To be captured by art is to surrender to a conversation you didn't know you were having. After three and a half years of screenwriting, I've stepped into filmmaking, where I need a different kind of patience. It's the patience of beginner's mind, that blurry, enchanted state where, as poet Aaron Shurin says, we must allow ourselves "a light stupidity."
What began last week as a simple New Year's card video, meant as respite from a larger project, well, it transformed. Through iterations of editing and re-seeing, it became something raw and frightening— too intimate and messy to share or name, yet compelling me to keep going.
After a second late night, the title emerged while taking a break: CAPTURE. The title crystallized things. Yes, I was capturing footage, looping moments that drew me for reasons still unclear, but more essentially, I'd become lost and had been taken over by the material, by the process itself.
In another couple days, I realized I was exploring the liminal state where the camera finds something that is neither artifice nor authenticity. When the camera captures something raw. The actor is captured, and the filmmaker is in turn captured by the actor.
Perhaps creation begins not in the conceptualization, not in the first drafts, but in the actual moment of surrender. When the sculpture reveals itself in the marble and we allow it to exist and talk to us, even when we have no idea its language. We see the gaping mouth, and we don’t shut it up.
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