Innocents and Others Read Online Free PDF

miss him. How much I will always love him. I sleep.
    In the early-morning light, I sit on the motel bed and examine the equipment I have bought. I read instructions; I put pieces together. I lift the camera and look through the viewfinder.
    I will make my trip and I will also make a film diary of my trip called A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents. My first film since high school. I will make film after film that spring and summer. In the fall I will briefly attend the college with the excellent undergraduate film program. My life will begin to take an ordinary shape, as if the past nine months never happened. As if it were a dream, an unfinished film, a lost radio broadcast.
    I am a hungry young woman, just like thousands of other young women. But I have some ideas. A directive, of sorts. I will work and I will work. I have said this is a love story, and indeed it begins that way: my love of cinema, as pure as any I have known. Making, watching, thinking cinema. I become a machine of cinema, a monocular creator. It is as though I had been a drawn-back rubber band my whole life, seeming to pull farther and farther away from the life I wanted, until I am released and then I come forward with a huge snap. I am no longer wishing; I am doing. What do I do? I make films that excite and please me, occasionally frustrate me, and for a long while that feels like enough. Later I will find this meager in a number of ways. Later I will see it as self-aggrandizing, problematic, not just useless but hurtful. Later I will quit.
    But there is still a bit more of this inaugural story to tell, the end of the story of how I began. A narrative thread that I have left hanging. So here it is: a year after he died, I was working late and began to think about him. There had been a big retrospective of his work, and there was a flurry of articles in the paper. I knew more about him and his work than all of these people. I considered my future and my opportunities. I took the wicker box out. I read the letters. They were ­beautifully written: some were a little erotic, some were funny. They could be tastefully edited, in any case.
    I took them out on the fire escape with me, and read them as I smoked. I could have shown them to an agent, published them, offered them to the highest bidder. That’s what he had suggested—no, urged—me to do. If I approached it all in the right way, the interest in me could lead to a chance to make a film. One little chance to take that attention and use it to my advantage. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was like a puzzle for me to figure out: here was how I thought the world worked; here was how I thought I fit in it.
    I also could burn them, one by one, like a girl in a black-and-white movie. Every last one.
    But instead I perched on the steps under a shimmer of deep-night summer stars, and I started once again at the beginning. I read one,folded it, and put it away. I read another, then another, then another. When I got to the end, I put them back in the box, closed the box, and put them away, my secret forever.
    I told you this was a love story.
    â€”Meadow Mori, 11/5/2014
    Meadow Mori was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, essay films, shorts, and video installations including Kent State: Recovered (1992), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary; Play Truman (1993); Portrait of Deke (1987), which won a BATT Silver Medal and the jury prize at the Seattle Film Festival; Inward Operator (1998), which was a jury prize winner at the Sundance Festival, and Children of the Disappeared (2001). Parts of A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents, the making of which is described in the post above, can be viewed here. Her reconstructions of famous lost films (made in 1984–1985) can be viewed here.
    Related links
    Carrie Wexler, A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8
    Meadow Mori