UNTITLED is a very singular film: at first glance, it is a shot through a window, with a camera moving across the landscape. What was the intention when you began filming?
I like to always work next to a window. Untitled was filmed in an apartment in Porto where I had developed something of a relationship with a particular window, working on my feature El espejismo in front of it day after day, often pleasantly distracted by the shapes and planes of the rooftops, the changing configurations of the cranes, or birds who would fly past or approach.
When the commission came from Portuguese TV channel Canal180 to make a short for their Jogo Cruzado series, I thought back to an unrealized, Covid-era idea of mine: to produce a portmanteau film inspired by Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre, for which different filmmakers would be asked to make films without leaving the confines of their homes. I decided to apply that constraint to Untitled, and filmed everything from two adjacent windows in the apartment.
Everything except the first shot. Which, serendipitously, I filmed from a plane on my trip back from last year’s FID to Porto.
The film simulates, or plays with, the idea of a sequence shot; however, the changes in light seem to suggest that the time elapsed is much longer than cinematic time. How was the film shot, and how much time was actually filmed?
The film’s dispositif is based on one I developed for certain sequences of El espejismo and a still unreleased 16mm short, Día azul. This time I began with 4k digital. I shot many long, long takes (upwards of 30 minutes), all with a wide composition, and at several different times of day. Then I began a process of selection: watching the takes, marking when events occurred (e.g. a plane passing, a crane shifting) and then deciding on how these events in different takes might relate to one another.
Once I had selected and put the takes in sequence, I effectively began filming again, this time in a digital space: using keyframes to move around within the original static framing, zooming, tilting and panning virtually to create new pathways through and connections within the images.
The camera seems to move almost autonomously, as if following the birds’ movements, the flashes of light that catch its attention, and it almost suggests a kind of intelligent camera…
Your phrasing reminds me of a favorite text, Epstein’s L’Intelligence d’une machine. This film is essentially subjective and yet it is clear that its subjectivity can’t be easily identified with my own as director. It is a hybrid subjectivity, belonging a little to myself, a little to the world filmed – that performed for the film in some sense – but most of all to the film itself, which has something like its own consciousness and will.
The process of keyframing was interesting in this respect. Zoomed in as far as I was, the tools with which I was imposing movement often stopped working in the way I was asking them to. Instead, they showed their own inclinations, stubbornness, whims and caprices.
There are two other very interesting aspects: the first is the sound. What can you tell us about the soundtrack, and about that almost inaudible voice reciting phrases in French, which we can barely understand?
Canal180’s commission was for their Jogo Cruzado series. This asks filmmakers to provide a silent short, that Canal180 then gives to a musician to score – without the filmmaker’s input on the choice of musician or their composition. I was very lucky to have been paired with the French musician Félicia Atkinson, whose work I knew and loved, and who granted the film not only more emotion, atmosphere, and grace, but also a new sense of history, personality and humor.
The last one is the distortion introduced into the image at a certain point, as if the image were duplicated and we were seeing the same thing twice, with a delay of a few seconds. Is it a reflection, an optical effect, or something intentional? What was the intention?
It is a reflection, with a pan from the reflected landscape to the landscape itself. But the reflection is also a surface, that of a window – precisely, the window from which the other shots were filmed. And that reflection includes both the landscape and my own passing shadow.
Interviewed by Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria
