To travel four different journeys at once . . .

"Perhaps the best way to conceive of films that go beyond the limited and all-too human is to quote from my own work in progress.  In all these projects I seek to move from one world into another, using a technique described in baroque Venice as 'Il Ponte,' a way of producing anamorphic agents that play with four levels of medieval rhetoric: literal, allegorical, ethical, and anagogical.  But there are also other rhetorical systems like the seven paths of Aboulafia, or such simple things as crossword puzzles.  Except that instead of seeking to read all four levels at the same time, the aim is to skip constantly from one level to another.  The jump is the element of surprise that not only procures a sudden illumination, but all the pleasure as well.  Imagine a slalom skier propelled with each turn not just in another direction, but on to a completely different slope.  In this way he manages to travel four different journeys at once, though the point is not in the journeys themselves but in the beauty of his leap from one world to the next."

 

-- Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema

Comments

[Alessandro]

I agree completely. It's the jumping. Sometimes, you don't even know you're doing it. Then later you find these different levels.