On invitation by Ayona Datta, Ger Duijzings and Rastko Novaković presented 25 minutes of the work-in-progress Lebensraum in the spring of 2009. In continuation is a transcript from the discussion which followed the screening.
Ger Duijzings: It’s in all respects an experimental process, for both of us; in terms of the research and also in terms of the presentation, so I’m particularly curious to hear what you make of it and what sort of understanding you have of what you are hearing and seeing.
A: Could you say something about the route you took. It seemed improvised…
Rastko Novakovic: It was very much planned. We spent about 2 months recording different sounds and constructing a sound map and then determined the route in relation to it and the local history. We rehearsed the route with Ger and Mark Durham who did the sound design, the people shooting it knew the route, they made their own decisions in terms of what they shot but it was left to them how far they deviated from the ‘procession’.
Robert Tavernor: For me there are 3 components to it. One of them is the written word which is being read and narration – the visibility of the narrator. Then there is the apparent normality of the city which it is being shot in but which has sub-themes which you spoke about at the beginning: places of conflict in the city and a laden past. I suppose that what we are used to in terms of television broadcasts, in particular the news is seeing text: there is a sub-text which is going on. It would have been interesting to have looked at it without your introduction. Because the introduction also gave it value – it was important to know that we were going through this space in London, that is where the tension was created with your narration about the conflicts, the ‘private’ as you say but within that horrific context of what was going on around it. It’s a question as to how you create that tension both visually and audibly. I wondered about the headings you gave us: dislocation, memory, landscapes, inhabited spaces – whether there was a way of introducing those into the sequence subtly. It is difficult. Part of it is also, if there are 6 images running, why aren’t there 4, why it isn’t more or why it isn’t less? To start with, I found it difficult to look at the images and wanted to shut my eyes and just listen to the words. Once I got used to the images I looked at one or two and actually some of them I found very disturbing, some of them made me feel sick: looking at the pavement gave me motion sickness and I found it distracting. For each of us it would be interesting to know how we looked at it, but I edited it in my own way and I was editing it in the context of what you told us at the beginning, so it’s that thing about filmmaking or writing a piece of text: how much do you put in and how much do you leave out, and my suggestion would be that there was less images and more structure. But I would be interested to hear how other people reacted.
Ayona Datta: Further along with Bob’s comments, I was having similar feelings. I was largely looking at Ger, your narration, the emotion that was going through your face when you were talking about some very horrific incidents together with mundane dispatches. I was also ‘editing’ the film. I was looking largely at Ger and sometimes also wondering, how come… I suppose, it is not ‘how come’, it is only in London that you can walk around in such a public spectacle and no one stops you and asks you… Were they stopping you and asking you and this is something you edited out? What were people’s reactions? There was one woman with a young child who stood and posed for you, but did no one actually stop and say ‘What the hell are you doing? Who are these people?’
RN: In part, the film was an exercise in filming in public. You don’t need a filming permit to film in public. You get this stuff all the time on the news, on BBC, they ask for videos from the public and then as soon as you take your camera out, a community warden comes along and says ‘No you can’t do that’. Yes, but where does it actually say that? If you don’t have tripods you are free to film. Everyone was briefed on the legal side of things, but we didn’t encounter any conflict with people having a problem we were there, with community wardens, with the police…
AD: I don’t mean a problem, more curiosity… something like this with people filming seems to be a spectacle and it is about performance, not just about Ger’s performance, but also about the people filming. In the shots which were taken from a distance, you could see that this is a bunch of people moving along, and I was wondering how come people were not curious and did not ask you what you were doing…
GD: I think there were some people, but I didn’t notice this at all, I was reading the text and I was navigating the traffic – that was important for me, not to get run over, but the rest… I didn’t really notice what was going on around me. I remember I once hit a signpost, but afterwards I was told that several people were asking questions, particularly to those that were at the end of the troupe of people moving along, so there were responses from the public.
AD: Because, it says something else about the city and the urban context of a city like London and that is probably another layer to your experiment, not just what you are reading and performing, but also the performance of the other actors in the city, it’s not just about the city itself but the people who see and accept it as an everyday phenomenon, people moving and reading and people moving and filming that person moving and reading in the city. It also tells us something about a city like London…
GD: I think the reaction that people had, if there was any, was ‘This must be a celebrity’.[laughter] And ‘Who is he?’ and ‘I know him!’
RN: It’s something between a paparazzi fest and a swat team moving through the city. But, part of the process had to do with having the equipment and the process completely visible. So, you can see the microphones on the spectacles, you see all the cameras and how the images are produced.
RT: Yes, it was interesting at the beginning to see the different cameras being introduced and to have that sense of how it is working in terms of the surroundings. I thought the work was very good. If you had gone to Canary Wharf, you couldn’t have done it; if you had gone to White City you would have had security guards on top of you.
RN: It’s a privately owned space.
RT: A publicly accessible private space.
RN: The film does end in a publicly accessible private space, where the cameras don’t go, which is Regent’s Park. So the film moves from the space of the office which is semi-private into the park.
B: I was quite surprised when you were sitting down, because I started reading the film quite differently. The first thing I was not expecting is that each camera had quite a specific role, so that this top left camera was really concentrating on you reading, and the top right one was taking shots of you from behind. I wondered whether there was a conversation about this first or whether it’s a complete coincidence. And then I found it interesting that when you were sitting down it changed the reading of the whole thing, because suddenly you had one still image focussing on you, but the others were still moving around, which I think gave your reading and text a different purpose. And then I was also wondering if you can explain a little bit more about this ‘one and the many’. There is something I find very interesting in that, it’s also for example this moment when one camera films the other cameras, it’s almost like this double mirror in which you see each other and then you multiply yourself. And what I find interesting is that you have this general history of Yugoslavia, then you have your very personal take on it, so from this multitude you bring it to one very personal diary and then again you multiply it. I find it interesting, but I don’t know exactly what was the process behind that.
RN: With regards to the camera layout, a lot of the people who were involved are filmmakers and it was completely left to them what they would do. So, Vlastimir Sudar, who shot the top left frame, said I am going to do a one hour close-up and I’ve brought and assistant who is going to lead me backwards for an hour – that was the decision he made and he stuck with it for a whole hour.
B: And the others were aware of this?
RN: Yes, several people said I am interested in this or that, so that the group had an idea loosely of where the others were coming from. With regards to the sequence where Ger is sitting, that was in always in the staging. The script is in 25 parts and takes place in 25 different locations in and out of Yugoslavia. The idea is to present each part differently and what you saw here is just one visual layout and it’s an early stage of the editing process. When Ger sits down, that is the beginning of part 2 which has there very long personal accounts, so we thought it would be good to allow it to draw people in, whereas part 1 is laying out the ground, allowing you to get attuned to this mode of presentation. ‘The one and the many’… For me, this whole project is a dialogue with standard media production, which compartmentalises between preproduction, production and postproduction. And these are almost airtight containers. So the person who is writing the script doesn’t go into the production process or later into the postproduction process. Whereas here, the script was taken from the diaries, Ger who wrote the diaries and wrote the script with me, performed it and is also involved in the edit and the presentation and the discussions. The same goes for the people who were shooting it, so it is a shame that Lottie Cantle was not able to come and I believe the editor Owen Saward is on his way, but he is not here yet. So, rather than compartmentalising these different areas, I see this project as an assemblage of different things which are plugged into each other. I don’t know if people are familiar with the word its technical use. I am not sure which backgrounds people are from here?
AD: Sociology, architecture, planning, geography, a variety of backgrounds…
RN: When I say assemblage, I mean assemblage in the way that Manuel DeLanda or Saskia Sassen refer to it, that is wholes which are characterised by relations of exteriority, so that each element in the whole has its own properties, its own way of interacting, so that if you were to put it in a different environment or you were to plug it into something else, it would react differently, produce different interactions and so on. So, one of the ideas we want to develop is to use the script as a radio play but also last Sunday it was performed in a different way, with a number of different performers (for more info, see the page ‘PROJECT SPACE 176 Kentish Town, 18/01/09’). So the script itself becomes one thing. There are also sound maps which map the site. In that sense, the method of working also has to do with multiplicities. There is obviously the relationship between a whole and a number of different groups that Ger meets in totally different environments, in rural environments, in urban environments, you have Kosovo Albanians…
GD: …Serbian peasants…
RN: …radical antiwar feminist groups. That is why I said in the beginning that I see it as an effacing of Ger as a person and an allowing for these different stories to be told through an outsider, who is also part-insider as well, because he speaks the language.
GD: I think you did a count of all the characters that are there in the diary, but there is a multitude of people…
RN: …something like 150. There were more, but then we cut the number down.
AD: It’s quite interesting, the way the narrative is juxtaposed with the images, it assumes knowledge for people who watch it and hear it, both about London and about the war and the conflict. I’m wondering… in a ‘normal context’, what we see circulated as documentaries and films, there is always a preceding introduction to the conflict and to these sites which were chosen very carefully, but to a person who is not aware of London, would not be able to identify them and connect them to these themes. I’m just wondering, what was the outcome that you expected out of this, was it not important to have a contextual element for people who might be out of the context and still watching the film…
GD: I personally think we should avoid giving that context, that’s how I feel about it. For those who know the context, it adds an extra dimension, for those who don’t, I am reading a script that will raise questions perhaps… but people will pick up on other things from it and I feel that in many ways it is a counterpoint to much of the existing media coverage of former Yugoslavia or much of the scholarly literature about the former Yugoslavia which focuses on politicians. In my script I talk about very ordinary people, which are never covered or they are covered through journalistic images which focus on the violence, on the victims of violence. During my stay in former Yugoslavia I was never directly in a war zone, although the noise of the war was constantly in the background… through the refugees you meet… the village in which I did my research disappeared from the map, the population decided to flee… The stories that I tell are those that haven’t been represented in much of the media coverage, so I feel that the way we are doing it is a very interesting, new way of exploring what I have done in 1992 and to perhaps raise a few questions, but it is also an attempt to comment on the existing scholarly production on the former Yugoslavia…
RN: …and the media representation…
GD: …in my case, I’ve written about Kosovo, about the Bosnian conflict and dealt with the Srebrenica massacre. There is a huge disillusionment on my side to have invested so much energy… but maybe I shouldn’t go into that really. I feel that this is a way of addressing these issues. And this is rather experimental; I never thought I would be doing this activity – performing in the street. It’s a very interesting process, we have had these presentations in different formats, this is one format – we also did one with just the sound recording running, instead of having all the images. The sort of response that produces is another interesting event. In that sense it is a real adventure.
RN: If I could bring your two points together – this question about how you transmit information, how you set the scene for something, through text and how much of an introduction you give… In standard media production, there are two tropes that are used almost everywhere. One is music – ethnic, local music. There is no music in this film. The other is archive material. From the outset we agreed that there would be no archive material, that all the images produced would be during a live public reading in London. There’s possibly a relationship with films like Shoah, which could bring us to the Kirmayer text that Ger offered as reading for this session. I don’t know if anyone has seen the film? Yes, one person… It is a film which is composed entirely of personal accounts of the Holocaust. It also has no archive images, but the accounts are counterposed with images of places where these things happened or places where these people lived. That brings us to this idea of ‘landscapes of memory’ which is very prescient for you (Ger) and there is an interesting passage that I found: ‘Memory is anything but a photographic record of experience. It is a roadway full of potholes, badly in need of repair, worked on day and night by revisionist crews.’ Here you have the idea that not only is memory not a static thing, but it is constantly made and remade. In a sense we are all Stalinists, we all remove people from photographs. Families go through this process of erasing people or ethnically unmixing themselves to create a stronger identity in one particular way. What I found interesting in the Kirmayer text is this idea of memory as hypostatic, as a hypostatisation, as a fixed, unified thing, almost like a column. This has more to do with what Kirmayer talks about as declarative memory which relates to propositions, more to signification, to certain utterances which can all be recorded in a linguistic code or any kind of code and then used or preserved. I think that what this film is, if you think of the script as a hypostatic structure, as a column, the film itself is an isostatic structure, it is much more like a sphere. Or like an assemblage: within it there are these oppositions between the hypostatic and the isostatic, and also between signification and significance. In the realm of signification you can say: ‘The Earth is flat.’ and you will be disproved. In the realm of significance, if you say ‘My life has no meaning.’ you cannot look that up in the dictionary. That is a meandering way of going into the Kirmayer text which I don’t know if anyone read of found interesting…
C: If I may query what you are saying about significance there… I study geography and I absolutely agree with that assertion that landscapes and spaces have a significance, memory and personal meaning. What I felt is that for most of the film the landscape was distracting me. That’s probably because the only significance and meaning of that landscape I have is that I used to live very close to there until a year ago and those spaces are so mundane, they are just places on your way to getting somewhere else, especially around Euston. At the end you were on Drummond Street and I thought: ‘There are quite a few good restaurants there…’ [laughter] and I found it difficult to focus as much on what was being said…
GD: I personally would not have wanted to make this film if it was just my narrative. So if we switch off all the images, my thought is: ‘Why do this?’ Because I don’t think the narrative of the diary is as important or interesting enough…
C: What about images of the places in which these diary entries were made. I suppose there were budgetary constraints, but what in particular turned you off that idea, because to me it seems obvious…
RN: Archive materials of Belgrade, Prishtina and so on?
C: Either archive or those you shot yourself…
GD: One of the first times we were presenting the work, the first respondent revolted and said that if you know basic concepts of filmmaking there, needs to be a correspondence between text and image. We completely violate that rule. On the other hand, I find that the interesting thing, because there is this disconnection, and what to do with it?
D: I found that while you were reading your narrative, in the beginning I struggled to create an image of the settings back in Kosovo and found myself closing my eyes… Then you get used to it and I found myself exposed to so many narratives: the persons making the film, the filmmakers and the stills photographer and none of those stills actually appeared in the filmmaking, so it seemed like a decoy, a bit of a cheat. That opening sequence reminded me of […] so I was making my own associations. Also, the whole idea of the derive is that you are experiencing the city in a dream-like state, you are reading street-signs, and exposing yourself to certain kinds of interpretations of those signs. […]
GD: Initially, the idea I had about the film, was that these different cameras express a multitude of ways you can read the city, and I am just one person who inhabits this permanent space. What I am saying may be normally just here [on the written page], but I am saying it aloud, and with those experiences in mind, they may influence the way I move through the city, may influence the way I perceive the city, may influence the way I interact with other people in the city. There is an interesting aspect to the fact that I am moving out of my office which is a sort of hermetic cell… how would you call it…
RN: …a sensory deprivation chamber…
[laughter]
GD: …where you keep your books as an academic. We could have filmed there… but you are still going to film there… And I am moving out as a scholar from my office, I walk through the building where I work and go out into the street. When we talk about Kirmayer, what I find particularly interesting is his idea that certain memories are allowed to exist and certain ones aren’t, because they are shameful. I don’t know whether any of you have read the text… I think it is one of the best texts I have read on trauma. The text is very much about public acceptance of trauma, or perhaps public rejection of traumas people might have. Kirmayer navigates on that territory, he is talking about landscapes of memory, the way people produce their own landscapes of memory, as a product of social interaction. It means that in the case of childhood abuse, a person who has had experience of childhood abuse, the very fact that the person cannot talk about that memory means that that memory fades away, there is hardly anything that a person will remember. In the case of Holocaust victims you see that these landscapes are very much articulated, are very much there, and that’s the product of the fact that these landscapes are socially and politically recognised and valued – other memories are not validated, are not talked about, are taboo. What the images mean to me is that I am performing something which is private in a public space and it is a comment on public space and what we do in public space with immigrants, with refugees, with people who are traumatised, what do we do with trauma in the urban setting. I think that is one of the ways in which you can read the film.
RN: For me this question of here and elsewhere is crucial. Yes I find the streets around Euston completely mundane, but I also find the streets of Belgrade completely mundane. I know all these places and they don’t have an air of exoticism, I don’t feel the need to construct images of those places. But this question is important: with all of these conflicts which we encounter on the news, how do we get from London to that place and back? Where do you consign images of the current war in Gaza? Do you have a daily ritual of watching the news and that’s that or do you go out into the street and do something about it, or do you occupy a building as we have seen here? [At the time of this conversation, students at London School of Economics had been in occupation of the Old Lecture Theatre for a week and one of their demands was that the college get rid of its investments in BAE Systems which provides weapons to the Israeli military.] The other thing is that I see this whole film as a set of interruptions. So, we are a minor interruption in the fabric of the city and there are all sorts of things which interrupt in the fabric of the film. I think it opens up the question as to why this story, why this conflict, why this person, why not someone else, why not that person, isn’t that person we are seeing in the street more important than what we are hearing? Where you want the film to cohere and you want to allow yourself the time to reflect or to put it in a particular place, it constantly fragments and shifts, resists you.
E: Maybe this is related to a point you just made and also what you said earlier when you mentioned that you wanted to give agency to the materials one finds in the city and I found personally that fragmenting it so much was the opposite, you needed to give more time and to be more respectful… I felt like you don’t spend enough time on anything to allow us to consider the agency of materials. I felt like the performance and the people filming were the things which had agency, and I wondered what you meant by saying that you wanted to give the materials themselves agency.
RN: What I mean is that if you look at the image as one image, rather than six, what you predominantly see is images of the urban fabric. It is almost like a fly’s eye or a number of tentacles feeling their way through a space. The camera itself is used not in the traditional sense: you have the horizontal and the vertical and the world slots into that, but here I see a non-human way of experiencing the world, it is visual, but is not anthropocentric.
F: I had a very different reading… For me there are three layers, first came the images of London and I thought of Neville Chamberlain and what he said: ‘Troubles in those far-away places in Eastern Europe…’ and how removed London is from all that happened over there. The other reaction for me was that I got so mesmerised by the story that I started building images, I was going to Belgrade, I was in Bela Crkva, going down to Prishtina, I was seeing pigs and peasants and they all came onto the London background. But on the third level, there were all these, what Baudelaire calls ‘correspondances’ – images that were reminiscent of those places: one moment there was a bus with a film advertisment, and only two weeks ago I was in Sarajevo watching the same movie… all of these things relating London to the Balkans. There were images of tabloid newspapers… and that provoked repulsion. How life is here, ways of living or the routine of living of getting consumed by such small things when elsewhere there are dramatic things happening. It’s a very different reading and I am a very emotional type.
C: I wouldn’t disagree with what you said, I didn’t mean it as a positive distraction, I am also disgusted when I see a London LITE, they are like banana skins on the side of the road. There was an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the slightly smug set-up, the detritus of London…
G: I think this is a very interesting experiment you have produced here. It is provoking the ideas we might have about conflict. It is also interesing that you have set up all of these translations: from the actual setting in Belgrade for instance, from how Yugoslavia was in 1992 and what is happening now, the London now and these records of then, the audio component and the multiple visual perspectives – it is an incredible scenario, very complex. It’s interesting to see how it is played out. I think it is such a complex story – the conceptual aspect is brilliant, but the film itself, for me… I had quite some difficulty between the balance between acoustic and the visual, because the story is so intense, so interesting…
GD: Can I ask you why is that? Because, I am just astonished why this is such an interesting story to listen to. I always told him: why one and a half hours? How can I expect people to listen to one and a half hours of these diary snippets? I am surprised to constantly hear from people that it is quite interesting to listen to, to the point that people switch off from looking at the images and just listen to the sound. I mean, it is quite mundane…
B: I don’t think it’s an interesting story…
GD: I am very grateful.
[laughter]
B: …I think it is the context which makes it interesting, that is what makes the story interesting. Because we know all of this history and also you gave this introduction, that is when it becomes interesting…
Robert Tavernor: What I will take away from this is the dislocation. If you are watching the news and someone is saying: in the Gaza strip these children were killed, then you see an ambulance arriving and an image of children in hospital – image and text go together. It is tragic, but it is commonplace sadly. It is this juxtaposition and dislocation… for me there were two shocking bits: one is hearing laughter and the other was the sound of sirens. In a way the ideas about memory, living space, landscapes, perhaps they weren’t so necessary, it was the contrast in the setting that worked so well.
Ayona Datta: For me the diary was interesting, not just because of the context, but it was interesting to see that even in the context of conflict, everyday life does go on… you go to McDonalds, you follow a football match. Although I could sense the tension in your writing and that you might also be worried about the future, you do say in the end: ‘we will all get killed’. It is set in a context where very powerful and violent changes are taking place, but also where everyday life is going on, and a diary is about everyday life, you are not dramatising anything, just are sketching it out the way it is affecting your everyday life in a very personal sense. That is why it was interesting, rather than that it was telling me more about the conflict… yes, it was telling me about a different side of the conflict, but more about everyday life going on despite the conflict.
GD: The whole thing about McDonalds is quite interesting, because McDonalds was the only place where I felt life was going on normally. The interesting thing, and I will give it away now, is that the last time I go to McDonalds, they didn’t have any fries, which if you hear it, it’s almost like your whole world is shattered. [laughter] It is one of those little threads that go through the script, I am talking about very mundane things, but we get to the point where McDonalds can’t get fries anymore – it is a metaphor for what was happening all around.
RN: I know I have been over-egging the conceptual framework, but for me this is a very personal film. I have the exact same memories of McDonalds as a child, a completely safe zone… This didn’t have anything to do with aspirations for the West, it had been there for a while. To go back to this idea of one and the multitude, for me it is a story in the third person, because Ger’s story is very typical of life in Belgrade at the time.
H: I have a lot to say… A lot of us have been talking about the physicality of the film, about closing our eyes, feeling disoriented, not being able to understand, not being able to have reactions other than the personal ones you are feeling and I think that this works very well. I am glad there are no images that relate to those places, I am glad there is no context other than your introduction… The fact that there is no fixating point other than closing your eyes and focusing on the master narrative, or you can focus on your [Ger’s] body rather than these movements in space, through the parks and so on. And I think this speaks about the complexities of memory, especially memories of catastrophe, you can never know and understand and always comes through these physical reactions to the destruction, so that if you feel sick or you have to close your eyes, I imagine that this might relate to people’s own reworkings of memories. I think you have hit on something interesting, that there is a physical reference for the audience, for me that is quite powerful. Also, you see the different perspectives but you also see the construction of the perspectives, it says something about histories and memories, takes on takes on takes on takes on takes, these potholes that get filled, but also images affecting other images affecting other images.
B: Somehow you deconstruct the film. Normally a film brings all the components together, you have the visual and the sound and it is used in a specific way and the narrative which may have a high point… you really deconstruct it. But I would argue that when you deconstruct, it might be necessary that this is the first film of a series, because otherwise it is very difficult to give meaning to this specific one. If it is this closed entity you can judge it within its framework, the moment you really open it up, one wonders: what do I do with this now? So, I either want more or… I am dissatisfied.
[laughter]
RN: It is. It is the first of a number of films. Also, my training comes from the fine arts and experimental film, so a lot of the techniques that we are using and the approaches are not new. I think it is the combination of the documentary form and some of these techniques which are arguably new to a certain extent. A number of things like this were being done in the 60s and the 70s, so it has a history there. Another interesting question for me is, I am not particularly interested in that niche, in the experiemental film niche, nor am I interested in it being a documentary or a piece of history… I am interested in the conversations that we can have and what we can exchange as different approaches and different responses…
Ayona Datta: One of the things for me, apart from what was actually being said and what was being seen was the idea of performance and the body in performance in the urban space. The linking of urban spaces across different parts of the world, through memory, through history of conflict and often tumultuous, often personal but often a much more public illustration of the trauma, for instance, things which you were talking about which you saw on telly there were the more public element. For me it was a performance piece. My question or my comment would be whether you as the person who is the author of that diary, not perhaps the author of the film, but the author of the diary, performing to a script of the author of the film, who was guiding your script through a particular kind of urban space, whether you felt that that changed or made you think about what you had written in 1992 in a different way. What were your thoughts when you were performing, and later on in a more reflexive way… What do you think about the diary now?
GD: The interesting thing is that because we started the project I reread the diary, which I hadn’t done… so the interesting thing, first of all is that I read my diary which I hadn’t read in 16-17 years. Sometimes I would leaf through it… there were moments when I was writing my PhD that I would have a look at my diary to see exactly… but these were just incidents and I never went through the diary. So, in a way, what Rastko did, was to force me to read the diary and perhaps unearth some of these memories I had and I must say it was very interesting to see how some of the things that were in my diary I could make sense of and there were these immediate sparks of memory, images or smells, and there were moments of ‘I can’t remember this at all’ and ‘What is this about?’ and by reading it you discover to a certain extent how memory works. That is already an interesting process to see how I forgot certain things and remembered other things perfectly. That was for me an interesting discovery. The whole performance of it… I don’t know, I’m still trying to make sense of it. It was Rastko’s idea to perform this and I said OK it’s your film, let’s do it, and we have both been very committed to it and there is also a relationship of trust that you build up, I think Rastko is very meticulous in the things that he is doing, he does them in a very meticulous way which creates trust in me that what we are doing is something good and interesting… What the performance did…? I rehearsed it a number of times and that was interesting because there were various moments when I was reading the script when I walking through the city actually provoked certain memories which I hadn’t had while I was reading during my first reading when we went through the diary in my office, but also a variety of places in London and during that first reading there were these moments where I could imagine exactly what had happened and those when I didn’t remember exactly what had happened at the time, and then while performing it, while rehearsing it… I don’t know how that process works, but because you walk through the city, the city impacts and triggers certain memories.
B: I find that process interesting… but, I am wondering, your diary has been translated?..
GD: Yeah, yeah…
B: …the moment you start translating, it influences some of your memories, when you suddenly read it in English, I would imagine…
GD: The diary is in a way partly fragmented in terms of language… I use Dutch, but I also use Serbian. If you are in a fieldwork situation, you start thinking in that particular language, so the diary is full of Serbo-Croatian expressions and words, so in a way the translation is from two languages into one.
RN: I think that, in terms of performance, that if you went to a film actor or actress and said, look there is this thing, and it’s a script and you are going to do it in one take, one chance to get it right, 75 minutes, they would say: ‘You’re crazy. You are completely crazy. This is impossible.’ Because they work in a completely fragmented way, there is a set-up here, you are saying six lines and there is a cut and you do something else, and so on. For me, the interesting thing was precisely that Ger is not a performer, so he was able to do it.
GD: You tricked me into it…
[laughter]
I: You really make the viewer work… it comes back to the idea of making aesthetics political, so I was wondering if you were writing anything about this project?
GD: I didn’t tell you [Rastko] yet [laughter], but I think I will indeed write a text which will cover the experience of making the film and what the possible understandings are for me, the viewers… This discussion is part of that process.
Ayona Datta: But you also do related projects around filmmaking: London in Motion…
GD: Yes about East-Europeans in London, and you have one participant of the group sitting there. The idea is to train people who don’t have any experience in filmmaking – researchers, academics, students who are interested in using documentary film as a medium to learn the first principles of filmmaking. It is a collaboration between SSEES and Bartlett.
RN: To go back to this question… I will be writing about it as well and there is a website to which some of the participants have already posted… so it is a constantly self-producing machine…