Guilherme Blanc: Your interest in both the materiality and immateriality of geological formations and eruptions can be seen as a very distinct trait of your body of work so far. You have been exploring their magical, scientific and tactile qualities with great proximity over the past years. And you have done it in different places and cultural contexts—Iceland, Martinique and now Azores. It is as if they are simultaneously the pathos and the logos of your filmic practice. They appear at the centre, although invariably telling stories about us. What can you say about your focus on this continued conversation between these non-living and living agencies?

Diana Vidrascu: Cinema’s very nature is probably marked by a tense relationship between its material and immaterial structures. Having studied and practicing cinematography, I find myself constantly challenged to translate the immaterial into the material. Something as fleeting as a person’s emotional state could turn into a list of camera, light and grip equipment. This intricate economy surfaces in the film’s “character” in a sensible way. From an animistic point of view, I like to think that any film has a life of its own and a certain personality too. I have a lot of respect for this organic “entity” that becomes a film during its making, which holds both tangible features and a dream-like state.

I used to fancy that any given place inherits its history unknowingly, collecting all the mineral and human events that happened there like sediments, giving it form but also shaping our present feeling of it. Maybe that’s my understanding of geology and the emotional presence of a landscape.

Although research is extremely important to me, be it scientific or historical, I’m also trying to pry deep into myself and see how I relate to the subject—maybe this is why my films bounce back as reflections of myself (or ourselves). But I also leave enough room for the unexpected to happen. For instance, in Volcano: What does a Lake Dream?, a Brocken spectre emerged while I was shooting the volcanic lake. I had no prior knowledge of this phenomenon so when I saw it through the viewfinder I instantly identified with this strange projection of my shadow onto a cloud, and knew it was important symbolically. Later, I also learned it made sense in the narrative I was trying to convey.

GB: If matters of ‘consciousness’, ‘memory’ and ‘displacement’ are intellectual aspects vividly present in your films, water is always serving as a background for their articulation—which comes across with your very first films. In your previous work, Silence of the Sirens (2019), you develop a diasporic tale resonating with atlanticist debates; in Volcano…, the ocean returns in force. Would you like to tell us more about the root of this connection to Atlantic liquidity?

DV: Water takes a magical form in my imagination. Alongside its extreme force in creating myths and stories, I also associate it with a certain fear of depth and drowning. From the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, I became vividly interested in the cultural links between different cities lining their shores, as if invisible wires were tied between distant places and were waxing and waning with the tides.

My link to the Atlantic is personal, Brittany became a second home. It’s a place that I like to explore and revisit in my narrative writing, at times as an abstract object, but also a fertile ground that can offer the opportunity of chance to happen. Oftentimes, when I feel that a character is lost or stuck, I like to bring it back to the sea to find its way, metaphorically speaking. But funnily enough, my aquatic film stories choose me more often than I choose them, through the characters I study, somehow always connected to an island. Retrospectively, I believe that insular aesthetics is an important concept in my work.

GB: My grandfather, who was Azorean, used to tell us foundational myths of the archipelago, to where Europeans have travelled over the centuries to search for Plato’s Atlantis, the Visigoth Seven Cities, and for others sacred physical and spiritual places. Your previous projects propose mythography exercises, and I was wondering whether your experience in the Azores was also driven by this natural predisposition of the island and the quasi-transcendent aura it carries.

DV: I have been fascinated by cosmogony myths since Gylfaginning - The Deluding of King Gylfi (2017), my first film, shot in Iceland. In that respect, all elusive landscapes like volcanoes, disappearing islands or mysterious lakes are key elements of world-creation in different mythologies. In parallel, I am seduced by the idea of transposing geological time in cinema.

Like Iceland, the Azores have a very recent history with disappearing islands, one that goes back to our grandparent’s generation, a lot closer than Norse legends of the 13^th century (from which Gylfaginning was inspired). The Icelandic island of Surtsey (erupted in 1963), which gave the name of the Surtseyan type of volcanic eruption, was actually the same kind of eruption that brought Sabrina (1811) in the Azores. Sabrina disappeared almost instantly; Stursey, like Capelinhos (1957), is still disappearing, with a clock ticking of maybe 100 years left.

When I started looking into Azores’ volcanoes, I was bemused by this coincidence but not totally surprised, since the two islands lie on the same mid-Atlantic rift, a tectonic “zipper” under the Atlantic, which causes intense volcanic activity. Geologically speaking, the two places are deeply connected and the phenomena they undergo are similar. For me, volcanic islands are so intangible they resemble the impossible story, like filmmaking sometimes proves itself to be.

GB: Your sonic compositions are particularly relevant in all your films. I would like to focus on that aspect, specifically on the meaning of sound for the visualities you operate. In Volcano…, it is quite spectacular that deep exhalation of the Earth through which sound achieves a spiritual dimension and subsequently a significant narrative and formal role. How was the process of sound composition for the film and what can you share about its dramaturgic meaning?

DV: Sound design became a foundational element in my filmmaking from the start, probably due to my lack of knowledge in the field, tackled by an ongoing curiosity to learn more. Cinematography was always my bread and butter, and I tend to observe it very critically, focusing more on the craftsmanship and less on the emotional charge, whereas sound perfectly enables the suspension of disbelief in me.

Volcano is the result of a great collaboration with Paul Régimbeau (Mondkopf) as a music composer and Romain Poirier as a sound mixer. We had streamlined our practice with the previous Silence of the Sirens and achieved a very good level of communication in Volcano. I came back from the Azores with a bank of field recordings and a bag of volcanic sand that I brought Paul to explain the abrasive quality I was looking for. He created a few pieces very instinctively and proposed a musical structure for the different states the "volcano" was in, whereas I did the sound and picture edit in parallel. We considered the volcano an emotional being, its breath and underlying force were central to the film.

My quest was to make narrative elements surface aesthetically in an unexpected way, breaking the convention of language, of the documentary form, or the way we look at motion pictures altogether. With the images I “forged” through special effects and editing, this self-destructive pattern (the film negative “erupting” from itself) was meant to reject the descriptive features of the original images and affirm the agency of the film independently of its maker, much like a volcano would erupt in spite of the population living at its base. The soundtrack was conceived as the volcano’s “wail”, or the film’s “howl”, as it was shedding its skin in this transformative process.

GB: We recently talked about your common friend Louis Benassi, who sadly left us months ago. You called him, quoting, a “supporter of this craft” and “a great film poet”, which indeed he was. That made me think of the way you may conceive your own medium and approach to work with print formats—as a crafting artistry and a poetical practice. Are these qualities you seek in film and particularly in your option for analogue?

DV: As a cinematographer, I always saw my role sitting somewhere between a craft and a poetic practice. When I started directing films, this idea rooted even deeper. I was already carrying the cultural baggage of a camera person and probably my attachment to celluloid too.

This medium’s physical qualities are a strong means of expressing one’s artistry in a more “lyrical” or “experimental” form. To me, this becomes interesting inasmuch as it is not self-sufficient but critical and meaningful.

The celluloid film format has been a close friend, with whom I fought many battles and sometimes fought against too. I’ve realised it’s not exhaustive for the stories I still have to tell, but it is so much more than a mere “vehicle”. It is a magical expression of time, due to the delay between shooting it now and watching it later, after it suffered a number of processes, independent from myself. One suffers with it too, in a sense...

I still like to look through the magnifying glass at a film frame, right after the lab processing, and see the wonders it holds on an infinitesimal level, and the wonders it will tell when kilometres of it will have run through the projector. As far as imagination goes, what I invest in it occupies that shifting space between the abstract world of images and the real world of storytelling, however real that can be.