The Seduction of Cinema and Beauty
Agnese Civle
12/06/2012
It seems that Mara Ravins is one of those women who knows the secret of youthfulness. She has been practicing Bikram Yoga for many years, paints her lips red and explores how the seduction of red is able to change a woman. She seeks beauty in everything.
Beauty itself, is the language in which the Toronto film writer, director and producer, born into a Latvian family, speaks, even when talking about exile to Siberia.
Mara Ravins and Latvian film director Jānis Kalējs docu-drama film Morning In the Pine Forest (1998) was shown at the International Film Festival Arsenāls in Riga, then continued its journey to the Montreal International Film Festival. In 2008, Arsenāls delighted its Latvian film audience with the black and white dramatic film Solace (2006), which had previously graced the cinema screens in Canada, New England and New Mexico film festivals.
Since September, Mara Ravins has been in Riga to fully devote to writing a dramatic feature film screenplay Siberian Story. Weaving throughout one story the essence distilled from the memoirs of those who were exiled to Siberia in the 1940’s, she addresses existential questions that are still relevant today.
Most of her life has been devoted to working in the Canadian film and television industry (in the 90’s making films in Latvia). Mara Ravins has frequently received support for her independent cinema projects not only from the Canada Council for the Arts, but also from the Ontario Arts Council and from the Soros Foundation and yet… has never felt that Canada is the place where she can meet artistically like minded people, hence her future plans are associated with finding a place where dialogues flow naturally – in Latvia.
Just recently you spent some time at the Ventspils International House of Writers and Translators where you were working on a film script. Do you always seek a particular milieu where to work?
For the most part, we live in circumstances where an ideal milieu is not available. If earlier someone had been observing me in Toronto when I was running around the city with my laptop seeking peace and quiet to work, they would have laughed out loud.
I had just left my day job to finally have some time to write… I beautifully renovated my living room – painted the walls gold, organized everything to a minimalism, sat at my writing table… then my home started to shake because of the monster drills working on the condominiums across the street, but in the courtyard at the university, where I usually took sanctuary under the old trees, the air was filled with the construction sounds from the renovations on the clock tower. The whole city had become one large construction zone, nevertheless, in some magical way we each learn how to deal with that, sit down, tune in and write.
Most amazing is to write in nature, when all the associations that one has with a city or home in which one lives, disappear. I like to take walks to clear my head then thoughts and ideas flow in a pure manner.
Please tell me about the script on which you are working right now.
At this moment I am writing a script for a feature film Siberian Story. The foundation is a story that has been created from hundreds of memoirs of those exiled to Siberia in the 1940’s – Latvians, Estonians, White Russians and Ukrainians.
I must add that I arrived at this work through an intuitive rather than a rational manner. In 2008, when my film Solace was presented at Arsenāls, I by chance grabbed a few books off the back shelf at Jānis Roze bookstore, which were women’s memoirs of their experience of exile to Siberia. In the airplane, flying back home, I started to read these books and wondered, why has no one made a dramatic film exploring this topic? I started to read more of these materials, go deeper into them. I would put them aside, but then again return to them. Intuitively I felt that this is the right work that I need to be doing. This time the work found me and everything is unfolding in a natural way.
Based on an episodic treatment of the story I wrote, a Canadian arts fund (The Canada Council of the Arts Established Film Artists Category) gave me a grant to write a script. I continue to write this script and to seek international co-producers. The film must be made as a co-production with four countries. This endeavor is huge and the process is slow. It is important to shoot this film in Europe.
Do you believe that it is possible to portray this situation in all of its dramatic amplitude in one film?
This theme can be explored from so many perspectives and every one, who creates a work about this, will have their own view. In truth, it is something boundless. Telling the story about Siberia, someone can make a film about those incarcerated in the Gulag or those who were sent to remote villages. I chose to situate my story in a village.
Reading the materials, I strived to extract the collective experiential essence and to raise various existential questions. This will be an existential film and I am trying to create it so that it will be understood on an international level.
In these times when people are forced to leave their homes and life as they are accustomed to living it because of economic circumstances, natural disasters, these questions I am exploring are relevant now. An individual can wake up one morning to find everything destroyed. He just has his suitcase, maybe not even, and he has to start from scratch. That is why I ask questions such as: What are you, when all has been taken? What defines you? What is important to you? What do you value, hold dear?
Does this film question or give answers?
It questions. All my work questions. I do not have the answers. Everyone has to seek the answers within themselves. A work is successful when the audience leaves the screening and starts to seek the answers for themselves.
In these unpredictable rapidly changing times it is important to think about these things because back then, nobody ever imagined that such a thing could happen (the Siberian deportations), taking into account that 20 million people perished.
Has the fear that something like this could repeat itself partially motivated you to create this work?
I do not feel fear within myself, though I feel the fear in society. Perhaps I do not have these feelings of fear because I practice yoga and try to maintain positive energy in my life. But I do feel uncertainty, instability. In the spring in Toronto, an area was closed off because they found a dangerous substance in a community centre. Of course no one wanted to talk about this but had the substance not been isolated, there would have been a permanent evacuation for a ten-block radius. “Friend, sorry, you can’t go home, the area is quarantined.” We are living in very interesting times when anything could happen! This is not science fiction. It is reality.
In these times, when we are living in a world where 1% owns everything but 99% nothing, the systems start to crumble and we are all feeling that something is changing… Subsequently we need to bring into our lives more humanity, kindness and to strengthen our consciousness. We have to strive for inner stability, because we cannot control the exterior. I try not to get caught up in fear energy, because that does not give anything.
Who are the heroes in the story and what is their inner world?
The main protagonist of the story is a fourteen year-old girl. She is artistic and curious about things. It is difficult to find her negative characteristics. Overall, the hardest task in this work, despite a natural part of the story being dramatic, is to find the negative qualities in the protagonists, those qualities they have to fight within themselves. The dramatic structure requires character development. We have to see how each hero overcomes something – not just exterior circumstances, but something within themselves. That is hard to find in my heroes, especially in a teenage girl who still has that unfathomable boundless youthfulness. She has to learn to be more patient. She is forced to become independent. I am still working on the inner development of her character.
Is this young woman’s character a part of you?
Each character is a part of myself – with all my neuroses… Those who know me well will understand in a moment.
It is not worth doing anything creative unless you process that through yourself. Of course, all kinds of wonders break out from the subconscious. Then you have to distance yourself from the material so that you can shape it.
What kind of questions and themes have you touched upon in your previous films?
My last film Solace was created by chance – literally from one witnessed scenario. At the time, I was working on a science fiction series Odyssey and I had to drive around a lot in a cube van on the highway. One winter evening, when the sun was beginning to set, I saw a woman in a tailored coat, carrying a purse, carefully step over a guard rail and begin to walk diagonally down a snow covered hill glazed with a layer of ice. Stuck in traffic, this was such a surreal scene and I could only imagine the crunching sound that each of her footsteps made as they broke through the thick ice crust into the deep snow, the effort she took to descend. Inspired by this event, a whole script flowed from my subconscious in which a woman meets up with a man and immediately feels a strong connection.
This man is one of those big city boys who lives on the streets, steals. I frequently have seen them in the mornings sleeping on park benches or in the subway. I have observed that these boys are maybe twenty-five years old and many of them are beautiful, like fallen angels. There is beauty here, a kind of innocence.
In this film, when the young man sees the woman coming down the hill, he tries to rob her, but is unable to succeed. In the moment where they are struggling, each recognizes in the other something of themselves… the story is about how two people, in one glance, can recognize what connects them and from that is created an intensive and real contact and they risk spending some time together.
I like that in life, that one small gesture, contact, one glance can change your whole life. All of my work touches on the theme of violence and grace in some form or another. It is important to balance violence with grace, with some kind of humanness. I really believe that no matter how terrible a circumstance may be, if we allow, grace always enters – something that attests to beauty, love, humanness. One cannot exist without the other, meaning goodness, beauty can’t exist without the darkness. All of us have dark qualities, even if we do not manifest them. This interests me and I will continue to explore this and it will always stand out in my work.
Even in the Siberian screenplay it is important to balance the brutal with the humane. Even in the most horrific moment, when a person is pushed to their limit, they have a choice to open their eyes and see the beauty in a flowering meadow. Such simple beauty has managed to save many from a terrible fate.
When I am writing this work, I try to approach each character as a human being, without judgment. It is important to find the humanness even in the darkest of characters.
Aside from that, this summer I am hoping to realize the short film Invitation to Red, which I am creating together with a Moscow film company Metafora Films. This film allows for a completely different creative form of energy and contrasts with the material I am used to working with. The story explores how the color red seduces a woman who in her surrender to the process slowly starts to blossom in her own essence and sexuality.
I once had this incident, where I saw in a store window a pair of beautiful, large and sculptural boots, which haunted me for a number of days until I bought them. Truthfully, after I bought them, many things changed. People started to act differently toward me and I started to become different. I discovered about myself many interesting things.
On your website subversivebeauty.com you talk a lot about beauty. Talk more about beauty in your life and in your work.
Beauty in whatever form is that which gives balance to all that oppresses and corrodes, even though the corrosive can also be beautiful.
Beauty is something that affects our emotions and evokes pleasant sensations, surprises, mesmerizes…
One art critic in his book about beauty mentioned that beauty is the most radical movement in art. Carravagio created shock with his paintings of angels and naked men displayed in the church. This author compares Carravagio’s paintings with Mapplethorpe’s photographs, which contain astounding beauty whilst being provocative. I do not know much about theory, about post modernism (about postmodernism I only understand that it is a mélange of different styles, a movement that does not like beauty… or the word “beauty”), but I do know that beauty is important and it is radical.
My work is often criticized as being too beautiful, as if it is too precious. I do not do this consciously. I simply notice beauty everywhere. I notice the gorgeous reflection of light in a window, a line on a wall that has seduced me… I am always fainting with wonder.
In Ventspils I was photographing a lot of old buildings, abandoned, corroded houses, the different colors and textures of walls, strange angles, rooftops, a sea of mud… Everywhere I was able to be inspired by beauty. I see all that and people do laugh at me for it…
And what if Siberian Story turns out too beautiful?
I feel there has to be beauty! For example, in the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) there is a lot of brutality but it has been gorgeously filmed. Or, for example, the film White Material (2009) with the magnificent Isabelle Huppert in the lead, a woman who refuses to give up her coffee plantation in Africa – that is a very intense and brutal film, but cinematically beautiful – a lot of gold color…
I believe this kind of balance must also exist in Siberian Story.
Please talk more about your passion with photography.
I am still using my old Nikon and film negative. I like to take walks and by intuition capture moments. I am always surprising myself. I think I will always photograph because it is important for me to express myself creatively. It is simply something I must do and it is easier to do photography parallel to other things happening because I do not have to wait for the film funds.
Alongside the Invitation to Red project, I am asking my women friends to take part in this photography project, a portrait series in which each woman’s manifestation of and relationship with passion is revealed through her expression with red fabric. I have a wonderful piece of red fabric and each woman chooses how she wishes to relate and work with this piece of cloth. I am doing this as a parallel project, because waiting for film funding… you can fall asleep…
What are the film funding politics right now in Canada?
Unfortunately, Canada is orienting itself more toward commercial film, looking more for simplified stories. I believe that they are deceiving themselves going in that direction, not really understanding what the public wants. The Canadian audience is ready for deeper, more alternative and interesting films. Canada, like the rest of the world, is obsessed with reality shows. At one point that will end and perhaps good dramatic series will take their place. Needless to say, American cable television HBO are creating wonderful series and the Brits also create wonderful television.
But, talking about Canadian film funding – thank God that there are still arts councils (Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts) which do not give colossal sums, but enough to allow the creation of smaller budget films and these are grants.
Quebec has a very successful film industry. They work together with France, but tend to give funding to their own Quebec artists. The film industry in the west and east coast is weaker.
It is not the right time to ask for money from Latvia. I understand the situation really well, that there is no money and therefore I do not wish to tap into their funding pot, if I do not need to.
What is your plan in relation to Latvia?
Riga is very dear to me. People think I am very naïve in this matter, however something really speaks to me in Riga. Just simply taking a walk here I feel balanced and I feel like I am in love. I have a love affair with Riga. That is some kind of relationship between the essence of who I am and the energy of this city.
I want to move to Europe, best first to Latvia, because it is clear to me, that the way in which I perceive the world, feel things – no one in Canada understands that. Sensibility and understanding exists here on a different level and I have an ease of understanding with others, I have no need to explain everything.
In Canada, a lot is very surface. Even though I have a few close friends, overall, the way in which I perceive the world, orient myself, this does not resonate and jive with the city in which I have spent so much time. Of course, I appreciate the positive and the good, but it is time for me to leave. Everything there has been done, lived and tapped out. It is the same as with relationships – one morning you wake up and understand, it is over. I need to live in Europe, where a new dialogue is developing for me. Perhaps I could live in Montreal, learn fluent French, but to integrate into their distinct society would not be easy…
What else would you like to realize in your creative work? Perhaps you have some conceptual ideas?
Often walking in cities and through different environments my head fills with images. For example, wild ideas like a swimming pool in the middle of the city that is filled with milk on which are projected films. I am interested in exploring ideas of bringing film into environments, film installations, but in a more poetic manner than what is done by advertising.
Mara Ravins. Self-portrait
