Today, I was thinking about the difficulty of capturing the sensation of fainting on film from the first person’s point of view. Some experiences just can’t be captured as fiction (film is limited; this is what makes it any good), and, in those cases, film shouldn’t try to simulate them, it should stimulate the audience into experiencing these unframeable moments of life for themselves.
Thinking this suddenly took me back a few years to a forgotten idea of mine; I remembered this being my - for want of a less silly idea of a word - motto as a young hopeful filmmaker: that my films would not encourage viewers to see more of my films; rather the audience would be encouraged to go out and live as a consequence of seeing my film. Through a paradoxically arrogant sort of modesty, I had a notion that, if people only ever watched one of my films, it would be a compliment and a testament to the success of this ideal.
Having this years-old ethos suddenly pop back to me meant a few things for me. First, it made me aware that, though young, I’m old enough to have once developed ideals and beliefs entirely my own, allowed them to evolve and shift and become insignificant, forgotten them and remembered so much later that my remembering them alone is surprising. Second, it made me wonder what caused that evolution, shift, insignificance, forgetting. Why did this naive, romantic but wonderful image of art inspiring life in the most beautiful way disappear from my mind and my heart? And third, if this is not the drive behind my desire to make films any more, what is? I know the answer to this last question - it is to preach: to educate on sociology and morality and humanity; and to question: to question sociology and morality and humanity - but the new goal is something that can co-exist with my old wish to motivate people towards taking greater advantage of life and all its opportunities. So did I become cynical? Did I become so arrogant and obsessed with the messages I want to distribute that I began to neglect the very ideal that spawned the messages in the first place? Or have I simply refined my definition of “going out and living” - and with each film given that motivation a much more direct purpose, even if it’s always a reaction to some negativity in the real world?
As always, it’s something worth thinking about. I’m only glad that, since this is a mental soliloquy and not a physical experience, I’ve been able to capture it to refer to later.