May 23, 2017

It's Hard to Be Utopian: Matthew Rankin on His New Film, "The Tesla World Light"

Matthew Rankin is a filmmaker with an emotional impact. It is a special talent given that much of his work is rooted in history and conveyed through abstraction.

His latest film with the National Film Board of Canada, Tesla World Light, premiered today at the 56th International Critics' Week, a parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival organized by the French Film Critics Circle.

The film experiments with light paintings to illustrate the last years of Nikola Tesla's life. Nikola Tesla was a utopian scientist with a vision of free energy disproportionate to 20th century capitalism, resulting in a love affair with a pigeon and a penniless death. The result is a surreal and seamless fusion of long-exposure animation, historical accuracy, and abstract art.

It is also another moving example of how Matthew Rankin can make an impactful mark in a matter of minutes with less material than many of his works. His final historical short, "Mynarski Death Plummet," packs an emotional punch, using the synesthesia technique that "The Tesla World Light" electrically replicates.

"I think of my style as synthetic," Rankin explained to Cartoon Brew by phone.

"With Mynarski Death Plummet, I hand-crafted the story. Tesla World Light does the same thing using early 20th century avant-garde abstraction. I like to use the vocabulary of abstract art and animation for narrative purposes. [Whereas his previous shorts, such as "Cattle Call," which he co-directed with Mike Malyniuk, and the NFB production "The Radical Expeditions of Walter Boudreau," played with the edges of sound, "The Tesla World Light" hits the eye with light . Its history, technology, and utopian promise remain topical for such a deeply troubled age as ours.

Cartoon Brew: According to your Twitter bio, you live somewhere between slapstick and utopia, which seems fitting since Nikola Tesla was something of a slapstick utopia. [Matthew Rankin: There is something very romantic about Tesla. He was an idealistic scientist who was convinced that what he was doing would save the world, and like many of the utopians of the early 20th century, he had a grand vision of the future. But I think Tesla ranks among the grandest of all.

Of course, that coexists with other aspects of Tesla. There is a picture of him reading a book while thunder rumbles around him. There is an element of the absurd in Tesla, and I like the contrast.

Your film begins with Tesla on his deathbed begging for a loan from J.P. Morgan. Today, Elon Musk's eponymous Tesla company is scaling up solar-powered electrification. Matthew Rankin: Interestingly, Tesla himself was not much interested in business. He had lots of ideas and had to spit them all out. Not only that, but he was an idealist who believed that energy and electricity could be provided free of charge to everyone on the planet. Of course, today's Tesla giant is somewhat cynical, but at the same time, if I understand its operations, its long-term goal is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and bring back electricity. It is a great homage to Nikola Tesla and a way to assert human freedom through energy.

And these are Tesla's actual letters, and everything in the film is drawn from what he wrote or said. The letter to Morgan is truly fascinating and I found it in the Library of Congress. They are much longer, more detailed, beautiful, poetic, heartbreaking, soul-destroying, desperate letters for help than the ones in the film. He has all these ideas, but the public is not interested. It is so beautiful and sad and reminds me of abstract art. I feel there are certain parallels between abstract futurists like Tesla and his contemporaries in the art world.

How did you use Tesla's history as a window to introduce it into your abstract technique? There is much in human experience that resists the historical record. So the profession of historian is somewhat immune from such information. What is the history of our most extreme emotions and how can we record them? Of course, that is imaginary. It is my interpretation.

You chose to play with light to illuminate scientists who have seen and felt light more than any other. [Matthew Rankin: Light was our material. Light painting is a great technique that I associate with experimental photography. You open up the exposure and move the light around. I think we burned 15,000 sparklers in the process of making this film. I also used fluorescent lights, flashlights, and light-emitting diodes. There is a shot of Tesla reading in front of a Tesla coil that breathes and vibrates with light, which is a windmill we built so we could change and move the rows of lights. We exposed the windmill while rotating it, creating a brilliant circle of light.

The source of much of this inspiration is Tesla's incredible photographic archive, most of which uses such long exposures and silver emulsions. And of course, shooting on 16mm film means that it is light. What you are actually experiencing is not an encounter with numbers, but with light. When you see black, it is the absence of light, not the increase of numbers.

You talk about using formalism for abstract art, but its handmade imperfection reflects Tesla's vision, which was disproportionate to his time.

Matthew Rankin: It's troubling because we live in an era that is said to be anti-utopian. The utopian vision of the future, which was a big part of how people met their world in the early 20th century, has all but disappeared. the utopian vision of the future, which told the story of how people met their world in the early 20th century, has all but disappeared. It has vanished. But it is a difficult time to be a utopian. I have a lot of idealistic longings, but not a lot of idealistic beliefs. I think there is a difference between the two. [Matthew Rankin: That was based on an interview Tesla gave, and he really said that. The climactic scene where the bird explodes with electricity is my interpretation of what Tesla himself said about the bird's death. He said that a light more powerful than any light he had created in his laboratory began to burst from the bird's eyeballs. This interview took place near the end of Tesla's life, a time when he was unstable, so one can imagine that his testimony was made through such a prism. But I chose to believe it and tried to play it as seriously as I could.

Being based on testimony is both comical and historically weighty. It also allows more room to play with symbolism and light. [Matthew Rankin: Exactly. According to my own diagnosis, Tesla probably has a form of synesthesia, in which encounters with the world appear visually. Tesla claimed that when he experienced extreme emotions such as love, fear, or shock, his eyes would fill with abstract luminous objects. This film exploits that.

He is a wonderful subject for you. I am very impressed with your work because it has a synaesthetic impact, which is a hallmark of your work. I can easily recognize it in Matthew Rankin's films.

Matthew Rankin: I feel like I live with a lot of cinematic ghosts. My style, such as it is, is a synthesis. In my last film, "Meinarsky des Plummets," I told the story through manual processing. In "Tesla World Light," I use avant-garde abstraction from the early 20th century. I like to use the vocabulary of abstract art and animation for storytelling. I like experimental films, but I also have a desire to create characters and generate emotion.

So my work is about how far I can tell a story through the prism of visual abstraction. I believe that visual language has tremendous emotional power. It's not so much limited or trapped by pure formalism. [Matthew Rankin: I just made a feature film called "The 20th Century," which is a live-action historical drama about a former Canadian prime minister who fell in love with a shoe. [laughs] I'm moving on to inanimate objects.

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