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Today I have been filming at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place every day for 11 months. I now only have 31 days left to go.
I can’t quite believe that filming is coming to an end this soon. The closer I get to finishing filming the more I have been questioning both the film and why I have put myself through this. It is such an odd thing to have done and has had a profound impact on me. I can’t help think of all the films I could have made why this one? I guess this is the nature of the creativity. You are not completely, if at all, in control over it. As soon as you do try and control the creative process it locks because it is about being open and spontaneious.
This project is an expression of an ongoing tension between this desire for certainty and the need to let things take their natural course. The film is about the desire to hang on to each moment of life along with the knowledge that this is a complete impossibility. It is about trying to control life and time somehow. The process of making this film has controlled my life in a way that no other job, film, relationship or event in my life ever has. The film itself will be incredibly controlled in terms of having one carefully chosen locked frame througout.
In some ways this has been incredibly liberating. It is sometimes hard not knowing what you are going to be doing next and where the money will come from. There isn’t an artist or filmmaker I know who doesn’t have fantasies about having a proper 9 to 5 job and the stability it would bring. This film has at least given me the 9 every day if not the 5.
Ever since I moved to Knoydart six years ago I have questioned my decision to come here. I absolutely love it here but I have always struggled with missing the things I left behind friends, family, cinemas, art galleries, the film industry and the anonomity that comes with living in a city. Sometimes the struggle between these two places and the two sets of the people in them that I love has been almost unbearable.
When I first decided to make this film I thought maybe as a by product it would help me decide where I wanted to be. But it is obvious now that if you impose any kind of rule on yourself for long enough of course you are going to want to break it. Right now I can’t wait to go and see my friends and family in London, to sit on a train and look out of the window and to see new places. But now the weather is good and it is beautiful here it has occured to me that not leaving the Highlands for so long might have made my bond with the place even stronger. I might not know this until I get away. I might never know.
What I have learnt is that the pursuit of control is an entirely human, but not entirely healthy impulse. You can’t force life either to move forward or to stand still. All you can do is accept that time keeps going, that we keep getting older and, yes, closer to our deaths. But this might not be such a bad thing because it is all about the gentle accumulation of moments that you pick up along the way.
Here is a year in the life of my wooden platform . . . .
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Filed under: Posts by Sam, Related work, Responses to the project | Tags: central london offices, chronic health condition, long exposure photography, oxo tower, travel
My older sister, Claudia Firth, is also an artist. There are many ways in which our lives our weirdly parallel despite her living in the centre of London and I in the north-west of Scotland. A couple of years ago Claudia started a project called Overtime. From her home in the Oxo Tower, a housing co-operative of around one hundred people, she can see many central London offices. Over the years she had noticed that there was always one man working overtime. Even when the lights in the all surrounding buildings were turned off his would be on, in evenings and at weekends. So she began taking pictures of him every day.
She says of the photos:
“This project came out of my own experiences as an “incapacitated” worker. Often at home in my flat not able to work because of a chronic health condition, I spent time watching and thinking about the offices that surrounded my building. I began to notice that even very late at night the office opposite my flat would be occupied with a lone worker and I decided to photograph him. I wanted to use long exposure photography to capture some of the time this man was working particularly after the normal 9-to-5. The photographs are stolen images, taken without his knowledge, but somehow I imagined them creating a relationship between us. Being faced, myself, with a feeling of a sort of suspension of normal time through illness, I felt that there was a kind of inverse relationship with this worker who always seemed to be there, sometimes even when I went to bed and again when I got up in the morning.”
These pictures couldn’t be more different from my project, they are covert, anonymous, and within a cityscape. The man is enveloped from the seasons by the warmth and light of his office, yet my film is about being exposed to and part of the natural environment.
There is definitely a sense though, in which Claudia’s photographs and the story behind them make you connect with this anonymous worker. I used to watch him working when I visited my sister and wonder about his life and what it was that made him spend all of his time in his office, but now I’m not so sure my experience is really that different. This unknown the man and I are isolated in our own ways, constantly propelled forward towards our own goals.
In my last post I wrote about a lack of happy endings, but I think it was as much about the lack of endings per se. I have been getting myself through this project by fixing on an end point, the date I finish filming. When in actuality this will be just the beginning of editing this film. At times it feels like continually climbing a mountain with never-ending summits and I often wonder when it is you get to go downhill.
But maybe its just a matter of stopping every now and then to take in the view, notice what you have and how far it is you have come already.
Like this:
My self imposed prison has turned into a bit of a paradise recently. The weather has been glorious, incredible sunsets, blue skies, cuckoos and a weekend of kayaking. Strangely even with the good weather and the opportunity to travel again imminent I still feel the same anxiety that has underpinned this whole year.
I have been trying to work out why this is and I think it is related to an ongoing struggle with the gap between fiction and reality. A gap particularly present because I am making a film about my life.
We all create stories out of our lives as a way of making sense of things. Stories that are constantly changing. I am clearly a bit obsessed with this, how and why we do it and how we distinguish between what is fiction and what is true. I used to think this was because I wanted to be a filmmaker, but now I think its the other way around. The obsession came first. I had created a whole world of imaginary friends by the age three, probably in response to quite a lot of uncertaintity at the time.
There used to be a time when people believed that the world had a natural order. When things became unbalanced a series of events would be triggered that eventually brought it all in to balance again – order would be restored. You just needed to trust that things would right themselves eventually. But we don’t believe this any more. Life feels random and chaotic, full of uncertainties. Moments of resolution are much harder to find.
I have spent the whole of this year trying to second guess this films narrative which will be defined by the emotional journey you see me go through over the year. Partly because I am a filmmaker and this is what you do, but this has also been about trying to work out what happens next in life. This urge to jump ahead without allowing things to take their natural course is almost always how I fuck things up. I know this, but I keep doing it.
Up until very recently I had managed to convince myself that when filming ends my life will suddenly change. I will walk out of the last shot of the film towards the loch and an ever lasting happiness out there waiting for me. When the reality is that all that needs to change is my routine. Of course other stuff will, but the beautifully neat resolution to this year and the film that I want is as unlikely as all of the countless other wonderful happy endings I have written in to my life that haven’t happened yet. Which makes me wonder whether I might have even started making this film in the hope that it would somehow bring about resolution. Fictionalising life in the hope it will behave more like fiction.
This year has been definied for me by continually having to accept limitations I have imposed on my own life. I have even weirldy come to appreciate the freedom my rules have given me. Maybe at last I will aceept that you can’t force a resolution.
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Just as I was starting to despair with the internet (see last post) thanks to Matt Hulse on facebook of all places I discovered Jim Henson’s 1965 experimental film Time Piece, below, which I’d never seen before and is a bit wonderful. The film was nominated for an Oscar and Henson made the first episode of Sesame Street three years later. Just goes to show you never know where making short experimental films about time can lead to.
Lots of people have been sending me videos and clips from you tube of people growing old, growing beards, travelling around the world taking their pictures every day. There are so many of them out there that there is now even a subsection parodying the original ones. I watched a lot of them before the project began and put my favourite up last June. Here is a link to the original post.
It’s been interesting thinking about the relationship between these films and what I am doing, which I hope will be quite different. I think maybe the phenomena of these films is as interesting than the films themselves. Like watching random algal blooms in a vast ocean, a You Tube film becomes popular then millions more like it appear, then millions more referencing the original one. The internet is like a weird travelling fair full of novelties, freaks and curios all crying out for you to take a peep. Then, every now and then, just for a second, someone shows you something truly funny or beautiful. Sadly, just like in real life, those moments are few and far between.
Filed under: ALL, Posts by Sam | Tags: 365, 365 project, Earths orbit, everyday, space
Having passed the 300th day it is now today exactly ten months since I started filming. It occurred to me this morning as I stood on my platform filming that even if I were to stand in exactly the same place for a whole year I would still be moving.
So I googled it and found out that I have been travelling on average at approx. 67,000 miles per hour as the earth loops its way around the sun, the sun loops its way around the centre of the galaxy and the universe expands outwards. By the end of my year I will have travelled approximately 583 million miles. (Sometimes the direction the earth is travelling around the sun is counteracted by the direction the sun is travelling around the universe). I know this isn’t really what we mean by travelling, but it is kind of fun to think about and I find it weirdly reassuring somehow that you never stay still, even if you really really want to. More soon.
Today is my 300th day of filming.
I don’t know exactly when it happened but a shift has taken place. The project doesn’t feel like it is defining my life any more. The idea of being here for another two months without leaving doesn’t feel strange or restricting. Having spent months counting the days, it now feels as though there isn’t enough time. There are things I want to get done by the summer and a massive backlog of footage to capture. Due to the nature of time perception, because I want things to slow down, of course, the opposite is happening. Time is flying. It is lovely here right now; wild flowers and sunshine, walks to be had on the beach, in the woods and lots and lots of visitors.
Someone suddenly and unexpectedly died on Knoydart yesterday. He was a sculptor, a difficult and lonely man. He had a heart attack in the village while helping to move a boat. Me and my sister watched the helicopter come with the paramedics. Later we watched a boat leave with his body. His death was another reminder of the randomness of life, of its frailty and the question of what you choose to leave behind. Mark made lots of enemies but he also left behind sculptures that strangers will enjoy. A fisherman holding a small child’s hand on Mallaig pier.
I have thought lots about this project over the last ten months, researched ideas about time, photography and documentation. Watched related films and had a more intense relationship with the internet than at any other time in my life. I have spent a lot of time talking to people about how we live and die, listening to their ideas and responding back.
I have found myself listing the significant events of the year so far, two visits by sister, two by mum, one black eye, one tabloid small frenzy, one death on the peninsular. It feels like it is time to start collating my thoughts and experiences somehow. To crystalise what have I learnt as a result of all of this.
I feel quite certain I have changed as a result of this year, but I am also quite sure that fundamentally I am still the same person. Like the weather, the tides and the seasons overall we change a lot less over time than it feels like. And so the question rises itself again of what we do with the time that we are given.
Like this:
Filed under: Posts by Sam
There is a developing psychology of time perception, which suggests our relationship to time affects how happy we are. Below is a fantastic animated illustration of Professor Philip Zimbardo’s theories on this.
I love that where you live in relation to the equator affects your perception of time. You can also hear more about Robert Levine’s studies on pace of life on the Radiolab Cities episode. (I am very tempted to compare average walking speed and how long it takes to post a parcel in Knoydart. I have a feeling it might be a lot slower.)
Follow this link to take the Zimbardo Time Perception test yourself and find out whether you are too hedonistic, fatalistic or able to exercise delayed gratification.. I scored OK on the time perception test, but I have a feeling I would have failed miserably at the Marshmallow Experiment (see below) as a child, which is a shame as all future success in life seems to be based on it.
Filed under: ALL, Related work | Tags: cesar kuriyama, documentary, film, one second every day, TED
Cesar Kuriyama is making a film using one second of film from each day of his life from. He started on his 30th birthday which, coincidentally, was the same week I started filming Stay the Same. His is a fascinating and incredibly ambitious project also about time, memory and the desire to capture all of lifes experience somehow. Here is what he has recorded so far.
Kuriyama’s project makes my painfully slow film making process seem like a breeze. His film, if he continues, will only truly be finished when he dies. In the TED blog he says he believes that the film will be how he remembers his entire life. The act of documenting and creating of images definitely changes the way in which we remember and construct our own narratives. But I am not sure if we can know in advance how we will remember things. It is a really interesting question. It is going to be equally interesting to follow Kuriyama’s project and see. It makes me think that it would be great if Cesar Kuriyama and Jonas Mekas could meet.
Thanks again to Simon Lynch (see previous blog) for sending me the link to Kuriyama’s work.
