Stan Brakhage, the interview.

Chodorov (Rail): Could you read these opening lines from your 1963 book,Metaphors on Vision, and expand on them and explain how these ideas influenced your filmmaking?

Stan Brakhage: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. What a way to take it. Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. Our whole structure of visual thinking is based on manmade laws of perspective and so on! But imagine! I say in my youth, an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. In other words everything you see, you have to be having an immediate adventure with it. It’s not canned in any sense.How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? In other words, can we actually see the rainbow at all unless we’re squeezing the eye in that particular way that causes that diffraction? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? In other words, can you really see the quivering, the actual quivering little wavelets through which every little shaft of light is, you know, feathered onto your consciousness? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, imagine it just alive with things we don’t know what they are, incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movements, everything moving. There’s not a moment of stillness anywhere and innumerable gradations of color. I mean, you start naming the different shades of, let’s say, these pants, blue-black? Are they gray-black? Are those socks then black-black? You have all these varieties…Here’s a blue…And you start naming: is this Prussian blue? Is this cobalt blue? Is this navy blue? And those are just blunt gradations, names that are given, and you can go on and on and on and you run out of words, finally. You’d end up with a dictionary full of words trying to delimit and otherwise describe a quality of blueness, very shortly, just along the line of these black pants and black shirt and black socks on this quilt which I will make no attempt whatsoever to try to describe. [laughs]

(read more...)

in a search of surrealist interiors: Andre Breton, 42 Rue Fontaine

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'..Surrealist appropriation of lived space aimed to inhabit not the private sphere as such but the dialectic between personal and collective, and the complex to and fro between the closed/occulted and the public/exhibited politics, space and actions that formed the hub of French surrealism's problems of inter-war years...

..A significant purpose of Breton's home was thus to shelter a physical and intellectual connection of objects whose prime function was to locate the self with the wider world outside. The status of these collections as poetic rather than archival or taxonometric encounters were further enhanced  by the inevitable shifts and rearrangements of their display, open to the dynamics of change and accident...'

( Thomas Mical, 'Surrealism and Architecture', 2005)

Sigmund Freud 'Uncanny'-extractions and notes

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'...We can collect all those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations which arouses in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common... The 'uncanny' is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar... The familiar can become uncanny and frightening.

...We tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

...Intellectual uncertainty: so that that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

...According to him [Schelling] everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

...'doubts whether an apparently animate being as really alive; or or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact aminate' (Jentsch)

...We know from psychoanalytic experience... that fear of damaging or loosing one's eyes is a terrible fear of childhood... No bodily injury is so much dreaded by them [adults] as an injury to the eye.

...It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But these factors do not solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition-not everything that is connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought belonging to the past of the individual and of the race-is therefore uncanny.

...An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.'

Space with Artificial Memory- Tunnels

 Kingsway Tram Tunnel, the entrance.
This beautiful entrance to the tunnel with funky rails going all the way beneath the main road. The picture of the tunnel, with two sets of closed gates being literally in the middle of a busy Southampton Row naturally amazed me and my imagination. Unfortunately, i could access the tunnel itself, but even seeing the entrance to it certainly left me with good impression. Eventually, i will try to access the tunnel, i think.
The tunnel haven't been in use since 1950's, and it remains almost it was now. To read more about the Kingsway Tram underpass please go HERE.

 The Clerkenwell House of Detention with its amazing tunnels underneath. The Building has been used as a prison, and then as a House of detention, up until the building has been demolished in 1893, and the Hugh Middleton School (the picture above) was build on the site. Luckily, the tunnels are left untouched and being used as film sets even today. Unfortunately, i could't access the tunnels this weekend, as there is a need to make an enquiry and book your visit in advance. But i definitely will be coming back there very shortly! Reference

 Greenwich Foot Tunnel
The tunnel first opened in 1902 to connect the Island Gardens to Greenwich. It is still being vastly used when the DLR is being shut down, just as it was when i have visited the tunnel. The footpath gives different impression, depending on its buzzyness. This time it was really busy, so i have found myself being more claustrophobic that i have been before in there. On my previous visits, the tunnel remained empty. As it being 1,217 feel long with 50 feet underneath the Thames, it feels like it will never end and there is no way out. No daylight at all, the spiral staircases on both ends of it, that are even hidden behind the wall, the echo of footsteps being stronger than ever before- all that gave me a chill on the skin.

Old Vic Tunnels are now being used as performance venue and car parking under path spaces, but most of them remain empy. There are plenty of rooms in there, as i have discovered myself, and all the walls are being covered with graffiti. The space certainly has underground art atmosphere, as well as the sense of danger for some reason, This tunnels though don't have any claustrophobic feeling about them, as they are being quite wide, but the rooms and smaller passes are definitely something i have not seen before. The space looks empty, and it feels empty aswell. There is something melancholic about them, something sad in a way. But yet, that was definitely a discover of a day!

Spaces with Artificial Memory

This is the screenshot from Gaspar Noe's 'Irreversible' film. I have suddenly remembered about this film when started to look at the tunnels, and wondering why is it that they give me such a strong feeling. And then I realised.
I've seen this film about three or four years ago and still it is the only movie, that i can recall from the depth of my memory, and remember every second of it. It certainly gave me one of the strongest impressions i have ever had after watching a film. It also is to do with the story being so real, it could have happen to anyone. And there we are, it is since then, that i have my almost superstitious fear of the tunnels.
And that is exactly why i am unconsciously drawn to them (it seems this way anyway), as you have to face your fear in order to get read of it.

taken from here: http://www.filmsquish.com/guts/?q=node/783

The location of the tunnel, according to the internet source is in Paris: Buttes Chaumont, Paris 19, Paris, France (the subway station). 

Spaces with Artificial Memory

It turned out to be quite strange to be visiting the 'Artificial Memory' places. Obviously, it depends on the scene of the film that has been filmed here or there. In this case the funny house with a 'flying door' and the one next to it are the ones where the two gangs of Guy Ritchie's 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' had  monstrous gun fight. But strange enough, the place does not have much to it. The atmosphere might have been cleaned out by the busy market next door or the fancy Paul Smith boutique, instead of 'MINICABS' like it is in the movie...

from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: Park Lane, Borough and the screenshot from the film of course

 London Bridge Station:

read about the fire on Tooley Street in 1861:
http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/AnniversaryTooleyStreetFire.asp

photos by Maris E. Skujins


Seems, like I am being drawn toward the tunnels and the sense of fear much more than to 'film spots' with their artificial memory. I think, for the rest of the research that would have to be the spaces with real atmosphere or with a very convincing and believed one.
So London tunnels, here i come!

Spaces with Artificial Memory

 186 Fleet Street: Sweeney Todd's memory

 Whitechapel: places where Jack the Ripper killed two of five women.

Wandsworth Roundabout: From the scene of Clockwork Orange, the first act of 'ultra violence'

The tunnels, the tightness of the spaces and their memory, artificial or not, certainly gave be some goosebumps on my visit there. All of these three spaces have few things in common: the aura of fear, tightness and tension of the inner space and, of course, the memory. My memory it is. That's what I judge the space before I enter it. That I found quite weird, as not many people are aware of the history of these London spots, and obviously not many people would share my fear of them. Gives me something to think about.