“You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like moulten lead.”
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pain
olympics
December 31, 2011
The U.S.A. Pain Olympics [round II]
December 24, 2010
The U.S.A. Pain Olympics
All images in this film were found easily and freely on the internet; the most powerful and all-encompassing multimedia tool of mass communication and information dissemination available in the entire history of mankind. I did not create any of these images, I only compiled them.
The images which comprise this “film” are shocking, disgusting, enraging, despicable and often, seemingly banal. All these images share one commonality amongst them; they are products created by members of the societies we all find ourselves living within. These images are products of our environment – and when our environment (both physical and mental) is quite literally poisoned, polluted, degraded, abused, affected and based off of half-truths, lies, deceptions and systematically contrived posturing and manipulations – then this is what we get. Everything utilized in this film was created under the moral tenets and ethical guidance of our civilized societies. These are our Frankenstein monsters, our demons let loose and our fears fully realized; word made cancerous flesh (Although, please, do make note that some images in this film are made from a genuine perspective of one thinking of these revulsions already – and denouncing in their own right. That is to say, there are clips included in the film of other people already screaming for the right reasons, against the myriad of true horrors contained herein).
This is the direct result of our ceaseless degradation of the human spirit, our vilification of the otherwise naturally inert human thoughts of darkness, our demeaning of gender and sexual proclivity; our commodification of the flesh. We suppress, repress, ignore, bury, stifle and outright deny these things a proper intellectual honesty. This is all part and parcel of our deliberate, massive institution based around willful ignorance that consumes some to the point of a hysterical schizophrenia. Forgetting… dismissively turning our heads… even though we know deep down, we know, that these things are not ghosts and far away from us – they are tangible and right outside our doors, sometimes even within our own houses. These sicknesses breed because of our lethargic submission to the Capitalist perversions of human emotion shamelessly passed off as ‘comfortable living’ in our modern age – and because the absolute prostitution of a true compassion has derailed our core humanity, we have been bred to want to be distracted, to want to not think. This film is comprised of the output produced and allowed by a society of deceived, scared animals who are so confused and shielded from their own minds that they no longer understand how to process their own existence – which is precisely what divorces us from our base humanity. We cease seeing the world as a connected, shared system and instead view things in dangerously small and closed off ways. This is what has turned the human condition into a dissociative schizophrenia – a pathology – and in the process human beings have grown further and further away from the basic humanitarian necessities of our shared perceived reality. War is elsewhere, detached. Our sexuality is shameful, disgusting and denied- which has turned most everything into some sort of dark fetish, more extreme than the last, in a reactionary attempt to own our own bodies once again; to punish and release in equal measure. Senseless, and dangerously illogical bigotries have been fostered and encouraged by religious and political institutions for no other reason than that it helps support their versions of truth, order, and in turn, comfortable control and profit. Their hate, disguised as love and law, is widespread, accepted, commonplace – even incited and noisily renewed by thousands of instantaneous sources on a daily basis. The human being is divorced completely from the single species it really is – there is always a clear “other” who is without a doubt, not us, someone who is different and thereby, contemptible.
All the while in America, 1% of the population controls the wealth of the nation and so it follows, they control every aspect of the information we receive that defines our personalities and experiences of the world. A bloody Capitalist regime, comprised of a-moral death merchants runs amok, utterly cold and uncaring for the populace which it programs and controls for its own nefarious and deeply insidious means of production, profit and loss. All they understand and traffic in is a corrupt, inhumane brutality, so should it not be someone’s duty to, in fair turn, hold a mirror up to their own vulgarity? To them human life is utterly worthless, meaningless and interchangeable – they understand humanity only through the numbers it represents, a global economic board game using people as worthless, plastic pieces; the absolute monetization of life in all forms… this is what concerns them. Nothing more. As that seems to be an indisputable and indefatigable fact of our modern lives, then it stands to reason that these people certainly hold an intense and great interest in driving us to ceaselessly consume senseless commodities provided to us without end, so as to create the unimpeded flow and circulation to this vast, accumulated resource of the “one percent’s” money. This is one of the reasons why journalism is no longer journalism (the same reason democracy is not democracy in America- kowtowing to special interest groups for financial recompense) – rather it simply stands as a gross parody of the notion; designed to entertain and promote certain aspects of the lifestyle which feeds everything else. Entertainment has become news and vice versa now, there is no distinguishing factor. Our best interests are sold out to the highest bidder and we are deliberately exposed to rampant misinformation and unethical, bombastic ‘infotainment’ sturm and drang – all designed to simply lend credence to the larger, even more fraudulent and self-serving lies which exist only to support the overall structure of the bloated bureaucracy.
SO – is it any wonder that some of the horrific things we can witness in this film are what we’ve come to represent? Create? Consume?
Is it worth compiling into an unbearably long litany of horrors; a montage of monstrosities, just for the slim chance that some may very simply think about the, admittedly, few contextual trappings I’ve been framing this work into?
Can the desire to confront those who choose to ignore be considered a fool’s errand? Can it be a futile and trite exercise bred only out of one of the solipsistic symptoms which have been learned and embedded into me by the very establishments I’m attempting to rally against?
Or can this be considered a rock; volleyed with a sincerity of good faith, at the phantom storm troopers serving at the behest of a collective fascist nightmare which we are unwilling, en masse to awaken ourselves from?
Who knows? Not me…
I fully admit this is not the film I set out to make, but I was not strong enough to create what I had originally imagined. I had envisioned a much more deliberate, rhythmic cadence to the editing, filled with much more varied content… but unfortunately I had to leave it as it now stands. I could no longer spend any more time watching, re-watching and selecting pieces from the hours of footage I culled to create the film. Beware when you peer into the darkness, the darkness also peers into you… so the saying goes. I worked on this film for more than a month and it carried me off into extraordinarily dark spaces, it seeped into my life and fueled my nightmares- I had to abandon hope for a controlled hand directing the piece, determining how precisely it would come together. I simply had to give up, defeated by the brutalities which compose the piece, yet fully believing in the overall statement and ideology which inspired and drove the piece.
You should NOT enjoy this film, you should be disgusted, completely and deeply disturbed and sickened that it even exists. The real question is – what are you going to do about it? How will you justify its existence? What reasons will you give yourselves to explain why it sits, here on the internet, made by a “civilized citizen”?
PLEASE BE ADVISED : THIS FILM SHOULD BE CONSIDERED TO CARRY AN “X” RATING FOR DISTURBING IMAGES AND SCENES OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE AND PORNOGRAPHY.
May 14, 2010
A Manifesto Towards a Free and Revolutionary Cinematic Expression
A Manifesto Towards a Free and Revolutionary Cinematic Expression
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Part 1 of 4 – Troubled Sleep (the verb to be)
Excuse my banality, but let me start out as plainly as I can: Cinema is the most powerful artistic medium currently available in our limited existence; literature (writing), music (sound), acting (drama, performance) and photography (cinematography, composition, color, texture) are all utilized and represented as a communal part of the whole. Then of course, all is sublimated through the interaction of the viewer – and therein, creates innumerable definitions – inexplicable evolutions of all said disciplines. When taken in by the audience, the viewer, the voyeur, they all change simultaneously for the entire duration of the work. They do not remain static; each experience is forever subjective and fresh. The meaning is personalized by each audience; their lives, their experiences, their prejudices, fears, loves, hatreds, neuroses, etc. are projected on to the projections and create a unique, personal context. Thereby this art form contains all existing, traditional art forms and serves that phantom other function – interactive, fully subjective experience. So then it stands to reason that it truly is the most perfect and complete medium available to any artist today. Whether used to commiserate or convert, it is always a jackhammer assault on every sense, engaging us completely.
This medium, which incorporates all other mediums into it, has the power of the gospels and the potency of coitus. It is a weapon and a bastion… an immutable piece of the dogma that allows the powers of expression and creation to flourish. We must be unafraid to harness these nameless and abstract ghosts, unafraid to shape them into audio-visual representations of whatever we feel the ache to express, whether we understand what we are doing or not. Fear must not creep into our hearts to stifle and suffocate us with superfluous emotional garbage while behind a camera, while putting pen to paper or aiming light onto a scene. These hypothetical films are ourselves we are photographing, writing and illuminating. We are not ashamed of ourselves. When these works are at long last displayed to the world we will hold our heads high against even the most vitriolic of reproaches, for we will have done what we felt we must have, what we believed we had to – what was honest. We had the courage to be unapologetically human, no matter how confused, angry, depressing, ugly, or beautifully simple and seemingly trite that may have been at the time. The underlying point is that action was taken. Passive inactivity was rejected, creation was given its just due, thereby we will see even our grand failures as great accomplishments.
If there were no structure, no context or even no audience it would not change a thing, for the artist simply creates out of an indefatigable need to create. This lends itself to a definition of “art” “artist”, etc. The definition may be summed up in a single word: Honesty. Divisions cannot be afforded when it comes to art… if they are permitted then the meaning is diluted, the points dulled, the intent sullied by avarice, ego, or pandering. This honesty is creation out of an absolute and genuine need to communicate; communication with oneself, the world, the unknown. Creation out of a need to express something which gnaws away inside yourself, something that must come out- that will come out – in one way or another.
This tool of cinema will forever remain razor sharp and able to gut even the most stubborn of pigs as long as the practitioners of said craft actively acknowledge and revere its complex yet gracefully succinct tenacity to tell the truth – even when it is blatantly lying.
So, take camera in hand, that is the only tool required, as long as you shoot what is honest to you, what is honest and un-affected, then you open yourself up to freely accomplish all which is available via this boundless form known as cinema.
Part 2 of 4 – The Key Stings the Lock (once upon a time to come)
I say: cut out the tongues of all those inefficacious fools who profess the weakness, futility, pomp and death of manifestos. The skies are dark and soot-filled, over-cast with heavy storm clouds rumbling an impending deluge. The land is brittle and cracked, covered by the senseless celluloid of soulless films past; trampled under foot and ground into the dust of past transgressions. It is time to rip open the heavens, soak this soil and create fertile ground able to cultivate the seeds of a new generation, allowing them to blossom and grow. It is time to SHOUT manifestos from every make-shift hill of debris you manage to saunter upon – I currently find myself upon a hill – so please, allow me to shout:
We should facilitate a true communal endeavor, an intricate network of cells all over the world working as a truly independent, yet wholly supported, cinematic community; a Cinematic Communism. A group of unique individuals who are all working towards the common goals of a pure cinematic expression, proudly standing outside of the stale, obvious and accepted industry which has encouraged and fostered pandering and irrelevant works produced by the reigning false idols of cinema; the shameless golden calves forever suckling at the diseased teat of bourgeoisie ideals. Silence cannot be tolerated, inaction must not abide within our community. Everyone must work to be equal, the Marxist nightmare which describes the brutal, capitalist equation wherein the workers do not make enough to actually buy back what they produce will be utterly abolished. Our revolution is for all people, all being equal. All of this is simply a small part of the dogma for people who worship the moving image.
The closed off and restricted industry ruled over by a select few witless gatekeepers, desperate to retain their personal and ultimately empty status, is the exact institution we seek to actively and vociferously topple to the ground. Filmmakers are not required to have deep pockets and loose, prostituted ethics in order to make a film that will be seen by a wide, welcoming and receptive audience, but for reasons far beyond belief it has somehow become an accepted and necessary evil one must endure in order to be part of a bloated design which in the end only stands for rote commerce – which only stands for the death of art. We refuse to continue wading knee-deep through the stagnant cesspool which has been accepted for so long as the film industry, an industry that is artistically bankrupt, utterly impoverished but rich with ersatz ideas and fraudulent inspiration.
An artistic virility must be maintained against the stubborn and painful constipation of an industry which no longer understands the medium they mass-produce and fob off upon the hungry, slowly drowning souls of the public. Our garages are filled with individuals who will no longer suffer the constant dilution and repudiation of basic artistic integrity – the principles of honest, unaffected articulations.
Our mission is to free the cinema from the insulting and demeaning bonds which it has been held within for far too long – violently divorce it from the homogenized commodity it has become and return it to the vagrants, outsiders, eccentrics, fetishists and artists who began it.
This is about resuscitating the small parts of yourself which you’ve been trained to ignore, little by little throughout the years. It is about communicating with the world on a universally understandable level using twenty four still frames of photography every second.
The internet and the digital revolution have indeed made the indentured servants, the poor huddled masses of the cinematic world into landowners, royalty and honest-to-god-damn practicing filmmakers; but to what end? If the content is not the direct culmination of the years spent fighting for scraps, if it does not ignite the world anew or at the very minimum fan the slowly dying embers of the world’s cinema then what good has this “revolution” been? Has there even been one, or have we just simply, at this point, only armed the peasants and wait still for their actual revolt?
I say we have only been precariously perched upon an edge and the real revolution has yet to materialize. This is why we have opened the garage doors; an upheaval of the underground. The demons we’ve had stored away in the cellars are being released; we’ve become intimate with the tools that control them and now is the time to put them to practical use. This spirited and sincere rebellion beckons all who have ever felt the presence of a question that threatens to disrupt their ability to function unless they confront it head on, unashamedly. We will give voice to the voiceless, an outlet to the underdogs and the truly independent.
We must condemn the pitiful, toothless dogs who whine miserably for their master’s to guide them through the darkness of portraying life as a trite and soulless play of egos. Denounce the endless trivialities which are shamelessly paraded in front of a half somnambulistic audience, numb to the predictable and condescending tones of the forever repeating and pale specters of what amounts to so much advertising disguised as entertainment. Reject their despicable need to attach a dollar sign to everything we do, see, think or feel. We have no choice but to innately, animalistically understand these precepts, to give ourselves over completely and convulsively – to bend and to be loyal servants to the tips of our swords; subverting hearts and minds by carefully crafting the content delivered to the ears and eyes.
So we must stand up and shout, yes. Not only shout, but we must sincerely believe our convictions. We can only harness the limitless potential of this medium if we truly carry the faith and remain lucid in our brilliant, feverish insanity.
A thousand different choirs singing a thousand different songs… dissonant, perhaps, yet deeply, richly textured with the beauty of human creation.
The anarchists of this new cinematic venture will always have their trigger fingers expertly poised upon the camera’s control, ready to shoot at a second’s notice. Ready to focus upon the scenes created out of the unassailable desire to reveal to the world something it may not have yet seen. Forever guiding the steady, unblinking and un-flinching eye of the camera upon the myriad of secrets which are hidden in plain sight; the image must be pure to the point of horror.
Part 3 of 4 – the stick (the pig)
The fog is receding and we’re starting to regain our focus. What will we see – and more importantly, how will we show it to others?
This is a fundamental question which begs, on raw hands and knees, to be answered in vicious and assured strikes of sturm and drang. We humbly posit to grasp this elusive and erudite language of intimacies, comprised as it is of the pen and camera, of sound and vision moving in time with one another to construct endless textures and extract endless pleasures from within all reality and ghosts in equal measure.
Camus once said; “What is a rebel? A man who says no.”: A person who says no, one who will not only refuse to abide the ugly prostitutions of our philosophies, but is also compelled to be vocal about their heartfelt disdain in regards to said prostitutions. We must show the world how dissatisfied we are with all the weak answers we’ve been afforded thus far in the game. Our goal is to not only provide fresh answers, but to pose entirely new questions as well.
It is time to make our youth into soldiers of a non-destructive nature; these poor youth who have been seduced by the systematically lowered standards of what is shamelessly passed off as art today. The sad-sack suckers who think, dialog is passé, “toilet” is the only type of humor, black and white only means old and CGI equals instant cinematographic grace. There is an entire generation wasting away from a methodically bred lack of enthusiasm, a manufactured lethargy, both intellectual and physical. The advent of the hyper-information age has reduced all content to instantaneous blurbs and bit streams; text messages and commercial laden television, filled with shapeless, soft, dull angles mindlessly rubbing up against the legs of any hapless viewer in its path; this indecent pandering is constantly taking place and much worse, being accepted, becoming the standard… we need to re-sharpen the edges, we need people to cut themselves wide open in order to make them take notice once again. Sometimes you have to kill the ant with a sledgehammer. The English language is now routinely sacrificed to the short-hand slang gods; nigh unrecognizable to the eloquent authors who are marginalized further with every passing day. The same foolhardy bastardization can be seen sickly leaking out into all other forms which language influences; our communication at its most base level has become sluggish and diluted, therefore it follows that our various expressions of said language will crumble away in a corresponding, dissonant harmony. We have taken this for granted too long and for too long has there been a void in the film world where people could go to SHOUT against these things without having to fear the censor’s edits and the producer’s avaricious indignations. A place that stood for HONESTY not just commercial gain, a place where people could look if they knew they wanted to see a film that came right from someone’s passionate guts, right from an intellectual and artistic integrity about the art of making films. People have been chasing the phantoms of expression for all time, desperately trying to pull close the ghosts of their obsessions, trying to create a mobius strip of their fetishes. But you cannot put your arms around a ghost, these concepts are intangible and abstract, this is why people look towards art; they need to see what they’ve been fighting and spitting to express said in way that had thus far eluded them. This is what we are here for, to provide a catalogue of the sufferings which have for so long been obscured by this fog of an intellectual war, the war to simply keep people entertained, not engaged in any meaningful way. We are here to provide an outlet, a confessor, a catharsis.
Part 4 of 4 – the last dark step
Now please, do not take my posturing as any sort of solipsism or banal egoism. I’m not above anyone (my stance is quite sincerely that all men are equal, without a second thought, some have just been fooled into ignoring this very important fact), if they want to watch the most recent explosions-tits-pop music-product placement laden piece of sub-entertainment that slithers its way into the cinema, then by all means, have at it. I’m in no position to judge anyone, I’m just offering my opinions here. I certainly sound militant and bullheaded in my tenor but I assure you, I want people to have some way to escape, even if it means they’re being condescendingly shown what amounts to a despicable advertisement disguised as a film. Whatever guise it may take; people NEED to escape. My position here is that it is simply unacceptable for that to be the customary way. People deserve some substance and if they are not afforded the opportunity to consume it in, at the very least, equal measure, than we are committing an atrocious act of negligence to not only the healthy escapism of an individual but to the continued intellectual evolution of the species as a whole. On that same note, please do not think I discount, ignore or am downright ignorant of all the truly beautiful, honest and enlightening art that is being and has always been created in the filmic medium. There are people making pertinent and honest films, just not nearly enough, or if they are, they have to fight tooth and nail while constantly having to maneuver adroitly through the standardized system, sweating bullets the whole time to meet insulting requirements or to appease target audiences, demographics and share-holders. This is not an acceptable breeding ground for art, it is an artist producing, against all odds, with every side falling in on them, art through the filters of commerce. It is ever increasingly difficult for an artist to create what they need to create without having to sacrifice their personal ethics in some way or another, and this is indeed a very troubling fact… yet a fact nonetheless.
The story is even more depressing for young, anonymous filmmakers who have not yet produced a noteworthy canon of work thereby having made a ‘name’ for themselves and cemented their stature in the industry in any significant, albeit small, way. The youth, the new blood, needs a new way to deliver the message of rebellion to a new generation raised on the internet and cellular phones. Digital cameras and powerful computers sit in every home, these are the guns and mortars of this revolution, these are the armaments our soldiers must become effortlessly efficient with, the technology which will win this war for us.
This fog may well represent a new dark age, when lucidity and poignancy in art are sadistically enshrouded by fanaticism, oppression and insincerity driven by bourgeois, economic ulterior motives. This then, must serve as the new Renaissance, a rekindled and impassioned Enlightenment. We need our community to be united towards a common goal; a goal of pure cinematic expression, a goal of honesty in the face of a society that does not pay well for honesty. We need to agree upon the basic tenets of artistic integrity and intellectual veracity, and shout their importance and glorification at every turn, into every ear available to us. We must fearlessly stomp our foot down upon, and then past, this last dark step in order to walk into the vividly bright futures we all deserve.
Download this post as a PDF: A Manifesto Towards a Free and Revolutionary Cinematic Expression
March 15, 2010
The Subversive Cinema of Dreams
“In the hands of a free spirit, the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. It is the best instrument through which to express the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct. The mechanism that produces cinematic images is, among all forms of human expression, that which most closely resembles the workings of the mind during sleep.” – Luis Buñuel
There is a feeling you receive from certain films; an almost out-of-body experience, something that is most often compellingly odd; something slightly askew that reaches into your head and confuses you a bit while still wholly engaging you at the same time; a heightened Surrealism that you somehow connect with on a purely emotional and instinctual level. This is the cinema of dreams, of the automatic – a cinema which is much too often relegated to the faux art-house crowd or played lamely for laughs, or used out of sheer laziness by what is an otherwise cynical and formulaic writer / director. The history of modern art goes to show that works which contain and exhibit sincere examples of these unnameable qualities are created by, what are perhaps, the genuine magicians of the medium; they are created by the true rebels who are not pandering to the maddening crowds or manipulating audiences with a pre-determined, often malicious, ulterior motive. They are working from honesty and a desire to lay bare the things which, even they, probably do not fully understand, in an attempt to both show audiences things they have never seen before yet still connect to – and to converse with emotions rarely confronted in the majority of films. But even this basic explanation is flawed, as the basis of this expression is not strictly confined to providing situations and images to the audience purely for their own, solipsistic sake. More often than not there is a grander, more concrete ideology driving the work and even if it is unknown by the artist at the time, they are being truly subversive simply by allowing themselves to expose the unknown and the unfiltered subconscious worlds in which the original seeds for the images germinated.
Now, before we go any further, let me make it a point to state that the thoughts contained herein do not in any way attempt to denigrate films which do not incorporate an artist’s subconscious recollections into the film; there are many astounding films which follow and feed a very structured and recognizable narrative linearity and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I simply wish to discuss one certain type of film/filmmaker here today, so please excuse my broad strokes of unbridled enthusiasm.
“Naturally our only recourse was to counter the exorbitant pretensions of this ‘reason’ that, as we saw it, has usurped the place of true reason; and also to save impulses and desires from the grip of repression, which only made them more harmful. To the extent that we stripped old ‘reason’ of the omnipotence it had assumed over the centuries, it is also understandable that the moral ‘duties’ it helped foist on man lost almost all justification in our eyes.” – André Breton
The avant-garde* was first and foremost created to mock the absurd standards of rationale – the accepted and agreed upon collection of ridiculous bourgeois, sitting-room-culture social mores shamelessly promoted by the ‘moral majority’. By making a concerted effort to break away from and disregard the firmly established forms of discourse and expression by embracing willful irrationality the avant garde automatically performed a subversive act. If artists wanted to speak out against the social and moral tyranny of their country they were suddenly forced to refuse and belittle the basic logical structure of an indefensible institution against which all forms of insurrection were gleefully justified. They desperately had to express all the emotions they had for so long, been forced to hide and apologize for.
The bourgeoisie had an exposed Achilles heel at the time; they would not suffer a personality who refused to play their trite little games of ego and pomp – in the process of being presented with such an individual they would be exposed; strict belief in their standards of social interaction was their weakness. Country and faith, the two iron gloves worn by the wide-spread oppression suffered upon the citizens of the world, naturally became the prime targets of the subversive because they were the gods beyond censure; worshipped by the status quo most openly and most hypocritically. It goes without saying that the system these artists were functioning within had a great aversion to any form of openly discussed thought which fell too far from the banalities of their safe, green-zone of accepted social behaviors.
Therefore the absurd became the rebellion and as it did, it ruptured something and bled generously into the hands of all the artists, inspiring and breeding countless works which would usher in a new renaissance. Modern art was born: an art which held an ideological structure at its center, concerned with the very rights of man; artistic, moral and sociopolitical revolt were unfalteringly interwoven into the works produced by this new avant-garde. They took a wry, petulant pleasure in ruffling the feathers of the stuffy old maids who had stood watch over the doors of the art world for decades. By bringing madness, irrationality, dreams, the automatic – in short, the truth about the human psyche into the various mediums available to them, they created a scandalous weapon which still remains deadly to this day; one which is immune to the attempts to stifle and smother it, merely because it recognizes the absurdity of their fight against the absurd. For it is simply too difficult to fight a man who refuses the very structure of your rational consciousness; so by acting in an unfiltered relation to the “illogical” subconscious, they disarm and confuse and their opponents. They create “unseemly” juxtapositions which debase and defraud the status quo simply by presenting familiarities within an incongruous context. When faced with the horrors of the rational world they came to the unavoidable conclusion that this sordid “rationality” must be relentlessly attacked.
“… It is clear to us that the world’s real torment lies in the human condition, even more than in the social condition of individuals. Be that as it may, this social condition, which is totally arbitrary and iniquitous, acts as a screen between man and his true problems – a screen that we therefore must first and foremost pierce.” – André Breton
Art became the new forum for class struggle; the revolt of youth was now being based around internal, intellectually artistic evolutions; being defiant by allowing them selves to be swept up and exist furiously in an unabashed, purely unpoliced and unashamed mental realm. When it came right down to it, no matter where their artistic sensibilities led back to, what they were fighting against was the homogenization of thought – the subordination of the individual’s mind to the hive, group-think, passively complacent mind-set of the culture at large. Yet even more importantly, social liberation was now considered to be part and parcel with the liberation of the mind. A fight was openly and loudly waged to reconnect with the natural human spirituality which we all innately possess yet society had continually gone out of its way to obfuscate and destroy. A reclamation of one’s own subconscious, a right to think of and openly discuss any idea or thought they may have – with no fear of reproach or condemnation. After all, there is no legitimate reason to be ashamed of thought – thought is completely innocent – thought does not act, does not kill, steal, etc. – thought is extremely powerful of course, but in its logical state it is nothing more than conjecture, a means to an end – the end itself is what differentiates the passage of thought into reality; physical actions with physical consequences.
Therefore the artist cannot separate art and the basic human rights of man. The act of creation is in itself an act of the free man. Their output is always subversive, even when they are being very conservative in their delivery because they use the medium as a vessel to deliver a message, and by simply using the medium to deliver this message they have transcended the innocuous regions of pure entertainment and moved into a pertinent commentary (even if it only remains pertinent to them personally), they have moved into the realm of art. So the avant-garde artist makes films which express messages in such a way that they involuntarily activate and converse with our subconscious and affect us on a level which I cannot accurately name: it is to converse with the phantoms of existence – then it follows: to create film which engages on a psychologically transparent level intrinsically manages to disrupt the status quo.
The world kept spinning, revolutions and revolutionaries were born, raised their voices and died, manifestos were written and burned, people shot and were shot… both sides continued to spin their various webs around the globe… this was still an EXPLOSIVE time, a time when the bounds were being shattered and redefined in frantic fits. Franco’s regime, Mussolini, Hitler, etc. ad nauseam… these rats continued to plague the world with tyrannical nonsense disguised as the rational and just moral high-ground, while the artists continued to bravely toil away under all the rubble that had been thrown onto their lives. They chose to speak, to express themselves instead of remaining silent… and their dissenting voices made them enemies of the state; targets. The original artists who took it upon their shoulders to spear-head a new movement with a new meaning, sought to destroy all conventional social, moral, and artistic habits of thought and perception; they, like Rimbaud, sought to create new colors, new words; Psychic automation as kinetic-flesh-jazz. They represented the mad ones, the evolution of the artistic mind-set into the political sphere, their hands were forced and they became a new breed of soldier; fighting on the front lines with images, words and ideas.
It may all seem stale and commonplace now, yet there was a time when denouncing the church, the government and the entirety of the social structure was a very dangerous and truly explosive act to take part in – these were still the days when you could be condemned, exiled, executed, jailed or attacked by a fascist mob for having the courage to show something as innocuous as a cow sleeping in a woman’s luxurious bed. There were very real, very dangerous consequences for “subversive” actions; therefore nothing was feigned purely for attention or shock value, they spoke out of the pure desire to help free a dangerously repressed society.
Now, what I suggest you ask is: Where do we stand now and even more importantly, where are we going?
“…I demand phantasmagorical films […] The cinema is an amazing stimulant. It acts directly on the grey matter of the brain. When the savour of art has been sufficiently combined with the psychic ingredient which it contains it will go way beyond the theatre which we will relegate to a shelf of memories. two courses seem to be open to the cinema, of which neither is the right one. The pure or absolute cinema on the one hand, and on the other this sort of venial hybrid art.” - Antonin Artaud
Let’s discuss this from here on out.
*For the sake of brevity, this article does not specify the “avant-garde”, but it should (hopefully) obviously refer to the “avant-garde” of the early 20th century, specifically the DADA movement and subsequently, with a greater focus, The Surrealist party
April 20, 2009
Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage
Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage – by Bardolph, Baronis and Telling.
I began this review long ago in a completely different vein, a more commonplace and recognized style of ‘review’, yet my mercurial temperament got the better of me and I decided to throw those virtual letters to the virtual wind and begin again. Yet even still, as I now re-read and leaf through this Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage, I’m very tempted to make specific note of many, many sections of verse… however, I realize that would be a disservice to the author… a bastardization of the medium, a cheapening of his hard work. This is something he created for people to read, to experience themselves, not something to have the magic and secrets greedily sucked out of and marginalized by over-anxious commentators such as myself. I do not want to kill the excitement and/or the mystery of the novel. It reveals itself to you at its own, very deliberate pace as it is read; it was written a certain way after all – and that way only becomes clear when experienced within the meticulously constructed context of the whole. So forgive my new found tendency to be very general when I speak of this work. I’ll focus the following observations of mine around general themes and the “essence” of the work.
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