» Filmkonst
Nr. 31 | »Local Heroes« | Published by Göteborg Film
Festival, 1995 »
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Text as PDF Why this passion for film? »Like a maniac beyond all boundaries, go where you want to, live like a lion, totally free from fear.« (Dzogchen-Tantra) First of all it can of course be so that it isn’t only the fate of the film industry and the director, but the destiny of the whole civilization not to be able to exist in the future. Although the destinies of all human beings are closely linked to one another. Culture reflects the spiritual environment that has reigned during an
era. In a contemporary culture the actual spiritual environment is being
shown also, and what has remained or succumbed from earlier cultures is
being visualized. Even the future appears in the magic mirror of culture. We can see film, which probably more than any other art form has the ability to make the spiritual environment visible, show man’s existence and document it. Because like no other art form – I am old fashioned enough to believe that film is art – the art of film is able to speak without words. It speaks in time, which should be able to give it an incredible visionary power. Undoubtedly it carries this power within itself as the Earth carries the fire. If we can think of how the first images were being projected, we see a dark room, a wall and a fire glowing behind a transparent image so that a reproduction is being made. These elements – dark room, wall, fire, and as a result thereof, a picture – lead us in to the caves where the first human beings lived, in places like Lascaux and Altamira. In the caves people gathered and created images by the light from torches. Images – as an important part of the ritual. Images – that conjured, that chased the demons away. Because what can be reproduced and mentioned loses its power, and man, who since the beginning has carried fear, can finally control the evil spirits by chasing them away. Through the pictures that those people made we find ourselves in the centre of fear, and thereby at the beginning of the film culture. Yes, doesn’t a simple handprint, thousands of years old, that a human being has left in a dark cave, leave a testimony of our alienation, the horrors within ourselves and our infinite longing for recognition. And don’t we gather, as we did thousands of years ago, in the obscurity of the cinema-cave watching surprised and bewitched the picturegame on the wall in front of ourselves, with the vague hope that we finally have succeeded in chasing away something deep inside ourselves that has caused the fear – and that we now are only ourselves. What we see today on the screen has hardly a ritual character; the images that are being shown only in rare cases remind us of man and his life. Even the magic insight of light, which always is an insight of the power of fire, seems almost lost. The “theatre film”, which now has reached the end of it’s
first century, can’t chase the evil spirits away anymore. With a
few exceptions it doesn’t grow from the wounds of our being anymore.
“Theatre film” at the end of the 20th century is running around
in a circle of system affirmations that never seem to end. Affirmations
that already have been accepted within all cultural areas, and thereby
have reached a dictatorial position. I don’t know what cinema or film is. I only have a vague idea, a feeling of what it could be. And that is something that has a lot to do with love, fantasy and freedom, that only can come from our souls, and that also is something our souls have to conquer. Our generation still hasn’t expressed itself. We still haven’t
liberated the fire in film, and we are given only a short time to do it,
in this era which have reduced culture to a ready-made product produced
by the entertainment industry. What obligatory topics can then our generation find? This seems to be
the basic question of our time, and film art of the future depends on
the answer. The new technology will not answer the question. What is lacking
in most films is not the technical ability, but spiritual and emotional
richness. And within the acceptance of this lack is probably where we
find the answer. Our generation has not expressed this yet. And we have to hurry up if our aim is to make films about life and reality – and thereby also the visions – instead of movies about the life that’s being led on the screen or on television. It could also be so that we one day look in our cultural mirror and still only see a demonic emptiness, where a confused grimace of our own madness is rushing forward from the background to devour us. Only to spit us out in the same desperate world that we came from, since we have become unappetizing. But through this perhaps it will show that it is easy and fantastic to
make a film, if we simply – with love and with all the means that
the film gives us – look deeply and tell about the things that really
touch us. |