13.04.14 | PUBLIC HEARING INTERVIEW
VISIONS: Why do you make films?
Wilkins: It is a bit of a compulsion. I am better at it that other things I’d like to do. My memory is really bad so a film is a nice place to put my thoughts and feelings for future access. This becomes really interesting when someone else’s film permeates my own memory. I like that trade. Less so image, it’s the “moving” part which gets me: time and expiration and illusion and termination. Music also moves but there is something more pure about it. I think I am less pure than that.
VISIONS: You seem to have a strong interest in the mundane...
W: I think I do but not so much because it's simply mundane but because it's the world that we live in. It's more an interest in proving that the mundane isn't actually mundane or acknowledging that the life I'm living, that we are all living, is it - this is it, this is our life. Cinema is a space of fantasy and when I was a kid I was certainly interested in fantastic movies, Hollywood and dreaming big but as I began to realise what social and economic restrictions I had (and didn't have - because I'm certainly privileged in ways) I began to get really interested in how I have an aesthetic that grows out of my restrictions. It's also influenced by what I'm surrounded by and my history and how I grew up and things I spent a lot of time doing like we all do, like sitting around in different places, waiting for things to happen, drinking bottled drinks. These things aren't arbitrary, this is our life. We may imagine ourselves otherwise and we are in part what we imagine but we are also the physical and the material. I think that physical and material acknowledgement is something that pops up in all of my movies even if they're very different. Maybe it's that the mundane isn't actually mundane.
VISIONS: The definition of the word "mundane" is "of this world", not something necessarily boring…
W: Then I am in complete agreement with that official definition. I think the reason to look at it via cinema is because it can really express its importance. I think it's an interesting contradiction making the mundane exceptional or viewing it through an exceptional lens. Then is it 'mundane' anymore? I guess the answer is no. That convergence is much more interesting to me rather than starting out with something that is already 'drama-worthy'. That's also why I find myself torn between documentary and fiction modes of expression because I do have a desire towards creation and writing and creating characters and screenplays but whenever I engage fully in that it feels so arbitrary. I can just write whatever I want so why even bother, who cares?
VISIONS: Controlling everything ends up not being that interesting?
W: 'Total fiction' or things like animation always have a flavour of the arbitrary and I always feel a lingering question of how and why things are styled or created in a particular way.
VISIONS: A formal approach seems to be important to you in your work...
W: Personally, it's a way of controlling my 'wilder' impulses. I feel quite blessed or lucky to be able to have always been able to pick up a camera or a pen or a pencil and just make stuff. I've always been someone who's constantly making stuff but I've done enough of it to find that it's not satisfying if it doesn't fit into something that makes a larger sense. I think going to art school and thinking about different media and about my access to things, I came to understand that it all means something. It might not be the end of the world or it may only mean something to me but the material real world has an effect on me. In a strange way even though formalism seems to be full of rules it's kind of freeing. In Public Hearing it was the words that guided everything and thus as a filmmaker I can function with the little resources I have. It's almost a survival tactic in a way.
VISIONS: By acknowledging the form do you find you can move beyond it since you've accepted its imperfections?
W: I think so and I feel that Public Hearing is almost something like a parody of structuralism to a certain extent. I have a problem with the idea of creating rules just because you need them. There's a film that came out recently, I forget the name of it, in which the filmmaker only filmed on Tuesdays for a year. That rule obviously leads to some interesting things like seeing a character in only one 'node' of their life but then you have to ask why restrict it to only Tuesdays when you could shoot on Wednesdays, too? Unless you're talking about some, almost imperceptible difference then it doesn't really matter. Making up that kind of rule becomes problematic just like choosing to make your film with five 100' rolls of 16mm and that will be your film. There is a structure that is created but for one thing it's already been done and I don't know if it's looking to achieve something larger. I think I get most excited when the content really determines how the film must be shot and it can only express its essence through being shot that way. I think the result then is often that the thing that is making the rules is actually contained within the final piece.
If you watch Public Hearing, you experience the public hearing and you can choose what to do, how to feel about it, what to do about it or whether or not you agree with my visual intervention or not but the PDF document that's online is in the movie. Even the Thin Blue Line, which is considered the grandfather of this era of self-aware reenactment in documentary, is still arbitrary because it's reenacting hearsay (it works I suppose because it's in the form of a procedural). They're not reenactments because they're not real. They're actually enactments that have an intellectual relationship to something that may or may not have happened. Public Hearing is different because it has no official or designated relationship to the public hearing, it's only linked to the words which are then instilled within the movie. It becomes a tighter circle. Not necessarily better, just tighter.
VISIONS: Why transform the real through a medium?
W: I think it touches back on being frustrated with the arbitrary and being genuinely interested in the world that surrounds me and its artifacts and particularly the things that I have access to. I'm not a scholar and I don't have any particular education that allows me to access human artefacts except what I come across through the Internet and whatever else through other misadventures. I think anybody who considers themselves if not a documentary filmmaker but working within a documentary tradition probably shares a starting point interest in other, real people.
VISIONS: Do you think transforming reality helps us see it better?
W: I think it helps us see a reality. I don't know if Public Hearing helps us see it's original reality. I think maybe what the movie achieves is that it's about many different things even though it seems simple in a lot of ways. The sound design is very minimal as is the distribution of images. I think that reveals something for me. The political documentary and social document aspects are important and worth talking about and I think that there's something to learn from it but to me it's mainly a documentary about processing information and how we use language and how we communicate to each other. I think if someone were to come to the film wanting to really learn about Walmart and the public hearing situation, they will get something out of it but it's not going to be conclusive. I'm sure there are films out there that better illustrate or explain how public hearings actually work. But that's not to say I'm not interested in that. I call the film a "didactic comedy" and I've been thinking a lot about what it means for a film to teach. The idea of a film being didactic has a really bad rap these days but I feel pretty strongly that every movie teaches, it's just a question of whether or not it's aware of what it's teaching and that it is indeed teaching. When I say that Public Hearing is teaching I don't have something to tell everybody that they don't know but it's just inherent in the structure of the film - you have to learn its language in order to even begin watching it. The film also has to learn the language of the public hearing. Everyone has to try and understand how everyone else is speaking. I find the first 20 minutes of the film to be really flat, it's almost impossible to understand the words of the people and it becomes almost gibberish and really oppressive but then it breaks open at a certain point and becomes a series of human monologues after that. I feel like that first part is definitely a test and it's usually in the first 25 minutes that people walk out.
I think currently in this hybrid documentary climate where everyone is exploring what is and isn't documentary there's still a cheap binary of saying it's one or the other or a blend of the two when in fact I think we need to look at the root of the word "documentary". It's not necessarily a document but comes from the Latin word meaning "to teach", that's the stem of "document" and thus "documentary". So then what is teaching? That seems to me to be bigger question. When you say something is documentary you should ask, "is it teaching?" and then, "how is it teaching?" and not, "is it dealing with fiction or not?". I think maybe then the radical thing to do is to admit that the modes of teaching that are common in the documentary genre have failed or are ineffective or ideologically driven and then try something else.
VISIONS: How does reenactment help to see or understand the world?
W: I think Public Hearing is a reenactment for sure in a very technical sense and I guess I'm not interested in reenactment in a looser sense. I think reenactment is very powerful but also has to be distrusted at all times. Part of the reason I decided to shoot Public Hearing is because I'd just come out of art school and had been reading a lot about reenactment at the time and became aware that a lot of artists were working with it but the work seemed to always deal with reenactments of things that really 'mattered' or were 'sensational' and were inherently interesting so I wondered what it would be to reenact something that nobody really cared about. The genesis of the movie was both the admiration of the tactics of reenactment but also trying to find a way of questioning what I feel is a little off about it as well. Again, in the first 20 minutes of Public Hearing you stop being able to understand what they're talking about and the content just melts away and people become objects and you watch them acting.
VISIONS: You seem to be interested in contemporary cultural 'archeology' and it's links with technology…
W: I love that stuff. I think it's so odd how this material junk seemed so seductively immaterial in its prime. A USB dongle is the most amazing thing until it doesn't work, it just becomes a piece of crap. Remember Zip disks? They were huge and so powerful and expensive at the time - they were 100MB. But I think that's just an age-old thing.
VISIONS: The acceleration must be much faster now though.
W: Yeah, it is. You're totally right. Then there are the software-based solutions that try and mediate the speed or slow it a little bit, like the PDF format which I really love. I find it to be such a fascinating conceptual notion or concept. It is always referencing its potential material standard which is the printed paper even though PDF's are rarely printed and the whole benefit is that you can view them on your tablets, download or send them. But it's just a sort of fixed standard that reminds us that we live in a physical world. I find that really seductive and almost reassuring: software citing a memory of the real world being more reliable than material things we rely on like dongles and Zip disks, that's an interesting thing to me.
VISIONS: You're also working in keeping the content and the format alive in a parallel by making a film from a PDF.
W: Yeah, totally. One thing I'd definitely like to say about that is even though it was shot on 16mm I don't lament the fact that I could never afford and never intended to blow it up to 35mm. I always knew from the beginning that it would ultimately have to be a digital film and I'm happy that it is this weird hybrid of media. That's why the flyover scene and the credits and any scene that wasn't directly cited or drawn from the transcript is created in a pure digital world and it's almost like the 16mm is embalmed and laid to rest in a digital shell or coffin or something and they butt heads. The only thing I do lament is that it's chances of being shown in theatres are reduced. It's not a question of image quality but it's more the event of having an audience watch an audience which is purposely minimal and quiet so the real audience can essentially provide the foley. When projected it's almost as though the cinema space becomes an experimental presentation space.
VISIONS: Have you ever projected it with all the lights on in a cinema?
W: No, that's a good idea actually. I should give that a shot.
VISIONS: The awkwardness of technology seems to give your films a rhythm. Is that something you're interested in?
W: Definitely. It's always the kind of stuff that we're always trying to elide in real life, like when a microphone squeals everyone winces and covers their ears and then we pretend that it didn't happen. It's so interesting. Every time technology upgrades we think it's so much better than the last thing but there is always some little flaw. I can't get over the fact that we now live in a culture of touch-screens and everyone accepts them but they're so greasy. They're always covered in human grease. It doesn't account for the fact that we're still these biological, greasy creatures. So now we're always walking around with these screens that are all smudged and nasty looking. I don't know why but I always pay attention to that stuff. Or earbuds are kind of gross, you stick them in your ears then they're covered in earwax. It always feels great when a technology is new but as soon as something newer comes along that changes.
Pedro Costa talks about some of his earlier films that he shot on DV and the ideology and ergonomics of cameras. He talks about how companies design cameras to be used in a certain way and are thus promoting a certain type of cinematography and thus image creation and thus information distribution. So he would purposely shoot in the opposite way that these new cameras were dictating. It's not deeply radical, I guess, because it's speculative in the first place and also it's not like you can't just put them on a table or a tripod as he does. But it's really interesting that he does acknowledge it and every time there is a new feature he does the opposite of what it's intended for. That's what I read or felt like I was picking out from what he said, at least. So I think there's something interesting in that. There is something interesting in the gesture of shooting in 16mm now because it's slightly masochistic and anachronistic. Why would I spend this money and angst when I could seemingly be doing it much easier? I think the answer is that it is actually different and we can't pretend and let one technology erase the history of another because that's false.
VISIONS: Is capitalism a recurring theme in all of your work?
W: Not always so explicitly. I think economies and labour and acknowledging the existence of money instead of dodging it is something I am interested in. I'm more than happy to talk about the challenges of money as a filmmaker and how it affects the kinds of movies I make rather than create a mystique around myself which I think a lot of artists do. Money is sort of taboo and they "just make work". A film I'm editing at the moment, The Republic, is basically all about a micro-economy. It's about a self-created state within a State of libertarians that reject the United States and deal with each other through contracts and barter. The details of civic maintenance and the capital that it entails is huge to this film.
VISIONS: Do you feel futile when facing the workings of big box stores and capitalist workings?
W: I don't feel futile. I feel I'm ultimately more interested in people than whether or not this specific political situation is or isn't going to work. I find the situation in Public Hearing ironic and I think a lot of good can come out of it even if the political result is totally failed. The process is important and the fact that those people came out to articulate themselves as human beings in a democratic society is really strong and matters a lot. I grew up going to Lutheran church and a lot of people shit on religion these days and I'm not religious but in a way it's fine. People go to church and whether or not you believe in what is being taught there's an important community maintenance, a low-level thing where you go and you see the same people every week. That to me seems to be beyond the critique of religion. Where do you really get that in today's society? It's worth acknowledging it for that.
VISIONS: The name of your production company is The Automatic Moving Co. How does this name relate to your work?
W: It's a name that does kind of represent our working mode in a jokey way. It comes from the title of a film made in the early 1900's called The Automatic Moving Co. It's an animation of life-size objects - a moving truck backs up to a house, opens itself up and the furniture moves itself into the house. When I saw that I was really struck by it and this early film that was so seamlessly animated but also exists in the real world. So that was the genesis of the name but it also represents the labour that my collaborators and I have often undertaken. We've had to do a lot of shitty jobs and a lot of manual labour to support our work. I've been really interested in that labour exchange - a day of shitty work equals a half day that I can pay to make my movie and the other half goes to living. Then the name is also an obvious play on what 'movies' are and also the idea of some sort of automated feeling or emotional reaction involved in film viewing.
Wilkins: It is a bit of a compulsion. I am better at it that other things I’d like to do. My memory is really bad so a film is a nice place to put my thoughts and feelings for future access. This becomes really interesting when someone else’s film permeates my own memory. I like that trade. Less so image, it’s the “moving” part which gets me: time and expiration and illusion and termination. Music also moves but there is something more pure about it. I think I am less pure than that.
VISIONS: You seem to have a strong interest in the mundane...
W: I think I do but not so much because it's simply mundane but because it's the world that we live in. It's more an interest in proving that the mundane isn't actually mundane or acknowledging that the life I'm living, that we are all living, is it - this is it, this is our life. Cinema is a space of fantasy and when I was a kid I was certainly interested in fantastic movies, Hollywood and dreaming big but as I began to realise what social and economic restrictions I had (and didn't have - because I'm certainly privileged in ways) I began to get really interested in how I have an aesthetic that grows out of my restrictions. It's also influenced by what I'm surrounded by and my history and how I grew up and things I spent a lot of time doing like we all do, like sitting around in different places, waiting for things to happen, drinking bottled drinks. These things aren't arbitrary, this is our life. We may imagine ourselves otherwise and we are in part what we imagine but we are also the physical and the material. I think that physical and material acknowledgement is something that pops up in all of my movies even if they're very different. Maybe it's that the mundane isn't actually mundane.
VISIONS: The definition of the word "mundane" is "of this world", not something necessarily boring…
W: Then I am in complete agreement with that official definition. I think the reason to look at it via cinema is because it can really express its importance. I think it's an interesting contradiction making the mundane exceptional or viewing it through an exceptional lens. Then is it 'mundane' anymore? I guess the answer is no. That convergence is much more interesting to me rather than starting out with something that is already 'drama-worthy'. That's also why I find myself torn between documentary and fiction modes of expression because I do have a desire towards creation and writing and creating characters and screenplays but whenever I engage fully in that it feels so arbitrary. I can just write whatever I want so why even bother, who cares?
VISIONS: Controlling everything ends up not being that interesting?
W: 'Total fiction' or things like animation always have a flavour of the arbitrary and I always feel a lingering question of how and why things are styled or created in a particular way.
VISIONS: A formal approach seems to be important to you in your work...
W: Personally, it's a way of controlling my 'wilder' impulses. I feel quite blessed or lucky to be able to have always been able to pick up a camera or a pen or a pencil and just make stuff. I've always been someone who's constantly making stuff but I've done enough of it to find that it's not satisfying if it doesn't fit into something that makes a larger sense. I think going to art school and thinking about different media and about my access to things, I came to understand that it all means something. It might not be the end of the world or it may only mean something to me but the material real world has an effect on me. In a strange way even though formalism seems to be full of rules it's kind of freeing. In Public Hearing it was the words that guided everything and thus as a filmmaker I can function with the little resources I have. It's almost a survival tactic in a way.
VISIONS: By acknowledging the form do you find you can move beyond it since you've accepted its imperfections?
W: I think so and I feel that Public Hearing is almost something like a parody of structuralism to a certain extent. I have a problem with the idea of creating rules just because you need them. There's a film that came out recently, I forget the name of it, in which the filmmaker only filmed on Tuesdays for a year. That rule obviously leads to some interesting things like seeing a character in only one 'node' of their life but then you have to ask why restrict it to only Tuesdays when you could shoot on Wednesdays, too? Unless you're talking about some, almost imperceptible difference then it doesn't really matter. Making up that kind of rule becomes problematic just like choosing to make your film with five 100' rolls of 16mm and that will be your film. There is a structure that is created but for one thing it's already been done and I don't know if it's looking to achieve something larger. I think I get most excited when the content really determines how the film must be shot and it can only express its essence through being shot that way. I think the result then is often that the thing that is making the rules is actually contained within the final piece.
If you watch Public Hearing, you experience the public hearing and you can choose what to do, how to feel about it, what to do about it or whether or not you agree with my visual intervention or not but the PDF document that's online is in the movie. Even the Thin Blue Line, which is considered the grandfather of this era of self-aware reenactment in documentary, is still arbitrary because it's reenacting hearsay (it works I suppose because it's in the form of a procedural). They're not reenactments because they're not real. They're actually enactments that have an intellectual relationship to something that may or may not have happened. Public Hearing is different because it has no official or designated relationship to the public hearing, it's only linked to the words which are then instilled within the movie. It becomes a tighter circle. Not necessarily better, just tighter.
VISIONS: Why transform the real through a medium?
W: I think it touches back on being frustrated with the arbitrary and being genuinely interested in the world that surrounds me and its artifacts and particularly the things that I have access to. I'm not a scholar and I don't have any particular education that allows me to access human artefacts except what I come across through the Internet and whatever else through other misadventures. I think anybody who considers themselves if not a documentary filmmaker but working within a documentary tradition probably shares a starting point interest in other, real people.
VISIONS: Do you think transforming reality helps us see it better?
W: I think it helps us see a reality. I don't know if Public Hearing helps us see it's original reality. I think maybe what the movie achieves is that it's about many different things even though it seems simple in a lot of ways. The sound design is very minimal as is the distribution of images. I think that reveals something for me. The political documentary and social document aspects are important and worth talking about and I think that there's something to learn from it but to me it's mainly a documentary about processing information and how we use language and how we communicate to each other. I think if someone were to come to the film wanting to really learn about Walmart and the public hearing situation, they will get something out of it but it's not going to be conclusive. I'm sure there are films out there that better illustrate or explain how public hearings actually work. But that's not to say I'm not interested in that. I call the film a "didactic comedy" and I've been thinking a lot about what it means for a film to teach. The idea of a film being didactic has a really bad rap these days but I feel pretty strongly that every movie teaches, it's just a question of whether or not it's aware of what it's teaching and that it is indeed teaching. When I say that Public Hearing is teaching I don't have something to tell everybody that they don't know but it's just inherent in the structure of the film - you have to learn its language in order to even begin watching it. The film also has to learn the language of the public hearing. Everyone has to try and understand how everyone else is speaking. I find the first 20 minutes of the film to be really flat, it's almost impossible to understand the words of the people and it becomes almost gibberish and really oppressive but then it breaks open at a certain point and becomes a series of human monologues after that. I feel like that first part is definitely a test and it's usually in the first 25 minutes that people walk out.
I think currently in this hybrid documentary climate where everyone is exploring what is and isn't documentary there's still a cheap binary of saying it's one or the other or a blend of the two when in fact I think we need to look at the root of the word "documentary". It's not necessarily a document but comes from the Latin word meaning "to teach", that's the stem of "document" and thus "documentary". So then what is teaching? That seems to me to be bigger question. When you say something is documentary you should ask, "is it teaching?" and then, "how is it teaching?" and not, "is it dealing with fiction or not?". I think maybe then the radical thing to do is to admit that the modes of teaching that are common in the documentary genre have failed or are ineffective or ideologically driven and then try something else.
VISIONS: How does reenactment help to see or understand the world?
W: I think Public Hearing is a reenactment for sure in a very technical sense and I guess I'm not interested in reenactment in a looser sense. I think reenactment is very powerful but also has to be distrusted at all times. Part of the reason I decided to shoot Public Hearing is because I'd just come out of art school and had been reading a lot about reenactment at the time and became aware that a lot of artists were working with it but the work seemed to always deal with reenactments of things that really 'mattered' or were 'sensational' and were inherently interesting so I wondered what it would be to reenact something that nobody really cared about. The genesis of the movie was both the admiration of the tactics of reenactment but also trying to find a way of questioning what I feel is a little off about it as well. Again, in the first 20 minutes of Public Hearing you stop being able to understand what they're talking about and the content just melts away and people become objects and you watch them acting.
VISIONS: You seem to be interested in contemporary cultural 'archeology' and it's links with technology…
W: I love that stuff. I think it's so odd how this material junk seemed so seductively immaterial in its prime. A USB dongle is the most amazing thing until it doesn't work, it just becomes a piece of crap. Remember Zip disks? They were huge and so powerful and expensive at the time - they were 100MB. But I think that's just an age-old thing.
VISIONS: The acceleration must be much faster now though.
W: Yeah, it is. You're totally right. Then there are the software-based solutions that try and mediate the speed or slow it a little bit, like the PDF format which I really love. I find it to be such a fascinating conceptual notion or concept. It is always referencing its potential material standard which is the printed paper even though PDF's are rarely printed and the whole benefit is that you can view them on your tablets, download or send them. But it's just a sort of fixed standard that reminds us that we live in a physical world. I find that really seductive and almost reassuring: software citing a memory of the real world being more reliable than material things we rely on like dongles and Zip disks, that's an interesting thing to me.
VISIONS: You're also working in keeping the content and the format alive in a parallel by making a film from a PDF.
W: Yeah, totally. One thing I'd definitely like to say about that is even though it was shot on 16mm I don't lament the fact that I could never afford and never intended to blow it up to 35mm. I always knew from the beginning that it would ultimately have to be a digital film and I'm happy that it is this weird hybrid of media. That's why the flyover scene and the credits and any scene that wasn't directly cited or drawn from the transcript is created in a pure digital world and it's almost like the 16mm is embalmed and laid to rest in a digital shell or coffin or something and they butt heads. The only thing I do lament is that it's chances of being shown in theatres are reduced. It's not a question of image quality but it's more the event of having an audience watch an audience which is purposely minimal and quiet so the real audience can essentially provide the foley. When projected it's almost as though the cinema space becomes an experimental presentation space.
VISIONS: Have you ever projected it with all the lights on in a cinema?
W: No, that's a good idea actually. I should give that a shot.
VISIONS: The awkwardness of technology seems to give your films a rhythm. Is that something you're interested in?
W: Definitely. It's always the kind of stuff that we're always trying to elide in real life, like when a microphone squeals everyone winces and covers their ears and then we pretend that it didn't happen. It's so interesting. Every time technology upgrades we think it's so much better than the last thing but there is always some little flaw. I can't get over the fact that we now live in a culture of touch-screens and everyone accepts them but they're so greasy. They're always covered in human grease. It doesn't account for the fact that we're still these biological, greasy creatures. So now we're always walking around with these screens that are all smudged and nasty looking. I don't know why but I always pay attention to that stuff. Or earbuds are kind of gross, you stick them in your ears then they're covered in earwax. It always feels great when a technology is new but as soon as something newer comes along that changes.
Pedro Costa talks about some of his earlier films that he shot on DV and the ideology and ergonomics of cameras. He talks about how companies design cameras to be used in a certain way and are thus promoting a certain type of cinematography and thus image creation and thus information distribution. So he would purposely shoot in the opposite way that these new cameras were dictating. It's not deeply radical, I guess, because it's speculative in the first place and also it's not like you can't just put them on a table or a tripod as he does. But it's really interesting that he does acknowledge it and every time there is a new feature he does the opposite of what it's intended for. That's what I read or felt like I was picking out from what he said, at least. So I think there's something interesting in that. There is something interesting in the gesture of shooting in 16mm now because it's slightly masochistic and anachronistic. Why would I spend this money and angst when I could seemingly be doing it much easier? I think the answer is that it is actually different and we can't pretend and let one technology erase the history of another because that's false.
VISIONS: Is capitalism a recurring theme in all of your work?
W: Not always so explicitly. I think economies and labour and acknowledging the existence of money instead of dodging it is something I am interested in. I'm more than happy to talk about the challenges of money as a filmmaker and how it affects the kinds of movies I make rather than create a mystique around myself which I think a lot of artists do. Money is sort of taboo and they "just make work". A film I'm editing at the moment, The Republic, is basically all about a micro-economy. It's about a self-created state within a State of libertarians that reject the United States and deal with each other through contracts and barter. The details of civic maintenance and the capital that it entails is huge to this film.
VISIONS: Do you feel futile when facing the workings of big box stores and capitalist workings?
W: I don't feel futile. I feel I'm ultimately more interested in people than whether or not this specific political situation is or isn't going to work. I find the situation in Public Hearing ironic and I think a lot of good can come out of it even if the political result is totally failed. The process is important and the fact that those people came out to articulate themselves as human beings in a democratic society is really strong and matters a lot. I grew up going to Lutheran church and a lot of people shit on religion these days and I'm not religious but in a way it's fine. People go to church and whether or not you believe in what is being taught there's an important community maintenance, a low-level thing where you go and you see the same people every week. That to me seems to be beyond the critique of religion. Where do you really get that in today's society? It's worth acknowledging it for that.
VISIONS: The name of your production company is The Automatic Moving Co. How does this name relate to your work?
W: It's a name that does kind of represent our working mode in a jokey way. It comes from the title of a film made in the early 1900's called The Automatic Moving Co. It's an animation of life-size objects - a moving truck backs up to a house, opens itself up and the furniture moves itself into the house. When I saw that I was really struck by it and this early film that was so seamlessly animated but also exists in the real world. So that was the genesis of the name but it also represents the labour that my collaborators and I have often undertaken. We've had to do a lot of shitty jobs and a lot of manual labour to support our work. I've been really interested in that labour exchange - a day of shitty work equals a half day that I can pay to make my movie and the other half goes to living. Then the name is also an obvious play on what 'movies' are and also the idea of some sort of automated feeling or emotional reaction involved in film viewing.
