I haven’t figured out yet whether I travel around the world to track down images or whether images drive my curiosity to see. In any case, since my camera found its place in my luggage, I realize that this high definition companion pushes me onwards relentlessly, requiring me to search my own voice, my own music in order to reach my own truth and identity.
The two of us have thus decided to dive to the neck into the societies that we intend to portray in order to reach a higher level of observation. We have this foolish ambition to come so close to real life that we will hear it breath within our shots.
We lie in ambush, patient and respectful hunters eager to capture the moment when life leaps ahead, waiting to recognize from the endless possibilities given to us the best time to shoot. Our favorite sport is to capture the essence of time, and discover it rooted inside our shot. The question of filming what takes place before our eyes in such a way that it seems both everlasting and fleeting like time can be is, for us, a fundamental issue. Indeed time is linked to rhythm and rhythm gives shape to the documentary’s character, it gives it harmony, and finally makes it a fine and successful product. « A film’s rhythm », used to say the Russian director Andrei Tarkovski, « is not determined by the length within the edited elements but by the degree of intensity with which time flows inside them. » (‘Time sealed’).
This effort to give time some density in the image also explains my passion for the desert (although my camera does not share this love for the endless sands!) because time in the desert can be ardently still. Long as eternity and short like a gush of air. And the beauty is there…
«The documentary filmmaker does not show what is, but what was. How it was one second before he pushed on the record button. His art is in past perfect. His imperfection is not to know how the things he films will turn out. If he is a true documentary filmmaker, he does not know. Otherwise he is merely a documentalist. Evolution belongs to fiction movies: destinies are then being invented at full speed. The documentary filmmaker has no backward movement. He is merely alert and sensitive to what is becoming. That’s the whole difference.»
Serge Daney wrote these lines in 1982 in «Cinéma du réel» in honor and memory of the late Jean Eustache.
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Film in the making |
EVLIYA CELEBI WAY
For further information, check the blog: www.hoofprinting.blogspot.com
and the website: www.kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/index.html
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A TURQUOISE SKY ABOVE KABUL
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English 