“I need to sort of tear down everything I've done and rebuild from scratch. And that's a process that I think is not incremental.... I just need to just destroy everything that's come before and see if I can kind of become a primitive again. I'm not even sure it's possible. I don't know if it's something you could do...It means just throwing away everything that you've learned and thought and trying to become in essence a completely different filmmaker, because I've hit a wall of what I feel I'm able to do at this point - not because I've figured everything out, I've just figured out what I can't figure out and I need to tear it down and start over again.”
—Steven Soderbergh
“Film-making is the only thing a man can do that could possibly be similar to a woman giving birth. It's such an emotionally complex experience, we men could never understand what a woman goes through, which is why women are so much more sophisticated and interesting, and in my opinion should rule the world.”
—Nicolas Winding Refn
Source.
Poetry in Cinema
I’m currently working on a film with the cinematographer Maria Cabra. It’s a small piece of poetry, shot primarily on Super 8 film, with special consideration of how the light is manipulated before it hits the celluloid (read: filters).
The film focuses on spring, spring showers, and the re-animated flow of life after winter. The image will be imbued with freedom through obscuration - images will be selectively fractured, distorted, and out-of-focus.
Formlessness is the source of possibility.
In most discussions of cinema, poetry is neglected. But poetry is what gives a film texture and mystery. I don’t create these small films for the money - I create them to practice the most important parts of the creative process.
A Georges Bataille quote that I discussed here comes to mind:
Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.
~ü
