Artist in Residence 2016: Chris Knight Part 2

June 13, 2016

For a couple of summers, I worked as a private investigator, mostly just recording the comings and goings of people into an office building. Someone was suing someone else, and my job was to create a record that they either were or weren’t doing the things they said they were. What I offered was knowledge, information that could be used to make a point or draw a conclusion. But there were always limits to the information I could provide.

In the film I’m developing, those limits are slipping away. If it were possible for a person’s memories to be recorded, accessed, searched, we could know what they knew.

Everything they knew. That kind of knowledge wouldn’t only be sinister — it would be an unprecedented historical opportunity to see, hear and understand what everyone alive has seen, heard and understood. The people who did it could describe themselves as the keepers of the greatest library the world has even known. What might begin as a voluntary way to ensure you leave your mark might quickly become compulsory, to make sure no data is lost.

I’ve written what I think are going to be the two central scenes for the film — well, one scene and one sequence. The film is about a woman who doesn’t want to remember, doesn’t want to be remembered as she was. On the other side are the technicians whose job it is to record her history.

I’m still not sure how these scenes will fit together. To begin with, they both take too long to get where they’re going. But more importantly, while I think they stand well next to each other, they need to integrate in some way. I’d like to avoid a simple cross­cut, since I think that would weaken the one long conversation. The conversation itself is having to do too much expository work, so another scene to establish the world and the rules might likely help. And right now things happen, but there’s no real trajectory to anything.

So yeah, a plot would probably be a good next step.

Read Chris Knight’s working script here.