ISLAND, released by Hakawati on 14 September 2018, is the second feature film from British artist filmmaker Steven Eastwood. It is a lyrical, slow cinema description of the temporality and phenomena of dying and has been called “disarmingly intimate, poetic and haunting” (Sight & Sound) and as a film that “probes unchartered territory with great intelligence and sensitivity” (Little White Lies). Here, Steven talks with Will Fowler (BFI) about some of the themes and motivations for the film.
Steven Eastwood, 2018
Will Fowler: Your previous films have collided narrative with conceptual reflections on or about cinema and medium specificity, plus fiction with documentary. They feel like enquiries. Island, with great sensitivity and boldness, follows four people as they experience the lead up to their deaths in a hospice on the Isle of Wight. What was the impetus behind it and what did you initially want it to do, or be?
Steven Eastwood: The project began with a commission from Fabrica, Brighton’s centre for contemporary art, who put out a call for artists to respond to the theme of end of life. In my proposal I said that I wanted to be witness to the moment of death. I knew that this was a provocative and contentious objective. I wanted to know more about what happens throughout the process of dying, and how the society I live in would react to such a proposition. A number of my earlier films have dealt with the ethical encounter between filmmaker and subject, often involving vulnerable people and populations. I’m interested in how making a film provides an opportunity to encounter the limits we have set within our culture. I proposed to work with moving image loops of different lengths across screens, and creating call and response between different environments with the end of life. One of the things I wanted to ask was, when it comes to a subject as sensitive as dying, when in life do we look, when do we look away, and why? How can I continue to look when it may have seemed appropriate to look away? A person with a terminal diagnosis is denied presence and participation in our culture and because of this they are denied a certain kind of image. Their image can be guarded, protected, and often without consulting the person going through the illness. Denying that person an image only further contributes to how they are repressed. The images we have are limited, by access and also by aesthetics. Descriptions tend to be medicalised, euphemistic, sentimental, or managed through symbols. I wanted to open the possibility for images up. I didn’t realise the project could become a feature film until around half way through the twelve months filming, when the people I was meeting and the very private and intimate situations I was becoming privy to made it clear that the work could be realised as a single channel for cinemas, as well as multichannel for the gallery.
WF: Fictionalised death, as in Hollywood action films, dominates cinema but specific, concentrated documentary approaches are very unusual, death ultimately remaining a taboo subject. How did you first present the idea of the film to the hospice and to patients, and what was the response?
SE: We have very poor frames of reference for what happens at the end of life. Most of them come through popular culture, such as fiction film, where dying tends to be dramatic, truncated, and far from the actuality of our bodily experience. Natural death is not outwardly eventful in the way that kind of film storytelling requires. The documentary has attempted to more accurately render the end of life, but it runs into numerous ethical problems, to do with access, consent, appropriateness, permission to witness, mode of aesthetics, and more. How can filmmakers record images of pain, or an image of someone who has lost consciousness? All of these thresholds greatly interest me. Perhaps our reticence in this space is justifiable, but not looking, or looking away, this can also be an unethical action, especially if the filmmaker decides not to film on behalf of someone without involving them in that decision. In documentary film, a form of contract hinges on the returned look. If we see that the person being filmed is mindful of the filming, there is a tacit agreement that filming is permitted. When the viewer cannot see that the subject knows they are being filmed, permission is in crisis. Island establishes consent aurally as well as visually, so that the viewer feels able to accompany four remarkable people into very private experiences, including those of pain, as well as loss of consciousness.
It was the team and leadership at Mountbatten Hospice on the Isle of Wight that made such a seemingly risky proposition possible. Introductions to the idea of filming the end of life were first made in my absence, by members of the community team on home visits to patients, across this beautiful and otherworldly archipelago. It was very important to develop the right ethical method for how to conduct filming. Spending time in family homes and in the private and public spaces of the hospice meant I was privy to extraordinary stories, encapsulated lives, gentle shifts in relationships. I met some extraordinary people. Alan had a deep philosophy of life, death, his own body, that he wanted to share, and I believe the film enabled him to do that. Alan invited me to be with him when he died and I feel very privileged to say that I was. This had to be witnessed by the hospice team and Alan’s daughter, and I was named as one of his next of kin, because he and his carers knew he would at some point lose consciousness. Jamie was very different, closer to my age, surrounded by family and friends in shock. Nobody wanted him to die. If Alan is the film’s mind, then Jamie is its raucous visceral humour and beating heart.
WF: The recurring shots of the ferry approaching and arriving at the Isle of Wight speak to the communication and isolation in the film. What was your thinking about what material to incorporate once you accepted that you were going to, and were allowed to, film a person as they passed from life to death? In a similar way, what happened to the weight of images, all images, during the edit after that point?
SE: I had originally set myself a zero tolerance for metaphor, because it struck me that symbolic structures, and euphemism in our language, are all part of how we consensually romanticize or occlude death and dying rather than give direct representation. We say that a person has passed for example, or we hold on to religious values and symbols even if within a secular framework. But the setting of the Isle of Wight provides an inescapable metaphor. Metaphor, and humour also, can be powerful ways to acclimatize an audience to more challenging events on screen. The scenes of the ferries arriving and departing, as well as the shots of microscopic biopsies (that read as topographies, or even planets) suggest a managing principle outside of the film, but eventually they fall away as devices, and the viewer is left with direct durational sequences that are about the motor of the body, and breathing as it runs out. It’s interesting that you mention weight, because in the edit we took a cue from the buoyancy of the ferries, and worked to keep the film unanchored, and not grounded in things like information, for example. I filmed Alan for 37 hours continuously, before and after he died, and it was an incredible privilege to have been there in the room with him. Seven minutes of this time form the pivotal part of the film. Even now, having watched this footage and the film so many times, I still feel surprised and compelled by Alan’s death, it affects my body. I still find myself transfixed, wondering if he will draw one more breath.
WF: Last year, at Fabrica gallery in Brighton, you presented the installation The Interval and the Instant, which drew on material shot for Island and was framed as a partner work. What did this consist of and, given the sensitivity of the material and that visitors to the gallery might enter and/or exit the piece at any point, how did you structure it? I ask this as great thought has clearly been given to the arc ofIsland, and specifically to how it begins.
SE: The Interval and the Instant is a multiscreen video installation that was first exhibited at Fabrica in late 2017. The work has at its centre a looped 50-minute triptych inviting the gallery visitor to be witness to intimate events including the moment of death. The work also involves a number of satellite video pieces, including One Day The End of a Life, which is five hours in duration. Although I completed Island first, the film grew out of my plans for this immersive artwork. The wider visual language allows the viewer to reflect on the passage of time, relationships, our mortality, and one’s own place in the world. Different communities of care emerge: from palliative teams to a family party fundraiser. Over time the inter-relationship of the screens becomes apparent, uniting instances of touch, periods of waiting, and the gradual transition away from personhood. The loop was shaped to accommodate visitors entering and leaving the space without necessarily seeing the full length. And so the edit was incredibly complicated, compounded by the fact that each screen was frame locked to the other. We had to consider how the screens, each notionally focused on Jamie, Alan and Roy’s lives and experiences, spoke to each other. We also chose to remove my presence, which is very clear in the feature film, and so in many ways Interval is a much less managed environment, you don’t have me there as the reassuring intermediary. It is very interesting, how these different cultural spaces operate. Film festivals have given Island an 18 certificate (it was eventually given a 15 certificate by the BBFC, for “scenes of real death”), but the gallery allows for anyone to enter. This is something the producer, Elhum Shakerifar, and myself have given a lot of thought to, that there are institutional guardians and gatekeepers for people with terminal illness, but there are also cultural gatekeepers, who act on behalf of audiences in terms of what they see, often based on whether the images are deemed offensive or violent (as though an image of a natural death on screen is violent), or, equally, whether death sells in terms of box office, because it is presumed that it doesn’t.
WF: In recent years the documentary form has felt calcified in some contexts and newly enlivened and open to fresh possibilities in others. Given its universal subject matter and that Island has been discussed on BBC Breakfast Time and in The Independent, do you feel that the film has resonated as an artist’s response or been received in that light?
SE: I have had many people ask me, is it one or the other, but in so many films there is no real way of distinguishing the two, and I don’t particular need to locate Island as either a documentary or an artist’s film. The film is clearly constructed within a specific register: it has only 140 cuts in 90 minutes, there are many shots that last longer than two minutes, no explicit narratorial framework is given, and where before filmmakers have been cautious about aesthetics, here colour and composition is central to every image. The films we have of this intimate but completely everyday event tend to be visually cautious, but I don’t understand why. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that we die not so much as personalities (for personhood has usually receded, or been sedated) but as simply breathing bodies. It was enormously helpful to our attempts to get the work seen that it featured in mainstream media like the BBC, something visual art rarely enjoys, unless it is controversial. Film press and journalism has really engaged with Island. The response from art press to Island and Interval has been more gradual. This may be partly because contemporary art has largely turned away from metaphysical or universal subjects and grand narratives like death. But death isn’t necessarily grand – in many ways death is boring. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least malleable and broached. I find that curious, because there is so much potential for art and representation in relation to how our lives end. It may also be to do with misperception of the film and exhibition – that it will be worthy, burdensome, a lecture, a cancer film… whereas in fact both artworks are much more concentrated on time, the body, touch, care and alterity, and the ineffable. A pain-managed death, in a home, hospice or hospital setting, can be so many things. It can be intensely beautiful, but also banal. It can be unspeakable and strange. It is as though life is an engine, turning over, stalling then stopping, the person already vacated, just the body living, until it no longer can. I don’t think of Island as being about cancer, or suffering. To my mind it isn’t harrowing. I felt uplifted and empowered by the extraordinary events I was fortunate enough to be invited to bear witness to. I hope that something of that feeling of empowerment has translated to the screen.
WF: Island prompts a lot of thought and discussion. What are you plans for its distribution and exhibition in the coming months?
We are developing plans to exhibit The Interval and the Instant in 2020.
ISLAND will be released at selected cinemas around London and across the UK in Sept 2018.
Steven Eastwood is an artist-filmmaker whose work has screened and exhibited internationally. His recent solo show The Interval and the Instant was at Fabrica Brighton. He has completed two feature length films, ISLAND (LFF, Rotterdam 2017/18) and BURIED LAND (officially selected for Tribeca, Moscow and Mumbai Film Festivals in 2010). His documentary THOSE WHO ARE JESUS was nominated for a Grierson Award in 2001. He has published widely and is Professor in Film Practice at Queen Mary University London, where he convenes the Masters programme in Documentary film.
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