Selected Milk Added from Reconstituted Milk Powder Whole Pasteurized Homogenized – RAW
Maybe the supreme condition to be a filmmaker is to be an Onironauta
and to abolish the barrier between dream and wake.
This is what may make this film to be “cinema” (Jose Luis Ducid).
This is an art film in the form of a manual for sellers of milk cartons in supermarkets.
Meanwhile, the scenes reflects the flashes of life of a potential seller
who does not meet the conditions of a milk carton salesman.
The images you have chosen are not only static, they are also “poor” in the sense that they seem to be random extractions from the perception flow of the narrator who remembers some episodes of his life as if he were in a state of semi-sleep. They are not “illustrations” of a text as one might expect. How did you choose them in relation to the text?
Jose Luis Ducid: The idea of making a film began when I saw a photo of María Meseguer and I thought: that’s a poem that I wrote. The peculiar photos of Maria are similar to my poems in its atmosphere, in the traces that leave in the spirit. She gave me all the photos that she made during 20 years, and I made a selection between more that 1000 photos to find the visual correlates of the poems.
Watching your film I felt – at times – traces of other authors emerge. For example Foster Wallace (for corporate language) Emir Kusturica for the bubbling of life. Then, I am a psychologist and certain writings by W.R.Bion – which not everyone knows – come to my mind which talks about the waking dream thought. For Bion the dream is a continuous process that acts during the waking as in the dream. If we fail to formulate certain thoughts, however, we can dream them. How about this? Do you dream even when awake?
Jose Luis Ducid: Forse la condizione suprema per essere un regista è essere un Onironauta e abolire la barriera tra sogno e veglia. La scoperta di questo film “quasi casuale” sta nel rappresentare ciò che non può essere spiegato con queste parole. Questo è ciò che può rendere questo film un “cinema”.
I think that cinema is an instrument of knowledge. I mean aesthetic knowledge. Specialized knowledge. How about this?
Jose Luis Ducid: Yes, it is a way of knowledge. ‘Crime and Punishment’ is about a young man who kills an old woman and later he regrets. That’s all. But if you want to go through the experience, you have to read it. In the same way, defining our film as a manual for supermarket sellers can not explain the hypnotic effect that it produces
Alfonso Camarero: Of course, the ‘katharsis’ is a way of knowledge that uses our capacity of empathy to communicate experiences. The spectator can live new experiences without really living it by means of this trick, and is able to redefine his concepts. This instrument has been improved during centuries, and now cinema is the most polished artifact.
In your film, everything seems designed to disappoint or undermine every expectation of the viewer. We go to “hear” a concert or a band. When we go to the cinema instead we go to “see” a film because cinema is primarily a visual medium. Selected Milk immediately overturns this expectation of ours. What prompted you to make this choice?
Jose Luis Ducid: The background noise. What we see is how the musicians are covering their instruments, and we have to imagine the concert before. We just give some clues of what should be imagined, but you only see a frame of a film you couldn’t watch. We bet on the idea of a tango verse that says: “that verse that we can’t remember, that’s the best”. We invite the spectator to build his own film. Finally, we found interesting, in an audiovisual ultra fragmented world, where everything is in movement, that the film was static.
Alfonso Camarero: The visual stream… that’s the question….when I think about the movie I can’t avoid thinking that, actually IT IS NOT A MOVIE, as there are no moving images. Even the still images aren’t telling the story. But there’s a movement that tells a story and that makes people watch it till the end: the movement is in the audio. In other words, we are not making the art of the cinematógrafo (cinema-to-grafo, movement-of-images), but instead, the art of the “cinematófono” (cinema-to-fono, movement-of-sounds, a funny word that I just invented)…, so the images complement the audio. The sound is the architecture, the image is the decoration.
Watching your film I felt – at times – traces of other authors emerge. For example Foster Wallace (for corporate language) Emir Kusturica for the bubbling of life. Then, I am a psychologist and certain writings by W.R.Bion – which not everyone knows – come to my mind which talks about the waking dream thought. For Bion the dream is a continuous process that acts during the waking as in the dream. If we fail to formulate certain thoughts, however, we can dream them. How about this? Do you dream even when awake?
Jose Luis Ducid: Maybe the supreme condition to be a filmmaker is to be an Onironauta and to abolish the barrier between dream and wake. The find of this “almost casual” film is to represent what can’t be explained by these words. This is what may make this film to be “cinema”.
In your film, life seems to be made up of a “heap” of perceptions that overwhelm us without escape: childhood memories, cooking recipes explained with precision, poor families with screaming children, wedding parties in which people die vomiting custard, bunches of lost keys that it is impossible to count. In the end, meaning remains of melancholy. How’s your life in the end?
Jose Luis Ducid: Nostalgia (greek): Nostos (return) Algia (pain). But not about the impossibility of return, which is evident, but about living in that state of sweet anxiety, like somebody who has an infected molar, and, putting pressure on, feels more pain with the objective of feeling more relief later. This misshapen relief is the condition in which I like living.
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