Roddy Bogawa, director of Have You Got it Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, has a film and video career that spans nearly 25 years, exploring identity and cultural themes in his work.
Film, however, wasn’t Bogawa’s initial calling. First he studied art and played in punk bands. However, while pursuing his arts degree at the University of California at San Diego, Bogawa took a class with French New Wave director Jean-Pierre Gorin. Bogawa watched Gorin’s 1980 documentary Poto and Cabengo, a film that he says “completely hijacked” his life and set him on a filmmaking path.
Gorin’s documentary follows Grace and Virginia Kennedy, twin sisters growing up in Southern California, who invented and spoke their own language until the age of eight, fascinating scientists and social workers. Poto and Cabengo were the names they called each other.
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
I was an undergrad at UC San Diego and I took a history of film course. Jean-Pierre [Gorin] was about 20 minutes late. [There were] about 300 people in the audience, and in San Diego, at that time, everybody had dogs and frisbees. It was total chaos. After 20 minutes, Jean-Pierre [appeared] and said, “This is where the history of cinema started.” The lights went down, and Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom came on. The lights came up, and he wasn't there. That was the first week of the film course. After that, I just was like a magnet on him.
Poster from the 1980 documentary “Poto and Cabengo.” Courtesy of The Criterion Channel
[Jean-Pierre Gorin] let me watch Poto and Cabengo. When I saw that, I thought, “Wow, I can make [a] movie.” I never thought that growing up in Los Angeles, I would ever be able to make films. I saw that and I was like, “This was really made with two rocks and a stick, and I got two rocks and a stick, and a few ideas.”
I literally was like, “Well this is like a punk rock movie. This is really super smart, but made with nothing, very, very little means.” And that's when I started making my first short films after that. I was like, “Okay, I can kind of do that.” I just borrowed a camera, hustled some film up, and then started shooting.
That’s probably partly Jean-Pierre’s fault, that every film is sort of autobiographical in some way about my obsessions. That's his big talk. It's about obsessiveness all the time.
So that's really the treat I would say that set me off on my path, which has determined everything since then.