Bas Devos
Violet, Bas Devos (2014)
Bas Devos is a a Belgian screenwriter, director and editor. His feature film debut, Violet, premiered at Berlin, where it won Best Film in Generation 14plus, and New Directors/New Films, where it won an Honorable Mention.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Bas Devos discusses sound design, the sensorial dimension of grief, shooting 4:3 and his next project.
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FILMATIQUE: Some of the most powerful images in Violet are close-ups of the character's face in long, uninterrupted takes, that involve both a slow push-in of the camera and concentrated performance. This is a demanding task for an actor, especially one at such a formative age. How did you approach directing these scenes in order to encourage the most expressive shots?
BAS DEVOS: I find that speaking to younger amateur actors in the same way as you would approach a professional, mature actor pays off. I always just explained to César De Sutter (Jesse in the film) what a scene was about, why I thought it had significance. He is very special. Even at that age, 17 years old, he understood. He is gifted in a specific way: when you put a camera in front of him, he doesn't change. Even professional actors start twitching, breathing louder and showing of more when the camera starts rolling. He doesn't. He's the same on and off camera. So I could work with him as if the crew and the whole machinery of film were absent, as if it were just me and him.
FLMTQ: The film's measured pace and lack of conventional structure gives it a dream-like quality. How did you seek to capture both the texture and the weight of the Jesse's feelings of grief and disillusionment?
BD: Violet is a very sensory film. Through the visuals but in particular through the use of sound, I wanted to draw the spectator in. The image editing was a careful process of balancing the narrative and the poetic and finding the right pace.
Sound editing took us longer. We only wanted to use sounds (apart from the one song in the middle of the film). But even though we used only concrete sounds, we wanted the whole to be a reflection of Jesse's feelings and his subjective take on the world. For me this is what gives a strong dream-like quality to the whole: the sound that constantly alters between closed off and muted, and wide and bright. His perception of his surroundings is skewed.
For me it is this state of heightened awareness and sensitivity that very closely relates to the more personal and abstract feeling of grief.
FLMTQ: A secondary color, violet suggests a liminal, in-between space that is yet beautiful. What is the significance in titling the film Violet?
BD: Violet is the color of mourning and what intrigued me, is that it's a color at the edge of our visual spectrum. A color you can never see sharply and that is truly the border between the visible and the invisible. That had a lot of meaning for me in relation to this film.
Apart from that, the word sounds a lot like violent. I liked that, since the film has a violent opening but then, throughout, tries to negate that violence.
A third reason is the black metal song in the middle of the film by the American band Deafheaven. It's called Violet and made the title all the more fitting.
Violet, Bas Devos (2014)