Interview with 'The Still Point' filmmaker Taki Bibelas

Interviews

Interview with 'The Still Point' filmmaker Taki Bibelas

Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 27 July, 2012 : - - Athens-born surfer/photographer/filmmaker Taki Bibelas made a surfing movie, The Still Point, with almost no surfing in it. Taki says he's a protected middle-class North American, born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Winnipeg and then Montréal in Canada. Not much surf. Heres a few insights: What inspired you to begin shooting images? What do you look for in a photograph? Tell us about your film, The Still Point.

Heres a few insights:

What inspired you to begin shooting images?
First, looking at the work of W. Eugene Smith, Bruce Davidson, Edward Weston, and others, and that it just felt like the right thing to do.

What do you look for in a photograph?
Timelessness. And is it memorable? It’s easy to take a nice picture, but not to make it timeless and knowing what makes it memorable.

Tell us about your film, The Still Point.
The Still Point started in my head years ago. I was spending all my free weekends in Geuthary, France, and got to know Miki Dora. One day, he invited me to a dinner meeting he had with Stacy Peralta and Agi Orsi, who just made Dogtown and Z-Boys. They wanted to make a movie about Miki. He kept saying that a movie about him shouldn’t be a surfer movie — there was or he had another story to tell. Later, I said, if I ever made a film about surfing, I wouldn’t want any surfing in it. Miki was really sick and knew he was dying; the movie never got made. I did take a portrait of him for Vogue just after. I think he liked that and wanted to leave something behind.

That idea of a surf film to show a true meaning of surf without showing surfing stuck in my mind and I set off to shoot Polaroids, super 8, 16mm and record audio in California, Hawaii and, later, Australia. The name The Still Point comes from some lines in the T.S. Eliot poem “Burnt Norton”:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

It described my feeling of surfing. I began to understand from the incredible people I met that the true spirit of surfing was the water … the ocean. I began to ask the question, “Is the ocean alive?” It lead me to setting up the film the way it is—like a poem, a film about everything and nothing, a film about water, the ocean and life as seen though the eyes of some very insightful surfing personalities. There is very little surfing in the film, but we really feel it.

What is the greatest thing you have learned in your life?
“Instant karma” and that I still have much to learn. Seriously, I guess that everything I do is connected to something that is connected to something else. So, it is very important to do things and live not just for yourself, but for the whole of life that you are connecting to.

Do you have any regrets or wish you had done something differently?
Yes, that I knew earlier what I just said above.

What’s next?
I am currently working on a book project of portraits of surfers called Surfing is My Religion. I have about 20 so far, but would like to have about 50 more. All the pictures are done as 19th century religious paintings, but the temple is the shoreline. They are very set up in the way they are lit and posed. I need more surfers to get involved, but I love what I have so far. I don’t want to show it until it’s done.

I would also like to start another film that reaches deeper into the ocean’s problems, but I would want to do it again in an artistic, poetic way.

Read the full interview

See the trailer for The Still Point here and more of Bibelas’s work here. check out Liquid Salt Magazine.

Source: Liquid Salt

Author: steve casimiro

Tags: The Still Point, Taki Bibelas

Interviews: Surfersvillage