watching a film about history

The film is in an ongoing edit. This week, I have watched it twice, giving notes, then leaving Mr Curry and the editor to play around with it. Editing at this point seems similar to writing: you look at the draft, see how you can improve it, make changes, look at it again. The closer you get to the end, the more minute the changes become, yet, all the same, each new edit makes the film feel like a different construction altogether, hopefully for the better.

There are many strangenesses in the watching of this film. Watching the actor whose house I am now living in. Seeing the sun of a Summer which has passed. Learning new meanings in lines written over a year ago. And more. But among these strangenesses is the way that my personal history permeates what is on screen. Not just in the friends whose faces are immortalised. In the detail too. The pictures on the wall which no-one will notice, from the trip through Uyuni. The surly Quechua driver’s eyes in the rear mirror, captured from the back seat. The car, the mighty mule, which Merrick drives off in, blankets on the back and the aura of its brief spell in our possession. Finally, though there may be other things which I will only spot later, the three headed silver plated candlestick, which belonged to George and Dorothy, which I have somehow inherited; which sat in their flat, and then sat in mine and which will forever adorn a Devon kitchen table.

The film is a part of my history, spinning its own stories. Yet it is also a receptacle of my history, both in the content of the words and ideas it deals with, and also in the physical content of its two dimensional matter.