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“A Nihilist Western”: Athena Rachel Tsangari on Harvest
Harvest It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing between the United States and Greece.
Tsangari returns this year with Harvest (2024), a fable set in a dying medieval-style village and filmed in rural Scotland on textured 16mm, Sean Price Williams, the cinematographer’s, signature. Bad luck and unresolved community problems start to drive a wedge through the hamlet as the outside world—one the villagers haven’t even conceived of—starts creeping in. The film follows Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), a childhood friend of the ineffectual Master Kent (Harry Melling), who ends up as the right hand to Quill (Arinzé Kene), the cartographer whose detached map-making is at odds with the villager’s spiritual relationship to the earth. When a group of outsiders arrive by boat one night, the social cohesion and authority in the community are put to the ultimate test.
I sat down with Tsangari over Zoom to talk about anarchic cinema, communal collapses and displacement after Harvest had its U.S. premiere as part of NYFF62’s Main Slate.
Filmmaker: When did you start developing Harvest?
Tsangari: About 4 years ago, during the pandemic. I was sent the first draft of the script by Joslyn Barnes, then I spent some time with the book. Have you read the book?
Filmmaker: I have not.
Tsangari: It took me a few months to find my way through Jim’s novel…quite difficult to adapt, I must say. It’s all told through Walt’s first person narration, and he is not what we call a reliable narrator. Joslyn and I worked together, but apart during the pandemic, then eventually I revised during rehearsals with the cast. I always change the script, radically at places, after all the cast is there and we physicalize the text.
Filmmaker: You’ve said before that with each new film you like to take on a specific challenge. Was there a specific challenge with Harvest?
Tsangari: It was all challenging because on paper it was a period film, but I didn’t want to make a period film. It is a modern story, a story that has not ceased to exist, that is taking place everywhere, right now. How do you speak about the erasure of land and people without falling into folklore or melodrama? Also, we were all keen on making this film as a community while re-enacting the destruction of a community. We shot on the western coast of Scotland during harvest season. The villagers had to be real people. So, we spent some time with Shaheen Baig, our casting director, putting out calls in the area and holding auditions at the town’s school. That’s how we found little Maya [Bonniwell], who plays Lizzie. She was a natural. Everyone had a character and a specific role in the village. No one was an “extra.”
Filmmaker: I think the film is extremely relevant to current events, and I think it’s interesting too that you use this almost faux-medieval setting—it is almost out of time for most of the picture—and then modernity starts to creep up on the narrative. I’m interested in what drew you to that imagery to tell this story.
Tsangari: I started with references mostly from ’70s cinema. Especially American and Eastern European ’60s/’70s cinema. McCabe, Missouri Breaks, Pat Garrett, Heaven’s Gate, Jancsó, Makavejev, the Czechs…Tarkovsky’s polaroids. But also Peter Watkins and Milch’s Deadwood. Nihilist, punk, hallucinatory kind of pictures. I was interested in sort of the chaos of the novel itself, how we could transfer this to cinema, this incompleteness. Nothing ever gets fully resolved, scenes kind of stop mid-scene, much like our day-to-day lives—a different process from my previous films. We immediately decided to shoot on celluloid to capture that fleeting tactility of the land itself, the main character, essentially. 16mm, natural light. The way we shot it with Sean [Price Williams], we had very little time and also I’m not very interested in shooting, like, tidy coverage. We were shooting every scene from beginning to end without stopping. So, everyone was always part of the dance.
Filmmaker: I think that ’70s, anarchic style is a perfect fit for Sean’s work. Was that why you selected him as the cinematographer?
Tsangari: Well, we worked before on Trigonometry, a BBC limited series shot in London, so I knew Sean would be right for this. We had a silent understanding, we didn’t have to say much to each other, we just moved together across spaces and faces. It was a very natural collaboration with everyone, cast and crew as one unit. We were all living together, working together, swimming, foraging, eating, drinking together. We were forging a community between us as we were making a film about the death of a community.
Filmmaker: With the cast and crew living together as a community while making this film, when the landlord character finally shows up it feels so outside of everything that the film has been living in so far. Did you keep them separate from the rest of the cast while making the movie?
Tsangari: No, actually, when Jordan (Frank Dillane) arrives we had already shot about three weeks. So, when he arrived it was really as if this alien landed. None of the villagers had even met Frank before. And actually, they didn’t know what we were going to shoot each day, so there was this sense of surprise and reacting to things as they were happening. When Jordan arrived with his posse on the horses, they stood there with their mouths open as if they saw a spaceship landing in the middle of their village. What’s on film is their actual reactions.
Filmmaker: Going to the style of the film, where it’s really down-and-dirty for the most part, when the travelers arrive, you pull to a god’s-eye view—or it’s almost the view of the cartographer. The camera moves up and the villagers turn into dots. A cloud comes over the landscape and envelopes it in a bit of shadow. The feeling I get is that it lends a certain sense of inevitability to what’s going on—it’s almost a force of nature that comes over them. But as the narrative progresses, it’s clear that all these things that are being forced to change are very manmade. I wonder what you think of that.
Tsangari: I mean, you said it. It was amazing actually when we were doing it. It was important to get into Walt’s head to visualize for the first time what a map means—how dangerous and insidious naming and enclosing space can be, what it means to be subjected to a god’s-eye view, or a western point of view. He kind of realizes it at that moment subconsciously—though he does absolutely nothing about it. It’s the beginning of the end. We never had enough freakin’ time to do more than two to three takes, and it was raining down on us most days, so it was actually a real miracle, with nature on our side, that the drone shot worked and in the end that cloud appeared like a ghost over the shot. Lots of miracles were happening like that. When we were shooting the barn dance and the burning of the corn dolly, there was something very Dionysian about it. There was so much rain that night: everyone was drenched, stuck in the mud, but they kept dancing and dancing. So, although it was a bitch to shoot, the rain came to add to this manic, kind of desperate spirit of the villagers. Celebrating, in a way, the end of their ancestry on their native land.
Filmmaker: I think it’s interesting, too, that at every turn the villagers point to outsiders as the reason everything is going wrong. To an extent, with the landlord and the introduction of capitalism to this village, that is true—this singular powerful person is displacing all of them. It seems like there are also internal dynamics that the village isn’t ready to reconcile with, in projecting out with all their woes being from the outside.
Tsangari: I was fascinated from the beginning in what was inherent in Jim’s novel, that no one is good in the world of Harvest. No one is really bad either. And they were fucked anyway before Jordan—representing progress—arrived. The crops were not enough for them to survive. It is as if they were secretly expecting some kind of change. They’re passive, naive. They’re xenophobic, but without really knowing how to name it, how to name anything. They’re innocent, but at the same time all guilty of complicity. And I think that’s…I’m trying to work through this. I still am. It’s the difficulty of Harvest as a film that doesn’t allow us to identify with anyone. There is no hero and there is no villain. The main character, Walt, is a coward. But he’s also a romantic, an idealist. And in the end, what he does is a really huge act for him, but in actuality quite small and pathetic. There is no redemption. Jos and I spoke a lot about the story as a fable, almost a children’s spooky story, about being passive and gullible observers to all this catastrophe that’s going on around us. We’re observing, we are commenting, we are forming opinions, but actually not doing much. So, it’s a film about doing nothing.The little girl, Lizzie , gets captured violently by the new master, the angel of capital, but then she quite likes where she ends up. She yearns for this shiny life he is going to offer her. She’s seduced. The eternal dilemma between Eden—the agrarian commons—and the promise—or threat—of the new world.
Filmmaker: I’ve seen you describe this movie as a Western, which I think a lot of people end up thinking of that genre as more aesthetics and imagery, but there’s a lot of function to it that gets missed. I want to dig into what you think of the Western as a genre and how it applies to Harvest.
Tsangari: The peaceful community that gets disrupted by the outsider, the Devil. The landscape being an epic witness to the unfolding clash between two world orders. But the difference with Harvest is it’s a nihilist Western, there is no hero to uphold the moral code on behalf of the town. The showdown toward the end is utterly pathetic. I see the Western as a kind of evolution of Greek tragedy in terms of there always being an innocent hero at the center of the story who slowly becomes aware of their fate with the help of the chorus, the village, the outpost, the caravan whatever. Then, in the end there is a catharsis, delivering themselves to their destiny. And in a way Walt, in the end, does.
Filmmaker: Back when you released Chevalier (2015), you said you were in a self-imposed exile from Greece. Is that still the case?
Tsangari: I am between a small island in Greece and Los Angeles. I’m teaching and working on a new film. I spend lots of time in Greece, there’s a lot of back and forth. I wish it was easier to make films in Greece. It’s like a form of punishment. We are the most underfunded cinema amongst European countries, maybe the world even. I wouldn’t be surprised. It just sucks big how little our successive ministries of culture cares about cinema. Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks cares more about cinema than the Greek ministry of culture.
Filmmaker: I was wondering because Harvest is a film focused so much on displacement. I wondered how much that is a personal feeling for you.
Tsangari: Displacement, drifting has always been a central theme in my work—not belonging, being a drifter, bystander to big or small history. From The Slow Business of Going (2000) until Harvest, I feel like my brain is displaced and dislodged like my movies. We finished Harvest just before Venice. It was a very, very intense experience—difficult film to make, difficult film to edit. In the end we had about 70 hours of footage to go through. There was a code I’d established at the beginning: we were going to go from close-ups—sort of like an ode to the human face—to big tableaux, nothing in between. And because we were shooting without stopping, it was quite a big feat for Matt Johnson and Nico Leunen, our two editors. The sound was, of course, as important as the image—Nicolas Becker, Linda Forsen and the whole sound team were extraordinary partners. Nicolas came to set and recorded with his contact mics the ground and under the ground. The soundtrack actually, the base of the soundtrack, was the earth herself.
Filmmaker: That’s so interesting about putting the contact mics so close to the ground, because I think through the eyes of Caleb Landry Jones’ character, he is also so intimate with earth and the fine details of it. He seems to miss the broad picture in the way that the cartographer can only see the broad picture. I think it’s interesting that you highlight both the beautiful qualities of those perspectives but also what they miss.
Tsangari: We considered the sound of the ground, the earth as being the rumble of everyone’s subconscious. She was always there, the earth always demanding her presence. Then there’s the birds, lots of birds. Nicolas recorded every bird and insect and all the little creatures in the land. And in a way, all of them were the greek chorus to the tragedy that was unfolding.
Filmmaker: It seems formally, too, like a rejection to the modernity that is coming for them.
Tsangari: Yeah but at the same time with Nathan Parker [production designer] and Kirsty Halliday [costume designer], we were constantly throwing small modernity bombs and watching what happens….injecting our bucolic world with contemporary textures and shapes. Atemporal is what we went for. The men up at the pillory are swearing in every filthy Scottish swear words, and it’s all completely ad-libbed. The feast dance, choreographed by Holly Blakey—she took elements from traditional dance and fused them with wild, profane contemporary movements of the bodies. The music score by the Harvest Family Band [Caleb Landry Jones, Ian Hassett, Nicolas, Lexx] was both electronic and fiercely analog, made with an array of handmade instruments. As I said, the whole process at every stage was quite anarchic, free spirited, symbiotic. There is something in Harvest, the book and the film, that is unknowable, a sense of mystery that I really didn’t want to disrupt. It’s unresolvable, like the wars around us and inside us right now, October 2024. And on this optimistic note… shall we stop here?
