Rule #2: Choose honesty

I think that being honest, is a difficult task in our world. Especially in the world of film making. It is a game that makes you self consciouss and makes you think about who you want to be and frankly doesn't leave a lot of space for openness and honesty. I have talked about this before, in the Mothlands manifesto. 

Choosing honesty, is not about giving everything away, however. Things can be left mysterious, unsolved, private. That's ok. But honesty is about showing the world who you really are and what you stand for. Meaning, also making yourself subject to ridicule, because you put yourself out there and show off your fragility and your fears and your uncool akwardness. It takes courage, and it's not a courage that is automatically with you all the time. At least not for me. It is a choice I have to make often and repeatedly, and sometimes I fail. 

So what has all of this got to do with Mothlands? 

Honesty is an emotional compas I want to put in front of us in the creative proces. Many artistic works are often driven by a need to be recognized, to perform well and make good work, and I believe this disturbs the possibility of capturing something really truthful. Idea nr. 2 is the reminder to myself and my collaborators to keep looking for moments of emotional truth. It is about choosing real emotions over aestethics, choosing authenticity over manipulation, choosing human characters over "what works" for the story. 

It's a rule which is there, to get the priorities straight. This doesn't mean, that the films can't be highly atmospheric, dreamy, fictional and surreal. It just means that we should try to avoid pretence.

It sounds so simple, even banal. But it really isn't. Honesty is such a difficult thing to maintain, because it requires emotional grounding, trust and confidence. I find that honesty is something to be nurtured, cared for, protected and - above all - chosen. Over and over again.

Challenge Linearity

A few people have asked me about the thoughts behind the 5 rules/ ideas. 

So I will take some time, over the next month, to elaborate over them one at a time.

Starting with idea nr. 1:

CHALLENGE LINEARITY

The other day, I was outside in my garden, when something suddenly tricked a distant childhood memory. It could have been a smell or a certain physical motion, I don't know exactly. But in the blink of an eye, I was there in the past, reminded of a specfic feeling, that I back then didn't fully understand. The flashback made me realise a connection that I hadn't made before. The threads seemed to loop in a mysterious circular pattern. I was thrilled by my new insight and felt inspired.

I'm sure a lot of you have tried something similar. This, it seems to me, is how our minds work. We are connecting threads in organic constructions, that seems a lot more complex than any cause-and-effect chronology could portray. Trouble is: If I were to tell the story of my life, I would have make it into a straight line of cause-and-effect, because this is how stories are build. I would have to edit out a lot of things that doesn't fit into the story. And in that process, I would edit out a lot of poetic, weird and insightful branches, in order to shape a lean and smooth tree. This is where I see a clash between our narrative tradition and the way we think, naturally. 

It's not a new thing I've invented. To play with linearity in cinema. 

Many filmmakers before me have explored a more organically structured narrative. Some of them are amongst my most influential cinematic experiences, and it seems that there is a wave of films right now that plays with different narratives. In recent years, brilliant films like Tree of Life, Martha Marcy May Marlene, We Need to talk about Kevin and the norwegian film Reprise, all explore a more circular narrative. I love all the films above and I'm excited about it. But the interesting thing is, that if you look closer, all of them seem to play with linearity only through the prism of a fragile psychological state (grief, shock, recovery). How can that be?

Maybe, it implies that circular and organic narrative (and the thinking pattern it represents) still has to be justified in terms of a subjective viewpoint. Our mainstream conventions still lean toward the linear structure. Of course they do. It's language. It's not something we can change overnight, I accept this. But it is also a living thing that changes, just as we changes, if we continue to challenge the structures we are used to, and open up for new connections.

But why should we? 

Because I think our collective narratives and the structure of these play an important part in shaping our understanding of the world. It's the old question: Can you think it, if there is not a language for it? 

(Orwell was on about Newspeak and that sort of thing.) I want to promote a language for the intuitive, the subconscious, the irrational and multifacetted viewpoint. Other cultures like fx the old native inuits in Greenland, shows completely different storypatterns in their old myths. Patterns different from the western world, that indicates a completely different perspective on time, causality and emotional logic. I have heard of other indengenous cultures that use the same word for past and future! They also have a circular narrative tradition. So what is it with us Westernes and the obsession with straight lines in our narrative tradition? What worldview does that promote?

Ok, it's really theoretical, but it fascinates me tremendously. I am curious to investigate what happens if we open ourselves up to different storypatterns, and I think it is a relevant aspect to examine. Especially, within a project that takes up the centraln theme of normality. What I need to figure out, is how to translate these abstract ideas into film making on a storytelling level. 

And how to achieve a balanced symbiosis between form and content.

Stories of resistance

I was teased in school quite a lot. Luckily it never tipped over into sinister harassment and I wasn't bullied systematically, like the worst stories we hear. But it was nevertheless a struggle for me, and something that had a profound effect on my social life and self-esteem. 

Grown ups told me, that I was "fun to tease" and gave me different advice on how to deal with it. Eventhough their intensions where good, the advice was often too akwardly intellectual to make real use of. "Try to ignore it" or "It is because they are envious of you" are difficult to put into practice.

When I turned 9-10 years old, my temper grew "bad". I started to react very loudly and physically to my teasing oppressors and threw a chair after one of them once. It felt great. 

I remember that he grinned at me with a face that was half impressed, half scared of my hidden power. Very quickly, a teacher ran to me, took me by my arm and told me firmly why that kind of behaviour wasn't tolerable! The message was clear: That I wasn't allowed to get that angry, and especially not channel the anger out. 

In my adult years, I begun to discover how this pattern also occurs at a structural level in society. We seem to tolerate huge amounts of oppression - in the form of a hierachic structure that we deem inevitable. But our norms demand us to control our emotions. We are not allowed to react.

I learned to control my temper in social contexts. It's not that I don't get angry anymore, I very often get upset by the dynamics of oppression when I meet them. But over the years, my anger morphed itself into this hard lump of resistance inside me. It is as if I can never get a full release from this feeling, only "blow off steam" once in a while, and always in private. The feeling of resistance has stored itself in my body, in my physical system, as tensions and aches. As something not allowed to come out.

This is what film #2 Fire in my bones will be about. Resistance. It's mental and physical manifestation in us. The form will be a series of intimate "interviews" with different young women, who has been formed by this resistance. 

What I am really curious to hear, is if you have similar stories out there that I might borrow as inspiration for the building of these characters? 

Do you have any stories or observations of a resistance of your own? Do you call it something else? Anything from anecdotes to physical experiences or dreams you had could be incredibly interesting to hear about. Hope to hear from you.

Yours, Trine

ps: catch me here: mothlands@gmail.com