Your father’s death, a fire in a Botanical Garden and the surviving trees, your grandmother’s adulterous love story. What gave Esa otra selva blanca its initial impulse? Which needs did the film respond to?
At first, the film was different. Even if it is crossed by personal themes and the presence of my son, the main part was my grandmother’s love story with pianist Walter Gieseking, told through the letters they exchanged. As the shoot went on, I realised that grieving my father occupied a more important place in the story and in me, but it is only during the editing process that it became a necessity linked to the film. There was a first phase of editing from the original script that was necessary to realise that my grandmother’s story was secondary and that the sequences that made sense to me were linked to some other research, and I decided to let them carry me. This meant setting the original script aside and working on a new script based on the footage in a second editing phase.
Though the film responds to a very personal need linked to grief, absences and changes, it also found its initial impulse in a visual and narrative research which I felt was fundamental for me to find, and which guided each of the decisions made throughout the process.
These elements, and others, intertwine with great harmony in your footage and in a first person narrative. Was the idea of the voice over evident from the start? How did you draw it up in relation to your footage?
The voice over was present from the beginning, but it evolved as the film went by. In the original script, I had written a text much longer than what I wanted in the film, but this work served as a guide to highlight the superfluous. However, it is during the second editing process that we started working the off directly with the footage, trying to guide it without explaining it too much. To reach this balance, the research was very important, because I only wanted the voice over to help make associations that the footage already displayed. In that sense, working directly with the footage helped.
At the beginning of the film you say that coming back to the footage you had taken during your trip to Korea and Japan after the death of your father was a way to “edit the memory”. Could you comment on this phrase?
Throughout the film, the exercise proposed consists in choosing, in a way, the memories that remain, and finding the right distance to reach them. The process of examining this footage to decide what was going to be maintained in my book, Ima, was the same: choosing through which object-image I can, and want to, remember a moment. This idea was raised in the first few minutes, and establishes from the get-go the game the film proposes with the collection of objects and memories.
The second sequence shows a printing press, and a book called Ima, which you published, comes out of it; instituting from the get-go a relation to the materiality of documents. Could you revisit this dimension?
Though the film evolved as time went by, one thing has remained the same since the very start: the idea of working from certain objects, inherited and personal, and their materiality. One of the first things we filmed was the printing of the book, as the object itself made up an essential part of these objects and was linked to my way of narrating with images; establishing a parallel with my grandmother, a writer, who did the same with words.
The recurrent presence of these objects in the film tells us about a context and about certain meanings which repeat themselves, add up and produce a personal-family archive. This operation is what I wanted to highlight through the collection which ended up being part of the film, by accessing remembrance through the materiality of these documents. In that sense, the tape recorder that appears supports the same operation by allowing me to access these sound memoirs-documents.
One of the devices actually consists in filming your hands, in movement, manipulating documents—photos, texts, letters—and objects in zenith shots. Could you revisit this choice of form?
and the entomologist’s. In my case, the choice of a zenith shot is linked to the importance of these document-objects I am handling, to their “central” place as much in the film as in the frame itself, and my relation with them. My hands show them and share them, but they also take care of them. I was interested for them to be “presented” in that way, because a formal link is established between all of these documents, becoming symbolic in making and presenting the archive of the memory.
This device crosses other visual writing systems: the daily life with your son, the archive footage shot by your dad. How did you think of this intertwining when editing?
Many connections were found during the editing process, especially those linked to my dad. It’s hard to explain, but when we were watching the footage, the visual and sound relations we were surprised by and which we had never seen before kept appearing. In that sense, the second editing phase was more free because we weren’t linked to the original script, and it also allowed to be more open to certain crossings, for example the images taken by my dad during his trip to Japan. Linking my dad’s letters to the burnt forest, my balcony with the Ginkgo Bilobas of the fire, the thrushes to the birds I had filmed, it was all the same. Some visual and narrative associations were established from the start, but it is from the editing process that the most important ones appeared.
The pleasure of the film also relies on the filmed relationship with your son, your dialogues, his questions, your shared production works. How did you work with him?
One of the most enjoyable things in the making of the film was to be able to share this space with my son. Ever since he was little, Simón has been coming with me to shoots and on trips and he is used to the camera, but seeing him “direct” was different. Since it was several years of shooting, the way we work together has somewhat changed. The scenes in which he appears were of course planned, but something unexpected would always come up. Most of the shooting locations were places I already knew or our own house, which helped a lot. The crew was very small and made up of people from our close circle, which was decisive for things to go well. In most scenes, we recorded the sound separately in order to be able to have longer conversations without the pressure of the camera. Bit by bit, he also started making his own suggestions for the film, like the poem he wrote after seeing my father’s ashes in the microscope.
The score is very streamlined. How did you go about composing it?
Most of the film was shot without direct sound, which forced us to remake all of the sound, something I had never done before and wanted to try a hand at. When editing, we started with this process, which was long as we experimented with several options in relation to the concepts emerging from the narrative. This is how, for example, the idea of the sound of my house being the sound of a jungle appeared, from the text written by my father that gives its title to the film, “white jungle”.
I also wanted for the sound to be related to the intimacy in the film, and this is why we included all sorts of domestic recordings, which also discuss with the footage shot in Super8 and in 16mm, but with Bolex.
Regarding the music, it is archive material of my dad rehearsing the trumpet, mostly archive from the 70s.
There are also two scores made specifically for the film by Roberto Collío. One is from a recording of my dad that appears at another point in the film, and the other is a recording of the pianist who played the Iberia suite.
Finally, in the end credits, there is a composition by Federico Durand, a musician whom I love a lot and who generously wanted to take part in the film with this piece.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
