BISFF Correspondence 通信计划
This program involves conducting brief email interviews with the directors of the international films featured in the festival, in lieu of the traditional Q&A session that follows the screenings. Through this program, we hope to provide a platform for filmmakers to discuss their work and share their insights with our audience in China.
为了跨越种种障碍，开辟更多交流空间，我们设置了“BISFF Correspondence 通信计划”，对部分国际单元的参展作者进行系列访谈，这些访谈将在作品放映后发布在联展各个媒体平台。
天堂之韵｜Heavenly Rhymes
Angelo Toscano
2024｜0:14:40｜Italy, UK｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere
Director: Angelo Toscano
Interviewer & Translator: Pincent Liu
Coordinator & Editor: Suliko
导演：安杰洛·托斯卡诺
采访、翻译：刘品呈
统筹、编辑：苏丽珂
Q1: Firstly, what drives your interest in the natural landscapes, particularly in rural Accettura, and the topic of how people interact with them? A ritual carried out once a year certainly is a rare opportunity to film. Can I ask what preparation have you done if you planned to finish the filming in just one ritual?
首先，是什么让你对自然景观——尤其是阿克塞图拉（Accettura）乡村的自然景观，以及人们与之互动的话题感兴趣的？面对每年一次的仪式，显然拍摄机会非常难得，如果你有计划在一次仪式中就完成所有拍摄的部分，为此你做了什么准备工作吗？
A1: I was born in Southern Italy, on the outskirt of Naples, where a Vulcano and the sea are reflective of people’s identity. The film came as necessity, found after living most of my life abroad, to reconnect with roots that I have felt still be there but never manage to fully grasp. My research began by looking at why, although Southern Italy is deeply Christian, some rituals who have been there for centuries, belonged instead to Pagan beliefs. At the same time, my idea was always to make films about love, and through the work of Ernesto De Martino, I found that a couple of hours away from my hometown, In Accettura, a marriage in between two trees is held to celebrate spring renewal. It was a somehow perfect combination of trying to understand what it means for people and how they interact with it, while also being a moment to reflect on myself. Although the ritual is carried out once a year, the process is a bit of a slow one. The trees are chosen, and only after weeks their carried through the mountain. This played in my favor because I had enough time to meet and follow all the people involved in the ritual, and without them this film would probably not exist. Yet, nature as humans, is unpredictable, so there were still compromise to be made.
我出生在意大利南部的那不勒斯郊区，那里的火山和大海反映着人们的身份。在国外度过了我人生中的大部分时间之后，我发现有必要拍摄这部电影，让我重新与那些我知道仍然存在但自己从未完全了解的根源建立联系。我的研究始于解答这个问题：为什么意大利南部虽然信奉基督教，但几个世纪以来此地一直存在的一些仪式，却属于异教信仰？与此同时，我的想法一直是拍摄关于爱情的电影，通过埃内斯托·德马蒂诺（Ernesto De Martino，意大利著名民族学家、宗教史学家，译注）的著作，我发现在离我家乡几小时车程的地方，在阿克塞图拉，人们会举办两棵树之间的婚礼，以庆祝春天的复苏。某种意义上来说，这是一个完美的结合，试图了解它对人们意味着什么，以及人们如何与之互动，同时也是一个反思自己的时刻。虽然仪式每年举行一次，但过程有点缓慢。树木先被选中，几周后才从山间被运走。这对我很有利，因为我有足够的时间去认识和跟踪所有参与仪式的人，如果没有他们，这部电影可能就不会存在。然而，大自然和人类一样都是不可预测的，所以仍然需要做出妥协。
Q2: Trees can be much taller than humans. There is a spectacle characteristic in the local ancient rituals that have been going on for centuries that attracts filmmakers to make physical efforts with some 'Herzogian' quality, to go there and film the tree rituals. However at times, this film chose to shoot how the ritual went at a far distance, or only to frame at a small part of the ritual. Did you intentionally, to a certain extent, set limit to the spectacle characteristic of the human rituals you filmed? Would you consider your work was made in an 'anti-spectacular' way?
树木是一种可能比人类高大得多的生物，当地延续了几个世纪的古老仪式天然有种奇观特性，吸引着电影人们开展一些“赫尔佐格式”的拍摄壮举。然而，这部作品在拍摄仪式的过程中，有时选择了以较远的距离来拍摄山村的动态，或者只将镜头对准典礼中局部的动作缓慢进程，在一定程度上你是否有意避开了对人类仪式奇观的过度呈现？你会认为你这部作品是以“反奇观”的方式拍摄的吗？
A2: Yes, it was primarily intentional as I did not want to represent somehow a folklorist vision of the wedding, but perhaps a moment of reflection where each shot can be taken apart and meditate on. More than an anti-spectacular way, I wanted to be able to give to nature and the ritual the chance to tell their own story, whatever that might be.
是的，基本上是有意如此的，因为我并不想以某种民俗学的视角来表现这个婚礼，而是想表现一个反思的时刻，在这个时刻，每个镜头都可以被拆解开来进行思考冥想。不仅仅是一种反奇观的方式，我希望能够让自然和仪式有机会讲述自己的故事，无论是什么。
Heavenly Rhymes, Angelo Toscano, 2024
Q3: In some scenes, the trees or the geometric lines almost play the main role in the images. Also you put two corresponding scenes with the bull at the beginning and at the end, as if the bulls were also the protagonists as 'professional workers' of the ritual. Are these related to a non-anthropocentric concept of nature? After all, the cinematic language in vogue is mostly anthropocentric.
在某些场景中，树木或几何线条几乎扮演着画面中主角的作用，并且，你在头尾放入了两场相互对应的牛的场景，似乎牛也是作为这场仪式的“专业工作者”的主角之一，这些是否与非人类中心主义的自然观理念有关？毕竟，时下流行的电影语言几乎都是以人为中心的。
A3: The work is deeply non-anthropocentric. A couple of days ago I read an article by Phoebe Chen on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, a beautiful work, and something she wrote has stuck with me since then. "His film a reminder that, with the right tilt of the camera, the sightline positioned just so, we can take residence in something outside of ourselves." I find this to be so close to why I make cinema and what cinema means to me. The cattle and the bull are in fact, on top of being part of the ritual, both welcoming us into the film and telling us when it’s time to go. We are so drawn into an anthropocentric vision of life that cinema has somehow lost its primordial reason to exist. As she better puts it "Cinema’s past century of technical devices have become as routine as grammar in a native tongue, but before the medium’s narrative turn in the 1910s, it offered simpler thrills: What stunned us were the series of views that this new apparatus could provide, its capture of incidental motion. In the actuality films of early cinema, it was 'the ripple of leaves stirred by the wind' that so enraptured the theorist Siegried Kracauer, 'nature caught in the act'."
这部作品具有很深的非人类中心主义思想。几天前我读了Phoebe Chen的一篇文章，关于滨口龙介（Ryusuke Hamaguchi）的《邪恶不存在》（Evil Does Not Exist，2023）——一部美丽的作品，她写的一些话之后一直萦绕在我脑海中：“他的电影提醒我们，只要摄影机倾斜得当，视线位置恰到好处，我们就能在除我们自身之外的事物中找到栖身之所”。我发现这和我拍电影的原因以及电影对于我的意义是如此接近。事实上，牛除了是仪式的一部分之外，还欢迎我们进入电影，并告诉我们什么时候该走了。我们如此沉迷于人类中心主义的生活观，以至于电影在某种程度上失去了其存在的原始理由。正如她对其更好的论述，“在过去一个世纪里，电影的技术装置已经变得像母语中的语法一样常规，但在二十世纪一零年代电影媒介的叙事转向之前，它提供的是更简单的刺激：让我们震惊的是电影这种新装置所能提供的一系列的视角，以及它对偶然运动的捕捉。在早期电影史的‘境况电影’（actuality film，是十九世纪二十世纪初的早期电影中最常见的一种通用形式，是以一种非虚构的方式来表现真实事件、地点和人物的电影类别，译注）中，令理论家齐格弗里德·克拉考尔（Siegried Kracauer，著名电影理论家，译注）如此着迷的正是‘风吹动树叶所荡起的涟漪’，即‘在片场捕捉到的自然’。”
Q4: Watching the shot of two men climbing the tree, I see there is a relaxed, acrobatic and performative sense to their course of action, seemingly in perfect harmony with the tree. There is an idealism to it, and revealing no danger of the possibility of falling down. Why did you documented this process in a five-minute long take? In terms of the single take length, it is pretty much the most important shot in the whole film.
观看片中两人爬树的镜头，我发现他们的动作过程中有一种轻松的、杂技的、表演的感觉，看上去他们与这棵树在完美和谐地共处，其中有一种理想主义的浪漫色彩，也感觉不到这些人可能摔下来的危险性。为什么选择用一个五分钟的长镜头来记录这一过程？就单镜头长度而言，它几乎是全片最重要的镜头了。
A4: That shot was actually 40 min long at the beginning and it was a very difficult decision I had to make in the editing. The entirety of the film before that shot is in preparation of that moment and I knew that inside that shot there was everything that I wanted to convey through the film. The only way to do that was to let enough time and enough space for life to happen inside the frame. Also, the men climbing the trees, at certain point disappearing into it, was a way for me to demonstrate how deeply their beliefs is rooted in the very essence of nature and what all of this means to them. I could only have achieved that by letting the shot live as much as possible without interfering with the ritual.
那个镜头一开始实际上有四十分钟，在剪辑时我必须做出非常艰难的抉择。那个镜头之前的整部电影都在为那个时刻做准备，我知道在这个镜头里，有我想通过影片传达的一切。要做到这一点，唯一的办法就是在画面里留出足够的时间和空间，让生命在画面中发生。此外，爬树的人在某个时刻消失在树影之中，我借此来展现他们的信仰深深植根于大自然的本质，以及揭晓这一切对于他们意味着什么。我只能通过尽可能地让镜头自然地记录而不干扰仪式，才能达到这个目的。
Heavenly Rhymes, Angelo Toscano, 2024
Q5: It seems to me the soundscape of the film is well-designed. The texture of the natural sounds is enjoyable, which reminds me of some Michelangelo Frammartino films. Can you talk about the requirements you conveyed to your collaborators in terms of sound design?
影片的声景非常出色，各种自然声效质感令人享受，让我想到米开朗基罗·弗兰马汀诺（Michelangelo Frammartino）的一些作品，能聊聊在声音设计上你向合作者传达的要求吗？
A5: Thanks for referring to Michelangelo Frammartino and to compliment the soundscape. He is of course a big influence in my work although in the case of the soundscape the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul is the work the film takes more inspiration from. In fact, especially in his film "Memoria," we find ourselves in a world of surreal sound and hyperreal sound. Together with my two collaborators that worked on the sound design, Nicolas Guttierez Garcia and Mattia Turchetti, my idea was to have a soundscape that reflected on the immediate image while at the same time sound that was not necessarily there, a soundscape that was somehow alien to us.
感谢你提到米开朗基罗·弗兰马汀诺，并称赞声景。当然，他对我的作品影响很大，尽管在声景方面，这部电影从阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古（Apichatpong Weerasethakul）的作品中汲取了更多灵感。事实上，特别是在他的电影《记忆》（Memoria，2021）中，我们发现自己置身于一个超现实声音和超真实声音的世界。我与负责音效设计的两位合作者尼古拉斯·古铁雷斯·加西亚（Nicolas Guttierez Garcia）、马蒂亚·图尔切蒂（Mattia Turchetti）合作时，我的想法是，既要有反映眼前画面的音效，同时又要有不一定存在于那里的音效，让声景在某种程度上对我们来说是陌生的。
Q6: The film is perhaps minimal in terms of its structure and narrative sequence. It almost follows the ritual process. In the meanwhile, it creates an experience that allow the audiences to spend some time with natural things. Can you discuss a bit about your thoughts on time itself in cinema, how you wish to interact with audiences over time, or your approach to having the patience of immersion?
这部电影从结构与叙述顺序上来看可能非常精简，几乎完全沿着仪式的过程来展开。同时，它创造了一个让观众与自然事物共度一段时间的体验，能再简要聊聊你对电影中的时间本身的态度吗？你希望如何与观众在时间上进行互动，或如何在电影中创造一种沉浸式耐心？
A6: I’m very close to a school of cinema that incapsulate work by Bi Gan, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pham Thien An. A cinema where duration and time is at the core of it. As Tarkovsky puts it "we could argue that cinema is a mosaic of movement and time." And in this mosaic that I found myself at ease when making films. The awareness that despite a camera always influences and manipulate time, I could still try and let each frame have enough time to be reflected upon. This approach comes as response to a modern cinema made of ultra informed images, where audience have little to no space to make their own mind about what they see. My aim is trying and let the audience have the time to look at each frame, finding the story they want in it, and perhaps leaving the cinema with questions and not answers. To me is the only possible way for cinema to continue living beyond the screen.
我非常认同毕赣、阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古和范天安（Pham Thien An）这些导演的作品。这些电影的核心是持续的时间与时间本身。正如塔可夫斯基所说，“我们可以说电影是运动与时间的马赛克拼接”。在这种拼接中，我发现自己在拍电影时感到很自在。我意识到，尽管摄影机总是在影响和操纵时间，但我仍然可以尝试让每一帧画面都有足够的时间可以进行反思。这种方法是对现代电影的一种回应，现代电影中的图像信息量极大，观众几乎没有空间对他们所看到的内容做出自己的思考。我的目标是努力让观众有时间仔细观察每一帧画面，从中找到他们想要的故事，也许在离开电影院时，他们会带着疑问而不是答案。对我来说，这是电影在银幕之外继续生存的唯一可能方式。
more information: https://www.bisff.co/selection/heavenly-rhymes