El Cadáver Exquisito | Collaborations

by
Elric

After viewing hundreds of hours of seemingly random footage shot from his
multiple trips to El Salvador and art installations in New York I had a
moment of panic. Here was a good friend trusting in me to help create
his film and all I could think was ‘It sure is pretty’. That’s it. No
connections, story or themes leaped out at me - just an endless array of
imagery, which, the longer it rolled, the less capable to find the film
I felt. So I agreed to edit the film like a man flailing in the dark
for a light switch.

What I hadn’t counted on was that initial viewing of seemingly random
footage would begin to invade my unconscious and soon I was waking up
with memories of key images and strange connections that seemed less to
come from me than they did an unseen narrator. These connections really
began to guide us during the intensive editing period where I “slept” on
Victor’s couch, in and out of sleep where key roadblocks in our edit
were solved through this lucid dream state.

A key moment was waking up and being certain we could make a bus fly and
that this would propel us into the story. I imagine most directors would
raise an eyebrow at such a suggestion but Victor merely nodded and
replied “ Ok man, let’s try it.” These are key words for a successful
collaboration: we never lose when we ‘try’ something. Many times my
ideas failed or led us down the wrong road but ultimately this freedom
to experiment and trust our instincts led us to places I have never
discovered in my own work. A strange and compelling sequence of images
and ideas that seemed unimaginable just weeks earlier began to emerge.

Our collaboration reminded me of Jodorowsky’s film ‘Santa Sangre’ where a
limbless mother used her son’s hands to create her art. Victor hired me
to edit the film but he was the one with the technical expertise. I had
always been a director and so I became the director of the edit and he
became my hands. As a stranger in a strange land he was also my guide. I
was editing a film in a foreign language about a culture that I was
unfamiliar with. In most cases this would be a terrible mistake but here
it gave me an objectivity to the footage and an outsider’s approach
that let me feel my way through it - to follow an emotional map rather
then a factual one with Victor’s knowledge as my safety net.

It’s rare that you get a chance to create in a collaboration that is
unscripted and only limited by your own ideas and limitations.
Creativity unchecked. So many films could have emerged from this
material but only one did. Our little sin.