:: Final ::

Like Water Thrown from Cliff to Cliff

A video inspired by a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)

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Motivation and Thesis

My project was inspired by the poem “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” by Friedrich Hölderlin of 1799:
(Translated to English by Emily Ezust; Source: http://planet.nana.co.il/oriahc/brahms-trn.htm)

Hyperion’s Song of Fate

You wander above in the light
on soft ground, blessed genies!
Blazing, divine breezes
brush by you as lightly
as the fingers of the players
on their holy strings.

Fateless, like sleeping
infants, the divine beings breathe,
chastely protected
in modest buds,
blooming eternally
their spirits,
and their blissful eyes
gazing in mute,
eternal clarity.

Yet there is granted us
no place to rest;
we vanish, we fall -
the suffering humans -
blind from one
hour to another,
like water thrown from cliff
to cliff,
for years into the unknown depths.

Although this poem – taken from the novel “Hyperion, or the Hermit of Greece” – was written in 1799, I find it still compelling for its pessimistic vision of human condition and fate. It is characterized by a feeling of hopelessness, loss, and loneliness and the desire for an unreachable ideal. It also expresses the poet’s tragic life as an outsider, his unfulfilled love to a married woman, and an outbreak of schizophrenia at the age of 32.

I was interested in finding a way to express the sharp antithetic contrast and the conflicts in the poem – peace and restlessness, happiness and suffering, eternity and mortality, certainty and uncertainty, nature and civilization. But my idea was to transform the despair -- caused by an unreachable desire -- by looking at these “suffering humans” with empathy and solidarity. As Albert Camus writes in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphos” (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942; English translation of 1955, republished in 1991 by Vintage International, p. 119):

One does not discover the absurd without attempting to write a manual of happiness. "What! by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing.

In this way, I wished to deal with the themes contained in the poem: loneliness and exhaustion, desire for a life in harmony and beauty, and the final hope and possibility of conciliating the contradictory nature of human life, thus following the poem’s dialectic of thesis – antithesis – synthesis.

Approach

From the very start I envisioned this poem as an audio-visual piece.

When I was in Vienna in March, I had the idea to symbolize  the first part of the poem through images of statues in the park of the baroque castle of Schönbrunn. They reflect for me qualities of peacefulness, eternity, and serenity. Furthermore, I have a nostalgic view of Vienna since I am in New York: It represents this “old world” where life is less hectic, and where I have my family and friends, a “place to rest”.

I filmed dozens of statues, mostly close-ups of their faces and with a fixed camera position in order to capture their expression in the best way:

There are examples of the metaphorical use of statues in film: I think about the lion’s statues in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin which were juxtaposed with the revolting and eventually defeated inhabitants of Odessa and which express the anger and grief this situation creates:

(Stills from Battleship Potemkin, Director: Sergei Eisenstein, SU 1925)

On the other hand, I wanted to take images of people I meet in every-day life in New York in order to express “reality”, my own reality in contrast to the ideal. The subway is an optimal site for studying a multitude of people of different cultural and ethnic background, and of different social classes who are restless and struggle to survive, and therefore I see it as a micro-cosmos that reflects a larger and global image of humankind. I find it especially interesting to watch people who travel by themselves: They are not performing but they show what they are. Through their expressions I am imagining their thoughts, their worries, and their histories: Here is a businessmen who seems to worry about a meeting, here is a Mexican immigrant who is returning from construction works and he is too tired to have any thoughts, here is a middle-aged woman who worries about how to get along with her job and her family at the same time, here is a young woman who doesn’t know how to pay her rent for the next month, and so on. In these very intimate moments of physical proximity, I feel sympathy and empathy for these strangers, and they reflect my own worries and problems.

It was extremely challenging to film in the subway with a hidden camera. In the beginning, I felt a bit embarrassed but eventually, I started to enjoy this method, as it made me totally aware of my surrounding, and I saw the camera as an “extension” of my eye.

I found sound that I thought was perfect for the atmosphere I was trying to create. by Oren Ambarchi which I edited to the images.

In my initial versions, I tried to remain faithful to the original structure of the poem and I started the video with the images of the statues, then introducing the shots of the people in a very abrupt way, changing the sound as well as the rhythm of the video. I soon realized that it didn’t work that way: the switch didn’t seem very plausible, and I tried out other ways. Finally, I embedded the statues into the framework of a subway ride, suggesting that the statues could be somebody’s fantasy or daydream. In the end, I introduced a narrator or observer by showing an eye and juxtaposing and overlaying it with views of people and out of the car window, thus emphasizing the “subjective camera”.

I made the transition to the “other world” of the “blessed genies” when the subway comes out of the tunnel and the sky is visible. Thus I also suggest the imagination of a “thereafter”. Then we “dive” into another sphere, the path becomes very slow and the sound changes when we see the statues of the “gods”. Eventually, this daydream is brutally interrupted by the sound of the subway and the coming back to the dark reality. In the end, when the face of a young man dissolves into the image of the statue, I try to conciliate the conflict by suggesting that although our lives seem absurd, we have the potential to be happy as explained by Camus above, and that art (the statues) reflects the human desire for beauty and harmony.

Results and Conclusions

I realized that my own imagination of the video and the actual effect of what I created, differed. While working with video, I find it very hard to plan the end result in advance when it comes to creating an “intuitive” and “emotional” piece. I understand the importance of time in this process: when I start creating, after a while the piece becomes “alive” and acquires a character of its own that I haven’t planned. This is a dynamic process, and I need to give myself enough time to go through it. I am not sure if there are two ways to approach this: a more cognitive and structured approach, or a more intuitive, uncertain one. I think that both ways may be combined: I may have a vision or an idea (cognitive) and structure it in advance, and when I start creating, I try to be open for the unexpected and for change.

         Furthermore, I realized that I have to improve my visual “vocabulary”, i.e. my technical skills in order to realize what I envision, and I need to be more adventurous.

         Finally, the experience of closely studying others in the subway, changed my awareness of others and made me feel more compassionate for my fellow men.

After all, I am not entirely satisfied with the result, partly because I have distanced from the poem while I was working on it, and I think in the future I would rather explore more specific (and political) questions in regard to my reality, partly because I wanted the video to be more compelling and uncanny. This will definitely be what I have to work on in the future: how to engage my audience emotionally and make them start to think at the same time. I realize that I have used a quite “antiquated” visual language, and I want to be more experimental in the future. I am still glad that I made this video because I have been thinking about it for a while, and it made me understand that 1) I want to work with video, and 2) I need to take more time for exploring different solutions.