Michal Kosakowski's Just Like The Movies

Michal Kosakowski was born in Szczecin, Poland in 1975 and has been living in Vienna, Austria since he was ten years old.  His work comprises over 100 films that have been shown in international film festivals and exhibitions all over the world.

In his 21-minute film Just Like The Movies he uses a score composed by Paolo Marzocchi and over 400 clips from 52 Hollywood films to reconstruct the events of September 11th, 2001 in New York City.



Have you always been doing films like this? Films with a political tone?

I started in Fabrica with political topics, but when I was really young I started with horror films, splatter movies, you know. This sort of visual violence.  Hurting people, and blood everywhere... but then in 1996, one year before I came to Fabrica, with another project called FortyNine.  And it's a video installation, which is going to be done now at the end of the year, so 10 years later.  And it's called FortyNine because it's 49 short films I did. About killing.

49 different ways how to kill people, all different lengths. The shortest one is 20 seconds the longest one is like eight minutes.  And all these films are going to be shown on 49 screens at the same time, seven by seven, like a video wall.  And this wall is surrounded by mirrors, on the floor on the ceiling, on the left, on the right side, and behind you.  So basically when you enter this room you are standing in front of a gigantic wall of TVs going on and on, with the reflections.  And this is going to be done now in Munich and this is again... my work contains so much violence, in different ways...

Since I came to Fabrica I started to do more of this invisible violence, more coming out through character, through emotions.  I did a film in Fabrica during my second year called Holy War and it's about Christmas in Austria.  It's a forty-two minute film, like Just Like The Movies, music and images. And you see the whole process of Christmas starting in December and ending with New Year's Eve, like how the war started.  So the whole December is like the preparation for war.  People go shopping like crazy, Christmas everywhere... just to show you the consumption... incredible consumption, buying things, but it all looks like people are preparing, people know that a war is going to come and so they go shopping and buy what is possible.  You see fabrics, wrappings of chocolates, of sweets but it looks like fabric for ammunition. It's like a kind of documentary of different Christmas stuff, you know, but the feeling you get is like that it could also be a war.

What's the shortest death in FortyNine?

That was a dog killing a man. But obviously this dog was trained by somebody, by skinheads, German skinheads killing a black guy. That's like a weapon, you know.

And the longest?

It's about rape... there are many topics: family tragedy, where the husband just goes mad and kills his wife and children... there's a child molestation, gang war... all different kinds of styles, but it's always important what is the point of view? And the point of view defines the motive, if you know it or not.  Sometimes you have a surveillance camera, you just see the act, you don't see the motive.  You don't know it.  Or for one killing the killer goes with a camera operator and he talks to the camera and communicates and he's just shooting and doing an interview with him afterwards.

Like the film Man Bites Dog?

Yes, that was one inspiration. Now I'm finishing that, I've still five films to do. And in Munich we're going to do the exhibition, the whole installation

When's that exhibition?

Probably in December.  For Christmas.  (Laughing).  Merry Christmas...

But after Fabrica I did my most successful film until now, it's called Sleepers.  It's three minutes, very short, but really intense.  Again, music and images.  You see children marveling and playing with weapons of the national army, the Austrian army, on the national holiday in Vienna.  Families come with their children, they try the weapons, they shoot... and I was mixing these images of these children with images from computer war games.  Like them becoming marionettes of this game, you know?  I moved the images of the children, I was moving them forwards and backwards, like machines, you know?  And just seeing constantly scenes from violent video games.  That's why I called them sleepers.  This is the generation that becomes one day... that's our responsibility, these children.  What they are able now to use in terms of tools, videogames... they have constant access to that.  There are no barriers.

This is a national holiday in Austria to let children play with guns?

Yeah, every year.  It's in the main square, the center of Vienna, and the army comes and they celebrate this national holiday.  It's when Austria gained independence in 1955 after the Second World War.  Since then, they do it every year.  And you don't see the children, if you just come there for a walk, you don't seem them.  You have to look more precise and then you realize what madness is there.  Many people when they saw the film they thought it was in America somewhere.

So where were you on September 11th, 2001?

I was at home.  With my friend from New York.  We were doing a film about him for Austrian television and this day it was raining in Vienna, so we came back home around two o'clock pm, which is eight o'clock am in New York, six hours back.  So we watched CNN, saw the first time, when breaking news appeared on CNN.  We followed from the first moments it went on CNN.  We stayed like six or seven hours in front of the TV, so we watched the second plane crashing live.  It was like, like a movie, you know?  The first tower collapsing and the second tower collapsing... And when the first tower collapsed, I immediately had this one image from Godzilla, Roland Emmerich's film from 1996, when Godzilla steps through a building and it collapses.  I had this image immediately in my mind because it was so... it was the same perspective, it was the same color, and everything was like that.  I said, “What the fuck is going on?”

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And how did you move from that image to what would become Just Like The Movies?

Through that image I realized that there are more images in Hollywood films.  I knew that.  Immediately.  But I didn't have the idea for the movie.  I just had the idea to collect the images and do something with it.  Because of course, from the beginning I didn't know if it's going to be possible to reconstruct a whole day in New York City.  So months passed by and I started watching movies.  And one year later I had around 50 images collected and then I realized, fuck, it is possible actually to do a film out of this.

Then I wrote a concept, two A4 pages with six main parts: waking up, rush hour, the silence before the storm, the first crash, people watching, the second crash which was more covered by thousands of angles as it was in reality too.  So I even went inside the plane and just tried to do super editing of these different angles.  And then I had people jumping, which was the fifth part.  And the sixth part was the collapse of the two towers, and the last part was like the epilogue, you know?  The aftermath, when you see the twin towers standing again, like a sign, like “Hey, wake up, it's a movie, it's not reality.”

And it was amazing for me because in all these Hollywood films like Deep Impact, Armageddon, Artificial Intelligence, they show the World Trade Center there, standing, but all of New York was wiped out, and these two towers remain.  But in reality it's the opposite.

So I developed this concept and I continued to watch films and taking out of every film what I needed.  OK, I need people watching... this has a good one, this one, this one, this one.  And slowly archiving them.  And it took me almost four years.  Going through like 600 movies.

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But you didn't use any films made after September, 2001?

First of all I want to show that these images had been created before.  By the dream factory.  And on the other side I looked at some of these images that were made after September 11th, like War of The Worlds, Flight Plan, you know there are many films... The Day After Tomorrow, this kind of stuff.  But at some point these images didn't have the same naive quality as the images made before September 11th, because they were so strongly influenced by this event, so the way of directing the film had totally changed.  They didn't fit at all together, like taking comedy and mix it with tragedy, something like this.  It just didn't work.  The dust is more realistic... The fear the actors are showing is totally different.... So I decided not to take any of them.  Only images made before.

And this makes the concept even stronger.

Finally, by the end, I chose images from 52 Hollywood films.

But you started with over 600?

I was watching more than 600 movies.  From every movie I took some images, but finally, for the film, I used images from only 52 movies.  And there are 418 cuts in the whole film.

And what about the music?

So before I started editing the movie, which was in September, 2004, I contacted my musician, Paolo Marzocchi, who I had worked with on two other projects before, and I sent him the concept without any images, just the concept, I wrote it down.  And I told him what about doing the music for a silent movie, a modern silent movie.  And he sent me for each segment, each part, two different layouts.  It was fantastic for me, it was this ragtime-based music.  And I took the music and I cut it a bit and had the background music for the moment and I started to edit the images with the music.  Not all the parts, but the main parts, rush hour was edited to the music, you know... And it took me three weeks to edit the film.  Because the whole film was constructed in the last four years, while I was collecting images I was doing the film in my head already.  That's why it took only three weeks to edit.

And then I sent him the finished film with his music and it took him only two more weeks to make a nice clean, you know... more drama, dissolves, transitions, and then he was done.  So it took us two months to edit the film.

And then the film was done.  I did it for myself; I wanted to see if it worked.  I had no big intentions with this film; I just wanted to show it to my friends, to scare them. (Laughing).  Really, I didn't think about distribution and so on.  Then suddenly, a few people saw it and they were shocked.  People were shocked.  And the more and more I showed it to people, the more I saw that it was really working.  So I invited a few Americans, a few friends from New York, and they were really shocked.  Two of them had been there, and they just really liked it.  More and more people were saying I should send it to festivals and contact galleries, blah blah, because it's a really interesting topic.

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But before I did that I new it was danger to go out to the public with this film because I do not own the copyrights of these films.  I did a very illegal job, you know, copying DVDs to mini-DV, totally illegal.
So I found a good lawyer, a friend of a friend, and he focuses on copyright issues.  And this happened at the same time when Evelyn Eberhardt, a very good friend of mine, who is now in German, because a curator of a new huge exhibition space in Munich and she immediately invited me with this project.  So I immediately said, “OK let's check the copyright for Germany.”  And this guy did like 50 pages of research, really expensive, and he found a spot where I could show it.  It's called the quotation law.  It's quite a new law there.  But it's saying that you can use found footage, like I did, you know, it's found footage, using it without clearance of the copyrights only when the work you create with those images is a completely new film which has nothing to do anymore with the original work. And it didn't.  And none of these films are showing September 11th, even Armageddon, with this one image of one of the twin towers burning, it was hit by an asteroid, you know?

This was a project I did for myself, and to show to my friends, but it turned out to be an interesting project to many other people.  What I like about this film is that's got a universal language; you can show it everywhere.  Everybody knows September 11th and everybody knows the Hollywood blockbusters.  Even in China or Japan.

What do you think is the proper way to show this film?

I think two ways are the best, the one way is how I did it in Munich.  You have an exhibition with the images and the film in the cinema room and you show it there, sometimes with a live performance too.  That's one.  Second, is my dream actually, show it in cinemas but with a live performance like in the old cinemas.  You show a silent film and the piano player is there and he plays the music.  A special event.  That's what I thought would be the best way to distribute.  Not on DVD, selling...

Have you seen United 93?

I was surprised how good it was, actually.  Because I expected to see heroes, you know, in the airplane fighting terrorists.  But this was total chaos.  Even the pilots were shown as victims.  Everybody was a victim there.  It was not about heroism but more about the fight for life.  But this probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was a European/American co-production, it had a lot of European influence.  Whereas the other movie, World Trade Center by Oliver Stone... that's going to be a mess.  I saw the trailer.  This looks really pathetic...

I don't know, because I saw it on TV and I'm European, but I can imagine for Americans this may be too early to do stuff like that.  Especially for New Yorkers.  And what for?  It was the best-documented event ever.  It was huge.   You have the second airplane crash shot by more than 100 video cameras, what's the point of doing a film about that?  I mean, Pearl Harbor, ok, it's interesting maybe, because there weren't that many medias there at that time.  But there?  You have the perfect film already done by CNN.

What do you think about the attacks themselves?  Have you seen any of these conspiracy theory films that are coming out now?

OK, my personal opinion is that this was done by some kind of terrorist, I have a problem with this word “terrorist,” but ok, let's say it was Al Qaeda, that's what we know, Osama Bin Laden, let's say they organized it.  But...  I'm so convinced some how that the Bush administration, they exactly knew what was going to happen.  They just didn't do anything.  Just to have a pretext for the politics they're doing right now.  And they're going to continue that for the next twenty, thirty years.  That's what it's all about.  And I think that's the most realistic scenario for me.  I'm sorry, you can't tell me that one of the best secret services in the world didn't know about it.  You can't plan that huge attack without anyone knowing anything.  Or... it was in the film United 93, where I saw the other point of view where they were really all confused.  It was so quick, you know?  Just things happening every ten minutes: another hijacking, another crash, collapse, the pentagon... They were totally confused.  But on the other side, it was not a thing they did... Oh, on the ninth of September, “Let's hijack four planes,” you know?  It's a very long-term plan.  Years.  But of course, we're never going to know.  Because that would just fuck up the whole world.  (Laughing.)  The world would collapse.

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So the only way to make an opinion is to do films like I do.  Just to give you a completely different point of view...

Website

http://www.nosugar-added.com




Just Like The Movies is currently on exhibition at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, NY

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