RSS feed Self Expression with The 1000 Journals Project by Laura J Smith
‘Personal art’ is all around us. On every street we are confronted with non-verbal thoughts and confessions, through graffiti-decked walls and buildings, on tattoos imprinted into skin for a lifetime, and messages clumsily carved into the backs of train seats. When art collides ever so inevitably with expression, remarkable things can happen.
It was late in 2003 that filmmaker Andrea Kreuzhage first stumbled across the 1000 Journals project. As she describes, “I came across it like so many people, on the Internet. I read that someone in San Francisco, who calls himself Someguy, had sent out 1000 blank books and just recently, one of them, Journal 526 had returned to him full. And it changed my life.” Kreuzhage describes how her burning curiosity led her to shooting the film. “I was really curious about what had happened to the other 999 books, and why one would come back, but the others wouldn’t.” A novice to documentary filmmaking, she speaks of how it felt as though the project had found her, and not the other way around. “I realised that the Internet is changing, everyday. People move from Hotmail to Gmail, from Myspace to Facebook, and it’s a very fluid, short attention span. And I thought, someone has to document what happened to these journals.”
Someguy’s intentions for his project were simple. To promote a revival in our creativity, that is incandescent and exciting while we are children, and yet slowly diminishes during our progression into adulthood. As his voiceover in the opening of Kreuzhage’s documentary, 1000 JOURNALS, explains, he has many questions, and wants to receive some good solid answers: “Where did all our creativity go? We were all creative people at one point in our lives, and now we all go to work every day and sit in traffic. So what happened?”
While managing to track down a staggering 80 of the missing journals during filming, Kreuzhage didn’t add anything to a journal herself, as she feels that 1000 JOURNALS is her contribution. “I felt that I was on the outside, and I wanted to stay on the outside. I never wanted to break this rule. I had this incredible privilege of seeing so many journals and I wanted to take care of them and then send them back into the world without putting anything inside.”
Describing the project as having an “interesting anarchic energy”, Kreuzhage is unsure as to whether 1000 JOURNALS can change the social or political climate, let alone the world, but senses that such a venture can revive our faith in mankind. In an age where the fear of terrorism is always on the tips of our tongues, Kreuzhage believes that “the moment you take something abstract, or political, and get it into the hands of people, where they can just be human, [they] can learn to trust again, as [they] become more curious about each others voices”.
Providing Someguy and his increasingly popular project with an even more audible voice through her documentary, her hope is to influence all who see the film, to encourage their own personal creativity, and cause them to nurture projects of their own. And it’s working. “At the very first screening, there was a random group of people who had never met, and they started their own journal right there in the cinema. And things like that have happened at basically every screening. It’s great if people do something instead of just consume. [We] go to a movie theatre and it’s 90-minutes of passively watching a film, but it’s great if [people] then go home and do something.”
Collective projects like this, as 1000 JOURNALS highlights, give people a cause, and something to strive for. That’s the power of creativity. When combined with community, it becomes something very potent that sparks creativity endlessly. With 919 journals still AWOL, (50 of which are known to have travelled to the UK), who knows what could be happening right under our noses. Kreuzhage has taken Q&As in the US where people have turned up guiltily clutching journals. Perhaps Cambridge will prove no exception – could you be the next one to contribute to a journal?
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