Because I am a stubborn, determined, yet obedient person, I do what I’m told, even when it’s me who commands myself to do it.
On Thursday this week I told myself: “Before you leave this residency, you have to finish this film, or at least finish the part of the film that needed to be done here.”
So today I did that. It’s 40 minutes long, a text-animation. It’s called Eureka.
It’s the first time I made something that I thought could become one of those lifelong projects, a film that keeps getting added to, ad infinitum. It’s a hand-written film, made letter by letter, in thought as in execution.
Finding a way to get my ideas into film is always hard, and near-impossible if I think about doing it with images. This summer I decided it was time to double down on the words.
During this process of tediously (meditatively?) hand-animating in this interim summertime in a place that is not my home, I begain thinking about “interim” projects, in my case what I now realize are “interim films” I make when I’m working through one subject and not quite ready to move to another.
Since last fall I had been searching for a way to justify to myself, or to bring clarity to my reasons for wanting to move out of the underground, to close the heavy steel door on the bunker, and to lift off, metaphorically speaking, into the stratosphere.
Most people would say to themselves, “Ok, so just change topics.” But I can’t do that for some reason. Instead, over the last eight months I made a lot of drawings, photographs, glass sculptures, and now, Eureka.
The goal with the film was to put down, letter by letter, all the stories I tell people when I talk about my current interests and ideas. How I explain the drawings, the glass sculptures, the rayographs, and how I think they’re related. How I make up connections, how I get excited about things.
If you want to call this buzzing of ideas and occasional deep dives into books, films, music, ideas “artistic research” go right ahead. I prefer to call it “the stories that are filling my head at this moment and I know they’re all interconnected if only everyone else could see that.” Perhaps Eureka is a better way to put it.
I usually get very excited about these “interim” films and projects while I am making them, and pretty much 100% of the time nobody wants to see them. And shortly after I finish them I see why. These are less for showing, I think, and more like a moving notebook, a space purchased with effort, a time for me to be making and ruminating at the same time.
I don’t know if Eureka is an interim film at all because I finished this part of the film today and haven’t taken any time to reflect. While making it over the last two months, I took enormous pleasure in slowly composing the text letter by letter without any preconcieved notion of what I was going to write. My only rule was that I had to write as clearly as possible about my thought processes and the story I wanted to tell.
I needed to get out from the underground and into the skies.
Other interim films include The Refractionist, originally a performance lecture I made for a conference at The New School. And another one called The Long Sleepers. They are both explorations of the underground, in their own ways.
Those two films are related because they are both over 20 minutes long, a duration that is not suitable for cinema or most art contexts either. And they represented different ways for me, at the time, to approach the underground.
They also utilize voice-over, my voice, something I vowed decades ago never to do again, after I edited my graduate thesis film and was tormented by having to edit myself on mind-numbing repeat on the 16mm film editing machine.
And when I look at Refractionist and Long Sleepers I feel weighed down by my voice and my thoughts. The films feel overdetermined, angsty, or silly and offer me very little breathing room. I don’t like watching them.
But I know for a fact I couldn’t have made any of my other animations and certainly not my feature documentary BUNKER without making these first.
I often wish I possessed a quicker or more efficient way to slough off the excess of ideas. But a notebook, while useful, doesn’t do the trick, nor do stills or drawings. They do something, but it’s not the same.
Sometimes you have to get the gunk out of your system. And that’s a physical process, it takes time and it takes effort. At least that’s the way I see it.
There’s something about enduring the process of making these interim films that forces me to become be more direct. To try harder to say what it is I mean.
I used to think I had to choose which kind of films to make, the austere hand-drawn animations or a “proper” live-action film. Or that I had to combine the two.
Now I know I need them both as they are.
Thanks for reading.
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P. S. Next week I’m traveling to the Esrange Space Center near Kiruna, Sweden to film scientists launching a stratospheric balloon (wrote about that here). Now that I’ve finished Eureka, it feels like I’ve thrown off some ballast and can float more easily into this new experience. I look forward to writing more to you from there.