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DV Body with a Celluloid Spine: The New Low-Budget Cyborg
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Alí Allié
| Alí Allié is the writer-director of El Espíritu de Mi Mamá, the first narrative feature film about the Garifuna culture of Honduras. In 1999, the original 78-minute version of Espíritu played at more than thirty international film festivals without finding a distributor. By 2003, the film existed only on digital video in a 60-minute version. Espíritu was in this state when it was invited to play at CineLatino in San Francisco—for the second time. Due to the success of this late screening, Espíritu was purchased by Vanguard Cinema. |
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BRAINTRUSTdv: Tell us about your background in filmmaking before setting out to make Espíritu.
Alí Allié: When I was about twelve years old, my best friend Cameron and I started making films on Double-8mm film in the Santa Cruz mountains where we lived. The first stuff was silly kids playing around making slasher films like the infamous "San Anton Massacre," the usual stuff. We weren't particularly creative. The other area of high interest for both of us was computer programming. So we both we both had brain development in the creative area and in structured programming. Interestingly, when we grew up I became a filmmaker and he became a computer programmer. He is totally happy with programming because he sees the art in it. I design films based on structure—say, twenty scenes that are going to do whatever toward an ultimate result. I don't even care about what might happen particularly in the scene. I don't care too much what people say or how it looks. Just that it performs the function of moving the story to the next scene and the overall series of scenes goes somewhere. I'm not detail-oriented in the look and feel. I just work with the body of a film like it's a template to be filled in later. Some people can't think that way. When I'm writing or editing, my mind overflows with placeholders. I just figure something will bridge whatever gap. I try to plant a seed and let it grow on its own. Of course that's how you end up with a 15:1 shooting ratio, too...
BTdv: Why did you want to tell the Espíritu story?
| AA: My original concept for the film was as a short, just about a immigrant worker named Sonia living a tough life in Los Angeles. She just happened to be Garifuna. At that point I was mainly interested in the idea of Spanish-speaking migrant population that didn't fit in with the assumptions of what the Latin American work-force experience is. The first script had more play on language and contained scenes that dealt with the fact that she spoke Spanish and was around people that didn't know she spoke Spanish. So I had this twenty-page script and was going to shoot it. But one night I had a |
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dream of Sonia's mother coming out of the sea and speaking to her, so I incorporated that into the script. At that point I hadn't researched Garifuna culture, and when I did, I discovered how integral the ocean is in the Garifuna culture/mythology. I took that as my cue to really expand the piece in that direction. Ultimately, the cultural elements took over most of the film. In a sense, the final work is a bit disjointed; the Los Angeles scenes don't seem very cohesive with the Honduras scenes. It is really two films jammed together. I had hoped this would set up a contrast, but I still feel it is somewhat disjointed.
BTdv: Did you write the script in Spanish?
AA: The film is almost completely improvised, except for the narration, which I did write in Spanish. I find it's harder to be sincere in English. I tend to fall into sarcasm or else it reads too sappy.
BTdv: Johana Martinez is very natural in the film. Could you describe your directorial approach to the actors?
AA: Everyone in the film is a non-actor. I just set up and did it. The more I worked a scene, trying to get them to be more specific in their goal or what have you, the more unnatural it got. Most of the time I ended up using the first take. Johana and I never talked about images or motivations or anything. She just had a look that made me want to know more. I felt that just putting her on screen at all said something—it almost didn't matter what she did. I wouldn't have made the film with any other actress. She deserves a lot of credit for sticking with this project for over four years, especially for coming back and doing dialogue replacement and voiceover and pickup shots and even helping with the editing. She didn't know what she was getting into. Neither did I.
BTdv: In look and personality, the characters of the aunt and uncle are particularly memorable. How did you come across them?
AA: Everybody's related in this film! It was a family affair.
BTdv: I think the metaphor of the Honduran culture beckoning Sonia softens some of the esoteric weight of her mother beckoning her from beyond the grave. Still, there's nothing particularly macabre about the mother's spirit appearing on the beach in white robes. How did you intend for this element to affect the viewer?
AA: Francisca Crisanto, who plays Sonia's mother, dictated what she would wear, how she would present herself. A lot of the film is directed in that manner. The script just became a general premise like "Sonia goes and talks to so and so to ask what she should do." In this case, I allowed Francisca to make it her scene, however she wanted to present it. She chose the location, her costume, and what she would say.
Traditionally, the spirit of the deceased would appear more as an angry, haunting figure. So the portrayal in the film departs from this tradition. This film takes other liberties with how the culture is presented. For example, the film refers to the ceremony at the end as a Dugu when it is not. More accurately, it should have been referred to as a Chugu, which is a sort of lesser version of the Dugu. The Dugu is not something that gets whipped together in a couple days. It can take ten years to prepare—and also the deceased would usually have been dead for over ten years, not five or six as in the movie. As Sonia's aunt says in the film, there are three levels of ritual to appease the spirit of the deceased: Misa, Chugu, and Dugu. In my metaphoric view of the film, I see that the film encompasses all three: Sonia does the Misa by herself with the picture of her mother, the dream she has is the Chugu, and the finale of the film is the Dugu. Although literally inaccurate, I think of these representations as showing the spirit of the journey. In fact, I often think of this work not as a film, but as the spirit of a film. There are many missing elements to the story as well as the production values, but it has just enough to suggest something more.
BTdv: Was the story as chronologically ambiguous in its longer version?
AA: The 1999 78-minute 16mm version that showed at film festivals was more confusing than the 2003 video. The original film starts out establishing Sonia's relationship with the soldier more and spends a lot of time on that backstory. The film starts out with Sonia's voiceover of when she met the guy and what that meant over more helicopter footage. Actually, one serious structural flaw in the short version is the omission of the beginning narration. With this gone, the idea of Sonia narrating the story isn't established in the beginning, so when her voiceover comes in near the end of the film, it is sort of odd that now she's suddenly narrating when she didn't before. It reads like the voiceover is just patching the holes in the narrative to wrap it all up. Overall, I think the shorter version is stronger because it gets to the heart of the spiritual journey faster. I feel the real value of this film is the cultural aspect. But, I plan to create yet another version in the future with the beginning narration back in again! It never ends.
BTdv: What was the logic behind cutting the film down to sixty minutes?
AA: The logic behind cutting the film down was that I was tired of seeing people walk out at about the twenty-minute mark. It wasn't engaging enough in the beginning. I remember I was in Montreal at a showing and I was hanging out nervously in the lobby when suddenly there was this exodus of about twenty people from the theater. I thought the film broke or something because everyone was leaving. I peeked inside and it was still going on.
BTdv: How did you achieve the look of the helicopter footage?
AA: The helicopter footage I shot on Hi8 about three years before I returned to make the movie. I edited the helicopter sequences together on video, then I used a video projector to project the video on a wall, and then I re-filmed it with a 16mm camera with a fog filter so the scan lines wouldn't show. I didn't mind that it looks so soft because it is supposed to be dreamy anyway.
BTdv: How did you get access to helicopter and pilot gear?
AA: I actually knew the guys who were flying the helicopter. I was working in an orphanage near Comayagua at the time and these guys from the Palmerola military base landed in their helicopter right next door when they came to visit, mainly just to show off. There were more helicopter scenes in the longer version of the movie, and the whole military aspect was much more enlarged. Honduras is location for more U.S. military bases than all the other neighboring Central American countries combined. When I was there working in an orphanage in 1993, every day there were always jets and helicopters flying around overhead. I was interested in the whole dichotomy that no matter what life was occurring on the ground (naturalistic, spiritual, cultural, a journey, getting married, sports event) there was always a helicopter buzzing somewhere in the distance.
BTdv: How did you deal with lighting?
AA: I lit the California scenes with lighting instruments in a standard three-point configuration. All the Honduras scenes are shot with sunlight only. Just one reflector bouncing the sunlit as a fill. The scene where Sonia visits the Buyei (medicine woman) is lit by placing a mirror outside the house and bouncing the sunlight in through the door up toward the ceiling where it again hits a reflector which softens it and bounces it back down toward the floor. That way the light that is hitting the picture of Jesus is coming from above.
BTdv: There are a lot of quiet, contemplative sequences in which Sonia walks down the street carrying her baby, or wanders through her native village in Honduras. Since most of these scenes are voiced-over, did you forgo live sound?
AA: There was no sync-sound recorded during the V.O. sequences. I think one of the best creative limitations about working in film is that you have to record sound separately. And you have to make a specific effort to sync it up later, every piece of it. This forces you make the conscious decision whether to use the live sound or not. You have to actually make an extra effort to use the live sound. So your thinking process is about picture and sound as two separate elements from the get-go. In video, the thinking process is often the opposite. The sound is automatically fused with the picture and we don't think twice about how it got like that. It is very easy just to leave the sound as it is and not explore other sound elements, such as re-creating the sound track from scratch.
BTdv: How did you post the sound?
AA: The location sound was recorded on DAT and edited in Pro Tools, multi-track sound-editing software for Mac. I did a back-and- forth kind of a process between picture and sound. In a way, I used Pro Tools as my NLE. I knew the material well enough in my head I didn't need to see it, so I edited scenes together by ear—especially the musical part in the Dugu where it transitions from song to song. Then I would lay the sound track onto a 3/4" videotape and then match picture (telecine) back to the sound. Then if there was a gap I didn't have picture for, I would re-edit the sequence by picture on video, and then take the audio from that newly edited sequence back into Pro Tools as a scratch track and then realign my Pro Tools timeline back to that again. Then I would continue working in Pro Tools, adding another track of sound or whatever and repeat the cycle. The Pro Tools output was finished to a 3-track master on DA88 (dialogue, music, effects) which was mastered to 16mm optical at Chase Productions. In the meantime, I also got a 16mm magnetic track made to use on a flatbed, where I matched the picture for the whole film back to an already finished soundtrack. That took a long time.
For the 2003 re-edited video, I transferred the DA88 master tracks to WAV files on my PC and used Vegas Audio to remix the sound, according to my new edit created in Adobe Premiere 5.1.
BTdv: How was the film shown originally?
AA: Three 16mm prints exist made by FotoKem. The English subtitles were done at Titra California. They're burned in on top of the prints using a laser process. I wrote the subtitles myself. It was an interesting process trying to pare down meanings to a certain character length. Titra informed me to give them a list in feet and frames of each subtitle screen, with a maximum of forty characters on each of the two lines. So I had a spreadsheet going with all the text alongside some rather funky formulas, and it gets tricky because you are trying to leave the title up on the screen for a certain number of seconds, but all your calculations have to be in feet and frames. That took about a month. Then I sent the first print to be subtitled and then they called and said there was too much text. It turns out someone at Titra had told me wrong: the forty-character length was for 35mm, but for 16mm you could only do thirty-two characters per line, so I had to go back and re-work all the titles again.
BTdv: How did you edit it to the shorter version?
AA: The very first print I made was a low contrast print and I had that transferred to BetacamSP at Monoco Labs. Later on I had made a Mini-DV copy of that BetacamSP tape and digitized from that into my PC editing system, which consisted of a Sony DSR11 DVCAM, Pinnacle DV500, and Adobe Premiere 5.1. The shorter version only exists on video. I had to re-type all those subtitles all over again in TitleDeko.
BTdv: How did you like editing with Premiere?
AA: I'm not crazy about Premiere after having worked as an Avid editor, but it does the job. Coming from a 16mm background, Premiere's A/B roll metaphor is a little more intuitive than Avid, actually, but some other things—like split edits—are too clumsy. For me editing is very simple: cuts, dissolves, titles—that's about it. I'm not attracted to all the new-fangled effects, so I've never bothered to upgrade beyond version 5.1. I invested in the Pinnacle DV500 editing system and Premiere for the specific purpose of re-editing Espíritu, but the next project I do I would probably start with something else—whatever suits my needs at the time. The video editing software landscape is changing so fast I think you almost have to consider equipment and software on a per-project basis now.
BTdv: The colors are crisp and vibrant—perfect for the green of the island and the traditional Garifuna clothing. What film stock did you use?
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AA: The Los Angeles scenes were shot with 7287 (200 ASA) and the Honduras stuff was shot with 7250 (50 ASA). I had some 7298 (500 ASA) which I had saved for the Buyei scene because I knew we were going to be inside with no light source. But Carlos Castillo, the production manager, told me we were going to shoot that scene outside so I used the 500 ASA for something else. Then when we went to shoot the medicine woman scene, he said we were going to be inside after all. So I had 50 ASA and no light. I shot that scene as if it were 200 ASA and pushed it two stops in the processing. It still came out pretty good, actually. |
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Sonia confronts her mother's spirit
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BTdv: What was your approach to marketing?
AA: I tell people who ask me about producing a film to make their film poster first. That's what you're selling, not the film itself. Film is a marketing industry: you only deliver the product at the very end. It's not like buying music. I hear a song on the radio, I go buy the album because I heard the song and I like the song and I want to possess the song, and what I want to buy is the repeated experience, not the initial experience. With film you are selling the mystery of an initial experience. You're selling something that the buyer doesn't know. They pay money because of the vision and image of what they think the film is, not what it really is. They don't get what it really is until after the money is paid. That's why the marketing materials are so important. You're distributing the image of the film, not the film itself. That's why I think marketing should be at least fifty percent of the budget, even for low-budget films. If I have $20,000 to make a film, I really shouldn't. I should make the film for $10,000 and then spend $10,000 on getting it seen.
BTdv: How many festivals did the film enter?
AA: Thirty or forty, I can't remember now. Johana and I went to the New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles showings usually. Getting a feature film shown on film at film festivals is not that hard. I think it is harder to show a short film, because there are more of them, and thus more competition. With a short film you need great still shots so that it sticks out in the program. That's why it is so important to take a lot of 35mm still photographs on your shoot, even if it's a video shoot and even if it's a short film. If you have a good photo, chances are it will be featured in a festival program, while all the other short films just have a one-paragraph blurb. I made a short video called Mi Piñata (1994) that was five minutes, shot on VHS, but I had a good 35mm still photo and it was featured on the cover of a festival program! If I had just taken a screengrab from the video it wouldn't have been.
BTdv: Tell us about some of your film festival experiences.
AA: I felt FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was an appropriate venue to world premiere the film, but there was a mix up in communication and I didn't hear they wanted it until the last minute. I shipped the film, but it didn't get there in time. So then the director of SXSW called and said they wanted to show it and I said great and she said "We'll do your world premiere". And I was naïve to believe that when they said "We'll 'do' your world premiere" that meant they were going to "do" something about it, like highlight it in some way. They just showed the film a couple times and that's about all. No special announcements, coverage, or anything like that.
Then I heard a year later from someone that they saw the film at Ouagadougou. FESPACO did get the film and they did show it. So I guess I had two world premieres.
I had sort of an epiphany at Urban World in New York. I was slouching near the box office and someone comes up and says they want a ticket for Spirit of my Mother. And the box office says, "That'll be $9.50." And I'm thinking, you're gonna pay $9.50 to see that? I felt guilty that this film wasn't the best film I could make. Just that little silly interchange made me we want to make a better film next time around.
BTdv: So you had some opportunities to introduce the film to audiences.
AA: Film festivals want to make sure the audience knows that they're getting special features, like having the filmmaker in person at the festival. So they want to make sure that they get the filmmaker up there in front of the crowd before the film shows, so that the audience feels they're getting their money's worth, special treatment. That's annoying to me because I hate appearing prior to my work. I feel strongly that an audience should experience the work first, then discover what or who is behind it, not the other way around. Yet, time after time, these damn festival people want me to introduce the film beforehand. I can't stand it.
BTdv: Sounds like you learned a lot.
AA: I learned that fests should only be one piece of your overall marketing plan. Your own publicity campaign is a whole other necessary project. I remember I was trying to get money from someone early on and he asked me the dreaded question: "Well, what are you going to do with the film once it's done?" "Show it at film festivals," I said. I realize now that's not enough of a plan. The way you can take advantage of film festivals is to really work the commercial aspects. A filmmaker has to accept the commercial end, otherwise the good work will never be seen. Who cares if it was shown at a film festival if no one ever saw it? You need to hustle the press, get interviews, photos, etc. The festival can be a springboard, but it's not enough.
BTdv: Did you see advantages to digital projection?
AA: I was pleasantly surprised at my first screening on video at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. It looked a lot better than I thought it would on a fairly large screen. I think it depends a lot on the projector itself.
I see distribution advantages in digital projection, that there could be more flexibility for on-demand screenings of a wider variety of works. But I'm not sure more is better. I haven't seen the digitally made and projected Star Wars movies so I don't know what the state-of-the-art looks or feels like to watch.
BTdv: How long was it between the first public screening and Vanguard's acquisition?
AA: I finished the re-edit in 2002 and submitted it to TV stations and networks, PBS, BBC, etc. No one was interested. I didn't know what else to do with it really, but I was happy with the new version so I duplicated five hundred VHS copies and was about to start selling it myself. Then I got a call from CineAccion in San Francisco and they said they wanted to show it in the 2002 CineLatino Film Festival. I reminded them they already had shown the long version on 16mm in 1999, but they still wanted to show it again at the Brava Theater. Cool. They had a fantastic video projector and sound system. It was one of the best showings. Nobody walked out, so I was finally happy. Then two days later I got a call from Vanguard. I licensed it to them for seven years.
BTdv: What do you think about the role of home formats in the success of independent film?
AA: There is certainly an aesthetic in home formats that some filmmakers desire. I don't approach filmmaking from an aesthetic standpoint. I'm more interested in finding characters and tapping into their feelings about life and/or the undefined. I think the choice of medium affects the work, certainly, and it becomes something else. That's fantastic—for the story to become something else because of the medium.
If a filmmaker would rather shoot film but decides to shoot video purely as a cost-savings, then I think that decision should be looked at very carefully. Even if I'm sure I'm going to post in video, shooting film is still viable. In Espíritu, over twenty minutes of screen time is dedicated to a ceremony that was all done in one take. If I only have one shot at it anyway, why not shoot it on film? After all, the work will live longer than I will.
BTdv: What do you think about the "life" of your film on home format, without theatrical distribution?
AA: I'm happy with it as it is now. I think it is something that I gave life to based on the tools and skills I had at the time. It doesn't have certain elements that a theatrical distributor would desire, but the film has its own personality, destiny, and I think the film is happy with itself.
Yet, it still keeps changing. I feel it hasn't even settled yet. I think DVD is a good final medium for it because the ultimate presentation will have three different versions—not as a gimmick or "just because it's possible," but because the arrival at the different variations has been part of its process and journey.
BTdv: Your risk-it-all approach to filmmaking is inspirational.
AA: I have mixed feelings about the "risk-it-all" filmmaker angle. Now that I've suffered through one film, I have a certain aversion to beating my head against the wall for another round. I tend to think that there must be another strategy to use all those energies to somehow manifest funding from somewhere and make something happen with a little more comfort yet still maintain control. Perhaps that's a fantasy, but it's my fifteen-year plan right now. Let's check back in fifteen years and see where I am!
On the other hand, if I hadn't risked it all by keeping myself in denial about how much it would really cost and how long it would really take and how much effort it would really require and how much stress it would really induce, I would never have made the film. Maybe I wouldn't be in debt right now, but I would be poorer in other ways.
BTdv: You belong to a certain breed of independent filmmaker, a hybrid of two dominant forces: celluloid and DV. How do you think the rise of digital technology will affect things?
AA: I think digital video will affect everything, once low-cost acquisition breaks its link with NTSC—or PAL/SECAM. I feel we don't really have affordable DV yet. The lower priced video systems (MiniDV and DVCAM) are still stuck in NTSC or PAL—525 or 625 vertical scan lines. We went from 486 viewable scan lines in analog to 480 viewable scan lines with consumer DV. I don't think that's revolutionary. Digital video cameras should capture super-high resolution images horizontally and vertically and not be beholden to backward compatibility with black-and-white TV sets from the 1950s. Once digital video breaks out of the NTSC/PAL barrier, and separates from TV, then it becomes its own medium. I think when HD video cameras become affordable—which will soon happen—then the revolution begins.
(A critical analysis of El Espíritu de Mi Mama can be found here:
"The Primitive Parameters of Spiritual Cinema: Transcendentalism in El Espíritu de Mi Mamá.")
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