THE WORSE PLACE IN SPACE, THE BEST POINT IN TIME...

THE WORST PLACE OF SPACE, THE BEST POINT IN TIME.


Julian Schnabel-in his commentaries on ‘Before Night Falls’ are talking about parts of the film. He said that each part had to have a type of strength…. he compared the film to a chain and that if there was one weak part the whole chain could not ‘pull’ the idea, the beauty, or whatever the film was pulling...’use’ even. He said that there is a similar wish or intention in a painting. His canvases are large in general and his process is very inventive. He will drag canvas paint with his hands. Dive in and out of words, color fields, appliqué. But the difference in the time’s passage from one canvas to the other …or around one canvas is linear…especially with the size of his canvases. In the span of a two-hour film we tend to ‘place’ the main character within a given space: his boyhood home, his apartment, the beach, the prison. If there is supposed to be this necessarily strong element within the canvas (in every space), and within the film (within the time and linkage of the cinematic composition) then memory is the sloppiness or the fallible glue that would put these things together as ‘good’. The memory…the neurons in the mind of both the artists and the audience…must be doing something ‘qualitative’ also. They must have a type of functioning like cinema and like the large canvas.

Spaces functioning as links…yes…in a spatially disinclined society this made sense. Time was conjoined as links that the modern bourgeois American was supposed to traverse. Such is the successful version. With the version of most they would be better off with life as a canvas…. the traversing of the canvases would interrupt the idea of linear time. And with and for whom did we attempt this time? Aristotle? Any part of the film is supposed to be as strong, beautiful, and true as the next? Could we not start with this relativism and say that the beginning of the film started with something wrong…at least not as strong? Memory and its use become very important in this use of both the canvas and the film of the life. Like the canvases of Schnabel, the span is large. We can go back…out of the onstage or out of the distance and high about the canvas and ‘understand it…where we would be…. but here we miss the textures and resort to one sense impression of the experience…usually vision. What is memory? Could we go deep into the canvas and see the textures and how a thing is made? Moving deeper could we see both a record of the process of the filmmaker and a record our selves as audience also? As space and time…. the canvas and the film are ‘paired off’ so to we sit as a fly on the wall in our present selves and watch the pairing off…the binary…of the artist (and all of his or her intents) and a very odd thing called memory…. lets assume it is ours.