Film

Film. I love film. The sound of the word, first of all. The sound and feel of the cellulose, second of all. The look of it. The sheen of it. The cold of it. The blade of it. The wide strip of it. The clatter of it in the projector.

Then also the idea of it – you can record a street scene, and reproduce it indoors. You can take the image of a street building, a shop front, wooden walls in the American Midwest, the faded brown of it, the worn wood, the detail, the flaking paint, the chipped finish, and the blue sky behind it, on a particular afternoon at a particular hour, and you can reproduce that elsewhere.

Indoors, in the dark, in the quiet, inside a room, as far away from the original location as you can get.

You can reproduce it in the opposite of what it is.

That is beautiful to me.

But there’s something else.

You can capture a static scene, but you can also capture movement. If a car goes past – or a pedestrian, or a horse and cart, or an aeroplane – you can capture, trap these things. At the same speed, at the same distance. The same poetry in the movement is yours to keep.

That moment of movement – that action that a human being or nature had decided to make at that time – you can capture it, trap it, nail it, like capturing the essence of it all in a bottle.

But there’s even something else.

Whilst you can capture the truth of what you see – the buildings, the street, the sky, the trees as they move in the breeze, the car parked at an odd angle by the store-front – whilst it’s fine to capture what you come across when you arrive at the scene, you can also invent stuff. You can get together some actors and you can make up a story – people who never existed can be moving in front of buildings that did exist.

So that blue sky - that cobalt sheet baking the world beneath it on an August afternoon – that was real, that did happen; and that summer sky on, say, the third of June 1968, that can be recorded forever. Years of audiences will come and go and they will still see that afternoon blue sky in that street as you filmed it on the third of June, 1968.

But beneath that sky, you can see the movement of people who never did exist – kids playing a game, or stealing stuff from shops, or adults kissing or falling out and rowing or anything – you can have the two together. The fact, and the fiction.

And the fact of the buildings blends into the fiction, and the fiction of the people blends into the buildings. They add to each other, feed each other, and depend on each other.

And you can show all this inside a room, in a cinema, in a small dark, away from the bright wide outside you had visited yesterday, or a few months before, or decades ago.

And the potential of all this fascinates me. That opportunity. All that space.

I’ve gotta be honest, I feel like shouting in the streets about it.

[end of extract]

Copyright © Paul Badger 2008