Film Show 020: Helena Wittmann
An interview with director Helena Wittmann in light of her new film 'Human Flowers of Flesh'
Helena Wittmann
Helena Wittmann, born in 1982, is an artist and filmmaker based in Hamburg, Germany. Throughout the past 20 years she’s created films that explore the relationship between image and sound, and of people and peoples across time. Her debut feature film, Drift, arrived in 2017 and felt like a remarkably intimate and prismatic work that, while driven by a loose narrative, contained formalist tendencies best captured by a nod to Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Uninterested in occupying the creative territories of decades past, Wittmann instead looks to interpolation as a way to ideas forward and breathe life into her works—she views these intersections as analogous to the interconnectedness of all life. Her sophomore feature, Human Flowers of Flesh (which is being distributed by Cinema Guild), incorporates text from Marguerite Duras and features Denis Lavant reprising his role as Galoup from Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. As with many of her works, short films and installations included, Wittmann’s film unfolds patiently without moralizing or clear messaging. The result is an indulgence in her arresting images and a consideration for the various questions and suggestions that her work provides. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Wittmann on October 30th, 2022 via Zoom to discuss how she approaches sound in her films, her similar approaches to teaching and filmmaking, various films throughout the career, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: You were born in Germany, correct?
Helena Wittmann: I was born in Neuss, but I didn’t live there. My parents moved there from Düsseldorf, which is a city in the West close to Cologne, and then they bought this country house. I grew up in the countryside, in a really small village (laughs).
What was the name of the village?
It was called Bernsen, which is in an area called Auetal. Nobody knows it (laughter).
How was it growing up in that remote location?
That’s a good question. I was very free—I was running around a lot and my parents would let me go [wherever]. As far as I remember I was always with friends and very much outside. I was riding horses, and I loved reading from very early on. It was quite a good balance between running around with other kids and building things in the trees, and I had my space where I would listen to music and read. It got unsatisfying when I was an adolescent. I was always very curious and would want to find out things, so I wanted to go to other cities. For example, with cinema the best we could get was arthouse, but nothing else.
I tried to get as much as possible outside [of where I lived] and always tried to participate in workshops. I remember once when I was 16 or 17, I registered for a workshop for camera assistants and it was in Cologne—I traveled there alone. Of course there were only people who were 30+ and already working in the field (laughter), but it was great!
It’s interesting to hear you talk about being in this remote location. When I think about your films, I always feel like there’s a careful attention to sound and how it’s intertwined with the images; the sound is always aiming to capture more than what’s presented visually. I’m curious if you have fond memories of listening to the sounds around you, of being enamored with the sounds of nature.
I remember the view out the window in my room, and there were these big walnut trees. My window was always open, and it’s still like this—I leave windows open because I need a connection to the outside world. There’s this image but the sound was always present too. It’s funny that you ask that because I was walking around here in Buenos Aires today—I’m visiting friends before going to Mar del Plata—and I was walking along the river. I sat down and started to write. I wrote down what I was hearing—everything I was listening to—and tried to focus on what was close and what was far away. I did this before I wrote down what I was seeing, actually. To me, sound is more immediate; it settles me more than what I see, and then it gives me a closer connection to the visuals. In a way, sound always comes first.
Is it typically in this order when you’re writing?
In this case I was just writing—it wasn’t meant to be something. It was really free. For scripts or when I’m developing something, it depends. I work with very concrete images and sounds but I try to describe very complex and vague environments, knowledge, feelings, and atmospheres. And this is very often the first thing that I have—I know the atmosphere, and then I try to focus on it with writing, and sound is part of it. Sometimes sound comes first, sometimes it comes second, but it always has the same importance as the image, for sure.
Did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker early in life?
I was interested in cinema early on. I think It started in school with theater, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t interested in acting. Usually all the pupils would act on stage, and it wasn’t [typical] to be behind the scenes in any way, but I started to collaborate and have ideas for scenes. It’s strange because cinema is something very, very different, but to have spaces and bodies and time—this was a starting place. Then I started with photography and it continued.
It’s also interesting that we talked about sound because I’m thinking of the first short film I did on my own. Nobody’s ever seen it, and I don’t even know if it still exists (laughter). It had a person going through different spaces but the sounds would be from other spaces. I didn’t think about it back then—I was young—but there was already this interest and curiosity in the relationship between image and sound.
I got very interested in cinema and at 21, I worked at my first film festival, which was in Cologne. And then three months after that I worked for Oberhausen Film Festival, and that was when I really discovered experimental film. That was crucial for me because I connected with it immediately. I didn’t understand what it was, and I really wanted to dig into that because it was something I had never seen before. And as I was talking about with where I grew up, it was really rare to see something like that—and of course there was no YouTube at the time.
What was the name of the first film you made?
(laughs). I don’t even know if it had a title. I only remember that I shot, for example, in the streets… it was really basic because I didn’t know how to do everything. For the audio it was a MiniDisc recording and I tried to record the steps of this person that I had recorded in the street, and then had the same steps in a church—and that was just because I wanted to have these sounds in a church. It was basically a man walking in the street through different spaces and then changing the sounds. I don’t think I have it anymore. It was on MiniDV I think, but it’s lost somewhere, unfortunately (laughter).
When was this?
That was probably 2002, maybe. So 20 years ago. So I was 20… or 19… (pauses). Well, it was with my boyfriend so it must have been during that time (laughter).
You mentioned how you were really inspired by these experimental films. Do you remember what they were?
The first one I remember very well. I showed it recently in a carte blanche program—it was Mothlight (1963) by Stan Brakhage. It was so beautiful. It was these three minutes that were silent and I remember someone in the audience screaming, “Where’s the sound?” I thought, “Leave! You’re ruining this!” (laughter). It was like a firework for my eyes.
Did you then proceed to seek out more experimental films shortly after?
As I said, I was working for the Oberhausen Film Festival and it was the 50th anniversary or something—they had some special programs. I worked there for three months and could see some things. And some films were published on DVD and I remember Tscherkassky, for example. Many of the Austrians were published on DVD and I watched them. And then I read books and I was just following that line.
I was talking with someone recently who was a student of yours, Gloria de Oliveira.
Yeah!
I started talking with her because I was listening to her music, and then I realized she was an actress. She was telling me about the classes you taught because you had these seminars focused on “waking” and “sleep.” Do you mind sharing how you chose the different films for each of those categories? I think the way anyone teaches about film speaks to how they approach the medium.
It’s so amazing that you met her. I loved the group. I started with the seminar “sleep” because I’m very interested in it. It’s really important for me, not just existentially of course, but because I work with it also. So many ideas, or the development of ideas, happen in the moments of falling asleep and waking up—it’s not so much in deep sleep. I dream a lot but I think the most important stages are those two. Sleep always touched me a lot. When I give a seminar, what the students need is important but I need to be interested as well. You need this passion or amazement to infect others, and it’s always a search for me.
I remember showing D’Est (1993) by Chantal Akerman and Cemetery of Splendor (2015) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. For D’Est, I had memories of these scenes in the train station where people are waiting and some are sleeping. These scenes always touched me so much because there’s so much confidence that they’re showing, because in sleep you’re defenseless—your body falls apart, it’s more horizontal, and they’re still in this public situation. When we watched it, I realized that was a really small part of the film (laughter) but the whole structure was like that of sleep—that’s what I found out with the students. We were talking about how these traveling shots were never looking ahead but looking back and sideways.
And I must say that I’m very freestyle. I have some ideas, and a pool of films and texts and where we could go with them, but I start and then decide where we continue as we go along. It’s a little bit like DJing, of reacting to the audience. Of course, it’s easier when you know the group and everyone gets along and it’s good company. With “Sleep” we somehow got to the topic of editing montage and then “Waking Up” became very clear. In this moment of waking you have this sleep, the present, and the future of being awake—it’s sort of like what happens between the cut of two images, and we worked in this way. And the next [seminar], which was “Wide Awake,” was my last semester and I thought it would be about being very attentive. We were there sometimes for eight hours in the room; I elected to have all [possible] time and tried to experiment with things.
You said you dream a lot—do you keep a dream journal?
Sometimes I write things down, or I tell people so I can remember them. As with everyone else, if I don’t do that they get lost. A long time ago, around 2011-2013 maybe, I wrote more regularly. Now I don’t. I embrace dreams in a different way, though. I have this feeling that I digest everything that I experience in the day and also that new things come up. Like the connections are freer, and I like this a lot; I’m always interested in the unknown, and seeing where things lead me. It’s the same with teaching, of not wanting to know what to tell them. I want to see where things bring us.
This all makes sense and I feel like it relates to the way it feels to watch some of your films. I haven’t seen all of them, and I definitely haven’t seen this one from 2002 (laughter). But the earliest film I’ve seen of yours is from 2010, whose title translates to Circling. I love that one because there’s a sort of optical illusion in the film; there’s the checkerboard floor and you’re working with that and specific camera movements at one point.
It’s really interesting because there are some parts of it that I find really cheesy now. It’s an odd one, but there are things that I like, and there are things you see I’m interested in [that appear later]. I was watching it the other day because someone asked to include it in a program, but I said, “please, no.” (laughter). With this film Circling, the scenes almost always start with a detail and then open up the context, via traveling, or in different ways.
When I was writing it, I had just been to Buenos Aires, which is where I am now, and I lived there for one year. Somehow I was amazed by how much being in a different place changed my perspective. It was so profound, and I never could have imagined that—being on a different continent, being surrounded by different realities. This is not politically reflected in my film at all but I think it still has this idea of changing perspectives and dissolving the borders between imagination in that film. I don’t like the dancing but I really like the crawling tiger kids (laughter).
I think the title was also about… I had this feeling that, with me on the receiving end—as a listener, as an observer—it felt like there were all these circles of ideas around me. In that film, they were sometimes colliding. For example you have this very close shot of the bodies and you see the pulse and everything, and then the text and voiceover talks about the biochemical things that are going on in the moment, but it doesn’t really inform you… it has its limits. And these things interested me a lot. In a car we are driving through the streets while we hear a voiceover that reads a very technocratic text from the rules and regulations of the road traffic authority about how to plan the streets as functional as possible. But what we see is this woman driving the car and the sunlight breaking through the trees, ever changing. So it shows two very different layers of the same subject. For me, these were like circles that were overlapping. And this now happens all the time, like when traveling or being with films today, I try to be as open as possible and see how a film itself transforms with different audiences and theaters and places and cultures. That’s exciting.
What are some stark contrasts you’ve seen with your films and where they’ve screened?
Showing Human Flowers of Flesh (2022) in New York was interesting because this film, more than the others, has a very concrete and regional anchor. There’s the Mediterranean with everything that it contains and its relationship with Europe and North Africa. With audiences in Europe, it’s still a film that rattles but they more directly feel something in there. In New York or the United States, that’s still theoretically the case but it’s more abstract so other things come to the foreground, which is nice. To have this different approach, which I can’t enter, but can listen to and hear people talk about more… I mean this film is full of textures but that was even more important in New York. I think that’s a good example, because with Drift (2017) it’s more universal… hmm.
I would say that’s true.
Maybe.
I appreciate that you’re an artist who really values and welcomes how a piece of work can be put out into the world and then be received in so many different ways. It’s not prescriptive, which makes sense because your films aren’t presented in such a way. There isn’t always a clear message or answer or idea that people should be focusing on.
It’s the same thing we talked about before with the seminars—if there was no space for a film to develop or change, it would be very boring for me. When I see films that are very closed, they can be very good but they don’t resonate. I love films and music and literature that connect… where after seeing or listening or reading, they continue. It’s more like being part of this world, where it’s not an object but a subject. And for that it needs space for the other, which could be you or someone else. I think you have to be even more precise to open these spaces; it seems like a paradox, but it’s not. You need to be very clear in what you show in order to give space.
I want to move onto The Wild, from 2013, which feels like an important film because you’re juxtaposing this domestic, intimate, human space with nature. And earlier, when you mentioned your interest in Austrian filmmakers, I started thinking of Peter Kubelka’s Our Trip to Africa (1966). Was that something you were thinking about when making that film?
No, but it’s so, so funny that you say that. I didn’t think of it but I had written about this film when I was studying media studies, before starting at the art school. But anyway, I’ve seen Our Trip to Africa like a million times, but when I saw The Wild I wasn’t thinking of it (laughs). This is so bizarre. I told you I put together this program in Ghent—they have this program called “Art Cinema OFFoff.” At Ghent Film Festival they showed Human Flowers of Flesh so they invited me to put together a program of films that had a kinship to the film. And the programmer of this whole series wrote to me, “I thought of Kubelka, we have never shown Kubelka, and I read that you had written about him.” And then it became crystal clear for me. I programmed [Our Trip to Africa] and then The Wild, and I realized how much of a connection there was—of course there was! I wasn’t thinking of it conceptually but it’s there. It’s like sediments. These memories come to the foreground or come to the surface, and sometimes it’s unclear. So, my answer is yes, even though I wasn’t thinking about it (laughter).
This is amazing because I didn’t even know about you having this film in your program! What specific goals did you have for The Wild? What did you want to accomplish?
I inherited an archive of Super 8 films from my grand uncle, so he was the husband of my grandmother’s sister. He had mainly filmed from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and a little bit in the ’90s. He had made some trips to Africa (chuckling), not for hunting—well, he was hunting, yes, but with a camera. He had all these films and he knew I was making some, so he asked me if I was interested in his material. He invited me to his place, which you can see in The Wild. It’s not their house but it’s very similar, like this small, 1950s post-war German house. It’s very clean and functional. In Germany you say spießig, which I never knew how to translate. These people come more from the working class… I mean the bourgeoisie can also be spießig, very much so, it means to follow the conventions, among other things. There were no signs of all these travels in their place—there were no photos. He put up this screen and projected the films and showed it to me in their living room and I was like, wow. They were really beautiful. I knew I wanted to do something with them, but I didn’t know what.
At first I thought it could be a found-footage film, but I wasn’t really interested in that. So I set it aside, watching it from time to time, and realized that what I actually found interesting was the moment when he showed me this material in his apartment, and that there were two worlds colliding that are linked with colonial history. I wanted to bring these two cinematic spaces together, and I also had the wish to have these animals included. I felt like, in being filmed and bringing them to a living room, these animals were domesticated even though they were still running free. I wanted to liberate them in a certain way with cinema. It was also the first time I was working with Nika Son, who now always does the sound. The Wild was the beginning of our collaboration and it also marks a change in my filmmaking, I would say. I can still relate to this film today even though I would definitely film it with different lenses now.
There’s the colonialism aspect, and that’s also present in Human Flowers of Flesh. We’ve spoken a lot about the way you approach teaching and your films, and how you don’t strive for didactic messaging. How do you reconcile having these undertones of political messaging with this style of filmmaking?
It’s always delicate, and with Human Flowers of Flesh it was the most delicate because you had the military body of the French Foreign Legion. I knew that I didn’t want morality to be the leading idea. That’s something where, you know, to have a judgment about it is so easy. I have one too—I think it’s wrong—but that’s not what interests me. What interests me is that they are there, and I, as a European, can’t escape the contradiction they provide. They are still maintaining this place that I’m living in—that I grew up in—to make it a prosperous, secure place. It’s horrible. It excludes people, and the majority of people are excluded, but I’m included. I wanted to let all this resonate into the film, and to me, the pure presence of military already tells something. In Germany, since the Second World War, there are no military operations in the interior. That’s not true for France, there you see many soldiers in the streets, and this is something that’s shocking for me—and it means something. So when I was finding out about this Legion, I found that their mere presence, at least to me, was a meaningful thing. I don’t need to dramatize it in the film. I think that when a film tells you too much about how to feel, think, or position yourself, it ends there. You can think, ah, that’s right, but then there’s nothing else. You feel safe, you feel good, you feel that you’re on the right side, but it’s more complicated than that.
I think even discussion of the military in the film, and their presence, is enough to create a sense of tension. And that’s something that coexists with all your shots of nature. I love your shots of water by the way, they’re some of my favorite right now, and experimental filmmakers love water. It’s a crowded field! (laughter).
And I think they’re all part of the environment. I’m not seeing so much of a hierarchy; the trees, for me, have the same importance. The film is political, but it’s not a message [film], of course.
I want to talk about 21.3°C (2014) because to me it feels like a structural film, as does your 2015 film Later, which brings to mind Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970). And then in Drift you have this homage to Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). Can you talk about your interest in structural films and how they inform your work?
I wouldn’t say they’re structural films. For me, I know these older structural films, but I also know their limitations. You probably couldn’t make a structural film today—it’s not interesting, it’s been done. But you can try to work with what was achieved and try to advance [what it did].
With 21.3°C we have this one image. The camera was in the same position for one week, but I was there the whole time. The decisions for when to shoot and which flowers to use were not mathematical at all. The decisions for when to let the film roll were intuitive despite the strict setting. And the whole sound, even though it doesn’t seem so, was a composition. This for me, then, is another layer that’s telling a story. There’s a construction site, for example, so that means there will be changes—nothing more and nothing less than that, but it still means something. And then you could start thinking about the architecture or what you hear, like the television next door.
Later was similar. I was behind the camera for a documentary and there was this amazing mountain and the fog and light and everything—there was so much changing. I made this shot and I worked on editing the time—sometimes I sped it up. And then with Wavelength in Drift, that was similar to [Claire Denis’] Beau Travail (1999) in Human Flowers of Flesh. It was never about homage as a result of liking these things—I mean, I do like these things—but I thought there was a relationship. There was something I thought could contextualize the film, that could build a link. Cinema is something that is a part of my life, and I felt the same way with these films.
I get that. “Homage” maybe centers the other films too much, but to you these works are just another facet of who you are and what you’re interested in, just as much as nature and sound. You’re just bringing all these different things into your work.
There are other things, like camera movements, that aren’t so easy to detect but are sometimes copies, in a way (laughs).
Okay now you have to tell me! (laughter). What sort of things were you copying?
There’s one that I remember. In Human Flowers of Flesh, there’s this shot where Galoup is in the street and a soldier is coming across. The camera moves and it’s inspired by Lina Wertmüller’s The Basilisks (1963). There’s this one shot in that film that I love, and I thought it was perfect because I was wondering how you could film someone following someone else on a street.
In Human Flowers of Flesh you also have text from Marguerite Duras. What does she mean to you? Why did you decide to include her beyond the thematic relevance?
I think she’s quite amazing in what she did with writing and film, and doing both is super interesting. I don’t understand why her films are so little known compared to her books because I think they’re really particular. I always loved reading her work. I feel like there’s something interesting happening with this closeness—you’re always close to her—but there’s also this “overview.” Her writing is also very romantic but it’s never cliché. I don’t know how she manages it, and I still can’t really grasp it. She manages to fill this place of romanticism with meaning—it brings you somewhere. And her language in general resonates a lot with me. With her films, she works very differently from me, but I still feel a link. I’m very sure she would not (laughter). For her, language always comes first. But there is something very special that she achieves with her films, almost like a [trance] state.
The last film of hers I saw was Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) and it has one loop of music that plays throughout the film nonstop. It’s amazing and makes so much sense. It’s obviously very artificial—she doesn’t even try to put it into the space—but at a certain point it starts to become a conversation topic. The characters will talk about it, that there are people in the village playing this song, and it represents the outside world in some way as we’re viewing these interiors. It’s also just the power of fiction in that sense, or of cinema, that we can say, look, I presented it like this, and it’s there. And because it’s there, it’s true. It’s really nice (smiles largely).
I’m now thinking of how you decided to end Drift with the classic Donnie and Joe Emerson song “Baby.” For so many other directors it could’ve felt cheesy, but I think the way you present the relationship between the women, and the intimacy and space between them, and then the whole expanse of the ocean, there’s this constant ambiguity that exists that makes the song so touching. The tenderness of everything we see in the film, and the romanticism of “Baby” work well together because your images aren’t always aiming to be super direct in their meaning.
That’s beautiful. Tenderness is the most wonderful compliment you can give because I think it’s important in this world. And hopefully everyone I work with does so with tenderness.
I was talking with someone a year or so ago who was your classmate. His name is Nicolaas Schmidt.
Yes! He made the film FINAL STAGE (2017).
That and FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET] (2021)... after seeing those films I immediately grouped you two together. There was this clear inspiration from these experimental and structural works, and a loose narrative, but most importantly there was this immense tenderness that I really felt, which is usually absent in avant-garde works.
That’s really nice because I really love Nico’s films. To me they’re so touching.
Now I have to ask—who do you have in your life that you feel brings you this sort of tenderness?
That’s a really nice question. My closest friends are all also collaborators or accomplices. I share so many different things with them, both about life and my work. Nika, who does my sound, is one of them. We also travel so much together for these works—we’ve shared the same bed often, because it was cheaper. It’s just knowing that someone is there, knowing that you can be silent together, knowing that you could fight and be looking for a solution during it. Not being competitive is also really important, and it’s not always easy, but it is the most stupid. It really doesn’t make any sense. It’s great to be around people who are so talented and who do things that can inspire me. Nicolaas Schmidt’s films, for example—I am so happy whenever I watch them. Or the films of my dear friend Luise Donschen. Or Nika’s work as a musician. I’m so thankful.
Do you try to translate the feelings you’ve had with your loved ones into your films? And it may not be anything direct, but maybe the same spirit.
Not yet, but I think it’s indirectly there. With Drift there’s Theresa [George] and Josefina [Gill]—I’m actually staying at Josefina’s right now—and we’re super close. That’s directly reflected but maybe it’s indirect because what this all really brings along for me is new encounters where I’m not afraid, where I’m trusting. But this trust is only possible because I have these strong relationships. I can always count on them. This is why I can move ahead and do my things, why I can try things out and talk openly about ideas I have.
This makes sense because your films are shot with an intimate crew. And if you’re on a boat, for example, you can’t have a ton of people there. Is there a way you approach working with your actors to get what you would like to see?
It depends on each person but I’m still kind of shy with actors because it’s a huge thing to ask for someone to do something for you in front of a camera. It’s always the case that I look for people who enjoy being in front of the camera—intimacy can come out of that. I always try to write situations corresponding to the actor; I always need to know that it’s possible for them to do it. There’s a simplicity, too, so that they feel safe—it’s important that it’s a safe space. And it’s only then that you can see if you can get somewhere. The main thing I’m interested in is presence, that we are here, me included. And very often we get there by listening; when you’re stressed it’s good to ask the person to listen to something because it can help ground them.
With Human Flowers of Fresh, you have Denis Lavant reprise his role as Galoup from Beau Travail, which then featured Michel Subor riffing on a character he played in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat. So what you’re saying makes sense because for Lavant, it’s literally someone he’s played before.
That’s a good example. He’s obviously super professional but he can also easily “overact,” so I was getting back to this Galoup and reducing it mainly to walking. I wrote this one scene because I knew he could juggle eggs, and I wanted to see that (laughter). It’s always like, let’s see what we have; it would’ve been so sad to not do something [like that] with Denis Lavant when he was already here. With him, I was more inspired by Denis Lavant playing Galoup whereas for all the others it was more so my interest in themselves, including Angeliki [Papoulia]. For Denis, he liked getting back into this role again, it was pleasurable. And that is important.
It’s been 20 years since your first film. In what ways do you feel like you’ve changed after having made these different films, from meeting all these different people, from traveling?
I’ve been thinking that, these days, I’m more open. In the beginning I felt a stronger need to define myself or to define very clearly what I was doing, and why. Now I know what I am and I really like this freedom. Maybe it’s also changing now because people know that I’m making films—there is already something I can build on. I can still go in different directions, though. I realized that with Human Flowers of Flesh, I didn’t show it to any programmer or anyone else until it was completely finished. I didn’t know how it would be received and I understand now that there were expectations because of Drift. It was horrible until the first feedback came in; I felt very vulnerable and fragile in this moment. But I’m still happy I did it this way because I wasn’t thinking about all of that while working on it. When I’m working, it’s important that I’m living with this film and the people I’m doing it with. When it’s finished, that’s another story—it goes outside and it keeps transforming. It’s important that I don’t compromise.
I was probably already following that ideal, but it was definitely underlined with Angela Schanelec. More than studying with her—because we only had one and a half years together since she came to the art school when I was already about to finish—but when I was working with her, it was important. I understood that it didn’t make any sense [to compromise]; it can be hard not to, but it’s not a drama. It was such a good school in that sense. And as I said before, this also happened when I was starting to work with Nika on The Wild—I see us growing old together, continually working, always having new challenges.
Do you feel a similar openness to the audio aspect of your films? How do you feel like you’ve approached sound from The Wild to Drift to Human Flowers of Flesh?
It’s been about 12 years since we started working together because it took about two years to make The Wild. We shared a studio and she started to make music, and I was very interested in it. I saw some familiarity there because she was working with concrete sounds and that was for sure something that corresponds with my way of image-making. Nika is very, very sensitive with sounds—she has this allergy (laughter). If something is going in the wrong direction—and this happened with Drift… it was so difficult to find the frequencies and sounds for the sea because it immediately became something “sublime” and we didn’t want that. We didn’t want to go into a metaphorical direction; we wanted to find something that was “just there.” It took some time to find it.
With Human Flowers of Flesh, it was the first time that she really composed a song [for one of my films], really. It’s during the dancing scene on the boat, which is amazing. It was really difficult because I edited it already and I had another song as a placeholder, and there was something about the song that worked really well—it was this rhythmic, propulsive thing. But there were certain elements we didn’t want, like “tribal” elements. We knew that they couldn’t be there. And she understands all this before we even talked about it. We have the same sensitivity; I have a certain feeling and she understands it and then we try to get to that point. We knew what it needed to fulfill, but at the same time there were many “hot surfaces”: nothing “tribal,” nothing techno-y. We didn’t want it to be put into a category. She was super happy when she managed it.
This is making me think about what you said earlier about not wanting to have specific meanings in your films. With sound, regardless of an artist’s intention, we’re able to associate noises and music with a specific meaning based on our past experiences. And with your films, you’re constantly thinking about those associations and avoiding them in order to have an ambiguous meaning.
Ambiguity is a really good word because I try to shed a different light on things. This can only happen when things are not so clearly defined in the first place. I also work with duration for that reason. You can look at an image and say, “ah, I get it,” but in order to question it, you can use duration to transform what the image means.
Can you name a specific shot where you were really meticulous about its duration?
There’s one very good example: the diving scene. First we’re on the surface, then you only see the waves and then you go underwater. That’s what you first understand, like, ok, now we’re underwater. And maybe you get a feeling of the depth, and then there’s this blue color and this huge body of water and you go down and at a certain moment a shadow appears and you have to figure out what it is. Eventually we realize it’s a plane wreck—what kind of plane is it? You don’t need to understand all this, but you can if you watch closely. It’s a military plane, and it’s probably from a different war, and then the camera moves closer and the surface has transformed into a home for different species. You need time to get the different layers of meaning in this one shot, and I like that.
Thanks for sharing that. I don’t really have any other questions for you. Is there anything you wanted to talk about that didn’t come up in this conversation?
Maybe just because I found this out during a Q&A, but I was asked about the desert. It was the very first time I was in a desert—to do this shot—and Angeliki wanted to know about that, too. I was asked if I went there because I thought the desert was the opposite of the sea—as in stable—or because I thought it was also fluid. And then I realized that I went there with this exact same question. Now I can definitely say that the desert is fluid.
There’s a question I always like to end with: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Wow. Let me think. (pauses to think). What I love about myself is that it’s very easy for me to be in the moment. This makes many things possible, including relationships.
With distribution from Cinema Guild, Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh will play in theaters in 2023. Her other films can be viewed on demand at Vimeo. More information about Wittmann can be found at her website.
Thank you for reading the 20th issue of Film Show. Let’s be in the moment.
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