2025 - 1975

Duval Rodrigues

Interview by C. VanWinkle

March 16, 2022

Let’s start at the beginning. What was the piece that you responded to?

It was a gorgeous painting of what looked like naked people dancing around a fire and I believe it was called Ritual. It felt like a little bit of kismet because, just that morning, I’d had an encounter with a good friend of mine who showed me an article that an artist, a writer that we both adore, had written. He was working on some tarot cards based on pop culture icons and I've been working on my own piece for about a year now, and I reached a wall. I stumbled on some horrible writer’s block.

What is this piece you're working on? A movie?

Well, it started off as a movie idea. Then it evolved into what we're probably going to do as a web series. It deals with a lot of the elements that were front and center in that piece Ritual. The article that my friend had sent me that day focused on a very specific tarot card, the magician card, which helped me get over that stumbling block that I’d encountered in my own piece. And just coincidentally, later that day, you brought Ritual into my life and that all seemed to coalesce in a perfect moment.

Perfect! And I know that you’re one who doesn't believe in coincidence.

There's no such thing as coincidence. Coincidence is too coincidental to be coincidence.

And that's exactly where I've been for the last year, just waiting. As it turns out, I was waiting to contextualize this particular scene that I've been writing in the form of a ritual.

How does this scene fit into the larger movie or web series that you're working on?

It's basically the starting point. It's what I think of as the first domino in something I hope to be working on over the next few years. I've been somewhat obsessed with the use of magic, and I think all artists are magicians who don't know that they're actually tampering with the higher forces. Every time you have a stroke of brilliance or every time a spark of inspiration hits you, that's really magic. That's actual magic coming from another dimension, another place in space and time. That's what my piece is about: the idea of magic as a force for creativity, and the very tried and true, well overused plot device of time travel.

I've had a lot of arguments with people over the years about what one would do if given the gift of time travel. Everyone always strives to do the most important things, to tamper with the timeline in the most meaningful way. But I've always just wanted to go to a show in 1975, at a little club in a big city that we're all aware of, and see some very, very specific people perform some very, very important moments in pop culture history.

Who would you see?

For copyright reasons, I prefer not to say. She's a poet and she knows it, and they're a bunch of artsy dudes playing very angular music. The other guys are a bunch of brothers from Queens, but between you and me, they're not really brothers. I think that specific moment in time in the spring of 1975 is a tremendously significant moment in history, and rather than go kill Hitler or go meet my parents or do anything important with time travel, I would like to bend the forces of time and space to go see that show.

I appreciate that yours is something so personal.

You know, I recently saw this really incredible documentary that moved me tremendously. One thing it reiterated again and again was that artists are responsible for reflecting their times and it’s the sacred duty of the artist to say important things about the important things that are happening right now. While that is often true, it is mostly bullshit to say that art has to do that to be art. I think about that movie Ghost World when the girl is in her art class. She's being taught by her pretentious art teacher who asks, “What are you drawing?” She says, “Oh, it's Don Knotts.” And the teacher says, “But why?” And the girl answers, “I don't know. I just like Don Knotts.” So yeah, you know, I like Don Knotts.

[laughs] That is a valid answer!

Who doesn't like Don Knotts?

You told me that this piece had a cast of two and a crew of two. Can you tell me about the division of labor among the crew of two?

My film partner Jason [Burrell] and I work very closely on everything we do. We've been working together for many, many years now. Generally speaking, the concepts will come from me. The bulk of the initial writing will come for me, but he always sort of fine-tunes it. When it comes to the actual production, it's 100% 50/50. I tag myself as director and tag him as the producer, but we both produce and we both direct. We both put all of ourselves in the actual production of it. When it comes to the editing, then it bounces back to me. I pretty much handle all of the post-production myself.

Do you like doing that part?

Yes and no. I like being the grandmaster overseeing it all, but it is a lot of work! I love editing, the idea of patching stuff together. I used to do collages when I was a little kid. And why collages? Why take other people's pictures and put them together to make a new picture? Because it becomes a new thing. When I was little, my dad taught me the very valid and almost lost art of mixtape making, and I feel like that's another version of the same thing. There's an intense artistry to creating a mood with patchwork pieces. When you are constructing something piece by piece, it sort of transforms.

That idea of transformation is very heavy in this piece, as well as in all the stuff that Jason and I do. We call ourselves Third Mind Productions for a reason. It comes from a quote from Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs that says when two or more creative minds come together, a third mind emerges from that. We take that to heart in everything that we do, both in the actual, physical construction of what we do and in the contexts and themes, too.

[Editing] is meditative and I would imagine it's very similar in any art that takes time and painstaking repetition. When you're doing something again and again and again, any sort of repetitive, tedious action can put you in an almost trance-like state. You transcend the tedium of it and you enter a different mindspace, where you become really connected with the undercurrent, the themes, what's really there, not just the pieces. The pieces are incredibly important and getting the right pieces and knowing where to put them, that's the magic. But the real magic is getting to that mindspace, where all the themes and the true meaning lay themselves out. I love editing. I do complain about it a lot because it is so tedious, but that tedium really drives me.

I am primarily an illustrator. The pandemic has been a creatively fruitful time for me because I’ve had more time on my hands, more focus, and a lot of feelings to work through. But you are a filmmaker. How has it been trying to make your art through all of this?

Tragically unproductive. Jason and I had spent the last year and a half before the pandemic shooting our last film and it was about 1/3 of the way edited. When the pandemic hit, I kind of shut down and couldn't even look at it. I was in a state of shock and somewhat frozen creatively. I couldn't really get past what was happening. All I could really do was escape. The work was too immediate; it spoke too specifically to where I had been before the pandemic and everything leading up to it. And I just I couldn't even look at it. I basically left that film alone until the spring 2021 when we finally finished it. But during that time, in an effort to escape the horror of what was going on in the real world, I set myself to a different task. I started studying the history of punk rock. And in the process, I created a 26-volume series of mixtapes chronicling the entire history of punk rock from New York in the 60s and 70s through to the present day, and all of those subsets and subgenres and offshoots. Honestly, at the time, I was doing everything I could to just escape the moment. I lost two of the most important people in the world to me during that time. And rather than deal with it, I dove deeper into my punk rock studies. And what I didn't realize at the time was that I was actually researching what was going to be my next project, which I hopefully will be working on for many years to come.

And here we are! Film is notorious for things always taking longer than you think they will. How did you feel about the two-week deadline? Was that a problem?

Normally, it's the kind of thing that would’ve freaked me out, but it really invigorated me. Actually, I do work really well with deadlines. In hindsight, maybe one of the reasons it took me so long to finish our last film was that there was no deadline at all. I could put it off for a year and a half and I didn't have anyone breathing down my neck about it. Having a clean-cut discernible deadline really juiced me with this one. I knew that I had exactly one week to get my storyboards in order and I'm terrible at drawing. I cannot draw. I do feel it's very important to storyboard, particularly with any type of narrative. I knew that I had one week to storyboard it, one weekend to shoot it, and then another week to edit it. That gave me a really good framework. We managed to structure it well, given the time we had. The basic concept behind the scene had been lingering in my head for the last year. The inciting incident that would take my proxy character (because really every character I write is just a proxy for myself), which would take me from the year 2025 to 1975, would be a magic ritual. It was exciting to visualize that kind of iconography because I'm a very witchy person and I tend to find all sorts of multiple meanings in the arcane, the profane, and all sorts of magical doodads.

Speaking of which, there’s some tarot imagery in your piece. Can you break that down for me?

Well, the artist who wrote that article that my friend showed me is putting together a series of tarot cards. They’re based on pop culture icons, and one of them was a very famous star man from Mars, wink wink. In the card, instead of holding up a wand, he is holding up a flaming microphone. There's going to be a lot of musical iconography in future episodes of this thing and it made sense to me that the icons that I would use to send myself back in time would all relate to that particular time, that scene, and that music. The drumstick being the wand, belonged to a famous drummer who played in that club in the mid-70s. The flask, which is blue to represent water, is the cup on the magician card. All of these icons are going to play a greater part in the story as it goes on. The fake switchblade will transform into a real switchblade when it counts, when a switchblade will be needed. And the record is particularly important too because it’s the pentacle. It's a symbol for earth, so it’s something as grounding as a record album. The record is the culmination of a musician's piece. You know, it's where it ends up. To have my magician transform it into something small and portable and usable for the future was very important to me. It was important to me to set it up with icons that can be used both in a utilitarian sense within a magic spell, and as tools at later points in the story.

I love that. Do you have any advice for someone else approaching this project for the first time?

I think that it's important not to go into it with a fixed idea of what you're going to do. Actually, when you told me about this project, I thought I was going to put my piece aside and just let the prompt guide me. It was pure coincidence, and you know how I feel about coincidence, that it all tied together. But I think it's important to be open and let the piece speak to you. Let the prompt direct where it takes you and be open to that, because who knows? You might have a coincidence on your hands.

[laughs] That's true!

I'm really glad and very proud to have been a part of this project because I've been a big fan of what you're doing with Bait/Switch for a while now. It was really special to me to be a part of it. Oftentimes, as artists we work in our own little silos. We don't realize that there are other artists out there and there are other magicians working on their magic. It's nice to know that we can hear and see each other and be a part of each other's work. Even though I don’t even know who the artist behind the ritual painting is, I feel like they've left a fingerprint on what I'm doing and what I'm going to be doing for the next few years. And I look forward to seeing what this piece inspires in the next person. I hope to continue to find people to collaborate with me on this going forward. I'm hoping in the coming weeks and months and years to find other magicians.

Call Number: C66VA | C68FI.ro

DUVAL RODRIGUES along with his film-partner, JASON BURRELL, compose the primary components of the Boston based THIRD MIND PRODUCTIONS, an art-film collective which has been producing no-budget shorts and phantasmagoric curiosities since 2010. When two (or more) minds come together creatively, a third mind emerges, autonomous, and with a will of its own.