OMPHALOS: the very first shot

On November 1, 2009, dear friend and long-time collaborator George Nicholas and I shoot the first shot of a film (OMPHALOS, 2015 release) whose production will span over 5 years. Airing our supercilious disdain for video, we shoot a VHS tape washing up on the Atlantic coast (in 35mm!).

Aidan Fraser, George Nicholas and Gabriel Judet-Weinshel filming 'The Heart is a Hidden Camera'

Gabriel Judet-Weinshel and George Nicholas

Bedroom set for 'The Heart is a Hidden Camera'

Filming video for 'My Love Will Keep Forever' by Adrienne Young

Lighting a house for Adrienne Young's 'My Love Will Keep Forever'

Button to Gabriel Judet-Weinshel DP Mini Site

'The Imperfect is our paradise.' —Wallace Stevens
'All our land is scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable / sundered are we and all our passionate surrender / but somehow tenderness survives.' —Dennis Brutus
'A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace.' —Irving Layton
'They might have emptied your pockets / but at least they left some poetry.' —Vusi Mahlasela
'The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.' —James Joyce, ULYSSES
'A singer may be innocent/never the song.' —John Berger
'I want a good life/with a nose for things/the fresh wind and bright sky / to endure my suffering' —Jeff Tweedy
'Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance.' —Italo Svevo
" 'How do you eat an elephant?' Cuaron asked me. 'One spoonful a day.' " —interview w Alfonso Cuaron on GRAVITY in NY Magazine
'Ask the young. They know everything.' —Joseph Joubert
'Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.' —Werner Herzog
'The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.' —David Foster Wallace
'I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?' —J.D. Salinger
'Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.' —Calvin Coolidge
'The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live ... You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.' —Sherwood Anderson
'The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.' —Leonard Cohen
'As you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do—determined to save the only life that you could save.' —Mary Oliver
'In the spent of one night he wrote three propositions: / That Hell is the Denial of the ordinary. That nothing lasts. / That clean white paper waiting under a pen / is the gift beyond history and hurt and heaven.' —John Ciardi
'Poets are band leaders who have failed.' —Ayi Kwei Armah
'That's what the practice of any art is. It isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.' —Kurt Vonnegut
'Let all go—the / big small middling / tall bigger really / the biggest and all / things—let all go / dear / so comes love.' —e.e. cummings
'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain' —Vladimir Nabokov, PALE FIRE
'If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If they're shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.' —Harriet Tubman
'Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.' —Werner Herzog
'The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.' —Susan Sontag
'I'm not a master of films. I'm rather a slave.' —Ang Lee
"The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself." —Sherwood Anderson
'New things had to be made out of fragments.' —Kurt Schwitters
'Song dogs barking at the break of dawn / Lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm / And these old hopes and fears / Still at my side' —P. Simon
'There is another world, but it is in this one.' —Yeats
'Maneuver and mislead, but always deliver.' —Werner Herzog
'Get used to the bear behind you.' —Werner Herzog
'No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.' —Confucius
'To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.' —Leonard Bernstein
'Now I am quietly/waiting for/the catastrophe of/my personality/to seem beautiful again,/and interesting and/modern.' —Frank O'Hara
'And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.' —John Steinbeck
'I read this book about how some scientists tried to get primates to paint. For 10 years they worked on it, and nothing happened. Then, one of the monkeys suddenly began to paint, and what it painted were the bars of its cage. So, in my writing, I believe I'm painting the bars of my cage so that I can get out. This is something you have to get done before you can meaningfully move on in any way.' —Ferron
'Ms. Ramsay showed a mastery of mood and atmosphere, an ability to make narrative film feel like an intoxicating and abstract fusion of painting and music.' —A.O. Scott
'A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.' —Orson Welles
'If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.' ―Leonard Cohen
'When everyone is telling you something can't be done, that's how you know you're on the right track.' —George Lucas
'Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty.' —Albert Einstein
'Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of . . . turning pain into honey.' —John Updike
'We are all born so beautiful / the greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not.' —Rupi Kaur
'Poetry must entertain if it is to heal.' —Max Ritvo
'Whatever you plan on doing eventually, do immediately.' —Jeffrey Katzenberg
'There's only one instant, and it's right now. And it's eternity.' —Richard Linklater
'To survive, you must tell stories.' —Umberto Eco
'I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.' —Jack Gilbert
'In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.' —Brecht
'A film is a petrified fountain of thought.' —Jean Cocteau
'Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.' ―James Joyce, ULYSSES
'I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.' —Leonard Cohen
'Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.' —John Berger
'You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t ... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.' — James Baldwin
'Wherever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared.’ —Alice Walker
'Repetition is how we master a trauma.' —Anna Freud
'Love's the only engine of survival.' —Leonard Cohen
'I worked all my life to become young— / no, you can't persuade me to get old / I will die twenty seven.' —Jonas Mekas
'I know no one's going to show me everything / we all come and go unknown / each so deep and superficial / between the forceps and the stone.' —Joni Mitchell
'Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.' —Anaïs Nin
'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.' —Gospel of Thomas