Veteran Danish filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen was in Amsterdam last week for the international premiere in Masters section of his deeply personal film The Banality Of Grief, in which he reflects on the recent death of his beloved wife, Madeleine.
Not long after his bereavement, Carlsen had been working on a project in Arizona.
“After my wife died I tried to kickstart my days by throwing myself into shooting a new film, but when I looked through the viewfinder I felt the motives I was focusing on with my camera were hiding what I really wanted to see. Everything in the little American town reminded me of your absence,” the director late wrote, explaining what prompted him instead to make The Banality Of Grief.
In the film, Carlsen is as frank and unflinching about his own grieving as about any other subject he has tackled. The film has only a few images of Madeleine. She didn’t like having her picture taken.
“My Madeleine, my beautiful wife, she didn’t like cameras at all…she couldn’t look back at the camera because the guy was hiding behind the camera,” Carlsen explains her distrust of the “cold, dead eye” of the camera lens. “I have very little footage of her.”
There may not be many pictures of Madeleine but Carlsen has made films all over the world and she used to accompany him wherever he went. “We lived with our kids in Africa and America, in Ireland and England, and she was always with me.”
When Madeleine fell ill, they spent her final months on their farm. He tried to persuade her that there was a tradition among farmers whose lives were ending to share their life stories for the benefit of their descendants.
Madeleine had a very complicated biography – born in Ireland, adopted by a British family but finally based in Denmark. Carlsen said to her that they should make a record of her experiences. “I actually talked her into re-using the evil eye of the camera on her. I said I could film your hands, I could film whatever as long as you tell the story. But then she died before I actually got to do it…”
The director isn’t making any lofty claims on behalf of his documentary.
“The Banality of Grief is a very banal film,” the director declares. “It’s a banal film in the way that suddenly losing something you love dearly happens to all of us. How do we deal with that, that total void that comes into our life? How do we re-ignite that or live on? That’s what I experienced – and all of us experience.”
By his own admission, Carlsen isn’t a mainstream filmmaker. “I digest by making films,” he says of how he makes sense of his own experiences with a camera. “I don’t make films to make money…but I have the big riches of making films the way I want to do my films.”
The director didn’t ask for funds for The Banality of Grief because he didn’t know how it would turn out. Only when he edited the film did he realise that, as he puts it, “it actually spoke to other people.”
“Of course, I am happy…this very private feeling is somehow translatable for other people’s reading of their lives,” Carlsen says of the experience of sharing such an intimate project with a public audience at an event like IDFA.
Wherever he goes, Carlsen always takes a camera with him. “I think emotions are far ahead of brains,” he says of why sometimes he’ll want to film a shot, but won’t know why. “Since I was 20, I have been in a perpetual process of filming.”
Shots which may at first seem very random invariably help him make sense of a project. For example, he might see cows out on the plain and will be overcome with the desire to photograph them. “It’s like a painting. There is a third dimension to that shot,” he says of the hidden meaning in the images he captures.
Both Carlsen’s parents were sculptors. Early on, he considered becoming a painter. “But I wanted a dialogue with something,” he says of what drew him to filmmaking instead. Not that he describes his work as “documentary.” He prefers the term ”narratives with fragments of reality.”
Carlsen has never been interested in the “false” suspense that drives so much of Hollywood cinema. “That contradicts my vision of the world,” the director pronounces. “Most of my time, I am standing on the road or sitting in a chair, thinking what is right or what is wrong and what I should do next…people are most interesting not in their actions which very often hide who they are, but before they act, when they are thinking about what to do and after they act…those for me are the glorious moments.”
“I can only tell stories that I recognise from my own life because otherwise I don’t feel qualified to tell the stories,” he adds.
Even projects that may appear to have nothing directly to do with him are actually in some deeper sense autobiographical. For example, his new film about teenagers growing up in a small town in Arizona reflects his own experiences as an adolescent, growing up with parents who weren’t able to prepare him for what the outside world held in store.
“All my films, all my good films, have stories that can be mirrored into myself. And my bad films are stories that cannot be mirrored into myself,” the director passes judgement on his own work.
