Work Log: Monday 16 June
[x] Film Practice
Work done: three interspersed hours of writing, but some solid focus in there.
An exciting day in hindsight.
I started writing off the back of the dialogue fragment that Manisha had, in the Poetry Clinic, identified as being useful to expand into what I feel (I hope) this iteration of the short film will be.
What I have been trying to identify is real clarity of form —
How to take some of these more isolated poetic narrative fragments, and anchor them into the film alongside the dialogue, or turn them into dialogic sequences; being careful of course to not let the duration of the piece blow out. I guess it's okay to over-write it for now, and pull back on the next pass. (How many passes does this film get? I've been doing passes for six months.) But, no. Now I'm so much clearer where it's sitting.
So it has two clear, distinct threads (and I can’t believe I’ve been struggling with this for so long):
The Epistolary memory / testimony to the unseen Lover, by the Woman.
Interspersed with dialogic interjections from the almost formless, mysterious Interviewer.
The epistolary / monologic spine borrows influence from:
Clément Cogitore's "The Evil Eye"
Marguerite Duras' "L'Homme Atlantique"
Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil"
Payal Kapadia's "A Night of Knowing Nothing"
from Payal Kapadia’s “A Night of Knowing Nothing”
The dialogic interjections are more nebulous; they take more oblique influence from:
Louise Glück's "The Denial of Death"
Samuel Beckett
Caryl Churchill
Anne Carson
My own interview-based work
There's definitely another reference and I can't remember what it is (I think it's cinema, not theatre or literature but I can't be sure), but it will come to me at some point over the coming days.
Perhaps that strange interview-based sequence in Robert Bonello's "The Beast".
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[x] Yoga Practice
Rushing this morning, so some wake-up stretches and breathing mostly and a beat of seated meditation before dashing out the door. Then to the physio to deal with this flaring wrist pain and my inability to weight-bear properly (a real issue), which might be rooted in something shoulder-related? Anyway, lots of strapping, exercises, remedial stuff to do. Practiced again for fifteen minutes when back in studio. Need to formalise this a bit more going forward, but still really ginger with the wrist, so let’s see how it settles over the coming days. Breathwork and seated meditation is enough for now, if I’m getting strength work in, too.
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The first teaser dropped for The Family Next Door, the show I shot (acted in) at the end of 2024. It’ll go to air on the ABC shortly.
It’s interesting having multiple identities and professions (filmmaker, actor, voice artist) and still after over a decade of carrying the three with equal weights at different times have never experienced any kind of unification between them. Even when acting in, and voicing over my own film. They are all such distinct practices. And require such distinct artists to serve them.
I wonder whether everyone who is a multihyphenate feels similarly. I don’t think it’s something we talk about amongst ourselves enough — particularly not in this day and age when everything is supposed to be so forward-facing, spit-polished and easy-looking. When a person is supposed to be a brand, so singular and cohesive. But that’s not the reality is it? There is actor me. There is writer-filmmaker-director me. There is voiceover artist me. (Then there is couch-peloton-road-cycling-watching me.)
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A flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos is suddenly claiming glorious airspace between the facades of the buildings right outside my studio windows.
We like the same kind of weather, I think. Grey, high-humidity. Cool, threatening rain. What they’re doing in the city I don’t know. I feel like they came to tell me to knock-off for the day.
Well then: I’m off to find a copy of The New Philosopher and pick up Bella Li’s Lost Lake from The Paperback Bookshop. I’m slightly afraid I’ll buy more books while I’m there… I mean, when I say afraid, I do actually mean hopeful.
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