the sourcerer: In the Cape yawn the ravens and we melt in sweltering days.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

In the Cape yawn the ravens and we melt in sweltering days.

We worked on a shoot in Stellenbosch last week. It was incredibly hot. "So warm, die kraaie gaap" and "snikhete". Two wonderful expressions in Afrikaans. I fed them into Google Translate and it came up with the title above. I see many hours of amusement ahead...

On the first day we watched as the mountains became darker and darker blue. Later there was a thunderstorm. Stellenbosch has changed a lot since I was a student there. They have rush hours now! But what really blew me away was how incredibly friendly
and helpful people were.

Our location was just out of town - Mulderbosch wine estate. They make one of my favourite chardonnays.

Spent a few hours doing beauty shots of lettuce. Zzzzzzz. All these lights and reflectors for one head of lettuce. I helped the food stylist reset her salad bowl for take after take. This meant picking out bits of carrots and nuts with a tweezer. (Surely there's a name for this job - like the Fluffer on a porn set?)

In the afternoon we moved on to the cellar set. Rubbed shoulders with some great legends in the world of rugby and wine. The most fun part of the day: recording wild sound upstairs - corks being popped, wine being poured, a rubber stamp being stamped.

It was a pleasant change to work with a down-to-earth Afrikaans director. He knew exactly what he wanted, no bullshit, no tantrums. Impressed.

1 comment:

arcadia said...: Ek is verlief op daai houtrakke. Pragtig.; February 13, 2011 at 8:28 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.