Emotions

I wanted to start this year with a note to you. I would like to thank you all for your comments. I cannot be more emphatic about this. Making films is a lonely process for me and this kind of conversation really means something to me. I am also overjoyed to be back in touch with many of those I had lost contact with. As many of you already know I am an absolute disastrous carer for my long distance friendships.

It has been an intense year for me and I have taken some time to look back at what I've done. The last three months of 2008 were specially difficult for me since I was coming to terms with a project I did over the summer that has made me very critical of my practice. I made a film about Alvaro, a kid aged 13, who suffered a stroke while he was undergoing an operation to remove his brain tumour and was left in a coma for six months; after which he spent a further 6 months in a vegetative state before being able to move or speak. In the film I was trying to deal with his struggle to deal with his past today now that he can actually talk again. Accepting what had happened to him was hard but necessary for him to progress with his recovery but this drastic incident in his life had utterly blocked his connections with part of his memories. When asked by a psychologist about whether he felt any changes had happened in his life since the stroke he would rapidly answer with a sound and clear "no".

The result of my project was not what I wanted. When I watch it today I feel a complete distance from my own work essentially because I find it detached from his personal experience. It is observational, voyeuristic, and it does not provoke the internal empathy on the part of the audience. Let me just say that while I had a immensely valuable experience in the process of the shoot, seeing the resulting images had a traumatic effect on me blocking my ability to progress. In a way, starting this blog was a way to come out of such uncomfortable paralysis, a way to refresh my ability to SEE things with another set of eyes. I needed to reaffirm my values, my believes in reality. Perhaps I was incorporating the feeling of frustration that my subject had with reality as a futile way to reconnect with him.

The fact is that my encounter with him has touched me quite radically. In this time I have been trying to go back to many of the things I have loved in the past to try to find connections that opened my mind in the hope that I would unlock my creativity. In this pleasant journey I stumbled into the conclusion that most of what I have studied, most of what I have enjoyed doing was related in a way to the notion of "stream of consciousness". All I have wanted to do is to get closer and closer in my work to the inner workings of our minds, to what one might call our perception of reality and others would rather associated it with the matters of the soul. I won't show you any clip from my summer project as I have decided that to take responsability of my work means being able to decide not to show what I think should not be seen. However, in turn, I would like to show you the piece I did just before it. This is possibly the closest I have been to my current idea of portraiture both in terms of relation with subject and actual filmmaking. Let say it opened my vision of what I could do at the time. It is also relevant today since the start of this year has come with collaborations with the two subjects of this film. I am now preparing a mixed media installation with Ochi at the same time as developing a film with Ros. Here goes a special kiss to Ochi and Ros for their part in this and for being there.

"Ochi" was a project developed in a workshop with filmmaker Gideon Koppel (Sleep Furiously) and philosopher Theodore Zeldin (An Intimate History of Humanity) in which we discussed new ways of portraying people in audiovisual ways. I will not say much so that I don't ruin your experience of it. Just let go. It is meant to be watched in a big screen, and without the artifices prompted due to online compression, but this is the down point of our means of global conversation. The good thing is that in this way you will be able to watch it as many times as you like and it opens new ways of reinterpreting every film. A recent example of this reinterpretation is that the "music video" posted in my last entry will be now screened as part of Fur Voice's visuals in his future performances.

I leave you with a quote from another like-minded filmmaker I have been reading about lately.

“Film is for me an attempt, still very rough and very premitive, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism. Nevertheless I insist on the fact that this is merely a small step forward with reference to what one should be able to accomplish one day. I find that once you descend into the subconscious, an emotion can be born… I believe that in life we do not think chronologically, our decisions never correspond to an ordered logic. We all have images, things that determine us which are not logical succession of actions that would normally develop perfectly in a chain. It seems intriguing to me to explore this universe, from the point of view of truth, if not morality”

(Alain Resnais)

Time

First, apologies for it has been a while since my last post. The reason behind it is that I started a small simple project that ended up being a 10 minute video.

A week ago I watched some shorts from underwater documentary filmmaker/artist Jean Painlevé that brought me an enormous amount of memories from my first flirtations with the documentary form back when I started my degree in Brighton. It was then that I went to see these short films projected on screen with a live soundtrack from Yo La Tengo.

From then I drifted to memories of my arrival to London, specifically of some shots I had taken three years ago, still with my handheld DV camcorder, in the aquarium. Back then I had the idea of using that footage together with some shots I had from a previous trip through Norway five years ago, when I visited the Bergen aquarium. In a matter of minutes I had traced a line between my arrival to London, my first holidays after my first work in a feature film and my beginnings in Brighton, all through the isolating images of the deep sea...

The sea has always produced a feeling of respect, fear and attraction in me. To see it in the peacefulness of an aquarium, a cinema theatre, or my own sofa has been a coward way to discover a little of it. The production of this video for me must be some kind of homage to all cowards. I constantly see a glass between me and the water. Speaking about it now doesn't make me braver but it does make me feel more secure, perhaps more confident. I don't know how brave or how coward Jean Painlevé was. All I know is that his films inspired me to work in a poetic approach to reality.

The music is from soundtrack artist, and friend, Fur Voice. He contacted me after seeing my last post and this is a kind of answer to him. Going though all the tracks that I have from him I found this old one that stayed with me for days. I frequently use music to give rhythm to sequences in montage. However, I nearly always get rid of it and start working on sound. This time the music stayed put. I came back to him to ask him for permission to show it before he sees it and it turned out that he had forgotten about this song that was written five years ago and marked a decisive moment in his life. Well, that is memory for you.

I leave you with a quote from a filmmaker I have been reading about that seems to be having a profound effect on me.

"It's not hard to tell things about myself personally. That's the easy part. The hard part about making personal work is not to make it one man's problem -not to make a film that just refers to my own grief. Who cares bout that? I want people to enter the film through their own lives... But by myself being open I think they can be open to themselves. That's what I think a personal film has to do -it has to show a trust but then it has to become more meaningful than what the story is about. It has to be bigger."

(James Benning)

Hope you like it and again, comments are welcomed!

Crossing the Line

I start this blog with a simple goal, to use it as a thinking audiovisual note pad. The idea is that I will capture real moments on camera and post them here as a platform for thought. This will not be a promotional blog for my work but a safe house for all things free and real.

I start this blog with a video shot over a year ago now. It has recurrently come back to my head in the last week and has given me the braveness to throw myself into this adventure.

All comments are welcomed.

Crossing the Line from DANIEL ELIAS DE LA TORRE on Vimeo.