Invisible Cinema

Faces in the Flowers by Jennifer MacMillan & Spectre Folk

FACES IN THE FLOWERS by Jennifer MacMillan & Sound by Spectre Folk

"He who knows that flowers are visions, let him enter boldly!" -- Gido

Charlotte and Jason, sister and brother, capture grasshoppers in the soft palms of their hands.  They explore the green and topaz garden, where the most delicate of antennae are tenderly watched over by all children. A song is woven with the discovery of pink, yellow, and violet petals, perched upon emerald stems.  A flutter of wings startles, surprise!  In the morning goldfish fly and honeybees dance in a love that extends across all kingdoms . . . Look for the presence inside the poem!

8 1/2 Dream

I was thinking about this dream on the L train this morning . . . especially the sequence when the devastating Marcello flies into the clouds. . . and is pulled back to earth on a string . . . This is my favorite narrative film.

Our dreams are a second life . . . .

I miss the days on this site when I explored scientific discovery and its relationship to the poetic document of cinema. Science is so beautiful, elegant, perfect, and revelatory that to learn and know its truth is my treasured reward . . . Anyway, what I am about to tell you fills me with a sense of vulnerability, but to conceal the dream I had last night would be to betray my blogger genius! :) Invisible Cinema is where dreams meet Web 2.0! Judge me if you must . . .

Before I begin, I'd like to invoke the presence of Gerard de Nerval. (I have always felt a kinship with this poet . . . and I stood at his grave at Pere Lachais, and in my own way, I prayed.)

 . . . After all, you cannot just wander in off the street and open yourself up completely to the dream world . . .

*

"Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter and the pale gravely immobile shapes that live in limbo detach themselves from the shadows and the night. Then the picture takes form, a new brightness illumines these strange apparitions and gives them movement. The spirit world opens before us.

Swedenborg called these visions Memorabilia he owed them more often to musing than to sleep; The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Dante's Divine Comedy, are two poetic models of such studies of the human soul. Following their example I am going to try to describe the impressions of a long illness which took place entirely within the mysteries of my soul; I do not know why I use the word 'illness,' for as my physical self was concerned, I never felt better. Sometimes I thought my strength and energy were doubled, I seemed to know everything, understand everything. My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of those joys? . . ."

- Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia

*

This dream may have been a prophecy or an importuned message or perhaps it really was a second life . . .

In my dream, I found myself in a long corridor, empty and lined with windows on each side. The light was grey, as in a room on a dark, rainy afternoon, when the lights are off, and only the windows are illuminated and the light takes on an ethereal quality. Outside I could see an expansive empty patio, it was like being inside a DeChirico painting. I turned around to see that in a cluster, little moths and insects, some more frightening than others, flew and buzzed about to my great annoyance. I had to help them escape through a window, but I was repulsed by them. Frustration, heaviness, and pettiness hung in the air, as if my struggling with the irritants touched all my surroundings . . .  Finally, the insects flew away. The winged creatures belonged outside! But then a group of tiny sparrows began to flutter on the opposite side of the room. They were trapped inside, and they were distracting & pestering me in the same way as the insects. Eventually, I opened a window, and they flew away as well. Then a man appeared sitting on a chair. As I began to look out the window, I was distracted by a vision of the mob of insects still on the outside but moving close to the opposite window, "Oh my god, are they coming back?!" When the man stood up and called me to look through the glass, I turned around; there was empty grey sky only, and then I felt true love spring & sear in the depth of my heart. I cannot tell you what happened next, but trust me, it was good . . .

Did anyone else out there have the same dream?

:)

Time to fall back to earth . . .

The Cheshire Cat . . .

Cheshire Cat:

"The proper order of things is often a mystery to me. You, too?"

-Lewis Carroll

Out beyond ideas . . .

I decided to take my new camera (Canon PowerShot XS100!) and try an exercise in photography: patience! (Feel free to download the Guns N' Roses song now. I just did! :)

Well, the image above is what I came back with. Honestly, I still am learning how to use the camera. I tried to stand there and wait for the perfect ray of sunlight, but I just couldn't do it! However, a very cool thing happened . . .

I was in McCarren Park photographing very graceful, shimmering green stalks of grass (simply weeds, perhaps?), and a man approached me and asked if I knew the name of the plant. It turned out that he was a worker in the park, and it was his day off. He mentioned that it made him happy to see me appreciating their work, and I replied that it made me happy each day to walk by the park on my way to work and see these plants. Awwwwww. :) Graceful reciprocity is why I make art! Why do I forget so easily? . . .

From Rumi:

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other,
do not make any sense."

Gardening at night . . .

A garden at night

the dream

the second life,

where just as the image reaches the surface,

it is captured!

*

The undiscovered forest

where beyond the green palatial corners

flowers kneel and bow and growl

in a jungle of astonishing childhood revelations

each one hiding an animal's face

and the eyes that stare back.

*

A summer morning

light waves linger and dance

across translucent petals

where all true ephemeral secrets

are glimpsed once forever

and forever live.

*

films by Robert Todd, Millennium Film Workshop, Saturday, June 7, 2008

photo credit: Spirit House by Robert Todd, 16mm, 2008

Zero point . . .

"Most astronomers are irrationally prejudiced against us astrologers. They typically deride our ancient art without ever having read any of the masters whose work articulates the core principles of astrology. It's the equivalent of speaking about the theory of relativity without ever having studied Einstein. Despite their disdain, I don't hate them back. On the contrary, I celebrate their efforts to understand the universe, and I make abundant use of the information they've gleaned. Be like me in the coming week, Sagittarius. Appreciate those who don't appreciate you, especially if they are doing good work that can benefit you and others.

* SACRED ADVERTISEMENT

Every act of genius, Carl Jung said, is an act contra naturam: against nature. Indeed, every effort to achieve psychological integration and union with the divine requires a knack for working against the grain. The 18th-century mystic Jacob Boehme recommended the same technique. The great secret to becoming enlightened, he said, is 'to walk in all things contrary to the world.' Qabalist teacher Paul Foster Case agreed: 'The basis of the spiritual approach to life, the foundation of the everyday practice of a person who lives the life of obedience to esoteric law, is the reversal of the more usual ways of thinking, speaking and doing.'

Name the ways you already use this approach, and brainstorm others you might like to try."

*

-- Rob Brezsny

That was then . . .

"A Buddhist Koan says: 'The master holds the disciple's head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.'"

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

And this is now . . . 

P. Adams Sitney at Light Industry, Tues. May 27!

Newsflash!  P. Adams Sitney will present an illustrated lecture on his new book, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, at Light Industry, Tuesday, May 27, 8:00. 

Please report back to me!  The heritage of Emerson?  Word up! :)  Brooklyn is our film school . . .

Eyes Upside Down
An illustrated lecture by P. Adams Sitney

Light Industry
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY

P. Adams Sitney will talk about movement and perspective in three short films, by Marie Menken, Ernie Gehr, and Stan Brakhage. He will illustrate the ways in which these films fulfill the promise of an American aesthetic first proclaimed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 and promoted in different ways by Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and Charles Olson, among others. This program reflects the argument of his new book: Eyes Upside Down: Visionary
Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson.

Films to be shown:

Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, Marie Menken, 16mm, 1961, 4 mins
"A new sound version of this classic film. It is a beautiful experience to
see her fabulous shooting. The cutting is just as fabulous and is something
for all to study; the new score by Teiji ito is 'out of this world' with its
many leveled instrumentation. Marie says 'These animated observations of
tiles and Moorish architecture were made as a thank-you to Kenneth for
helping me to shoot on another film in Spain.' Shot in the Alhambra in one
day." - Gryphon Film Group

Shift, Ernie Gehr, 16mm, 1972-74, 9 mins
"For Gehr, Shift broke new ground, hence perhaps a pun in its title. The
film is his first to employ extensive montage. The actors are all mechanical
- a series of cars and trucks filmed from a height of several stories as
they perform on a three-lane city street. Gehr isolates one or two vehicles
at a time, inverting some shots, so that a car hangs from the asphalt like a
bat from a rafter, using angles so severe the traffic often seems to be
sliding off the earth, and employing a reverse motion so abrupt that the
players frequently exit the scene as though yanked from a stage by the
proverbial hook. A sparse score of traffic noises accompanies the spastic
ballet mecanique. Not only the action but Gehr's deliberate camera movements
are synced to the music of honking horns, screeching brakes, and grinding
gears. The eight-minute film is structured as a series of obliquely comic
blackout sketches: trucks run over their shadows; cars unexpectedly reverse
direction or start up and go nowhere." - J. Hoberman

Visions in Meditation #2: Mesa Verde, Stan Brakhage, 16mm, 1989, 17 mins
"This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa
Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity
as Place. 'There is a terror here,' were the first words which came to mind
on seeing these ruins; and for two days after, during all my photography, I
was haunted by some unknown occurrence which reverberated still in these
rocks and rock-structures and environs. I can no longer believe that the
Indians abandoned this solid habitation because of drought, lack-of-water,
somesuch. (These explanations do not, anyway, account for the fact that all
memory of The Place, i.e., where it is, was eradicated from tribal memory,
leaving only legend of a Time when such a place existed.) Midst the rhythms,
then, of editing, I was compelled to introduce images which corroborate what
the rocks said, and what the film strips seemed to say: The abandonment of
Mesa Verde was an eventuality (rather than an event), was for All Time thus,
and had been intrinsic from the first such human building." - SB

Tickets - $6, available at door.

About P. Adams Sitney

P. Adams Sitney is a historian of film art, a co-founding member of
Anthology Film Archives, and Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton
University. He is the author of the book Visionary Film, originally
published in 1974, which was the first major study on the post-war American
avant garde cinema, and is today considered a classic. Among his other
publications are Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and
Literature from 1992 and most recently Eyes Upside Down: Visionary
Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. His articles regularly appear in
Artforum and other journals.

Beauty will save the world

The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970

---

 

1

                                                        

Chad Kyojun Kleitsch

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up - a strange cast-up from the ocean? - something unearthed from the sands? - or an obscure object fallen down from the sky? - intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

  So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please   those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement - right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another - grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel - for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

  But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets?  Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not   remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best - if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it.

  One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual   system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today's ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.
 
  Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God's heaven; then, however, his responsbility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness - his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.

  But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings - they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist's vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.
 
  Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?
 
  And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

  Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.

  Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

2

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beauty will save the world." What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?

  There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a   headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

  Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition - and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

  In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

  But a work of art bears within itself its own verification:  conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force -   they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

  So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?

  In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world," was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

  And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

                                               

Harrison Mitchell

   

 

 

Excerpted from Beauty Will Save the World:  The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Copyright © 1970 by the Nobel Foundation. Reprinted by permission of the Nobel Foundation.