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Antonio Campos and the Case of the Conscious Camera (A Mystery)
In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of attempting to place the viewer in his protagonist’s subjective space, Campos has pushed his formal approach into a sublimely inventive new realm.
Don’t take my word for it – recently, at the behest of IFC Films, I had the chance to interrogate Campos, detective-style, in the hopes of solving the mystery of how his wholly unique method of filmmaking works. Speaking personally, I can say that my conversation with him has helped me enormously with respect to how I approach filmmaking.
(The above video was produced by IFC Films, the distributor of Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer, and offered to Filmmaker for premiere on this site.)
