After watching Chick Strand’s film, Soft Fiction, two things that
she touched upon in her interview with Irina Leimbacher came to mind.
When teaching film students Strand tells her students "don’t
just stand there. Go dance with it. It is an extension of your body
and your identity. " I think this attitude feeds into another comment
with regards to men and woman. She states "Trains can be symbolically
linked with men, but the idea of riding on a train is somehow linked
to woman, perhaps because on a train you see everything in between"
(149).
Soft Fiction
deals with "seeing in between." Watching the in depth interviews,
they deal with details. Moments are highlighted with very specific memories.
For example the woman, who speaks about her encounter with the cowboys,
remembers that her pictures were out of focus, because she was so nervous.
And she remembers the "soft cowboy yell". In the interview
with the woman who talks about her experience with drug addiction, the
experience she communicates is not one of a "junkie" but of
a woman trying to "exercise" a painful love of a lost man.
That is what life is. Memories; the details in between every hour of
every day. When most people die, I don’t think they want to describe
their life as "I was born, I grew, I worked, a reproduced, I died".
Just as the woman who was addicted to drugs doesn’t speak just
speak bout scoring and getting high. She talks about what was important,
or of personal value. What her addiction was about for her. I think
this attitude attributes to Strand’s anthropological background.
Because is all about being human. Srand describes her work as "
that it is never about fixed things, people or states but about relationships
between things and people."
The fact
that she tells her film students to "go dance with [the camera]".
Is also very anthropological. The act of dance, in any culture( I’m
thinking of places like Bali) is very important. Strand also that her
films are about "transformation, whether psychological, material
or metaphysical; about the constant and awe-inspiring process of becoming."
I think Soft Fiction fits this description.