On the Bus

I once heard a man say that he'd fallen in love with a woman on a bus. A woman he'd never talked to and maybe not seen completely. But something about her pose and her clothing made him fantasize about her. And, he added, it was these little love affairs, the ones that were purely ephemeral, that were the most poignant in his life.

This makes sense, and I think many of us understand it intuitively. Who hasn't fantasized about Mr. Darcy?

Women in suits on buses I think is also the reason many visual and storytelling artists go into their trade. I for instance, though only on the cusp of artistry in my video work, am drawn to documenting and talking and pointing cameras at people, because I want all their stories. I want the woman on the bus and the guy behind her and the mom with the little kid that's going to get whooped pretty soon, each in a little tiny book with hard covers, captured and put away on a shelf for posterity.

There is such an activity, of course. It's called fiction writing.

Writers generalize forms just as the man I heard tell the bus story did. But they generalize expansively and imaginatively. And correctly. They take the woman prototype AND the reasons random men on buses might be attracted to her AND the reasons some particular man might be - and they qualify her. They make her into a person but also into a generality. Just in the way my little hard-cover book would. Then writers put bunches of these prototypical but individualistic characters together in a collection and put life around them, just as a painting blocks its main subjects and then builds around. Then writers fill in blank after blank. They begin with a focus: someone sitting at a table telling someone else they don't know where their daughter has gone to - and then build detail upon detail. Until the blocking becomes clear. And the scenery. And, just as they seem to really get going and begin refining, the last clarifying step just snaps together. Like those awkward children's puzzles that are all strings and wobblies until you press something just right and the whole thing locks together into a cube or a ladder or something else blocky.

Then the story is done and it is over. You, the reader, were shown, bit by bit by bit, the whole picture. And as you were waiting for a similarly progressive process to go over the bits and now put bows on them, bows and all are slapped on top of the picture, finishing it in one fell swoop and pulling the curtain besides.

I like to think that, in its own way, video production can have a similar effect.

Of course, it has the advantage - and the challenge - of real people to contend with and, while a single look on a person's face can tell as much as would take special care by a writer to convey, yet the producer is at the mercy of greater uncertainty and much less control.

Music goes a long way in sculpting video projects to a focused point, and certainly the music removes video and its offshoots from the written word. Cameras and looks on faces is one thing, but add music and now you really cannot compare the media. You have to separate them and not attempt an overlap, no matter how many movies are produced from books. Perhaps the Hollywood producers who work on book-to-movie projects will have something to say about whether a movie is anything like a book or whether it is only, as its credits say, "based on" one and nothing else.

Still, auteurs of all sorts draw to the women on the buses and the men in the deserts and the people in kitchens like moths to a lantern. These are the focal points of our attraction. Around their potential we see the house of cards that our vision spins. I will start with music under and fade up from black. And then she will look up and she won't say anything. Then we will cut to a wide shot of a building with a car in front. Not that car. A white, long, skinny one. And then the music will change.

The music will change and grow and end. And I will wrap up and put the whole thing in a little book and shelve it.