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TED talk - Shekhar Kapur: 06 Transcript extract
Identifier
016327
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Here Shekhar is talking about a scene from the film Elizabeth.
In this extract he is talking about destiny, the philosopher's stone, using symbolism like the well.............
Architecture = Great Work
A description of the experience
What am I doing with the architecture? The architecture is telling a story. The architecture is telling a story about how, even though she's the most powerful woman in the world at that time, there is the other, the architecture's bigger.
The stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic. It'll survive her. So it's telling you, to me, stone is part of her destiny.
Not only that, why is the camera looking down?
The camera's looking down at her because she's in the well. She's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal. That's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality, come in, release her spirit. And that's the moment where, in my mind, both Elizabeth and Bess are the same person.
But that's the moment she's surgically removing herself from that. So the film is operating on many many levels in that scene. And how we tell stories visually, with music, with actors, and at each level it's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other.