This is the very first project I made in a “Basic Filmmaking” summer intensive I did at NYU back in 2006. It’s shot on Kodak 16mm film using an old Arriflex and was hand spliced and screened silently for a class led by Katherine Lindberg, who seems to be still teaching there.
I don’t remember what the project prompt was, but I loved how she intuitively got what I was about. She would later tell me (approvingly) that I “like to poke sticks.” She didn’t let me quit on myself when Israel’s shelling of Beirut started to mess with my head.
I haven’t seen this footage since that summer. This is why I was at Aurora today; I had this reel digitized at GT Recording after almost two decades of it just sitting there in plastic bag in my old bedroom in Lebanon.
“You were clearly having a lot of fun with this,” they told me when I picked up my reels today. Yeah. I think I was.
The hypocrisy of my wanting to take photos of other people is the very simple fact that I hate having my own photo taken. I’m definitely someone who would say: “I’d rather not.”
I talked to some of you about that. There’s an odd mismatch between the kind of connection necessary to the task and types of personalities often drawn to undertaking it. We want to tell stories, but we don’t want to be in them, necessarily.
These are some stills scanned from strips of 16mm film I’d salvaged from the cutting room during my final project that summer at NYU. They’re the shots that didn’t work. I’m glad I kept them. And I’m glad to see this footage starring my barely 20-year-old self, though I can’t bring myself to post the actual footage. The cringe is too strong in this one.
But my story had to be told in this way. I remember how it came to me on the train back to Manhattan from Coney Island. I was despondent, feeling the weight of guilt for having the summer of my life while bombs rained on Beirut. The last thing I wanted to think about was roleplaying as a moviemaker. And then these images started to hit me. I went and bought a surplus army shirt, borrowed my roommate’s PlayStation controller, and tried to figure out double exposure.
These stills summarize the short film; two wolves, tearing each other apart, but something else is pulling both their strings.
An allegory of war, but, maybe a metaphor of my psyche as well. As Mos Def/Yasiin Bey said: “I against I, flesh of my flesh, and mind of my mind.”
I modelled these two characters after “western power” and Hezbollah dudes I’d met and known. I would ironically get to see a lot more of dudes just like that, up close and uncomfortably personal, when I returned home later that summer.
With these shots, imagine a soundtrack of the theme from Pong over a breakbeat and you’ll get the vibe.