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EDITORIAL Rosa Olivares
The director's eye is the key to the magic of films. One single person, such as the director of an opera, the general of a military exercise or the manager of a circus, creates magic out of nothing. The director is the artist who puts his name to a work in which many others artists, actors, writers, scenographers, designers, graphic artists and photographers are involved: dozens of artists who place their intelligence and abilities under the direction of one single individual. As in the Renaissance ateliers, in the film world a more or less anonymous team undertakes a joint creation which is undersigned by one single name: the director's. Since its origins, cinema has been directly influenced by the art of its period, from Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari to The Cell, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Matrix, the aesthetics of their time, an aesthetics defined by plastic creation, sparkles in a number of images, forms and, of course, contents which their public at large takes in much more attentively, in a much more direct way, than through the plastic works themselves which generate that aesthetics. In this sense the director is a man who belongs to a particular aesthetic moment, a creative place rooted in the world of art. The director's eye has been trained not only in films but more particularly in photography and painting. It is from the world of plastic creation from where films, images, renew themselves, grow, multiply and become enriched. The relationship between photography and cinema is the relationship between two complementary languages which feed each other, and if it is the case that many maintain that cinema comes from a logical form of the evolution of photography, many others consider that photography has undergone its own transformation through the film camera lens. The fact is that both as subject, reference point and language and method, the cinema and photography appear inextricably linked. Films like Antonioni's Blow Up or Hitchcock's Rear Window bring in photography as a key element in their plots. Curiously, the presence of photography in films is almost always associated with some mystery or investigation, when it is not directly connected with the police and crime (Naked City, L.A. Confidential…). Photography traps the essential moment that man's eye has let slip past imperceptibly. However, something draws the attention once again back to that image, and that image, that moment made into photographic paper, is blown up again and again until we can see that previously unnoticed detail: the body in the park, the artificial scales, crucial elements in the plot. This happens in Blow Up and Blade Runner, films in which photography forms part of the script, not only as a triggering element, but as the representation of the memory. In Blade Runner trick photography serves to create false memories in the "replicants" until we begin to question our own memories, whether what we remember is true or created in our imagination. This is one of the inherent doubts in photography, the doubt between truth and lies, between what is real and what is false. Something which the cinema avoids with its element of dramatisation and its fleeting vocation, ephemeral and sometimes grandiloquent. Everything we see photographed we tend to believe as real, everything we see in the cinema seems to us to be fiction. Perhaps because this is the only way of surviving it.
But the cinema has always depended on photography, and photography - especially photographers - have always seen the cinema as a extension of their own work. Commercial or experimental cinema and video are for many photographers a later stage of continuity in their career. Some very well recognised photographers in the world of art, such as Larry Clark or Robert Frank have become film directors, each one of them in very different styles. In other cases, such as Chantal Akermann, her work in films and photography run in parallel. In many other cases the cinema has been an almost hidden, parallel activity, closely approaching the biographical work of many artists, as is the case of Ed van der Elsken. Finally, many current film directors began as fashion photographers, publicists, or photographers for news magazines, from Agnés Varda to Stanley Kubrick to Russ Meyer. Others, however, after a life full of vicissitudes, passed from film making over to photography, sometimes documentary, such as Leni Riefenstahl. Carlos Saura became interested in photography before films, while Pedro Almodóvar does photography during filming... Some of the most interesting film directors began as photographers, others have reached photography as an inevitable complement to their work in the cinema. At the end of the day it is all a question of working behind a camera. In this edition of EXIT we deal with some of the film directors who have considered photography as a different language. Many of them are unable to divorce themselves from the cinema as a subject or as working material, as is the case of Godard and Waters, for instance, but the perspective is certainly different to that of their usual work. We have tried to establish a relationship of reciprocality between the cinema and photography from the film director's perspective, from their photographic work, sometimes outstanding, other times surprising, and other times simple documentaries on how the director's eye seeks out and selects one single fragment from amongst the whole landscape. It must be made clear that this is not only a weekend hobby. It is evident that today everyone takes photographs, from film directors to artists, writers or lawyers. This is no compilation of frivolities, we are talking of artists who, quite apart from their photographic work, are exerting an influence upon the way of looking at several generations. The force of their work, from a strictly visual point of view, is essential to understand the development of plastic arts. Moreover, they have chosen photography as an essential, basic way of posing their particular aesthetic stance. Many of these directors are regular features in leading galleries, and their presence at art festivals and exhibitions is constantly on the increase: David Lynch, Abbas Kiarostami, Dennis Hopper, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, John Waters, Carlos Saura… are some of the most frequent.
We have managed to bring together the work of more than twenty artists; film directors who have produced key photographic work. It has not been an easy job, as many of them - those who do not maintain links with the world of art and its market - practise this facet of photographers in a low key manner. Some are now dead or have moved away from the world of films. Others who should be on these pages have had to decline as they are currently preparing books with their entire work, or were simply too busy with their film work. Some have considered it unsuitable to show their photographic work, as for them this is something strictly private. In any case, we believe that from the moment this issue, entitled Fuera de escena (Off Screen), appears it will automatically become a luxury and an exceptional document for both cinema and photography enthusiasts. Never before has this graphic material been brought together in one single publication. The two central artists are Wim Wenders and John Waters, with films which have signified a clear evolution in the current diversity of the film world and who do very different photographic work which may, in some way, characterise two opposing forms of photography from the viewpoint of the film director. The texts which accompany the photographs deserve a special mention. These are texts written by specialists who first of all analyse in depth the characteristics and peculiarities of these artists but also, more particularly, they consider the links between photography and films, life and culture, combined with a text by Wim Wenders, as yet unpublished in Spain, which will come out in a new book of his in the US after the summer. Finally we would like to bear witness to the knowledge, support and advice of Felipe Hernández Cava and the perseverance and patience of the co-ordinator of this issue, Seve Penelas, since with his work and the help of friends, collaborators and experts from all over the world (the page of thanks on this occasion is virtually a prolongation of the editorial staff), we have been able to bring out this magazine, something which at certain moments seemed to us to be quite impossible.
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