Maya Sfakianaki in Conversation with Basim Magdy.
I was intrigued by the idea of curating a retrospective on Magdy’s works. I knew it would be quite challenging, as a film curator, to talk about the work of a visual artist, whose artistic practice spans within different mediums of both still and moving image, paintings or collages. As I immersed myself more and more into his work, I found myself taken over with a feeling and emotion that runs throughout his films. I felt like I did not need to understand everything, Magdy would hate that, and his works reflect this. His visual world is layered with meaning and questions, managing to be both stunningly beautiful and emotionally moving while also boldly harsh and honest. This is not experimental cinema that only concerns itself with the visual outcome of the experiment, but Magdy’s poetic inclinations come out strong in his works as he is deeply fascinated by the contrasting ambiguity and power of language as a medium.
What inspires and what drives your work? What are the images that interest you to capture, to explain, to interpret or give your own meanings to?
The images that look familiar but either their composition or details intrigue me and open doors to new questions that transcend their normalcy. The next step is to create narratives where these images find themselves forging unusual connections with different familiar yet intriguing images. I have become aware that in what I live, experience and consider to be reality, I find myself in situations that offer nothing more than familiarity and white noise. Most of the time, a closer look at their details shows absurdity and a form of humor within them. There are other situations, places, objects that the longer I experience, the more questions I have. This is exactly what I like to capture, this growing curiosity and inability to find a sense of resolution within the norm of some binary logic. What really inspires my work is the layers of reality that seem to go unnoticed, the synchronization of absurdity and rational thinking, the perfectly timed randomness and the unpredictability within any situation. Most of what I do with film is create fiction that highlights those layers and try to find new meaning in rearranging their details to create different ways of understanding them.
If your cinema was a colour, what colour would it be?
It would be many colors, all of them are either intermediate or created by mixing two different intermediate colors. I like to think of those colors as having the ability to morph into other colors and to be sensed and understood differently as time passes. Colors also change in different lighting, so depending on which part of the world you’re in, and depending on the season, these colors will become different hues of themselves. I think I want my films to constantly find themselves confronted with their identity crisis of whether they are paintings or photographs in time form.
In your cinematic world we often see time logic, time, memory, future and dreams all merging together, only to disappear in the cloudy in between - what would you describe as the anchor that grounds your cinematic vision?
The anchor is all of this because it keeps shifting from one film to the other. Logic is never a constant, it changes with age and experience, time passes, some memories fade and others are conveniently altered, the future is uncertain by default and a dream is a complex form of creative awareness of all this. It is very important for me to make structurally and thematically different films. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time. When I start working on a new film, I try to reshuffle and question everything I know about communicating ideas through image, sound, narrative and time. Creating a film that feels like a cloudy dream is the ultimate dream. I think my films are always about the present. Sometimes I’m looking at the present through the ambiguity of the past and the imperfection of memory. Sometimes it’s the present as I imagine it will be seen when looked back at from an imagined future. I believe the passing of time is the most political subject one can work with because it encompasses everything. It shows us where we went wrong and how to not fall for the trap of romanticizing our future as science fiction.
What scares you and what excites you in the world - and how do you portray these feelings in your moving image work?
Nothing scares me like human greed, it causes blindness to the world it exists in. It also causes massacres. Greed takes over and eliminates all other human emotions. The growing hunger for fast money and power that the rise of billionaires in politics has created among everyone else is beyond scary. On the other hand, what excites me the most is curiosity, my own and that of everyone around me. Curiosity is the reason I wake up with the urge to create something that I’ve never seen before, something I didn’t know existed until it is created. This is what makes creating any form of art important. It starts with curiosity and ends with an incredibly unique experience. I want to make films about love and poetry and alienation and loss and hope and death and the million ways to live meaningful lives. I don’t think I can make a film about love alone. It’s impossible for love to exist in a void. It’s impossible for alienation to be felt without the knowledge of love. It’s impossible to understand hope without the inevitability of death. I can’t talk about one thing in the absence of everything else.
Your films feel eerily intimate yet curiously detached. How personal are the stories you tell, and who serves as the narrator in your work?
They’re very personal but also very fictional. It’s unrealistic for me to make fiction that’s completely detached from my own experiences, at least until now. There are always personal details in my films, but they’re not meant to tell my stories. Even though living my own stories is what keeps life exciting, I don’t think my experiences are not significant enough in themselves to be shared with others in a film. Instead, I use few little personal experiences to build fiction. For example, my film The Dent started with me standing in front of a small provincial hockey arena wondering why its facade had an unexplainable dent. There was nothing special about the arena or the dent. This simple question weaved the fictional stories that became one of my most politically layered films. A simple question gave me the fictional tools to discuss the evolution of my understanding of collective hopefulness and failure in the previous three years, without making it about my personal experiences. It is critical for me to make films that are open enough for others to see their own experiences in them and hopefully understand them better or differently.