Miguel Gomes on three-part epic Arabian Nights
Fantasy and reality blend in Miguel Gomes's epic three-part remix of Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights folktales. We gather round the campfire with the Portuguese filmmaker.
“It’s a miracle! A Catholic miracle! The Holy Trinity!” exclaims Miguel Gomes when The Skinny ask him whether he thinks of his latest work – the triptych of absurdist, docu-fantastical national portraits that comprise Arabian Nights – as three films or one six-hour epic. “We thought it would be interesting to have the film divided like the book – it’s so huge that normally it’s divided into volumes,” he says, “but it would be interesting if each one of them had their own soul. So, for me, it is the three. And I guess that each film is having a dialogue with the others, and this dialogue is really the film.”
His starting point was Scheherazade, but this is no straight-laced adaptation. Instead, those classic folktales provide inspiration for a fanciful state-of-the-nation appraisal. “I had this idea that to make a portrait of my country, Portugal, it was not possible to only show things as they are in reality,” explains Gomes. “They should be expanded and the way to do it was with fiction. And I also thought that things were going very wild in Portuguese society – not for good reasons, unfortunately – but they were getting wild and we started to have stories – very strange, very surreal – and I thought this was something that could work with the spirit of fiction that appears in Arabian Nights.”
Gomes first came across the book as an impressionable 12-year-old and, although he never finished reading it (“which is a little bit strange for someone that makes a film with the same title!”), he was enamored with its labyrinthine structure. “I found out that it was possible to start a story and then, in the middle of that story, find that there were other stories coming up and interrupting it. We could stop the previous story to hear this new story and, in this new story, there would also be another story. So I was completely amazed by the possibilities of storytelling – very Baroque of course – that appeared in that book. For me it was like discovering the Holy Grail.”
This rambling, nebulous narrative approach then became all the more intrinsic during the filming. “There was something very annoying during the making of the film because our government, and also people from European institutions that were here, kept saying one sentence all the time: ‘We have to do it this way, because there is not another way.’” He's referring, of course, to the European Union's austere approach to the financial meltdown bubbling across much of Europe. “And hell, I’m not a politician – gladly! – I’m only a filmmaker. But as a filmmaker I know it's possible to make cinema in very different ways. I know also it’s possible to tell stories in different ways. So why the hell in economics and politics is there only one way? Sounds to me like bullshit.”
“Each film is having a dialogue with the others, and this dialogue is the film” – Miguel Gomes
As a result Gomes set out to make a film that embraced different modalities of storytelling jostling up against one another: “Different kinds of cinema and ways of looking at reality. For instance, at the beginning, there’s this kind of paranoid, biblical, ecological plague; this almost slapstick comedy about a coward film director; and a social documentary – direct kind of cinema – about the shipyard workers. They mix together and they start to create this kind of chaos.”
For Gomes, this is the medium's essence: “Cinema, for me, is a very organic process, y’know? It’s not so rational. Of course, you cannot just be dumb about it – you have to think a bit – but most of the time it’s really instinct. I think what is often neglected by people who talk about cinema is pleasure, which is something that I also got from Arabian Nights the book; it’s a book about pleasure.”
Arabian Nights screens in Glasgow Film Festival: Vol 1: 22/23 Feb, GFT, 6.15pm/12.50pm | Vol 2: 24/25 Feb, GFT, 5.45pm/1pm | Vol 3: 25/26 Feb, GFT, 5.50pm/1.15pm
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