Some say that the island of Malta is a remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis, a contested claim that superimposes the mythic grandeur of a drowned past onto the quotidian existence of a present society. From Plato to pulpy science fiction and into the sea, Atlantis is a search for utopia – and a reflection on the desire for it – that documents place and non-place at once.

Erika Balsom: Did Atlantis take you to Malta or did Malta take you to Atlantis? How do you understand the relationship between these two islands?

Ben Russell: Atlantis figured into my imagination long before I could ever pick Malta out on a map; it rematerialized once I was given the chance to spend four weeks there, once I learned that Atlantis was oft-confused for Malta (and vice versa). Instead of arguing for or against this confusion, I accepted it as fact and decided to make a portrait of a place that otherwise only exists as myth.

EB: Islands have interested you for quite some time, even back to yourTerra Incognita (2002), which was shot with a pinhole camera on Easter Island. More recently, we have Let Us Persevere In What We Have Resolved Before We Forget (2013), made on Vanuatu. What draws you to islands? Is it tied to your longstanding fascination with the possibility of utopia? After all, Thomas More’s Utopia is a depiction of an island society.

BR: My first video (Boyz ‘n The Camp, 1993) was made on an island (Catalina), as was the ”commune” section of A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013) – islands seem to have been floating around my subconscious for quite some time. When I was researching Easter Island forTerra Incognita, I realized just how intensely geographic isolation can affect the development of society. With the Rapa Nui people it resulted in a profound kind of spiritual madness – there’s certainly an ideological trace of this in More’s Utopia and an altogether different sort beating in the heart of Vanuatu’s cargo cult.

EB: Let Us Persevere introduces us to a practice of subtitling that you continue in Atlantis. You record a song in Maltese, but instead of translating it faithfully into English, you supply subtitles adapted from a literary text – in this case, from More. What led you to adopt this approach?

BR: In both cases, I looked towards Werner Herzog’s notion of meta- or “ecstatic truth” as a touchstone for this apparent mis-representation of language. In Atlantis, which exists as a documentary portrait of a non-place, the Għana singers give voice to a sentiment that all citizens of Utopia share. The singers in my film are doubles, existing in both image-present and language-past. While I don’t generally aim for truth, I’m convinced that this is the ecstatic truth of that moment, on par with the truth of the inverted sunset, of the Last Man of Atlantis disappearing into that Technicolor sea.

EB: Forms of doubling recur throughout the film. At the formal level, we find a striking use of superimposition and repeated shots involving a mirror. You open and close with the recitation of a text. Conceptually, the film is at once a document of the real island and a fictional conjuring of a mythic lost civilization, creating something of a rhetorical double exposure. Why this deployment of the double? Does it allow you to suggest something about the relationship between reality and representation, a concern that is arguably at the heart of all of your films?

BR: Practically speaking, it’s all but impossible to film an island as Island unless you can view it from a distance – the film frame doesn’t allow for a 360-degree view. I used the mirror to reflect the very physical space of Malta back onto itself and, in the process, to project an Atlantean imaginary onto an apparent actuality. For a project based on a very specific kind of construction and projection, this move made a great deal of conceptual sense: it allowed me to layer myth upon fact upon myth – and yes, I think that this negotiation of the real and its image is deeply embedded in my practice. Cinema suffers when asked to merely reflect, so I always hope that my images come out ahead…

EB: And finally, to turn the question you ask in your film back on you: what is your idea of an ideal society?

BR: That society of humans that still gathers silently in the dark, that briefly lives a collective life under a unified flickering vision – and then scatters, each individual transformed, and returns to their own everyday: this is the closest to an ideal society that I can imagine. I’m talking about cinema, of course, and I’m more and more convinced that cinema is the only site where utopia can be truly realized. It is a non-place, a time-as-space, an always-arriving present that requires our presence to exist.

Credits

Directed by Ben Russell

Produced by Ben Russell

Co-produced by Kinemastik