Reflections: The Self, the World and Others, and How All These Things Melt Together in Film

Stephen Dwoskin

Film is my language and without language I become silent and in my silence I cease to be. Silence can kill you, and to remain silent is literally to close down the sense of one’s humanity. This is true for everyone – our language (whatever one we choose to have) is the most effective way to keep hold of ourselves and keep our humanity alive. This is a simple way to explain it. It becomes more complex when this language has to become refined and worked in order to be understood while retaining its integrity as an individual expression. Complex, as well, because film (cinema) has been manipulated by economics, analysed by academics, controlled by industry, and entwined by technology. Against this backdrop, against this surrounding phenomena, as Tarkovsky might have said, I have had to find my voice as a filmmaker, and retain my own sense of humanity as well as a personal mode of expression.

For each and every person the cinema becomes their own thin space, progressing as a polished mirror, with vast potential, capturing and reflecting shadows. I don’t know why but it can often feel like that strange space between being and not being. It is a charged question that propels one into the very heart of cinema’s own contradiction of being both a metaphor and an actuality. Out of this enormous panoply of potential, cinema became the agent through which I explored a way to establish my own sense of humanity, and, of course, to find a voice to speak to others. For me cinema was the contemplative move from the sensibilities of painting to those of the moving picture. Conceptually this was a simple move and therefore a simple decision. Film added the element of time to an otherwise static image and I needed that element of time to extend my voice.

However, in this simple conceptual transition the contradiction that I know as cinema soon revealed itself. Contradiction, for me, lies at the very heart of expression because it allows for the probable to be placed alongside the improbable. (Or the improbable made possible!) Here then is a language, and a potential, that goes beyond the singular presence of painting, as wonderful as painting is, and moves beyond singularity. It all germinated in a period where the prevailing climate encouraged the freedom of ‘doing whatever you felt like doing’, a ‘counter culture’ so to speak, and the sudden liberation allowed by inexpensive equipment and material. To make a film was simply an open field of experiment, expression and experience.

Cinema blurs the differences between categories and genres. When I think back to my own beginnings with film, categories or genres posed no problem. They posed no problem because neither I nor any of the other filmmakers I knew ever thought about it; never considered any absolute difference. Making films was not a stylistic choice, but an expressive direction. In that sense forms such as fiction and documentary can be fused together. To document fantasy, or to dramatise a real event, were equally blended in the greater picture of making cinema, or in Brakhage’s famous words, ‘the art of seeing’. Film certainly is a unique place of fascinating mystique, iconography, and social statements, while managing to explore its own structural and material qualities. The diversity and potential are unlimited. Once there were no boundaries and, for a time, no rules. Of course the potential and diversity are still present, but new definitions have been forced upon us. The seemingly anarchistic nature of filmmaking then, free and without boundaries, appears to be no longer tolerated. Yet it is in the ‘free and open space’ that the most honest and truthful films are made. This kind of cinema – this other cinema – uncatalogued and individual, needs no explanation. It explains itself.

I only do what I know. Nothing else. I do it to make films to free myself and, of course, to free others, especially the viewer. I also do it to make films that explore and express the self. To express the self is to also expose the self, but at the same time to allow a dialogue with others. It is not only a dialogue, but a process of investigation and reflection for all, or in Lacanian terms ‘positive transference’. To fulfil this, filmmaking has to (in my opinion) be honest and revealing. It has to bear witness to the subject and to the self. It has to allow the viewer to be able to engage with their own selves and their own feelings. Films, my films, have to open up to the elusive and intimate space in order to permit the viewer to enter them or reflect upon them. Filmmaking can therefore be a space where the viewer, like the filmmaker, introduces their own form of ‘narrative’, a ‘narrative’ that is not necessarily conclusive or resolved; a process that questions through its own inherent contradictions.

For me, then, films become like a mirror, as my films are. They are made as a process that is reflective (often meditative) and at the same become reflectors. This forces a type (or style) of filmmaking that is outside or beyond the barriers of conventional ‘storytelling’ (and beyond even voyeurism). There is no precise label for this kind of film (though it has often been called ‘personal’). Because of this absence of classification, or this absence of explanation, the films appear difficult and threatening to some (certainly to the established conventions), haunting and moving to others. Clearly, the mirroring effect produced by a ‘personal’ and ‘expressive’ type of cinema, like my films (and some other people’s work), presents an image of life in a boundless way.

The perplexity posed by the mirror effect is that of a reflection that tells the truth (like documentary), yet exaggerates (like fiction). It gives the films a ‘dubious resemblance’ that distorts, but the equality of the double reflection gives emphasis to what it represents. The singularity of expression affirms itself in the reflection and in the reproduction. A resemblance or likeness offers the possibility of knowing oneself, and also offers it to others. Looking is a marvellous thing, and looking is what cinema is about.

One then has to consider that the experience of making (or seeing) a ‘personal’ film (or any borderless film) is like making a trip into an unfamiliar land – to a place where you’ve never been; like having a love affair with a person who demands things of you that you have never done before. It becomes an adventure and a process of revealing one’s selfhood. It insists that the spectator has to work at viewing. I must make films into ‘my own story’. To conjure up the feeling of ‘my own story’, I had to not only make films, but to make films where I became the camera, therefore a participant, and where the connection to the ‘other’ became intimate and direct. This kind of film, my kind of film, as the words of Rilke or Baudelaire suggest, has to look so far to be able to see not only the beautiful, but the terrible and apparently repulsive things, because those things that exist and are in common with all other beings, have value.

(London, 31 January, 2004)

This piece first appeared in Trafic, no. 50 (Summer 2004).