LIDF

In The Solitary Life of Cranes, Eva Weber joined some of the hundreds of crane drivers who, despite working high above the city, enjoy a strangely intimate view of London by Kamila Kuc

Kamila Kuc: Your award-winning documentary, The Solitary Life of Cranes reminded me of Dziga Vertov’s classic Man with the Movie Camera. How did you get interested in cranes?

Eva Weber: I originally got fascinated by the idea that there is almost another world above London; yet most of us never look up to notice cranes or their drivers. The drivers in turn can see everything going on below them, yet their only way to connect with the world they are building is by watching it from a distance.

In many ways, the film builds and expands on themes touched on in my last film ‘The Intimacy of Strangers’ [shown at the 2007 LIDF] – the conflict between being intimate yet distant; and how our lives are shaped by our urban environment.

One of the drivers describes in the film how he can see the same person in a building every day and it is almost like this person becomes part of his life, yet when he sees the same person in the street, they would not know him.

However, once I started researching the film further, I was also just blown away by the sheer beauty of being up on a crane and seeing the world from such a different point of view.

KK: Did you learn anything new about the city through making this film? Has the making of it changed your perspective of the city, the way you experience it in any way?

EW: Being up on a crane gives you a very unique view of the city and life below – there is something about being so high above the ground and removed from the world that puts everyday life into a very different perspective and lets you see the wider patterns of a city.

Yet, in many ways it has been the small observations of the drivers that have really stuck with me: the way people walk differently at certain times in the day, the different way couples look before and after a long and stressful Saturday afternoon shopping trip, or the way that buildings in London’s financial centre change at night – where during the day, mirrored glass keeps the outside world out, you can suddenly see inside clearly at night.

KK: Do you work with a script and how tightly do you follow it?

EW: Having had preliminary chats with all the drivers before the interviews, I had a very clear idea of the topics and themes I wanted to explore in each interview. Yet, whilst I had a list of questions; I tried to approach the interviews more as a conversation between me and the drivers, as I wanted their answers to sound more like observations, rather than formal interviews.

My aim was also to allow them enough space and time to further explore subjects and ideas that came up in the interviews and to try and go beyond the questions that I had thought of.

KK: There is a certain degree of voyeurism in The Solitary Life of Cranes – one driver talks about a middle-aged woman walking around her flat naked for example. Did observing crane drivers remind you a little of your profession as a film-maker? In Steel Homes you also, albeit in a rather metaphorical sense, enter people’s private spaces and lives?

EW: Voyeurism is inherent in the film-making process, and this is definitely something that fascinates me as a film-maker. In my films I like to capture small intimate moments of people when they think they are unobserved – these moments can say something deeper about us and the way we live.

As a film-maker, I am particularly interested in exploring the conflict between the private and the public, of being intimate but distant, and the way we relate to each other in urban environments. As one of the drivers says in the film, their work and the enforced closeness to some of the buildings around them means that it is difficult for them not to look at the lives of the people working and living inside them, and I think this is definitely also true for many of us living in modern cities – there is almost an enforced intimacy in our lives.

KK: The story is told from the drivers’ perspective but to what extent would you say your documentaries are your own take on subjects and what would be your definition of a documentary film?

EW: I definitely have a very clear idea of the themes I want to explore and am interested in when I set out to make a film and this informs the whole filmmaking process for me, from the interviews, to the visual style, to the way I approach the sound design.

For instance, I decided very early on that I wanted to divorce the image and sound in the film to reflect the way the drivers are separated from the world they are building below. My aim was to make a film that transcends individual stories, and for me, the detached stylistic approach invites the viewer not only to engage in the portrait of individual people, but to recognize in them bigger, more universal emotions and experiences.

Rather than being unmediated moments of reality, films are for me a ‘creative interpretation of reality’ informed by my own take on the subject (although I am not sure my understanding of this is the same as John Grierson’s). In this case, I set out to make a film that explores feelings of solitude and isolation; and then tried to find the best way to express this in the film.

So, while this film is told from the drivers’ perspective, it is obviously shaped through my own experiences and interpretation of their situation. However, I always try and keep an openness to change my ideas about a film or a subject, during the interviews, the filming or in post-production, and to respond to what is actually unfolding in front of me. For me, films are very much created in the editing, and I love to explore different ideas and to be surprised by the way a film develops.

KK: We’re also showing your documentary Steel Homes, which is a very touching film and in many ways, like The Solitary Life of Cranes, is about shared space. But a very different space – a storage space – where people store and hold on to objects that have emotional value, even if they bring back bad memories. How did you find the subjects for this film?

EW: Many people see self storage warehouse solely as places where we can temporarily and safely store our belongings, when we move house, run out of space at home or go off traveling. Yet I believe that self storage and the things we store in the steel boxes can say something deeper about us as individuals and as a society.

For me, storage units are places where we can forget about things until we are ready to deal with them, where we can hide parts of ourselves we do not want anyone else to see, or where we can hold onto lost dreams and hopes. One recurring motif in the film is of people in a kind of temporary or permanent limbo – people who have lost their homes, their sense of roots, either literally or metaphorically.

To read a review of The Solitary Life of Cranes, click here.