There is an often told story of the first days of cinema, that of the train arriving at the station. It was 1896 and in a small cinema theatre in Paris the brothers Lumiére were preparing to show their 50 second film, L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. The lights were dimmed, the projector spluttered into life and some of the first images in the history of cinema were shone onto the wall before the eyes of the city’s cultural elite. We are there too, seated in the first row, the pupils of our eyes reflecting the title card of the picture, entranced already. Suddenly, we are on a train platform with several others, shrouded in monochrome. And the locomotive comes into view…
The story goes that the theatre descended into chaos and we, with the rest of the audience, made a break for the exits, stricken with panic and fear. Fear that this train, now at a halt, sitting at the station, was going to burst into the theatre and be the end of us all. Or so it goes. Some film historians claim this nothing more than an urban myth, some believe it to be true. Most, however, see it as an amusing parable for the evolution of technology, the overwhelming power of the image, and the way in which cinema perpetually revolutionises the way in which we perceive the world around us.
Another story, from the same city, 34 years hence. Luis Bunuel waits in the wings of a screening of his new film L’Age d’Or. Something ominous brews in the crowd of cinemagoers. A year earlier he had been waiting too, at the premiere of his debut film Un Chien Andalou, with rocks in his pockets. He was expecting a riot. He was expecting to use the rocks to ward off the baffled and incensed audience. The film was adored and Bunuel was forced to go back to the drawing board. So now he waits again, for the riot that never came. The crowd, this time, seems to be taking the bait, simmering to point of frenzy at the images before them which are dripping with lust and raging against religion and the bourgeoisie. The audience rip through the cinema, destroying everything in their path, and slashing art by a number of surrealist painters that are hanging in the foyer. Chaos. Somewhere Bunuel smiles.
There are several theories as to what caused the riot in Montmartre that night. The night, incidentally, that Jean-Luc Godard was born, a few miles across the city. Many believe the rioters to be members of the Anti-Semitic League and The League of Patriots, wrongly protesting the film because they believed Bunuel to be Jewish. Or, perhaps, they protested because of the Surrealists’ association with Communism. Nevertheless, it was Bunuel’s never before seen, never before comprehended, imagery that hurled them over the edge. Just like the Lumiéres before him, the Spanish filmmaker had pushed the cinematic image into the realm of the unknown, beyond our former perception. Just like the outer reaches of our universe, these borders around perception in cinema are in constant expansion, towards new frontiers, with no visible end in sight.
These two stories were on my mind when I was taking part in the recent Belfast Film Festival. I thought of how filmmakers and artists are still creating these kinds of reaction in their audiences, of disbelief at the revolution of the image, whether it be from smashing up the history of cinema and rearranging the fragments as in The Mirror by People Like Us, engulfing us in new worlds through Virtual Reality, or making us question our future’s memory as Don Hertzfeldt does in his World of Tomorrow animations. Their own brands of chaos.
A Montage of Reflections
The Mirror by People Like Us – which is artist Vicki Bennett’s moniker – was a booking made by both the Belfast Film Festival and Sonorities Festival in collaboration, and performed at the Crescent Arts Centre. This contemporary performance of cinema and music speaks to inward reflection and outward projection. Bennett brings a hammer down on her Mirror and obliterates its once total existence. The Mirror being our perception of cinema and musical history as linear, separated into disparate planes stuck in their own echo chambers. Bennett makes these planes of history communicate with each other, across years, decades, even centuries. She removes a fragment of a film from its original context and fuses it with another, and another, and another, all joined now by a new web of meaning. It is not dissimilar from Soviet Montage, made famous by masters Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein explained his theory of a Montage of Attractions by comparing his editing process to Japanese hieroglyphs, or Kanji, how two individual symbols come together to create an entirely new meaning. The Mirror takes this theory and lets it run amok, fusing hundreds of images from old and new existing films to create a wild new meaning every second that the projector flashes. At the core of the performance is a sequence that splices together many images of eyes, the film cascading its way through cinema history – from the famous close up of Janet Leigh’s in Pyscho, to Keir Dullea’s pupils witnessing all of time and space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to, funnily enough, Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye in Man With a Movie Camera – to reflect the times, before this, that our perception of the image transcended beyond its pre-existing borders to a realm unknown. As Bennett herself says, “we are carving new pathways for our minds to (re)explore.”
Similarly, in his seminal book, Cinema II: The Time-Image, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes:
We draw out a sheet which, across all the rest, catches and extends the trajectory of shining points, the evolution of regions. This is evidently a task which runs the risk of failure: sometimes we only produce an incoherent dust made out of juxtaposed borrowings… But it is possible for the work of art to succeed in inventing these paradoxical hypnotic and hallucinatory sheets whose property it is to be at once a past and always to come.
He seems to speak directly to The Mirror, and Vicki Bennett back to him. She reflects his writing, as she expects the audience to reflect her performance, joining the dots of her framework with the pencil line of their own perception. This is perhaps what raises these intricate and sensational juxtaposed borrowings out of the incoherent dust into the hypnotic and hallucinatory stratosphere. It is a beautiful collaboration between performer and her audience, in a small theatre where space and time are first compressed and then expanded to infinity, in an experience that owes itself to the past, is realised in the present moment, but is already part of the future.
“I’d never thought I’d see Moses calling upon God’s will to destroy the White House,” I overheard someone say as we exited the theatre. Indeed, there was a preposterous and wonderful sequence in The Mirror where Charles Heston, in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, raises his staff to the heavens, cries out “Behold his almighty hand!” and a holy beam of alien destruction is unleashed on the White House, blowing it into a million pieces, courtesy of Independence Day. Let this chaos reign, I’d never thought I’d see any of this.
Shadows on a Wall
Vivian Sobchack expresses the virtual world as a new reality on the cusp of existence that emerges in an interval of present time that is rich with past and future images. Much of Virtual Reality seems to be focused on finding its own place in the world, interlacing itself into the fabric of history. One of the worlds I found myself in, When Something Happens, told the history of the cosmos, from the first atom to the chair I was currently sitting in, inside The Barracks in the Cathedral Quarter. In another well-known VR film, Life of Us, explains Shari Frilot, “you start out as an amoeba, you turn into a tadpole, you start to crawl on land, and then you turn into a raptor, and go all the way to the end: becoming a robot at a disco party with all your earlier manifestations.” It is perhaps with the ambition to justify itself and its worlds within do many artists working in Virtual Reality seek to enter this technology into the long line of evolution on Earth. It is a divisive concept. Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese filmmaker, says, “Virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people.” He recalls the allegory of Plato’s Cave, which was also used to create a discourse around cinema in the early 20th century. In the allegory, slaves are imprisoned within a cave, unable to turn their heads. A fire burns behind them, and in between puppeteers perform, casting shadows on the wall before the slaves. These dancing shadows are their illusory reality. What names would the slaves give to these shadows? Plato asks.
The comparison is understandable. If we imagine a cinema theatre. A light (fire) shines from behind, through celluloid images in a projector (the puppeteer) and onto a wall before the audience (slaves?). A new illusory reality. The names we give these shadows? Films. Virtual Reality. The exception, of course, is that we are not slaves, we can turn our heads at any point and glimpse back into the world. And whilst Virtual Reality sends us further into this illusion, into a 360 degree universe of shadows, to a point where we lose our physical bodies, we can still take the headset off. Which is, admittedly, something I did when the world I was in – Face Your Fears - unleashed a demon zombie baby upon me whilst I inhabited the body of a child sitting up in his bed late at night. The thing that brought me out of that world? I could feel my palms sweating.
Frilot says of VR that, “you are not the master of your experience. You’re an explorer, a discoverer. You have an enormous amount of vulnerability.” It remains to be seen as to whether we can lose all of our bodily inhibitions and become fully and completely immersed within the infinite worlds of Virtual Reality. If and when this happens will we become more and more like Plato’s slaves, unable to turn our heads, to take the headset off, to locate the world we left behind? Or will we be seen as intrepid explorers in the vein of Roald Amundsen, or Neil Armstrong, reaching out for new frontiers?
A Tourist in the Landscapes of Memory
Don Hertzfeldt reaches into a new frontier: tomorrow. His stunning World of Tomorrow films also chronicle that quantum leap into a future of virtuality, of losing one version of yourself and inhabiting another. And then another. He ponders the human desire to maintain our memory, a desire that might eventually spiral out of control, to the point where we create supposedly healthier clones of ourselves as life goes on to restore our memory, but only succeed in losing that organic connection to those experiences we gained in the past. I wrote in a previous piece for Playtime about the Amazonian myth of the Chullachaqui, a being that steals your image, a clone essentially, but one that doesn’t hold any of your memories. The being is merely a façade. The Chullachaqui can be seen as a parable for the psychological Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). An individual in the throes of this condition, writes Paul Renn, will experience events like they are disconnected from their ordinary meaning and perception is distorted. Experience takes on a dreamlike, unreal quality. In part I of World of Tomorrow, as Emily as a young girl and her future manifestation travel through the kaleidoscopic worlds of their memory the future manifestation perceives these worlds as belonging to her, yet still experiences them as like “seeing pictures in a book.” They travel through these worlds to regain a primitive connection to the past. Tina Wasserman states, Landscape and site are concrete remnants of the past that continue to exist in the present. Thus, they have the capacity to be visually powerful visual surrogates for a time that no longer exists. Theses landscapes of memory that the two manifestations of Emily are viewed like pictures in a book because they have all but forgotten them from their initial contact, these visual surrogates are all that they have left.
As the second episode of World of Tomorrow comes to light, this dissociation of identity becomes much more severe. The clones, the Chullachaquis, have multiplied. Each clone, with a serial number stamped on its forehead, travels through Emily’s memories to find those organic experiences. But still, when they find them, they are but “memory tourists”, taking photos of their own past, a past that has become like a foreign land that they are visiting for the first time. Imagination is glimpsed as the cure to this dissociation, reaching new lands with the power of the mind, mirroring Miyazaki’s derision of Virtual Reality, which he sees as a kind of memory tourism.
There are too many images and moments in World of Tomorrow that are worth writing about but there was one, in particular, that stood out to me: In an astonishing sequence, Emily as a young girl and her future manifestation wade around in the “bog of realism”, and as the former spies a glowing spectre floating towards her and picks it up, “a glimmer of hope”, she is told to drop it back into the murky depths, and it sinks to the bottom. Hertzfeldt’s animations, like the glimmers of hope, are steeped in melancholy, yet hold a divine morsel of humour. His characters and worlds are at the same time exaggerated caricatures of a future that we don’t yet belong to, but ones that also ring true to the present we live within today.
It’s funny, a stick figure Hertzfeldt introduced himself to us at the beginning of the screening by saying: “You might not like some of the films in this programme. You might not like any of the films in this programme.” And whilst the whole audience waited for the “but” that never came, Hertzfeldt disappeared and his film began. It’s remarkably similar to the Sonorities Festival mantra, “You might not like it,” and is a small but hilarious example of how he challenges our expectations with every utterance or every frame of his wonderful and unique cinema.
“One must still have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. No one fled the cinema in terror, and there were no riots, but the Belfast Film Festival did have chaos within, from Vicki Bennett’s fragments of reflections to Don Hertzfeldt’s forgotten future, via all the worlds in between. And we all marvelled at the dancing stars.
By Joseph Gilson
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