Cinematic (Manu Joseph)

A Note To My Adolescent Self.

As a lonely young man largely forgotten by the world and invisible to the mostgorgeous women whom you adore, should you not be writing melancholy poetry or the vain prose of deep self-regard. Instead you are drawn to cinema, you derive so much from movies, and it appears that you have been infected by the unsung altruism of commercial cinema, its duty to entertain.

Is it because you think you know how to entertain? Is that your conceit? Or is it humility that pushes you to entertain? Is it not true that you find the need to have a deal with your audience – ‘I have something to say and I am afraid you may not be interested, but I seek the right to say it by giving you something in return’. Isn’t that the humility of cinema?

Or is it just that you are from a dramatic nation where all human emotions are in plain sight, and conversations and gestures in real life are imitations of cinema. You cannot capture the great republic without a dramatic form of story-telling.

Or is it just that you are daunted by the scale of the freedom that fiction provides? Are you searching for boundaries to limit yourself because you will go crazy otherwise? If you can write anything, what must you write, what must you omit? But if your fiction is a film, then it gifts you boundaries. You can only write what you can show, what you can transmit as an image. You do insert abstract notions, but largely you write what the eye can see.

Also, you love the underdog. You are on the side of the underdog. In the stories you wish to tell, the defeated plot their ways to triumph. A story requires movement and the progress of the underdog is movement. Cinema has done this the best, and so you have taken much from it.

ENDS

Pour citer cette ressource :

Manu Joseph, "Cinematic (Manu Joseph)", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), juin 2015. Consulté le 04/11/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/entretiens-et-textes-inedits/cinematic-manu-joseph-