Experimental Film

I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.

In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

it's the things you don't see, in this world or any other--the hidden things, unseen, lost between frames--that will always make all the difference.

Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time.

The problem with all numinous things is that you can't just take somebody's word about them, especially the ones you're warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they're really there. You look at them even though you know it's not a good idea to. You can't not.

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative.

For a thought cannot be un-thought, anymore than the world can be un-made, & thus we can never escape the consequences of our mistake, not without great price, & cost, & pain. Or perhaps not even then.

In the end, you will always look at the thing you're told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists.

She is the only true thing.

So they're supposed to be God's emanations, these angels, and God delegates most earthly action to them—sort of like how the mediaeval Cathars and other Gnostic-influenced sects claimed the Devil was 'king of this world,' with God's complicity. It's a system that leaves room for a whole lot of animistic deities, spirits of place or concept—the kind you get in ancient Greek, Roman, Aryan-Indian, and Slavic beliefs, or even Chinese Shenism and Japanese Shinto. And these things could be good, could be bad, could be beneficial or malign, but since they all had God behind them, you couldn't really get rid of 'em, not completely. The best you could do is, um . . . stop paying attention. Ignore them, walk away. Don't eve give them what they want.

Here are seven angels, one with peacock feathers for wings and a crown, but no devil. And here also is God, behind it all, who created both Himself and them, whereby everything else was created. Yet there are other things as well, you must remember—things which have always been, which fools without true religion sometimes choose to worship, or trick themselves into worshipping. Small gods for small minds, trapped in small places. And while these creatures' scope is narrow, as with all half-made things, their reach can be long, long . . . just so long as their names are still known in this world, so they may hear them whispered somewhere, recognize themselves, and come calling. . . .

You could argue—as I have more than enough times, as part of my Film History lecture—that, no matter its actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era.

Yet there are other things as well, you must remember—things which have always been, which fools without true religion sometimes choose to worship, or trick themselves into worshipping. Small gods for small minds, trapped in small places.

Because in experimentalism, the film itself was the point, the question and the answer, all in one. In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

When the witness is ready, the ghost will appear. When things wear thin.

So many individuals in different places, all with the same good idea. All, in their own ways, attempting to use light on a wall to open a window into another world. And how odd is it that the two guys who made the first viable motion picture happened to have a surname that means “light”? Still just coincidence?

the tragedy is that the world never does end, ever. That it goes on & on, forcing us to go along as well, until at last there is nothing else, nothing more. Until there is only what was, same as what is and what will be--Only the truth, which never changes. Truth not made flesh but image, for anyone to see.

Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself.

I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a pain, and without it life isn't even death, just . . . nothingness.

What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate, impassioned call for murder?

Because stories lie hidden inside other stories, and we always know more about any given thing than we think we do, even if the only thing we think we know is nothing.

I hold as much of my son in my heart at any one given time as I can, Mom, and I’m sorry if that seems like it’s not enough. But I have to protect myself, first and foremost: not from him, but from my own … disappointment in him, over things he can’t even help, over my own reactions to those things. The sheer poison of it. I have to keep myself just far enough apart from him to be able to love him at all, knowing it’ll never be as much as he deserves to be loved. And that’s not because he’s broken, no. Not at all. That’s because I am.

Well, the 'origin story' for Malak Tâwus is almost exactly the same as the Muslim myth about Iblis, the djinn they later call Shaytan—but Yezidi revere Malak Tâwus for refusing to submit to Adam, while Muslims believe that Iblis's refusal to submit was what made him fall out of grace with Allah. From our point of view, God praised Malak Tâwus for refusing to serve something made out of dust, because he was made from God's own light; instead of punishing him, God made the Peacock Angel His own representative on earth, telling him to dole out responsibilities, blessings, and bad luck as he saw fit. And we can't question him, because he's beyond good and evil—good and evil are human qualities.

We're storytelling creatures. Give us a bunch of seemingly random images and we will try to organize them into a linear progression: tree, apple, head, bruise, gravity . . . a man sat under a tree, an apple fell on his head because of gravity, a bruise appeared, the end. We just won't be able to help ourselves.

...if you're in constant pain for a long enough period, your overall tolerance for stress and discomfort rises so high, any sense you might have had of what's 'normal' gets reduced to what's bearable. And by that point, you simply expect to hurt, so complaining abut it feels inappropriate. Nobody should live like that, if they don't want to.

The problem with all numinous things is that you can’t just take somebody’s word about them, especially the ones you’re warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they’re really there. You look at them even though you know it’s not a good idea to. You can’t not. In the end, you will always look at the thing you’re told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists.

I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away.

But it is what it is--that's all you can say about it, and simply wishing it wasn't will never make it so. If my aunt had nuts, she'd be my uncle; if things weren't the same, they'd be different. You just have to deal with it, which I do--mostly. Inadequately, probably, a lot of the time.

Which is just how things work out sometimes--completely the opposite of how you thought they would. The chance comes, and then it's gone; the moment turns and you don't know why. Nothing's ever the same.