F.M. Why did you decide to make a film that focused on Russia and the Russian language? Could this film have been set in any country, using the facts and myths of any great lake?
J.P. I had not planned to do a 'Russian' film - or rather, a film spoken in Russian. But I will have to tell you two stories: Fernand Garcia's and Nobuhiro Tajima's.
Fernand owns Polygone Films, in Paris, and subtitling is one of the services provided by Polygone. I worked with him in '98, subtitling a video piece of mine, Widow Simone (Entr'acte, 20 years). Fernand is the most meticulous, precise person, checking and rechecking, going over everything until five in the morning if need be, with the same enthusiasm and a constant kid's smile that shows his satisfaction. It's like he is eating ice-cream.
I understood through this work with him that subtitling is a fascinating job, and in many ways a frustrating one. There are constraints on every level, compromises at every turn, and these go hand in hand with difficult decisions that brush work ethics. First of all there is the time allotted to each subtitle, which should be enough to read. Television broadcast has different norms - subtitles are usually held longer than necessary to be read - and longer than in cinema screenings. Many films are re-subtitled so that they can be shown on television. So, subtitles cannot accompany speech in a synchronised manner, except for moments like "Yes.", "No.", "Go away!", and a long, intricately constructed sentence in one language invariably ends up as a poor rendition in another. And this, even assuming that there is a good translator behind the subtitling text. The translator faces a serious problem: that there are just so many words that can be placed on the screen, even on two lines, on a defined area of the image. When the subtitler gets the text and some of the sentences don't fit those parameters, it may not be possible to break them in two subtitles because there isn't enough time to read them as separate; so, to reconstruct the sentence - writing another version of the original translation - may be the only option.
After my work with Fernand I thought I would do a text I would write as subtitles, avoiding all the problems I have just mentioned, and that this original text - not a translation - would be the subtitling text. This was the beginning of what was to become 336 PEK. Now, if I were to have this text as the 'perfect' subtitles, they would have to be translating another language, and I would rather have a language not widely spoken, and a language I didn't speak myself. And this is where Nobu comes into the story. Nobu is a young Japanese man, a friend of another Japanese friend of mine, and we met only briefly on the day before he left for Japan after a few years in London. He wasn't going to stay long in Japan, though; he felt like some adventure, and he got a job with the Japanese Telephone Company to work in Irkutsk, in Siberia, for three years, with a three month trial. Irkutsk is not an easy word for a Japanese person, I had never heard of such a town, we didn't have a map, and all he could tell me was that it was near Lake Baikal. The thought of knowing someone who was going to live there made me want to know more about it; I started reading about it and was instantly caught by its legends and facts. It was at this time, through Internet research, that I found Maxim.
Nobu didn't even complete his three months trial. In two months he was gone back to Tokyo. I, on the other hand, was to remain deeply involved with the Baikal for the rest of my life, thanks to Nobu. Quite a bit has been written about 336 PEK, mostly focusing on the mechanics of memory, and it has become a film 'about' memory. To me it is still primarily a film which uses its original English text as subtitles to its Russian translation, which in turn is the film's soundtrack. The 'plot' is 'Russian' because the text is spoken in Russian.
F.M. Reading your story of the genesis of 336 PEK I was fascinated by your final statement that, for you, it was still primarily a film which uses its original English text as subtitles to its Russian translation, which in turn is the film's soundtrack...'. That is, rather than a film 'about' memory. At first, memory seems a much greater subject - a theme if you like, whereas the use of subtitles seems to be simply a technique employed within a work. Thinking it through, however, and reading back over your encounter with Fernand Garcia, I began to see a deeper preoccupation behind the focus on subtitling. The film, with its series of translations, misprisions and misreadings, could be seen to be investigating the process of storytelling or, on a different level, the process of writing history. What seems to be at stake in the film is the relativity of truth, and memory is only one aspect of this issue. The practical constraints of different media (for instance, subtitling) mean that the truth gets squeezed, just as the constraints and conceptual differences between various languages recast the truth with each telling. Scholarly confusions, such as that over the number of rivers, can also bend the truth out of shape as can time and timing.
I was also fascinated by the thought of different versions of stories. I have come across this often in literary studies where, for example, you might find two mediaeval versions of the story of Eurydice. In one, Orpheus will successfully free his lover from Hades, while in the other he turns to look at her as they escape and she is damned. Likewise, in Great Expectations, Charles Dickens creates two endings for the novel, as does Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust. I always found these novels unsettling and I quickly realised that the academic community found these texts to be the most difficult to handle, despite the dominance of post-modern theory.
Interestingly, though, last week the American public voted Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' their favourite American poem. Perhaps that desire for the untold story defies the more deathly academic response. What I wondered, as I read your account, was what other stories emerged as you shaped the film's structure and what stories might you have edited out, repressed or set aside for another project or another time?
J.P. When you said you were "fascinated" you may as well have said "shocked" that I could be such a die-hard formalist!
But let me tell you that, apart from the translated subtitles for the soundtrack, I also wanted to use a one hour single take; and this because a mini-DV tape is 60 minutes long...
In the end I didn't use the whole take - I faded the image into yellow for most of the duration of the list of rivers. When the park image comes back out of the yellow it is the frame next to the last one you saw at the end of the fade into into yellow; I 'suspended' the image, drifted off somewhere else for a time when I wanted to give the viewer all the freedom to picture those rivers or think about something else, whatever, while listening to a film where at any one time there is nothing but a yellow screen with a white subtitle. But the sound is continuous - 59 minutes of it. The image and the sound where recorded at different times, and this again is more of the die-hard formalism.
On the other hand, the very end of the text is pure schmaltz. I wanted to end with an ending in the traditional mode, which seemed appropriate after one hour of a difficult, rather extreme cinematic experience. I should tell you that I have great respect for tear-jerkers; if it makes you cry, there is certainly something that has been put together with great care. The cinema is still one of the very few places where this can happen, although it doesn't work for everyone. I saw ET with my sister, who is a Freudian analyst; I wept all along while she laughed so loud that people around us were telling her, in great indignation, to shut up. How could she be so stonehearted? This little confession is just to make the point that I'm not a cold blooded planner. I need structure like a fish needs water, but then I swim freely. Along the way I am totally taken aback, surprised, by what I come up with. And then I am not myself who lives here on the first floor. Ms Stein said that your little dog doesn't recognise you when you are writing a masterpiece. Sounds good!
Going back to the method of putting the text together, I'll tell you that in painting what interests me is the flexibility of simultaneous images. When I paint I usually put two or three or many stretchers together. This comes from the "lack of a centre" in the dance of Cunningham, the chance element from Cage, and the 'combine' approach from Rauschenberg. When I draw I never erase. If I draw the 'wrong' line I'd rather go on from the mistake, improvising on it until it is no longer a mistake. I have had many dozens of pencils for years, but only one rubber.
I am talking about techniques of improvisation. Same with the texts, but when they are part of a time-based piece, I have the linearity of time on my side; I can go back and forth, twist and drift, and it is still ticking away as a backbone. Both 336 PEK and Mister have a beginning and an end. The middle is everything between the two. My great pleasure is in finding my way to the end not knowing the route.
But to answer your question, my method for 336 PEK was additive. There were no stories that didn't get in; that I could salvage for another project. I had just the right amount. And it seems still like a miracle that I wrote something that when read out by someone else ended up being 59 minutes long, when my goal was 60.