Eduardo Williams
BY
Nicolas Rapold
A conversation from Locarno with the Argentinian auteur.
The Human Surge streams on Metrograph At Home as part of The New Auteurs.
When you watch the work of Eduardo Williams, it feels like seeing an artist doing something genuinely new with cinema. The 36-year-old Argentine director has made a pair of globe-trotting features that follow their young subjects through the world in eye-opening ways: The Human Surge, his wondrous 2016 feature, and The Human Surge 3, which last week premiered at the Locarno Film Festival to great acclaim. For those keeping score, there was no The Human Surge 2—evidence of Williams’s healthy sense of humor and habit of casually rewiring the normal way of doing things. His movies reflect the perpetual churn of our through-the-looking-glass reality: how virtual spaces collapse the gulfs of the physical world and foster new forms of intimacy, even as vast systemic forces reinforce the rigid socioeconomic structures that hold us all.
In Williams’s The Human Surge features, the future is now: the present is vividly alive in his daisy-chained scenes of friends hanging out, or going out on walks through cities and jungles. The Human Surge begins with a man named Exe waking up and wading through floods in Buenos Aires to get to his box-store job, before the story seems to untether following a webcam encounter, leading us to... a new milieu in Maputo, Mozambique, and then in the Philippines. Williams’s practice of switching film formats enters another astral level of perception in his latest with the use of a 360-degree camera, producing footage he then edited with a VR headset. Once again, he’s created images of being in the world that feel like nothing else in feature filmmaking today.
I had the chance to talk with the affably chill Williams (who goes by Teddy) at Locarno, revisiting the porous realities of The Human Surge and getting the latest on the screen magic of The Human Surge 3.—Nicolas Rapold
NICOLAS RAPOLD: I feel like the more questions I think to ask about your movies, the less sense I make. The best thing is just to watch them.
EDUARDO WILLIAMS: [Laughs] That’s good. I’m happy then.
NR: Where did you grow up?
EW: In Buenos Aires.
NR: What do you remember first using the internet for?
EW: First, it was just a special thing that I could do one hour per day; now it’s something I use [all the time] every day. I remember the internet was not so mainstream—it was small, hidden. It felt like a place where you could find people, and then it started growing and growing. Before, my parents didn’t know what the internet was. It felt underground. Now, mainstream culture is there, in every sense… Before, it felt more like escaping from mainstream culture. Now it’s the other way around: the internet seems to be everywhere.
NR: Watching The Human Surge, I became more aware of both the differences and the connections between navigating virtual spaces and physical worlds.
EW: I suppose because that’s the world in which I live, with both virtual connections and physical ones. At many moments of my life, my way of knowing the world is more virtual, so that’s a big way my brain works. When I’m making a film, going to each place, it’s a very physical experience. I don’t use much virtual information when I’m there. I use information given to me by people I meet. I like to think of my films as a connection between that virtual and then the physical experience—the pre-shooting and the shooting.
The Human Surge (2016)
NR: Your films are full of imagery that merges the inspired and the everyday. At one point in The Human Surge, a group of people gather together inside a tree. I began to think this scene represented all the little social spaces that we enter online.
EW: [Laughs] I don’t think of it in such a direct way, but it’s totally possible. Sometimes it’s [in the scenes] when people are not using their phones that the film is speaking about the internet world. I think it’s in how we hang out together, how we speak, how we see each other, how the film sees the people. At the beginning, these are just images or situations that come to my head. I don’t have an explanation for them, and I try not to look for one. I try to think if they will work in the film. But you saw [that scene] like that, and I really like getting different comments like that.
NR: The Human Surge also captures current attitudes toward life and work and free time. This aspect of the film felt important to you—was it?
EW: Yeah. For me, cinema is the way I imagined that I could try to make a living and avoid a monotonous job. When I started traveling, [these ideas] naturally came up all the time, especially for young people before they get totally caught in the world of working all the time. What we say is always the same: everyone would like to do this, but they can’t even try because they have to try the profitable thing, which is something else. I realized we share this with people in many different countries. And I always thought about how crazy it is that it is such a privilege to have an interesting job or even to have some free time. Sometimes you cannot really have a different life, but imagination offers a way out of this life that many people are forced to have.
NR: These themes of interconnectedness and work come together with the webcam scenes, where you show friends picking up some extra cash doing sexual antics for strangers online. What made you include these scenes, which are so casually done?
EW: They had many of the things I was thinking about for the film: hanging out and working together. You never know if they’re doing it for the money or it’s an excuse just to do this with their friends. There are many possible reasons. I also liked that we see two different groups in different places, and how different their reactions might be. Also, when we talk about this, it’s a bit tragic, but we don’t leave it [in the film] as a tragic thing. When it’s our reality, we try not to be so tragic about everything. We need to laugh and to have a good time. And that’s how it really happens.
NR: That reminds me of another encounter in the film when someone at work is saying, “I don’t even know who I am.” And then the women around him, his co-workers, are like: “Oh, poor him. So complicated.”
EW: I love that scene. The women were just improvising! I really like that they laugh about him but also are laughing about me a little bit, saying, “Oh so dramatic, poor him.” The fact that they are laughing doesn’t take away the seriousness of it, but it’s a different point of view.
NR: How do you cast the people in your movies?
EW: I try many ways; in different places, a certain way works better. In Argentina, it’s my country, so it’s more friends of friends, or friends of mine telling me, “I met someone that I think maybe is very good for one of your films.” In Mozambique, I printed papers for a casting day, and we went around the streets giving them out, putting them up in parks and bus stops. For The Human Surge 3, in Taiwan, it was more online. That helps when I don’t speak the language, because I can translate and write to people in their own language. For a shorter film I made in Vietnam [I Forgot!, 2019], I used the same technique in Hanoi as I had in Mozambique, and only one person came. In the Philippines, [I cast] the family we were renting a room from, and their friends.
NR: Could you talk about your work in the seven years between the premieres of The Human Surge and The Human Surge 3?
EW: After The Human Surge, I spent a long time showing the film, which was good but takes a lot of time. I made a short film in Guinea-Bissau, called Parsi (2019)—an Argentine poet named Mariano Blatt proposed that I make a film with or about or around his poem [“No es”]. It was very free, the proposal. It was interesting for me. It was also the first time I used a 360-degree camera, and virtual reality for editing. So many of the things I tried in The Human Surge 3 came from this short film. I started preparing The Human Surge 3 in 2019, but with Covid it took longer to travel. And [last year] for an exhibition related to Bruce Baillie for a museum in Bilbao, I made a video installation [A Very Long GIF], for which I used a camera that you swallow.
The Human Surge (2016)
NR: How did you choose the locations in The Human Surge 3?
EW: First we shot in Sri Lanka, where I went before for holidays. I was in a bus and I passed by the neighborhood with spherical houses that you see in the beginning. I saw it just for a second in a semi-rural area, and I was very surprised. They’re sort of futuristic, yet also they’re just normal houses in the countryside. I discovered there was a tsunami some years before that had destroyed many houses, and these [spherical] houses were constructed with this shape to resist tsunamis in the future better than rectangular houses. It’s the type of place or image that I like for my films—realistic and fantastic at the same time. It’s also about how common life for some people can appear fantastic or surreal for other viewers. My interest was to discover what was happening and learn more about this part of Sri Lanka.
Then we went to Peru. There is this place near Iquitos, near the Amazon rainforest, where half of the year it’s flooded because the river rises. I also wanted to shoot in the jungle. That was important for me. And then Taiwan came at the beginning, more as a proposal from a producer really, but sometimes it’s like that, things come in a bit of a random way. It wasn’t a country I would choose myself, but that was a good reason to go, to try to escape from my choice patterns.
NR: The Human Surge 3 continues your innovations in technique and in picturing the world. Is that a helmet VR cam you used?
EW: It’s more like a backpack, but there’s something that holds the camera over your head. It’s something we constructed with some friends and people who helped us.
NR: It reminded me of an Austrian horror movie called Angst (1983), where I also couldn’t figure out the strange floating position of the camera.
EW: I think I saw this same film. The camera was very strange. I searched around a bit, and I think the camera was tied to the actor, but on a “ring” rig. I never get this direct idea of being inspired by something or not, but I was very impressed by that film, I remember. Maybe it had something to do with trying to use the camera in a different way.
NR: What did you like about shooting this way?
EW: The first reason was to have the 360-degree space available for the editing. The framing of the film is decided when I’m editing, by me using a virtual reality headset and moving. So what you see as a frame is me moving while I rewatch the footage. I thought this was very interesting in Parsi, but I wanted to try this system in another type of film, more narrative.
For me, it’s very important, changing the moment when we think about the framing of a film. Usually we think about the framing during the shooting. But I think we see the film and we think of the framing in a very different way when we are shooting with a camera and when we do it with our body. I realized what I wanted to see while I was seeing it [in a headset] was very different to when I saw it on the computer.
You can also think about the evolution of the movement. I discovered it gave more of a human-machine relation—a strange mechanical thing about how it moves. I think there was more like a human-machine weird presence in the film. Also, I could choose to frame what was supposed to be behind the scenes, like actors preparing to come into the scene, or plants in the jungle, parts of real life that were happening around us while we were doing the fictional scene. It gave me a lot of possibilities.
The Human Surge (2016)
NR: Both The Human Surge and The Human Surge 3 are really good at showing people just being with each other and relating to each other. Maybe The Human Surge 3 is a bit more about friendship groups, and you show multiple conversations going on at the same time.
EW: Maybe this also comes from how I see films: even if films are very clear and tell you how to follow them, I cannot follow so well, I always get distracted by a detail in the image. The talking at the same time relates to the internet, how you have many conversations in chats at the same time. And also it came from the 360-degree shooting.
Something very important for me about this film that is different from the first is that people from each of the countries traveled too. In The Human Surge, it was only me who traveled, but here the actors from Sri Lanka came to Peru, and the actors from Peru and Sri Lanka came to Taiwan. Connections were made by the actors, and we could share that experience with the spectators. I think that relates to what you were saying about [the new film] being less focused on individuals in some way and more on groups of friends. I tried just being with them, for many moments.
NR: There was also at times a bit of a video game feel in the new film—the sense of people having a goal to get somewhere. Was that part of your thinking?
EW: I think this type of camera also gives that feeling, and I liked it. The video game thing maybe comes naturally for me and the actors. We talked a lot about that. I wanted to have some type of goal [for the characters to pursue] but not something that everyone will think is the main point of the film. That’s why it’s not very clear, it’s mysterious. This goal makes them walk forward, toward this thing that they don’t understand very well.
NR: Do you play video games?
EW: No, not much, because if I play, it’s difficult to stop. So I try not to. But I played Zelda when I was a kid and now I started again because there’s a new one. But I have a hard time controlling time. I should learn how to play but not for so long.
NR: You talked about the jungle being important to you. What does it feel like to be in the middle of it?
EW: For me, it was incredible. I think if I have to choose the best or the most crazy or different experience from all the experiences I have ever had in life before, it was being in the Amazon in Peru. Maybe it’s being in a place where humans haven’t intervened much. Everywhere has some type of human intervention. But here you feel all the other non-human life that is so abundant and so present, especially in the sound. You experience all the animals more by listening to them than by seeing them. It was very impressive.
The first time I ever went to a jungle was in Argentina, before making a short film called Could See a Puma (2011). It’s a jungle where there are pumas, but they’re difficult to see. I had this feeling of wanting to see the wild animal but also being afraid. This feeling of wanting something and being afraid, and not knowing what you would do if it happens, it’s a type of emotion that I would like to associate with cinema, or what cinema could be.
Nicolas Rapold is a writer and editor whose work has been published in Artforum, the Criterion Collection, Sight & Sound, The New York Times, and the Village Voice, among other publications. He was editor-in-chief of Film Comment magazine (which received the Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics), and curated the magazine’s Film Comment Selects programs. He hosts the podcast The Last Thing I Saw and the screening series Essential Films, and is a contributing editor at Screen Slate.
The Human Surge (2016)
