Sophie Cundale’s 2016 film, After Picasso, God sees a woman (played by Cundale) visit a hypnotist to address an unwanted addiction. As part of her cure, objects, people and images are transformed through hypnosis; pain is bought to the surface and removed through analgesia.

Lucia Pietroiusti:Can you explain the origin of the film’s title and what is represented, symbolically or emotionally, by Picasso and Dora Maar in the film’s narrative?

Sophie Cundale: ‘After Picasso, Only God’ is a quote from the photographer Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s lover and muse for almost ten years. When her relationship with Picasso ended, Maar turned to religion. Lacan, who was her psychiatrist, thought that she needed something to believe in, otherwise she’d go mad. Her roots were in Catholicism, and this faith was prescribed to her as a means of salvation. For me this quote describes what it is to love with complete abandon. When you lose someone who became everything to you. What is created in their absence? That’s the film.

LP: John Cassavetes was often mentioned as a stylistic reference-point for After Picasso, God. It seems to me that it is primarily an authenticity of feeling, as well as an emotional intensity both on and off-screen, that brings your film closer to Cassavetes’ style. What resonates for you in his films or filmmaking strategies?

SC: Everything feels real in Cassavetes’ films. They have chemistry because his friends and family are the cast and crew so he knows how to provoke them but it’s all coming from a place of love. They trust him but they don’t know where they are going to, it’s like life. You can feel this through the screen. It’s about creating the right conditions for magic to happen. When I was thinking about the scenes with Nicholas (who played the hypnotist) I knew they wouldn’t work unless the chemistry between us was visible. I was hypnotized over the five days it took to shoot the scene, the views from the windows had this symbolic power and I felt like I was possessed by Dora Maar. The hypnosis had to be real for this to happen, so I had to trust everyone in order to feel uninhibited enough to be in this state.

LP: More than half of After Picasso, God takes place during a session in which the protagonist is hypnotized in order to quit smoking. In Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, the protagonist attempts to quit smoking through psychoanalysis. Can you talk about what role therapy and the confessional form play in After Picasso, God? Why did you choose hypnosis?

SC: There’s this quote, ‘only for love would someone surrender to a hypnotist’. Hypnosis is a process of seduction and I felt that the dynamic allowed me to make a film about love without it being a love story, because the romantic lead does not exist. The hypnotist becomes every other character – I wanted his existence to be part of the woman’s imagination like in Drop Dead Fred – he is the vessel for the woman’s image repertoire and her heartbroken fantasies. There is a question of control in love and hypnosis and in both cases the relationship won’t work without the desire to make it work. You can’t be forced to do anything you don’t want to in hypnosis. Hypnosis is a very subtle relationship, which is why it doesn’t work for a lot of people, you have to trust the hypnotist with your subconscious mind, the deepest part – I couldn’t be hypnotized by just anyone, which is why I wrote the script for Nicholas – he is a hypnotist in real life as well as an actor and a good friend.

LP: It could be said that this film is deeply implicated in the language of mourning: a ritual which, by investing an object with emotional agency, repeats the experience of losing in order to process it. In Freudian terms, mourning is a successful processing of the loss, while melancholia occurs when the lost entity becomes interiorised and haunts the self. Subsequent texts have been critical towards this healthy/unhealthy binary, and your film appears ambivalent about it. Can you speak about this a little?

SC: Instinctively this sounds right. I feel like the character of the woman transitions from melancholia to mourning. An exorcism takes place which allows this to happen. For me this is the difference between experiencing heartbreak and death.

LP: Without giving too much away, the final sacrifice in After Picasso, God is asked simultaneously of you, of the protagonist and also, in some sense, of the audience: when we first screened the film at the cinema in Peckham, this was physically obvious in the room. Did you think about viewership when editing this, and if so, what role do your viewers occupy?

SC: I wanted viewers to feel as connected to the body of the woman as possible, so the camera barely leaves her side. I felt that through this identification, the viewer could experience hypnosis themselves. Nicholas and I thought about this a lot. David, our hypnosis advisor, warned us about the ethics of it, because highly hypnotizable subjects might enter a hypnotic state and not come out of it. This is possible – I didn’t really eat or sleep during the week of filming because of a line that was repeated to me every time we filmed the scene, ‘no hunger, no thirst’. I really liked the idea of people walking out in a trance. I remember the drinks in the bar afterwards felt like a wake, so I think the film had some kind of effect.

Credits

After Picasso, God
with Nicholas Audsley
Cinematography by Giacomo La Monaca
Sound by Adam Laschinger and Helen Miles

Commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and South London Gallery