Do strangers have walk on parts in the film that is your life?

In his entertaining ruminations around his reading of Geoff Dyer’s book about photography The Ongoing Moment Colin Campbell Robinson says (my underlining);

 

I have a crank theory that there are only 27 people in the world. One of
them may be the man in the overcoat Geoff Dyer refers to. He who passes
through the history of photography as the figure in a landscape, anonymous
but present. In a 60s submarine film  (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?)
Edward G. spends many scenes merely making up the numbers as strategies
are discussed. He stands around saying nothing. I thought every film
should have a character that just stands around.

Which raises the issue of strangers who have regular walk on parts in the
film that is your life (or your life that is the film). At the moment I
have two. One is quite hirsute and strides purposefully around in heavy
leather boots. At first I saw him as he walked down my street. Then I
started to see him up the shops and finally I saw him twice in one day in
places distant from each other and suspect he, like me, is a renegade
flaneur. The other is in a number of people’s films and his story, as
related to me by the barmaid last Friday when I was scribbling my thoughts
re The Ongoing Moment into my aforementioned notebook, his story has a
poignancy to it that I cannot relate until the facts are confirmed.
However, he is around and he waves at me and others as if he’s behind a
two-way mirror.

The silent closeness of strangers ……..

 

If you have seen Cirque du Soleil‘s  Quidam you might agree that it is the most profound and successful of Cirque du Soleil’s productions.  Why because it creates the context of a narrative which is the whole into which all parts fit.  As such it is the opposite of the ‘variety show’.

Quidam means “a certain one/thing” or “anonymous passerby” in Classical Latin.  The Quidam may have stepped out of a surrealist painting or been conjured up out of Zoé’s imagination. He is anonymous; he is everyone, and, at the same time, he is no one.

The entire show is imagined by a young girl, named Zoe, a sad and forlorn girl who is alienated and ignored by her parents. She dreams up the whimsical world of Quidam in an attempt to escape her sadness.

The title refers to the feature character, a man without a head, carrying an umbrella and a bowler hat. Quidam is said to be the embodiment of both everyone and no one at the same time. Subtitles at the beginning of the official video state: Quidam: a nameless passer-by, a solitary figure lingering on a street corner, a person rushing past. One who cries out, sings and dreams within us all.

According to Cirque’s literature: Quidam highlights our frailties and our anguish in the face of the new millennium that lies before us. It also underlines differences, conveying positive feelings and resentment and confronting our dreams with our nightmares. Quidam is more scripted than previous productions, integrating performance and theatricality to a greater degree, and draws on the emotional relationships between the performers in the troupe.

You can hear a fascinating  interview with Geoff Dyer HERE

Phrases from the interview:

a cloud that moves and takes different shapes……..a very fluid carousel of images………….no chapters……you can go from page 3 to page 63…….icons of photography – the blind beggar – the image that is begging for pity – interesting new pictures come from older pictures ………..organizing principle was always what the photographs were showing….had no prior ideas – post-its in books hands, clouds etc. – once I noticed categories I was looking for them -backs-benches-hats-white fences -some kind of story is emerging – the man with his back to us – changes through book – killed off in a photograph – Steve Shapiro – silhouetted figure often wearing an overcoat particularly Kertesz – Shapiro photo figure is leaving out of the frame – but reappears in Balkans at the end – blind beggars – they keep appearing and disappearing – Strand expressed his desire to take picture when they were unaware –  Paul Strand Weston rivalry Weston fence homage to Strand – a tag or graffiti in homage – HCB chided Evans & Weston about photos of rocks – strange inversion evidenced by Lang but it was taken by Ben Shern – my favourite photo by EW was taken by WE – they became the same – photographers morphing into each other in form – photo a remake of B & C – your wit seems to be about self-defeat – someone said it was about p at all – yes if photos were seen as a lens through which we come to see the world differently – to see these photos you have to see them in a context of significance… p becomes a way of creating a m change – P was a naturalist with a wonderful eye – you the analyst become like a child with a top, fascinated I pick up on things that are completely arbitrary – no inevitability-

Perhaps best of all the idea of The Ongoing Moment as ‘a non-fiction work of art’

Michael Silverblatt of KCRW did a brilliant job – Dyer sounded only slightly condescending in the second half.

To go to Silverblatt’s decades of interviews go HERE

It reminds of my years of anguish in trying how to settle how to write lineally in a PhD about Holistic Education.  What was the solution? “Shut up and get on with it – they are the rules of the game……”  

See my earlier paper on Circus, Holistic Education and  Cirque du Soleil