Interview with Alessia Cecchet, Director, Producer, and Animator of Onikuma
Interview by Jennifer Bell
Developmentally Edited by Alexandra Hidalgo
Copy Edited and Posted by Iliana Cosme-Brooks
Your short film, Onikuma, is based on a Japanese folk tale about a demon bear known for chasing horses. In the film you blend carefully composed imagery of photographs, objects, nature, and people with stop motion animated sequences of textile and wood crafted animals and places. What inspired you to bring that story to the screen and to do so with this hybrid aesthetic?
I started to become obsessed with making Onikuma after reading a short story by Curzio Malaparte, an Italian writer and war correspondent known for mixing reality and fiction. Set on the Eastern front during WWII, The Horses is a very moving story which makes mention of a peculiar body of water, the Russian Lake Ladoga. According to Malaparte’s account, this lake was a favorite location of many war soldiers, who would visit it to admire and contemplate the eerie landscape that the body of water had to offer: “The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax.” According to Malaparte’s account, in an effort to flee the enemy fire, the horses had sought refuge in the nearby lake which, at that point, was not yet frozen. However, the water was so cold (supercooled, which is when water’s temperature is below the freezing point but is still liquid) that the horses functioned as a catalyzer and made the water freeze instantly, trapping them inside. Although this phenomenon could never occur in the real world—only in a laboratory—the image of the frozen horses was so evocative to me that I started thinking about how I could transform this image into a film.
It took me three years to write and shoot Onikuma. It all started with the very vivid image of the frozen horses, and then other images started to appear, and a loose narrative started to form in my mind. I wanted to engage with storytelling, deceit, lies, and power dynamics. At the same time, I wanted to recreate the sense of contemplation that emerged from the original short story, so I opted to privilege stillness over action by excluding some elements that, while usually pursued in traditional narrative filmmaking, I find unnecessary to include because they can easily be inferred. One of these elements is the representation of the trope of the discovery. Instead of showing the characters while they find something, I show them before and after; two moments of emotional stillness. These moments of contemplative immobility are places for the user to fill in with their own set of experiences and memories, leaving room for an empathetic experience. Instead of seeking the engagement of the viewer through closeups or a piano soundtrack, I privilege wide shots and immobility that allow space for poetic contemplation. In my view, this decision allows for viewers to decide for themselves what happened in the narrative and create individual versions of this film; versions that are more personal and rely on the viewer’s past experiences, dreams, fantasies, memories, and trauma.
Regarding its hybrid approach, I incorporate different modes (stop motion, sculpture, found footage, 2D animation) into every film that I make. I do this because I believe the idea that humanity has all the answers is anthropocentric, patriarchal, and oppressing. For this reason, one of the guiding principles of my artistic practice is to portray the world as complex, ambiguous, and sometimes, unknowable. I reject a binary understanding of the world and I embrace opacity, open-endedness, and lacuna. Employing an array of media allows me to render a partial, ununified, and fragmented perspective.
Onikuma takes place outdoors in wintertime, with ice and water as recurring imagery. The film also includes no dialogue, leaning into this quiet, restrained, wintertime feeling. Why was it important for you to set the film in winter?
I started writing Onikuma (through images and storyboards—I never wrote a script for this film) during the first year of my MFA. I had just moved to Syracuse from Italy, and that year the winter was particularly snowy, and my imagination was struck by the abundance, beauty, and quietness of snow. The story that inspired it is also set in the winter, so that also influenced me.
You intercut the wintertime imagery with quirky household objects such as photos, horse figurines, and cameras in front of wallpaper. These objects connect to different moments in the film such as a woman holding a camera and an animated horse. I am curious about the role these items play in the world of the film. Do they belong to one of the characters? What was your intention with their placements?
When I was conceptualizing Onikuma, because there is no dialogue or voiceover in the film, I found myself pondering what was the best way to portray the characters. I wanted to provide some context about them. However, because the film is in short form, I did not have much room to do that. That’s when I came up with the idea for these object-centered vignettes. I took a long time in pre-production to think deeply about these characters. I collected a lot of reference images and shopped in a lot of thrift stores. I think objects can emanate some sort of energy and I like to try to listen to it—that’s how I selected the objects for each character—and then I arranged them in carefully composed vignettes. Their placement within the film follows the introduction of each character. To create continuity, I used the soundtrack as a thread to connect the domestic and the outside settings.
Beyond the symbolism of these items, the bright wallpaper behind them and the symmetrical shot structures throughout the film reminded me of a Wes Anderson film. Was this an intentional reference? What films and filmmakers have influenced you as you’ve crafted your style?
I like Wes Anderson, but I would not say that he is a big influence of mine. I do get this comment a lot though. I think it’s because he is the poster child of what I would describe as “eye pleasing independent filmmaking.” Symmetry is an aesthetic tool that is so ingrained in Western understandings of beauty that it is impossible to point to a specific source. I was definitely influenced by painting. When I was a child my favorite painter was Salvador Dalí, and I later discovered the work of Frida Kahlo, Henri Fuseli, Balthus, and others. Literature was also a big influence, specifically the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Carroll, and more recently, Philip K. Dick. When I was completing Onikuma I encountered for the first time the work of Armenian director Sergei Parajanov (the younger actress, Sarineh Garapetian, actually introduced me to it) and I discovered that he was the artistic father I never knew I had. So many of the things he made resonated with me and my work. Before Parajanov, my work was influenced by Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past, 2002), Julie Taymor (Titus, 1999), and by Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955).
I am also interested in how you connect human and animal characters. The film is titled after a demon bear, and you intercut live action people with animated animals. Why are the (dis)connections between humans and animals significant to your filmmaking?
I love animals. I love to observe them and to imagine how non-human life must be. I like to take animals as they are, without imbuing them with human traits, without needing them to perform or entertain. I think that people have a relationship with animals that is generally based on human assumptions and belief systems that don’t necessarily apply to other species. Animal documentaries have to entertain humans by showing animals that are constructed for human amusement. Movies that feature animals have to have a human morale that the audience can go home with.
We love puppies but we look horrified at the animals that we can’t or don’t want to understand. For example, in wintertime the beaches in California become full of debris and trash brought ashore by storms. One day, while reading, I discovered that I was sitting near the dead and headless corpse of a sea lion. After I realized it I decided to stay and I started to pay attention to people passing by, trying to figure out whether they were noticing the animal or not. Most of them did not—the corpse could be easily mistaken for a log—but at some point a young woman noticed the sea lion and I could see her reaction. She showed it to her partner and the expression on her face went through a range of emotions. First, a gigantic smile on her face believing that she had found a mammal on the beach and then, the horror in the realization that the animal was dead. In a very brief amount of time the transition between wonder and abject horror happened. The couple then left, leaving me and the sea lion alone. This experience really struck me, as it was the first time I was able to witness someone else’s reaction as they responded to the sight of a dead animal. It made me think about the value that we see in animals and how death changes that. It made me ponder about the space that these dead animal bodies occupy, both materially (for example, the roadkill that we encounter on our morning commutes) and culturally (how we are socially primed to respond to these sights). This moment was pivotal for my artistic practice as I started to explore these questions through sculpture, animation, and film in an effort to give form to an inquiry invested in the corporeality of the animal body and the space that it occupies in Western society.
You wrote, directed, produced, and filmed this project on your own. What was it like to have full creative control over your project but also full responsibility for its storytelling and aesthetic values?
For me film is an art form. As an artist, I want to have as much control as I can over what I create. For me making film is mainly a visual and haptic experience—which is why I incorporate objects that I make in my films—and for this reason it is very important to me to be able to shoot my own films. I started to learn cinematography at the beginning of my MFA and once I understood the basics, my mind was blown away by the degree to which I could manipulate images and render what I had pictured in my mind.
What advice do you have for other independent or experimental filmmakers who are producing, directing, and writing their own films?
Go for it but keep it feasible. Learn to assess the feasibility of your project and make changes according to the resources that are available to you. Inspiration is everywhere! Look around at your surroundings, community, and local history. There are a lot of interesting stories and histories out there that want to be told! Also, remember that film is a medium and not an industry; there is no right way to do things. This can be very liberating once you realize the limit is only dictated by your mind(and resources), but you can find creative ways to deal with limitations.
How has the pandemic affected your work, and have you found any useful strategies to stay creative and focused this year?
The pandemic has affected my work really badly, actually. Between the pandemic and the west coast wildfires (like thousands of other people, I had to evacuate my home back in August) it’s been very hard to connect with my creative self and find a purpose in making things. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and I have mostly been focusing on writing my dissertation, which is invested in the ways in which Western societies and cultures negotiate animal death and engage with the materiality of the animal body. Writing during the pandemic has also been very challenging, but I am slowly getting back into it. Thankfully, I have a beautiful and loving dog, Hannah, and she has been helping me a lot just by being so goofy and cute. We go on long walks together and the pandemic has made us bond even more. I also practice yoga and I just recently started meditating. During the pandemic I discovered the value of self-care, and I can already see how that has a beneficial effect on my practice. I recently started to work again on a film I started over two years ago that I never finished because after a while I found myself disconnected from it. After a year since I last touched the project, I finally reopened the edit a couple of weeks ago and decided to start from scratch because I realized that none of the cuts I had were meaningful to me anymore. I wasn’t anticipating this, but this choice made me feel excited about this project again and I am very happy to be working on it. The title is Corpi di Balena {Whale Bodies} and I am hoping to release it before the end of the year.
You can watch Onikuma on FlixaTV and Illambra, and learn more about it on its website. Find Alessia Cecchet on Instagram, Twitter, and her website, and learn more about Jennifer Bell on her profile.