The Parrot and the Swan
“The film is an excuse for a more important thing.”
—The Gold Bug
Watching the films of Alejo Moguillansky can often feel like playing a children's game—the rules are constantly being invented and reinvented on the fly, cinematic conventions (the relationships between sound and image, onscreen and offscreen space, narrative and documentary) are bent into whatever shape produces the most fun. Watching films like The Parrot and the Swan (2013) where the main character is also the film’s boom operator and the film’s soundtrack is tethered to how he moves across the frame, it’s easy to think of the overly playful 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard wherein the discovery of cinema’s many possibilities becomes the driving reason for the film itself.
And, like Godard, this unbridled pursuit of cinematic freedom also comes hand in hand with a sense of political curiosity—namely, in Moguillansky’s case, a Marxist exploration of artistic labor in a capitalist system. Like the protagonists of his latest film For the Money (2019), about an independent theater troupe trying to put on a show about the terrible influence of money in their lives while slowly going crazy with greed, Moguillansky’s movies exhibit a constant struggle between the promise of a life dedicated to imagination and the constraining lure of money. This becomes foregrounded through his choice to often use the very act of filmmaking itself as his subject matter, thereby creating a mise-en-abyme where the movie becomes literally the story of its own making. A potentially disorienting effect emerges where the audience is left watching both a fictionalized documentary of the film’s own production and a real documentary of the film’s production of fiction itself.
Perhaps this struggle between the hard reality of labor and the expansive fantasies of art-making is partly resolved not in Moguillansky’s films themselves, but through El Pampero Cine, the Argentinian film collective Moguillansky founded in 2002 with filmmakers Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, and Andres Mendilaharzu. For the past 20 years the Argentinian filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine has been executing a mini-revolution in how films can be financed, shot, and distributed on the international film scene. Refusing all outside funding, working entirely with their own equipment, and trading off production roles with each project (Llinás and Citarella have produced Moguillansky’s work, while Moguillansky has edited their films including Llinás’ 14-hour long La Flor), El Pampero Cine has found a way to remain resolutely independent in a global film production ecosystem that has become increasingly more interdependent on bureaucratic systems of influence and control, from streaming services to grant-writing.
On the occasion of a wide-ranging retrospective of Moguillansky’s work both as a director and editor which runs throughout November and December at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, I spoke with Moguillansky over Zoom to talk through his career and process.
NOTEBOOK: I would like to start by talking about your artistic process. In The Little Match Girl (2017) the pianist, Margarita Fernández, tells the German avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann that his music is just a game for kids and I think that resonates with how your own films often feel. There is always this sense of exploration and inventiveness, you seem to be having a lot of fun with the rules of filmmaking. How do you prepare a film and how do you manage this spirit of invention and discovery?
ALEJO MOGUILLANSKY: It’s a big question. I always start from very rough materials—by shooting a documentary or maybe finding a piece of music or theater or even a literary text. Like for example in The Little Match Girl the first thing that happened was that we shot the rehearsing process of the philharmonic orchestra from Teatro Colón for two weeks. They were rehearsing this piece, The Little Match Girl, from Helmut Lachenmann. I then try to find a story behind these materials, I start to realize, “there are characters there, what characters are they?” and try to develop these characters and a story that have been born from this act of documenting the working process.
Then what I do in this second period of the filming is to try to find the countershot of each image. I ask, “who is seeing this shot?” and when you find these countershots you make a new question, “who is now seeing these countershots?” It is sort of a musical process, you play a chord and then you find the second chord to respond to that first chord, and then the third and fourth. This process of finding the image to put in front of another image, is like the definition of editing itself. You can go in the same direction of that image, you can go in the opposite direction of that image, or even you can put some other image that makes it a new scene. Like the old experiments from Kuleshov, I show some food, and that brings up the idea “hungry.” And what I try to do is not to make sense, not to make an illustration of the first image or a simple development of it and not even to make a third sense, like in this Kulechov experience. I always try to make the images question themselves with questions that the other images cannot answer. Which is basically a possible definition of editing. The editing can be understood as the art of putting something besides another thing when they don’t have anything to do with each other, but in the act of putting one besides the other you make a new sense which is in nonsense.
So then the editing becomes the real writing process, the editing is what’s telling the director what to shoot. When I shoot it’s like a dialogue between me as an editor and me as a director and we try to betray each other, try to be smarter than the other. And that makes a very complex structure which is full of mistakes, errors, nonsense scenes, tricks that don’t work, et cetera. And it is at this moment when people like Walter Jakob appear, who is the main actor from The Little Match Girl. He’s a theatre actor and there’s a point when I need him to come into the film because he brings classical structure. He’s very smart trying to realize where the classical figures are in the structure of the story and that’s when we rewrite the story. This way of working is very profitable because in the process of shooting I can be very irresponsible with the narrative, and then somehow those scenes, those delirious dreams, can be framed into a story.
NOTEBOOK: How does sound come into play in how you edit and conceive of the images? I think in a lot of ways your films are very inventive in how they use sound, especially in The Parrot and the Swan where the whole film is framed around film sound.
MOGUILLANSKY: There is always music around and I am always trying to feel sound as music even when it’s not music itself. I am always trying to make the sound itself like some material that you can play with to make this contract with the one watching the film. The sound is an invention, it’s another material that is there besides the image. And the same act of synchronizing a sound with an image is something that is playfully “denounced”—not in all my films, but most of them. I try to make this contract with the “spectator” where we say, “okay, the fact that the sound is synchronized with the image is a contract between you and me, but we can of course break this synchronization when we want and let it come back again.” It’s about not allowing the images and sounds to be automatically produced.
The Little Match Girl
NOTEBOOK: Do you often edit and then go back to filming and then back to editing and then back to filming again?
MOGUILLANSKY: Always, yes. But it’s something that I want to stop, I confess.
NOTEBOOK: Why?
MOGUILLANSKY: The last script I wrote was Castro [2009] which was an adaptation of the Samuel Beckett novel Murphy. We used a classical style of production where we shot for two weeks, stopped for New Year’s Eve, then resumed for the whole month of January. I never worked like that again. The following film was The Parrot and the Swan, which started with us shooting the rehearsals of this independent dance company and led to us inventing a small film crew shooting these rehearsals and then we invented that they were making a documentary of dance in Argentina, so we went to shoot other, much bigger, ballets, And that was the beginning of this method of working.
NOTEBOOK: Why did Castro inspire you to move away from a more orthodox filmmaking process?
MOGUILLANSKY: I think I wanted to bring more oxygen into the films. Castro was very choreographed, very sharp in its shape, not only with the physical space but also with the sounds and the dialogue. Everything is framed into some bigger idea that is happening with the editing too. It’s the kind of film that young filmmakers imagine a lot, the kind of film that you have in your mind for many years so it has a lot of ambition. And after that I just needed to bring something more impressionistic to the films, something lighter.
NOTEBOOK: Your films often incorporate a lot of documentary and many even portray the production of a documentary itself. For example in The Gold Bug (2014) it’s not the production of a documentary but everyone is playing themselves and you’re making the movie about the movie that you’re making, so it feels like a documentary. How do you see documentary filmmaking being involved in your process and influencing you?
MOGUILLANSKY: It’s true that most of the films I directed look like they are playing with both of these worlds, documentary and fiction, but I confess that I really don’t believe in that difference. Well, of course there is a difference because if you shoot something that was going to happen whether you shoot it or not, that is a possible definition of documentary. And if you produce something that was not going to happen anyway, well that is a possible definition of fiction. At the same time I would say that in my films I am thinking more like a painter. Painters most of the time don’t think about fiction or documentary, they just paint. You look at a portrait of Rembrandt and it looks like fiction, but at the same time you look at a Manet portrait and it looks like a documentary. It’s a very tiny difference and I would say the films that I direct portray life like painters, they don’t mind if something is documentary or fiction. Most of the time, documentary material produces new material that is absolutely fiction and the opposite happens as well so in the end there is no real difference. It’s the beginning of the language of the film—a language of difference between the two which the film forgets really fast in order to try to produce just images.
Castro
NOTEBOOK: Speaking of the relationship between documentary and fiction, you often work with people that you know—your family, your film crew, or the theater group you are involved with, Grupo Krapp. How do you balance having them be themselves while also having them fit the idea of the character and of the specific shot that you’re going for? Do you find yourself giving a lot of direction or often just stepping back?
MOGUILLANSKY: I have never cast a movie in my life. Basically all my friends are actors and actresses, so it would be very tricky to do a casting. I feel very lucky in that sense. I never wrote a character and then tried to realize who will play the role. I think in the reverse way, I think first about the actor and how this person will work in the film and then I write a character or some lines for them. I start thinking about that person, thinking about what they are able to do, and, more importantly, what they are not able to do. Usually I go for that, for places that they won’t reach easily, these uncomfortable places of acting or moving, and that finally produces humor.
NOTEBOOK: And when they are playing versions of themselves, how do you direct them? Do you find that you have specific ideas of how you want them to be or do you find it to be very collaborative? How do you find this difference between who they are and who you want them to be in the film? And how do you negotiate that during the production?
MOGUILLANSKY: It depends. In The Gold Bug it was very easy because I wrote the dialogue of the film thinking in each person’s voice. But The Gold Bug also has this sort-of comedy of errors, there are always three or four or five people in the shot and everybody’s talking at the same time. Almost all of the actors were theatre actors so they were proposing and proposing and proposing, and I tried to listen to that, to bring these propositions into the film. But there is a point where you have to filter it or everything begins to be just funny or just ridiculous. That is the point where you stop the improvisation and you try to make it go to a different place. I use the interview method a lot. I make an interview with the actors and then edit it as a conversation where I cut across interviews between different characters. There are lots of dreams in my films which come from interviews or little conversations I had with the actors. In the end the strategy, the method, the secret, is to work with people that you are very familiar with. It’s the method of a company or a troupe. When you work with the same people over and over again like a company, you know them and you can experiment and change the characters or try to make these sorts of games. Chaplin shot every day in a year with the same company, the tall one, the girl, et cetera. And when you know each person like that it’s like a football team. Go there, come here, change the positions of each other. And I would say my team is still playing well. There will be a moment when the team won’t play well anymore, and we will have to change the team, to change players. Or we will die and those players will be finally playing for another team, I don’t know.
The Gold Bug
NOTEBOOK: I’ve been thinking a lot about how politics makes its way into your films. I think many of your films are interested in politics and incorporate many different political viewpoints—in The Gold Bug you talk about anti-colonialism, feminism, political radicalism. and The Little Match Girl has this whole thing about the RAF—but at the same time I don’t get the sense that you are ever making a direct political statement or that you want the audience to get something specific out of it. How do you view your relationship to politics and filmmaking?
MOGUILLANSKY: It’s tricky because I try to escape from the idea of a political film as a film focused on a particular theme, which is political, in the same way that I try to escape from every theme. It used to happen a lot with Latin American films where you can see them from far away and say, “okay, I know what this film is going to say…” and the problem with most of these political films is that they are actually the confirmation of what you thought they were going to say. So in a way they are false, by definition they are just an advertisement. But at the same time I don’t believe in films that just simply escape from real problems that are around. So it’s a problem that you’ll always have. In a way, I don’t know the answer to your question. Sometimes in my films when these political themes appear, they tend to appear in an unexpected moment and what is being said is something I don’t expect anyone to say. I like to go to the less politically correct content, but at the same time not to go to the expected less politically correct content, not to be just politically incorrect which just becomes another category. I believe in the art of producing a new language as a political solution. I believe that once you develop a new language you are able to say something political in a way that is not necessarily a speech, you are at the cutting edge of art.
NOTEBOOK: I think that is something I appreciated in The Gold Bug, that you play with all of these political ideologies and you make fun of them, but at the same time it also feels that they are each given a very sincere approach. It feels like you still believe in them to some degree. I think in that way it becomes more about the nature of ideology itself or the nature of political discourse, than the actual political content itself.
MOGUILLANSKY: In The Gold Bug I think those ideas work because the film itself is the result of those ideas. The film is the result of the idea that Europe has to produce films from off-grid areas with budgets that are ridiculous compared to European budgets, but the act of charity is still happening. I think that if that film wasn’t a film which was a result of that process, that political situation, it wouldn’t be interesting. It would just be a theme or an excuse. The secret is to make the film able to think about its own existence and if you let the films think like that then you have to also question your own identity.
NOTEBOOK: Could you also talk specifically about the anti-colonialist sentiment in The Gold Bug and how you feel about the international film industry and system of film financing? The character you play in that movie seems very concerned with fighting against European influence—is there a specific truth to that sentiment in film or is it somewhat fictionalized for the film?
MOGUILLANSKY: Yes, I was very concerned by these ideas at the time because I was making a film that was in the middle of this problem. It had to be co-directed with a Scandinavian director that I didn’t know and she had 51% control of the film and I had 49%, so here we saw the whole scam of political correctness. Even if it's made with the best intentions and even if it is necessary that these films are made, this scam somehow always appears. Sometimes it’s because of the sponsor, sometimes it’s because of the government and sometimes it’s because of the institutions, but it always appears. And those ideas were strong in that film because the film itself was made in this particular situation. So instead of the colonialist way of expecting what the third-world countries should say in their films we had the idea to make the film answer questions like, “what are you as a film?” I would say that this attitude is a leitmotif in each film, trying to do this to the film… [mimics trying to shake the film back and forth with his hands] so that the coins fall from the jacket. To try to get the film nude and to portray the film as a film.
For the Money
NOTEBOOK: You have mentioned that part of what you see as your project with your films is to represent work and labor and especially artists as laborers. Where does your interest in this come from?
MOGUILLANSKY: I’ve always been interested in the artist as a worker because I belong to a generation of artists that has always worked in the independent theatre and cinema with no budgets. And in the particular situation of Argentina, artists really work all the time. The most alienated people you can imagine are artists. When you start to see these people as workers with no wages, no unions, no protection, nothing, they start to become like marginal people in a way. Marginalized from the rest of the working class. There are moments when you don’t even understand and you say, “What are they doing? They’re not working.” Yes, that is working! Of course it’s a working class.. Trying to fcus on that is the first political idea of the films. These films belong to a working class that is generally not recognized as a working class. They are recognized more as bohemians on the border of the society. And they work! They are workaholic people. It is a tragedy that has no solution. The whole story of the films in the end is trying to portray these working class people.
NOTEBOOK: Thinking about your career as a whole I find it interesting that in Castro the main character is trying hard to avoid work and the responsibility of making money, but in your latest film, For the Money, the characters are obsessed with getting money at all costs. I think there’s a cynical approach towards work in both films, but there’s also a big change in the personal attitudes of the characters. Have you felt a change in the way you view your working life across your career?
MOGUILLANSKY: I don’t know. Money is always around. Money has the power to make the whole world work for it. Power in the most abstract expression is money. It’s nothing, it’s just power. Power to have a family, power to rent a house. It’s a leitmotif that is always around in my work because evidently it’s a problem. For artists in Argentina, in the whole world, it’s this problem but if you say it, it becomes kind of silly. It’s the limits of freedom in the end. We are free until we have to go for our own living. I mean, there are situations, of course, where money and freedom get along, but in general they don’t get along very well.
NOTEBOOK: How do you view this inevitability of money interfering in relation to your own career and your own work? Your most recent film, For the Money, literally ends with you dead on the beach because the need for money got in your way. Do you feel like money is often a problem when you work?
MOGUILLANSKY: Well, most of my films, from the point of view of a producer, are cheating. For the Money betrays the original proposal of the TV channel; The Little Match Girl was originally a documentary on the rehearsing process of Helmut Lachenmann in Buenos Aires; and The Gold Bug was somehow cheating the original proposal to have a collaboration, it was a collaboration, but was also trying to question that collaboration and denounce it. In a sense it’s a search for freedom. It’s acting like a cheater, putting yourself in an illegal place where you use the money that they give you for another purpose. It’s the definition of corruption, but perhaps the production system produces that kind of corruption. It is needed to make films that avoid what is expected from them. This search for freedom is connected with crime. The artist is a necessary criminal. They have to be.
Por el Dinero: The Films of Alejo Moguillanski is showing November 6 - 28, 2021 at Spectacle in Brooklyn.