Over lunch today I read husband-and-wife Thom Taylor and Melinda Hsu's Digital Cinema, The Hollywood Insider's Guide to the Evolution of Storytelling. In his Foreword, Richard Martini, co-director of the Do-It-Yourself Film Festival in LA narrated how he made his first film using "super slow-mo" on his 8-millimeter camera at the wheelchair races at the Special Olympics. The 10-minute film won at the film festival in Mexico City in 1980. "It was at this point," he writes, "that I realized that the content of the film was more powerful than its delivery."
That was a powerful insight for Martini and points to what I feel is my main failing creatively. There are topics I am compelled to write about but none pervasive and persistent enough to fuel a diligent application of time and effort. Content. We are too often prevented from doing what we dream of doing from deep-seated feelings of inadequacy with the technology yet I've come across so many stories of how people started their careers with the most primitive of equipment and know-how. What they had was indefatigable interest, passion.
Martini points out something else that I found helpful. "Images," he wrote, outweigh any words." He described the young Vito Corleone walking across the rooftops after murdering his enemies and tells his infant son, "Your father loves you very much."
Content and images. For much of my life my inner life was a life of ideas and thoughts. It was after I bought a Minolta SLR some 15 years ago that images begun to interest me. I took that camera when my sister and I drove to Texas through Kentucky and Tennessee, then later Arizona and New Mexico. My family made fun of me when I showed them my trove of pictures: corners of buildings, close-ups of flowers, landscapes empty of people, and no one they recognized gracing any of them. I was so proud of what I've shot that the negative reception only fired my interest in "cold" images. Later I discovered that inanimate objects can evoke as powerful emotions in the viewer as human subjects although admittedly people relate easier when they recognize something human in what they are viewing.
Martini's next movie project was a dare from a friend to find how little a full-feature digital movie would cost. Most actors he knew declined to participate in his no-budget venture so he decided to make the camera the main actor in his movie. Camera had its world premiere at the Digital Talking Film Festival in India in 2000. The organizers paid for his hotel, one night's stay costing more than the movie cost—$300 for the tapes. Otherwise the movie earned him no money but did lead to his being hired to shoot a commercial for a tour company in India.
The book's authors too started their book by telling the story of how three men developed and carried their movie idea to completion as the independent digital feature Washington Heights. "Their creative efforts, as often happens in the real lives of everyday people, are sometimes forced to take a back seat to their needs to pay the bills and have a somewhat normal existence..." Somewhat normal...
They posed their question: why is storytelling exciting? "Going back to our came-dwelling ancestors sitting around the fire, the human impulse to entertain, provoke, move, enlighten, and share has shaped our whole history of dramatic, written and visual work," they answered. Then they wrote something that struck me maybe more than anything so far they'd written. Art happened "because of someone's ability to externalize an internal experience and affect others with that externalization.
I've lived all my life in my mind, at first with just the thoughts that streamed endlessly through its interlinking byways, later admixed with the images those thoughts, largely memories and association, compelled to appear. To make the transition towards becoming a content producer, an artist maybe, I need to translate this amorphous mass into one form of media that I can share with others. Not to do this is to keep the inner life I've grown to love to myself. It will die with me as it dies moment after moment. To externalize pieces of it into some art form is to contribute to the ocean of images and ideas in which societies swim, from which they derive new inspiration and push the shores to undiscovered lands.
I shot this image while walking along the cliff walk overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. We were visiting Cinque Terre, one of my favorite places in Northern Italy.
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