password: cucu
Before making (and remaking...) this piece, I read Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude in the same sitting as reading Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I found a very odd strand between the two. Paz is not only speaking for Mexican people in the U.S, but about men and specifically hermetical men in a universal sense as is Nietzsche. There is unraveling of our past in Paz's writing that shows how we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us...a very circular process...The demons that we deal with are dealt with in Paz's writing. I find them true beyond the speaking of them on a mythic level, I can feel them and see them everywhere and in everything when I am completely open. And this opening makes the demon no longer demonic, but the layers within me and the working parts of every person, and they walk along with us, and they play with us, they fuck with us, and it's beautiful and sublime. These demons combust within us, and our denial of their existence leaves us in an emptiness away from Home.
In this film, the intention was to find these demons within these men, that reside in this block of the Mission district, to find the past's contention and ridiculously obvious presence in their daily lives, and in the block itself. Something about this place feels so wrong, but also right. Something about this place feels very alien, in limbo of the past and the future.
I did not achieve this vision. It's a film that I'd like to continue editing, but on the other hand I think that I do not have the material available to make it. I feel very incomplete leaving it at this, it's one of the first films that I truly feel that I have not "finished" and it's a very sickly feeling.
But I'll go on! Next subject...
