By Julian Semilian
If you could do anything you wanted to, anything at all, in order to pursue your artistic inspiration, what would be? Well, good, here’s the money for it!
When the wonderful Kenan folks told us, Will and I, that the grant was for us, to get ourselves inspired as artists, we couldn’t believe it. We thought for sure there had to be a catch. No one trusts artists to that extent! We know better! But there it was, and in addition, Kenan invested complete trust in us. So, with the aid of universal serendipity, we engaged in the wildest fantasy an artist in our shoes could have: to travel to UK and Czech Republic in order to visit, dialogue and study with some of the greatest artist-filmmakers of our time, Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer.
What follows are disjointed notes, an artist’s diary, some of the insights as a result of this wonderful journey.
I did, do, wish to embark upon a more individual pursuit as a film artist, following the surrealist path of creating images. After more than 35 years experience as a film editor and ten years as a film educator I began embarking upon a new exploration of imagery. Contact with these artists would trigger new ideas and open paths I hadn’t dreamed of before.
For me it was a new journey. A new way of using film. Instead of editing films for others, I wanted to make my own films. But I was not interested in production, which is costly, time-consuming and, moreover, involves many other people. It was not the aspect I was interested in. On the other hand I had good training in the use of the camera; years of studying photography, having been influenced by and studied with photographers of various styles; I had studied and practiced rich tonality and precise framing of Paul Caponigro; I had studied and practiced the casual and accidental framing of the street photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. I was an avid viewer of Man Ray’s abstract black and white experiments during his early French period, filled with the evocative internality and mysterious poetry of the life of the unconscious. The surrealist paintings and collages of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Roberto Matta, the boxes of Joseph Cornell; the photos of Emila Medkova. It’s the early abstract films of Man Ray that inspired me to make my own film, Tear Void Insomnia Mist, in which I was to resolve an old-time aspiration to make a film about the state of hypnagogia. Making this film opened up many other possibilities for me, and inspired me to make other films, to extend my personal writing into the visual work that I had become so enamored of. I finally had to remind myself what had excited me about making films again: that I could use an easily-affordable personal camera and shoot everyday objects without expensive set-ups; that I could edit and transform what I shot on my laptop and use my thirty-five some years of experience in new and unexpected ways, I could rediscover myself as a filmmaker, that I could use my skills, acquired over a very long period of arduous work and paying of dues to express myself anew.
What did I first expect to get out meeting the Quays and Jan Svankamajer? As soon as Kenan announced our request for a grant to meet with these artists was granted, I began asking myself this question ceaselessly.
Could we, by meeting them, catch their genius like a cold? Or even better, like a kind of contamination, in the sense that whatever it is you catch, cannot be cured.
I was worried we wouldn’t meet with them meet long enough; but through our own effort to study their work, the meeting would act as a catalyst. Also, although I have been around a long time, memorable meetings have been few; yet each time, the convulsive nature of the encounter, the intensity of the moment, and my own readiness, realized through consistent intense efforts, made me a ready recipient.
But perhaps there was something absurd in the way I thought about it. I am after all about the same age as the Quays and only 14 years younger than Svankmajer. I have a significant body of work, as a filmmaker, as a writer, as a translator. What was lacking in my own work that I needed to get inspiration from those artists?
I began by repeatedly viewing the short films and the features of BQ and JS. Repeated viewing yields new information which the spectator misses during the first view.
I searched the internet for all the possible articles and interviews with them, as there are no books available on BQ. The articles were interesting but seemingly approached their work from an academic viewpoint and I did not feel I could relate to them. The interviews as well seemed to lack the kinds of questions which I wished to ask but could not yet formulate in my mind. I kept looking at their films almost obsessively, over and over again. I could not articulate exactly what it was that I wanted.
However what became clear is this was the first benefit of the grant: it forced me to do some serious investigation into their work.
Upon repeated viewing, I felt frustrated realizing that despite the attraction I had felt for their work, I didn’t really understand it. I also began reflecting on my own praxis: why did not begin a deeper analysis into their work earlier? But then the first advantage of the grant makes it itself apparent to me: I was actually beginning a labor of authentic research into their work.
I found myself flailing before my own incomprehension. On the one hand I had the clear attraction I felt for the work; but an investigation, research had to be undertaken in order to break below the surface.
Their way of editing film was different than the styles I had developed for myself over the years. It was of course the long years of experience which allowed me to make this discovery and through which I allowed myself to be more open in the way I look at my own material, ways of editing which I realized I would know how to incorporate in my own work. In addition I began to expand my understanding of the work of my students.
While the films I had worked on as editor were of the dramatic kind, the Quays and early Svankamjer worked within a different aesthetic. While I was able to surreptitiously insert an aesthetic close to those artists into the films I edited, I now could use these aesthetics freely in my own work.
I was attracted for instance to the way in which the Qways obviated from the Kuleshov method.
Athanor is an alchemical term meaning oven. It is where the Prima Materia, the base metal fated to become gold is placed, where the actual transmutation takes place. The connection here is to any distressing experience that transmutes into art. Martin Stejskal, JS’s art director writes that it is conflict which leads to the convulsive imagery of surrealism.
Kuleshov, where it’s clear who’s looking at who or what and why. But what the Quays have created is an indeterminate terrain where all is maybe clear, but not quite, where one has to strain in wonder to comprehend until comprehension provides unexpected answers which are not obvious at first viewing. As a matter of fact, this is the point: the Quays’ films requite multiple viewings, and in that sense they are similar to painting or music, where repeated viewing or listening are a necessary component. In order for the viewer to obtain satisfaction he or she needs to work. The ideal result is that the work itself starts to appeal intuitively, to call out to the inner world of the viewer; it’s an incomprehensible connection, incalculable, in the sense that no caliper can be applied to it, it comes, for the lack of better denomination, from the soul; if you are going to try to classify it, it is to be placed in the category of the ecstatic experience, or Gnostic, where the knowledge you gain is an internal knowledge, emotionally and spiritually satisfying, a holistic experience which integrates, at least temporarily, one’s self; it is an inner recognition of one’s identity; it is both fulfilling and frustrating; frustrating because it cannot be placed on the tally of social success, does not integrate well within a corporate structure; it is frightening as well, because it draws the traveler to a destination which is not identified in the social register of values. Yet, when we speak about fulfillment, it is the only genuine fulfillment there is.
Even in speaking about it, I am speaking of a negative space.
Thus the work continues to live and to give, the viewer becomes enriched by discovering a new aspect of inner self.
A narrative movie provides no genuine understanding; the conclusion has been drawn a priori, it follows along the path of a well-established formula. The narrative may be skillfully executed, the drama skillfully acted, directed, edited. The work of the editor may be in some ways subversive to the plan of the narrative. That is commendable. It may work to fool the viewer, and to create a few moments of genuine poetry. Ultimately, unfortunately, the narrative formula wins out, despite its veering off the pre-established trajectory for portions of the narrative journey.
Most viewers judge a movie a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the degree of stimulation they receive from a single viewing.
The work of the viewer in the process of comprehension. A different kind of comprehension than the viewing of a film in which the narrative is clear and follows a a pre-established narrative line, based on the emotional manipulation of the viewer through forced identification with a protagonist played by a movie star, who behaves according to pre-established moral dictates in line with the ideology of the filmmaker.
The danger is present and clear: an ideology, not ideas, is perpetrated on the viewer through the offices of emotional manipulation. The viewer is a victim since everyone is emotionally manipulable. On the other hand in a Quay film, the audience is asked to be a participant. The audience is asked to do half the work, the film is a collaboration between the filmmaker and the viewer, note I said the viewer, not the audience, the idea being that each individual viewer does the work, to participate, to be involved in creating meaning, to create meaning for him or herself. The viewer is asked to overcome habitual mental and spiritual sloth, is asked to ask questions and, to answer them, in such way that the work, or rather the work done to the work, or in response to the work, provides gnosis, spiritual sustenance, leading to mental and spiritual elasticity, openness, and why not, joy.
An indeterminate terrain in which disorientation itself is the purpose.
Multiple viewings: a 21 minute film such as Street of Crocodiles becomes much longer, of indeterminate length, as long as the viewer wishes to participate in watching it. It lasts as long as a viewer is willing to continue viewing; the viewing can take place over the period of one day, one month, or any number of years;; one can return to the film, refreshed or renewed by new experiences: a new love affair, sad or happy, a visit to Eastern Europe, a new course of study. Sometimes something as banal as trying to get mortgage or make it to the end of the month, or becoming involved in political or social action, contemplating the ills of the world, losing a dear one or finding a dear one, regaining a long lost identity. The viewing can become infinite, or defined (de-finite) through death’s intervention.
Svankmajer cluster of shots which destroys the Kuleshov construction yet provides a more satisfying perception, both physical and psychological. The cluster of shots which acquire unexpected and whimsical shapes, like a jack-in-the-box; the shots, though short, are of different lengths, the lengths being made significant by variety and direction of the motion of the object within the frame, motion created either by the motion of the object within a still frame or the still object recorded by a moving camera. Jerky serpentines, sinuous zigzags of short duration, in reality, but of long duration in the mind; the shock of transitions, two distant objects placed next to each other in subsequent cuts, the novel and bold use of Eisensteinian juxtapositions, still valid in this day and age, both energizing and soothing to the nerves of the viewer.
This was revolutionary for the period when these films were made; even though this way of editing has become somewhat common in MTV (though by no means as effective, as insightful, as skilful) Svankmajer appears to be the pioneer, using this kind of editing in the sixties and early seventies, long before even the idea of it became commonplace.
Another Svankmajer technique: animating still objects through quick editing; for instance, the sequence of still shots cross-cutting between shots of science book drawings of monkeys and live monkeys: the stillness of the drawings transmutes to motion through the quick cuts: the still expressions on the faces of the monkeys suddenly come to life. There is no time to reflect ponderously upon the image: one is entranced, literally, by the juxtaposition of objects in quick sequence. And the alternation of the different lengths, the difference being simply one of a few frames, creates adorably ungraspable rhythms of unbearable seduction.
Yet another kind of editing in Svankmajer: in Alice for instance, when the rabbit first comes to life under Alice’s gaze: its motion is composed of a series of quick shots detailing for one second or less different actions and events in close detail of the rabbit’s animated motion. One could argue that it could have been just as effective to observe the rabbit from a neutral point of view; some have said that this essentially cubist analysis of motion/action is pointless and unnecessary; I disagree: the film is this activity created through the sequence of close-ups, each detailing a piece of action/event which is at the same time both significant and inconsequential, each furthering the story while at the same time subverting it; this simultaneous counter-activity: though temporally sequential, the short length of each shot followed by the next, the pure and purposeful precipitational nature of the shot positioning in the sequence make it incomprehensible to reason, which needs to time to ponder and, in this instance, can’t; the lack of time needed to ponder in counteroffensive to the inherent need to ponder; a lost struggle, unsuccessfully put up by reason, the reason which will not capitulate, watching in entrancement as enemy tanks of the sequential precipitousness rule over it; reason, defeated but ready to pick itself up from the ground to continue the job of interpretation. (See Bergson)
The definition of each action/event, the creation of identity through the process of selection, the point where one cuts in to the point of where one cuts out.
There is the pure physical joy of watching this sequential nest of squiggling worms, nearly impossible to articulate for the purposes of lexical preservation.
The jerkiness of the cuts in Quays. Against the smoothness of dramatic narrative.
A loosening of the way one edits. Feeling more freedom. A loosening of the constrainment caused by traditional narrative. I had come up against my own borders. To indulge into one’s own comfort without fear of punishment. I do not mean comfort zone, but the genuine inner freedom.
What causes an artist’s work to reverberate in such a way that one’s entire being is shaken, that the sense of one’s identity moves to a new level, more internal, a known unknown.
Is genius designated by fate, is it immutable and fixed, a matter of unchangeable fate? Is one a genius as opposed to the rest who merely aspire for greatness but fated to wallow in minor-league obscurity? Can one reach greatness with the effort of one’s being or does it only come naturally, divinely or karmically endowed?
Certainly it does not come from committee meetings, decisions reached by committees, actions infused with agendas whose purpose is not identical to the whimsical trajectory of artistic pursuit.
Does one need to meet genius and perhaps catch it like a cold, be contaminated by it, or can one improve by making efforts on one’s own?
To keep going without rationalizing one’s shortcomings.
Can one be teacher and artist at the same time?
The administrative duties, excessive committee meetings do not allow time for self-reflection. A process that depletes the artist. Does not allow ample time for research; exploring the depths of the art and its subtleties; a sign of mistrust of the faculty. Art by committee is anti-art, subverts the purpose of art, what does it hope to achieve? Does it propose to improve art, because everyone had a new idea? It depletes the individuality, the individual expression. Ultimately the students as well are cheated out of a genuine artistic experience because the faculty, made up of artists, supposedly, is cheated out of having an artistic experience. Art is an expression of the individual soul. or it isn’t.
I cannot speak about the artistic experience I have undergone without including my personal history. Budapest as way to safely explore that part of myself. Hungarians have the power of self-reflection. Budapest as idealized memory. Bucharest destroyed by Ceausescu. Memory as act of self-defiance.
Dilletantism; disregard for the process of creativity; a concern with results alone; a concern with surface rather than depth, results acquired through time-spent. Conformism, commerciality rather than encouraging unalloyed process of creativity. A squelching of the artist. Excess of committees squelching the creative work. No interest in the true art of cinema.
There is a clear connection between the work of Brothers Quay, Svankmajer and Joseph Cornell. I too claim a strong connection to Cornell’s work. This I knew instinctively but Laura’s insistence on visiting churches everywhere make the connection clearer.
Cornell as well as BQ and JS are fond of categories, of the connections that are odd and unexpected. King Rudolph.
The grandeur of churches versus the humble elements of Cornell. Gold and marble versus cardboard.
Boxing as a way of investing with value. The delicacy and frailty of Cornell’s boxes, the naïveté of the choice of objects standing in contrast with the grand gesture. In BQ’s Institute Benjamenta, an entire scene dedicated to rehearsing gestures and words of aspiring servants. Making servitude natural. The absurdity of the conception is both delightful and frightening as it mirrors certain sad personal truths.
In BQ films, everything is fit into boxes as well, inside nooks and crannies, in hidden compartments, in a suggestion of surprising and mysterious separations of space, in implied catacombs: and the implied and reserved eroticism.
The arrangements of the things and beings inside those spaces, implying a plethora of other worlds beyond the worlds we see sustaining them and being sustained by them; implying, or rather eliciting mysterious worlds which exist in us, entre’acts which we choose to ignore, because they draw no market value or surface social value. Things, ideas, beings that “slip between the cracks,” ignored because they do not bring societal acclaim. In truth, our identities. The Quays frame what we choose to leave out of the frame, the paths to our self-knowledge. What we chose to ignore rebels; it exacts revenge; when we do wish to reclaim it, it protests, it doesn’t make it easy for us. There are subterfuges, there are mechanisms of forgetfulness, into which our good intentions are sucked like quicksand, into which they vanish and disappear like political prisoners. The walls we have set up in order to build the illusion of safety are crumbling; what the Quays tell us, acquaint us with, give us a flavor of, in case we wish to follow our path, are traces of the trajectory, buried in our diminishing memory, in our chronic distraction. The vortex at the center of our being, which one of Svankmajer’s admirers speaks about, which the energies of distraction prevent one from attaining.
Altars to entre’acts
A film editor eliminates the bits of screen behavior that prevent identification with the star; we reflect ourselves in the behavior of the star after the entre’acte behavior has been carefully surgeoned out; a committee of censors, border guards, participate in this castration of the star’s behavior. As these films are made for popular circulation, these are criminals participating in a greater lie. We adjust our own behavior to fit within the narrow standards of the lobotomized behavior of the people on the screen, puppets of many agendas, sequences of propagandized gesturings, to serve the purposes of those who, in the darkness split the profits at the expense of our souls.
What are these incoherent fragments? What names do we give them? Where inside our being do we find ways to name them, what are their purposes, are they us?
Challenging the framework within which we playact the contour of our identities; the detours we take to contour the expected identity. Dear Sir, we write to inform you that your identity is no longer functional within our paradigm. The puppets you have been using to promote your ideas have been exhibiting cracks, through which unsolicited fragments of behavior have been recorded.
It is the reason for our frustrated feeling of impotence against current events, the current of the times; someone else in the shadows pulls the strings, we are merely the puppets of the times; we are defined by the agenda of the powerful, and how can it not be so when we are powerless even to know our own selves; we are defined by others, and have not even the power to look inside.
We are tired, so tired can’t even dream anymore.
The poets, or the few artists who dedicate their blood and guts against all odds to shine the lights on the interior, to expose all that we are, that immense minority as Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez calls it.
Churches as boxes that assign the value of the belief system of a nation, freeing in one sense, tyrannous in another; Cornell assigning value to the freeing of the individual. But elements of procedure are similar and not similar. A manner of viewing. The connection between church and other manners of valuing. Leftovers. The dust in Quays.
While in church we find the stated belief system of the nation, and here I am risking wrath and going below the surface of our purportedly secular cognition, in Cornell, Quays, Svankmajer we find what has fallen between the cracks, the untold, what we’re afraid to tell because it doesn’t concur with what we would like to believe about ourselves.
QB regarded us with friendly and familiar eyes as Baudelaire in his poem Correspondences attributed to his forest of symbols:
In Nature's temple, living pillars rise,
That whisper words of hidden sense;
Man walks through forests, of symbols dark and dense,
Which gaze at him with friendly and familiar eyes.
Embracing the concept of and the search for a cinematic terrain to correspond with one’s own interior world (Karel Srp), one that mirrors not the apparent reality, or a reality twisted into a political correct view (a result of the prevalence of Marxist leanings in present day academia) in which aesthetics become distorted into and by a ideologized system of ethics, but the excavation for what lies hidden underneath. (Which Marxists hate, as they hate humor.) But not a mimed aesthetic, though new aesthetics may emerge, but a veritable psychic reality. Abandoning what has worked before as ‘tricks,’ embarking on a concentrated journey towards the personal inner vortex, derailing from previous and known trajectory.
I don’t know if I thought (but secretly hoped) that meeting QB and JS would result in sudden artistic transformation. But the certainty of the impending meetings forced me to embark upon serious study of their art, their films and the written texts on their films, and serious questioning of my own work.
The meetings themselves occurred so serendipitously that I wondered whether we were pawns in larger play whose ethos or purposes we were not allowed even a glimpse of, or whether we were being tricked. If these were arranged by a higher force, I told myself, then perhaps I was being validated artistically.
It resulted, more than anything, in continued struggle, it resulted in fresh hope that the struggle would yield unexpected and unforeseen, and clearly positive results.
I was afraid from the beginning: what would I say to BQ? What would I say to JS? How will we be able to use the meeting to cause a major shift in my own work?
I was worried I might return empty-handed and eggs and tomato remains as the only, albeit free, lunch.
It feels as if only now, after returning from the meetings and the journey, that I am beginning to be filled with the breadth of new understanding.
1995, Dark Alchemy, a book about JS. It was composed of a series of articles, most of which were very complex and difficult to understand, and which reflected not so much the work itself as the theoretical ardor and agenda of the writers. They shed little light on the work itself, some by their own admission, but presented theoretical compounds that confounded all good sense, and I mean the sense by which one recognizes the workings of self in the artist’s work.
What finally came to my aid was finding JS’ journal on the making of Little Otik. In it JS revealed a daily personal account in making the film, including his dreams, his relationship with his wife, the artist Eva Svankmajerova, his sidekick and collaborator on most of his movies.
This will appear exceedingly simple but it ended up being a principal element in my search to extract the essence of Svankamjer’s work in a way that would be useful to my own work. Dreams are sine-qua-non in surrealism; many authors admit that their inspiration came from dreams: Louis Bunuel comes to mind, repeatedly; Eugene Ionesco claims the inspiration for his Rhinoceros came from a dream, that and many other of his works. Mircea Cartarescu, the Romanian author whose Nostalgia I translated, called his book The Dream after the originally titled Nostalgia was censored by the communist dictatorship in 1989, just before its fall. (I dare to imply here that this act of censorship is what infuriated the gods so that they finally brought down the dictatorship. What took them so long to wake up?)
One evening before going to bed I read one of JS’ entries about dreams: he admits he doesn’t remember his dreams and blames himself for being too lazy to record them upon awakening. I also didn’t remember my dreams now, because I was also too lazy to write them down, while before I used to be an obsessive recorder of dreams. I felt validated by JS but determined to start again my journey of writing down my dreams. Dreams provide the quickest and most veritable access to one’s inner life, essential to the working artist, even more so to the surrealist: Andre Breton in his Manifesto of Surrealism, states that the dream is the only place left in which genuine life can still exist.
The next morning I woke up from a disturbing dream: I was holding a large lizard in one hand and caressing its brain with the other. The dream felt unbearably realistic, thinking of it now I can still feel the rough scales of the lizard’s skin palpitating in my palm. Upon reflection now, it felt as if I was holding an aspect of myself. I woke up feeling terribly unsettled and out of sorts with myself. I thought right away that I should write down the dream, I had placed pen and paper by my bed for that purpose, but, since it was Sunday, I felt too lazy to write it down. I thought, well, Svankmajer is a great artist and he doesn’t write down his dreams, I don’t have to either. Instead I woke up Laura and told her I wanted to tell her my dream, I figured that way I would still remember it. Laura said: why don’t you write it down honey, and then tell it to me when I wake up? Writing the dream provided me with lots of insightful knowledge as all sorts of internal ramifications became apparent. Later after I told Laura the dream she suggested a trip to the Greensboro zoological gardens, where we were allowed by friendly attendants to hold in our hands a variety of odd and interesting lizards.
One of the writings about JS talks about the journey towards the internal vortex: that the works of JS are surrealist in the sense of psychic automatism, that unconstrained by ideological devices, he is perennially approaching his internal vortex.
Jewish Prague
while in Prague I visited the Jewish museum and familiarized myself with the rich history of the Prague Jewish heritage. The Jewish history of Prague abounds in legendary characters, Rabbi Lowe for instance, the creator of the legendary Golem. The Jewish community of Prague, reputedly dating back to the time of the second Temple, has experienced alternately times of peace and times of upheaval. In order to protect his community, Rabi Lowe, a skillful cabalist, created out clay a powerful creature called the Golem.
Reading all this Jewish history I felt cheated out of my own heritage. As a Romanian Jew, born soon after the second world war and during the time of the communist dictatorship, I was not privileged with a sense of personal history. The anti-Semitism was covert but nonetheless prevalent. Maybe not so covert. Growing up, I was constantly asked if I was a Romanian or a Jew. On the one hand I felt no connection to Romanian history, after all my family arrived in Romania from Russia at the end of 19th century, but at the same time I knew nothing about my Jewish past or about the past of my family. Growing up during communism one had to be careful with personal information, which could be construed to be in conflict with communist ideology. While communist ideology overtly stated that all people were equal and there was no discrimination in the communist state, Stalin had already begun his anti-Zionist propaganda. Many Jews who had embraced socialist ideology as a way to escape from the constant discrimination and persecution now faced the same persecution and discrimination from the communism regime, which they themselves helped bring to power. Because of Stalin’s Zionist paranoia two of my uncles, innocent of any wrongdoing, political or otherwise, were send to forced labor camps for long years on trumped up charges: the doorbell rang in the middle of the night and communist officials carted them off in a van with darkened windows. Their infant sons, my cousins, grew up without their fathers.
My only connection to it was through the history of persecution.
This is really not the time and place to bring up the communist atrocities: the enslavement, the torture and murder of millions of people. But I bring it up because of the problematic lack of awareness that exists in the United States about those times.
The work itself. A seriousness of intent in the dedication to the work. A fusion between the work and the psychic life of the artist, a transmutation beyond aesthetics.
*
There are two ways of viewing films in order for them to yield degrees of realization and creativity in the viewer. One is intuitive. No special effort is necessary except the desire to descend. One simply sits before the screen in a state of trance. As an aside, it is not easy to achieve trance, and I am not sure I wish to begin speaking about uncertain and unscientific methodologies. But trance may grip you if it deems to do so, and deems you worthy. I suppose the question one should ask is what exactly are the kinds of things, thoughts, words actions that one must engage in to become worthy of being accorded trances? In any case, one will become aware that one’s body begins to imitate the film. Perhaps emulate rather than imitate is the appropriate word. I don’t mean that it attempts to recreate the film. But a kind of motion at the level of the molecules perhaps, begins to occur in the current of one’s blood, in the plasma that figures one’s life; the blood, or the plasma begins to play out in the movement of its stream the internal drama of the film, causing the fingers to suddenly, unexpectedly perform, unconsciously of course, a free-form dance, no, not free-form but following forms from a world that speaks to us only rarely, in dreams or the greatest of the works of art, echoing the responses of this alternate world that calls for our own to respond. As if the fingers are attempting to suck the essence of the film into the viewer’s soul, for the purposes not of imitating, that would be mundane, but an emulation of a spirit world. Not an art of conscious imitation but a channeling.
In doing so one subconsciously appropriates the spirit world that originally motivated the work.
The other way of studying is close scrutiny. You pause the DVD player, go reverse, play slow, time and time again. You spend time scrutinizing what goes on in each particular shot. Each shot is a world in itself, sometimes simple, sometimes complex; each shot is a kind of painting extended in time. Your close scrutiny transforms the nature of each shot, originally intended to be seen in its own sequence of shots, not to be closely perused but to reveal its meaning by playing its intended role within the sequence. To view a shot or a sequence again and again is kind of an infringement upon its intended purpose. To do so is a form subversion, an artistic theft, an intrusion that may be punished with the acquisition of knowledge. I declare this kind of theft, this kind of subversion is good thing. Revelation, gained through personal effort, time spent, and viewing films will never be the same again. All the more so in the films of QB and JS, films which do not allow themselves to be oppressed, imposed upon by the restrictive rules of narration.
The trance art is difficult to get to. It takes a long time and sustained effort to get there. For me, it didn’t occur with the work of QB or JS till I returned from Europe. Jetlagged, I became glued to the screen, my fingers suddenly caught in a dance, the films and my plasma one and the same.
The editing is not “smooth.” “Continuity,” which is essential for the audience not to be “taken out of the story,” takes a back seat. In “Street of Crocodiles,” our main character pops out from behind a doorframe, his body coiled in a stealthful posture, like a stalker, holding a box in his hands. Before we have time to orient ourselves in physical space, the box in his hands pops up in extreme close-up; stalker places a large screw in it. Before the screw is completely placed inside the box we cut back to the shot of the stalker, finishing the act of hiding the screw inside the box. This rhythm of the sequence of shots is unusual, jumpy and disorienting. Before we have time to adjust ourselves to the space created by the stalker as he creeps in, in other words, allow our sight to become adjusted to his actions, the box in which he places the screw looms large, occupying the entire size of the screen and before we have time to adjust our sight to the action regarding the box, we cut back to the figure of the stalker. The timing of this sequence of shots creates a sense of disorientation in the viewer, which would be unusual in a narrative sequence. The character would have to pause long enough for our sight to take him in without feeling cheated by the too-quick a removal of the space it wants to spend time in for the purpose of our “comfortable” perception: if the time it takes to perceive the space is not long enough, the eye, and consequently the body of the viewer feels a sense of discomfort. The same can be said about the extreme close shot of the box: the eye would have liked to linger upon the action of the hand inserting the screw in the box. Despite the fact that the correct and continuous action of the hand is followed throughout the three-shot sequence, our sense of space orientation is disturbed.
Against the realistic, informative style appealing to the lowest common denominator. The mind does not need to understand as much as to be mystified. The predominant culture pervaded by the ambition for realistic understanding dulls the best minds, strangles the imagination in its pliers-jaw grip. This is coupled with the ambition for emotional satisfaction, the artificial and false emotional satisfaction which most narrative films fall prey to. The desire to be emotionally manipulated——like the obsession for revenge that haunts current mentality——that audiences fall prey to.
The unmistakable sense of artistic inebriation that I felt, the longing for the cinematic world they (BQ and JS) created and continued to create.
It is only appropriate that instead of being a conclusion, concluding upon our visit with the Quay Brothers in London and Jan Svankmajer in the Czech Republic is only the beginning, merely the starting point. Thus it is only appropriate that my journal should begin now, upon return. It is only appropriate that it should begin in the middle, like the arbitrary glance falling involuntarily upon the Rorcharsch spot, spreading out of its own unconscious will and flowering out with various whimsical interpretations in order to reveal an occult truth, and moreover, a cluster of amusements, a process eminently pertinent to surrealism.
Svankmajer’s rhythms are so entirely different than my own that I was at a loss as to how to respond. His editing is audacious: it seems as if no one has done it before; it is defined by his rhythms.
Sometimes, watching a Quay scene, simply pointing my finger at the screen, rotating it, I can suck in the scene, the sense of the scene and keep its marrow forever, digest it in my Athanor and even turn it into a scene of my own; how long that takes for it to evolve? That’s not up to me, these things develop according to reasons untouched by limited human reason. I am amazed at myself, at the ease with which my finger dances, rotating on its own axis at the transmutation of the screen image through the institution of my dancing finger into my own blood, later to turn into a transformed image o my own making. There are currents that teem unknown to dumb reason. Our suffering occurs when we choose to ignore them. Our suffering is our heart, clenching in despair at our ignorant choice to ignore the currents of true life.
I am not speaking of poetic currents, poetic such as non-existent fancy, but a scientific fact that only the poetic mind can measure, a fact such as electricity or strictly speaking, one aspect of it was enslaved in the service of the restricted.
Against distraction.
As validation for my journey, I ran into these lines by Paz:
“Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up inside the secret and ever-changing land of his phantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless turmoil of everyday life. A thousand things bid for our attention at the same time, but none manages to hold our interest; thus life turns to sand between our fingers and hours to smoke in our brains. If we had the courage to make a daily examination of our acts and thoughts, we would confess that we are guilty not of inexpiable crimes but of countless momentary desires and appetites followed by momentary renunciations or betrayals of ourselves and others. But are we even able to remember what we did yesterday? If our sin goes by the name of dissipation, our punishment goes by the name of forgetfulness. Reading is the opposite of dissipation; it is a mental and moral practice of concentration which leads us to unknown worlds. Worlds that little by little reveal themselves to be an older, truer homeland: we came from there. To read is to discover unexpected paths that lead to our own selves. It is a recognition. In the era of advertising and instantaneous communication, how many people are able to read in this way? Very few. But the continuity of our civilization lies in them, not in the data of statistical surveys.”
Octavio Paz
The experience of taking the subway, dragging our suitcases across the pavement. It was in our budget to take cabs but we chose to walk. We walked more than we ever walked before. We were always tired and by the time the trip was over and we came back we were still not over our jetlag, though when we got back we had to adjust to the new jetlag.
At times, not quite certain where we were going, we took subways and buses, having rummaged through the complexities of city maps. Are the minds of those who design city maps imaginative enough to understand how our minds work?
What does it take to actually channel a surreal reality, a surreality, and not merely force-grin yourself into weirdness? You have to be there. Who said it, that it is easy to do the work I do once I put myself into the right state?
I have to admit that watching a JS movie is difficult. When I say watching I don’t mean distracted viewing, expecting mere entertainment an stimulation from the screen, but viewing with readiness to learn and understand, to grasp what the filmmaker had in mind, what his process was. JS’ rhythms are jerky, unexpected perhaps, I would venture to say infused by the same illness that Dostoyevsky suffered from. I lean towards smooth, flowing rhythms; watching JS’ films I feel as if I need to allow myself to learn those rhythms, to get to the place where my subconscious feels comfortable enough with them, to where it ingests and absorbs them, in order for me to allow myself to perform them. It takes courage. This is what I mean by breaking through. One is limited by the way one has done things in the past, the ways one got used to working, throughout an entire career sometimes, ways of working that served one very well in the past, that became the tried and true ways of working, ways that marked one’s previous successes. One grows into them and perceives, as self-protection, other ways as aesthetically inferior, one’s self-defense mechanisms throw-up red flags, one tightens up in order to protect oneself. I think a concerted and concentrated effort needs to be undertaken in order to achieve a veritable breakthrough. A judicious effort. The anxiety of meeting with JS forced me to view his films repeatedly, to read the essays and interviews over and over again. Still, despite the effort, they remained a foreign land to me. They were the same films I had watched before, the essays contained words and concepts I knew very well from years of reading surrealist texts and ideas and concepts, but a wall remained between us and I kept banging against it, leaving me frustrated and feeling numb. It was only after returning to the US after the meetings with JS and QB that something in my consciousness began to thaw, the walls slowly melted, the films to open up to me as if a mutual territory always existed between us, as if the films and my subconscious were made of the same metaphysical material. The essays too, instead of being the familiar but foreign enemy words suddenly began to yield new ideas; it felt as they penetrated the wall, the blockade, and they were like a kind of alchemical prima materia dancing subversively in my subconscious soup.
Svankmajer’s drilling of holes in walls: an obsessive endeavor which makes its appearance on many of his films, is a subversion, an authentic surrealist subversion. It occurs in JS Bach and A Quiet Week in the House. It’s an attack on the viewer’s good sense. One accepts it because there is nothing apparently “dirty” in it: it’s just the drilling of a hole; while one is actively but surreptitiously rejecting the idea that something subversive is going on (oh, it can’t be that!), something subversive is in fact going on and the more one attempts to reject this idea the more it imposes itself, like someone unexpectedly sticking out his/her tongue, a defiance and a provocation. One feels being challenged, in a humorous manner, but still, challenged, but who will protest against innocent drilling of a hole. My fingers dance in emotion and emulation of drilling.
The challenge not to take a cab but hoof it down an unknown street, to take the subway to the train station, dragging heavy suitcases down crowded streets in order to get to the subway station, a subway station existing previously only as mental haze as we are not certain we can trust certainly the directions we were given. The nightmare of getting lost in a foreign city constantly looming before us.
How much of Prague makes up JS’ films
1. peeling walls
2. the frames
The future, inaccessible to memory’s anxiously groping fingers, the future, bluish repository of unformed words and images, fitted with a jagged watery edge like a giant eye, staring impassively or anxiously at our frantic actions and attempts at second-guessing its various intents. Intents.
People as a general rule settle into the acceptance of incomprehensibility. They reject that amorphous terrain or accept it with boredom and horror. There is no money to be made from it.
“A poetic ascendancy of the everyday.”
The question is always there for the editor: what constitutes the entity of a shot, beginning with the first frame, ending with the last. What constitutes the content of a shot? How do you exactly know where to go in, where to go out? That sense of recognition, so precise and at the same time so uncertain, causing the editor so much anxiety, anxiety as well as joy. From the most simplistic, say the turning of a head, to the most complex, a shot containing in time a multitude of events. The complex shot, for instance, may contain two separate actions which are unrelated to each other but which can define each other and together define the essence, the name of the shot, its title, very much like two or three apparently unrelated words form a poetic image. The skill of the editor is being able to see the unrelated events following each other and discern where to cut in, where to cut out. Exactly where to cut in during the first event in order to define that event as that particular event that it becomes by the action of the cut, an event that acquires that particular entity, id-entity and where to cut out of the second event, again so as to define it as itself. Venturing into Quays’ films, I realized that I could open up and challenge the way of seeing I had developed over the years and perhaps I had become entrenched in without allowing myself a sense of new discovery.
Of course, by necessity, the sequence of shots is essential, how each shot follows the previous one. But ultimately, the selection of the content of each single shot, from first to last frame is essential, the most essential element
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