Your film is partly a commissioned work, and discusses the building of the Ardnacruscha hydro-power plant. How did it originate, and how did you decide to take the commission in the direction you took?
I was commissioned to make a film by the Irish Museum of Modern Art for their expansive and ambitious exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, which looked at the commencement of the nation state era.
It’s a subject that I’ve long had an interest in, and one that previous films of mine had touched upon. As I tend to do, I got absorbed in the research, and while I initially wanted to make something about the Ardnacrusha hydro-power plant as a symbol of Irish independence from the United Kingdom, I was also greatly interested in the concurrent political developments in mainland Europe and the influence of the October Revolution of 1917 on the emerging nation state projects that had sprung up globally at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. As such, I chose to extend the project into a film trilogy named The Broken Promises Trilogy, of which One Power for All the Land is the first instalment. The other two films are Love and the End of Romance in Czechoslovakia and How We Lived Together and Apart, both of which are currently in post-production.
Your film moves between black and white and colour. Why this choice?
This is something that I’ve done many times, and something that will also be present in the forthcoming two films in the trilogy. In the case of this film it’s rather simple really. I wanted the first part of the film to refer explicitly to early Soviet cinema and early documentary film—Eisenstein obviously, but also Alexander Dovzhenko. The film in a way echos an earlier film of mine from 2013, and which was the first film I ever screened at FID (We Are Not Like Them), which was also heavily influenced by early Soviet film. In essence, I was trying to make the film about Ardnacrusha that wasn’t made in the 1920s at the time of construction.
For the latter part of the film I wanted to make a portrait of the power-plant in later life, and so it made sense to depict it in colour. Much of the more recent footage of the plant that I have seen has been shot by drone. I am not interested in drone cameras, and find drone footage and the drone camera style particularly lacking in grace. It seemed to be more in keeping with the nature of the architecture to shoot on film, and for the camera to be grounded within or adjacent to the structure. It just felt more appropriate.
After a very detailed narrative in the first part, the second half of your film leaves no place to the human voice, narrative or otherwise. How did you conceive of the soundtrack of the film?
As stated above, I wanted to combine a reflection on Ireland as a part of the burgeoning nation state era of the early 20th century with a portrait of a working industrial hydro-power plant. The building, to me, is extraordinarily beautiful: this enormous behemoth built on Ireland’s largest river, the Shannon, but cast in concrete, which provides a notable contrast to the surrounding countryside. It’s a very special place and the staff that oversee and operate the station have a clear love and appreciation of, and deep kinship with it. It feels like a modern wonder of the world when there, and the overwhelming power of the water is strikingly evident.
On reflection, it reminds me now of Theo Kamecke’s Moonwalk One, although I didn’t think about Kamecke’s film when I was making it. I wanted the power plant to be the main character in the film, and for it to be able to describe itself in its own terms. I felt it unnecessary to provide a commentary, and the wider context is communicated in the first part of the film. Structurally it is similar to How I Became a Communist (FID 2024), which begins with a 20 minutes sequence, devoid of dialogue, depicting an elderly woman on a farm. In this film the order is reversed. The architectural structure itself becomes the narrator, and each essential component of the hydro-plant is described visually.
Objects, as well as mirrors, play a key role in your film, so much so that a box is listed in the credits. Could you tell us more about these objects and the decision to build certain scenes around them?
When researching the film I had been looking at a lot of early European modernism, particularly that of central Europe. The mirror sequence is a homage to Wacław Szpakowski’s Quintuple Self-Portrait from 1912 and Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Multiplied Self-Portrait in the Mirror, 1917.
The mirror was a recurring theme in the work of early modernist artists, and appeared in the works of Umberto Boccioni, Marcel Deschamp and Francis Picabia around the same time.
As one of the forthcoming films in the trilogy focuses on the former state of Czechoslovakia I was looking at a lot of Czech Cubism, which is less well known than the cubist work from Paris from the same period. Czech and Slovak artists found their own vernacular within cubism, and this extended beyond painting and sculpture into the decorative arts and interior design. Form naturally, was central to cubism and geometric shapes and the crystal became significant motifs for these artists. Pavel Janák’s lidded box from 1911 is one of the most iconic works of the Czech Cubist period—a reproduction of which features in the film. It seemed fitting to use these forms and primary colours in the film, and to contrast these with figureheads of Marx and Lenin as many of the European modernist artists were influenced significantly by the Bolshevik revolution. Janák’s crystal box seemed to be the perfect Pandora’s Box from which the enduring conflicts and conundrums of modernism would emerge.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
