haunted by someone else's past (beware: artist at work)

I feel a little silly about what I'm going to say here.

I suspect there isn't a person in the world who isn't guilty of a little nostalgia from time to time, and guilty of being swept up in some brand of sentimentality. I would also suspect that most people usually get nostalgic for bygone eras of their own lives, for times to which they have once been directly connected. It's a guilty pleasure for me, looking back in sentimentality at times I miss.

But I am almost embarrassed to admit that recently I've more often looked back at times I missed and feel sentimental about them. I'm talking about times before I was born. Before I was even a twinkle in my young parent's eyes. Even before my young parents were twinkles in their young parent's eyes. I find myself sometimes missing the turn of the century. Not this century. Last century.

Are all the people I've ever idolised all products of generations before me, who lived and operated according to the rules of the early 1900's? Why is this? Is there not anyone I can relate to now? I don't know if this is the case, really, I'm only posing the question to myself now... because until now I've been a girl who has had relatively few idols. Is it because I feel I missed out on something exciting? Is it because they had one foot in the old times and one foot in the new? Is it because they lived through the paradigm shifts that have changed how we relate to the universe we live in and took hold of the opportunities available to them that sprang out of our mounting understanding of the world and used all the new thinking as tools for their lives and livelihoods? Why on Earth would I be nostalgic for an era I was not a part of?

I get excited about 1904. I wish mightily that I had seen the 1920's and 30's (although, as it seems history is repeating itself in the financial world and we've just come out of a 20-like roaring ecnomy, I might just get to see a 30's brand of living yet). There are so mny people I would love to have met. There are so many things I feel I would have been a shoo-in for back then. I would give my left arm (and maybe my right) to have been around when cinema was new.

I'm currently gripped in a fit of inspiration after reaquainting myself with the work of Charlie Chaplin recently (or even currently) and have been addressing an aching need to write this bloody, nagging story/screenplay that has been incubating inside my head for a few years now and every time I feel my interest wane I throw in a Chaplin DVD and feel myself swept up again. I've been reshuffling scenes that have been sitting in my mental attic for what feels like decades and slotting them into a new framework that seems to finally make sense, and I have to say it's all thanks to Mr. Chaplin.

But Chaplin is only one on a growing list of people who are inspiring me lately. I wander off in front of the computer reading about them all and then I find myself getting really distracted by delving off into photo archives (I especially fault LIFE Magazine for adding their entire collection into Google's image search... what a wealth of amazing treasures are there! And what a distracting lot!). I've just been looking at photos from the 1930's and feeling these pangs of... literally missing these times. Why am I not there?

Does this strike anyone else as really wierd? Am I losing it?

I've decided to use this idiosyncracy as an aid in writing my screenplay. If I have to live with my neurosis, I may as well address it as a tool. Not the missing-times-one-never-lived-through bit of my neurosis, mind you, just the inspiration of learning more about the motivation, the logic I see in Chaplin's films and his film making process. I'm delighted to say I'm having wonderful visions. They were wonderful before I discovered this latent yearning for the old days of filmmaking, but they're made even more wonderful and logical by what I'm gleaning from my nostalgic archeology.

... and in the spirit of every desperate artist longing for the break, I also have been having very clear dreams or visions (don't remember if I've had them asleep or awake) of being awarded something in a very large room full of people for my work. Good, huh? Might as well think big.




I saw this for the first time recently and it makes me laugh for three reasons: it reminds me of old Super8 home movies in which my mother and her siblings would always get in the shot, mugging for the camera; it reminds me of my brother, who is always doing silly things similar to this; people are still infatuated with "accidentally" getting into shot when you're out shooting an event. To this day it happens all the bloody time.