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April 06, 2006
Advent
As if on cue, I've gotten sick, and it's started raining.
This was one of the posts I had meant to make last week, before I got sidetracked. Had I managed to get it up on Friday, the day we started shooting GDMF, it would have had a more cosmically balanced effect - out with the old, in with the new. Sort of.
It was reported in the Washington Post last week that the DVD of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane would come with an alternate cut of the film, edited by Steven Soderbergh, who had different ideas about how the narrative could be formed. I've got the film in my Netflix queue, and will be writing about it as soon as I watch both versions. For now, this bit of experimentation is very much in line with what Soderbergh said about multiple cuts last fall; so to is it a good lead-in for explaining where exactly The Outlaw Son is.
It's still on my hard drive at the moment (where my initial 35 minute rough cut will soon be shortened by about fifty percent. I've suddenly realized why Wong Kar Wai spends so long shooting his films; when telling a story in this fashion, you always need new footage to supplement whatever direction the film decides to go in. I'm currently pushing hard against this unknowingly self-imposed limitation - and, if all goes well, I won't be alone in doing so. Over the next few months, other filmmakers will be taking the footage and making their own versions of the film. In keeping with the rule during production that forbade anyone from reading the script, no one cutting the film will have an idea about its contents, or receive notes from myself on how the footage should be put together. The film, then, in these multiple interpretations, will be an experiment in subjectivity. Within its own four walls, it will be an uncertain memory; its pieces constantly shifting, taking on ever-so-slightly different meanings.
From my own subjective perpsective, this is an exciting experiment. More than that, though, it's really, really scary.
It will take a while to get everything taken care of, and I'll write about it at greater length and with more grand disclosure later, once I have a full slate of participants, and once my sinuses clear up; in the meantime, however, let me offer up a series of adjectival phrases describing the film, each with its own imagistic accompaniment.
Posted by David Lowery at April 6, 2006 01:11 PM
Comments
I look forward to the 'final' results of this process. 'Final', because, theoretically, you could cut forever.
Oh, to have a thousand monkeys with implanted cinephile chips. .
Posted by: David at April 7, 2006 12:18 AM
i LOVE the website, btw
Posted by: brad at April 7, 2006 12:54 AM
yeah, ditto...:)
Posted by: frank at April 7, 2006 10:16 AM
Thanks for the tip on Keane. I think it's in my Netflix queue, too, but I'm *way* behind on my movie watching. I still haven't seen the Michael Haneke films everyone discussed lst month.
But this provokes an interesting thought experiment. What directors could do the most interesting re-mixes of other people's films?
Posted by: Chuck at April 10, 2006 03:24 PM