1 00:00:08,440 --> 00:00:10,480 -Take a half a step this way. 2 00:00:11,240 --> 00:00:12,501 That's it. 3 00:00:13,200 --> 00:00:14,940 Okay, are we kind of– 4 00:00:15,590 --> 00:00:18,362 Oh, I know what I'd better do is just check my sound on this. 5 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:22,060 It's– no, it's kind of nice. The black is good. 6 00:00:22,060 --> 00:00:23,882 -Better? -Yeah. Yeah. 7 00:00:27,880 --> 00:00:31,360 -There was one singer I knew Who used to– always first, she'd 8 00:00:31,360 --> 00:00:34,411 start the day by checking if her voice was there, and she'd go... 9 00:00:34,411 --> 00:00:36,000 [hums an arpeggio] -Okay. 10 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:38,358 -The high--those kind of crazy sounds. 11 00:00:38,358 --> 00:00:39,160 -Okay. 12 00:00:39,160 --> 00:00:41,880 -The piece that's being made here is designed to be shown on 13 00:00:41,880 --> 00:00:45,120 the fire screen at La Fenice Opera House in Venice. 14 00:00:45,120 --> 00:00:47,240 And the principle is that they get– have a projection on the 15 00:00:47,240 --> 00:00:49,800 fire screen while the audience comes in and the orchestra is 16 00:00:49,800 --> 00:00:51,393 tuning up. 17 00:00:51,393 --> 00:01:02,080 [singing arpeggios] 18 00:01:02,080 --> 00:01:04,240 [singing over cell phone] 19 00:01:04,240 --> 00:01:04,840 Hello. 20 00:01:04,840 --> 00:01:07,160 Hello, this is the– 21 00:01:07,160 --> 00:01:12,706 this is the pianist calling, all the way from William's house. 22 00:01:12,706 --> 00:01:14,920 [chuckles] So, Kim, 23 00:01:14,920 --> 00:01:17,400 What I'll do is, I'll play you some chords, 24 00:01:17,400 --> 00:01:19,960 and then I'm gonna kind of play along with you a little bit, 25 00:01:19,960 --> 00:01:20,800 Okay? 26 00:01:20,800 --> 00:01:21,800 -Okay. 27 00:01:21,800 --> 00:01:24,960 -Hold on. I'm going to speak to you now. 28 00:01:24,960 --> 00:01:28,588 Hold on. Okay, let's put that there. 29 00:01:31,040 --> 00:01:33,960 Just talk a bit. Sing– sing a bit. 30 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:39,663 [singing in foreign language] 31 00:01:39,663 --> 00:01:40,633 -Good. Hang on. 32 00:01:40,633 --> 00:01:42,840 I'm just trying to line this up. That's all right. 33 00:01:42,840 --> 00:01:45,360 Okay, all right, here we go. All right. 34 00:01:45,360 --> 00:01:47,594 [plays arpeggios on piano] 35 00:01:47,594 --> 00:01:50,400 Can you hear the– -Yes. 36 00:01:50,400 --> 00:01:52,039 -Okay. When you're ready. 37 00:01:52,039 --> 00:01:53,409 -Okay. 38 00:01:53,409 --> 00:02:23,840 [singing opera music] 39 00:02:23,840 --> 00:02:25,960 -Kimmy? Kimmy? Stop. 40 00:02:25,960 --> 00:02:26,760 -Okay. 41 00:02:26,760 --> 00:02:28,840 -Okay, let's just do that phrase... 42 00:02:31,655 --> 00:02:34,040 [plays tune on piano] 43 00:02:34,040 --> 00:02:35,600 -Let me just say something to you and Philip. 44 00:02:35,600 --> 00:02:36,360 -Okay. 45 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:40,760 -Okay, to both of you. Phil? 46 00:02:40,760 --> 00:02:44,400 Sorry, William here. One of the things that would be 47 00:02:44,400 --> 00:02:50,920 good is to not so much repeat a whole phrase but to jump– 48 00:02:50,920 --> 00:02:53,800 to break in the middle of a phrase and repeat. 49 00:02:53,800 --> 00:02:56,560 So like where you've got, "Babbo, pieta," 50 00:02:56,560 --> 00:02:58,400 But to... Babbo pie– 51 00:02:58,400 --> 00:03:00,040 Babbo pie– 52 00:03:00,040 --> 00:03:01,800 Try this– when you complete it 53 00:03:01,800 --> 00:03:06,849 at the "Ta," it feels too elegant as a completed gesture. 54 00:03:09,303 --> 00:03:21,629 [singing in foreign language] 55 00:03:22,811 --> 00:03:23,311 Yes. Okay. 56 00:03:26,280 --> 00:03:28,920 -Make a stripe with the bias cut? 57 00:03:28,920 --> 00:03:29,680 Or you prefer what? 58 00:03:32,440 --> 00:03:33,790 - I don't know. 59 00:03:33,790 --> 00:03:40,400 [both speaking quietly] 60 00:03:40,400 --> 00:03:41,840 I work with a wonderful opera 61 00:03:41,840 --> 00:03:45,600 singer who lives in Cape Town. so I called her, and I said, 62 00:03:45,600 --> 00:03:49,160 "Kimmy, would you sing this arietta on the phone, and I'll 63 00:03:49,160 --> 00:03:51,400 sort of sit at the piano and give you the key. 64 00:03:51,400 --> 00:03:56,040 It has a sort of uncanny sound of both old and modern and 65 00:03:56,040 --> 00:03:57,139 contemporary. 66 00:03:58,440 --> 00:03:59,480 -Initially, he'd– I think he'd 67 00:03:59,480 --> 00:04:02,560 done the recording on the cell phone as a guide track. 68 00:04:02,560 --> 00:04:03,960 And then when we heard the recording on the cell phone, we 69 00:04:03,960 --> 00:04:08,240 said let's keep it and work with that strange, caruso-esque, 70 00:04:08,240 --> 00:04:12,420 old quality of the voice, which is why today there are– 71 00:04:12,420 --> 00:04:15,760 we're working with images of Kimmy on the cell phone. 72 00:04:15,760 --> 00:04:16,680 -It was just one of those 73 00:04:16,680 --> 00:04:19,160 moments which happened when I work with William, where we 74 00:04:19,160 --> 00:04:22,640 both went off and played, and the playing worked. 75 00:04:22,640 --> 00:04:25,880 That's one of the things about working with William that 76 00:04:25,880 --> 00:04:30,419 I enjoy so much is the ability to play and experiment. 77 00:04:30,564 --> 00:04:33,654 [singing high notes] [voice breaks slightly] 78 00:04:33,654 --> 00:04:34,588 [clears throat] 79 00:04:35,793 --> 00:04:42,459 [crackly recording of Kimmy singing] 80 00:04:42,459 --> 00:04:43,561 I suppose the first 81 00:04:43,561 --> 00:04:47,120 promptings to work as an artist are still there. 82 00:04:47,120 --> 00:04:49,520 The questions haven't changed. 83 00:04:49,520 --> 00:04:53,880 How does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating 84 00:04:53,880 --> 00:04:57,000 the society that one lives in but allowing what happens there 85 00:04:57,000 --> 00:04:59,240 to be part of the work, part of the vocabulary, 86 00:04:59,240 --> 00:05:03,040 part of the raw material that is dealt with. 87 00:05:03,040 --> 00:05:06,451 South Africa is very much part of the work. 88 00:05:07,344 --> 00:05:11,032 [Kimmy's singing continues] [singing fades out] 89 00:05:11,032 --> 00:05:21,913 [somber instrumental music] 90 00:05:21,913 --> 00:05:24,240 The important thing about the first animated films I made is, 91 00:05:24,240 --> 00:05:28,840 they were done as a response to doing something which I thought 92 00:05:28,840 --> 00:05:31,134 I understood, which was making charcoal drawings. 93 00:05:31,640 --> 00:05:34,440 So they were done on the basis of trying to get away from 94 00:05:34,440 --> 00:05:36,840 a program of doing drawings, having exhibitions, in which 95 00:05:36,840 --> 00:05:40,360 I could see my life heading out ahead of me, 13 more solo 96 00:05:40,360 --> 00:05:42,400 exhibitions of charcoal drawings. 97 00:05:42,400 --> 00:05:44,600 So I decided I had to do something that couldn't possibly 98 00:05:44,600 --> 00:05:47,400 fit into that context, that wasn't going to be in a gallery, 99 00:05:47,400 --> 00:05:50,750 that was done for my own interest and pleasure, 100 00:05:51,135 --> 00:05:54,226 and Soho and Felix came out of that. 101 00:05:57,960 --> 00:05:59,080 There was no expectation they 102 00:05:59,080 --> 00:06:02,040 would be part of the real work I was doing, that they would 103 00:06:02,040 --> 00:06:05,280 have to be understood or justify themselves in a broader world 104 00:06:05,280 --> 00:06:08,640 at all or that they had to even have a logic to them. 105 00:06:08,640 --> 00:06:09,560 It doesn't matter if there isn't 106 00:06:09,560 --> 00:06:11,800 a story because it's not trying to sell it to a producer; 107 00:06:11,800 --> 00:06:14,000 it's not starting with distribution. 108 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:16,640 It's starting with its own crazy logic, so it doesn't matter 109 00:06:16,640 --> 00:06:18,240 who these two characters are or what their names are. 110 00:06:18,240 --> 00:06:19,560 They don't have to represent 111 00:06:19,560 --> 00:06:21,720 anyone but themselves in the film. 112 00:06:22,635 --> 00:06:24,400 It took me a long time to kind of understand that, and 113 00:06:24,400 --> 00:06:26,600 that was the substantive work I was doing. 114 00:06:26,600 --> 00:06:28,120 And so that experience gave me 115 00:06:28,120 --> 00:06:31,640 a lot of confidence in the validity of working without 116 00:06:31,640 --> 00:06:35,760 a program, without the essay being written in advance. 117 00:06:35,760 --> 00:06:37,760 I made a decision I would never 118 00:06:37,760 --> 00:06:40,800 ever write a script; I would never write a storyboard; 119 00:06:40,800 --> 00:06:42,711 I would never ever write a proposal. 120 00:06:43,819 --> 00:06:45,160 [water burbling] 121 00:06:45,259 --> 00:06:48,760 The history of Jews in South Africa is quite complex in the 122 00:06:48,760 --> 00:06:52,000 sense that there were, as there are in all parts of the world, 123 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:55,120 an absolute overrepresentative number of Jewish people who were 124 00:06:55,120 --> 00:06:57,720 iInvolved in liberation struggles, in fights against 125 00:06:57,720 --> 00:07:01,680 apartheid, who had very honorable, ethical, 126 00:07:01,680 --> 00:07:03,400 and moral lives. 127 00:07:03,400 --> 00:07:04,360 But there were also a large 128 00:07:04,360 --> 00:07:07,000 number of Jewish people who did very well under the nationalist 129 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:09,868 government, who made a lot of money through it. 130 00:07:11,622 --> 00:07:13,471 [faint, repetitive tapping] 131 00:07:13,471 --> 00:07:16,648 The depiction of Soho and Felix, who are both Jewish, 132 00:07:16,648 --> 00:07:19,640 so in the– Soho's a Jewish businessman. 133 00:07:20,796 --> 00:07:22,000 It has to do with that double edge. 134 00:07:22,000 --> 00:07:23,800 It would have been very easy to have done– say, "Okay, I'm gonna 135 00:07:23,800 --> 00:07:27,120 draw a terrible Afrikaner and make him entirely separate and 136 00:07:27,120 --> 00:07:28,524 distant from myself." 137 00:07:29,608 --> 00:07:32,360 Whereas, the Soho is a kind of 138 00:07:32,360 --> 00:07:34,197 understanding that that's part of who I am. 139 00:07:34,920 --> 00:07:37,080 The pinstripe– someone who always wears a pinstripe suit 140 00:07:37,080 --> 00:07:38,828 is from a photograph of my grandfather. 141 00:07:39,840 --> 00:07:41,040 The two names came out 142 00:07:41,040 --> 00:07:43,120 of a dream, and it came out of the period when I said, "I'm 143 00:07:43,120 --> 00:07:44,160 making this film for myself. 144 00:07:44,160 --> 00:07:45,279 I don't have to question 145 00:07:45,640 --> 00:07:47,334 who these names are or what they mean." 146 00:07:52,156 --> 00:07:53,366 [cat meows] 147 00:07:55,558 --> 00:07:57,880 I then understood later on that they're both a kind of 148 00:07:57,880 --> 00:08:01,080 self-portrait, a self-portrait in the third person, 149 00:08:01,080 --> 00:08:02,622 and a place self-portrait. 150 00:08:03,080 --> 00:08:04,720 So the films have had to 151 00:08:05,320 --> 00:08:08,440 Either defend themselves or ignore, but they've certainly 152 00:08:08,440 --> 00:08:10,341 been accused of anti-semitism. 153 00:08:11,160 --> 00:08:12,360 In many ways, the work seems 154 00:08:12,360 --> 00:08:16,000 unbearably semitic to me, in the sense it deals endlessly 155 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:19,840 with memory, with loss, all the kind of cliches that you think, 156 00:08:19,840 --> 00:08:22,120 "Oh, this is what a Jewish artist is going to be talking about," 157 00:08:22,120 --> 00:08:24,120 and it's kind of distressing for me that they get 158 00:08:24,120 --> 00:08:27,337 stuck in that terrain, but that is where they are. 159 00:08:33,680 --> 00:08:36,160 The films opened an enormous doors because they gave me 160 00:08:36,160 --> 00:08:40,200 a sense that it was possible to work without a program 161 00:08:40,200 --> 00:08:42,920 in advance and that it was possible to make a film without 162 00:08:42,920 --> 00:08:44,676 first having written a script... 163 00:08:44,676 --> 00:08:49,240 [woman singing] That if you work 164 00:08:49,240 --> 00:08:52,240 conscientiously and hard at it and there is something inside 165 00:08:52,240 --> 00:08:54,160 you that is of interest, that is what will come out. 166 00:08:54,160 --> 00:08:57,435 You yourself will be the film. The film will always be you. 167 00:08:58,760 --> 00:09:00,640 I think a lot of the work that I've done since then, 168 00:09:00,640 --> 00:09:03,120 even if it's not using that technique, has certainly 169 00:09:03,120 --> 00:09:06,240 used that strategy, the understanding that images 170 00:09:06,240 --> 00:09:08,640 and movement as well as static images are a key thing 171 00:09:08,640 --> 00:09:10,680 for me to be working on. 172 00:09:10,680 --> 00:09:12,000 The provisionality of drawings, 173 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:14,080 the fact that they're going to be succeeded by the next stage 174 00:09:14,080 --> 00:09:18,040 of the drawing, was very good for someone who's bad at knowing 175 00:09:18,040 --> 00:09:20,560 when to commit something to being finished, to say, 176 00:09:20,560 --> 00:09:21,960 "When is this drawing finished?" 177 00:09:21,960 --> 00:09:22,920 Here, the drawing would go on 178 00:09:22,920 --> 00:09:25,280 till the sequence was finished in the film, and that would be 179 00:09:25,280 --> 00:09:26,415 the end point of the drawing... 180 00:09:26,415 --> 00:09:28,745 [faint rumbling] 181 00:09:28,745 --> 00:09:31,756 Understanding of the world as process rather than as fact. 182 00:09:32,840 --> 00:09:35,480 And temperamentally, all of those things made sense to me, 183 00:09:35,480 --> 00:09:37,760 And intellectually they made sense to me. 184 00:09:37,760 --> 00:09:39,400 And somehow this technique and 185 00:09:39,400 --> 00:09:44,186 this medium emphasized or allowed that to come forward. 186 00:09:45,655 --> 00:09:46,815 [cat meows] 187 00:10:06,421 --> 00:10:08,760 In the anamorphic film 188 00:10:08,760 --> 00:10:10,800 What Will Come Has Already which is about the 189 00:10:10,800 --> 00:10:13,560 Italian-Ethiopian war of the 1930s, 190 00:10:13,560 --> 00:10:16,760 works on the principle that what is distorted in the projection 191 00:10:16,760 --> 00:10:20,566 gets corrected in the viewers' seeing of it in a mirror. 192 00:10:21,120 --> 00:10:22,560 So the distortion is the 193 00:10:22,560 --> 00:10:25,439 correction, and the original is the distorted. 194 00:10:27,920 --> 00:10:29,840 One of the things of doing the film, or doing the drawings, 195 00:10:29,840 --> 00:10:32,480 was learning the grammar of the transformations that happen when 196 00:10:32,480 --> 00:10:35,400 you go from a flat surface to the curved mirror. 197 00:10:35,400 --> 00:10:36,840 So that, for example, to draw 198 00:10:36,840 --> 00:10:41,640 a straight line is relatively complicated because every 199 00:10:41,640 --> 00:10:44,760 straight line is in fact a curve, whereas every straight 200 00:10:44,760 --> 00:10:47,960 line that you draw becomes a parabola. 201 00:10:47,960 --> 00:10:49,920 So loops, telephone wires are very easy. 202 00:10:49,920 --> 00:10:51,000 Simply draw a series of straight 203 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:53,720 lines on the drawing, and the lines will loop themselves 204 00:10:53,720 --> 00:10:56,243 around the surface of the cylinder. 205 00:10:57,640 --> 00:11:00,440 Whereas if you want a straight line, you've got to calculate 206 00:11:00,440 --> 00:11:02,824 a not obvious curve on the sheet of paper. 207 00:11:02,824 --> 00:11:06,234 [festive folk music] 208 00:11:06,234 --> 00:11:09,794 I'm interested in machines that tell you what it is to look, 209 00:11:10,280 --> 00:11:13,600 that make you aware of the process of seeing and make you 210 00:11:13,600 --> 00:11:16,400 aware of what do you do when you construct the world by looking 211 00:11:16,400 --> 00:11:20,440 at it, but more, as looking and seeing being a metaphor, or 212 00:11:20,440 --> 00:11:22,600 a broad-based metaphor, for how we go through the world, 213 00:11:22,600 --> 00:11:25,421 how we understand the world, for thinking or understanding, 214 00:11:26,240 --> 00:11:28,360 When you look through a stereoscopic viewer, 215 00:11:28,360 --> 00:11:32,400 you're aware that you have two completely flat images and that 216 00:11:32,400 --> 00:11:34,520 all that is happening is that your brain– not the images, 217 00:11:34,520 --> 00:11:38,640 but your brain– is constructing an illusion of three-dimensional depth, 218 00:11:38,640 --> 00:11:40,480 which is very clear when you look at the stereoscopic 219 00:11:40,480 --> 00:11:42,845 viewer because you know you're seeing two flat images. 220 00:11:43,760 --> 00:11:45,080 What's much less obvious is that 221 00:11:45,080 --> 00:11:46,520 that's we're doing all the time in the world. 222 00:11:46,520 --> 00:11:48,480 Our retinas are each receiving 223 00:11:48,480 --> 00:11:52,200 flat images, and our brain combines the two images from our 224 00:11:52,200 --> 00:11:55,440 retinas into this illusion of coherent depth, and because we 225 00:11:55,440 --> 00:11:57,120 do it so well, we believe that's what we see. 226 00:11:57,120 --> 00:11:59,320 We believe we are simply seeing depth rather than 227 00:11:59,320 --> 00:12:02,710 we are constructing depth out of two flat images in our eyes. 228 00:12:03,000 --> 00:12:05,560 So that, again, is both interesting about the phenomenon 229 00:12:05,560 --> 00:12:09,480 and the wow factor of stereoscopes always, but it's 230 00:12:09,480 --> 00:12:13,040 more about the agency we have, whether we like it or not, 231 00:12:13,040 --> 00:12:14,584 to make sense of the world. 232 00:12:16,680 --> 00:12:18,120 When the metropolitan opera said 233 00:12:18,120 --> 00:12:20,440 they wanted me to do an opera, we spent a long time trying to 234 00:12:20,440 --> 00:12:21,997 find one that seemed appropriate. 235 00:12:22,720 --> 00:12:24,560 They suggested Shostakovich. 236 00:12:24,560 --> 00:12:28,880 I said yes to Shostakovich, but first prize for me would be The Nose. 237 00:12:31,120 --> 00:12:32,200 I've always wanted to do 238 00:12:32,200 --> 00:12:34,880 a Russian project, which is to say, a project in which all 239 00:12:34,880 --> 00:12:36,920 those different things could be looked at, which is the 240 00:12:36,920 --> 00:12:41,440 political history, the formal elements of modernism and 241 00:12:41,440 --> 00:12:44,828 cnstructivism, and the poetry and the writing. 242 00:12:46,032 --> 00:12:47,960 They all come into the The Nose; 243 00:12:47,960 --> 00:12:49,520 Not all of them into the opera, 244 00:12:49,520 --> 00:12:52,981 of course, but chunks of them into what we had at Sydney, 245 00:12:53,680 --> 00:12:55,680 I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine 246 00:12:55,680 --> 00:12:58,262 and various other iterations of the material. 247 00:13:14,640 --> 00:13:15,680 There'll be houselights on and 248 00:13:15,680 --> 00:13:18,040 all the projections off when people come in. 249 00:13:18,040 --> 00:13:20,000 Then he'll switch the houselights off, and I think 250 00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:22,000 the two side lights onstage will be on. 251 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:24,040 Some of those numbers are references rather than things 252 00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:25,840 that are actually happening in them. 253 00:13:25,840 --> 00:13:28,171 Like, from the dive, it runs to the end of the whole tape. 254 00:13:28,171 --> 00:13:28,718 -Yes, right. 255 00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:31,017 -Okay. 256 00:13:38,400 --> 00:13:40,880 -Can I have your autograph for my program? 257 00:13:40,880 --> 00:13:41,640 -Sure. 258 00:13:41,640 --> 00:13:46,300 The Sydney piece is a series of eight projections in one room at the same time. 259 00:13:47,080 --> 00:13:50,680 I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine, With music by Philip Miller. 260 00:13:50,680 --> 00:13:53,360 And you want to understand that these are simply torn pieces of 261 00:13:53,360 --> 00:13:56,640 black paper arranged in a certain way, and is it about 262 00:13:56,640 --> 00:14:00,200 a generosity of viewing to see these torn pieces of paper 263 00:14:00,200 --> 00:14:03,560 make a coherent whole, or is it an inability of 264 00:14:03,560 --> 00:14:07,280 ourselves to stop these fragments coming together? 265 00:14:07,280 --> 00:14:08,520 This is a section of 266 00:14:08,520 --> 00:14:10,359 I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine. 267 00:14:11,009 --> 00:14:12,160 And the title comes from 268 00:14:12,160 --> 00:14:15,200 a Russian peasant saying– denying guilt. 269 00:14:15,200 --> 00:14:17,400 If you were accused of something, you'd simply say, 270 00:14:17,400 --> 00:14:18,920 "I am not me. The horse was not mine." 271 00:14:18,920 --> 00:14:20,480 or that "I didn't steal the horse." 272 00:14:20,480 --> 00:14:21,952 Who wrote these notes? 273 00:14:21,952 --> 00:14:24,360 I mean, this is– none of this makes sense. 274 00:14:24,360 --> 00:14:25,440 What is our page? 275 00:14:25,440 --> 00:14:28,680 They're satellite pieces, but they're not only satellite pieces. 276 00:14:29,400 --> 00:14:32,240 It's material that's been excavated while working on the 277 00:14:32,240 --> 00:14:34,120 opera that then has its own place. 278 00:14:34,120 --> 00:14:35,240 So it's either like a kind of 279 00:14:35,240 --> 00:14:38,120 a footnote to the opera or an essay about the opera. 280 00:14:38,120 --> 00:14:39,520 I'm not meant to be doing this stuff. 281 00:14:39,520 --> 00:14:42,400 What am I doing on top of this ladder the whole time? 282 00:14:42,400 --> 00:14:43,560 None of these is any good. 283 00:14:43,560 --> 00:14:44,080 Here. 284 00:14:44,080 --> 00:14:44,920 Brackets. 285 00:14:44,920 --> 00:14:46,000 Prolonged laughter. 286 00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:46,990 Uproar in the room. 287 00:14:46,990 --> 00:14:50,934 [chaotic instrumental music] 288 00:14:50,934 --> 00:14:52,920 But in some ways, you can turn it on its head and say the whole 289 00:14:52,920 --> 00:14:56,080 opera production is simply a provocation to arrive at this 290 00:14:56,080 --> 00:14:58,960 piece because in fact the opera had seven performances. 291 00:14:58,960 --> 00:15:00,600 After that, that's it. 292 00:15:00,600 --> 00:15:01,760 Whereas this already has had 293 00:15:01,760 --> 00:15:04,197 a much longer life than the opera will ever have. 294 00:15:18,480 --> 00:15:19,360 Let's try it. 295 00:15:19,360 --> 00:15:20,400 -Compilations. 296 00:15:20,400 --> 00:15:21,880 -No. That's all right. 297 00:15:21,880 --> 00:15:23,783 Just wanted to use this for the soundtrack. 298 00:15:27,275 --> 00:15:59,035 [faint chaotic music playing] 299 00:16:00,360 --> 00:16:02,720 The first passage is just the horse by itself. 300 00:16:02,720 --> 00:16:07,640 And then the horse is going to come in and stand like a circus horse. 301 00:16:07,640 --> 00:16:10,600 And then he's going to rear up, at which point I disappear, 302 00:16:10,600 --> 00:16:12,520 and the front stepladder disappears, and it's just my 303 00:16:12,520 --> 00:16:14,960 legs with an animated horse on top. 304 00:16:14,960 --> 00:16:17,320 The back horse rears, and then I leap up. 305 00:16:17,320 --> 00:16:18,320 -This is coming on now. 306 00:16:18,320 --> 00:16:18,960 -Yeah, but they're on 307 00:16:18,960 --> 00:16:20,200 together, obviously, at the same time. 308 00:16:20,200 --> 00:16:22,080 -They come– they follow each other on? 309 00:16:22,080 --> 00:16:25,280 -See, that's what I forgot about: that damn ladder. 310 00:16:25,280 --> 00:16:27,680 Oh, no, it's actually possible to make that right. 311 00:16:27,680 --> 00:16:32,491 When that guy at the back does his lean up, then the front guy 312 00:16:32,491 --> 00:16:35,111 disappears, and we just have the ladder by itself. 313 00:16:35,111 --> 00:16:59,032 [chaotic circus music] 314 00:17:10,840 --> 00:17:17,720 So here, I advance the image one, two frames and then shift 315 00:17:17,720 --> 00:17:19,440 the horse– the paper horse– along. 316 00:17:46,920 --> 00:17:47,880 And when I shoot it with 317 00:17:47,880 --> 00:17:51,160 a camera to reshoot what's being projected with the 318 00:17:51,160 --> 00:17:55,245 addition of the extra elements, I'm also shooting two frames. 319 00:18:25,520 --> 00:18:30,560 We're allowing a similarity of shape and tone to make the 320 00:18:30,560 --> 00:18:34,627 viewer not understand that we suddenly changed medium. 321 00:18:40,287 --> 00:18:42,344 Hi. Hi, boy. 322 00:18:42,344 --> 00:18:43,991 -It's lunchtime. -Okay. Thank you. 323 00:18:44,400 --> 00:18:46,959 We will just get this guy up, and then we'll stop. 324 00:18:56,160 --> 00:18:58,880 I think one does think with one's hands, and I think that's 325 00:18:58,880 --> 00:19:02,080 why a keyboard is not a good place for me to think. 326 00:19:02,080 --> 00:19:03,997 So people think very well on a keyboard. 327 00:19:04,960 --> 00:19:08,800 I need kind of the fidgeting of charcoal, scissors, or tearing 328 00:19:08,800 --> 00:19:13,480 of something in my hands, as if there's a different brain 329 00:19:13,480 --> 00:19:15,462 that is controlling how that works. 330 00:19:15,920 --> 00:19:18,686 There's an uncertainty of what you're doing, an imprecision, 331 00:19:19,144 --> 00:19:22,400 so that what you do when you look at it is not to know 332 00:19:22,400 --> 00:19:24,852 something in advance which you're carrying out 333 00:19:25,815 --> 00:19:28,794 but rather rely on recognizing something as it appears. 334 00:19:38,480 --> 00:19:41,800 What I can do, but only as well as anybody else in the world 335 00:19:41,800 --> 00:19:44,349 can do, is recognize things as they appear. 336 00:19:45,240 --> 00:19:48,200 So it's not that I'm better at recognizing eight pieces of 337 00:19:48,200 --> 00:19:50,502 paper as a horse than anyone else. 338 00:19:51,080 --> 00:19:52,480 What I do do is allow myself the 339 00:19:52,480 --> 00:19:54,680 luxury of saying, "This is going to be the way I'm going to spend 340 00:19:54,680 --> 00:19:57,760 months and years of my life is arranging stupid pieces of 341 00:19:57,760 --> 00:20:00,040 paper and then saying, 'Ah! A horse,' every day, 342 00:20:00,040 --> 00:20:01,447 as if it's something fresh." 343 00:20:04,000 --> 00:20:06,000 Okay, here we take a pause for lunch. 344 00:20:06,840 --> 00:20:07,543 Come on, Tamino. 345 00:20:07,543 --> 00:20:08,303 [whistles] 346 00:20:08,303 --> 00:20:09,120 Here, come on. 347 00:20:09,120 --> 00:20:11,341 The seriousness of play is important in the work I do, 348 00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:18,854 and it's important as a strategy for allowing images and ideas to emerge. 349 00:20:19,520 --> 00:20:22,789 It's about saying in the looseness of trying different things. 350 00:20:23,680 --> 00:20:24,560 And it is– you know, it's 351 00:20:24,560 --> 00:20:27,280 terrible that one associates that looseness or open-endedness 352 00:20:27,280 --> 00:20:31,000 with childhood, that after that, that possibility of exploring 353 00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:33,320 something not knowing quite where it will lead to, 354 00:20:33,320 --> 00:20:36,200 understanding one can do things lightly and quickly, 355 00:20:36,200 --> 00:20:38,816 isn't exactly frowned upon, but it's not the norm. 356 00:20:43,320 --> 00:20:46,280 All the interesting ideas I've ever had, or interesting work 357 00:20:46,280 --> 00:20:50,173 I've done, has always been against ideas I've had. 358 00:20:51,040 --> 00:20:52,520 It's kind of been in between the 359 00:20:52,520 --> 00:20:55,374 things I thought I was doing that the real work has happened.