I thought that the cinema of my dreams wasn’t allowed to exist and that I’d stop looking for it. Over the eight years I worked on this film, whose budget was organised around 50 shooting days and four seasons, I often had to think of Mendel Singer, the protagonist of Joseph Roth’s “Job”. After leaving his home in Russia to go to New York, he first loses his family, then his faith and finally himself. By that point, he says he is now just the remains of Mendel Singer.
The editing suite is also a dangerous place. Overtired, I sat before the patterns from the Mongolian wolves’ pen once again and stared at the meat that the animal keeper had put out. They’d smelled the camera, something unfamiliar in their place of retreat, and preferred to leave the food to the flies rather than do us a favour. Yet my desperation only really became tangible once I was unable to distinguish between the fly in my room and those in the pen. I took off my headphones, played the sound through the speakers and tried to make sure that everything was now clear. The fly was no small thing and I gave up for the day. While falling asleep, I actually had to think of Brecht and I wished he'd never published his poem about the doubter.
The next day, I allowed myself to be mesmerised by a bluespotted ribbontail ray, one of nature’s hidden treasures. We were able to shoot it from below in the zoo aquarium’s quarantine tank. You learn about this particular animal, how old it is, and when you see it swimming vertically upwards it’s like seeing a bird in water. You’re surprised how the different shot lengths can provide fresh interpretations of the actual conditions, you’re happy that it was your own camera that wanted to trick you and grateful that the editing process and its checks and balances have made the sequence advance.
No, I’m not afraid of the pre-Socratics who are yet to be discovered. I trust them already, as they knew that thunder and lightning were not to be put down to the wrath of God
You finally feel ready to approach the most difficult material contained with the 6500 shots that we captured, the scenes with the stick insects. Unlike the florescent golden poison frog, these insects protect themselves with the perfection of their disguise – which also makes them deadly for others, however. During the shoot, there was no other place where the visitors’ enthusiasm about not being able to see or recognise something came to such a head than in this terrarium of one metre by two metres. The stick insect looked like a twig, the walking leaf resembled a plant transformed. To capture both the illusion and the discovery of it in an image, a shot or even in a magical moment always remained a challenge. On that evening, the editing was not able to support us.
Still half-asleep, I read that it’s now possible to identify 700 different types of ape, 50 years ago there were still just 250. I think of the 500 animals that Aristoteles, the founder of zoology, described over 2000 years ago. I think of his teacher’s allegory of the cave, the first description of a cinema experience in our culture. I still want to know whether implementing the allegory in a film would be easier to achieve than the scene with the walking leaf.
No, I’m not afraid of the pre-Socratics who are yet to be discovered. I trust them already, as they knew that thunder and lightning were not to be put down to the wrath of God. They spent 200 years repeatedly turning the world on its head with their inexhaustible curiosity, looking for the origins, telling us about becoming and passing. How carelessly we exchange this value today for a system of rules in which everything must be categorised. It provides calm and relief, but it doesn’t serve understanding; it destroys diversity. Finally I drift off, I dream of a vast trade zone of ambiguity that is truly free, in which art sets itself against the disambiguation of the world, with film as one beautiful means of doing so.
Romuald Karmarkar
Translation: James Lattimer
