Metaphor for creation

 

Silence, darkness dir. Paweł Kędzierski

camera Wojciech Staroń

This is an amazing documentary from 1999.  Its camera follows a group of deaf, mute and blind participants of a sculpting workshop.   Due to the mastery of the DP, great sound design and editing we experience creating in its dramatic phases.  

The on-screen predicaments of the workshop participants are nothing but hugely amplified elements of any creative process.   Selecting as artists people with serious limitations brings home often forgotten fact that making something is mostly a struggle with once own lack of knowing, seeing, hearing, touching.   

From a certain point outside of ourselves we must look blind, mute, deaf and yet desperately trying to outguess the reality and then give a voice to our limited discoveries.  

This fabulous film can be seen here

Humans vs politics

What I like the most in “Cold War” and “Roma” are ways they bridge the intimate with big political backgrounds.  Perhaps one of the reasons for the movies huge success is their acknowledgement that we can’t escape the politics, that our beings cannot be separated from the social deals that in a very direct way shape our destinies.  Perhaps it’s a sign of times that this kind of sensitivity chimes so well with the audiences.  It does so because a new wave of some profound social and political rearrangement is coming and we all feel it.  A few super talented and sensitive people are acting as rods for those bulging premonitions and project our anxieties on a big screen.

Nothing new.  Plenty of movies have done it before and yet this feels so very fresh.   Perhaps it's the question of artistic balance and the swelling gravity of the external...

Farewell to Great Editor

Weeks ago I payed last respects to Agnieszka Bojanowska, the person who greatly influenced my thinking about film making.  Madame Agnieszka worked with me only on a few projects but made a huge impression.   There was something in her way of approaching material and making decisions that has stayed with me and became one of the most important "tools". 

"How would Madame Agnieszka do this cut?" is a phrase that comes to my mind very often during editing.   And I think it greatly improves the results.  

Our first collaboration was on a TV feature decades ago.  I was too young and too inexperienced to fully understand her input - aside from the fact that I liked her suggestions. 

When years and years later I brought to her "Lawnswood Gardens" and then "The View from a Cathedral" I was able to understand more of what she was saying. 

But it wasn't only about technical choices that she communicated.  Her being was larger than her craft.  Or rather her craft was the result of her being. 

Thank you Madame Agnieszka.