Today, a major first for the blog. Over the past couple of months, I've had the immense privilege of exchanging a long-form e-mail discussion with filmmaker & scholar, C.W. Winter, one half of the directorial unit (also including Swedish photographer Anders Edström) behind The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). Among, if not the most monumentally accomplished, but assuredly chronologically towering films of the 21st century thus far, there is unequivocally no room to be quizzical about why of all the films to be released in the previous year, this ended up ranking above all else for me. It is a film about time, sculpted in time. About durational observation, the sensational act of labor, and lives lived. A multi-plane portraiture of an individual, of geography, of the auditory realm and even the nature of dramatic construction in itself. Against the ideological current of the cinema as a hidden structure to the whims of an audience, Winter & Edström's object appears to be an active antithetical to this notion. Its abolishing of continuity in favor of exposed, or at least dangled, artifice recontextualizes the temporal, realizing a cinema in constant liminal flow.
From a set of pre-conceived questions handed once at a time, I asked and he answered. Enjoy.
DE: As an assembled object of scattered aesthetic elements (image, sound, text, blank slates) and dramatic reconstruction that give shape and organized meaning to the non-fiction reality the film is based upon, consequently creating fiction, how prevalent or existent was the debate between it existing either as a "documentary" work or work of "narrative fiction" during the conception and making of the project? One can recall works like Kiarostami's Close-Up or the self-reflexive critiques of Robert Greene's films (Procession, Kate Plays Christine) that largely play to this discussion, but with The Works and Days, I'm left not feeling entirely convinced that this was what it was trying to be. I still don't know what the film is at the moment to be quite honest. Can you explain?
CWW: A thing to understand about us making the pictures the way we do is that, to a large degree, it’s a matter of intentionally not knowing. Of putting ourselves into situations of uncertainty.
The question it seems one is most asked when making a film is: what is your film about? Most films will begin with this question, answer it, and then move forward from there. The idea is then plugged into a production apparatus and is shot according to “how it’s done.” Because that’s what people tend to do by default. Just as a function of inertia, people will make things with the tools and methods that are familiar. Most of the time, from our view, this sort of approach results in film ideas that are too interesting to be interesting. For our way of doing things, we don’t start at aboutness and move forward. We start at aboutness and move backward. Via first principles, we reverse engineer the how-it’s-done part, not with the aim of coming up with the cleverest story, but with the aim of reducing things down to the simplest initial states we can imagine.
Some of this is prompted by cellular automata. Conway, Turing, etc. It’s the knowledge that if you get things down to a clear, simple initial state—in our case: a place, a person, a camera, a microphone—and then plug that initial state into simple rules, complexity can emerge. The end result being a model of the lives and the locations that we’re recording. And with this, there is some background sense of a lineage of people like Tony Conrad, James Benning, Bruce Nauman, Henry Flynt, Catherine Christer Hennix, Sol Lewitt, Dennis Johnson, Peter Kubelka, Delia Derbyshire, Tex Avery, and Hollis Frampton, makers who got to the first day of a project at least in part via math.
And, to a large degree, this means having the trust to push ourselves away from the space capsule, as it were. To embark scriptlessly into a production largely defined by a not-knowing. ‘A state of ignorance and curiosity,’ to borrow from Bresson. And then having to use the basic tools of the camera and the microphone to find a way out of the situations that we’ve put ourselves into. Partially by grokking and partially from long-term familiarity. And then believing that we’ll somehow get to a finished movie that way. Of course, this way of doing things is often stressful and exhausting and uncertain. And it invites contingency to frequently befall us. But this way of doing it gets us to scenes that don’t annoy us. So, this is how we proceed.
It should be clear though that the form isn’t at all purely mathematical, on account of the knowledge that most automata go extinct. Complexity isn’t always the result. And so additionally we bring to bear a kind of nuts and bolts, defeasible way of making things that has evolved over a couple decades of us talking about how we think images and sounds work and don’t work. And how social situations come together or don’t. And how a map is and isn’t like the territory. And of finding ways of bringing the warmth of the emotions of the people we film into sufficiently high resolution. It’s a short set of parameters and constraints that we can apply quickly in the field. And then we come at things from many initial states, running things over and over, until we reckon we have enough patterns to make a whole movie with.
As might be clear by now, debates about documentary and fiction never enter into it. During the shoot, such things are quite distant from our thoughts. For us, filmmaking is problem solving. And each day we go out into our locations and set ourselves the task of solving the problems of recording things. For that, we want a long list of options in the drop-down menu. We’re not going to deprive ourselves of methods in order to make one kind of film or another. For what we’re doing, it has to be freer than that. There’s no Platonic ideal per se. A hope is that if we do it our way, the film will end up as some sort of other. What exactly the film will be we’re not sure. We’d prefer to not quite know. But to not quite know meticulously.
For example, we make a point of sidestepping a lot the exposition that goes into most films. In the domain of making, we find clarity to be so misvalued, even as we know it will be more widely received, even in art house circles. But here, we preferred something of an untidiness of ideas. Of contradictions and incongruities, of incommensurabilities, of the partial and the unexplained. In this case, taking the people of Shiotani as they are, in their variable measure. In that way, it remains remote from the excesses of the dominant ideologies with all their certitude and overdetermination and exhaustion of meaning. The films are a place where distinctions between earnestness and put-on or actuality and artifice can just be beside the point. So that things can be more mysterious and emergent and surprising and extricated.
But to come back to the original question at another angle, to get an imprecise inventory of our downtime viewing, one could do worse than looking to films like Arnulf Rainer; Pine Barrens; El Valley Centro; The Shooting; Looking for Mushrooms (1996 Version); or Robert Frank’s The Present. To Rien que les heures or Le Tempestaire for some geography. To any number of Fords or to The Little Minister (the 1921 one) for towns. To A Way in Untilled for some mereology. To Watkins for the indefatigable. To Naruse for the anguish of choices that can’t be unmade. To Mutrux and Reis/Cordeiro for both muddying and clarifying. To Niblock or Ford for mapping. To Head for approachable social graces. To surf films for what it means to record in the elements. To Moullet for skint resourcefulness. To Renoir as benchmark. To Nestler for dispatching. To Rousseau for some of the presque rien. To Mendieta for presence. To Jack Goldstein or Warhol for revelation. To Thom Andersen for the enormity. To Straub/Huillet for some hard-knuckled defiance. To De Sica for some time. To Bresson for some discipline. To Tony Conrad for being a ham. To Sekula or Mike Kelley or Dan Graham for the accompanying writing. To Fisher or Honda or Farocki for some self-reflexivity. To Ogawa for description. To Pialat for conversation. To Cassavetes for forgiveness. To Bo Harwood for heart. To Ozu or Kiarostami or Ford or Boetticher for character. To Oliveira for some grace. To Wang Bing or Burnett for some empathy. To Pedro Costa for the grit to go his own way. Or to Chaplin or Lewis or Yvonne Rainer for physicality in spaces. Again, it’s not that we are thinking about other films while we are shooting. We’re thinking about how Anders has been taking his pictures consistently since the ‘80s, about how I record sounds, about the people in front of us, about the light, about the weather, about whenever there’s gonna be time to sleep, and about whatever the next logistics hassles are gonna be. All this other kind of talk comes after the film’s done. There’s no time for that on one of our sets. If we were to be pausing to yammer on about cinema, so many scenes would be dead in the water. And if you’re doing influences while you’re filming, you’re doomed. You’ve got no chance. At least not with our way of doing things. But these films just mentioned are ones that are inside of us. So maybe somehow they faintly arrive as some sort of background radiation.
DE: It appears to me that the clash between an educated instinct (of lessons and experience) and that of a day-to-day survival (the variables and contingencies that cannot be accounted for) is seemingly promoted to the highest position of order to attain the ultimate existence of the work. Every film just about endures this struggle, but where others may usually try and tug the rope as much towards their end, you embrace the chasm of elements braced before you. Wonderful.
What strikes me most perplexingly, and is ultimately the quality that resounds above everything else, is the film's ever expanding nature. Coverage of spaces, people, and even sounds never appear to stay buoyant in the sense that something, or many things, are always shifting temporally. Tayoko's house, the village, and the basin are geographically mapped to a certain relatively completive end not too long into the movie, as to at least sense the scope of the surrounding location, yet as the film forges on, each subsequent image and alteration to the soundscape paint an almost abyssal depth of size and complexity. And by the end of it, I felt as if I just waded through one of the most epic films ever made. Something even larger than a Hollywood epic like 2001 or Lawrence of Arabia, even though the film does not traverse through nearly as many radically changing locations or feature a consensus idea of on-screen dynamism as those works perhaps provoke. Instead, the film keeps to its minimal routine, evolving by means of spatial and aural variation, slowly but surely. As to not ask you much again on a singular, baked-in process of working, what do you make of this observation?
CWW: To some extent, what you’re describing will be down to the pure duration of the film. There’s a volume of stuff there. There’s lot of material to get one’s head around. Though also, it’s largely down to ideas about complexity that may not be intuitive or obvious.
When you’re creating a scriptless filming system where the initial state isn’t predictive, nobody will finance your film. Because the entire model of film financing aims to control for as many pre-known knowns as possible. Scripts, pitches, casting, rehearsals, location scouting, tech recs, etc. Which has a horrible constraining and contorting effect on what fiction films can be. And the insidiousness of it is that it convinces people that this constrained and contorted version of the medium is the goal, is somehow the mark of quality. So to forgo that and do it our way, we work cheaply, using inexpensive consumer equipment, shooting family and friends, eating home cooking, and holding onto our day jobs. And this frees us to make films as we’d like, as we have no one to answer to.
With that in mind, the structure of our film is more fractal than theatrical. By which I mean that we let things run, and then bifurcate. And then let things run further and bifurcate again. And so on. It’s a net of bifurcations. So that the film is structured more like a bush than like a stage play. It’s a very simple, scale-free, local rule, departing from a simple initial state, that, for what we’re doing, results in more resilience than brittle three-act templates. And this works against general intuition. It maybe shouldn’t seem that complexity would arise from basic, local rules and simple initial states. But it couldn’t be any other way. We see this with circulatory systems, nervous systems, fungi, trees, and all the discrete automata we see around us. They won’t teach this in any film school. But the universe shows it plenty. And, while historically, many wonderful fiction films have been wrested from the constraining classical machinery, that sort of form has had diminishing purchase on our imaginations as time has gone on.
Not to put too fine a point on it, as none of this is literally so, but in our films, aspects that one might tend to think of as dramatic emerge as something like a messy Cantor Set, a pattern created by incremental elimination of possibilities. And, contrarily, aspects of our films that one might tend to think of as non-dramatic (though still fictional) are maybe something more like emergent automata, like Rule 30 or Rule 90. And then the film as a whole is each of these patterns running simultaneously and layered on top of each other. These are patterns that were running, as we were filming, in ways that we couldn’t possibly fully predict, that we couldn’t possibly intellectualize, as a lot of it is intrinsically generated. Because of course what’s interesting is when one’s guess at the patterns is incorrect. But doing this with a camera and a microphone, as it turns out, takes a lot of effort. It’s mostly knees and thighs. Sleeping as little as possible. Carrying heavy things around. With a small crew. Often on the move. Dealing with people. And pointing the camera and the microphone at things. Knowing that most of the patterns won’t be seen to emerge over the footage until the edit stage.
That said, with this way of doing things, one does need to have been sufficiently predictive while out there filming. Otherwise, the edit will be a disaster. We should caution that this is a way of working for which chances of failure run high. But if one has some working understanding of how complexity arises and how it can lead to robustness, and then is willing to keep at it for durations that far exceed production best practices, then one’s chances go up. Simplicity leads to complexity which leads to resilience. For our way of doing things, working with a script or with too many pre-conceived ideas would be like overfitting to a test set. We prefer a shooting space in which things can emerge more freely.
Now, during the edit, it was taking so long and word was getting out that it was becoming quite lengthy, and so I think some people understandably reckoned that we were in there making something like a film equivalent of TempleOS or something. But it was really just a matter of scale, and of getting the patterns precise so that they mostly become invisible.
To maybe circle back for a second, we can look at the fact that consciousness evolved to be predictive. And people largely enjoy familiar story forms because they aid in this predictiveness. These forms, for the viewer, when successful, do most of the heavy lifting of one’s sense making. And that’s all good and well. There are all kinds of movies in the world. And there are plenty of good ones that go this route. But for what we’re doing, we’re interested in reverse engineering some of the trade-offs that exist in that sort of formulation. Because reducing degrees of uncertainty also means reducing degrees of freedom. For our sensibility, we’re interested in hewing further away from a lot of the certainty to open up the modeling. Creativity can begin the moment you no longer know what you’re doing. Cuz when you get away from familiar templates, when you get away from old mental habits, you find yourself left with recourse to the fundamentals. To images. To sounds. To construction. To a location. And to what makes people the people they are. So that, sure, the whole time, you can feel the authors authoring, or so on. But at the same time, the people in front of the camera are given the leeway to make it about themselves as well, about what matters to them, about how they see things, about the contours of their labor, about what makes them ache and hope. It’s a writing process that’s a give and take, through draft after draft and take after take of shots and sequences. And so this populates the film with more than just our ideas. And because this film maybe doesn’t look like one that’s off the rack, some people assume we get there in all kinds of ways. Most of the written guesses we see, well, they’re often inaccurate. In reality, it’s mostly chores. It’s cleaning up. It’s conversations. And groceries. And propane. It’s making meals. It’s sleep deprivation. And booze. And snus. And more conversations. And getting up before the sun. As much as we can muster. For the longest hours we can sustain. For as many weeks as we’re there. Sure, the result is maybe idiosyncratic. But that’s largely owing to us just not using a template. So it feels personally made, with our strengths and foibles and aptitudes and stupidities. And in the end, it’s a movie. And there it is.
DE: What do you make of objectivity in art and do you believe in such a thing as a neutral viewpoint as it pertains to this field? As a short primer, an amused personal takeaway from previous interviews with you seem to express a generalized criticism or lack of satisfaction with widely shared notions around what it means to produce a 'good image' in film or photography. That such perceived aesthetic populism adds very little to nothing in the decoding of an artist's expression and the subsequent formation of discourse that arises. How I further poke you on this matter is in regards to the nature of universal perception at all. Does an agreeability necessarily point towards a truth for the human condition at large, or perhaps is it something of an effect of a conditioned visual mythology in our consumption of media? Or is it merely just our biological knack for pattern recognition and variable organization being flattered and tickled nicely. For the sake of this question, I make the assumption that your ideas on visuals apply to the auditory space as well.
That said, I think we can talk about objectivity or truth in a nuts and bolts way by just defining some practical parameters. Parameters of allure or economics, in order to get to some ideas about what the dominant consensus might see as “bad.” Employing methods that the dominant consensus might consider “bad” is a recurring method that artists have used in order to get out from under the stultifications of various classicisms, avant-gardes, tastes, ideologies, and/or economic situations. We see this with painters like Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Lee Lozano, Jean Fautrier, Asger Jorn, René Daniëls, or Paul Thek. Or musicians like Kaoru Abe, Joe McPhee, Jandek, Mike Kelley & Jim Shaw, Martin Kippenberger, or The Shadow Ring. Or cinematography like late Robert Frank, Allan Sekula, Heinz Emigholz, Jean-Claude Rousseau, or Straub. It’s an indifference to or a defiance of dominant modes of allure.
When one works in commercial image making, which Anders and I both did when we were just starting out, one would formerly have become acquainted with the concept of the focus group. (Which has now been all but replaced by metadata on clicks and hover times.) And all kinds of things were shown to focus groups. Different options for color correction, sound, and so on. When one sees this process run enough times, one is liable to stop seeing the controls on the various post-production boards as color or sound or etc knobs. And instead, they start to reveal themselves as money knobs. It becomes quite clear that in turning up or down the cyan, for example, one is turning up or down the cash, as certain decisions will more broadly appeal than will others. With this, it comes into sharper focus how one is making decisions around cinema and commodity. And then you apply that mindset not just to post-production, but to casting, writing, framing, and all the way down. We’re not interested in making art rules for other people, but for what we’re doing, we prefer to hew towards lower commodity settings, so that the decisions that we’re making can be seen as more saliently personal and can be made more freely from broad calculation and ulterior motive. Some might regard this as disagreeable or so on. Which would be fine. Though for us it feels more like a welcomed friction.
DE: Additionally to the film, you and Anders have also contributed solo projects in other mediums based off the work done here. Anders' sizable photobook Shiotani (which I've only seen digital excerpts of), and your album of ambient remixes, The Black Sections. Listening to the album, and as a fan of ambient music myself, what personally interests you in the genre and where did the conception come from to mix the field recordings from the Basin with pre-existing tracks?
CWW: Anders’ book I love. It isn’t just 756 pages of work in one location; it’s the latest installment of an enormous body of work that has been moving ahead, singularly and no-nonsensically, since 1986. At the moment, he’s working on printing some new Paints images. They’re great. It’ll be nice for people to see those.
As far as the album, yeah, it’s interesting to hear an after-the-fact framing of it. Though, at the time, thoughts of ambient music per se never entered my thoughts. It didn’t occur to me to think of it as a genre exercise. In the edit, there were lots of timelines created. Many of them with fragments and tests and dead ends. And at some point, it just seemed that some of the sound sequences on those timelines were engaging enough to be their own thing.
I’m just enough of a determinist to not want to take too much credit for this stuff. I mean, I don’t know where ideas come from. They’re not there; then they are there. It’s hard to see how I had so much to do with it. At some point, it just donned on me that, without too much heavy lifting, some of the rough sections I had already cut together could be minorly pushed and pulled into a couple album sides. About the only pronounced intervention from that point was the realization that: here I had this list of musicians whom I admire who were kind enough to allow their music to be in the movie, and then I had gone and buried most of that music down into the film mix to near “invisibility” in several cases. So, with the album, I made a point of pulling the music a bit more forward. This was a way not just to be able to more fully appreciate that music, but also to make the album some kind of relief by which one could understand the film’s sound editing better.
That said, I never wanted this to get too far from the film. This is film sound. And that’s all I wanted it to be. I wanted it to remain grounded in the rules of the film, other than the one minor exception noted above. So I wasn’t going to go too far off of that. This isn’t some delicate art record. It’s just the brute presence of the sound of the film laid into two twenty-two-minute spirals. And that’s that. So I never got around to thinking of it as ambient or as anything else.
Sure, there was probably the unconscious influence of people like Luc Ferrari, Henning Christiansen, Annea Lockwood, Halim El-Dabh, Terry Fox, etc. And also there’s some baked-in sense of a history of Minimal music going from Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson meeting La Monte who moved to Berkeley and turned on Oliveros and Riley and then moved to New York and so on. That’s somehow gonna all be in there too. But three years into the extreme editing situation of hundred-plus-hour weeks fifty-two weeks a year, the outside world largely fell away. And the material on the computer became much more immediate. Here are some timelines. Here are some audio channels. Here is some sound. Just edit. And so, one day, the album was just suddenly there with barely any lead-up or leg work. It’s mostly just a byproduct of making the movie.
DE: What would be your advice to a young filmmaker?
CWW: It depends which day you ask me. But I’m inclined today to say the following: don’t be an acolyte.
A mistake that I see a lot of film students and even a lot of very knowledgeable cinephiles make is that they become acolytes of filmmakers. They will essentially mentally upload and transcribe the words and opinions spoken in interviews and Q&A’s by the directors who they regard as the most excellent or most serious or most rigorous or whatever metric it is that they find meaning in. And those opinions become their new opinions. Word for word.
In the field of Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, there emerged a branch of research called Expert Systems. The broad strokes were that if they could only get leading experts in various fields to explain their thinking, this thinking could then be encoded into the AIs and the AIs could themselves then become experts. Maybe I should have started with an extreme example that I got from a researcher at MIT called Leslie Kaelbling, which is that we are all experts at vision. We’re amazing at vision. “But none of us has introspective access into how we do that. What we’ve found is that experts can give post hoc explanations for how they did things, but they weren’t necessarily very good. They depended on some kinds of perceptual things that maybe they couldn’t really define very well. So fundamentally, the underlying problem with that was the assumption that people could articulate how and why they make their decisions.” But it turns out that people are actually not very good at that.
And so when you hear a director, in an interview or a Q&A, be cognizant of the fact that to a certain degree, they don’t know what heck they’re saying. They don’t know exactly how they did what they did. They are guessing at themselves. They are giving you what are largely post hoc guesses and justifications and narratives that they’re telling themselves as some sort of homeostatic sense-making apparatus, in order to be able to function. They can tell you a story about why they do stuff, but it’s going to be an unreliable why. They are guessing at themselves. They are guessing at how they’ve done what they’ve done. Such that most of a good Q&A is actually a Q&G. A question & guess.
Now of course there are many facts they have access to: what kind of camera did they use, where did they film, how many minutes is the movie. But when it comes down to the good stuff, the mysterious stuff, they are largely guessing how they did it. Most of the time, the best films will be films over which the most mystery emerges. So find your own mysteries; don’t search for someone else’s.
Now, don’t get me wrong, by virtue of being themselves, directors will have had the greatest proximity to the intertidal zone of the hard problem of their own consciousness. So their guesses will likely be better than anyone else’s. But so much of what art making is lies behind the paywall of the hard problem, and none of us has the currency that that paywall accepts. There is no Archimedean Point from which our consciousness can be regarded. They are making often sloppy guesses at what they’ve done and why and how they’ve done it. They’re relaying a partial accounting of the partial simulacrum that their minds have made for them. And so at best, much of the time, they are speaking in hunches and heuristics. So don’t be an acolyte. Don’t repeat their every word. Because they don’t have all the answers. That wouldn’t be possible. Even the greatest, most rigorous, most serious directors in the world will talk a fair amount of bullshit. Now some directors won’t have the epistemic humility to acknowledge this. But it is necessarily so.
And so upon realizing that, one can begin to come to terms with something like Heidegger’s gelassenheit or Keats’ negative capability. A coming to peace with the fact there are certain mysteries that won’t likely ever be resolved because they are outside our grasp or are too combinatorially explosive. And therein lies so much of what we attempt to mean when we speak of concepts like beauty or the sublime or so on. The sublime is tied to realism by an underdetermination of words.
DE: Lastly, stepping away from this project and delving into cinephilia, especially in how it correlates with being a studious practitioner of the form as well - which is what this blog ponders, as a person who clearly proves their cred as a knowledged consumer of all kinds of cinema - and additionally many other artistic crafts - who are the filmmakers and artists most important to your being and who working now would you consider your personal favorites? Films, albums, projects from the past 5-10 years you'd recommend folks to seek out?
CWW: Yeah, I dunno. That’s hard to say. I mean, we’re just not really that into the ‘20s. At some point, you get to a place where your work is a development on what you’ve previously made. So all this business of keeping up with the Current Thing really becomes beside the point.
If we had to say something…Black Truffle Records we think is a good label, as one example. And Blank Forms and Unseen Worlds we think are doing good work. And Wang Bing and Pedro Costa and Tsai Ming-liang are doing it for real.
But, for our interests, as a guide, it’s mostly about late career work. And late careerism as a thing. It’s seeing what Godard is wringing from the cloth. And looking at Rousseau forging on because. And Straub wresting epics from his apartment. And Joe McPhee punishing instruments. And Loren Connors finding beauty in the margins. And the glorious second act of Bill Orcutt. And Keiji Haino or Phill Niblock making new sounds. And Robert Turman or Éliane Radigue eking out even more. And if Shaw, Chaimowicz, Tuymans, Nauman, Heilmann, Barlow, Oehlen, Soulages, or McCarthy make some work, we’ll take a look. And if Thom Andersen writes something new, we’ll savor it. And if Benning or Cozarinsky makes a film, we’ll buy a ticket. And if Daniel Wenger makes a new chair, we’ll regard it. And if Fuller, O’Brien, Glück, or Kleinzahler have something new, maybe give it a read. And when Houellebecq writes a new one, I’ll read it too. And if they posthumously publish a Sebald photo book, then maybe look. And if Thomas Nagel offers some thoughts, maybe take note. Of course I’m leaving loads of stuff out, but maybe these are representative.
It’s not just an interest in understanding work; it’s making models of whole lives of work. Looking at models that hold state. And appreciating inward turns, even ones that come at the expense of public understanding. And it’s having a respect for people who have made things, over a duration. Making things that they then, in most cases, can’t possess themselves—that just belong to the culture. And they do it anyway. Against the countervailing forces. Because what else.
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The Works and Days is currently streaming on MUBI and available to rent/purchase via Grasshopper Films.
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