Lensing

Where is the exact location one does art?

“Film School” yells the student in the back who continues to murmur about Bergman and Tarkovsky, and did you know Sven Nyquist lost a million dollars on the explosion shot that just went black?

“Orgies” yells the thirty-five-year-old man with a notebook that’s barely been touched and twenty unread text messages from women who were touched all too well.

We’re told to buy the next best book on how to make it because emotional storytelling and great works of art have always been created through the strict discipline of following steps one, two and three.

It was Frieze week, and party invitations were coming as fast as the rainstorms in Los Angeles (in 2023, too quickly). At 3 am, Ty (the boyfriend) and I were leaving some party in the Hills full of “art” and “Hollywood” people. While glamour and decadence adds a sense of luster to one’s life, that wasn’t my grand takeaway of the night. On the walk out, trying to hail an uber through zombie-like partygoers, a greater image filled my mind –

A girl laying in the fetal position, in her throw up. Her girlfriend walking up picking her hair strands out of the throw up and kissing her on her forehead, placing her jacket over her back.

No glamour, no decadence. No sense of Babylon. Just a girl being loved by someone in a humbling state. The detail of picking the strands of hair out of the throw up speaks up more emotionally than any dance floor of A-listers.

So, where do we find art?

I’ve found something consistent about my work – whether it’s a strength or a weakness. I consistently write about characters who want to be removed from their situations, whatever it may be, and escape into some sense of fantasy. That fantasy could be unrequited love, it could be a dream to escape the realism of life…

I grew up in a world that I didn’t want to be in – it was very religious and sterile and unforgiving of anything that was not deemed upright by the church. Mentally, I found myself escaping through stories and dreams and little history books and old music videos and anything that felt kaleidoscopic, rather than uniform.

As a director, I’m like a child peeking through a hole into a world. An observer of emotion. So, while I wasn’t that girl in the fetal position, laying in her throw up, I found myself seeing it…noticing it and connecting through the emotional connectivity of experience. (Although I’ve definitely been the drunk girl in the fetal position, just not in that exact spot).

So, where do you find art? You sit in it, stand, dance, and revel until you die and have forgotten where to put all those experiences? Or you hide away from the world, stick your nose in a book and learn every dictionary definition that could be found under art. Bravo!  

While I am still figuring this out, I really think you need to walk through life with a lens – a lens that distinguishes shapes and people, a lens that can interpret the pieces of a party that mean something. Once you begin to look out for the shapes of people in a dark room, for the sharp humanity that sticks out underneath the rock and dust of everyday life.

Taxi Driver was written out of Paul Schrader’s depression, feeling like a man stuck in a yellow, metal coffin – which he gave a name – a yellow taxi cab. He wrote it to distance himself from that man, to save himself.

I like to think that looking at life through the lens of something greater and more meaningful allows us to save ourselves. If this is all there is – that that girl on the street was a passing thought to be forgotten, that none of this really matters… I don’t want to know that. The fantasy, then, is that every heartbreak, every detour, every misstep, every kiss, every sense of love, and every inhale we take of life is to be used for something so much higher than just the moment.

And then, that is how I believe we find art.

Josephine skinny dipping at Hollywood Party.

Medium Wide. Skinny Dipping, Hollywood.

Left. Skinny dipping party, Hollywood.

Right. Skinny Dipping, Hollywood.

Sustenance, Hollywood.