108_For most of my life, and principally during the time of my filmmaking career, for some utterly stupid reason, I spent pleasing and providing extra services to people. Some of them who turned out to be completely ungrateful, sociopath and most of all invisible exploitatory entities like a leech packaged as a fake friend (and some of them, of course, remained my dearest friends to this date strong as ever). To be honest, it is a complex issue for me and all my life; I had struggled with it. I don’t want to disclose it here in public too much because I don’t believe in projecting negativity. My friends and people who are familiar with my character, know that I am a straightforward and an extreme person with a massive sense of grim humour and the great tendency to laugh at the absurdity of existence. But I have struggled madly with this complex all my life. It had even doubled by my immigration to Europe. Immigration brings a massive amount of ramification as you feel you are frequently being watched, judged and scrutinised by the society and its members. So I always tried to give more to individuals around me and be generous as I can. I think I am a sympathetic and caring person (I try to be at least). Still, at the same time, I always knew to give too much was my weakness and occasional downfall. Particularly when you realise that the people who you devoted too much of your love and compassion were in it only to exploit and emotionally manipulate you for their benefits. It is only recently that I discovered perhaps it wasn’t the fault of those exploiters to grind me down but myself. I should not have given too much and controlled my emotions, to begin with from the start. Of course, it is life; you learn things (hopefully), and you move on to become more at peace with yourself and your environment. So far, this pandemic has been a phenomenal period of reflection for me (I re-watched a great deal of Ingmar Bergman films too, on top of that). I contemplated deeply about correcting and finetuning some of my attitudes towards complexes such as crowdpleasing and financial decisions for example. I want to look at this period as a renaissance, a rebirth.

109_This is the very reason I absolutely love Ingmar Berman; to approach cinema in the most literal way that ultimately becomes a mysterious personal world of the filmmaker. For example here in Winter Light (1963), he portrays the character reading a letter. We, as the viewer must know the content of the letter somehow by some techniques, the filmmaker, must reveal the content. Usually, in other films and here too (briefly) the character starts to read the letter out loud so we could grasp it. But then, being the master, he would cut directly to the close-up of the actual writer, looking directly at the lens (us) and reciting with her own voice (not reading) the content. This act is simply called anti-illusionary cinema. I believe cinema and art, in general, has got nothing to do with reality whatsoever. You don’t create a mirage but merely a system of images that can be worked out like a puzzle. Yasujiro Ozu was also the same. Once he said “It is easy to show drama in a film, but this is only explanation. A director can really show what he wants without an appeal to the emotions.” Ozu is not giving you the drama you want but giving you the drama he wants, which is the drama of formalism. One must pay attention as these are the essential lessons in filmmaking – how to formulate your style and think about the content next, not the other way around!

110_Over the past few days, I have watched a lot of contemporary films by emerging filmmakers. Now, whether I like or dislike these films is irrelevant to the idea I have in mind about the current state of Cinema. Something worries or perhaps bothers me, and that is ‘representation’. I wrote and shared this text below a while ago, but I want to share it again to test the public consciousness. What do you think? ⁣
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⁣Sometimes I think about a series of memories I have from the past experiences. They are bitter and sweet fragments of my life; continually pulsing and flickering in front of my eyes and waiting to resurrect!⁣
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⁣Most days, I think about the dreams and nightmares that I had the night before. I usually write them down digitally in my documents to not forget them. They are incredibly feverish, violent and aggressive beyond belief. A parallel world! ⁣
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⁣Sometimes I simply think and observe my daily life and everyday living conditions. In society, with friends and family and such. I essentially scan my life and analyze the data continuously, like a computer made of flesh and nervous system. I watch my life!⁣
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⁣It took me twenty years to realize that, when I want to make films, I don’t need any of these three resources or categories. I never have or will illustrate, recreate, reconstruct, represent or even re-imagine my movies. ⁣
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⁣I want to make films based on nothing, absolutely nothing, zilch. I want to be the images, sounds and ultimately, Cinema! ⁣111_ I have always refused to believe and accept the fact that the documentary genre in Cinema would be even possible. Directly because as soon as you touch the material, they become heavily subjectified and therefore fictionalised. At what point does a fictional construct collapse back into the documentary reality of the moment in which it is filmed? These questions have always haunted me and played a crucial role in my filmmaking. I make films with an almost documentary approach, using places and people that I encounter and responding to them with an uncommon degree of freedom and spontaneity. I construct my films from the footage I accumulate rather than from a predetermined script, which is also a documentary method. Yet the result is always the creation of a fictional universe. For example, particularly in my 2018 feature-length film, Phantom Islands, I consciously examined the tension between these two apparently opposing categories of filmmaking that seem less and less distinguishable the closer you look at them. Confronted with a landscape or a human being, does filming them or choreographing them in a specific way make them more ‘documentary’? Or is ‘documentary’ simply a category of fiction, a term used to give audiences an indication of the type of film they will watch? ⁣
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⁣We have to realise the fiction/documentary binary at the heart of Cinema that existed since its inception in 1895. And I want to propose a hypothesis with my films and on the work of other filmmakers that I deeply admire. I suggest the real documentaries are films such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna (1969) because they are the evidence/sources/material of an internal landscape of the mind with no dependability or faithfulness to the reality of our existence.112_ All of us at the Experimental Film Society are engaged with the craft of filmmaking and are filmmakers first and foremost. But we are also animated by a passion for the history of film; our films are constantly interacting with, incorporating, or ingesting the history of film directly or indirectly in a creative and mysterious love affair. Therefore, a platform to discuss this has become necessary. After over twenty years of making and screening films, I realized that I need to explain myself in critical terms solely to survive as an artist. And by ‘survive’, I mean to continue making and screening films. EFS has organically created an underground niche for itself, but the type of work it produces is still fragile and emerging as far as its visibility is concerned. For a long time, I felt the work should speak for itself, but I have seen that frank and, if necessary, controversial discussions around it have only had positive outcomes. Therefore, I have decided to systematically write about what I do in my films, what I think about the cinema in general, and how I feel about the work of others. I have always believed in cinema as a craft, and perceive it as a laboratory of experimentation: tests, trials, and errors. This process should, therefore, be systematically documented and shared with others. If you don’t know the history of film and film criticism, you can’t hope to find your way through its future. Engaging in film history is not only necessary but essential for filmmakers.⁣113_  I rewatched Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole (1998) today, after many years. An existential poetic masterpiece about pandemic and virus outbreak. The sheer simplicity and ability of the director to turn ordinary settings into miraculous situations are extraordinary. Nothing is happening in the surface, and yet the turmoil of the hidden undercurrent haunts the film. It’s a lesson for filmmaking for young and old students of cinema.

114_One obsession in Cinema always leads to another and another until it becomes part of nature. Ingmar Bergman made two masterpieces in 1957, first The Seventh Seal and after that Wild Strawberries. What do they have in common? Everything!

115_I rewatched Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole (1998) today, after many years. An existential poetic masterpiece about pandemic and virus outbreak. The sheer simplicity and ability of the director to turn ordinary settings into miraculous situations are extraordinary. Nothing is happening in the surface, and yet the turmoil of the hidden undercurrent haunts the film. It’s a lesson for filmmaking for young and old students of cinema.

116_Just watched Variola Vera (1982) and I thought it was brilliant. It is a Yugoslav film directed by Goran Marković shot in several Belgrade hospitals which portrays the 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak. What is fascinating is the constant shift between the dramatic nature of the film and subtle surrealistic horror sequences it conjures up masterfully! More importantly, it examines the deep, disturbing relationship between love, eroticism and death in extreme situations like an outbreak and quarantine. A theme I am also very much obsessed with it. Surprisingly, Erland Josephson also appears in the film, but Rade Serbedzija’s performance is electrifying. Heavily recommended!

117_The puzzle with making extremely personal or autobiographical films is the possibility of out of body experiences first and foremost for the author and later on for the audience. ⁣
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⁣This description perhaps provides a scientific means for the subject: out-of-body experiences are characterized by a location of the self (or one’s centre of awareness) outside one’s body, an impression of seeing the world from an elevated extracorporeal perspective, and a perception of seeing one’s own body from this perspective. They are striking phenomena because they challenge the experienced spatial unity of self and body—or the experience of a real me that lives in one’s body and is the subject of experience and action.⁣
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⁣Now in the realm of cinema, if I want to articulate the same phenomena, it is much more complex and yet a necessity for my survival. For example, very recently I was deeply affected (in a tragical way) by an experience with another person, and I decided how I can poetically look at my life again as an out-of-body experience to create a film. After some time thinking about it, I realized that I simply couldn’t and there is no option but to abandon and abort the project because there is not enough for me to create.⁣ Is creation a chaotic agony?⁣

119_In today’s world and the cultural landscape of our time, Cinema no longer needed to be art. It has been almost entirely disarmed from this extraordinary quality. Instead, it is now functioning as a political tool, an activism platform and a medium of awareness. I guess the world needs it to be like this and one must understand and respect.
When you make a film you are engaging with history, yours and that of the medium and at the same time, as a human being and filmmaker I have right to think and practice cinema as a high art form. To employ and deploy imagination, craft and poetical surgery of my existence and my surroundings. This is merely vanishing and dissolving in front of my eyes. We are forgetting what cinema is and can be. I refuse to give up and abandon my position simply because I am not physically and mentally capable of it.

120_I have been making experimental films for the past twenty years, and I have never used the word “blocking” up to now. I’m not kidding. But over the past week, I heard this terminology being used in every single aspect of filmmaking and cinema. Narrative films are all about blocking and nothing else from what I gathered. For those who are not familiar with the term: “Blocking a scene is simply “working out the details of an actor’s moves in relation to the camera.” You can also think of blocking as the choreography of a dance or a ballet: all the elements on the set (actors, extras, vehicles, crew, equipment) should move in perfect harmony with each other.” As for me, I can only make films like Kenneth Anger. Blocking, for me, means this image!

121_It is astonishing how in each culture (between languages) concepts, notions, themes, ideas and subsequently, the meanings generated can be so different. I find it fascinating to see stark differences between two isolated systems of thought and values, and the misunderstandings caused in their collision. When this is transposed to the cinema in the form of theories and hypotheses, it becomes something else once again. Thankfully only the films themselves can save us from darkness, or who knows, perhaps lead us into more tenebrosity.

122_About what cinema is: Robert Bresson expressed in ‘Notes on the Cinematographer’ that cinema is “To translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing.” Today, I have thought about what I might bring into the table that is simple and not complicated. This is my banal definition of cinema which I believe to be very naive: “Cinema is not a mirror of life but the life of a mirror.” The older I get, the more I enjoy the process of wasting my time thinking about what constitutes cinema.

123_Anyone familiar with my work knows that I use an extensive amount of black screen in my films. I am obsessed with creating these lonely, isolated and vast voids within the structure of my movies. I look at them, perhaps in a philosophical sense, like black holes which they would suck the audience within themselves and maybe there is no way of returning from them. These are the moments where you turn the cinema to the audience and force them to become an ephemeral filmmaker on the spot. They have no choice but to fill the gap some information, an image, a sound or some form of a mental material. I think they are very frightening experiences to go through with and yet exceptionally provocative. The more you try to present the realism and getting close to naturalism, the less effective and hence artistic the product becomes. All art is profoundly fabrication and orchestrated thoughts whether you want it or not and therefore, it is just a matter of how to use these elements in your work. For me, it is fascinating how a filmmaker decides to construct the truth or falseness of reality in her/his films and more importantly so, how does one employ the techniques to execute these ideas? ⁣

124_Is love a revolutionary practice, a delusional but necessary urge or simply practicality of living? What do you think?⁣

127_Today, a dear friend of mine was expressing some concerns about the future of his art practice. In response, I tried to formulate some of my old thoughts to provide useful feedback. Perhaps?

Over the past twenty years, I have been working on and developing a very particular type of cinema, which I believe is formal, personal, and radical. From the very first day until this very moment, distributing these films has been tremendously challenging. Fighting the system and forcing yourself into it at the same time is a stupendously frustrating and exhausting act. Thankfully, I could screen these films globally to a modest degree, and the results have always been surprising and encouraging. The audience either loved the movie, and was affected by them, or hated them so much that it made them think and ponder—even in the most negative situations, there was still an interaction. I think this is something worth spending time and energy on because I have never had an indifferent audience.

Now, after all these years, I ask myself how much more I can push this agenda because sometimes it is very tiresome and debilitating. I don’t believe in fighting the system any longer. I think film-making in its own right is a political act, not merely political by choice of topic or theme.

Now, with the sheer volume of films being produced every day and perhaps the vast majority of them being dreadful, the system needs not to be picky, specific, thoughtful, and selective. Whatever it wants is already there and has been produced beforehand. As long as it has a conceptual idea and functions as a cargo of information, it’s acceptable. Nothing is unique. The only thing that matters, like it always was, are the films themselves and the history of the medium. In film-making and within the machine of cinema, only one thing calculates, and it is hard work — every single day. Talent, luck and creativity are not always reliable; you either have it, or you don’t. Now I plan to go in a different direction with my films. Somewhere still unknown but new territory. I am still processing, but being in the unknown is exactly what drives me forward. The fear? Yes. The fear.

128_The Iran–Iraq War began on 22 September 1980 (I was born in 23 December 1980), when Iraq invaded Iran, and it ended on 20 August 1988, when Iran accepted the UN-brokered ceasefire. An estimated 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died, in addition to a smaller number of civilians (I think it is far more than that). The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and most Arab countries provided political and logistic support for Iraq, while Iran was largely isolated. So my generation and I grew up in the war. ⁣
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⁣Today Trump said the US ready to strike 52 Iranian sites if Tehran attacks. Why? Two reasons, war by nature is a great business, and Trump wants another four years. ⁣
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⁣Who is paying the ultimate price: you and me!

129_I made my first film entitled “Nucleus’ in January 2000. With this short film, my career as a filmmaker has started. It also gave birth to the Experimental Film Society (EFS). I cannot believe it was exactly twenty years ago that my friends and I came together and initiated this life-changing experience. On those days, not even in my wildest dreams, I could have Imagined how events would develop and turn to what it is nowadays with EFS. In twenty years, I have completed thirty-five features; forty short films; and 199 instalments of a series called Homo Sapiens Project. I travelled and screened these films globally all over the planet. I have never considered myself as an Iranian, Irish, or what have you. I am a citizen of the world and belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I want to see the world as much as I can and continue travelling with my films. ⁣
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⁣The most important lesson I learned from the past two decades is this: in filmmaking, ultra-radicalism is a choice that you must carefully decide upon because it is not merely a way of filmmaking but also a way of living. I destroyed myself to sustain my mind to make cinema. It might sound very fatalistic, but it comes from a profound experience of my living condition. And as always there is no difference between my personal life and my films whatsoever, they are the same. ⁣
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⁣I have had an opportunity to meet and work with many extraordinary human beings who changed my life for good without any doubt. I made my best friends during those years who I am deeply grateful to have them my life. I owe my life to cinema and people who I love dearly: my beautiful friends!⁣
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⁣This year, 2020, is the twentieth anniversary of EFS and I have plans for a series of exciting projects and events to run throughout the whole year. Huge thank you to every single one of you for your support, watching my films and following my activities. Onwards!⁣
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130_Sometimes I think about a series of memories that I have from the past experiences. They are bitter and sweet fragments of my life; continually pulsing and flickering in front of my eyes and waiting to resurrect! ⁣⁣
⁣Most days, I think about the dreams and nightmares that I had the night before. I usually write them down digitally in my documents to not forget them. They are incredibly feverish, violent and aggressive beyond belief. A parallel world! ⁣
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⁣Sometimes I simply think and observe my daily life and everyday living conditions. In society, with friends and family and such. I essentially scan my life and analyze the data continuously like a computer made out of flesh and nervous system. I watch my life!⁣
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⁣It took me twenty years to realize that, when I want to make films, I don’t need any of these three resources or categories. I never have or will illustrate, recreate, reconstruct, represent or even re-imagine my movies. ⁣
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⁣I want to make films based on nothing, absolutely nothing, zilch. I want to be the images, sounds and ultimately, Cinema!

131_In late 2017 we published our first book, Luminous Void: Experimental Film Society Documents. Edited by Maximilian Le Cain and myself, it chronicles the history of EFS by compiling a series of essays, interviews and manifestos that set out and explore the ideas that drive and emerge from EFS filmmaking.⁣
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⁣Last year I started (very slow-paced / work-in-progress) to work on the second EFS book, which will be my first as a writer. It is entitled “The Art of Phantoms or Ignis Fatuus”. It will take the form of poetic writings and deals with ideas such as what cinema is, the genesis and inception of it and the concept that from the dawn of time we have had cinema within us. It was only awaiting technological advancements to materialise. The book investigates this ancient phenomenon and how it relates to our human condition, survival and the history it generates in us. The ideas are still forming, but I want to maintain a tone of pure fiction rather than factual documentation. A written spectacle, perhaps!⁣

132_I played the leading role as Dr. Baron Von Mertzbach in the upcoming underground feature film, Kino Clinic (2019), by Jann Clavadetscher He brings his trademark combination of intense visual experimentation and impish humour to Kino Clinic, the second part of his self-described Cine-Medical trilogy. Like its predecessor, Kino Hospital (2018), it is an assault on narrative, genre and the sensorium.

133_In my twenty years as a filmmaker, I have had an opportunity to work with some spectacular people. One of them, without a doubt, is James Devereaux. Together we made seven feature-length films, and eight short instalments as part of my Homo Sapiens Project. I always admired actors, and I have developed a fascination with certain actors relationships from cinema history, in particular when a director and an actor develop a close bond and work together across several films. As that trust and friendship develop further over multiple movies, it results in the pair growing together continuously, and the creative process merges into the unconscious. ⁣
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⁣But recently I was as usual drowning in my own thoughts, and James gave me a piece of advice which was extremely helpful to me. I just wanted to share it with others. Thank you, Oldboy! ⁣
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⁣“People are unfathomable. But I believe we should not take anything too personally – most of the time, people are not really responding to us; they are responding to something going on inside their minds!”⁣

135_In exploring this process, Phantom Islands includes images that are generally categorised as ‘documentary’: portraits of local people on the islands where the film was shot, images of other visitors and the crew working or relaxing. Then there is ‘fiction’: stylised, melodramatic performances at once conveying and caricaturing extremes of emotion. Both approaches are reactions to the island landscapes that inescapably contain all these figures. But the islands themselves fluctuate between being presented as postcard-clichés and feral sites of exploration and disorientation. This fiction/documentary instability is further heightened by the frequent use of black screen that punctuates many scenes like a camera shutter, constantly reminding the audience that it is watching a film that never stops taking itself apart to put itself back together again. As hypnotic as it is disruptive, Phantom Islands is a documentary on the creation and workings of cinema itself. As such, it repeatedly revisits the fiction/documentary binary at the heart of this art from its very inception in 1895, when the Lumière brothers staged a scene of workers leaving their factory for the camera, making at once the first documentary and the first fiction film.

137_Seeing The Irishman was like experiencing the cinema for the first time. I also remember the first time I saw Rocco and His Brothers, Mirror, Accattone, The Gold Rush, Sherlock Jr. among many others were also like this, being born or rather die and not surviving cinema. The Irishman is a film where you can easily give up filmmaking after seeing it merely because it’s enough for a lifetime. The acting perhaps is among the most significant achievements of art of acting. But above all Martin Scorsese gifted me a film where I’d carry with me for the rest of my life! Thank you, old boys.

138_The more personal, internal, inwards and confessional the film is, the more political it becomes and not the other way around.

139_Over the years, I was told by many film festivals that we would like to show your work, but we don’t have any categories that can include your films. We simply don’t know how to present it and under what circumstances. I never understood or comprehended if it is a curse or a blessing. I literally have no clue whatsoever. As always, I’m very open about my film practice and enjoy sharing them with the public. Onwards!

140_The most enjoyable part in cinema, apart from watching films from the history of the medium, is the actual craft of filmmaking, shooting/gathering the material and editing/montage, both heavily technically. After that, there is a feeling of loss and nostalgia, each film when it’s done is an absolute death, but it behaves as if it is alive. That is why the cinema is all about ghosts and shadows in my view. In this process, if you are lucky, you may find great collaborators/friends, and as a result of this, you don’t have to endure this feeling alone. Everything else is a waste of time for me. Literally, everything! Nothing else is giving me any satisfaction.

141_From 2000 to 2010, I made minimal films. From 2011 to 2019, I made maximal films. From 2020 onwards, I will just make films!⁣

142_My films are already artefacts and ruins of the collective consciousness of the human settlements on the planet earth and the process of evolving, which cinema is part of it. I am glad that in terms of the technological advancement of our civilization; I belong to the category of early pioneers of the digital era in art. What I have done so far and will do until I die will interest to look at and study in the next century, perhaps. Therefore, I gave up to fit in; I am simply too weak to be accepted! ⁣

143_Marguerite Duras madly influences me for many reasons, but the most important is this approach he had developed in her films which I find it extraordinary. In my own films, particularly the films I made after 2012, I have deeply experimented with this method that she is describing here but in reverse and entirely on the other side of the spectrum. An Ouroboros regression formula if you like to tap into how far can you go with images and to what extremes!⁣
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⁣“I have a theory: I believe that writing is like this: it’s this parallel between the reflection in the mirror, and the object reflected. When one begins to write, there is already an image in the mirror. That is, one has already been taken over the idea, but it has yet to emerge.⁣
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⁣So, then we got a sort of simultaneous absence/presence of the actors. The image loses its supremacy, and the spoken word becomes more important. So then the dialogue is no longer between a particular man and woman but rather between their essences.”⁣
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144_Ultimate Tragedy⁣: There will be many films that I already know I can never make them in my life, but nevertheless, I tremendously enjoy thinking and picturing them in my head. Because of this I genuinely adore and love Cinema! It is the ultimate tragedy …

145_A text I wrote a few years ago about how the possible presentation of Experimental Film Society movies will be in the future:⁣
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⁣Years of curating and screening EFS short film programmes have taught me a great deal about how to present such programmes – and about how not to. One thing which never ceases to astonish me while watching them is how much films made under the EFS umbrella have in common. Although each member is very much a creative individual, the aesthetic and formal similarities between our works seem to indicate the presence of a central nervous system that we are all connected to and which generates a subconscious force that steers us towards a shared but unknown destination.⁣
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⁣In a typical EFS programme of, say, ten films by ten filmmakers, each film will have its own structure and its own opening and closing credits. But if the films are well selected, watching them will also be akin to experiencing a single feature with each short taking on the role of a sequence in this longer film. This observation has led me to devise a whole new approach to presenting EFS work, the ‘Carcass Programme’.⁣
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⁣These programmes will consist of new assemblages of scenes edited together from the work of EFS members. The scenes might originally come from features, shorts or medium-length films, but they will be compiled to form entirely new hybrid films.⁣
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⁣Pieced together like cinematic Frankenstein’s monsters, these morbid creations will feed on the flesh of previous EFS films, simultaneously announcing their death and enacting a potentially limitless series of resurrections. Each one will be specifically created for a single venue or event, be that a festival, gallery or museum presentation, meaning that they will have a very short lifespan. Each one will be named Carcass Programme: (title) and credited to members whose films have been used. This will be the presentation format for EFS programmes. The film is dead, long live the film! ⁣

146_Personal Vision⁣: Experimental, avant-garde and underground cinema does not exist anymore within the general discourse of art, and it has gone forever. Thanks to academia, film festivals and curators who removed craft, imagination and the role of creativity to the extremes. Everything now is about conveying information, addressing socio-political issues and activism approach. The most profound question is these are all great but where is the ‘Art of Cinema’? How can one engage with history, yours and that of the medium? Is it even possible anymore? Cinema’s vast experiential capacities are capable of so much more than this and can one engage with cinema on purely sensorial levels?⁣
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⁣In response to what I have just written up there, I can only and solely follow my path and vision with the Experimental Film Society. And at the end that is the most political act I can commit to. Even if I am wholly disillusioned, disconnected, detached and rejected during my lifetime, my duty is to stay truthful to my beliefs on an existential and artistic condition of my living years. Uncompromisingly personal work raid my psyche to fuel phantasmagorical reconfigurations of techniques and half-remembered nightmares from cinema history. As I experiment with cinema, I allow it equally to test on me. I aim to create experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien. In evoking possible futures cinema might once have had, my films upset the continuum, rendering my life and the work I create until there is no distinction between them.⁣

147_The most frightening or comforting element in engaging with cinema or art, in general, is to confront ideas that you never thought would become a reality of a kind. For example, I just had a conversation with a friend who deeply affected me in several ways on how we perceive films, how do we digest them and subsequently how do we flush them out of our system. My thoughts are still forming, but I cannot help to think about this quote: “The image of violence. That’s something much easier for me to understand. Violence was born with the history of mankind. It is bound up with the birth and life of humanity. It’s a natural force. There is no need to make any effort about violence. It’s a mere nothing. I’m not afraid of it. I would never be wounded by the thought of violence.” – The Koumiko Mystery (1965) Chris Marker

148_If I had to choose films from only one country (out of all the countries on the planet), it would be Russia* (former Soviet Union Cinema). In my opinion, no other country has endowed the cinema with as much total and poetic imagery as the Russian masters. Images rooted in a deeply pictorial expressionism, imagery that is so violently strong and assured while in other moments serene, vulnerable and disturbed. For me, Russian cinema displays so many characteristics and examples that are as close to the real art of photography as filmmaking has ever been and perhaps will ever be. If a background in photography and a keen interest in the 19th century sit alongside your itinerary, then the great map of Russian cinema lights up across the board. I don’t think the true essence of their cinema has departed from romanticism.⁣
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⁣Now with all of this in view, the torment of some haunting desire to make a film hangs over the head of the cinephile, creating an indelible impression that follows them thereafter. You, ultimately behaving like the masochistic creature that you are, happily descend the road hand-in-hand with the torment of cinema, along the way inflicting madness on others due to some sadistic urge to share, and perhaps more so because you react to films in a more satisfactory manner than to life itself. I think that your own films are simply personal letters that must be sent… a one-way love without hope!⁣
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⁣*Note: Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Sergei Parajanov, Aleksey German, Boris Barnet, Mikhail Kalatozov, Konstantin Lopushansky, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Larisa Shepitko, Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Kozintsev, Dziga Vertov, Tengiz Abuladze, Elem Klimov, Kira Muratova, Yevgeny Yufit among others!⁣

150_A sincere and straightforward statement by Lav Diaz about the art life. I share these principle and generally think along similar lines. My work demands complete freedom of imagination to summon reality in a sort of seance, to seek out its uncannily incomprehensible nature and to render an impossible perspective on it. Therefore I sell my soul to a universe which only cinema can materialise. This is my struggle, one which hopefully some others might feel the need to share. ⁣
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⁣“I’m very fatalistic about life. Whatever happens, happens. The imperative for me is that I do my contribution for my people, for my culture. I still want to make films for them. I still want to make films that confront our struggles.” – Lav Diaz

152_Visions and ideas in their original form perhaps spread best in a scenario where the receiver subjected to an atmosphere (which may take hours or days) and notions slowly precipitate and willingly absorbed into the body of the receiver, a process of contagion, therefore, I cannot explain the films I want to make. ⁣
⁣In a work like this I feel that sometimes ‘not knowing’ is a very good thing, it puts all of us (the crew) in the same boat and the process of filmmaking becomes a hunt during which we all disintegrate. The audience uncovers this filmic document and begin their investigation, only finding traces of us and so I would hope that they themselves would climb in and perhaps discover that the danger is real. The more you try to express and explain the film, the more shallow and decrepit the film becomes.

153_An utterly fundamental and vigorous statement from a conversation with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub with Hans Hurch about their adaptation of Kafka’s novel “Amerika.” I think this answer alone highlights the biggest crisis in how radical cinema preserved and tremendously neglected by many film festivals, gate-keepers and programmers. Also, on a human level and coexisting within society it has so much to say:⁣
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⁣“These films should also be a school of tolerance. Without irony. Sometimes you even have the duty to be intolerant, but there is also a tolerance of which one has to be capable of practicing, especially as an intellectual. … And tolerant also in the political sense as well as aesthetically. That one accepts disparate forms, forms in sound and image.”

154_Recently, I revisited several of my early feature films. I made these experimental features as a test or trial experiment. The films were assembled from footage I had accumulated over the years, archival footage, found footage and rushes donated to me by my close collaborators.⁣
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⁣To be more precise, I didn’t plan on making any of these films, I never thought about them systematically and therefore I never specifically shot any ‘new’ material for them in most cases. In a certain way, these films were made so I would have something to work on, something to occupy my mind and thinking behind cinema. This is an attitude I have kept from the very beginning, to always keep myself busy with the craft of filmmaking. Although I must confess, I didn’t think they would contain so much deeply confessional and private experiences of my life within them. Is it me the creator who has changed drastically or the films themselves are mutating and shape-shifting? Because when I was amid making them, I have no recollection of these themes that now embedded in to the work. How can this be? ⁣

155_I have been making films for twenty years now and lived in two continents. One of the inescapable and unavoidable facts I have learned in the past two decades as a professional artist is that your nationality defines every single move you make. Quality and merit of your work, your personality, your character and everything else in your existence comes afterwards once the system renders you through this autocratic biased agenda. We would all do well to remember that our country of birth is arbitrary. I know very well that there is no escape from this fatalism, so that’s that. We live within artificial, human-made boundaries. Where are these borders, and who owns them? Answers only give headaches and create segregation, so no need for them. At the end of the day, when I think about all this, I remind myself that thankfully Cinema is infinite, unknown and still being invented.

156_The biggest downfall of art, and particularly in my hypothesis, Cinema, comes from conclusion, resolution, and understanding. How much should we trust our perception of the external world? The world is a construct we’ve built from patterns our brain has identified from sensory experiences, so to each of us, it is – a subjective reality, based on individual perception and interpretation. Whether there is an overarching ‘reality’ for all of us is quite another matter. When a filmmaker makes a film, he or she presents a reality or universe that is supposedly self-contained and autonomous. The very basic urge to create comes perhaps from ideas such as sharing, disturbing, or destroying. The filmmaker is also an audience of that film, and this makes the whole concept of Cinema a genuinely frightening experience. Simply put: how is it possible to make a film for yourself?⁣
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⁣It is, of course, possible. In its genesis, and in the embryonic stage of that film, how much the film will be solidified by mass consumption and how much it will be forgotten by the resistance of restricted, control-freak, and utterly-insecure human settlements is already decided. Basically, looking back into the history of evolution and our position in the cosmos, or perhaps chaos, we can suggest that everything is a phase and nothing can last forever. ⁣
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⁣Therefore, concepts of conclusion, resolution, and understanding are the methods we might find to prevent mass suicide and mania. The origins of Cinema – an utterly sensory, dreamlike, and the primal human condition (sleep) – can suggest that its very raison d’être is to tap into the morbid nature of derangement. It is straightforward: the creation of films with such a nature will naturally be eradicated by us, the very peculiar species that we are … Nevertheless, the urge will continue.⁣

157_Today, June 1st 2019 marked the 15th anniversary of my emigration from Iran to Ireland. I was 23 years of age when I arrived, and now I am 38, and a tremendous number of life-changing events have occurred in the meantime. However simple the reasons that cause a person to emigrate might initially seem, it inevitably becomes apparent with the time that immigration is a highly complex process that never reaches an endpoint, even if you decide to return to the place you came from initially. Questions of exile and identity, both one’s own identity and that of society itself, confront you every day. Moreover, on an emotional and existential level, it becomes clear that ‘going back where you came from’ is not and will never be really possible. The story of my immigration (and, in fact, my whole adult life) is inextricably linked to my experimental filmmaking and to Experimental Film Society (EFS). From the very first day I arrived in Ireland, in 2004, there was only one crucial question in my head: how do I continue EFS in this new country? My jetlag had not even subsided before I started to work on this notion, and I have doggedly pursued to do so in the 15 years since. In filmmaking, ultra-radicalism is a choice that you must carefully decide upon, because it is not merely a way of filmmaking but also a way of living. We are all exiles.⁣

158_For me, making cinema (or art in general) is about catharsis and abreaction. Artist retreats into her/his alienation until there was nothing but herself/himself through bodily and mentally purging phenomena. I employ, use/abuse or simply take my constitutional pain, chaos and turmoil, and pass it through the medium I refined throughout the years with my personalised craft to relieve myself to exist. This entity is a massive emotional and intellectually charged energy that wanders the world as a spectre, it is no longer you and yet is it the artist in a different parallel universe. So in a way, art has therapeutic qualities, and at the same time, one can never recover from this Ouroboros-like practise. This image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process which has no beginning or end.

159_Ten stills from my third feature film, ‘Bipedality (2010)’. My movies are almost all wordless, but when I incorporate speech, it is in the form of long monologues or dialogues. Without an expectation, I tend to push whatever style I adapt to its extreme limits (for example like all the features I made with James Devereaux). I look at conversations and speeches as painful studies in how inadequate language is to communicate feelings. ⁣
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⁣I made Bipedality with an entire cast and crew of three people, and there wasn’t any script or pre-writing planning for it, and all the shots were taken only one time without any rehearsal, but occasionally I gave the actors notes to read in order to provoke certain feelings and then filmed the scene straight away. I shot the three main segments of the film in only three days, but the inserts and pillow shots were taken over a full year in a different part of Ireland. The film is heavily saturated with sound and colour, making use of meditative still photography.

160_Flickering Shutter⁣. I absolutely love when in some of the pre-1970s films you would hear the motor of the giant 35mm cameras such as Mitchell Camera etc. Obviously, the attempt of the DOP and sound crew wasn’t proper enough to conceal the sound 100% (especially in the interior scenes), and as a result, you hear the hypnotic flickering sound of the shutter. Contrary to popular belief, I think flaws and defects like these bring us far closer to reality than trying to eliminate any sense of pieces of machinery, apparatuses and equipment. As if we are in the location right at this very moment with the crew and recording these scenes. The more you try to present the realism and getting close to naturalism the less effective and hence artistic the product becomes. All art is profoundly fabrication and orchestrated thoughts whether you want it or not and therefore it is just a matter of how to use these elements in your work. For me, it is fascinating how a filmmaker decides to construct the truth or falseness of reality in her/his films and more importantly so, how does one employ the techniques to execute these ideas!⁣

161_Between 2007 and 2012 in Ireland, I stopped taking photographs in analogue format and started to employ DSLR cameras as my primary tool for photography. I took many stills within those years but was never happy with the result whatsoever. Somehow the result was not satisfactory, and subsequently, I decided to recycle all those material I had accumulated into a feature-length film entitled ‘Structures, Machines, Apparatus and Manufacturing Processes (2012)’. In doing so, I had shot some additional scenes in Iran with miniDV and combined them all together in an extremely formal approach. Synopsis: “As in a number of his recent films, Rashidi uses images accumulated over the years to explore memory and cinematic form. In this case, he creates an elaborate and haunting montage that mainly interrogates still images.”⁣⁣
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162_Over the past few days, many respectful and curious individuals and film enthusiasts contacted me and asked about many aspects of my films, philosophy and techniques behind them and such. I always do my best to answer such questions as best as I can and keep a warm contact with people who follow my cinema. Without exception, I explain the queries almost immediately and very attentively. It is a habit I always had and continue to champion. But I see a common thread within many of them, and that is the lack of engagement with the films itself. I am a Cinephile myself and going through a filmography of a filmmaker in a long period of time, is one of my most enjoyable and rewarding experiences in life. ⁣
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⁣At the same time, I have always been very active in providing ways and methods for people to engage with my films both in virtual space (my website and social media) and also face to face encounters. My sole advice for understanding and discovering my filmography and for that matter any other filmmakers’ films is to simply start watching them in chronological order and do not be afraid of the unknown world of the artist at all. Things may look uncanny, mysterious, ambiguous, hard to comprehend and even nonsense but every journey begins with a single step. Just start to watch the film with your full focus and let the cinema itself guide you throughout this journey!

163_This William Blake quote triggered me to make my 2015 feature film, Ten Years In The Sun: “In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”⁣
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⁣The film was one year in production and throughout shooting and editing it drastically mutated and deviated in various ways from its initial idea. In this film, I have taken elements from such genres as science fiction, horror and erotic drama and given them a radically minimalist treatment. I aimed to attain what could be described as a ‘ground zero of drama’ through the systematic removal and breaking down of any narrative structures.⁣

164_In 2012 I shot a feature film, entitled ‘Bard Is a Thing of Dread’, in only three days featuring my brother Reza. It was a challenging and emotional experience for both us because we were dealing with a very personal and private subject matter. Synopsis: “An eerie portrait of a young man locked in emotional limbo, sinking ever deeper into himself. Rashidi employs a combination of monologues and pensive silences where his eye for atmospheric imagery conjures a truly haunting vision of isolation.”⁣

165_Eight screenshots of my 2012 feature film, ‘Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness’. In 2011, I began to work a series of feature films constructed from the footages I had accumulated in Iran and rendered them to the extreme limits with various re-capturing and telecine techniques into grainy black and white, which emphasized the displacement in time and space this material was charged with internally. Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness starts as an apparent formal exercise in pulsing visual rhythms and builds into a feverish nightmare retread of home movie footage.

166_“The Poison of Activist Art”⁣. One of the most horrendous, disgusting, appalling and exploitative acts of creating art is to devour the suffering and misery of others, for example, the current refugee crisis. This is particularly so when the art is made in the privileged conditions of a wealthy western society for a privileged first-world audience. Such artists exploit these situations in a way that is deeply underhand, in order to feel safe and content about their indulged and pampered lives. Who owns images of refugees? How can anyone make use of something like this and morally and ethically justify themselves? 99% of today’s activist art uses this inhumane formula. Last night I watched Aki Kaurismäki’s masterpiece The Other Side of Hope (2017) and realised that at least a handful of brilliant artists working today can still address such issues with integrity, intelligence and respect for their viewers and subjects. The latest trend of new art activism is working 100% against this.⁣

167_Shot reverse shot⁣. Sometimes you watch a scene of a film where two people are in a small room and having a dialogue with each other. Most of the shots are filmed with a Tele lens, and everything feels immensely magnified. The camera tilts and pans exceptionally smoothly, and you almost don’t feel it. Shot-after-shot we see close-ups, inserts and occasional exterior cut-aways filmed through the windows where you see blurry edges of the frame. The language is isolated because it is dubbed; all the distracting sound effects were eliminated, and you hear nothing but the voices of actors which is very manufactured as a result. The music softly playing in the undercurrent of the scene and somehow feels detached and ethereal. You look at all this and to be honest, it feels elementary and easy somehow. You start to ponder and think about the structure of this dream machine we call Cinema. Suddenly a great deal of despair and sadness overcome your emotion, and you realise that it is in-fact excruciatingly complex how it functions. It has been done countless times in many years in so many different movies, but somehow one stands out over the others. Why? Why this particular film which uses the Shot reverse shot (or shot/countershot) technique effectively, suddenly superior to the rest! In my entire professional life and within all my films I have struggled to investigate and perhaps comprehend this phenomenon of Cinema. The particular movie I am talking about is Aleksandar Petrović’s Majstor I Margarita (1972) which is an absolute masterpiece.⁣

168_I wrote and shared this a while ago, but I think it is important to post it again only because if you are a filmmaker, the most important act you must do is to protect yourself within the hostile art world and be satisfied with what you achieved by working and struggling hard:⁣
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⁣“There is only one resource that can protect you as a filmmaker in the hostile conditions of the film industry (including the arthouse and experimental sectors which can be even more conservative and traditional than the mainstream). This is your filmography. The films that you have made over the years can shield you from the absurdities of this environment and keep you sane.⁣
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169_One of the constant concepts and motifs behind all my films: ‘Eros and Thanatos.’

172_While ago, I announced the news about planning to make ‘a series of modest, small, micro-budget, mysterious landscape feature films containing mainly nature, ghostly blurred human figures and eerie soundscapes’. I have been given it some more thoughts and came up with an idea about a trilogy which I still yet to name. For each film, I will be going through my old 35mm photographs, using them as a kind of visual script or an ancient map to resurrect the movie preternaturally. I will surrender to the ideas and feelings that I once had and wholly forgotten during the time I was taking these photos and only will let the hidden instinct buried inside these artefacts to guide me. These photographs snapped between 2000 to 2007 in the Middle East and Europe.

173_With my cinema, I have always tried to convert my aggression, sorrow and anxiety into pain and subsequently transforming this pain into extreme audiovisual sensory experiences. Contrary to popular belief, pain is the most crucial and vital element in any individual entity that exhibits the properties of life such as us humans. With pain, you can reflect upon matters, contemplate and feel the senses. I can not speak on behalf of everyone or anything but it what makes me and my films ‘alive’!

174_In filmmaking and within the machine of Cinema only one thing matters, hard work. Every single day. Talent, luck and creativity are not always reliable you either have it or you don’t. Even if you do it is not bankable. The only thing that counts is labour and maintenance of craft. In my case I completely fetishize the Cinema, sure what have I got to lose?

176_“Hurrah for anarchy! This is the happiest moment of my life.”

177_“Hey you, out there in the cold. Getting lonely, getting old. Can you feel me?”

178_Shoplifters. Sometimes films are not necessarily audiovisual sensory experiences (they don’t offer any images); sometimes they are not about stories and conclusions. Instead, very plainly they pose a very deep fundamental question. A question that many people can relate to and understand. Basically, they are not good films but profoundly effective at the same time. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018) is such a film. It challenges you to think what the meaning of family is? Does a person born inside a family or does that person choose/create one? Any answers are irrelevant here, only the question matters.
Accidentally, today I read a text by Henri Langlois which said “…people intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything and buy everything.” This statement is painfully real and essential.

179_Sometimes, murder’s like love.

180_I might have overdone, extremely exaggerated and utterly indulged myself in my upcoming film. It is the most intense film that I have done so far. I have no idea what I created whatsoever, to be honest! These are not images of the actual movie but behind the scenes.

181_I want to bring a mutant-film into this world of ours. Do you want it as your friend?

182_Something is coming on your way. However, what is it? When is it happening? – 2019 “I am everything male and female, light and dark, flesh and spirit.”

183_Something is coming on your way. However, what is it? When is it happening? – “It would be best to live as a ghost anyway…” 2019

184_The Case of Dušan Makavejev. Over the past few days, I have been watching Dušan Makavejev’s films and revisiting them. The radicalism, alternative approaches and thinking behind his cinema are genuinely unmatched and utterly unique. His movies from 1965 beginning with ‘Man is Not a Bird’ to 1974 ‘Sweet Movie’ are absolute masterpieces. Unfortunately, any other films he made beyond ‘Sweet Movie’ (after a seven-year hiatus) had lost their magic and extremism. At the same time, I wonder, what can you make another personal film after a gigantic groundbreaking product like ‘Sweet Movie’? How can one filmmaker deal with such a considerable amount of creative eruption and continue making films after it? This notion also reminded me of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse which he has said will be his last. So far, he hasn’t made a film after having a mind-blowing career from 1977 to 2011 and of course never compromised.

How long, under what mental and social conditions and for what motivations outsider-filmmakers can keep on doing work and survive at the same time? When is the right time to stop making, if ever? These questions have always been haunting me, and I still found no answers for them. History of cinema is everything and the most crucial guide for any filmmaker to comprehend (solely for themselves internally) the psychological, practical and existential aspects of filmmaking!

185_During the professional life of an underground/alternative filmmaker, there is an almost inevitable challenge, that is perhaps one of the, most important in their career: rejection. But what does this actually mean? How should one react to it, and what are the ways of dealing with it?

It used to be the case that the studio-system/major-art-organisation were the gatekeepers of cinema, charged with the responsibility of keeping out underground films. Film festivals were a way around that, but now they have become gatekeepers as well. There are exceptions, but for the most part if you don’t know how to play the game, if you’re not connected, or if your movie doesn’t deal with horrific slogans relating to the sociopolitical agenda of the day (which change like fashion trends), your odds of making it on the festival circuit are a lot worse than you may think. Basically, what get screened comes down to the taste of programmers and curators. In my experience, even after many years of submitting, proposing, and dealing with them I still haven’t got the slightest idea what type of films they take in and bring to the silver screen. Naturally and obviously they prefer films that are accessible, less formally challenging, concept being everything, films that have one or more news bulletin-style reflections on societal issues, and some quality that will serve to expand the audience. In the end, it all boil down to the satisfaction of the audience, and one simply cannot programme works that disturb this equilibrium – never. How can you fight against that? The conformist, conservative machine produces too strong a current to swim against. So what can a struggling underground filmmaker do?

186_Progeny. I will continue my tradition of dedicating films until the end. My next film will be dedicated to the great Raúl Ruiz.

187_Does a work of art (in this case FILM) have to comment on socio-political conditions in a direct way? Is it just a tool to address problems?

FILM must raise awareness about social issues, unjust scenarios and the miseries of the world?

Must art be a form of political activism? In this way, it exists for the betterment of human settlements?

Or all of these questions are irrelevant; the film will do all of this in one way or another, directly or indirectly, head-on or obscure?

What do you think?

188_Ultra-Radicalism. I have always been mesmerised by how Cinema functions and what the inner workings of this grand machine are. I am still processing what Cinema is.

I am constantly asked why my films are so far from reality. Why don’t they address the socio-political factors of human societies; I am asked to express how these films comment on our daily lives and how can an audience possibly relate to them. I always respond saying “I don’t know. What do you think?” I have always preferred to explore a different type of dramaturgy.

The idea of fiction in Cinema (and art in general) is something that has always interested and fascinated me. It must be utterly fictitious, 100% fabricated and thoughtfully constructed by the creator.

Due to the nature of Iranian society, which was a product of political conditions, I preferred to function as privately as possible, working entirely in the margins. Furthermore, when I was making films, I could not tolerate any social interaction at all. Later when I moved to Ireland, I found myself in a similar situation. I immediately became an outsider, for an immigrant and tackling a new language, and also for the culture I was pursuing (underground and avant-garde cinema). I had positioned myself twofold into a place of alienation. I included this atmosphere in my work, creating my universe and in a sense constructed a means of surviving this alienation, through cinema. The making of such work was not a choice but perhaps the only way I could survive without going insane. Though this is my fault and my own choice, I look at the films made by my colleagues of Experimental Film Society, and I see similar qualities of an atmosphere. I understand not only several shared preoccupations but also a complimentary response from those working from the outskirts, looking in.

189_It is not merely seeing a district, country, continent or planet from a particular perspective but seeing cinema in that way. Our films are sensory objects and therefore experiencing them from start to finish with an open mind is the most critical factor. There has always been a sense of tension from the commercial remit and the so-called ‘art world’. None of us wants to be an enfant terrible of any kind, and our primary purpose is to make and screen these films on a regular basis.

I genuinely like to turn negativity into a source of positive energy and feed that into my work and other EFS projects. Even if I fail (and there is always a chance that your films are simply failures) I still enjoy working non-stop. In filmmaking, ultra-radicalism is a choice that you must carefully decide upon, because it is not simply a way of filmmaking but also a way of living.

190_Strangeness of Existence. The only way to get to know any auteur filmmaker’s universe is to watch all of his/her films, and at that point, it doesn’t matter if some of them are weaker than others, they all contain very crucial elements of his/her alchemy. Cinema only exists in an entire filmography and not merely as individual films.
Especially, in today’s world, we are bombarded with an innumerable amount of moving images. The world flooded with media, and it is impossible to digest all of these images or even breathe under the weight of such a vast and growing mass. Only by creating work that is unique and entirely personal, deploying alchemistic imagery within a Cinematic context (of which the history is deep, ruthless and oceanic), can we bear down and define ourselves away from any monotonous or repetitious engagement with moving image that seems to stream from all sides. Anything that resembles reality, naturalism and ‘perfection’ is hiding behind a safety-guard, and this is deeply worrying. With an intimate and personal Cinema we can push forward in this seemingly all-encompassing medium and destroy any boundaries or safety mechanisms.

191_Cinema as life and life as cinema. Whatever I have done in filmmaking has and will always be about Cinema itself, and of course my intimate life, I surrender to nothing outside of these concepts. It took me over a decade or so to fully realise that it was not just a refusal to tell stories using Cinema as a tool, but perhaps a near-total lacking that capacity in me, to begin with. Once I came to this conclusion, everything became so much more vivid. I am genuinely fascinated and perhaps hypnotised by this utterly mysterious dream-Kino-apparatus that functions as a very technical, industrial and dangerous machine. Cinema itself is a complete and utter perversion, sorcery and magic, only because you are looking at people, objects, situations and the universe itself, and not just the things you are not supposed to gaze at but the ‘ordinary’ things.

Moreover, when these items are put under the microscope, we see the teeming multitude of bacteria, and to some degree, we infest this material with our secret histories and thoughts. I always gravitated toward cinephilia, while at the same time I have always been a capable technician, so these two elements are enough for me to make my films. I knew in advance that this type of filmmaking would always marginalise a person, but even that suits me fine, just because I cannot tolerate the vast majority of social life.

193_Cinema is an integral part of life, and for me personally is the entire life; we know the world because of cinema.

194_With speech, one is blind. To speak is not to see. With image, one is vision. To film is to imagine. Filming never reveals the reality but imagines it for the first time, always the first time. Cinema is like the eye that sees for the first time, but its function is not sight; it’s the tears that come from it. The endless tears.

195_One of the most critical decisions I have made was never to bring a child into this world. I will know who I have always been and why I made this decision in the future. Up to this point, my history is anonymous. Yet, the most vital capacity of humankind is the ability to give birth and create something unknown. It is the ability to define and construct the future and not let yourself be determined by your past. Hence, my films are being born as I slowly reach the end.

196_One can never truly convey anything to anybody despite the language, intelligence, intuition, and sympathy. The fundamental essence of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, sealed up in the impenetrable personal vault of the individual soul and body. As a result, our life is a constant search for communication of one sort or another—the refusal to utilize language. To consider the world as sight and sound and not as signs, symbols and narrative structures.

197_A shot-reverse-shot starts with a shot of a character and then cuts to a shot of what or who that character is looking at (the reverse of the angle from the first shot) and finally cuts back to the initial image to show the character’s reaction. But who/what is the character in cinema? What is the character looking at or thinking in a film? Who and what factors decide these characteristics? What is a cut? I have always wanted to make erotic cinema. Not necessarily about the love between human beings, but in a much more universal sense. About the sensuality of the mechanism of the cosmos.

198_There is no single unifying factor connecting the work of filmmakers associated with the Experimental Film Society. Still, in my own personal film practice and methodologies of running EFS, I have always pushed toward the active possibility of catastrophe and the unknowable.

Drawing upon the hypothetical logic of science fiction, horror, occult, pagan, dystopia, and the avant-garde are the enduring presence in many of the works produced by EFS. Cinema is re-articulated as a more heterogeneous space containing all galaxies and forms of life, even ones we can sense but can’t fully comprehend.

199_ When I make films, I always create a mysterious, enigmatic and uncanny version of myself by employing and casting all the actors collectively (actors could be non-human too). Nevertheless, they eventually form the ‘filmmaker’ as a persona within the world of the film. Their presence is not functioning as players but as a substance through which sensory impressions are conveyed or physical forces transmitted. I always aimed to create a philosophical ‘Vanishing Twin’ phenomenon between the audience and myself – one will eventually devour the other.