Film as a Conceptual Nostalgia
-The film director Jennifer Montgomery, when referring to the extinct film stock Kodachrome said, “A lot of people seem to have nostalgia for things they never experienced.” This statement sums up most of everything I experience in everyday life. Nostalgia for times I have never experienced. I’m in love with the sixties. But yet what for? For the music, the film scene, the community, the active role people were taking in society, and the massive amount of change that was happening. Maybe it is because it is a time before I experienced extreme emotional pain and loss. I revert back to a time I idealize in order to erase what happened in my lifetime, maybe to have some sense of comfort in knowing what is going on at that exact moment. Yet there is that feeling of history and longing I have embedded in my mind when referring to this past. I base everything I do on history. This past is mysterious to me and by working with it through my art I can try to formulate some kind of cohesion on why it means so much to me. In a way these new genre types categorize the films that I make: Mystery History and Optical Mystery.
-I’m also fascinated with other uses of history in culture. Like when songs are covered: for example “I Put a Spell” on you has been covered at least 50 times. I’m also intrigued in the fusion of media, music, and art in the 1960s. Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page were making music for Kenneth Anger. Cinema Verite filmmakers were capturing the protests and spirit of the times. Art and music became historic references for social change.
-I don’t think that the enthrallment with nostalgia is a new thing. I think for a long time people have been terrified by the present and are able to cocoon themselves into a safety net of the past. This has the potential to be a threatening problem to society and culture of today. There is no room for progress in this case. But this is hardly a national problem, yet.
-Yet as a filmmaker and artist the way that I deal with the nostalgic urge is to conceptually use film as a way to revert back to these eras I couldn’t experience. In a way it is a filmic Happening. If I cannot live this era I must create it. A reenactment of sorts.
-Let’s try an experiment right now.
-I want you to close your eyes and visualize the 60s.
-When I close my eyes I see grain, super saturated 16mm color or stark black and white contrast. I see neon signs, roadhouses, blues, heartache, powerlessness, and control. Travel, highways, Americana, and individualism.
-There is grit and humanism to everything that I relate to the sixties. I romanticize this era and I know that there was war, oppression, and similar issues we are dealing with today. There is violence and hate. But I can visualize it all. I see it in frames. And I’m intrigued that a time can have such stark correlation with image.
-Ultimately I realize I use nostalgia as an escape. The urge to run away from the present and drop off the radar is in the core of a lot of us. But film is an opportunity to escape and tell stories without disappearing. The ability to explore places and things that exist or have existed without experiencing them out right. This is why so many of us have an obsession with movies and film.
2.21.2008
2.04.2008
02/02 - James Joyce's Ulysses Project
This was the script of a sync shoot I did Saturday:
YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed. He was dying on account of her to never see thy face again. All men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty, he is now, so as to wheedle (swindle) any money she can out of him. No fool like an old fool. I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back. Why can’t you kiss a man without going and marrying him first? You sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way, so nice all over you, you can’t help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime. When he’s there, and kiss me, in his arms there’s nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul, almost paralyses you, then I hate that confession. He smelt of some kind of drink, not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweetie kind of paste, they stick their bills up with some liquor. I’d like to sip those rich-looking green and yellow expensive drinks those stage-door johnnies drink with the opera hats. I tasted one with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father; he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep. I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top. The moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end. When he’s there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit. Putting on the indifferent when they come out with something, the kind he is, what spoils him. I don’t wonder in the least because he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron. I said I liked, though he was too beautiful for a man and he was a little. Before we got engaged, afterwards, though she didn’t like it so much, the day I was in fits of laughing with the giggles. O yes, that sometimes he used to go to bed with his muddy boots on. When the maggot takes him, just imagine having to get into bed with a thing like that. O Sweetheart May wouldn’t a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction, actually too stupid even to take his boots off. Now what could you make of a man like that? I’d rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex. Of course he’d never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do. Know me, come sleep with me. Some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad and always the worst word in the world. What do they ask us to marry them for? Then he wrote me that letter with all those words in it. How could he have the face to any woman? After his company manners making it so awkward after, when we met asking me, “have I offended you?” with my eyelids down. Of course, he saw I wasn’t. He had a few brains. I could see him looking very hard at my chest. When he stood up to open the door for me, it was nice of him to show me out in any case. “I’m extremely sorry Mrs. Bloom.” Believe me, without making it too marked the first time, after him being insulted and me being - supposed to be his wife. I just half smiled. I know my chest was out that way at the door, when he said, “I’m extremely sorry” and I’m sure you were
Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong, that train again, weeping tone once in the dear dead days, beyond recall. Close my eyes, breath my lips, forward, kiss, sad look, eyes open. Adultery, that idiot in the gallery hissing the woman adulteress, he shouted. I suppose he went and had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after, to make up for it. I wish he had what I had then. Damn it, damn it. And they always want to see a stain on the bed to know you’re a virgin, for them that’s all that’s troubling them. They’re such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over. A daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice, no, that’s too purple-ly. I wonder was I too heavy sitting on his knee? I made him sit on the easy chair purposefully when I took off only my blouse and skirt first. In the other room he was so busy, where he ought not to be. He never felt me; I hope my breath was sweet after those kissing comforts. Easy, God, I remember one time I could scout it out straight. Whistling like a man, almost easy.
Who knows is there anything the matter with my insides? Or have I something growing in me getting? That thing like that every week. When was it last? And they call that friendship killing and then burying one another. And they’re all with their wives and families at home. I could look at him all-day long. Curly head and his shoulders, his finger up for you to listen. There’s real beauty and poetry for you. I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over. I don’t care what anybody says it’d be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it. You wouldn’t see women going and killing one another and slaughtering. When do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses? Yes, because a woman, whatever she does, she knows where to stop. Sure, they wouldn't be in the world at all, only for us. They don’t know what it is to be a woman and a mother. How could they? Where would they, all of them, be if they hadn’t all mothers to look after them? What I never had. That’s why I suppose he’s running wild now, out at night, away from his books and studies. First, I want to do the place up. Someway the dust grows in it, I think while Im asleep. Then we can have music and cigarettes, I can accompany him first. I must clean the keys of the piano. It was leap year, like now, yes, 16 years ago, my God. After that long kiss I near lost my breath, yes, he said I was a flower of the mountain, yes. So we are flowers, all a woman’s body, yes. That was one true thing he said in his life. And the sun shines for you today. Yes, that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is. And I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could. Leading him on till he asked me to say “yes.” And I wouldn’t answer “yes” and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the Jessamine and geraniums and cactuses. Yes, when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used. Or shall I wear a red? Yes. And how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought, “Well, as well him as another.” And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again. Yes. And then he asked me, would I, yes, to say yes. My mountain flower and first I put my arms around him. Yes. And drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts. All perfume. Yes, and his heart was going like mad. And yes, I said yes. I will Yes.
-I'm afraid it is pretentious, but funny.
After that was done, Imamura blew my mind two more times. And yesterday I watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma.
You're Charisma, baby.
YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed. He was dying on account of her to never see thy face again. All men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty, he is now, so as to wheedle (swindle) any money she can out of him. No fool like an old fool. I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back. Why can’t you kiss a man without going and marrying him first? You sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way, so nice all over you, you can’t help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime. When he’s there, and kiss me, in his arms there’s nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul, almost paralyses you, then I hate that confession. He smelt of some kind of drink, not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweetie kind of paste, they stick their bills up with some liquor. I’d like to sip those rich-looking green and yellow expensive drinks those stage-door johnnies drink with the opera hats. I tasted one with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father; he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep. I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top. The moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end. When he’s there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit. Putting on the indifferent when they come out with something, the kind he is, what spoils him. I don’t wonder in the least because he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron. I said I liked, though he was too beautiful for a man and he was a little. Before we got engaged, afterwards, though she didn’t like it so much, the day I was in fits of laughing with the giggles. O yes, that sometimes he used to go to bed with his muddy boots on. When the maggot takes him, just imagine having to get into bed with a thing like that. O Sweetheart May wouldn’t a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction, actually too stupid even to take his boots off. Now what could you make of a man like that? I’d rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex. Of course he’d never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do. Know me, come sleep with me. Some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad and always the worst word in the world. What do they ask us to marry them for? Then he wrote me that letter with all those words in it. How could he have the face to any woman? After his company manners making it so awkward after, when we met asking me, “have I offended you?” with my eyelids down. Of course, he saw I wasn’t. He had a few brains. I could see him looking very hard at my chest. When he stood up to open the door for me, it was nice of him to show me out in any case. “I’m extremely sorry Mrs. Bloom.” Believe me, without making it too marked the first time, after him being insulted and me being - supposed to be his wife. I just half smiled. I know my chest was out that way at the door, when he said, “I’m extremely sorry” and I’m sure you were
Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong, that train again, weeping tone once in the dear dead days, beyond recall. Close my eyes, breath my lips, forward, kiss, sad look, eyes open. Adultery, that idiot in the gallery hissing the woman adulteress, he shouted. I suppose he went and had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after, to make up for it. I wish he had what I had then. Damn it, damn it. And they always want to see a stain on the bed to know you’re a virgin, for them that’s all that’s troubling them. They’re such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over. A daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice, no, that’s too purple-ly. I wonder was I too heavy sitting on his knee? I made him sit on the easy chair purposefully when I took off only my blouse and skirt first. In the other room he was so busy, where he ought not to be. He never felt me; I hope my breath was sweet after those kissing comforts. Easy, God, I remember one time I could scout it out straight. Whistling like a man, almost easy.
Who knows is there anything the matter with my insides? Or have I something growing in me getting? That thing like that every week. When was it last? And they call that friendship killing and then burying one another. And they’re all with their wives and families at home. I could look at him all-day long. Curly head and his shoulders, his finger up for you to listen. There’s real beauty and poetry for you. I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over. I don’t care what anybody says it’d be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it. You wouldn’t see women going and killing one another and slaughtering. When do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses? Yes, because a woman, whatever she does, she knows where to stop. Sure, they wouldn't be in the world at all, only for us. They don’t know what it is to be a woman and a mother. How could they? Where would they, all of them, be if they hadn’t all mothers to look after them? What I never had. That’s why I suppose he’s running wild now, out at night, away from his books and studies. First, I want to do the place up. Someway the dust grows in it, I think while Im asleep. Then we can have music and cigarettes, I can accompany him first. I must clean the keys of the piano. It was leap year, like now, yes, 16 years ago, my God. After that long kiss I near lost my breath, yes, he said I was a flower of the mountain, yes. So we are flowers, all a woman’s body, yes. That was one true thing he said in his life. And the sun shines for you today. Yes, that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is. And I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could. Leading him on till he asked me to say “yes.” And I wouldn’t answer “yes” and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the Jessamine and geraniums and cactuses. Yes, when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used. Or shall I wear a red? Yes. And how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought, “Well, as well him as another.” And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again. Yes. And then he asked me, would I, yes, to say yes. My mountain flower and first I put my arms around him. Yes. And drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts. All perfume. Yes, and his heart was going like mad. And yes, I said yes. I will Yes.
-I'm afraid it is pretentious, but funny.
After that was done, Imamura blew my mind two more times. And yesterday I watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma.
You're Charisma, baby.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
