Renowned Scottish Oscar winning actor and artist Tilda Swinton is co-director of The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze, a playful, experimental documentary produced by the Derek Jarman Lab and that looks at learning from every angle. The film, also co-directed by Bartek Dziadosz, screens in the International Competition at Sheffield Doc Fest.
The Hexagonal Hive is the second collaboration between Dziadosz and Swinton after The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), a series of short films portraying the eponymous Marxist academic and author.
“Probably the very first moment when we started talking about the next project was in Berlin, when we premiered Seasons In Quincy,” recalls Dziadosz, Director at the Jarman Lab, based at Birkbeck, University of London. “We all decided we wanted to continue. We had so much fun making a film about John Berger. We were pleased with the results and everyone was happy with the film – and so we decided we would make another.”
The idea for the new film came from Swinton. “Tilda invited us to Scotland because she was involved in a school based on the [Rudolf] Steiner method. It was a small school on a hill,” Dziadosz says of Drumduan, a school based in a beautiful woodland setting near Forres in Moray.
Everyone trooped up there. “We started off by coming to Scotland quite regularly over a year and thinking that we were making an observational documentary – a year in the life of a school. It worked to some extent…”
Dziadosz, Swinton and the rest of the team soon decided, though, that they were more interested in making film essays than in traditional verité movies. The scope of the project therefore changed. They decided to make a film that would “interrogate” the very idea of education.
This, Dziadosz emphasises, was very much a collective endeavour. He and Swinton may be credited as co-directors but it was a “group” effort on behalf of the Derek Jarman Lab.
“And Tilda actually is a really good collaborator. She is an attentive listener. She doesn’t impose direction but sometimes steers in a certain way. When she doesn’t say anything, it means she doesn’t like it…I think it’s a marvellous method of working.”
The Hexagonal Hive touches on everything from machine learning and AI to the latest educational experiments at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology. Footage is also shot in Bangladesh, India and West Africa. Children are shown learning how to weave baskets. Indian women learn literacy.
“Suddenly it [the film] started to expand in all sorts of directions. That was the moment when the sudden pause happened which was to do with the pandemic…”
During the Covid period, the filmmakers stepped back and again reconsidered their approach. They began to think of the project as a “story” or “sci fi poem.” They wanted to follow “sensory logic” rather than to explain their subjects in a doctrinaire manner.
Dziadosz had noticed that when he told people he was making a film about education, their eyes would glaze over. He couldn’t quite understand why. “I thought this is a fascinating topic. Everyone should be talking about it. Learning is the foundation of everything…”
The challenge, though, was to make the subject cinematic. This is where Simon Fisher Turner’s evocative, futuristic musical score played a crucial part. He was involved in the project from the start.
“All the important decisions happened on zoom calls between me, Tilda, Lily [Ford, the producer and co-writer] and Simon,” Dziadosz says. “Right from the beginning, we were thinking of images and sounds together. It [the music] wasn’t an afterthought. It was very much part of the process.”
This wasn’t an easy edit. Very disparate and often challenging ideas are being thrown together.
“But, in a way, all our films are experiments. We have a point of departure but we don’t know where we are going to end up,” the co-director observes. “I wanted to be playful and I wanted the film to be watchable. I don’t believe in making unnecessary hurdles for communicating something…in building associations between one image and another, I followed what felt right and interesting.”
Clips from some well-known movies are thrown, for example Charles Laughton’s The Night Of The Hunter, a film noir about a serial killer pursuing two kids, and FW Murnau’s chilly vampire classic Nosferatu. There are also several references to Alice In Wonderland.
“It might seem like jumping from one subject to another but I know there is a logic behind it,” Dziadosz explains the film’s fast-moving freewheeling approach.
Who is the film aimed at? Is there an ideal audience?
The co-director brushes away the question. “I don’t know. We made this film for like-minded people whatever their age or demographic.”
Although the tone is generally playful, there are moments when elements of “urgency and darkness” are introduced. This is when the documentary touches on subjects like climate change and capitalist exploitation of the environment.
The co-director acknowledges that the film doesn’t have the polemical undertow of the work of, say, John Berger. However, the team are working on future projects that will be more provocative, for example a new trilogy called ‘Europe Endless’ which revisits the work of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. This is directed by Christopher Roth in collaboration with heavyweight literary critic and film producer Colin MacCabe (who set up the Derek Jarman Lab in 2012). Dziadosz describes it as “a proper Marxist film.” One part of it looks at the story behind the film theory journal Screen.
Financing for The Hexagonal Hive came from a variety of sources. “We were fortunate enough to have American private donors who funded the production part,” Dziadosz says. The Derek Jarman Lab itself is supported by Birkbeck. A sales agent is yet to be appointed. “Our strategy was to launch the film first, have a world premiere in a good festival. Sheffield liked the film a lot and helped a lot promoting the film. We are very grateful to the Sheffield team,” the co-director signs off.
