Director’s notebook:I’ve just spent a reflective vacation in the Patagonian Andes, and I’ve been mulling over how to present our protagonists and their actions, from the Andes farther North, to the rest of the world. Such a particular reality… the plan is to project this reality in the most particular way possible, that is, faithful to the particular people, time and place we have collaborated with/documented, while still creating a totally original artistic vision. The trick is to have this be understandable to people while still stretching their understanding to new heights.
The balance, then, that’s been weighing on my shoulders (wish they were more Atlas-like), is what I refer to in the title of this post. Artistic creativity works through communication, and communication needs a shared frame of reference, a mutual intelligibility. However, if it is immediately completely understandable, the message becomes sterile, and a collective “duh” comes from the public. Concretely, I’m worried and excited about our experimental character-actor improvisations (the same person talking to themselves, essentially in two different roles) and some of the more controversial political interventions.
I think ideally a viewer should immediately access one level of understanding, based on their own experience and knowledge. Let’s call this ground floor of our Spectacular Palace of Meaning. Once in, they should be given a spectacular view of the inner courtyard, with hundreds of doors, all differently shaped, entering into the various wings of the complex. However, from the central courtyard, and even from outside the building, it should be obvious from the upwards-pointing lines in the architecture that, although all doors pass through different sections, the entire structure is designed to channel you upwards towards the pinnacle of it all, a shiningly beckoning tower from which the whole world will be seen from a new, worldview-shaking perspective.
You don’t have to understand how you got there after your wanderings about the tower, you don’t need to understand the plan, you don’t even need to remember which door you came through, since they all lead to the same transcendent place.
So that’s one theory. Another was eloquently put by a close friend of mine, who said that if he can get 0.0001% of people to like his work, he will be supremely successful. So, either you find this population and cater to their needs/desires, or you do your own thing and trust that this population will find you and your work – it’s probably wise to go with a bit of both strategies. Though there’s always someone who will enter a senseless maze of a building (or movie) and say, “wow, I love it.” Same goes for big empty blocks without windows.I think the world was made to be only partially intelligible, with mystery equally important as understanding. The tower of Babel was built with it’s top in the heavens by the people who survived the Great Flood, people who all spoke the same language. “God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do." So God said, "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8).
Why would God do that? Was it because everyone understanding everything all the time is boring as hell?
