Saturday, May 31, 2008
Do we need to make any sense ?
Was delivering ( I guess) a lecture on film at the Northwestern University in Chicago. This was a film history class and I am one of the most film illiterate people I know on the planet. By the time I got to be a film maker it was too late to catch up. Yet the students and I had a very interesting session. We plunged straight in to the ideas of 'not knowing'. How do you approach story telling without knowing the outcome. How do you completely surprise yourself. Is any art, including film making, an attempt towards exploration of the unknown ? For if it is not, then it is not art is it ? How do actually go out and try NOT to make sense, but allow the inherent tensions that exist within that exploration to surface, the inherent contradictions within you to surface, and these contradictions then begin to tell the story. Or some semblance of a story. Something emerges that you cannot take credit for, for the film had, or the story had it's own organic being. The story and you meet not in the realm of sense, but somewhere outside in the largesse of the universe where the story is not trying to make sense but is somehow provoking thought processes that have so much contradiction in them that they make sense and do not make sense at the same time. Like a boiling pot - with somehow sense coming to the surface but disintegrating into 'no sense' and sinking back, merely to give rise to the illusion and a tantalizing glimpse of sense again, only to fall back again into no-sense. Like all great poetry. Leaving the viewer/reader to connect the dots to try and create something of logic or of sense in it all. Or not.
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