MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Yesterday was our sixth day of shooting. Today we are off. Tomorrow begins the final three-day push. I am tired but pleased. I would like to sleep, but I would also like to write about what has transpired since Lupa Beach while the details are fresh in my mind. Each day on the White Light […]
Throughout my work on this project the past has had an uncanny way of becoming suddenly and unexpectedly manifest in the present. This happened recently when I was recording character voice-overs for the film. I needed someone with a Hungarian accent, who was also a fluent English speaker, to read the parts of two people […]
Translation has been essential to the writing of the Restless Hungarian book, and also for filmed interviews conducted in Hungarian and Spanish; but the process of translation is far from precise. Computers can do it but this misses tone and nuance even with languages that are structurally similar. When you tell a machine to translate […]
We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty A wonderful thing happened recently. On October 4th and on October 11th thirteen filmmakers, writers, curators and editors met on […]
I remember the moment, eight years and five months ago, when I had the idea to make a film about my father. I was laying in the bottom of a canoe, drifting in Higgins Pond, near the ruin of what had been our summer home. I had come […]
THE MYSTERIOUS UNFOLDING OF REALITY All my life I have made lists. When I got my first computer in 1989, a Kaypro word-processor the size of a suitcase, my list making became more sophisticated. It was easy to cut and paste things I had to do in order of priority. I recently came across a […]
January 22nd was my mother’s birthday. Born in 1912, she would have been 109-years old. Also, at 9:00 AM it started to rain in Calaveras County on the western slope of the Sierra Mountains. It was a welcome event in what, so far, is turning out to be a pretty dry winter. At 9:05 AM […]
I have been struggling to write you a seasonally and COVID-appropriate letter for several weeks and not coming up the words to express how I feel, and how we are experiencing life in this time. Last night I was listening to an audio book of Viktor Frankel’s lectures, just published in English for the […]
In support of Black Lives Matter, I am making available for free the FACING RACISM documentary. I made the film in 1996, but it remains astonishingly relevant in light of recent events. The John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation supported the wide dissemination of videotapes and a facilitators guides to schools, health departments, community […]
Imagine a rope suspended from the sky. It is a thick rope of hemp or sisal, and It has knots tied into it at regular intervals. For the past eight months I have been climbing down that rope very slowly, pausing for long intervals at every knot. Each one represents a scene in the script […]