[underwater sounds] [music playing] SPEAKER 1: Passion,
the definition of it is a kind of surging wave
that comes up through people and comes out into the world
that you have no control over. And the reflection
part of it comes later. It's like you wake
up oh my god what did I do you know I just yelled
at my kid and terrified him. You see red. You get taken over. The Passion series kind of
evolved I think gradually. What opened me up
was the connection to people through what the
old masters were doing. It's about the depth
that's within people. And when you're
seeing those people, you're having a moment
with the being presence of another person from another
age that's no longer with us. I had this whole connection
with that art in another way in my personal life with life. Having kids, seeing my
parents leave this earth. And all of that stuff, I
think, came to a focus in 1997 when I was invited to be
a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute. And the theme of that year
was representing the passions. How do you represent extreme
emotional states, which by their definition
involve losing control, losing sense of self? [strong wind sound] [silence] When I was a scholar in
residence at the Getty in 1998, one of the paintings that
I looked at more than any was a work by Dieric Bouts,
the Northern European artist in the 15th century. This was painted
in the early 1450s. I just fell in love
with this painting. It's so austere and zen-like. Of course, this is one of
the most special moments that's ever been represented. And that is the moment when
that angel Gabriel comes to Mary to tell her that she's pregnant. But what it really is
about the times when we know something, in
the place, before words and before language. Because this kind
of conversation that's going on here is not the
conversation we're having now. This is a conversation
on a different dimension. I mean, the way
that a woman inside knows that she's pregnant,
it's an inner knowledge in a way that isn't
about verbalization. And that's the magic of all of
the Annunciation scenes, that are this kind of quiet
stillness of that moment when this being, who is here
represented as a person, but obviously in reality this
is a voice speaking to you from some deep, deep place. I love this ambiguity of the
hands just going like this, or at the same time, they're
going like this, you know? So, we don't really
know and then Gabriel's got his finger
up, which is really odd. And these kinds of hand symbols
are not just like us gesturing. They have very
specific meanings. The hand symbols that Christ
uses are very similar, some of them, to the ones
that you see in the Buddhas. And all of those mudras
as they're called in Hindu have very specific meanings. [wind sound] The piece that I'm
making for the Getty was inspired by this
painting by Masolino who worked with Masaccio
in the very beginnings of the Italian Renaissance. It's a fresco, it's a Pieta. And what's going on here
is Mary and Saint John are placing Christ in the tomb. I was excited by it
and I even sketched it, which I don't do that often. And then you put it away and
you don't think about it. That's absolutely key,
because it does not interest me whatsoever
to restage, historically, any of these kind of images. That doesn't interest me at all. What interests me at all is what
happens when these images go in to us and sort
of live in there and transform and grow
into other kinds of things. [background sounds of video shoot] What I saw in my mind
was this man rising up out of the water, young man. And as he's rising
up, the water's overflowing over the top of this
cistern or well or whatever, and he comes out and there's
two women on either side of him who are shocked and surprised
and emotionally overcome with the appearance
of this young man. [background sounds of video shoot] So, if I look at this
from the point of view of our contemporary eye, it's
the aftermath of a drowning. These two women pulling a limp,
lifeless figure out of water. If I look at it from the inner--
with the inner eye, what I see is a birth. Of water overflowing
and a young man who's practically
naked being taken out by women, almost in the
function of mid-- midwives, of bringing a being
into the world. So, and I don't want to specify
that image and lock it in. For me, images have their life
because they're untethered and free floating, and that's
where I want them to be. So, I've probably
said too much already. [wind sounds] SPEAKER 2: When I went
to see the greeting, something changed for me. I mean, that was the
most astonishing thing I have seen in a
long, long time. The main thing
about it is that it happens in extreme slow
motion, so that you see something is neither
quite a still nor a movie. And it gave you a
chance to look and feel the shifting relationships
between the figures, which painting doesn't let you do
in quite the same way, anyway. [silence] What's startling about the
pieces in the passion series is that none really
has a narrative line. Each is emotive and sometimes
emotionally quite gripping. But for reasons that
are often mysterious. [silence] What's also unfamiliar is
that we get a very long, slow, lingering look at the coming
and going of these feelings and the expressions. We realize how much we
have been fixated by stills or conditioned by movies
to think of film time as the same as our time. [silence] SPEAKER 1: This is another
one I used to look at a lot. The Dream of Pope Sergius. What I loved about this was
this simultaneity of the spaces, where you see
inside the interior. I mean, this is
a bedroom, right? So, this is
completely, you know, impossible that they would
have this open wall here. It's there so we can see
in to this special moment of the dream. And then, here he
is again out here. He's simultaneously
existing with himself in two places at once
in the landscape. And yet, this is not a
separate panel or image. So you have this idea which
we've completely lost today in the age of cameras
and the logic of imagery based on optics, and how
the eye sees the world. Because we've lost
this idea that someone could be in two places at once. [sound of waves, birds singing and characters walking] It's been interesting
for me in my work, being influenced by this kind of
sense of space and simultaneity instead of sequentiality. Like I'll lock down the camera,
and I won't move the camera and I'll just keep recording. So, instead of, OK, John talks. We get you. And then you move the camera
over here and then Bill talks. And then we have this kind
of-- and then we come back here and we shoot us together
with the painting and we're both talking, and
then in the editing room they will cut those
things together in a language that is so
obvious and familiar to people, they don't even see
it as a language. It's a way of structuring
space and time. But when you keep
the camera still, you're in this kind of space,
where time is unfolding as a continuous process. And when I started working
with the passion series, I realized that I
couldn't move the camera. If I was going to
move the camera, the motion I was after would
get disrupted because the motion I was after is the motion of the
continuity of an emotional wave that comes up and passes
through a person and subsides. [silence] Hey, there's another one
up there with-- I just looking at this, behind you. There's the story
board, here we go. So, Hollywood
producers, take note. In the early 14th
century, here was a pitch to studio executives
for a new movie, St. Catherine of Alexandria. OK? And they had all the
scenes worked out. And in this image, you
see the storyboard. You see the time, the
chronological sequential story of the life thing, which is
what all movies are based on. Our culture only sees this. We only exist with this. And we know that
really intimately, but we don't know this,
in terms of images. What this central
image really represents is, it's both the sum total
of all of these events that make up a person,
make a person who they are, but it's also at the same time,
it transcends those things. It's the way for me, for
example, that I have my mother and father with me right now. They're showing the
invisible presences that we keep with us, that exist
outside of time and outside of optics and outside
of the laws of physics. SPEAKER 2: Bill is interested
in his Christian background, you might say, and is
interested in that tradition. But, he's tried to distance
the content from the affect. These are images that
have enough power, have enough suggestive power. Have enough, you
could say, ambiguity to allow all kinds of
different readings. [silence] SPEAKER 1: The Christians
do not own the resurrection. They don't own the crucifixion. These are elements of human
life, human existence, that have been utilized by all
great traditions on the planet since the beginning of time. Those elemental forms have been
hardwired into this system. That's in our operating system. You don't get rid of that stuff. You can bury it, you can
change it, give it another name and forget about
it, but it's there. [wave sounds] The beauty of that is that
you can put an image out of a guy floating up out
of the water or a figure floundering in water or a man
burning, bursting into flames, and it stirs the
same things inside, but without all the
formal structure. [silence]
