Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1997)

14 @ ANGLES was an incredible freedom. I was able to put some money together and take some gymnastic classes. From that I got in contact with movement, improvisation and dance. LT: Did you study choreography formally? NO-B: Not formally. I felt like my body wasn't trained for ballet, and I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to be a dancer, but I had the need of expressing myself. I wanted to create, and put on the stage or show to other people how I thought and felt. LT: How do you compare film and dance, and how did you start to think of merging them? NO-B: I know now that somehow film gives me more tools to work with, to create that intimacy with the audience. I like the fact that you can travel in time and space, and in film you can go from an ordinary moment to a very unconscious and perceptive moment. In dance I feel like that's more difficult, it's a little bit more far away, and not so direct. A good dance performance can also do it, but I don't think that it happens that often, where you can merge your unconscious, your dreams, your fantasies, traveling through many different places. I think that films work more like the unconscious in the internal world of a person than dance does. LT: Were you exposed to video and dance performances in Spain or Europe before you went to New York? NO-B: Yes, I had a friend whom I gave one of my dance works to, and she had been in the U.S. She came back and did multimedia work with video and dance. On the other hand, I always liked photography. My father worked in photography, developing film for magazines. It was still photography, and he used to bring all these books from his work with pictures of places that I'd never been, very far away. Those images made me dream. With images you can keep them, and you can look at them again and remember times that have passed. LT: Do you feel that's also possible with film or video? NO-B: Oh yes, like in my film Alicia Was Fainting-when I dance in that piece, I have a couple of sections that were from a solo I did on the stage, which I readapted for the film. The concept of being able to freeze time is also something I like a lot in film. It's so interesting when you perform and then have a record, but that record is not real in a way. When you do something for the stage, it's for the stage and when you transpose it to film or video you have to re-adapt it if you want to really get the same feelings. ~ LT: You studied dance and video at the Merce Cunningham School in New York. How did you make the transition of going from video to film? NO-B: I was used to seeing a film like a big screen where everything involves you, and video was more like “the little TV.” I took technical dancing classes at Merce Cunningham, but they don't have classes in video dance, so they couldn't really teach me. As a choreographer, in my unconscious, I wanted to be a film director, and not only record dance. Little by little, | worked with Merce Cunningham's film director, Eliot Caplan—he also was working in video and film dance. I was his assistant for two years. : p z I really started liking Filmmaking is very the idea of film and the physical and it's craft of filmmaking. LT: Do you identify directly connected to your emotions and your body, but yourself as a Spanish or Basque filmmaker or feel that you are part of a group? mostly the rhythm NO-B: Yes, I feel and the timing. that my background, being born in Barcelona is like everybody who grows up in a certain place, you carry that within yourself. I generally don’t care if filmmakers are Basque or Catalan, or from Madrid, America or France. I used to see more Spanish filmmakers, and of those, I like Bufiuel a lot. For me, he’s a master of the unconscious and dream world. I like the irony, the sweet and bitter themes of Almodovar, and I love Victor Erice. He takes a long time to make his films, and he puts all his love into it—he’s amazing. He did films when Franco still was alive and he always had problems getting money, but his films are really wonderful. LT: What was the purpose of the Sundance Choreographers and Filmmakers Workshop? Are they still doing them? NO-B: No, it's really a pity that they are not doing it because, as I said, there is no place generally for these studies. The purpose was that the choreographers would direct, and they would have the opportunity to find out how it all works, such as telling the cameraman the angles and creating the structure, going from stage to film to the frame, and mostly it was the opportunity of experimenting and learning. There were also editors who edited the work—it was just an unbelievable opportunity. LT: Would you like to try to create another type of program like this someday? NO-B: I think what I really would like to do is direct films again, but I have to fight with my dreams for that. When you come out of school, it's a whole different story. I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York and I did a BFA in film directing with a focus in editing. Editing is very connected to dance and the rhythm of choreography—you feel that you are choreographing as you are cutting. By what you choose and how you arrange it, how you put it, you can make so many different films. And it's so direct with the film itself, you touch the film and you end up sweating. The film starts getting foggy from your