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AN INTERVIEW WITH ISABEL SANDOVAL
'I feel like the best films are essentially a Rorschach test!
You're interested in something you refer to as 'sensual cinema' - could you define what that is?
For me, sensual cinema is really about desire. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we go and watch films, or experience art. We are drawn to something that elicits that feeling of desire within us. The making of films is essentially a way for the creators or artist to project or translate the desire that they feel into something visible that can be experienced by spectators. I think it's also part of my personal evolution as both a person and an artist - especially after my transition. After my transition I've become more comfortable and more open about sensuousness and sensuality in my work, in that it's now no longer shrouded in a feeling of shame or guilt. I was born and raised a Catholic in the Philippines, and I think my transition and the psychological and emotional process that I went through helped me to overcome that. With desire, and tackling desire in art and on film, our experience with the art transcends rationality because desire is rooted in something more primordial, even biological. I would consider a film that I make to be successful if it allows viewers to experience desire beyond rationality. Where someone realizes they like or love a film, but can't pinpoint the reason why.
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For me, the most sensual films are actually about desire being repressed rather than being satisfied or consummated. I think that repression and actively yearning is a more realistic human experience than physical gratification. The films that give you the ending that you want and that sense of closure are energy expended. You can go back to your life and routines and everything is fine. But it's the ones that got away that linger within us. If Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love [2000] ended happily, then no one would still be talking about it.
As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people - in their power - because if you do not believe in the people, then why do you make film... for what? Béla Tarr B: 1955 / N: Hungarian
Hungarian writer-director Béla Tarr plays 45pm genre film records at 33rpm speed. He uses cuts very sparingly, instead opting for sinuous sequence shots where his somnambulic camera slow-waltzes across, around and through a given space. Although Tarr's work may appear antithetical to the snappy 'genre' entertainments produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, he does co-opt the iconography and story structures of musicals, westerns and noirs, and then drags them into his own dismal microcosm of dive bars, boggy fields and desolate townships. Damnation (1987) is a classic film noir, but displaced to a run-down burg where the only true pleasure to be had is watching a torch singer at the local pub. It has the femme fatale, the tragic patsy, the scheme that goes wrong and the downer ending, but these elements are presented to emphasize the crushing duration of dead-end boredom. The artful expression of torpor, done in a way that is utterly compelling despite its testing duration, is Tarr's stock in trade, and the ne plus ultra of his project is 1994's seven-hour magnum opus Sátántangó (Satan's Tango). This includes a famous scene in which a young girl plays with a cat and becomes ever more aggressive with it. Tarr will not allow you to look away while the scene runs on and on. He pushes the idea that cinema has the ability to imprison you in a moment, and the director gets to decide the length of your sentence.
The cinema was an explosion of my love for reality.
Pier Paolo Pasolini B: 1922 / N: Italian
The films of Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini demonstrate that the term 'reality' can be subject to multiple definitions. The concept of his 1964 film The Gospel According to St Matthew was to present the life of Christ as terse realism rather than romantic fantasy. What if Jesus were a real person, and his miracles mere humdrum acts administered at random? Pasolini started out working in the neorealist vein popular in postwar Italy, and his 1961 debut feature, Accattone, remains one of the finest examples of this influential movement interested primarily in the life of the common man. His casting of non-professional actors and his fulsome embrace of life's squalid underbelly would remain with him until the last. All of his films, whether set in the past or adaptations of bawdy medieval stories Bocaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), speak to contemporary mores. He is a filmmaker with a thrilling sense of purpose and urgency. Prior to his brutal, unsolved murder in 1975, Pasolini directed Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a loose adaptation of the eighteenth-century novel by the Marquis de Sade. It is one of the most punishing and difficult films ever made, detailing a procession of violent acts and sexual humiliation inflicted on a group of teenagers by four wealthy middle-aged men. Salò deals in the reality of degradation, as Pasolini remains unflinching in his belief that witnessing these horrors is the only way to truly comprehend the reality of fascism.
I always felt that writing short stories was more of a job. I could complete them on a schedule—they were inevitably finished within a day, or a few. Novels are impossible to execute that way. Over the years that you work, your sense of the book shifts. You deepen your understanding of your characters—you’re living together. Once I’m halfway done with a novel, they start saying things of their own accord. Sometimes I’ll think to myself, This is even better than I could have imagined.
When you’re writing, you are always thinking of the reader, but that reader ultimately has to be yourself. If you discover, Wait, this sentence isn’t quite right, that’s the reader in you, the part of you whose taste has been shaped by hundreds of great works of literature, speaking up. A writer who’s always reading the best—whatever they come up with can’t be that bad. But someone who’s just reading crap, no matter how talented they are, won’t get anywhere good. And sometimes the reader and the writer in you will argue. The writer thinks, It’s fine the way it is! But the reader says, No, it’s still not quite there! Most of the time, the writer has a nap and realizes, Wait, actually, they might’ve had a point there …
Well, where else were we hosties going to go when we got too old, too tired, when our voices gave out from all those smoky flights? When we’d spent years in the air, crossing the Pacific, crossing the Nullarbor, half imagining, because time seems to slow during plane travel, that the years weren’t passing below us, killing our parents, burying our friends in marriages and the wrecks of marriages, driving up the price of city real estate? So that when we retired, the single place we could afford to live was a tropical town so remote you could justify flying there only if you had an ex-employee’s airline discount. Midsize cruise ships stopped in all the time: for the sunsets, the seafood platters, the Japanese cemetery, the quaint pearling boats. But by car, the town was twenty-two hours from the nearest city.
really liked the voice in this story
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.
Maybe that’s why, in those moments, I formed a crazy plan. I would walk toward her, the dog by my side; I would go down on one knee right there in arrivals and ask Jill to marry me. Not because she was in love with me, or even because I was in love with her, although probably I was, but because I was beginning to see life as a series of losses—that have already happened and are happening and will inevitably happen—and no one should have to face that alone. I sure as hell didn’t want to. This could be something permanent, I thought, me and Jill and the dog. Some family. Some luck.
I didn’t, of course. I didn’t even lift her in my arms and twirl her so carefully that her dress wouldn’t ride up and expose her backside. What did I expect to come through that door? A tear-stained face, a broken woman, a damsel in distress? What came was Jill. Her face seemed, as usual, to promise access to something fundamental, some deep source of beauty and generosity that had always been just outside my reach. No one would ever have guessed at the disappointment she’d just suffered. I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.