{"id":118936,"date":"2017-12-07T16:28:31","date_gmt":"2017-12-07T21:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118936"},"modified":"2017-12-08T12:45:14","modified_gmt":"2017-12-08T17:45:14","slug":"a-very-particular-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/07\/a-very-particular-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"A Very Particular Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When asked to make a short film to accompany the release of Sam Stephenson\u2019s\u00a0Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>I was more than pleased. It meant an increasingly rare excuse to wander, in Midtown and through my own footage archive. I\u2019d need to sit with Stephenson\u2019s soft-spoken reading of excerpts from the book and\u00a0search for images that could at least loosely relate to Smith\u2019s infamous Sixth Avenue \u201cjazz loft.\u201d\u00a0I had neither the intention nor the means to re-create New York City in the period of 1957 to 1965, and in any case I didn\u2019t want to compete with the text by being literal. It soon became evident that the film had to be a celebration of the\u00a0subtractive<\/i>, something Stephenson had done so beautifully in the book itself. I use that term to mean that which is added by leaving things out. For Stephenson, who worked on his Gene Smith project for more than twenty years, this meant relinquishing the more predictable biographical tome he could have written in favor of something looser and riskier. He would evoke the photographer via the lives of people Smith intersected with and through other fruitful, if unorthodox, digressions\u2014one being the very particular sound of a very particular bird.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my own work, especially in collaborations with musicians, I sometimes find myself needing to strip the films down so that the visuals function less as spectacle than as bed; a place for sounds or words or just thoughts to rest. (Is there room on the Internet for such slower, quieter, even humbler propositions? Maybe, but only if we make it so.) For such projects I\u2019ve sought out moving pictures\u2014well, sometimes\u00a0barely<\/i>\u00a0moving pictures\u2014that can serve that function. Years back I filmed a piece of stray cellophane stuck to a Herald Square subway grating. The shot then rested on a shelf in my archive awaiting its cue\u2014which turned out to be this assignment, for Stephenson\u2019s book. While originally filming it, which took a while, I was struck and amused by what a fool I must have looked to passersby, a man bent over a tripod waiting for a piece of nothing to do something. While trying to finish\u00a0Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/i>, tossing aside thousands of his own words, Stephenson must have been struck, amused, and terrified to let go of the weight of facts he\u2019d compiled about W. Eugene Smith\u2019s life,\u00a0<\/span>instead giving many other characters, and his book, room to move, room to breathe.<\/span><\/p>\n