Digital / Primitive

notes on making video (1994 - 2004)

1.
I love fiction. But I love other things about cinema too.”
— Hal Hartley in conversation with Jean-Luc Godard, May, 1994 




3.
When making video, what can be learned from the beginnings of cinema?

5.
“Painting... means perceiving harmony between numerous relationships and transposing them according to a new, original logic.”
— Cézanne

7.
Early Movies / Early Video

9.
Consider picture editing a kind of graphic design. Cut together this footage as if we are laying out a magazine.

11.
“I don’t paint pictures. I just want to find things out.”
— Piet Mondrian

13.
“The natural does not require a specific representation.”
— Piet Mondrian

15.
Liveliness of gesture / strength of composition

17.
Look at the light, not away from it. Even darkness is conveyed by a few well-placed objects over-exposed by stray light.

19.
Flaubert said, “what seems to be outward form is actually essence.” And so I think, then, to attempt the subtlest of kickboxing movies.

21.
There exists a type of poetry which we admire for the economy of gesture with which it ignites a rich field of meaning—a broad sure stroke in response to some clearly seen detail that opens a way to more complex associations. When I write, design, direct and edit, I am attempting to create this type of poetry.

2.
Video is the prehistory of something. Primitive. Embrace its electronic naivete. And shape that into something decisive and graceful. That is why Jesus, in The Book of Life, checks into the hotel as DW Griffith. Like himself, Griffith was a traditionalist at the start of something new.

4.
“To become classical again through nature, that is to say, through sensation.”
— Cézanne

6.
How to make images of sensation? How to let the viewer wallow in some troubled light without losing track of the story?



8.
Lighting: discover or create a bright source and compose activity around it. Then cut a frame out of it.

10.
Radical separation of elements. Words, music, setting, character and action independent of one another. (This, too, is Brecht, but bent a little more to my own needs.)

12.
Color = troubled light.

14. The difference between an image which is information and an image which is a fact. What are the practical differences between moving pictures which illustrate and moving pictures that are moving pictures first and foremost? What is a motion picture in and of itself?

16.
For me, the ugliest and bleak nowhere still yields opportunities for compelling pictures as long as there’s a human figure for me to shape that picture around and out of. And any idea or intuition I have about a character or situation is rendered by shaping it into physical activity. 

18.
Exquisite Miniature
Epic Miniature
Miniature Saga
Exquisite Miniature Epic

20.
Jesus and Satan
Cain and Abel
Cinema and Video
Brothers