On the 14-hour KE192 flight back from this week’s shoot in Korea, I had the quiet realization that much of what we’d experienced - microscopy in the mudflats of Incheon, where the tides rise an astonishing 30 feet, putting even my beloved Downeast shores to shame; a walk among poppies with a taxonomist near the DMZ, where ravages of landmines hinder her ability to press new specimens; several young K-poppers practicing a dance on a sidewalk, way past my bedtime and surely theirs too; our marvelous traveling scientist Manu Prakash setting up an armada of portable microscopes in his hotel room with the backdrop of Seoul’s neon flickering outside, showing us thousands of diatoms bonking into one another like drunken kayakers - all these visions and more were stored on portable hard drives the size of a pack of cards.
The hard drives ride home in my carry-on luggage, along with a smattering of lenses and my trusty Sony FX9 that I bring along as a backup camera to Ezra’s powerful ARRI rig. The strange condensing of sounds and images onto hard drives is nothing new to me. The Arc of Oblivion (2023), which is still having a wee run in theaters scattered around North America before it hits the digital VOD land this summer, explored the fragility of our archives, and helped me think through some of the pileup of digital imagery that has happened in my 21 years of filmmaking and 8 years as a father.
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But there was something about this week in Korea that made the hard drives seem particularly absurd as carriers of what we’d experienced. Perhaps it was the sleepless nature of a shoot like this, 13 hours out of sync with my body’s time zone (or does that become 11 hours out of sync?). Or perhaps it was the abundance of smells that we encountered — the vermillion kimchi of Seoul street markets, the sweet woodsmoke I caught near the border with North Korea.
I haven’t had the displeasure of working for many other filmmakers over the years, but one told me once, “all that matter is what’s in the can.” What he meant was that if we didn’t capture it on film (or, in those years, tape), then it’s as if it didn’t happen. Or, put another way, you need to ruthlessly focus on getting things recorded. This is second rate hogwash. What we record is important (which is why I don’t say this expression is first rate hogwash), but the things we see and sense outside of the scope of the camera’s gaze are integral too.
At a botanic garden a long stone’s throw from the DMZ, with soldiers whizzing overhead now and again in patrol helicopters, I spent a few minutes scouting, stumbling around in the underbrush of the forest in search of good looking ants, armed with the assumption that like any good botanic garden they’d cleared out any land mines before opening to the public. We were filming with a probe lens rented in Seoul, a proboscis-shaped contraption that gives a wide-angle macro perspective on tiny objects. It was then that I heard a low hum coming from the hills, the same low hum I’d heard, mysteriously, in rural central Texas a month ago at the precise moment that the moon fully eclipsed the sun.
Well, surely not the same hum. It didn’t last long, and our intrepid sound recordist Tom was down the trail a ways capturing the clatter of birds in the woods; I won’t know until back in the edit room whether we have the hum, and in any event it’s the sort of thing you tend to pull out of your footage — it’s out of place. For me, it was less about the hum itself as a sound that I needed to record, and more about the slender thread of connection that was drawn in that instant between the leaf litter of the DMZ and a dirt road outside of Junction, TX. As if an odd tunnel had been laser-bored in a hard line through the Earth’s crust itself, from where I’d been to where I was. A line joining two points on an arc, by the by, is called a chord.
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Ever since the week of the eclipse, I’d been dogged by some inexplicable bouts of anxiety and shortness of breath, and in the calm of those spring woods a month later things suddenly seemed - time will tell - to resolve or settle out, as if some door that had been wrenched open was now gently closing.
What all this means for the movie we’re making, heaven knows. The moment passed and I said nothing of it to my team. But for me it was a reminder that the filmmaking process, despite its firm realities of deadlines and hard drives and all the rest, is shot through with experiences that we cannot immediately explain, or record. Preserving even a sliver of that feeling in the final film is, I suppose, all I can ever strive for — the closest we can get to a glimpse of magic, or humanity, or both.