Francesca Gavin: What initially drove you to create a film about the matsutake mushroom foragers documented in Anna L Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World?

Jason Evans: I read the book probably five or six years ago. At first, I was just interested in learning about the matsutake mushroom—How do I spot it? What does it taste like? Where does it grow? Why is it so valuable?—but as anyone who’s read Tsing’s book knows, it also dives deep into ideas of freedom, consumption, and possibilities for open-ended, entangled ways of living. I kept coming back to the sections about seasonal pickers in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Though I’ve lived in the US for fifteen years, at that point I had never been to the Pacific Northwest myself and was curious about this landscape. Most of the pickers are of Southeast Asian descent—a mix of Cambodian, Hmong, Mien, Lao—many of whom have been displaced by war. I was interested in their relationship to the landscape, as well as being outsiders in that landscape. I did some further digging and found an article online that described the campsites and temporary shelters that were set up every year during matsutake season, in a small town called Chelmult. Hundreds of tents and tarps scattered in the woods, held together with rope, bungee cords, etc—which is the kind of human ingenuity I’m also interested in. I became more curious about this specific location, but had trouble finding any photos taken out there, so eventually I decided to just venture out for myself. I didn’t really have a plan, it’s not like you can call ahead and find someone to speak to first.

I arrived on the last weekend of the season. It had been an especially poor year for mushrooms, so when we got there most of the foragers had already left. I found a mess of abandoned shacks, tents, and tarps scattered in the woods, along with missing parts that felt incompatible with the forest itself—a kitchen sink, a door sandwiched between two trees, a shrine, plastic clothing hangers, structures with Gordon Matta-Clark type incisions. With the few people who were still there, I fell into the slow-paced rhythm of their day-to-day life, all of which informed my approach to filming things with a stillness.

FG: Matsutake mushrooms are so interesting because they grow in the aftermath of industrialisation. How did those ideas around the post-human landscape influence you?

JE: Yesterday I saw an installation by artists Monira Al Qadiri and Raed Yassin, in which three floating robot heads discuss a rare type of fungi known as the 'Apocalypse Mushroom’ that supposedly "grows in very large, highly populated disaster zones where there are no humans around to disturb its growth”. It sounds like the work of science fiction, but that’s basically the story of the matsutake. In many ways this mushroom is a symbol for resilience and adaptation— matsutakes live in human-disturbed forests, emerge in blasted landscapes, and are linked to some of the worst ruination in history. After the destruction of Hiroshima by the U.S. atomic bomb, for a long time the matsutake mushroom was the only thing that continued to grow. In the Pacific Northwest, where I was filming, the timber industry brutally destroyed the forests for many years before stricter conservation protections were put in place. Out of this destruction grew the matsutake, which is now one of most valuable mushrooms in the world (in the 1990s the annual commercial value of matsutake mushrooms in Oregon was as much as the value of the timber).

While I was in Oregon, I was thinking about what the landscape was and how it evolves when we extract things from it (whether that’s mushrooms, coal, or trees). I often focused the camera on scenes of disturbance. Aside from the forests in which you see the matsutake mushroom being picked there’s also other signs of trauma throughout. For example, the gravel path shown both at the start and half way through the film leads to a massive pumice mine. The pumice filters the town’s water, which in turn lends a sweetness to the noodle soup many of the mushroom pickers make.

FG: The film captures the slowness and focus of the transitory workers. Your camera is very still. What attracted you to that sense of speed and poetic detail?

JE: There’s a certain kind of documentary filmmaking that implies realism, it usually includes a voice-over and some camera movement to put you in the moment. I’m not particularly interested in that. Though I was working with non-actors within existing spaces, there were formal considerations that helped me construct the film in a more staged way. Such as filming with a fixed camera on a tripod, which slowed down my process and made me observe things more closely. It forced me to be less nimble, as if I was using a 4x5 camera. When I was filming the abandoned shelters on the campsite, I was actually thinking about photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, driving their Volkswagen camper across Europe, making these minimal, still photographs of timber-frame houses and industrial structures. That stillness in my case had a lot to do with arriving at the end of the season. I’m sure if I was there when the campsite was full of people I could not have made the same film. Also, as we know, the most abusive colonial weapon was/is the camera. To this day we refer to the act of “shooting” with a camera. So for the same reason I wanted you to question if this was staged, I also wanted to make it clear that we’re outside of this community by just letting the viewer in for a brief moment. Sometimes the focus is on a small detail in the foreground, like a dog chain, other times it is on a wide landscape where people disappear completely into the background.

FG: Do you feel there are parallels around the ideas of labour and politics and fungi, in a wider sense?

JE: Again, what is so exciting about Tsing’s book is that it asks us to imagine open-ended, entangled ways of living. Instead of falling back on the type of survival that’s all about saving yourself at the cost of others, Tsing advocates for a survival which is collaborative. At one point she writes, “... staying alive—for every species—requires liveable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.” For Tsing, matsutake show us a kind of collaborative survival, they nurture trees and help forests grow, creating possibilities to co-exist within environmental disturbance. Likewise with the pickers in Oregon, many of whom are displaced cultural minorities who work different off-the-grid jobs, the mushroom creates a situation in which they’re able to co-exist together despite a range of differences—linguistic, cultural, national, etc.

So with END OF THE SEASON this is the world I was trying to imagine. A more straightforward documentary may have focused solely on recording the expertise of mushroom pickers, while I show very little of the hunt itself (only one mushroom is actually uncovered on film). Instead, I had in mind this feeling of co-existence and collaborative survival.

FG: Nature is the protagonist here. Shooting in black and white, the film touches on this lineage of the photographic and filmic image of the Great American Landscape. Were you conscious about subverting that heritage?

JE: If I think about my own understanding of American landscape, most of the photographers and filmmakers important to me use color—Justine Kurland, Kelly Reichardt, Victoria Sambunaris, Ron Jude, etc. Though there’s this tradition of black and white seeming to be more real, which of course isn’t true at all. When you think back to early black and white photography that shows people amongst the American landscape, photography by Darius Kinsey or L.A. Huffman, these were always staged due to the long process of actually making the pictures. This is also true for photography that shows landscapes without figures, often tied to capitalist desires. Like the large-format photographs of Carleton Watkins, used to attract investors in mines or in claim cases against Mexican owners in California, by newly arrived white occupants. Documentation of the American Civil War was also photographed through landscapes—depictions of an aftermath, forests where these battles had taken place, traces of war. Susan Sontag wrote about early canonical war photography in Regarding the Pain of Others, saying it was mostly staged or at the very least tampered with. I was thinking about all of this and certainly the choice to present the film in black and white was a way to lead the viewer towards history.

Credits

Director: Jason Evans

Cinematographer: Matthew Schroeder

Editing: Luca Cappelli

Sound design: Nick Batterham

Soundscape: Krom Monster + Cambodian Living Arts

Color grading: Daniel Stonehouse

End of the Season, USA, 2020

The filmmakers acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which they filmed, the Klamath people, of the Plateau culture area in South–Central Oregon.