...inside a theatre-like cinema... as substitute church this sunny sunday morning... which is also armistice day...
a long wait during which many fashionable and young voices speak in perfect patience, and in semi-darkness, for a film to begin...
...all such beginnings are to me evocative... of what?... of the actual yet huge potential of such cinematic, theatrical (or even religious) moments... before the curtains open, or the ritual begins, to provoke our expectations far beyond what any artists, priests or other or performers can subsequently achieve within the limits of their (or our) humanity... (divine or otherwise?)...
...the film opens to mysterious images of (to me) unrecognisable objects being wrapped... Japanese fashion, within a formal tradition of origami-like paper-folding art... (but enormously magnified to fill a panoramic screen)... this could be a model of the whole process of the film...
...after which the camera directs us to view wooded hilltops from directly above... and valleys inhabited by people in ancient and also hightech buildings
...and then to view chemical or atomic engineering plants, highways and bridges ... among which are slow processions of strangely-clad mechanics... and a disciplined traditional carnival... infiltrating and taking over these modern industries... as if some unimaginable change was overtaking industrial life... combining the vast scale of global industry with the precise enactment and retelling of an ancient ritual...
...later our attention is directed to the forms and details of a modern whaling ship (was it the Nissan Karu?), aboard which totally obedient technicians are constructing a large tank in the shape of Matthew Barney's Cremaster symbol (an oval form with rectangular cross-piece)... which i suppose is meant to magically evoke an alternative culture... until eventually they fill this tank with a whiteish substance that could be wax or ambergris or petrolium jelly in some obscure-to-us and totalistic* process...
*'totalistic': a new word for me and i don't altogether like it, nor the film itself, though it fascinates all 300 or so of us... looking and listening in attentive silence to this so far almost wordless and supervisual** dream
**'supervisual': another and even more dubious machine word but the best i can manage for the moment...
next day:
... my notes (written in the cinematic darkness) are mostly legible but difficult to take in (as was the film itself)... so i will attempt to shorten and clarify as i go:
...throughout the film there is a mixture of wordless sound and image, the sound being much amplified and the images appearing at the vast scale and in the exact detail of what are called 'high production values' which i suppose means the extremely expensive ways in which professional film-making fakes and re-enacts what it presents as reality... in this case the planned movements of large ships in time with an imposed fiction calculated to impress and to confirm prevailing or fashionable expectations... except that in this film the aim is not so much commercial as cultural... it seems intended to change the culture we inhabit as well as to confirm and to combine new trends...
...for instance the Japanese traditions of tea ceremony and love suicide are combined in an invented ceremony aboard ship in which a couple (Mr and Mrs Barney in modified traditional dress) are seemingly killing and dismembering each other in a tank of sea water (to resemble an industrial jelly) and even eating parts of their discarded legs and arms and returning to the sea as whales!... (at the time i did not realise that this is what was supposed to be happening but someone suggested that it might be the intended meaning... perhaps critical of whaling as it is?)...
...another overwhelming impression is of control, the absolute power of the producer-director-performance-artist to finance and to specify every detail of the faked and photographed reality so as to make a believable world, different from the one we inhabit (in that we do not see our own actions and those of others from the contrived camera viewpoints, or with the accompanying sound tracks, of the film as seen in cinemas, away from the actuality it pretends to re-create)...
...and as i noted elsewhere*** this 'tampering with public images' (within the shadow reality of the cinematic world) is often suppressed if it interferes with the images and interpretations imposed by economic and political processes of what is called 'the status quo', the presented rightness and morality of 'things as they seem' and not as they might be in a different power structure, or ethic...
***'beyond wheels' in the internet and everyoneespecially pages 222-223.
...for the moment i won't reproduce all else of these 'notes in the dark' (which are meant to one day be published complete)... i'll simply end with a call for non-realism... beyond that which Matthew Barney has managed to contrive where others of us have only imagined...
...and in this i am hoping, as always, for a new equivalent of the evident fiction, or non-reality, of poetry, and of poetic or musical or literary or choreographic or other creation, of an invented world that does not claim to be real but is true to itself... as is at least partly achieved in Moby Dick, and The Tempest, and Paradise Lost, or Goethe's Faust, the Divine Comedy, and particularly in Noh plays, in Kalidasa's Sakuntala, or in Indonesian shadow theatre... all of these sharing, i believe, a timeless contentment with art as artifice, with ritual as non-real, but formative of culture as way of living...
...but now, late at night and feeling tired, i stop at this point to sleep and to continue life off-page, off-screen, for the reality of actual sleep and dream and touch and hearing in the dark... trusting that all this will make good sense in the morning!
in the morning:
...now (having begun to correct this text in detail) i see a kind of sense... but not quite complete... for i have not yet defined what i mean by 'non-realist':
...what i intend is that the realism (of for instance in the novels of Emile Zola, or of Henry James, and also of Matthew Barney's film, or of any commercial novel or film you might name) be abandoned... in order to give public space to the primary imagination... to permit the portrayal of new worlds (including that of scientific discovery... which often contradicts 'common sense' and presents in its place an experimentally verified yet almost incredible fiction)...
...but now again, as i attempt to describe this wish in factual terms, i realise that it cannot be done in abstract words and theories but only by taking the risk of making non-realist life, perceived as such and not as if it were common-sense reality... to present our wishes and imagined worlds more as rituals than as facts, as Matthew Barney might do if only he acknowldged that realism (even that of camera, microphone, and of science and industry and economics) is also also also a concoction, evident as such, once we begin to recompose industrial life and art as this... as this... these words... and all else as things of unsuspected nature...
...and now on a rainy Thursday morning in November... i cannot desist any longer from the realism of this moment (evident, if nowhere else, in commencing words for weekdays and months with capital letters)... as itself the primary reality (of bodymind as we might call it)... and thus in this last paragraph to admit that no more can be done this morning than to write these far from final words of hope and evidence... sniff, sniff...
...and now for exercise, breakfast, and the difficult and indescribable world as it is... in each ordinary moment!
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