F.M. Lingering on the notion of improvisation, it seems as if the audience for 336 PEK are also given the opportunity, or responsibility, to improvise within the situation you have set up. Likewise, time will continue to transform the work in ways that you cannot control and presumably do not want to contol. As you can see in the online Central Europe Review you are already being translated into something else...?
Aleksandr Sokurov's Days of the Eclipse
various locations
Hot on the showing of his latest film Moloch at the London Film Festival, a limited release for an early film from Aleksandr "Mother and Son" Sokurov. Generally thought to be Tarkovsky's heir and praised by the likes of Nick Cave and Martin Scorsese, Sokurov is one of cinema's most challenging directors. Days of the Eclipse, a study in alienation and exile with a screenplay from the writers of Tarkovsky's Stalker, is not one of his easier works, but certainly shows him at his best.
See the film on 14 December at London's Cine Lumiere. Sokurov fans in Brighton can catch the film at Cinematheque in January
Joao Penalva's Legends of Lake Baikal
until 16 January 2000
Camden Arts Centre, London
Baikal is a magical place, holding some staggering 80 per cent of the world's fresh water. Now an eco-system in peril, Penalva weaves recollections and personal memories of the lake and the area around it into this medium-length film.
J.P. Thanks for the gem from the Eastern European Gazette. No surprise, though. 336 PEK had already become Legends of Lake Baikal in The Guardian, and I bet that the next variation will be The legend of Baikal. But Baikal's legend is also a possibility. I deliberately kept the Baikal out of the title, but it was obviously bad marketing strategy and people out there are putting it right for me!
I'm glad to see Legends of Lake Baikal just below Sokurov. Was it just chance that you found him when looking for me, or the other way around? This gives us a chance to talk about Sokurov. I have seen quite a few of his films, and if in 336 PEK I owe something to Russian film it's mainly through my criticism of Sokurov, not my admiration for Tarkovsky. I see Sokurov with great interest, but I find him mannered. Nevertheless, each time I go away inspired because I understood, through him, what I don't want to do. And also inspired by something that he didn't develop but that was nevertheless there.
I thought I would let you know a few more thoughts on the making of 336 PEK.
It was conceived as a film that could provoke four separate, simultaneous perceptions: of what you see; of what you hear; of what you read; of what you visualise. Each one has its own time.
The image is that of a park on a sunny summer day, with people strolling by, dogs running, cyclists, etc; a ready-made image with small incidents over which I did not have any influence. Nothing significant happens, and that was exactly what I wanted as the visual support to the reading of a text written to be read as subtitles, at the same time as what one hears - its' Russian translation - is incomprehensible to most of the viewers.
I have, therefore, on the one hand an image from which after a few minutes one does not expect more than what a security camera would report, even if the image was radically altered by the removal of its 'real' colour and replaced by another, heavily manipulated and frankly artificial. One realises very quickly that what happens on the screen has the rhythm of real life, and one doesn't expect anything to come and alter it. On the other hand, the sound of a Russian narrator has the same effect on the public; that is, that one does not anticipate that he will change to another language. This stability, common to both the image and the sound, is very useful to me as a setting for the reading of a text that comes and goes very fast, as subtitles that one manages to read only through an effort of concentration. And in this way, it is through the text that the 'action' takes place, under a frame of perceptual conditions which allow for visualising all that went into the text with the specific role of provoking images. Almost everything is described without adjectives, because adjectives do not bring in images. And it is all that the public is encouraged to create in her or his personal imagery which becomes another film; a memorable film because one has directed it as well - not the one of the banal image of a park.
F.M Can the story remain the same as it moves from one language to another, or is that even desirable or important? In the book of 336 PEK you present the text in four languages: English, Russian, Portuguese and French. For me, that text highlights the inevitable shifts in meaning that occur in any act of translation...
J.P. The book of 336 PEK was about to go to press when I met up for the first time with the Russian and the Portuguese proof-readers. We were at the graphic designers' office to check that the text had been correctly laid-out. It ran in four columns from left to right, in Russian and the three languages used in the subtitling: Portuguese, French and English. These different languages had required different subtitling time-codes, but on the other hand there was no time-code for the Russian text - it was spoken, not subtitled - and neither the graphic designers nor myself could read Russian. We had no way of knowing where we were in the Russian text, our task was to align the Russian with the other languages, and this was why the proof-readers were there.
Although the text was aligned horizontally (according to the top line of the set of two lines of figures which represents the subtitling time-code at the moment when the narrator started a new sentence) it was confusing that there were cases when the text appeared in Portuguese, French or English as only one subtitle in one language but split into three different subtitles on the corresponding sentences in the other languages, or cases where one sentence would appear as one subtitle with two lines in one language, and in two or three subtitles of only one line in another. This juggling of words which had to start and end at the same times but varied in their arrangement in between those times was mostly my doing at the subtitling sessions, as these are languages I speak. The longest, sustained experience throughout the film is that of reading, so I had to make the individual components of this process as clear as I could, knowing that it would still remain difficult for most viewers. There are about one thousand subtitles. I was looking for a grammatical logic where each line, even those of a double-lined subtitle, would hold an independent, complete meaning. When it came to the time allotted to read each one of those lines I didn't conform to any standard subtitling rules; I rather preferred that the text and speech were perfectly synchronised and that this exact doubling of time experiences would create an intimacy with the rhythm of the Russian voice. As if one 'spoke' it oneself in Russian.
Both proof-readers were also fluent in French and English, so they told me rather seriously - as advice for me to do something about the matter - that it was really unfortunate that the English and Portuguese translations were so poor; that neither conveyed the richness of the Russian text, that all of its poetic quality was absent, and that to them they were just simplified versions of a very good, very beautiful Russian text. It was embarrassing for me to have to explain - and not once but several times - that the English text was the original, not the Russian, that I had written it myself, and that I had also done the Portuguese translation. I gave the French translation to a native French speaker, though, and that was the only version they felt was somewhat closer to the spirit of the Russian 'original'. Of course the French had also been translated from the English original.
So, what can I conclude from this? That although I had asked Elena Fialko, the Russian translator, to keep the text in the spoken language she turned it into something literary? Or should I think that in the process of making my text Russian she allowed it to take on all the nuances of the Russian language to a degree where a native Russian and a Portuguese who lived in Russia for twenty years believed it to be an original text? Or that its acquired Russian authenticity inevitably placed it in a context of Russian literature? I would have worried if they had told me that the Russian text read like a translation. My own inaccessibility to the transmutations of my English text when it took the Russian voice was something I looked for since the beginning of this project.
They were so firmly convinced that the Russian text was the original, that I had found it in Russian, had had it badly translated in three languages and was only pretending that I had written it myself that after a while I saw no point in disappointing them.