My Calling

Rushing, I remember. I was rushing back to my rented house from KDU, the college where I was studying. I hurried in and turned on the TV which was in the living room. It was one of those Dunhill Movie Festivals but the one I was watching was different, I’ve heard of it but now I had the chance to watch it.

Mesmerized I was to the screen as the RKO STUDIO title came up... The subsequent NO TRESPASSING signboard... the camera cranes up. That was my first introduction to great black and white film and I remembered vividly that I have always love movies but Orson Welles somehow changed my life. I was yet to be introduced to film language, mise-en-scene, auteur, etc..., but the film sucked me in ways that I know that I understood what I wanted to do with my life after that. My calling.

The next semester, a visiting Drama Professor from Penn State came for a season. She would have the first major influence in my life when I took her drama module. (The one thing that I’m guilty of here is for not remembering her name, for that I apologize) Immediately, I know what I was good at. Somehow I knew what I was doing and my love for the craft slowly deepened.

The one person that is a major influence was my lecturer at Columbia-College by the name of JEDEDIAH HORNER (That name I will not forget). He was already in his 70s and tough towards the students during class. Students were not allowed to sit on the same seat in each of the classes. Mr. Horner said that one should not get comfortable in one position because that would make the person complacent. I took extra classes with him out of the college where he taught me the art of acting and directing. I owe my attention to details and discipline in filmmaking to Mr. Horner.

Orson Welles introduced me to the possibilities of cinema, the Drama Professor introduced me to the craft of acting and Mr. Jedediah Horner gave me the courage and discipline in honing my filmmaking abilities. To the three of them, my deepest gratitude. Rosebud rules.

AM I MISUNDERSTOOD?

I speak bluntly sometimes. What I mean is I speak from my heart and mind and at times, people deemed that to be arrogant and self-centered. Everybody, to some degree, is arrogant and self-centered, do you agree?

The purpose I am living is to know myself (self-centered) and by doing so, I can learn to know the people and surroundings that will continually enrich my soul. I tend to speak as it is, and I can be divisive and opinionated in my ideas about films, my films, my outlook on life, music, philosophy, etc... And by that, I can be arrogant if one sees it as that. What is so wrong in having a strong personality and opinions? One gets marginalized if one does not have the same stream of consciousness as the current popular sentiments.

My love is image telling and cinema. I tend to gravitate towards Hollywood-type of filmmaking because I studied cinema in Los Angeles and lived there for a better part of my formative years, 7 years to be exact. My experience through the Los Angeles Riot of ‘91 and earthquake of ‘94 gives me a valuable insight to my living this life. My films tend to be fragmented because that is how I view the world. The characters in my films can be flamboyant, quiet, deceitful, but they are always ambiguous in their motivations. I see people in the shades of gray, don’t we all?

I have succumbed to the ultimate answer, that I am misunderstood in my attempt of image telling the way I see it as my way. Maybe I need to join the flocks but do I need to...

No thank you. I will continue to trudge ahead with the way I tell my images. At the end, I will be praised or blamed for doing it my way. I rather have that any day of the day, weeks or years... ;)

EXIT review - 6 (final)

fORUM fILEM KUALA LUMPUR
The Film Forum of Kuala Lumpur

PATRICK LIM: EXIT
The Second Camera As Magnifier Of Truth

Interpretation by Dr. Anuar Nor Arai

Patrick knows that EXIT is an attempt to play drama and documentary express two fragments of materials: a) the interrogation and b) the recordings of the interrogation in camera and sound. Drama acts out the indefinite perspective of truth, and the camera records the objectivity of the indefiniteness of the reality and truth. The two materials collected in space and time – the past, the present and the future. The future comes very early after the past and the present tells us the revolving and the rotating nature of truth is always in the mind of man. The interrogator is given an exit and holds responsible for all the deductions of words, and he looses hold of his capability of words with the lady in the room.

Another interrogator enters to play another game of words – a game of time past, present and future. The cycle will go on and definite truth will never be found. Time is also alienated in the mind of man.

Alienation in EXIT is in the oral report of guilt. The lady in the room explores the potentials of language to disseminate terror within her and to claim that she was the victim of repression. She could go on telling the same story because she has that strength to transgress words. She could nourish herself by multiplying words. She is enclosed by the three walls but she could get herself free by verbalizing.

EXIT review - 5

fORUM fILEM KUALA LUMPUR
The Film Forum of Kuala Lumpur

PATRICK LIM: EXIT
The Second Camera As Magnifier Of Truth

Interpretation by Dr. Anuar Nor Arai

The lady in the room is well photographed. She has that lingering dark memories of sexual harassment at a young age, and could not bridge her emotionally arid consciousness towards the interrogator. It is from her pale face that the deep gloom of her past could well justify her words. She could take on the interrogator and all angles of the story and articulates the story around her and threatens the interrogator as the guilty one.

Patrick’s approach on photography that is bare and whole projects a discoloring of emotions that holds mysterious truth to be objectively and subjectively revealed between the two. And very wordy physical with her story the interrogator bends to register in his mind the reverted truth of himself. The reversal of truth strikes right into the core of truth – that the indefiniteness of truth itself is examined. Truth pulsates in words and could change perspectives within words.

to be continued...