Armin Linke’s Alpi is the result of seven years of research on contemporary perceptions of the landscape of the Alps, juxtaposing places and situations across all eight bordering nations. Alpi shows the Alps as a key location, owing to its delicacy and environmental importance, where one can observe and study the complexity of social, economic, and political relationships. Even if the imagery of Alps is still that of a world that is pre-modern, Alpi presents that unique landscape as a laboratory of modernity and its illusions.

Tobias Pausinger: Alpi started as a collaborative research project with Renato Rinaldi and Piero Zanini. How did this team come together? Was this cooperation planned from the beginning?

Armin Linke: I had already been working for seven years on a photographic project about landscape infrastructure, how it influences human working and living conditions, and its aesthetic and economic implications. Piero Zanini, who is an architect as well as an anthropologist, told me: “You are always on the plane travelling around, and this kind of change and transformation is happening just 80 kilometres from Milan!” That’s the city where I was living. “Why don't you photograph this?” I suggested making it more complex and doing a film about the topic. And so it began.

TP: How did you develop the film further? Was the work planned as an installation or for a single screen? And what role does sound play in it?

AL: The whole project went through different steps. First it was a three-screen installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale. We won a prize, so we said, “Oh wow, it's easy, let's really develop the theme, then”. But to be honest, we were not really thinking consciously about it [laughs].

How could we bring all these pieces together that work in a special installation, which is also non-linear? And how could we make it work as a narrative? We tried with “classic” film editors while the production developed in different stages as an installation in museums, adding new material filmed around the specific locations. For example, Kunsthaus Zürich invited us to do an exhibition, and through this invitation we got the chance to film inside the Swiss Police Academy bunker. So the dialogue with the local institution was also an important component of the filming.

As for the sound, in the beginning, we didn't consider it properly, and after a year of filming we realized that we didn't really have a classic film subject telling the story. In a certain way, we really follow the landscape.

And so we understood that the sound was even more important because it was part of the depiction. And at this point Renato Rinaldi came in as musician working on the topic of the soundscape (he also organized a music festival on this topic for many years). In the end, for the editing we worked with Giuseppe Ielasi, who in fact is also a musician and not really a film editor. We tried to cut the film according to the sound. In some sense, it was a kind of choreographic editing.

TP: So, in shooting or collecting the material, you had a multi-screen installation in mind more than a single narrative?

AL: Let’s say for the first two years, we had more this multi-screen installation or single-screen installation in mind, but in fact the whole project is a kind of hybrid project. A few months ago, for example, the German IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), took the film as a part of the “Future Perfekt” exhibition curated by Angelika Stepken and Philipp Ziegler, which will now travel around the world for possibly ten years. So the project still has a kind of strange identity that lies between film and art installation.

TP: I think it’s a perfect hybrid. Because it can be read or watched in two ways. It works perfectly as a single-screen piece for me, and that is how I received it the first time. Knowing about the initial installation, I was also so surprised that the narrative in itself worked perfectly well in terms of how the story grows and how the tension and the atmosphere flows through the whole length of the film. That’s why I was curious to know more about the structure or the editing process. You’ve hinted at the fact that the rough cut was done by following the audio of the film, and there must have been a parallel workflow where you determined the chapters and episodes inside the film that had to be assembled together...

AL: Yes, it was an interesting workflow. We analyzed and extracted each take.
At first we were doing the editing from the three-screen installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, but then it was completely forgotten. In fact, it was almost like it didn't exist anymore. Then we began to look at the single clips, like I would do with photographs. We analyzed them all by the kind of space or location or event, and we also started to select according to different categories, like how people would relate to that space or what kind of material it would be: for example, inside or outside the mountain, reality or representation. We had a lot of variables to check. For an installation at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, I developed a kind of “controlled random editing machine” that used a certain algorithm to edit these clips by topic. This was a kind of a preparation for the final edit. All the material was now reduced and edited from 50 hours that we filmed in Super16 to something like five hours. For me this was also a way to learn more about the material and to test what would be the best possible thing to do with it.

TP: So the rough cut was done by an algorithm?

AL: Let’s say so. But still, it would combine three or four to ten clips from a certain location and then switch to the next location or action. It was also a way to test the different topics that exist throughout the whole body of material. After this installation it was really quite easy. In one moment it was solved. We began to work on this with Giuseppe and it was quite clear how it would fit together. The film begins to describe a certain situation and then switches, but with no apparent explanation, and viewers must continually question their perception of things. Of course, one thing that was very important for me from the beginning, with a film crew from the south of India, was how they use the landscape of the Alps in relation to their own identity, a kind of reverse exoticism. It was important to state that this film is not only about the Alps, but also about perception and cultural identity. Later you see the exterior of the Ski Dome in Dubai with construction workers from Asia (who might be a potential audience for the musical) and then, for example, in the urban landscape of Davos during the World Economic Forum, you again see the advertisements for the Dubai buildings…

TP: The fascinating experience watching Alpi is that even though at first glance there might be no obvious storyline, the viewer is taken on a journey through all kinds of situations, locations and observations in and about the Alps. The audience is always invited to create its own associations and conclusions, and is often amused and surprised by discovering connections, contradictions, paradoxes, and the beauty of the image. As a filmmaker you give a lot of clues and hints to the audience, so they investigate, contemplate and discover things while watching. That’s why I was so highly entertained by the film.

AL: The film works like a spaceship that transports viewers from one place to another, between seven countries and five different languages, but without telling them. Basically it’s a kind of space machine, and you never declare to the audience that you are transporting them to another place. So it always questions more than it explains. I see this as a game with the viewer.

TP: Which functions perfectly. I mean, it is not that you throw the viewer into cold water. It's more like you let them walk through a lot of unknown or undefined rooms.

AL: Yes, and it’s really about perception, both visually and acoustically.

TP: The film has a distinct visual concept, breaking with the dramatic visualization of the Alps we normally expect to see. In Alpi we are often looking at replicas, models, presumably interiors. Also, the camera mainly remains static, no pans or movements. Can you explain this approach?

AL: Alpi is shot in Super16 with an Aaton A-Minima camera, still on film; absurdly, there was no HD video when we started Alpi and Kodak brought in three new different kinds of emulsions during our production period. It is impressive to think how video sensors have taken over the whole production system in the last seven years. It was expensive to use film, but the analogue physicality of the material depicted is very important: stone, snow, and different light conditions, so light is, alas, a physical material for the project. The entire project was filmed with one lens, which is a classic 50mm “normal” photography lens.

TP: That looks like the way we see things…

AL: Yes, the 50mm is near to human vision. So we did not use a wide-angle to show the whole landscape, or a tele to show distant things closer. Especially no wide-angle, which is a lens that is always used in mountain films to show the horizon, and in action films to create a more spectacular perspective. And we always have a fixed camera pan and camera movements that are typically used in films to show the “panorama”.

And we decided never to show the horizon. We also had two or three shots from helicopters that were quite complicated to produce, and we finally decided to use just one. But in this scene, the helicopter is almost flying into the wall of the Grande Dixence Dam. This shot ends very claustrophobically, and the dam is somehow transforming itself on the screen. Alpi is a claustrophobic landscape film, and it’s a film where we try to look at the mountains from the inside, somehow. Maybe the only wide-angle scene is this last scene at the end with the flight; it opens up and you see the sheep.

TP: Is Alpi a documentary?

AL: Well, it is not a film that explains things, it poses questions. Maybe the only classic documentary scene is about Pastore Giordano (Sheppard Giordano), this 75-year-old man who lives with his sheep at two thousand meters above sea level, even in the winter. He seems almost like a figure out of the John Berger book Once in Europa. He says, “Well, I had to take care of my mother and I was young, I did not go to the valley or to the city to work in the factory like my brother did, and now I am old. And look here, there is nobody who lives here anymore in the winter and it's hard to be exposed to nature”. It was important to have this scene so that the film would not be a simplification of the theme of ecology. The film is also an homage to a project by the painter Segantini. In 1897, Giovanni Segantini conceived a panorama painting or panopticon for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The project was to build a round building with real grass, cows, rivers, sounds, and smells, a kind of protocinema, but the project was never produced because one of the hoteliers involved pulled out. In the film we see one picture from the triptych exhibited in the St. Moritz museum that is in some ways a model of the larger project.

Credits

A film by Armin Linke, based on a research project of Piero Zanini, Renato Rinaldi and Armin Linke

Camera: Armin Linke
Sound: Renato Rinaldi
Editing: Giuseppe Ielasi

With the support of (amongst others): Minerva Stiftung, Montura, Provincia autonoma di Trento, Stiftung Erna und Kurt Burgauer, Trentino Film Commission, University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe