on filming supermanThere are several things that interested me during the period I followed a human statue, superman, in Dam square. My first interest concerns what happens when the statues are on the square. Dam square is one of the most crowded public spaces in Amsterdam. People pass by the square and never stay longer than taking pictures and walking from one end to the other. It is not an inviting place to be, besides touristic reasons, and it is mostly populated by tourists and passer-by’s. The human statues create an inevitable private space within this public space, by being there in a ‘less temporary’ way (they come and go, people change, most stay couple of months and some stay for years). They stay there longer than the tourists, they come back every day between certain hours, and what makes this very interesting is that they eat, change clothes, meet their friends, give smoking brakes, get phone calls, get important news, talk to their far away family members on the phone… in the square. They do daily, mostly domestic activities in front of a big crowd. The public space and private space merge during those moments. Those moments are the moments that took my attention in the first place. Second thing that makes me interested in the image of superman, is the way he is in the square. I met him in his first day of ‘being a superman’, and he was very new to the act, he was clumsy and not fulfilling the expectations superman image creates in our minds. His connection to superman was a result of very practical reasons, but in our end the story is different. An image comes to us with its references, and we process images all together; the idea of superman and what we see in the Dam square does not match and this results in an amusing footage. It makes us smile, it makes us laugh, and in the end it makes us feel for ‘the superman’ that stands there on the Dam square. When I showed the footage to people, some people reacted with a laughter, but some others said the footage was in fact a sad one. You see someone trying to make money by being there, in a ‘ridiculous’ outfit and try to make it work, everything fails in one way or other, but this is his job and there must be a story behind this imagery. Related to the last point, the other dimension of the story is a very obvious one. There is someone from Romania standing on Dam square for two months, to make money, and he needs to leave the country after two months, he has hard time finding job, and constantly getting rejected because of where he comes from. A ‘usual’ story of an immigrant. I had not dive into this aspect of the story because during this two months, we have seen each other for 1-1,5 months, once or max twice a week, not enough time to get to know each other. This led things to be less about facts and figures but more about figuring out how do we behave each other, what distance we keep, what we reveal and what we keep to ourselves. Also during this time, my interest diverted from superman being the ‘leading character’ towards taking him as a reference point to get to know the square, its different characters, rules and politics, as well as analyzing myself and my existence in the square, how can I exist in that community, and how do I get accepted, how do they see me, and how do I behave, this includes the moments of approval, disapproval, confrontations, moments of silence and many others.. |