'There's a certain pleasure to cinematic artifice'

Matthew Rankin on world-building and catharsis in Universal Language

by Amber Wilkinson

Matthew Rankin: 'It’s a very prismatic film and it's playing with cinematic artifice, the essence of Cinema'
Matthew Rankin: 'It’s a very prismatic film and it's playing with cinematic artifice, the essence of Cinema' Photo: Oscilloscope Labarotories

Universal Language, which creates a quirky bridge between Iran and Winnipeg, opens in the US next month. In it, the story of two young girls (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaelli) who find a banknote frozen in the ice overlaps with the stories of an eclectic mix of adults, including a man visiting his ailing mum (played by the director Matthew Rankin) and a tour guide (tour guide (Pirouz Nemati, who co-wrote the film) with an offbeat route. In the first part of our interview, we talked to the director about a child’s eye view and liminal spaces. Here, he talks some more about collaboration and putting himself in the frame.

You’re in this film as well as directing it - you might say that’s another of your liminal spaces - how tricky was that as a juggling act?

Matthew Rankin: It's very tricky. But it's a community effort - we made it together. Any difficult thing that you have to do, if you do it with your friends and you do it together, it becomes easy.

Did you enjoy the experience of acting?

MR: I do sometimes act, I've acted in a few of my friends’ films but it's not an ambition that I have to act. The reason I'm in this is because we felt the story would have more meaning and the ideas would be more energised if it was really me. Playing myself through this prism - it’s a very prismatic film and it's playing with cinematic artifice, the essence of Cinema. We forget about this because the arc of film history has always been bending towards the simulacrum and the idea that we have to make it as real as possible and so much of filmmaking is about making more and more and more real. I don’t know if you watched the digitally reprocessed ET, for example. It was a puppet and everyone knows a puppet and that was okay. But for some reason they went back and they changed it to make it more realistic but in a weird way that made it more fake.

Yes, sometimes CGI doesn’t do a movie any favours, you end up with an ‘uncanny valley’ feeling.

Matthew Rankin at Thessaloniki Film Festival
Matthew Rankin at Thessaloniki Film Festival Photo: Thessaloniki Film Festival/Studio Aris Rammos

MR: That's the thing. There's a certain pleasure to cinematic artifice and it has a certain expressive potential to it. When it comes to the artifice of making a film, typically when you make a film, you're avoiding that. Like, a continuity error is a mistake. It makes the movie bad and takes you out of the simulacrum. You see that it's fake and so then it's wrong. A wooden performance is like a mistake or when your film takes place in some place but you're filming it in another place so anything that gives it away is wrong. And yet even a film that’s extremely credible, where you don't ever doubt the simulacum, it's still, fundamentally, just an accumulation of cheats. It's always cheating and we forget that there's a difference between a film and the real world.

We have somehow bought into this notion that the purpose of film is to be authentic and yet it never can be and it never will be. I feel like the ‘cheat’ is actually kind of interesting. I feel like there's expressive potential in that which we haven't really explored so much to this point. An interesting example, I think, is that when people shot on film, there was all this concern to remove specks of dust from the film, because then you’re encountering the materiality of the film and then it's not real. And then the simulacrum is broken.

But I feel like now when people shoot on film, they want to reference the materiality of the thing and that's the purpose of shooting on film. Even when people shoot on digital, it’s so clean and there's so much information that they add grain. So I feel the simulacrum is kind of at breaking point and anyway the And anyway whatever our need for simulacra is, it’s moving somewhere else. It’s moving into artificial intelligence and virtual reality and all that - that’s what is going to take over. So I feel the composite parts of filmmaking and the artifice of filmmaking is now where cinema can go. It's like what happened to painting when photography was invented. The burden of having to create the simulacrum through painting was kind of neutralised. You could still do that, of course, but you could also explore what paint can do that photography cannot.

Your film is a great example of an exercise in world creation. The point is not that the world looks exactly like the real world but that it feels true to itself.

MR: It’s a new way of looking at the world, as surreal as it is.

There’s a heightened sense of the absurd. For example, the tissue shop.

MR: There is something absurd about putting these two worlds together. It's like the divine and the ridiculous overlapping. And yet that is our encounter with the world. These two things coexist and they are involved in this strange interplay and that's funny but it's also very beautiful. That is why I decided that I had to play my own role because it's again that it all has more energy if it's really me playing this prismatic version of myself. It's an image of me, it's me in another dimension, it's me through another prism.

So what we’re saying is that world creation is your thing and you won’t be turning your hand to recreating ‘the real’ any time soon.

MR: That’s the thing, I feel like cinema can be more interesting than just the Simulacrum.

The film has been travelling widely, were you surprised?

MR: When we finished it, we loved it but you never know how people are going to respond. But we really loved it and we were like, ‘If this only plays in a Winnipeg community centre or a real estate seminar or something that's fine. But it has really connected and I feel like what people are connecting with is that there’s something cathartic about it, actually, it's a very gentle film. It's very warm in how it brings into proximity these two spaces between which you might imagine great distance. I think there's a certain relief in that and it's not doing it in any sort of didactic, political, in your face, kind of way.

It is a very apolitical film but given the subject matter it could have been.

MR: True. Usually our encounters with these subjects is kind of structured around oppositional paradigms. And so it's kind of a relief, I think, for people to just be in this space, that's kind of gentle and funny and a little bit absurd and beautiful and, ultimately, kind of building a community. I think that's something that we're really starved of in our present world.

Matthew Rankin: 'It's a relief just to build as space of togetherness.
Matthew Rankin: 'It's a relief just to build as space of togetherness. Photo: Oscilloscope Labarotories

I feel like our world has become more binary focused since the pandemic, and these rigid Berlin walls have shot up all around us and it's violent and it's really hard on the soul. So with spaces of togetherness, of getting to know each other and having some encounter with each other and creating a sort of a new way of looking at this very complex world we live in, I think there's a certain catharsis to that. It's like a relief to just build a space of togetherness because I think certainly in politics and in all kinds of available structures, even social media, it's all kind of focused around organising the world into oppositional binaries. But I feel like our experience of life actually isn't like that but the structures we've built and the institutions upon which we rely have become very rigid.

I admire your optimism

MR: I am. I think we underestimate how much emotional processing we really have to do from the pandemic. It's a lot, you know, and it's really kind of an injury for the whole world. The solitude became almost weaponised. And there were people who were like sharks swimming around that water who realised the value of that solitude and how that solitude can become lonesome and that lonesomeness can turn into discontent and can turn into anger. And a lot of people have benefited from that. So I think it's important to create these spaces of togetherness and of solidarity. It’s a movie that speaks to a broader sense of human belonging and I think that that might be a very radical gesture at this time.

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