I just watched the Cinemascope Trilogy by Peter Tscherkassky. It was what I expected to see more of after seeing
Decasia.
Interestingly, it preceded Decasia by a few years. Before that was Stan
Brakhage and even Man Ray or all the way back to Lumiere.
What
I'm thinking about is the question that early film posed, you know, the
train enters the station and an audience ill-prepared, barely aware
that it can comprehend a series of images flashed on a screen, screams
for their lives. What didn't they grasp at that moment? The extent of
the illusion. They had no notion of how it all worked and so couldn't
tell if the train were really coming.
Now we know about film.
Now we know so much about film that we can distinguish between analog
and digital. We know so much, can perceive through so many layers of
simulation, that reality becomes a less significant touch point to our
understanding. This is an amazing condition that we encounter more than
we know. Every web page certainly stares at us with a myriad of
illusions. The tabs in the navigation above appear to represent file
folder tabs, as if I were perusing a rather large and deep filing
cabinet that contains this little box for me to write in. All of this
displayed on a desktop with my folders so tiny, as if this web page in
fact hovered so near me while the folders below were like people seen
from the top of a building. And the ground beneath is a still from
Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" an old man, driven mad by war, holds a
chicken to his chest and stares hard at something he doesn't
understand. All this on a thin LCD screen with a translucent apple on
the back. How is it I know what I am looking at?
When I saw
Decasia,
a lot of ideas about narrative came to mind. With video, we became even
more aware of film as an artifact. Digital accelerated that. I can
watch a DVD copy of this film which is the spliced together fragments
of decaying film stock set to music. What I am seeing is one man's
reaction to seeing this footage. I am seeing his critical faculties
assemble the pieces, applying intuitive aesthetic judgments. The music
is a reaction to the result as well as a guide to the aesthetic
choices. Mood, tempo, the bizarre effects of the failure of film.
Decasia
is a kind of collage of found art. Watching the CinemaScope trilogy put
more pieces in place for me. This piece is the conscious desecration of
footage found in Hollywood. The footage is pristine to start, the art
is in the decay. Re-exposing fresh stock with subjectively assembled
bits of another film. Film thrown about, solarized, twisted, layered.
All to some effect. A violence to the form. But when I watch it, I see
it in a frame. A fixed shape. A work of art. A portal into a tumultuous
sea of imagery. This time the soundtrack is ruined as well. That
jittery slice beside the image, that soundtrack is exposed as well. The
resulting sound is a chaotic cacophony of layered clicks and pops, a
bit of speech, a scream?
Brakhage drew on the film stock. The
result is a chaos of things flipping past with no particular
discernible logic. Watching a film like Eye Myth is confusing. Mystical? Maybe. Not for me. I'm intrigued, but it
strikes me as a sort of playful exploration. Idiot savant perhaps. The
key is that the medium is the story. Our perception of the medium
grows. We are becoming the sort of critters that can appreciate this
stuff. Perhaps Brakhage was just ahead of his time. Ahead of our time
as well.