The dark creative passage

One of the most important images in this book is the element of darkness within the creative act. The film-maker who reads closely a particular literary text must pass through a long process of turning away from everyday light, toward forgetting, toward a kind of darkness that eventually will lead to a vision that will produce a new work of art. In Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, this art becomes sketching or painting. Here, within these pages, this art becomes film. Greenaway reads the text of the Heian Court’s Sei Shonagan, where lovers write letters of poetry, then films a late 20th century Japan and Hong Kong where Jim Jarmusch reads William Blake and then puts these words into the mouth of an aboriginal who, along with an accountant from Cleveland named Bill Blake, flee memories of the empty Marcan tomb; Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” characters arise from ancient Maltese Falcons; Jean-Jacques Arnaud’s “The Lover” arises from Marguerite Duras’ Vietnam nights of deep blue, and Anthony Minghella’s “English Patient” lives in sun-drenched deserts, rather than in Michael Ondaatje’s dark Tuscan villas. What happens in between these literary and filmic texts is part of the mystery of creation that this work explores.