Blood Vessels (working title) – film
The Americans, Now (working title) – book
Them, I, Us (working title) – multimedia exhibit
This project is an American experiment 25+ years in the making, as am I. The span of my immigrant life in the United States has been spent in a mostly conscious observation of journeys: From child to adult, from “illegal” to “legal,” from the Northeast to the South and back again. My movie-based preconceptions about the country were systematically broken down, and broken down again, by a ravenous hunger for my own real discoveries. Thrashing at first between the sense of categorically knowing “America” and not knowing it at all, a deeper and truer sense of the place began to emerge: It’s an entity bigger than any of us can fully grasp at any one time, more complex in its seeming simplicity than we can possibly realize, and endlessly rich in fascinating things of all kinds. Aside from my own experiences and those of my parents (with whom, in different generational waters, we each waded into the New World together) I began to absorb the experiences of others. Countless others, of all possible varieties of the American experience. People of all kinds told me their stories. (I didn’t even have to ask.) I was lucky to have an unusually multifaceted life here. Bound by no greater social entity than my own immediate family, and a curious family at that, observations came richly and freely to me, without bias. Being an alien is good in this way. As I learned English, grew older, and gained my own footing, I continued my journey on the road decidedly less traveled. Sometimes it wasn’t much of a road at all, or even a path – but right through the brush, with its close calls, snake bites, and moments of disorientation. Luckily through much of it I was accompanied by my best allies – my camera and my notebook.
The journey continues, but the work done so far is now ripe for the picking.
Blood Vessels (working title): A road film.
An impressionistic portrait of an ailing empire through the vantage point of its cardiovascular system – its interstate highways and the long-haul trucks that supply it with almost everything.
Everyone living in the United States has one thing in common: Our daily lives are entirely dependent on long-haul trucks. Almost everything we touch, see, or covet, was brought there by at least one truck. “Big Trucks,” as they’re known on the road, carry our foods and our medicines, our poisons and addictions, our tools, distractions, and toys. They supply our holy and unholy books, our fuel, our prized possessions. They dispose of our waste and toxic by-products. They are the blood cells maintaining the life of the vast organism we call the U.S.A.
This film takes us on a ride through the veins and arteries of the country in an 18-wheeler. More precisely, several of them, on various routes, throughout the entire United States. From this angle, the exploration of the state of the Union is an almost medical one: We see the inside of its infrastructure, as well as its lifestyle-induced conditions. But more importantly, it’s an emotional and social one, as being on the road is an unparalleled opportunity for the character study of a rapidly changing nation. Because of the solitary nature of trucking, this vantage point is largely unexplored and heavily mythologized. The road is full of unique characters who, through the eyes of the perpetual outsider and the experience of constant motion, offer an original and intimate way to look at this giant organism in its current state, and to feel its heartbeat from within. Though trucking itself has changed considerably since its oft-depicted glory days, it still is, at its heart, a calling of free spirits. Even with the exponential increase of the stress factor of the job due to overpopulation, traffic, technology encroachments, and everything else we all collectively suffer from, by its nature long-distance driving gives people time to think, unaffected by every current trend and headline. For a receptive mind and open eyes, the road still provides endless material for analysis and growth. Unknown and unpublished, these silent observers and road-philosophers are more immediately in touch with the pulse of the country than even the most decorated scholar – because they dwell INSIDE the pulse. In each of their personal journeys, there is a speck of the living history of the US, as it is made, right now.
Blood Vessels is first and foremost a road movie. From the Odyssey to Star Trek, a road trip is a singularly perfect way to get at the soul of a thing. As Fellini puts it, “The theme of the journey is one of the great foundations of the art of narration.” This is particularly true in any exploration of America – a young nation nursed on gasoline and brought up on wheels. The Road, as it lives in our collective consciousness, is so intricately tied to the romance of America, it calls in some way to each of us, tickling our dreams. It is the notion of freedom, real or illusory, that beckons what idealism is left in the private corners of our hearts. That universal longing is what this film seeks to answer. To take each of us on a road trip, and through the eyes and windshields of those constantly moving to enrich our perspective of America and our sense of self within it.
The Americans, Now (working title): A revisiting of America in the footsteps of Robert Frank.
When Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was published in 1958, it provoked as many different opinions as there are ideas of what “America” is. It was viewed by some as having a communist or otherwise political agenda, and as being un-American by others. But by many, and enduringly through the years, it is viewed as a revelatory portrait of something so big, that the only few endowed with the opportunity to see it are honest artists. Though each photograph is by now “iconic,” they are hardly still at all: they are ever-changing, moving, and alive. As the context of this society changes, our view of these photographs evolves. Though the world seems so different then, and the post-war United States was in its rapidly ascending state, “The Americans” is perhaps more relevant now than ever. In those images we see, in its child-like unawareness, the forming of the America we have today, with each photograph directly leading our minds to the present. This is why it must be photographed now, with Robert Frank’s eye in mind. 1958 is as much yesterday as a long time ago, and looking at “The Americans, Now” will put another point on the graph from which to see and feel the continuity of our direction, and to understand deeper the forces that truly govern us.
This is not meant to be a shot-by-shot attempt to in any way emulate or mirror the original book. Far from it, and perish the thought! Inspiration aside, the commonalities are only as follows: a European photographer, who brings an outsider’s eye; a number of road trips throughout the continental USA; an open eye, mind, and heart. Beyond that, America will once again speak for itself through an artist’s lens.
Them, I, Us (working title): A multi-media personal clarification of terms.
We live in a state of strong emotion, perpetual discord, and heated verbal debate based on deceptively simple terms: I, you, them, us. We lean on these terms heavily, convinced that they mean something concrete, and that they mean the same thing to everyone. But what do we know about “them?” If I am not you, how do I know what “you” mean? Who is included in “them,” and who exactly are “we?” To each of “us,” “they” are different – so where is the dividing line?
This exhibit is not an attempt to answer any of these questions. It simply seeks to ask them, to be explored by each of us safely in the most private spaces of our minds. The goal of the experience is to blur the lines between those terms, leaving them less concrete and thus leaving us slightly less divided and more permeable to absorbing others’ points of view in order to find our own authentic positions.
Though this is a public exhibit in real space, it is an intensely private experience. By its physical structure – one-person-wide walkways in a black labyrinth – we are encouraged to walk into it alone. As we enter the labyrinth, each of us discovers different things. In its various turns, dead ends, and cubby holes, we find life-size images and stereo voices of real people, interspersed with (and sometimes printed and/or projected onto) mirrors. Holography plays into it too, as well as live performers. The one thing each image, hologram, projection, mirror, and performer has in common is this: Each makes direct eye contact with us. The voices speak to us privately, asking us and telling us private things. The blackness of the labyrinth absorbs all direction and light, and leaves us to be entirely present in the moment, eye to eye with “them,” ourselves, and upon exiting the labyrinth – each other.
