Rivedere (working title)

Some films begin with a subject. Others begin with a place. This one began with a feeling that the mountains were remembering something.

The project started, at least on paper, as a documentary portrait of an Italian artist who lives and works high in the Alps. My intention was fairly conventional at first. Follow the practice, follow the hands, follow a finished object back to the gesture that made it. Within the first week that intention had already begun to loosen. He works across sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and animation, and no single discipline could hold him still long enough to be filmed as a portrait in the ordinary sense. What I found myself documenting instead was closer to an atmosphere, a particular relationship between hands, material, and weather that moved fluidly through all of his different forms without ever settling permanently into any one of them.

What I found compelling was not only documenting an artist, but imagining the mysterious landscapes that inhabit his inner world. The sculptures, drawings, masks, forests, and conversations were all part of the same creative ecosystem.

Filming in the Alps meant learning an entirely different relationship to time than the one I usually work in. The weather changed on its own schedule, indifferent to whatever the shooting plan for the day had been. Clouds gathered over the peaks with a kind of theatrical suddenness, then cleared just as quickly, and I learned to treat those shifts not as interruptions but as material. Long periods passed in which nothing happened that a conventional edit would call footage. I filmed silence more than I filmed action. I filmed a man sitting at a small wooden table set up in the middle of a forest, a cup of coffee going cold in front of him, a carved black animal watching from a nearby chair, and nothing about that scene needed narration. It needed only enough patience to let it exist on camera for as long as it wanted to exist.

Abandoned interiors became part of the film's vocabulary almost by accident. We would wander into spaces largely untouched for years, dust settling into a particular quality of light, and the artist's handmade objects, when placed inside those rooms, stopped reading as contemporary art and started reading as something closer to folklore. A carved wooden fox on a workbench. A cluster of sculpted heads gathered on a table like a small, silent council. These objects seemed to belong equally to two different registers, the gallery and the fairytale, and the film began, without my fully deciding it, to live in the space between those two registers rather than choosing one.

I have come to think of a significant part of documentary filmmaking as an act of waiting rather than an act of capturing. You arrive with a plan, and the plan gives you permission to be there, but the actual material almost always arrives later, once the plan has been quietly abandoned and you are simply present, camera running, waiting to see what the place decides to offer. Some of my favourite footage from this project was never planned. A hand resting on a half-finished sculpture. Weather changing outside a studio window mid-sentence. The particular way silence settles between two people who know each other well enough not to need to fill it.

There is a boundary in documentary work between observation and myth that I find myself increasingly interested in, and this project pushed directly against it. I do not think observation and myth are opposites. I think myth is often what happens when observation is patient enough, when you watch something closely enough and for long enough that it stops being merely itself and starts accumulating the kind of resonance that folklore accumulates. A hooded figure walking across a mountain ridge at dusk is, factually, a person wearing a costume for a scene. But held long enough on camera, in that light, against those peaks, it stops behaving like documentation and starts behaving like something older, something closer to a figure out of a story the mountains themselves might tell if they could.

That figure, cloaked and bird-headed, recurred throughout the shoot without my ever having planned for it to become a motif. It began as a single costume built for a single scene. By the end of filming, it had become something closer to the film's own recurring dream, an image that kept returning, reshaped slightly each time, never quite explained and never needing to be. I am cautious about assigning it meaning too precisely, even now. I do not think the figure stands for any one thing. I think it is closer to a question the film kept asking without insisting on an answer, a way of holding open the porous boundary between the artist's actual daily practice and the larger, older stories his mountains seem to carry inside them.

Landscapes shape inner worlds more thoroughly than I think we usually admit. Spend enough time in a place this severe and this beautiful, and something in how you think begins to take on the shape of the terrain. I noticed it happening to the artist over the course of the shoot, the way his gestures seemed to echo the slow accumulation of weather, the way his silences had the particular quality of mountain silence rather than any ordinary domestic quiet. I suspect it happened to me too, filming him. Documentary work asks you to observe closely enough that the boundary between subject and observer starts to blur, and by the end of this shoot I was no longer entirely certain where the portrait of the artist ended and the portrait of the place he lives inside of began.

I arrived thinking I was making a portrait of an artist. I left with the feeling that I had been filming a landscape that had quietly entered the artist first.