“As Humans, We Overestimate Our Presence”: An Interview With Victor Kossakovsky
Victor Kossakovsky is a Russian documentary film director, award-winner of numerous national and international film forums, currently based in Berlin. He began his career in motion pictures at the Leningrad studio of Documentaries as assistant cameraman, assistant director and editor in 1978. Years later, he started his own production company in Saint Petersburg, Kossakovsky Film Production. His two latest films Aquarela and Gunda were both featured in the the American Film Academy Awards shortlists!
Today, he joins one of our writers, Zosia, for a deep and insightful interview!
Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela (2018)
Zosia Sablińska: I first wanted to ask you about the beginning. Of course you’ve been in the film business for so long, what made you want to go into film and also why documentaries and not feature films?
Victor Kossakovsky: I was taking pictures ever since I was seven, and mostly what I was taking photos of were cats, dogs, flowers, grass, so that was the first part of my childhood. Later, as a teenager, I started filming outside the city. I was biking in the forest and started filming frogs and then foxes and birds and nests, and I was just doing it every weekend. In Russia, at age 15 you have to decide either to study or to continue high school, if you continue to study then you have to decide where. I had doubts. I thought maybe I will become a Ranger, you know to protect forests and animals, or I go into cinema. So I decided to do cinema. My dream was to become a cinematographer. I started my study at film institute, but in fact it was a technical institute at that time. I was so disappointed after two months, I realised it was the wrong university.
I later went to Lenfilm Studio, where they produced feature films, and I was first working on a few films as a camera assistant. I was also helping production designers, moving furniture, moving dollys and cleaning lenses. Then one great cinematographer, Vladimir Diakonov, helped me to grow and I became first cinematographer’s assistant very fast. He was the one who told me, “you better go into documentaries, you are always looking and you like natural light, you don’t like to change anything” and he was right, so I went into documentaries. I was very lucky because in the day that I came there to Leningrad Documentary Studio, a Latvian filmmaker Hertz Frank was showing there his film “10 Minutes Older” and for me it was a total revolution. It’s about a kid who’s watching a theatre play, nothing else, the camera is in front of the kid, 10 minutes and you understand his emotions, everything. What is conceptual is, at that time in USSR the film’s roll’s maximum time was 10 minutes. This film was just one single shot, 10 minutes long. This was conceptual and it was cinema without any words! It was so revolutionary, I thought this is the way to do it. I forgot about feature films immediately. Of course I watched Tarkovsky, Fellini, I like Polish films, I think my intellectual and artistic brother is Kieslowski. If I had to choose one person to have wine with, it would be Kieslowski. I never met him, but I see what he was trying to do, I understand his mind. I’m not sure many people understood him, but I see what he’s trying to do as an artist, he is the closest one to me, although I’m a little bit more focused on the image itself, but in terms of the meaning of art and cinema I think I’m very close to him.
Victor Kossakovsky
ZS: One of my favourite short films of his is “Seven Women of Different Ages”, about ballet dancers, each day of the week there is a different dancer, at a different stage of her life and career.
VK: Exactly! You see, this is the way he thinks. This is what made me think of documentaries as art. Also in his feature films, questions about how my life would change if I go left or right, do something differently, this is how I think as well. I miss him.
ZS: I’ve noticed both in Aquarela and Gunda, there are strong connections to nature, is that your source of inspiration? How do you chose your topics?
VK: It started earlier, 10 years ago, when I was making a film “Vivan Las Antipodas!” It is about how people and places are diametrically opposite from one another on the surface of our planet. Let’s say, we are in Europe, but who lives at exactly opposite point, upside down? Is there a connection between us? So I kept thinking about it – if you put two people from absolutely opposite points of the world in the very same frame, next to each other, you have a great image. In the beginning, I wanted to see how people are here and on the opposite side of the world at the same time. If we are precise geometrically and geographically, it might be an interesting coincidence, especially that most of the planet is covered by water, so you don’t have that many places which correspond with each other across the world. Poland’s opposite is the ocean, Spain’s opposite is New Zealand. When I went to New Zealand I started filming a story of a whale who committed suicide and how people wanted to help, but they couldn’t because the whale was huge – 17 meters long. Then the local, indigenous people of New Zealand Māori, were supposed to bury it, but it was so huge, they didn’t know how to move it. They spent around 3-4 days burying it, so at first glance it looks like a film about people, but it was actually about the whale and about a dog who was running around and ocean itself. What happened was because they couldn’t move the whale they decided to cut it in half, so you could see what was inside the whale and I noticed I was afraid to look inside, like it was a big magical secret. Every time I was running around and filming, when I was from that side I was not able to film, I kept turning away. Then I noticed that there is a dog which was running around the whale, very excited, but when he came to the cut, he was not looking either. You’d think it was the opposite, there’s blood, there’s meat a dog can eat it and grab it - NO, the dog was not able to look. It was an unbelievable moment. Then I calculated what what the opposite side of the world and on the opposite side there was a rock, same size and shape as the whale. You wouldn’t believe it, you could not miss it!
So I started thinking, there are no people here, what can I film and I settled on a caterpillar, which became a butterfly at the end of the film. I later found myself in Africa, wanting to film a woman there, suddenly a hundred elephants crossed my frame and one came so close to me, to the lens, that you could see his skin, one full frame, only his skin. I didn’t know why I needed it, but then I came to the opposite side of the world, Hawaii, and it appears that volcanic lava, when it’s frozen looks like the skin of an elephant. In Chile there was a man who had 200 sheep, he knew all of them by name. In he morning he would go “Hello Maria, hello Anna, how is your stomach, how did you sleep?” Smoothly, my film became not about people, but about the mystery of this world, in my film the whale, the elephants, the sheep, the condors, the butterfly - they are just as important as humans. Bradbury talked about the butterfly effect and this is what happened to me, my film became something else to me.
Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda (2020)
We are in an anthropocentric period of human history. We overestimate our presence, our importance, we always talk about us, how do we think, our emotions, our dramas, we do everything for us and we don’t care about anything else. For example, now I’m filming about architecture and I’ve come to realize that if an architect needs to build in a park or forest, they don’t care, they will cut tress out. An architect just cuts it out. This is what we do, we don’t care. It naturally happened that there were less and less words in my films, in Aquarela there were two or three lines or something, in Gunda there is none and I became closer to “10 Minutes Older” where there is no words. What we don’t use is, nature taught us to understand each other in one glance. The animals in a Savannah go and see other creatures and immediately know if they are is dangerous or not. We are the same, we know how to distinguish in 4 seconds if someone in front of us is friendly or wants to hurt us. How do you know it? Only by looking, it’s amazing! Our brain is a huge computer, but we don’t use it. People do cinema and they put voiceover, “This is an octopus, look” I know it’s an octopus! Let me see, let me watch. Cinema is closest to nature! Anyone can make a movie in their brain, just by looking around. You wake up, you go left, you make one movie, you go right, something else happens to you, you make a different movie.
ZS: Do you feel that it has gotten worse with time? Are things being over-explained?
VK: Yeah, of course. When I came to the industry, I knew there were 20 filmmakers I had to watch, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Tarkovsky, couple of Polish ones and a few Americans, but I knew what I had to watch. Now we produce 50,000 films a year. We’re living among visual garbage everywhere, images, stories, clips. Back then, if you didn’t read Homer or Dante, War and Peace, it was bad. Now, ask someone who is Copernicus, no one knows, because there is too many of everything. If you look around in NY or LA it’s easy to find filmmakers than taxi drivers. Everyone says “I’m an artist”, especially now when cameras are so easy and cheap, people think they can do a documentary, but it’s not so easy. People think that because they’re good people, they can change the world, because they can show this problem, the world will be better. No, the world will be better if you don’t change it, if you respect it, if you firstly learn about how the world exists, its rules, first you have to learn to be modest and not to kill anyone. Here in Europe we eat around 80kg of meat a year, in America they do over 100kg, sometimes even 120kg. If you live 100 years and you eat meat every year, it means you ate 10.000 kg of meat, so when you come to the end of your life there will be a few mountains behind you, the first one will be a huge mountain of plastic and the second one from bones of animals. This is what we do, we kill over a billion pigs a year, we kill half a billion cows, we kill 50 billion chickens, we kill trillions of fish a year. We are killers. So I said, I have to make a film about that. If people don’t understand reality, if they live in this fantasy, that humans are the most important creatures in the world and therefore humans are dominating this planet, then I have to show them that there are other creatures around us who have their emotions, feelings, thoughts and who have rights to be here. But we do not want to see it and we are also not ready to accept it. When I say we shouldn’t kill animals and we shouldn’t eat meat, people laugh. Even intellectuals. They tell me “you did a great movie” and then go eat a burger. We are so slow! Some of us do not even understand yet that racism is wrong. Why do people of colour still have to fight for their rights? Why do women still have to prove their right to be paid equally? Why does the LGBTQ community still have to fight for their rights? We are so slow! At least we are not eating each other anymore.
Victor Kossakovsky
ZS: Has the pandemic influenced this situation or you in any way?
VK: Yes, when I was making Aquarela, people kept asking me “why are you making it so brutal?” with loud music and so on…and I always said, I have to shake my viewers. You cannot live without water for more than a few days and you still believe you’re the most important! One billion people do not have access to clean water, at the same time we have over a billion cows, they need 10 times more water than humans, depends on the climate, sometimes even 30 times more. To feed the cows we cut out forests, when we cut them out we make the land dry, so it’s total absurd. I kept saying that if we don’t respect nature, then one day nature will punish us. Everyone said that I was crazy! One month later, the pandemic started. What is important to me now, apart from the fact that I lost a few friends during pandemic, is that I have ideas on the table, which I will want to do and I measure them in this way: “What if I get the virus and I die tomorrow or in a week? Are my ideas really important, crucial? When people are dying every day, when you can die, is it meaningful what you’re doing now?” For me the pandemic was a kind of a wake up call. I only do what is important, crucial for my life as a filmmaker and as a human. We tend to forget that the planet belongs to water and viruses. We are the guests, they were here long before us and they will always be here. If we behave with too much pride, nature will retaliate. We are so arrogant. When I was filming Aquarela, we put the camera below icebergs inside the ocean, we dove and suddenly we saw a little seahorse, down there we met him and he met us, and he was emotionally shocked, he probably thought “who are they?”. It was the most beautiful moment ever. Our goal is to live 100-120 years, but look at trees, they live thousands of years, or a shark in Greenland, it can live 500-700 years. We want to escape this age trap, because we get arthritis, high cholesterol, and so on, but look at crocodiles, they don’t have any of these, no matter how old. Some of us, in the big chairs, behind big walls, want to be immortal. An iceberg is probably a 100.000 years old, but you can drink its water and you’re fine, it’s a life. Immortals exist, but it’s not humans. It’s nature.
Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan las Antipodas! (2011)