The Curtain 52: Bottom Up, Not Top Down š
Stop trying to be productive. Meaningful things emerge organically.
Hi friends,
Welcome toĀ The Curtain. Itās written by me,Ā Gus Cuddy. If youāve been forwarded this email, you can sign up for yourselfĀ here.
Iād love it if you forwarded this email to a friend!
Hope youāre staying safe and well, wherever you are. All is OK here, though Iām eating more rice, beans, and pasta than ever. (OK, since middle school.)
Iāve also seen some cool things just staring out a window for most of the time, like two crows eating gopher on a tree branch:
Bottom Up, Not Top Down
Iām convinced that one of the main curses of my life is that I know moreĀ aboutĀ movies than Iāve actuallyĀ seenĀ movies.Ā
Over the course of the last ten years, Iāve created countless syllabi, read endless articles, and curated what can only be described as a quantum amount of lists of lists on the history of film. I made a plan to watch the entireĀ They Shoot Pictures, Donāt They?Ā list (itself a curation of many lists) before I was 23; it didnāt happen. I thought for sure I would have at least gotten throughĀ the AFI listĀ by now; nah. There are many filmmakers who have had a large influence on me when Iāve only seen one or two of their movies; for some, Iāve seen none. To be clear, I donāt think this is inherently a bad thing. Learning to talk about experiences youāve never experienced is probably an essential part of the modern age; I think this is what Pierre Bayard is getting at in his bookĀ How to Talk About Books You Havenāt Read. (But Iām not actually sureāIāve never read it.)
But now that weāre effectively in Quarantine, Mari and I have started to watch movies. Sometimes two a day! This has been my dream for so long; finally, with unlimited free time, I can surf the niche waves of cinematic universes that Iāve always thought more about than actually experienced.Ā
But there is a critical difference to this newfound luck: it emerged organically, bottom-up.
Iāve realized that every other previous effort Iāve had to watch movies has been top-down: Iāve tried to assemble massive spreadsheets of information, and then got frustrated with my brain when it was unable to muster up the motivation to even know where to start. But starting is the hardest thing, and the most important.
I had it all backwards. The best way to start is bottom-up: doing what is interesting and in front of you, instead of trying to adhere to some grand pie-in-the-sky vision. For getting into a movie watching habit, it means actually just watching whatever you want to watch. We decided to watch CĆ©line SciammaāsĀ Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a movie weāve both wanted to watch for a while. Itās not on any of my canon lists (yet), but it was what was in front of us: a recent, acclaimed movie that has been recommended to me many times. (Keeping up with the cultural conversation is a perfectly bottom-up motivation that works.)
WatchingĀ PortraitĀ led to a bottom-up rabbit hole. Since we liked the movie, we decided to watch the rest of Sciammaās work. This, then, connected with something weāve been trying to do: watch mostly movies directed by women. Eliza Hittmanās new filmĀ Never Rarely Sometimes AlwaysĀ was just released, and had a lot of buzz in the film world. Itās $20 to rent which is a lot, so we watched her previous two movies on Hulu,Ā It Felt Like LoveĀ andĀ Beach Rats.
All of a sudden, weāve watched a lot of movies! And it emerged organically.
I think thereās a reason this bottom-up approach works especially well today. In the Information Age, where we are constantly bombarded and overloaded with new info, itās more important than ever to be able to adapt and leverage information powerfully. Old, industrial-age manufacturing processes are centered around top-down, plan-based construction: you have a vision, and you work towards it by working backwards from the vision, step by step, till you know what to do.
But in the digital age, this is far too slow. Information comes at us so fast, and things change so quickly, that trying to stubbornly stick to some long-term vision can lead to things going off the rails. We need to be quick on our feet, and the best way to do this is by starting from the bottom up. Starting from the bottom up means allowing yourself the freedom to tinker in the direction thatās most interesting to youāand allowing that direction to change. Itās OK to leave the end vision hazy because itās going to change a lot, and youāre probably never going to get thereāand if you do, itās not going to be exactly what we imagined.
Iāve been thinking about this more because this time of social distancing has been tough for people in so many ways. For those of us who are privileged to have a lot of free time right now, it can be easy to beat ourselves up for not optimizing every second of this time. We have been conditioned to treat time as money. Now that we have an abundance of it, it seems that we need to use it so wisely: be as productive as possible, invent calculus like Isaac Newton did during quarantine, or writeĀ King LearĀ like Shakespeare did.
We might even try to commandeer time itself by laying out a master plan, top-down, that we will commence on to complete our goals. (Goals that might not necessarily even be self-imposed, but that weāve inherited from society.) But I think itās important to resist those urges, and instead just do whatās interesting to us, right now. Letting our interests and loves guide us, letting our next projects and goals emerge organically. Trying the other way around is like building a stack of LEGOs with one brick at the bottom and a hundred at the top: pretty, but itās all going to come toppling down with the slightest bump.
š Notes from the Week
Williamstown goes full audio
Well, itās finally come to pass: a major theatre is collaborating with Audible to deliver their entire season via audio.
Williamstown is going to use all of their actorsāincluding Bobby Canavale and Audra McDonaldāpay their artists, and professionally record them with sound engineers. They say theyāre going to try to do it in person, which seems very strange to me. Isnāt the point of something like this the idea that you could record remotely?
Still, Iāll be very interested to see how they adapt something like Robert OāHaraās version ofĀ A Streetcar Named Desire. As bullish about audio as Iād been in the past, this does seemā¦weird. But Iām excited a theatre is going to give this a shot.
Zia Anger and the Power of the Moving Image
Another artist Iāve been following for a while isĀ Zia Anger. Her recent workĀ My First FilmĀ is a fusion cinema and live theatre experience, which Richard BrodyĀ wrote up in a glowing review. She toured the experience around, but is now doing live stream performances of it. As far as I know, the only way to get in on these is toĀ follow her on Twitter, which I recommend.
I also lovedĀ this pieceĀ in The Creative Independent with Anger, about why moving images are so important:
Right now, in this whole paradigm shift, moving images are the great equalizer.
Stop trying to be productive
This urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of Americaās always-on work culture
Notes on Thomas Ostermeier
Everyone in the online theatre world has been talking aboutĀ SchaubuhneĀ and their streaming theatre, and the virtues of auteur director Thomas Ostermeier. (His old production ofĀ Hamlet, for instance, was recently featured.)
What I always find interesting about Ostermeier is that heās considered a conservative theatre maker in Berlin. I recommend the bookĀ āThe Theatre of Thomas OstermeierāĀ for a great (if sometimes academic) resource on Ostermeierās process, with interviews from actors and essays from Ostermeier. It only has two reviews on Amazon and thatās baffling to me.
There are two big things I took away from the book. First is his approach towards what he calls ārealismā in theatre: itās an attempt to āportray the world as it is, and not as it looks.ā This means that ānaturalismā is not the point. Secomd, despite his (and many othersā) reputation for ādirectorsā theatreā (often used in a derogatory way), Ostermeier ultimately believes that nothing is more important than the actorāand how they can be totally liberated on stage.
Recommendations
Some great film recommendations from the past few weeks:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma)
Tomboy (Celine Sciamma)
Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins)
End Note
Thatās all for this weekāthanks so much for reading!
If you enjoyed this, I would really love it if you forwarded it to a friend or two.
As always, you can access the entire archiveĀ here.
You can reply directly to this email and Iāll receive it. So feel free to do that about anything. I love to hear back from people.
See you next week!
-Gus