It has once again been too long. As are so many of you, dear readers, I am devastated by the endless bombing and violence and the crushing of dissent around the world. The warmongering and silencing of voices standing up for humanity feels out of control. And I get sucked in and scared and so deeply sad and shredded and then try to pull myself up again and focus on the small things that give joy but as is the case for most of my life there is a sense of living in parallel worlds.
One world: a subterranean river of mourning. The other world: a lived present.
I catch glimpses of it from time to time, like when the sun shines through those Japanese maple tree leaves and not only are they crimson but they are glowing in a way that you just can’t help but stop and embrace. Or the sight of people in the neighborhood you’ve known in passing, saying hi, seeing how their kids have grown up, seeing how they (and that means—oh horrors—I) are grayer, a little shorter, much more tired, but still out heading towards the park or the store or work.
Acknowledging that you do not fully live in yourself or in the now requires a strange sort of acceptance. It asks you to embrace the perpetually unresolved. The instruction manual of how to live—that you thought went missing or someone else was holding onto—never existed at all. The partial, fragmentary, incomplete, that’s all you’ve got.
Living in parallel is happening a lot these days. I am logging footage. For those of you who don’t know what that is or don’t do this for your films, logging is when you watch unedited filmed material and write a brief summary of what’s happening in each scene. Sometimes logging involves transcription, but mostly it’s about what is there in the picture. There’s a grid, a spreadsheet, numbers and words. It takes a lot of time.
My first job in video, decades ago, was a job logging documentary footage that had been transferred to VHS tape for this purpose. At that time I wrote the logs by hand on yellow legal pads and rewrote those notes into gridded forms. These were used by the director and editor to help make a paper edit before they went into the video editing room, a space that, at that time, was expensive to rent by the hour or day.
After that I had a job logging keycode, miniscule numbers wedged between sprocket holes on the side of the film. These I type-pecked into a Mac Classic to maintain a record of what the documentary filmmaker had shot. As I’ve written in past posts, I had originally wanted to be a cinematographer but was discouraged by numerous people at that time because cinematography was seen as a pursuit for men. Who were strong. Who could carry cameras. And leave their families for months to make films elsewhere. Women were often encouraged or subtly guided over to the “softer” area of documentary and into editing. At least I was, by many. Also decades ago.
Elizaveta Svilova was the editor of the 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera and she is pictured in the film, sitting in the dim room lit by the glow of images of the outside world captured by her husband and her brother-in law. She’s at the editing table, rolling peoples’ lives forward and backward, taking scissors, cutting lengths of film and putting them back together. Building worlds. The first editing machines were remarkably similar to treadle sewing machines and the fine motor and eye-hand coordination from that labor were retained, for the most part, as a space for women within the film industry.
After many years of not liking editing because I saw it as somehow lesser than the crafting of image within the camera frame, I now love it. I love editing even more when I, like Svilova, am sitting at an analog film editing machine using scissors and tape, connecting time and space.
These days I am logging the (digital) footage I shot at the space station in northern Sweden back in September. I have a tendency to wait before reviewing my material. It might have something to do with how I learned on 16mm film which meant that you shot the film and had to send it to the film lab and wait (patiently or anxiously, depending) for a week or two to get it back to review it. So I wait with my footage and during that waiting I vanish into the life of the present. The deferred pleasure arrives when I click on a couple of folders in the hard drive and open a portal to another world. Just when you think it may have only been a dream, it’s there in front of you.
Often, it is not a pretty sight. Scenes you remember as amazing while shooting, high drama happening before your eyes, are boring. There’s a smudge on the lens. You’d forgotten how much it rained. But there’s good stuff too. The landscape is more magical than you even noticed at the time. You caught that gesture you only had felt but were not conscious of, but now you see it—just—there. The way the bright low rays of sunlight after a snowstorm makes a face, deep in concentration, glow.
The more acceptable or traditional way to make a film is to have someone who shoots the images and someone who edits. And the shooter hands the material over to the editor. The editor gets to work and shows the director different variations. And they talk about it and the editor keeps working. But they are most often separate jobs.
Because I both shoot and edit, I am forced to accept the challenge of trying to distance myself from the memory of being in the place. I have come to enjoy the struggle to recognize what is within the frame’s rectangular boundaries. The job is to figure out how I might want to reconstruct or alter the experience by putting shots together.
And logging is the first step. The temptation to jump ahead (because in digital editing you can) is enormous but if you do that you get disoriented and forget everything about the time and space you are in and that the film is in too. You have to just sit and watch.
A young scientist at the space center asked me if the film was going to be about a day in the life of a young scientist. He looked disappointed when I said no. The multilingual audio in all the footage I’m logging feels like a café murmur; sonic evidence of being busy doing science without explanation of the specifics. This is one part that feels right.
The other part that feels right is the contrast between the scrambly, tension-filled up-all-night activity of humans in a large metal dome working so hard for years trying to build a device to help them understand something about the natural world, and the absolute indifference of the natural world all around and above them.
The forest and the lake dipped in the distance did not give a damn if the “Hermes” scientific team’s second camera to map earth’s surface was broken, or if the “Spacis” group from Porto was freezing, huddled in a tent next to their subwoofers beaming low frequency audio from a snowy hillside up to the stratosphere. They’ve seen it all before.
The landscape did whatever it wanted in its own spatial and temporal rhythm. Not to say it wasn’t affected by and affecting humans, but there was something about the way I looked at it through the camera (and it looked back at me) that was aloof, almost laughing, as if to say, what are you all mucking around with, why are you working so hard on these things that will never tell you the full story of anything, why can’t you just be here and accept that there is no full story at all.
A translation of that feeling is what I’m looking for in the footage I’m logging right now.
Thanks for reading.
Also, I’m excited to announce that BUNKER is now available on Mubi, Metrograph, Amazon, and Projectr.tv. So many streams, so little time. But I hope you’ll watch the film.
thank you. parallel so many things and lives and horror and joy