I will tell you a story first. Once, when I was about 8, I stood with my mitt and ball in the driveway waiting for my Dad to walk out of the house and to the car to drive me to the little league game, where I played for the "Angels."
The day was hot and I stood alone on the asphalt looking up at the sun. I would be playing first base, an unfamiliar position.
I was a boy headed to a game and that, up until then, had been enough. But on that driveway of crushed rock and tar I simply had a realization that I was alive. Heart beating, existential, alone on a planet, in an unfamiliar universe, alive.
I was eight and in the movie, time slows to a crawling slow motion that lingers well beyond any reasonable lingering on a detail of my cheek, which twitches.
I didn't know what to do with that. It sounds funny, I know. I think that day waiting for my debut on first, I became a man.. So they called me off first to pitch. And men were on first and second.
And I tried to pick the guy off first, which made for good entertainment for the twin bleachers of parents, one ours, one theirs.
And I got a guy to pop up, and then after a long drawn out and distracting drama on the mound, struck the next little opponent out.
Which left me to walk triumphantly off the mound, with my team following and the crowd roaring at the dramatic fireballing youth, so capable in an adult, shamanic sort of way.
It was only two outs and nobody noticed. Which brings me to introduce the following little films. They are little but they are not little. "The Battle of Blythe" made over maybe three days driving from San Diego captures some deep history and brings the evidence out of the closet, literally.
John Reaves' "Turning the Titanic." I can tell you how an artist works but that will remove the mystery and the fun. We play the hand we are dealt. Juxtaposition is our friend.
These are films made in a moment because someone needed them. They are raw like life, and I assure you honest enough to have come through the lens of my camera quite unplanned.
Understand these moments would have passed you by if a guy wasn't there with a camera and the actual physical inclination to move it to make that particular picture. I have always admired the work of photographer Elliot Erwitt and its, well, wit. We don't have to be there... get it?
These are moments that got away from the ordered narrative of the consensus, the planned operations of respectful disagreement. These films are accidents. Heresies. Malcontents.
I'm changing my approach to all of this now in that it is the last five years caught by the flashbulb and no more. You have to watch out, when you are a filmmaker, not to revisit the past.
