Everything you leave out, allows something else in – nothing is wasted.
Form in any art form is important, but almost like there should be a creative intention between the form and your desire to escape the form. The form is almost like the rules from which you dispense with.
“Inspiration is useful if you can get it, but working is more useful.” – Burrows. When you start doing, is when things come together. there is something about putting one word in front of another (e.g. shooting and interview, getting out, etc.) liberates your mind and that’s hard because the process of working it brings something out.
“Stealing is useful, as long as you know you’re stealing.” – Burrows. You have references and you have to search an argument and back up your argument. You’re not stealing, you’re developing your film.
You have to have a connection to yourself, to your inner world and landscape (because that’s valuable). Look outside yourself and say: “how am I going to craft this?”
READING LIST:
General Specific:
- Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky – profound and sometimes hard to understand.
- Making Movies by Lumet – the most practical book on making film.
- Conversations by Ondaatji & Murch – conversations about editing English Patient.
General:
- But Beautiful by Dyer – partly a factual book about the stories of jazz artists.
- The Argonauts or Bluets by Nelson – memoir & reflections on the colour blue.
- A Choreographer’s Handbook by Burrows – dancers and choreographers.
- Essayism by Dillon – an essay on essays & where he fuses the idea of an essay.
- To The River by Laing – about depression and the river’s history.
- Notes to Self by Pine – strange mixture of her own memoir
- Francis by Wroe – a biography of St Francis but also with poems about herself.
- Walk Through Walls by Abramovic – autobiography of her life and performance art.
- The Years by Ernaux – tells the story of modern France.
- M Train by Smith – her life as a kid.
- On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Vuong – his life and coming to America.
Project Specific:
- Decoding Advertisements by Williamson – seminal book about understanding ads.
- Poems and Sister Outsider by Lorde – essays on race.
- An Unquiet Mind by Redfield Jamison – mental illness and art.
- Black Performance On The Outskirts by Gaines – essays on race.
- Space and Place in Irish Cinema by Holohan (ch. 22) – landscape in Irish film.
- The Big Goodbye by Wasson – the making of Chinatown.
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