Thessaloniki Documentary Festival –
Images of the 21st Century
11-20 March 2016
JON BANG CARLSEN PRESS CONFERENCE
The Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen attended a press conference on Tuesday March 15th, 2016, as part of the 18th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which this year pays tribute to his work.
The first issue discussed during the press conference, which was coordinated by Dimitris Kerkinos, was the boundaries between fiction and documentaries, between imagination and reality, with reference to the director’s “staged documentaries”. “I am not the one blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination” Carlsen replied, adding: “According to my view, the boundaries are already blurred. We all have to create our own reality. It’s just that some people think that they have the authority to define this reality. Many years ago, since I was a student at Film School, I realized that I am trapped inside my mind, and I started making films upon this realization. We are all trapped inside our minds. The only thing we can do about it, in my opinion, is to try and be as much honest and truthful as we can in the way that we ourselves see the world. To me, the concept of reality is absolute nonsense, a meaningless concept. There are only different points of view towards the world, from one part, and from the other, there is our inherent emotional need to merge all these views into a single one. But we always remain trapped in our loneliness. I think, this is the most important thing we need to understand”.
As the director went on explaining, fiction and documentaries are just two different ways to tell a story. “Think of life: life is constantly moving, going on, changing. Nothing stands still, each thing is transforming every moment that passes. What I do is putting this movement to compact form in a creative way and expressing it visually, conveying it to the outside world. This can be done either in a fiction film or a documentary”, stressed Mr. Carlsen.
According to the director, the differences between fiction and documentaries are only a matter of temperament. On this subject, he noted: “I had to resort to fiction when I couldn’t find real people to dramatize the scenes I needed for my story, in other words when I couldn’t find the necessary bits of reality to tell my story. That is how I came to employ professional actors”. Mr. Carlsen also made a reference to humans and originality, attempting a sort of comparison between professional actors and people depicted in a documentary, saying inter alia: “Life can be very dramatic, when people are unable to hide behind their own actions. I need access to as much originality as possible. Real actors usually lack originality, only a few of them have it. If you take out suspense, you can see that they are fake. The story keeps them going in a film. On the contrary, real people can stand in front of the camera without really doing anything and they make a strong impression, they are really dramatic, exactly because their originality is intact”.
To a question on how originality can be achieved when dramatizing a situation, the Danish director replied: “I never dramatize a situation. I write scripts based on extensive research. The scenes I write have either occurred to people or they could have occurred. They are no strange to them and I always have to be very accurate in the way I describe them. In fiction, the actors use that thing that they call a technique. Of course, the technique is an important tool for their acting, but sometimes as a director, when your instructions are not precise, you might end up discovering in editing that the scene lacks life, there is no presence there. In documentaries, you can immediately see this “lack of life”, exactly because real people don’t use a technique to cover it”.
As to the distance or closeness needed in documentary filmmaking, he noted: “Sometimes it is necessary to take a distance from a situation to be able to understand it. This does not apply to everyone nor is it always the case. How can you get close to the people? That is the real question here and it can be done in different ways, including when making a documentary film. For instance, you can place someone close to the camera or you can approach the story you wish to tell through the use of music that you choose to have in the film”.
With regard to the current migration issue, Jon Bang Carlsen didn’t try to hide “his confusion”, to use his own words. Answering to a question on whether he is considering making a film on this subject, he pointed out: “I don’t think I am good at political films. My political views are so concrete, that in a way they can take out from the sweetness in the soul of a film”. On the same subject, Mr. Carlsen added, inter alia: “I feel confused. In Denmark there is a powerful middle class, as well as a good health and education system. Now there is much social unrest and turmoil. People who traditionally considered themselves to be open-minded and believed that we should accept everyone, now they wonder whether if it is worth it to be open-minded, if there is a risk of losing everything for which the immigrants want to come to the country in the first place. In other words, all these privileges, for which the immigrants want to go to a European country. The issue lies in reacting to the political systems in the countries that these people come from”.
