A Quote by Damian Pettigrew
I don't like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.
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Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.
As a young girl, I loved having stories read to me. There is something magical about narration and voiceovers. Recording a voiceover is an art form in itself.
Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself.
My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language.
With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.
When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.
The communal experience of sharing something, and being part of it, and watching something visually striking, that's what film is all about. Seeing everything on a big screen, and to be able to see something phenomenal in that way, and being moved by it. We have kind of lost the tradition of that, and we're not nurturing the next generation in that tradition, and maybe that's why they're not turning up.
If you look at the films that I've done generally, you would probably get an idea of what I'm most interested in, and if ever I do something unusual like a science fiction film or an action film or a comedy or something, then that to me feels like a step to the side to do something different.
The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.
The only genre of movie that I could see making that doesn't have anything magical or otherworldly about it would be a war film. I'm very interested in history, and a war film could be something that would lure me in.
I’m interested that light has thingness itself, so it’s not something that reveals something about other things you’re looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.
I don't think it's about art being a career but it's about making sure that if art is something that you love, something that brings you joy, it's about you having a duty to find time in your life for that thing that brings you joy...even if it can only be a small amount.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
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