Andrea Dojmi

“ELY”

Introduced by Chris Sharp

8mm/video, 15' 25''

Year: 2011

ELY takes us through a journey across an arid landscape made out of strips of incandescent road, endless skies, and intimate recollections that combines mourning and ecstasy, defying genres and languages, conflating sci-fi and suspense, light and sound, sun and darkness, memory and projection.

Chris Sharp: The narrative structure of this film is appreciably evasive, in the sense that it is hard to tell what came first, the footage or the narrative. At times the two components seem perfectly matched, at others they seem to almost fortuitously coincide, while at others, they seem driven by a dream-like logic in which the narrative rational succeeds the appearance of a given object or action. Could you speak about this shifting and disjunctive relationship? As well as the narrative itself, which is quite elliptical, like a poem?

Andrea Dojmi: I like to think of Ely as a ‘kit for a film’ in which footage, narrative, and sound are complementary: alternating, moving away, or working in parallel to one another. It’s about providing the images, the sound, and the words and letting the viewers assemble the various elements by themselves. Being part of a trilogy, initiated with The Distance to the Sun(2008), and with a third, forthcoming one, Ely has a fragmentary narrative in which you can feel and imagine your own movie while watching a movie, where you can create completely new images and whole sequences of images in your mind, moving from someone else’s imaginary.

I’m more interested in evoking a space and a time than in narrating it through a classical film structure. I've always been attracted by those precious features that classical cinema couldn’t grasp; I tend to assign a special meaning to those elements that are far from the filmic narrative. Ely’s first storyboard was text – it was then necessary to find the ‘real set’ to host it in time and space. It was a half-planned film in which its spontaneous events, both during shooting and montage, were essential. It comes out of a specific poem, using only fragments of it that constitute an elliptical feeling made out of departures and returns. In the last scene you see an astronaut on his own in a motel room, and it’s the sound that evokes the words that I didn’t want to use: “Now I sit on my bed, while the nearest star caressed my light red suit, now without ranks, badges, space missions and huge crowds. The launching ramps, silent, were now in a most complete abandon.”

CS: The impressionistic and evocative mood of the film seems to be as much the byproduct of montage and sound (the soundtrack is excellent by the way), as well as the dialectical play between the image and narrative, but there is also something if not historically located, then strangely nostalgic about the piece. This comes through the Super 8 quality of the filming – how in fact was it filmed? – and the sense that this is taking place in the west (LA?), several decades ago. Worth mentioning also is the novelty of space travel, as well as the montage itself, which brings to mind everything from Easy Rider (1969), to Stan Brakhage and Owen Land. Could you say a few words about your motives here?

AD: Ely was shot in Single-8 with two professional Fujica cameras. Developed in Japan by Fujifilm in the 1960s as an alternative to Kodak’s Super 8 format, the Single-8 is a rare super 8mm technology that is steady, cleaner, and much more professional than the classic Kodak film. Leaving Los Angeles to Nevada, this seemed like the most appropriate technology for a kind of time-space travelling film (and soundtrack) set in remote sites.

I grew up watching films that depicted our world, its nature, geography, technology, while we were in-between the end of an era and the beginning of a new tech-digital time. The grainy, nostalgic aesthetics come from these films I grew up with. The thing about those older films is that their image and sound quality wasn't so perfect, and I always felt that their meaning lied in their distanced look, the truth being behind the representation of reality. Elyhas no time; it is located in a future past… The future concerns an idea of space age and the past is about the end of that same age. I envisage Ely as a nostalgic analogical space passage that places you in an idyllic setting of your imagination, located within your own distant memories.

With Ely I tried to picture planet earth as I would remember it now if something apocalyptic occurred: images from a distant life; the earth; a family-day-trip to the astronomical observatory in LA; inner memories; a woman talking with no voice; a mother; a son; the video messages sent to the spacelab around a mysterious planet; faraway voices of kids playing and birds singing from the earth; a day full of sunlight in 1969.

In relation to the montage, there is something that comes directly from Easy Rider (1969 is a number that returns), which is the almost subliminal alternating frames from two different scenes that anticipate the new one. The soundtrack shaped the montage and so images drove to the sounds, day by day. Editing and recording were done at the same time and in the same studio, located in a house by the sea, just when we came back from shooting to Los Angeles.

CS: Your approach puts a spin on the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel the Go-Between (1953): "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." In your case, since you’re Italian, the past literally takes place in a foreign country; and you somehow manage to share with the viewer that same sense of deracination that occurs in the film. In the sense, I wonder if this mode becomes a somewhat bleak, contemporary allegory of memory, and by extension, nostalgia: bereft of genuine experience (Benjamin), any memory that might have accompanied it becomes no less removed and mediated. As a consequence, we are increasingly left wondering if it actually happened, or if we saw it in a film, or finally, in a dream. Incidentally, in such an equation the only plausible form of nostalgia becomes nostalgia for nostalgia itself.

AD: When I was a child I had an illustration by Robert McCall; most science fiction lovers grew up with McCall’s artworks without even knowing who he was. That illustration was the cover of one of my school notebooks: a huge a spaceship in the morning sky, coming out behind a bleak hill and a kid running down the same hill… Maybe there was a whole nation in that giant spaceship. At that time, I used to wonder why people couldn’t live on earth anymore, and the only explanation I could find was related to an escape caused by overpopulation problems, or, as mentioned in the film, “something big happened and the planet looks like in those sci-fi movies from my childhood-days, when I couldn’t see cosmic darkness and blue skies, but only arid lands, radioactive light and humans adapted, mutated, walking along in long lines, slowly, for days…" I recalled this image for many years, as if it was an event I personally experienced, and looking back to that illustration, the feeling I had was a sort of nostalgia for the planet left behind, its original life and all the memories before leaving the earth. Nostalgia for nostalgia itself.