Output:

What the Cinema Should Do

Words: Rob Nilsson

There is no more understanding of people available than there is of the open face of a black hole in space. We can learn about people, but we can never truly understand their persistent mystery. We are as fascinating as the deep-diving whale shark or the albatross sailing for weeks above the waves. A real story is the beautiful limning of an elusive shade, tiny as a thrumming bird wing, immense as the sun line perpetually marking out sun and shade across the globe. The only way an account can become profound is through its umbilical to the human animal and spiritual wisdom we see in works of art such as The Fast Runner. Here we can begin to experience the forces behind the amazing everything that surrounds us.

The Fast Runner is moving into territory I believe is the destiny of cinema. Past the traditions of the theatre... beyond academy schooled structures, past the vanity of star systems with its millionaire actors, past the opinions of critics and the politics of film festivals. The poetry of the cinema seeks to find the means to do the same thing as oral bards and word poets learned to do in the eras of their pilgrim discovery... feel the pulse and the recognition of the power and frailty of being... Close observation of human character and of life as it is lived is the filmmaker's way. Infusing that character and life with profound human emotion and feeling is his high achievement.

The real filmmakers of the coming time will do what the poets of Igloolik did -- harness their artistic vision to their people's collective experience... assimilate it, deny it, swallow it, regurgitate it and reconstitute it, providing mirrors and windows for them and for all of us linked by our own histories and bardic traditions, all of us who care to hold forth with our many questions, wild cries, ecstatic laments, triumphant Yawps, and high flying surmises.

Rob Nilsson directed Signal 7 (1985), the first feature length small format video-to-film transfer. Heat and Sunlight (Sundance Grand Prize 1988) and Chalk (1996) were Beta SP to 35mm blow-ups. He is also winner of the Cannes Camera d'Or for Northern Lights (1979).