a concave, transparent picture view of the city.
This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama, which added the illusion
of movement by shifting the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects.
Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's Park, a rare survival,
since these shows depended always on effects of artificial light, produced
by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended in fire.
Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles without substance. They
achieved complete sensory experiences through noise, incense, lightning,
water. There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the
sensation of rain.
Cinema has evolved in two paths.
One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total
substitute sensory world.
The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the
untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's
window without need of color, noise, grandeur.
Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater,
but with the popular diversions — comics, chess, French and Tarot decks,
magazines, and tattooing.
Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from
ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving
history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its
lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a
summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire,
men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these
seances, shades are spirits which ward off evil.
The spectator is a dying animal.
Invoke, palliate, drive away the Dead. Nightly.
Through ventriloquism, gestures, play with objects, and all rare variations of
the body in space, the shaman signaled his «trip» to an audience which
shared the journey.
In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous panic, deliberately evoked through
drugs, chants, dancing, hurls the shaman into trance. Changed voice,
convulsive movement. He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics,
chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning, were once esteemed. They
mediated between man and spirit-world. Their mental travels formed the crux
of the religious life of the tribe.
Principle of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened
by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from
doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers,
a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. The cure is culled
from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain
stolen, soul.
It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film
runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures
his existence.
The happening/the event in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people
through air vents makes the chemical an actor. Its agent, or injector, is an
artist-showman who creates a performance to witness himself. The people
consider themselves audience, while they perform for each other, and the gas
acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body. This
approaches the psychology of the orgy while remaining in the realm of the
Game and its infinite permutations.
The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike
reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of
perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total
organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which
focus on narrower inlets of sensation.
Multimedias are invariably sad comedies. They work as a kind of colorful
group therapy, a woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual semimastur-
bation. The performers seem to need their audience and the spectators — the
spectators would find these same mild titillations in a freak show or Fun Fair
and fancier, more complete amusements in a Mexican cathouse.
Novices, we watch the moves of silkworms who
excite their bodies in moist leaves and weave wet
nests of hair and skin.
This is a model of our liquid resting world
dissolving bone and melting marrow
opening pores as wide as windows.
The «stranger» was sensed as greatest menace in ancient communities.
Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations.
Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration
into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly
anything.
The subject says «I see first lots of things which dance… then everything
becomes gradually connected».
Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and camera give us. Not falsified
by «seeing».
When there are as yet no objects.
Early film-makers, who — like the alchemists — delighted in a willful obscuri-
ty about their craft, in order to withhold their skills from profane onlookers.
Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of Ars Magna, and its heir, the
cinema.
The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of mechanical hermaphrodite.
In his retort the alchemist repeats the work of Nature.
Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as «Mother of Chemistry», and
confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic
science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and
transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are
ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.
The alchemists detect in the sexual activity of man a correspondence with the
world's creation, with the growth of plants, and with mineral formations.
When they see the union of rain and earth, they see it in an erotic sense, as
copulation. And this extends to all natural realms of matter. For they can
picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility
of fire.
Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of
being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.
These disturbing connections: an infant's cry and the stroke of silk; the whorl
of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard; a woman's head lowered in
sleep and the morning dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which
transcend the sterile signal of any «willed» montage. These juxtapositions of
objects, sounds, actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine in an
unheard — of way, impossible ways.
Film is nothing when not an illumination of this chain of being which makes
a needle poised in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its