Tall Lights, Short Shadows

Coming Home Now

2011-04-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Here it is at last. This is Fur Voice's "Coming Home" video. Hope you enjoy it. And please do comment. Again, I cannot say it enough, please visit his website where the Album "Onto Endo" is available from today here

Coming Home Soon

2011-04-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

Fur Voice "Coming Home" long awaited music video will be released any time as part of his strangely beautiful "Onto Endo" Album.

Shot in Argentina last September and in the works since then, the time has come for it at last.

Here is my personal tribute to him. These shots were taken during my last visit to Barcelona. Please be alert as he will be posting the video any moment!

Villanuba Airport

2011-03-14T13:27:00.001-07:00

Esteros del Iberá/Anticipation

2011-02-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

I'd like to avoid an ending to this travel photo-story by coming back to where I begun with a personal note on anticipation.

Here in this picture I decided to photograph the house of a man who I saw day after day seating outside his house, Mate on hand, listening to the radio and looking at the "road" in front of him, waiting for something, waiting for someone to walk by, some car to drive pass, something to happen.

Esteros del Iberá, Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, is possibly the quietest town I have ever been to. Only reachable through hours of dirt track and only when it doesn't rain, it is the home of 300 bird species and the one and only bar. There I found a feeling of unprecedented freedom as I walked around town. Suffice to say that not many cars did actually go by this house at all.

To anticipate seems necessary to plan ahead, to protect oneself from future danger, or to positively think of the future. However I feel sometimes we live in anticipation, dedicating most of our days to predict what will happen next, worrying about our future, or purely dreaming and fantasizing about it, so by the time the car does go by we are not ready to enjoy the view, to talk to the driver, or to simply be able to say "I saw it pass".

Anticipation seems somehow to be opposed to surprise and as such I do try to resist its temptations. I have always been concerned with the way we seem to be always waiting for definite things to happen, as if we were slaves to preconceptions and easy judgments. As a documentary cinematographer I am used to wait for those "decisive" moments to happen. You visit a place, you meet its people, you visit and revisit and you wait and wait because you know where and when to wait for things to happen. I sometimes will spend long hours purely observing what's around me, seeing it change, seeing "change", looking for the unknown, with utmost belief in reality's ability to surprise me.

So, when I look back at this picture, at times I think of the man behind the curtain as someone less dependant on a definite future, someone who is purely freer to sit back and watch the world go by. Someone who's main anticipation is his faith that something, not a car, not the usual face but something new, perhaps just a small detail but nevertheless new, is out there, right in front of us. Someone whose life is not about waiting or worrying about things that are just about to begin. Someone who rather spends his life vibrantly enjoying his pursue of the unknown.

Independencia

2011-01-31T03:22:00.002-08:00

Independencia: spanish for Independence, a condition of a nation, country, or state in which its residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory.

Autonomy (in slight contrast) refers to a kind of independence which has been granted by an overseeing authority that itself still retains ultimate authority over that territory (see Devolution). A protectorate refers to an autonomous region that depends upon a larger government for its protection as an autonomous region. The dates of established independence (or, less commonly, the commencement of revolution), are typically celebrated as a national holiday known as an independence day.

Causes for a country or province wishing to seek independence are many. Disillusionment rising from the establishment is a cause widely used in separatist movements, but it is usually severe economic difficulties that trigger these groups into action.

Independencia has also been the name for many ships. The Chilean corvette Independencia (1818), the Argentine coastal ship Independencia (1891), the 1958 Argentine aircraft carrier Independencia, the 1894 San Domingan gunboat as well as the 1865 Peruvian ironclad, wrecked and blew up in 1879 during the War of the Pacific, or the 1874 Mexican gunboat Independencia.

Independence is also referred to in psychological and emotional terms. Some see it as sign of maturity, of thinking for one self without subordinating one's thoughts and actions to those imposed by society's dominant discourses. Some other people see it as a fortress where one becomes isolated from his or her surroundings. This is because independence means a primary focus on one's own evaluations rather than the evaluations of others, it implies: a primary focus on reality and of one's honest evaluations of reality. So, to be independent is to proceed neither by the incorrect evaluations of others, nor by one's own arbitrary evaluations.

The top shot was taken in the town of Humahuaca in the northwest of Argentina. It is a largely indigenous andean town close to the Bolivian border. Here a large number of kids look at a stage as they wait for a community clown show to start. Behind them, their monumento a la independencia.

The bottom one was captured at Independencia subte station, a central stop in the Buenos Aires' underground system.

Lithium

2011-01-30T04:01:00.000-08:00

Laguna Miscanti is a brackish water lake located at 4,200 meters of altitude in the antiplano of the Antofagasto Region, in northern Chile. Miñiques volcano, on the left, and the Cerro Miscanti, on the right, can be found just behind it. The western shoreline of the lake is separated by less than one kilometre from the drainage divide between the lake and the Salar de Atacama basins. The lake is part of one of the seven sectors of Los Flamencos Natural Reserve.

From here the water collected from the falling raindrops and the melting of the ice peaks gets filtered down the mountain through rivers flowing under the ground. Above the ground the temperatures are high and the humidity is practically absent. This water, full of salt and volcanic minerals, will only resurface from holes found more than one kilometer below our feet, onto other salt lakes found at the Salar de Atacama.

There, under one of the most arid climates in the planet, the water simply evaporates. To my surprise, it does not only leave behind traces of the obvious product, rock salt. The Salar de Atacama is also, together with the neighbouring Salar de Uyuni, the world's major producer of Lithium.

Lithium is the organic representation of emotional stability. I only found out about the properties of Lithium when I was a kid because back then my mother and I shared a house for a while with my aunt, who suffered from schizophrenia. I was told her ocasional passages of delirium were caused by a lack of lithium in her organism. And here I was, in front of the mother of all the lithium tablets consumed and quite often avoided by many.

According to modern cosmological theory, lithium—as both of its stable isotopes lithium-6 and lithium-7—was among the 3 elements synthesize in the Big Bang and is believed to have been formed when the universe was between 100 and 300 seconds old. Lithium seems to me as intrinsic to our nature as water. One could ask how is it possible that the key to our physical emotional stability is so closely related to the physics of our world? However my question remains one less mystical and much more down to earth, what do we do when we stand in front of it?

Desire

2011-01-28T03:30:00.000-08:00

Found Objects

2011-01-27T04:44:00.000-08:00

These are extremely large found objects. The road mirror must be around ten meters in width while the abandoned rails were probably six meters in length each. Their surrounding landscapes are so incredibly vast that they render them almost maleable. And yet I found them to have a special sense of belonging.

I first stumble upon the mirror while we were driving from Cafayate to Cachi on the famous Ruta-40, a dirt track that took us 5 hours to complete. There are very few towns in the way and I think we only crossed two cars on this day.

And there it was on one of the many curves that we passed by. Its angled shape seemed to mirror the mountains in its backdrop. However, what really attracted me was the fact that if you were to stand right in front of it you would not be able to see yourself. Instead, you could only see and feel the vast surrounding landscape.

The truth, I guess, is that this mirror was not designed to be a reflection of oneself but a means of communication between those people driving on the road at night, a means for an encounter, and what an encounter I should add. There were no lamp posts or anything of the kind. I could not think of a good enough reason to be driving through that road in the middle of the night. I could only imagine the effect of the car lights as they approached the curve and their reflection on the other side of the road, on the other approaching car and its driver, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of utter darkness.

Unfortunately, as we were yet to see a single car crossing our way we did not stay to see what such a dramatic play of light and shadows would look like. I could only visualize it and play with it in my mind with delight. In the absence of darkness and cars, there and then in the daylight, this mirror had lost its original function to become an extremely large and industrial object of rather strange beauty. One could say it looked almost out of place and yet everything about it was place.

One week later I saw these abandoned tracks as we were on board of a disused train line designed by Eiffel. It had been turned into some sort of train engineering tourist attraction. Its original function was to communicate the city of Salta with the impossibly high town of San Antonio de los Cobres where the copper mines are situated. The sparse landscape gave us an idea of the little sense it made we were there at the time. However, these enormous oxidized tracks, strangely lined up pointing towards another dirt road in the horizon, belonged there. Removed of their original function and isolated from the track we were onto they reclaimed their role in the surrounding landscape. Once again I had this feeling that these objects looked almost out of place while everything about them was place.

It has made me think that sometimes a certain degree of displacement it's necessary if one is ever to encounter its place in the world.

Blurred Boundaries 2

2011-01-26T08:45:00.001-08:00

Blurred Boundaries 1

2011-01-26T08:37:00.001-08:00

Curiosity

2011-01-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

Roadside

2011-01-21T12:01:00.001-08:00

This series of stills were taken while in movement on the coach trip from Jujuy in the northwest of Argentina to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. This was an outing that I was very close to cancel due to some serious problems with my neck that had me hospitalised and then in bed for the most part of august. It has come to be a journey that I will remember as an act of defiance as I went from bed to adventure.

We begun our trip with a hired car which I dearly enjoyed driving. But once we got to Jujuy we had to leave the car behind us and jump on a coach. These shots were all taken with a wide angle lens very close to the rocks with an extremely fast shutter speed and so it was hard to focus at times. The composition was not an orchestrated act but rather the result of my interaction with the road as we crossed the Andes.

I remember the sense of excitement that I felt when seeing these pictures for the first time. Yes, they were an act of resistance towards uncontrolled change. I wanted to freeze time, to stop anyone or anything driving my life except me, to stop my bones deteriorating, to stop time having a physical toll on me. However, they were also liberating, as I did not looked backwards nor forwards but rather sidewards towards the roadside, to a place where I could not see nor predict what was right in front of me.

Forming

2011-01-21T05:13:00.000-08:00

These pictures were taken on the same trip yet in two very different places, the altitude of the B-357 road, crossing the andes on its way to the Atacama dessert in Chile, and the altitude of a plane overlooking the great Chaco on its way to Iguazu. Both were photographed while being in movement yet at truly different speeds in relation to the land they portray (one on a coach, the other on a plane). However they both ask the same question: how do we form?

The first still made me think of Emilia. She is a good friend of my mother who made me understand grammar in a completely different way. As someone who worked with adults to help them become literate she understood language like no other. She was articulate enough to make me see how grammar wasn't just a set of rules but responded to a need to associate meanings and a need to communicate those to others. So, in my little head while at school, if I wanted to understand a writing's meaning I needed to understand its grammar, as form was intrinsic to meaning.

It was Emilia too, not the teacher but the warm and rebel woman, who made me see that freedom came from unexpected associations, from using those same tools to form new meanings. And so my guess is that we form and form in the lookout to liberate ourselves from those associations that were set at a time when we were not able to understand their formation.

To Emilia.

Esteros del Iberá/The way in

2011-01-20T10:02:00.001-08:00

Expanded time

2010-11-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

At last I am back. No matter how busy I am I seem to have a delay from making something to showing it in this blog of about 2 years... So much for new media's immediacy!

However, this is not the place to sum up my life or tell you what I have been up to, or make some sort of branding of myself. It is a place to share things with you. It sometimes coincides with a need to try to make sense of what I've done before I embark on a new adventure. Most times it is the opposite rather, I have no adventure in sight so I am left alone with what I've made. This time, however, I want to show something that I did not make on my own. It was a collaborative project made in early 2009 with photographer Ochi Reyes, who you saw in my previous post. It was only possible thanks to the help of Celia and Ana in Cabo de Gata, Spain and the support from Eva Russo and Annalisa Dunn back in the U.K.

Péndulo was presented in the ruined basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, London and later commissioned and installed under London Bridge at Shunt. To see the pictures and the video will never account for the experience that was "being there". Nevertheless, it remains the only possible way of sharing some of it with all of you today. Perhaps the personal and social context of this work has shifted since it was originally presented but its essence continues to captivate me.

On July the 24^th 1928 a man was tragically killed in the surroundings of the Cortijo de Fraile in Nijar, Almeria, Spain. It is the story of a bride that escaped from his groom on a mule with her true lover, her cousin, only to be confronted by the groom’s brother in law who finally shot him down. The events leading to his death were to inspire Federico García Lorca to write Blood Wedding in 1932 capturing the essence of the tragedy while making it an iconic example of Spain’s blood culture; a culture of memory, of passion and of tragedy; a culture of remembrance, of bereavement and barefacedness.

‘Love/Death’ is at its centre. A single deep word that sums up the tragic feeling that is at the heart of every passionate existence. A single word that best expresses the paradoxical character of life. It does not talk about rational truths but about the truth of passion, the unity between suffering and understanding, between feeling and looking inside us. It is a culture that, comprehensibly, has been refused with contempt and violence by the culture of progress, of reason and of reconciliation, by that vision of the world that for such a long time has considered itself to be the only one possible and true. This culture of progress self-imposed itself throughout Spain’s democratic transition stressing the need to always look to the future and never look back.

Péndulo takes the Cortijo de Fraile as a departure point to create a spatial and sensory experience where fear and attraction constitute the principal forces and movements and where the visitor remains the subject of the piece.

In Péndulo there is a collection of photographic images buried both at a representational level and a physical level within the installation. They form a circle of point of lights in a darkened room. In the centre, a bag of blood hangs of a chain from the roof of the room. The circle is fractured where an image is missing. This lack is filled with the projection of a video. The sound is only available to the visitor through the use of hanging headphones. Behind them, in total darkness, the figure of a woman covered in black clothes stares at us.

I'd like to leave you with a quote by Susan Sontag from “Under the sign of Saturn” that inspired the making of this piece.

“Allegory is the preferred method of writers and artists prone to indistinct, indecisive longing for a past that did not exist (sehnsucht). A fitting tribute to melancholia, allegory, imbued with a sense of the forbidden, is distinguished by the sense of having lost one’s way, a sense analogous to the disorientation and the loss of time. Thus allegory does not project a plan or proposal but is characterised in spatial and temporal terms as “a place where one gets lost”[…] The melancholic’s need to make whole that which has been shattered is exemplified by the haunting experience of imperceptible lack. Thus melancholic’s often exhibit the obsession of “the collector”, gathering and indexing to excess any number of things in a vain attempt to hold onto a world that does not appear to include them”

Hope you like it and as always comments are welcome!

Emotions

2008-12-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-25T08:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-11T05:08:00.000-08:00

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.