Inspiration
“Dear Mara, I have a faded fax that you sent me from the jungle of Chiapas. The words you wrote have melted into the yellowed paper with the years, along with the photo of Subcommondante Marcos on his horse and you holding his hand, smiling. Now, I can make out only shapes and outlines and in a few months, I think it will be gone. Do you remember how it began? It was 1993. I had been living in New York for a year.”
No Footsteps Remain: Letter to Mara Catalan by Laura Waddington
“I learnt how to shoot film with an Arri S, a small 16mm camera, designed in Munich in the 1950s. It had a beautiful curved body with three rotating lenses, mounted on a turret and was built like a tank. Light enough to carry on my shoulder, it never once broke. It only took one hundred foot spools—about four minutes of film—so I had to hone in on what interested me in a scene and draw everything that I could out of it. Fascinated, I used to imagine all the filmmaker’s eyes that had gazed through the camera; the many places it had travelled and the scenes it had filmed and the talented craftsmen’s hands, that had assembled it, decades earlier. I filmed mostly in black and white because of the way it abstracted things and rendered them more powerful. Limited by the price of film stock, I’d sometimes wait hours for the right light to film for only four minutes. There was a magic in that.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
“I miss black and white cinema. It is intrinsically artistic and more powerful. One could create volume and depth in the image. When filming in colour, the colours themselves provide the contrast, and define the separation of space. Let me say this: Picasso wouldn’t have achieved the same social and artistic impact with Guernica if he had used colour. For my part, I grew accustomed to photographing in black and white, creating what I call murals of light…”
From Shadows and Mexican Skies: An Interview with Gabriel Figueroa by Walter Rippel and Laura Waddington (Photo scanned from the printed Spanish version, El Amante Cine, no. 12, Buenos Aires, November 1992)
Gabriel Figueroa was my favourite cinematographer at the time, thanks to his work on Luis Buñuel‘s and Emilio Fernández‘s films:
My first short film, and the start of a collaboration with Delfina Marcello.
“The world is small, even in New York, where Delfina Marcello took her first steps as a filmmaker at the beginning of the 1990s, within the milieu of independent cinema. In 1992, she landed on the set of Laura Waddington’s film The Visitor, the story of a chambermaid who photographs the traces left by a guest in the hotel room that she cleans each day: personal possessions, the first page of a diary, the cover of a French edition of Cesare Pavese’s This Business of Living [Le Métier de vivre].”
Delfina’s Cinema, Which Was in a Hurry by Roberto Ellero (English translation of the Italian)
“When I sat down to write my first short film, I thought of an incident that had happened to me in a hotel in Venice. A chambermaid had gone through my possessions and mistakenly recorded her voice onto a cassette inside my Walkman. The music tape was a gift from a friend so I continued to play it for years and the chambermaid’s voice wove its way into my life. Listening to that small trace, which she had left, I was fascinated by whether one can ever really know another person or only disconnected fragments.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
“A friendship was born. And the genesis of the film, which the director traces back to a Venetian memory, is curious: ‘Once in a hotel in Venice, a chambermaid had gone through my things and recorded her voice onto my walkman. I wrote this story for her.’ Even more unusual are the recollections of the encounter with Delfina: ‘We shot The Visitor in a weekend in a Manhattan hotel room, carrying the camera and equipment into the hotel, hidden in suitcases. The actress, Delfina Marcello, whom I had picked to play the chambermaid for her beautiful face and a mystery about her, turned out to have come from Venice. At the end of the shoot, she told me that we had already met. Years before, while studying in London, she had worked as a coat check girl in a restaurant and had always remembered a shy school girl, who had handed her a coin and smiled. I didn’t recall our encounter but it was, indeed, the restaurant, where as a teenager, I used to meet my father.’”
Delfina’s Cinema, Which Was in a Hurry by Roberto Ellero (Self-portrait by Delfina Marcello, in collaboration with Jeff Cowen, from the Love Accessories: Delfina Marcello catalogue)
Still of Delfina Marcello on cardboard from Letters to my Mother, an unfinished film by Laura Waddington (1993) (Photo based on Frida Kahlo‘s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940)
Still of Delfina Marcello from Letters to my Mother, an unfinished film by Laura Waddington (1993) (Photo based on Frida Kahlo‘s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940)
“At first, when I started shooting video, I was always comparing it to film so I made the decision to film for a few years without using my eyes in order to completely unlearn: (Filming with a spy camera attached to my body (Zone) and later asking people in 15 countries, via internet, to film my story in place of me (The Lost Days). My hope was that when I came to look through the viewfinder again it would be like filming for the first time and that I’d learn to take video for what it was. And so I came to love video for being a form of writing.”
The Small, the Fragile, the Unfinished Voice by Laura Waddington
“I bought a spy camera and sewed it into the lining of a traditional Turkish waistcoat, covered in small circular mirrors. By removing one of the mirrors, the camera gazed out at the world, unnoticed. Connected to a small 8mm video recorder in a pouch around my waist, it could record up to ninety minutes of tape.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
Experimenting with ways to conceal the Spy camera on my person (Summer 1994, with Delfina Marcello). See Zone Prologue
First shots taken by the hidden spy camera, as we worked on concealing it (1994). See Zone Prologue
Workbook about the making of Zone ( Unpublished, 1995). First pages.
“When I think of those years, I think of the happiness, the empty streets around North 1st, summer days on the roof, your voice from the dark room shouting out stories … I remember a party you gave crashed by people, who were so beautiful from everywhere, filling the street with dance until dawn; rides in the old Cadillac; boats passing; the old flamenco player; all the fun we had taking photos, making films, helping each other. You say, ‘when I think of you then, everyday was a new adventure‘.”
No Footsteps Remain: Letter to Mara Catalan by Laura Waddington (Photo by Mara Catalan)
”In 1996, I wrote a story about a young woman, travelling around the world, sending back video letters to a friend in New York. That year, I contacted people on the internet and asked them to videotape their countries with Hi8 cameras, as if they were my protagonist. A mixture of friends and strangers in fifteen cities sent me over fifty hours of cassettes. The footage, which I received, was extremely diverse. Some people had filmed their towns for weeks, living inside my protagonist’s mind, others had recorded their daily routines, homes, family and friends … The challenge was to transform such a wide variety of images into the rhythm of one person’s journey, and eyes.” (On The Lost Days)
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
“I searched second hand stores for old video equipment. I began to re-film the footage off various screens, passing it en route through an old analogue colour corrector, which I pushed to the edges of its parameters and using my first ever digital video camera, the new Sony DCR-VX1000, whose manual options I constantly explored. It was the first three chip Mini DV camcorder and is called by some ‘the grandfather of digital cameras.’”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
The Lost Days on the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999.
The Lost Days on the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999.
The Lost Days on the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999. Extract: China
Cargo ship behind the scenes footage. See Cargo: Prologue
Cargo ship behind the scenes footage. See Cargo: Prologue
“They had been hot, exhausting days, the sailors obliged to work with decrepit and malfunctioning loading equipment. They hated the Syrian ports. Shortly before I’d boarded the ship, two of the crew, sleepless and overworked, had been crushed by falling containers, as they unloaded cargo there. A voice had come over the satellite radio, ordering the ship to carry on its endless journey and they had had to abandon their paralyzed shipmates in a hospital, with promise to return later.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
(Shot: inside the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria)
“I had spent the time hidden inside the boat, crouched behind a porthole. It was a military port, full of soldiers, and the captain had warned me that if they discovered a filmmaker on board, I’d be arrested and the ship would have to set sail without me. A few times, some men banged violently and insistently on my cabin door but I stayed silent and unmoving, while my camera recorded fragments of a life below: soldiers running, a man stealing wood, figures on a submarine…”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
(Shot: inside the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria)
Start of a correspondence with Peter Hutton about filmmaking and the sea, prompted by his viewing of Cargo at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2001, and getting in touch. A meandering conversation unfolded, despite us never meeting.
Some of his words about his maritime travels and his films … films which give us back time:
”I love the sea and ships so much.”
(March 28, 2001)
“Thank you for responding to my fan mail . Im so delighted that youll trade with me ..yes Pal is fine but youll have to accept a vhs from me . Ill send you a tape with one landscape,one city and one river..if thats ok ? I actually rarely put my films on tape because you cant see the small details….like mice running in the distance …..but a trade is a trade so ill send something before I go to Shanghai.”
“I spent 10 years working on and off ships 1964-74 as a way to get through art school and learn about the world.”
“I spent a rainy November on the west coast of Ireland watching the weather and light out over the Atlantic. Ive never seen the sea look so foreboding and so beautiful. All my life Ive had dreams of falling off cliffs over the ocean..in cars, on foot …when I saw the first cliffs on the Aran Island I couldnt move I was so terrified by the drama of the sea . When I was working on ships I would always dream that the ship was sinking and Id have to swim underwater to rescue my camera and film from the drawer under my bed. Such is the life of a mariner.”
(March 29, 2001)
“I sent you a tape c/o Fed Ex on thursday, let me know if you dont recieve it in 10 days.. Its nothing special….a rather sad and lonely film of Lodz Poland that I made in 1990. Also a short landscape film for Thomas Cole a 19th century landscape painter that Ive always admired…the film opens with a sequence of a million tires on fire….then the 1st part of my Hudson river study. 1996-7”
(April 8, 2001)
“Dont worry about the letter but it may show up eventually.E mail is so sterile…I like to see my fingerprints on things , plus I have a great rubber stamp collection .. .I enclosed in that missing letter a xerox of my Merchant seamans card for the 60’s which I still carry around with me .”
(May 3, 2001)
“A quick note to thank you,thank you, thank you for the tapes. Im almost packed and out the door with a scent of Jasmine in the air.Im so happy to be going ,going,gone . Have you ever read B.Chatwins Songlines? It starts with a wonderful renumeration on nomads and travel and the phycical act of moving thru time and space.”
(May 8, 2001)
“its a good sailors story floating down the Yangtse and I hope I have the future occasion to bend your ear …Youve been in my thoughts because Ive been riding on freightors going up and down the Hudson the past 2 weeks . A Dutch ship bound for Surinam with a Russian crew and a Greek ship with a Filipino crew off to Spain I shot 20 rolls which Ive just looked at and seeing Zone reminded me how far away Ive gotten from mystery my all time favorite cinematic mistress … I do hope I can connect with you to continue our nautical discussions which are of great value to me.”
(January 18, 2002)
“Just reentering your world via Zone reminded me how literal my own work has become and how important it is to reference more abstract imagery to allow the viewer to dream.”
(January 19, 2002)
“just spent the morning at a zen monestary. The rituals were a bit wierd but I enjoyed the silence. I sat quietly for 30 mins and tried not to think .I pretended I was on the forepeak of a ship crossing the Indian ocean at night. I used to dream that the ships I was riding were sinking and I had to swim underwater to my cabin to get my camera and film. I always made it to the surface.”
(February 10, 2002)
“Im in the finicy last stages of my long opium induced film on the Yangtse and Hudson rivers… it resides somewhere in an older tradition of travel films.Its always hard to contectualize reality. I always admired Aget.”
(March 11, 2002)
“so many filmmakers of the experimental dont seem to understand the limitations of the form and are endlessly frustrated by the lack of recognition which I see as a value. I enjoy the obscurity … .you maybe the only humanist left on the planent.”
(March 30, 2002)
“Im still working on my epic 3 part study of ships and sea. Ive completed a section on Shipbreaking in Bangladesh last summer and a section on ship building in S Korea this summer.Im waiting to hear about a ride across the pond this winter to film the last section :crossing the N Atlantic in winter on a russian ship from florida to St Petersberg. All shot on film . Life is crazy as usual but always interesting.”
(September 14, 2005)
Later, after his death, I discovered that we happened to share a birthday, which is also the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, whose words at the end of The Maker had reminded me of the person and filmmaker that I can still glimpse in Peter Hutton‘s letters and films:
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” (JLB, Buenos Aires, October 31, 1960)
Taking notes in Sangatte for Border, March 2002
“There, my understanding of what constitutes a true image of reality completely changed and I have never looked at images or reality in the same way again. Where the only illumination was that of distant car headlights, far off street lamps and police torches, I constantly brushed up against the limits of what my small video camera could capture. Fragile and at breaking point, the images which emerged, were on the verge of disappearance.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
Photo by Heath Bunting
“One night, near the Channel Tunnel, where Afghan and Iraqi refugees were trying desperately to jump on the trains headed to England, I met an Afghan man. He was cold, underdressed and very depressed. He was a house painter, born in the Panchir Valley. He told me that one morning he had left his house and when he came back there was no house, his whole family had been killed in an American bombing. As we walked in the dark, he explained that although he was a housepainter what he really loved was poetry….”
Abdullah and the Fireflies: On Reading Survivance des Lucioles by Laura Waddington
(Photo of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, taken from a refugee’s wallet while I sat talking with Abdullah and placed on the ground for me to film, illuminated by the passing headlights of a car. Massoud was killed on September 9, 2001, by explosives hidden in the camera of suicide bombers posing as journalists. His assassination, a harbinger of what was to come, was one of the events that had initially prompted me to travel to Sangatte.)
“I used to dream that the huge corrugated iron hangar, where the migrants slept, was a vast processing plant for the suppression of memory and history: fragments of the migrants’ past and our shared future blocked from travelling across the border, without which we wouldn’t understand the terrifying years to come.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
(The tearing down of Sangatte Red Cross camp, December 23, 2002.)
Christmas in Calais after the Sangatte camp was torn down. The remaining migrants and refugees, mainly from Iraq and Kurdistan, were hiding in bunkers in the fields.
“In Greece, they had spent several months in the port of Igoumenitsa trying to hide inside one of the trucks bound for Italy. When the long orange truck had appeared, the smuggler had warned them that it was too dangerous to hide inside: it was a diplomatic truck, he said, its two trailers tightly sealed, and they would be concealed deep inside. But after months of waiting in the port, they were growing impatient and decided to go against his advice.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
(Filming in the port of Patras, 2002. Photo by Mathilde Kohl.)
“And so I came to love video for being a form of writing. I feel it’s a medium which leaves room for the personal, the intimate, the patient, letting one’s story and the way it should be filmed emerge gradually through accidents and chance meetings.”
The Small, the Fragile, the Unfinished Voice by Laura Waddington
Iraqi Suitcase TV
First sketches for M's Story (not in the final project)
“One night, in Brussels, I had a dream that I was drawing M’s account. The next morning, I took a tram to an art shop. I bought two black pens and a small notebook and I began to draw. Not having drawn since I was a child, I imagined that my sketching was temporary, a few pages to give to an illustrator to carry on in place of me. But immediately I liked the improvised nature of the pen with its lack of claim to accuracy, and became interested in the stark gap revealed between M’s words and where my untrained line couldn’t go. Faced with the limits of my comic book-like sketches, I hoped that the reader’s mind would wander into the spaces between and beyond the images, to reflect on the zone of terror that M described alone.”
Early images for M‘s Story, not used.
Early images for M‘s Story, not used.
Lhasa de Sela and Patrick Watson, Fiume Nights, Montreal, April 2009
Source: Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes (YouTube)
“I had immense respect for Buñuel, he was an extraordinarily intelligent man. I remember during the filming of Los olvidados, he gave me a camera position, I composed the image and asked him to examine it. He looked through the viewfinder and said to me: ‘That’s a beautiful landscape, Gabriel. But I have a better suggestion: why don’t we turn the camera around 180 degrees and film those dirty geese flapping their wings in the mud?’ [laughter]
From Shadows and Mexican Skies: An Interview with Gabriel Figueroa by Walter Rippel and Laura Waddington (Photo scanned from the printed Spanish version, El Amante Cine, no. 12, Buenos Aires, November 1992)
Luis Buñuel: Un cinéaste de notre temps by Robert Valery. Source: YouTube.
“Most of all, there is Pasolini’s 1975 text about the disappearance of the fireflies, a phenomenon he believed coincided with the destruction of culture. Pasolini, who foresaw all that has now occurred and warned of a “true fascism” that would seep into our souls, our words and gestures. A few days later, when I went into a café in Amman to ask where I could find a copy shop to print out some extracts of the book and the owner insisted on printing out the whole of Survivance des Lucioles on his small home printer and offered it to me as a gift, I remember thinking, as I had many times, that one could still find something there, in the Arab world: a human contact, and that Pasolini’s prediction had not spread everywhere: “I ask simply that you look around you and become aware of the tragedy… the tragedy that
there are no longer human beings.”
Abdullah and the Fireflies: On reading Survivance des Lucioles by Laura Waddington
Source: Pier Paolo Pasolini – Le fascisme de la société de consommation (YouTube)
Jean-Pierre Gorin on Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.
Source: YouTube.
Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami (1990), final scene. Source: YouTube
Gilles Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? Conference given at the FEMIS, Paris, March 17, 1987
Source: Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act 1987 (YouTube)
Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders.(1989). First minutes.
Source: YouTube
Mute interview with Samuel Beckett, Hotel Riadh in Nabeul, Tunisia, October 23, 1969. On the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize, Beckett agreed to an interview with Swedish television on the condition that no questions would be asked.
Samuel Beckett and Victor Waddington looking at Jack B. Yeats‘ painting The Music (1946), likely at Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1954. Source: National Gallery of Ireland.
“But I don’t remember your father, just the ghost of an image of a very elegant old man on a country road, and a stranger who came up to me at his funeral and explained that your father had saved him and other children from the camp of Bergen Belsen and asked me to never forget.”
Letter to My Father about The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello by Laura Waddington
James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni part 1, on ‘Soul!’, WNET, November 1971 (A transcript was later published as the book, A Dialogue, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1973)
Source: (YouTube)
Georges Didi-Huberman on Pier Paolo Pasolini, in conversation with Laure Adler, Semaine Spéciale Pasolini (3/5) : Dans l’atelier de pensée de P. P. P., Hors-champs, France Culture, Radio France, May 2015
Source: Le Sémaphore (YouTube)
Ausência, written and spoken by Vinicius de Moraes (accompanied by Toquinho), MPB Especial, TV Cultura, Brazil, 1999.
Etel Adnan on art and urgency.
Source: San Francisco Museum of Art (YouTube).
Jean Renoir on the sincerity of art.
Source: lachambreverte (YouTube)
El sueño de la liebre. El cine de Luis Buñuel y Gabriel Figueroa. Trailer for the exhibition at the Filmoteca de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain, April 27–August 27, 2023.
“We are gathered on the balcony in Jabal al-Weibdeh. Hisham is playing guitar, Bassam is in a bad mood and gets irritated when I record him. Saad arrives with a plastic bag full of books, which they gather around and thumb through eagerly, excitedly discussing a new Arabic translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism, just published in Cairo”
The Iraqi suitcase by Laura Waddington
Noam Chomsky‘s critique of postmodernism and a strand of academia. Location and year of talk unknown.
Source: Noam Chomsky – Postmodernism I, Chomsky’s Philosophy (YouTube)
Mimmo Paladino, creation of a new artist‘s curtain for the Teatro Regio in Parma, 2021
Source: Mimmo Paladino – Sipario d’artista, Teatro Regio di Parma (YouTube)
Marjan Farsad, خونه ی ما (Khooneye Ma)
“I had only read one graphic novel at the time. I turned my attention and soon my awe to gekiga, the socially engaged comics that had emerged in Japan, at the end of the 1950s, with their harsh themes, vivid black and white drawings and cinematic techniques. Uncompromising portraits of the human condition, they carved out room between deceptively simple images and dark societal commentary for their audience’s imaginations to go to work.”
On Mirrors and the Making of M’s story by Laura Waddington
Kikuji Kawada discusses Chizu (The Map) (1959-65).
Behin And Samin Bolouri, بلا چاو (Bella Ciao)
Behin And Samin Bolouri, لالایی خورشیدک (Lalaei Khorshidak)
“He loves the films of Tarkovsky and most of all Mirror. I leaf through his very worn copy of Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, which has travelled with him, and find the passage that I discovered in a bookshop in New York when I was twenty-one: “The goal of all art, unless it is aimed at the consumer, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him, what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for the existence of this planet: or if not to explain, to at least pose the question.”
What was it that so fascinated me about Mirror at that time? Its hidden residues. It was as if Tarkovsky had secretly dismantled the internal scaffolding of reality as we slept and very subtly reconfigured it, leaving in its place something that resembled the neutral and untampered with appearance of life, but crisscrossed by invisible undercurrents and tensions, and this charged the world with a hidden weight, anchoring his images into our hearts and eyes.”
Extract from The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
“But in Ozu’s world, objects are charged with weight – and like the intricate, shifting lines, and colours, and shapes and gently changing landscapes of his films – with their hidden patterns, they reveal truth and tell their own story, sometimes ahead of time – like signposts dotted along a trail.”
Small Gestures. Notes on a clip from ‘Tokyo Story’ by Laura Waddington
“The kindness of the men in the tiny store where I eat foul for breakfast. Every morning they blast Fairuz from a beaten-up CD player, like scores of restaurants, shops, and taxi drivers across the city. I wake up to the sound of some of my favourite songs: Zaali Tawal, Wahdon, Kifak inta. She has the voice of an angel.”
The Iraqi suitcase by Laura Waddington
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