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Who are Marianna and Daniel O’Reilly?

We’ve been trying to work that one out for a combined 65 years.

Your film is about?

In January 2009, the videomakers Marianna Magurudumova and Danila Antonov disappeared under mysterious circumstances. ’Deerpark’ presents their final two films ’Delivery’ and ’Blackmail’ in conjunction with a documentary ‘Symposium’. Comprised of interviews with a friend, a critic and a nameless actor, the documentary seeks to recover a motive for the disappearance by analysing their final two videos.

How did you start with film? And do you have an educational background in art or film?

We began with video when we were given a camera as a gift and with it we made a short video for a drawing installation we were exhibiting. We found that in our desire to work exclusively together, video became an interesting envelope for our concerns and contiues to produce new complexities in our relationship with each new project. Our research is formed largely around a mutual passion for cinema and philosophy, and our background is one of painting and philosophy.

Could you explain how you work, what themes or concepts and what is important to you?

Our experiments with video have resulted in a series of protracted studies on subjectivity. These symposia focus primarily on the relationship between human freedom and individuality, the operations of self-deception, frustration and alienation, and a critical re-examination of identity. It is also important to note that these works are experiments and not finished products. We instead prefer to run experiments to seek out difficulties, provoke criticism and court failure – in our relationship, our social situation and our philosophic concerns, and at present we place greater value on questioning than on answering.

Where do you get your ideas or influences from?

Ideas arise up from out of our life-process and from an engagement with culture; literature, art, music, film – any works that demand a commitment and a challenge to our understandings and positions - and which provide a continual source of questions and display the greatest potential for self-development. Furthermore, the persistent conflict involved in this type of engagement has become a central catalyst to our output.

How does the title relate to the work, and how do you find a fitting title?

Every title is conceived differently-‘Deerpark’ is a reference to Soren Kierkegaard whose writings we were reading extensively at the time; the concept of ‘an outing to the Deer Park’ (which is an existing park outside of Copenhagen) interested us because the Deer Park became a metaphor for the degree of interest an individual takes in their own life.

How does content relate to the form of your work?

The videos are largely analytical of psychological scenarios and these become adapted into specific types of cinematic language. Deerpark hinges on a number of cinematic tropes wherein contrasting and unrelated spaces become sequential and linear through editing them together and then using artificial sound loops to create the inference of a space or situation. Also, through the use of incognitos we are able to populate this artificial world with artificial people who enter into discourse and/or conflict with one another.

How important is sound in film, and if you use sounds, do you create your own or use existing?

Initially we began to develop polemical monologues which correlated with the psychological and philosophical examinations of the current period. Beyond that we began to introduce characters and trained ourselves to speak with accents to lend credibility to the [false] spaces where the videos were taking place, (i.e. Russia, Denmark.) For our most recent project we have tried to produce all sound effects, speech and music with our own voices. This is the next development for the physiological-biographical aspect of the work.

How do you finance your projects (by yourself, sponsors or subsidy)?

We use conventional employment to fund our work.

Nowadays everyone with the right equipment can create videoart, good, bad or ugly?

This question does not want an answer but wants many, many more questions.

What possibilities of the web are yet to be explored? Which dangers do you see ahead?

We would like to develop the concept of cinematic space discussed above in the virtual space of the internet – such as streaming live video from various global destinations into a single narrative, or using existing virtual spaces such as Google Earth to map our own cinematic ‘space’. We have already used this technology to plan out the shoot of our recent video ‘Longbridge’ in Copenhagen, then we went and executed it according to this plan and the next stage is to post images of the locations used back onto Google Earth.

Video broadcasting platforms on the internet, why or why not?

The advantage of internet ‘broadcast’ is that one does not require the traditional ‘mass audiences’ that television and cinema require to remain viable and neither does one require financing in order to be able to screen new work. To us this means that we are free to experiment with ideas and techniques without needing to create a finished, saleable ‘product’.

In what category would you place your work; cinema or art. And is there a difference between those?

Our main concern with categories is not to place ourselves within particular spheres of activity but to instead ask questions about the relevance of doing so, how the process of discrimination and categorisation takes place and for what purpose.

How important is the reaction to your film by the audience?

The main way in which we see this as important is the risk that when making a video one might justify certain decisions relating to content, form or structure so as to be accessible to an audience. To do so is in the first instance to ‘fantasise’ an audience and in the second, presumptuous of what an audience is going to like or what it can cope with. We attempt not to deviate from our line of questions no matter how obscure or absurd but demand of ourselves to be critical of our ideas, to make the videos we wish to make and to build integrity based on this. Ultimately our work will elicit a response from the audience, although that response will be the business of the audience and not of us.

What is your next project about?

Our current project is a short film entitled ‘Coppola’s Spyglass or Royal Male’ in which we try to merge analytical and impulsive, libidinal energy of the creative process investigating the so called ‘woman’s question’. We have attempted to critique the cultural, historical and symbolic role that women appropriate, desire and are assigned in society, the clichés and definitions associated with the feminine and the role that language plays in the creation of gender. Our concern was to investigate what type of language a woman could define for herself as an individual and whether existing language could facilitate the enhancement of individuals regardless of sex.



Copy the interview with Marianna O’Reilly