Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra premiered in Locarno his latest project, a concert film with Ingrid Caven, Sixteen Moments of My Life.
The film records a concert performing 16 autobiographical songs in French and German with the electronic Catalan group Molforts at Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Yet Serra rejects the idea that he simply arrived to film a concert. He initiated the musical collaboration, mediated a deliberately indirect exchange between Caven and the musicians, and eventually turned six years of shared life into a film.
In conversation with Screen Anarchy, he discusses concentration as a form of performance, shooting with five cameras but no monitors, his resistance to influence and nostalgia, editing as the foundation of cinematography, and the limits of AI.
Screen Anarchy: At the film’s premiere, you said you don’t give a shit about concert films.
Albert Serra: No. I would never shoot a concert if I were not personally involved in creating the music, or in pushing it in that direction. I’m not interested in shooting just any concert.
This one is the result of a long process driven by my initiative. I connected the musicians with Ingrid, and I was involved in the creation of every song. I was the bridge because they did not communicate directly with each other.
How did that indirect collaboration work?
All the communication happened through music. The musicians recorded something, Ingrid answered by putting her voice over it, then I sent that back. We used mobile phones, but the music also had to be put onto CDs because Ingrid would only listen to CDs.
It was a primitive technological era, but this non-communication had its charm. They communicated only through the form of the music. You receive something and have to understand what to do, but there is nothing concrete you have to do, you must create the thing yourself.
If everybody is in the same room, they tend to create the same thing. You start with the structure, there is a melody, and so on. Here there was another logic. It is very close to the way I work with actors and technicians. I liked that. The film was ultimately a consequence of all this, but an accidental consequence. It could not have existed, and I would already have been happy enough.
What made you decide that it should become a film?
They made an LP with the same music, and I was not satisfied with some artistic decisions, mostly in the sound, that were not connected to us. I said, let’s do a live concert and let’s make a film.
Live performance gives more to this kind of music. It can communicate something different artistically. The music is very abstract and atmospheric, but at the same time the arrangements are extremely concrete and sophisticated. You cannot simply improvise them. There is space to move inside, because there are irregularities, but these are not pop songs where you can laugh at the audience and play the structure automatically. You have to be concentrated.
The musicians do not seem to perform for the cameras, or even for the audience.
Exactly. They feel the pressure of the audience, of course, it’s the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, not a joke, but they do not perform for the audience or for the cameras. They have enough problems to solve.
It is like the bullfighter in my previous film Afternoons of Solitude, he has enough problems to solve without thinking about the camera. The musicians have enough problems to solve without thinking about the audience or the cameras.
I like that attitude. I like concentration in general, because it is what is missing nowadays. We all miss it. When you see people truly concentrated on something difficult, that has charm. They do not care what other people think, they are concentrated on the artistic problem.
Cinema gives you more room to correct or redirect what happens than a live performance does.
For me, it is easier because between the shooting and the finished film there is the edit. There is a long process I can control and manipulate. I can solve mistakes that happened before, or do the opposite, create something that did not exist in reality, not even in my mind, by discovering new sensations inside the material. Concentration allows you to deal with that.
The project unfolded over six years, through COVID, the war in Ukraine and countless sessions in Ingrid’s Paris apartment. How did that passage of time, and the changing world outside her window, become part of the film’s creative process?
Ingrid’s apartment is behind the Russian embassy in Paris. We started the project in 2019, before COVID and before the war in Ukraine. I would be there sending CDs and recording in the dining room, looking at the embassy during relatively normal times. There was activity, guards, people.
Then, through COVID and the war, the embassy almost closed. The windows closed, there was no activity. Ingrid’s husband, who is a writer, used that image in his latest book.
I like a process in which life becomes integrated with creation and everything can be a stimulus. This film is not only the result of one performance. It is the result of six years of work and life. Ingrid said something beautiful, “Now these are not 16 moments of my life. They are 16 moments of your life too”.
It took so long. There was COVID, the record, endless conversations in her apartment. It was a life, not one day of performance.
Ingrid is remarkably energetic.
A lot, for her age, I have never seen anybody like her. And you see it in the film. What else do you want? Which extra proof do you need?
She was walking slowly onstage yesterday because she is obsessed with wearing platforms in order to look taller. Put her in sneakers and she will take those stairs faster than you.
Was she present in the editing room?
No. She discovered the film yesterday. She was very nervous, not about the quality of the film itself, because she knew it would be great, but about her performance.
The first time, she was not looking at the film as an artistic object. She was looking as a singer, Did I make a mistake there? Was there a technical problem in that song? Maybe the second time she will see it as a film. But she is happy with it. She is proud of it.
You filmed the concert with five cameras. Were they all operated by Artur Tort?
No, five human operators. Artur was one of them. We usually work with three cameras, but here we used five because it was a single day. And still there are two moments when not one camera was doing something useful. Not one.
Even with five cameras?
It is difficult. On Afternoons of Solitude, we filmed fifteen corridas and used five. Here we had one day, no rehearsal, and very little light. The lighting was prepared for a theater piece, not for cinema. Ingrid moves, and we did not know where. The light changes, the concert had three or four different lighting setups. It was not easy.
Were you watching monitors during the performance?
No. We never use monitors. I was beside the person doing the live lighting. We had prepared four or five setups, and because I knew the songs, I guided the changes and checked that there were no mistakes. But I was focused on the sound in my ears.
A camera in front of me prevented me from seeing the stage very well, so I was more concentrated on listening. At the end, I felt there had been several moving moments. I was happy because of that, but I had no idea of editing the film immediately.
When did you decide to edit it?
The concert happened around a year and a half ago. Then one day I woke up and said, now I will edit that concert. It happened like this.
Of course, we recorded it because we thought that one day we might make something, but there was no date and no plan. We knew the film would be interesting because of the artistic originality of the music, because of Ingrid and her age, because it was a unique event, and because it is my film. I know how to do it.
We felt proud of the process because it was an important part of our lives. It was pure creation. We were not copying anybody. We did not want to do anything anybody else had done.
I found it interesting that Ingrid was Fassbinder’s wife. When we first met several years ago, you spoke about Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Was he an influence?
Not artistically. Artists are important to me if they transform something in my mind, never because of concrete aspects of their work. Another filmmaker’s films do not influence what I do. The attitude of a filmmaker can influence me, the spirit, the way they do things.
Warhol, Buñuel, I like their attitude. I like the concrete result too, but I will never use that result. Ferran Adrià, the chef behind elBulli, once answered a question about his masters by saying that when you work at that level of originality, it is better not to have too many masters. If you have masters, you end up copying them or following a tradition. It can paralyze you because you want to emulate. So, if influence means attitude, I accept it. I want to be as crazy as Warhol or as original as Buñuel.
You see Buñuel as impossible to imitate?
Who influenced Buñuel as a filmmaker? Nobody. The Surrealist movement, perhaps, but you cannot find the direct trace of another filmmaker. And who was influenced by Buñuel? You can see connections, but he is so particular. Hundreds of people were influenced by Douglas Sirk. Buñuel is impossible.
It is the same with Warhol. He had images and stars, and then said “I will make my own version of the stars with underground people, and this will be my Hollywood”. Those are ideas and attitudes, not concrete images from the past.
You have also built your own working method outside the usual professional structures.
Almost everyone who works with me made their first feature film with me. I never learned by working beneath another filmmaker or with established technicians. Actors are different, of course. But cinematographers, art directors, costume designers, production people, I produced my own films. In Europe, for somebody of my generation, that is not common.
I edit all my films. Most filmmakers work with an editor. Nowadays I edit with Artur, my cinematographer, and sometimes with other people. I realized long ago that, given what cinematography means in contemporary cinema, a cinematographer who does not edit the film is bullshit. It makes no sense. But understanding what is happening in the film, what you have to shoot and why, that is only possible through the edit.
Are you using AI yourself?
Not creatively. It is useful for technical things that you used to do in post-production like changing a color, removing a microphone, fixing a wall, taking somebody out of the frame. You can do these things faster and more easily, and that is perfect.
But AI will not create a film, because the essence of creation is innocence.
What do you mean by innocence?
I have been talking about it since Documenta in Kassel in 2011 or 2012, when I wrote a diary about “the new innocence”. I delete data. I do not collect data. It is the only way to be innocent.
If your work is based on collecting data, admiring the history of cinema and assimilating other filmmakers, AI will do that better than you very soon. It already writes coherent texts and analyzes subjects. Imagine it in ten years.
AI being innocent is a contradiction in itself because AI is based on collecting data. We human beings can perform spontaneously, without data.
What is your next project?
We are co-producing the Ulrich Seidl's next film Distances about dark tourism. It is in pre-production with locations, financing, finishing the details, so he can shoot as soon as possible.
I like his films, they liked me, and they asked me. My exact role depends on the balance of the co-production and what each country has to do. We are still discussing it.
And your own first English-language feature, OUT OF THIS WORLD?
We are editing it. It has American actors, Riley Keough, F. Murray Abraham, and Russian characters. It depicts the beginning of the war in Ukraine, but it is not directly about the war. It is about the economic consequences of the war, about the United States and Russia. We have hundreds of hours of rushes, so it is not something you edit quickly, even with many editors in the same room.
Would you ever accept a commercial studio project?
If they asked me and gave me total freedom, yes. Until now I have always had freedom. There can be friction, but I have final cut. Even if Marvel asked me, I would do it, but I would have to have final cut, and they will never give it to me.
Image courtesy of Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press.