VIII
The Duty of the Director
Piecing fragments together into
a whole. He saw this as the central duty of the director. Although clearly
echoing the thoughts of Eisenstein, he was actually referring to a short story
by Italo Calvino on World Memory.
He was always referencing
someone or other, or visiting some site of fictional importance. You may have
already noticed that many of his ideas pay homage to that film he loved more
than any other, Sans Soleil. It seems
that most of his words aren’t his, instead they’re nostalgic rehashings of a
time and place beyond his reach.
“The duty of the director”, the
story goes, “is to make sure that nothing is left out, because what is left out
is as if it had never been.” The director is “working in expectation of an
imminent disappearance of life on Earth. We are working so that all may not
have been in vain.”
He
identified with this Borgesian project to salvage all memories of worth, and
from his letters I can tell that he feels it with a greater and greater
urgency. I sense that he saw it as the key to immortality in a time of
uncertainty, a time where we have before us Nietzsche’s gate, revealing
eternity in both directions.
He wrote me of Umberto Eco’s
description of a philosophy of immortality as duplication. If we replicate our
lives, copy the things we love into steadfast images, images that can be stored
in one vast archive, library, or museum, then they will be granted an eternal
life of remembrance.
Despite all this, he distrusted
the greatest archive imaginable, that web of connections that has rendered the
notion of physical storage of information obsolete – the internet. Even if the
world were to be destroyed, all of our memories would still be up there,
bouncing around between satellites. But this gave him no solace. He distrusted
that which he could not hold, that which he had no control over. He wrote me
that the internet has no director, nobody to filter out the rubbish that
deserves no remembrance.
