Digital Revelations in South Central LA

Tony Keily and Lir Mac Cárthaigh talk to Sophie Fiennes, an emerging documentarist with a very personal working method. Her Hoover Street Revival applies this method to an exceptional case of ghetto evangelism. [Extract]

TK We were very interested in the organisation of the material in both of your films.

SF It's an instinctive thing about how you reveal things. About how you handle anticipation and the need for information. You're creating a route for the audience and yourself. It's less about story than about using images to shift the quality of feelings. I work both intuitively and rigorously. I ask myself how I can choreograph emotions.

TK There seems to be a conservative worry on the part of many documentary filmmakers to establish things too clearly. Are the audience getting it? Are they understanding it? In HSR we get a shot of the Bishop cleaning his glasses before we know it's the bishop. It takes us another ten minutes to work out who this man that we've seen is.

SF I'm using the language of fiction for real material. If I set everything up too clearly at the beginning, there's no interest: this is L.A., this is The Ghetto and so on. I want everything to be revealed gradually to the viewer.

TK There's a scene when you have a young tough-looking guy in his apartment. We're with him for a while before he gets up and goes into the bathroom and there's his little daughter in the bath. That fact completely changes the view we've just formed of him...

SF Yes. You say, this is a fucked-up house and they're playing their music and smoking spliffs. Suddenly there's a baby in the bath and the audience perception has to shift.

LM Also we don't know who the hell he is or why we're watching him!

SF He's relevant to what the Bishop says, to his message. But not in an obvious way.

TK At another point in HSR we see a man reclining on a bed listening to a tape of the Bishop. Then later we're brought into a prison and we get the same shot of that character on the bed. but only then do we realize he's a prisoner.

SF Same as the Bishop with his glasses. I love that when I'm watching a film. That "Oh I see!" moment. In the Dardenne brothers' films there's sometimes something going on that's so subtle you have to ask yourself whether it's there or not. Then it's confirmed and you have this wonderful feeling of complicit dialogue between the viewer and film.

TK In BIS you have a ping-pong game dropped into the film that isn't strictly 'relevant' to anything. If you applied a strict economy of exclusion of 'irelevenat' material, that couldn't be there.

SF That kind of thinking comes from a word-based, essay-writing view of the world. Justification. Images carry different types of emphasis, and that's what you work with.

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 90