to carry my films forward with images and with these sounds instead.
So Phantom Islands, I would say, is a complex structure built out of all these ways of looking accumulated over the years, all these references gathered over the years. Before making the film I had swallowed them, and I wanted to do something with them. They all took shape, and came out in this film.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · That is very interesting, Rouzbeh — that this film is so engineered. Because I too, on every viewing and particularly the last, felt how much energy had gone into it, how much work has been done on every single image: from the simple choice of the vista, to the camera angle, to the relation between actor and camera, to the work done on the soundtrack. A film worked over to that degree — and yet one that does not for a moment want to appear engineered in its relation to the viewer. It is, I would say, a kind film.
Now, when I say the film is kind to the viewer, I do not want to give the wrong impression to someone who has not seen it. It is still not an easy film. But it is a film which, for an ordinary viewer with some patience, can be kinder than perhaps your other work.
And one more thing, purely out of personal curiosity: when you showed this film to the people who had funded it, what was their reaction? That interests me particularly because your relationship with funders — with the funders of your future work — may determine a good deal.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · On your saying that the film is kind: I entirely believe that, Vahid.
When I finished this film it reminded me of something Kieślowski said in one of his interviews. He said: I genuinely do not understand my own films, and I do not know at all why I make them. The reason I make them is so that, together with the audience, I can understand what on earth I have done — what I did, and why I did it. Arriving at that understanding is very important, and I learned it from Kieślowski: that we do not occupy a god-like position with respect to the work we create. It forms under very complicated, very particular human conditions, and in a state that is highly creative, highly critical, intangible and obscure — moments of creation to which we have very little intellectual access.
And when we have made these works, when the work enters the cycle of distribution, when an audience sees it, when a critic writes on it, when you go and talk with an audience — only then do you understand what has actually happened.
When I began travelling with this film to different countries — I went to South America three times, having never been before, and to a great many places in Europe — talking with audiences about the film, every one of them, without exception, said exactly what you have just said: that the film was kind to us, and that we were able to connect with it. So what you say is right.
As to how the funders reacted. When I first showed the film to the people who had invested in it, some of them were completely shocked; they had expected nothing of the kind. Others became intensely enamoured of it. It polarised them beautifully. Some, I can say, did not like it at all and were profoundly disturbed by it — it did not leave them in a good state. And others praised it passionately and loved it.
And I think it was precisely that bipolar reaction which helped the funders decide: very well, let us take the risk, give this man the rest of the budget, let him finish the work, and stand behind it.
This was also the only film of mine that a distributor properly took up — the Irish Film Institute bought it and shows it. And it is interesting that this film is working, without my having thought about it especially deeply. I say that seriously. Over these years I have come to find this honesty, this way of speaking about one’s own films and about filmmaking, very interesting. I genuinely made no such claim for it. I could only speak about the engineering of the film.
Which reminds me of an extraordinary interview with von Stroheim, one of the great filmmakers of my life. He said in one of his interviews that the working relationship he has with his films, the relationship he has with cinema, is that of a patient and a surgeon. I do everything in my power to save this patient and grant it a life. If the patient lives, then I did my work well. And very often the patient dies on the table.
That view was extremely interesting to me. I could only do the surgical part, the part that was in my hands, and do it completely, so that this film would be able to live and go on living — and it has. Whereas a great many of my films — I have made films that have all died. This one exists.
Yes, it never entered the great circulation of an audience. Perhaps this is the vampiric quality that cinema also possesses: it is possible that these films will be resurrected — that they will come back like Dracula and live, even once I am dead. You never know what will happen to the work, because the history of cinema is extremely complicated in this respect and full of surprises. Sometimes there is a film that attracted no attention whatever in the period it was made, and years later it becomes a cult object. I do not know what will happen to my other films. But in the meantime this one is working and moving forward, like a pulse carrying my filmmaking along with it.
And meanwhile, the people who gave me money knew me as an extreme filmmaker, and as someone with a considerable reputation in the experimental world. They knew it was a risk. And that will always be with me — the people who give me money to make films, the people who give me the opportunity to show them, and the people in the audience. I have always wanted to be in that space. A space full of risk.
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A note on four names
Four names were indistinct in the recording and were left marked rather than guessed. All four were confirmed by Rouzbeh Rashidi on 8 September 2026 and are now set in the text.
David Lynch — the ominous quality whose source is never seen. The name was badly mangled in the audio; confirmed.
Leos Carax — unrecoverable from the audio, and left blank in the first version rather than invented. Confirmed as the filmmaker meant: not prolific, working inside the frame of a commercial feature director in order to make his films, and infinitely experimental under close scrutiny.
Gérard Courant — the audio gives something like jarad kurand; confirmed.
José Val del Omar — the audio gives something like khoz valdar omar; confirmed.
Two further notes, which are repairs rather than uncertainties:
Where the recording says “suspension of belief”, this has been set as suspension of disbelief, the term the argument requires. – Where the recording gives “green love” for the Rohmer film, this has been set as Le Rayon vert / The Green Ray — Whisper has misheard the Persian for “ray” as the Persian for “love”, and both speakers describe the film’s ending unambiguously.
