CKLN Interview with Cameron
Bailey (March 1988)
CB: ?O,Zoo!; what’s the intonation on that?
PH: You
have to say with with a question mark.
CB: ?O,Zoo?
PH:
Something like that.
CB: OK,
that was a film written on top of a film called A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway. Anyway could you just describe the new film passing through for us?
PH: OK, I
can talk a bit about it. It revolves around my mom’s history; she’s from
CB: You say
a collision between texture and form and also different genres of experimental
film. What exactly do you mean by that? What genres does it use and what’s the
experience of watching the film?
PH: Well
I’m not sure about the experience but I try to make it so that it’s, you know,
not on experience but anyway I guess what I mean is that my background is
experimental film and the films of the 60s and 70s or the films that I studied
and grew through film with.
CB: Stan Brakhage?
PH: Brakhage and Snow and Wieland and
you know, a lot of those experimental filmmakers. And I think, in a sense, my
film covers a lot of styles. Yet I believe it has its own style, its own way of
speaking.
CB: From
your other work that I’ve seen, you tend to work very much with your own
history; your family history, your personal history, and with your memory of
say growing up or what your childhood was like and that sort of thing. How is that treated in this film and how is it different from
what you’ve done before?
PH: Well I
think it would be good to compare it with my first film On the Pond, which was also about family in which I was trying to
somehow represent my part. It was the first film I made, about eleven or twelve
years ago, in 16mm. I don’t think this film tries to represent a past. But
instead, in passing through, I work
through film to, I would say, I don’t try to represent a past but whatever I
come upon, as I put myself in the midst of this filmmaking, looking into my
mom’s past, I sort of discover as I go along and I guess put everything into a
big pot and what comes out is the film. So I’m not consciously trying to remake
my mother’s history but, you know, the film is very much about what’s happened
to me right now and how I experience my mother’s history and the things that
are happening both in the old country and
CB: What
does your mother think about this? I know you make films… your films are very
much involved with your family. What does your family think about having a
filmmaker sort of filming them all the time? How do they react to it?
PH: Well
that’s not too unusual because I’ve always had a dark room in the basement and
I’ve always, you know as I was young, they were used to a camera being around.
It’s not that unusual. But I also don’t think the film comes off as someone’s
personal life. I think it could be anyone’s. And I try to create the characters
in a way that, even though I’m using people around me, through film I recreate
different types of characters, using their voices and images to match. I try to
get away from this thing of having to grab onto a character. There’s no way you
can in my film, passing through. And
in this way it sort of takes it out of the realm of simply personal. Hopefully
then, more people can get involved in the film.
CB: I
noticed as well that, you talk about emerging techniques, I noticed that you
have a certain resistance to the conventions of any particular form; in ?O,Zoo! I remember there’s a sequence where
you tell a story and then you say-you show an image of the site of the story
after the actual story has happened. You say, “This is what it looked like
after everybody had left.” And that sort of resistance to showing a narrative
or just sort of getting caught up, as you mentioned before, in character. And I
was just wondering what’s your relationship to filmic
conventions, conventions of documentary or narrative or whatever? How do
you work within and outside of them?
PH: Well I
think, especially with the example you gave, it allows a viewer to participate
more in the making of the film and whether I use a black screen and have a
narrator talk about a scene and you know maybe I might not give you that scene
in the image but really I am because you can imagine it how you wish. I think
the new film, passing through, is
just a labyrinth of those kind of exercises, which I started with in maybe ?O,Zoo!… So how I feel about the conventions
is, even in experimental film there are conventions and they must be
continually broken. And so I think I’m interested in that always; to try to at
least display a convention and then turn it upside down a little bit.
CB: Another
thing I wanted to get your opinion on, the whole idea of ethics in filmmaking.
It’s an old question, “What can you film and what can’t you?” We were talking
earlier about your grandmother who is in the film and who is now in a nursing
home. And your, sort of, initial reluctance to film her and also the state that
she’s in now-she doesn’t necessarily know that you’re filming her. So it’s not
a case of getting permission. What can you film and what can’t you?
PH: Well if
we’re going to talk about my grandmother, that would
be Babji, that’s the Polish of that. The film’s
dedicated to her so unfortunately when I knew her as Babji
when she made perogies in the kitchen, I wasn’t
shading sixteen. I have to somehow deal with that in passing through, those
memories. But yet I still have to deal with her and the experience that she and
I are going through with her sickness. And I have to deal with it right now. I
have to deal with it with my camera and she happens to be in a nursing home.
CB: OK, I’d
like to ask one final question and that’s about the process of collaboration.
In his film you have used a Christopher Dewdney poem and an excerpt from a work
by Marion McMahon at the end. I know our relationship with
PH: Well