the sourcerer: Seeing in a different way.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Seeing in a different way.

Working in film has changed the way I experience movies. I find it hard not to be over-analytical. It's particularly difficult when I watch something that I worked on. I watched Lord of War the other night. 2004: I was subcontracted to work on one set only - a swish New York apartment. As I watched I found it impossible not to feel what was happening behind and around the camera. And then the circles get wider. I remembered driving to the studio on cold winter mornings, the refinery's flame wavering in the predawn light. One day I had to dress a child's bedroom in near darkness, while listening to Nicholas Cage rehearsing his lines through a paper thin wall. I remembered that feeling of unsettledness - I loved a boyfriend to distraction, for I was coming to the realization that he couldn't love me back. Long talks over soup and whiskey at Cafe Ganesh. Even though no mirrors were broken, many years of bad luck and sadness would follow.
But I didn't know that then.

Arcadia asked the other day if things get easier as you get older. My answer is Yes and No, but mostly Yes. May the wonder never stop.

2 comments:

Petro said...: Lily,
How could he not love you back? Was he deaf, dumb and blind?
Good riddance!; November 28, 2011 at 1:55 PM
the sourcerer said...: oh Petro, that made me smile.
thank you.; November 28, 2011 at 2:06 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.