Thoughts on Cinema

As an artist, I'm supposed to have an Artist's Statement that explains, thematically or conceptually, what my work is about. When I then add that I'm a filmmaker, I'm expected to pitch film plots instead of concepts and theme. There's no one answer I can give that meets both expectations, so instead I'll explain my life philosophy, which is woven from an ongoing plot of recurrent and emergent conceptual themes.

Everything is in a constant state of transformation. You are not exactly the same person you were last year, last month or even last week. However, some tenuous webbing shape has taken you from point A to this room and will deliver you onward to other places. We are both constantly transforming into something else that is informed by the repetitions of the past as well as the chance meetings of the future. The labeling and identification of one individual as something specific to that individual is to name its essence. Like a nostalgic perfume, the essence resists capture and tangible classification. Sometimes it vanishes almost instantly, yet undeniably marks its identity on your memory as it transforms into something else. Both human joy and human suffering do the same thing.

For me, this nailing down of the essence, the personality, or the mood of an individual person, place, memory or dream comprises the poetics of cinema. Tarkovsky called it Sculpting in Time. Herzog called it Ecstatic Truth and when I'm older, I'll have a name for it too. As a practitioner of artistic time, I consider myself very lucky - because no matter how I spent it yesterday, tomorrow I'll wake up with a fresh supply of time.