08 September 2007
Tiananmen Square 2003 - by Yin Zhaoyang
)Published on September 8th, 2007 @ 08:21:52 am, using 409 words, 236 views
I saw this on a sad Friday. The kind of Friday you want to share with someone who can hold you up because you don’t feel up to the task yourself. I spent it alone and found out I was. I walked into the exhibit expecting China. Fitting… Expecting to feel like I had crossed oceans, longing to feel like I had emerged from the last one dripping and renewed… clean. But found more. That is, more and less. We’re always in for something slightly different than what we expected. Different and the same. I went all the way around the world to a piece of China to find a painting that reminded me of a German movie… and of me… and of something I once read from a Polish director…
…a film about things on a macro scale, on a global scale. That doesn’t interest me in the least because I don’t believe societies exist. I think that there simply are, I don’t know, 60 million individual French or 40 million individual Poles or 65 million individual British. That’s what counts. They’re individual people.
(Kieslowski on Kieslowski)
I expected to see China and I saw people instead. Different. The same. I went in expecting art and found a mirror, inspiration, words I would’ve otherwise never used. Less. More.
The opening sequence of Run Lola Run…
Those blurry images of people, far too many people aggregated - the blurriness making it hard to focus on any one. A hazy day, clouds hovering above, a hazy confluence of hazy souls and their obedient shadows. They might as well have been standing on ice or walking on ice. Thin ice. Their existence, each individual existence so rife with uncertainty, so insignificant, so delible. A seemingly handmade blurriness to each and every figure. Two strokes is all it takes, I’d be willing to bet. Two fingers on the canvas while the paint is not yet dry. Left, right - and the haziness is there.
As though a mere breeze could sweep them off their feet and then away.
It so often does…
As though the mildest draft could make them dissipate.
Them… Us.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S.Eliot)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Run Lola Run, hazy, people, shadows, canvas, Kieslowski
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