Photograph by Robert Voy Stark

NOTES ON THE FILM (GASSAN-BLAISDELL)

Tenative title:   DOORS OF MEMORY AND DESIRE.

Chippewa Poem:

You are Walking around

Trying to remember

What you promised.

But you can’t remember.

I am walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember.

 Can the narration run in a kind of counter-point to the images: first as, say, a description of what  will happen next visually; then as a description of what is or has just happened–  but always keeping to the tone of a specious present.

Camera catches M putting on cracked and broken shoes,

lacing them slowly, hastily, angrily. The laces break.

The foot kicks the shoes off. A hand reaches into the frame,

picks between the toes, moves out of frame.

“I have been walking, too long, too swiftly, sometimes much too swiftly

and much too slowly.”

Camera catches man as he moves towards table.

 I have been walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember…can’t  remember what I desired, what I promised…what it was that I desired so much that it made me  promise…whatever it was I did promise.

Perhaps this is because I’m not used to promising,

to desiring, to remembering even.