He was a street kid, literally, living in “a chaotic squat for 17-year-old runaways” in Philadelphia. It’s a remarkable movie, both for the questions it poses and the answers it never quite articulates.īut to back up a step: Justin is intrigued by what he sees in that first tile in 1994, that is, a phrase and poetic arrangement that will become familiar to him and everyone else who notices the Toynbee Tiles: “Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick’s 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter.” Justin remembers that his first encounter was not especially life-changing, given his circumstances. The film tells the stories of lives, but also looks at how those stories are produced and told, how they circulate and how they lead to other stories. It’s also, more profoundly, a consideration of how the material world can intersect with imagined worlds, conjured from subjective experiences, collective perspectives, and efforts to define selves in relation to others. If Jon Foy’s film begins with Justin’s discovery, it goes on to examine what’s at stake in discovery as an idea and a practice, what Justin and his fellow investigators working on the Toynbee Tile Mystery realize about themselves in this process. It’s also a sign of how smart and odd and provocative Resurrect Dead will be. It’s a sign of what he will come to see, beyond the tile, and beyond the next step he imagines for himself, as well as the film’s own part in that imagining. And the imagery as he tells it - the close-up of his nearly painfully pale face, then the cuts to tiles, seeming to float even as they’re anchored in pavement - is hinting at why it goes on for years, an indication of Justin’s capacity for creative thinking and commitment and a particular kind of evolving comprehension.
As Justin Duerr tells his story in the documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, spotting the tile initiates an investigation that will go on for years. “The first time I noticed a Toynbee Tile on the street was on South Street.” It sounds so simple and innocuous, this “first time.” And yet it’s not. Make + Glue tile!! You! Only by destruction of media can this movement survive.
0 kommentar(er)
