04/04/2023 - The Italian-Swedish director discusses remodelling documentary conventions, imagining the future through the present and envisaging a world without work

(© Jens Lasthein)

Erik Gandini is an Italian-Swedish film director, writer and producer known for his award-winning documentaries, such as Surplus - Terrorized into Being Consumers and Videocracy [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. He also produced The Raft [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marcus Lindeen
film profile] by Marcus Lindeen. Gandini’s latest feature-length doc, After Work [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erik Gandini
film profile], which recently screened at CPH:DOX, explores mankind’s relationship with work and attempts to imagine how people could adapt to an automated world. Cineuropa sat down with the director to talk about remodelling documentary conventions, imagining the future through the present and envisaging a world without work.

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Cineuropa: While watching After Work, the first idea that springs to mind is the theorem from your previous film The Swedish Love Story – that a person can freely choose the life they want to live. Is After Work a sort of sequel to the hypothesis presented there?
Erik Gandini: Definitely; I'm happy that you saw the connection. There was a sort of frustration in me with The Swedish Love Story, especially with the Swedish audience, who sometimes didn't recognise the world or the dimension I showed as true. The argument was that they didn’t recognise the present. Well, my whole mindset when I was making The Swedish Love Story was more of a “what if” attitude, in the sense of me trying to capture not necessarily “how things are now”, but rather how they “could be”.

When it comes to documentaries, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding. People think it is journalism or that documentary should be very factual. I have always claimed that I want to make sense of the present and show reality as it feels, not as it is. But now, I was taking it a step further, trying to make sense not only of the present, but also of the near future. How things could be – which implies embracing the hypothesis. And After Work is exactly that: it’s a hypothesis. And in documentary filmmaking, there is still a sort of resistance to accepting that you could follow a hypothesis. After Work is even more of that because it's really dealing with a situation that hasn't happened yet. So, the challenge was how to capture the future through the present.

Those who want to imagine a future are usually futurists. Why did you want to use the present to imagine the future?
I am a documentary filmmaker, and I really like to work with the present. I cannot see myself working in any other way. But I like to capture things that are unpredictable. You go to a place you don't know very well, and see what people are going to say or do. In the first act of After Work, we are in two countries, the USA and South Korea, which immerses us in the dysfunctional sides of the present.

In the second part, we move forward to Kuwait and Italy, where we explore how things could be if we were really to become work-free and suddenly have a lot of extra time. Cinematically, it’s more interesting for me to work with more dysfunctional places. Kuwait is interesting because it is really a society based on basic income, yet it’s basic income with a twist: people get money for pretending to work, for putting on an act.

Why did you keep the talking-heads convention?
I don't like talking heads either, and in After Work, they are reduced to a fraction of the film. But I like to interview people. And with the DoP, Fredrik Wenzel, who’s a fantastic cinematographer, we at least tried to make them look as good as possible. We also use the Errol Morris technique, the Interrotron. It used to be a huge, expensive tool, and now it’s just a box that you can put in front of the camera.

What is your relationship with documentary conventions?
I know that the most successful documentaries are portraits – character-driven stories. I made the decision many years ago, even though I know that it's an idea that’s perhaps doomed to fail, to make idea-driven documentaries. Characters are carriers of ideas, small puzzles in a larger picture. But I don't want to get too close to them. I don't want to build on this intimacy, which has become very well known through the proliferation of reality TV and has been turned into a business model.

There was an obsession with intimacy in documentaries in Sweden. When I went to film school, it was like: “You should get very close to the protagonist; you should be able to smell the character.” So, in my own trajectory, I moved away from these conventions as soon as they became a business model at commercial television stations. This is connected to cinematography, too. I love characters, and I really like to work with them. But I also like to think that they don’t need to have their intimacy invaded just to help me with my exploration.

After Work is part of a larger project, The Future Through the Present. What is it about?
It's my artistic research project about documentary film and time. Until now, documentary has been confined to the present or the past. The documentary is restricted to these chronological dimensions, but there is the chronological dimension of the future that has so far been entirely monopolised by science fiction. Why can’t documentaries deal with the future, too? The documentary filmmaker is not solely an observer who captures the present. We can empower ourselves as artists and even speculate about how things could be, but there are no aesthetics for that.