Introduction

Coming along with the film, in its box, is a set of liner notes, some folded pages trying to say, in a fairly concise form, where the film is trying to go. An expanded version of those notes we have referred to as a Compendium, intended to follow below. To be more exact, we've talked about an open-ended kind of text, rather than a larger, fixed version. Whatever the size, it's not quite here yet (forthcoming, as they say).

Meanwhile, to give some pointers, we may quote from a couple of places in the liner notes, from the very beginning and from the later words, so that a small arc may be established that could give a general idea of what's still to come. The liner notes start out in italics:

Snow. An old man. A stick. A little boy. Using the stick, the old man slides on the snow. The boy asks, “Can I try that?” The old man hands the stick to the boy, who begins to play with it, on his own.

The key words here, and maybe for the film as a whole, would be “on his own”. To find out for oneself. To experience that sliding on one's own. To try that.

That trying, however, does not take place in a vacuum, it's seen within one's living, it takes place. The old man slides down the hill, in the snow. He slides down a certain way. A way that he has taken over, in his younger years, maybe. Or a way that he has forged, slowly. So that now he slides, and he gives a particular expression to that sliding, a certain sliding, not necessarily certified.

What the film is trying to say (and it may be inserted here that this scene happened completely unscripted, the snow that entire year in Seattle lasting some twenty minutes), at least trying to say about itself, at this point: if you are interested in some of this, the many ways of the ball, then look into it, on you own. Rather than instructive: introductive...