Author Archives: Dimsumblow

T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock’ has influenced and continues to influence my ‘days and ways’ ever since I first encountered the poem when I was thirteen. I remember hating the poem when I first read it, but I hated it only because I did not understand. After reading and re-reading it many times, reflecting and considering its winding ways, I began to understand: I began to understand that life is beyond our capacity to understand and therefore by quelling our pressing desire to make sense of the senseless, we can understand it more: as George Orwell said in his book ‘1984’, “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength” What I take from Orwell is that the minute we categorise and label something is the minute its mystery, its boundless form, its ability to surprise is quite removed.

In this film, I wanted to show man walking away from what he knows, to turn his back on the ‘one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants’, to remove himself from the ‘streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent’. The image of the sophisticated world: the highways, the cars, the consumerism, the happy MacDonald smiles that infiltrate a increasingly dissatisfied society is overlaid with the simple image of a pair of feet that walk towards the camera; away from the flow of traffic into the city; away from our ‘civilised’ society. Why I wanted to do this was because I feel that so much of the way we think today, the way we act, is mediated and influenced by the media and governing powers. We’ve come to depend too much on the thinking of others, denying our instinct to the point where we no longer feel our instinct.

In essence I wanted this short film to be a turn on everything we are educated to do and to believe in: this idea that we must have jobs, we should marry and have a family. But what happens when the day comes where we look at ourselves in the mirror and say: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, the day we realise that we kept telling ourselves ‘there will be time, there will be time’, and now all that time is gone. That our lives have been wasted on dreaming of the future and living in the past, it’s such a rare thing to meet someone who lives every day as it comes, who lives entirely in the present, but why?