Gareth Evans: As a British artist long resident in Mexico, you occupy an interesting position in relation to the making of a work in the Latin South. This is not to suggest your film-making has a political equivalence to Henry Ford's intervention, but how did you navigate the challenges inherent in such relationships, and especially to do with filming communities and individuals? 

Melanie Smith: Yes, historically, and on a daily level, I have had to deal with the stereotypical notion of being the guerita (a fair-skinned female), and this can lead to automatic assumptions about power and finance that some communities may assume I come with, but in general with my projects there has been an intermediate or local contact that first helps to set things up. I think working with a local figure is integral to any filming project where communities may feel threatened by outsiders. This is normal and right on their behalf, so on one hand negotiations have to be made with extreme delicacy, and on the other you always have to try to remain true to what you would like to film and what those limits are. To your point about challenging Ford's intervention, this film was about feminising or some way erotising the jungle, which is an inherently male space. Werner Herzog taught us that, no?

GE: You have a range of approaches to shooting, including extremely close shots of bodies, along with sudden zooms and pans, that rupture the generally calm style more familiar to artists' film. Please talk us through some of these choices.

MS: I think a lot about framing, even in its looseness or non specificity this is a very precise aspect to me. In the case of Fordlandia, scale was of particular importance whereby the immensity of the jungle butts up against the minute flap of a parakeets feather. I don't think in terms of sequence, but much more about contiguity where different scales and rhythms unfamiliar to traditional documentary can coexist, so that's why I made aerials and macros alongside, and very few American or establishing shots. I wanted relations of humidity, sweat, stupor, bewilderment, liquidity, bodies, machines and animals to all be horizontal, and yet unstable within the camera. Everything just about moves, yet it’s very much alive. Flower stamens become penises, nuts become breasts, trees are wounded, a motorbike light become a crocodile’s eye. On a conceptual level this means that instead of describing Fordlandia—the place, the ruin, the journey, etc.—by switching tempos and scales in something that doesn't necessarily make sense, I try to suspend the viewer in the present, concentrating much more on how different forces, voids and vibrational qualities of the living come into play through the instability of frame.

GE: Following on, your sound design is extremely rewarding—intimate, heightened, associative, 'natural' and scored. It reminds us, as ever, that an image, however beautiful, can fall or hollow out if the sonic is technically poor or conceptually unrewarding. Again, please share with us some of your motivations here.

MS: When I edit, I always edit sound at the same time as image, it never becomes an afterthought that just gets stuck on top. Sound is very important in pulling tensions, and sometimes bridging different images. Most of the sound is recorded directly on site, but less often is it recorded in sync. This means that other collateral sounds that happen in the area become interesting, and they often help me to really tear up any sense of linearity. It's a Brechtian strategy in the sense that sound becomes alienating; you're looking at one thing but hearing another, or it may be used as a mimetic force whereby a cicada could sound like a machine, or dolphins make human sounds. 

GE: As the film progresses, we encounter more and more of the forest's non-human inhabitants, and your work suggests a longer lasting, and rightful, occupancy through this focus, while remaining clear-eyed on the often predatory nature of these relations. How were you affected by immersion in this extraordinary and increasingly threatened environment?

MS: As an experience this was singular, humbling and at points a little scary. The crocodile shot was especially breath-taking as we were so close to this enormous animal that could at any moment have knocked us sideways, but I had huge faith in the guides that were leading us, who have such a respect for nature; the distance or closeness that you can get to animals, or just how to understand the rhythm of the jungle—it can really absorb your energy. Your whole body clock changes when you’re mostly filming really early or really late as we were. It also gives a sort of senselessness to our urban routines, time expands somehow onto a different level, and I think all the team became extremely emotional at points. Yes, I guess scale inverts. You feel pretty unimportant. 

GE: As you show, the Fordlandia site is genuinely remote, even in terms of Brazilian scales and distances, which was perhaps the prime reason why it was abandoned by the Brazilian government after they acquired it. And even Ford himself never visited it. What is your sense of what it means now, as a place and as an idea, to those living locally, and to Brazilians, if at all?

MS: It's on the radar for most Brazilians, even perhaps on a slightly mythical level. The settlement of Fordlandia has about 300 inhabitants, and a few local characters who seem to almost take care of the place. An older man who appears in the film goes there to sharpen his tools, and there's another man who has made a bizarre small museum of leftover machines and furniture in his house. Daily life happens with the ruins just there. It's much more about a certain kind of nostalgia that Ford's failed utopian project represents to them, or his failed desire to conquer the wild, like a legacy that came but didn't stay. Today, one of the locals’ major problems is the soy bean plantations which are everywhere, and unfortunately have huge consequences to local communities, damaging the ecosystem immensely, so this looks like a far more violent threaten to them.

GE: Attention to (modern) ruins, and their implications, is central to cultural practice across media now, for many perhaps obvious reasons, given the times we're in. The Fordlandia site offers a particularly rewarding example, as it was intended from the beginning as a 'total' space for living, delivering far beyond industrial production only. That it fundamentally misunderstood the 'nature' and limits of its location is all too clear now. In this way, it's both specifically itself and a profound and telling metaphor. Given that specific historical information is not explicitly provided, how much would you like viewers to read into your film, beyond the precise and careful observational motivations of your camera and sound design?

MS: I never really intended the ruins themselves to be the motivation for the film. In my mind it's just a kind of backdrop for the animals and nature itself, so in that way I think this film really is a journey against the tide as it doesn't attempt to describe the place, the journey or to "discover" something (in a 19th century travellers sense). This is all purposeful, as if in a dream-like state we have to somehow make our own sense of it. I have a special dislike for artworks that try to find moral solutions. This is a film about possibility, about the mere vibrational, living, breathing flecks of life that just ARE and implicit to the living. In a way it lacerates animal and nature's reversal of modernity's sense of progress, but it doesn't try to clarify. In the best of cases, viewers are just absorbed in the present through visual associations.

GE: A significant part of this work is the remarkable publication produced to accompany it. In terms of your larger practice, did the Fordlandia project feel like the culmination of a series of enquiries for you?

MS: For the publication and conceptual framework for the film I worked with the philosopher Jose Luis Barrios. We have also worked together on other projects, and yes Fordlandia, I suppose like in any new work, comes out of previous works. I like working at specific sites, and revoking and reinterpreting what those sites might have meant or mean to contemporary living. Pulling out tangents between nature, bodies and industrialisation is my concern, and I see that over time my work becomes like a huge double helix spiral picking up traces along its way. I like making books because the manner in which I delve into all these forms of questioning can be laid out in a parallel but not identical sense to film making. 

Credits

2014, HD video, sound, 29’ 43”

Courtesy Melanie Smith

Image: Julien Devaux

Produced by: Milton Keynes Gallery and the Arts Council England