Trust energy

I think people have a natural type of energy or rhytm to them. What I am starting to realise more and more, is that some of the secrets behind great collaborations, is a match in those energies. Not that they are completely synchronized, but in tune. Open and alert to each other, and corresponding to each other. Think of a great jazz band for instance, and how they jam with seemingly little effort. Watch the energy!

Working with an artform like  music or film making, is a lot about the energy between collaborators. One of the things I have learned about film making, is that there need to be a certain tightness to the energy in the process. A certain alertness and a presence, that makes people excited, yet grounded and open. And if the presence and energy is not there, then it is difficult to create something strong and pure out of it. 

I still haven't figured out the magic alchemy, of how to keep the energy just right at all times. I think it is a difficult task, even in small crews, but I am learning what the pittfalls are. Stress is a killer for instance. It creates an hypertension that makes everyone a bit too efficient. I myself get aggressive and defensive when I'm stressed out, and it potentially leads to conflicts that can take hours to get over. But an energy that is too laid back, also gets problematic, because then the process becomes unfocused, and people become insecure about what is going on. It's like a string that needs to be held just tight enough not to slouch, and not even one person can let go of it. 

Film making - especially improvisation - is a lot like jamming. The energy need to be there. It has to have that swing. From every single player. It is something I'm paying a lot of attention to at the moment. Rule number three is a reminder, that energy isn't something fuzzy to be shrugged at. It is an important ingrediens in any creation. Something that we need to listen to and something that we need to trust! 

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

Raw material

A week ago, I started organising and going through the material. As I go through it, I'm writing down my thoughts about the intensions of the different scenes, and where I imagine they could go, so that we will have a starting point for the edit. It looks like there is enough different material to shape a developing narrative. Because even if it might not be a linear storyline, the film is shot to have a narrative. But will it hold? Is the curve emotionally true? Are the key scenes strong enough? 

This part of the process is a strange intermezzo. It's the stage, where you haven't yet got the full overview. You don't know if it will work yet. But you still have to look at the facts of what's in front of you. Here's the material. Raw, unpolished. This is your film. 

It's scary and it takes a while to adapt to this new reality of the piece, because all this time in the development, the film has been an image in my head that I have tried to capture. Now, that particular image has to be replaced by the facts of the material. That means some element of letting go of the imagined film in my head. Not the vision, the vision remains the same, but the imagined idea of the film. There's a difference. It can be compared to a love relation. At some point, you have to let go of the idea of someone, because it stands in the way of the possibility of having a real relationsship with the person. It stands in the way of seeing them clearly, for what they are. Sorry for the tacky metaphor, it was the best one I could come up with.

I am giving the material over to my editor sometime next week. Then he will have a chance to get to know the material and come up with his ideas, before we start working on it together. Meanwhile, I will begin fleshing out the ideas of #2. Keeping the flow and energy going. 

Dreamscapes

Last sunday we came back. It felt like we had been away for months, working non-stop in a dreamscape that had it's own agenda on where to go. In reality, it had only been a week. But nevertheless a week of intense collaborative creation, and we were all exhausted. In a good way.

We had been deep into the swedish forests. A place called Pålskog, a 20 minutes drive into the pinewoods, following a long and winding dirt track. Out there, where there is no phone connection, unless you stand on a rock and point your not-so-smart-anylonger smartphone in a specific direction, and then maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get enough signal to send a text message. Out there, where the darkness was overwhelming and the early misty mornings seemed Tarkovsky-esque divine. It was perfect.

We knew our central elements. The cottage in the forest was the geographic frame around the story. We knew our characters, the conturs we had drawn of their backstory, the depth of their emotional dilemmas. I had a list of keyscenes with me, that I knew I wanted to capture. Even some dream-imagery that I didn't fully understand, but I knew was important. The rest was something we had to discover together.

We were a dynamic pack of 5 people. Two of them, are the most incredible actors I could have wished for: Gaia Rosberg and Sofya Johnson. Fearlessly the two jumped head first into this intuitive exploration, and kept true to their characters at all time, even when I gave them very little linearity to work from. 

It's not always given that actors can access that intuitive place with such ease and trust in the process. And depending on the content of the piece, it's sometimes too much to ask for. Gaia and Sofya was able to do it, because both of them are incredibly intuitive talents and because they had excellent chemistry together. 

We had done two workshops before we left, with emphasis on a very physical way into the material. It was obvious, that the work we had done in the workshops, had been a crucial component. My only wish, is that we had had more time to dwelve deeper into the method, and to bridge the process more seamlessly.

We were cut down to the bare bones. The intention was intimacy, which we achieved, but it was also hard work. Film maker & video-artist Gabriel Foster-Prior was the films cinematographer and experimental sound-artist Carlo Störup was on sound. The three of us was the whole crew, which even for my small-crew standard is a very slim set-up. Luckily, both Gabriel and Carlo are talented artists with an experimental heart, who know what it is to play and explore and who take their work seriously. They entered the proces with an impressive creativity and work-ethic and managed to cope with the extremely high demands that came from being a more-than-skinny skeleton-crew. I'm really thankful for what they brought to it. 

We came back from the forest 8 days ago. I don't have the faintest idea of where those 8 days have gone. 

I must have slept through it somehow. We were all exhausted. But thrilled as well. It was a good experience. Now, the next step of the process lies ahead. A more introvert part of the creation. Going through the material, together with my editor. And then, slowly, begin to wrap our heads and hearts around this enigmatic creature: Mothlands #1.

Setting sails

Outside the sky is cloudy but bright. It rains occasionally, but the temperature is mild. I like this time of year. Transition-time. It is a very suitable mood for this Mothlands launch. No fireworks or shout outs. Just a  quiet setting sails.

I sit here, on my bed under a thick blanket, accompanied by my cat. We both enjoy this quiet moment. 

I've needed it for a while. The last weeks have been full of activities, like summer always is. But for me, this summer in particular. Moving into our new old farmhouse in Sweden, and preparing this project simultaneously, has been an excercise in handling many to-do's without getting stressed out and still being present. However, I think farmhouse-living and Mothlands is an inspiring combination, that forces me to keep a broader perspective. I like that.

There is two weeks to go before we start shooting the first filmsketch, so things are intensifying, creatively and production-wise. The first sketch is a portrait of the relation between a 10-year old girl and her mother, sharing a bond of destiny. We are filming further up in sweden, over the course of 6 days, starting on sunday 15th of September. It's a small team of really interesting people, so it's going to be an intimate and intense process. The major elements are falling into place, but I also know that now is the time for higtened creative concentration on the little details. 

Going into an intuitive workmethod demands thoruough preparation and grounding. Emotional grounding. Meaning, reaching that place, where there is a solid foundation of common emotional understanding in what world we are entering together, so that we can access this place through our instincts, rather than through our intellectuality. Without that grounding, I believe it's almost impossible to create honest and emotionally complex material. 

I'm positive that we will get there. Nonetheless, my creative anxiety has slowly begun to creep in. I guess it's inevitable and completely natural. Afterall, it's the first filmsketch of this project. The first plunge into this creative odysee, that Mothlands is. So my anxiety is not just about this particular filmsketch, it's also about wanting to create a inspirational and defining start for the project and the people involved. 

I try to be very acceptant about my anxiety. You know, acknowledge that it's there, and be really outspoken about it, because then it becomes less dangerous. It also helps me to re-read the mothlands manifesto, when my need for control starts to disturb my intuitive flow. It reminds me that there is nothing to be afraid of. That the notion of "failure" is a piece of old luggage that I'm about to get rid off.