No Ampersand

I've been missing in action a bit, which has been mostly terrible, but somewhat useful I guess to take a step back, not be loud, and observe and reflect a bit. I talked with George a lot last night after the shooting ended and my night at Pacific Standard came to a close. It feels like a lot of people believe some kind of impasse has beset us, and there's even a slight panic I can feel about the waning of our time in February.

George gave me a rough and tumble run-down of the goings-on for the past few days. It's pretty remarkable how the process can change so quickly; I just hope we don't lose sight of the process in the hopes of making a movie. Attitudes and opinions about structure, editing, Movies proper, and the neuroses behind wanting something at the end of all this have started to surface with more intensity than perhaps since we started. Exigent new methodologies pop up and take hold, and I can't help but wonder what's changing (this isn't a value judgment).

This fascistic mode George took up last night brings up my own concerns about "community filmmaking;" I don't think it will ever succeed without the full and ready participation of everyone present. That's what makes sporadic attendance and attention spans such a complicator. Self-governing has come not just on the group level, but the personal level. Two nights ago, the chaotic performance model was not something I was interested in or liked at all; I don't begrudge it happening, but since I reduced myself to a non-participant, I removed myself from the film for that evening. I think maybe that's a little unfair to the process, and probably more than a little bit selfish, but in the end more constructive.

As for the new directions, I don't see any need to break form and set our sights on defined, limited goals for the next week. What the process has produced so far is working; if it's workable, that's another story. Regardless, I worry about veering too close to the fascistic order George finds so reprehensible or inversely the chaos-performance of the night I left. Both quash the thinking and creativity we've been engaging in up to this point, and both put too much weight on sense and spectacle, respectively.

Issues of documentary and experimental film and Kaprow-style happenings have all been raised, especially last night, and I don't know if I can think about them anymore. The application of shared elements from each of these styles as well as conjecturing about their manifestation has really taken its toll on my mental health. At this point, I feel like the only thing I can do is to just keep going. The nodal, associative, thematic, and entropic filmmaking we've engaged in still works for me.

George asked what we all thought our best scenes were. The Michael/Erin bed scene and the auto-harp scene are my picks. I have dragged my feet and been a victim of the apathy I already derided, and so I'm going to try to correct that. Those scenes, placed next to each other, make sense in the space and the world. But with the commonality of Michael, I want to expand on it. I want to reshoot the auto-harp scene, painted or scripted. I want a close-up, improvisatory scene that captures Michael's disdain for the so-called horrible auto-harp. Those three scenes together work, and like Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, have every right to be single shot, or not, if people want to "make movies." The great benefit is that a tarot card reading could have Michael walking through the back, and serve to unite the space even more.

Scattershot and rambly. I'm just looking forward to tonight.