pitching failure
a genre of excitement
I realised last week that I don’t have all that much to say. For the past four weeks, sure, I have had plenty to say, about one thousand words a week. However, those words had probably been simmering for quite a bit already. I always want to start something new, love to write a good pitch, or maybe get everthing you need in order to make an oil painting. I think I have bought all those things about three times, and the closest I have ever come to making one, was a penciled outline of a dove at a furry convention. Recently, Aske and I had a conversation about venture capitalism, we pondered on the possibility that I perhaps had chosen the wrong line of work. With excitement and intuition, something sparks your mind, you put time and energy into it, become more and more excited, and then when the glow starts to fade, you sell it and earn a shit ton of money. When the glow starts to fade within the creative field, the opposite is bound to happen, I suppose. Not that the opposite of that opposite ever really happens. I, of course, don’t want to be a venture capitalist, but the idea of getting rewarded for letting go of something mid growth in order to start something completely different, sounds pretty sweet. Disorientation as a line of work. Something to counter the professional and the genius. Still, I can’t help but find it seriously impressive when someone is just really good at something due to the fact that they have done it since childhood. Through this infatuation, I better understand why parents force their kids to learn the bass guitar at four or sign them up for tennis when they are in the womb. They just want them to be really good at something. In that way, specialisation acts as a sort of parental insurance, aligning the kid with the structures of success.
The other night I watched The Man Without a Past, I have watched a lot of movies by this Finnish director, and they always make me want to make one. There is something accessible about his storytelling, deeply human and slightly amateur. Maybe that is what is human about it. Amateurs start from scratch, they don’t build upon preset ideas of what’s right, they just try their best, which is what the nameless protagonist of the aforementioned movie does. He gets mugged and loses his stuff, but he himself is luckily found. In an abandoned shipping container, he gets nursed back to life. Even though he loses his name alongside his memories, he begins again by moving into the neighbouring container and lets his life spread from there into the city. And I say all of this with no spoiler alerts. Finishing it left me with the same feeling as many of his other films has, which is… what a wonderful thing it is to make a movie, just a bunch of people, tell a story, have things said and done, not read on a piece of paper, but experienced in the sensory world of ears and eyes. And then I went out to write a pitch to my friend and longtime amateur-film collaborator Neeltje Van der Vlugt. We have made two films together, and both were no-cost, quite easy and very fun to make.
Our protagonist arrives in Amsterdam by public transport. It’s never said where she comes from, though her accent might reveal it. She moves into an abandoned tramhouse and begins to make it her home. As she settles, she starts building small scenographies inside of it. It’s unclear whether these are for anyone or simply part of how she understands her surroundings. She looks for work but is always met with bad timing or wrong qualifications, she has two degrees but can’t make a flat white. Her days move between the tramhouse and the city, between the tasks of living and acts of construction. Sometimes she reads a line from a book, and later, we hear that line echoed in dialogue on a street corner or played out within one of her sets. A fiction filmed within the real, drifting between building a life and building a set, having the domestic and the surreal slightly collapse into one another, as they so often do. What begins as a search for work and belonging becomes a contemplative construction on time, labour, and imagination, a film that watches someone trying to make something out of where she is.
The nice thing about the format of a pitch is that what it describes doesn’t actually have to happen in order for the pitch itself to exist. In excitement, Neeltje and I could share a few dreams, a laugh, and a potential failure, regardless of whether we make another film. I think I also might just be lazy, and that’s why I like writing so much. Actually making stuff is so much effort. Writing is mostly just consuming. Walking, reading, watching, lying, feeling, chit chatting, drinking, noting a few things, and then sitting on my bum a few hours a day. However, I still end where I started. I don’t have all that much to say, or I at least need a bit more time to simmer, so I will make this substack posting into something monthly instead of weekly. Otherwise, it goes so fast.
*I recently watched The Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismäki