Billy Palumbo, WOEFF Festival Director: Your film, apocalipsis, in some ways feels like a travelogue, but kind of a bleak travelogue. I'm wondering about the interplay between the images and the text: Did you originally have that in mind when you're collecting the images, or did the film take shape after you photographed and as you were piecing it all together? 

 

Lauren Vick: It took place completely after the fact. It was this travel footage from a trip that I took and I had no idea what I wanted to do with it after. I also had no idea it would end up being something that is so sort of bleak, but that is what manifested, yeah. And then after is when I wrote everything and then it sort of pieced itself together.

      I had shot all of this stuff on a trip that I took with an ex-partner and we had talked about making something together, but we couldn't. We never ended up figuring out what we just were shooting things. And then we ended up breaking up on this trip. So then I had all of this footage and there was also the end of this relationship and it was like, do I do something with this? Do I not do something with this?

      At the same time that I was trying to decide about all of these things, I was having all these conversations about apocalypse with my friend who's also a filmmaker, but we were just talking about apocalypse and I think she was the one who brought up to me that the root of the word apocalypse means revelation. We were just sort of talking about all of that and like the language of it all. So that was one aspect.

      And then there was this other aspect where in that relationship, my partner had made a film. In the very beginning of our relationship, he sent me this film that he had made that was inspired by a film that was inspired by La Jetee by Chris Marker. And so the two films inspired by that were basically travel footage turned into apocalypse film and more traditional apocalypse films [with a voice over that says it is] the last recordings of like humanity or something like that. There is this sort of genealogy of these films. And he had sent me his, but he didn't know that it was inspired by La Jetee. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that's one of my favorite movies, you should watch it. And then it was this whole thing in our relationship where he never ended up watching that film.

      And so then I had all of this footage and then I was having these conversations about my with my friend about Apocalypse and then it became this thing where I was like, oh, this is going to be an apocalypse film and it's going to be like the descendant of all of these other films. . . It wasn't like I had written a whole script and then was fitting things or had all the images and then was adding words to it. It kind of they all happened together.

 
BP: Throughout your film, there are some words that seem, like “apocalypse,” to take on extra importance and you highlight their definition on-screen. When you were piecing your images and words together, were you looking for ways to incorporate some of these other words, or were you kind of stumbling upon these words and meanings? 

  
LV: I think it was mostly a stumbling . . .  

      This was shot in Colombia, which is why it's called apocalipsis because it is Spanish. And so also on that trip we were taking some like language classes, so I was thinking about conjugation, which is where the idea of “will” comes in, because it’s just: “I will do this. I will go to the store.” There’s not a specific way to say the future for verbs in English. And that influences the way you think about things.

      At the end, I'm talking about how “apocalypses” sounds like “ellipses” and sounds like “Ypse” and all of these things, and the fact that it does sound like it reminds you of those things, or at least for me, that's how I think about ideas. It's like, oh, this reminds me of this, even if it's as simple as it sounds like this thing. And so then I have some sort of association, whether they're like that rightfully there or not. But then it kind of is rightfully there because it's what I think of. I think it’s the same for everybody.

      [Another important word was] Empty. I was thinking about the empty thing, like atoms, which are mostly empty space. And so then I was thinking about that and I stumbled on it.

 
BP: Yeah, I was just struck again watching that section, about empty space of the atoms. And then since the atoms make up us, we're mostly empty space and I'm curious if for you, is the empty space a gap, something missing, or is the empty space the potential to be filled? In other words, is it optimistic or pessimistic, glass half full or half empty? 

 
LV: That's interesting. You know, I am definitely like a glass half full type of person generally, but I also think —  

I used to always think about people: there are people who are like solid objects that take up space, and then there are people that are more liquid that then like fill up the remaining space. Not that one is better than the other.  

There's just differences and thinking of the atoms, and the empty space, and then the end of this, this “great love.” And -- what is love between two people? Someone else filling up that space and you filling up someone, space in someone else's life, and then the absence of that. This absence that is now this new absence, that what has been filled by that person for the rest of your life, you know, or — or maybe the way those the atoms that you are have reoriented themselves because of the shape that they were like formed into because of this other person, even though that person's not there anymore. I hope that answered your question. . . 

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BP: When you're talking about some people being solid, that makes me think about words and the way that you're talking about words, that they have these very tangible definitions that are sort of irrefutable, but then some of them, or all of them, have subjective associational meanings. Obviously your film is drawing attention to language, but in a way that is is different than films that are voiceover-driven and that instead you've decided to have text on screen, two (or three) different "voices" of text styled differently and placed differently on the frame. Could you talk about the choice to use written text rather than voiceover? 

 
LV: I thought about doing voice over and I landed on not having it because I wanted there to be silence because it felt like the way that this person was no longer in my life. Like there was this silence, there was this absence.  

      This very much was a film about this, but it's not just so clearly a film about a breakup. It’s about an apocalypse and an ending and also the way that that is a relationship. I think it was sort of like the silence of an ending, you know, like the way you sort of just sit with something or the emptiness, like there's the thing missing.  

 
BP: Speaking of the endings and the things left behind, I wanted to talk about how the film treats time, with some seemingly incompatible ideas about it. On the one hand, there's the apocalypse, the end, and the apocalypse is the end all of endings, right? But then there's this idea of “will” of the future tense and thinking forward into the future. Could you talk about how the film handles the idea of a future after an ending. 

 
LV: I think there is no ending without a beginning of something. You can't see that until you have completed the ending. Sometimes there is no way until there is some sort of closure or death or passing through. Which I think is because this thing has to be experienced, and we can only experience it in, you know, 24 hours a day, the way we experience time.

      And I think that's like there's the element of of film in that too. Film is a durational medium. You watch it, there is a beginning and then there is an end. And then there is the you that has seen the thing or that hasn't seen the thing. And then there's the you that has seen the thing and then there's you experiencing it and that happens in time. It's different than looking at a painting or a photograph.

Even Apocalypse comes from Revelation, it is this illumination, a shining back, but also an illumination of the future and what is now in front of you. You can have the outlook of like “this is something that can be filled and it's good” or “this is something that is empty and something is missing” and I think it can be both. I guess that for me, with an ending, there is always a beginning of something . . .

 

This interview was edited for clarity.