Manifesto

Correction: it would be great to miss the point, but I don't think I have. No, I've just sidestepped it into oblivion. And that's as inexcusable as missing the point out of ignorance.

A quote from a book that I'm reading, Rollo May's The Courage to Create:

"This courage will not be the opposite of despair... rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair... Courage... is not to be confused with rashness. The ultimate end of such rashness is... [getting] at least one's head battered in with a policeman's billy club... In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality... Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological - it is essential to our being."

I have certain methods of avoidance - most unconscious - that I am becoming more and more aware of as time passes. I believe that, in certain ways, the creation of an ambivalent manifesto was a method of avoidance. I said nothing - made no commitments - and so accomplished or received nothing. Is ambivalence another word for nihilism?

This semester, I propose to create a film in which I will display a courage to trust the image - a film in which I will commit action to my thinking and understand why I am making decisions - a film in which I linger over the image. Jeff Pence has mentioned "slow pans, long takes, dialogue, no heavy editing."

I also might mention: a less violent form of filmmaking. This is not to say that the film might not have violence - but that the formal aesthetic of the film does not involve a certain - warfare on the image.

More on this later.