You Want It Always to Stay This Way

Returning to Formentera for the third time, I see that the small windmill is almost gone. Some spokes and stakes are left of it. Time and changing circumstances have been meddling. In Northern Europe, windmills are progressive, here in Southern Europe environment-friendly mechanisms fall into disuse.

I filmed the mill seven years ago – a perfect, dreamily rotating circle with paddles on a crystal – clear slightly tilted landscape, that I didn't understand then as well as I do now.

Although, what do I understand about it now? Perhaps that something slightly tilted can be very uplifting for a Dutchman, once he has lost some of his passion for mountains and valleys, that overdose of drama.

I can see it better since I often think of Cézanne (I would like to do something about him someday, but I don't know how) – those tiny tilts, faint angles between planes and the critical difference they make in the light. On that plane, Giacometti as man: a wire nail, just as minimal, and the great plasticity born in that wasted form. A man on a plane, another plane, hardly rolling, hardly rising, just touching. More is not necessary.

That man meets another man. Maybe a third man joins them and together they go on. A road makes its way in the plane. Who determines the road's course? Who looks after provisions? How is the food divided up? “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is,” Donovan drowsily sang. For me, it became a motto. Written down it turns into culture, while it is nothing more than a great, often somewhat impractical love for “the body of reality.” Or just for the body.

The little windmill, as it was shot on Formentera and used in the film The White Castle, was followed by the image of a lean, old, despondent black woman – looking out the window of her American ghetto, a smoking cigarette dangling on her lip. Through the binding law of montage, which creates a physical coherence in a simple sequence of images, that woman looks at that mill. Ultimate longing for what has been taken away from her, that circle. One of the most touching moments I encountered via the trickery of editing, and one of those moments that isn’t that conspicuous in the course of the film.

The black woman looking at a very distant windmill creates a political connection. A mysterious one. Because you don’t state, “It's been taken away from her,” the viewer is free to overlook it. When you do say it, you obligate and antagonize him, “Ah, the theme of loss!” Yet, I feel that sometimes you have to stand for platitudes and say, “It most definitely has been taken away from her!” That then happens in other places, in other films, when you are angry, battling against cohorts of nonsense and lies, and thereby perhaps adding nonsense to that nonsense. Sometimes you have to step forth from emotion.

Looking at something that isn’t there: a man on a plane and the light on it, a road, time passing, the dividing of food – that is more or less what filmmaking is about. There are numerous filmmakers and fine artists, who rarely speak that represented a break for me towards a freer form: The medium is the content, the form is the message. or write a word-- not the worst ones either. For myself, writing was necessary at times, because something lived inside of me, floated before my eyes, that I wanted to grasp. With hermetic formulas or intuitive stammering, speculative ebullitions or harsh prescriptions for the world. Sometimes a little tough guy takes the floor; he wants to stay on top of the confusion. It's not always pleasant to read over old texts, and yet I don't re-edit them, because censorship bars change.

Through years of playing diligently with the visible and audible material that presents itself within the four sides of the image, the making of images became my profession. But what should you film all day long? In order to point my camera at other people I have to conquer certain disgust, because the image paralyzes life – limitation and falsification set in immediately. Professionalism is the conquering of that disgust: to wrestle some life from it in spite of that, to get closer to people, to bridge the distance. When I write, I hardly hit upon the problem of disgust. Writing is not my profession; it is an activity to link other activities.

Texts from the early sixties show that I could formulate certain things long before I could make them happen in my films. I suspected film for some time to be a thing in which time and space have fused and solidified, before I could really make that thing. In the meantime I needed words to connect my head and my hands.

Shifts are also detectable. Before long I wouldn't be held responsible anymore for an all encompassing remark like “It should be possible to translate politics into a teacup or into the Bank of the Netherlands,” and that goes even stronger for my assertions about the “Woman” and “Western Culture” in the draft for Diary. Shifts exist in my view on the media. In the heated report on a week of Dutch TV in 1966, television is seen as a hollow form, a latent presence, a void awaiting a message. A year later I became entranced by Marshall McLuhan who pointed out in Understanding Media that the mobile, probing, somewhat blurry way in which the electronic image is formed has far-reaching consequences for our perception and our reactions. That unfilled image relates us all immediately and simultaneously to everything, in a worldwide alternating current. Through this vision I gained a strong desire to make The Spirit of the Time, a film that represented a break for me towards a freer form: The medium is the content, the form is the message.

Meanwhile, in the outline for Beauty (still under the working title Private Dick), made at that same time, the cool media of the electronic era are looked upon somewhat more cynically and a few years later all triumphant expectation is abandoned resolutely. “The masses will have to change their own destiny – electricity could spread the necessary knowledge – but electricity too became an instrument of repression,” as the didactic texts appearing between the images of Diary read. The media cannot be separated from the economic interests they must serve. Not the global village, but the global market.

Yet I am still fascinated by the incomplete, blurred information, the diffuse image around which McLuhan built his fairy-like framework. I am thinking of the intense emo-tion that came over us upon seeing a duplicate of a film of a videotape of a television broadcast in which you could see and hear John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison and McCoy Tyner going at it, extremely vague, almost completely engulfed by static. It is the most direct experience of this quartet still available, and therefore the most direct experience you can imagine. It takes a myth for that blurryness to work. What was shown here couldn't really be depicted, it was too grandiose, too intense. Never will we get closer to it. It's like the top notes of the older Coltrane himself, as if he didn't really reach them, tearful, reedy, muffled, brokenly played, because they cannot be played. He was a religious man.

As a tribute to “low-definition,” I put in a photograph of Peruvian miners in an elevator that has just come above the ground. The picture was reproduced with an impressive loss of quality from the film The New Ice Age, but I think that if focused, it couldn’t be more effective. I also know the opposite tendency: the filmy silhouette, the detailed surface of skin with all shades of light. You want it always to stay like this.