My lovely friend, Carys Kresny, had the kindness and good sense to forward me the contents of a speech given by none other than one of my cinematic heros, Tida Swinton. Orlando made me fall in love with her. Upon reading this speech, I was given a little window into why. Love, like "Cinema", as she calls it, and like dreams, are somehow only deeply knowable. We can't always say exactly why we are so deeply affected by someone or a film or a dream, we only know that we are. Sometimes we're given clues though. This was a wonderful little clue. She wrote her speech on the plane to San Francisco where she was to address people at the San Francisco Film Festival. She was thinking only about her sleepy son and the question he had asked her before he dropped off. Here is an excerpt from her writings:
"My friend, the great Italian cultural critic, Enrico Ghezzi, has written about this very thing, he remembered the invitation to reverie that a visionary cinema can provide, the invitation to become unconscious. No joke. Personally, having been exposed recently to the slew of trailers before Spike Lee's new film, or even those before "Ice Age 2," I would have been grateful for a cosh on the back of the head for any temporary escape from the escapism of those previews of forthcoming attractions.
I think the last film in which I experienced this kind of ecstatic removal was at a screening in Cannes of the Thai film "Tropical Malady" (Sud pralad), in my opinion, a masterpiece, mysterious and shapeshiftingly magical. A love story that actually carries the power to tip one into love, a nightmare of nature that kicks a primal punch, that takes us into the wilderness of human nature and leaves us there. I actually remember rubbing my eyes with my fists in a comedy gesture during the screening, convinced, for one split second, that I fallen asleep, that only my unconscious could have come up with such a texture of sensation.
Can I be alone in my longing for inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape? For the context of cinematic frame, a frame that in the end only cinema can provide, for the full view, the long shot, the space between, the gaps, the pause, the lull, the grace of living."
Well, there is so much more, but this part I thought was particularly appropriate for this site and is maybe the prime reason Carys sent me the article. (To read the entire speech go to http://www.sf360.org/features/2006/05/the_2006_san_fr.html)
Thank you, Carys.
