Maybe Your Art is Not for This World
I’ve been making films for a while so I occasionally get the question, “what advice do you have for young filmmakers?”
I’m not young. I’m not old . . . but I’m definitely not young.
My first advice would be, “you shouldn’t take my advice,” but aside from that, if there is something in this post that resonates with others, great!
I’ve had a particular artistic trajectory. I imagine my filmmaking journey as hiking through the wilderness. I’m an experimental filmmaker also currently interested in sci-fi with esoteric undertones. I suspect I’m too campy/esoteric/supernatural for the experimental film world but probably too experimental for the sci-fi scene. So, it is a wilderness. I’m cool with that . . . sometimes. It does get a bit lonely. I find that when I’m contemplating giving advice to a younger filmmaker, that person is really just me at an earlier stage (and I suspect I’m not alone in this).
“We’re about to pass a stampede of wild elephants,” I might tell my younger self in this hypothetical wilderness. “You can keep walking along if you like, but I’m going to duck into these bushes until the stampede passes and I suggest you do the same.” I know what’s ahead for younger me. And so I can give some advice to my previous self. Things to avoid. Things to do differently. But you, young hypothetical filmmaker who isn’t me? No idea. I make weird shit that tickles my wonder whiskers but is not guaranteed to grant me (or you) success.
You and me, are two totally different people - at different stages in our lives, growing up in radically different times. Maybe you’re fresh out of college (or still in college). I’ve got (slightly) more than half a century on me with fewer fucks to give by the year. I’ve got a stable job. I don’t have to satisfy market pressures to buy my groceries. I’m lucky in that way. I get that. I wish we lived in a world where you were in the same place. But we don’t. To be fair, I was once there. In order to get the job I have now, I had to get into film festivals which meant that I had to work within certain frameworks. I had to check the boxes with my work to “win.”
As I get older, and I do have those fewer fucks, there’s something else that pulls at me. Maybe it’s “the beyond.” Jeez. Beyond what? That freaks me out a little. I sound dead already. But I’ll try to illustrate.
So in my latest film, I have been obsessively filming shells, tide pools and clouds at sunrise. I can’t tell you why, exactly, but it’s satisfying on some molecular level. Perhaps it’s because sunrise (or sunset) uniquely provides a real-time experience of massive bodies moving in space - as they have done for billions of years. One can almost sense the cosmic gears turning. This of course puts into perspective the smallness my anxieties and petty gripes. There’s the 10-15 minutes before sunrise and the 10-15 minutes after sunrise where I get the light I want and that’s it for the day.
People come up to me on the beach. “The early bird gets the shot,” one person says. “You should have been here 15 minutes earlier,” another says, seeing me with my camera and unaware that I was and did get that brilliant sunrise shot. Another simply takes the shell I brought from home that I’ve staged a mere 5 feet from my camera. That’s ok. I didn’t need that. Another gives me a weathered shell, the next day. “I think this one would provide a nice contrast to the sand” she offers. She’s right, by the way.
Though I can be a bit of a misanthrope (I’m filming beaches, shells and clouds after all - not people), I do find a certain kinship with this early morning beach “community.” And I’m happier making this film (so far) than I was working on my last (highly digitally processed animated) film - my gaze locked as it was to my computer screen for hours at a time over a three year period.
I’m not under any illusion that my current project involving shells, sunrise light, illuminated orange-red surf, driftwood trees and tide pools will revolutionize cinema. I wouldn’t complain if it did, but I’m not banking on it. I’m drawn to this project, “Hyperobject,” (a film which - to be honest - I don’t even know completely what it’s about) because there’s something primordial in this environment I’m trying to access. The fact that what the primordial thing is and what this film is about is still a mystery is what makes the process interesting.
As I get older, I find the collective public media sphere a bit exhausting - which I’m pretty sure speaks more to my age than anything else. There’s just so much electronically generated stuff out there that I get a bit sensory overloaded. I find the antidote to this at the beach under an expansive cool morning sky. And yet, the irony of me creating even more electronic stuff as I try and get away from all the electronic stuff is not lost on me. Maybe it’s cognitive dissonance, but I hope my film will ultimately convey the spaciousness and occasional all-encompassing mental silence I find so satisfying.
My personal satisfaction at the process of making the film - just having a good time - matters more these days. After all, sooner than later, I’ll be dead. You, hypothetical younger filmmaker, will too, someday but like younger me, you probably don’t think much about it at this point. You shouldn’t.
I suppose, if I had to offer any advice to younger filmmakers, it would be this.
When you make film, or art of any kind, pay attention to your motivations - not what motivates a particular piece of art, but what motivates you to create art in general. Those motivations will set you on a particular course. If you want to “make a name” for yourself, you will walk down that road and will probably meet other people with the same goal. If you want your art to have a positive social impact, you’ll go down that road (with all the hidden - even to you - motivations) and you’ll find fellow travelers there. If you’re not particularly concerned with your work achieving material success but do it because it gives you satisfaction, you’ll go down that road. Whichever path you take, just don’t be surprised when you find yourself ending up in the direction you were traveling.
That’s not to say you are guaranteed to make a name for yourself, inspire millions to take up a cause that you believe in, or will always be happy working on your projects. You might but - no promises there. What I can almost guarantee is that you will, at some point, run up against the shadow aspect of whichever road you take. You want to make a name for yourself? You either won’t and will feel disappointment at that, or maybe you will, and then feel exhilarated - for awhile - until that wears off and you need the next fix which requires a constant cycle of external validation. What about the positive social impact path? Maybe this work gives you a sense of greater purpose, but perhaps you wake up one day and realize you’ve just been a self-righteous asshole - completely unqualified to speak on behalf of the cause you’ve been championing. You want to create work for the pure satisfaction of the process? Most of the time, you feel pretty content working this way, but perhaps you ultimately realize an emptiness at not doing more to share this work with others or enter it into the collective creative conversation. I don’t mean to cause despair. I hope you are able to find some solace in the fact that this shadow aspect is probably central to the story of - every artist. And, I suspect, its our wiser mind’s way of letting us know we’re taking ourselves too seriously. It’s ok. We’re really not that big a deal in any individual sense - so have fun.
For me, it’s been a mix of those three roads, by the way. The least satisfying has been the “make a name” for myself road (more travelled in my younger days). This road is a lottery. It’s built on shifting sands. It's arbitrary. It’s constructed by a patchwork of forces beyond any one person’s control. It does not determine the value of the art. One of my most “successful” films, by external metrics, is far from my favorite. One of my favorite and personally satisfying films, on the other hand, has enjoyed far less worldly success.
Maybe my taste is just really off the grid. Maybe that’s why some of the music I like has a fan base of around 5 or 6 people. But the important thing in this example, I suppose, is that someone bothered to make music for only 5 or 6 people who were not getting that itch scratched elsewhere.
These maybes remind me of another maybe that I heard on a podcast a few years back. The host, an artist working in multiple mediums, at one point conveyed an idea that came to him about his own work. “Maybe your art is not for this world.”
This really stuck with me because the meaning can be interpreted in so many ways. What is the world one’s art is for - if not for this one? Is it an alternate dimension populated by sentient entities who literally feed off of that art (the far out interpretation). Or, is the world a more internal, individual space as opposed to the marketplace? Or, is the world that the art is for somewhere in the future - or maybe somewhere in the past? The important implication is that there are many possible worlds and at least one of them is for one’s art.
Personally, I think there needs to be a place for art that occupies the in-between places, that hints at the unseeable and unknowable or those realms that can only be intuited out of the corner of one’s eye. There needs to be a place for art that excavates strange conceptual alien artifacts that exist in a language we don’t yet understand. This type of creative work may not be of this world - or for this world (in any direct sense) - but somehow manages to ripple into our reality to unlock new ways of seeing, existing as a healthy complement to a fixed narrative or whatever is capturing the zeitgeist these days.
If I am to be completely honest, I am something of an evangelist for this type of art. That’s not to say I think all (or even 15% of) art needs oriented this way. But some of it does and if you are a younger filmmaker that resonates with this - welcome. The world needs you to create work that may not seem like it is for this world. Without this kind of creative exploration, I would argue that we risk collectively cultivating mono-crops of culture, where the loudest voices, most provocative content and low-hanging-fruit absorbs all our attention “nutrients” and makes it increasingly difficult for wild and varied ecologies to thrive.
I’m reminded of something I hear quite often about the stars and our relationship to them. As we are all aware (but maybe don’t think about all that much) - because of increasing light pollution, we see less and less of the night sky. I know we get these fantastic images from the Hubble or James Webb telescopes, and that’s really cool, but it’s not the same - just like an experience of a sunrise in person versus seeing that sunrise in a film is not the same. I’m not the first person to wonder if our decreasing ability to see the stars is also causing a cultural myopia, where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see beyond our current cultural atmosphere. It becomes harder to realize that cosmic vastness if our vision is confined to an electronically charged bubble.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently working on a film, “Hyperobject.” The term, hyperobject, is borrowed from writer/philosopher/professor Timothy Morton to describe objects so massively distributed in time and space that we can’t really perceive them in their totality. I wonder what our collective artistic output would start to look like if more of us started poking through that cultural light pollution to contact something more in tune with deep time - maybe something that continued to bring into our awareness those hyperobjects within which we are enmeshed.
Back to Earth - and back to that advice for younger filmmakers. I think there are actually two diverging variations on the initial question, “what advice do you have for young filmmakers?” One variation would follow the question, “what advice do you have for young filmmakers who want to get a job in film?” while the other would answer “what advice do you have for young filmmakers who want to develop their art?”
While these two questions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the answers to both variations would arguably also yield some very different results. Maybe this is a point to explore in a later blog post but for now - that exploration is not for this post. For those younger filmmakers still reading, don’t worry too much about the jobs and the money. You’ll figure something out. And then eventually you’ll get to write your very own, very long blog post (if you feel inspired to do so). It may only appeal to 5 or 6 people. But that’s ok. Maybe those 5 or 6 people weren’t getting that itch scratched elsewhere.
There is one parting bit of advice that I think crosses generations. When I was the younger filmmaker and more established filmmakers were offering their advice - and really not just filmmakers but anyone who was “making it” in their field - I heard a lot about the value of perseverance - the “if you just keep at it, and don’t give up, you’ll make it” mentality. I still think there is a value to perseverance, but as I get older, I think a more important trait is adaptability. It’s an understatement to say the world (both human and more-than-human) is changing at lightning speed. We don’t really know where we’ll be in ten or twenty years so if perseverance is your primary driver, you may find yourself fixed to one direction while the world veers another way. I’m not advocating for following the cultural current, just for the sake of getting ahead, either. I think there is a third way where one can check in with one’s experience of these cultural/planetary shifts and respond from one’s own creative gut. And sometimes, the art that emerges from that practice is for this world and sometimes it might be for another world. Either way, it’s still art.
As I’ve shifted my filmmaking focus to those wild spaces of rivers and oceans, I’ve learned that creating film in the more-than-human environment requires both perseverance and adaptability. If I only have about 25 minutes in the morning where I get the light I want, I must have a plan and stay focused on that. I must be prepared to wake up before sunrise again and again and drive 20 minutes each way for 25 minutes of usable light. That’s the perseverance. But I should also have my senses tuned to everything else that’s happening around me, in case I have to ditch my plan for something more compelling that might prompt me to turn my camera in the opposite direction. I lose all the potential great footage that was part of my plan but maybe I get something far more interesting. That’s the adaptability.
In the end, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. If some massive catastrophe wiped out our civilization, the most stubborn survivors of the cultural output from the past 200 years might last 500 years past the cataclysmic moment. Then dust. What matters? What lives on? And how?
