Brevity, Polonius said, is the soul of wit. I think that's true, yet I
am, by nature, an enthusiast of the long form. In fact, longform.org, an
aggregator of long-form articles new and old, may well be my favorite
newish site on Internet. Clearly, brevity isn't the soul of good
journalism, nor would I call it the soul of rich sonic experience, nor
would I call it the soul of great literature, nor would I call it the
soul of fine cinema. Because I make things I myself would enjoy — as
anyone making anything should — I'm thus more of a natural long-form
worker, too. Certainly I don't think brevity is the soul of fascinating
interviews.
But then again, wit's nothing to scoff at. Even
beyond getting big laffs, brevity's useful as a creative constraint.
I've spilled much digital ink before about the catalytic effects of
constraint on creation. The documentarian Errol Morris put it best,
describing his way of art: "I create an arbitrary set of rules, and then
follow them slavishly." Where I to create an arbitrary set of rules for
blog posts, then follow them slavishly, what would they be? Could one,
in the name of brevity, wit, focus, challenge, etc. be keeping each post
at or under 500 words?
I'm working on two different film
projects right now, both in their very early stages. One, The Aleph
(which I've now started writing as just א, as it'll appear in the
titles), adapts the eponymous Jorge Luis Borges short story. Since I'm
working with pre-written source material and shooting on the savagely
limited Super 8 film format, a lot of the "rules" are established for
me: faith to the events of the text, minimal divergence from the details
of the text except to strip it of its most specific temporally and
geographically locative elements, no sync sound, that sort of thing.
The
other, my submission to the Vimeo Festival, is wider-open yet has thus
been more difficult to get my mind around. Racking my brain for ideas
about what to shoot, I eventually just began laying down rules. What if I
set a ten-minute time limit, halving the contest's official 20-minute
cutoff? What if I shoot in black and white, but with colored text? What
if I don't move the camera? What if I set a ten-second minimum shot
length? (This should get a more pleasing ASL, not that I'm an ASL geek
or anything.) Why not have narration that comes through the phone, and
disallow that narration from referring directly to the onscreen action?
Why not score it with tones that gradually dissolve into noise?
The
dam broke. Ideas, so insistently un-forthcoming, flooded my mind. I
went from despairing about having nothing to shoot to barely typing at
pace with the movie itself as it screened in my head. Each idea I get
down on the screen generates unexpected offspring. I'll tell you now
that the film is about two girls and a creeping sense of exciting dread.
But I could tell you so much more.
