OM: Craft. Very simple. It’s an argument I’ve made quite often: most of the stuff that comes from the art world obviously considers craft as something “secondary.” That said, where should it come from? On the other hand, if I’m interested in filmmaking, I should try to learn it also on the level of craft. People from the art world like to tell me: Oh, it’s such an old-fashioned discourse! But if I remember it correctly, art is actually a way of shaping your idea. Not only giving it some kind of space but also actually shaping it. And that’s what craft in cinema is. Now, I don’t want craft to be mistaken with technique. When I talk about craft, I mean a precise idea about your tools and what you can do with them. To give you an example from literature: Amos Tutuola certainly knew what he was doing when he wrote The Palmwine Drinkard (1952), even if his English is different from the King’s. As Chinua Achebe pointed out in several essays, people put Tutuola down for using English in such a fashion but failed to see the poetry and precision in his language, his English. Tutuola definitely knew his craft; he was precise in his use of his tools. And many an artist working in video is not. Most of them seem to be fumbling around with the machinery. Coming up with feeble approximations of cinema.
Interview with Olaf Möller, Part 2. “I’m not a cinephile”
Posted 1 year ago
