photo Pekka Mäkinen for ANTI Festival
I’ve been watching The Story of Film, An Odyssey on 4OD.
I was stuck by how Bill Forsyth, who directed ‘Gregory‘s Girl', a film I loved as a teenager, spoke about the simple feeling of realising where you are in relation to what is about you - a feeling something like being mindful, or as the best performers are - in the moment. This is where the idea for Flickers came from. The act of walking and seeing and the point at which everything appears suddenly significant, hyper-real. A feeling of being here, now, in this place.
This is how Bill puts it:
‘I could just sit on a hill and look at a housing estate and listen to an ice-cream van - for quite a long while - and that would fill me with good feelings.
...Someone finding themselves somewhere and that moment of apprehension that you’re here and this is where you are. It’s a difficult moment to describe but it’s a moment that is very cinematic for me.’
This is the aim. This is where I want people who take the flick books for a walk to get to. Do they get there? Or only people with a certain kind of sensibility? I have had responses that range from ‘sorry, but I just don’t think I got it at all’ to ‘I feel like I’ve been playing in the woods with an invisible friend for hours’.
It only matters if no-one gets it.
I was stuck by how Bill Forsyth, who directed ‘Gregory‘s Girl', a film I loved as a teenager, spoke about the simple feeling of realising where you are in relation to what is about you - a feeling something like being mindful, or as the best performers are - in the moment. This is where the idea for Flickers came from. The act of walking and seeing and the point at which everything appears suddenly significant, hyper-real. A feeling of being here, now, in this place.
This is how Bill puts it:
‘I could just sit on a hill and look at a housing estate and listen to an ice-cream van - for quite a long while - and that would fill me with good feelings.
...Someone finding themselves somewhere and that moment of apprehension that you’re here and this is where you are. It’s a difficult moment to describe but it’s a moment that is very cinematic for me.’
This is the aim. This is where I want people who take the flick books for a walk to get to. Do they get there? Or only people with a certain kind of sensibility? I have had responses that range from ‘sorry, but I just don’t think I got it at all’ to ‘I feel like I’ve been playing in the woods with an invisible friend for hours’.
It only matters if no-one gets it.
