Interview with Peter Forgacs

By accident, I deleted half of the interview I made with you yesterday. Do you have any experience with accidents like that or of any other kind?

I work with accidents. I am a professional accident maker and an accident founder. I exploit faults and accidents. I work with bad films, home films, bad shots.

Does accidents in your work have any influence on you?

Philosophically it is something what we consider in our everyday life as unimportant. It is something obvious and not special. It is a non-representative part of our ego. Our home movies are recorded holidays, happy moments, they regularly do not cover tragic points of our life. There are few exceptions though. If you pick a family album, will you see any divorce photographs in it or some one hit by car in an accident? Will you take your camera while visiting your mother dying in a hospital?

May be the funeral…

May be. But it is part of a ritual. Now we are talking about turning points of the life. One is the birth. Not every one is taking pictures of his wife or girlfriend delivering a baby. Would you do that?

No, I wouldn´t.

And not even when your mother is dying, your own divorce or your brother being shot in the Chechen war. So, let's skip these dramatic major moments and let's take the rituals, ceremonies, happy moments. It is so obvious that the problem of naughty pictures and kitsch home movies is still representing something beyond the fiction film. These home movies are like the stories Czech writer Hrabal was always listening to in the pub.

Is it your job to look for those tragic and unexpected aspects in home films?

No. I am a visual artist and the whole idea came from bad photographers not from the good ones. It is part of an object trouvé. It is kind of a collage. The composer John Cage once said: "Art begins where beauty ends." The footage you find is kind of an object trouvé, like Duchamp's pisoir, and the twist or recontextualising those objects gives the material a new power but it does not have anything in common with "the beauty". Everything tends to be beautiful but the art is beyond or under that. What I do is on one hand archeology work (what happened in Hungary or in Europe in the past), on the other hand it is also a gesture of the avantgardist. Let´s take a look on things through different eyes. Home movie is something like that.

What is your opinion on visualising violence in documentaries? For example in some films presented at this festival?

I don´t have a problem with that. I am just on a different track.

Have you ever met with it in your job?

I have never wanted to use effects like that in my films. To be honest with you I do not consider myself to be a documentary filmmaker. I am a cinematographer, a moving images maker, an archeologist and if the festival organizers or art collections' curators recognize my work as an art piece, I am always very happy for that. If they consider my work to be a documentary film, I appreciate it as well. To understand my language is the problem of the reader. I have a duty to present it. To answer your question directly, I don´t agree with direct reportage or representation of pain, war and blood, because there are no limits like there are for example in a card game. Does it make the film better or do you understand war better if you show more blood and more pain? Certainly not. But as my Cambodian colleague in the jury said: "We can understand better the problem of war by reading Camus then by seeing a reportage. We can understand from La Peste the devilish circle about it. What to do against it? I don't think that the tabloid papers or TV news will teach the viewer how to act against it. And that is very important message. Try to make film beyond the prime time television hunger as it makes us blind.

As a member of the jury isn't it sometimes depressing to watch those films?

No. It isn´t the film that is good, it is the war that is bad. Of course I am touched by it. But if I want to really understand it, why is it that I have to go beyond?. I have a very strong argument against documentary film festivals. They are considered to be politically correct. Have you ever seen fascist, Nazi or right wing films at the festival? No. All documentary film festivals are politically correct - the jury, the organisation. All the films are liberal, radical liberal or humanitarian. There are no nazi films, not even conservative or Christian-democratic films on the scenario. You cannot talk about it, compare it or tell which film is representing better suffering, because you cannot use any arguments then.
Soren Kierkegaard said: "There is esthetical, ethical and religious stage of mind." Here we cannot talk about the ethics as all films in this competition and at other festivals are of good ethic standards. So you cannot say this is more ethical or that is less ethical, this is more politically correct and that is less politically correct, because all of them were selected because they are politically correct.
There is another dimension we have to talk about - the esthetical one - the way they transmit the idea, the way they make me feel. So the newspapers are wrong - more blood means less thought.

If you have such a strong argument against festivals like this one, why did you agree to be a member of the festival jury?

It helps me to select the best film. I can discuss the message. I am not against politically correct films, I am against evaluating them in a wrong way, misinterpreting them.

Do you miss any special kind of documentaries here at the festival?

No. It was a very good selection. Our jury members finally considered nine films to be able to receive Grand Prix. They were all of a very high quality and that is what we were looking for, not for the political correctness.

Have you heard about the recent situation in Czech Television? What is your comment on that?

I have to say I hate the Czech Republic. We were not able to make that clear in Hungary like you did. We don´t have this civil courage. Congratulations! A couple of twists occured in the history of televison in Hungary, when all political parties were trying to influence it and grab it. Mainly it is the right wing being afraid of independent journalists. All independent journalists are liberal agents in their eyes.

What do you think about the term "objectivity" in documentaries - both in films shot by authors themselves and in films based mainly on archive material?

It depends on genre. When Hitchcock was asked by filmmakers to tell them how to shoot horrors in concentration camps he answered: "Don't make any cuts, then there will be no sign of manipulation". It means that if you want to show a real horror you have to show it as a documentary without any cuts. But it is impossible. The truth is not divided by reportage or archive genre it is somewhere else. Because so called objective documentary or magazines will give a voice to all parties who are involved in the conflict. Your commentary must be free of words against his or her own opinion, it must be supported by a rich material. On the other hand it can be very educational.
There is a great hunger from TV and media for direct public propagandistic forms telling you what it is you see.
Manipulated media in communist era were always sweet and happy and nothing was really told. Now it is in an opposite dimension, we are overwhelmed by details of blood and tears but we may miss the point.
So I think the genre is also not that significant. What is more important is the message, how you present it and what is the consequence. I am not a commercial traveller with human rights. You cannot advertise human rights as it is not a propaganda item. Human rights are not for sale. You can present it, you can make people think about it but you cannot sell it.
This is the point where your festival can be a great event. This gives an opportunity for the culture, for the arts, for the events to open people's mind and eyes. But it should never become propaganda, it should be a transmission.

Radim Špaček