To take from Tag Gallagher, film criticism without images is more or less fruitless. We’ve introduced ourselves as a magazine, but that’s not quite true: Still Light is not much more than a group of friends whose cinematic apprenticeships ran along parallel trajectories.
The initial motivation was the simple wish to freely incorporate images into our writing. The earliest pieces are marked with a persistent innocence: more carefree, less rigorous. Everyone was doing everything. There was a lightness to the process, prompting words that were probably too harsh, too wide-reaching in their enthusiasm, too inconsiderate towards our compatriots. Inevitably we became conscious of the responsibility that lies at the edge of other, more serious horizons. Perhaps it was a flaw on our part.
Some questions in regards to this undertaking now become apparent: what is the purpose of our magazine, composed of a handful of students across continents, and how can it manage to get at making sense of the history of film criticism, as has been written in a yet-to-be released text: “to bring Bazin to Brakhage, Bénard da Costa to Markopoulos, Gallagher to Snow, Mourlet to Dorsky”? Really, we don’t purport to know the answers. The production of this issue has been precarious, to say the least.
Nevertheless, aspirations to the art et essai circuit quarters are nowhere to be found, nor to the frigid correctness of program notes, bless them. The wandering amateur is the ball of fire, like the displaced orphan boys of Shimizu or the westward searchers of Walsh, looking for a place to settle down, never succeeding, always seeing and hearing everything; like Brakhage, we hold this restlessness as a badge of honour against the “professionals” and “artists”. We’d be nowhere without the numerous online troves of films and criticisms: a bunch of cinéma-naifs from across the globe, finding our way around this ever-changing expanse. The itinerant cinephile should not stop at any particular establishment; let this be a nameless roadside inn.
Amateurism, in its endless restlessness, has to be kept with the humility and promise to never settle, a failure we’ve seen so many times in our predecessors. Our conditions have not changed, nor has the spirit of our original goals; there must be a space to be as carefully impractical, measuredly rash, and consciously disoriented as needed. An emergent facet in the theme of this issue deals with younger filmmakers persistently questioning their own position in the periphery; staking their roots where they feel they can hold the most control over themselves. Let’s call it a pragmatic accident.
We have gathered some filmmakers who traverse a theme; because they traverse a theme, similarities appear. The decision is as simple as that. And, like signore Rossellini, who is interested in what lies beyond and beneath reality, we are interested in what lies around the word at the center of everything. Like Aprà said, if De Sica was a neorealist filmmaker, then what Rossellini was would have to be completely redefined, and thus cinema would have to be redefined. Perhaps we could simply call him a “realist”. This word and its variants are almost entirely absent from the issue—at the same time, we must invoke Rivette, when he managed to reach its entirety in the simple affirmation that “the straight line is the shortest path to get to one point from another”. Just as Rossellini was able to grasp onto a miracle by abandoning rigor, this foolish belief carves through mountains: only by possessing it can one begin to approach any notion of reality. Not a theoretical jumble, but the exact opposite: when Boris Lehman speaks of his fellow compatriot Robert Kramer, he points out that the physical effort put into “clearing one’s own eyes” is so much more valuable than intellectual reflection. We aren’t monks, our lives are not devoted in pursuit of absolute self-isolation. Yukong was just a man; after St. Francis leaves the man afflicted with leprosy, the shortest and only feasible movement was to look towards the sky, never content to stop on what has been seen on the ground.
(To define is to constantly develop. Past the confines of a piece, an issue, a magazine, constantly.) The amateur criticism may always be in a constant pre-history, distant from certainty. As Aprà denotes in his comprehensive text on Warhol (translated in the issue), a primitive prehistory is the specific point from which certain chasms can form—a starting place that is by its very nature precarious, always defined relatively to what may come after or before it. These chasms represent an opportunity. Every issue is necessarily a continuation and complication of the subjects that have been written about prior.
Our name comes from a collective interest in what was once a film that only existed in our imagination. The point of departure being specifically unknown, we struggle to believe in discovery and rediscovery—they are terms that seem to represent a trend towards a hypertrophy of the ‘I’—but in encounters, through disparate geographies, from different cultures and timezones, like our namesake film, which travels northward from Hydra, through Switzerland, into London. As the last shot of the film—entirely unsatisfied—shows, there is never a destination.
All this to say that the filmmakers discussed in this issue engage in the obstinate belief that one must abandon preconceived notions, to see anew, to surrender one’s eyes to the world before setting up the camera, traversing the world in order to reach a greater understanding of a whole, whatever that may mean. We are all naifs, filmmakers and cinephiles alike. A thing is always at once itself and something else—as important as this is to how we see film and think through film, it is, at the same time, an important edict on how to live. And that’s all that matters.
Our deepest thanks to all who have and will have benevolently cast their eyes on this humble undertaking wandering at the periphery of the periphery.
