Imagine sitting down in a room with an iPad, a screen and loudspeakers. After a brief introduction to the set-up, you are in there, alone, for what is described as an 80- to 90-minute “live cinema experience.” Its title: Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede.
After you look around the room a bit, you pick up the iPad. And off you are on a surreal journey. If you are now wondering what the heck I am talking about, the creator of the experience, Joe Bini, is likely smiling.
Yeah, THAT Joe Bini! The creative, who in his work as an editor has collaborated with the likes of Werner Herzog, Andrea Arnold and many others. While that work is all about helping someone else’s creative vision become reality, Bini has now created something very, very different.
Is it a book? Is it a movie? Well, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. What it is for sure is a sold-out offering that is part of the Inter:Active Exhibition at the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen
International Documentary Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, March 22. And the fest program lists Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede as a live cinema experience.
You really have to experience it to understand it. But let’s look at how it’s described on the festival website. You can read there that it is “an abstract memoir of Bini’s life as a film editor and storyteller.”
Bini himself, in an artist statement, tells us: “Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede is a story told by an author who refuses to be an author, so they try to convince you that you are the author. Which is ridiculous, since clearly you’re the reader. But then it turns into a film and suddenly you’re a viewer. Which is even more ridiculous.”
During a CPH:DOX panel discussion this week, Bini shared that “a lot of what I’ve done is feature-length documentary that’s a very specific form,” before surprising the audience by adding: “My feeling is that it really doesn’t work half the time. There are much better forms of documentary and much better forms of cinema.” His conclusion: “Authorship more and more now is [about] the person taking it in,” rather than the filmmaker or writer.
And that’s where Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede comes in. After all, it may proudly defy classification. But once you do sit down in that room and pick up that iPad, you will likely find that the experience is a mix of book, film and your own imagination.
Bini wrote and directed the project, produced by Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi. The technical director
is Nick Bush, and the composer Max de Wardener.
THR met up with Bini over coffee in Copenhagen to talk a bit more about the creative adventure that is Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede.
“Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my career as an editor is the idea of audience,” he explained. “And a lot of what the piece comes out of are things I never liked about the film business. I don’t like the whole role of what the director is. And a lot of producers, or funders, when they imagine the audience, it’s adversarial,” and the thought it you have to make movies “okay for the audience.”
So Bini started thinking about who the audience for his films is or could be. “Instead of a film goer, I started thinking about a reader,” he told THR. “I like the idea of a reader, because a reader thinks you’re really smart and laughs at your jokes and all that kind of stuff, which to me, was very freeing.”
Bini felt it would make sense to write in character for Ganymede. “The whole thing is a character. He speaks, he writes,” he shared. “It’s similar to me, but it’s not me. It’s based on things from or about my life.”
So, wait! What does all that mean for authorship? “I have always been interested in that [Michel] Foucault idea of the death of the author,” Bini explained. The French philosopher argued that the author is not a true creator but a functional, historical construct designed to classify and limit the meaning of texts. “The author thing is [BS]. We put too much precedence on that when, in fact, you’re reading a novel, so it’s so much about you. You have that control. So these were just some of the things I thought were interesting to play with.”
And that he does with Ganymede. Using the language of open cinema, the experience mixing text and imagery, giving the audience room “to put their own meaning on it,” Bini said. Does he consider the experience to be cinematic? “Yes, for sure,” he told THR. “I think that’s a really important message. You don’t have to spend five years on one movie. “I love the art of cinema. That’s the reason I do it. And if you like cinema, then you should be creating.”
That long title of Bini’s live cinema creation is a reference to Les Banks’ Burden of Dreams, his doc about the chaotic production of Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. The mention of other people’s dreams is a nod to the role of the editor.
The pragmatic challenge of Bini’s live cinema content, for now, is that time and delivery limit how many people can actually experience it. But he said he is looking into options to address that. A guest book that people can make entries in after experiencing Ganymede already include thankful comments, a flow chart of sorts will all sorts of thoughts and arrows, and a short piece of music composed in reaction to the experience.
One person fell asleep during the final minutes of Ganymede, Bini shared. And he was happy about that. “I thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” he told THR. “They got into that state of mind to such a degree that they felt comfortable enough to fall asleep. I didn’t take it as an offense.”
The title of the wild ride that Bini has served up at Copenhagen makes one wonder if there could be more experiences in the vein of Ganymede in the works. Shared the creative: “I have ideas for others.”
