'U2 3D' Not the First IMAX Art Film: An Interview with Elka Krajewska

Despite justly rapturous reactions to Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington’s recent concert tour documentary film U2 3D, is it, as Matt Zoller Seitz says in his 1/23/08 New York Times review, “the first IMAX movie that deserves to be called a work of art”? Not so, says Brett Kashmere, Canadian experimental documentary filmmaker (Valery’s Ankle) and writer, who commented to me by email several days after Seitz’s review ran. “By the way,” he adds, “IMAX film was developed in Canada by members of our National Film Board for Expo 67 in Montreal. Some of the first IMAX films were experimental works of art. And, in the 1970s or 80s, Stan Brakhage painted on IMAX stock (which, printed down to 35mm, later became part of The Dante Quartet); however, IMAX refused his requests to project the film using their technology. To this day I don’t think it’s ever been seen that way.”

Closer to here and now, New York City-based filmmaker Elka Krajewska’s Plany Mela for dome was screened/performed last April 21st in upstate New York at Bristol IMAX Omnitheater, part of New Vision/New Sound/Big Screen, a special program of the 4th Syracuse International Film Festival (SIFF) of experimental works relating image to music. Plany Mela included live performances by Krajewska and her project collaborator, the musician/composer/writer Alan Licht, also based in New York City.

This single evening’s program – also including work by computer artist Heath Hanlin, photographer/video artist Carrie Mae Weems and video artist Bill Viola – was entirely sold out. That unexpected turn of events created a snarl in seating logistics that delayed the program’s start over half an hour, unnerving to Krajewska because – like Brakhage – she hadn’t received specific IMAX approval and wasn’t entirely sure moment to moment that it would actually go forward.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1967, Krajewska has an MFA in photography from Yale University. Having brought her trademark micro-collage films to SIFF previously, she developed Plany Mela specifically for a one-time screening/performance at the Syracuse IMAX. Krajewska collected source images for Plany Mela during the summer of 2006 on a three-month trip along 2180 miles of the Polish border, encountering strangers on a daily basis, screening her own work from a portable projector that she wore on her head, and documenting her interactions. She says Plany Mela “addresses porous relationships between periphery and center, stimulates our remembering eye, activates our blind spots and renounces target thinking.”

In its entirety, Plany Mela lasted about half an hour, consisting of a 90-second film collage that screened three times, alternating with two sessions of live, improvised music that Licht performed from the floor of the theater while Krajewska, next to him, manipulated and projected video images from a webcam beside her. Krajewska believes this 15/70 mm film/digital collage/video hybrid was the first such work of its kind that combined these formats, specifically created for and performed in an IMAX theater. In not officially supporting Krajewska’s experimental work, the IMAX Corporation judged her use of low-resolution video images and some film portions as “below IMAX standards.”

The month following the film festival’s conclusion, Krajewska and I recorded a lengthy audio interview. A portion was broadcast on Women’s Voices Radio, on NPR-affiliate station WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM. Here is an extended version of that conversation.

NKR:First of all, what does the title mean?

Elka Krajewska (EK): The long title is Plany Mela for dome. The first part is in Polish and it means Plans of Mel (or Mel’s Plans). Mel is a boy whom I met along the routes of my trip. It was kind of like a training trip. I traveled with a projector mounted on my head for three months along the border of Poland where I’m originally from, collecting material for the collage that I would do for one of the sections of the movie. Mel was six and had sort of incredible powers. He gave me a lot of drawings – most of them illustrating his plans for irrigation systems or explaining what he saw in my movies – and some understanding of the purpose of actually making art. So I decided to include him in the title, as a good omen. On the poster for the film some of his drawings are included as well.

NKR:Could you explain the technology of this project?

EK: It is a hybrid that originated as a 90-second film for an IMAX dome theater. Somehow I always work in a very, very short format to make you aware and be alert for every little second. But I wanted to stretch that 90 seconds to a half hour performance and the dome technology actually collaborated with me, because an IMAX projector has to be re-loaded every time something is played. To play the 90 seconds again there was a ten to twelve minute gap. During that gap I made live video improvisations together with a musician improvising music. So we had an alternating sequence of film – it was 70 mm IMAX format film – then a 12-minute video that was put together live, with a lot of different controls, so I could control independent layers that could work together as a collage. Then back to film, and video and film again. To describe the film, it’s a circular, ring-like collage of many layers that rotate at different speeds around a hollow center. When the movie finished, that center is filled in with video projection. As I told you, I collected the materials for that collage last summer – I was doing door-to-door, very intimate screenings to people at the periphery of the country that I come from, who did not expect me. Walking into strangers’ houses and saying, “Here I am. This is what I do. Uh – give me something in return.” So the collage has lots of what stuck to me during those meetings with people as visual elements. It looks like a dense visual mess, but it’s actually kind of a map of these very intimate, very alert encounters. So there is a relationship and it’s still that sense of the ultimate immediacy of the meetings that persists.

NKR: The IMAX Corporation said that they didn’t support the project because they didn’t want low-resolution video images on their screens – what’s the dispute?

EK: IMAX was not going to have anything to do with this project because it combines two different technologies and low resolution. The video that I would be using was made live, so it couldn’t be pre-authorized or previewed, which was a requirement for any IMAX involvement. I was shooting from within the audience with a webcam. According to IMAX, it would lower the standards of what they want to show on IMAX screens. To some extent they really didn’t care what I would be showing. It’s rather the quality of the image that I would be combining with the film. In a way it’s kind of appropriate, I think, for the whole project, because it involves working as an artist within structures. You always come against a lot of different battles and support for your work is always tied to a lot of different strings. It’s always this sense of juggling – where do you find your independence, where do you find your voice? I think every artist has to come across that. For my kind of work IMAX was a kind of extreme screening environment, because it’s the biggest cinema ever, the biggest format that exists for the shortest movie reel that can totally be shown on it. So a lot of things were clashing. I believed in what I was doing and I just realized, I have to do it, you know, no matter what.

This is a corporate environment. So you are working within these confines when using their theater as a venue for projection. But I don’t think there was really much preparation to use the IMAX technology and their projector for this project at all. I was careful not to use “IMAX film” in any promotional materials, because I think it’s a proprietary name. But I did transfer the digital movie collage to high resolution single frames and then I transferred it to this IMAX celluloid, the 15-sprocket, 70 mm film.

NKR: The excerpt from their official letter to you that you include on the documentation DVD of the project and April event – it seems so blustery, so stern and scowling.

EK: I think that’s maybe because they just don’t want to engage. What happens in a corporation is nobody is personally responsible for anything. So the language is always like that and I think we all know it – that at some point you can’t go any further. I really didn’t want to make it my ambition to fight the battle and have this accepted by the IMAX. I didn’t speak to that many people about it. But I was afraid and kind of paranoid, till the last moment, that, oh, my God, if there’s an IMAX Corporation representative in the audience, they can shut down the projector! I was terrified this might happen. But I also knew that the movie is so short that – 90 seconds – if they shut it down, they probably would shut it down after the first turn! [laughs] So it would get projected anyway. I financed most of this project with my credit cards, so it was a very personal risk.

NKR: This project is quite a progression for you. What you have screened before at this festival in previous years was very small scale, very short. And often you’ve made physical arrangements in galleries where people could view your films individually through head-set viewers.

EK: Exactly. I always build little contraption because it was important that it’s that one-to-one meeting. You can do millions of one-to-one meetings but I still want to register that I am speaking to you.

NKR: And now there’s this mass, overwhelming, total-body experience! I remember before – when you came to the festival – one of your shorts was shown on a big screen at the Palace Theater – which is possibly the largest screen among the festival’s half dozen venues – and you hadn’t seen it yourself in that format before.

EK: Exactly! And that shock brought about this whole IMAX venture. After that screening, when I saw the movie that way for the first time, that huge, I registered that, wow! I just relived the ultimate cinematic experience – when you’re in the dark and you think it’s for you alone. You are aware of other people in the audience but basically you are – looking. That situation of you looking at the screen is ultimately a very intimate affair. Right after that screening, somebody said, “Oh Elka, we should have your movie screened at the IMAX. We should see it even bigger!” That’s where it all started. Each of my movies has a different shape. If I look at cinema as a visual art, I’m responsible for everything that’s in the frame – for its shape and rhythm – so it doesn’t make sense to show a square movie on a round screen. Why don’t I make a movie specifically for that screen? And when I said yes to that, you know – I had hopes: oh, it’s gonna be great! Programs will get funds for it. But I said yes because I was excited about it, because it was a challenge for me. And after all, we didn’t get funding.

NKR: It was a hugely popular program with many filmmakers and gallery people in the audience, and it actually sold out.

EK: Yeah, it was. When it started, we didn’t know that. It was nice to hear just before the screening started, “Ladies and gentlemen, please move in closer, it’s a sold-out show.” It was very great to hear that. But you know when I was making it, I was set for disaster!

NKR: As I was watching this again on your documentation DVD, I realized that the way the IMAX theater is constructed, it projects images similarly to what happens on the inside of the eye.

EK: Yeah – it’s an iris. It looks like an iris.

NKR: There’s a little cutaway diagram of how this would work when you were inside and what you’re doing with the images, between the three showings of the 90-second film, is really like jazz improvisation. It’s a performance that’s visual but it’s like music.

EK: Yes, of course – that’s why, before I set out for my trip I wanted to work, for the first time, with a live performer who not only is experienced in improvisation but has a certain attitude towards it. I went for months, looking! I went to clubs, trying to find a musician that I would feel I can work with. When I met Alan Licht, I listened to some recordings and someone I knew – I can totally trust what he does. Not only is he a total pro in music but he has a particular focus and relationship to visual image, he has studied film, he writes about film. I needed to have someone who will be there with the same kind of attention that I’ll be there, focused completely on what he’s doing in music – then I can be completely focused on vision. Only then will those two worlds actually be able to relate to each other. Because if it was somebody just kind of leaning toward the image to illustrate it, it wouldn’t have worked. It had to be a battle of the two mediums. And that’s what happened. Some of the people who look at the documentation, they say, “Oh my God, it’s like I’m seeing sound!” I wanted that to happen very badly and I was very happy that I found him by the time I went to Europe. I would crash at my studio often, after going from club to club, because I was really looking. Until then I was very, very restless. And then when I kind of tied it down, then I went for my trip and started collecting images and had some sort of feeling of the rhythm of how that 90 seconds would work. It has to be complete abandon at the same time. It’s a very tight structure but it’s a tight structure that holds a complete impulse – complete, original. And those two things very much battle with one another. That’s what I feel like the core of the project actually is. But yes, it is very much like an eye. And the structure of the black and white video in the middle is like the pupil and this very detailed ring moving in a frenzied way is like an iris. It’s a kind of obvious thing that in a way helps you to go past it, because it doesn’t stop at just being an eye. It’s many things at the same time.

NKR: Manhattan poet, critic and musician Thom Donovan has written about Plany Mela on his weblog Wild Horses of Fire [5/22/07, whof.blogspot.com], where he says that part of what informs this work are the experiments of the Russian artist Mikhail Matiushin [1866-1934]. He discusses Matiushin’s aim of pushing perceptions to a certain edge where they start to bleed into another realm. Could you talk about the idea of training perception in this project?

EK: Of course. The whole movie is a training exercise for your perception, for your sense of how to be alive, how to actually be able to participate in life in a kind of awakened manner. Matiushin was a musician and a painter at the same time. He was a little bit older than Kazimir Malevitch, but Malevitch came up with many of his formulations through Matiushin. Matiushin suggested and explained a lot of things to him. Going back to that time – the 1920s in Russia – he conducted what he called the laboratory of organic culture. His ambition was to show that you can train yourself for a kind of extended vision. When you train yourself to observe better, you can see through 360 degrees – you can actually see behind your eyes. He would take painting students to the bank of the river and have them paint the river standing with their backs to the river. There was no voodoo there. There was really a study of what happens with color and sound and their relation, what happens with image and shape and after-image, and how a certain kind of alert observation and training makes you widen this spectrum of sight. Your can train your peripheral vision to be brighter, more focused. Normally in optics, the peripheral vision is characterized as being black and white, just focused on motion. So central vision focuses on detail and color. In my project, I’m reversing that so the peripheral part of what you see on the huge screen is detailed and colorful and the central part is very bare. I’m using techniques of alteration to play around with Matiushin’s ideas of making those extremes into exercises, where you start to focus on things that are moving apart. He would take two circles and try to stretch them – spread them further and further to train the eye to see both in focus by widening the angle of perception. He was also a musician. He wrote music for the opera Victory Over the Sun, a collaboration with Malevitch and others, for which Malevitch did the sets. Those sets were the beginning of Malevitch’s Black Square. That’s where that whole visual abstraction started. So Matiushin is very important but not really known much because he didn’t travel. Malevitch left, traveled all over and became famous. Matiushin stayed in Russia. I think he made one visit to Paris to the World Fair and he thought the Palace of Electricity was totally amazing. But for me he bridges art and science and focuses on a really acute study of perception. It’s not Expressionism. It’s really wanting to get better at seeing more and wanting to include “other” in a way that was never done before. So in a way the whole project is about that, about meetings with these strangers that I had and the chance at negotiating the terms of seeing the other. I went out, trailed along the borders of Poland, wearing abstract movies on my head, exposing people who have nothing to do with the art world, would never see anything like that in their life. And we did create a territory for very incredible exchanges, over and over again, days in and out. I would wake up in the morning – I traveled in a van – I would park in somebody’s lot and just go from one house to another and it was incredible. It was also a kind of social training. So Matiushin is big – because he wanted to include the results of his studies in a kind of social network. He wanted to include architecture and the way we design our places to live and how cities are designed, that we actually take in all that peripheral material. He’s very much the ghost behind this project.

NKR: How is Plany Mela going to be available to people? You’ve put a documentation and some notes on a DVD, but this is very one-to-one as well.

EK: It’s really just documentation. My friends came to the screening, brought their amateur cameras and recorded it. Because the screen was so huge, they could just film things in parts. So I put the DVD together just for the people who couldn’t make it there so they could see it, but it doesn’t represent the project. You can’t really see the way it should be. This is not going to happen probably in an IMAX theater again because in Syracuse we had the luxury of using the theater under the auspices of the festival. But the original collage, the movie, was done digitally and then transferred to film. So the original is actually a digital file, a very, very high resolution file. After talking to Alan, we decided we both believe in the project enough that we do want it to have another life. I think we’re going to try to find dome theaters and again have that very big screen, because it’s built for a dome – a concave structure – but with high definition video. A lot of places actually have amphitheaters, dome theaters that have high definition video projection systems. Also I was thinking of doing a miniature version – build a space that’s a portable concave screen on which I can screen it. It’s really always a question of scale. If you bring one person into a space that is kind of enclosing, we can reproduce the effect, I think, on a smaller scale. Of course it’s not going to be the IMAX – that was immense. To have seen my movie on that screen, those 90 seconds three times, was really incredible.

NKR: And it was exhausting.

EK: [laughs]

NKR: I read someplace that we may think we see with our eyes but actually sight is distributed throughout the body. The brain is distributed throughout the body. They’re not only localized structures in how they actually function. And inside the IMAX I really experienced that I was seeing Plany Mela with my whole body.

EK: Because that screen really envelopes you, because we’re sitting at about a 30-degree angle, sitting in a capsule. I don’t know if you remember, but I requested – because another part of the perceptual process of this movie was the idea of the after-image – I asked people during the black and white sequences to periodically close their eyes, because I also wanted to have the body contribute to what you see. After-image happens autonomously and it’s an effect I wanted to build in. I knew it would be a shock when you have the 90 seconds’ exposure – very bright, colorful stuff – that your body’s going to have, you know, it’s gonna be a trauma, a shock. Because you’re faced, not with a landscape kind of picture that takes you outside – IMAX is always about this world “out there.” I wanted it to be about the situation “right here,” based on the sensation of your vision and your body too. So I asked, just before the projection, to have complete darkness. We even had the exit signs turned off completely. When we turned the bulb off, I haven’t experienced that kind of darkness, I think, ever, probably. It was pitch-dark and your body felt it. I felt suspended – kind of like space travel! And suddenly you’re kind of attacked with this exposure, this colorful movie. It was very physical. Just before the black and white sequence that followed I also had a little gap of blackness because I thought, your body’s going to bring up this after-image on its own because the exposure was so extreme that I need to allow for that to happen and let everybody have their own shock image form before I start playing with this black and white part. So truly yes, I think you’re right – it was the extreme of body sensation as well. And the sound works on that too, because every time that the movie played on film we had different sound tracks – to bring in different rhythms and have your eye pick out different elements in the film. So it was definitely directed as this kind of full-body exposure.

New projects in the works?

EK: The things that I brought back from Poland, from the trip, it’s a huge archive of incredible, eclectic recordings that I’m developing into a movie book that I want to do. Basically I want to perform it with narration for, like, a full day movie. At the same time we’re trying to work on how to re-work the dome structure into a space that would be surrounding, so I can actually reproduce similar effects on a concave screen but in a space that surrounds you. So there are those two projects that I’m working on right now.

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Nancy Keefe Rhodes is a Syracuse-based writer covering film, photo & visual arts & a founding member of FilmSlash. The Syracuse International Film Festival celebrates its 5th anniversary this April 25th-May 4th. Elka Krajewska documented Plany mela on DVD. Contact her & see more of her work at www.elka.net.