So I’m in New York.

I’ve spent my last two days like a character in a Taiwanese film, pacing around my apartment bored, looking at things in long take, waiting. When you don’t have a job and have been in a city too short a time to have a social life, you really get a good sense of that overwrought cliche ‘urban alienation’ - I spent time today looking at some jobs - applying for at least one internship that wouldn’t pay but might eventually lead to something I’d really like doing. I’ve waited for boxes - sixteen of them - to arrive, so that I can at least begin to unpack my life into my 10×10 room (and 3×9 closet, with loft). It’s a bit of an ignominous start to my life in New York, but I suppose Godard didn’t arrive in Paris to the sound of trumpets (besides his own).

Knowing that the deliveryman didn’t arrive until the late afternoon, I was afforded the opportunity this morning to take my first real walking tour of my neighborhood, Yorkville. It’s not a well-known neighborhood - most people collapse it into the Upper East Side that surrounds it on its south and west, but it’s its own little outcrop, a weird knob of New York that at one time was a center for the city’s German and Hungarian populations. Most traces of this bygone era have vanished, but one still sees Hungarian churches and Eastern European bakeries around. So far I’ve only counted three Duane Reades in the neighborhood, which I think is a good sign.

A hell of a lot more after the jump…

Maybe the single best feature of Yorkville is its proximity to Carl Schurz Park, on the east side of Manhattan. Besides being the location of Gracie Mansion, the official home of the mayor of New York, it’s also a spot with an incredible view of the East River looking out to Roosevelt Island and Queens. I took to a bench here for a few hours today to work on the film still tentatively titled Rome. (Yes, I know there was an HBO series of the same name, but I doubt their period drama and my modern comedy will have too much of a conflict of interest - meanwhile, once I actually write the damned thing, I’ll open up to naming suggestions from you guys). It’s a wonderful park, as I said, and I can see myself here a lot working on various projects.
I’m still conflicted on this script - I’ve got a sense of What I Want to Say (theme), a relatively decent sense of How to Say It (plot) and the Vehicles By Which to Speak (characters) but I’m plagued by issues of self-doubt. There’s a certain tendency within many of my notes of self-didactism: “Conflict cannot be too heavy - this is a comedy, not a polemic!”, “Watch out for tone in this scene.” Dealing with issues of faith and self-identification in the modern American city is a rather portentious task, but for some reason questions like the ones I would like to at least raise in Rome are difficult to do so with any subtlety. I’m terrified that after 100 pages I’ll end up with some ignoble piece of smug liberal condescension or hackneyed sentiment (Crash plus God!) rather than my ultimate goal - to make a work that is both about faith and a possible reflection of a presence of a sort.

Then, there is, of course, the problem inherent in this - why am I aiming for such lofty goals? Should I just crank out the nitty gritty of the script and then iron out questions of theme and meaning and unintentional self-revelation later? There’s something to be said for the most common criticism of major filmmakers whose works are a reaction not to the world but to cinema itself: Godard, Fassbinder, Tarantino create entirely self-contained works that are too often alienatingly mechanical in their proceedings. While this sometimes works for the filmmakers (and, to be fair, while they sometimes escape these trappings - look to Godard’s work with Karina, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Jackie Brown as pertinent examples), this is not the sort of movie I want to make. My animation professor told me my problem as a filmmaker was that I perhaps think too much - I’m too aware of cinema and its history and the theoretical problems of cinema as a medium, limiting my willingness to freely experiment. By exposing myself to so much film, I’ve also exposed myself to a lot of the limits of film - if I want to assert myself in any real way, I need to assert film in a different manner than it’s been asserted before.

So if I don’t want to make works that found their inquiry on an extremely conscious engagement with the problems of the cinematic apparatus, what is my voice? I find myself drawn more and more to intensely quiet films - as noted in that ‘About Me’ panel off to the side, filmmakers like Dreyer, Bresson, Ozu, and Tati, and Stillman are the ones whose films I love most. Seeing Eugene Green’s Le Pont Des Arts at last year’s Telluride Film Festival was an absolute revelation to me, a rejuvenation of the possibilities of cinema today - but what do I derive from these masters? What can I glean from their work? If I merely attached onto their formal strategies and used their storytelling methods to tell my own stories, I’d be no different than the cynical postmodernists. (There is something, despite his inconsistency, to be said for Truffaut’s blend of critical distance and classicism - though a critic and coming fully from a theoretical perspective on film, he was able to author his own voice in a way that didn’t distinctly define itself in relationship to other texts.) I can’t stuff my films with shots of characters speaking directly into the camera and complex Situationist mise-en-scene play and gorgeous pillow shots of unrelated imagery. So that’s the question. How can I tell my little stories my own way?
Anyway, thoughts? A lot of you readers out there are people I respect greatly on the subject of creativity, being creative persons yourselves. Where does one derive a personal sensibility? Is it simply a reflection of who we are, or should our products be overtly conscious reflections of our understanding of the patterns of signification found in artistic texts? (I think the answer is probably ‘both’ - write passionately, edit dispassionately, but as I’m having a bit of an authorial crisis here I’m eager to get your thoughts).

Also, it’s nearly October and I still can’t rid Miami Vice from my mind. It remains, even after seeing over a dozen upcoming prestige films at Telluride (including the incredible, probably never-to-be-released Day Night Day Night), the best film of 2006 for me, a potent meditation on men whose very selves collapse into their profession. Its questions are grim ones - can we even have identities in the modern global society? Are we all surface? But it’s a fully formed and entirely cohesive work - form follows function perfectly, with slick, gorgeous (but entirely digital, lacking in tactile negotiability) imagery and a thoroughly engrossing narrative that only gained in structural integrity upon a second viewing. If you didn’t see this while it was on the big screen, I pity you, because the small screen will not do it justice. I wish I had as much eagerness to produce genre films of this sort (though I’d make the argument that Miami Vice is a certifiable art film - at times it’s about as rarified and formally challenging as 99% of anything I’ve seen this year), but at this point I see myself making small pictures and moving from there.

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