Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield, 2010)
When someone dies it doesn't change anything. People go on living their life, temporarily affected by the loss, but in the big picture, nothing alters. Death is the end of one life, but others continue.
Human lives do not contain the same elements as a story. I mean, they do, but the pacing and narrative structure are all out of whack. There are extended scenes of boredom, of tedium: as we travel, as we wait. Nothing happens at these moments, although things are always happening to us. And when we die, there is no denouement to be ascertained, events simply stop. What we experienced was really more of a disconnected series of events, and death reveals no story lying underneath these events. That is what it is to live a life.
In addition to that, there is what it means to be young, and what it means to be poor.
Youth encapsulates two opposing ideas: excitement, and boredom. Being young involves undergoing a set of feelings which are much stronger, much brighter: black or white, with little inbetween. And of course, when something happens to us when we're young, it is happening for the first time. It's the learning period. And learning can be difficult, and it can hurt. Feelings are sharp back then, everything is new, everything is happening for the first time.
True poverty expresses itself as the removal of options. When one is truly poor, there is no choice available, there is only one tried and tested route to be followed, and that route is followed until death. Poor people do not move to other towns whereby their poverty might be alleviated, because they have had their options removed from them. They are tied to a place, tied to the people they have chosen to populate this place with. True poverty is a trap that is extremely hard to crawl out of.
All of this is finally wrapped up in looking at things. In staring at things. In looking at the empty spaces around us, and the people who walk in and out of these spaces. Staring at these things teaches us nothing, because there is no meaning in any of it. But that's okay. It's the experience of looking which is important.
Human lives do not contain the same elements as a story. I mean, they do, but the pacing and narrative structure are all out of whack. There are extended scenes of boredom, of tedium: as we travel, as we wait. Nothing happens at these moments, although things are always happening to us. And when we die, there is no denouement to be ascertained, events simply stop. What we experienced was really more of a disconnected series of events, and death reveals no story lying underneath these events. That is what it is to live a life.
In addition to that, there is what it means to be young, and what it means to be poor.
Youth encapsulates two opposing ideas: excitement, and boredom. Being young involves undergoing a set of feelings which are much stronger, much brighter: black or white, with little inbetween. And of course, when something happens to us when we're young, it is happening for the first time. It's the learning period. And learning can be difficult, and it can hurt. Feelings are sharp back then, everything is new, everything is happening for the first time.
True poverty expresses itself as the removal of options. When one is truly poor, there is no choice available, there is only one tried and tested route to be followed, and that route is followed until death. Poor people do not move to other towns whereby their poverty might be alleviated, because they have had their options removed from them. They are tied to a place, tied to the people they have chosen to populate this place with. True poverty is a trap that is extremely hard to crawl out of.
All of this is finally wrapped up in looking at things. In staring at things. In looking at the empty spaces around us, and the people who walk in and out of these spaces. Staring at these things teaches us nothing, because there is no meaning in any of it. But that's okay. It's the experience of looking which is important.