Recently I have asked myself if the wind is an off-screen phenomenon because it comes or goes to those places we cannot see in cinema it makes our eyes red although it is not there no wonder that it is a phantom just like cinema a ghost made by a force some call an auteur other coincidence is the wind visible or invisible we may see its power the white clothes of running women the curly hair of a lost schoolboy but do we see the blowing lips that create it we can see clouds Griffith said that cinema was the wind in the trees but wasn’t cinema the moving trees alone the question behind this movement who told us that it was wind like when Tarkovsky made his wind an off-screen helicopter wind-machines wind is an illusion but it can be there could never have been there like in expensive and cheap melodramas what I am really asking myself is: How can I film the wind naked?
To feel the wind I close my eyes (never in cinema) to see the wind I see something else it is imagination and it is just natural for any naïve filmmaker to dream about not needing this imagination to have a camera that can objectify not only fear but the invisible and therefore wind the pleasure of dreaming about innocent purity: Nobody is really interested in that anymore we all agreed on the illusion construction and our blessed subjectivity but why I don’t have an answer just a desire: Film the wind without creating it.
Of course I know and I even enjoy the pleasure of the off-screen movements its poetics the longing for the unseen the glimpses we give to our imagination in a world loaded with on-screen banality but the wind is invisible if I just filmed it I could create another off-screen maybe even the result would be off-screen and a new language was born they have called it experience but they were always talking about materiality sensuality never about the experience of things that are not there thus the ghost could return to life and we could imagine death and time to stop just for one night see them among us until we sleep again with our calm illusions I will try and I will fail, but maybe I can feel the wind without closing my eyes again.