CyberEmpathy Journal Issue 2/2011 The Gilliam's Atlas Jakub Wojnarowski

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI

WUNDERCAMERA TERRY GILLIAM'S MOVIES

A movie as a personality cabinet 1.

An attempt to comment Terry Gilliam's oeuvre only by written words seems to be a paradoxical intention. Film director, who is the world builder rather than a storyteller, has got a temperament, as well as a bloated creations sensuality, which do not fit the textual requirements of a linear narrative (which dictate their rules even to the "experimental" essay formula). On the other hand, Gilliam universe deeper analysis lets us notice an unusually "meaningful" network under the fictional surface.

The network is woven out of lines of voltages, analogies, visual quotations and erudite references, organized around central points of that symbolic topography. Apparently, anti-psychological world is presented as a set of "masks" – objectified and personified ideas. The visual model in the narrative, accepted by the director, which is more synchronic than diachronic, allows maintaining the original sparking among the images, colliding in dense icon sphere, regardless of the linear story rules.

It is believed that the Gilliam world researcher should be geographer rather than historian. The idea of creating a visual guide of this extraordinary universe has become a driving force of the research project, the effects of which were presented in the Wundercamera. The Terry Gilliam's Movies (a book edited by Kuba Mikurda). The book was published on the occasion of the 11th New Horizons International Film Festival together with a review of the director’s works.

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI Graduated from ASP in Krakow (the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), where he currently conducts courses at the Narrative Drawing Studio.

He is an independent curator, designer, creator of comics, artbooks, movies, installations and site-specific projects for public space.

He analyses possibilities of usage of different visual narration forms as tools of theoretical reflection. He is cocreator of curator gonzo projects and member of the Quadratum Nigrum crew. He is constantly cooperating with Ha!art Corporation (Polish: Korporacja Ha!art).

On the pages of Wundercamera the traditional types of textual narrative (with more or less performative nature) were supplemented with graphical binder, allows to include some visual discourse elements to the film interpreter’s arsenal (such as illustrations, graphs, and symbolic icons). www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

2.

The selection of the collage as the dominant aesthetic and methodological conventions allowed restoration of director’s strategy (currently the strategy is present both in his animations and feature films productions), based on the principle of recycling and creative transformation of the available reality elements - from the earthbound everyday life to the effects of cultural sublimation. Sam Gilliam is keen to emphasize that he feels not as an author (auteur), but as a filter (filteur) - a person who selects and processes the pondering reality elements (and as a result merges them into a new vision).

The introduction essay in the book directly compares the idea of the secondary demiurge with surgery. In accordance to these principles, the creator, or even the pre-creator (as the collages ‘author, collector, film editor) opens the skin’ curtains with a scalpel in order to "sculpt" the world with alive material instead of creating the ex nihilo beings.

Gilliam, starting with the early animation projects and up to the current ones, often evokes - as some metaphor for reality - images of the body conventionally tortured, what does not differ much from the childish cut-out game.

Many artists - the director claims in the conversation with the authors of the book - would agree that the idea is to open our eyes to the world.

Sometimes all it takes in order to see it in a completely new way is to dismantle something and turn it upside down.

KUBA MIKUDA has studied psychology (MA, 2006) and philosophy (PhD, 2012). He has worked as a film critic, film curator, film book series editor, TV show host and TV show director. He has edited and coedited books about Terry Gilliam, Brothers Quay, Guy Maddin, Tsai Ming-liang and surrealism in Polish cinema.

He has taught visual culture at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow; he currently teaches at the Film School in Łódź. In 2012 he became a member of Canal+ Poland Production Team and ViceEditor-in-Chief of Film News Desk.

In this context, the video edition is also nothing more than a cutting and "stapling" together many seemingly incompatible spaces.

Gilliam uses creative editing and trimming for "filtering" the contemporary American landscape while looking at it through visions from the archives of European culture; the specific historical visual styles can be assigned to the separate movie’ images: Romanesque (The Fisher King), Classicism (12 Monkeys), Baroque (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and American Gothic (Tideland). Strategy of the reality "filtering" is also an excellent illustration of the Time Bandits, where the elements of presented video appeared to be children's toys, observed through zooming lens of the camera.

3.

Act of “plunder vision” (thus the exploitation of existing images), which Terry Gilliam makes in the archives of visual culture, makes him a collector of peculiarities - extraordinary imagination, crammed into film frames so tightly, that the identification of all details became possible only thanks to the technological revolution. This now allows the viewer to stop film at any time and to test it as if it was under “magnifying glass” (what, in effect, could let us dismantle it, turn it upside down and watch it in a whole new way.)

MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK Film critic and scholar, editor of the film reviews section of "Film", the Polish film monthly; programmer at Off Plus Camera IFF. He wrote the first Polish monograph of Terence Davies. Together with Kuba Mikurda, he published a booklong interview with Guy Maddin. His translation of J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Midnight Movies" was published in 2011. Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondent. His writings can be found at: www.oleszczyk.blogspot.com

As the director says: wander cabinet includes a multiplicity of various elements: a little of this, a little of that... And observer can choose himself, led by curiosity and free in some. Another time the director admits: I watch movies, I look at how they are made, and then I think: “I’ll take this, this and that.”

Gilliam's collector passion appears to correspond to the motto of the www.issuu.com/cyberempathy CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition) XVII-century collector Pierre Borel, who placed an inscription: „Here you will see the world at\ home, this is a microcosm or a compendium of all rare things” above the door of his wonder cabinet. Fashion on subjectively redecorated wander cabinets (which were displaced in the Age of Reason by rational museum collections) was turned out to be a measure of a great astonishment by the world and an attempt of taming of fears that haunted a modern man. Girolamo Cardano points out that people like what they know – what they have mastered by their senses.

“To master” – is a political word; “subtlety” involves the exploration of the Unknown. According to this view, there is no sphere of experience which itself is non-artistic. Though every “custodian” of wonder camera, a collage of fancy ready-mades, is an artist (hence the creator of the most distant relations - incompatible compliance).

4.

Contrary to appearances, the fact that the wonder cabinets’ structure is incomparably more organic than, for instance, a museum, is not the evidence of its totally amorphous nature. Although the Gilliam’s center of the world is almost always empty, filled by mirages, in the best case, elusive, the characters themselves are immersed in constant motion, overpowered by hermeneutical fever, combined with hope of finding the meaning of the story, they are participating in.

The metaphorical "movie book" functionalizes almost in every Gilliam’s world, expressing itself in the form of thick manuscripts, maps, notebooks, tables (filled with notes and newspapers’ cuts), collecting boxes filled with significant collections of valuable objects, altars (merging personal memorabilia), variable tarot cards’ configurations (which are equivalent to the story itself - as in the case of "The castle of crossed destinies" by Italo Calvino) and paranoid plans, which playback the networks of people, objects and places connections. Actually this "movie’ book" – which is a form of a diagram showing the content of narrated history - is the beginning of the method used and developed in Wundercamera.

The visual atlas (as a kind of emblem book - emblematum liber), describing the works of Terry Gilliam, is not only archiving the "path" he marked out, but also interpreting it in a subjective way, such as through hierarchisation of elements and highlighting the symmetry, visible in the relationship of individual parts of the puzzle. An attempt to find the right interpretive key in this case helped to mobilize the arsenal of different patterns of visual structures that are used in different fields of knowledge, such as anatomy (an instruction of intervention in a film body), archeology (tunnel as a time-space "well"), architecture (the tower of power, stressing vertical and horizontal social hierarchical voltage), astronomy (cosmological constellation of "bodies" wandering on orbits), geography (map of territories and forces working within the borders of the "represented world"), technology (user manual of fiction’ "building blocks") and the theory of games (board game as a gods "playground").

An attempt of including the “rejected” elements into ready ones determines placing medley print in the book, which is the image created by the juxtaposition of Gilliam’ visual inspirations, and also kind oftableau, documenting the course of the investigation conducted by the authors of the book.

The used method - which main advantage is the openness of image semantic structure - is not spending all the possibilities of visual analysis of the film image, of course; the other "door" could be opened up, for www.issuu.com/cyberempathy CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition) example, by using the color-code or - going forward - "spatial" hypertext narrative.

Generally speaking, one can say that filter, proposed in Wundercamera, works like wide-angle lens (often used by Gilliam), that allows a wider view of the situation, but at the cost of exaggeration of certain elements.

5.

The narrative created in the book is being opened and closed by the symbolic picture cage, depicted in two guises: a representation, compatible with the rules of geometry, and - finally –an imaginary impossible figure.

This metaphor can be understood in two ways.

The first interpretation of the image we can find in the preface by Kuba Mikurda: terms like "”eccentric”," mad visionary", "”outsider" (or even mandatory “member of Monty Python's Flying Circus”), somewhat close Gilliam in the show cage. In this book we try to identify at least a few ways to escape from the cage. But to do this, we had to "”forget Gilliam” we read about and the one we used to. We had to try - so far as possible – to watch his movies again, one by one, in sequence, as one film’ massive, the progress of images and stories that once again organize themselves around the same themes and opposition.

Another interpretation can be linked directly to the Gilliam "philosophy" of imagination.

Fantasia has nothing to do with a happy ending – it can lead to madness, serial murder, hearing voices in one’s head, which dictate the most terrible deeds – the director declared shortly after the release of his "The Damnation of Faust" opera, evoking a grim picture of the totalitarian power alliance with imagination. Mephistopheles - as an announcer and director’s porte-parole – explains to Faust the powerlessness of mind and his own alienation, which metaphorical image can be cubic monolith levitated among the "romantic" mountain landscape.

This ambivalence, related to the role of imagination, is perfectly illustrated by the vision of cage, hung in a vacuum - a vision which returns at least in several Gilliam’ films and gains probably the most spectacular dimension in the Time Bandits, where the characters wander among the swinging iron cubes in the dark, hoping to find a "permanent " ground. Many times „civilized" version of the prisoning appears at Gilliam’s: a salon, which is illusory oasis of peace, an illuminated spot in a dark space. But just behind the walls there is the start of the hell.

The paradox is hidden in the described situation, while the deliverance from "the mind cage" is not a guarantee of safety, or the final goal to be achieved – it can be a beginning of the journey, full of dangers. The one which denies the stability, aspired by prisoners. The phrase of ecologists in the “12 Monkeys” sounds equally ambiguous: Empty all the cages!. Thanks to fantasy, they get released from the "cage" (and coupled with the power of science) and become as dangerous as the virus, invisible to the eye.

Prison turns out to be asylum, influencing the imagination in a destructive way. On the other hand – Gilliam seems to explain – it’s due to fantasy that a prisoner becomes indivisible master of the cage, www.issuu.com/cyberempathy CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition) treating it with own, “impossible” rights.

You can also consider - Kuba Mikurda says - that this emptiness, which extends beyond the cage, in fact, is a screen emptiness, where we project products of our imagination. In this case, however, the projector is still in the cage.

6.

Perhaps it is not the coincidence that in the northern word wunderkammer resounds the Mediterraneancamera. In the modern era camera obscura became a metaphor for the eye and mind as a place to which the sensory impressions arrive in the form of images, the one formed into a new entirety.Wundercamera evokes this experience in a physical field.

Camera obscura is undoubtedly one of the symbols of modern "optical revolution”, complemented by the invention of the microscope and the telescope, through which man has become - perhaps more than ever before – “a Space being”. Relating to micro and macro, a size depends on the point of view, and that point is our imagination - phantasia. In fact, a fantasy was that area, the exploration of which was served by one more optical instrument. Although this invention had plenty of names in different ages, the one of them particularly well describes its nature. The term "phantascope " (fr. phantascope), created in the Age of Lights, combines two words (Greek phantasia - imagination / gr. skopéō - I look), one of which refers to the empirical sciences, and the other one refers to the subjective interpretation of their achievements. It is no wonder that phantascope, which was seen by its contemporaries as "stimulus of provocative excitement", turned out to be prefiguration of cinematography. (all citations are taken from the book titled Wundercamera. Terry Gilliam's Movies)

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI

THE GILLIAM’S ATLAS

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail The four edges of a chessboard are the four forces that interfere with the world of film on basis of deus ex machina: 1. The inside-film – the God who instructs the Arthur to find the Grail, when that one over-thinks and gives up the idea of reaching the castle of Camelot, and the police, which tracks the Round Table team and in the end accelerates the storming of the Aaargh Castle (thus making it impossible to get the Grail). 2. The Meta-film - the narrator (who is revealed on several levels - in the trailer, in the opening credits as the voice-over, as a hand turning the pages - first of the woman, then of the beast from the Beast), and the animator, whose sudden death saves lives of knights , who are fleeing from the many-eyed monster. The King Arthur is in the center of the chessboard, his four companions are in its four corners. Arthur, like King Bruno from the Jabberwocky (but also like the Deputy Minister in Brazil) could be named "the Questionable" - his power is an illusion. The plot of the film is dominated by castles (which are besieged and conquered by characters and which imprison them) or obstacles (usually in a form of knights, who must be overcome, avoided, or bestowed a hedge on) - both types of adventures are marked on the board.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Jabberwocky A concentric graph accords to the structure of the city, the political machine and the relationship between the characters. The empty throne of Bruno the Questionable is placed in the middle (certainly no one would notice his absence), surrounded by a circle of a bureaucracy (a secretary and heralds). "The royal sphere" is being torn by the four forces - the church, the craft guild, the mercantile guild and the knights.

The whole conflict takes place within the crumbling walls of the city. The monster prowls outside the walls, his tamer – Dennis Cooper – comes from the outside of the walls. Two knights are revolving around the monster, and Dennis is in-between the Princess and Griselda Fishfinger.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Time Bandits The home left by Kevin is in the middle; built of bricks, with a gap in the middle (Kevin comes out of it, pushing out one of the walls). Next worlds are built with the blocks removed from the house, the worlds, which are visited by the characters (elements of each of the worlds are modeled on the basis of toys and drawings in the Kevin’s room). The collection of worlds breaks up into two parts - the historic one and the legendary one.

The Supreme Being is circling on the outer orbit.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Brazil The center is empty in Brazile (like the throne of Bruno the Questionable in Jabberwocky) – there is only the Vice-Prime Minister, no Prime Minister himself (the highest authority figure). People, papers, excrements are revolving around the empty place. The housefly wanders in the middle, bulking the operation of an information machine; it produces a typo, heavy with fictional effects. The Sam Lowry's mother overlaps with the mistress on the following fantasy’ orbits and the chivalrous character’s alter ego overlaps with an enemy, whom it tries to overcome. Lastly, the border circle is also clouds, a smoke from factory chimneys and guts of the city-leviathan.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Münchhausen uses different means of transport to travel through the land of the four elements (air, fire, water and earth). He leaves and comes back to the city (one of the Gilliam’s Cities). In the film, someone always loses his head - the King of the Moon, the sultan’s subjects, the equestrian statue in the city center (which in the end appears to be the monument to Münchhausen). The city itself loses its head - towers are crumbling, buildings lose their roofs, and a city’ body is ripped by the conflict between mundane, biopolitical administrator Horatio Jackson and myth-creator Munchausen (the big Baron’s head flies to the sky on the movie poster). The second axis of the conflict is set by love and death.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

The Fisher King Gilliam turns New York into an early medieval city ("Jabberwocky meets Brazil"?) - a small area, Roman walls, cathedral towers. Vertical architecture reflects a social hierarchy system - from the tower of power with the Grail (the millionaire’s apartment) to the royal chambers (the Jack's house), to the tower with the princess (the Lydia’s editing house), to the peasant hut (Anne’ video library), to the dungeons (Parry’s boiler room). The two main characters basically move only vertically or horizontally - Jack falls from the top, gets up and climbs back (and in the end its him who has to climb to get the Grail), Parry runs along and across (fleeing from the blazing knight) and wanders through the streets.

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

12 Monkeys The graph refers, firstly, to rings of the mighty tree from the fragment of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, cited in the film, secondly, to the scheme of spreading the virus, which appears in one of scenes, thirdly, to the "tunnel" made of the Warner Bros. closing logo’ board (due to the used in 12 Monkeys quotes from popular animations, as well as a number of tunnels, shafts and wells). The central part - but also the end of the tunnel and the bottom of the well - is a beginning of the sequence of events that led to the outbreak of the epidemic. The James Cole’ orbit of the fantasy/memory’ about the airport becomes a place, where old James meets the young one (though the physicality of old Cole also has something of a big child) and the Blonde, in whom he recognizes doctor Railly in the end. The team of scientists from the future observes right behind the last circle – a half-blind providence.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas The fall begins with an exile from the paradise (the angel with a flaming sword at the hotel parking in Los Angeles), the spiral fall down to the center/bottom, which revolves around its own axis (carousel at Circus Circus casino). The spiral line is a tape cartridge with the record of the two leading protagonists following excesses, which is tried to play in the second part of the movie. According to the film's motto – which is "He who makes a beast/animal of himself gets rid of the humanity’ suffering " (the Samuel Johnson’ quote) – the heroes meet another "beast" on their way and it gets more and more human-like, transforming from a bat to a chimpanzee.

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

Tideland The shark-train rides on the outside orbit (like a shark circling around the victim?), sets a rhythm and a boundary of the film space, cut it from the rest of the world. The circle gets broken only in the end, the train derails, and therefore Jeliza-Rose leaves the "tideland." The heroine in there circulates between two nearly twin homes, hides the body of dead father and dead mother. Jeliza-Rose imaginary makes two couples - her father with Dell, the neighbor, and herself with Dickens, the Dell’s brother. The tree grows in the center of the world (the movie poster suggests that it grows above and below the ground) and rabbit-hole opens - the first words in the film are from the Alice in Wonderland: "Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her..."

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Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

The Brothers Grimm The center of the graph/the film’ world is taken by “the tower in the middle of the forest", in which the queen-witch is waiting to complete a magical ritual. The twelve graves are placed around the tower, like hours on a clock face. Insects, birds, trees in the forest, as well as the Brothers Grimm, are circling around the tower - literally (trying to find an entrance) and figuratively (trying to unravel the mystery of the local village girls’ disappearance). Battalion of the French army is stationed at the edge of the forest. General Delatombe, the representative of cultural intelligence (Jonathan Pryce factually recreates his role from Munchausen), orders to burn the forest – the refuge of romantic superstition.

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Panassus Doctor Paranassus and Mr. Nick are circling on the outer orbit – they are the incarnations of positive and negative principles of the film world.

Both negotiate its rules; their bet is the main narrative frame. The bet stake - Valentina, the Parnassus’ daughter - is located right in the middle between two mirrors ("His" and "Her). Selection of the one of the mirrors prejudges the outcome of the game, while still allows Valentina to leave the determined central position. The two rivals - Tony and Anton (Anti-Tony?) – revolve around the heroine.

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

The damnation of Faust The graph uses "animation" for separating sequential parts of the performance, the one based on a gradual rotation of the Vitruvian man

by Leonardo da Vinci - from the vertical position through the deviation from it to the complete reversal, that occurs in the final scene of Faust being reversely crucified at the swastika. The Cube, which Faust brings on his back in the first scene (in his lab, where he meets Mephistopheles) turns out to be a cross after unwrapping. The Nazi eagle is in the center. The claws, however, do not hold swastikas, but the clock face - which, on the one hand, suggests the inevitability of the historical process, staged by Gilliam ("the history falls here on head and on the neck" - he says in the interview), on the other hand, refers to the scene, in which Mephistopheles turns back time, thus proving his absolute power over of the world of performance.

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CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

KUBA MIKURDA, MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK, JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI

I'll take this, this and that TALKING WITH TERRY GILLIAM

While watching your movies, we kept noticing more and more connections, common elements and repeating motives.

Terry Gilliam: Right, but you should know that I don’t do these repetitions consciously. In such situations I always cite my wife, who says, that I keep making the same film only changing costumes. In some way this is true, because all my films have source in the ideas circulating in my head – it’s just that every time I apply those ideas in a somewhat different way. […]

One of our ideas about you is that you are rather a worldmaker, than a storyteller. Although in such movies as Munchausen or Parnassus the storyteller is in the middle, in the center, at the same time there is an interesting tension in your films as such, there is tension between storyteller and between worlds, like between Munchausen who wants to stay in the world and the girl who keeps saying: “Come on, keep telling…! They are waiting”.

I think this is really smart, because I think you understand the underlying structure in what I think I’m doing.

And could you tell us something about the structure?

It starts like this: with serious conflicting ideas. And then it becomes a kind of battle between them. And then, when I get bored with the structure, I just throw it in the air and bury it. I never become pedantic, I hope, about what I’m doing. I create a lot of rules and then sometimes it’s fun to break them all just to see what happens. But the wholeness in films is bigger than what appears on the screen. You got all these reasons, imagination, you got life, love and death - all of it is in there.

And I reach a point where I just forget what I’m doing. I’m going to start up with all these ideas and then reality comes: “We are run out of money, we are run out of time etc.” But hopefully those elements never get run away. They all held on during some way and sometimes that is not as successfully as I’d like it to be. […] usually in your films there is this couple of characters: the one who is more rational and the one who is more imaginative.

With the exception of Las Vegas Parano. www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI Graduated from ASP in Krakow (the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), where he currently conducts courses at the Narrative Drawing Studio. He is an independent curator, designer, creator of comics, artbooks, movies, installations and sitespecific projects for public space.

He analyses possibilities of usage of different visual narration forms as tools of theoretical reflection. He is co-creator of curator gonzo projects and member of the Quadratum Nigrum crew.

He is constantly cooperating with Ha!art Corporation (Polish: Korporacja Ha!art).

KUBA MIKUDA has studied psychology (MA, 2006) and philosophy (PhD, 2012). He has worked as a film critic, film curator, film book series editor, TV show host and TV show director. He has edited and co-edited books about Terry Gilliam, Brothers Quay, Guy Maddin, Tsai Ming-liang and surrealism in Polish cinema. He has taught visual culture at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow; he currently

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

But in Las Vegas there is this group of policemen and prosecutors, whom you can actually identify with the system.

But they are not the main characters. I think the difference is not that one is more rational than the other one, it’s just that one probably has morality with a little bit more structure; but only slightly. (laughter) Let’s stick to Munchausen and Brazil again…, the figure of rationality is usually associated with power - an institution, a state. And the other guy, he is not powerless, he has the power of emotions and can tell the story and stuff, but in Faust actually Mefisto is the one who is associated with a power of state and he is again on the side of fantasy, of creation – on the one hand he inspires the fascist machine, but, on the other, to him this machine is a show, the work of his imagination, his creation. In your earliest films you clearly tended to sympathize with those people on the side of fantasy…

I thought Mefisto is an interesting character. Faust is basically a puppet.

Again he is the rational man. It is about rationality to me. The way we work with science, we try to measure and then we can put a thing to the chest, we can label it, we can understand and control it. And the other side, the imagination side, is actually out of control, it’s the other side of us – just appreciating a mystery. An imagination springs out of that, but you are not trying to control it, you let it go. It’s a way our minds work.

Psychologist Steven Pinker describes the brain when it’s asleep: it’s like you are walking in the room, where thousand conversations are going on. When we are sleeping, sensory operates us - touch, smell etc. - and then the brain just gets the dance. And then you wake up, you hear something - so the world starts closing in, you feel something - then the world is closing in more, you open your eyes - and it all closes in.

Suddenly all conversations stop, and then we are trying to make sense of it, so the rational brain goes to work. I mean, we need both of these things, that’s why it’s in my films. I suppose I fight against the rational because this thing makes cages. I mean it happens to me: two halves of my brain are fighting each other.

teaches at the Film School in Łódź. In 2012 he became a member of Canal+ Poland Production Team and Vice-Editor-in-Chief of Film News Desk.

MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK Film critic and scholar, editor of the film reviews section of "Film", the Polish film monthly; programmer at Off Plus Camera IFF. He wrote the first Polish monograph of Terence Davies. Together with Kuba Mikurda, he published a book-long interview with Guy Maddin. His translation of J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Midnight Movies" was published in 2011. Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondent. His writings can be found at: www.oleszczyk.blogspot.co m

You tend to treat fantasy in ambiguous way in your films.

Of course, that’s why I don’t like when you normally talk about fantasy in films of Hollywood. They are all happy endings. No! It’s not that at all.

Fantasy is not guaranty of happy ending – it can lead to madness, it can lead to serial killers, it can lead to people having voices in their heads saying “kill them all”.

I guess Munchausen is the most affirmative in terms of fantasy; all the others are trickier.

I guess so - setting it in the XVIII century, the Enlightenment and all - I just had more fun. I mean, Munchausen is a liar. And I love the fact. And to me it always has been an interesting thing that the lie may be closer to the truth than the fact. I don’t want things to be nailed down, because the minute everything is nailed down life gets really boring. The more we all become like each other… this is really boring. Where are all the mysteries in the world? The darkest Africa is no longer very dark. We know too much. Maybe it’s again just kind of infantile attitude, I’ve always want to be the little kid who gets surprised by things.

When we talk about structure of your films, we try to find something which could be a metaphor of your worlds in www.issuu.com/cyberempathy CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition) creating. And we think it is not a museum, but more a Kunstkammer, a Cabinet of curiosity.

Yes, you are right.

Because it is not structureless, it has structure, but it’s an open form. And it’s more organic, more human-like.

I agree totally. That is what it’s about. A little bit of this interesting thing, a little bit of that interesting thing… And a viewer can choose, impelled by curiosity and somehow free. I had this idea when I was making the “imaginarium” in Parnassus. […]

If you talk about the structure of your films, about the conflict, things that base on some ideas, could you tell us how you work when you translate the idea into the image, any visuality you follow making this? For example in Munchausen Jackson is black and white and Munchausen is colorful. Is there a kind of system in this?

No, there is no system. It all is just instinctive. The costumes in Munchausen were designed by Gabriella Pescucci. I said I wanted the colors to be almost like Technicolor colors. So if you see the red, it’s really, really red. I was just going for almost primary colors. But there is no necessarily clarity in my logic. It is just instinctive. I just say: „I like that”. The more I behave instinctively, the better I normally am.

But there is always reference, like with Parnassus; I was quite obsessed with Norwegian painter cold Odd Nerdrum. So we started stealing from that some things. Other things then were Maxwell Parish’. So there is definite influence of painters when I’m looking at different types.

In Tideland it was Andrew Wyeth. We start with that and then we just go whichever direction we want to go. But the pro-choice to me whatever it is - you do a lot of research, you merge yourself and then you look, and look, and look; and you just throw it away and go. And then you are free. But if you really absorbed it, it’s there; it’s in all your decisions.

And what about The damnation of Faust? Mefisto was almost black and white and Faust had red firing hear. The contrast was strong, but different than we expect. We expect that Mefisto will be firing red.

That was the costume designer’s idea. She’d love the idea with red hear and we said: “Great. His head is on fire with ideas”. So we justified it after the fact.

On the other side – it’s very similar haircut to the one that the boss of the theatre group in Munchausenhas.

Here is my new description of what I do – I’m not an auteur (author), I’m a filteur (filter). (laughter) Because we start the process and then people come up with a lot of ideas and I’m the guy that lets those ideas through or not. And I just liked the red, so I justified things afterwards by saying: “Because his mind is so full of ideas his head is burning with ideas”. But if I have to do an interview about it, I’ve got an answer. (laughter) […]

You are usually perceived as a creator, as someone who creates from the scratch. But again you tend to underscore the importance of finding things. Like in the surrealistic tradition www.issuu.com/cyberempathy CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition) - the found objects...

Yes, like the computer in Brazil. It’s a found object. But it’s a found and manipulated object. (laughter) And you then start playing with it – start the process to get straight to the machine. We take the cover of, we see the guts, now we need a television screen (the smallest one we can find) and when we can’t see anything else, we put a magnifying screen. It grows like that. And suddenly you’ve got something. It’s like being a sculptor; it’s like being an artist. Most artists open our eyes to the world.

Sometimes you can do it by taking that thing and making people see what it really is by turning it upside down. […]

London, 7th of May, 2011 An interview was conducted by Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk and Jakub Woynarowski.

Authors of questions: Mariusz Frukacz, Błażej Hrapkowicz, Kaja Klimek, Michał Ligęza, Stanisław Liguziński, Jakub Majmurek, Kuba Mikurda, Piotr Mirski, Jagoda Murczyńska, Magda Nawisielska, Michał Oleszczyk, Bogna Rosińska, Maciej Stasiowski, Maciej Stroiński, Kamila Wielebska, Jakub Woynarowski

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI

More Illustrations for Terry Gilliam's Movies

JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI Graduated from ASP in Krakow (the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), where he currently conducts courses at the Narrative Drawing Studio.

He is an independent curator, designer, creator of comics, artbooks, movies, installations and site-specific projects for public space.

He analyses possibilities of usage of different visual narration forms as tools of theoretical reflection. He is co-creator of curator gonzo projects and member of the Quadratum Nigrum crew.

He is constantly cooperating with Ha!art Corporation (Polish: Korporacja Ha!art).

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication

Empathy Issue 2/2011. The Gilliam’s Atlas (Special Edition)

www.issuu.com/cyberempathy

CyberEmpathy Journal of Visual Communication