This letter was
written
Dear Rick,
This letter is a
gesture towards accommodation between generations. A metaphor, if you like, for
a new kind of solidarity in a new kind of time. A meeting place.
It's so damned
disheartening to witness the kind of petty assbiting that figures so prominently
here on the fringe (in a masticating rush for spoils that seem ridiculously
cheap). In a national community that is barely able to maintain a congregation
of a hundred supplicants these kinds of attitudes are rank with the worst kind of
self indulgence.
It seemed
important to begin here, in this place, between these pages, because we've
disagreed over so much so often in the past. That time is over now. There is a
new generation of filmmakers waiting to take their place at the hastings whose ambitions will
serve no part or party, who have come to recognize a body of resemblance, who
will not learn to subtract. While much has been made possible, there
remains so much more to be done and I fear we will need all of our resolutions
to bring our best intentions to light.
A few words
about Waterworx (A Clear Day and No
Memories)
The site of eyesight is a
distribution of surface, a language of line and plane. It is a world uniformly
alight, accessible at each point to the discrete and discriminating sight of
knowledge, to the knowledge that is sight.
Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) is a film by
Rick Hancox. Waterworx is a progression
of perspectives, a program of surfaces, a return to place. Leavening the images
of earliest childhood, the filmmaker returns to the waterworks of his youth. Over the
course of its six minutes, the camera moves over stone and steel, searching out
the impressions of a child growing older.
Hancox moves
through a location of return, suggesting a history passing between
an informed and informing impression. The auras of the present, the
spirits of our space, are not a function of sight. What cannot be represented
likewise cannot be recalled. Memory imagines the present as an image of
reproduction, as a point from which an infinite geometry of regeneration may
move in concert with the history of spaces.
There is no
place between A Clear Day and (Alain
Resnais') Night and Fog. Both proffer a gaze that can show us only less, that can only summon a more irresistible figure of
'Loss and despair. Passing over the broken
rail ties of
In both works
the camera speaks of the unmoving masses whose dark interiors are in no way
betrayed by the passing impression of
a wall. The camera recreated an immutable architecture in its own image,
circumscribing the limits of passage. The parameters of the real. The surface
of the understood.
Water worx is a
trap carefully laid, a work of hunter and quarry, stalking history with the
impressions of a presenting present. The camera is a film always returning to
the point of the now, metaphor for a time of space and spaces, a present without
horizon or history.
Waterworx is an act in two parts. Its passage
does not create meaning but empties it into an unbroken plane of sea and sky, into
a place like all the rest. Here, between the impressions of an unbroken surface
and an unrequited desire, the film begins again. Once again the gilded brick of the
waterworks plant is laid open for inspection, the passage of
unspeaking stone made to stand the site of a progression without progress. Of a
site that may speak at last only of its own construction, of its own history
wound neatly through the light and dark of the machine.
It is here in this place, where the images of the first act
are reproduced in their entirety, that language is applied. The computer
generated text of Wallace Stevens' A
Clear Day and No Memories moves across the represented figures of the
second act, replacing the memory of an image with an attention gathering its
own history. With a language of bodies. pith a place that cannot fail to
impress its own exacting standards of address upon a world reduced to
reproduction. To what is reproducible.
The last image of the film breaks the
bi cycle of repetition. From a sea blown vantage gained from the rear of a
waterworks, a lap dissolve moves us into the shallow space of a computer
terminal. In its face the reflection of a man and his movie camera, waiting for
words, for a language whose gesture is subject to an infinitesimal calculation.
To the wedding of an imperfect memory and a perfect reproduction. To a place of
beginnings without end. To a democracy of space.