Lisa Logan: Marie Craven 'Pale Black'

Spotlight on Pale Black: an Interview with filmaker Marie Craven

Pale Black

Were you surprised to win the Dendy Award?

Yes, I thought Pale Black was a more extreme experimental film than the Dendy Awards would be able to tolerate. I'm very happy to have been proven wrong.

How did Pale Black evolve?

I didn't really have a film in mind at the start, mostly just an impulse to take images from my daily life and to record dreams and other things in a diary: This is how most of my past films have started, so I knew that it could lead to a film, but I did not have any set idea of what the film would be in the end. At a certain point, after collecting and editing images for quite a while, I came up with a collection of about thirty images I wanted to use in a film. I then tried out a number of things for the soundtrack, but in the end decided I would do something with the material that was in my diaries. I did a lot of editing and rewriting. For both the images and the soundtrack, it was a fairly drawn-out process of distillation.

It was about at that stage that I went to the Australian Film Commission. It's-difficult for funding bodies to deal with experimental projects, in that it's often very difficult for experimental filmmakers to come up with a script that will give any concrete sense of what the finished work will be. It's an old problem, but one that seems more acute at present, given the very small number of projects being funded. I think it's something that film makers and funding organisations both really need to grapple with right now. In the case of Pale Black, I made the decision to approach the AFC at a point at which I could indicate quite tangibly what the film would be. With all the images shot and the voice-over completely written, the AFC could virtually see exactly the film they would get (although I think the extent of the darkness and silence in the film may have been a bit of a surprise in the end).

The film was all shot on super 8 and transferred to 16mm in San Francisco - there is no place in Australia that does this properly. I got the information about that from Virginia Hilyard in Sydney, whose wonderful film E.G. was blown up from super 8 to 35mm at the same lab, Interformat. I couldn't have afforded to finish the film on 16mm without the AFC.

What was the budget for Pale. Black?

It ended up being more expensive than I initially imagined, about $18,000. Part of the funding was to work with Louise Fox, a professional actor, on the voice-over narration, which was a really fantastic experience. Otherwise, I would have had to do the voice over myself, and even though I think that works really well for some people's diaristic work, the kind of work I'm doing is more abstracted than most diary films. There is a performance element in it. She brought her enormous creativity to the project.

Did Louise's role as an actor influence the final script?

We did change the way she performed the text a bit in the process of rehearsals, but essentially her inner interpretation was there from the start.

Do you think the process of making Pale Black has influenced the direction of your film-making? Will your next film be as personal as Pale Black?

Although I hate to admit it, the practical reality of getting some real money from the AFC has helped me to be more confident and ambitious. I'm dreaming about the possibility that my next film could be 35mm, which will require more funds.

Artistically, I think of my work in a continuum - one film grows out of the other. The material for my next film Maidenhead has also come out of dream and fantasy writings, so the voice-over stories in Pale Black have led into this next work. On the other hand, working with the minimalism of Pale Black, the darkness and silence, over a long: period of time has made me want to make a film that is very colourful and full of noise. This time, I want to stage the fictions, rather than tell them. The experience of working with Louise on Pale Black has led to a great desire to work more with actors. Acting is an art in itself. It brings a whole other dimension to the work. I intend to develop Maidenhead in association with actors workshops.

As to the other question, Maidenhead does contain personal material, but it won't be presented in the first person, so it may not seem as intimate. Also, I have become much more interested in the absurdism and humour that comes out of these dreams and fantasies that one has. (Laughs) There is actually humour in Pale Black, which some people pick up - it's a dark humour, guess.

The use of black and silence between the vignettes, what was your reason for doing that?

It wasn't really a conceptual thing, not that Structuralist sense of wanting to violently confront the audience. I simply like precise forms. It's to do with my aesthetic preferences and the fact that I feel comfortable and natural with the language of avant garde cinema. The darkness and silence was simply part of a vocabulary that was available to me. It is also to do with stating things clearly and not wanting to clutter things up, which I think happens in quite a lot of films, they lack clarity. I like things that are crystalline. In Pale Black you get the sense that the images could be stills.

Yes. I'm interested in the idea of photography as the basis of cinema, and I like the French theorist Andre Bazin, who said wonderful things about photography being like the shroud of Turin, in that it takes a physical impression of reality. That's appealing to me as an aesthetic (and kind of mystical) notion. It's a very appealing metaphor.

What attracts you about the avant garde?

It has a very free, plural film language. I see it as a rich, artistic tradition, but a tradition without very fixed codes and rules, one that presents a lot of opportunity, a lot of room to move. It's freer artistically than any other space within cinema.

How do you define experimental cinema?

(Laughs) Ever since I can remember, people have been trying to come up with some definition for 'experimental'. I think it can be a lot of things. To me, it's about engaging with the history of avant garde cinema, which goes back to the early part of the century.

Can you describe it in terms of formal structure?

No, and this is one of the things I like about it. I don't think you can say there is a genre of film which is experimental. There are a whole range of genres within experimental cinema and a whole range of other possibilities. Neither do I look on it as a cutting edge. Originally, the avant garde in cinema pushed ahead the Modernist idea of progress. But most of us have since realised that pursuing 'the new' endlessly is not the most rewarding impulse. I guess new technologies have adopted that cutting edge role these days. That's probably why I'm a bit dubious about that area of practice: newness for its own sake.

Do you think male filmmakers are picking up the strands of making personal statement films?

I'm. not particularly keen on discussing things in this male/female dichotomy. But, yes, there have been more diary films made by men over recent years. Despite the personal nature of the material, some of these films seem to me to lack a certain feeling of intimacy. The Good Woman of Bangkok by Dennis O'Rourke is a prime example of this. To me, it's like a monument to his alienation from himself.

Which filmmakers currently working in Australia and overseas impress you, and what specific works are you impressed by?

Sydney filmmaker Andrew Frost has made some fantastic work. I think he's an under-appreciated artist, mostly because he has worked primarily in super 8 and video. He makes quite - abstract works and it's hard to say things about abstract films, but I think he has a very sophisticated understanding of visual and aural material. I have already mentioned Virginia Hilyard and E.G..

I like Jackie Farkas' films a lot, both Amelia Rose Towers and The Illustrated Auschwitz. It's interesting that Amelia Rose Towers, which to me is unproblematically an experimental film, has done so well in mainstream circles. Marcus Bergner makes excellent films. Also, there is Arf Arf's film Thread Of Voice, a very rich work. Chris Windmill makes fantastically strange, personal fictions that remind me in some way of George Kuchar's films. I responded favourably to the work' of British filmmakers Michael Maziere and Jayne Parker, shown at Experimenta last year. I love Su Friedrich's films. Also, Corinne Cantrill's In This Life's Body is a film that was an enormous inspiration to a lot of people, and certainly to me. There are a lot more. I have only named a few.