Escape from Boredom and Days of Stillness, Part Two: Rouzbeh Rashidi in conversation with Vahid Mortazavi and AliSina Azari
A recorded conversation in Persian, part two 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 دوم گفتگوی وحید مرتضوی و علیسینا آزری با روزبه رشیدی فیلمساز تجربی
Part Two 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.
That approach Rouzbeh describes — the kindness we have been insisting on — is there in Phantom Islands. But we should add one more thing, which is what makes his next film so interesting: that the experimental cinema, in spite of everything Phantom Islands achieved, does not simply continue into it. This variety within Rouzbeh’s work, these different experimentalisms, is one of its most marked features.
I would like us to talk more about Luminous Void, because the last time I watched it I watched it twice, and everything we have been discussing is present in it in another form altogether. It is a film that displays, very plainly, one of the most important characteristics of experimental cinema: it resists every kind of classification.
And there is the interesting fact that Luminous Void equals Docudrama. Here again we are faced with a documentary-writing that is not documentary. We are faced with a mass of quite different pieces set beside one another, each of which seems, in the manner of a cinephile, to summon some part of the history of cinema. It summons horror cinema, which is one of its most compelling aspects. It summons science fiction. And it is full of references — from Lynchian melancholies through to many of the material, body-centred dimensions of cinema.
And all of this sits against a background that is addressed as collective work, because we can effectively regard the film as a kind of cinematic manifesto of the group. The whole group is inside the film, in the act of making a film. And all of them seem to be encountering cinema, and searching — inside the text and inside the images — for how cinema is to be summoned at all. That form of searching in the next film is completely distant from Phantom Islands.
Friends, let us talk about it a little.
ALISINA AZARI · Let me add one thing before Rouzbeh begins. It is rather timely, because I have just learned that in two weeks, on the first of March, the film is going to be released online for a general audience — anyone will be able to rent it and watch it. That was only by way of explanation. Rouzbeh, please go on.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Yes, of course. Sina, thank you, truly. I am genuinely glad that both of you — and dear Vahid — open this up so beautifully and speak about it in this way. It is a very great honour for me.
And let me say that I have a delight at this moment that, like a child, I cannot hide. Because I think I can say this is the first interview in some eleven years in which I have spoken Persian — with Iranian critics, and within the world of Iranian cinephilia. For me that is a milestone, and it matters a great deal. I do not know why things have developed as they have, but I have not been able to connect much with Iran, whether through showing the films or through Iranian critics. So the fact that you are speaking about these films — and not in English, but within a culture and a literature of their own — is extraordinarily beautiful to me. I only wanted to open that parenthesis, and to thank you both.
Now, Phantom Islands. What happened to me in 2017 was that I received two funds at once, for two films, within a month or two of each other. Getting funding for experimental filmmaking is normally extremely complicated, so that year was a very important one for me. I had applied for Phantom Islands, and I had also applied to make a film that I knew I wanted to use in 2020, as a celebration — as the twentieth anniversary of the Experimental Film Society.
We have spoken about Phantom Islands. I did not want to touch Luminous Void until it was done, because Phantom Islands carried the larger budget and I was more answerable to the people who had funded it. So I finished that film; it went out, had a very good premiere, and began travelling the world. The moment it was finished I rested for perhaps two months, and then began making Luminous Void.
Luminous Void is, I would say, one of the most important films of my life — if not the most important. For me as a person: for carrying on, for the survival of a life, for pushing the artistic work forward, and for the next movement towards somewhere else that I wanted to reach. Like a bridge. Phantom Islands and Luminous Void: Docudrama served exactly that function for me.
I wanted to mark the twentieth year. I wanted to make a film that, after twenty years inside that extremism, that radicalism, that fanaticism I described earlier, would kiss the whole thing goodbye and step aside from it. I wanted to make a film in which I thought about nothing at all except pure radicalism — a film in which the genres I actually believe in would take shape without limit and be given their full value. Horror is an enormously important genre for me. Science fiction is an enormously important genre. B-movies matter intensely to me. Exploitation and sexploitation matter intensely to me. And I wanted to say something about those genres.
At the same time I wanted it to be the most collaborative film I had ever made. I wanted to involve every one of the extraordinary people and artists I had worked with across the years — twelve years, fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty — all of them at once, for the first time. There had never been a film whose scope was large enough for me to work with all of them together; I had made films with a few of them, and then, when that was over, with some others. It was tremendously adventurous and tremendously ambitious, and full of ideas, and I wanted to overturn all of it. I wanted to make what one might call an unmakeable film — unmakeable even in human terms.
And when I came to make it, I rented a studio for three months and made the entire film in there. All the settings you see in it were built in that space, over weeks. I built them, filmed them, then destroyed the sets I had built, moved well away, and built the next one. Very much like Cecil B. DeMille — on a minute scale, obviously — the way they would build ancient Rome, shoot it, tear it down, move on to something else and shoot that. It was like that for me. I wanted to work with these genres, so I built all of it, brought these people in, and collaborated with them very deeply.
I wanted to make a film in which my own limit would be entirely visible. The limit of technique. The limit of cinematography. The limit of editing. The limit of making sound. What experimental filmmaking and collaborative filmmaking actually are. I concentrated all of that onto this one film. And that limit of mine, across those twenty years, and every view I hold about experimental filmmaking, is given its value inside it.
It is a farewell to a period I do not want to return to. A period I lived in for twenty years and which is now over for me. Like a marriage — like a married life you were inside for twenty years and have now ended, and there is a child, and the child goes on living its own life and moving forward; but you too must go and find another partner, another companion, and begin a new life. That is exactly the view this film held for me, and exactly its philosophical, even poetic, weight.
The film is extreme, and it was never able to win the reception Phantom Islands found. But I had to make it in order to move on to another stage, to come closer to another region of my own artistic world.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · And what you are naming here is the twenty years. A farewell to your own past two decades. The manifesto-like form of the film, and its perfectionist form, inside a radicalism — and at the same time a radicalism that is entirely deliberate: in the play with light, in the play with montage, and in the capacities the montage opens up. That deserves a discussion of its own, and for this conversation I think simply introducing it is enough.
But at the same time I would like us to mention another work that has been taking shape alongside all of this, across the last ten years: the Homo Sapiens Project — of which, in this twentieth year, a new version has also appeared. Films made over a decade. An enormous project, and one that reminds me strongly of the experiences and the dailiness, and the recording of dailiness, that Mekas pursued on his website late in his life, or of Brakhage’s home movies in the sixties and seventies. And at the same time it carries your own cinephile disposition — a personal stamp. A kind of daily note-taking of inner states that are constantly changing.
How can we record personal states at all? How can we share with an audience the daily things that appear to be throwaway, that appear impermanent — when from another angle that very impermanence is the treasure of a life? And that treasure has been pursued in these films along quite different visual routes. One can see the traces of Phantom Islands in them, and the traces of the last film, Luminous Void. I would like us to talk a little about this ten-year project, which seems to me a major work, and one that stands up perfectly well within the field of experimental cinema.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Thank you, dear Sina. The way the two of you analyse this is extraordinary. Thank you. And it is exactly as you say.
I had several reasons for taking refuge in the Homo Sapiens Project — and I use that word, refuge, quite deliberately. Because whenever I make a film there is a need inside me. I imagine it is like this for every artist in some form: there is an urge, a need, a fire inside you; it takes shape and it has to come out. Homo Sapiens is not that. Homo Sapiens is a project I took refuge in, in order to produce a watering place for my addiction — my addiction to cinema — so that it could keep drinking there, and go on, and feed itself. That is the first reason.
The second is that in 2010 I no longer wanted to make short films. Which is very strange, because nearly all the classics of experimental cinema are short films, and we rarely see an experimental feature. The great majority of experimental work is short. But my inclination went the other way, and at first I did not know why, and I still cannot find a particular reason for it — perhaps because of a period in which I had watched an enormous number of features. I always wanted to make features, and if you look at my filmography, features are mostly what I have made. But in 2010 I decided, and I stopped making shorts.
The third reason is that I wanted to do something specific. I wanted my experiments — if I found a new camera, if I found a new lens, if I began with new footage from somewhere — I wanted deliberately not to make a good film with them, but to begin playing with the thing, examining it, putting it under pressure, and recording the results like a scientist. They need not carry any artistic weight at all; perhaps what they carry is a scientific weight. That became very interesting to me. When I talk about Phantom Islands I often mention Doctor Frankenstein, who built his monster — and in the same way I began gathering all my experiments under a single umbrella, the Homo Sapiens Project, and recording them.
They are not necessarily very good films. Perhaps they are; I cannot judge that. But I did not make them with the intention of making a masterpiece. I did not make them intending to make a perfect film, or to produce something extraordinary. I only wanted to carry out a series of experiments — with the equipment I had, with the films I had seen, with the life I was living, with the travelling I was doing — and to record them.
And I did not want to give them names. Because, as the linguist says — I have forgotten his name; I think it may be Bakhtin — when you give a name to a body, to a person, to anything at all, you give it an identity. You give it a history. You give it everything. And I did not want these films to have names. I wanted them to be like a prisoner with only a number on his hand: to give them numbers alone, so that they would be entirely without identity, entirely without kin. So I began calling them Homo Sapiens one, two, three, four, five, six. And between 2011 and 2015 I made a hundred and ninety-nine short films, and put every experiment of those four years into images.
Their logic and technique go some way beyond the film diary, because I was not simply recording something and leaving it there. In each one of these films I carried out one small experiment. Perhaps not groundbreaking, perhaps nothing extraordinary — but one small technical or aesthetic experiment upon that footage, and that is what takes it outside the film diary. I greatly enjoy watching the work of people who use the film diary, someone like Jonas Mekas. But it was not the way I wanted to work myself. With Homo Sapiens I tried to go one step further. It is another option.
And alongside that, I wanted to do something else with Homo Sapiens: to begin attacking, in a frenzied and quite savage way, every film I had made in the past, and tear them to pieces. I wanted to smash all of them apart, limb from limb, and pull new films out of them.
There were two reasons. The first is that I was not satisfied with a great many of them. For me they were over — and yet they were not finished — like the films I had made in Iran. The second is that I wanted to find out whether the making of a work of art, at the moment you say I have finished this film, is actually finished at all, or is not finished. Because among us filmmakers this assumption is very customary: you make a film, and… if I were making that film now, I would make it differently. And I thought: very well, why not make it again? Why should I only think about it? I will go and demolish the film. I will take a bulldozer to the building I put up, break it open, tear it down — and out of the iron and the bricks and the materials left in the ruin, I will build new films from the rubble.
So I brought every film I had made before 2011 back into the Homo Sapiens Project and produced them again in another form: with alternative edits, with different sound carried in from other films. They turned into strange, parentless monsters that you cannot identify at all. But I was far more satisfied with the way those films had come to exist than I had been before.
The project began swallowing things. Like a leech. Like a termite. It fell upon the films I had made and consumed all of them, put them through a mincer, mixed them together — and I was able to reproduce those films with an entirely new design of my own.
And when you do that for four years, you learn a great deal from it. You learn an enormous amount of technique.
There is a Spanish filmmaker I want to mention here — I spoke earlier about José Val del Omar; there is another called Adolfo Arrieta, whom you may know. I have read that he does exactly this with his own filmography: he goes back and reworks films he made long ago, gives them new versions, and in some cases wipes them and builds new films out of the material inside them. And Jess Franco — the Spanish horror director, who made a great many of his films in Germany and Italy and Portugal — does the same thing with his filmography.
Jess Franco is a horror filmmaker. Arrieta moves between the art-house world and the experimental one. And I wanted to build a bridge between those two, and between horror and science fiction — though horror above all has played an enormous part in the formation of Homo Sapiens.
The things I learned from this way of working I then carried into several films. There is Trailers, a science-fiction film I finished in 2015. There is Ten Years in the Sun. And most importantly of all, everything I had learned from the project — every technique — came to rest on Luminous Void: Docudrama.
So this was a school I had built for myself. A school in which I was both the teacher and the pupil, and I learned from myself. I never went to college. I never studied cinema formally. As Wenders puts it, my school was the cinémathèque I went to. I learned filmmaking only by watching films and by the experiments I devised for myself. And so my graduation — my graduating from the college of the Homo Sapiens Project — has as its thesis Luminous Void: Docudrama.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · That is very interesting. It seems now, with the definition you have just given, that Luminous Void is in one sense an ending to a period of your own path — and also, in its collective sense, that you regard it as a closing ceremony for a period of the work you did with the Experimental Film Society.
And perhaps that is exactly the pretext for us to look, from here, at the Society itself. There are plenty of reasons: this film, and the way you define it in relation to the Society. This year is the Society’s twentieth, and there was the celebration that took shape around it, the public screenings you held, and the book that was compiled — in which I had the chance to write a short text myself.
I would like us to open the Society up a little further. What actually happened, for this Society to come into being? I think your presence in Dublin was very important — so what actually happened that took you to Dublin?
And alongside whatever account of EFS you want to give, I would like you to bring out one more thing: the collaborations that took shape between you. You were, after all, different filmmakers, and yet certain resemblances can be seen in the work. When I saw Inside, for instance — the film two of your friends in the Society made in 2017 — its resemblances to Phantom Islands became fascinating to me. I felt that one layer of Phantom Islands was doing precisely, or nearly, what Inside does. They were made at more or less the same time, if I am right — or I think Inside was finished slightly earlier. But Phantom Islands is the more ambitious film, because it goes down other roads that Inside perhaps has no wish to take.
I would like to know how conscious that is — whether it was conscious — and what discussions you had inside the Society. It is a long question, and I hope you will take it wherever you want to.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Thank you, dear Vahid. Yes, I understand exactly what you mean. Let me answer it like this.
A great many filmmakers, and a great many people who begin taking refuge in cinema, want to say something. They want to use cinema as a means to give form to the preoccupations they carry, the stories they have, the questions that arise in their minds. That is in me as well, naturally.
But what matters for me is that my view of cinema has never been that it is an instrument I use in order to say something. That was never enough for me. Cinema itself is the subject. The foundation of my work, its groundwork, has always been cinema — cinema itself. I am engaged with the thing itself. That is the first point.
The second is that this is the reason Phantom Islands took the shape it did: I wanted to speak about cinema itself. And it is the reason the Experimental Film Society came about at all — that experience in Iran threw me into it. I wanted to speak about cinema itself. Meta, in the sense I described at the beginning.
I did not see myself within the categories that existed in Iran at the time, and I think the way this took shape in Iran is very important to mention — though I came to understand later that it is not only Iranian; it is the same in a great many other places. So the title I chose for myself was, in truth, an inevitable option. Something imposed. I never really understood why I chose it in those years; it was simply the nearest thing available to me.
And in Iran I could see nothing. I could not see a club. I could not see a current. Or I could not easily find people who were deeply engaged with cinephilia, who genuinely wanted to say something through cinephilia, who genuinely wanted to work in an experimental way… …to make your film with you. The question of the script was always there in Iran. You would speak to someone and they would say: well, where is the script? That exists here too. But I wanted to get away from all of it.
And very slowly — I could even say unconsciously, and in a fairly unripe way — I began creating the Experimental Film Society.
I would say that I planted a seed, and was a gardener to it. You plant an idea. You have very little control over it. You cannot really steer it. You do not really know what its outcome will be, what kind of tree it will turn into, what fruit it might even bear. You plant something. EFS was that for me: an idea took shape, and grew over twenty years.
In the beginning I simply wanted to make these films, and there was no budget. The only way I could make them was to bring other people in, involve them, and make the films collaboratively, as a team. So the first ten years of the Experimental Film Society existed purely in order to make experimental films.
Then, once an archive had been produced, once a genuine literature had been produced, once a real foundation had taken shape, we sat down and asked: very well — what do we do with these films now? The festivals do not show them. The cinematheques do not show them. So let us build a distribution system ourselves. And a system of distribution was added to what had been production. We began programming and curating, and working with galleries, cinematheques and museums to give the films we had made a shape of their own. That was a new phase.
Then we went further, and reached the conclusion that we would have to write about these films ourselves — because some of them are so far ahead, so unconventional, that an audience cannot make contact with them. And we had not the slightest embarrassment about writing about our own films, producing a literature, inviting other critics to come and see them. At that point we started an online magazine, EFS Publications, in which everything was about our own films, and now and then about other films we were watching that stood close to EFS’s. The basis of it took shape very organically.
Then, as it grew, we thought: a great many articles now exist — why not publish them as a book? So everything that had accumulated on those sites, together with other material, became the first book.
Then, while we were running screenings, we concluded: we have been doing these for years — why not make a festival of our own? And so all the energy that had been forming scattered around the world, or forming in Ireland, we concentrated into a single point, into three consecutive days, and turned into a festival.
Then, as it grew again, we said: why not add performance work, and invite different people — people working in dance, in ballet, in performance art, musicians, sound artists — and find out what the relationship of cinema to the other arts actually is. So we began putting on performances.
What I am trying to say is that across these years we went forward like this, without any very definite idea, on the basis of what the material itself dictated to us. We built the possibility that it asked for. And that is something only produced inside a world of collaboration.
When you begin collaborating with people over years, a shared space forms between their works. The same actors start appearing in one another’s films. The same locations start appearing. Ways of editing. Without anyone deciding it, something like a collective consciousness forms among the people who are collaborating. It is like a planet with its own layer, its own weather, the same for everybody on it: we are all breathing that air, drinking that water, eating that food — and so certain things form between all of us.
Those seams, those shared methods among people who had worked together, produce a harmony, a homogeneity, in the EFS films. And after ten years, after twenty years of filmmaking, you can say: that is an EFS film. Whereas we never consciously wanted that. This is a confession, and I like saying it very much: it was never conscious. It formed organically.
The emergence of EFS, the projects that took shape inside it, and the ways EFS filmmaking itself took shape, are all organic. We never had a textbook in advance. We never said, right, let us sit down and do this. In all of it, we listened to a history.
When you are a cinephile and a filmmaker, from a certain point onwards you are confronted by cinephilia and by the history of your own filmmaking. And that is very frightening. You build a filmmaking culture for yourself, and then that culture grows larger than you. It carries you. It produces its own path and dictates to you, and you cannot disobey it. You have to listen to the material that exists. You have to listen to the films that exist — because these films want to show themselves, they want to be made; they dictate themselves. And in EFS we always tried to listen to that inner voice which the history of our own filmmaking had produced for us.
The way we collaborate, the way we make the films, the way we show them, the way we produced the two books — for which you, dear Vahid, took the trouble and brought us your excellent text — all of it has been organic, and without any seriously drawn-up plan. At a certain moment we would feel: now is the time, we must do this. And when the moment came, we knew whether it was the time or not.
So EFS’s filmmaking has gone forward very organically. And after twenty years I feel — and this is my personal view — that we have even come close to its final borders. EFS now needs to reproduce itself. To reimagine itself, under the conditions we are all living through as human beings: with this pandemic, with the coronavirus, with this very strange, critical situation. All of it has arrived at once.
And it is a very strange period of reflection, in which we are thinking about what the EFS that emerges after the pandemic will be. Will these filmmakers want to collaborate again — to go into one room, as with Luminous Void, and make that film together? Or will these practices become solo, become more individual, and will we drift further apart? That question about EFS is still open for us. So all of us are thinking about how EFS reproduces itself. Perhaps it will not. Perhaps it will die. Perhaps this Society lived for twenty years and now dies. Time provides all of that. But all of us, all the artists inside EFS, are following the question very organically, to see what the next stage will be.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · You have also touched on the point I raised about the resemblances between Inside and — forgive me — because I want to come to one specific discussion. These resemblances, these differences…
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Yes — let me take it before I forget. Not at all; there were a great many points.
What you say is very much the case with that film. Inside was made by two very good and very dear colleagues of mine, Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan, who had themselves been collaborating as a pair for about ten years. And their circumstances were remarkably close to ours. They had also received a fund. They also had to come out of the mould of the collaborations they had been working in, to break that mould — and it was their first feature. In terms of the economic conditions and of artistic aesthetics, they wanted to reproduce themselves, to reimagine themselves, to bring themselves to a point where they had said something new. So both of us were pursuing the same problem, inside the particular films we each had.
And the way we used the locations was very similar. They went more towards the forest, towards dense trees and vegetation; I went towards the edges where Ireland runs out — the ocean, the cliffs, the islands. But in a sense we both took refuge in a very particular reading of nature. We took our people out there and began working with it.
I should also say that by the time Inside and Phantom Islands were being made, we had been collaborating for ten years, eleven, fifteen. A great deal of our filmmaking technique overlapped; it passed back and forth between us and grew alike. The way we used sound. The cameras we used. Those diffusion lenses that give you very dreamlike images. The way we used actors was similar too. Though Max and Vicky have their own particular history, which sets them apart from Phantom Islands, and the references Max brought in were somewhat different from mine.
But at the same time you can say plainly that both are EFS films, and that one company produced them — because legally, too, both are EFS productions. So they have a great many points in common, and points of difference as well, because the references differ.
What makes them interesting is that both are EFS films, and both point towards a very particular culture of Irish cinema that existed at that moment. And, strangely, Inside was also a turning point for Max and Vicky. They had made eleven or twelve short films, but that one became their most successful work — it still is. And for them too it was the end of a period: after it they made one or two more shorts together and then took a break.
Because this kind of intensity happens in experimental cinema, and in cinema generally. Imagine a working relationship in which a director makes seven or eight films with the same collaborator: they work together very deeply, something of a high order is produced, then they separate, and perhaps come back to one another twenty years later. It is there in the history of cinema — that people make enormous collaborations in intense periods, because you need to measure your own limits under those extreme conditions, and people push each other, motivate each other to break each other’s boundaries and go further. And then they become saturated, and you need to give it a pause, or it may break off entirely. And then history shows what happens.
We in EFS have now reached the point where we feel we have gone a very long way past our own boundaries, and that it is time for reproduction. Max and Vicky have taken some distance as well; he is carrying his own practice forward, Vicky is carrying hers forward. Perhaps in a few years they will come back and make another feature. And the production company is still EFS. Now we have to see how EFS reproduces itself.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · It is true that all through your remarks we are speaking about the end of an era. And at the same time, this is the twentieth year of a Society — and we tend to think of a Society’s twentieth year as its youth, as a flowering — while for the people inside it, it is simultaneously the end of something.
And there is that spontaneity in the very shape of the Society’s history. From that angle it is extraordinary. I think the ending you are describing is an ending as a form of individual filmmaking. But one of its achievements, which the manifesto also names — a general manifesto that can be found easily enough in Persian too — is the support of filmmakers who fail, who meet failure. And the spirit of that idea seems to me fundamental for every filmmaker of this kind anywhere in the world, because we are dealing with a cinema in which success is far harder than in any other kind. That distribution and support side of the Society, which has become a genuinely important base, seems to me a very significant thing in Europe. So of this movement I do not think one can say “the end”. I think one should be speaking of its youth, and of its foresight.
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · At that moment I was only — if you will excuse the word — making a bit of a complaint. It comes out of a frustration, a tiredness inside me from these years in Ireland. When I say “end”, I think what I am really talking about is Ireland.
But let me add this. The Experimental Film Society has reproduced itself in many different periods. And this is roughly the end of an era, the end of a decade. We have entered 2021, with this pandemic, and a great many things will change when we come out of it and life returns to normal — if it returns; we shall have to see.
The ideas I have for the Experimental Film Society are these. First, I want to come out of the Irish space. I want to pull the whole thing much further towards Europe and towards the Middle East. I am thinking about that a great deal at the moment.
Something has happened to me: an enormous distance, an enormous fault line, has opened between me and Iran — I could almost call it a sulk. And I am now genuinely thinking and planning to come to Iran and make a series of films there. I have been researching locations: Qeshm island; places I am thinking about on the Persian Gulf; gathering material. Or the stories of Sa’edi — the things in his work that touch on horror, the literature of horror that exists there. The landscapes in places like the Kavir, those very dry landscapes; the landscapes on Qeshm; Kharg island.
I want to come and take all of that, and make a reconciliation between myself and Iran, and begin making films in Iran. And I want to bring the filmmakers who have worked inside the Experimental Film Society to Iran — and by bringing those people there, and using Iranian locations, Iranian culture, Iranian collaborators, I want to put fresh blood into the tired body of the Society. That is my first aim.
My second is that I want to go and live in Berlin for a few years. That is the space I am in now, because I have had a very long period in Ireland and England, and I want to start moving towards central Europe and discovering other connections, collaborating, and seeing what happens. I recently produced a film, for instance, for a young filmmaker from Bosnia and Herzegovina who lives in Sarajevo, Zulfikar Filandra — and we made it together, which was very interesting for me. I had never made a film like it inside the Experimental Film Society. This man had made no film at all for fifteen years — for fifteen years he had simply been accumulating an archive on his hard drive, with his phone and with all sorts of different cameras. We spent a year on it, restructured the whole thing, and finished the film. It was screened a few months ago in Belgrade. And if you watch it, it has nothing whatever to do with an EFS film, and I am very glad I did it.
I pulled myself back somewhat and worked only as a mentor, standing beside him, helping. I took this man’s vision and gave it a shape through the Experimental Film Society. I would very much like to do more of that now, in order to reproduce experimental cinema — and to see what is happening in the Middle East and in central Europe, if we are able to travel more. We shall have to see, after the pandemic; at the moment everything is locked down and nobody can go anywhere. Those are the kinds of plans I have for the future of experimental cinema. And I want that bridge with Iran to take shape much more fully, above all in using the locations Iran has.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · When you were talking about Iran, I remembered something — a few months ago, I think a short note of yours that you had shared on Facebook — in which you spoke about the relation of a filmmaker to the place he grew up in, or the culture he grew up in. Your position there was very free, very unbound. You said, quite radically, that you see yourself as a filmmaker of the world; that for the idea of the filmmaker, this geography has no real meaning for you.
From what you have just explained I did not take it that your return to Iran would be a return to those roots. Are you not in fact opening up the duality between yourself and Iran — that you moved away, having lived years there? Setting aside the question of the new possibilities it offers you, what else can that return be?
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Let me say that this is very important. As Serge Daney puts it — he says that he never regarded himself in terms of a nationality; that the citizenship he holds is the citizenship of the continent of cinema. That idea was extraordinary to me when I read it in Daney’s writing, and I felt such kinship with it. I belong to the continent of cinema. I believe in that very deeply myself.
Let me open it up. When I began making films in Iran, because of the films I was making — I had no permit, and there were the conditions I had to work under. The question of the hijab, for instance. I genuinely did not want it. It was a real problem for me that I could not bring a person in and say, take off your headscarf, because I do not believe in these things at all.
So what happened is that I hid myself. If you look at the early Iranian films, they take place inside a bubble, in an entirely subjective, interior space. You cannot say this is Iran, or Iraq, or China, or anywhere. It is an interior landscape. Very concealed. Very strange. That is the first thing.
The second is that when you begin making experimental cinema you sink further into an inner space — into that bubble, into that very interior space, into that space of interior dread. So I had a double reason to become an alien, to become an extraterrestrial: in my own country, and in the style and manner of the filmmaking I was doing. In Iran I always felt like an extraterrestrial. I plainly felt I was an alien. I could not connect with that society at all. I did not understand what was happening there.
The music I listened to, the films I was in contact with — and I did not go to university either — all of that was very limited. I hardly went to the cinema. I could not go and watch a Masoud Kimiai film; I genuinely did not understand what that film was. So instead I brought people into my own garage, or into my own room. I had something like two thousand-odd VHS tapes, and those were the only films I watched.
The only place I ever went to see films was the cinémathèque hall at the Museum of Contemporary Art — and I am very glad that after fifteen years I went back and they showed an Experimental Film Society programme there, because that place was extraordinary for me. But I never went to the cinema in Iran, which is a very strange thing for a cinephile. I did not understand it. I could not — I do not want to name titles — go and watch a film full of people in headscarves. I simply did not understand such a thing. My view of it was, I could say, hateful. There was a great deal of anger in me. I had no wish to enter that space or be involved with it at all.
And when I came to Ireland, this did not double. It tripled. It quadrupled. I had carried it in Iran; now I had become an emigrant; now I was making experimental cinema in Ireland; and again I went into that alien space, that interior space.
So I never felt myself to be Iranian. Nor did I understand myself as Irish. Nor as European. Because I was none of those things. And therefore cinema was, and is, an existential condition for me. It is the thing that gives me an identity, that gives me roots so that I am able to live. Cinema is far more than an art to me. Cinema is my whole life. Cinema is my entire activity. Cinema is my identity.
And science fiction was like a suit of iron armour I made for myself. Like a costume. Like an identity card, like a passport I built for myself so that I could survive inside it and settle the whole question of immigration within the space of the films I was making.
Schroeter says something very fine about this. He says: I make these films so that they will inhabit me — so that I can live inside them. Schroeter is a very, very important filmmaker for me. And I did exactly that for myself. He was a filmmaker who was queer, homosexual, in a very strange situation in Germany, and he had to do this. His films were intensely operatic; he used Maria Callas, which had nothing to do with the period of the films he was making. And I did the same, so that as a human being I could live inside the films I make — inside those spaces, inside those landscapes.
That is the reason I have never considered myself Iranian, nor Irish, nor European. Even now, when I say I want to go back to Iran — well, in any case, I grew up there… My language is Persian, and there are certain things I understand well. That landscape, that location, works on me a great deal. And there is the literature I have read — Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, or some of Hedayat’s work. To my mind there is an extraordinary atmosphere of horror in Iran and in the Middle East which, as the English say, is entirely untapped. We have not gone into it. We have no horror cinema, no science-fiction cinema, no experimental cinema. I do not know whether it is because of Iran’s political or social situation, but these are severely neglected genres — genres nobody has looked at, nobody has worked on.
So I have several projects now: to come and ask what Iranian experimental cinema actually is. What Iranian horror cinema is. Who has worked on it. What Iranian science fiction is. And I would like to make a series of films there myself — not only myself, but bringing the friends I have worked with, to see how we might reproduce EFS inside those landscapes.
Tehran, in particular, does not interest me as a place to work. Go to the north, or the south, or the Kavir — above all that landscape, so extraordinarily exotic and untapped and strange, that exists in Iran. Textures that are like Mars. If you go to Qeshm — you will certainly have been, or seen pictures; Sina is nearer the south — the south has an extraordinary landscape which I have hardly seen used in films at all, and I would like to come and use it, and see what happens: to me, to the Society, and to the people I bring there and invite to make films.
So I would say that Iran has an instrumental function for me rather than an existential one. My identity is cinema. I am neither Irish nor Iranian. It happens that I was born in Iran, that I speak Persian, that my family is Iranian — but beyond that I do not know. I hold the same view of Ireland, and the same view of England in the period I have spent there. I cannot find any strange harmony with a society and say: I belong here.
And you hear that strangeness in Chantal Akerman too. That extraordinary filmmaker came from a Jewish background, she was Belgian — but if you read her interviews she says: I belong nowhere. Like a wandering Jew, searching for an identity and unable, to the very end, to find it. Perhaps I have something of that condition myself. That is what the space is for me — being Iranian, or not being Iranian.
VAHID MORTAZAVI · Let this be the closing question, or at least the next one. There is a clause in the manifesto of the Experimental Film Society — I think among the first, second or third — where you refer to the definition of independent cinema, and it is very ironic, because immediately afterwards you say that independent cinema does not exist at all. It is quite clear that it was written in a contemporary context: the manifesto asks what the word can still mean in an age when anyone can pick up a camera and shoot a film.
I would like us to open that word up. Particularly because another idea that seemed intrinsic to experimental cinema at a certain period — I mean over the last forty or fifty years — appears to be shifting with the spread of digital culture, now that a digital camera is in everyone’s hands, and part of that everyone is the experimental filmmaker. Our nostalgia, our childhood, the time when we were discovering the first experimental films — a great many of those were shot on 8mm. Those trembling images. It seems that the technology itself is changing the definitions.
ALISINA AZARI · Forgive me, Rouzbeh, let me complete Vahid’s question. Do you still believe — given this technology, and given that all your films, as far as I know, were shot on digital cameras — in what has been placed under that heading: that the Super 8, the 8mm, the 16mm camera carries a kind of poetic gem, an imperfection that adds poetry to a film? At this twentieth year, do you still hold that belief or not, following on from what technology has given your films?
ROUZBEH RASHIDI · Let me start like this. We have arrived at a point in cinema which is a very important one, because with the advance of technology — the advance of the means of production and of post-production, of shooting and of editing — we have reached a point where we can have extremely high quality in recording our images, and where we can both record and edit at an extraordinary standard for a very, very low cost.
The result that has produced is that independent filmmaking has become so widespread and so accessible that it no longer makes any sense to call it independent — because everything is independent now. Either all filmmaking is independent, or else you take your money from Netflix or some large company, which is more or less the studio system again.
And the rate of production, the sheer number of films being made, has gone extraordinarily high. Every film that is produced, by anybody, from anywhere — it does not matter — attaches itself to the history of cinema. It does not matter whether we like it or not. These films are filtered, and we see only a fraction of them, a very small part. But thousands of films are produced every day that are for nobody, as Brakhage says. And yet those films exist.
So independent filmmaking, to my mind, no longer means anything. It is not the situation of the sixties, when John Cassavetes, in the hard years of the studio system, was making Shadows — because he would get a camera from somewhere, get film stock from somewhere, and the actors worked for him for nothing. Now that has become the norm. That is one part of it.
The other thing that has happened is that, with the way these possibilities are simply laid in front of filmmakers, filmmakers have sold their entire aesthetic to the aesthetic the instrument hands them. The instrument has become dominant. It has taken possession of the filmmaker’s taste. Filmmakers have given up making a craft and a technique of their own, and have put their trust instead… …in that kind of image, in that texture, in the colour grading the camera produces for them. Skill has vanished. Technology has taken over. And that is the greatest danger facing independent filmmaking.
It ought to work the other way round. You should begin from a craft. Take photographs. Go and look at figurative painting. Go out and watch films, study, come to know lenses and filters. Then find a skill, and begin examining these things, so that eventually you can say: this is my own skill. And then bring your own personal concerns into it, your own personal technique, and say: this is my filmmaking; this is my craft, as a potter has a craft. But filmmakers do not have that now.
And it has produced a homogeneity — meaning that all images become alike. That has created a cancer, an enormous cancer, inside the discourse of the history of cinema, which we are now grappling with. We are in a very particular crisis.
That is digital filmmaking. Celluloid filmmaking — work that is engaged with film stock, 8mm, 16mm, 35 and the other formats — is very different, because of its very high cost, its background, and the kind of texture it carries. If you take a single shot on a digital Canon costing two thousand euro, and one shot on an 8mm camera that might cost two hundred, with stock at fifty-five euro and the laboratory developing on top, perhaps a hundred and fifty euro for three minutes — and you set them side by side, 8mm wins the contest outright. It has a texture, an aesthetic, that is far more beautiful, far more poetic, far more velvety, far more dreamlike. Digital does not have that.
And here my view is actually very different from most people in experimental filmmaking. They still love the texture of Super 8 and 16mm and believe a filmmaker ought to be working with them. I do not believe that at all.
I believe our cameras — the cameras of our time, the cameras of the era we are living in — are digital cameras. Our laptops. Our phones. The consumer products we are already entangled with. Cameras you can go and buy at the corner shop. Cameras available on Jomhouri Street in Tehran, or on any high street. Things we can buy with a month’s wages. Those are the cameras of our life, and we must begin working with them — and experimental filmmakers must begin working with them.
And they must not be ruled by the aesthetic the factory has installed inside those cameras. You have to break that and move into another stage. You have to get inside the optics of these lenses, try your own lenses, try your own particular conditions of light. If you do not do that, you simply reproduce the homogeneity again, and everything becomes the same.
From that angle, independent and experimental filmmaking have contracted an enormous cancer — because filmmakers have forgotten this skill, and rely only on the camera, on the texture, on the colour grading DaVinci hands them, or on the way one edits in Final Cut Pro. Everything comes out alike. That is the danger of our era.
Whereas 8mm and 16mm filmmaking did not have this problem, precisely because of the cost. It is very expensive. People need a basic skill, a basic technique. You have to work with light, measure the light, so that a shot can be saved at all. It is hard and complicated. You need that groundwork. You cannot simply pick up a camera and go. You need to bring the camera operator, sit down and think about the shot. It is not a matter of pressing a button.
But even so, my advice to young filmmakers now entering the world of independent cinema, of experimental cinema, is not that they must go back and work on 8 or 16mm. They can, and there is no problem in it. But in the end, when you finish the film, you will have to show it — and at some stage, some layer, some level of the filmmaking will be digital. You cannot take a reel of 35, shoot it, and show that. Every theatre, every cinema has taken out its 35mm projector and put a digital projector in its place. So even if you go back and shoot on 8 or 16 or 35, the moment you distribute the film it is digital. So you have to find a mastery over the digital — over the technology of your own time.
Going in and digging inside digital technology is therefore very important, and it is something we tried hard to push in EFS’s filmmaking, to bring it close to its limits. In the Homo Sapiens Project I did things that took the camera to the point of destruction — I gave it so much light. I tried to push the extremity of it, and I recorded every one of the resulting experiments inside the project: what this camera is capable of; where it actually breaks; how much its screen can tolerate; how much colour it can tolerate; how much gradient; how much contrast; the point at which the colour textures scatter and dissolve into one another.
So it matters enormously to me that filmmakers do not put their trust in technology, but build a skill, a craft and a technique of their own. And that is something profoundly individual. Every filmmaker has their own particular technique for getting their preoccupations, and what is inside them, out.
music — end of Part Two
Passages marked as uncertain
Both points where the recording was genuinely indistinct have since been resolved — one against an external source, one by Rouzbeh Rashidi himself. Neither was ever guessed, and they are recorded here so the reader can see what was checked. Nothing has been quietly corrected or quietly dropped; each is left for Rouzbeh Rashidi to rule on.
The year of Inside — resolved, not guessed. The recording gives 2007; the context indicated 2017. Rather than choose, I checked: Experimental Film Society’s own site lists Inside (2017) at `/films/inside/`. The year in the text is therefore 2017 on the evidence of his own archive, and no longer carries a mark.
The Sarajevo filmmaker is Zulfikar Filandra. The name was indistinct in the recording and was left marked rather than guessed; Rouzbeh Rashidi supplied it on 8 September 2026. No mark now stands anywhere in this text.
Two further notes, which are repairs rather than uncertainties:
Where the recording names a filmmaker who made “seven or eight films” with the same collaborator before separating, the name is unrecoverable. The sentence has been kept as the general observation it is, with no name invented. – One descriptive word attached to Adolfo Arrieta is unintelligible in the recording and has been omitted rather than guessed. Everything else in that passage — that he reworks his own earlier films into new versions, and that Jess Franco does the same — is clear.
