We enjoyed a generous serving of cinematic delights on Wednesday. I was fully prepared to delve into all that I had to say about Brakhage, until I saw Solomon’s work - the first film of his especially, Psalm II: Walking Distance. I wish to devote the entire blog to discussing the reactions to Psalm II. Along the nature of these films, my writing will deal in large abstractions and attempt to tackle both the galactic and zygotic.
I thought the aesthetics of Psalms II were incredible. The composition is so eroded, oxidized - seemingly descendant from the dead aeons. The celluloid withers and warps listlessly and fluidly, like the shaping of stone over millennia. The aesthetic seems so atavistic and primordial, the movement of the films topography does not seem to illustrate the hyperkinetics of modern minutia, but the movement of natural processes - glacial. Vague outlines of human figures appear amidst the sands of time - seemingly atemporal - the human archetype who dwells in the collective unconscious.
I heard some people say that they found these films disconcerting or scary. I didn’t find them scary. I saw them as alluding to the conduction of some sort of telluric orchestra. To be afraid of the image, even if it threatens to engulf my precious flesh into the oblivion in which the 21st century is but a blip, is to be afraid of that beautiful process which absolves the human individual of any divine encumbrance and returns humankind to the reasonable hierarchical rung of the animal. To me, it felt like watching the ocean. I felt calm in a placid environment. I fell into a kind of trance, which did not offer any lucidity until the film had concluded. Physiologically, it was a meditation. I would like to share some spiritual reactions to Psalms, though they are in many ways anchored in my belief of reincarnation and personal in nature.
Solomon’s Psalm II presents the archaic putrefaction of the symbolic image. It is a cinematic ossification that strips away the comforts of typical image epidermis to expose its dinosaur bones. It invokes a way of seeing that is either long-forsworn or long-pending - exploring the spectatorial terrain lying between the postmortem and the antepartum. The Psalms were richly ontologically evocative for me. I don’t believe that Psalms II presents an omnipotent view, but a revelation of ineffable truths accessible exclusively beyond hominid flesh, but emphatically discursive on the examination of human perception. As someone who subscribes to the notion of the reincarnate cycle, I’d like to think of the gestative period as liminal or mitigative between the incorporeal ubiquity after death and the singular individuality of the begotten human. The fetal subject, I believe, undergoes a purge of transcendental sagacity - the collective intelligence of incorporeality - so that it can re-learn organic pedagogy once-more -- how else could a divine body ascend higher other than re-learning the mortal lessons in a new being? The process of transformation from an immaterial being to a begotten one is therefore an exchange of the imaginary/universal truth for the symbolic/empirical estimation. The fetal dream vision is very interesting - it is superior to the visual language of the begotten as it is not constricted by the contours of the symbolic order - yet the fetal dream vision is less omniscient than the incorporeal body’s vision as its information is processed through the human mind, which, by the very definition of its mortal design, relays an intelligent scope much narrower than the breadth of astral body understanding. For beings who have not yet died, the gestative period is the most halcyon chapter - our visual period least inculcated into the choke-hold of symbolically ordered viewing. This, I think, is the goal of Psalm II: to present imagery so archaic as to entice us towards our primordial roots, to relate obscured tapestry that requires our automatism and subliminal perception - vision not as perception of external objects, but vision as internal elucidation. You will find sparse representation in Psalm II, just the nebulous silhouette of the human form contained within the terra firma. To me the images in Psalm II, of the human embedded within earthy strata. I assert, therefore, that both the form and content of Psalm II relate to the primordial state, challenging spectatorial symbolic vision and depicting primordial imagery - inviting us to recall the glyphs painted on uterine walls - the prenatal mirror-phase during which, as we saw anything and everything, it was a reflection of our conception and ability to command mental plastic.
This practice of encouraging gestative, pre-symbolic viewing, as I see it, reflects very much so the Brakhage tenets of hypnagogic viewing as outlined in his interviews. In “Brakhage at Sixty,” he describes close-eye vision as “a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes” - I couldn’t apply a more apt description to the symbolically desolate, psychologically-private visual landscapes of Psalm II. Many of the sentiments that I felt after viewing Psalms II resonated in Brakhage’s interviews. The deleterious influence of the symbolic order on the purity of the imaginary mind, and the ontological munificence of primordial vision, as I argued, are also argued by Brakhage. He asserts that the eyes are “tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic” and that he wishes to “imagine a world ‘before the beginning was the word.’” He laments our excommunication from the antepartum, the halcyon imaginary period, describing maturation in “Metaphors on Vision” as a “loss of innocence” - an innocence to which we “can never go back.” Brakhage is emphatic in his pursuit of unadulterated perception, seeking the primal.
Thanks for exposing us to all these works, David
No comments:
Post a Comment