Watching How Life Used To Be
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| Untitled (Girl in Window) (1999), Gregory Crewdson |
All film-watching is now nostalgic because it is the way the world was. Social-distancing in any films that are theatrical in nature can’t exist as before, evincing the over-the-shoulder shot, with characters in a blurred pull-focus, large wide-angle shots with just a few people in the distance, or the “0-Shot” (essentially landscapes), or all bleakly-staged like a Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall shot--and of course the great-grandfather of the vacuity of urban and suburban landscapes, Edward Hopper. In Crewdson, the characters are all in an Ambien-induced sleep-walk; In Wall, they are the hyper-normal and hyper-banal--so normal they look almost stupid--but those are now nostalgic: they show people how we normally see people.
We are in a great moment for film-making, image-making, or even sound and music-making, because it gives us new constraints, new metaphors to live and create by--pregnant with the revival of the humanities. For those people already predestined for art-making, this is a good time to get into making pictures.
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