All that heaven allows
The great American independent director Rob Tregenza talks about his art, life and his excellent new film, The Fishing Place
The first vortex. Rob Tregenza’s The Fishing Place is poetry by other means. (All photos courtesy of Rob Tregenza and Cinema Parallel.)
Rob Tregenza has been a vital and electrifying figure in American cinema since his astonishing, formally intricate debut, Talking to Strangers (1988), a 35-mm feature composed of nine uninterrupted 10-minute takes.
He is one of the world’s greatest cinematographers, evident from his own films and his stunning work on Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (available on the Criterion Channel). He also shot Alex Cox’s Three Businessmen.
Jean-Luc Godard was an early champion of Talking to Strangers, initiating a fruitful professional relationship. Their collaboration deepened when Godard produced Tregenza’s third feature, Inside/Out (1997).
Beyond his filmmaking, Tregenza—alongside his partner J.K. Eareckson—founded the essential arthouse distributor Cinema Parallel.
The company was instrumental in bringing to North American audiences works by some of the greatest modern filmmakers, including Godard (JLG/JLG, Hélas pour moi), Jacques Rivette (Haut bas fragile), and Tarr (Damnation, Sátántangó).
If, as Heraclitus says, one cannot step into the same river twice, Tregenza is a filmmaker incapable of repeating himself. His latest work, The Fishing Place, is poetry by other means—both a moral inquiry into fate and consequence and a meditation on survival and guilt.
Set during the Nazi occupation of Norway in the snowbound village of Notodden, in Telemark, the film plays like a variation on Winter Light by Ingmar Bergman and Le Corbeau by Henri-Georges Clouzot, of everyday life marked by suspicion and dread.
At the movie’s center is a charged triangle: Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a woman with a mysterious past; Hansen (Frode Winther), a Norwegian Gestapo officer with whom she shares a history; and a newly arrived priest (Andreas Lust). The story takes a fateful turn when Hansen enlists Anna to spy on the priest.
Like all of Tregenza’s work, The Fishing Place is built on stunning imagery and rigorously composed camera movements, interweaving actors, landscapes, mise-en-scène, and natural sounds into a deeply immersive cinematic experience.
The film unfolds in what Tregenza calls “three vortexes”—splits in the atom of filmmaking. The final vortex reimagines the movie’s daring two-part structure, clearing the decks not just in terms of form but of meaning itself.
The Fishing Place premiered last month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and opens this weekend in Los Angeles. If you're in LA, don’t miss it—the images are breathtaking.
After many years, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Rob Tregenza this week for a wide-ranging conversation about his life and art. Enjoy.
Shadows and Dreams: I thought of the famous quotation from the French critic-turned filmmaker Luc Moullet, “Tracking shots are a form of morality,” watching your film, of meaning and moral consequences in style.
Rob Tregenza: That scene was a major blow-up in the early days of that period. In that scene you’re alluding to, there was a shot of a woman in a concentration camp, and the camera goes towards the fence, and they went on to discuss the morality or a lack of morality of doing a dolly shot. I read that a long time ago, and I don't think it made a lot of difference in my mind, but I did put it in there somewhere.
You can consider how aesthetics definitely opens the door towards ethics. And if you're going to talk about the beautiful, then you can end up talking about the good in some way. So you can ask if the camera has an aesthetic responsibility to be beautiful, and then the inverse to be ugly. And if it does, then you can start talking about cuts and dolly moves on that horizon and I guess consider whether they're ethical or beautiful.
However, Patrick, for me, moving the camera is more an extension of dancing, physically the relationship of things in space and time. I wouldn’t initially ask is that an ethical move, or is it a beautiful move. It's just a move that has some sort of resonance with the internal organization of the film and with the constellation that it's operating within. I feel it, and then I do it.
Then I’ll come back to it, I'll look at it, and I'll say, in what sense does it quote, work or not work. And that then brings more of an aesthetic judgment into it. I think I moved the camera basically because I feel this intuitive need to do it somehow. That's connected more, I think, with the aesthetic with the narrative. Does the narrative justify it or motivate it, or is there something internally in what's going on in the constellation of that film that it calls out for motion. Of course, stillness is the inverse of that.
People talk a lot about my stuff being moving camera. A lot of my shots are just planned sequences where you basically don't move the camera. So it's the absence of the movement that makes the movement more pronounced when you finally see it or get back to it.
You can’t have constant movement all the time. It becomes frenetic, in a sense. So there needs to be that sort of control, absence of movement, and movement in some sort of connection. But connected to what? Usually it's connected to a narrative, or the rejection narrative, either not going with the causal connection of narrative, OR where you're subverting the causal connection of narrative.
Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) is the center of the emotionally complicated triangle.
Shadows and Dreams: Given how formally and thematically your films are, is it fair in constructing your scripts, you think more in images than language or words?
Rob Tregenza: When I did Talking to Strangers, I got the need for dialogue out of my system. And that film, when I look at it now, it’s so talky that I cringe. But it was part of the constraints or the poetics of that thing was about talking to strangers, so it tended to be heavy on dialogue. And I think to its detriment, actually. When I look back at it now, I think, “Okay, I did a talking movie,” and subsequently, from now on, I did less and less dialogue.
Actually, Inside/Out was an attempt to have no dialogue, synchronous sound, with no dialogue. But then the dialogue crept through in terms of those little monologues that I had the actors do. I basically said, “You will do what I ask you to do, collaborate with me, and I'll give you one minute of screen time to do and say whatever you want to do. It's got to be a fixed shot, but you can say what you want to say. You can do what you want to do. Give you a minute.”
So those little vignettes so to speak of Inside/Out were their opportunities to talk right, and their chance to say whatever they wanted to say. I use dialogue if it's necessary. If I don't have to have an actress stand there and do a page of dialogue, I'm very happy.
Shadows and Dreams: What was the impetus to make The Fishing Place? Was it an idea, an image, what compelled you to make it?
Rob Tregenza: The world of the imaginary and imagination. I do sometimes work off the specific images I have in my head. But they've been banging around my head for 50 years. I think rather than say I'm going to start with this image, I start more with a situation and a structure.
So going back to Talking to Strangers. It was nine shots, approximately 10-minutes long, no cuts. With The Arc, I started with the idea I wanted to do something about ARC, moving and cutting, and then from that, he became an arc welder. Then it becomes a reflection on the long take versus the cut.
So, there is a sense that they all come out of a conceptual framework that precedes the narrative. Inside/Out came out of the concept of being inside and out at the same time, and I was thinking about doing a film in a mental hospital as a metaphor for American society. So when I shared the idea with Jean-Luc, he was interested. I gave him a book of pictures. I went to the actual location with my own camera, and I shot black and white stills of all the places I wanted to shoot. So I gave another book of pictures and a very slim outline. I don’t think there was any dialogue.
I think the poetry of Gavagai was the original structure of that film. When Kirk Kjeldsen helped write that film, he basically said: “Here you’ve got to read this poetry,” because he knew I liked poetry. He wanted to do a documentary. And I didn't. For me, a documentary is no different than a feature film. They're all fiction, they're all fake. They're just playing with different rules.
But I don't like to play with the rules that are, quote, “documentary.” I like to play with the rules that are on the fiction side of things. So I said, “Well, I don't really want to do a documentary. Let's do something that integrates narrativity and those kinds of things into it.” He gives me the poems. And so that came off of that.
Shadows and Dreams: Was it different on this film?
Rob Tregenza: It was a different process, in a way, because I had specific ideas that I wanted to do about technology and the impact of technology on culture. So it was much a meditation of what happens when there are catastrophic changes in a culture because of technology or because of war. Those were the original ideas. Then it moved to Norway, because I’d already done a film in Telemark, and I had an affinity for that region.
The original story idea was set in Shanghai, China. We were going to do it there because there were similar historical rhythms. You have the Republic, or Nationalist army, of Chiang Kai-shek up against Mao, changing political situations, and people being trapped in the middle. The original genesis was a woman who was forced to be a spy in Shanghai between the changeover of the communists and the Nationalists. We couldn't get the money, and practicality comes in.
Then we tried to do it in Poland, so that, once again, the situation changed there, because there it was between the Polish resistance and the communists coming in. The third development, shall we say, is let’s just go back to Norway and stick it in in the Norwegian context at the end of World War Two, so that the dynamic of a woman being forced to be a spy and put into an ethical quagmire with all these people that remained consistent. The snow and all the stuff that's in there was just a happy blessing of being in Norway when it snowed.
So my films grow out of structure, they grow out of sets of associations, and then they come together, and then I start modifying it poetically. I'm more interested in the poetry of cinema now than I am in the quote narrativity of it. I think that shows. Of course, it’s more conducive to the image and less to the dialogue. My style has changed a lot since way back when we first met, and I've tried not to do the same film twice. I know that I have a very limited number of films in me, for a lot of reasons. So The Fishing Place was an attempt to do a different film.
It was set in Norway, but it was not really set in Norway. Its presence is set in the world that resonates with the Norwegian context, but it's hopefully a more international commentary on war and on the things that subvert human integrity and subvert what it is to be really essentially human and authentic. So that could have been China, that could have been Poland, and it ended up being Norway.
Shadows and Dreams: Do you speak either German or Norwegian?
Rob Tregenza: That’s the beauty of life, and also the issue of Gavagai. I got my PhD in UCLA, and my language was French. I did okay in order to pass my obligatory French language exam. I was doing my dissertation on Martin Heidegger. So I started trying to pick up German, not to speak it, but just to read it. I just started going crazy, and I basically said, “I can't do this.”
I've always liked the confusion you have when you encounter a different culture in a different language, and what it does to your brain. It opens up opportunities for the imagination, and the commonalities of human existence come forward, right? Yes, there is obviously a historical consciousness of every culture. There are these idiosyncrasies that are peculiar to that culture. But the human element is, I think, transcultural. The existential elements are transcultural. So I focus on those. I don't focus on exact dialogue. I have very few lines where I tell the actors, “You must say this,” because I want the actor to be confined by the script, but not confined by the dialogue.
All working at the creation of this event of cinema has to be within the parameters of what the screenplay is, what the overall arch and design is, but I don't care if they change my dialogue as long as they’re operating within the character. We collaborate on the creation of the character, but the characters are essentially created by the actor, under the realm of the script. You can’t do a low-budget art film without a script. That’s a death march. I have to have a script.
I have a script written. It may not have dialogue, but it has structure, right? I tend to be collaborative in demanding shall we say dialogue. I’d rather they be the character then be my dialogue.
Shadows and Dreams: You also are the cinematographer of your own films. Forgetting form and style for a moment, what does that mean practically? Are you operating the camera? How do you divide your responsibilities of directing and photographing?
Anna Hansen (Frode Winther), the priest priest (Andreas Lust), and the Norwegian Gestapo officer (Frode Winther).
Rob Tregenza: Up until the last film, I physically operated everything. I was the camera operator and the director of photography. The last film we basically moved back to robotic cameras. Cameras were basically remote control, and the end of cranes are arms.
We had two shots in Talking to Strangers that were shot off a 27-foot crane with a remote camera on it. When I have those situations, I sometimes use an operator who then uses the wheels. I don't use wheels. I basically use fluid heads when I operate because I didn't come through the studio where it was necessary for you to sit there with a studio geared head. So I've operated everything, all my films, except for the two shots in Talking to Strangers.
With The Fishing Place, I had to have an operator. I was not able to direct and operate and be on the crane at the same time. So that was the first film that I didn't physically, shall we say, run the camera. But now we have video assist. So I'm sitting next to the operator saying, “Left tilt up, deep down,” and you'll hear me doing that at the end of The Fishing Place.
There’s a funny thing where you can actually hear me telling the operator what to do. Now because of video assist and the ability to watch on video, I’m not saying operators are not essential, but they are less significant. In the old days, you didn't get to see the shot until dailies. The only person who saw the shot was the operator. I’ve never trusted an operator to do what I can do. I didn’t have the money to do it two or three times, and I was possessive about the creation of the image.
Shadows and Dreams: Like Stroheim or Sternberg, you’re not just obsessive or possessive about the image, but are you graphically or stylistically conceiving the work through the camera?
Rob Tregenza: I mean that that's sort of inevitable if you're the DP and the director, writer or the producer. I do not, by the way, believe in the auteur theory. Basically I do all those functions because I can't afford to pay other people to do it. So the penury situation of being an independent wanting to have certain things done the right way required diversity out of me.
We'll see if that continues as we go forward. But certainly it was a function the last 40 years of just being able to get it done and wanting to get it done in a certain level of efficiency and a level of art. I have all of these films in my head as a director. As a DP, there is never a shot I’m not ashamed to have in my mind as a precursor of another shot from another film.
I wouldn't say I have a photographic memory, but I’d say an extensive visual memory of scenes and specific shots as a DP that I've liked. And so that informs me as I go along.
For example, if I'm doing shots that do off-screen sound space. I'm thinking about examples of off-screen sound space. I'm literally thinking about A Man Escaped. So then I'm probably going to go to 50mm lenses. I'm going to probably control the shot. I'm thinking about Bresson. If I’m thinking about metaphorical crane shots, I’m thinking about Mizoguchi. If I'm thinking about sequence shots, then I’m thinking about Ophuls.
If I'm thinking about how Jean-Luc would do this, which of course I’m consistently asking myself that, I’d think how would Raoul Coutard shoot this. I go through the history of it, and then I go through the specifics of the shots, and I modify through imagination the application of what I'm trying to do.
Shadows and Dreams: Do you storyboard before the shooting?
Rob Tregenza: I tried to at the beginning, but I just found that useless, especially if you do have a plan for a sequence. That’s another reason why I'm the operator because you have to make so many mid-course corrections in a shot. A lot of times, if I had an operator, I would not have been able to do the shots, because the operator would have to bail out. At that point, they’d need the director to say, “Pan right, do this.”
So the corrections in a planned sequence are usually unforeseen, or often unforeseen. They're just something that happens, and you have to open your other eye, and look around the room and say, “Okay, where are we going?” And then you make compromises and sometimes blessings, because all of a sudden, you say, “I see that,” or, “That’s where we’re going.” Whereas if I'm just looking only through the lens of the camera, then I don't see that over there. So it's kind of schizophrenic. You got to operate with both eyes open.
Shadows and Dreams: Shooting in 35mm, like you do, there’s really no other alternative format, is there?
Rob Tregenza: There's no alternative. There will be elements of video in the film I’m doing now, because you’re watching a television screen. Godard did that with Numero Deux, shooting 35mm on TV, shooting video as video on monitors. I’ll do that, but I would never just take video raw and stick it up on the screen, unless there was some intervening reason for it. You’re doing a home movie, or something like that.
No, I'm gonna shoot 35 until I die because I like the analog textures of it. I know that digital images are getting better and better, up to 8K or 12K, and they’re going crazy with it. Digital images are getting better and better and better. But there's nothing quite like light going through a lens and hitting emulsion, and that silver halides that are in the emulsion, the way it reacts to the light. I just hate to overuse the word organic, but it feels more organic to my eye. The lenses, of course, are paramount. The lenses I used on The Fishing Place are vintage Cooke, the same lenses that Kubrick used.
You go back to the historicity of the process. And what lenses shot that, what camera shot that? What was the body here, what was the frame rate there, and if it was that lens, was there diffusion on it? If so, what diffusion? And I can tell that more so when I look at 35 because I have seen it in my mind. I've got the benchmark of what the 35 image looks like, and then I can start seeing the manipulations of it. I can't do that as well, maybe because I'm not familiar with it, with the high-depth digital images. I'm used to exposure. Everything I shoot is at a T-4 (transmission stop).
It doesn't matter if it's day, night or whatever. I know what the depth of field is going to look like. I know how it's going to affect the lenses. I know what I need to do as far as quantity of light, to get the foot candles up. If you don’t need to change that, then don’t change it.
Yes, I love the aesthetic of it, but it’s also habitual. I can use it as a tool to make sure that my images are still at that level of discourse that I want to operate at. Having fought through 16mm, and all the years we shot 16 lusting after 35 you know, it's only till we got to 35 and we got those lenses, and we got the depth of field. You could not get the same depth of field with a 16mm image. And we're spending years trying to do that. And as soon as around 1985 I finally got into 35. That was after shooting 16mm for almost 20 years. It was a liberation. You died and went to heaven. There's Arriflex, and there's the Zeiss lens, and there's a Angénieux lens. It was like Christmas time every day.
Shadows and Dreams: I haven’t seen or spoken with you since the death of Jean-Luc Godard. The formal and narrative rupture that happens in the last movement, or second part, is that an explicit reference to Contempt?
Rob Tregenza: Godard used to say up until the time of Pierrot le fou that he’d ask himself when he got into a corner what Hitchcock would do. Then he realized after that film he couldn’t use that anymore as a go-to situation, at least according to Richard Brody, who I found very trustworthy. Often, when I get into a corner, I do ask myself what Jean-Luc would do. I did not think of Contempt. If it was going to be anything, now I’m going to do Weekend. That was three cuts. It wasn’t one continuous thing.
I think about Godard a lot. Part of that, I think, is just that he is the poet of cinema. I mean, whether you like him or not, he did more, I think, than any single individual to redirect the landscape of cinema, and did it over time, and did it so radically. I go back and look at it, it's really humbling to consider all the years he did what he did.
I wanted to do an extended take. It’s a meditation on mise-en-scene, using the camera, using sound, off-screen space, how to use the crane, how to use the extended shot, when to use the cut, how to use the cut. So, I mean, that's all always in my head now. And so that puts you back to Godard a lot of times. So I knew I wanted to push out the parameters of what is possible in a planned sequence.
Getting back to your point about structure, do you want to do an extended take, something that reflects on the nature of what you’re doing. You also want to continue the narrativity in a poetic way, from from the first section to the next section.
In my mind, I think a lot about history. People ask, “What period is that part of the film based in,” and in my mind it’s based in the present, the historical present. That is the nonfictional telling of the fiction. That’s a structural assumption or metaphorical assumption.
The actress represents herself and makes the transition from the character to the person, and also the whole metaphorical thing behind that, playing on the idea of, “Don’t look back.” Those are the symbolic, metaphorical associations that come out of the first half into the second.
