Medskapandets lov | Amos Oz

Amos Oz sa i kvällens Babel att en skillnad mellan litteraturen och t.ex. film var att läsaren av en bok i så mycket högre grad var medskapande. Att vara medskapande är för mig en avgörande egenskap när man talar om experimentell film, poetic cinema eller personlig film - vad man nu väljer att kalla denna lilla grupp av filmer.

I mina egna filmer ger jag ett antal pusselbitar, ett bildflöde i samverkan med t.ex. ett ljudlandskap, en grundkänsla som sedan betraktaren får, och måste, vara med och forma till en sorts betydelsebärande helhet. Det som sticker ut, och ofta gör folk förbannade, är avsaknaden av en rätlinjig berättelse.

I min nätjakt på uppgifter om filmaren och professorn i Visual Arts vid Harvard, Alfred Guzzetti, som jag för övrigt mailade i dag och tackade för hans fantastiska kortfilm The Tower of Industrial Life, hittade jag följande blogginlägg av Greg Pettit, Texas, vars resonemang är mycket typiskt för hur de flesta ser på s.k. experimentell film.

6/9 - Marie and I went out with Adele, our friend the Director of Photography from the Politics of Fur movie a while back. She's much more interested in documentary film making, so she invited us to a screening of some experimental documentary shorts by a guy named Alfred Gazetti. Yikes. Experimental was right, although he may have been experimenting with something other than film at the time. They introduced them as being sort of like "travelogues" in that they didn't have the traditional narrative. That's one way of putting it. There were about a dozen films, all about 10 minutes long. Whew, I thought Joe's student film was long? That was a piece of cake. These had some interesting shots of clouds, and light shining through trees, and then sunlight reflecting off water, and maybe a person in the water, and them some other random stuff. Then they had some less interesting shots of clouds, and light shining through trees, and sunlight reflecting off water, a person in water, and other stuff. And then they had some quite boring shots of clouds, and light shining through trees, and sunlight reflecting off water, a person in water, and other stuff. Has anyone ever seen Koyaanisqatsi? If you have, imagine that with less interesting music, less interesting visuals, and less variety. He also seemed to have recently come across some of the nifty video editing tools that came with his computer program, which allowed him to have split screens, and boxes of clouds within clouds, and totally irrelevant text running across the bottom. In the end I decided it was like being in an art gallery, except instead of being able to choose which works you like and which you would just glance at, you are forced to stare at every single painting. For ten minutes. Each.

Just nu rullar den ultimata dokumentären om Patti Smith på TV, ett måste för den som ännu inte har sett den.