On December 28th, 1895 the Lumiere Brothers famously exhibited motion pictures to a paying audience for the first time. They were hand cranked man on the street short films and one of them happened to be of a train pulling into La Ciotat station. This film, less than a minute long, reportedly sent people running from the tent out of fear that the train was going to crash directly into them.
Nowadays it can be hard to imagine something that could make us jump like that. In many ways technology has been making us more docile as it makes us more comfortable. We are less willing to believe in “what if?” because fiction is just a term for things that haven’t happened yet.
I’m Saul Sudin and I’m a filmmaker, which means I get to spend most of my days thinking about creation and perception. I’m planning to use this space as a forum to talk about the things that excite me, make me question the world, and inspire some imagination. Hopefully it will elicit something in you too.
Here are five facts about me, some of which you might find in a resume, some of which you won’t.
- I’m from St. Louis, Missouri. I take my origins very seriously and have a severe flyover state complex.
- I’ve done some projects that I think are pretty cool like a documentary called Punk Jews or the viral video Sleeping on Strangers on the Subway (produced in conjunction with this site’s founder Elad), and once earned a year’s worth of free popcorn for winning Runner-Up in Popcorn, Indiana’s Munch Better Video Contest.
- I am the Creative Director and co-founder of Jewish Art Now, a central portal for the convergence of Judaism and contemporary art with a fresh and innovative perspective. So I spend a lot of time talking about art and how religion has become pretty taboo in the contemporary art scene.
- I once earned the nickname “Saulogram” for being the guy people would go to for weird facts or to remember an actor’s name before everyone could simply look things up on the internet at any moment of any day. I remember a time before the internet, but fully embrace our future as consciousnesses uploaded to The Cloud. Nowadays people call me Saul because that is my name and I am currently obsolete.
- I like puns. Mostly I come up with ones that no one but me appreciates, either because I am too weird or the puns are. Here’s a bilingual one as a test: “A good name for a Jewish girl living in Alabama would be Dodi Lee”. If you got that, give yourself a gold star.
Stick with me and you are guaranteed to see discussions on the movies, technology, music, comedy, history, spirituality, and various other arts and sciences that shape my thoughts. I’ll be playing in a pool of past and future combined, because linear time is just a limited perception.
I’m writing this on my birthday, so I suppose given the previous statement I should end with:
“See you in the present”.
