The title of this post is a reference to another I made on livejounral exactly four years ago today. The post consisted of my personal statement submitted to FSU's undergrad film school. My intention tonight was to post the rough draft of my personal statement for FSU's graduate film school. The coincidence of the dates is completely unplanned, in fact I only realized it when I dredged up the old post on livejournal to reference its title. I can't say anything other than that it's just kind of funny. I would take as omen or auspice if I could, but whatever it means is just too vague. Other than the obvious damnation to the same failure that occurred four years ago, I can't think of anything else, and since I refuse to believe in my repeat failure, I will simply ignore this coincidence. So anyhow:
It felt a lot like one of those hot summer days of my childhood spent at Ft. Lauderdale Beach; the gritty sand was in every crack and crevice on my body, the salt spray of the ocean and the high equatorial sun were stinging at my pink neck, and the sunscreen was melting from my flushed forehead and bleeding into my burning eyes. I stopped toiling in the sand for a moment to borrow a gulp of water from Rachel, then slipped into melancholy while thinking about how after so much, being here and doing this had come to feel quite ordinary. Here was atop the sacred temple Huaca de Cao located in the El Brujo complex on the coast of Peru. What we were doing was archaeology, or less glamorously, preserving the temple by repairing tiny cracks on unearthed adobe walls. We were a study abroad team, the fifteen of us, two anthropology professors, our guides, a Vietnam veteran and a young female Peruvian archaeologist, and a diverse group of students from ages 18 to 40 and only one of whom spoke any Spanish. From afar the half overburdened temple looked just like a giant sand castle.
We made our way down the temple, heading for a hot afternoon lecture in a room with no A/C, when out on the foot of the temple we saw several men working in the sand far away from the activity we were used to seeing. We came upon them and there not even a foot below the sand under the same path we walked that morning to get up the temple was a burial mostly uncovered. The body had been posed arms crossed across the chest and there were several beautiful pieces of pottery broken around the body, which we were told were intentional broken and placed around the body as an offering. None of us students had seen anything like this before, and as we watched the workers dust away the sand from the bones, I felt again the enchantment that I stepped off the plane with in Lima. My experience with cinema is related in kind to what I felt on that day in El Brujo, the realization of disillusionment and then its reversal into enchantment.
For most of my life I kept the wonder of cinema safe in my room inside a wooden cabinet along with every saved theatre ticket stub. However, as I packed away the safety of that room for college, the creeping curiosity that had consumed my life like a slow moving snake full of half-digested interests finally flicked its tongue into the air of that wooden cabinet, which I’d swung open to wonder back at what to do with its contents. So in the jaws of my curiosity I was lead to an education in cinema at the university; that is where my enchantment with movies began to slip off the spool.
This personal anecdote might illustrate my disillusionment better than any florid description: While careening around the turns of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland in a cart with my two older sisters we suddenly jerked to a stop. Just as we realized that this wasn’t part of the ride, the house lights were slammed on, and although we had stopped I still felt my stomach drop as the magic of that once wild ride was crushed upon witnessing its bare mechanics. It was nothing more than a rolling skating rink with bits of track laid out on the floor and some painted cartoon cutouts propped up in the corners. The feeling was the same when the lights were slammed on film when I begun my first courses in cinematic studies at the University of Florida where my eminent professors taught rigorous classes in deconstructing the continuous images of cinema in order to understand them in terms of a film language, their psychoanalytic messages, or their social, political, and historical importance. Through this indoctrination into the art of film I can say that I’ll never look at a movie in the same way again, and though at first I worried that I had ruined movie-going for myself, I soon became enchanted once again with a deeper love gained in understanding the systems supporting the once impenetrable images seen on screen. This understanding has lead me to otherwise overlooked influences in historic and world cinemas, and, oddly enough, even to finding much delight in the films of the French New Wave, or more specifically, the films of Jean –Luc Godard who did so much to confront illusions in cinema. Furthermore, naming these illusions has given me a great deal of respect for those masters of illusions, namely Hitchcock. However, it is the more unassuming films that currently influence me most.
In my six weeks of training in black and white 16mm silent film at NYU I found a connection to a more simplistic kind of film. I suppose that coming to understand the complexity of film production through practically doing it has lead to me to a love for films that work on a fundamental level, films like Knife in the Water (dir. Polanski, 1962) or The Bicycle Thief (dir. De Sica, 1948). I suppose it is something like a Bob Dylan song, though it can be beautiful dressed up like Mr. Tambourine Man (The Byrds, 1965), I still prefer Dylan’s bare essential version. It’s through removing ornamentation that you can truly understand the lasting quality of the work. That is the kind of film I want to make, films with universal stories told with a very specific and thoroughly investigated settings so that the drama which unfolds becomes organic, films that do not overlook the potential for adventure however minute in any setting, films that capture a milieu, films in which the drama is accessible on every level, inner, inter-personal, and extra-personal, films in which entertainment is a byproduct of seeking fine craftsmanship and not the other way around, films with equal attention paid to the broadest level of story and the level smallest detail, beautifully cinematic films, films that are aware of their place in cinematic history, films in which nothing happens without reason.
