in collaboration with Federica Iodice
On this blog it is available an Italian version, translated by Silvia Tarquini: j.mp/intervista_EFS
This interview is part of an Artdigiland project supported by Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, Italy
The Experimental Film Society is an independent collective of people who work in the field of experimental cinema, founded in 2000 by the Iranian director Rouzbeh Rashidi, and based in Dublin. EFS is a project which brings together filmmakers from all over the world, with a common interest in researching "alternative" cinema. www.experimentalfilmsociety.com
What do you mean by experimental film?
Maximilian Le Cain: On the one hand, it’s sort of a good shorthand way of telling an audience that what you’re going to get is something unusual. It’s not going to be a traditional narrative, it’s not going to be a documentary in the sense that most people understand it. It’s going to be something hopefully unexpected. But, more importantly, the way we work is quite experimental. We take the elements of cinema and we play with them and rearrange them and work on them in such a way that, speaking generally, we really only know what our film is going to be on the last day of editing. So it really is a process of experimentation. And Rouzbeh goes even further, he’s often compared himself to Dr Frankestein!
Rouzbeh Rashidi: If I were to add anything, it would be something like Jonas Mekas always says: if you think narrative cinema is like a novel or literature, experimental film is something like poetry where we have atmosphere, where we have ambiguity and obscurity. Vagueness, I suppose. This is a very straightforward, simple answer but I think it works. But, as Max said, it’s a very complex question.