by Laird Hunt
Responding the other day to the third of my prererelease Impossibly short films, my long-time Coffee House editor remarked that it was getting hard to know where the book (The Impossibly) stopped and the nonbook began. This was good to hear. It is important to me that ten years out from its original September 11–smacked appearance in the world this book live a varied life outside of itself. That it live in different ways outside of itself.
In Georges Perec’s great novel La Vie mode d’emploi, one of the lesser-known constraints at work is that in every section Perec obliged himself to write in something that had happened to him during the period the section was being written. All writers do something like this, but Perec’s insight was to formalize it. To make sure the intervention of the daily, the random, the swerve of quotidian chance was alive and breathing in an enormously governed novel. When I was writing The Impossibly I borrowed this mechanism of directed dailyness. In fact, it infected the whole novel: the entire work is informed by the home footage of a life being lived. Footage dunked in a bucket of late twentieth-century perplexity and early twenty-first-century blur.
The little movies I have made seek to speak to this impulse.
I am making them by taking bits of music by serious musicians (thus far my sister, Lorna Hunt, and Denver-based Roger Green) and combining them with more or less adeptly arranged footage, which I shot over the years with no particular pretense. In each instance, my silenced film clips have been activated by the music set to work with them. Film #1—shot with my Olympus Pen E-PL1 through the windshield as I was driving away from Ojo Caliente, New Mexico—was just blurry road footage caused by a visible thumb smudge interfering with my autofocus until I listened again to a clip sent to me by Lorna last summer of something she had done with a mandolin she found in her closet.
Film #2 combines footage from the streets of north Saint Louis and central Paris with an epic ride I took down a slide at the Saint Louis City Museum.
Film #3 came to life for me when I combined a draft clip from an album Roger Green has made around The Impossibly with old footage I had from a Barcelona street puppet performance and a biplane ride I took near Rhinebeck, New York.
Films #4 and #5, to be released over the next few weeks, will follow a similar process.
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