A Lesson in Cinema

On 30 March 2015, film school La Fémis invited Sergei Loznitsa to give a masterclass to students. The following is a transcription of some of the director’s remarks that day.

A Dangerous Profession

The profession you have chosen is a dangerous one, because what the world holds most dear in a director is evidently his gaze. This gaze is necessarily pointed in one direction and that direction is the world. It’s through this gaze that one describes the world. The description of the world is obviously linked to meaning. Most people are in the same state as those they see in the image, but meaning is there to awaken, and no one needs to be awakened, neither those in the image, nor those who own this meaning but have no desire to share it with those who are in the image.

In the Beginning of Cinema

Cinema, for me, is one of the instruments used to describe the world. It’s a language which, in itself, can end up deforming what we say. And so, at the very start, I tried to understand the basis of this instrument and what I was going to do with it. For me the best method was to tackle documentaries, to go out with my camera and get images. Even though I had studied feature films, that’s how I started.

The idea of cinema was invented about 25 centuries ago – invented but not recognised. The idea of it is there in Zeno’s paradox, the paradox of the arrow. During its flight, at every moment of the flight, the arrow is at different points. If we could reduce the arrow’s speed, the sum of the static points would give us movement. But it’s not possible to wholly reduce the movement so that the arrow is static. This paradox exists to tell us what cinema is: the illusion of movement. What we see on screen is only ever the illusion of movement.

Cinephilia

During my studies I watched up to five films a day at Moscow Cinema Museum, where I served my apprenticeship as a cinephile. It almost closed in 2004 and breathed its last in 2015, which just goes to show how dangerous such a place is in the eyes of the authorities. I have a strong connection to French cinema: to Bresson, whom I would call a calm filmmaker. Marcel Carné too. And I’m a fan of Renoir. Later, the Nouvelle vague of course. Broadly speaking, something monstrous happened in the sixties, considering that in Italy alone Fellini, Pasolini and Antonioni were all active at the same time... If you compare it to today, we’re really playing it safe! I also think that there’s a lot to learn from Hitchcock, whose filmography includes masterpieces like The Birds and Psycho. I feel very close to Buñuel, because he doesn’t always treat serious things in a serious manner. Russian cinema also means a lot to me, of course, I’m deeply versed in it: Dovjenko – Ukrainian like me! – Boris Barnet, Abram Room. Dziga Vertov, for his theoretical contribution and the debate he introduced about the relationship between cinema and reality, using frenetic editing for emotional effect, and to construct a new world through cinema, especially in Enthusiasm.

To speak generally, we are influenced without really knowing by whom or by what. I recently watched Chantal Akerman’s D’Est again, and it reminded me that I’d first come across it in 1993 in Moscow. Rewatching it, I understood that many of my films stemmed from this first screening which I’d nonetheless forgotten. Three or four of them were born, completely unconsciously, from my discovery of D’Est in 1993 – Paysage undoubtedly being the work which owes the most to it, with this camera that pans over faces, over the crowd, over weary human figures.

Documentary/Fiction

There are many definitions for these terms, including those of Manoel de Oliveira: in feature films the actors know they are being filmed, and in documentaries they don’t. Suggesting that the documentary camera looks from below, even monitors. The second definition comes from Hitchcock: in feature films, the director is God; in documentary films, God is the director. As a human, you experience things that you expect and others that you don’t. If things pop up when I’m making a documentary, I tell myself that I’m on the right track.

As for the structure and construction of film, for me there’s no difference between documentary and fiction. What changes is our ethical approach, defined during extreme situations. If I film a suicide attempt, and people tell me the actor slitting his throat has put in a good performance and I reply that it wasn’t fiction, the cinematic edifice falls, dissolves.

It has nothing to do with the image itself, since that hasn’t changed. What has changed is our relationship to this image. This is the boundary that separates documentary and fiction. And documentary cinema is rather cunning, because it claims to show us events as they are; it’s thus considered the cinematic testimony of a filmmaker who has captured what was. All this is pure fiction of course. Yet, while we think rationally, life itself is irrational, so we must put ourselves at its disposal to accommodate it.

On Meaning

Most people believe that what is shown on screen is a part of life. Each time I start a film, I tell myself that I don’t know what the world consists of. This is obviously a definition that I slot back into a metaphorical framework. Each time I make an image, I have to resignify it and so continue the work started right at the beginning of the shoot. From the very first image, you are condemned to stay inside the frame you have chosen. It all has to do with the composition, the position of the camera and the length of the shot. Each new image that you film contributes to the meaning that you allot to the whole. Once you have finished shooting, the film’s meaning is whole. The most important things in a film are the beginning and the end. In any case, no one remembers the middle. It’s Paradjanov who said that. The most important thing is the last shot and above all the very last image.

I like to experiment with forms and with Into the Fog I reworked meaning from a single sound; the character at the very end remains alone in the fog. I added just one sound and it changed the meaning of the whole film. It’s a gunshot. We understand that the character has committed suicide. I could have removed this gunshot – which some spectators encouraged me to do, because viewers traditionally like the film to end happily – and it would have given the film another meaning.

Time, Rhythmics

It’s important to note that cinema is an art which unfolds in time, whereas other arts dwell in immediacy. Cinema, theatre and dance are art forms which take place in time, whereas sculpture and painting are grasped in the immediate, at ‘X’ moment in time. It’s therefore crucial to consider time in the perception of the arts. It’s necessary to know that, right up until the last image, the film isn’t over, one must have watched the film right to the end to get a real sense of the specific, the total, picture. One must finish the credits to understand if this film has, or hasn’t, steeped you in the structure it hoped to offer its viewer. This timeline influences our perception, which is subject to rhythm. Whether the perception is conscious or unconscious, the viewer feels and experiences this rhythm.

With my films, I create graphs (the projection of the graph in In the Fog produces astonished and amused reactions). It’s not that funny, you’ll see it’s actually very practical… In fact, it’s like a game, but a very serious game. Since it’s a game it’s false by definition even if there’s an artistic authenticity to it. It’s a graph of the film’s rhythm; on the abscissa you have all the shots in the film, and on the ordinate, you have the length of each shot. You thus obtain waves, on which the viewer sails as they watch the film. You can make the waves an identical length, in which case things become impossible to watch, whatever you show. It’s something I can’t explain, just as it’s impossible to explain the golden ratio. But this movement which exists in all art forms must be respected without fail.

You can see from this graph that my shots are long, very long even; that means there must be something essential in them. When you make a film the most important things should be at the extreme point of the shot, at least if you want the viewer to pay attention to them. Sometimes directors hide the point they’re making – they don’t put it in the foreground. Renoir for instance belongs to those filmmakers who don’t highlight particular things. The most important thing is therefore what happens between shots; it’s in this interstice that one can play with the dimensions both physical and intellectual, conscious or unconscious, of the spectator. You can remove or add nuance, you can conceal or reveal. And if you don’t willingly decide, you’ll have to make intuitive choices. I don’t finish a film without making a graph, and this one isn’t good: there are too many long, isolated columns in the midst of the rest. However, there’s the continued flux of the film and one sees that the editing is more dynamic at the end while I stretch out time at the start – which is one of the rules.

Thanks to this graph you see your film’s rhythm sketched out. It’s like trying to see the invisible. For example, try to picture the roots of a tree, then the projection of a horizontal section of the roots of this tree. In a projection of this section, you see a white canvas with the points emerging from the roots, but you don’t see the relationships that may exist between these points, you have no idea of the dimensions, of the connections. Well, to visualise this, you need the perspective the graph offers you. It’s the very task of cinema, which is to visualise things which are connected in themselves but whose relationships are invisible. In the same manner that we, as human beings, live in the midst of events without seeing the links that bind them.  

Into the Fog is one of my feature films, composed of 140 shots in 2 hours 17 minutes, which is an average rhythm of 40 seconds per shot. If I could, I would always stretch out time, but I’m not ready for it yet, and nor is the viewer. But I insist on the utility of such a graph, especially since sometimes we don’t know where our mistakes are nor why what we have have imagined has not worked. Because on the edge of the narrative that you follow, there is also the emotion that sometimes doesn’t work, and these very formal and technical things can help you to resolve your mistakes, or to avoid them. Moreover, when you shoot a film, it is difficult to know if you have the complete thing. With Into the Fog we edited the new shots straight away, adding them to what had been shot previously – I am a very impatient person at such times. It’s a very curious feeling to see a film being born and developing before your eyes, like you’re watering it in the day and it grows in the evening. But although I did this during filming, it’s only at the editing table, when all the shots are put together, that I know if my film is an entity, if it’s a whole: it’s the most fearful moment for any director.

Music, the Musicality of Sound

My connection to music is, broadly speaking, strong. One can ask oneself what the definition of music is. For instance, whether or not it’s something to be aligned with John Cage, for whom everything that makes sound is music – even if one must organise, build music from these sounds. That’s why, alongside my sound engineer, Vladimir Golovnitski, and using the materials at our disposal – largely from the shoot – I try to construct a sonic composition. I’m aware that I haven’t yet managed to harmonise with the music accompanying images in films; that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for other films, but I find no place for it in my own according to this definition. Most of the time, it’s used in a utilitarian way to support the images, to maintain or attract the spectator’s attention, like a sign. For my part, I don’t wish to use this kind of commentary, which is exterior to the film’s substance. In my documentaries, the ideal is to have films without dialogue. And if I could I’d make all my films without dialogue, including my features, because I think that the substance of cinema resides in the image and the sounds.

With the arrival of sound, the language of cinema went into decline; things could be solved because one could quite simply say them. But, as in the rules of thermodynamics, that has a function and effect upon people: according to this same principle, filmmakers adopted the simplest solutions to convey information. That considerably impoverished the language of cinema. It was necessary to wake up from this relative slumber, but the awakening was not as explosive as the exceptional creativity of the 1910s, and above all the 1920s.