(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When you watch the films of the Indian Vipin Vijay, you quickly notice a wild strangeness: When you hear him talk, you understand that he thinks film in his own, mysterious way – a bit like the Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (check out his book Poetics of Cinema, from 1995 for an introduction to his universe). For Vijay, as for Ruiz, filmmaking is not about creating linear narratives, but about composing a more dreamlike and cryptic logic between images that open up to new realities; a logic that breaks with usual thoughts about time and space in film, and which aims to provoke new intuitions and associations.
The Indian filmmaker is little known in the West, but has won several awards for his short films, which have been shown at film festivals in Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, New York and Tehran, as well as at art museums such as the Serpentine Gallery in London and Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. He has currently directed one feature film (The Image Threads (2010) which has recently become available on DVD for a western audience), and is currently recording his second – A Voice From Elsewhere. In his home country, Vijay has been awarded the prestigious Sanskriti Prize for "social and cultural achievement".
I spoke with Vijay during the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen this year, where he was devoted to looking back – "the first case", he tells me, "where the short films have been shown as a collection". This text, which will introduce some of Vipin Vijay's thoughts on film, is based on an email correspondence we had after the festival.
Unknown terrain. Vijay grew up in the Indian city of Kerala, which had "a strong tradition of mainstream filmmaking", he told me. Still, it wasn't until he started film school in Kolkata (The Satyaijt Ray Film and Television Institute) that Vijay caught his eye for film as an art of art. Here he got, "he says," a new encounter with film as a design language ". He adds: “To be honest, I was confused. There were some movies that caused a real turmoil in me. I gradually realized that these works that created this turmoil indirectly created an 'inner film' in me. At the end of the first year of film school, I began to embrace this turmoil. ”
This turmoil seems to structure all his thoughts on film. For Vijay, film is somewhat mysterious. At film school, he learned to use his energy for what he calls a "fanciful passion." It has been about seeking the unknown and engaging in an exploratory “dialogue with oneself”, which can be daunting, but at the same time what “makes life exciting”. During the Oberhausen retrospective, Vijay talked about film as a work of constantly "reinventing himself." In his films, he did not look for "the ultimate truth," he said, but about "unknown, unexplored terrain."
Create realities. When I ask him what he thinks about the qualities of the film compared to other arts and linguistic expressions, he points to what he calls the film's "hidden movements" and "a direct sensory experience". This interest is reflected in the film's expressions and themes, such as in the 30-minute essay film Venemous Folds (2012), in which he deals with, among other things, prophets and poisons – two phenomena that operate in secret.
Vijay has his own idea of what he calls "concept images" (where he spins on Gilles Deleuze's ideas on the motion picture and the time frame). Without going too far into this theoretical concept (which, in addition to being esoteric, is still under development), it is about looking past "the information content of the images alone" and into "deeper layers of consciousness and cognition". Vijay says he wants to give the moviegoer "a sense of new possibilities", a sense of being able to go beyond what he calls "material configurations". He asks: Can you find certain core concepts related to the film images? Are there certain core concepts that are latent in the images, which can be seen more than they can be seen, and which can open up new sensations and intuitions?
I think film can take place off-screen, in the viewer's 'inner gaze'.
Vijay talks like an enigmatic pictorial archaeologist; There are layers of realities in the film's images – as if they themselves have visions, not just visuals. The point for us is not to fully understand this idea in the first place, but to see a certain way of thinking related to film. It is about seeing film as a unique time material that can be used in an examination of the limits and possibilities of consciousness. With his films, Vijay will not primarily transmit information, show anything visually – he will awaken new worlds of imagination, open up new fields of recognition, and thereby challenge what we understand as "the self".
Experimental. As the Indian filmmaker Amrit Gangar has pointed out, care should be taken to apply terms such as "experimental" and "avant-garde" to Indian filmmakers, partly because aspects of traditional Indian art may seem experimental from a Western perspective. But with this caveat mentioned, I would like to point out that Olaf Möller (in the Oberhausen festival catalog) positions Vijay in a trans-Indian avant-garde, along with figures such as Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and John Abraham. Möller points out, among other things, that Vijay's films tend towards the hybridized (for example, by mixing real-life films and animation) and "the dismissal of all conventional classifications".
"I gradually realized that these works that created this turmoil indirectly created an 'inner film' in me."
Vijay's "experimental" point of view also relates to the film viewer's situation. He writes: "I must clarify that in the case of film, it is enough that the film we see and the film we perceive are not the same. I think perception takes place in an area that is beyond the meaning that can be immediately interpreted – somewhere between the meaning of the images and the meaning of the words. ”
The experience of film, like the experience of reality in general, is partly characterized by processes that are hidden from our immediate perception. "The process of making a film becomes […] an awareness survey," writes Vijay – and this also seems to be the case in how one sees a film: "I think film can take place off-screen, in the viewer's 'inner gaze'. . I wonder if film creates mood for the viewer through the narrative aspect that lies in a picture, or if it is the composition, the colors, the movement, the space, the actions and so on. "
For Vijay, this premonition about the reality of others is essential: "The process of making a film helps me to see into the imaginary world of individuals," he writes, adding: "You find that every person has their own thoughts, formulated by a huge mythological past. ”
Strange experience. Vijay tells us that this basic wondering attitude to film, perception and time stems from a special experience while working on the exam film The Egotic World (2000) – a lyrical black and white film solvable based on the ancient philosophical text Yoga Vashishtha. Along with his "like-minded friends" from film school, Vijay traveled around villages in West Bengal in search of a recording venue. "I remember the night when we reached a place after a day-long search for location," he says. "To our great surprise, we discovered that the place was full of 1000-year-old Jaina ruins and idols that had recently been deified by the low caste and tribal people. We decided to shoot the movie there. When we started filming, the process became a strange meeting for all of us. ” Gradually, Vijay discovered that he and the other film workers internalized the environment in light of different "temporal coordinates" – "while we were in the same place and looking at the same objects."
It's hard to know what this experience consisted of and what they did to them, but at least it became a "turning point for some of us," Vijay says. Here he found and embraced a "sense of strangeness" that he has had his cinematic work influenced since.
This is evident in a film like The Image Threads – a visually striking, colorful, fragmentary, "hallucinating" reflection on sexual desire in a world that is increasingly spinning its threads through virtual communication. In this film it is difficult to determine the dimensions of space and time, and it is even difficult to locate meaning – where the film's expression starts and where one's own associations start. (One place – where we get pictures of hairy human skins sounded with a music track brought straight out of a 1950s science-fiction movie – I thought of Jack Arnold's It Came From Outer Space (1953). my cultural ignorance than it does about the film.) Vijay quotes philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza ("No one has the right to change the state of things") in a modern mythology where "the individual", as a character in the film says, "is a old fashioned concept ».
Vijay has shot most of the material for his next film, A Voice From Elsewhere, but is looking for more funding to complete it. In this film, he continues to explore how people perceive reality in different ways, isolated from "the usual discourses of time and society" – ways that "may not be so easily accessible to others," he says.
Will find his time. Vijay's films are also not the most accessible: they can be difficult to see, and they can be difficult to see. But the movies will probably find their time. There is also something fundamentally interesting about Vijay's cinematic attitude that extends beyond the particular films.
During the retrospective in Oberhausen he paraphrased a teacher from the film school, who had said that you are only free when you "invent your own questions". In other words, freedom is not a given reality, but is something that is confirmed as one creates something. Here, this "turmoil", as Vijay informed, becomes a key: "The turmoil is what shakes you out of your comfort zone."
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