SCPK Prototypes - 08.11
03. It started here. Right where I lived. Actually, I lived on top of it. Under me, in that place, that funny place I use to tell people where I live, but that funny place I don't want to enter. I was raised far to prude to do anything more than just talk about that place, without being there. But there is a power source in a package. A package didn't get delivered, a package with the power for the thing that gives me power. To turn my lens on, I need to turn myself in, to this shop.
So I did.
I just went in, it wasn't so bad.
The batteries weren't even there. I found them eventually. But suddenly that's a bit irrelevant. Or is it? I still mentioned it. It's ironic, I suppose.
What I did find in the shop was a human. Many of them, actually. In pieces, discombobulated.
Pieces of humans that remind me of how prude I am...was? Was? Am?
There was one human in full though, and this I found far more interesting. It's because of this human I write now. M. Turns out he spent years in Toronto as well, around 2013 until....it's not quite clear. But that was more than enough for conversation to roll. Many conversations rolled and rolled in the following months, maybe a year, or more? The conversations rolled to the point that where M told me he too felt discombobulated.
In those chats, I already started to feel this.
How did M live? How did M get here? Why is M here? Where is M from, originally? I really thought this. Is that so bad? He has barely a clue how to use his mobile phone, I noticed.
Chats in the shop turned into chats outside of the shop. Hang outs at the cinema in Schiedam, or on the park bench by the Laurenskerk. He likes his beer strong, I noticed. Preferably 'Atlas'. 14% . I didn't know this existed. Just one he said, and then you don't need to drink all night. This was a sort of functional alcoholism a previous version of myself would have liked to adapt. Here I was adapting now though, proost.
M spoke lots, I listened lots. My dutch wasn't so good at first, and even though he lived in Canada, he didn't seem to have confidence in his english. It's not like I did in Dutch, but i just went along with it. It's good practice. Amongst long talks about understanding ourselves, painful pasts also come out.
We planned to go to Stedelijk Museum Schiedam that one day. To see the expo Spiritual Urgency. He cancelled. Feeling 'depri'.
The next time I saw him he explained about his girlfriend, who now sat in a clinic, preventing her from taking her own life.
He told me about his creative crisis. About how he dropped out of school right before he would have graduated. About being a junkie for the last 30 years. Is M really almost 50 years old? His skin looks better than mine, at almost twice the age. Get away from everything. He needs that every so often. SO he takes his bag and whatever money is in his hand and goes to India. He can live there for a dollar a day he says. The dirtiness, the nastiness, he loves it. The colour, he loves the most. The people are the colour there. Unlike here he says...where it's just the neon lights.
I should mention, he started to tell me these things on camera. I brought my camera to that shop. I brought coffee. Snacks. That spot under me was now also a part of me. At first it was admittedly still strange. With time it became a second home. A safe space. Just like M described it to me that time F visited. Especially during corona lockdown. THe city workers didn't dare enter. The two of them could sit, chat, smoke and be- inside of that place. Unlike elsewhere. Now I have the same with M, also with F when he comes by.
But the camera. I wanted to make something of this. He wanted to do something creative. I offered the camera, the only tool I have. I wanted to help him. But I also wanted to help myself. I saw a subject. A character. A rough, gritty, un-understandable life. Someone I need to but in my 16 by 9 frame.
Someone dumb enough to let me put them in that.
Did I really say that? I thought it, maybe?
Regardless, I brought my camera more often. We chatted and chatted. Never about sex. It's not that this was a rule, it's just not something either of us were particularly interested in discussing together. Nor the shop. Although we did, at a later point acknowledge my awkwardness to come in there. He acknowledged his use for this place as spot to make money under the counter. Not much more. Although theres plenty of stories. Stories from the past about this place, hard to believe. But I do. I don't think M has it in him to lie.
Is he my alter ego? Someone mentioned this.
M sees everything opposite to me. I remember when I finally dared to invite him to my house warming party. I had moved, no longer ontop of M. In hindsight I guess I seperated church and state. But I invited him. By that point we were so close.
M drank alot, not just one. But so did everyone.
M eventually left, so did everyone else.
No one else messaged me that night, except for M. About an hour after he left.
<insert photo: M with bloody face>
He fell off his bike going home, completely cut up. The photo was a selfie of M with the biggest smile, being hugged by W, the woman who offers him a floor to sleep on at her place.
"Best experience, one I really needed. So shitty, and that;s why it's so great" (something along these lines, but in dutch)
I called him. Very scared. Is he crazy? Clearly, he kind of is.
LET GO.
He keeps telling me this. Especially when I sit with him for hours and i can't hold my body language back from silently telling him I'm frustrated and have no idea what we're doing with this project. I let him be co-author. Director! I was supposed ot have my subject to use, now I feel I'm being used? Let go of what? Easy for him to say. After 9 months he has confronted himself and his creative crises. The amount he told me this project is exactly what he needed. That touched me. I was the saviour!
But just for him. I was locked in to collaboration of nothingness, that i tried so hard to mould into my little art-house specimen.
I looked forward to just finishing our shoots each time. Because I know afterward we can drink an Atlas and smoke a joint and forget about this all.
That reminds me of what I used to when I worked at that one place during that one time I was always depri.
Still, we are here. IN the shop, in the institution. Now we're editing together?. He doesn't even understand ctrl + c and v.
LET GO, is the viewer important? Are we not making it for ourselves? Make a film that's not a film.
He's got a point and I'm starting to believe him. Or understand him? Or convince myself I do. But I don't want to show a black screen for 2 hours. We have so much more. I try and try to understand what it all is. What have we done, where can it go?
I want to make a film with him, and he's open for that. But he also doesn't care about making a film. It's just the thing, the engine, the action, the placeholder, for something. For me too though? I let him turn the camera on me. He did it himself actually, he likes to film with his mobile phone. That shitty -5 megapixel lens and cracked to infinity screen, from that bike fall. Can't he just use my camera. Then at least we have this in infinite pixel quality.
Ok I can accept it. Actually it's a bit cool to have different media...it shows the process.
The Process! M: it's all about the process. We are constantly in process.
Me writing this. Processing of a process. How to let this process be seen? How to convey this? And how many words are missing here, words that are also important to describing the process? So many. I need to tell you about so much more. This is a mere fraction. A fraction of a fraction of a strange filmmaking faction of Rotterdam West.
OK what if i separate myself from these words for a second.
I've been working on a project with M for almost a year. I've known him longer. Since working on the project, my attitude has gone from: fun little thing to try to potential great portrait subject to not a subject but a co author to shit why am I doing this to fuck I don't even know this person am I getting too close to fuck it Sam stop thinking about that look at this beautiful person who is doing this with you, offering endless time and warmth to wow we are making something but I'm not sure if its actually anything to ok but stick with it for now to it should be like this! or that! to ok maybe it's really time to stop (not my words but a profs but i was dumb enough to believe it for a second) to how do i make something out of all this material? to what if all this material is just research? to come on you've been watching all this ethnographic fiction for so long to so you can do that with this.
What if, up until now, the process has been exactly just that. A process in the making of a film. All this time I've been doing exactly what was necessary for me, letting go of the idea of making a film. And in this moment, now I realize that since I've done that- I can make a film. I freed myself from the schedule, style, plans, forms. Now I can adapt them. Use them. We can.
02. Slooow Down, Sam