Interview with Peter Liechti, winner of Documentary Award
This year’s documentary award goes to Peter Liechti’s unique study of a suicide, the film THE SOUND OF INSECTS – Record of a Mummy. The decision was made by an independent jury composed of documentary filmmaker Nino Kirtadzé (France/Georgia), Austrian producer and ORF editor Franz Grabner, and Russian documentary filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky. After screening all ten nominated documentaries, the jury decided to award THE SOUND OF INSECTS “for its skillful exploration of minimalistic means to create an extraordinary visual story between life and death”.
The EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY DOCUMENTARY – Prix ARTE is presented in association with the European culture channel ARTE and the winner will be honoured at the 22nd European Film Awards Ceremony on Saturday, 12 December, in Bochum/Germany.
Herr Liechti, congratulations on the European Film Award. When did you hear about it and what was your initial reaction?
I was out for a walk with friends on the countryside when my cell phone rang and I received the news from Vilnius. It was wonderful! We immediately wanted to celebrate with a glass of champagne or at least sparkling wine but we were literally in the middle of nowhere. We ended up in a tavern and had a great regional dinner and some must.
Can you tell us what THE SOUND OF INSECTS is about and what makes it unique?
For me, the whole subject is outstanding. When I first heard about a man who committed suicide by starving himself to death, I was very irritated. It is a very long and painful process. And there was no clear motive either. With time I realised it is not a film about death but about life. For me, that was the key access to the subject. I tried to tell a life backwards, with death as a sort of birth.
We never see the man, we only hear his voice. Did he actually exist?
Yes and no. There was no Swiss man who starved himself to death. His monologue is based on the novel Miira ni Narumade by the Japanese author Shimada Masahiko which is based on a Forensic report by the Tokyo police. I don’t know what parts of it are authentic and what is fictionalised, and I wasn’t interested in it either.
How did you develop the concept and visuals?
For a long time I asked myself: What point of view would be appropriate? I settled for a prologue in which you can see the setting from outside, like in a crime story with the dead body and the policemen, while a narrator very prosaically reports on what has happened. After that I changed the point of view but it is not a “subjective” one. The voice is not the man who died but someone reading his journal. I, as a filmmaker, try to re-trace these emotions as authentically as possible and try to transfer that to the audience. What is it like to be alone in the woods? The coldness, the dampness, the darkness, the noises… What is it like to slowly fade away?
Not only do we see images of nature, of clouds, but also of streets and people in trains. What do these images tell us?
Besides the prologue that I mentioned, there are three visual narratives. First, the physical presence with images of the woods and the tarpaulin that he had built up and that functions like a projection screen in the film. Then there are the immediate memories with images of the city that he apparently left behind, the casino, the train ride. As time passes, those images fade and in the end, they stop appearing at all. And the third is the most important one, especially when someone is on his own for a long time: the introspection. Dreams and desires, and with agony also come hallucinations and visions.
Was every image shot for this film? Or did you also use archive footage?
The first two narratives were entirely shot for the film. And three-quarters of the introspection, which was shot on Super-8, consist of material that I shot for the film and the rest are images from my personal Super-8 diary that I have been keeping for the last 20 years.
So these are really your own memories, dreams and desires.
Yes! I even shot the other three-quarters in a way so that they also relate to me. It all comes from me, I didn’t want to empathise with another character. This narration is sort of “anything goes” so in order to confine it, I emanated from very personal images.
How detailed was the script?
The concept with the four visual narratives was there, including the prologue. It was always clear that there would be no visible protagonist and that the viewer is invited to take on that role. A lot was very clear, only the images at that point were still rather speculative. I didn’t know what I would encounter and that is the documentary part of the film.
How long were you actually in the woods yourself for shooting these images?
Never for a long time, to be honest. Once I stayed for two days and nights in a row but apart from that I avoided that. We set up location in the Alpstein region, about 1000 m above sea level. All in all, I went there 12 times, mostly accompanied by my director of photography.
Your film is not easy to categorise, it is both documentary and experimental. Do you feel at home in the documentary award category?
I was always against such categorisations but if I have to choose I’d say it’s more of a documentary because of the way it was shot. I personally don’t categorise my work at all. I am interested in cinema in general.
In your other work you change from fiction to documentary to essay. How do you describe your approach to filmmaking? Do you have a recurrent theme or a leitmotif?
My films are a personal process. I try to get to the bottom of an idea or a subject by making a film about it. And I try to follow that road as honest as possible. For that purpose, sometimes fictional means are better and other times documentary means are better. The ideal would be to not make that distinction at all.
Documentaries have been very successful in recent years, both critically and at the box office. Is there a new creative freedom in the genre because of that? Or do you feel more like a lone wolf, really?
I can only hope that there is more freedom. I haven’t experienced this until this jury decision. I am still confronted with that fundamentalist resistance of many documentary film makers who believe that my approach does not belong in their nest. And it’s the same with fiction feature directors. It is changing with the younger generation of filmmakers, though. They are more open, less obsessed with categories. I always called my films essays. And I never wanted to be a lone wolf; I always look for exchange with colleagues, and with the audience. If you look at a film like SANS SOLEIL by Chris Marker from 1983, it becomes clear that my film is not so cutting-edge after all.
Telephone interview by Thomas Abeltshauser
