Camille Henrot: 'Frankenstein is an ecological tale'

In Psychopompe, artist Camille Henrot incorporates material from various sources – B-movies, indoor climbing videos, scientific footage, records of postcards and written documents – to explore the past and present imagery of Frankenstein, whose existence complicates human, animal, and machine differentiations and questions nature-culture divides. Filmed on an amateur handheld camera on night shot mode and originally conceived to be accompanied by a live performance featuring improvised music, Psychopompe is a hypnotic ritual of metamorphose. Art Basel´s film curator Filipa Ramos finds out more. 

Filipa Ramos: Psychompompe gravitates around Mary Shelley's character Frankenstein. What attracted you to him?

Camille Henrot: I was mostly interested in Mary Shelley's biography and how it informed the story of Frankenstein. She had a strong sense of social justice, in opposition to the individualism of the Romantics: her vision of ecology (Frankenstein is vegan), the loss of three of her children, her status as the illegitimate partner of Percy Shelley, the weight of the guilt of the suicide of Shelley’s wife...

As it happens to many women, her name was erased, but in this case, it was also erased because of her work's success. It is also interesting to note that in the novel, Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not the monster. Mary Shelley herself said she identified with the monster and, like the monster, her name lived under the shadow of another one.

FR: Psychopompe transposes the Swiss mountain landscapes, where an important part of Frankenstein takes place, to the context of indoor climbing environments. Can you tell us more about this transformation operated by the film?

CH: The endangered environment is the real subject of Frankenstein, and the main threat is the arrogance of people and the belief that technology would be able to make up for nature’s destruction and ultimately replace it. The indoor climbing walls are like Frankenstein—an imitation of nature, just like a snow cannon. I was also fascinated by the way that climbing carries a sort of minimal narrative (‘will they fall or not?’) that relates to the basic definition of suspense in film. I also had read somewhere that the French verb ‘mourir’ [to die] in different languages literally came from ‘ walking on the mountain.’ The mountain has always carried for me the significance of a transitional space between life and death, sky and earth. It is also very important that Frankenstein takes place between Geneva and Chamonix, which is where I used to go every holiday in summer and winter as a kid, and I was very influenced by alpinist cinematography. I shot some of the indoor scene in Chamonix on the indoor walls with local guides, as well as the artificial snow canon, the cable car, and the swan.

Frankenstein is an ecological tale, but I wanted to explore the way the story is told and retold, distorting it into a type of popularized and fragmented ‘mythological waste.’ In my film, there are two intertwined stories: the story of Frankenstein and the story of what happened to the story. From a melancholic ecological tale to the erotic B-movie playing on the old trope of the sexualized woman to the mercy of the monster or the ‘experiences of the body.’

FR: The entire film has a dark, greenish patina. How was it shot?

CH: It was shot in night vision with the first DV camera.

FR: As in many works of yours, music and sound are also fundamental in Psychompompe.The film was originally made to be accompanied by a live concert. Can you tell us how images and musical performance constituted one another in the process of thinking and presenting the work?

CH: My first films were made to accompany a musical performance, so when the Centre Pompidou and The Kitchen invited me to create a new performance production, I was interested to work with that format on a larger scale. Many of my films start with a soundtrack idea. I would combine different ideas and references and then share them with a musician, and the discussion on music would bring about the ideas for images. Later in the process, the power dynamic switches and images starts to lead while I’m editing. I generally start to edit with a draft version of the music and then I work for weeks without sounds to build the narrative, it is only after that that I ask the soundtrack to adapt to the edited film. There is a back and forth between the two processes; for me, the images have a music and rhythm within them and it is important that the music does not get overwritten by the images. The images are a musical score and they have to work with the music as if they were two instruments in a dual composition.

Camille Henrot is represented by kamel mennour (Paris, London), König Galerie (Berlin, London, Tokyo), and Metro Pictures (New York City).