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www.pnop.com top movie recommendations

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Not to our surprise,
the BBC asked for a script or an idea

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for what we wanted to base the film on.

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And prior to this we'd seen an exhibition
at the Hayward Gallery, based on...

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It was called ArtAnd Psychosis,

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or it was called Beyond Reason,

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which was works from the Prinzhorn collection,

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which was a collection
of what is called "outsider art",

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or the art of the insane.

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And it's based in Heidelberg.

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It's a collection that Hans Prinzhorn
collected in the early 1900s,

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and in particular, there was one...

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...set of images or drawings

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by a woman called EH,

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which we discovered later was Emma Hauck.

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Born in 1878, died in 1928.

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Occupation: none. Marital status: married.

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Diagnosis: dementia praecox.

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The image was so powerful,

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of letters written to her husband

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that were deeply disturbed...

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...writing, which was like...

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She would write over the top of
the original letter again and again and again,

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to a point where it became
almost a graphite blur of imagery.

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So we said
that this was what the film would be about.

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I should also say, on top of this,

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that Stockhausen, when he did announce

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that the music would arrive
on August 29th at 12 o'clock,

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it did in fact arrive August 29th.

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At that time we had been...

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Prior to that time,
we had been doing some camera tests,

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anticipating his music,

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which I think
we had a general kind of sense of feeling for.

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And these tests are, as you can see,

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a combination of us trying to trap light,

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as a kind of natural phenomena in our studio,

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and although this décor that you see
in front of you looks fairly abstract,

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it was something that I think
we initially threw down as a gopher.

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We just said
that we wanted to observe the light,

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and we just needed something
for it to kick against.

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Yeah, I think we sort of constructed
a very ad-hoc, abstract set,

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using gauzes and allowing light to penetrate...

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Our studio's situated
that we have a set of windows

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that reveal the light, the sun,

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arising from the east,

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and it would rise in English summers

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at around 4:30 in the morning,

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so we'd have the Mitchell...

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This was our last 35mm film.

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So, as you can see, in a sequence like this,

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you can see there how the light is slowly rising,
and moving,

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and this is pixilated light, time-lapsed.

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In other words,
we would shoot, not by any mechanical way,

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but we would just sort of count every five
seconds and shoot one shot at a time.

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But at the same time, simultaneously,

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we were actually animating...

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...the puppet or windows or objects
exactly at that same moment,

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so we were sort of responding

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both to real light rising in...

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So, ifwe set our brief
to animate every five seconds,

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we would have to animate the ball or the object
within those five seconds.

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One of the ideas
that we'd read about in Adolf Wölfli

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was that it's a part of his...

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...which is one of the other mad artists
that we talked about in the Gilgamesh film,

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This Unnameable Little Broom...

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was that he had a...

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The authorities who ran the asylum
gave him two pencils a day.

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And just to capsulate -

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at this very moment in the film,

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we didn't have the actress on board.

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She wasn't available,
and so we substituted one of ourselves,

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dressed up in this costume,

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which in fact is the costume from Institute
Benjamenta, Lisa Benjamenta's costume.

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So, the close-ups of the hands are one of us.

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I think that, in terms of...

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the whole film was built out of...

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...taking the notion of light,

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and almost making it a kind of...

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refracting it through a psychotic... or through...

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a prism.

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The prism of a window.

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Not only the window, but Emma Hauck's brain.

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I think it was a kind of approximation
of her psychosis.

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And also, it's almost like...

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To a certain degree,
it's like the back of her skull had been removed

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and that she was just open to the slightest...

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...flickerings or movements of light.

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And the feeling of...
here, when you see the light varying like this,

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it was just something that...

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In actual fact,
these were clouds moving across the sky,

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but because we were shooting every...

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For instance,
this is a slow tracking shot forwards,

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which we were animating on hands and knees.

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You know, moving in one millimetre at a time,
like that, and then shooting a frame,

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so the passage of time
might have been 15 seconds.

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So, imagine a whole array of...

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...in the English landscape...

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lmagine the clouds
rolling across the sun like that.

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It creates this powerful flickering.

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But at first we sort of assumed
that it was a defect,

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and then we immediately realised

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that of course it presents absolutely brilliantly
a sort of psychosis...

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Those massive, violent fluctuations.

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And, of course, all of this
set against Stockhausen's quite cosmic music,

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which has these...

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♪ Whining electronic instrumentation

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It's a sort of...

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...a fresco of music, which is full of...

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...crescendi, silences,

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of laughter, derisive laughter...

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...all setting up this sense of belittlement,

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of a psychosis,
which is prey to the slightest variations...

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...of how the environment responds.

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And of course...

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...we based... powerfully...

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...by focusing on, right here, for instance,
the lead of a pencil.

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The pure graphology of a woman

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whose entire existence
of writing letters to her husband,

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which we never know
ifthey ever even got that far to her husband,

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was based on wearing down of pencil points
and creating - right here for instance -

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this little graveyard
of the last remnant of one piece

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of the finest bit of a pencil point.

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And of course the image here for us was like...

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This was a sort of metaphor for the husband,

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the far-off husband in a parallel realm.

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It didn't matter whether he was
some kind of vague monster, or what.

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And here we've emphasised the sequence

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where it's as though she had to...

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clean the glass of the prism of her window,
to see...

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not that she actually saw daylight,

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but that she could feel this sense of...

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...of allowing light or daylight
or the outside world

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to inundate, to enter her realm,
and to pour into her.

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But of course it ends up
being a trope of obsessiveness,

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of looking for the tiniest particle of dirt,

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or something that might block, obstruct the light.

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Here at last our actress came on board.

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Again, here you see a long interlude...

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it's a kind of light cadenza,

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where we had set up a whole series of mirrors
on the floor of the studio,

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because the light moved across,
through a series of windows in our studio,

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and we had the mirrors pre-rigged,

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to reflect back the light up onto this one,

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the only window that we had,

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which was a real, life-sized Viennese window,

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that we found in a second-hand shop in Vienna.

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And this is the one thing we carted back with us,

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and we had... with our assistant, Ian Nicholas,
we constructed this window.

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We built one tiny little wall in our studio,

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with just this window,

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and just the elements of a room, with this clock.

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And originally,
a lot of the scenes with the close-ups...

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This is the hand of my brother
coming in to redirect...

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It was actually...

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He was trying to modify
the actress's, Nicole's, hand, to do something.

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And I was watching through the lens,

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and I just turned over,
because I thought it was such a...

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To see this other, third amputated hand
enter the frame,

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that it actually was, as it were...

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could have represented the husband's hand,

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or some other...

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♪ Scream-like electronics

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...abstract notion
of these other forces directing her.

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A lot of the close-ups of the hands
were actually...

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...my brother's hand, because Nicole wasn't
quite capable of creating the sense of almost...

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spasmodic quality of when she's writing,
to be really intense,

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and because it was hard to bring in somebody

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just to do close-ups of your fingers
gripping a pencil,

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that we thought we could do perfectly well
ourselves, for instance here.

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And very important for us was the whole idea
of trying to keep her as anonymous as possible,

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either the back of her neck...
and eventually... and, as well, only her hands.

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Here again,
my brother's face leaned into the frame.

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I caught it as a test...

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and realised that again it was
as though the husband was talking to her...

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...in a mysterious transferral.

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We were also shooting...

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...in Vienna at the time,
working on a theatre piece,

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and in the evenings
we would walk around with our 8mm camera,

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and we discovered this scene here,
with the curtains blowing in a window.

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We shot a whole sequence of this,
and then had it blown up to 35mm,

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and incorporated into these scenes here.

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But they had a... it was a sense of...

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...parallel...
correspondence of her emotional realm,

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of this sort of sucking in and sucking out.

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And again, the slightest whim of a breeze

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would have such an emotional...

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...bearing upon her sensibility.

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What's interesting is that afterwards,

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Stockhausen told us that he hadn't the slightest
image in mind when he made this music...

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...which for us is astonishing.

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And even though the piece
was actually called A Pair,

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which we discovered later,

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and in a way
we'd invisibly been working on the idea

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of the wife and the invisible husband
being the pair.

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(Whimpering and shouting)

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This is a little automaton that we built.

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Even to this day,
we're not quite sure of its purpose,

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other than to say that it was...

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It's almost as though she's sitting
on top of her own psychosis in the...

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knowing that she's...

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Or maybe it's a childhood memory of her...
in her... the liberty of that, before she...

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and yet shackled with this neurosis,
this schizophrenia,

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which is manifested in the shackles.

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This was the one time
that we revealed the actress's face,

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and we were hoping to keep it more in shadow,
but we failed.

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But here you see that it's a whole landscape
of shaved sharpenings of a pencil, of the...

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Pencil shavings,

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which cover the floor.

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♪ Pulse-like electronics

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I know the music was at times so intensive,

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that we felt we could only listen
to seven seconds a day.

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And that was our kind of apportionment
for that very day.

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And there's such... in the music
there's such moments of... vast moments of...

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...derision and belittlement of her,

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and mockery of her...

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as though these voices
were mocking her efforts.

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And yet there's this sense of chaos inside her,
but in order to control that chaos,

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this attempt all the time of trying to score...

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these moments of writing to her husband.

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Again, I think that's one of our hands doing this,
whilst it's Nicole slapping her neck.

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And you have a sense
of a fractured narrative here -

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there's no way her hands
could be around her neck and the pencil.

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Almost as though she's observing herself.

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And this is actually the real writing
of Emma Hauck, from the exhibition.

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This is the way she wrote to her husband.

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And of course our idea... we developed it...

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...in the clock here.

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It's a clock that we have in our studio,

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but we realised that...
where you can see the pendulum swing,

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we realised that we never knew
whether the letters reached her husband.

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It's also a postbox.

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And then it became a vast postbox... of which
of course they never reached her husband,

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and they just piled up.

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And time was going in reverse,
unbeknownst to her.

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And always it was the resetting of time.

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And again we return to this abstract
cosmic landscape, where time rolls on.

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This landscape here
was only about a metre wide on a little tabletop.

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And here we have the idea

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of just one of the caretakers in the museum -
in the asylum!

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You know,
we can return to the idea of the two pencils -

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that here's her daily allotment,
and that he will come.

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It's also her ration
to a kind of sanity within insanity,

243
00:18:12,280 --> 00:18:15,159
and she awaits it with great expectation.

244
00:18:15,160 --> 00:18:18,160
And Stockhausen,
when we first presented this film to him...

245
00:18:18,600 --> 00:18:21,159
We had to travel to Cologne
to present the film to him,

246
00:18:21,160 --> 00:18:23,839
and at the end of the screening,

247
00:18:23,840 --> 00:18:26,840
a BBC documentary crew had arrived with us,

248
00:18:28,280 --> 00:18:30,639
because they wanted to do an interview.

249
00:18:30,640 --> 00:18:33,640
And at the end of the screening
there was this commotion with Stockhausen.

250
00:18:35,040 --> 00:18:38,039
Timothy and I were standing in the background,

251
00:18:38,040 --> 00:18:40,639
and what had happened

252
00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:43,439
was that Stockhausen was crying.

253
00:18:43,440 --> 00:18:45,759
And what he felt was that the woman,

254
00:18:45,760 --> 00:18:48,760
the back of her neck,
in this anonymity, was his mother,

255
00:18:50,160 --> 00:18:53,160
because the Nazis had taken her away
and exterminated her,

256
00:18:54,160 --> 00:18:56,559
and that he presumed
that we had known about this,

257
00:18:56,560 --> 00:18:59,239
and that this film
was us scoring an element of that.

258
00:18:59,240 --> 00:19:01,279
And of course we didn't know that bit.

259
00:19:01,280 --> 00:19:04,280
Therefore, he thought that we were telepathic,
and we had to tell him we weren't.

260
00:19:06,240 --> 00:19:08,959
It made a deep impression on him,

261
00:19:08,960 --> 00:19:11,960
and what we liked in a way was
that he said that what we had done was that...

262
00:19:13,120 --> 00:19:15,250
he had written the images
and that we had created the music.

263
00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:19,124
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