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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
The Shipwrecked Triptych When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first as seen in a nursing home in 1983 over which queer male nurses preside, then in an unnerving rural segment in which an alleged child services employee talks his way into the house of an African family and refuses to leave and finally flashing back to the medieval ages. The segments are shot, respectively, on 16mm Kodachrome, 35mm that was then transferred to VHS (!) and black-and-white 16mm augmented with some AI. The blackly comic results were a standout at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam; the film has its North American premiere at First Look this Saturday.
Filmmaker: It took you four years to make the film. I’d like to know if it began as a gallery project that you then thought of expanding into a film, or if that was always the plan. Secondly, I’d like to know how that four years broke down.
Eroglu: We were always very aware that we could show it as a three-channel video installation in a museum space, and that it would also function as a feature film. The production company I worked with were interested because, for them, that would be a new step. Before that, they were working with a few artists like myself on shorter pieces, helping with the technical aspects: cinematography, production, post-production. In order to make it into the film business, you need to [make a film that’s] around 90 minutes to get it into circulation. I made a film in Bulgaria with one of the two owners of the production company that has a running time of 50 minutes and so far hasn’t made it into any festivals, even though I’m very happy with the film. When you don’t adhere to conventional duration, you have a problem.
We had a complex funding scheme going on. Basically, with German funding, you have to front the money yourself, then you get the money once the film is made. There were issues with liquidity, assets, flows of money and, just before we were supposed to shoot part one, COVID hit. We shot part two in September 2020 as the first film, because it was only a few actors and much more manageable for us, then part two in February 2023, then the last one this summer. With this last one, I had to insist with my partners that we [go] ahead and shoot it, because they were already saying, “But maybe we should wait another year.” I didn’t want to wait another year to get more money, or for them to have a better influx of money from other streams of income so that they could front it in a more comfortable way. It was kind of weird; this is the first time I made a film where I felt like, “Oh, I’m not really calling the shots. I will just have to wait.” And part three had already been postponed one year.
Filmmaker: In The Bedroom Triptych, there is a pretty clear structure of how these segments all relate. This is not so clear. How would you describe the conception of Shipwrecked’s parts to each other?
Eroglu: I’m pointing at parallels between African refugees, the ostracized, mentally ill people in the Middle Ages, homosexual nurses and, in a sense, also the old people [they take care of]. They’re all walking along this precipice, this abyss, unbeknownst to themselves. All these protagonists carry that burden. I think that’s a very human trait, that people just take on hardship and accept things, kind of like when children have a hard upbringing they just think it’s normal. I feel like that’s how people got through the Middle Ages—they thought it was how it’s supposed to be.
That connection is a bit tenuous. The idea was always that this would be a kind of chronicle of German history encompassing many centuries, social realities and conundrums. Making this has been a very intuitive thing; that’s the way I make films in general. I pick up a lot of stuff from other directors that I’m interested in, and with technology the last 20 years, we’ve had a treasure trove of film history readily available to us in good quality, so you could really study things very meticulously. I’ve done that: going into the countryside, watching 200 films every year by myself and setting up a cinema-like space there. I remember watching this passage with Ingmar Bergman in one of the many documentaries I watched about him, where he says that this image that comes to him, then he builds. That was about Cries and Whispers; he just saw women dressed in white in this red room. That’s very much how my films appear to me. And also with my knowledge of film history, I realized, “I’ve never actually seen a Ship of Fools portrayed in cinema,” then this image of people wandering aimlessly through some kind of landscape came to me. I think that was the first motif. Of course, there’s a lot of symbolism. That probably came later.
Filmmaker: Before we talk about the individual segments, I want to talk in a general sense about your approach to capture mediums, because you’ve worked through so many different formats.You’ve shot on very sharp digital cameras, a lot on 16mm, also VHS. So, I’m wondering if there’s a systemic, indexical probing of their properties. I’m also wondering if 16mm is your favorite format, and what has changed about working with it over the years? For example, Kodachrome wasn’t in stock 10 years ago, so you wouldn’t have been able to use it for the first segment then.
Eroglu: Let me start by saying, I love 16mm. As a spectator, you have to add something to it. I really love when there’s something in the image that’s not really there because there’s a lot of grain, or the way you work with light and dark. Cinema is about understanding darkness and light. When you film a landscape or a space in a house [in 16mm], it’s dark, there is so much that’s enveloped. mother! by Darren Aronofsky was actually a major reference for film number two, that house that they’re stuck in. When people start arriving at the house, there are nondescript meadows around the house that are beautiful but also creepy, because they flow and fade in a way that you can get with the 16mm that you can’t really get if you’re shooting with a Red camera. It’s just too specific.
I started shooting on 8mm, like, 20 years ago, and that was pretty accessible. It was financially feasible for me to shoot on that, then I got more into 16mm. I got a Bolex camera, downloaded the user’s manual on the internet and taught myself how to use that. Later, I started working with people from the Danish Film School; I just happened to meet some of those people at parties, talking about cinema and stuff. Then I showed them the 16mm films I’d shot myself, and they were like, “Maybe we should do something together.” All of a sudden, I’m shooting with a crew, very skilled technicians, and then I realized “I’m learning, I’m growing and I’m thriving when I have a crew”—and then later, “Oh, I’m also thriving when I have actors. I think my work is getting better because of these things being brought in.” It could very well be the opposite, you know. Personally, I could get big discounts in Denmark. It’s a very small film industry, so they would rent the Arriflex camera for very cheap to up-and-coming people. You basically only paid the insurance costs. I’d go to Zentropa, Las von Trier’s production company, and rent cheap dolly equipment, sound equipment and call in favors from friends. Everything was quite cheap.
I took a loan as a student to pay for those films. I was trying to make films—not something that was like an attempt at making a film, or a sketch for a film. I went directly: “I mean business here, I’m going to make a film.” And that cost me a lot: I had to go and get apples from the neighbor’s tree and make apple pie for dinner for months. But that also gave me precision. A lot of these films are pre-cut in my mind; I show up with a very clear idea. It is getting more complicated, of course, to shoot on film—pricier, more difficult—but now I am shooting with film funding. I come from an art background where, you know, The Bedroom Triptych was made for maybe 8,000 euros. With funding, [shooting on film is] a minor detail.
Filmmaker: So what’s your philosophy when it comes to transferring film in post? I’ve noticed that often when people shoot on 16mm the last five years or so, when they transfer to DCP, the pixels are the size of cars. How do you work on that kind of thing?
Eroglu: To be honest, I just go with what I can see. It’s really not about a good scan. A 4K 16 millimeter scan doesn’t really matter so much—although with this one, we did have a 4K scan, or maybe even a 6K. But with all the technical details, my cinematographer’s really in charge of that. We shot with a Bolex and used negative film for the very beginning of the third part, where you have all these scratches on the film, and when we saw that, we were quite shocked. This was just a reconnaissance trip for the cinematographer and I; we had to shoot in Germany, in a specific state, so we just went around, shot some landscapes. When we got it back from lab, we thought, “Whoa, they really mishandled it.” Only later I thought, “Oh, wait, we can use this like a portal back, as if this was shot with a 500-year-old camera.”
Filmmaker: Why did you want to shoot 35mm and transfer to VHS? I don’t think I’ve seen somebody do that before. As you were talking, I remembered that Zentropa and Lars von Trier had their own relationship to digital-to-film, but in the reverse direction.
Eroglu: I’m definitely inspired by von Trier. Also, I was reading a text by Robert Eggers recently about his new Nosferatu; he said that he watched Nosferatu originally on a VHS tape and it was like it was disinterred. I like that; VHS makes [the image] even more kind of removed or pushed away somewhere else. I can give you a pretty clear answer: I wanted to destroy the film. For all three films, it was always a discussion with the producers: “Do we really need to shoot on film?” And I insisted. Before I did it, I would say it was about committing an act of violence to my film. And the film is about violence, so [it made sense] to do something to the film as well. When I did the transfer in Amsterdam, I can tell you honestly, I felt a bit nauseated when I watched it. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it physically made me so uncomfortable. Maybe also because I empathize with my own characters. I was there, of course—the film is imbued with real suffering in a way, and it was a very uncomfortable film to make. I like all the actors, we all got along, some of them came for the premiere, but still, to make a film like that is very uncomfortable, something I’ve learned now.
When I was doing the sound mixing in January, we went back and looked at all three films to match them. We had the 35mm up first, before I did the transfer, and it was really strange to see. My first reaction was, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful, the light and everything.” Then the sound engineer switched it to VHS, and it was kind of shocking. And he was against it: He’s like, “I don’t like this, and this is not going to be good for the sound either.” We didn’t do that; we didn’t transfer the sound, only the image, you know. But then we watched it, we adjusted together, then he said, “This works.” Watching it in the cinema for the first time, I thought “Wow, this is so fun. When people go to the cinema, they will never have seen this before.” You have the [VHS] crackling at the bottom, almost like it’s hellfire or something. When I reflect on it now, I would say I wanted to dispel those characters into an even more hellish dimension.
Filmmaker: When you shot the 35mm, did you then fully grade and finish it as if it were going to be 35?
Eroglu: Yeah, and I didn’t even tell the grader what we’re going to do, because I didn’t want her to be discouraged in any way.
Filmmaker: So when you transfer it to VHS, do you have to regrade it again or do you just accept the result?
Eroglu: I just accepted the result exactly like it was.
Filmmaker: And then you scan the VHS back in and that’s it?
Eroglu: It’s a complicated procedure. I don’t know how they did it even though I was present for it. It’s a huge machine. Many of the parts are not manufactured anymore. And [the transfer] changed the frame rate, as film is a minute faster. I didn’t know that. The sound engineers, who are brilliant, were able to change the sound design so it fit and you don’t hear [the gap between image and sound], but that was something I wasn’t prepared for. VHS is a bit faster, the difference adds up—one minute per 30 minutes.
Filmmaker: Where was that segment shot? In Germany?
Eroglu: All three films are shot in the same region of Germany, Hessen. That was something the film funding requires, and we had to hire people from that particular state, so that was a bit of an obstacle. But now, when I look at the films, I love that area. I also studied there. You can find all this stuff there. We did cheat a little—we shot a little bit in Austria, the snowy stuff, the mountains.
Filmmaker: The nursing home in the first part, was that a decommissioned nursing home? A soundstage?
Eroglu: A hotel that is furnished with ’70s stuff called Parkhotel 1970, located about 30 kilometers east of Frankfurt in this very rural, deserted area. It was just perfect. We spent a huge chunk of the budget just renting the location. It’s a gigantic hotel.
Filmmaker: Does it still operate as a hotel?
Eroglu: Yeah. It’s a funny place. It looks kind of fancy when you Google it, but then when you’re there, it has this flea market smell. [The hotel has since closed.]
Filmmaker: Were there guests there while you were shooting?
Eroglu: No, we rented the whole place. It was quite dilapidated, but it fit our film perfectly. [The production designer] added a lot of touches, of course, but we basically got a full, three-dimensional film stage. When you build a set, sometimes you don’t shoot the the ceiling, etc. Here, you can move the camera in any direction you want.
Filmmaker: When I watched it, it didn’t really occur to me to ask how the special effects were generated. I just assumed they were computer-generated in a conventional sense. Then yesterday, I was looking at my Twitter feed, and this guy is very upset with you, because he says that you’re using AI in the third part and that it just ruins everything. So, if you are using AI, is it meant to be perceived as AI, or is it simply a tool to achieve those effects?
Eroglu: Maybe there should also be a trigger warning before the film. I’m just a self-taught filmmaker. I’m sure a lot of film directors are the same way: They can make a nice film, but there’s so many things they don’t know. I don’t know anything about budgets or whether we’re obliged to show an AI [disclaimer] at the end. There is some AI in the film. I think it’s quite obvious myself, actually, but it’s a tiny bit, and I think whatever this person is saying, maybe he’s overreacting a bit, because it’s folded into other things. I don’t think that’s unethical; I don’t think it’s cheating or anything. I made drawings that I sent to the animators; maybe 1/3 of the image when there’s AI is constituted by AI, the rest is not AI. It’s three programs; it’s not like we’re just prompting something. Also, the post for the third film was done quite fast; we just finished it basically before the IFFR premiere.
You wrote that the effects didn’t look photorealistic. That was definitely very considered. They actually did something a bit more realistic looking and made different worms—we call them worms, it could be something else, of course—but I said I wanted them very graphic. There’s this economy in it. I think in general, when you make films, it’s very important to always scale back and refuse this impulse to seduce. There are some backgrounds in the film when he’s dancing at the end in this forest. Those are the moments where I think it’s quite obvious that it is AI-generated backgrounds. There’s also this demon we took from a Bosch painting. We animated that. The fact that we’re putting [the AI-generated images] into 16-millimeter film made it a lot easier, of course, because of the resolution [required to composite special effects into 16mm] being quite low. I did have a concern that maybe this will not age well, but I liked that it gave it another push towards the phantasmagorical. I thought that really suits the film, actually, that we make it a bit more bonkers.
Filmmaker: You’ve lived in Germany. You’ve lived in Denmark. The film is, to some extent, explicitly about German identity through the centuries. Are you interested in the idea of exploring German identity as a cinematic project, or is this just one part of a larger consideration of the European landscape? You’ve made installations and sculptures about your father. There’s an immigrant, diaspora component; how does this fit within all that? I guess a simpler way of putting it is, do you conceive of yourself as a European filmmaker, or do you conceive of yourself as a filmmaker in Europe? Because it’s not the same thing.
Eroglu: There are cultural overlaps between all these countries. I actually live in the Netherlands, and that has something to do with financial structures. I’m very happy I don’t live in Denmark anymore. I feel like Denmark is a northern German province, a little bit like the Shire—people just want to have a good time, light some candles, eat well and watch TV. Whereas Germany has a much more insane history, and it’s so much more dramatic. Not only when you look at like political history and wars, but also Kant, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Kafka, Thomas Mann—I’m very shaped by those things. When I was studying art, I moved to Germany to study in an art academy there, to finish my studies there, and it was amazing. It’s a country that takes art really seriously. They really believe in the sublime as a kind of ideal, whereas in Denmark, the notion of the sublime is silly. They don’t need that for anything. Then again, a lot of things are also sublimated here. Not so in Germany. I also lived in France for a few years, I’ve lived in Italy for few years. I’m very European; I really believe in Europe. I mean, Europe is also very bad in many ways, but I believe in the coexistence of all these countries and, hopefully, the idiosyncrasies of different cultures. I could make this film about German history, which is quite a audacious thing to do, because I lived in Germany for ten years. I learned the language properly, I started reading German literature in German and so on, then I felt like, “I get this place, I have something to say about it. I can shoot a German landscape, and it’s also part of me.”
I really don’t want to be a filmmaker who just goes somewhere: “Oh, let me go make something like Paris, Texas. These landscapes, they’re so poetic!” I would never want to do that. I lived in Italy, then I had a divorce, then I had to leave Italy, but my idea was, I stay here another 10 years, maybe I can make films like the films that I really love, maybe I can go towards something like Pasolini. I think you can’t really make a film in a language you don’t understand. I’ve seen films that felt very translated. A great example is The River by Jean Renoir. That film is clearly written in French, then translated directly into English. To me, it’s just a bit silly. Now with my next projects, I’m considering, where should I situate them? I have funding for something in Germany, so probably I’ll make another German-language film. But then I’m thinking, should I also go to France? I speak the language. It’s a very difficult choice, because everything you say in that language, it just means something else. It has another color, another mood, and my films are 100% about atmospheres. These three films are about presenting you with three different atmospheres and letting you lose into those worlds, and letting you enjoy that, having fun in there, and seeing what you’ve grasped from that.
I will never shoot in the Netherlands because I don’t like the language so much. And also, they don’t have any landscapes, it’s just man-made everything. They have this expression: “Everything is doable.” Sorry, I think it’s the antithesis of believing in the sublime, something that’s bigger than yourself. If everything is doable, there’s nothing that draws you. What about death and so on? Also, the domestic spaces are so small you can’t get a camera in there. Without landscapes you’re going to have a problem. I think that’s why you don’t have a lot of Dutch films that circulate in the top festivals. When you look at the great American films, the great Italian films, also to some extent the great French films, they have landscapes as such an important component. So, there was a long-winded answer to your question, but I think Europe is an interesting playground for filmmakers like me.
