the man who could not see far enough

本片是一部美国片，由Peter Rose导演，由主演。

剧情简介：Film maker Peter Rose stars in his own film that examines the art of seeing and the limits of perception. A wide range of literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors are applied to the task of understanding how and what we see. Employing multiple moving images and inspired camera work to convey the act of vision, Rose asks the viewer to look at things in a new way. A look at a solar eclipse; a gravity- defying ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge; gazing off to the horizon from a pier on Long Island; are some of the venues for Rose's unique observations and manipulations of visual perception. An original soundtrack adds to the nearly hallucinatory feel of the documentary. Uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory." The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. Once upon a time There was a man who could not see far enough. There was nothing wrong with his eyes, Nor did he need to see something in particular in the distance. It was just that he wanted to see, Physically-with his own naked eyes, As far as possible. He felt an inexplicable hunger As if it were through his eyes That a special nourishment passed, One which filled his entire body with a wonderfull fullness. It was a physical craving- Too physical to be satisfied by the refined stars, The constant horizon, The simple surface of the sky. His need seized upon things that could be felt in an almost brutal way, That could be absorbed, as if, In witnessing the thing in the distance, The entire intervening space were inverted into his body- The body of a creature whose eyes beheld its own infinite interior. Often he had the sense Not so much of looking at But of seeing beyond things, Of observing not only that a tree lay in the distance But also that it indicated a space beyond itself, That it was a kind of visual oasis Marking the place where vision rested Before reimbarking on its quest. Some said that the universe was curved, That even light would return to its source. That there were not mysteries beyond mysteries, That all would ultimately be seen, Caused in him a profound dismay. Certain spaces held great power for him- The crests of hills overlooking the sea, Sudden doorways opening into light, The desert, The moon. The act of seeing- Of losing himself in space and finding himself in vision, Of embracing and being embraced by an immensity of distance, Was an index of his will to know. Distance summoned him. He felt perpetually bound. This material was shot while I was walking down to the Long Island Sound from the house where I grew up in Queens. I've been taking this walk for about twenty years, and it's become something of a ceremony for me. When we first moved here, this place was a forest. Then they put up apartment projects, and one of these had this pier built. I found it and starting coming here. Very few other people ever came out here. Once in a while fishermen would come here and people used to come occasionally to swim, but most of the time I had it all to myself and I felt very free here. I usually came down here at night. When I was in high school I came here just about every night with a friend of mine. We'd come down here to look at the sunsets; we'd come down here to look at the dawn; we came to look at hurricanes and storms; we'd come to look at the rain; we came here to celebrate; we came when we were feeling depressed. We came just about on any pretext. I came here while I was living with my family. I continue to come long after having moved out and having lived in a number of other cities and after having seen a good part of the rest of the world. This place is still very much of a touchstone for me. I can remember all the times I have been here and I can anticipate the times when I will be here, and all of my selves can sort of convene and become aware of each other, of a common selfhood. What draws me here, what makes it such a powerful spot, is the bridge, the Throggs Neck Bridge. I watched this bridge being built as a kid and it was quite spectacular. There were huge pile drivers that broadcast explosive blasts all up and down the river, and gargantuan cables hanging all over the sky, and these glorious twin mythic towers rising up out of the water. When it was finished, it was quite magnetic, like Mr. Fuji is for the Japanese. You could see it for miles around, and whenever we took talks we were inevitably drawn to the bridge. From this vantage point, it's far enough away to have a kind of mystique, a presence, because of its distance, and yet you're still close enough to it to get a sense of its massiveness, its scale, and its power. So we used to go down to the bridge. Two miles downriver, off-screen, is the Whitestone Bridge, and on a clear evening, far-off, you can see the lights of the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson River. Part of my sense of who I am is bound up with this sense of looking out and over at the bridge. I have come to think of them, of the bridges, as my own personal totems, and I have come to feel reassured, and even protected, by them. I was just about to come down here, to record the sound for this film, when the telephone rang. It was the hospital. My father just died. "The man who could not see far enough" has won major awards of distinction at numerous festivals both here and abroad, including the Oberhausen, Edinburgh, American, and Sydney Film Festivals, has been broadcast nationally, and is in collections at Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Image Forum in Tokyo In a brief prologue, we hear a narrative fable, a kind of mythical generative story for the film. The story concerns a man who is obsessed with seeing further and further into the distance; it is a kind of measure of his will to probe into the unknown. His longing for distance is described as specifically physical. This delineates for the film a basic truth, that through the physical act of seeing into the distance, one incorporates greater and greater spaciousness into one’s own body. The story is told in English subtitles, and is simultaneously narrated by a man’s voice, but spoken in a made-up language. Viewers of Rose’s other films will be familiar with this device; here it seems to indicate that the story is about a primitive, subconscious need, which can only provisionally be translated into everyday discourse. The images are of a suburban landscape viewed from the side window of a moving car. Embankments in the foreground often accentuate the near distance, while the far distance is glimpsed fleetingly in the gaps. The car’s shadow, which constantly lengthens and shortens as it falls over different terrain, seems the embodiment of the longing spoken of in the story. In the film’s first section, we see a triple projection of three films side by side. The three images are pieced together to make one very wide view of a house and the beach which it faces. An immobile man is leaning out over the deck railing, looking across the road and far into the distance, out to sea. The images in the three screens rotate, so that the whole panoramic image does a slow 360 degree pan around the landscape five or six times, increasing our sense of the vastness of space surrounding the man. The three images are increasingly temporally displaced, however, so that we see dramatic differences between them of the light and of passing objects such as cars. Suspenseful music by Thomas Czerny-Hydzik builds tension. The section ends with a shot from the point of view of the man, looking over the deck railing. In the film’s second section, we see handheld shots of a walk down to a pier overlooking Long Island Sound, with the imposing structure of the Throgg’s Neck Bridge dominating the scene. We see this walk in a variety of different kinds of light. Rose’s voiceover tells of how this particular place is a touchstone in his life, since he has been coming here to be alone or with close friends ever since he grew up near here. His memories of coming here at regular intervals from childhood into adulthood seem to function for him, I realized, almost like the cables on the bridge; as regular markers which measure for him the temporal distance. The bridge, because it is an immense object which looks big even when stretching far away, emphasizes the sense of scale and distance, and Rose speaks about how he came to feel the bridge was a totemic object in his life, protecting him. Despite this protection, in the next sentence he informs us that, prior to filming the scene, he has learned that his father has just died. The shot changes instantly to a nighttime shot of the bridge, the garish lights along the cabling making it look like an alien spaceship, filmed with a vibrating, shaky camera. This climactic shot of the familiar turned utterly strange suddenly highlights what all this obsession with distance is about: death. The third section shows a large group of people, excitedly pointing up to the sky. Low music portends a cataclysmic event. They are evidently here to witness a total eclipse of the sun, which is the greatest perspective/distance effect we can see with the naked eye (aided by a pinhole device), in which the moon, oddly, is revealed to be the exact size necessary to neatly cover the face of the sun as it passes in front. At the climactic moment, we hear a tremendous wail of excitement rise from the crowd. The single image is replaced by a grid of many smaller images of the eclipse. The disappearance and reappearance of the sun is made into a rapid film loop, which flows all around the grid, so that the eclipse (and the sound of the crowd’s wailing) becomes a kind of rhythmically pulsating mandala, a totem of the living, breathing, cyclic nature of the universe, which I also read as a kind of transcendence of the father’s death in the previous section. The next, brief section shows a 5X5 grid of film images with another 360 degree pan. The images are of two people on top of a rock overlooking a river (no bridge). This time, the pan turns vertically instead of horizontally. Somehow, this vertical motion seems to connect the figures more to the sky and to outer space, to the orbits referenced in the eclipse section. The final, unforgettable section is a handheld shot as Rose climbs up the cable which is draped along the tops of the two towers of the Golden Gate bridge, followed by a magnificent long shot of the bridge. The climb creates a thrilling sensation of danger and vertigo. The long, asymptotic curve of the cable as it stretches way down from the towers to the span below reveals the suspension bridge as a monumental way of harnessing the power of the vertical to extend oneself horizontally. This section climaxes the film’s theme of the desire to make a bridge between oneself and the far distance. (The Golden Gate bridge is a long way from the Throgg’s Neck.) “The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough” has an epic scope and ambition not often seen in independent, experimental film. Yet, like most experimental films, it is firmly grounded in the personal and the autobiographical. Rose manages to make a bridge between his personal story and the ancient, universal urge to connect with the vastness of the universe. That the film is at once grand and mythic and personal means that it’s form is in harmony with it’s content. By the time you reach the film’s final shot, you really feel the distance.

地区：美国

导演：Peter Rose