Internationally known as experimental filmmakers because of their five Film Exercises of the period 1941-44, James and John Whitney began working separately around 1945. "After the exercises," James recalls, "the structure of my work was external, following pretty close to serial imagery concepts. The intent was a unity of structure which would result in a whole experience. The structure was whole, and naturally it would relate to your own attempts at wholeness: as you were more whole the structures you were dealing with would become more whole. Then after that there was a long period of development in which I tried to make exterior imagery more closely related to the inner. Those early images just weren't relating thoroughly to my own experiences in meditation, for example, where forms are breaking up. So I reduced the structural mode to the dot-pattern, which gives a quality which in India is called the Akasha, or ether, a subtle element before creation like the Breath of Brahma, the substance that permeates the universe before it begins to break down into the more finite world. That idea as expressed through the dot-pattern was very appealing to me."
Thus in 1950 Whitney began work on his first truly personal film, Yantra, an inspired and arduous project, which was to consume ten years before its completion. Drawn entirely by hand on small filing cards, it was an attempt to relate images to Yoga experiences. ". . . A Yantra is an instrument designed to curb the psychic forces by concentrating them on a pattern, and in such a way that this pattern becomes reproduced by the worshiper's visualizing power. It is a machine to stimulate inner visualizations, meditations, and experiencees... when utilized in connection with the practice of Yoga the contents of the Yantra diagram represent those stages of consciousness that lead inward from the everyday state of naive ignorance through the degrees of Yoga experience to the realization of the Universal Self."26
James Whitney: Lapis. 1963-66. 16mm. Color. 10 min. "A mandala that revolves eternally like the heavens."
Lapis: ". . . they manifest as though out of the air itself, gathering and converging around a central sphere ... revolving with implacable grace against the eerie drone of the tamboura."
During most of the ten-year period in which James Whitney was laboriously producing the intricate images of Yantra by hand, his brother had developed the analogue computer, which could produce images of far greater complexity in a fraction of the time. After Yantra was finished the brothers assembled another mechanical analogue computer, and it was on this device that Lapis was created.
In general, the term Lapis held the same meaning for the ancient alchemists that the mandala holds for the Lamaist, Tantrist, Taoist, Hindu: a kind of "philosopher's stone" or aid to meditation. In alchemical times, and later during the period of the Rosicrucians, the Lapis was felt to contain a vital force or mystic power, a center of knowledge. Hermes asserted that the Lapis was composed of body, soul, and spirit, “… that thing midway between perfect and imperfect bodies." Gnostic philosophy suggests that the way to the power of the Lapis is by a spiral or circumambulation, specifically, according to Jung, "a mandala that revolves eternally like the heavens."
Whitney began work on Lapis in 1963 and completed it in 1966. Much of this time was consumed, however, in the construction of the analogue computer that programmed the extremely intricate mandala-like structure of the film. Thus cybernetics assisted Whitney to return through the centuries to the ancient practice of syncretism in his search for a more total vision.
The opening sequence of Lapis is startlingly beautifuclass="underline" a pure white frame into which, very slowly, moves a ring of thousands of tiny particles. They manifest as though out of the air itself, gathering and converging around a central sphere of light, gradually tightening, growing more complex, until they become a vast syncretistic mandala of intricate geometrical patterns. These configurations defy definition as they revolve with implacable grace against the eerie drone of a tamboura.
To achieve this effect, Whitney hand-painted glass plates with fields of dot-patterns that began sparsely and collected into high concentration toward the center. These were placed on rotating tables beneath a vertically-mounted camera. The tables spun on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis, and at the same time moving horizontally across camera range.
At first the huge mandala is a monotone beige against a white field, then it becomes a glowing red-orange and crystallizes into thousands of intricate modules, each containing a green floral pattern inside a diamond configuration. Forms take shape and vanish as the whole revolves majestically, its movement accentuated by the sonorous drone of the tamboura. Suddenly the image disintegrates into a loose cloud of red, yellow, and orange particles that solidify into the word Lapis. This bursts apart slowly as the first beats of the tabla are heard and a raga begins.
The mandala draws away from the camera until its individual sections are no longer distinguishable from the whole. It dissolves into a blue multispoked mandala in the center of a black void, revolving and spewing out showers of fine sparklike particles that fade and vanish. One seems to detect snowflake crystals, diamonds, molecular clusters— but they're transformed before the mind's eye can grasp their trajectory. Later we see starbursts throwing off showers of light, spinning around dark centers. A repeat of the opening sequence is done in blue and black— thousands of tiny blue particles slowly collecting around a central vortex. For a split second the particles freeze into diamond-like crystals and then melt back into the syncretistic field. A vibrant orange sun shimmers in blackness, surrounded by a corona of concentric rings, each enclosing a peacock floral pattern.
Finally the original beige mandala reappears and spins rapidly through the various configurations we've seen throughou t the film. Two translucent globes within a blinding white center begin to stretch apart diagonally across the frame, creating a sense of enormous tension and stress, shimmering, pulsating, until the final blackout. This was Whitney's way of suggesting what he calls "the last breaking or snapping, unable to reach Samadhi. That was because Lapis was near the end of what I could do. The machine restricted me; my fantasies couldn't flow. Of course we're in the most primitive stages of cybernetic art, but my inner imagery gave way at the same time that my outer ability to control the instrument broke down."
Whitney finds more than a casual resemblance between Eastern philosophy and modern science, and suggests that this confluence may have a profound effect on conventional notions of art. "Only to a person who has expanded his consciousness," he says, "is ordinary experience expanded. So it's exciting where art is going in this respect. Art and science are getting much closer to Eastern thought. But you'll always find those who seek to go beyond any language. Those are the people whose eyes and ears are really open. But they will come back, and they will be totally open and very sympathetic to what the artist is doing, but they won't have the energy to remain within that confine of art. Artists must in order to create. The other man will see art as the great play and fun that it is, but he won't be able to put that same sort of intensity into it as the artist does. The artist, in a sense, must keep a lot of ignorance. To stay in the world you have to preserve a certain amount of ignorance.