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May 29, 2008
The Unseen
I was typing up something of a CV for St. Nick the other day and got hung up on the part where I was talking about the filmmakers whose work has influenced and inspired me. I couldn't think of who to include; I mean, yeah, Malick would be up there, but do I really need to mention that? It's not just rote - it's just not interesting.
And I find that these days I'm more influenced by films I haven't seen. Had you called upon me six months ago and asked, I would have cited the work of Pedro Costa, James Benning (particularly 11x14 and Thirteen Lakes) and the opening shot of Silent Light as being big influences on what I was going for with this new picture. There were others, too. I hadn't seen any of those films at the time, but something about the way they were described and critically assessed excited me. What they seemed to represent excited me. In reading about them, I was able to extrapolate, to cull what appealed to me and imagine it through the lens of my own personal perspective. I could make it mine without ever having seen it.
I've done this for years, actually. When I was thirteen, I checked out some authoritarian little volume on Godard from the library read the entire thing, and took what I could from his work (which at the time wasn't much) without seeing a single frame of it. It shames me somewhat to think that it would take another ten years and the advent of Netflix for me to actually catch up with all those films. And by this point, too, I've seen some of Costa's films (thanks, Darren!) and Silent Light, and they exist for me now now wholly separate from whatever imaginary vision I conjured in my head and recapitulated, in some generation yet even further removed, within my own work.
On a vaguely related note, when I first started planning St. Nick last summer, I told people that it was going to be a cross between a Malick film and Ernest Scared Stupid. I wasn't joking. The idea that inspired the comparison was greatly reduced by the time I got around to making the movie, but it's still there. As is the Britney Spears-inspired scene, which is one of the best moments in the entire movie.
Posted by David Lowery at May 29, 2008 9:27 PM
Comments
Wait, what was the rationale for the Ernest influence? I totally forgot. It must be everyone coming in through the window. Ernest always came in through the window!
Posted by: Clay Liford at May 29, 2008 10:25 PM
If I remember the commentary correctly, Spike Jonze's video for the Pavement song "Range Life" operates on a similar principle: it was Jonze trying to make a version of Todd Haynes's SAFE, a film he'd never seen, but one that'd been described in detail to him by then-wife Sofia Coppola. I love this idea and totally relate: sometimes, evocative discussion of an unseen film can create a movie in your mind, something even better than the one that really exists. (That's why, these days, I'm often more excited by lively film writing than I am by much filmmaking.)
Have you managed to track down 11x14? I've been dying to see that for ages now.
Posted by: wells at June 2, 2008 10:04 AM
I haven't found a copy yet, but I haven't been looking that hard. All I've seen are educational copies that go for 300 bucks or so.
I love that Jonze story. Likewise, if I remember correctly (and my copy of his book is in storage so I can't fact check this), Guy Maddin based Eye Like A Strange Balloon on an extremely lengthy Russian film that he'd never actually seen.
I guess good film writing is something of an act of adaptation, in which the critic, however objective, conveys the essence of the work - or what he or she believes to be the essence of the work, and that often with plenty of embellished extrapolation - through a personal lens, thus creating a stripped down mirror version of the film that either enhances the original or, in some cases, exists entirely as its own work, with only vague similarities to its source (the pivot point between these two results being the perspective of the audience and the reader).
Posted by: David Lowery at June 2, 2008 7:31 PM
Yeah, the film that inspired Maddin was La Roue, by Abel Gance. Now he can finally see it as they put out the 8 hour version (or maybe it was the 4 hour one) on DVD.
Posted by: Clay Liford at June 4, 2008 7:33 PM