Sinking into the bath, feeling the water rise around you. Diving into the pool, breaking the surface and passing into another world. One that's all around us, a kind of noticeable density that you can feel against the skin.
Light is different – more diffuse. Sound is warped, becoming strange. You can feel ripples, movements through the medium, feeling other people without touching them though they're some distance away.
It's a whole different world – and you're no fish, are you? You can feel the difference, because you know somewhere else, somewhere unusual, with a different set of rules. When the rules are different, new possibilities occur, just because things operate in a different way than you are used to.
You can rise and fall, supported by this new environment, by its very density you can accomplish movements you would never be able to perform in the world from which you came.
Fully immersed, you affect the world. Your every movement changes things.
You are like Archimedes, displacing his bath-water, just before he has he has his Eureka! moment.
Immersive theatre provides you with that other world – a whole different place to interact with. A narrative that keeps you close, that you can feel, touch and hear without the artificial distinction of audience and player.
“Welcome to the Museum Of Virulent Experience. You join us on the eve of a veritable renaissance, a tipping point in time. England is on the cusp of a new age, its rebirth and metamorphosis into a model vision of efficiency and elegant restraint is soon to be unveiled to the world.
Through the tireless work of the Ministry Of Information, you are about to experience first-hand, the greatest revelation in this nation’s history. You stand within the walls that keep England and her people safe from degeneration and dissolution, preserving the very fabric of our society against its own self-destructive urges. Through the use of therapeutic technologies we have carefully INDEX-ed and partitioned all harmful experience from your minds and the soul of this nation.
Here, the emotional content which once spread through the human psyche like wildfire; the irrationality which spread like a virulent plague, is archived and sanitised for your protection, and the protection of your families and friends.
You will be shortly witnessing first-hand the very mechanisms and protocols which enable the halcyon age in which we now live, in contrast to the unchecked ferocity of the 20th century – and the endless novelty-seeking of the early decades of the 21st.” - Dr. Julia Warburg, Museum Director
Dear Candidates and Guests,
We look forward to welcoming you into the Museum of Virulent Experience. In less than a week, a month of celebrations commence in honour to the Emotional Experience Act of 2032 and England Reborn. We request that all candidates and guests choose one of the six Index Pictograms below to display as your profile picture or avatar within your digital interactions. Your choice will help our scientific team to evaluate your well-being, and allow us to recognise your elite status prior to your visit. Please stay tuned to this feed for futher data-requests.
"Try as they may to savour the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendour of eternity, which is forever still". - Augustine of Hippo, c. 400 AD.
It is no secret that the initial idea for Melancholia came to Lars von Trier whilst the filmmaker was being treated for severe depression. More specifically, von Trier was inspired by a theory gleaned from one of his therapists at the time- that depressives and melancholics are more likely to act calmly in violent situations than "happy" people, who have a tendency towards panic. As the Danish film critic Per Juun Carlsen writes in a 2011 interview with von Trier, "Melancholics are ready for it. They know everything is going to hell". Carlsen also observes that von Trier "does not consider Melancholia to be about the end of the world and the human race but about humans acting and reacting under pressure".
Indeed Von Trier openly rejects the way in which Melancholia has been marketed by Hollywood, right down to his own PR department's tagline - "a beautiful film about the end of the world". Instead he makes clear that the film's entire plotline - of a distant planet colliding with Earth and bringing about the end of human life - serves as metaphor for depression and the melancholic state. This is evident particularly with regards to the relationships between characters, the ways in which they interact with one another and the very different ways in which they attempt to cope with the coming apocalypse.
I have already described in a previous article the way in which there is a rising sense, within cultural theory and the cinema of the past few decades, of being on the brink of what some have termed "inertial destiny". This sense is particularly prevalent if you are of what we shall call a "melancholic" disposition (and judging by the statistics we're all depressed nowadays so that probably includes you), if you're a left-wing activist or ponderer, or if you have a stockpile of tinned baked beans in the basement for when 2012 hits hard. But what exactly is it that we are holding out for? Nuclear holocaust? Mass flooding? A supervolcano? An alien invasion? Or, perhaps, planetary collision...? Contemporary financial crisis porn might drive us wild with its motifs of chaos on the streets and daily despatches from the most recent pockets of doom but as far as wiping us from the face of the planet goes, as yet, it's not much of a contender. Oh yes, we're going to need something much bigger than the end of capital to satisfy our eschatological yearnings...
What melancholics really crave is a permanent release from the perpetual state of depression, boredom and lack of meaning in which they are trapped. That is, to say, a reprive from feeling obliged to put on a brave face, pretending that everything is ok, that you're happy, you're participating, you're "normal" and you most definitely, definitely, do not want to go back to bed and sleep for a year or worse, die.
In short, the best thing that could possibly happen would be for the world to end and for everyone you know and love, nay, everyone in the whole entire living world, to be wiped out. That way (a) you don't miss out on anything because all of the vital actors and reactors within your life are dead too; and (b) it's not your fault.
For the melancholic the worst thing that can possibly happen is for the clock to just keep ticking with no skips, delays or major cataclysms. As David Ewing Duncan so eloquently describes,
"This is our blessing and our curse: to count the days and weeks and years, to calculate the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and to capture them all in a grid of small squares that spread out like a net cast over time: thousands of little squares for each lifetime".
It is no coincidence that a painful life mapped out in small squares can be a life of extreme creative action. Von Trier stands out as one of thousands of examples of artists whose depressive inclinations have inspired artistic greatness. This I shall take as given. What I'm more interested in is the possibility which this creative sensibility gives rise to - that melancholics do not long for nothingness in their cravings for Thanatos, their taste for oblivion. Instead I posit that they long for something much more ambitious - immortality.
In an interview from 2004, Zizek claims that "[Freud's concept of the] death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called Nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner's operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death".
Viewed as a drive towards immortality rather than inertia, the death drive (Thanatos) becomes a macro version of the will to survive, create and procreate (Eros) which can only ever exist on a mortal, finite scale. It is well documented that in completing his work on the drives, Freud was very much aware of the parallels between his investigations and those of the philosopher Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer the misery inherent in the world stems from the gap between the world as we see it (Phenomenon) and the reality of the world (Noumenon) which is, rather irritatingly, unknowable to us. Desires (unfulfilled) and our Will (thwarted) form the greatest sources of suffering and so it follows that the only way in which one can attain peace is to forego all desire, to negate the Will. Such negation of the Will, of Eros, is necessarily this longing for death, expressed most satisfactorily by the savvy melancholic's desire for the end of the world.
It is no coincidence that the composer Wagner, whose Prelude from Tristan und Isolde is used to overbearing effect in Melancholia, was greatly influenced by the work of Schopenhauer. It also no coincidence that like von Trier and Freud, Wagner was chiefly interested in expressing ideas about sex and death. Whilst Isolde's Aria in Act III is often referred to as Liebestod, Wagner himself used this term (meaning love-death) to refer to the Prelude. His ecstatic visions of suffering, longing for what one cannot have, the juxtaposition of creation and termination, of sex and death; the beauty inherent in suffering; such visions looms heavily in von Trier's work. In many ways it is possible to view Melancholia and the earlier Antichrist as parts of the same whole - the Thanatos to the latter's Eros. Tod und Leben.
The rapture and melodrama inherent in the works of Wagner and von Trier stands in stark contrast to the shades of grey in which the melancholic sees existence. Both von Trier's Melancholia and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde painfully build towards their ecstatic crescendos - the narrative points of no return which the depressive mind so desperately longs for. But real life is not like the movies; there's that gap which Schopenhauer was so devastatingly fond of. Love is never sweet enough, pain is never agonising enough and the Prelude never does strike up in the background of those cathartic moments.
Yvette Biro writes of the way in which cinema "redeems" physical reality by charging the everyday with the emotional content of ceremonies. So surely it is worth stopping to question why it is that we seek out these extremities of emotion and why it is that human beings have, throughout history and the world over, grappled with and been drawn to eschatologies as ideals.
In the next article in this series I shall outline the history of such thinking, tracing its roots back to the time of Zoroaster, in an attempt to determine where this taste for the apocalypse, this fascination with the End Times, came from. I shall examine the possibility that such eschatological hopes and suspicions are in fact variants of a vast socially constructed myth; the fallout from thousands of minor political, religious and military decisions, taken hundreds of years ago in a land very far away from here...
A writer, haunted by an idea for a new story hunts for four refugee performers of a theatre destroyed in a mysterious fire.
He locates his friends in a remote, pagan settlement founded by Stronheim; owner of a Strange Factory hidden deep in the local countryside that emits an infamous Hum.
Victor enters into a dangerous pact when a vow is made to re-build their theatre if the story is completed in time for it to be performed at the village festival, where bizarre rituals are enacted by the Villagers under the influence of a hallucinogenic effluence siphoned out of the Strange Factory.
Victor's imagination and the fragmented memories of his friends collide in a violent fiction that not everyone can survive.
Today I'm very proud to share with you the 'Strange Factories' trailer.
As many of you already are aware this is FoolishPeople's first feature film and I believe it contains some of the best work FP have produced.
Every person who has collaborated with us on 'Strange Factories' has worked tirelessly to ensure that 'Strange Factories' is a truly unique film.
We're currently in post-production, but it won't be long until you visit the settlement and learn how you, the audience are very much part of this story.
FoolishPeople would like to take this opportunity to thank all Dreamers who attended the Society of Vandals Guild on Friday 3rd February. Your participation has been noted by the Vandals and their leader Brother Arlec.
We are delighted to present a selection of photographs from the evening, courtesy of Strange Factories' Director of Photography Yiannis Katsaris. For more photographs please keep an eye on the Strange Factories Facebook page - feel free to tag yourselves unless you'd prefer to keep your masked identities under wraps...
It seemed only right to share our official Strange Factories wrap party with those who have supported us on this project so far and we very much enjoyed meeting so many of you in the flesh (and also in mask!). We were also incredibly pleased to receive such positive feedback on all that was revealed...
FoolishPeople would also like to thank Sally Rushbrook, Guignol's Band and Kilto Take for their inspired musical performances. Finally, huge thanks to Rena and all at Jamboree for their enthusiasm and assistance in making the evening possible.
We have much to share with you in the coming months. Radiogram IX, released under the light of tonight's Full Moon, shall be the final installment in the Strange Factories Prologue series. The next phase of Radiograms, beginning very soon, shall mark a turning point in the Strange Factories creation story thus far. To make sure you don't miss out please subscribe here. We look forward to revealing the next stage...
Upon the purchase of Lars Von Trier’s recently released end-of-the-world movie Melancholia, Boris Kit, the head of Magnolia Pictures, commented, “as the 2012 apocalypse is upon us, it is time to prepare for a cinematic last supper”. Subtitled by Von Trier as a “a beautiful film about the end of the world”, Melancholia delivers not only on Kit’s promise but also succeeds in providing a brutal social critique, masquerading as an archetypal character study which explores the nature of the depressive mind versus that of the socialised individual. Switching from a staged social realism reminiscent of the Dogme films to the fantastical science fiction of the movie‘s second half, Von Trier utilises cinema’s possibilities for the hyperreal similarly to, and as effectively as, Gaspar Noe's nihilistic exploration of life after death Enter the Void.
Both directors specialise in bombarding their audiences with visual and auditory spectacles to numinous ends via shock and awe. But in addition to their shared technological preferences and overridingly nihilistic outlooks, there exists a shared sense of the ecstatic, of the seductiveness inherent in destruction. Von Trier and Noe are masters of the numinous realm, of the creation of cinematic rapture and loaded technological attractions. This often serves the purpose of translating their individual visions of oblivion into the minds of the audience. The results are undeniably beautiful and cathartic. But let's not be bowled over by mere aesthetics, or be fooled into believing that either director believes in shock for shock's sake.
It is apparent, in light not just of 2012 but of the current global situation, that both Von Trier and Noe have captured something of the zeitgeist. They have channeled particular kinds of feelings of futility in the face of a dying planet, a dying capitalist order, a consumerist cultural wasteland, in addition to a more generalised sense of existential doom. But why does this sense of doom, of living in the end times, resonate? Have people of every generation and social order contemplated the notion of living in the end times or is this phenomenon specific to the late capitalist period? What separates the current apocalyptical discourse from previous, more ancient visions of Judgement Day? And why is it that, as Jameson once remarked, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism? Finally, how is cinema reflecting these feelings, or even, moulding them?
Over the coming weeks and months I shall be posting a series of articles which explore the history and nature of eschatological thought and how these ideas have come to bear on cinema. Along the way I shall encompass elements of film theory, philosophy, psychology and cultural theory in exploring the concept of time itself and the seemingly inevitable outcome of a dead-end consumer culture, all with a focus on The End (of the world, of time, of capitalism).
I also aim to reveal the way in which Strange Factories can be placed within this mileau and how its themes manifest in both the content and form of FoolishPeople's forthcoming Film Fantastique.
Perhaps there will be some light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps, to paraphrase Half Man, Half Biscuit, the light at the end of the tunnel will be the light of an oncoming train. Nevertheless, I hope you'll take your chances and bear with me. After all, have any of us anything to lose...?
(Images: Lars Von Trier's Melancholia; Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void)
In April 1933, Anais Nin was invited to attend a lecture at the Sorbonne by Antonin Artaud on the subject of "The Theatre of the Plague":
Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theatre came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began...His face was contorted with anguish...His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers stretched...He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left...But Artaud went on, until the last gasp...Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. Artaud and I walked out in a fine mist....He was hurt, wounded, baffled by the jeering. He spat out his anger. "They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on "The Theatre and the Plague", and I want to give them the experience itself. The plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realise they are dead. Their death is total, like deafness, blindness. This is agony I portrayed. Mine, yes and everyone who is alive...I feel sometimes that I am not writing, but describing the struggles with writing, the struggles of birth."
In Inside the Temple of Cinema, I discussed Walter Benjamin’s response to the effect of reproductive technology upon art with reference to his views on cinema. I noted how, for Benjamin, the introduction of film marked the termination of uniqueness and authenticity. Whilst I continue to argue the case for cinema as ritual, Benjamin maintains that cinema is the first form of art purely devoid of any cultic value gleaned from what he terms the “fabric of tradition“. Nevertheless, the ideas at the core of Benjamin’s arguments can help us to understand and explain what is important about making a film like Strange Factories today.
The Priests of Art Unveiled
Writing in the 1930s, Benjamin hailed cinema as the technological innovation which would destroy the quasi-religious reverence with which people expect, or are expected to, view works of art. He argues that cinema is unique in the way in which it can come true on the otherwise wishful thinking of avant garde elites. Within cinema lies the possibility of discarding with the priests of art, those apparently “enlightened” mediators who falsely position themselves between object and audience. Look around you. Yes, there they are.
It is apparent that in the Western World we have grown accustomed to looking at works of art - especially classical works of art - as if they possess some deep, ancient, spiritual meaning which eludes us “plebians“. We are expected in this way to perceive all art as if it were sacred to us personally, as individuals; a view which can surely be condoned as little short of absolute nonsense. In Ways of Seeing, Berger describes the popularity of a Leonardo Da Vinci in the National Gallery, virtually unknown before an American offered £2.5 million dollars for it:
Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows - not because of the meaning of the image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value. The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what the paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.
We look at paintings in museums and - embarrassed admitting to ourselves that we don't know what the fuss is all about and squinting in the hope of catching a shaft of holy light - we think "But there are people who know why these things are important..." Some of us issue a degree of reverence for these elusive cultural experts, for most of us its more akin to contempt. Either way, we cannot deny that the "Art World" is housed in churches and watched over by priests. Berger offers statistical evidence to back up his claims:
Benjamin's hope for the cinema is based on the fact that we cannot revere the unique "aura" of a film shown simultaneously and repeatedly all over the world. As mentioned previously, film is a reproduction of a reproduction. Cinema inherently lacks the cult mystique of "art", claims Benjamin. Therefore, he reasons, the best movies were able to preserve the radical educational programme of the modernist experiments then taking place in traditional media - as theorised, in the case of the theatre, by his friend Bertolt Brecht - whilst exposing experimental attitudes to the masses in an unmediated fashion. At the cinema, we might be good students, but not out of any fearful respect for our teachers. Like 17th C. radical protestant sects, we would listen together for the word of god, our attention drawn to the truth without the need for a priest to interpret.
For Benjamin, motion pictures share with progressive or radical art the potential to offer viewers new critical ways of seeing the world. Only at the movies is this critical perspective intrinsically delivered to a mass audience. And only at the movies, according to Benjamin, do the masses take radical images in their stride, seizing upon them, analysing them, putting them to use in their daily struggles against the factory and the police and (in Benjamin's Europe) the imminent threat of fascism:
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting turns into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie [...] With regards to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide.
Cultural Consumption And Mass Appeal
Benjamin and Berger's view of the art world still rings true today. One forever hears artists wishing they could break out of the "art ghetto", a perverse ghetto where the monetary values circulated are astronomical. Benjamin's ideas about film, on the other hand, seem a little naive.
Only a few weeks ago, Slavoj Zizek used his audience with Julian Assange to once again point out the ideological effects of mainstream films, even in the Natalie Portman ballet vehicle Black Swan, directed by one of America's supposedly "indie" voices. And the extent of product placement in most films makes Hollywood resemble Madison Avenue more than any "artistic" venture.
But Benjamin is notably sceptical of those amongst his contemporaries who simply turn their nose up at "plebian" cultural consumption. The lighthearted rowdiness of Friday night picture house attendees is of course distasteful to those who wish to learn noble (classical) truths. But Benjamin wonders whether the contemplation cherished by the high priests of culture is not really more akin to avoiding looking in a world that moves so fast. Is a state of distraction perhaps better attuned to properly experiencing the shocks of modern living? Should we allow ourselves to absorb the work of art ('Art on the Inside...'), rather than to let the artwork itself absorb us (what is art without our blood)?:
A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into the work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.
Indeed, Foolish People's working practice, Theatre of Manifestation, is a direct inheritor to a tendency (Dadaism, Surrealism, Artaud, "happenings") in modernist art that treats "reception in a state of distraction" as both "symptomatic" of, and appropriate to, reassessing "profound changes in apperception". The numinous experiences invoked during FP events transport the audience to a plane from where they are able to view this world of horrors anew. The numinous state does not, however, resemble anything we might call contemplation. The shocking nature of FP's work is not thus for its own sake, but rather because absorbing shock is the best way to get a handle on our late capitalist lives.
In Benjamin's defence, we can look to our own time and find examples that have emerged from the boardrooms of a cynical culture industry and yet managed to attune our vision to the hidden workings of the world far more successfully than so many avant garde works. How many boxset marathons in front of the television ("idiot box") watching SyFY's Battlestar Galactica, AMC's Breaking Bad or HBO's The Wire? Insomniac, procrastinating or winding down from work as viewers of these shows may be, nevertheless war, injustice, class and and politics are quite seriously illuminated by the time the television is reluctantly turned off. From Vibrant Cults to Orthodox Churches
Surprisingly, Benjamin's claims for radical potential within popular forms withstands scrutiny perhaps more firmly than his faith in the intrisically egalitarian nature of film. Benjamin's vision of a cinema without priests expresses his belief that technological innovation had finally done away with the ritual or cult origins of art. This hardly matches up to the world we live in. Cinema clearly has had both a powerful cult value imposed upon it and the corresponding string of sects and bishops to police that. Susan Sontag, whose work I have also referred to previously, criticises Benjamin for his mistaken belief that cinema attendance had no ritual element. She describes the cult of cinephiles that emerged since at least the 1960s:
For cinephiles, the movie encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life..."One can't live without Rosellini" declares a character in Bertolucci's 'Before the Revolution' (1964) and means it.
We are no longer in this cinephiliac (or cinematic) heydey, however. The avid moviegoers of the 60s have seen to it that cinema take its place among the lofty 'arts'. The quasi-religious undertones have been eschewed in favour of the unabashed self-assurance found in the commercial art world. Vibrant cults have given way to orthodox churches. Notions like "arthouse" and "world" cinema are the collerary of "literary fiction" in publishing. Sunday supplement reviewers, Picturehouse programmers, the BFI, all unintentionally ensure that the radical perspective that film promises are filtered through the reassurance of class difference. Most of all what we are expected to learn from a "difficult" film today is our place in the world, our belonging to the elect, our sinning nature (all those films you know you ought to have seen). In short, our need for a priest.
In this context, reapproriating the religious appreciation of film can be a challenging communal gesture. We must once more go to the cinema with that radical protestant lack of deference, find our own connection to the sacred. Blakean moviegoers! We demand that our cinema be magical, evangelical, and above all, anti-clerical!
IndieGoGo & The Internet Age
Contemporary developments on the internet bear some resemblance to the context in which Benjamin discusses cinema. Online media, like photography and film in earlier times, offers the possibility of equality of opportunity in terms of making things happen without corporate, market based mediators. Unfortunately, this does not always ring entirely true, as is evident in the case of ceertain social media which are fast becoming tools of power and mass manipulation (Facebook, I am pointing at you).The development of crowdfunding and sourcing, however, at present does deliver on its promises of democracy. FoolishPeople are proud to have become a crowdfunding success story, raising over $12000 via IndieGoGo by allowing others to decide whether or not they believe in our idea, whether or not it has mass appeal despite it‘s rather terrifying label as “art“. There are no priests in this Church. In fact there isn't even a Church, rather just an online platform where everyone is welcome, everyone encouraged to ’like’ or ’unlike’ what we do. Every person has a place in this narrative.
But that is not to say that we do not want our audience to be a very special one. Yet our definition of 'the elite audience’ is perhaps much more in line with that espoused by Grotowski:
We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyse himself…an elite which is not determined by the social background or financial situation of the spectator, nor even education. The worker who has never had any secondary education can undergo this creative process of self-search, whereas the university professor may be dead, permanently formed, moulded into the terrible rigidity of a corpse…We are not concerned with just any audience, but a special one.
And so I ask you, tongue perhaps a little in cheek, are you one of The Elect?
Thank you to Sam Clodd for his assistance in writing this article.
(Images: Fritz Lang's Metropolis; Hettie by Yiannis Katsaris (from Strange Factories); Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal)
"The other day I heard Punch asking Judy what she thought of his cathartic manifestation. She told him not to be disgusting and hit him with a frying pan".
"No one can be the person they were born to be if you cut out the most wonderful sections of the narrative"
Under the glare of last weekend's Full Moon the Core Creative Team behind Strange Factories once again embarked on a 48hour Tweetathon in the run up to the final week of our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign.
We heard stories both profound and provocative, secrets at once dark and delightful, dreams with the potential to rouse nightmares in our readers.
Thankyou to everybody who participated by sending in their fragments. At the final moment we announced the lucky winner of the Strange Factories Secrets, Dreams and Storytelling Competition. Huge congratulations to Adrian Giddings, who will now be joining us at Stronheim's Mansion in the beautiful Czech countryside!
So here are some highlights from the finale of our epic Tweetathon. As our funding campaign draws to a close we heard some amusing tales of the effects of sleep deprivation and workaholism on FP's Core Team, as well as some of the bizarre events that have occured in the pre-production phase of Strange Factories:
In a crazed moment of exhaustion, I lost all perception of common sense and stuck my hand in a live socket!
We intuitively feel and know in our bones when sacrifices have been made for a story to be built and told...
The burglar had dragged my violin case out of a cupboard and left it open on the floor, the instrument untouched and perfectly in tune..
We also heard many beguiling truths and fictions of magick and mystery:
Her hinged jaw opened impossibly wide, and her misshapen mouth somehow managed to form the words again: "Am I beautiful?"
The yanari were illustrated as tiny daemons…They looked like distorted humans with wide demented grins on toothy mouths.
I know woman who was turned in to a white rabbit.
A woman drugged her husband, tied him to a bed, cut off his penis, threw it in the waste disposal unit and switched it on, police say
And we pulled a few skeletons out of the FP closet too:
As with all magickal rites, sometimes the thing you don't want to happen is the thing that needs to happen. You have no control over it...
I think even Carrie was a little worried that we had all carried on with our manifestations when we thought she was dead!
FoolishPeople are akin to those Pioneer Village actors, and would be horrified to see the audience catch a glimpse 'behind the curtains'...Where dedicated actors never break their character, even when faced with a horrific hostage-situation!
This is one of many reasons why we will survive the zombie apocalypse and become a touring troupe of zombie fighting minstrels.
I had the pleasure of dunking her in the river, cleansing her 'soul' and then taking her home for a bath......
Desecration dealt with human demons. How they're created & constructed from the bleakest and saddest stories of our lives.
I miss Deluge still!
Finally, it was noted that:
Having strangers pledge and support Strange Factories who have never seen our work has been the highlight for me, personally.
I think this is a thought that all of the FoolishPeople team hold in our minds. We are so grateful to everyone who has contributed to our campaign so far. There are only a few days to go, so please, if you can, do not hesitate to join us on this wonderous journey:
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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