{"id":5186,"date":"2010-05-25T22:08:49","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T05:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=5186"},"modified":"2010-06-02T03:56:03","modified_gmt":"2010-06-02T10:56:03","slug":"traces-of-smoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=5186","title":{"rendered":"Traces of Smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Paul Auster\/Photo: Lotte Hansen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With slicked back hair and his piercing wide-eyed stare, the well known novelist Paul Auster described his first experience making a movie.\u00a0 Co-directing with Wayne Wang, he wrote and directed \u201cSmoke\u201d in 1995.\u00a0 For ten short minutes, in the quiet of the Sergei Courtyard in the center of Jerusalem, he shared the inspiration for the story behind the movie, and the long process of production.<\/p>\n

Before the projector lit up, Auster warned us that Smoke was the kind of film in which \u201cnot much happens\u201d.\u00a0 It is the story of regular people, the faces we pass everyday on the bus and walking down the street.\u00a0 Like smoke at a bonfire, the presence of these strangers surrounds us and is felt so strongly, yet verges on invisible, and often disappears as suddenly as it comes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film introduced a small cast of characters traveling on their separate journeys through life who find themselves crossing paths in unexpected and oddly banal situations.\u00a0 Every character is strikingly different, each with his own life and own challenges.\u00a0 Paul Benjamin, the novelist who can\u2019t move on since his wife\u2019s death, is at the center of this web of connected strangers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The movie smoothly shifts to other characters, and slowly the circles of people expand and overlap.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, Auggie, the good hearted owner of the corner store, exposes a hidden passion for photography which is key in displaying one of the central ideas of the story.\u00a0 Thomas Cole, a skinny kid with a rich sense of humor, takes these very ideas and adopts them into his life. These two men introduce their own human ties, new figures that join the growing cast of characters. In his or her way, each asks and tries to answer questions about human relationships and group identity.<\/p>\n

A short scene at the beginning of the movie is a harbinger\u00a0of many of the stories that develop later in the plot.\u00a0 Upon noticing Auggie\u2019s camera and asking to see his photographs, Benjamin, perhaps for the first time, is exposed to the thoughts and insights of this person who sells him his cigars every day.\u00a0 Flipping through the photo albums, the viewers see along with Benjamin that all of the pictures were taken at the same street corner, and share in his confused smile as he remarks, \u201cThey\u2019re all the same\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Auggie puffs his cigarette thoughtfully and explains his project.\u00a0 This is his life\u2019s work \u2013 4000 days, same time and same place.\u00a0 He suggests that Benjamin slow down as he looks.\u00a0 Benjamin grins, hesitates, and repeats, \u201cBut they\u2019re all the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You\u2019ve got the bright mornings, and the dark mornings, you got your summer light and your autumn light, you\u2019ve got your weekdays and your weekends, you got your people in overcoats and galoshes, and you got your people in tee-shirts and shorts, sometimes the same people and sometimes different ones, sometimes the different ones become the same and the same ones disappear.\u00a0 The earth revolves around the sun and everyday the sun hits the earth from a different angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

My cynical side screamed aloud.\u00a0 The pictures, of course, did look the same to me.\u00a0\u00a0 Auggie\u2019s words were beautiful, but something in the idea he was expressing seemed too forced, too artificially philosophical.\u00a0 It was like watching a clich\u00e9 being born.<\/p>\n

And yet sitting in Jerusalem, something in his words did resonate as truly profound.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t help but imagine- what if someone would have created such an album for the past 2500 years here?\u00a0 Eight in the morning, a location in the Old City, everyday.\u00a0 Scenes of worship and war, love and misery.\u00a0 The rich and the poor, the rain and the sun, weddings and funeral processions, tears and smiles.\u00a0 People of all nationalities and walks of life.\u00a0 Just life.<\/p>\n

In some eras, it was a cultural center, a religious center, and even a shopping center.\u00a0 And there were periods when, as Auggie stated simply: \u201cIt\u2019s just one little part of the world\u201d.\u00a0 Quiet times.\u00a0 But like the street corner, our city has always been there, a silent witness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How strongly the constant illuminates the variations.\u00a0 The constancy of Jerusalem\u2019s ancient stones emphasizes the differences of those within, yet creates an intimate framework which embraces them all.\u00a0 In this world of Auggie\u2019s dusty albums, where the background is constant, the paradoxical idea of the vastness together with the proximity of strangers can be truly understood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I watched as Benjamin sucked in sharply when seeing, in a picture from some random morning, eight o\u2019clock sharp, his late wife Ellen captured in a moment by Auggie\u2019s camera.\u00a0 I knew that if I had been there, sitting with Auggie and looking slowly through his albums, Ellen would have been just another face.\u00a0 Where lies the thin line between stranger and friend?\u00a0 I wonder if it becomes more clear just who is what when everything else about the picture is the same, and the people are the ever changing variables.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201creal life\u201d, away from the safety of a singular backdrop, the characters struggle to understand who is a stranger and who is not.\u00a0 There are strangers who become friends \u2013 seen in the closeness that blossoms between Benjamin and Thomas.\u00a0 There are those who seem to be friends and are surprised to discover that they are, in fact, strangers \u2013 like Benjamin and Auggie, though this realization ultimately led to a more powerful friendship.\u00a0 There are strangers who were once intimate.\u00a0 Auggie meets an old lover.\u00a0 Thomas meets his father.\u00a0 And there are strangers who begin as strangers and end as strangers, yet who manage to affect one another\u2019s life significantly \u2013 like Auggie and the petty thief Robert Goodwin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Strangers and friends alike are trapped between the pages of Auggie\u2019s album.\u00a0 Snippets of hundreds of separate worlds come together to create a single world.\u00a0 Snippets of hundreds of separate worlds have been connected without even knowing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This film resonated deeply, reminding me how everyday life brings interactions with entire worlds.\u00a0 Like the known clich\u00e9, that we are surrounded by strangers who are friends waiting to happen.\u00a0 And perhaps even more significantly, that part of the makeup of our lives is the insignificant interactions with strangers as they are.\u00a0 Auster and Wang succeeded in capturing these human moments, these everyday exchanges in a way so real, that though it may be a movie in which \u201cnot much happens\u201d, I would recommend it enthusiastically for a shot of insight, a dose of wisdom.<\/p>\n

LEILA DASHEVSKY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul Auster was in Israel as a guest of the 2nd International Writer’s Festival 2010, which took place at Mishkenot Sha’ananim. The film “Smoke” was screened at the Sergei Courtyard on May 5, \u00a0in an intimate encounter with the audience, as part of “Between the Lines” – events that explore the connection between the written word and other forms, such as cinema, music and theatre. “Between the Lines,” sponsored by the Schusterman Foundation, is a herald of things to come in 2011, when The Jerusalem Season of Culture <\/a>will be launched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With slicked back hair and his piercing wide-eyed stare, the well known novelist Paul Auster described his first experience making a movie.\u00a0 Co-directing with Wayne Wang, he wrote and directed \u201cSmoke\u201d in 1995.\u00a0 For ten short minutes, in the quiet of the Sergei Courtyard in the center of Jerusalem, he shared the inspiration for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}