notes for novel

19/07/08

A book about a writer overlooking the shooting of the movie adaption of one of his novels.

He comments intelligently about the ontology of adapting a novel for the screen. He comments thoroughly on the validity of the director’s cinematic interpretation of his novel. At the same time, he comments on his novel and on the ontology of the novel, of language, of writing.

Basically, he outlines his novel’s characteristics, he witnesses the shooting of the director’s interpretation, and as he witnesses he narrates along the accuracy of the interpretation.

A novel about novels, about the filming of a novel.

The coup de theatre is that the account of the filming is the story (so what can they be filming?).

The other coup de theatre would be if Fincher decided to adapt it!

23/07/08

…And the third coup de theatre would be if there was a film about Fincher’s adaptation.

One question might be…What is the story of the novel they are adapting?

This is a problem that must be solved because

If there is an actual story: everything becomes allegorical because by introducing a proper story the audience can clearly make out the seams of the levels being overlayed. There is a writer. A novel he wrote that is being adapted. He is at the shooting of this adaptation and he will walk us throughout the story, commenting on the director’s interpretation. The fact that there is a story seduces the viewer into an immersive state (the urge to experience the story of the novel being mounted in a hopefully compelling film). The real question would become: how do we make this metanovel be as compelling as the story. A weak solution in the past has been to simply have a compelling inner story…and to have the outer story not be an actual story but only a mere framework. Weak.

The challenge is to make the outerstory as compelling as the inner one.

But the initial problems are these:

1. What is it they are shooting?
In order to answer that question, the narrator would have to reveal the story of the novel they are adapting. Yet, there is not supposed to be a novel. The only novel is the one about the novel being made into a film.

The reader wants to know the story of what is being filmed. But the narrator is only giving the story of the shooting, not the story of what’s being shot.

(That is because there is nothing being shot. It is only an excuse to wax philosophically about the nature of writing, the nature of filming, the nature of filming writing, and the nature of self-refexive art.)

So what to do? How to reveal a story that does not exist?

… … …

Some Art Ideas

1. Art As Hobby
Find people with corporate jobs. See if they make art. Be varied in the selection of art they make. Buy their art at a low price and expose it. The exhibition of their art is the artwork. Sell it.

2. Take pictures of the books in my library which I’ve yet to read.

3. Somebody’s reflection faintly etched “inside” a mirror.

4. Make a committee of well-known artists that will approve all my art before it is publicly released. The debates are documented.

On The Room Short Film

As I write this reworked version of my initial synopsis. As I create the short film within the short film. I am learning to at times go beyond the cinematic fabric of the thing. That is, to momentarily disregard cinematic concerns and to involve myself more deeply into the treated subject.

Because I see now that it was a mistake to thread on the cinematic fabric, to pull the story into it.

Today I see that the art emerges from the discovery of cinematic glimpses within a foreign world. My role then becomes to give birth to these images in a way in which the viewer will recognize their cinematic inheritance but also their instant newness and unseen-beforeness.

Can you film an anus?

sexcuse mais je dois dormir trop de sexcuse mais je dois dormir a cause du sexcuse mais je dois dormir pour penser au sexcuse mais je dois dormir

ideas for film II

1. the discarding of ideas
2. the meaning of montage (see book put together my Montand’s wife in “La Guerre est finie”
3. The primacy of the camera–all else is secondary.
4. Straub-Huillet base all their films on already existing material–The tension between the wholly original and the referenced….(the impetus behind a wholly original segment in a wholly original story)
5. A film that reflects on its own formal/stylistic devices. For instance, if WKW would include in his story annotative comments about his use of slow-motion…
6. Something has to replace the clichés of self-reflexivity. The beautiful tracking shot of a tracking shot in “Contempt” as the credits are read out…should be replaced today by something new that indicates the same issues…The ‘essence’ of this sequence which I’m in love with….is something I wish to reproduce…but maybe it can be done without going through the path of self-reflexivity. The obvious alternate path would be to have a sequence with narrative meaning (unlike the extra-diegetic sequence of Contempt). So now the question would be…what are the other filmic emanations apart from extra-diegetic self-reflexivity, diegectic sequences,…I am not sure. What about the false takes an actor makes, when he taps into the ‘wrong’ feeling and the director must correct her/him? What about the kind of footage that is never in the script but ends up being shot out of sheer opportunity at the moment of filming (and the audience can feel that)?

7. A movie directed by Michel Gondry about a man who tries to convince a woman that they met the year before at a 35mm screening of Marienbad. Seeing that the woman is clearly unconvinced, he makes a short film recreating their encouter. The man is played by Peter Greenaway. The last remaining print was destroyed in an Afghan cave before a special screening for US Soldiers. During a trek to a humanitarian mission, Olivier and Hugo find bits and pieces of the print and try to put it back together.

8. Obsessive-Complusive Personality Disorder is defined by absolute denial that there is a problem. Good way to explore in an explicit way that space where the viewer knows more than the protagonist.

IDeas

1. Do I come up with an idea because school asks me to? How do the ideas that traverse me naturally differ from those generated by a school requirement? Must I go through the process of discarding the act of generating ideas in order to detach myself from the forced-upon feeling (which causes stress and fear) of pressure?

On Melodrama

The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship.

According to Brooks, melodramas portray a victory over psychological repression.

About Ideas

Whenever I get an interesting idea, instead of writing it down, my first instinct is to let it float in my head awhile. Eventually I drift into another thought and the initial idea gets lost.

Sick Existential Insight

Nous sommes seuls dans l’amour que l’on porte à ceux que l’on aime.