Ho Tzu Nyen (raz jeszcze)

Jakiś czas temu zapowiadałem dodatek do/kontynuację mojego artykułu o Ho Tzu Nyenie z najnowszego M|I. I oto jest: zbiór fragmentów z mojej korespondencji z Ho, któremu chciało się odpowiadać na moje pytania (oczywiście podziękowania za poświęcony czas).

Zacząłem nawiązując do jakiegoś wywiadu, w którym mówił, że wszystkie jego poprzednie filmy (krótkometrażowe) były eksperymentami przygotowującymi do Here, prosząc aby rozwinął tę myśl:
"Quite simply, I think of all my works as one continuous stream of experimentations - and so long form of feature film Here is a way for me to bring together all the experiments in shorts and videos I have made until then.

I should perhaps note that shorts and medium length films such as Newton,Earth, Zarathustra - all works made in 2009 (because Here was shot in 2008, even as it premiered in 2009) perhaps took on a different direction precisely because of this...and then Endless Day becomes once again, a point in which I am sum these experiments up (while trying to push them to a limit)....."
Endless Day to kolejny film fabularny, nad którym Ho obecnie pracuje.

Jeszcze później powróciliśmy do tego tematu, bo zapytałem, czy od początku wiedział, że będzie kiedyś chciał stworzyć fabułę:
"I always knew that I wanted to make a feature film, and that my work with the shorts and video art pieces are ways in which I can test out ideas, and learn about techniques - though at the same time, each of the work I do, are really 'complete' in themselves - in the sense that I stretch whatever I have to the limits....I try to perfect them with whatever resources I have."

Nie mogłem też powstrzymać się od podrążenia wątku nawiązań i inspiracji, z których niektóre są wyraźne, jak na przykład użycie tytułu debiutu Fassbindera Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, czy kryptocytat z Blowup, inne to być może bardziej moje skojarzenia, jak pewne pokrewieństwo z Cronenbergiem:
"Of course 'love is colder than death' is Fassbinder's first film, but it is also just a beautiful phrase in itself. Collage is actually a mode of operation that is crucial to everything I do - the re-assemblage of existing things. So filmic passages in Here are reworkings of existing films and documentaries, just as many of its textual passages come from existing literary, and critical sources.

These sources are just tools and materials that are part of my mental universe...in a way, I consider film making to be an art of recombining existing things - locations, people, language....just as Earth is a recombination of various paintings from 16th to 18th Century....

As for the reasons why each of the sources and chosen (and why an infinite number of other sources are not) - I would say that there are certainly reasons - too many reasons...reasons that sometimes seems apparent, and reasons that are subterranean....so I'm sometimes not even sure how I can explain and unpack them in a succinct and interesting way for others...you know, it is a little bit like why a painter chose a particular tone of blue for the sky and not another....I think that there is a specific reason, and a kind of clarity - but this clarity exists at the level of sensations, for the nervous system - and it is so difficult to explain them with language - to do so, one either is forced into an incessant flow of words, or one becomes mute - like the main protagonist of Here.....

In any case this has always been a kind of ideal for me - making works that are so dense with meanings that the layers also cancel each other out, so that the end result is a kind of emptiness, like the blank canvas, or the screen....to allow for projection - both projection of light, and the imaginative projection of the spectator....

This is similar to how I think of influences - I think I'm influenced by many things - even by films I haven't seen before....so Cronenberg I have definitely seen before, and enjoyed, but I won't usually include him in lists of artists that I would say affected me the most....but that also would not mean that I am not influenced by his universe....or perhaps the formation of his universe draws from sources which are also important to myself...."

[Filmy Ho odkryłem dzięki poprzedniemu Festiwalowi Filmowemu Pięć Smaków, który właśnie ogłosił pełen program tegorocznej edycji.]