Daniel Stopa talks to Woj­ciech Staroń about mak­ing ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’, music inspir­a­tions and ways of doc­u­ment­ing ‘simple matters’.

‘Argen­tinian Les­son’ has won five awards dur­ing the 51^st Krakow Film Fest­ival, includ­ing The Golden Horn Award and The Award Of The Pol­ish Asso­ci­ation Of Cine­ma­to­graph­ers, both for best pho­to­graphy. Whilst giv­ing their feed­back, the judging panel described your film as a true mas­ter­piece. What was your reac­tion?

W. S.: You know, for me the biggest reward is that ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’ gets across and that people are watch­ing this film, inter­pret­ing and dis­cuss­ing it. Fest­ival high­lights and pos­it­ive responses from the judges are also very import­ant, espe­cially as I am always try­ing to aim higher. Firstly, I col­lab­or­ate with vari­ous great dir­ect­ors and I observe how they make films, their atti­tude towards the prot­ag­on­ist as well as how they achieve the essence of real­ity. Secondly, it’s vital to me to nail the point in a film, I am against doc­u­ment­ar­ies in which ‘the tabloids’ head­lines’ are the main sub­ject. The float­ing sub­ject very often absolves the authors from man­euv­er­ing with film form. At some point, the look of the film or how it is made is no longer import­ant; but it is its ‘hot topic’ that counts the most. I am very pleased that my work was appre­ci­ated in Krakow.


I already know the kind of films you are against. So, what sort of doc­u­ment­ar­ies do you prefer?

W. S.: To me, mak­ing doc­u­ment­ar­ies is like step­ping into a com­pletely new envir­on­ment. I can’t come up with an idea and then simply film it – trans­fer my ima­gin­a­tion into pic­tures or a fin­ished form. I’m always curi­ous where the film will take me, so I try to gain an insight into it dur­ing the prin­cipal pho­to­graphy and post-​production. Often, in the end, I am sur­prised with its res­ults, when we have cre­ated a totally dif­fer­ent doc­u­ment­ary than ori­gin­ally planned. As for the sub­ject, I always aim to talk about simple things, inde­pend­ent of the socio-​political situ­ation. To me, the polit­ics can be entirely pushed aside, it is never a start­ing point for me.


Janek appears to fit in to your hun­ger for the unknown, the eager­ness to get to know the world. A child seems to be a proper example of lit­mus paper, an excuse allow­ing obser­va­tion. After watch­ing the film we have noticed that it is you who learn more.

W. S.: Yes, I was search­ing for the right ele­ment that would enable me to fol­low my interests, to look at everything through a cam­era. Some­times with a smile, another time with sym­pathy or irony. Fol­low­ing a child with the cam­era it’s the ideal excuse to observe simple, every-​day activ­it­ies – some­times even in a rather naïve way. Through Janek I was try­ing to find those little meta­phors that a viewer can gen­er­al­ize and fit in gen­eral truths about life, feel­ings, rela­tion­ships. On top of that I think that ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’, like every doc­u­ment­ary, is a kind of a meet­ing – a meet­ing with a new world, people, real­ity. Thanks to the pres­ence of a child I could exper­i­ence such a feel­ing myself, enter a dif­fer­ent world and open my own too. In ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’ we can see how cer­tain rela­tion­ships are formed between Janek and Mar­cia, how the pro­cess of get­ting closer is being built between the two people. In a doc­u­ment­ary this close up is the most beau­ti­ful – just like in a real life.


In both ‘Syberian Les­son’ and ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’ know­ledge is mutual. Depar­ture and Pol­ish les­sons are an obvi­ous excuse of the nar­rat­ive.

W. S.: In the begin­ning the assump­tion is exactly like this: Mał­go­sia is to teach Pol­ish and it is indeed hap­pen­ing. How­ever, each meet­ing is a big learn­ing tool for us. We get to know how oth­ers live, how they can do some­thing bet­ter, or some­times worse, what their prob­lems are etc. There is a sort of mutual learn­ing exper­i­ence occur­ring. The Syberian and Argen­tinian exper­i­ences taught us empathy and co-​responsibility for oth­ers. In both films we treat people we meet as our part­ners. We learn life mutu­ally.


In ‘Argen­tinian…’ the verbal side, dia­logue is at a min­imum. Does visual story-​telling based on mov­ing images interest you more?

W. S.: Abso­lutely. I think you should watch a film even when some­body turns the sound off. A film without sound can be very com­pel­ling. I always try to treat dia­logue more as sound, some­thing that can add a lot to the mean­ing, but it stays as an abso­lute min­imum. As I have men­tioned earlier, my obser­va­tion is lim­ited to simple things – every day activ­it­ies. But I try to look at everything so that this per­cep­tion expresses some feel­ings, emo­tions that a viewer can recog­nise. ‘Argen­tinian…’ almost entirely con­sists of small activ­it­ies such as hide and seek, set­ting up a shop or brick-​making. You need, of course, to link these things coher­ently. The scene set up has an extraordin­ary mean­ing; there are some ele­ments that need enforce­ment and oth­ers that need a punch­line. I very much like to com­pare film to music. The dra­matic struc­ture of a film should resemble the struc­ture of a music com­pos­i­tion. Chorus, cli­max point, faster and slower ele­ments – it can be all found in a doc­u­ment­ary film.


Do you play any instru­ment your­self?

W. S.: I’ve never played any instru­ment, but I listen to music quite a lot. I ima­gine that you can lead the cam­era, just like rock stars play their con­certs – a bit aggress­ive emo­tion­ally. I do like jazz and often while mak­ing fea­tures I col­lab­or­ate with act­ors observing how they impro­vise; I let the cam­era go and wait, to see what is going to hap­pen. I also get inspir­a­tion from clas­sical music that expresses emo­tions in more har­mo­ni­ous, peace­ful way. There­fore I work a bit like a musi­cian.


Com­ing back to cut­ting the verbal sphere, I was won­der­ing whether intro­du­cing dia­logue and voice-​over wouldn’t falsify the truth about the prot­ag­on­ist of ‘Argen­tinian…’? Janek seems to be quite a retir­ing child.

W. S.: Exactly, I was even try­ing to record voice-​over with Janek – I thought that the film would be based on a verbal com­ment­ary. It didn’t work out at all. Janek didn’t feel like show­ing his emo­tions dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion what­so­ever – I think he isn’t that age just yet to start talk­ing openly about feel­ings. We had another idea to film the con­ver­sa­tions between Janek and Mał­go­sia, in which we would sum up some events (for example Marcia’s situ­ation). On one hand, it wasn’t my aim because I pre­ferred telling the story through a visual image and con­trast­ing vari­ous scenes – not via dia­logue. On the other, Janek is a reti­cent per­son, but very act­ive phys­ic­ally; he was con­stantly com­ing up with new fun and games, new tasks. I was observing him and didn’t need any words at all.


You also men­tioned that scene lay out is extremely import­ant. How did the edit­ing look like?

W. S.: The edit­ing was multi-​phased and extremely dif­fi­cult. In the begin­ning, we had to cut the whole foot­age. Next stage was related to syn­chron­iz­a­tion of sound. I was shoot­ing on cam­eras that don’t record sound. I had to use sound record­ers instead. I needed sounds and dia­logue in synch and I had to do it manu­ally. It was dif­fi­cult, time con­sum­ing work. Only after that the pro­cess of cre­at­ive edit­ing has begun, dur­ing which I received a lot of help from vari­ous people includ­ing Zbig­niew Osiński, Agnieszka Bojanowska or Marian Mar­zyński. Together we watched vari­ous ver­sions many times, chan­ging ‘ply­wood’, mov­ing scenes around, cre­at­ing new sequences in the film. ‘Argen­tinian…’ con­sisted of par­tic­u­lar bases that we knew we had to shoot in chro­no­lo­gical order, such as the arrival, depar­ture or first day at school. The rest was like build­ing bricks, small ele­ments that can be com­pared in many ways. We piece them together so that they will cre­ate a story about the exper­i­ences of a girl and a boy.


You chose to work with tape, which lim­ited the length of the film to just nine hours. Did it influ­ence integ­rity of the film?

W. S.: Cer­tainly. While I was film­ing I knew I would need to choose just a few takes. I star­ted to select the scenes in my mind much earlier. I was also await­ing chosen moments in extreme ten­sion, so that I wouldn’t lose any­thing, to ensure the cam­era was on. This is the main dif­fer­ence between shoot­ing on digital tape and on video. When you shoot on video cam­era, you’ve got the com­plete scene from a begin­ning to an end. There­fore it is very easy to lose this ‘some­thing’, this ten­sion. If I shot ‘Argen­tinian…’ on video, I would have at least hun­dred hours of foot­age. It is dif­fi­cult to work with it. Addi­tion­ally, I like to make film from vari­ous ‘shreds’. Some­times it can be only recor­ded sound or a short take, from an entirely dif­fer­ent scene. I’ve got a sequence like this when Mar­cia comes back from her father – it is an emo­tional col­lage of at first totally unre­lated scenes. Tape helps this kind of solu­tion. I col­lect and merge takes, shot in dif­fer­ent place and time, how­ever, in the same spirit, and then a new ‘word’ is cre­ated of them.


Have you ever run out of tape?

W. S.: Surely. On many occa­sions I ran out of ‘reel’ or had to swap tapes and lost the scene. But you can always turn everything to the bright side. When you are over­look­ing some­thing and need to switch tapes you’ve got a two-​minute break, so you observe what is hap­pen­ing and think­ing how to cap­ture what you’ve missed. In a doc­u­ment­ary film even though you haven’t man­aged to cap­ture what you wanted in hun­dred per cent, but it happened in front of you, you will some­how restore it. You can tell what was missed through film­ing some­thing new, people or events. I have learnt it shoot­ing on tape. It makes you think.


Dur­ing last year’s Ber­linale you were rewar­ded for best pho­to­graphy on ‘El pre­mio’ by Paula Markovitch. Allegedly ‘Argen­tinian…’ is remin­is­cent of it…

W. S.: There are a lot of sim­il­ar­it­ies: Argen­tina, small town, school, chil­dren of sim­ilar age. A girl – as Janek – thrown into a new place, to an unknown city. In ‘El pre­mio’, like in ‘Argen­tinian…’, the socio-​political issues are far in the back­ground. They obvi­ously per­vade the screen, but you don’t talk about it. Stor­ies are extremely short, they con­sider rela­tions with other chil­dren, regard­less of the context.Have you learnt from the exper­i­ences of shoot­ing both films?W.S. I have star­ted prin­cipal pho­to­graphy on ‘El pre­mio’ after a year and a half’s work on ‘Argen­tinian…’, thus I have gained large exper­i­ence with Argen­tinian chil­dren; I knew how they react to cam­era, what is hap­pen­ing at their school. There­fore, the doc­u­ment­ary exper­i­ences, obser­va­tions of real­ity trans­ferred onto a storyline. Even the Argen­tineans didn’t know about Argen­tinian school as much as I did. I helped them by provid­ing inform­a­tion about the set or some school rituals. All of that has con­nec­ted us enorm­ously.


You once men­tioned that you are pre­par­ing two ver­sions of ‘Argen­tinian…’ – for tele­vi­sion and for the cinema dis­tri­bu­tion. In Krakow you presen­ted the shorter one. When and where are we able to watch the cine­matic ver­sion?

W. S.: I am con­stantly try­ing, hav­ing a go at the pos­sib­il­ity of using some extra scenes I like, to extend the tele­vi­sion ver­sion for another ten minutes so that it meets the the­at­rical require­ments. As for the cinema dis­tri­bu­tion, it is extremely hard to screen ‘Argen­tinian…’ once it had been shown on tele­vi­sion. People, who poten­tially could have watched the film would have seen it on tele­vi­sion and prob­ably wouldn’t go to cinema after all. Dis­tri­bu­tion also requires a lot of money and time. Of course, we would like ‘Argen­tinian…’ to have the­at­rical dis­tri­bu­tion; I feel this film is made for cinema, it is full of nuances, details cre­at­ing the vibe. We also think of the fest­ival dis­tri­bu­tion.


Do you know at which inter­na­tional fest­ivals you will screen ‘Argen­tinian Les­son’?

W. S.: We still don’t know that. We are invited to numer­ous fest­ivals, but these are the invit­a­tions to the main selec­tion only – the final selec­tion hasn’t happened yet. The major­ity of most import­ant fest­ivals have the premiere require­ment. Katar­zyna Wilk from the Krakow Film Found­a­tion has her fin­ger on the pulse, mak­ing sure a film will have a premiere at a big­ger fest­ival. I hope it will hap­pen.


I wish you all that and thank you for the inter­view.

W. S.: Thank you.



Woj­ciech Staroń was inter­viewed by Daniel Stopa.



(Trans­la­tion by Aleksandra Kaplon) (14.06.2011)