Saturday, June 26, 2010

Death and Early Cinematography

Every film maker's first 
film explores death, naturally.
Morpheus, Terminal, 
Expiry, or just The End,
the sweet kiss of poison 
on curiosity's lips, probing 
the world for mortality 
with their lens to capture
the mystery of our 
enchantment with the
loss of being.  You see it
in the shadows, the ghosts, 
as if  their art breathes life
into some lifeless scene --
a blade flashing in the
blazing sun, a blind frigate
bird soaring to the sun
and then falling like some 
dumb boomerang into the sea,
Dirk Bogarde, stumbling 
and pathetic, sweating 
in the plague-heat of the
Venice beach, puckering
on the sand like some 
old carp.  In my brother's film
I'm caught in slow motion,
a stupor, climbing a dune,
grasping the weeds to 
pull myself up, then the 
obligatory montage, cut 
to the westbound  Amtrak
effacing me, cut to 
staring at the mirror
and seeing nothing but 
the silvery darkness, the
liquid memory pool of 
nothingness, the old
existentialist trappings,
cut to a graveyard, 
lichen-spotted stones and
the camera swings skyward
to the November cold,
but once the production
is splashed on the screen
the great mystery is 
reduced to a scrim of 
slippery images sliding
before our eyes--there's no
transcendence, no epiphany,
no elegy, the sweet cello
fades, it's a film, after all,
about nothing, the other side
of a story, a sequence 
of dead flowers left beside
the road, a field of chopped
corn stalks in the snow,
a redemption, a benediction,
a way of being that can't
be sensed or repeated,
and that failure, grandiose
or felt, cannot be captured
or known by image, it
can only be known by
surrender, whether 
by the eros of music or
first person narrative, 
limited.


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