Lech Kowalski, dépasser les bornes

Du 15 avril au 15 mai

Questions à Lech Kowalski

-Except, maybe, Gringo, Story of a Junkie, your cinema is documentary. Yet we often feel a great sense of staging, and control. Why documentary, and what the oppositions fiction/documentary, mise en scène/spontaneity mean to you, if anything? How do you work with your team and the people you film?

Every film is about my own process of discovery. To discover something I don’t know about. As opposed to discover something that people expect me to show. Be it emotions or people or situations, where the camera is placed, is more important than any one single element in a film. Of course the juxtaposition of the scenes makes the story in the film, but where do I place my camera is the most important question I ask myself. It tells me about my relationship to the subject and with myself. This is what makes me most nervous when I am filming. Did I make the right decision?

How much to I leave out of the scene, meaning show only as little of what is happening as possible is profoundly important because I am only interested in interpreting what I am witnessing and not documenting the full entirety of it. This is why it is hard for me to work with a camera operator. It is not a question of good or bad photography but my relationship to the moment that was filmed. It’s that relationship to that moment that later I consider very carefully when I am editing the material into the final form which is a story that has some sort of narrative progression but is also about my relationship to what I have filmed. I am not at all interested in being objective. I am interested in the excitement of the moment. How can a moment tell me about life as opposed to tell me something about a plot? The plot is secondary. It is essential to keep the audience involved in the story but there are all sorts of plots. The plot of what will happen next is what I am interested in. Where is it going? How is it connected to honesty as opposed to a greater story plot? This is what I build my stories around moments that lead to the next moment. In the end I want to be emotionally satisfied with the journey but not because it was filled with information.

-Many of your films have a controversial aspect, by their subjects (addiction, marginality, and marginalisation, sexuality) and the way they challenge our perception of those realities. They are sometimes perceived as shocking, often as nonjudgmental. What are your thoughts on documentary ethic and limits?

I’m not interested in political correctness. It has little value in history. Marginal characters are closer to reality. They are closer to being lost. People who are in control of their lives pay a huge price. The price of losing the best reason to live. To live you have to take the chance with death. Death comes in all forms. Walking dead is what most people are. They live in the confines of their little stories. Not all people who live on the margin are heroic, but I get extreme pleasure rubbing up against them. They make me realize life is worth living, if lived.  It’s this challenge I try to make films about. The measure if a good film is how it is viewed in the future. For some reason this has always been on my mind when I make films. Even with the first films I made. Situations change but our time is our time and that is what I am grappling with. Why are things the way they are in my time? I am afraid of not being able to deal with this question. It’s beyond my intellectual capacity to deal with it but perhaps my films do. This is the great gamble I play with.

-New York and the American “underground” were for long at the heart of your films. More recently, you have filmed in Europe, and particularly in Poland for a trilogy (The Boot Factory, On Hitler’s Highway, East of Paradise). What does that change mean for your cinema? 

There is no underground. Maybe there never was. There is only fashion. I have to invent my own underground. I am my own underground. I am not connected to any culture movements anywhere in the world. I never have been. But I have been interested in fashions. I am also afraid of getting trapped by all the things I am, that we are surrounded by. I am escaping from them as well as looking for something. I work out of optimism because I believe in the creative endeavour but I am also afraid of something and my fears have chased me to Poland and well beyond that. I am now creating in larger margins. The idea is to create a fantasy reality that does not really fully exist and then make a film about it, in my case are called my documentaries.  But they are creations. Creations about something that does not fully exist until I make them exists and even then what do the documentaries add up to? They are windows to be able to look at something. Perhaps it’s where I have been.

-From D. O. A. to Born to Lose and Hey is Dee Dee Home, music plays a strong role in your films. What does the punk aesthetic means to you?

I only film music stories that connect to me in some sort of aesthetic way that I connect with. Punk is a way of thinking. If punk had never been invented I would still work in a punk way. It is not a philosophical approach it is a way to survive and by surviving I mean to make thinks work for you as opposed to having to fit in. You make a space. The more I work the bigger that space becomes. I remember when there was no space at all – and now after all these years the space has a body of work in it, but I think I am not always there. The space is not me, it’s something else. The work itself is the space and I am the intimate visitor in that space.

-Your latest project, Camera War, is an online cinematographic blog (www.camerawar.tv). On your web site you wrote that traditional filmmaking cannot convey the complexity of our world anymore. Do you think Internet is the answer?

Camera War is my way to connect to a world that is way beyond comprehension. That’s my only challenge. Everything else connected to this project is subservient to that objective. This includes the story telling form, the presentation, the chapter format, the narrative style and the evolving narrative itself. We live in a post documentary reality too, meaning that we are no longer living in a world where there is a possibility of explanation. We are suspended in reality. We live in the moment and we do not trust much if anything beyond what is going in our lives moment to moment. The only governing force we are part of is one that tells us that we will be surprised. We are not part of ethical reality. We are part of unethical survivalist fiction; I want to survive because I have to but where I fit in, is impossible for me to know because I am not connected to roots or to continutity.

These are the rules of Camera War. Yes I can talk about the shit state of distribution or the way television is awful and how hard it is to get money to make anything that is meaningful. These are problems we are all very well aware of for some time now and are not worth discussing anymore. Therefore I am in action. Camera War is my action. This action is making me discover stories that I want to tell that I would not have considered unless I was in this forward momentum that camera war is. Camera War is my community. This is perhaps the single most post documentary reality that I can discuss. Community. There is no community in the traditional sense. Thus I created a place where a community can meet. A community that did not exist before I created Camera War but is in fact many individuals who live around the world and who share ideas and curiosities.  Everyone shares on camera war and they come here to explore to look and to be part of something that is needed as opposed to simply consuming a commercial product. Camera War is part of me. It is part of a bigger community that exists as part of many communities. It is about imagination and creativity. This itself is energy. Every chapter need to exude energy. To give rather than to destroy, to open rather than to close, to give energy, to show things that are not so obvious and to do all this because corporate money making mechanisms ignore all of these things.

Entrevue réalisée via Internet par Karine Boulanger, assistante à la programmation. Ce cycle est présenté en collaboration avec la Corporation Québec-Pologne pour les arts et le ConsulatGénéral dePologne à Montréal.