The camera as a magic tool
The camera as a magic tool
Interview with Rosalind Nashashibi
In 2003 she won Beck’s Futures, but in the Netherlands Rosalind Nashashibi is still relatively unknown. An interview with the acclaimed artist about her interest in filming as a way to creep up on reality.Rosalind Nashashibi (1973, Croydon, England) uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. She aims to understand situations in which groups access a codified other ‘real’ dimension. This can be achieved in front of her camera during collective rituals that solidify the social routine of small closed groups, for instance the Mexican community of a Midwestern town (Midwest, 2002), a Palestinian family during Ramadan (Hreash House, 2004) or the students in a Glasgow library (University Library, 2004). In more recent work, the transition between everyday reality and the realm of the possible is scrutinized through the exploration of objects that can act as a go-between. Park Ambassador (2004) depicts a totemic object in a Glasgow park and in her last project Eyeballing (2005), she filmed a series of faces found in architectural façades or in objects in her apartment juxtaposed with shots of policeman in uniform loitering around their precinct. Ingeniously, she gives the urban landscape an identity, a ‘face’, not only one which can gaze out but one which can also look back.
What is your relationship to ethnological documentaries?
‘My work is not coming from the tradition the ethnological documentary, it comes from movies. I was inspired to make films through watching Pasolini, Fassbinder and partly Godard, his mixture of fiction and reality, as well Bresson, his economic way of filmmaking, his stripped-down dialogues that bear the marks of pure reality.’
You did not study anthropology but I notice in your recent practice an ‘anthropological turn’.
‘Yes, you could say that, but it is rather a mixture between looking at films such as Pasolini’s Medea – movies that are also epics, mythological films – and the social awareness we have built-in from living in an institutional world. I became interested in Greek tragedy and group enactments. I haven’t directly used that in my work but it is behind my thinking; I am interested in micro-societies, small groups and their rituals, for example theatre companies or the crew of a commercial cargo ship. Microcosms, I suppose – very extreme micro-social structures; that would be similar to the mood of Hreash House but in non-specific spaces similar to a theatre stage. I am interested in theatre rehearsals; in particular actors working on the understanding of the text, in what is called ‘physicalisation’, and the transformation of people into characters.’
Are you trying to investigate the interplay between reality and the ritual – something close to Pasolini and his use of amateur actors?
‘Yes, and you get that from Fassbinder too. Also Bresson’s Lancelot was really important to me because of his use of props that achieve a brutally real effect. Lancelot’s armour constantly clanking is so hyper-real. It takes him ages to walk across the room and all this noise…it feels like you are watching a play rather than a movie.’
What is your relationship to Pasolini’s notion of cinema as the language of reality, to his cinema of poetry in which reality is used to enact a transfiguration?
‘I was completely and utterly bowled over by it. Initially it was Accattone and Mamma Roma but later Medea and Oedipus Rex, as well as Fear Eats the Soul by Fassbinder. It is hard for me to translate the way in which I went from looking at that to making what I make. A couple of years ago I saw Contact, a film by Alan Clarke about the British army in Northern Ireland. It is a fiction that looks incredibly like a documentary, which is intriguing. It is about trying to mythologise normal, banal things and back again. We need that mythology, that glamour in our life.’
Do you use anthropological techniques, like non-participating observation while filming, for example the Palestinian family in Hreash House (2004)?
‘I suppose that Hreash House could seem like a documentary as people see the family as the most ‘exotic’ subject in my work. But I would never have made that work if my own life didn’t take me to that place and that family. There is some crucial intuitive process at stake that is slightly different from fieldwork. There is a confusion with the so-called documentary in the reading of my work. In fact, I use real situations but I am not interested in documenting real life.’
Why do you use film?
‘Film appears to me more like a kind of thinking than any other medium. It works as a way of understanding reality, perhaps because of the openness of the shoot itself that takes in information before having to intervene with it. You can just absorb reality through the camera and the editing becomes like a sequence of thoughts, like thinking and acquiring knowledge.’
Could you say that you enter into a situation to investigate what fascinated you in the beginning and that filming it is a way to make sense emerge?
‘The shoot is the magical part; it is a performance and a ritual during which I am attempting to connect with where I am and with what happens. It is partly an unconscious process in which I am involved with the light and the rhythm and the energy I feel in that situation, with getting it all on film. An extra dimension that goes beyond recording truth happens through filming. The camera is a magical instrument rather than a truth-recording device.’
André Bazin speaks of film and photography as something similar to magic when he talks about the Shroud of Turin as the first photograph ever made. He describes photography as a holy transcription, ‘a transubstantiation’ that makes the film become evidence of something rather than an indexical sign. Is this what you are trying to do, in particular with Eyeballing and with Park Ambassador?
‘I hope that this already happens in Hreash House although Eyeballing is getting closer to the potential of that idea. That’s why I only discover what I was looking for on the shoot when the film gets back from the lab. Initially, I didn’t realise that this was my intention with Hreash House. In all the films, all I realised is the presence of an energy that I experienced, and the task was to try to filter that energy through the medium of film.’
What is the relation between the energy that you have in front of you and the one that you capture and then offer to the viewer? Will there be a transference of energy through the film?
‘It would be filtered because I shoot and then I edit it – a phase in which it becomes more like a thought process. Exhibiting is part of that thinking process. I want to see if a particular sequence can make people think about an idea in the way I thought about it. I am asking the viewer to engage with what I propose as a magical thing.’
How does this process work in Eyeballing?
‘There are two important elements in Eyeballing, firstly the cropping of the camera to reveal these faces, which you could not see without the framing. Secondly, I was interested in these found faces because they are not representational, but they are objects or architectural views that the viewer and I were turning into faces. Then there is the juxtaposition of the faces and the cops. I knew it was important to show policemen in uniform alongside these faces, because they have a symbolic function. Cops translate into archetypal dream figures and the faces for me represent us, individuals, the people, but also shapes that the city is generating by itself. And they look like gods or monsters.’
What is the difference between Hreash House and your later works like Park Ambassador and Eyeballing?
‘Park Ambassador depicts an object working like a kind of talisman; it is a film of a recreational structure in a Glasgow park that resembles a primitive sculpture of a man or woman, depending on if you see the circles as eyes or breasts. The earlier work has more to do with group enactments and social institutions.’
Is Park Ambassador investigating contemporary shamanism?
‘It is a reflection on what an ambassador is; the film is a comment on the ambassador being a shaman. The structure in Park Ambassador is clearly primitivist and totemic in its look. The ambassador in contemporary society is a totemic, mythological figure, the go-between connecting you to another world: the nation he represents. I try to make this apparent by showing the basic rendition of the human form, a totem, and calling it ambassador. I also wanted that structure to seem invested with some magical power, like the ambassador having influence on the world around him.’
I wanted to ask you about one of your most recent works, the triptych called Mythologising Gives Existence a Glamour We Wouldn’t Want to Be Without (2005). To me it represents a sort of key to your latest practice.
‘Well, the images are: a dancing ritual in Gumbi [a Malawian village with a secret social structure], Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex and La Cicciolina. And the title’s quote is from Jung. He explained something that I was struggling to articulate or to understand: why is mythologising important? And I am fascinated by the use of the word ‘glamour’ in its old sense [magic spell]. No matter how serious the issue at stake, human beings need glamour. The Gumbi image refers to both ethnography and tribal reality, this ritual takes place in front of a brick building: the enactment of the traditional rite is oddly juxtaposed with the modern world. Then there is the cover of Pasolini’s screenplay, in which Oedipus performs his own destiny. That photograph has an uncanny feeling similar to theatre performances and it looks too real and therefore fake. The quality of the image is wrong, the colour is too vivid. You look at it and think of 1970s costume drama… and then, I had that image of La Cicciolina since 2001. I really like the way she dresses up in characters, even as herself; she has turned herself onto a series of feminine icons. In that picture, she looks like a ‘Madonna and Child’ in an 80s outfit.’
Do you see yourself as actively mythologising in your work or are you interested in revealing how the mythologising happens?
‘It probably is more the second option. Every new project I approach is a kind of investigation. I want to create a mythology in order to dissect it as well at the same time.’
Do you produce art in order for it to have the same function of go-between?
‘Yes, for me it is the way of going between what I know and what is possible. Jung’s quote summarises what we need and I think that’s what art is for.’
Francesco Manacorda
