Sunday, December 02, 2012

Favorite quote from Thomas Heise

Favorite quote from Thomas Heise, the director of MATERIAL (2009), SO WHY MAKE A FILM ABOUT THESE PEOPLE? (1980), THE HOUSE (1984), and THE PEOPLE'S POLICE FORCE (1985):

"Archaeology is about digging. It's like the work of moles, who live underground. A mole is virtually blind, but it has a nose and a feel for finding what it needs. And it has the patience to collect what it finds. It collects provisions to last through the winter.

In a dictatorship, the idea is to amass hidden stores of images and words, portraying the things that people living under the dictatorship might have actually experienced, but that could not necessarily be seen or heard. Then, when the dictatorship was no more, those images bore witness to it. Similar to the mole, the work of collecting those images required a certain nose for the worthwhile as well as practice, since a picture seldom makes it immediately apparent what it depicts and a sound seldom tells us of the part we can't hear."

The quote above reminds me of such films as DEVELOP BLESSING GIANT DHAMMA IN 3 WORLDS: I'M GONNA BE A NAIVE (2012, Viriyaporn Boonprasert, 24min, A+30).


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