Greetings from France. I promised at the start of this log that I would generally avoid travelogues/journals and stick to documenting the process of making a documentary film, but since I ended up not bringing any tapes with me on our vacation in France, the project is on vacation as well. That said, it’s not out of mind. There are a few things that we’ve seen here that stick in my mind and will probably find their way into the project/story in some way:
Skip to content
Gleaners (see the link below on 8/5): My wife’s family’s house is in Provence, in a small village of farmers north of Aix-en-Provence. Fields everywhere of grapes, melons, tomatoes, and potatoes, which all remind me of Agnes Varda’s film.
Farmers: Of course, the rhythms and activities of the farmers around us here are very similar to those in Mapleton, the location we shot in earlier. Just today, in fact, we passed a truck loaded with baled straw. The fact that many of the farmers we see around are quite old also parallels the US, where it’s rare for young people to stay with the farming tradition of their families. One exception to that is the vintners, most of which continue as family businesses.
Nabokov’s Ada: Nothing like dense, intense reading on an otherwise unplanned, isolated vacation. I’d been told this was the most difficult of Nabokov’s books, and it is certainly complex. The narrative structure and fragmented timeline–written as commenting on looking back, memories out of chronological order–is kind of enticing and annoying at the same time. Nabokov gets the benefit of the doubt (I’m only 1/4 through); would people indulge such a complex structure for the film? Could I pull it off? Think about the film, Memento, which isn’t Nabokov, and forefronts the structure. battery’s running low. gotta go. a bientot.
the making of, by greg allen