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
“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)
“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).”
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, with Delfina Marcello (Summer 1994). 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 showing the spy camera setup.
Behin And Samin Bolouri, بلا چاو (Bella Ciao)
“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
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.
Source: FotográficaMx, Colección Fundación Televisa (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)
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Victor Erice. Trailer.
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, 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), probably 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
Colm Tóibín on Giacometti, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
Source: Louisiana Channel (YouTube)
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)
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