The Cheese Stands Alone
& other happenings in a Maine basement
Dear friends,
I’m prepping a new film - called Shelf Life - for its film festival premiere in June, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The colorist has begun his work, the sound editors are beginning to clean up dialogue, and the composers are wrapping up the score. But I am still trying to get cheese to mold.
On and off for the past several years, I’ve been running time-lapses of cheese in various locations - a damp wine fridge, a cargo trailer, my office - to capture the marvelous flourishing of bacteria on cheese. But to no avail. One cheese gathered a bit of unimpressive white. Another deflated. Still another just sat there, and I hollered at it now and again.
My mother brought me a Tupperware from her fridge, labeled “Mold for Ian,” a magical jungle of blues and greens that reliably blooms in the back of her cheese drawers. (That’s a good sentence for a cheese romance novel!) plunked it near my cheeses, but alas. Nothing.
Almost every film I’ve worked on has involved time-lapses of one sort or another. For most of these, I’ve used DSLR cameras, the sort of cameras a photojournalist might use. (There was even a period, maybe 15 years ago, where we used DSLRs as our main cinema cameras. Amazing!) You click a picture, wait for time to elapse, then click another picture. Eventually you have enough of these to string together a motion picture of something changing over time.
My first time-lapses were in high school, filming the stars, but I have also installed time-lapse rigs atop towers in Qatar, office buildings in Boston, at the corner of a cornfield, near an ark built in Maine, and in the cab of my erstwhile Truck Farm. While setting these up, I’ve often wished we had had time-lapse cameras running for centuries. New England, my home landscape, has changed a lot in the last 500 years. What if we could see it?
My friend Jessica Oreck and I have daydreamed about setting up very long term time-lapse cameras in different places on the planet. Her dream is partly to depict how different species experience a lifetime, or any stretch of time: what is it like to be a tree? What is it like to be a lichen? I love this idea, because it speaks to a core project of cinema: to help us understand what it’s like to be someone else. (As Roger Ebert put it, “movies are like a machine that generates empathy.”) In this case, the someone else is another species, but the idea is the same: step into another way of seeing the world. I’d like to set up landscape time-lapses that exist for multiple centuries. Perhaps it might help us grapple with changes that can be mind-bogglingly long in timescale.
For the cheese time-lapses, I wasn’t sure how fast the mold would grow on the cheese. So my interval, the amount of time elapsing between photographs, was set at 5 minutes. Click. Grow mold for 5 minutes! Click. Grow mold for 5 minutes! And so on, for a few weeks. My current set up, my last ditch effort, is in the basement of this decrepit office building that my sister and I are fixing up for Wicked Delicate HQ; after paying some gentlemen an absurd amount of money to pour a new slab in the basement and waterproof it to prevent future mold, I’m now down there doing my darnedest to grow mold.
In closing, I would like to mention my main regret with regards to Shelf Life, which has nothing to do with my failed cheese time-lapses, and everything to do with the fact that I neglected to include in the movie the very odd phrase that appears at the end of the nursery rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell.” It haunts me, and I believe it to be one of the stranger song endings available to the human people.
Unsubscribe now, or face the consequences next week!
Exciting! I have a ticket for Friday, June 7 at Tribeca. See you there.