South African director Simon Wood’s latest work, The Silent Form, had its world premiere at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival 2016. The film was also the only South African documentary to be selected to compete at the festival.
This is the second year running that Wood’s film was selected for Hot Docs following his 2015 film Orbis, which still features on the international film festival circuit.
The Silent Form – by Cape Town based SaltPeter Productions – is an artistic collaboration between Wood and one of South Africa’s most renowned artists – sculptor Dylan Lewis. “After decades of sculpting alone in his studio, I was honoured to be the first filmmaker to be allowed to document Lewis working,” says Wood.
Lewis is an internationally acclaimed sculptor of the human and animal form. Over the past 15 years the sculptor has exhibited extensively, both in South Africa and abroad. “Lewis sculpts deconstructed figures that navigate the continuum between male and female, human and animal, sculpture and landscape. Recently he began to create his largest work to date, I was keen to document the process,” comments Wood regarding the origins of the 21-minute documentary.
After months of filming Lewis in studio, Wood noticed his reluctance to offer an explanation for the work he was creating. The filmmaker and the sculptor would often film for hours on end without exchanging a single word, causing Wood to ponder on the limitation of words to describe art.
“I felt he was basically forcing me to interpret his work,” he explains. In a quest to find this meaning and further explore the notion of “the limitation of words to describe art,” Wood embarked on a two-week road trip up the west coast of Africa, filming the abandoned towns and dilapidated shipwrecks of the Namibian Coast: “This sent me to deserted diamond mining towns, the vast Namibian desert and South Africa’s treacherous western shoreline littered with colonial shipwrecks. The film kind of feels like a tussle between Dylan the sculptor and myself, the filmmaker, with our competing visual grammars.”
Drifting between Lewis’s physical practice and the organic and abstract material which he draws from, The Silent Form through its unusual yet beautiful and emotive cinematography and soundscape, “grapples with the essence of the artist and his work.”
“The film forges the artist and the filmmaker together, occupying a space between art and documentary, it plays into the world of interpretations and reinterpretation,” comments Wood. “We witness myself the filmmaker visualising the sculptors work and in turn giving birth to a new creation: the film as a new form. Here begins the endless world of interpretation and creation so that is probably why the film ends where it begins.”
Wood, who directed and shot the documentary, captured the visuals using a Canon C100 and an external recorder, as well as Canon Cinema Lenses, which he says were all chosen due to his love for the Canon film look and colour science.
Commenting on the film’s look and feel, Wood says: “The Silent Form documents an artist fiercely immersed in the process of creation and interprets his work in a visceral unexpected way. I wanted there to be a clear divide between the sculptor’s world and mine, creating two independent spaces within the film. I present a deeply visceral experience but it is important to remember that this is only an interpretation and has little to do with the truth.”
Staying close to the film’s tagline: ‘Art is a language without words’, The Silent Form presents – in an unexpected artistic method – the social pressure that is placed on an artist to justify their work and questions the possibility of interpretation.
“It forced me to think carefully about how people interpret my own work and overall to realise that most artistic ventures are mirrors which the viewer must observe. I think interpretation says far more about the viewer than the artist… Dylan Lewis once told me that art is a mirror and has much more to do with the person consuming the art than the person making it.”
