|
I firmly believe that film
can be intellectually engaging and emotionally moving at the same time. Flms
which demand serious effort on the part of their viewers can also be
enjoyable. Brecht taught us that to think and learn does not of necessity
exclude the possibility of pleasure. That is, I believe, a utopian element of
my film. You have to work at it when you watch, but hopefully the work
provides joy and is worthwhile. Not all work, after all, has to be toil done
merely to earn a wage. It is also utopian that
something beautiful can be cobbled together from so much that is ugly. It
proves that there is hope. This is important to remember for people like me
who are constitutionally bleak-minded; it is also good to recall for my
friends who tell me that my film depresses them. I think it is the world that
is depressing them and my film makes them realize this a little. If that were all that my
film did I would not consider it a success. It also seems to offer a bit of
an experience of beauty. That experience is disconcerting because you do not
generally expect something like beauty to emerge in an artwork where you see
human beings murdered and literally blown to pieces. But it is also
intellectually reassuring in that it shows a way forward. A critic once wrote
something about my film that I cherish. He said the film "shows us how
to cross the world several times with the minimum of means -- with no more
than a pilgrim's staff." I take this to mean a couple things. "To
Those Born After" is a piece of what is called "appropriate"
or "sustainable technology" in the arid language of economics. The
only difference is that it so far has profited no one. But it is also a
comment on the possibilities of minimalism, a minimalism whose goal is not to
reduce art to pure aesthetic gestures but to propel art outward into the
world and to allow the world into art. The simple signs and symbols have
always been the best. My favorites: a camera and an eye; a hammer and a
sickle. There are two images that I
believe should be shown on film or video only with the greatest care or
perhaps not at all. One is the image of the World Trade Center burning and
collapsing. It turns your mind off to see that; the response is Pavlovian.
The other is any image of George W. Bush speaking with synchronous sound. The
ban on graven images that Adorno and Benjamin so cherished was misplaced.
Images of god or utopia are not the problem. It is images of people like Bush
that are dangerous because the images grant a particular substance to him
when he literally has none, aside from his crude corporal materiality. Godard
once said that the original mission of cinema was to show us that the world
was there. But then it became the mission of cinema to make us believe in the
world on the screen. The last thing we should do is believe in a human being
who has no thoughts of his own and who says nothing that is true. My eldest daughter is the
child in the images at the end of the film. She is a remarkable human being
worth believing in. From very early on she disliked having her picture taken
and that's why so many pictures of her that we do have are stolen images. Not
quite "life caught unawares" but more like "life caught with
its guard down." I don't bother her much with the video camera now. The
few video bits we do have of Sophie often end with her snarling at the camera
or turning away as she realizes she's been caught, as she does at the end of
this film. It is a good reminder that we should be careful of what we demand
from those born after. We don't, after all, want them to turn away as well. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||