Carlos Reygadas
Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas (2007)
Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican screenwriter, editor, and film director. His debut feature Japón premiered at the Cannes Film Fsetival, where it won a Caméra d'Or - Special Mention; his second film Battle in Heaven, which links the well-to-do daughter of a Mexican general with her middle-aged chauffeur through a web of sex and secrets, premiered at Cannes, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, and Rio de Janeiro, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. Silent Light orbits issues of desire and redemption inside a Mennonite community in rural Chihuahua state, while Post Tenebras Lux observes a young family's move to the countryside, navigated through the characters' realms of perception. Nuestro Tiempo (Our Time), Reygadas's latest film examining the vicissitudes of a marriage, and featuring the director himself in an acting role, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, San Sebastián, São Paulo, and Havana, where it won Best Director.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Reygadas discusses cinema as an art of presence, the natural feeling of eternity in youth, cinematic time as a mode of encountering the peripheral, and the virtue of filmmaking as a hermeneutic endeavor.
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FILMATIQUE: Many consider you to be one of Mexico's most prominent contemporary directors, with several critically-acclaimed films that have premiered at prestigious festivals around the world. Prior to this, however, you studied international law, in London. Can you briefly discuss your journey from law to filmmaking?
CARLOS REYGADAS: I studied law in Mexico City and then earned a master's degree in England. I liked my profession and especially the law of armed conflict and use of force because only a fraction of it is positive law and it lacks an actual coercive system. As most of it is customary and particularly subject to argumentation, its application requires a good use of logic and a bold imagination. What I did not like—and actually what I started to fear when I saw it appear before me—was the life of the lawyer. I was in NYC collaborating with the Mexican delegation before the UN in preparatory works for the International Criminal Court and at night, and at dawn and at noon, I could see from the room I had in Midtown lawyers in the building in front of me, eating microwaved food, taking showers and changing their clothes so they could work without leaving the office. I felt a form of auto-imposed-slavery and was bitten by a painful urge to quit. No matter what, in that kind of profession you cannot escape a repressive way of life.
I then felt the anguish of knowing myself to be useless for any other job. Then, the dormant passion that cinema had been since I was eighteen came to my rescue. I felt for the first time that film was what I had to do. I quit it all and went back to Brussels and made short films with students from the INSAS, on expired black-and-white Super 8mm film and sound in Nagra magnetic tapes. My DOP then and for Japón and Battle in Heaven, Diego Vignatti, was fundamental on all these roads. He was a great friend and I miss him. Gilles Laurent became my sound engineer. We learned so much from each other, we three and all the rest of our friends/collaborators who made those films together. Gilles is no longer with us and I also think often of him and his radiancy… how he loved music and listened to Schubert every day. I miss all the freedom and the clean light and the natural feeling of eternity and the factual unity of everything. Then it was all there: pure reality without an element of thought.
Today the air feels heavier. I feel like I feel less and sort of "know" more—I do not mean wisdom unfortunately, only that there's a part of my feeling for life that has turned into the mental, probably even the conceptual. I know it may just be my eyes that are not as sharp as they were, but maybe thoughts do have a weight and demand an energy that could be used for better things, or even more, that might even negate life in a certain way. We were passionate and relentlessly discussed cinema, music, literature, football, human habits around the world. We loved Kiarostami and Peleshian. L'Humanité by Dumont was just out in Europe and I had not seen it but they kept on telling me about it. No one was a professional then. The eldest of us three was 27. The mercenary element of film crews wasn't around yet. There were no plans for the future, no funds, no pitching, no festival route, no sales agents, no subtitles, no interviews, nothing external. Just the places and the people I loved so much that I wanted to do films with. We produced Japón with US$37,000 that an art collector gave us. We shot on a 2.9x1 frame ratio on 16mm film, for 10 weeks, with all our determination, our patience and our joy too.
Japón Carlos Reygadas (2002)
FLMTQ: During a masterclass at last year's IFFR, you noted that "making a film is not the same as building an airplane." While this remark was likely intended as an off-the-cuff reminder that cinema cannot be simply engineered, it struck me as quite a bold defense of a sensorial, intuitive approach to filmmaking. Can you unpack this phrase for our readers? How does the germ of an idea for a film first evolve in your mind?
CR: In an airplane or a cellphone every nut and bolt serves a purpose. Nothing is there that does not have a specific reason to exist and a duty to perform. I hear many people teaching cinema this same way, in books and in schools. Story, a clear conflict, character construction and development, turning points—in sum, dramaturgy. Then dialogue is conformed so it all signifies and informs specifically, all is bright and crispy and in the center, measured in duration just so we can have the right amount of time to conceptualize information. And worst, the construction is all around a permanent choice for the main characters, which exists on top of an underlying but definitive morality. Most filmmakers work like this today and I hear critics seeing films in this light for sure, as if they were mechanical devices, like clocks, for example. The perfect film and the paradigmatic film... Even worse, on top of this, is that now films seem to be ideological scans of the maker, proofs of external conformity with the rule of our time, educational instruments and affiliation cards.
I believe a film should have no codified rules of procedure and should never be constructed primarily in a dramatic form, just the way that the world is not. Cinema is not a dramatic art—although it's been used as such even by the Lumières after a few of their first films—but an art of presence. It should firstly show, bring to us, put forward—not express—the impression, or better said, a shade of the impression of an individual's approximate intuition of her feeling of existing, which then may communicate with the viewer so that she can associate her own perception of being alive with someone else's. Film is a unique art because it can present the actual uniqueness of a being and of being itself, not symbols and representations of life. Film as captured sound and image, by definition, presents. But we've used cinema so often—to the point of making it tradition, as if it were literature—to represent.
FLMTQ: Both Battle in Heaven and Silent Light are characterized by a circular narrative structure—the former film begins and ends with an act of fellatio between an upper-class Mexican woman and her family's driver; in Silent Light, the crepuscular conjuring of a day's end parallels the sun's rising, from the beginning of the film. This mirroring destabilizes the notion of time as teleological—here, time seems not to be advancing toward some concrete destination, but rather moving in cycles, iterations. Can you comment on these films' ostensible circularity? How can cinema alter the way we relate to and experience time, and how do you conceive of that potential?
CR: Well, the fact is that nothing is advancing anywhere. This is only a conceptual procedure of the mind that we confound with actual perception, and this perception seems to be that we exist in a sort of progression, resonating within a major objective. Mathematics may explain things, but they do not have an actual sense of purpose. The fact of the matter is that nothing is organized, neither in time and much less in dramaturgy, to make no mention of morality.
These are just tools of intellectual understanding which we mistake for knowledge. I wonder if this is the error that explains why we improve technically but remain as cruel and blind as we have been since we lived in trees. All this does not mean that a film has no option but chaos. My films are indeed organized, but I try to keep such order at the level of human conception only, all of it below the general feeling of a superior mystery that cannot be schematized. I think Nietzsche expressed this idea perfectly with the thought of the eternal return: only the possibility of the eternal reviving of this life allows for things to change their nature; all comes back again, not the same things as such, but rather their opposite. Being is the return itself.
Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas (2007)
FLMTQ: Upon premiering at Cannes, Battle in Heaven caused quite the uproar for its frank and almost banal depictions of sex—indeed, from the opening sequence of Japón to the swingers' club in Post Tenebras Lux, your oeuvre resists sensationalizing sexual relations. What is also interesting about these depictions, moreover, are their incongruous pairings of bodies; as one critic dutifully surmised of Battle in Heaven, it is the "double linkage of ugliness/beauty and poverty/wealth that provokes the critical avalanche." How do you think about sex as an ubiquitous presence in your films, or as a proxy for exploring social relations more broadly? Insofar as mainstream media can tend to commodify and/or exploit certain bodies, to what extent do you see your approach as subverting this system?
CR: While making my films I have always felt a duty or loyalty to what I perceive as direct reality, not to codes. Why is it that in a renowned film like María Candelaria—which takes place in the Mexican countryside and which is meant to "portray the indigenous people of Mexico with innocence and dignity"—everybody is of indigenous origin apart from the actress playing María Candelaria (Dolores del Río), who pretends to be so by dressing up and imitating their speech but actually being very similar to a lady from Sicily?
I believe this kind of forgery—which leads to actual social aspiration—is not only a boring code, but is at the base of the perpetuation of racism. (This idea must not be confused with the new correctness that demands that a heterosexual character be played by a heterosexual person, for example. While sexual orientation is an actual feeling, I am discussing things that have to do with the image—which is the object of cinema).
I remember being accused with Battle in Heaven of wanting to create shock value by filming sex among "monstrous characters." Well, these monsters are part of my life and I think of them as people, simply. I truly do not see the "ugliness/beauty" dichotomy in that film. Only the western/non-western, but that goes no further into the field of aesthetics. On the contrary, poverty/wealth—which is an objective category that we tend to associate naturally with the previous one but which is definitely separate—is mostly always present in my films. I cannot avoid it as part of the duty of loyalty to direct reality I mentioned before. We have it all around the globe, the haves and have-not's that we form by countries and then within countries themselves, down to the smallest unities of separation, and which constitutes another proof that we do not evolve in matters of cruelty and domination. I do not want to subvert the system. I do not care much about it, so I do things my own way. I see human nakedness the same way I perceive that of the equine and fish. I am not afraid of sex and nudity.
FLMTQ: Another quality that spans your body of work is a near complete lack of moralizing. In Silent Light, Johan's infidelity is met with patience and understanding rather than judgment; only once in the entire film does a character issue any judgment at all (a passing, flippant remark by Esther, which is almost immediately reversed). Similarly, Nuestro Tiempo deals with non-monogamous relationships in nuanced, ambivalent ways. How would you qualify the moral and/or ethical stance of your narrative universe?
CR: When cinema is about presentation then you do not judge. When drama is renounced, this occurs automatically. Not because of one's will, but because cinema doesn't allow it. Only when it is used as a tool for storytelling does it become a means of judgment, loosing its intrinsic beauty.
Drama needs a moral but cinema itself can't have one. Again, in the eternal return, negation—as a quality of the will to power—transforms into affirmation on the return. Acquiescing to life, the moralization of the world is over, and its lecture in light of guilt, injustice, punishment and a will to correct lack all sense. A film should make the world more beautiful, show its power, brutality, vastness and infinite openness to interpretation.
Silent Light Carlos Reygadas (2007)