The Kingdom of Shadows

"The gal I love
she's long and tall
she moves her body
like a cannonball."
- Dink's Song,
Traditional American

I was thinking about my girlfriend the other day (who I'm crazy about), and I noticed that I seem to think about her in montage. This is of course the abstract idea of my girlfriend, which is a lot of smiles, glances, sitting around, and lying in bed, those nice things that we do together that draw my attention to the fact that we are together, without having to worry about the where and the why of it. Us spanning time, to quote Vincent Gallo. I'm fairly certain this is a common way to think of loved ones, though I'm really basing that assumption on bad music videos and symbolist poetry (Rimbaud has a lovely poem about kissing a girl's breasts, and the trees swaying in the background, and her laughing, and saying nonsense... the bastard was 15 when he wrote it)...

I feel compelled to say something along the lines of "of course my girlfriend is more deep then a series of images," but I hesitate, because I'm inclined to feel that there is something deeper to this set of images then can ever be contained in in any conception of who or what a person is.

If we say that someone is nice, or that someone is mean, the statements are both horribly imprecise. The statements are based on the mistaken idea that we can equate identity with action. A more correct statement would be along the lines of, "this person did something nice," "I believe the person is nice based on several of his or her actions," or "this person is capable of acting nice as can be told by his or her actions," all of these statements are really rather meaningless.

A collection of visual images. Like the description of the afterlife in the Decalogue, I find far deeper. When I draw up a mental image of my girlfriend sitting in a room with me doing nothing, I am aware that she can exist in a non-judgable state. That she can for a moment be neither good, bad, nice or mean, that before that she just is (sitting). If I add to that that I can see her, then I know that we spent time together, that we were comfortable together, that she could expose to me that she just was. If I remember that the image was in the past, then it reminds one how time eats away at us all. How she gets older everyday, how she will eventually no longer be. How every moment that she is... that she is with me... is far more important than if she is nice or mean, or happy or sad. What a collection of images of my girlfriend tells me is that she is a solid fleshy thing, not immune to time, that the trembles with life, and that blood flows in her veins, that she's lovely, and she will always be lovely as long as she is, because she moves through the world with a kind of determination that only living things have, and is thoroughly and unexplainably magical.

In my opinion understanding this about a person is what relationships are about.

Barthes said photography is about death, Bazin that it was a kind of continuation of the idea of someones life. Cocteau more poetically said that "mirrors are the doors through which death enters and exits, if you look in a mirror your whole life you will see death's hand at work," Gallo asked that a photograph be about "spanning time." A photograph, and a film, should remind you that there is a certain magic to the fact that someone is living and breathing, and that you should fall in love with everything.

On the street today, I saw a young woman walking with a baby carriage down the street. She looked serious, or possibly angry. When I saw her I saw all the fury of the God's creation. Living, trembling.

That is cinema.