Intangible Asset Number 82: Director’s Statement
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
By Emma Franz
In my previous life I was a jazz singer, and in 2005 Simon Barker and I were both in Hong Kong to record an album for an audiophile company. I had flown there from Australia, but Simon had arrived from South Korea. I asked him what he had been doing there, and he replied that he had been looking for a shaman. I was immediately intrigued by his story.
Through my own work and travels with music, I had often experienced the power of music to bridge cultural divides. I had been wanting to create a film that expressed music as the universal language that it is. I was immediately inspired to follow Simon’s search, knowing that if a thirty-something jazz musician and an eighty-year-old Korean shaman met, it was inevitable something beautiful would happen. As an added bonus, the exotic road trip would be visually compelling.
As I followed Simon, I too became absorbed in the ideas he was exploring. Witnessing an ancient aesthetic that continues to inform and support the lives of a modern people, the journey also became a contemplation of music and culture’s continuing relevance and intrinsic worth.
Through Simon, comes the vantage point of a highly skilled and insightful musician able to translate the exotic and abstract into something we can understand and appreciate. One can witnesses the progression of his understanding manifest in his playing throughout the course of the narrative. For me, the advantage of a protagonist such as Simon is his disarming self-effacing manner and humility, despite his extraordinary talent and skill. Initially unfamiliar cultural and musical concepts garner meaning and beauty, as we observe Simon change and grow through this process.
There are many aspects that contribute to an artist¹s means of expression including skills, influences, experiences, environment, and philosophical and aesthetic ideas. Admirably, Simon is on a continual quest to become a better musician, and to develop an individual voice that resonates with his own environment and experience. Because of my long-standing working relationship and friendship with Simon, I aimed for the film to be an intimate portrayal of his experience. Using selections from Simon’s personal reflections and revelations along the way, I tried to create a ‘thought track’ that would provide an intimate insight into the processes of a creative musician as he was inspired and transformed. Although he does eventually meet the shaman, it is the search itself that ultimately alters Simon’s approach to life and reconciles his sense of self and relationship to music.
I wanted to create an engaging narrative as I experienced it - woven together from Simon¹s thoughts and reflections, the linear journey, the philosophical and aesthetic lessons, and my own visual impressions. I wanted to take the audience on a similar journey; into the heart of a beautiful and complex land and aesthetic, simulating the sensations of diving into the unknown, ebbing and flowing between moments of anxiety, high energy and excitement, into moments of reflection and contemplation.
Because of my long-standing working relationship and friendship with the central character, I aimed for the film to be an intimate and deep portrayal of his experience, and through him, a reflection of my own.
