ooh lala

Handmade by Denis Kamioka

a dandy list of videos landed in my inbox today and i haven’t watched it in its entirety, but i’ll like to point out a little one that’s pretty charming. Handmade is a short film by Brazilian director Denis Kamioka, and it shows how the most arcane thing in the world — feelings — can be visually sculpted. if you’ve read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud (or, made to read, heh) and loved his visual literary style, you’ll fall for Handmade as well. both of them are guardians of articulating ideas more than abstracting them. for e.g., Foer’s language is simple, child-like, but the  rhythm, cross-disciplining and eventually the imagery he conjures are so ultimately brilliant. it reminds me of how a child can sometimes tell a story way better than an adult precisely because his imagination is limited by vocabulary. the good in lack. how do you watch a film of words? word out a moving film? sing a song through pictures? or paint a picture through a song? 

How could somebody living in our world not respond to all the visual stimuli? It’s not a coincidence that words so often show up in painting. It’s not a coincidence that in music there’s so much sampling and borrowing. For whatever reason, writers don’t show the influence of other forms of media all that much. They show it less than any other form right now.

In part, that’s good. It protects storytelling. It protects the book as something that is different from a web site or a pop song. On the other hand, it starts to diverge from how most people I know experience the world, which is as a collage of different kinds of media, a jumble of sights and sounds and bits of information, in a way that wasn’t true even five years ago or ten years ago.

September 11th, in particular, was so fundamentally visual. Can anyone even think about it without seeing the planes going into the buildings or the body falling? I read somewhere that it was the most visually documented event in human history; nothing’s ever been seen by more people than what happened that day. In that sense, I think it was the first truly global event.

I was in Queens when it happened, and my experience was probably similar to somebody living in Australia or Iceland or China. Physically, we were at different distances, but we were experiencing it simultaneously. I know it’s not quite that simple because, being an American, being a New Yorker, there are all these layers of emotional connection that you have, but in terms of the raw experience, we were sharing those images, those visuals. So for this kind of book, in particular, a visual language really made sense.

- Jonathan Safran Foer