and power.
There are no glass houses. The shades are drawn and «real» life begins. Some
activities are impossible in the open. And these secret events are the voyeur's
game. He seeks them out with his myriad army of eyes — like the child's
notion of a Deity who sees all. «Everything?» asks the child. «Yes, every-
thing», they answer, and the child is left to cope
with this divine intrusion.
The voyeur is masturbator, the mirror his badge, the window his prey.
Urge to come to terms with the «0utside», by
absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out,
you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden
where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe
within the skull, to rival the real.
She said, «Your eyes are always black.» The pupil
opens to seize the object of vision.
Imagery is bom of loss. Loss of the «friendly
expanses». The breast is removed and the face
imposes its cold, curious, forceful, and inscrutable
presence.
You may enjoy life from afar. You may look at
things but not taste them. You may caress
the mother only with the eyes.
You cannot touch these phantoms.
French Deck. Solitary stroker of cards. He
dealt himself a hand. Turn stills of the past in
unending permutations, shuffle and begin. Sort
the images again. And sort them again. This
game reveals germs of truth, and death.
The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet
possibly finite, card game. Image combinations,
permutations, comprise the world game.
A mild possession, devoid of risk, at bottom sterile. With an image there is no
attendant danger.
Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological
Garden, male performers from the University. The women were professional
artists' models, also actresses and dancers, parading nude before the 48
cameras.
Films are collections of dead pictures which are
given artificial insemination.
Films spectators are quiet vampires.
Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked
up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula
wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom
with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the
sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable
jewels.
Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.
Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema
was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been
amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite
mythology to be dipped into at will.
Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable
appearance.
The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
The modem East creates the greatest body of films. Cinema is a new form of
an ancient tradition — the shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation
of it. Bom in India or China, the shadow show was aligned with religious
ritual, linked with celebrations which centered around cremation of the
dead.
It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that cinema belongs to women.
Cinema is created by men for the consolation of men.
The shadow plays originally were restricted to male audiences. Men could
view these dream shows from either side of the screen. When women later
began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend only to shadows.
Male genitals are small faces
forming trinities of thieves
and Christs
Fathers, sons, and ghosts.
A nose hangs over a wall
and two half eyes, sad eyes,
mute and handless, multiply
an endless round of victories.
These dry and secret triumphs, fought
in stalls and stamped in prisons,
glorify our walls
and scorch our vision.
A horror of empty spaces
propagates this seal on private places.
Kynaston's Bride
may not appear
but the odor of her flesh
is never very far.
A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus, and Mayhew's showman,
exhibiting at Islington Green, burned up, with his mate, inside.
In 1832, Gropius was astounding Paris with his Pleorama. The audience was
transformed into the crew aboard a ship engaged in battle. Fire, screaming,
sailors, drowning.
Robert Baker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail for debt, was struck by the
effect of light shining through the bars of his cell through a letter he was
reading, and out of this perception he invented the first Panorama,
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