Goddard's Knock

It's something about the quality of attention. WH Auden says that curiosity is the one human passion that can be indulged without satiety. And he's right, there's always something to be noticed and then noticed more deeply. It's a self-replenishing source of energy. If we move through the world touching things with delicate attention they come alive under our fingertips. In the snowlit corridors of mountain hotels and long journies across the white plains of Turkey, people and things seemed to sparkle and thrum.But it also struck me that it's not enough to be attentive. You need to pay attention to the kind of attention you're paying. Otherwise, the quality of our noticing shapes what we notice. That's apparent in this photography thing. Over the years I've been taking pictures with my camera, I've noticed that I've started to take the same sort of pictures. Framed things in a certain "aesthetic" way. Picked certain objects to photograph and ignored others. I was talking to Laurie and Rob, the camera and soundmen on this shoot, about how boring this was getting. There's a great story about Jean-Luc Godard. His Director of Photography would get on set before shooting, spend hours setting up lights and camera angles to create a perfect, beautiful shot. Then Godard would step up to the camera, look through the viewfinder, and before calling 'Action' he would kick the tripod and shoot the whole scene on a random skew. Of course, in the film it looked weird but wonderfully correct. Similarly, Lars von Trier says that the best thing an actor can do for him is to fuck up. Sometimes the crap, the ugly and the random generate new beauty. So towards the end of the Turkey trip we started to deliberately mess-up shots. Holding the camera up in the air, vaguely pointed at people to get an fresh frame. Photographing random things. My patron anti-saint, Oscar Wilde, said that art is a raid on the predictable. And the skew-whiff art that I think is the best art makes life less boring. It stretches the perceiving eye to perceive more. It's like when I watched Godard's Alphaville on the way up to Haworth and suddenly Yorkshire train stations seemed like 1950s nouvelle vague. Knocking the tripod can surprise us with stuff we didn't expect to notice.

From Do Buddists Watch Telly?