Projections

For those of you missing the big screen experience, particularly the celluloid or celluloid-derived kind, I can wholeheartedly recommend lying on your back outdoors when it’s snowing. The white sky becomes a great screen, animated by manic granular white-on-white activity. A bit like the whites in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE, blown up from 16mm so the grains are like golfballs.

If you turn your face into the wind so the flakes are bombing right at you, it’s a 3D movie.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing it for the full ninety minute feature length. It’s strictly a one-reel experience.

Another form of projection became familiar to all of us in the Trump era: the way he would accuse his enemies of doing exactly what he was doing, so that you could pretty reliably deduce his undiscovered crimes from the things he said about opponents.

Now on my second documentary feature (finishing tomorrow) and it increasingly seems to me that whenever we talk about other people, we’re talking about ourselves. Nearly all my interviewees offered concise self-portraits when asked to talk about the subject of the film. The implications are slightly alarming, not least for me, since I spend most of my time on here talking about other filmmakers, including bad ones…

Above: just about the only frame of the new film I can safely reveal.