After a very interesting conversation last week with Ronnie Bass at Montserrat. I have been thinking about his comments about the fragmented and unfinished nature of our different film projects. He said that he liked that quality. I do too. I am thinking about how the story and the poem differ. I like how John Berger makes the distinction. To paraphrase, he believes that a story drives its way to an ending. We know that it is going there. That is the purpose of the story, to get to the end. At the same time, a poem or the poetic moves across the same territory as a story but its purpose is to acknowledge, ..."to give shelter" as he says, to the experience through language. In a way, the poetic is more like the photographic in that it does not aspire to an ending but just is. This seems to me more like the raw experience of life than the structured experience of a story.
This film is a work like that. I want to make it more like the poem than the story. I started this 4 years ago inspired by the memory of an experience had with my father when I was 19 or 20 years old.
5 years ago
