When Belgian filmmaker, Lars Von Trier, began the production of his prized film, Dancer In The Dark, he did something no other filmmaker in history had ever done before. He positioned one-hundred Sony 3CCD cameras at strategic locations on the set of each shoot and then later took that footage to create what he had hoped to be The Perfect Shot for each scene.
After the production was in the can, he explained in a later interview that he had failed and that to truly capture the perfect shot he would need several thousand cameras, possibly tens of thousands positioned all over the set in every nook and cranny. This of course was not financially sound for such an experimental project so he moved on to other projects.
I remember at the time thinking how ballsy this was of him. With the superstar musician and elusive actress, Björk in the starring role, and a million dollars of other peoples' money to play with, he was still bold enough to experiment in the midst of it all. Surprisingly, the harrowing cinematic film went on to win the coveted Palme D'or at Cannes and is now considered a cinematic classic already, and Mr. Von Trier presently works with some of Hollywood's elite.
It seems within the mysterious shroud of the creative process, there is a special place for people who are courageous in their endeavors. For people who do it even though everyone is advising them not to. To me, in terms of Art, Everyone is wrong until the art is out there. Once it's out there, it's out there and truth will find it. But it has get out there first. It has to exist for it to have any effect on anyone and anything.
I've spent the past few months re-thinking the "plight" of the Asian Male image, and I have come to view it as if I'm seeing it through a diamond - the many angles, the many perspectives and they all look like the real thing, but what I am realizing now is that they are all the real thing and they are all different at the same time. They are all necessary in the experimental process of discovering what this Asian-American Image is and how we will wrap ourselves around it, as well as how much will also pass into extinction or become something else all together as this image forms. In many ways it is like an organic evolutionary process that must occur from the inside out, and only then will the images congeal into a whole.
