Grey, this goes hand in hand with Swinton’s reamrks on Jarman. It’s from Swinton’s State Of Cinema address, “A Letter to a Boy from His Mother”, given at The 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival:
We discovered cinema in the same moment in history when we rediscovered — through Freud — the significance of our dreams. Now we are displacing and distorting — with our passion for genetics, neuroscience, cognitivism — the ineffable element of the dream within the machine. Our dreams are the place where we can remember that which we never realized we knew. And the prism through which we can reflect these visions — the trick of the light, that alchemy of smoke, of mirrors, so much more than the sum of its parts — is what the cinema is. This is what you might call the Good News.
There IS a place to make for, the original online world that doesn’t give up on nature, an unmeasurable border to cross that can hold us and our dreamscape secure and inviolable, peaceable and lawless, where we can meet and be faithful beyond the petty worldly confines of all corruptible networks and their nets.
The State of Cinema
The place where you met Jacques Tati for the first time
Jean Cocteau
Michael Powell
Buster Keaton
Bresson’s donkey Balthazar
the Melies moon
and Chris Marker
and Luis Bunuel
and some people you are yet to know, just around the corner
Someone called Terrence Malick
and someone called Wong Kar Wai
and someone from Hungary called Bela Tarr
and someone from Italy called Federico Fellini
and someone from Switzerland called Jean-Luc Godard
and someone from Iran called Abbas Kiarostami
and someone from America called David Lynch
where the Pixar people live
where you saw China first
and Japan before you went there, hand in hand with Miyazaki
and Africa
and Sweden
and the universe under the sea
That place where anything you can imagine is mirrored, where nothing is real and everything is really possible. A broad, a catholic old church that repels no boarders, knows no limits, flies the skull and cross bones with her head held high, tells you stories with unexpected endings and shows you landscapes and conversations and gestures and pictures that open your mouth and your imagination and let you know that your wildest dreams are met.
Read it here.
Nice, thanks!
It is not just about “less money” but also about the ownership of the “product”. The only thing missing here.
It is absolutely about less money. The reliance upon the technical could bury cinema in a miasma of empty images. Peter Jackson had complete control over “King Kong” but Merian C. Cooper’s film is far better, and shorter. Good film has nothing to do with money. An auteur may have complete control over his production, but if he doesn’t have to search and scrape, make do with something less yet make it work, then the film will be no good. The big-budget digital feasts they are serving up these days will not survive for the most part. The small-budget filmf with bountiful spirit will.
As scared as the international economic downturn makes me, I’m also excited about it as far as what people will figure out they can do with limited resources. It’s always been about good ideas, whether you have $1 or a million.
Grey Daisies
The following is an excerpt of a speech given by long-time Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton (Caravaggio, The Last of England), at the “In the Spirit of Derek Jarman” event at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August of 2002. (see the full version online at: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/268)
[…]
I say bring it on. Bring on the fisticuffs and let’s get weaving. And that we could do with you here among us. And I can’t be the only one, cos look: hey, you’re a memorial lecture now and look: hey, stranger still: I’m giving it. Are they tired of the academic view, one wonders, tired of the need to listen to lectures about funding bodies and cultural diversity? What do they want to hear about from me? What can I give them?
Given that it’s you who should be the one standing here giving your own Memorial Lecture—not for the first time, your closest friends might cry—and you are presently otherwise engaged, or at least have left the building, I suppose I might as well read them this and let them in on the trick—that the conversation is not done yet, that the company you keep with us, when we care to think of it, is just as strong and empowering as it ever was. That the example you set us is as simple as a logo to sell a sports shoe; less chat, more action, less fiscal reports, more films, less paralysis, more process. Less deference. More dignity. Less money. More work. Less rules. More examples. Less dependence. More love. It has nothing whatever to do with money. Money is the easier thing in the world for any filmmaker to come by: next to vision, stamina, vocation, resourcefulness, comradeship, a sense of the ridiculous, and the long, long view, money grows on trees. Money is the one element that socializes a filmmaker—that ties him to the shore. Easier to control, easier to scupper. Who’s for Emeric’s surf-bathing?
A suggestion about money: keep it clean. Have less. Need less. Want less. Work with straw, but work.
And the challenges facing a film culture here?
The possibility of filmmakers losing the use of their own spirits
The paralysis of isolated original voices
The existence of the student loan in the place of the student grant
The rarity of distributors with kamikazi vision
The habit of patronage
Too many conference tables
Too few cinemas
Too little patience
Pomp and circumstance
The concept of the ‘successful’ product
The idea that there is not enough to go around
The eye to the main chance
The substitution of codependence for independence
The idea that it has to cost millions of pounds to make a feature film
The idea that there is only one way to skin a cat
WH Auden to BBritten: ‘Goodness and beauty result from a combination of order and chaos, bohemianism and bourgeois convention .. bohemianism alone leads to a mad jumble of beautiful scraps .. bourgeois convention alone to large unfeeling corpses.’
This is what I miss, there being no more Derek Jarman films:
the mess
the vulgarity
the cant
the poetry
the edge
the pictures
Simon Fisher Turner’s music
the real faces
the intellectualism
the science
the bad temperedness
the good temperedness
the cheek
the standards
the anarchy
the gauchness
the romanticism
the classicism
the optimism
the activism
the challenge
the longeurs
the glee
the playfulness
the bumptiousness
the resistance
the wit
the fight
the colours
the grace
the passion
the goodness
the beauty
Longlivemess.
Longlivepassion.
Longlivecompany.