Summer and The Ladies

So the weeks and months pass and turn from future to past, like this summer. I have spent my time with four wonderful young ladies - not real, of course, just in my mind. Real people I have not seen in months, accept while getting some food from the grocers. As  social bullying is one of the most depressing things in this world - why should I miss people? Well, some are nice...

These ladies I mentioned - Sara Karen, highly intelligent, logical mind in a slender and beautiful body. And her concept of justice... She works as a part time informaticist in the university library, but if asked about her profession she would say she is a poet. Poetry is her real ambition, information is just for money. Part of poetry consists of justice. Her view of justice is quite of the Old Testament: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. She is not religious, on the contrary, but there is no mercy in her thinking. So she is intelligent, but also highly emotional, which is a dangerous combination, and the ruthlessness... This made her charming, enchanting and a killer.

And Myrte, the skillful surgeon with great ambitions . she is an example of a modern woman at her best! Until she met Roy... She fell for him head over heels - ok, I admit, he was charmant, trés charmant, but why could she not see through him? When she found out... well she turned her skills to torture and killing, and so she lost her innocence. After three weeks alone with her, chained and maimed, Roy was barely half conscious when she promised to him that it would be the last day of his life, he said: - Just what I've wanted most of my life, someone to put me out of my misery. Death is a release and I love you, my Myrte...
By saying so he robbed her joy and turned it to a Pyrrhos' victory.

Yet they had to live within themselves, as killers and murderers. And then they met each other, but they also met Oana, the young refugee girl from Serbia. She was so different for she had seen the other side of hate, the innocent side, as a victim. Even Sara Karen states that there is no justice in life.

Yes, I suppose I have to keep their company for some years before we are done, justice or no justice. They are interesting ladies, not forgetting or excluding the youngest, Penny, who still believes and studies with bright eyes and untamed fury. She believes in her science and trusts it to give answers when questions appear. Penny, Penny - and they all want to keep her so, to protect her from... yes, from what? Life?

Pictures and words, rhythm and drama

27. August 2012

A cinema is built of pictures, words, sounds and their rhythm. The rhythm is the continuum, length and scale of individual pictures and the music. All edited with great care,  quality and good taste, they form an entity for the audience to identify with, an illusion so convincing that it substitutes reality for a while.

A cinema also has characters and their respective lives, so that drama is  in their passing, possibilities not realized and lives not lived, or their encounter, passionate , violent, indifferent... The essence of drama being self-deception, fear  and misinterpretation.  The human feelings and emotions thus need to be translated to pictures, words and acting so, that the wanted atmosphere is born. In cinema and especially in close-ups the acting should be very subdued and nuanced so as not to be overpowering and extravagant. Nuances give the viewer a chance to reflect and identify, but big and noisy gestures and overpowering figures easily alienate - in drama at least, comedy is another thing!

Iconography of certain time or place is a good point to start. Anyway that is the main thing, starting. If you start, take the first step, other steps shall follow. But without the first there won't be the second nor the third...  Iconography comes from many sources and in many ways: magazines, net sites, street, fashion, and also from our own environment, our consciousness and memories. It is all like a great dump of things where you can pick and choose as you  need and want. Defining what you need to get your story work is the first thing. The basic story has to be functional before you start to gather the pics and other stuff to it. It is like the framework of a ship, the story, whatever kind it is. A story is not a chronological counting of events, no, that is a chronicle. A story is a form given to things that happen, the best possible form all things considered. It correlates the contents and in this respect cinema offers a wide range of possibilities, almost unlimited combinations.''Don't get greedy, keep in the minimal. At some point the core is compact and you can advance to the optimal by adding, not cutting off: The balance is easier to maintain when you add... Of course that is just a subjective experience or opinion, so you can do as you like, find your own way!

Little Things Do Matter

 7. August 2012

 So it is said, but do they? What is considered 'little'? I was just thinking how we made 'Sketching Love' over six years ago - God I'm happy I did it!! Because without it I think I'd be dead by now. With it done - however with a bank loan and school kids - I know I can pick the right things from just anywhere, build a world on screen according to my own mind and even acknowledge it as mine still years later. But that is the way I've always done everything - one can see beauty in ugliness, one can steal moments and survive, but one can't have everything and survive. Not without the skill of acting in harmony with your deepest emotions, soul, rhythm of the stem cells. For you can't own anything but for a moment, you can't make things last - you can only find new things and let go of the old. That is why you should not hurry, not do lousy work for your life may depend on it.




 This world is so full of beliefs and teams and common good so what is the meaning of individual performance? The same as it has always been: the chain is just as strong as it's weakest link. And strength is not a synonym for mute, selfish narcissism. Strength, according to me, is synonym for linear continuum, lasting, enduring sustainable, flexible.

Some people are fighters and as such strong and screaming and destructive. Some are builders and cultivators: according to need they do the best they can with the entity in mind. The fighters, they may be right but what good is the pathetic  screaming and breaking? Nothing, if there is no continuity and building after them. And details are only important if the whole structure is well done: no detail could ever save a lousy construction!

Breaking Boundaries

This is my first entry to this 'My Look Forward', kind of editorial of Film Factory. First entry can only be once. Today has been a day when also something else happened and caused me to think of past. So my first editorial deals with past, but not only. It sketches also a structure to a film I hope might be possible to make someday - by me or someone else.

My idea of cinema is kaleidoscopic: interacting different layers - layers of time or events in different places, or episodes in lives of people. Even complex structures are today possible to carry out technically at a reasonable price when the production is carefully planned. Well planned is half made, it is said.

Creativity means always breaking boundaries. It means failures and forgetting, new beginnings and new roads. It is important to remember that I have a right to make my own mistakes, we all have. History will be the final judge weather they really were failures or just seemed to be.

We all grow old and quite many of us shall be gaga, that is to lose the ability of  rational thinking. This is the basis of my idea of a cinematic structure. I have known many such people during my life, mostly boring and worrying, maybe even aggressive demented old ones. And I have also known some that happily adventure in the past day to day quite randomly entering different periods of their life. These delusions seem to be vivid and recreative bringing happy moments of reunion when persons long gone are reborn in the deteriorating brain. Their childlike acceptance to relive these flashes is exhilarating - strange choice of word maybe of such a tragic process leading inevitably to death, but somehow it is a process very merciful.

Now my idea was to make a movie of this mind and it's wanderings. The person in question has had an interesting life crossing the paths of many people in different historical situations. The person has seen war and the birth of modern industry, has met losses and gained experiences, has lived in different places... Imagine the rich tapestry that could be woven of this material and at random order. But in the end the audience has  shaped as a whole the puzzle presented to them. If the scheme works... there is always that 'if'.

This idea is worth developing, in my opinion, and I shall have a notebook for it and maybe later a folder, when material is accumulating. So I have one more plan! With a little help from my friends... a little? Well, maybe a lot!