Eloy Enciso is a Galician filmmaker whose films have explored themes of place, history, memory, and performance. His film Arraianos (2012) is a close look at a village in Galicia that has been compared to immersive ethnographic works like those made for the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, while featuring villagers reading existentialist dialogue in a way that evokes the films of Straub-Huillet. The blending of fiction and non-fiction with an understanding of myth and performance has also drawn comparisons to Pedro Costa. His subsequent film, Endless Night (2019), once again features non-actors delivering pre-existing material, here excerpted plays, memoirs, and letters written by political prisoners during period of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War..
The Seventh Art: Could you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea [for the film]? I know you mentioned in the Q&A that it wasn’t just like one day it happened, but when’s the first time that you started thinking about a concept of that period of time?
Eloy Enciso: The inspiration started with the letters of the prisoners. I like [them] because they were kind of trashy, but very poetic and simple at the same time. That was the first moment that I thought like, oh wow, we need something done with these letters.
That was the first thing and then as I explained the other day, when I was exploring this period of time — not thinking of making a film, but just for myself, as I was reading it the first time — I was really shocked that I didn’t know [about it]. I felt a little bit… maybe not guilty, but really like a character in the film, I started to feel a little bit of anger, you know, because why haven’t I been told this? This is very important to understand my present, so why [were] me and my generation… they told us not to look into this.
Yeah, I was going to say, what happens in school, how is this dealt with from an institutional standpoint?
What happens in school is… many times you don’t even get there, because the end of the semester, the end of the year comes [first]. I remember when I was a kid, basically finishing with the loss of Cuba, you know, the last colonies. The loss of Cuba and Philippines and I remember at the end of the year, it’s great, you end up not to have to study the last part of the book, so of course you don’t know, you don’t care. And also when it was approached, it’s also in a kind of relativistic way like, “Well, it came out of civil war, you know. We know civil wars were cruel and of course the Franco part had support from Nazis, from Germany and Italy, but yeah, hard times, lack of freedom, but you know, it was not that bad.” You know, it’s kind of a relativisation of this. “So yeah, [Franco] died and then we happily, we started a democracy.” Yeah, so when I started to read these letters, these books about this, especially the memoirs, I started to feel really like the cutter in the film. I start to feel a little bit of anger, you know, it’s important, it’s so unfair, an injustice, that of course that happened, but more than that, it’s maybe disappearing, this memory of these things that happened.
Some of the feelings of us being lost now — you describe the economic issues in Spain — these are the things that maybe we could avoid if we better acknowledge the past, that we make mistakes because we hide it?
I think so, like this famous sentence: If you don’t know your history, you probably will be condemned to repeat it. And that’s why also the transition was fundamental. One of the key concepts of the transition was this one: if we want to move on, it’s better if we don’t look into the past. And I think it’s the other way around.
Is there a reason that the film moves from the literary sources that were more public to ones that were more private, ones that were more hidden or suppressed? Like it’s getting closer to explicit language.
Well, I never thought about it in this way. It’s true that the film, in terms of narrative, the first chapter is more about describing how the society works, so that’s why it’s more choral with many different characters. They are not connected between them, but they are connected because they are living in the same place and the same society in the same system.
Outside, like, in the public.
Yeah, it’s like the public place, as we are now in this little square, how they share this, where it’s considered very public space. And then the second part, it’s true that it starts to be more intimate. It has to do with this idea that half of the population, although they had not agreed with this form of this system, they couldn’t talk publicly. These stories were most of the time hidden and you can see even in my family, or in many, many families in Spain, even inside the family, inside the houses, they didn’t even talk about that.
I [found out] recently, things about my grandfather, that actually my mother didn’t know even being his daughter. So that’s why it goes [to] the last part, it’s about the letters, which are actually more intimate private communication between the below ones [the lower class]. And I like in these letters, this combination of… they try to communicate like love and esperanza. Esperanza is like hope, for the below ones, to the ones that are outside of the prison or the concentration camp, but at the same time, they are conscious that the machinery is reading these people. So at the same time, it’s this combination of, “Oh, I’m fine, I hope they all are home, don’t forget the children getting to school,” and all this, but at the same time, “they are, ah, but “Please go and talk to father to write a letter of recommendation.” So this combination of the more intimate and private, and how to face the system that’s trying to put all this weight on these people, that they consider don’t deserve to exist. This dialectical fighting between the individual and the system, which is not like a bad guy with a moustache, it’s a system that is everywhere and it’s kind of invisible. I think it’s very contemporary also, like how an individual can face a system; it’s very easy to say that the system is this guy in the White House, but it’s much more complicated than that.
Yeah, even when [the film is] in its third part, which is in nature, you still feel a sense of bureaucracy, because even if you don’t physically see it, it’s still…
Yeah, it’s still through the letters.
Did those letters have like a coded language, were there any ones where they developed a system where they could allude to things without the sensors or whatever seeing or picking up on it?
Sometimes I know they did, but sometimes they were very naive and the system was not really well structured, so of course they were leaking. Sometimes you’re surprised how many letters [got] out without the censorship, especially at the beginning. After it became more difficult. [So] they did, but that was very complicated to explain in a film.
The film has to code things, too, which I find interesting, because you have to find visual ways to express ideas that aren’t just obvious. Like in that section, if you didn’t know what the letters were about, visually you may not understand, but you have to combine them as a viewer and get the meaning out of the images and the letters, right? So it’s a kind of visual code that as an artist you have to come up with to express this, because it’s not a period piece.
Yeah, because my goal was not to make a historical film, but a film that’s trying to say that’s how it happened, that’s how it was living in the 1940s. Because I don’t know, I was not there, so the idea is more like let’s see what the echoes are of… not what happened, but how it happened, you know? Because how things happen usually doesn’t change that much.
We can be there or in this year or another place or we can change the name of the guy, but how it happened is usually the same. Like machismo for instance, no? Machismo is not like a gross guy, you know, with a gross cigarette. It’s something that is… how is it integrating [into] your own culture and your society? My idea was not to tell you so much what happened, like a naturalistic way of representing the story, this period, but how it happened [in order] to maybe see the echoes — that today in a different way things are still happening this way.
In the third section, the way you use landscape — your last film had a lot of landscape, but it doesn’t feel the same [here]. How do you take kind of the same space, but reset it or re-present it to create a new meaning for this different project, obviously.
Yeah, I think it’s very different because somehow in the film before, in Arraianos (2012), landscape was the present, [but] not totally, because it’s also a film that plays a bit with historical time. It’s not clear where things are happening and when these characters are living. Is it actually the present, is it the past, you know? In this film, I think I presented it more clearly, that this landscape somehow has no time, or it’s all times at the same time. So the landscape is past, it’s present and maybe future, also. Yeah, this idea of landscape doesn’t have a historical time, but it summarises all the historical times.
I think there’s something about the way you shoot it, also with the boat ride, [that] gives it a kind of epic or mythic quality. It’s heightened, it’s not naturalism, it’s like a myth that will remain true throughout time. How did you achieve that dark look?
When I was starting to make this project, I realised I wanted to make a really, really dark film, even playing with the boundaries of what you can see or can’t see. And I realised that there were these new cameras coming out to the market that they can actually shoot with very, very little light. They are able to shoot in with the moonlight and I thought, wow, that’s a nice thing to explore. Because every project I’d like to explore also in terms of aesthetics. We did some tests and we thought at the beginning that it was going to be a very dirty and imprecise image, the quality of the image. It’s really interesting, how you can shoot things that if we had to light [it], it would be either super, super expensive or either impossible. Like the scene you were mentioning in the river. How could you imagine to light a whole valley with a river. I realised that it was possible, so we decided to work, because the other option was to do day for night, as you know cinema did for many years. With Mauro [Herce], the director of photography, we always like to explore new situations and get a little bit out of our comfort zone. We didn’t know exactly how it was going to work out, but somehow we… It’s not totally moonlight, but it’s basically done with the moonlight.
In that section, were you experimenting more in general? You said that the blocking was very intuitive, that you were like, “Move over here now,” and just feeling it out on the day…
Yeah, we usually do a lot of scouting, we go more than once to the locations. When we start shooting, usually, we know at least where to start; we have been doing, at least with a still camera, some tests. The guy could start here and they go here and there, but I like, usually, not only with this part, with different parts of the film, even with the dialogues, I like to have a point to start, so it’s very practical. When you get to the shooting location, everyone knows what to know, what to do. But then, at some moments, I also like to feel how things are going, and there are scenes like that, at the forest was like that; we started and then we started to move and to shoot… the place is not that big, it’s maybe, I don’t know, the size of this park, even smaller, but it’s very [labyrinthine], so I like it very much because I had this idea of the labyrinth. The people who are writing the letters, who we represent, not in a very obvious way, but in a subtle way, that these guys are trying to escape to this. They’re trying to escape from this bureaucratic and repressive labyrinth, but they don’t know how to, they are trying with the letters. You go and ask the priest to bring a letter of good behaviour, because maybe that’s the way I can find the way out. So this place, for me, not in a very obvious way, so I don’t know if you notice, but actually, some of the places are the same places [already used]. If you really look carefully, you realise that at some moment, he’s around the same place, but again, we didn’t want to in the editing make it very obvious. Somehow, the feeling of the guy, that he’s walking around in the same places, and it’s like Kafka, no? I don’t like to have a relation with cinema [that’s] very intellectual — of course, everything is intellectual somehow, but not that the first and the main way of relating to images and sounds and the words are through the intellectual. It should be a combination of sensations, like intuition.
In the first two parts, especially, when the actors are delivering these texts, how did you work to get the sound of how they would orate, how they would say the written text? It’s in Galician?
Yeah, it’s Galician language, and it’s pretty simple, actually, it’s just rehearsed and rehearsed again: let’s practise, let’s read the text first. First is just reading, reading, there’s a work, big work of memorising. I work with them so they are not worried about knowing the text when we are already shooting. We change little things, sometimes they even propose [changes], I sometimes realise that at some parts of the text [where] they can get stuck. So we try to find a way of getting over this. And then, little by little, they start to interiorise, it’s not like they have to just read or say a line, they have to embody it somehow, no? Like, maybe like dancers do. When they are rehearsing for a show, for a dance choreography, they don’t have to just know the movements, they have to embody somehow.
And the idea is this, no? But again, not to intellectualise or not to dramatise, this idea is somehow a temptation for actors, or even non-actors, because they are used to seeing films and most of the cinema is very dramatised, it’s very melodramatic. I’m always really trying to get beyond this area. During the shooting, we usually make many takes, because it’s about rhythm, it’s about sometimes very technical things, like the relation of their position to the camera, or where or what time they look. For instance, in the monologue, that was very staged when she had to look to Misha [Bies Golas], the main character [Anxo]. It’s not by chance, it’s not random, it’s staged, so you will look at this moment and [it will] be intense, but not dramatic in the bad sense of the [word].
Do you discover any of this in the edit? It sounds like you have a very specific plan and you’re doing a lot of takes to get to that point, but is there anything that you find when you’re editing that is surprising?
Yeah, sure, editing is a very important process. The editing of a thing is very radical, it’s like a very, very severe trial, you know, for anything in the film: for photography, for sound, for, of course, for the acting. I’m trying to think of something specific… I don’t know if it’s what you were thinking about, but for instance, the last conversation in the second part, which is about the fear and the guys who sit in the stairs, and he’s saying how they won the war, because of the fear. It was supposed to be before the monologue of Amadora, of Thelsa, by the fireplace, but somehow we realised during the editing that it was more intense, once you have passed through this monologue and this story, that is happening in the prison. Your skin will be more sensitive to receive this idea of fear, because you already have somehow experienced a little bit of fear when Thelsa is recalling the day that she thought she was going to die. Also in the third part, this character becomes like a robot, I mean like more like a zombie somehow, she’s like he himself says, we are like automats in this place. We tried to make him in the second part of the third part like this, but we realised that you have to see him more in a naturalistic somehow, like eating the berries or sleeping — just walking around like normal, to then to see or to feel more like he’s losing his personality, he’s losing his free will, and he’s like an automat, you know, like walking around in the forest. Do you have the feeling that he is escaping from something? That somehow you start to feel, little by little, that he’s not escaping any more — he’s just wandering around.
You just reminded me that I was thinking, obviously, about Straub-Huillet, because you were quoting them about the landscape, but just in general how they work with their editing, how the actors embody the texts that they’re engaging with. I am reminded that they adapted Kafka as well [in Class Relations (1984)].
Ah, yeah, they filmed Amerika [Kafka’s first, unfinished novel]. I must say it was not this film in particular, it was not that much in my mind. I realised later, I think it was Mauro or Beli [Martínez], the producer, who told me, “Ah, yeah, it’s also Kafka, you know, it’s also Amerika.” Because the references I had, the closer references, it was more like [Straub-Huillet’s] Sicilia! (1998) somehow, but even more like From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979), which is more a film that deals with the memory of oppression.
The sound design is very interesting in the film. I was wondering how you guys approached that.
Yeah, it was a lot of work, especially in the third part. I work with Juan Carlos Blancas, who’s worked in cinema, but he’s more like a sound artist. I discovered him through a friend’s work and I really like his very sensorial and physical approach to sound. I like very much how the idea of representing a forest is not only about representing a faithful, naturalistic forest, but the idea of a forest. The concept of a forest can be represented in a much more sensorial and abstract way. And the idea of the silence of a war, which is Franco, especially his postguerra years, that everything was frozen. That’s where the title of the film comes from, from [Celso E. Ferreiro’s] “Longa Noite de Pedro,” which was this book of poems that were written in this time. This is like an allegory of the Franco era, as everything was frozen in stone.
We had this process to understand how to represent this idea of stillness and this idea of everything frozen without just being like an empty, empty soundtrack. We realised that sometimes contrast is the best way you can… for darkness it’s sometimes better to have a point of light in the frame. And then because of the contrast, you realise how dark the place is, for instance. And also with the sound, we realised that [this was needed] to build this idea of a place, which somehow is getting more and more dead or frozen or silent. This idea of little elements that you can hear on the last part of the film, like the crack of a tree in the distance or a small animal that you don’t really know what kind of animal it is, that is somehow like a cuckoo in the distance. The challenge was to build, [to] going beyond with this idea of stillness and silence.
It’s also the theme of memory, something that it seems like it comes up a lot in your work. Is it something that is especially interesting to you? Not just with Franco, but just in general how we remember how memories are expressed, when they’re allowed to be expressed. How we are able to remember, how we are not able to remember, how we express memory or represent it.
Yeah, I was thinking how not to do it, how not to do that. I think that sends us back to the beginning of the conversation. How can we relate to our own history? How can we deal with it? That’s probably the main change between Arraianos and Longa noite, that I decided to take the challenge and the risk to deal with not my own history, personal history, but the place where I come from. I was not in the mood to make like, I don’t know, a romantic drama or whatever in the present. Because I thought that actually the present v the roots of the present — were back in time.
I think the last section shows how we think of memory or history as maybe a simple thing or an easy thing. I think the more you try to think about memory, the harder it is to express it or to engage with it, because there are no easy answers. And I think that that’s what I got from the end of this film. Like the bureaucracy, the harder you try to navigate it, the more lost you can become.
It is difficult because, because it’s easier to say, okay, they are the bad and we are the good because we know who we are. We have better political ideas or consciousness of what human nature is or whatever. And I think it’s actually, you’re right, it’s more difficult to cope with the history and with everyone who was involved. I think I’m more or at least this film is more [like] the idea of what Marguerite Duras says about what to do with the memory of the Holocaust and the Nazi period. She said that we have to make this all our own also. We should cope with it. We shouldn’t say, “Oh, they were the others. And we know we have nothing to do with this. And it’s okay. Just try to not [let it] happen again.” And I don’t think it’s that easy. I think Fascism, destruction, aggression, and all these bad behaviours of human nature is also in us. We have to be awake and to think that we are also part of it, especially today with capitalism…
There was a scene that I really regret [that’s] not in the film, because after the conversation of the old guy and the main character about the fear, about the past of this guy through the prison, and this memory that stays in your own body. So there was this conversation about how he was able to integrate into society and the guy was explaining that it was through a corrupted society, he was working as a political prisoner in a mine, and everyone was creating a black market with the mineral they were extracting. Everyone: the prisoners, the guards, everyone. And at some point he says, “We knew there was an owner of the mine, and we knew that the owner of the mine was behind every one of us, but no one ever saw the owner of the mine.” It was a very nice way of saying that we were all part of it. So, okay, my only way to integrate into society was to accept that I had to be part of this. This idea of memory and history, we are part of it, and we cannot be only part of the nice part, you know, of the heroes, because there’s been so many films also in Spain and everywhere else portraying this area, or this period as, “Okay, they were the evil, they were the bad ones, and we were the good ones, but yeah, we lost. Oh, okay, we are sorry, and maybe next time.”
It’s like the worker in the first part of the film, who’s working on the restoration of the police headquarters — regardless of who he voted for, he still has to exist. Maybe he doesn’t vote for the fascists, but if they get in, then what do you do? Do you stop working?
Yeah, it’s this sentence that we hear today in different ways: if it wasn’t me doing it, it would be another one. There’s a lot in the line waiting for it. So the police station would happen anyway. Yeah, it’s also criticising this relativism and the lack of individual compromise, you know. In the position with the poor woman, you are selfish. You’re a coward and you’re selfish doing this
When we were talking about the structure of the film, did you already always have the idea that it would be those three parts in that order or did you ever consider maybe the first and the second one to be switched?
Someone suggested once that the film should be the other way around. I tried, but it didn’t work. At the very beginning of the writing, compiling all these texts and sources, I did this division in three parts. There had to be something as a first step to be able to organise all the material because I had so many. Just a way to myself organise the chaos I had in my mind and on the table. So I decided to start to group it not much about what they say but about the type of text or the dialogues. And it happened that it ended up in the three parts, the first one more like talkative and more dialogue between individuals that know each other, but they are more like in the public context, as you say. The second part is based on memoirs, it’s more like about testimony and the third part about the letters.
But little by little as I was working, going ahead with the film, I started to realise that actually this part of the story in Galicia and in Spain, the memory of this and the traces of this period are like… it’s really fragmented. So I decided to keep it in the film like that, as a way to be honest with the spectator. I’m not trying to tell you that this is like this, like a very closed story, it’s a very close way of seeing this period, but it’s fragmented. And also because when you deal with history, it’s told usually as an instruction and I think it’s a wrong way of dressing history because at the end, history, everything that happened, it was a combination of individual stories and individual individuals. So it was a way to say, at least be suspicious, every time someone tells you something happened like this.
Maybe it’s more like a postmodern or Brechtian way of approaching history in the sense that it’s always a process, it’s always something that we have to rewrite and re-think and come back to see with a new perspective. And it has to always be with multiple perspectives. Those are all the reasons why I decided to keep these three chapters. It’s not a fairy tale. Because I think in cinema so many times, everything, especially history, is dressed as a fairy tale: the good vs. the bad. The problem is you get very close to moralism or paternalism. And I was thinking that my goal was to actually make it simple, make the spectator want to learn more, to address history, feeling that this is not enough. There are more stories still to know and to learn and to be told.
Is that something that you thought a lot about at the end? Because that’s so important to how you end a piece of art like this, to make it incomplete or something, give that feeling where the viewer feels there’s more I need to consider and it’s not just complete and the end is done.
Yeah, that’s one reason and the other one is that I think there’s something conservative and sometimes even reactionary in social cinema that is like… I say sometimes that I think it’s like before people used to go to mass on Sunday and you go and you feel sorry and you feel guilty for maybe one hour and a half and then it stays there. All the emotions and all the consciousness can stay there and then you go back home and you behave the same, you keep your own life as it was. Of course I like emotion, to have emotions when I’m inside the cinema and when you are watching a film, but to have this emotional and also political conclusions, I think it avoids the possibility of this happening when people leave the cinema. And so that’s why somehow I have like a conclusion to the film, it’s a way to work in that other direction: okay, we cannot restart it here, we have to just think, but outside of the cinema, we’re not going to resolve anything here. Maybe the last letter of the film is this idea of… if you see it in the perspective of how cinema usually works, it’s very pessimistic. But somehow it’s like a call to the spectator to say, okay, this could be an end, but maybe if we start to think different and change some of our ways of thinking and behaviours, maybe it could be different. I think this is better than some of the thinking and emotions. And this happens inside the cinema, but hopefully after. ❏
Our interview with Eloy Enciso was conducted in September of 2019 and is part of our TIFF 2019 coverage, along with interviews with Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, Thomas Heise, and Ben Rivers.
