Forest of memory

"I think there is a little bit of a battle between nostalgia and reality"

The 43rd New Directors/New Films in New York is presenting the World Premiere of Jessica Oreck's timely foraging of memory - The Vanquishing Of The Witch Baba Yaga. On the first full day of spring, I met up with the director at Lincoln Center where we discussed the influence of Vladimir Propp, the poetic connections made for her by Andrei Codrescu, going into the forest with Robert Pogue Harrison, mycology, and how it is best to edit at the threshold.

Golden chanterelles, a shepherd and grazing horses, a woman in traditional embroidered garb sitting in front of a blue house in a tiny village. A scarecrow made out of beer cans flutters its rope arms in the wind. A dismal, run-down Eastern Bloc apartment complex, each balcony a different shade, each shabbiness a different look. In animation, a brother and sister flee the soldiers who took their father and discover how to deal with the tests of a witch. Oreck takes the traditional tales of Baba Yaga, who lives in a house on chicken legs, has cannibalistic tendencies and makes certainty falter, and imaginatively folds them into a documentation of the sylvan landscape of our time.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Before the start of New Directors/New Films, I spoke with Marian Masone from the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA's Jytte Jensen about your extraordinary film. In his study called Morphology Of The Folktale, Russian formalist Vladimir Propp looks at what he calls the 31 functions of a fairy tale. One of them (number 18) is the vanquishing of the antagonist. How much did Propp's theory influence the structure of The Vanquishing Of The Witch Baba Yaga?

Jessica Oreck: I actually mapped out the entire film. My little diagrams include all the various things he insisted were part of a folktale. I did read Morphology Of The Folktale. I started this film five years ago so a lot of this is out of my head by now but I read a lot of Vladimir Propp before I read the Andreas Johns book about Baba Yaga [Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale] and really tried to stick as true as I could to the actual structure of the folklore and stay true to Baba Yaga as well.

Jessica Oreck on The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga: "I build my films in a modular way" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

AKT: Baba Yaga exists in very different versions. In some incarnations she is good, sometimes she is bad.

JO: And always a little bit ambiguous, which interested me. But definitely, I wanted to stay true to her. You know, originally this film was about mushroom hunting in Eastern Europe. And then Andrei Codrescu set me up with a bunch of poets in Romania and I spent a couple of days with them mushroom hunting and walking through the forest and just talking to them. And they sort of set me on this other path that was much more philosophical, much more about the way we look at the forest. How mushroom hunting is more of just an excuse to be in the forest, more a gesture that people could use to get them out of the cities.

So it really started that way. And then the more I read about it, the more I realised that not just folklore but Baba Yaga, in particular, is such a big part of the way that our initial imaginations were shaped of the forest. And it wasn't until you grew out of that that the forest changed into something different. Baba Yaga just kept coming up, and kept coming up and the more I read the more I realised she actually does represent exactly what the forest means to everybody in this weird, very particular world.

AKT: Who were the people you met? Tell me about some of the quotes you chose.

JO: A bunch of different poets. Ruxandra Cesereanu was my main contact on the ground there. There are two quotes by Olga Tokarczuk. She is such a huge influence on me making this movie. She is an amazing writer. The rest of the narration and some of the other quotes were things that I wrote based on conversations I had, not just with the poets or from the research but from conversations we had when we were there. An amalgamation of a lot of different things.

AKT: Did you grow up mushroom hunting?

JO: No, not at all. I actually have always lived in a city. That's what interests me about other cultures that have a connection to nature I never had - which is why all my films tend to be about ethnobiology.

"Memory is hidden in habitual action… hidden in the shape of a plough handle, in creamy chanterelle soup. Familiarity breeds invisibility"

AKT: At the beginning, you locate your film in "Eastern Europe - some time after the 20th century." This is slightly more precise than "Once upon a time in a land far away" but not too precise. What made you situate your story this way?

JO: It occurred to me that it does have an element of that once upon a time. It was also removed from a level of "this is right now". There is a lot of time space you can play with. It doesn't have to be First World War or Second World War or any particular war, it's just violent in general, human nature in general. I also wanted it to be clear that it wasn't fairy tale and very much something that is real. So balancing those two things - "Eastern Europe - some time after the 20th century" was just the right way to do that. It actually wasn't even my idea.

AKT: It fits - also the soldiers you include in the animated Baba Yaga tale, who are not specifically identified.

JO: The tale was meant to be very traditionally a Baba Yaga tale in its structure but is actually based on stories that we collected while we were there. That scene where the soldiers come for the father - we were actually listening to a conversation. A woman said, "they came for father in the middle of the night. It was always the middle of the night when they came." And I thought, "that's going in the movie!" We also heard people talking about finding ghosts in the forest saying, "I need to be settled. I need to be in the earth and be at peace. Help me find that peace". The fairy tale is part traditional but then also part incorporating all these pieces that we collected that felt so potent and real, even though they are so far from our own reality.

AKT: I didn't feel that you were giving in to nostalgia, the film is hovering. It's very close to nostalgia but it isn't.

JO: I feel that there is some nostalgia. It fights a lot with a certain amount of wonder with just whatever is happening at the moment and that is contemporary. So I think there is a little bit of a battle between nostalgia and reality.

AKT: You talk about memory and superstition. What connection does your film make between the two?

JO: I think I say something like, "memory is hidden in habitual action… hidden in the shape of a plough handle, in creamy chanterelle soup. Familiarity breeds invisibility".

AKT: In "a father's gesture?"

JO: Yeah, something about "hidden in a father's gesture."

AKT: And in the re-telling of tales.

JO: Stories re-told, yeah. And the last sentence is, "all that's left is an unconscious gesture before some sacred book, hesitation at the threshold, superstition".

AKT: There are a lot of thresholds in the stories you tell. How were you mapping them out? Your film is an intricate weave.

JO: It is. It was a struggle for me. I build my films in a modular way. Each section exists as its own little lego block and then I write everything out on note cards. I note the music I want to use, the voice-over, the imagery, the sounds because shooting on film your sound is separate from your images. And I write it all out on notecards and then spread it out and literally shuffle things around and around until things seem to be aligning and then I edit it.

In the end I got pretty close and got really stuck. So I locked myself in my bedroom for three days and I set up my laptop on my bed and I lay down. I would only work as I felt like I was falling asleep or right when I woke up. I would be in this half dream, half awake state. Probably a very unhip way to edit a movie. But I'm a true perfectionist, I can be quite obsessive-compulsive. When I'm working there's constantly this little voice telling me that I'm not good enough. The best way to shut that voice off is to be in those liminal states, the threshold between dream and consciousness where you can turn off the rational part of your brain and let the emotions through. It's such an intuitive process for me and I feel a little bit like a fraud. I feel a lot of times that I'm just channeling another entity inside of me and I have no recollection of actually writing or actually editing. It just happens.

AKT: Perhaps you are channeling that ghost under the tree in the forest waiting to be buried. Beyond the forest, I liked the connections you made between belonging and belongings. Especially the importance of belongings in this world we live in. Can you speak about that?

"People don't have homes the way they used to."

JO: So much of my work is based on research that I did. Robert Pogue Harrison is one of my favorite contemporary writers and he wrote a book about forests and he talks about how being buried somewhere gives grounding to future generations because that gives them a sense of home, a sense of belonging to that land and being in that land. As a contemporary society, it's the first time that we don't know where we want to be buried. People don't have homes the way they used to, and people are cremated and frozen and there's not that sense of being tied to the land in the same way of being physically and literally rooted in the land through your blood and flesh of your ancestors.

AKT: Also, there is a change in connection to the house. People are born and die in the hospital, not the home.

JO: Exactly, and so much of that. And Olga Tokarczuk talks so much about stuff and how it just separates us from what're actually meant to be doing on this earth. It's difficult, because so much of the narration is so thick that every single sentence could be exploded out into a full-length feature thesis.

AKT: Some of the objects, such as the beautiful traditionally embroidered blouse have the process of their creation embedded in them. Very different from some fast fashion object you buy cheaply and throw away almost immediately.

JO: Also the food. Each mushroom is handpicked and then you see it go through that factory process and get turned out into these ultra-saturated food markets that have nothing to do with the reality of where it comes from, the hands that were a part of its growth. Who cares about "eat locally?". I feel most contemporary Americans, especially city dwellers, are just so adrift. Myself included. I do have a certain nostalgia.

AKT: You live in New York. Do you eat locally? Do you go to the farmers' market?

JO: As much as I can. I do go to the farmers' market. But most of the time it's more just, what's quick? What's easy? What's fast? What's cheap? What's nearby? I do care about eating locally. But that's not what the film is about in any way. It is just about being tied to something.

Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art's 43rd New Directors/New Films festival runs until March 30, 2014, read reviews from the festival here. For more information about tickets, visit the official site.