“Without DV My Work Would Be Unthinkable”: A Conversation with Laura Waddington

By Peter Kremski

^PK Could you have shot Cargo on film?

^LW It would have been impossible because of the situation on board, the fact that some of the sailors didn’t, a priori, want to be filmed… That the film exists, is largely thanks to the fact that I am a woman. The sailors explained that it was okay for me to film because they didn’t believe that a woman would ever manage to shoot a film about them. I only had a small prosumer camera with me, a type of video camera also used by tourists, and that was already familiar to some of them; and this contributed to their impression that I was a sort of amateur, and different to a man with a camera. It allowed me to penetrate their world and to live among them, and to film as I wished. If I had arrived on board with a large 35mm or 16mm camera and a crew, the film would not have been possible.

^PK It’s interesting that you use the term “penetrate.”

^LWI was an intruder in their world and I sensed that I was, to a certain extent, manipulating the space that I entered into, in that I was aware that men had already tried to film on other cargo ships, and had not managed to obtain the permission of their crews, and had been forced to disembark. Whereas, in my case because the sailors didn’t believe a woman was capable of shooting a film, I was able to film, I didn’t have to run away.

^PK Living as a woman in such an exclusively male world, can hardly have been easy

^LWIn such an intense and claustrophobic all-male environment, power struggles and macho dynamics are a part of life. As a woman, one is lucky enough to be able to engage in a different kind of interaction, one is treated as something outside of that. By dint of the absence of women in their world, and because some of the sailors had not laid eyes on a woman for many months, they were happy to be able to talk to me. I was an outsider, for sure, but an outsider who they wanted to be there. There was, of course, an underlying tension. At times, it was difficult to be the only woman amongst so many men. It wasn’t just the thirty or so men on board, sometimes we would get stuck in a port for several days, including one we returned to twice, where there were around seven hundred men at any given time. They were military ports, closed to the public, and that was a much more extreme situation.

^PK To what extent did you have already have a vague concept of what the film would look like?

^LW The film was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for the project On the Waterfront; the idea being that each one of the ten filmmakers invited to participate, shoot a digital video diary in a port of their choice. I had no expectation of what I was going to film but there is always an image that I have in my mind when I set out to make something. It’s a very powerful image which gets me moving, and in this case, it was the image of a sailor at night on a ship surrounded by the sea. And I found that image there, on the ship.

However, once I am in a location, I try not to follow any preconceived ideas. I didn’t want to move around the ship with the intention of catching something specific or in search of a particular visual style. I did nothing but live there and film constantly for a few weeks. During the first weeks, I had the impression that I would return home with footage that wasn’t usable at all, because the sailors were constantly fooling around in my presence. They found it difficult to simply ignore me and to leave me the quiet moments that I was looking for—to film with a certain distance and concentration. This only began to change when we got to Syria. There, the mood became tense because of the difficult political and practical situation in the Syrian ports (and the captain warned me that if the Syrian port authorities discovered that there was a filmmaker on board, I would be arrested and the ship would have to set sail without me, so I was instructed to hide and the sailors, who hated being in the country because of their past experiences there, became focused uniquely on getting their work done and getting out of there). Only then, did I start to get closer to the kind of thing that I was looking for. I started to feel that I was getting to something, without being able to say exactly what that was.

Later, when I returned home, I started to reduce the material and I kept refining down until I arrived at a certain way of dealing with and perceiving the images. In the end, what remains is what I was looking for at the onset, without having understood what I was searching for.

^PK So for you, the sailors’ world already had something of a dream world quality about it, at the origin of the film?

^LWNot only a dream world. I already had some experience of travelling by sea and encountering seamen because I have a plane phobia. When I travel from Europe to America, for example, I make the journey by ship, and in the process I have met Filipino seamen. The real motivation for the film came from this—a political motivation, but political in a very personal sense. I was quite upset about the situation of the Filipino sailors whom I encountered. I wanted to learn more about it and to recount something of it, in my own way. That was one of the elements from which the film sprang, the other was that vision of the sailor at sea that I mentioned.

^PK This somewhat dreamlike and masculine world of sailors is also a homoerotic topos – present in the work of Jean Genet and which has inspired, for example, short films by Kenneth Anger or Matthias Müller are also inspired.

^LW I didn’t think about that aspect, at least not consciously. If there was any influence in that regard, it will have come from Jean Genet and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Possibly, it was there in the background but I didn’t reflect on it until now. Probably it was quite strongly present in my unconscious because Genet’s Un chant d’amour and Fassbinder’s Querelle are both films that left a deep impression on me.

^PK But the way of observing this male world in Cargo is a female way of looking

^LWWhen I initially decided to make a film on a cargo ship, I barely thought about the fact that I was a woman. I realise it may sound strange but it wasn’t until I was actually on the ship—confronted with everyone’s reactions—that I understood how surprising it was from others’ perspectives that I had turned up there, a woman alone (at first, the sailors were extremely shocked that I’d dared to come on board, repeatedly asking why I wasn’t afraid of them. Thankfully, over time, this changed, and they began to joke that I was “more of a seaman” than them). But I was focused primarily on making a film, not on my gender; I just thought of myself as a filmmaker. Now. when I present the film to audiences, people are often shocked, and the same questions arise: “What was it like as a woman? Why did you do that? Weren’t you scared?” However, at the time, I wasn’t focused on that, nor on having a female perspective. I was simply observing and filming.

Watching the film now, I realise that it is about a woman looking at men, and that the film could not have been shot by a man. It is there from the onset, in the narrator’s voice and in something about the slowness of the narrative, which I can’t entirely define. These are doubtless stereotypical notions of what a female narrator is and can be. Nevertheless, I feel it is there.

One of my issues with television is that it is constructed almost exclusively around a masculine way of editing and building a narrative, a masculine sense of duration—and the notion of an all-knowing objectivity. But I want the audience to keep in mind, at every turn, that what they are watching is a construct. That’s why I intentionally introduced a number of inconsistencies into the voice-over of Cargo, to unsettle viewers and make them question my reliability as an author. To this end, the narrator recounts a mixture of things that really happened and a few that didn’t (one of her statements is blatantly contradictory). I say certain things that could sound invented but aren’t—and vice versa. The same principle applies to various shots, such as the image of a woman with an umbrella on a bridge in Venice. Some audience members have assumed that the shot was staged, seeing it as a form of fiction, but it wasn’t, and I am comfortable with their interpretation. I wanted it to remain ambiguous, to invite viewers to wonder who the woman they observe there really is, what she is really doing.

Perhaps this way of doing things was also a form of self-protection. Because Cargo is a very personal film, and I wanted, to push the audience away from me, to some extent. So, even though the film is almost entirely true to reality, as it unfolded, I wanted the audience to question whether that is the case or not. I want them to question my reliability as filmmaker and the reliability of the narrative voice in general.

^PK It has been compared to the work of Marguerite Duras.

^LW It’s hard for me to answer your question. I love the work of Duras and find it very inspiring but I would not try to make films like hers. I love her books, which I have read, but I haven’t had the chance to watch her films (only a part of one) and now I am afraid to watch them for fear that mine might be a bad copy of something that I haven’t seen. This, because you are far from the first person to bring it up.

^PK Have there been any critical reactions from the audience?

^LWYes, some people have been quite annoyed by the film. For instance, certain women in the audience have been angry that I went on the ship at all. Other viewers have been unsettled by the film’s slow pace. At the beginning, there is a shot of a man—a soldier—fishing off the side of a submarine in Syria, consisting of a very slow zoom. It lasts for more than three minutes, and near the end of the film, a very similar shot of the same man reappears as night falls. Some viewers felt provoked by the slowness of this initial shot and became quite disgruntled, even accusing me of deliberately provoking them. I don’t find the scene boring, so it’s difficult for me to understand the issue from their perspective. When I was in the editing room, I didn’t fully grasp how slow the film would feel. It was only in the first screening, watching the silent passages on a large screen with an audience, that I became aware of the way in which time unfolds when the film is projected. While the actions I observe are certainly slow, I think what intensifies this feeling of slowness is the absence of ambient sound. For large parts of the film, I replaced the original sound with a composed soundtrack (a piece by Simon Fisher Turner), and in the scenes of the soldier fishing, there is complete silence. I believe this asks a lot of the audience.

^PK

^PK What was the editing concept?

^LWThe Rotterdam Film Festival gave me an editing room in the city for about six weeks. Fortunately, there wasn’t longer, or I think I would have gotten completely lost in the material, as I’d returned from the boat with so many hours of footage. Initially, I went through all the tapes and selected the moments that I felt most faithfully conveyed the the essence of what it was to be on the ship—the same shots that had given me a strong sense of presence while recording them; and I reduced the film to just those instants. But then I lost my nerve, convincing myself that the film couldn’t consist of so few passages. I ended up spending several weeks trying to turn the film into something that it wasn’t, a more traditional narrative. One or two weeks before the deadline, I decided to revert to my original vision. I took apart everything that I had done and returned to the few essential images of my initial edit. Because that’s Cargo: just a few shots.

^PK How did you work on the colours?

^LWI just heightened them a bit in the final online edit; it was a decision made in a few minutes on the last day. However, I think the vivid colours in the original footage were of greater importance than anything I did afterwards. On the ship, I recorded with my camera’s aperture wide open, while aiming to depict things in a very simple way. For instance, you have an image of a sailor sharply defined against the sea, contrasted with the intense green of the ship itself—the green was so bright because the sailors had to paint the decks and the ship’s exterior over and over again, for no apparent reason, whenever we got stuck somewhere, by order of the captain. The simple composition of some of the images also highlights colour: a single colour here, a person there, and then the sea.”

^PK The pictures have an impressionistic effect.

^LWA lot of people have described the film as impressionistic. It’s hard for me to comment because it’s simply the way I film and see. When I film, I wait for something to happen. If the images appear this way, it’s likely due to a combination of light, the position of people in the frame, and the slow speed with which I move and zoom the camera toward them. It’s instinctive… though I did also rework the speed of certain shots in a very rudimentary way, to create an off-kilter effect. I imagine this time lag contributes to the impressionistic quality that some people have remarked upon.

^PK The image of the young woman with a red umbrella in the port in the evening has an impressionistic mood like in a painting by Georges Seurat

^LWThe shot was taken from inside the hotel where I was staying in Venice. I was holding the camera and gazing out the window, when suddenly a storm broke and the woman with the umbrella appeared. I gradually understood from her behaviour that she was a prostitute, waiting for a client. It was pure coincidence, she came as if out of nowhere. It is an example of just waiting for something to happen. Several people who lived near the bridge were astonished by the shot because they told me that they had never seen a prostitute there before. As mentioned, a number of spectators have assumed that this scene is staged, but it wasn’t. It does, indeed, look fictional.

The same goes, to some degree, for the scene when I look down from the cargo ship onto the Syrian port and a man on a bicycle appears and starts stealing wood. It is strange, I look out, and suddenly he appears. Some people think this, too, was arranged or premeditated, especially since because both he and the woman in Venice perform a similar semi-circular motion. It looks as if I have given them stage directions—but it’s not the case.

^PK The woman with the umbrella appears at the beginning of the film, and the film also ends with images of women

^LWYes, I wanted the film to end far from the world of the cargo ship, so I used these images that I shot when I was at home in Paris. Some have interpreted this as a return to a female world. I didn’t think about the shots in those terms, but unconsciously, I think I wanted to balance the film out. The woman you see sitting in the metro (and whom several people have mistaken for me) has a certain kind of fragility about her. Maybe I thought that was necessary after all those men.

^PK The world of men seems as hermetic as a prison.

^LWSeveral of the sailors described to me feeling imprisoned. They felt not only trapped but cut off from the world. They were in true limbo. The men were wandering endlessly out on the high seas, with no control over the route taken. There was no seeming rationale to the orders they were receiving. They would set course for somewhere and then suddenly a new order would arrive instructing them to sail in a completely different direction, or to turn off the engines and float for days. No one bothered to provide them with an explanation. For those who experienced it as a prison, it is arguably one of the worst kinds of sentences: to be confined without knowing how long it will last and where you will be taken. It is this feeling of claustrophobia that I wanted to convey.

Even in the ports, the men remained, in some sense, strangers and out of place. Often, they told me they really wanted to disembark from the ship in a passing port, but few of them ever did. And those who did disembark didn’t venture far; they rarely went to the outer edges of where they were allowed to go. They remained prisoners of a situation.

^PK Limbo is a religious term, a term for limbo.

^LWThere is something haunting about the way in which time and life are suspended in liminal spaces, like in the refugee camps and border zones that I have been travelling to while researching my current film Border. What most strikes me is the way in which individuals are stripped down to their essentials there. When societal conventions fall away, you begin to see who a human being really is.

As a child, I couldn’t speak English and communicated in a garbled language that only a few people could understand in fragments. For the first seven years of my life, while doing intensive speech therapy, I often found myself rejected by normal society. I frequently had the impression that I was living completely alone in a separate world. I spent years observing life at a distance. In some respects, I am still drawn to situations that evoke that wall of separation that I experienced as a child. I think this is what pulls me towards liminal spaces—temporary, suspended spaces where people must act differently; places where the conventions of everyday life fall away. Though the material circumstances are very different, that sense of isolation, of being pushed to the edges of a society that doesn’t find it convenient to acknowledge or see you, in your difference, remains.

^K How do you assess the mass phenomenon of DV here?

^LW

I have worked with Hi8 and 8mm video since the early 1990s, and have always appreciated the ‘poor’, rough quality of earlier non-digital video formats (the same raw quality that stopped many filmmakers I know from considering video a serious proposition until the arrival of mini DV). So the shift to shooting with DV felt natural to me. Given that technological progression, I’m somewhat reluctant to talk about the advent of DV as a revolution, as it is often now portrayed. Still, it is revolutionary in terms of accessibility and distribution—the fact that many filmmakers who once spurned video are now working with DV, has normalised it. Hierarchies are breaking down, and video can now be projected almost anywhere, alongside film—something previously unthinkable. With new technology often comes a shift in focus and aesthetics. Because DV is so easy and comparatively cheap to work with, it is opening doors for people to make very personal films. It’s an ideal medium for video essays for instance, and I am happy about that. My work would be unthinkable today without DV.

To me, the real revolution comes whenever an exciting new filmmaker emerges… There will always be people who explore innovative approaches with a new medium. But DV can be challenging to work with. At first glance its images appear smooth and perfect compared with the less polished video formats of before, but in turn the footage can lack weight and presence. You have to work with and against this. I am trying to diminish the appearance of perfection.

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