Invisible Cinema

Rumi as sociologist . . .

"Traveling is as refreshing for some as staying at home is for others.  Solitude

in a mountain place fills with companionship for this one, dead-weariness

for that one.  This person loves being in charge of the working of a community.  This

one loves the ways that heated iron can be shaped with a hammer.  Each has been

given a strong desire for certain work, love for those motions, and all motion

is love.  The way sticks and pieces of dead grass and leaves shift about in

the wind and with the directions of rain and puddle water on the ground, those

motions are following the love they've been given."

-Rumi, "Love for Certain Work"

White Noise . . .

My illustrious friend, Thom, has invited me to reveal what I am reading reading right now on the not so random page 123.  So I'd like to share an excerpt from White Noise by Don DeLillo:

"I turned off the radio, not to help me think but to keep me from thinking.  Vehicles lurched and skidded.  Someone threw a gum wrapper out a side window and Babette made an indignant speech about inconsiderate people littering the highways and countryside.

'I'll tell you something else that's happened before,' Heinrich said. 'We're running out of gas.'

The dial quivered on E.

'There's always extra,' Babette said.

'How can there be always extra?'

'That's the way the tank is constructed.  So you don't run out.'

'There can't be always extra.  If you keep going, you run out.'

    'You don't keep going forever.'

    'How do you know when to stop?' he said.

    'When you pass a gas station,' I told him . . ."

-- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Everyone makes experimental films . . .

"Everyone makes experimental films in their dreams."

- Jeff Scher

Check out Jeff Scher's, new film "All the Wrong Reasons" on the NYT!  It is delightful! 

"Dreams are picture-driven, non-linear quilts of movie-like moments sprinkled with cryptic epiphanies. They play nightly in the private cinema of your head but the rub is the audience must be asleep. Then again, maybe sleep, or at least the suspension of conscious thought, is the ideal state for entering such a movie.

“All the Wrong Reasons” is an experiment in making a film that feels as if it has percolated up from the subconscious; a dream you can watch with your eyes open. It’s one of those big cathartic dreams, a labyrinth of fleeting moments full of metaphor and mischief. I wanted it to feel like a bumpy roller coaster ride in and out of the dark side of the brain where all the wrong reasons reside. And, as with all dreams, the meaning and significance are open to interpretation.

There are almost 3,000 paintings and collages in this film. I used rapidly changing color to give a shimmer to the animation and lots of collage to create a visually percussive texture. Shay Lynch’s score pulls all of the wildly disparate images together."  - Jeff Scher

*

P.S.  This film reminds me of a certain cartoon, I'll describe it here:

Frame 1:  A woman awakens, her cat sleeping on her bed, to see a pixie surrounded by stars, "I'm your fairy godmother!"  Frame 2:  The fairy taps the woman on her head with a wand, "ping,"  and declares, "All your dreams shall come TRUE!"  Frame 3:  The woman sits up in her bed (oddly she has been wearing sunglasses throughout this story) and she is delighted!  Frame 4: Suddenly, she is in a classroom full of students - naked (!), while  someone hands her an algebra final she skipped a few years ago . .

:)

This beautiful day outside?  It's beautiful, because you are in it!

You are here . . .

"Our culture does not value poetry, and it drives poets crazy."  -NYT

I've been apartment bound for most of the week, and I am beginning to recover now, but I still am not strong enough to see Hitoshi Toyoda's live performance and projection of 580 images at Anthology tonight!  This event would be the perfect thing . . .

Where to begin?  You are here, in the night, in the dreamscape that never lies to you, in the mysterious unknown, in the perforations of the physical world, and in the nature of life as it is . . .

I've been wondering about some of my complements over in the cinematic yang . . .  Some may see reflections in the traditional film review (prosaic, compartmentalized, rational document that it is) that I cannot see.  I realize that all truths wait in all things!  If film reviews are what you are into, totally go ahead with that.  Personally I don't feel that writing a film review is much of a challenge in comparison to what I have accomplished thus far, and I have no aspirations in this regard.  My blood boils when writers, upheld as experts, admired as teachers, and awarded the brightest visibility as employees, openly hold the entire blogosphere in contempt.  When that behavior is exhibited, the person ceases to be an expert, you know?  Furthermore, I don't understand why bloggers give so much attention and linkage to film critics who insult everyone writing online.  Why?  What is up with that?  Why not get in touch with the ubiquitous, humble bloggers and ask them what they think about the blogosphere?

(I guess that we all have to live out our own conflicts.)

When I am at my best, my writing is hot!  But there will always be someone who is writing, or has written, or will write what I cannot express.  I am called (!) to discover these worlds  . . . the annihilation in the superabundance of being!

"I would now happily remain at the table while it was being cleared, and, if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band might be passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I would turn my eyes.  Since I had seen such things depicted in water-colours by Elstire, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished as though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin into which the sun introduced a patch of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass which thus showed to greater advantage the sweep of its curved sides, and in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, some dregs of wine, dark but glittering with reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colours of the plums which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden yellow in the half-plundered dish, the promenade of the antiquated chairs that came twice daily to take their places round the white cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the rites of the palate, and where in the hollows of the oyster-shells a few drops of lustral water had remained as in tiny holy-water stoups of stone; I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundity of 'still life.'"

-- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Part II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 613.

Life is a dream

"What is life?  A madness.  What is life?  An illusion, a shadow, a story . . . for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams."   -Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A memory from 1968 . . . Jackie Raynal, Deux Fois 

What is poetry? Part 5

The poet is like a seismograph that vibrates from every quake, even if it is thousands of miles away.  It's not that he thinks incessantly of all things in the world.  But they think of him.  They are in him,  and thus do they rule over him.  Even his dull hours, his depressions, his confusions are impersonal states; they are like the spasms of the seismograph, and a deep enough gaze could read more mysterious things in them than in his poems. -- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "The Poet and the Present Time," 1907.

"From this passage Warburg's art history seems to have retained two points: the 'despecification' of discourse ('indeed, this precise separation between the poet and the non-poet does not seem at all possible to me'), which makes it possible to recharacterize the discourse of the historian or the philosopher as a form of authentic poetic expression; and an implicit critique of the philosophy of the subject: the author is less the master of his words than he is a receptive surface, a photosensitive plate on which texts or images surging up from the past reveal themselves."

- Philippe-Alain Michaud:  Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

leaves of silver turning to green . . .

"A yellow sky with yellow sun

*
a reddish cap and orange bricks

*
twelve flowers that are light on light

*
trees gray-green with a pink sky

*
cypresses of bottle-green hue

*
some very yellow buttercups

*
and all the ground is yellow, too

*
roses in a green vase

*
a window with a green shutter

*
a lady's clothes in black, black, black

*
two chairs the yellow of fresh butter

*
leaves of silver turning to green

*
stars sparkling, greenish, yellow, white

*
a big bunch of violet irises

*
and in my head a starry night"

- Vincent van Gogh

Text taken from Vincent's Colors (c) The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (For my niece, Charlotte)

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Orchard, 1889.

Claude Monet

A friend at work watched the BBC series, The Impressionists, and she mentioned that Claude Monet reminded her of me!  :)  Actually, she was referring to the artist's indignance with the Salon, and how Monet, along with Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne created their own exhibition in Paris, 1874. ("I will never show at the Salon!") 

Impressionism was initially perceived as "scandalous and heretical" (that is so great!) & so regarded with contempt that one critic proclaimed, "They have declared war on beauty." 

*

Like the 1874 exhibition, my cinema program, The Invisible Film Series, was DIY!  My films were rejected from festivals, and I really had no other choice but to exhibit them myself.  Mike Park & I curated a show at the beginning of May for 5 years, and I kind of miss it right now.  Although, this endeavor took me to the beautiful world I live in, and I really cannot go back . . . Cinema is a journey! 

After seeing "The Impressionists," I realized that Monet is a guide for me.  (Finally, someone else who really loves flowers!  :)  But it's not just that Monet also was drawn to the ephemerality of nature and light, à la experimental cinema!  He seemed to know and search for the infinity in the subject of nature specifically, always changing, always new . . .

"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."

--Claude Monet

Monet, Claude. Water Lilies, c. 1914.

P.S.  Happy Spring!

 

What is Poetry? Part 4

"Angelo Poliziano, a broadly educated humanist, a philologist, jurist, historian, philosopher, and poet, versed in Greek and Latin, and a prominent figure in Italian culture, was the model of Renaissance erudition.  As Eugenio Garin has noted, his poetics, dominated by interpretations of Antiquity, was based on an idea according to which 'to imitate . . . is to become aware of one's own originality in the relationship that links it to the other, to find in oneself the means of creation with an example before one's eyes, to assume its intimate nature through a sort of looking into oneself.'"

- Philippe-Alain Michaud:  Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Tenderness

Why are my favorite writers fired?