This week the 6th Annual Queens World Film Festival was filled with dazzling works by many young and sometimes not so young women filmmakers daring the world to look them in the eye through their stories. The world is a wonderfully different place now, women of all ages stepping forward insisting the colors and shapes and shadows that sculpt their tales be seen and noted.
So long ago, I only had Jutta and Lina Wertmuller. And now matter how much I watched men and women delve into sex in German, it was Jutta where a more important and quieter discussion took place.
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Originally posted December 23, 2014
Painting From the Inside
A rare dinner at Jutta's. Fay joins us.
The kitchen table pulled into the living room and the canvases carefully tucked away so that the Chinese food doesn't spill on them. Her son, sick with the flu, has left two good bottles of wine, one of which we drink.
The hearing aid, being what it is, doesn't always direct her to who is speaking. It has no subtlety. She has to ask at times, "Which one of you is speaking?"
But, in the long run, it doesn't matter. The ideas do.
And they don't flow out. They don't explode out. Its more like they burst out, like a ton of Christmas lights bursting out in the dark.
It gets later and later and soon it is just me, the Mariner and Jutta. The food is put away, the table returned to the kitchen, the chairs back in their spots so she doesn't bump into anything.
The long weeks have caught up with everyone and home beckons.
But wait, I say. We have to look at your paintings.
Suddenly, it is as if we had just arrived minutes ago.
Curiosity does that. Because we are all bouncing like baby goats, as Jutta starts pulling out canvases.
"This painting is just beginning," Jutta says.
She doesn't know what it is and where it is going, but she is following something here.
It's what writers are going through, what artists are going through, this return, she explains. Getting in touch with that root self, that primitive being within, that "caveman".
With sight now relegated to a corner of her right eye, she is no longer looking at a landscape outside her window or a still life on her table.
She is returning her gaze to her soul, that universe moving beyond the speed of light that was in her from the moment she emerged into the world.
And when she does, she sees everything
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Related Posts:
Sunday Memories: All Together Again In Jutta's Kitchen
Jutta's Kitchen: Part One
Jutta's Kitchen: Part Two
Jutta's Kitchen: Part Three
Jutta's Kitchen Revisited
Jutta's Kitchen Blooms
Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet
At the End There Is Nothing Left Except Love
