devotional Cinema

I read Nathaniel Dorky’s “Devotional Cinema”. There are some quotes I want to post because they narrow down the way in which I want to approach this project in terms of filming and editing.

“For alchemy to take place in a film, the form must include the expression of it’s own materiality, and this materiality must be in union with it’s subject matter”

“We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, (…) In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theater, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. (…) It is important ti understand what we are participating in, to realize that we rest in darkness and experience vision. Many people take vision as a given and don’t realize that they are actually seeing.”

“The other imbalance occurs when there is nothing but the view of the filmmaker, when nothing in the film is really permitted to exist in its own right. (…) The film has no ability to respond or resonate within itself.”

“If we do relinquish control, we suddenly see a hidden world, one that has existed all along right in front of us. In a flash, the uncanny presence of this poetic and vibrant world, ripe with mystery, stands before us.”

“If a film fails to take advantage of the self-existing magic of things, if it uses objects merely to mean something, it has thrown away one of its great possibilities. When we take an object and make it mean something, what we are doing, in a subtle or not so subtle way, is confirming ourselves. We are confirming our own concepts of who we are and what the world is.”