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In 1998, the Pompidou Center in Paris, France, mounted an exhibition "Man Ray: Photography and Its Double" drawn from the Man Ray archives donated to the Center's collections in 1994. It was at this exhibition's London showing that Oskar Alegria was surprised to discover that Man Ray's talents included a filmography, albeit limited to four films. He entered a dark room where they were showing Man Ray's films and the first thing he noticed were the words "Emak Bakia", which he found mysterious. As his heritage was Basque, this film Emak-Bakia captured his imagination. He found himself watching the film like a detective or an investigator, trying to determine if Man Ray had made Emak-Bakia near his hometown, but there was no way of gaining a clear answer because the film was essentially visual. If anything, the mystery of the film's production provoked him to search for the inspiration behind Man Ray's film, which at first he thought was a graveyard epitaph, but which gradually revealed itself to be a house near Biarritz where a portion of the film had been made. Thus began The Search For Emak Bakia (2012), whereby Alegria sought to pay an homage to Man Ray by making a film in the same free spirit with which Man Ray endeavored his film, without interference, on foot, and eschewing a large production crew.
In one of the earliest sequences of The Search For Emak Bakia, Alegria ponders Federico Fellini's query: can a clown die? This association intrigued me because of Fellini's attraction to C.G. Jung's depth psychology, which came to characterize the maturation of Fellini's filmic style in the 1960s. C.G. Jung was fond of saying that—in order to bring up the creative contents of the unconscious—one needed to solicit the cooperation of the unconscious. I've never seen a film that has actively solicited the cooperation of the unconscious as much as Alegria's The Search For Emak Bakia. Recognizing creative opportunity in vision's peripheral margins, his film wanders and wonders—sometimes in seeming confusion—as he pursues tangential threads. Just when you're about to think all is lost on the quest, Alegria delivers a deep, resounding and satisfying resolution to his circuitous pursuits.
The Search For Emak Bakia was programmed into the 56th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival where—quite by chance—I met Oskar in the press lounge. We started conversing about the value of retaining family recipes and our mutual backgrounds: his father was a sheepherder, mine a sheepshearing contractor, and—though I had not intended to watch his film—I ended up watching both screenings at the festival and a later screening at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco. Oskar's following ruminations on his own film come from multiple personal conversations, and Q&A sessions with his various audiences.
On the "Knuckle Ball"
But he wanted to introduce the film to his San Francisco audience with a local metaphor. The day before, he had spent time with a local filmmaker who taught him the fundamentals of baseball, which previously he knew nothing about. Since he was in "the kingdom of the Giants", he decided a baseball metaphor would be the perfect parallel to his film. His afternoon companion had laid out for him all the different pitches in baseball and the one he appreciated the most was the one they called the knuckleball; a difficult pitch, he was advised, and a dying art for many pitchers. The Search For Emak Bakia likewise concerns itself with a dying art and a way of life that is vanishing. As described to him, the flight of the knuckleball is erratic and unpredictable, which Alegria asserted was what he loves about cinema. You will see, he offered, that The Search For Emak Bakia is also unpredicatable and erratic and that it flies like that ball without knowing where it is going.
On the Distinction Between Chemical and Spiritual Restorations
Regarding whether one of his original intentions was to reawaken an interest in Man Ray's filmic work, Alegria ventured that two kinds of restoration could be achieved with movies. There is the classic restoration, what one might call the chemical restoration, as was done by the Pompidou Centre in Paris with Man Ray's films. The original print of Man Ray's 1926 film was badly damaged with scratches and dust and this was the task the Center set out to rectify. But you can also make a second kind of restoration, Alegria distinguished, which is a spiritual restoration. Just as the physical nitrate print could fall into disrepair, so could interest in the film be likewise damaged by the passage of time. Man Ray's four films were made in a non-commercial free spirit. He worked with one assistant and not a production crew. That old way, that spirit, of making cinema also needs to be recovered as a way to work with cinema today, which is what Alegria tried to do with The Search For Emak Bakia.
On Doubting The Free Spirit
When he discovered Man Ray's film Emak-Bakia at a London gallery retrospective, he immediately tried to determine if the film had been shot near his hometown, but the film provided no ready answer. Instead of frustrating him, the mystery energized him. Man Ray could have made a film where he situated the house, showing an exterior, having the viewer enter through the front door, but—Alegria joked—that would have made for a short film. All Man Ray provided were three clues: a window, a doorway, and a shot of the coastline. There was an even more fleeting landscape shot of a car driving up the hill that showed some big white houses in the background. The form of the hills and the architecture identified the landscape as that of Iparralde, which is the north part of the Basque country in France. The farms in the South have different architecture and the terrain is more mountainous. That was all Alegria had to work with.
On the Battle Between Journalistic and Creative Instincts
He was a having a coffee in a park in Biarritz when he saw the plastic glove blowing around in the wind and thought to himself, "Okay. Let's follow that." That's not the way he would ordinarily pursue a story as a journalist. He certainly couldn't go to an editor and admit he found Emak Bakia by following a plastic glove blowing around on the street; but, in its own way it felt like he was celebrating his defeat as a journalist. An option opened up for him as a creative person. But, yes, these two impulses—journalistic and creative—dance together, much like the plastic glove and the napkin it woos.
On Coursing Rivers and Their Destinations
The first cut of The Search For Emak Bakia was two hours long. He was getting lost in his enjoyment of the search. He even wanted to go to Africa because one of the women who auditioned for the sleeping women sequence slept underneath a tapestry from the kingdom of Benin for protection. The film's thematic courses were like rivers confluencing into each other. Though many questions reside behind the film, his favorite question remained: why do rivers try to postpone their destination? Who knows?
On the Romanian Connection
He used to think that this part of the Basque country, the French coastline, is magical. There's a special wind there. If you are exposed to that wind, something happens to you. In that part of the Basque country, every hill on the coast has a palace on it, and each palace is full of mysteries. You could make a lot of films there, palace by palace. Sometimes he feels that the hill on which the house of Emak Bakia rests—though a tiny hill with no more than 25 houses on it—could inspire a film. Biarritz rests on the border between Spain and France and, accordingly, there's a lot of surrounding history. Sometimes he thinks that—if he continues to be a filmmaker—he will base all his films on this tiny hill. It's called Parliamentia Hill. He could turn it into Parliamentiawood, like a Basque version of Hollywood.
On the Importance of the Hare
A festival programmer recently phoned Alegria to state that he had counted all the animals in the film and tallied 357 animals. You have 200 seabirds, you have 16 cows, you have one cat in a storm who looks dead, the programmer told him. Perhaps he likes animals so much, Alegria figured, because they're the only ones who look directly at the camera? It's like they know something. They can read human beings.
The chronology of the story in his film was real. He was a man searching for a house that failed to readily appear so he tried to find other things named like the house. But as he was going along and the film kept growing, he realized that the house was not important; the substitutions for Emak Bakia were not important. The main thing was the path, the search, to be on the way. Thus, the house appears in the middle and not the end of the film and is, in effect, the true beginning of the film. That's when chance began to work hard.
On The Poetic Influence Of His Parents
Commenting on the poetic strength of his film, I asked him who he admired as poets? Alegria didn't miss a beat and said he admired his mother and his father. They were, as he stated earlier, from a tiny mountain village. They taught him how to make a film without knowing they were teaching him how to make a film and those are arguably the best teachers. If you want your child to become a pianist, you have lost your way as a parent because you will have to force them to learn how to be a pianist. The best lessons are involuntary.
His father was a shepherd since childhood. When his parents finally moved to the city in their old age, his father took a pencil in his hand and a piece of paper and for the first time began to write all the words that were disappearing in the Basque world. The names of the birds, for example. Kostalangorri, the bird with the red tail. Zumiriki, the island in the river. He was making a little dictionary. In years since, he has thought a lot about why his father was doing that. The lesson is that if the word for the bird with the red tail (kostalangorri) disappears, the bird itself will also vanish. Words in the Basque culture have tremendous strength and harbor a connection with nature. His father tried to fix things in time and Alegria feels he is doing something similar with his cinema. Perhaps that is the magic of cinema? Through his film, the name of the house was recovered and restored.
His mother always taught him, without knowing she was teaching him, to have a strong faith in magic, which references back to the conflict between his journalistic and creative instincts. Journalists are rationalists. Creative people pursue the magical side. By way of example, he remembers when he fell off his bicycle as a child and hurt his knee. His mother applied iodine to his scrapes and then blew on them. Iodine might be the science; but her breath was the magic. To this day, he doesn't know which made his injury recover more: the science or the magic; but, he's convinced that without the magic there would have been no recovery. And that's the lesson for making a film. You have to know how to fix words. You have to know how to disappear into the white paper or the blank screen. But also you have to use magic for that.
On the Use Of Intertitles Instead Of Voiceover
I understood why he decided to use intertitles to advance his narrative rather than a voiceover, but I was curious why he decided the intertitles should be in English? Per the transnational practice of using intertitles in traditional silent cinema, I wondered if he had plans to translate his intertitles into different languages to distribute in different countries? He confirmed he already has translated the intertitles of the film into five different languages; that there existed five versions of the film. The first was in Basque. Then Spanish. Then French. Then English. Now there's one in Italian and the most recent in Hebrew.
He explained that he used intertitles not just because Man Ray used them in his film, but because of a mistake. He loves mistakes. He loves accidents. Man Ray's film was full of accidents. Several of his photographs were born from accidents. Someone turned on the light when they shouldn't and it produced magic. For example, some of the best inventions of human beings—like champagne and Viagra and LSD—are accidents. The smokey cheese they have in the Basque country is an accident. The houses of the shepherds were so small that the smoke of the hearth flavored the cheese. Now they have to provoke it; but, originally it was an accident. His usage of intertitles had largely to do with the fact that when he started the film, he couldn't speak French. When it came to editing the first cut, he decided to write it out though intertitles since he couldn't speak French. He had to welcome the accident and believe in it.
Once he finished the film, he realized that what worked in the film was not his presence, but his absence. He's not on-screen. At most, you see his hands. At one point, you hear his voice briefly. He's felt in the film but never seen. He sent the film to a filmmaker in Belgium and he expected him to say something about not using voiceover in the film, but his friend wrote back qualifying that—as much as he preferred voiceover—it wouldn't have worked in this particular film. He said that Alegria had achieved something much more difficult with his film: he had captured the tempo of breathing by the pacing of the intertitles, and not through his voice.
On Richard Griffith
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| Oskar Alegria & Richard Griffith meet for the first time. |
On Tonino Benacquista
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On the Mysterious Door Knocker
On Befriending A Hungarian Princess
She told him she wasn't there for Man Ray; she was there because Emak Bakia was the house of her childhood. She spent the first summers of her life there. For her, that house was very important. She had three major memories of the house. The first was the big Saint Bernard Biri who she used to ride like a horse around the grounds. She remembered the chimney. And she remembered the big lightning storm. That part of the Basque country is known for its hard weather. Since then, he and the Romanian princess have become good friends. Not only is cinema magical for recovering the name of a house, but for making a princess a friend. She is 95 years old.
On Editing and Finishing A Film
Film is not as accomodating as books in that regard. In publishing, there is a faith in mistakes. In the second edition of a book, the publisher can add an errata which is an honest admission that the first edition was not complete. Alegria loves that books can be honest in that way, whereas films often are not.
After he completed his final edit, he received one of the best phone calls of his life. He had tried earlier to convince the owners to change the name of the house back to Emak Bakia but that proved difficult because French regulations required that the house be named after their corporate enterprises. But then the owners of Emak Bakia phoned him to say they were sitting with their lawyers and drafting new regulations for the house and were able, at that juncture, to rename the house. "What was that strange name you told us?" they asked. He spelled it out for them. This was his happiest moment in the three years of making the film. And yet again he felt compelled to include this development over the closing credits because it felt like an additional gift to the project. Even to this day, he doesn't believe the film is over; it continues.
On Future Projects
When asked what his next project might be, Alegria admitted this is a question he asks himself every day. Though preoccupied the past two years with accompanying The Search For Emak Bakia to festivals all around the world, he continues to have a passion for searching, and for anything on the cusp of extinction. By example, he related how his parents are from a tiny village in the mountains and from them he remembers the lesson that the people who cut the wood in the forest then cord the wood on the side of the house facing the sunset because they know that this wood will burn better.
We have to work with those people or those things that are on the cusp of being forgotten. One proposal that came to him after his screening in Buenos Aires was when a representative from their Culture of Ministry invited him out to lunch and said that they would be interested in supporting him if he would be willing to find the three houses where Marcel Duchamp lived in Buenos Aires. He said he would consider it, only for the purpose of having a business card that reads: "Oskar Alegria, Finder of Surrealist Houses."
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