sensation of rain.
Cinema has evolved in two paths.
One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total
substitute sensory world.
The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the
untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's
window without need of color, noise, grandeur.
Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater,
but with the popular diversions — comics, chess, French and Tarot decks,
magazines, and tattooing.
Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from
ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving
history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its
lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a
summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire,
men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these
seances, shades are spirits which ward off evil.
The spectator is a dying animal.
Invoke, palliate, drive away the Dead. Nightly.
Through ventriloquism, gestures, play with objects, and all rare variations of
the body in space, the shaman signaled his «trip» to an audience which
shared the journey.
In the seance, the shaman led. A sensuous panic, deliberately evoked through
drugs, chants, dancing, hurls the shaman into trance. Changed voice,
convulsive movement. He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics,
chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning, were once esteemed. They
mediated between man and spirit-world. Their mental travels formed the crux
of the religious life of the tribe.
Principle of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened
by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from
doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers,
a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. The cure is culled
from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain
stolen, soul.
It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film
runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures
his existence.
The happening/the event in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people
through air vents makes the chemical an actor. Its agent, or injector, is an
artist-showman who creates a performance to witness himself. The people
