Marfa Carpenter / MCSq2
Q: You work in a lot of disciplines, but your current project is a documentary. How is a documentary fundamentally different from a fictional film? They both manipulate reality to tell a story.
RGK: My first short film was a mockumentary which, despite the existence of a traditional screenplay, was partly improvised because I had told the actors not to follow the script to the letter, but to react spontaneously as if it were a real documentary. It wasn’t easy for them, especially for the human actress who played a vampire. As a photographer, I try to avoid too much staging and I try to do the same in our upcoming documentary. I hardly try to explain anything, but rather to transfer the images linked by a theme or an idea and leave their interpretations to the spectators. What happens when we ask a question that people have probably never heard in their entire life . . . It’s almost an experimental film whose result currently remains uncertain; it could be a totally different film at the end.
Q: How do you decide on a documentary’s POV? Isn’t the POV really the filmmaker’s?
It probably is, or almost always. There are also producers, editors, DOPs, production designers and many other people who, more or less, influence the final form of films. And that is its beauty. I do not believe that documentary film has ever reached the stage where it would be able to completely get rid of a certain subjectivity, nor cinéma vérité and direct cinema. However I have always preferred to work in team in order to avoid being too biased or subjective. I had several creative partners, most recently the screenwriter and critic Sophie Bouvier, author of the original concept of the upcoming documentary, so finding a POV is in my case a collective, team decision.
Q: Are subject interviews always performative?
I don’t have a specific answer. But this question is crucial to our documentary. This is also why I categorically refuse to add subtitles, although the interviewees can express themselves in several languages. I don’t want to draw viewers’ attention to the written text so that the visual side escapes them. But I think there is a kind of performativity all the time . . . .
Q: Does the film’s financing affects its philosophy?
Maybe. Making a film is not like writing a novel. I’m not saying that writing a novel is a one-person job. There is also an editor, a proofreader, a graphic designer, who all contribute to the final product. But you do not need to establish a budget to start writing a story. However, making a film is teamwork for most of the time and the financial issue cannot be ignored. Regarding the philosophy, or the idea of the film, I’m not sure how much it is influenced by the financial side. If we wanted to make a film about an alien invasion, we would make two different films with a budget of five thousand and five million from a technical point of view, but the idea would probably remain the same. Nevertheless, the advantage these days is that the technologies are well advanced; cameras or smartphones are not only of good quality, but also affordable. So, it is possible to make a film in your own way – with your own philosophy – with a low or “zero” budget.
Q: What is the most successful documentary you’ve ever seen? And is “successful” most truthful, most artful, most shocking, most popular, etc.?
Very difficult to answer this question. I don’t even have the favorite film, I have about thirty of them and I also have an – imaginary – list of directors who had marked me. But if I had to choose just one film, it’s MISÈRE AU BORINAGE by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens about the conditions of Belgian workers in the 1930s. Before watching it at the age of 17 or 18, I didn’t think too much of the power of the documentary genre: its ability to make us think. But at the same time, it’s a documentary film with fictional elements such as the extras the authors hired, extras who, by accident, were mistaken for real protesters by the police. So, in my case, “successful” means “the one who convinced me of the power of genre”, but also the one who proved to me that the absolute truth or realism does not exist nor in this genre which considers itself “truthful”.
R.G. Karkovsky is an exhibited photographer, director, award-winning writer, designer and college lecturer in film and visual media.
R. G. Karkovsky – About & Contact (myportfolio.com)
