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Not to our surprise, the BBC asked for a script or an idea
for what we wanted to base the film on.
And prior to this we'd seen an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, based on...
It was called ArtAnd Psychosis,
or it was called Beyond Reason,
which was works from the Prinzhorn collection,
which was a collection of what is called "outsider art",
or the art of the insane.
And it's based in Heidelberg.
It's a collection that Hans Prinzhorn collected in the early 1900s,
and in particular, there was one...
...set of images or drawings
by a woman called EH,
which we discovered later was Emma Hauck.
Born in 1878, died in 1928.
Occupation: none. Marital status: married.
Diagnosis: dementia praecox.
The image was so powerful,
of letters written to her husband
that were deeply disturbed...
...writing, which was like...
She would write over the top of the original letter again and again and again,
to a point where it became almost a graphite blur of imagery.
So we said that this was what the film would be about.
I should also say, on top of this,
that Stockhausen, when he did announce
that the music would arrive on August 29th at 12 o'clock,
it did in fact arrive August 29th.
At that time we had been...
Prior to that time, we had been doing some camera tests,
anticipating his music,
which I think we had a general kind of sense of feeling for.
And these tests are, as you can see,
a combination of us trying to trap light,
as a kind of natural phenomena in our studio,
and although this décor that you see in front of you looks fairly abstract,
it was something that I think we initially threw down as a gopher.
We just said that we wanted to observe the light,
and we just needed something for it to kick against.
Yeah, I think we sort of constructed a very ad-hoc, abstract set,
using gauzes and allowing light to penetrate...
Our studio's situated that we have a set of windows
that reveal the light, the sun,
arising from the east,
and it would rise in English summers
at around 4:30 in the morning,
so we'd have the Mitchell...
This was our last 35mm film.
So, as you can see, in a sequence like this,
you can see there how the light is slowly rising, and moving,
and this is pixilated light, time-lapsed.
In other words, we would shoot, not by any mechanical way,
but we would just sort of count every five seconds and shoot one shot at a time.
But at the same time, simultaneously,
we were actually animating...
...the puppet or windows or objects exactly at that same moment,
so we were sort of responding
both to real light rising in...
So, ifwe set our brief to animate every five seconds,
we would have to animate the ball or the object within those five seconds.
One of the ideas that we'd read about in Adolf Wölfli
was that it's a part of his...
...which is one of the other mad artists that we talked about in the Gilgamesh film,
This Unnameable Little Broom...
was that he had a...
The authorities who ran the asylum gave him two pencils a day.
And just to capsulate -
at this very moment in the film,
we didn't have the actress on board.
She wasn't available, and so we substituted one of ourselves,
dressed up in this costume,
which in fact is the costume from Institute Benjamenta, Lisa Benjamenta's costume.
So, the close-ups of the hands are one of us.
I think that, in terms of...
the whole film was built out of...
...taking the notion of light,
and almost making it a kind of...
refracting it through a psychotic... or through...
a prism.
The prism of a window.
Not only the window, but Emma Hauck's brain.
I think it was a kind of approximation of her psychosis.
And also, it's almost like...
To a certain degree, it's like the back of her skull had been removed
and that she was just open to the slightest...
...flickerings or movements of light.
And the feeling of... here, when you see the light varying like this,
it was just something that...
In actual fact, these were clouds moving across the sky,
but because we were shooting every...
For instance, this is a slow tracking shot forwards,
which we were animating on hands and knees.
You know, moving in one millimetre at a time, like that, and then shooting a frame,
so the passage of time might have been 15 seconds.
So, imagine a whole array of...
...in the English landscape...
lmagine the clouds rolling across the sun like that.
It creates this powerful flickering.
But at first we sort of assumed that it was a defect,
and then we immediately realised
that of course it presents absolutely brilliantly a sort of psychosis...
Those massive, violent fluctuations.
And, of course, all of this set against Stockhausen's quite cosmic music,
which has these...
♪ Whining electronic instrumentation
It's a sort of...
...a fresco of music, which is full of...
...crescendi, silences,
of laughter, derisive laughter...
...all setting up this sense of belittlement,
of a psychosis, which is prey to the slightest variations...
...of how the environment responds.
And of course...
...we based... powerfully...
...by focusing on, right here, for instance, the lead of a pencil.
The pure graphology of a woman
whose entire existence of writing letters to her husband,
which we never know ifthey ever even got that far to her husband,
was based on wearing down of pencil points and creating - right here for instance -
this little graveyard of the last remnant of one piece
of the finest bit of a pencil point.
And of course the image here for us was like...
This was a sort of metaphor for the husband,
the far-off husband in a parallel realm.
It didn't matter whether he was some kind of vague monster, or what.
And here we've emphasised the sequence
where it's as though she had to...
clean the glass of the prism of her window, to see...
not that she actually saw daylight,
but that she could feel this sense of...
...of allowing light or daylight or the outside world
to inundate, to enter her realm, and to pour into her.
But of course it ends up being a trope of obsessiveness,
of looking for the tiniest particle of dirt,
or something that might block, obstruct the light.
Here at last our actress came on board.
Again, here you see a long interlude...
it's a kind of light cadenza,
where we had set up a whole series of mirrors on the floor of the studio,
because the light moved across, through a series of windows in our studio,
and we had the mirrors pre-rigged,
to reflect back the light up onto this one,
the only window that we had,
which was a real, life-sized Viennese window,
that we found in a second-hand shop in Vienna.
And this is the one thing we carted back with us,
and we had... with our assistant, Ian Nicholas, we constructed this window.
We built one tiny little wall in our studio,
with just this window,
and just the elements of a room, with this clock.
And originally, a lot of the scenes with the close-ups...
This is the hand of my brother coming in to redirect...
It was actually...
He was trying to modify the actress's, Nicole's, hand, to do something.
And I was watching through the lens,
and I just turned over, because I thought it was such a...
To see this other, third amputated hand enter the frame,
that it actually was, as it were...
could have represented the husband's hand,
or some other...
♪ Scream-like electronics
...abstract notion of these other forces directing her.
A lot of the close-ups of the hands were actually...
...my brother's hand, because Nicole wasn't quite capable of creating the sense of almost...
spasmodic quality of when she's writing, to be really intense,
and because it was hard to bring in somebody
just to do close-ups of your fingers gripping a pencil,
that we thought we could do perfectly well ourselves, for instance here.
And very important for us was the whole idea of trying to keep her as anonymous as possible,
either the back of her neck... and eventually... and, as well, only her hands.
Here again, my brother's face leaned into the frame.
I caught it as a test...
and realised that again it was as though the husband was talking to her...
...in a mysterious transferral.
We were also shooting...
...in Vienna at the time, working on a theatre piece,
and in the evenings we would walk around with our 8mm camera,
and we discovered this scene here, with the curtains blowing in a window.
We shot a whole sequence of this, and then had it blown up to 35mm,
and incorporated into these scenes here.
But they had a... it was a sense of...
...parallel... correspondence of her emotional realm,
of this sort of sucking in and sucking out.
And again, the slightest whim of a breeze
would have such an emotional...
...bearing upon her sensibility.
What's interesting is that afterwards,
Stockhausen told us that he hadn't the slightest image in mind when he made this music...
...which for us is astonishing.
And even though the piece was actually called A Pair,
which we discovered later,
and in a way we'd invisibly been working on the idea
of the wife and the invisible husband being the pair.
(Whimpering and shouting)
This is a little automaton that we built.
Even to this day, we're not quite sure of its purpose,
other than to say that it was...
It's almost as though she's sitting on top of her own psychosis in the...
knowing that she's...
Or maybe it's a childhood memory of her... in her... the liberty of that, before she...
and yet shackled with this neurosis, this schizophrenia,
which is manifested in the shackles.
This was the one time that we revealed the actress's face,
and we were hoping to keep it more in shadow, but we failed.
But here you see that it's a whole landscape of shaved sharpenings of a pencil, of the...
Pencil shavings,
which cover the floor.
♪ Pulse-like electronics
I know the music was at times so intensive,
that we felt we could only listen to seven seconds a day.
And that was our kind of apportionment for that very day.
And there's such... in the music there's such moments of... vast moments of...
...derision and belittlement of her,
and mockery of her...
as though these voices were mocking her efforts.
And yet there's this sense of chaos inside her, but in order to control that chaos,
this attempt all the time of trying to score...
these moments of writing to her husband.
Again, I think that's one of our hands doing this, whilst it's Nicole slapping her neck.
And you have a sense of a fractured narrative here -
there's no way her hands could be around her neck and the pencil.
Almost as though she's observing herself.
And this is actually the real writing of Emma Hauck, from the exhibition.
This is the way she wrote to her husband.
And of course our idea... we developed it...
...in the clock here.
It's a clock that we have in our studio,
but we realised that... where you can see the pendulum swing,
we realised that we never knew whether the letters reached her husband.
It's also a postbox.
And then it became a vast postbox... of which of course they never reached her husband,
and they just piled up.
And time was going in reverse, unbeknownst to her.
And always it was the resetting of time.
And again we return to this abstract cosmic landscape, where time rolls on.
This landscape here was only about a metre wide on a little tabletop.
And here we have the idea
of just one of the caretakers in the museum - in the asylum!
You know, we can return to the idea of the two pencils -
that here's her daily allotment, and that he will come.
It's also her ration to a kind of sanity within insanity,
and she awaits it with great expectation.
And Stockhausen, when we first presented this film to him...
We had to travel to Cologne to present the film to him,
and at the end of the screening,
a BBC documentary crew had arrived with us,
because they wanted to do an interview.
And at the end of the screening there was this commotion with Stockhausen.
Timothy and I were standing in the background,
and what had happened
was that Stockhausen was crying.
And what he felt was that the woman,
the back of her neck, in this anonymity, was his mother,
because the Nazis had taken her away and exterminated her,
and that he presumed that we had known about this,
and that this film was us scoring an element of that.
And of course we didn't know that bit.
Therefore, he thought that we were telepathic, and we had to tell him we weren't.
It made a deep impression on him,
and what we liked in a way was that he said that what we had done was that...
he had written the images and that we had created the music.
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