First I would love to ask you about the genesis of this film: can you tell us how the film was born in Albert’s mind?
Working simultaneously different projects was a constant in Albert’s artistic activity. In this case there were two theses that forged its ideogrammatic scheme. The first by Walter Benjamin, cited in the title. And the other was the French surgeon René Leriche, who in the Encyclopédie Française of 1936 (the same year of publication of the French version of Benjamin’s essay) wrote « Health is life lived in the silence of the organs ». Albert presented me the project repeating this mantra often. And how these organs had been associated with the evolution of art from the beginning: the close symbiosis between aesthetics and medicine goes back to classical antiquity and its apogee was in 19th century, with the incorporation of medical imaging. Paradoxically, the closer we get to the metaphorical silence of the organs, the more necessary their aesthetic synthesis becomes, through increasingly complex and precise sounds and images. The current paradigm of health technology, where human bodies and their representations are often indistinguishable.
Can you tell us more about the shooting and how did you work with Albert constructing the visual identity of the film?
It started with extensive fieldwork at Klinikum Stuttgart. We recorded and processed different sounds and images generated by hospital technologies; we also wanted to introduce a more sensitive dimension, almost abstract, of the use of this technology on human body. Focusing mainly on the aesthetic and moral mechanisms of the almost gross desecration of a living body.
We didn’t want to intervene in what we were filming, since Albert intended to craft its reflection in editing. That’s why our filming device had to be as discreet as possible. In a new production masterstroke by Albert, we were able to get a Zeiss 21-100mm lens, which allowed us a deeper perspective, but also more intimate, more strange. We were filming with the aim of building small sequences within each scene, that’s why there are few cuts. We were also interested in depicting how time dilates, contracts and becomes confusing in an operating room.
The film is the result of a complex work of editing and composition, both of images and sounds. Can you tell us more about this process?
The post-production process perfectly captures Albert’s temperament. Insightful, attentive. Perfectionist and tireless. He shared with me the first edited version after many months in which he had dug deep into the images and contrasted them with the original intentions. Regarding color correction, Albert quoted Godard: the origins of cinema coincided with the origins of radiology, in fact, the sale of X-ray film made a company like Kodak much more successful than its photographic film. Also, the colors used for special effects backgrounds and for the design of uniforms and hospitals follow a single logic: green and blue are complementary to the tones present in blood and flesh, so we had to enhance this chromatic bias.
Interview by Margot Mecca
