dandelion-o-clock:keyboard-worrier:Daniel Kwan (co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once and
dandelion-o-clock:keyboard-worrier:Daniel Kwan (co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Swiss Army Man) on maximalism in art. [Image Description: Screenshots of a twitter thread written by Daniel Kwan, one of the two filmmakers known professionally as Daniels, in response to a tweet by filmmaker Kogonada which reads: “Less is not always more. Sometimes more is more. See Everything Everywhere All At Once. A triumph of the more. The Daniels find meaning in the all-at-onceness of our metamodern existence. In the everything and everywhere.”Daniel Kwan’s response reads:[Emoji with overflowing tears] “Thank you for saying this. I’ve spent most of my career ashamed of the fact that I am a maximalist filmmaker (connected to my, until recently, undiagnosed ADHD). I admired and envied the minimalist masters (like kogonada) but knew I could never have the confidence to do it.“ [emoji of a spool of thread]“So much discussion around “important” art is usually focused on minimalism/restraint, subtlety/nuance. But now I am realizing there is a place for work like ours, especially in a world where there is too much to process, maybe maximalist art is essential to meeting this moment.”“Often, artistic expression requires minimalism. But that approach can also lead to essentializing, marginalizing, & excluding for the sake of making the art “clean”, but to the detriment of whatever/whoever gets cut out. It feels like analyzing data with an incomplete dataset.““It took me until recently to decouple “subtlety” from “nuance”. While our work does not have much subtlety, we are always searching for nuance. Subtlety is a volume knob turned low, while Nuance is naming new sounds no one has heard before. There is no reason they have to be conjoined.”“I am learning that we are allowed to be nuanced with a jackhammer. We can discover new liminal feelings no one has ever named before and scream those names from the top of mountains. If we’ve discovered something beautiful & nuanced… why should we hide it in subtlety?”“I’ll end by showing you this painting by Ikeda Manabu. It became a guiding light two years into the writing process when I was feeling overwhelmed by the script, feeling worthless and stupid for trying to tackle something so big.”[Images of Ikeda Manabu’s “Foretoken,” an intricate painting showing an enormous wave rising from a cluttered sea. The water is filled with a dense, chaotic mix of out-of-place items like water slides, high-rise buildings, trains, airplanes, trees, boats, staircases, and even icebergs being traversed by tiny mountain climbers. The overall composition of “Foretoken” echoes Hokusai’s famous print “The Great Wave.”]“Manabu’s paintings are pure maximalism, but when you pull back there is still always a core. In this case, it’s a wave. Just a big wave, holding as much as it can. For our script, that core was a family. It’s just a family, holding as much as it can. And wow look at all it holds.”“Good luck to all my maximalist buddies out there. Go do your thing.”End Image Description.] -- source link