It’s a kind of a semantic game: lying versus truth-telling. One doesn’t lie for the sake of lying; one does not invent merely for the sake of inventing. One does it for a particular purpose and that purpose always is to arrive at some kind of spiritual truth that one can’t discover simply by recording the world-as-it-is. We’re inventing and using imagination for sublime reasons- to get at the essence of things, not merely the surface.
-Tim O’Brien
2 east arizona street, detroit
I’m in the nitty gritty of the writing phase!
The film I’m currently writing is set in Highland Park, Detroit, a place that seems very similar to where I grew up in “South Central” Los Angeles, off of Crenshaw. It’s about a black young man, age 23. But it challenges everything you might think of this person growing up in this kind of neighborhood, he is atypical. He has chosen to become a muslim extremist.
I am thinking now of Haneke and the way he makes films. His films almost exclusively deal with the upper middle class becoming victimized in some way. I am very different as I come from a family of lower-middle class, people who were raised in poverty in central america.
Classwise–I’m dealing with the already victimized. And so, I’d like to explore a new way of telling this story. Because true suffering does not arise solely of poverty. It arises out of a circumstance and how people perceive that circumstance.
I’m in the midst of writing something that doesn’t negate class and race but does challenge the public perception of what if means to be a “black man in America”. I’m writing of a family like my own. Though colored, they are not the close-knit comedic family of the Tyler Perry film. They are often alienated and often alienate themselves from each other.
I need it to be challenging–first and foremost. I need it to make people uncomfortable because then it would have some real lasting meaning. I want to show the capacity to love along with the capacity to suffer.
I don’t want to give it all away–so I’m speaking vaguely here. But this helps me think it through.
I’m happy though, for the challenge. I’m also fearing it.
i can tell you’re a romantic. i’m not. but hey thats okay. as im in a pessimistic stage (sort of) i deal more in destruction. well…at least i’d like to comment on how we destroy ourselves and each other.
make films for you and humanity. if you read that tolstoy quote it says it all: “And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union, will show them, not by reason, but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life.”
thats the ultimate goal. creating empathy.
artists do it in different ways. flannery o’connor, a southern writer who wrote in the 50s, wrote one iconic model of a story in different ways. she took a character and put them in a defining situation, where they either turnaround and act with grace, or continue on their path to self destruction.
joseph conrad, another author i like, wrote journey stories (Heart of Darkness) but he did it with characters who were unsure of themselves, who were almost unformed, who had to then define themselves in their journey. (think of Apocalypse Now).
tolstoy tried to unite us all in our plight within an inherently flawed system. he fought for our souls.
every author/artist should have a clear point of view about humanity. or humanity within a given context (time period). at least i suppose, if you’re dealing with humans as characters. that is the key!
if you can find your answer to this you will know absolutely everything there is to any film you’d like to make. you will know what shot is correct. you will know if you should or shouldn’t use music. you will know what actor to choose.
because its all going towards one direction ==>towards your belief. you will inherently know which answers are wrong, because they will mean the wrong thing.
i’m not sure there’s a way to “elevate” your voice. but i do feel through life you go through a clarification or refining of voice.
clarifying your voice (in my opinion) comes through challenging yourself. of questioning your choices in your own life. your own emotions, reactions, etc. knowing yourself on the deeper level, which for me, means knowing everyone. because we are all the same on a gut level. all the superficial stuff falls away, and is in the end forgettable.
i always think about what will be important to me when i’m on my deathbed (if i die at an old age). what will i be living for then? it wont be politics. it wont be external beauty (long faded). romance will have fallen away. but i think what i would value is a strong connection with others.
that’s why i’m (newly) against films which romanticize/fetishize poverty. poverty falls away. what are left with humans making choices (poor or positive, or even those which will have no effect). a good film does not narrowly focus on poverty, it focuses on humanity (of characters in whichever state) in the context of poverty.
lucrecia martel is interesting because she challenges a lot of what i have to say, and i love her films. She says: A film is a process in which one wishes to share a perspective, not a story.
She says you shouldn’t manipulate your audience and try to teach them anything. Lucrecia tries to share with you the world the way she sees it (or hears it, btw, she is very much focused on the way sounds shape the way you perceive the world). She strums tension in a film like a guitar. She is quite talented and unique.
Apichatpong W. and Reygadas also are less invested in story. They want you to have an experience. They want to effect your senses. There’s a great magic in that. Apichatpong speaks alot about magic in film.
What art is not, absolutely not by any means, is a way to make money. If you make something with the intention to sell it, then you are corrupting your film. It is not about the film anymore, it has a separate intention. It effects the choices you make in the film, and then you will not make the right ones at all times. Your choices will lack meaning. You have to forget about that ($, career) when you are making a film. (Unless you’d like to be a businessman…then by all means…)
There’s my POV.
Wendy
“And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union, will show them, not by reason, but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life.” (Leo Tolstoy, “What is Art?”)
The writers that I enjoy always speak of a deep interconnectedness of us all. Something we tend to forget. That empathy.
Tolstoy and his grandchildren (1909)
A film should be as rhetorical as this Julian Schnabel painting.
A professor at Columbia helped me realize that film students are flawed in their “intellectual” decision making. He suggested that making films based on one’s lofty ideas never really affected any audience–that it is only through getting to real emotion that you will have an impact on your audience.
We are also taught in storywriting to focus on the manipulation of our audience’s emotion. That it should be like a kind of “emotional rhetoric”. That, for example, sometimes you fake out your audience to elicit a feeling of surprise. That ultimately you’re leading them in a certain direction, towards a certain end which you’ve already determined. That you must have in mind a desired emotional effect.
I am starting to think that film should neither be intellectual nor rhetorical!
All I can honestly present you with in a film (or with any art form) is my derivative for life. So why aim to make short-lived arguments and puzzles?
The following quote is a doozie:
“Una película es un proceso en donde uno desea compartir con otros un punto de vista. No una historia.” Lucrecia Martel (A film is a process in which one wishes to share a perspective, not a story.)
I can’t get that phrase out of my head. For me its an entirely new vision of what film can be.
In other news, lately I’ve been daydreaming about returning to El Salvador to make a film about my great uncle, a fisherman in a small village (I’m such a romantic). He sure did spook me when I met him a few years ago. He had unique solutions to his life’s problems, including the creation of magical potions.
I recently read an essay from Flannery O’ Connor, the famed Southern writer, in which she writes:
“The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it.” (O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction)
The word was a revelation! Anagoge is a notion of meaning that connects everything we do in reality (and depict in art) and frames it on a spiritual level.
Plus, its a mighty sexy word.
So here’s to anagoge, and to a new blog where I’ll try (read: fumble about) to identify the connective tissue between life and art.
Love,
Wendy
