Read Instead…in Print

”There’s not a right way of doing something and a wrong way.
There’s a right way and another way
– and that way is freedom.”

Read instead…in print #28

In his book, The World Is Ever Changing, Nicolas Roeg writes one page about his personal life and upbringing, and the rest of the 236 pages about film and filmmaking. I love that. But, of course, in writing about film he brings into discussion books, paintings, poetry, he employs his feelings, thoughts and opinions on life. He writes about films the way he made them, from a very personal perspective and from a deep love and understanding of cinema. He didn’t just have a love for movies, but for the medium of cinema, for experimenting with elements that are only specific to film, like time or camera movements, for the way images and not words can and must drive the action and the plot, for making films that only belong to cinema. He tells the story of a true visual storyteller, one whose faith in the imagination nullifies all reasoning, one who was always “willing to leap into the unknown – that way you’re investing in the future”.

If there were just one paragraph that you could read from the book, it would have to be one that encompasses what filmmaking is about and the magic of it all, when Nicolae Roeg describes a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries that he ends with: “A beautiful moment in the most superb film. This is movie storytelling. How can you possibly do that on the page?”

”If only we could put the clock back
– isn’t that what’s often said? Well, in film we can.”

”I realised that there was another way of telling stories,
of passing on information – not on the page, but through
the retention of the image, the moving image.
This is such an extraordinary thing. We’re used to it now,
but it still excites me because this whole idea of
connecting film with our minds is still unexplored.”

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.