In the Editing Suite, Syliva Pass

IN THE EDITING SUITE, SYLVIA PASS / CATHERINE MEYBURGH & WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

CM:

… It starts with the bellows coming out of the signals

(music and pumping sounds in background)

… Then the bellows could come in here – (WK on film in the background: “the idea of bringing hygienic time to the institutions and citizens of Paris…”)

… Slowly fading—and that may be the way to go.

WK:

Let’s watch that again.

CM:

It’s quite slowly coming out of confetti on screen 3… Screen 1 is the single

coffee pot and at slightly different times, the others also form, so – WK:

We have five coffee pots –

CM:

All five coffee pots. They are blown into the air again, single coffee pot

again, or a double coffee pot. So, four coffee pots on either side, blown away, and then we have the megaphones. That was the sequence.

WK:

No other images?

CM:

None.

WK:

But if we’re speeding it up now –

CM:

If you speed it up, then I’ll bring in more images.

WK:

I think it’s good in the middle to have a section where the objects change

quickly.

CM:

Do we have, say, the rhino on screen 3 and the globe on screen 1 and the head

and typewriter on the other screens, or are they all the same?

WK:

No, I think it’s good if you play with them. So you blow a typewriter from

projection 1 to projection 6, and the head flips or shifts around. So I think there can be a migration. In other words, sometimes we’ll have all the same images, and then when they blow up they can also shift across the different screens, as if a kind of a signal has been sent from one side of the room to the other. I think that’s good. What would you end with?

CM:

I thought of going back to the bellows.

(Music in background begins again.)

WK:

To end it with, but what about these images? At the moment you’ve got

the megaphones, the double megaphones, which I think are good for the whole piece, for the whole project. Would you have megaphones all around the whole room?

CM:

I think that ending with the bellows will…

WK:

OK.

CM:

At the moment, I have us ending on the black confetti covering the screen again.

WK:

Maybe that’s a good…

CM:

That’s how I’ve got it.

WK:

I think that’s the right way. What comes out of it, where do we go to after the…?

CM:

The twins.

291

-INSERT F-TEXTE MEYBURGH 230x310.indd 291

26/07/12 13:26

WK:

Into the twins, so then it’s into the book. I think it’s better to come

to the book, from the confetti than from the bellows.

CM:

It’s a clean start on the black. With the bellows, I need to fade them out,

or do something with them. I’m thinking that in the beginning they can all be together and then as it develops they break up at different times.

WK:

Oh absolutely.

CM:

That cat is swirling, the coffee pot settles, the globe is swirling,

and the typewriter settles.

WK:

I think we’ve got a sense also of a moving fan that’s moving around a room,

so your curtains swirl when the fan hits it; then ten seconds later it hits the pieces of paper on the desk—rather than everything being caught in the same gust of air.

CM:

That’s what I was thinking—because trying to make it work like Anti-Mercator

is just not happening.

WK:

No. In Anti-Mercator we had clear, big breaths of air that would shift

everything—and that was also one screen. Here we’re working on five different screens. I think we can allow a syncopation, images arriving, and being blown away into their confetti.

CM:

It’s not that long. There won’t be that many more images than we have now.

WK:

Well, the point is, if you allow many different images on the different screens,

even if they’re just seen once, we give ourselves five or six other possibilities.

I think we want to get a sense of ‘this could be otherwise’; the world could be otherwise, the coffee pot could be a typewriter, the typewriter could be a globe.

If you see that once, you understand the principle.

CM:

I like all the megaphones together.

WK:

We definitely start with coffee pots together.

CM:

Do we have two lots of coffee pots coming down together, or do we have just

the one coffee pot and then we start changing?

WK:

I like the coffee pots, and—oh, whatever you blow up, the sense they’re going

to turn into the same damn coffee pots. And then a surprise – CM:

And then there’s the megaphone and after that they start breaking up?

WK:

Or otherwise they could just break up from coffee pot or other images and

end up as megaphone.

CM:

At the end.

WK:

I think that would be the way I would do it.

CM:

That’s a good idea. Together.

WK:

Or a staggered arrival, but all seen together, and then going into the black

paper from there. The black paper can be a premonition of the black hole that we’re going to get to in the end.

WK:

OK. Sometimes we discuss a sequence, or you have the material, and then you go

into a deep silence, you and the machine. I want to know what’s happening in your head in the silence. What’s the dialogue you’re having with yourself?

CM:

I’m re-editing all the images five hundred times at the same time.

WK:

Talk me through that re-editing images in your head.

292

-INSERT F-TEXTE MEYBURGH 230x310.indd 292

26/07/12 13:26

CM:

I’m looking, I’m thinking, and OK, if I put this cat here and then I have

the globe there and then I have the bellows to confetti sequence here… OK, no I don’t like that, OK let’s try globe, cat, bellows, no, let’s move typewriter there and try cat here and bellows slow and confetti fast and this one and then, no…

I keep doing that until I get to a point where I think maybe it’s worth sharing…

WK:

So it’s not one monologue that’s going on in your head, there are many

possibilities that are being tested out in a kind of virtual screen in your head?

CM:

Yes.

WK:

And do you see them?

CM:

I do. I see them in my head, I see the construction on the timeline and how it’s

going to look and how it’s going to work and then obviously also the music and how that’s going to impact, and knowing the points in the music which I’d like to aim for and where I’d like those pieces to be; and then figuring out, OK that’s not going to last long enough to enjoy that moment, so maybe it has to be different.

Maybe it needs to be something else.

WK:

And when you actually do it and you’ve typed it out on the computer and you see

the sequence on the screen, is there a difference or does that make you then go back to other images you’d stored in your head?

CM:

Sometimes it makes me go back. With the rendering, what’s so difficult is that

I can’t look at it immediately, to say “OK, that’s going to work,” or, “obviously that’s not going to work.” Thinking through it in my head is important because once I’ve made a decision, a lot of time is spent leaving it overnight for the computer to render. I hope that I have made the right decision, because the next day when I look at it, hopefully it’s working.

WK:

This is very different from editing film, where you have the physical material,

and you can see roughly, even without perfect dissolves, how something looks as you do it.

CM:

Well, it would be like that if it wasn’t so layered. If it was just a straight

timeline with shots one after the next then I’d just put them in, reshuffle them, and try them in a different way. Actually do it on a timeline not even only in my head, experiment more physically with it. But with these layers… For the coffee pot sequence, I’ve got the background layer, I’ve got constantly swirling little bits of paper layer, then I have the coffee pot or whatever other object it is.

And then also in some areas I have another layer where there are bald spots, where I would like a particular bit of confetti to be flying.

WK:

So you are actually constructing the whole random flying of the confetti.

CM:

I’m trying to make it look as random as possible and that takes lots of extra layers.

WK:

When I see it, I think, gosh, didn’t we flap that confetti well! It all arrives

at just the right point.

CM:

The metronomes also look very simple. But they have been very heavily graded so

that we don’t see all the edges. Layered underneath that, there is also a background.

Because when I freeze the arm of the metronome, I can’t actually freeze it in any position I want, because of the movement; it means it’s all out of focus.

293

-INSERT F-TEXTE MEYBURGH 230x310.indd 293

26/07/12 13:26

So we have to construct one. So we cut and paste a little arm from a static one, and then we can put that wherever we want it on the metronome in each of the positions. But that takes quite a few layers to do.

WK:

So you’re dealing here not just with multiple layers, but of course with

the five screens that we use, when you’re going into this dark space in yourself and you’re seeing this film in your head? It’s interesting because with the image, it’s doing the layers under one’s fingers and seeing it. With you, it’s imagining it in your head, then seeing it on the screen and then going back and redoing it.

In a strange way, the digital makes it more labor intensive in some ways.

CM:

Because of the possibilities.

WK:

Because of the possibilities, and once you have those possibilities, you can’t

ignore them.

CM:

If you were working in film you wouldn’t have that.

WK:

We would have had to get the background right first time round. But here,

because we can change the background to the confetti…

CM:

… We can do as we like. Imagining the five screens is the big thing. When

I’m editing, even when working on one timeline, I keep going back to the other timelines to say OK, make sure this particular moment on this timeline, this is what’s happening, so therefore, this.

WK:

It seems that what you’re doing in the edit is also a kind of demonstration

of the argument of the piece about multiple times. There are all these different timelines, moments when they coalesce and they are in sync, other moments when they drift apart—and there’s an anarchic possibility of the timelines getting completely out of control.

CM:

It’s amazing, it’s fantastic actually, because it’s exactly that. With the

melodramas, all the possibilities of how you could reconstruct the storyline with different endings, different beginnings, making the beginning an end, or an end the beginning, or the middle a repeat of something else completely—and not feel restricted. It’s been amazing, that interaction between all the time zones.

WK:

Like different time zones, the room, not the twenty-four time zones of the world,

but the five different time zones of the screens… And every now and then you hear the pips of Big Ben all around the world at the same instant and set your watches.

It’s the same with the projections around. You are, as it were, the clock room of Greenwich Observatory, giving us all our midday signal at its….

294

-INSERT F-TEXTE MEYBURGH 230x310.indd 294

26/07/12 13:26