Filmmaker’s Diary: Re-Evolution

 The word for the year is REVOLUTION and/or RE-evolution. We need revolutions to undergo radical restructuring and bring about a definitive end to an outdated regime. Revolutions are turning points in history!   Revolution is also the word to describe the “orbital motion about a point, especially as distinguished from axial rotation” and I like the word affiliation with movement. Physical movement, social movement, intellectual movement, spiritual movement. Moving away from something outdated!   So I’m keeping revolution in mind and every-so-often I think of guerrilla. They – the MARKETeers – called some filmmakers guerrilla in the past and I kind of like that image, especially since I made my first (a short fiction) film in Cuba – land of the guerrilla revolutionaries!    A guerrilla is a member of an “irregular unit” and I guess I’m a member of an irregular unit – something in my head is not regular…it is all so very irregular that I can’t even call it something, there’s no name for it!   But this guerrilla-thinking makes me see kamikazes! And I think of them because they are suicidal and I think of suicide because of Antonin Artaud (the French poet, essayist, playwright, actor, director, visionary) who thought about suicide and who coined the phrase “artist is suicided from society.”  Then he wrote, “You will see my present body burst into fragments and remake itself under ten thousand notorious aspects a new body.”   Suicide, then, is the sum of one and the birth of a nation…of hearts, of ideas, of a new world view and I, for one, am in the game!   Challenge institutionalization! Challenge conformity. Challenge the doctors, the biographers and autobiographers, challenge society and history (especially). Challenge the passive self. Challenge the active self. Challenge the ghosts, the demons, the voices. Challenge popularity. Challenge the myths. Challenge…in order to deconstruct and deconstruct in order to metamorphose and emerge and to become and I feel myself becoming even though I have so many obstacles to beat in order to make this film, so many walls to climb or tear down. Social structure, economic structure, art structure, history structures,  my own personal structures and needs. I have to be very strong, a soldier, and I have to be ready to kill all preconceptions and guard my idea and vision against the infantry of preconception-ists! I’m building up my immunity!   In 1909, in “The Futurist Manifesto”, F.T. Marinetti wrote, “We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks!” Be a warrior Rachael!  He also wrote, “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character.”  And I know he is right because I know the fight. I know how far I’ve come and how much further I have to do. So I keep repeating his words – the manifesto – because I know that search and questioning are violent acts and these violent acts will force me to see and to feel the beautiful!   The wacky Futurists also advised us to “demolish museums and libraries” but it was because they knew it was necessary to deliver the world from the “gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.” We tell you who is a real filmmaker and who is not. We tell you how you can and cannot make a film. We tell you this and that is not acceptable. We tell you and you accept! I’m not listening! I’m not listening! I can’t listen anymore! The rupture has occurred. The water is flowing! No turning back now!   Buckminster Fuller said, “Dare to be naïve!”   So I will. And I will imagine naïvely. And I will improvise and “see how that feels.”  Life is on hold and my only focus is my (he)art.   “I have absolute confidence in nature’s own gestation rates,” Fuller said, “I am sure that the most important things take the longest.”