And then I saw her. It was Joyce, unarguably. She turned and smiled at someone behind her. Catching the light, her earrings gleamed. She turned back and I panicked, I had lost her.
But she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.
I rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing pixels.
Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.
The video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her, backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with verifiable stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of hope for the future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years she would die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.
I resumed the tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience what Joyce once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous applause and the crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk alone".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary
What really drew her in she says was “the image of the TV flickering over her, that symbol of modern day communication. When you are on your own, you watch TV to connect to the world so you don’t feel completely isolated. But you are.
“Joyce was born near to where John Logie Baird had had an office in Covent Garden, in the same year that the Post Office tower was built, and she died in the shadow of the TV transmission tower. It said things to me about modern life and how we all communicate.”
Dreams of a Life is not an expose of what happened in her final days or why authorities, from the housing association she rented her flat from or utilities companies whose bills were unpaid, didn’t discover her, “ I didn’t want it to be a film about the technicality of how she died or who was to blame. I didn’t want people to look at this story and close it down. I wanted to explore the complexities of being a human being and the things we have in common.”
“I think Joyce fell through the cracks because she never looked like anything was wrong. She never gave anything away.”
In the end, Dreams of a Life is as enigmatic as Vincent appeared to be, posing as many questions about her as it answers. “What the Leveson enquiry is showing is that people are so desperate for answers that they will make them up, rather than accept that there are maybe things in life that we cannot know. I wanted to retain that mystery in the film.”
It also reflects back the missed chances, lost friends and broken relationships that punctuate all our lives. Despite it seeming that in an age of Facebook and Twitter, it is now impossible to disappear, Morley warns, "On Facebook people have so many ‘friends’ feeding in that does anyone notice if someone goes off? I think the old days when people had pints of milk building up outside the door there was more chance people would notice something. Now, I think we are less known.” Morley says that the effect of the story afterwards on viewers is often to go and phone people up to check how they are but that she wants the film to be about our responsibility to ourselves as much as it is to each other, “If I could do one thing it would be to give Joyce a legacy beyond this tawdry story. She wasn’t a victim. She had volition and she chose to cut herself off from people. What I want to do is draw the story closer to people and make them think. ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8959454/Dreams-of-a-Life-interview-with-director-Carol-Morley.html
But she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.
I rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing pixels.
Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.
The video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her, backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with verifiable stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of hope for the future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years she would die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.
I resumed the tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience what Joyce once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous applause and the crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk alone".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary
What really drew her in she says was “the image of the TV flickering over her, that symbol of modern day communication. When you are on your own, you watch TV to connect to the world so you don’t feel completely isolated. But you are.
“Joyce was born near to where John Logie Baird had had an office in Covent Garden, in the same year that the Post Office tower was built, and she died in the shadow of the TV transmission tower. It said things to me about modern life and how we all communicate.”
Dreams of a Life is not an expose of what happened in her final days or why authorities, from the housing association she rented her flat from or utilities companies whose bills were unpaid, didn’t discover her, “ I didn’t want it to be a film about the technicality of how she died or who was to blame. I didn’t want people to look at this story and close it down. I wanted to explore the complexities of being a human being and the things we have in common.”
“I think Joyce fell through the cracks because she never looked like anything was wrong. She never gave anything away.”
In the end, Dreams of a Life is as enigmatic as Vincent appeared to be, posing as many questions about her as it answers. “What the Leveson enquiry is showing is that people are so desperate for answers that they will make them up, rather than accept that there are maybe things in life that we cannot know. I wanted to retain that mystery in the film.”
It also reflects back the missed chances, lost friends and broken relationships that punctuate all our lives. Despite it seeming that in an age of Facebook and Twitter, it is now impossible to disappear, Morley warns, "On Facebook people have so many ‘friends’ feeding in that does anyone notice if someone goes off? I think the old days when people had pints of milk building up outside the door there was more chance people would notice something. Now, I think we are less known.” Morley says that the effect of the story afterwards on viewers is often to go and phone people up to check how they are but that she wants the film to be about our responsibility to ourselves as much as it is to each other, “If I could do one thing it would be to give Joyce a legacy beyond this tawdry story. She wasn’t a victim. She had volition and she chose to cut herself off from people. What I want to do is draw the story closer to people and make them think. ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8959454/Dreams-of-a-Life-interview-with-director-Carol-Morley.html
No comments:
Post a Comment