Limits

There is a new video in the This Week’s This series: “Limits”. It’s a divergence from the usual form: an experiment in sound (music), action and editing.

“A cinema studded with dreams, which gives you the physical sensation of pure life… A certain agitation of objects, shapes and expressions that is interpreted by the convulsions and jerks of a reality which seems to destroy itself with irony, which makes the extremities of the mind cry out.” Artaud

(click on image)

Experimental film? It’s a genre little known by the viewing public of commercial cinema. It’s goals and intentions are far a field from the concerns of mere storytelling. I like to use examples from the visual arts to speak about theatre, or in this case cinema. It’s easier to speak about. Can we imagine a film in the style of cubism for example, or abstract expressionism, or pure abstraction? We thus get an idea of the aspirations of experimental film. There is a desire to approach the directness and immediacy of music, to be free from “the tyranny of the written word”.

Antonin Artaud: Almost 80 years ago he was already critical of the tendency of film to follow a literary form, that is, successful only to the extent that it must be supported by words. A big fan of Charlie Chaplin he wanted, like in his theatre, a cinema “where psychology itself is devoured by action”.

Think of our dreams, or a nightmare. Words hardly ever play a part and if they do, those words have weight…doubles…shadows which terrify!

“Dreams have more than their logic. They have their life where nothing but a sombre truth appears.”

And as in dreams, some paintings and most always music, from the void of our separateness a truly chaotic, anarchic journey is set in motion. From the interchange of forms, light, shadow and rhythm our bodies are confronted physically: bodies as vehicles. We are transmuted from what we were, to what we are becoming. It is cruel this crisis of the birth of feeling. It wells up inside of us, subjecting us to its power and unknowable mystery. Springing from the very source of our entrenchment to life and death we are touched, our souls quickened to its finest edge.

Amorino dormiente di Caravaggio

Perhaps this is why we don’t remember well our dreams. “Because they are the human skin of things. The derm of reality,” where we find the essential answer to the enigma of being. The veil is torn away and we stand face to face with our nothingness. And we wake up- and go and make the coffee!

Link to "Limits"

note: All the quotes are from Cinema and Reality (The Shell and the Clergyman)". Collected works, volume three, Antonin Artaud.