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。
You Are the Truck and I Am the Deer｜你是卡车，而我是鹿
Max Ferguson
2023｜0:05:07｜Belgium｜English｜Asian Premiere
Director: Max Ferguson
Interviewer & Translator: Zifei Wang
Coordinator & Editor: Suliko
导演：麦克斯·弗格森
采访、翻译：王紫菲
统筹、编辑：苏丽珂
Q1: Let’s begin with the intriguing title of your work. It immediately conjures a vivid image – one charged with dramatic tension and imaginative possibilities. The dynamic between the Truck and Deer seems to serve as an analogy for a relationship rooted in an accidental encounter that culminates in a tragic outcome. Could you elaborate on the inspiration behind this title and how it shapes the themes of your work?
我们不妨从您作品的这个有趣标题谈起。它生动地勾勒出一幅画面，既充满戏剧张力，又激发无限遐想。卡车与鹿，仿佛象征着一种偶然邂逅中诞生的关系，又透出悲剧宿命的气息。能否请您谈谈这一标题的灵感来源，以及它如何奠定作品主题的基调？
A1: The title comes from a letter I wrote in anger where I was trying to accuse someone of causing all of this pain in me. The exact phrase in the letter was "I have the self-preservation of a deer in the path of an oncoming truck (In case it isn't clear, I am the deer and you are the blaring truck, so dumb and stubborn in its metallic rage)." Looking back at this sentence now, I find it interesting that the lines of responsibility are already blurred here in the admittance of a lack of self-preservation.
When I started working on the film, I had moved past the stage of throwing out blame and was looking inwards, trying to find something in me that allowed this pain to continue its hold on my body. What was it that was hiding in my body, in my subconscious that would not allow me to step out of the way of the truck? The reason why the metaphor of the truck and the deer works so well is that the truck is actually just following its path - it cannot leave its lane. Therefore, it is more interesting to uncover the role of the deer: what role does she play in this drama of blood and guts, in the creation of her own pain?
标题来源于我在愤怒中写下的一封信，当时我试图将所承受的痛苦归咎于某人。信中的原话是: “我的自卫力，如同鹿在面对疾驰而来的卡车时的那般（以免你不明白，我是那只鹿，而你是那辆轰鸣的卡车，愚蠢而顽固，充满冷硬的怒意)。” 如今回头看这句话，我觉得有趣的是，在承认自卫力不足的同时，责任的界限便已模糊。
当我开始制作这部影片时，我已经不再单纯指责他人，而是转向内心，探寻是什么让我容忍这种痛苦继续占据我的身体。究竟是什么，潜藏在我的身体和潜意识之中，使我无法躲避那辆卡车？“卡车和鹿”的比喻之所以贴切，是因为卡车其实只是沿着既定轨迹行驶——它无法偏离车道。因此，探索鹿的角色才更具意义：在这场腥风血雨的戏剧之中，在自我痛苦的构建过程中，她扮演了什么样的角色？
Q2: What fascinates me most about your piece is the way it embodies emotional pain—turning something usually invisible into a palpable, almost physical force. In just five minutes, the rapid juxtaposition of sound and vision immerses viewers in an unsettling world, where questions and emotions collide in tension. Did you encounter any technical or conceptual challenges in translating abstract, internal experiences into a visceral form? What was your process in selecting the specific images to visualize these emotions, and how did you decide on the pacing of the different elements in your film?
您的作品非常巧妙地表现了情感上的痛楚，将那些通常看不见摸不着的感受，转变成具象而强烈的存在。短短五分钟内，声音与影像的快速交替将观众带入一个充满紧张感的世界，让人沉浸在谜一般的情感体验中。在将抽象而内在的情感转化为深具共鸣的直观体验时，您是否遇到了技术或概念上的挑战？您又是如何掌控作品中不同元素展现的节奏，以实现您的预期效果的？
A2: This was exactly the main challenge of making this film - it felt like trying to contain two opposite forces in one bag: hiding and showing; touch and intangibility. As I was working with a personal experience about something as slippery as emotion, in the image-making process I let myself work freely and associatively. In a vaguely therapeutic way, I was evaluating my feeling in the moment and finding textures that could mirror it. This led me to uncovering visual metaphors such as paper representing the fragility of skin. In this experimentation though, there were some ground rules. From the start, I set myself the goal of making myself vulnerable in the film and using my own body to do so. On the other hand, what I was looking to avoid was the cliché prevalent around representations of women's pain and emotions. Men have a long history of representing women's pain in art in patronising or romantic or monstrous ways and I wanted to find my own language to speak about a pain that was mine and only mine.
After some time of experimentation, I realised I had too many visual elements to condense into a coherent film. So I picked out images that resonated with me and re-used and worked over those which is why several visual elements come back later on in the film in a different way.
这正是制作这部影片的主要挑战——感觉就像是试图将两种对立的力量装进一个袋子里：隐藏与显现；触碰与无形。因为我在处理的是一段难以捉摸的个人情感经历，所以在影像创作过程中，我让自己自由联想。带着一种治疗的意味，我评估自己当下的感受，寻找能够映照它的质地。这让我发现了一些视觉隐喻，比如纸张象征皮肤的脆弱。不过，在这个实验过程中，我还是设定了一些基本规则。从一开始，我就为自己设定了一个目标，那就是在影片中展现自己的脆弱，并通过自己的身体来实现这一点。另一方面，我希望避免围绕女性痛苦和情感的陈词滥调。男性在艺术中长期以来以居高临下、浪漫化或怪物化的方式表现女性的痛苦，而我则想找到属于自己的语言，讲述一种独属于我的痛苦。
经过一段时间的实验，我意识到自己积累了太多视觉元素，难以将其凝练成一部连贯的影片。于是，我挑选出那些与我产生共鸣的图像，并反复使用、加工它们，这也是为什么有些视觉元素会在影片中以不同的方式复现。
You Are the Truck and I Am the Deer, Max Ferguson, 2023
Q3: The work feels deeply personal, featuring images and footage of yourself alongside a poetic text you wrote. The visuals are not simply oriented to follow the text; instead, they introduce a new layer of semiotics to the text. While the text conveys trauma, pain, and anger, the visuals evoke fluidity, femininity, and metamorphosis. How did you envision and manage the interplay between the visuals and the text during the creation of this film? In bringing the text to life, did you narrate it yourself, or did you guide someone else to perform such an emotional piece? How did the process of voicing your words intertwine with the sound design?
这部作品充满个人色彩，不仅融入了您的私人影像，还以您原创的诗歌作为旁白。画面并非对文本的直接视觉化呈现，而是在构建新的语义维度。文字传递出创伤、痛苦和愤怒，而影像则展现出流动性、女性特质和蜕变。在创作这部影片的过程中，您是如何构思和把握视觉与文本之间的互动关系的？是您亲自朗诵诗歌，还是您指导他人来诠释这段情感丰富的文字？文本配音与声音设计之间又是如何相互融合的？
A3: As the making of this film was so process-based, I think all these layers of meaning you mention really arrived step by step. I started working on the film with only the text, and at that stage, I was still very much in the throes of anger and loss, which is reflected in the words. Then, through working on the animation and visual elements and forcing myself to put my body on the screen, I turned this lens of anger and despair inwards. There, I found a darkness that, for me, was very much linked to my desires and identity as a woman. In being alone with myself and the film, I found the freedom to turn and to change. As someone once said to me, "We've all been the truck, and we've also all been the deer." So, I hoped that the audience would follow this confusing, enlightening journey of discovering a monster within themselves and embracing her.
In the early stages, I toyed with the idea of inviting a slam poetry artist to voice the text, but after discussion with my mentors, it became clear that the subtle play with truth and perspective would only come through when told through my own voice. Since the text is actually two poems smashed together, the sound design was actually a second step after the first task of puzzling these fragments of text together in a way that told some sort of a coherent story. My sound designer Seppe Indigne was a big part in that as he became an external sounding board to check whether we were finding some kind of narrative flow. When working with personal stories, it becomes very easy to lose the thread as there is no need for explanation to oneself.
这部影片的制作是一个层层推进的过程，因此我认为你提到的这些意义也是逐步形成的。最初，我只有文字作为创作的起点，那时我还深陷于愤怒和失落，这些情绪也渗透在文字之中。随后，通过制作动画和视觉元素，以及强迫自己将身体呈现在屏幕上，我将这份愤怒与绝望的视角转向了内心。在那里，我发现了一种与我的欲望和女性身份紧密相关的黑暗。在与自己和影片独处的过程中，我找到了改变与蜕变的自由。正如曾有人对我说过：“我们都曾是那辆卡车，也都曾是那只鹿。” 因此，我希望观众能跟随这段既混乱又富有启发的旅程，发现并接纳自己内心的怪物。
在早期阶段，我曾考虑邀请一位诗歌朗诵艺术家来诵读文本，但在与导师讨论后，我意识到，只有通过我自己的声音，才能更精确地呈现对真相和视角的微妙把控。由于这段文字实际上是两首诗拼接而成，声音设计其实是第二步，第一步则是将这些文字片段拼凑成一个能够讲述连贯故事的结构。在这个过程中，我的声音设计师 Seppe Indigne 起到了重要的作用，他充当了外部反馈的角色，帮助我们检验是否找到了叙事的流畅性。处理个人故事时，由于自己无需向自己解释，往往很容易失去方向。
Q4: Turning to the motifs of hair and the butterfly in your work, I was reminded of Rebecca Horn’s use of these symbols to explore the confines and complexities of femininity. In your work, what do these motifs represent? Do they stem from personal experiences, or are they intended to engage with broader narratives about gender? How do you balance these familiar symbols with your own unique interpretation, to keep them fresh and evocative instead of falling into cliché?
您作品中的头发和蝴蝶这两个元素让我不禁联想到瑞贝卡·霍恩（Rebecca Horn）的艺术创作，她同样运用这些象征物来探讨女性特质的界限与复杂性。在您的作品中，这些意象扮演了怎样的角色？它们是源自个人经历，还是旨在回应更广泛的关于性别的叙事？此外，面对这些广为人知的象征，您是如何确保它们在您的创作中保持新鲜度和深刻性，避免落入俗套的呢？
A4: With the perspective of now a year and a half on this work, I think it's become quite clear that my aesthetic taste is quite influenced by the tumblr pages of the early 2010s. This fetished female sadness that pervaded the internet during that time appropriated the literary works of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. In my memory, the butterfly (or shadow-self, the moth) was an important symbol in all of this. I think tumblr was probably my first encounter with images that made physical or tangible something that was purely emotional.
It's good to hear that I can render familiar symbols fresh. I can't really say specifically how I managed, perhaps I was very motivated to dig as deep as possible to take all these images that already had their own meaning and wrest them together until they formed a whole that was recognisable to me. I'm just very lucky that it also speaks to other people.
从现在回望这段约一年半的创作历程，我认为我的审美品味明显受到了2010年代初期 Tumblr 页面的影响。那个时期，网络上弥漫着一种对女性悲伤的迷恋，充斥着对弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）和西尔维娅·普拉斯（Sylvia Plath）文学作品的借鉴。在我的记忆中，蝴蝶（以及它的阴影自我——飞蛾）是其中一个重要的象征。我想，Tumblr 可能是我第一次接触到那些将纯粹情感转化为身体化或具象化图像的地方。
很高兴听到我的作品能够让熟悉的符号焕发新意。我也说不清楚自己是如何做到的，或许我当时非常有动力去深入挖掘，试图将这些本身已有意义的图像强力结合在一起，直到它们组成一个我能认同的整体。我只是很幸运，最终这些作品也能触动到其他人。
You Are the Truck and I Am the Deer, Max Ferguson, 2023
Q5: Finally, let’s not miss the remarkable blend of techniques you’ve employed, including stop-motion animation and cut-out collage. These choices bring a distinct texture to the piece. Could you share your thoughts behind selecting these particular methods, and how they contribute to the emotional depth and narrative structure of your work?
最后，让我们来聊聊您在这部短片中运用的技巧，比如定格动画和剪贴画拼贴。这些技巧赋予了作品独特的质感。您能否分享一下选择这些技巧的初衷，以及它们是如何增强作品的情感层次和叙事结构的？
A5: To be honest, stop-motion and cut-out animation has been the method that has spoken most to me. I do not have a lot of experience or technical skill in drawing or puppetry so I think this choice has maybe been some practical way to hide my lack of skill or perhaps find a new way to introduce this rough and unrefined style. I like to work with my hands and be able to feel my work which is also why I gravitate to working with physical materials. I think also since I really wanted to make a work rooted in the body, it was imperative that in my method of making I could do to my material what could also be done to the body - that is: tear, scratch, break... I guess that in working in this rough stop-motion way, the set and materials in front of me become an extension of my body that I can switch out and bring back, following the whimsy of whatever inspiration strikes at the moment.
说实话，定格动画和剪纸动画是最能打动我的创作方式。由于我并不擅长绘画或木偶制作，所以这种选择可能部分是出于实用考虑，既能掩饰技术上的不足，又或许能让我找到一个新的方式，呈现这种粗糙且未加雕琢的风格。我喜欢用双手创作，喜欢能够真切感受作品的过程，这也是我偏向使用实物材料的原因之一。我认为，既然我真心想要创作一部根植于身体的作品，那么在我的创作过程中，我必须要像对待身体一样对待材料，也就是：撕裂、划擦、破坏……我想，在这种粗糙的定格动画创作中，眼前的布景和材料变成了我身体的延伸，我可以随心所欲地更换它们，依据灵感的闪现自由创作。
more information: https://www.bisff.co/selection/you-are-the-truck-and-i-am-the-deer