Friday, March 11, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
Collisions/Religions
Paring it down, that's what we're doing with Blood, paring and peeling, flaying and stripping. What's left when there is (seemingly) nothing?
For some reason, I am reminded of Tzintzuntzan,the ancient P'urhépecha (Tarascan) city built on a volcanic slab high above the shore of Lake Patzcuaro, in Michoacan, Mexico. Climb to the top and out there is the slithering verdigris of the semi-tropics and there, below, are the oldest olive trees in the Americas, bone-like and balding, and somewhere up here in the vast ceremonial tableau, humans were boiled or flambeed or just simply bled, in sacrifice to the all-God, Kurikaweri.
Nowadays, the problem is ritual sex and all the empty bottles of Modelo Especial. And the lake below is choking on commercial fertilizer. It would be fun to diagram the biological/ecological and cultural collisions.
Flambe this world and there will still be collisions, only these will particles or atoms following some sequence of events preordained by genes. The particles will collide seemingly at random. And that's what happens in Blood, when there are only remnants left of various human civilizations drawing to a close. People collide, as if at random (and yet we know it isn't random). And are there gods at play? Do our characters--Martine and Santi, Baca and Henry and Juh--exist only in the collisions? Or are they yet seeking and imagining other, more pure, worlds? In an e-mail exchange, Anders and I collided, or grazed slightly, over the existence of "religion" in Blood:
N: The space between the infinite and the intimate is existence and when we touch one of the various lines in that space, for example, to quote a narrator of mine, "Somewhere in here, it occurred to me, there is a pair of animals, great bulbous ants or praying mantises or ducks or foxes or rats, who are fornicating, touching, pressing against the line that separates ecstasy from evisceration," we hit religion.
A: The nagging discomfort is also (somehow) absolutely optimistic in that it presents possibility and one could equate that to a sense of hope. A nice abstract beauty in that. Hopefully that sense will prevent boredom when watching three men riding horses to nowhere. Interesting that you should say "religion", while I understand the sentiment, I also feel that it is very much the opposite of religion, but perhaps in a different way. Camus had a nice line about his disdain for Communism, comparing it to religion in that they both sacrificed the man of today for the man of tomorrow. I'm not saying this to be contrary to what you are saying, it's just funny how these things cross and mesh and blur. I see the film as very immediate and inherently lacking any promise beyond itself.
For some reason, I am reminded of Tzintzuntzan,the ancient P'urhépecha (Tarascan) city built on a volcanic slab high above the shore of Lake Patzcuaro, in Michoacan, Mexico. Climb to the top and out there is the slithering verdigris of the semi-tropics and there, below, are the oldest olive trees in the Americas, bone-like and balding, and somewhere up here in the vast ceremonial tableau, humans were boiled or flambeed or just simply bled, in sacrifice to the all-God, Kurikaweri.
Nowadays, the problem is ritual sex and all the empty bottles of Modelo Especial. And the lake below is choking on commercial fertilizer. It would be fun to diagram the biological/ecological and cultural collisions.
Flambe this world and there will still be collisions, only these will particles or atoms following some sequence of events preordained by genes. The particles will collide seemingly at random. And that's what happens in Blood, when there are only remnants left of various human civilizations drawing to a close. People collide, as if at random (and yet we know it isn't random). And are there gods at play? Do our characters--Martine and Santi, Baca and Henry and Juh--exist only in the collisions? Or are they yet seeking and imagining other, more pure, worlds? In an e-mail exchange, Anders and I collided, or grazed slightly, over the existence of "religion" in Blood:
N: The space between the infinite and the intimate is existence and when we touch one of the various lines in that space, for example, to quote a narrator of mine, "Somewhere in here, it occurred to me, there is a pair of animals, great bulbous ants or praying mantises or ducks or foxes or rats, who are fornicating, touching, pressing against the line that separates ecstasy from evisceration," we hit religion.
A: The nagging discomfort is also (somehow) absolutely optimistic in that it presents possibility and one could equate that to a sense of hope. A nice abstract beauty in that. Hopefully that sense will prevent boredom when watching three men riding horses to nowhere. Interesting that you should say "religion", while I understand the sentiment, I also feel that it is very much the opposite of religion, but perhaps in a different way. Camus had a nice line about his disdain for Communism, comparing it to religion in that they both sacrificed the man of today for the man of tomorrow. I'm not saying this to be contrary to what you are saying, it's just funny how these things cross and mesh and blur. I see the film as very immediate and inherently lacking any promise beyond itself.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Into the Inconceivable Brightness
In the video posted just this afternoon on Al-Jazeera, the people of Cairo are filling Tahrir Square. They are laughing and they are smoking and they are singing; they are wearing purple headscarves and natty sweaters; and now it has been posted, they are organizing a football tournament. And they are marching--ever so sweetly--to the edge of the unknown.
When Anders asked me to help him craft the script for Blood, he came to my house with five books and five canisters of scents of New Mexico (if you were to ask him who exactly he is, he might just point to those scents, which are pictured in an earlier posting on this blog). The five books: Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, a little photo history of the Taos Pueblo, Taschen's lovely collection of Edward Curtis' photographs of American Indians, a family heirloom Portraits of North American Indian Life published by the American Museum of Natural History (a double-sized coffee table book of Curtis' work), and Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, which includes an essay by Stanford Kwinter, "Flying the Bullet, or When Did The Future Begin?"
Most of this didn't surprise me. Anders has a vision (a vision that encompasses time and space and smell) for Blood that emerges from his own experience growing up in New Mexico and the places and ways that experience intersects with the people and landscapes in Curtis' work. One imagines the historic relationship between photography and film (Carlos Reygadas' Silent Night, for example, seems to jump right off the pages of Larry Towell's book of photographs, The Mennonites). But Anders had something else in mind with Koolhaas and Kwinter, whose essay co-signed Koolhaas to Chuck Yeager, the epic American flyer and dogfighter. To fly the bullet was to viscerally accept and assimilate danger, in other words to walk headlong, as the people of Cairo, into to the most brilliant, inconceivable spot in the heavens. To fly the bullet was to find a way for us to talk about a process of film making that would, as Anders put it, "build as if by stone, piece by piece, each rock fitting into the next in perfect (imperfect?) symmetry, like a puzzle ordered from natural chaos."
I would add that it isn't so much a puzzle, but a spirited world, etched from the very elements: bone and dust and chile and sagebrush, and yes, blood.
When Anders asked me to help him craft the script for Blood, he came to my house with five books and five canisters of scents of New Mexico (if you were to ask him who exactly he is, he might just point to those scents, which are pictured in an earlier posting on this blog). The five books: Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, a little photo history of the Taos Pueblo, Taschen's lovely collection of Edward Curtis' photographs of American Indians, a family heirloom Portraits of North American Indian Life published by the American Museum of Natural History (a double-sized coffee table book of Curtis' work), and Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, which includes an essay by Stanford Kwinter, "Flying the Bullet, or When Did The Future Begin?"
Most of this didn't surprise me. Anders has a vision (a vision that encompasses time and space and smell) for Blood that emerges from his own experience growing up in New Mexico and the places and ways that experience intersects with the people and landscapes in Curtis' work. One imagines the historic relationship between photography and film (Carlos Reygadas' Silent Night, for example, seems to jump right off the pages of Larry Towell's book of photographs, The Mennonites). But Anders had something else in mind with Koolhaas and Kwinter, whose essay co-signed Koolhaas to Chuck Yeager, the epic American flyer and dogfighter. To fly the bullet was to viscerally accept and assimilate danger, in other words to walk headlong, as the people of Cairo, into to the most brilliant, inconceivable spot in the heavens. To fly the bullet was to find a way for us to talk about a process of film making that would, as Anders put it, "build as if by stone, piece by piece, each rock fitting into the next in perfect (imperfect?) symmetry, like a puzzle ordered from natural chaos."
I would add that it isn't so much a puzzle, but a spirited world, etched from the very elements: bone and dust and chile and sagebrush, and yes, blood.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
JCC? no, NRP
Went to Paris to meet with JCC. Was unable to see him, but we spoke and had a brief correspondence. Very useful but we will definitely not be working together. Wrong man for the job. Have drafted another writer, he's brilliant, low profile and a great guy - a far better match! He will doubtless push the film in new directions and I'm really excited to have him on board.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
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