Into the Inconceivable Brightness

In the video posted just this afternoon on Al-Jazeera, the people of Cairo are filling Tahrir Square. They are laughing and they are smoking and they are singing; they are wearing purple headscarves and natty sweaters; and now it has been posted, they are organizing a football tournament. And they are marching--ever so sweetly--to the edge of the unknown.

When Anders asked me to help him craft the script for Blood, he came to my house with five books and five canisters of scents of New Mexico (if you were to ask him who exactly he is, he might just point to those scents, which are pictured in an earlier posting on this blog). The five books: Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, a little photo history of the Taos Pueblo, Taschen's lovely collection of Edward Curtis' photographs of American Indians, a family heirloom Portraits of North American Indian Life published by the American Museum of Natural History (a double-sized coffee table book of Curtis' work), and Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, which includes an essay by Stanford Kwinter, "Flying the Bullet, or When Did The Future Begin?"

Most of this didn't surprise me. Anders has a vision (a vision that encompasses time and space and smell) for Blood that emerges from his own experience growing up in New Mexico and the places and ways that experience intersects with the people and landscapes in Curtis' work. One imagines the historic relationship between photography and film (Carlos Reygadas' Silent Night, for example, seems to jump right off the pages of Larry Towell's book of photographs, The Mennonites). But Anders had something else in mind with Koolhaas and Kwinter, whose essay co-signed Koolhaas to Chuck Yeager, the epic American flyer and dogfighter. To fly the bullet was to viscerally accept and assimilate danger, in other words to walk headlong, as the people of Cairo, into to the most brilliant, inconceivable spot in the heavens. To fly the bullet was to find a way for us to talk about a process of film making that would, as Anders put it, "build as if by stone, piece by piece, each rock fitting into the next in perfect (imperfect?) symmetry, like a puzzle ordered from natural chaos."

I would add that it isn't so much a puzzle, but a spirited world, etched from the very elements: bone and dust and chile and sagebrush, and yes, blood.