Martyna Ratnik & George Finlay Ramsay: A Correspondence
While in ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ (dir. Martyna Ratnik, 2022, Lithuania), (post-)apocalypse comes in the form of the fall of an empire and a farewell to a friend, ‘CASTOROCENE’ (dir. George Finlay Ramsay, 2021, Scotland) imagines an (almost) human-less world where beavers get to rebuild everything, from zilch. In the span of eight emails written in response to “The Blue Screens of Nothingness” short-film programme, the filmmakers discuss their personal visions of the end of the world, alongside the limits of language, poetry and grief.
Martyna Ratnik: When I got the commission from the Cinematheque, I told myself that this time I’d curate a screening that feels tender and personal – and then went on to write a proposal for a selection of films about the apocalypse and its aftermath. And yet, watching them back-to-back, I realized that while mapping many different ends of many different worlds – some real and some imagined, some already in the past while others postponed to the future – they have all managed to tame the void and make it their own.
I was thinking about this while re-watching your film yesterday night, how each time its humour and tenderness still takes me by surprise. For me, the latter is tied to the use of analogue and the voiceover. And yet, perhaps it mostly comes from your proximity to Bamff, that beloved Scottish swamp of yours. Given how a return home seems to be a recurring motive in your moving-image work, I wanted to ask what was the genesis of CASTOROCENE - why did you decide to go back home to make a film about the apocalypse, why was it the place where the world could begin again?
George Finlay Ramsay: I guess tenderness and apocalypse at first seem like strange bedfellows but somehow they make perfect sense to me. If the world is ending, we'd better cuddle up.
The reason for making the film at Bamff was because I was living there during the pandemic and I got this commission from [a Vilnius-based centre for art, residencies and education] Rupert... All I remember from the call with the curator was ‘what happens after capitalism?'. So, I went for a walk in the most psychedelic bit of the beaver swamps and thought about it, then it struck me, after capitalism: beavers. Beavers teach us (amongst other things) that environment adaptation doesn't need to be at the cost of other species. Our environment adaptation has brought us to an apocalypse but perhaps there is another way.
I was also reading Timothy Morton's Being Ecological around that time and in it they
talk at some point about 'the world without us' obsession in art, which is why in the film the narrator says 'after humans have destroyed the world (again)' as if this is some kind of eternal return of apocalypses. The film then ends with the line 'there was even room for the odd human being'... basically a light touch way of saying I'm not an eco-fascist, and am actually very frightened of such ways of thinking.
Having just re-watched your film I am struck by how much I too am drawn to that moment in history, how compelling it feels, and yes how apocalyptic. For me your dad and his pals’ manifesto is a reminder of the big thing that the Soviet project left out of its equation: spirit. Do you think that you see a split spirit in your parents' generation, and those who lived in the former Soviet Union? And what do you think they can teach us about living through an apocalypse / the death of a major idea?
Also, what made you work with family material, and why do you think you are continuing to do so with this upcoming film about your granny?
MR: I had an email exchange with Miki [Ambrózy, Martyna‘s analogue filmmaking mentor at a Vilnius-based Sponge Lab] the other day about using family material in my new film that I think gave me an answer as to why I was drawn to it in the first place. Miki wrote: ‘We need to look at our own imaginary archives, as places from which we give, not places which we have’.
I feel like my relationship with the concept of ownership is somewhat complicated and, since owning these family histories had always involved carrying a lot of grief about the lost futures they contain, working with them is perhaps a way for me to keep them by letting them go (but also my brain just really likes solving riddles and I know that this family archive – with all of its unknown variables and unreliable narrators - is a riddle that will never be fully solved).
As for the lessons to be learned, your ‘eternal return of apocalypses’ is perhaps the main one. All grand narratives fail, all empires eventually fall. Here, in the 90s, you could see an attempt to fill this void left either by the prevailing ideology or an opposition to it by the surge in religious cults, in nationalism, in mobs even. I’ve always found it quite saddening, yet it is also so fundamentally human.
My question in regard to this while making the film was ‘how do we establish a connection between the earth and the sky beyond the beeping of a government satellite?’. I was trying to find out what binds us together and gives us a sense of purpose and belonging apart from these ephemeral and artificial belief systems. Or perhaps what is left after the world (yet again) ends.
I love that your answer to this post-capitalism thought experiment was beavers. However, it also made me think how, when trying to imagine such ‘post-‘ scenarios, we are more often than not faced with the limitations of our own imagination, as the structures we create always structure us in return. And language of course being one of them.
Your film focuses on language (as a text) a lot, from its chapter structure to borrowing passages from books and then (mis)quoting them - and yet you also have a preoccupation with ancient oral societies and their ways of being. Could you tell me more about your use of language in CASTOROCENE and your relationship with it as a filmmaker more generally? And, speaking more broadly, is there a language for where we, as species, are headed?
GFR: I like your and Miki's meditation on ownership. On my way to Argyll I was listening to the audiobook of David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, which I would recommend if you haven't already read it (I've started it twice now...). What it makes me think is: a state of nature is a state of play. Humans have always experimented with how to live and come up with some pretty amazing ideas. You have to go back in order to go forwards.
About language, I come from a very verbal family and as its youngest member am its least verbal member. But language, and an interest in its limits, are very present in what I make. I was reading A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst around then, an incredible book, very worth reading, and had become interested in Haida culture as a result, hence using the Haida beaver myth that features in the film.
In the Haida myths as they feature in Bringhurst's book there is a recurring phrase 'they say...' as if the myths are distantly remembered pasts rather than something made up, that they are a kind of gossip about our ancestors, some of whom were beavers and ravens... Maybe this is a way to think about the future - humans have faced problems like this before (although perhaps never on this scale or complexity).
When people arrived to the American continent, they initially drove species of megafauna extinct. It was likely through cultural shift, in part through myth telling that allowed them to change their ways. Trickster myths can in one sense be understood this way: they are cautionary tales about the foolishness of greed. Although this is also too simple, as the trickster is sacred; he created the world, and his foolishness is divine.
Clearly you are a verbal person, highly intellectual and inquisitive person, and it seems like there is an academic, or shall we say conceptual strand to your filmmaking too, that you are using it to interrogate ideas. Do you think you would like to continue to explore the video essay form or would you ever be interested in making a fiction film?
MR: You’re probably right about my work having an academic quality to it - since I was trained in thinking and writing about moving-images, creating them seems to simply be an extension of that same process. I would say it equally applies to you as well, as your work has a performative and theatrical feel to it, which makes sense given your background in physical theatre.
The film was actually a result of my frustration with academic language, as I made it parallel to my thesis on the aesthetics of boredom in Lithuania’s 90s video art. Moving-images allowed me to speak about exactly the same things I was writing about, just by using different – less restrictive - means and registers.
When it comes to fiction, I’m somewhat more in the camp of Peter Watkins given all his annoyance with the so-called Monoform. Yet at the same time, for all I care, an idea can turn into an opera, a video game or a dance as long as it allows me to make my thoughts and feelings legible.
Lately though, while curating open-air screening series Deep Rivers Run Silent I got to think about site specificity a lot. How, when you’re screening something under the Liubartas bridge, the flow of the river, the changing of the light, the city’s soundscape infiltrates the work, softly sculpting its meaning. In terms of my own practice, I would like to move into the direction of installations and have a dialogue with the space, while letting it interrupt me here and there. Also, non-linearity and multi-screens might be a better representation of how my mind functions in general.
I really like the special thanks to the beavers of the swamp at the end of your film which reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend recently. We spoke about artistic production and the concept of cenius, as a genius of the community. We were saying how we feel a part of this interconnected, symbiotic arts ecosystem, where we all depend on each other and are constantly exchanging time, labour and ideas - and how no one ever really creates alone, making the myth of a sole genius nonsensical.
Apart from the beavers there are more collaborators mentioned in the credits – from your mom to Alex [Hetherington, film’s DOP] who helped with the images or the sound coming from your band Sissy Fuss. I would love to hear more about this cenius of CASTOROCENE. And, as a bonus question, was it hard to give up control and allow others to be a part of this post-apocalyptic universe you were creating?
GFR: About the cenius, there is a bit in the aforementioned The Dawn of Everything where it talks about this genius myth, and how turns of phrase that Shakespeare is said to have invented were often just common Elizabethan phrases that he would have written down, and now gets to take all the credit for. Although for me this doesn't diminish what he did, because to synthesise things you have overheard in the pub into a masterwork isn't nothing. But yes, the genius myth is dead. About giving up control, I am not sure I did give up much control. I just appropriated bits and bobs like a beaver integrating a plank or a satellite dish into its dam. I am still a total control freak like every artist, and maybe every person that I know.
I watched a film last night that I think you would appreciate called Unrest [dir. Cyril Schäublin, 2022] about Pyotr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist prince and geographer, spending time in the Jura mountains of Switzerland where an anarchist collective was running a watchmaking factory. At one point there is an election and the workers propose putting 'the commune' into the ballot box instead of any names. As well as Swiss watchmakers, Kropotkin's deeply held anarchist views were informed by observing nature, like the way that ants will form a raft of their own bodies in order to cross a river. Anarchist ideas seemed to fail in the early 20th century, but perhaps their time is yet to come.
Interesting about multi-screens and the way your mind works, makes me wonder what is the relationship between curation and creation for you?
MR: Creation and curation are totally intertwined for me (and perhaps even interchangeable). I really need them both for projects to take shape and also to have some sort of balance emotionally. I sometimes get really tired from having to keep a critical distance and then switch to the mode of creation that feels more like falling in love with ideas and ways of expressing them, until that gets tiring too and so I can be a snarky and cool critic again.
But curatorial work definitely had quite a strange effect on my creative practice. I think working for film festivals more often than not feels like sifting through waste, through things that are just content, as the festival circuit is so fast-paced and over-productive. So, I think that this is yet another reason why in my film I went for the family archive, the readymade stories that were always there, my dad’s manifesto, the poor images from old VHS tapes. Creative restrictions, recycling and the use of ‘organic’ and ‘locally grown’ ideas feel like a form of conceptual sustainability in a landscape that reproduces the structures of a globalized consumerist society.
And my last question for you is this: what’s our responsibility as art workers in the face of real-life and real-time apocalypses? Is it barbaric to write poetry after Gaza?
GFR: I think it is even more necessary. Witold Gombrowicz gave a talk called Against Poets in which he wrote: 'Not only their piety irritates us, that complete surrender to Poetry, but also their ostrich politics in relation to reality: for they defend themselves against reality, they don't want to see or acknowledge it, they intentionally work themselves into a stupor which is not strength but weakness.'
