Pamela Cohn - Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers

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First printing 2020

Published by OR Books, New York and London

2020 Pamela Cohn

Barbara Hammer first appeared in modified form in Still in Motion , 19 May 2009.

Khavn first appeared in modified form in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 29 September 2010.

Deborah Stratman first appeared in modified form in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 21 January 2015.

Chico Pereira first appeared in modified form in Filmmaker Magazine , 3 March 2017.

Orwa Nyrabia first appeared in modified form in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 10 October 2014.

Terence Nance first appeared in modified from in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 26 April 2012.

Ognjen Glavonic first appeared in modified form in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 6 January 2017.

Adam and Zack Khalil first appeared in modified form in BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, 29 February 2016.

The author would like to express her deep appreciation to these publications for permission to reprint those interviews here.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Lapiz Digital. Printed by Bookmobile, USA, and CPI, UK.

paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-232-0 ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-235-1

In memory of my grandmothers
Rose Franzman and Sarah Cohn

I cant photograph these spaces and show you how to move within them, but I can show you where I went. I cant tell you how long I was there, but I can construct an idea of the time I occupied. The paths and boundaries I created are vaporous and already gone, but the space remains, waiting to be ambled through once again.

Sky Hopinka, Around the Edge of Encircling Lake

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one anothers, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clo w n

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

A few of the filmmakers, or perhaps certain film and video works, featured here might be familiar to some readers since many of them have been making work for decades. But Ive used this opportunity to put together a compilation of voices that likely wont be known to anyone at all, even by many working in the sectors of independent nonfiction or experimental cinema. That is not to say that every artist presented here has not realized major awards, prestigious grants, fellowships, festival prizes, high critical praise for their works and, in some cases, international cinema releases and television broadcasts. But the unchanging reality of making independent film and video work is that the oftentimes quiescent and brief durational aspects of these acknowledgements rarely turn into substantial support for any kind of sustained artistic practice. Whether a maker acquires enough support, financial or otherwise, to conceive, make and complete new projects, or whether he or she is used to working within the confines of a studio using homemade resources, everyone here works in virtual obscurity. There might be only a handful of people to acknowledge or witness their daily toil. The artists represented in this compilation either work with a select group of stalwart colleagues or completely solofundraising, writing, researching, producing, directing, editing, scoring, and completing post-production, all on their own.

My hope is that the effect of disparate personalities gathered together in one volume evokes an expansive and global conversation, not merely a series of dialogues strung together. One of the many joys of putting together a book like this has been following the paths the process has taken me down, how the roster that would end up here coalesced purposively (of course!), but also organically, serendipitously, and in some cases quite accidentally. It was only as this wonderful cast of characters started expanding, as each conversation began to emerge, that I started to seek out very specific makers, ones who would complement, offset, and challenge the other voices contained herein. This is not a box of chocolatestheres not one of every flavor. My purpose was not to introduce these filmmakers as merely representational of a group or a persuasion or a movement. They are artists with something substantial to contribute to the overall discourse of making art in the twenty-first century.

Organizationally, Ive selected from my own archive of what I call legacy interviews to head each section of the book. These are conversations Ive conducted over the past decade. The twenty new conversations were recorded for this compilation between August 2018 and March 2019. The placement and juxtaposition of certain makers in certain sections in a certain order should be taken as an attempt to turn this compilation into an overarching human-scale story. Any of these individuals could slip into any one of the themes presented so its not really meant to be a hard and fast classification of where I think someone should fall within this contrived pantheon. Right now, there are many talented makers crafting film and video work that reflects the more liminal spaces between fiction and nonfiction, or portrays some kind of enhanced reality wherein discrete aspects of memory and personal history coalesce into distinctive narratives.

This book is meant to capture a sort of zeitgeist moment in nonfiction moving image as it reflects the world around us in very specific ways, encompassing the socio- and geo-political nature of the creative impulse, activism, debate, cogent argumentation, notions of beauty, sonic espionage, borders both mobile and immobile, disruption, visual anthropology, and the specific stories and events that have caused small ripples of impact and changehow certain artists choose to utilize the power of personal histories to tackle legacies of colonization, racism, sexism, ethnic warfare, and the constant endings and beginnings and re-endings and re-beginnings all held in the crucible of memoir.

This is why I always insistand have insisted herethat we initially engage in verbal discourse. And even though the transcripts of the talks were edited and reworked by both myself and the subjects for the best read possible, their genesis came from a human-to-human conversation, full of grappling, spontaneity, improvisation, and the concomitant awkwardness and intimacy one experiences when youre talking about deep and weighty matters with a virtual stranger.

Fortunately, they all embraced the challenge.

Berlin, Germany

January 2020

YOU CAN HAVE BOTH LOVE AND ARTBARBARA HAMMER

In Memoriam: 15 May 1939, Hollywood, California16 March 2019, Manhattan, NY

We know death through life, our vitality and the appreciation of it, and being conscious of that vitality.

Barbara Hammer passed away in the spring of 2019 at the age of seventy-nine. Ten years ago, shortly before her seventieth birthday, she invited me to her Manhattan studio. In an email, I had explained to her that I had started a blog dedicated to female directors and was interested in presenting these conversations and that Id like a couple hours of her time. Initially, I had decided to dedicate most of my attention to female makers because in this milieu of documentary and experimental work women really shoneas directors, producers, writers, and agents of their own creative visions. This phenomenon was fairly singular in film because that wasnt generally the case with narrative work. A couple of years after starting my blog, Still in Motion, my long-form conversations (sometimes very long) started appearing regularly in various publications such as BOMB Magazine s Arts Blog, Filmmaker Magazine , Guernica , Senses of Cinema , and DesistFilm . At the time I met with Barbara, I was basically just an unknown film blogger who she agreed to meet with anyway. It was an essential time in her long career and there was much to share.