me and mr greenaway

The frame is from Island Home Country. The text - a quote from David Tiley at AIDC 08 on Greenaway's plenary at the Conference. I, didn't go, of course. No money and at the beginning of the fifth year of making a film that defies completion....how to explain this rabbit hole I am down? Who would understand? I can't.

"He is also unimpressed with the documentary tradition, which he calls “false and phony – this desire to tell the truth, the truth is untellable.” We create subjective, individual truths; to assert they are more is “an act of extreme arrogance. I would rather advertise and proselytize myself as a liar in order to be able to tell you the truth of those lies than the opposite way round.”

“I’m duty bound I think as a self conscious filmmaker to always tell you that when you are watching one of my films that you are just watching a film. You are not looking through a window on the world. I’m giving you a film. An extraordinary vocabulary and language which is deeply, deeply artificial.” Peter Greenaway

The end of empire: Jarman, Swinton and "pre-industrial filmmaking."

Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton, at the filmmaker's grave. Julien has curated a retrospective on Jarman. Photo Nina Kellgren.

On August 17, 2002, eight years after Jarman's death, Tilda Swinton, published an epistle to  Jarman entitled Letter to an Angel:

 Derek made filmmakers out of all of us who worked with him. Our work came out of the pre-industrial atmosphere of an art context, not the segregated professionalism of industrial filmmaking. This is the atmosphere I carry with me everywhere, like an amniotic sac.  It is the only way I know to work.

Well, some call her essay a lament for a lost era, yet I love the way she keeps it alive in her mind and the way it influences how she thinks and works today. A thinker, is Swinton.

navigating jonas mekas

Immersed in links to international distribution of documentaries - in this era of multi platforms - traditional and new paradigms circling each other...and I stumbled on Jonas Mekas's site: what a find! And then STREAM.

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

why Jonathon..I was so happy to get a response to my blog - so thanks for that (it hardly ever gets a response;  my daughter says: "well Mum, it's because it's so boring like your films." ) And then, the only response I get from you is navigational advice for the poor user who doesn't realise that the link is always in the header of each post I write! I must say I'm more interested in what you think of Tilda's essay than navigational advice...maybe it was irony.....By the way, what do you feel about Tilda's essay?

A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

Boy , my darling is how Tilda Swinton starts her beautiful essay on cinema and dreams and possibility and ethics : You asked me the other day, just as you were dropping off, what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented. You who talk blabberish and chase rabbits in your sleep, hurrumphing like a dog..you who never watch television..I’ve been thinking of your question ever since. I need to print her essay out and read it slowly, savouring each word as this actor/writer/cultural activist speaks in a voice little heard in the speed of the age, in the age of speed. 
Tilda Swinton’s State of Cinema address, San Francisco, 2006. First published in Critical Quarterly, vol.48, no.4. Now in Vertigo