I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Interpretation
Reality often doesn't fit our narratives, no matter how much we wish it would.
Ruth Ozeki reflects on her experience in documentary filmmaking, highlighting the tension between the storyteller's intentions and the unpredictable nature of real life. Despite the desire to shape reality to fit one's narrative, she acknowledges that true authenticity cannot be controlled or manipulated, serving as a reminder that art and life can diverge significantly.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of documentary filmmaking, this quote can highlight the unpredictability of real life.
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
I love playing with makeup. Makeup has become a thing where it's an art form. It's not a thing where you use it because you need to feel beautiful or because you don't like the way you look.
I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend. It would look ridiculous to do what we're doing now when I'm 40. That's why I want to destroy my career before it's too late.
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