Palm recharging at home, I had a little red notebook with me on the train last night, and, still stuck on the entry from the other day, I wrote “Who are such mystics, astronauts, filmmakers, ?, people with a Knowledge, but limited means to convey that knowledge/experience?”
Film technology and technique go so far in “accurately” communicating/realizing what is in the director’s (realisateur, in French, you know) mind, but how long does it remain effective? Early filmgoers reportedly jumped out of the way when they saw an image of a train chugging toward them. The War of The Worlds usurped the medium of radio news reporting and scared millions of less alert listeners. Yet by 1998, the spare-no-CG-expense afterlife in What Dreams May Come had all the impact of a rendering demo at Macworld.
There may be many paths to the top of Mount Fuji, but the techno-theocratic path seems to be leading off somewhere else. Seeing the earth from space may be a transformative experience for the engineer/colonel/astronaut, but their flatly telling us so doesn’t change us that much. In Contact Jodie Foster’s character is “reduced” to pleading for faith after her $600 trillion, globally engineered space trip appeared to go nowhere.
So as I wrestle with how to realize my own vision, the simplest means seem the best. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s brilliant film, After Life [DVD] not only portrays the next world as a shabby but genial bureaucracy, it contains documentary-style segments that celebrate theatrical geniuses who use the humblest means to re-create the happiest memories of the dead. For all Matthew Barney’s baroque dazzle, a single Felix Gonzalez-Torres photo or a lightstring (components bought on Canal Street) strike a deeper chord. The vision is more perfectly realized/transferred.
Three tidbits that I couldn’t fit in:
I thought it was scary enough when Alec Baldwin was the one saying, “I am God.”
On a Harper’s panel about film/literary adaptations, Todd Solondz “defended” James Cameron when someone decried the soulless banality of Titanic: “Oh, I believe that Titanic did come from deep down inside James Cameron.”
The first book I read on my Palm was the 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds, by Charles MacKay, which we all should have read 3-7 years ago.
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the making of, by greg allen