This summer has been full of travel for me. A lot of refolding clothes and repacking suitcases, a lot of sleeping in spare rooms, hotels, sofas and visiting family.
Incredible, and exhausting.
I love travelling and visiting people, and I really love exploring and seeing new things, but keeping my working routine anywhere near stable or calm has been challenging. (And people who read my post on finding calmness in chaos will know how important it is to me).
Keeping a routine was so hard that I gave up trying. Instead, I let go of my usual processes and tried to be open to new ways of working and seeing and keeping myself inspired. As a result, I’ve often felt like I might lose my mind, or that I have spent a lifetime not really learning anything. but the best of it has given me new ways to work, new ways to not work (yes, it’s ALL the work, but you know what I mean), and new ways to be a human being.
And it’s given me a great big pile of summer inspirations to share.
Reading (short) books, not just watching films.
I usually watch about 250-300 films a year. It’s a big part of my life and I take it seriously. But this summer, with all the travel, I decided to take the summer off and instead read more.
I didn’t want to just lose myself in long, exciting story books either I wanted books that felt small, specific and surprising - and that made me feel the way the films I love do. Full of observation and emotion and humour and beauty. Books full of ideas, even if the ideas aren’t complete.
And short - 150 pages or so. Definitely under 200. So they could be read in a day and experienced in a condensed time frame (like films).
I’ve loved the practice of reading daily in the times I might otherwise have watched film. Getting through so many books in a row has given me a masterclass in world building and setting frameworks for stories.
Some of the highlights were;
And West by Carys Davies, which is spectacularly good. Here’s the synopsis:
When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to return within two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister, Julie.
The language, the imagery, the characters unfolding and the sense of time and place are all so incredibly masterful.
Agnes Varda
I took my daughter to the exhibition of Agnes Varda’s photography at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, and somehow it made me think even more highly of her.
She is already one of my great inspirations. Her playful, curious films that drip with empathy and filmmaking mastery are almost all delightful. And her voice/ hair combination is unrivalled.
But this show was even more inspiring because it wasn’t really much to do with her films. To see all the other work that she did (advertising, photography, her notebooks, plays, public art projects) and realise that everything she did, she did with curiosity, invention and imagination, and that form (let alone genre) was much less important, has been burning in my mind ever since.
She tried something every single time. She set herself playful rules and then made expressive human work within those boundaries. And even more than that, she created and lived a life around her work, and vice versa, that meant both fed each other in a beautifully intertwined and open way of being that I really hope I can emulate.
My daughter also loved the small piece of Cléo from 5 to 7 that was playing. It’s the film that Cleo watches from the projection booth. So Varda got Godard and Anna Karina to act in a little film within a film she made. Genius, playful and very inspiring.
Daniel Kitson is a British comedian and playwright. I’ve followed his work for a long time and watched him many times. I find him another person who defies easy classification, and who is always making something surprising.
But the inspiring thing this summer hasn’t been his work, it’s been how he reaches his audience. Daniel doesn’t do TV, have an agent, or advertise. Until recently you could only get his past work on some bad bootlegs, a bit on bandcamp or a couple of links on Vimeo. Instead, he has a mailing list. He books his own shows. And now he has a website that I think shows a path forward for people who own their own work, and who can cultivate and connect with their audience directly.
He has recently added the ‘An Accumulation of Failure’ section, which is an expanding collection of past and future work you can subscribe to. There are audio recordings, some videos, some music, copies of scripts. It’s added to more or less monthly and I think it’s brilliant.
Owning your work, connecting with people who want to see it, and offering them not only the library of work in an exclusive way, but glimpses of the process feels to me like the kind of model that this next wave of filmmaking has to embrace.
Sometimes inspiration for me is what is just about to come. And this September I‘m going to San Sebastián film festival for the first time.
There’s nothing quite like a good European film festival for me. A true celebration of cinema, not just an industry event with some screenings you can’t get into (ahem).
If it happens to be in an amazing place, with a great line up of films, then I get very inspired indeed.
This was part of a series of Filmstack inspirations kicked off, inevitably, by the great
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Others like
(with an epic post on making your stories mythic) and amongst others have also posted their recent inspirations, which I would highly recommend. That will then send you down the rabbit hole of inspiration…
San Sebastián is a one-of-a-kind city. I’ve never been to the film festival but the backdrop alone will be worth the trip!
Thanks for the kind words, and all the new discoveries. I've never even considered feasting specifically on short movie-length books. Love it!