The least required.
What is the least — the smallest unit of whatever we’re working with right now required in order to tell this story in the way in which it needs to be told? What is the least required here in order for this to be true?
This is the question that I keep reminding myself of as I work through the assembly of Dissidence (which is currently a process of purely laying images up against one another, roughly based on my most recent wrangling of the text), and anticipating the next phase, wherein I know I will need to be linking images with spoken words.
I’m thinking about this a lot, especially in the wake of the loss to our world of the master filmmaker Béla Tarr. The duration (otherwise labelled “slowness”) at the beating heart of his cinema being an act of refusal to entertain or manipulate. Duration being not an instruction, but simply what it is: time. And when the spectator (audience) meets with time which refuses to flinch, what does she find there? Herself.
What is the smallest unit required? The fewest gestures? The least number of cuts? The fewest ideas? What is it to meet with a single idea, and sit with it? Is this where we find ourselves? And then go beyond ourselves and time, and find the very essence of nature?
I don’t mean this in an abstract, meditative sense. Perhaps in the transcendent, yes but if transcendent, then specifically so. I mean this in the sense of the transcendence of narrative or cinematic pretence, to the realm of human honesty. The aching tragedy of human honesty. The blissful ecstasy of human honesty. The present ambivalence of human honesty. The honest essence of the nature of this specific moment. An expression of some kind of truth.
The films that thrust themselves to the front of my mind with immediacy as I write this are Angela Schanelec’s Places in Cities, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. I don’t know why these two in particular today. On any other day, a dozen others. Something about the deep, aching patience demanded of both in us, and also the promise of a meeting with ourselves then, too.
The employment of the smallest unit of explanation, perhaps. Perhaps even the employment of no explanation at all, and in its absence, an abundance of brutal, transcendent and everyday truth.
