Collateral Beauties

…We still always paint people against a golden background, exactly like the medieval Primitives. People stand before something indefinite – sometimes gold, sometimes gray. Sometimes they stand in the light, and often with an unfathomable darkness behind them.

That makes sense. To know people, we have to isolate them. But after experiencing them for a long time it is only right to put these isolated observations back into a relationship with each other, and follow their broader gestures with a more mature gaze.

There are in fact, moments when a person stands out from their grandeur in clarity and silence before you. These are rare festive pleasures that you never forget. From then on, you love this person. In other words, you work to retrace with your own tender hands, the outline of the personality that you came to know in this hour.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Notes on the melody of things

This is what drives me. I believe it has always been so.

To discern.

To stand and listen to what, when faced with movement, speaks.

Maintaining the gaze.

Creating.

Today, filming, taking pictures, framing,

being moved by that other movement and, after the take,

feeling the disorder of all these recollections.

What to film?

Dance, its gruesome aspects. The nakedness of the body, its violence.

Love. Incongruity. Grace.

The darkness that awaits.

I film alone and make do with the means at hand.

I don’t attach too much importance to technic

I make sure it doesn’t interfere.

I am aware of some awkwardness,

I prefer this to too much skill.

I need to create this relationship with those I film,

intimate, sensitive, almost organic,

I endeavor to make films like Haikus.

I fail to achieve this.

So, I start over until I grasp something.

Until that something moves me.

I wonder, why show my visuals?

Who will distinguish them in the monstrous flood of what forms the screen?

I stay away from the shore.

I think of images, carried by the depth of the abyss.

Heddy Maalem