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One of my favorite Cassavetes stories was told to me by the director Henry Jaglom. The night before Jaglom was to direct his first film, he was suddenly and utterly terrified. In the wee hours he drove up to John’s place. He asked John what to do.

“Don’t be afraid of anybody or anything,” John said. “No, no, John, I mean, what do I do with the cameras, what do I tell the actors?” But John only said again, “Don’t be afraid of ANYBODY or ANYTHING.”

—Michael Ventura, Cassavates Directs.

The rule is a question of culture, the exception a question of art. Everyone speaks the rule: cigarettes, computers, t-shirts, tourism, war. No-one speaks the exception. It cannot be spoken. It can be written: Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It can be composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It can be painted: Cezanne, Vermeer. It can be filmed: Antonioni, Vigo. Or it can be lived, and is thus called the art of living: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. It is part of the rules to want the death of the exception. It is the rule of European culture to organise the death of the art of living.

—Jean-Luc Godard, quoted by Fergus Daly in “Godard’s Forever Mozart“.

[Image from Histoire(s) du Cinema.]

I’m going to say it in an extreme way — for discussion, at least to think about it. I am afraid that we are getting weary of this planet. We are using it up, its resources and its wonder. And as we humans are more separate from, and dominant over all other living things, we are driven to find ever higher levels of diversion and stimulation. We are inseperable from our technology. It has become an extension of our nervous system. We depend on that technology to project us into a new world, a fresh new world where everything still remains to be done and discovered. Or we are dependent on that technology to actually get us off this planet Earth and out there, away, on the road again!

Surely I simplify. But a feeling in us is: there are too many of us, we have made a mess, it is doubtful that we can learn less destructive, less competitive, communal ways. And the unchanged habits of the predator, or our genes working to assure their own survival, compell us to move on, to seek out the next fertile area that we can successfully occupy and use according to our whims, and with all our fragile justifications.

The connection with film in general and documentary in particular? Cinema — not “the movies,” or “the image,” or “television,”–but cinema, this specific project, this discipline, this practise of a certain investigation, analysis and representation of ideas, cinema belongs to the material world. It is about where we are standing now. It is about the pleasures and problems of here. It is always about this world and our bodies moving through this world. Cinema, and especially the documentary, affirm not only our inseperability from each other, but also from a whole web of relationships with objects and other living things. The irony is, that even as the image increasingly stands in the way of a real contact with things as they are, as image-spectacles mirror the very world-weariness I am talking about here, the right film at the right time gives us one of the few ways we have of staying in touch with what is really around us, and to recall why it is important to remain in touch.

One result of such experiences is to help restore communicability between us and the world around us.

—Robert Kramer, Juror’s Statement for Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Now that I’m alone and old, I foresee only catastrophe and chaos. I know that old people always say that the sun was warmer when they were young, and I also realise how commonplace it is to announce the end of the world at the end of each millennium. Nonetheless, I still think the entire century is moving toward some cataclysmic moment. Evil seems victorious at last; the forces of destruction have carried the day; the human mind hasn’t made any progress whatsoever towards clarity. Perhaps it’s even regressed. We live in an age of frailty, fear, and morbidity. Where will the kindness and intelligence come from that can save us?

—Luis Bunuel, My Last Breath (1983, Vintage), p252.

(Portrait of Luis Bunuel by Salvador Dali.)

There is absolutely no doubt that we are on a disaster course. We are destroying the planet and we are destroying each other. The world is mortally horrifying, especially compared to what people of my generation expected it to be at the beginning of the Seventies, after Vietnam and everything.

But while all this terrible stuff is going on, people are getting on with things. Not least people who care for and nurture the future, which is kids. Which is teachers. Which is Poppy [pictured above]. And that is something from which we should draw, not palliative comfort, but a real sense that life doesn’t stop being about life.

—Mike Leigh, interviewed by Nick Curtis.

The main reason I’ve been such a useless blogger these past months will be screening as part of the National Film School’s graduate showcase in the Light House Cinema, Monday 9th June, from 6.30pm.

For more info, or if you are a journalist or blogger and would like to write about the event, please contact nfsgradshowcase@gmail.com.

UPDATE: The event was subsequently covered in the Sunday Tribune.

I’ve co-programmed, with Esperanza Collado, the next Experimental Film Club screening happening this Sunday at 4pm in the Ha’penny Bridge Inn in Dublin. You can read my introduction to the programme here.

So my thesis is finished (and online—you can read it here.)

If I have one minor misgiving about the finished piece, it’s that I had to cut the following section from its very end. It seemed a little indulgent and redundant given the focus of the thesis—but still, it sums up why this project meant a lot to me personally, and I don’t want to forget it, so here it is, for posterity…

The motivation of this thesis has been to explore, research and engage with the political and formal practices of an older generation of radical filmmakers. Part of this has been in an effort to apply lessons from that generation as much as possible on today’s world; but part of this has simply been an effort to connect with that generation; to understand where they were coming from, seek inspiration from their efforts and understanding from their ultimate failure (ultimate in the sense that the movements of which they were part did not succeed), and in particular filmmakers of that generation whose work have been consistently marginalised and ignored.

This desire for a generational connection or legacy is something both Kramer and Godard were engaged in in the ‘60s. The collective title chosen by Godard and Gorin was the most obvious gesture in this direction. According to Gorin, the name

was to say, well, although our situation is different, we want to focus on the first filmmaker of the Bolshevik revolution. We didn’t want to find ourselves a father, because we are not Freudians, and we didn’t want to say that now we are going to do what Dziga Vertov did. We are just saying that Vertov has a concrete experience out of which some problems can be worked out and used for our own purposes.

The invocation of early Soviet filmmakers was not unique for the time; Chris Marker’s film collective, the Medvedkin group, was named after a lesser-known agit-prop filmmaker of 1920s Russia. According to Brenez, it was a case of “reinvent[ing] the 1920s for different times with different needs.”

As for Kramer, not long before his death he wrote an essay in which he reflected on his own attempts to connect to an older generation, that of the political filmmakers who were active in the Left movements of the ‘30s and early ‘40s. The experience was a profoundly disappointing one, with the filmmakers refusing to engage with him and asserting instead that “even though we did what you want to do but better, we have learned that it is not worth doing.” Nonetheless, his recollection of what he was seeking from his elders, and what he seemed more than willing to impart to the next generation, seem a fine distillation of why this thesis was written:

Most of us weren’t there out of respect or admiration for their past or what they had become. But we did want to meet them as people who made movies and who had tried to live out something through and around movies. We wanted to go deep into the detail of an experience in which each of them had given a lot. We wanted to know how they had reconciled individual and collective work, what about ambitions and careers, how had they planned out their movies, what had the role of the Party been, did their marriages survive, what about their children? … There were really a lot of things to talk about. Blindly, I’m sure, we were swimming toward the source of material that really makes a difference, material that is behind and before either judgments or positions. Material that is about how you live a life.

And that if there was anything left of the sensibility that in their pasts had led them to find a home in radical movements, or comfort in humane ideas like equality, solidarity, generosity, cooperation, it was precisely with us that you would have thought to see it put into practise. In a way, to be the people that I think they did want to be, they had to find a way to talk openly with us. We were the living presence of their past. We were their implications. We were their opportunity to look at that again from another point of view. They could say “what a drag.” Most people would agree with them, “what’s done is done.” Or you could feel that you were being given a big gift: “those not busy being born are busy dying.”

(Picture of several original Newsreel members at the Vermont International Film Festival in 1998, taken from Roz Payne’s Newsreel website.)

Jörg Bruitt, Berlin-based actor.

The makers of Seaview: on the left, directors Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley; on the right, composer Dennis McNulty and producer Maya Derrington; and in the middle, Forum programmer Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.

Philippe de Montijon, co-organiser of the Lucca Film Festival.

Rachel Rath and Kevin Marron, two actor-writers from Ireland, being followed by a foreign TV crew for reasons I still don’t understand.

The CHEAP collective, organisers of the Gossip Studio at the Arsenal Kino.

Two journalists bonding in silence.