by MLP
Constructed around a series of monologues lifted from various touchstones through art history, and recited by actress Elodie Vincent, La chambre d’ombres, aka Room of Shadows (2024) is the second feature-length from Camilo Restrepo, after his 2020 debut Los Conductos, aka The Conductors (2020). Born in Medellín, Colombia in 1975, Restrepo has lived in France since 1999, where he is a member of the artist-run film lab L’Abominable.
In many ways, Room of Shadows is everything Los Conductos was not—reserved, quiet, still. After the former’s ostentatious visual language, this is hardly what one might expect as a follow-up. Yet, they share a radical formalism, a simple yet increasingly rare interest in basic aesthetics which have not yet been (fully) co-opted by the images of advertising and capital. Bold colors, thoughtful camera placements, and movement—in short, evidence of a moving-image artist thinking specifically within the medium. Visually, it feels like an object from another era—a feeling emphasized by some of the older quoted texts—but its questions are urgently contemporaneous to our modern self-inflicted dystopias.
MLP: I find it quite remarkable to see Room of Shadows in 2024, primarily because it is such a rare breed; a feature-length film which utilizes visual language from avant-garde filmmaking in a theatrical ‘narrative’ space. Do you think of your visual style as a filmmaker as being a part of a particular lineage? And how has being a member of L’abominable influenced your development?
Camilo Restrepo: I wasn’t trained in cinema, but in visual arts. When I started making films I treated cinematic framing, color treatment and set design with ideas borrowed from painting, photography and sculpture. In Room of Shadows, in addition to providing me with formal tools, these disciplines are present in the very content of the project. Because, in simple terms, Room of Shadows is an imaginary museum in which I’ve brought together works from different periods, made by artists using different materials.
My project was artistic and pedagogical, since I wanted to create a work of art that would contain other works of art, to briefly examine how certain artists have questioned the social role of representations. How do images impact us? How do they condition our behavior? What does it mean to show or not to show an image?
Formally embracing my questioning of representation, I thought that I couldn’t just simply show the works of art I was referring to, as in a classic art documentary. I aspired to explore a new way of putting art history into images. My solution was to create an analogy of the photographic camera, the “Room of Shadows” referred to in the film’s title. This camera/room is inhabited by a kind of consciousness, embodied by a woman who describes the art works. Language appears as the tool for creating mental images, following an ancient art-historical procedure known as ekphrasis.
This huit-clos (no exit) situation immediately evokes a theatrical scene, all the more so as the bedroom decor is resolutely artificial (torn wallpaper, broken mirrors, colored fabrics, etc.). I admit that the theatrical tendency of my film, with its pedagogical intent, is in line with the works of Bertolt Brecht.
This choice may come as a surprise today, as contemporary cinema is tending more and more towards storytelling. In Room of Shadows I don’t tell a story, nor do I want the viewer to be moved by the plot or the character. My film is more like a kaleidoscope, made up of multiple narratives that help us think about what it means to adopt a point of view (physically and mentally).
Without having to follow the constraints of storytelling, I was able to compose the film with great freedom in the use of color, scenery, framing and sound. This formal freedom was widely explored by the avant-garde, and is unfortunately becoming rare. I believe that artistic exploration is drying up because films are increasingly conceived as products, and not creative mediums. As a product, its goal is consumption. I have the feeling that I wanted to challenge this production standard by making a film that was imperfect, cheap and with an unconventional length. This sense of revolt against imposed production models is a common trait of the filmmakers behind L’Abominable.
‘Formal freedom’ sums up this tendency very nicely, I think, in a sense which goes beyond what I had considered as just existing within an avant-garde lineage.
And indeed there is a political freedom in the film to back-up this sense of revolt. I’m curious if you could talk a bit about the short Marking the Boundary (2024) which came out of this project?
(Note: You can watch Marking the Boundary here.)
Whereas that material directly speaks of Palestine, Room of Shadows has an unabashed leftist politics without addressing the colonial elephant in the room (at least of this moment in time in which the film is coming out). It is hard to see Shadows and not think of Palestine. Why did you decide to have Marking the Boundary be a standalone short rather than incorporating it in Shadows? Or was it just a matter of timing?
My intention with Room of Shadows was to show that certain artists develop in their work what we can call a ‘politics of the gaze’. By this expression I mean that, through their art, they point out that the acts of showing and seeing have implications for the organization of societies. In Room of Shadows, I was particularly interested in works of art that dealt with the implications of the representation of war. This choice stems from the fact that I was born in a country marked by the violence of an armed conflict.
Some of the art works mentioned in Room of Shadows allow us to think about the way in which the camera has been a complement to the gun since its creation (the on-board camera in missiles, surveillance cameras). Others encourage us to think about the social and political impact of transmitting images of war (propaganda on the news media, for example). And finally, there are works that help us to interpret the marks left by war (on buildings, bodies, maps). This is the case of the work The Green Line by artist Francis Alÿs, featured in the short film Marking the Boundary. The Green Line reactivates our memory of the border line between Israel and Palestine, putting the conflict into a historical perspective that leads right up to the most recent terrible events.
We filmed the Marking the Boundary sequence long before 7 October 2023, but after that day Alÿs’s work resonated even more strongly in the minds of Room of Shadows’ team. It was only a few months later that we decided to release this chapter of the film for free online. Our sole aim was to propose The Green Line as an opportunity to reflect on current events in Israel and Palestine.
Isolating Marking the Boundary from the rest of the film was very simple, because initially I had conceived Room of Shadows as a series of short episodes. It was during the editing that I realized that my material didn’t allow me to arrange these episodes properly, pushing me towards the format of a film. But by giving the project the form of a film, I sometimes have the feeling that I’ve failed to convey more easily the works of art I wanted to talk about. However, I’m not sure that the series would have been watched more than the film. Marking the Boundary, for example, is rarely seen. Perhaps because its form is unusual for art documentaries, or because talking about an ongoing war through the prism of art gives the impression of putting oneself in a position of comfort, or perhaps just because of a lack of publicity.
I was struck by the choice to quote from Travis Wilkerson’s Nuclear Family, since it is the most recent work cited by a significant margin (41 years!). Can you offer some insight into that decision? Was there any hesitation to include such a recent text?
I have to mention again the original idea of making a series of short episodes. I actually wrote 26, some of them about works by contemporary artists and collectives such as Deborah Stratman, Sophie Ristelhueber, Forensic Architeture, Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña. But only the sequence on Wilkerson’s film seemed to fit properly into the montage of this unique film that became Room of Shadows. In Nuclear Family, Wilkerson recounts how he uses his camera to record images that were supposed to calm other images: those of his nightmares. In this way, he assigns an almost magical role to the camera, as if it were an instrument for healing the soul. And yet, the most common discourse on the power of cameras accuses them of being instruments in the service of mind-numbing. So, talking about Nuclear Family very early on in my film enabled me to distance myself from iconoclastic discourse.
The rest of the examples of recent artworks did not disappear, but took another form. The San Sebastian film school (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola), which has supported the project from its origin, published a book also called Room of Shadows. The book contains the texts for all the episodes in the initial series, some reproductions of a set of drawings I made to imagine the ‘room of shadows’, and my notes on the conception of the project.
Book and film form a whole, like a multidisciplinary work. Both complement each other, allowing the viewer to find information that is not in the film, and the reader to find images, sounds and sensations that are not in the book. But being also independent forms, people can only see the film or read the book, and that’s enough. I just wanted to offer the possibility to go from one to the other and see how they connect to reveal more meanings.
Where things got tricky was coordinating public access to the book and the film at the same time. The book would have to be sold after the theatrical screenings, or come with a DVD of the film. I don’t know… After the release of the film and the book, I realized that I couldn’t handle distribution on my own. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the support of sales agents, bookshops or any other distribution system to get the project out there. The film is rarely programmed and the book is stored in boxes.
Does this kind of reception to the film discourage you, or do you already have plans for a new film?
I have to admit that I expected a better reception. I thought the film would circulate a bit more. But I’ve noticed that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to show films that go against the dominant production standards. I think this is a common difficulty for independent filmmakers. I see a lot of discouraged filmmakers around me who stop making films, and others who try to fit into the system by making films with more conventional narratives, often in comedy.
It seems to me that we’re living in an age of progressively expensive film-making, where fiction crushes other narrative forms. Probably because films are mostly consumed via streaming, and therefore designed to quickly capture the attention of viewers distracted by their surroundings. Room of Shadows, on the contrary, is an inexpensive film that perhaps demands too much attention.
I see Room of Shadows as part of a tradition of low-budget films, deliberately imperfect so that they can be made quickly, allowing filmmakers to explore the social issues of their time in a variety of ways. Because it seems to me that, despite its “old movie” appearance, Room of Shadows treats the theme of the social role of images to give it a historical perspective that leads to the present moment. The film concludes with the implications of enlarged video surveillance, which makes the use of images in the service of population control an everyday practice. This observation is not new, but it’s important to point it out again, because it shows that our societies have accepted all forms of image-based vigilance, now with improved effective traceability thanks to Artificial Intelligence, through our everyday tools (telephones, computers, etc.).
I often hear that we’re caught between these two dominant currents of images. On the one hand, an enormous enterprise of distraction through images, and on the other, an enormous surveillance through images. A few years ago, I rejected this pessimistic assessment. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe that the world isn’t turning that way. If I have conceived Room of Shadows as a journey through works of art that question representation, it’s quite simply because some of them make me think that images can also be vectors of hope, because they allow us to challenge imposed orders. Thinking about this encourages me to pay attention to what other people are going to do with images. Maybe from now on I’ll be more of a spectator than a filmmaker.
Maximilien Luc Proctor (MLP) is a French-American filmmaker, the founder of Ultra Dogme and the avant-garde instructor at Berlin’s Art on the Run filmschool.
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