In 2014, Satō-san offered to introduce us, and soon thereafter we decided to make a film together. Not only was the subject new to us—we had reflected superficially on cannibalism’s symbolic significance, and its affinities with spiritual and sexual desire, but never thought deeply about the phenomenology of cannibalistic acts themselves—but so was working in a country culturally quite foreign to us whose language we didn’t speak. As anthropologists we usually undertake long-term participant observation in contexts that end up becoming quite intimate and familiar. By contrast, in Japan much of what interested us was predicated on our alterity, insights or sensations that would only ever come to an outsider. It is also our first work featuring talking heads, except that Sagawa-san almost never talks, and when he did we couldn’t understand what he was saying (Nao Nakazawa, our collaborator and sound recordist, would translate for us later).
With somniloquies (2017), our approach was also quite alien to us and to our anthropological inclinations. For the first time, we were dealing with the materiality of an archive, a series of sound recordings from the 1960s in New York of a man apparently dreaming out loud. Scabrous and surreal, they often simply beggared belief. For this work, we decided to invite people to offer us their sleep, to be filmed sleeping nude. Each night a filming session felt like a journey to a foreign shore. We didn’t know what to expect, but our relationship to the sleepers was at once intimate and voyeuristic. It had a kind of violence to it, as well as a kind of vulnerability, that were quite different from what we had encountered in our previous work, and unlike the interpersonal negotiations associated with more conventional ethnography.
HP I’m intrigued by this idea about violence in relation to filming the sleepers, and the negotiations related to conventional ethnography. Why did it feel violent? How does this relate to larger questions of a kind of violence that might be bound up in representation? How do you respond to the idea that representation has to have an extractive or violent aspect?
VP/LCT Many people prefer not to be observed when they are asleep; unable to compose themselves, they feel defenseless, exposed. Those who agreed to sleep for us trusted us, in a sense. It felt humbling, and was a challenge to depict them in a fashion that was worthy of their trust. It was also profoundly unsettling to be filming sleeping nudes, many of them unknown to us, from a distance of just a few centimeters. Beads of sweat occasionally dripped off our bodies onto theirs. The magnitude of the humanity, the being, and the alterity, of our sleepers quite often overwhelmed us.
As for the violence that is inherent to representation, we find this less bothersome. Violence is part and parcel of the fabric of the human condition, and it enters into any intersubjective relationship. But so do many other conditions and emotions, including desire and love. The notion that representation, unlike pure presentation, is inherently violent, or extractive, in a fashion that is sui generis and morally indefensible, seems to us silly. Often anthropologists of ethics and moral philosophers commenting on artistic and documentary ethics—or advocates of trigger warnings and safe academic spaces—have a kind of smug moralism that seems parochial and unmoored from the real stakes of life beyond the ivory tower, and reflects a kind of unacknowledged embarrassment in the face of contours of human difference.
BR While filmmaking is necessarily exploitative and power is always at play in the processes of representation, there are enough forms available that violence doesn’t have to be the outcome. I try to approach representation more along the lines of S&M—a power relationship in which subject positions shift and players both act and are acted upon.
HP To shift the use of the term representation slightly, how do you deal with the challenges of representation and form when it comes to more intangible aspects of reality? You all work with documentary methods and forms; within them, how do you approach the reality of the subjective, of the emotional and mental, the “truth” of individual and collective imagination, dreams, desires, beliefs, memories?
VP/LCT As anthropologists, it’s probably peculiar, but we don’t think about these subjects much any more. We can’t remember the last time, if ever, we explicitly considered the problem of representation, or talked about the visible versus the invisible, or the material and the immaterial. One is simply often the vessel, or the membrane, of the other, no? Affective and psychic states, and sociocultural conditions, are made manifest in any number of visual and sonic forms. Is anything more expressive of interiority and subjectivity than a human face? Much of our work has perhaps been at an angle to the humanism and anthropocentrism of documentary and anthropology. But our recent work privileges the spoken word as much as the gestural or corporeal. In Commensal (2017), our piece with Sagawa-san, we attend as much to what he seems unable to say as to what he does; it is very much at the outer limits of language. But the interplay between the articulable and nonarticulable, both linguistically and ethically, remains at its core. The dreams we hear in somniloquies are spoken out loud, which makes them an oddity: Who of us really dreams out loud? So they raise issues of performativity and authenticity. But even while reflecting on these questions as one is listening to them, they remain intensely evocative of the psychic, the sociocultural, and the political. They are as illuminating of 1960s New York, and indeed the unconscious ruminations of us all, as they are of the oneiric preoccupations of one eccentric individual, a brilliant unconscious artist.
BR As a starting point, it helps to not fully believe in a reality of the objective—at least as far as representation is concerned. The film image is ultimately too mediated—to frame is to not-frame, to record is to not-record—to be trusted, and allowing for misrepresentation as a fact of representation means opening oneself up to the misrepresentation of all sorts of subjective realities. My work thus far has mostly dealt with subjects/spaces who are not me, and, to that end, I rarely feel willing or qualified to make claims about meaning or interiority. Instead, I think about projection in the process of filmmaking. How can I produce audience as subject, how can I create a time-space in which the audience is activated, immersed, reflected back on itself? The dream state, the drug/trance trip, the utopian drive—these exist as interiorities, singular experiences that can neither be depicted nor represented with any kind of accuracy. They are subjective truths and, as such, have the most weight when they are shared. In all of my work, I try to produce a cinema that the audience can occupy in parallel with the (apparent) on-screen subject—a physical space where meaning is open and contingent, where time becomes a resonant chamber, where bodies are called out to be present.
HP How do you make and relate to images? Can you speak about your relationship to the camera and your own presence in the shooting and its context? And do you consider camerawork as a specific epistemology, producing a particular kind of knowledge?
BR I don’t always think about the making-of and the relating-to in the same breath—those processes feel so distinct from one another that I have to build in a period of not-looking if I’m ever to see the recorded image for what it has become. The longer I spend in a place filming, the more the place will declare itself, and the longer I’ll have to let my images rest before I can work with them. New images need time to breathe, to live, to escape the weight of whatever I thought they were going to be.
Working on 16 mm film means that there’s already some kind of delay built in—I rarely get to see the processed image until at least a week after it has been exposed. After an initial viewing, I usually extend this delay even further. Working with a film camera also means that I am necessarily more conspicuous, more visible—my kind of image making takes more time. In this case, visibility equals presence, and I hope that my physical presence as a filmmaker gives my subjects an opportunity to determine the level of their own participation and forces me to negotiate/explain/discuss the work that I’m doing with them. Negotiation is as much a part of filmmaking as recording is—and recording without permission can only result in a contaminated image.
As for the camera itself, my vision is neither terribly romantic nor conceptual—I see it simply as a technical form that finds its reason in content, a tool whose function often varies from frame to frame. A handheld camera connotes one perspective, a Steadicam produces another, a camera on a tripod proposes yet another way of seeing. I’m not after a cinema that mirrors the world but rather one that creates a world in parallel—a world that reflects its maker, its receiver, and its material as much as its newly minted two-dimensional subject.