I haven't shaved completely in years, because my naked face frightens people. It makes grown men scream like little girls. My shaving is apparently one of the signs of the apocalypse around here.
I mention this, purely for informational purposes. After all, the more signs and portents you know, the more you can prepare. You can check your almanac, your A to Z against the lie of the land, plan the route.
Provided of course, that you're holding the map the right way up, and it's the right map, you shouldn't have any real problems, right?
But what happens when you've got the map upside down, or back to front? We've all been in a situation where things don't make sense to us; maybe you've arrived in the middle of something, picked up a conversation half way through. Everything is full of unintelligible nonsense and you're damned if you can work out what's going on, because you have no clue what kind of frame of reference people are using.
You're in medias res. Stuck in the middle of things. Your beginning isn't the same as theirs. They started before you got there, damn their early-bird ways.
So now you have to stuggle to catch up - to throw yourself into the river and hope there'll be some familiar things to grab, like driftwood, or rocks; politics, religion, sports scores; something and anything you can latch onto, to pull yourself onto the boat and join the voyage properly as one one of the crew.
I wasn't around when FoolishPeople began, or when Enochian; Language Of Angels was being performed in the early nineties. I was busy doing other things. I wasn't around in 2011 when Strange Factories was being filmed.
Here's the thing, for as sure as angels are angels, it doesn't matter whether they have wings or not. It doesn't matter that it's 2013 and I wasn't around ab ovo ('from the egg'). Like you, I'm in the middle of things, here and now.
Because all we're always in the middle, always where the action is, struggling to make sense of things.
And as sure as eggs are eggs and the angelic choir of seraphim have wings of fire to cover themselves, something has happened, something called life. Somehow, that's where the magic happens - that's where the feathers fly.
Life doesn't give you a nice neat introduction, a significant pause to indicate that something is occuring. The house lights do not dim in a genteel way to attract your attention. That's a ritual of theatre, of Art.
That's taking the raw stuff of life, of that rushing river - the same one that you cannot cross twice, by the way - and carefully, deliberately crafting something.
We mutter something around here: "Art on the Inside. Blood on the outside."
Because when Art meets Life, the theatre might as well be consumed by a conflagration, obscured by a cloud of flame and feathers. And those angels, those watchers - that audience up in the Gods?
Most of the time we don't really think about moving. We just do it, and the motor functions and muscles do the rest for us out of habit. It's automatism at its finest, muscle memory that works faster than thought.
But we've all been there when you're thrown into an unfamiliar situation; that moment when your frame of reference has shifted so mightily that everything seems unpredictable.
If we feel negative towards it, often the experience will seem threatening - we'll want to do everything we can to turn back to what we perceive as the status quo. But then again, there's a creative angle to such things - an inescapable newness that may inspire a sense of vast possibility.
Because there's now the chance that the simplest, most ordinary of things can and will assume a new meaning for you. Because the unfamilliar, the unusual, the strange, and the uncanny forces you to re-evaluate, to fire up those faculties that you used to make sense of things.
Those same engines that were idling, merely ticking over before now, as awareness starts becoming important, because anything can and will happen. Because you're in a new situation, a new world where things work differently.
Your most ordinary of motions become infused with strangeness, and that's precisely what John was talking about in his last post on the Power of Nostalgia - the sense that you hang upon a precipice, or that the barriers, boundaries and screens which lend definition to your world are actually paper thin.
The fact that those very things you count on to make sense are fragile and subject to change is the reason behind the conservative urge, in the apolitical sense.
The Great British - or English if you prefer - Strangeness with which Foolish People work is, in a sense, precisely about nostalgia in the melancholic Homeric sense. A kind of unease which permeates our work, illustrating the rhythms which exist in spite of human society.
An urge to return to an imaginal home where ritual and shape may once again connect us to what it means to be human. To violate strictures of linear perception and immerse oneself in the deeply weird.
In that sense, it's unsurprising that the seventies and eighties in Britain were profoundly haunted; the spectre and the apparition may appear from nowhere. Antedilluvian spaceships may be unearthed amidst the concrete and modernist architecture. Ancient pagan rites emerge, fused with the insatiable curiosity of modern science. Atom bombs and athames, astrology and particle physics, nuclear power and telepathic children.
And this is the heart of Strange Factories - a story told in a pagan landscape. A landscape and place that is uncivilised, as the Romans named the countryfolk outside, in the provinces. There is a heretic heathenism to it - a journey down strange roads, with natives that do not obey the mores you know.
Perhaps calling Strange Factories cult cinema is far more accurate than it appears. Like the cult that surrounds Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, FoolishPeople perform rites and acts which may at first seem bizarre and occult in nature to outsiders.
But these rites and performances are at the heart of cultic practice, a shared excperience that bonds people and their environment together. The relationship one has with experience, with environment and culture, and with other people, is subtly altered.
That experience can break and reforge bonds in new ways, so that you may never see things quite the same again. In that sense, it is the nostalgic ache for the long-forgotten, dimly half remembered, that we seek to give you. For though you may not be able to ever go home, to go back, the very ache, the very strangeness provides you with a new awareness of youself and your origin.
The strange crooked roads are lonely and haunted, yet you will find many companions along the way, odd though they may be, and weird their ways. The Hum of Strange Factories is all around you, but its origin, and how you relate to it, is yours and yours alone.
Before I started work on the Strange Factories script, I knew I wanted to explore nostalgia and the stories that affected me so profoundly as a child. Their themes and the content of the dreams they instigated were so wondrous and deeply creepy.
Children's television for those of us born in the seventies in Britain, who grew of age in the eighties was deeply strange. For lots of reasons. It seems the layers between the truth of the fairytale and the power of the myths that haunt these isles were still close to the surface, calling to us from stone tapes and faces hidden in the wall.
The strongest current within children's television programming of this period for me as a young boy was the infusion of disquiet and unease amplified by the loss of my father, grandad and nan in quick succession.
I spent a great deal of time alone with only my imagination and gravestones for company. This overlapping nature of this architectural uncanniness helped open doorways that have never shut.
The loss permeated the stories I watched, it was already there waiting for me.
As a child I was scared of everything, my mother was deeply religious and after losing my father she retreated to the safety of various forms of religion. The children's television of my childhood offered no safety. The characters never told me things would be ok or alright in the end, they showed me that only the weirdest had the skills to survive the onslaught of apparitions and shifting realities, that bathed a generation in the odd irradiance, creating tomorrow's people.
These threads showed us the day after, awful futures we didn't want to live in, fictional narratives that threatened to obliterate the real.
These stories sent my friends and I to bed with true horror in hearts, many a playtime was spent dissecting the apparent doom that grew closer every day, reaching out to us from the television screens. Nuclear Armageddon was such a real and profound fear, its poison seeped deep into the reservoirs of dreams our imaginations held, causing tides of toxic dreams.
Saphire and Steel is a programme that fills me full of dreadful wonder even today. It relentlessly refused to open its world completely to its audience, it treated us as equals, expecting you to interpret and investigate the cases just as its two agents.
No easy answers, no simple solutions. This journey must be endured, for it is in the experience of the geography of these narratives that we learn the shape of our own imaginations, reflected deep in the landscapes of their characters and worlds.
Televison of the 70's and 80's arrived wrapped in nostalgia, even as you watched it for the first time you felt a deep longing, that turned young eyes into old and vice versa.
Bagpuss, probably one of the most fondly remembered British children's television programmes was about forgotten and lost toys, left to experience fleeting moments of what once was.
Strange Factories, is born of a type of nostalgia. A longing that you can't verbalise, that connects the marrow in your bones to worlds that only exist when you dream of them.
This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the previous article here.
Afternoon skull examination by Benedictine monks at Einsiedeln Abbey, Switzerland.
But the game's worth all the candles, since now they're burning at both ends, and that's fine: the chips are down. -Alain Jouffroy
Tens of millions of people worldwide practice theologies which contain an overt element of the eschatological. Such "Armageddon theologians" have even made it into the White House. It is not a requirement of such views that one is religious but fear not, I've quoted Zizek once in this series already, I'm not going to do it again. According to Norman Cohn, eschatological beliefs and mythologies are not exclusive to our time; such beliefs have reared their heads repeatedly throughout history, particularly in times of mass disorientation or anxiety. (Is there any other kind of time?) Across two volumes on the subject, Cohn poses the question as to how and where such expectations of annihilation and consummation developed. As his groundbreaking study unfolds, it dawns on him what a bunch of suckers we all are and have been for quite some time, since Zoroaster, in fact. What's more, the end (of this idea) is not nigh, for as he proclaims, "who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it [the eschatological tradition] may generate in the forseeable future?"
So let's rattle through the history lesson. Cohn argues that until around 1500 BC Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Indo-Iranians, Canaanites and pre-exilic Israelites were more or less united in their world view; that in the beginning the world had been organised and delivered from chaos by one or more gods. To displease a god would be to risk the divinely ordained order of things, for the opposite of order was primordial chaos, a dangerous force which seeped into the earthly realm under the guise of plague, famine and invasion. The Egyptians knew this divine principle of order as ma'at ('base'), the social and political embodiment of which was the Egyptian state, or rather, the Egyptian monarchy, which comprised human heirs to the throne previously believed to have been occupied by the sun-God Ra himself. Periodic regeneration and rejuvenation through upholding ma'at on the personal, social and political planes was key to understanding the Egyptian ideal. The best any pharaoh could do would be to restore the feted order of the past, re-establishing the ultimate conditions experienced under the rule of Ra, 'in the beginning'. This continual reaffirmation of ma'at, this endless return to 'the first occasion', the notion that order is always teetering on the brink of chaos, which must surely be reigned in and always is, leads Cohn to describe the Egyptian world view as "static yet anxious".
According to Cohn, sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC such ideas were turned inside out by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra, better known as Zoroaster, who espoused the controversial idea that all existence was "the gradual realisation of a divine plan". He proposed a dualistic cosmology of the spirit of good, Ohrmazd, and evil, Ahriman, between whom man is free to choose. Cohn argues that Zoroaster's prophesy was inspired by the Iranian version of traditional combat myths, whereby a young hero, blessed by the Gods, keeps chaos at bay by winning a great battle against an embodiment of evil, most likely a form of the feared 'chaos monster', and is rewarded by being appointed ruler of his kingdom. By adopting such a mythology, Zoroaster provided his followers with a view of the world which was forward-thinking and vitally comforting in its optimism. He foretold of a final battle, in which the supreme god and his supernatural allies would defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and destroy them absolutely, leaving the divine order to reign without conflict or obstruction for all eternity. Mental and physical distress would be banished forever in a world which basks in total security and peace, unchallenged by chaos or evil. History would effectively cease. This was to be known as 'the making wonderful'. And for Zoroaster, it was going to happen very soon.
In the sixth century BC Zoroastrianism became the religion of the first Iranian empire.
Of course, in order to function as the primary religion of a successful, well-established empire, it was essential that Zoroastrian eschatology be modified to suit the needs of such an empire. Unsurprisingly, immediate and total transformation of the world was not necessarily an imperative when times were good, riches were abound and new temples were being erected. Therefore the 'making wonderful' was postponed, officially, to a remote future, thousands of years away.
Whilst numerous empires withered and collapsed, Zoroaster's proclamation lived on. In particular his notion of the great cosmic war to come had a deep influence on certain Jewish groups, particularly the Jesus sect. Whilst the particular political situations which prompted Zoroaster's proclamations faded into history, the ideas seeded in his prophesies lived, taking the form of a convenient social myth which had the ability to both console and fortify those with uncertain futures. Through its own malleability, Zoroaster's eschatology was reformed, regurgitated and adapted, surviving many attempts to kill it off for good.
'The Last Judgement', Rogier van der Weyden, (1445-1450 )
Even when quashed or driven underground by the regimes of the time, the idea would rise once again, years later, in distant and disparate areas where overpopulation and social change, war, drought, plague and famine assured that the cosmic war, in the form of (in the case of Protestant millenarians, for example) the coming of the Antichrist , was tensely awaited. A great deal of fraternity was to be found in such beliefs throughout the centuries, from the early Jews and members of the Jesus sect, to Protestant millenarians and even today's evangelical Christians.
One Big Happy Apocalypse? I think not.
Whilst dreams of revelation and collapse foretold are doubtlessly comforting, Cohn reveals over the course of his study that they are ultimately nothing more than a social construct, an illusion. Whilst Cohn pursued his conclusion out of fear, fear of the extremities of action justified by such eschatological yearnings, his understanding of the readiness of people to adopt such social myths is great. But perhaps we would do better to free ourselves of such myths or at the very least, to consider a few exciting alternatives.
Richard Lester's absurdist comedy The Bed Sitting Room (1969), scripted by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, goes beyond the apocalypse in search of meaning, envisioning life after the collapse of civilisation, post- the lifting of the veil. As in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), there's an awful lot of rubbish lying around. And nothing makes much sense. In fact not an awful lot has changed since the End Times were over, prompting the question, what if, as Evan Calder Williams claims, the apocalypse just wasn't apocalyptic enough? As Calder Williams explains, "you aren't post-apocalyptic because the apocalypse happened, the film stresses. You become post-apocalyptic when you learn to do something better, or at least more morbidly fun, with the apocalyptic remains of the day."
To be apocalyptic is to be in waiting. You might as well be one of the undead. To be post-apocalyptic is to be alive, by the skin of your teeth. Ok, so there's a lot of rubbish piling up everywhere but isn't it high time we stopped fantasising about pearly gates and great consummations due to take place on some date unknown but possibly long after we're dead, and started making the most of the remains of the day? There's a lot to be learned from decay, rubble, ruins, dirge and toil. Earlier in this series I linked the hyperreality thesis to the omnipresent fear of death ("those fantasies of death and apocalypse harboured in every bedroom across the world...) and the un-therapeutic unveiling of atrocities by filmmakers such as Noe and von Trier. Neither filmmaker is fearful of bombarding us with disease, decomposition and other images traditionally greeted by us with disgust. If disease is as inevitable as death then why shy away from it? Why turn from what you MOST NEED TO KNOW? To turn from death and disease is to shy away from life itself:
"Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone...The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healty people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air". (Roberto Bolano, 2666)
To survive modern life is, to adopt Calder Williams' thesis, to become a "salvagepunk". Part of what we are salvaging is our right to death. As contemporary society grows ever more riddled with incurable diseases and cancers, Western life expectancy remains mystically high. On this planet, nobody is allowed to die. Our fear of death has contorted life itself, our contemporaries and elders rot in hospital corridors, their lives strung out by the latest life-saving technology. As in The Bed Sitting Room, there's a lot of junk lying around. Our bodies are no longer our own. And if we don't own our own bodies then we certainly can't lay claim to our own deaths. And if we don't own our deaths then how can we possibly assert the rights to our own lives? With the licensing of every new cutting-edge cure, death is pushed yet further away and our sicknesses and maladies only increase in their virulence. Meanwhile, Eugene Thacker points out that yet another zombie movie has stormed the box office...
Proximity to the ruins of our existence, then, can be the only prescription.
In August 2012 FoolishPeople performed John Harrigan'sVirulent Experience, a thirty nine cycle ritual at Conway Hall in London which took fear of death as the basis for a work which also functioned on the levels of both contemporary political satire and gnostic exploration. On an even more personal level it was, for me as a performer, a means by which to transform personal experiences of cancer and loss into the form of a mythical narrative which would enable me to reach a new understanding of myself, my life and the world which I inhabit through repeated catharsis; three eschatons a night, for thirteen nights.
FoolishPeople's work in theatre and film runs parallel to the hyperreal projects of Noe and von Trier, drawing upon ideas inherent to both the cinema of attractions and the theoretical work of theatre practitioners such as Artaud. The purpose of such work is always to confront ourselves with ourselves, to reveal the ways in which reality can be as illusory and abstract as hyperreality. Or unreality. To question whether such a thing as the 'self' even exists. As a means by which to redefine freedom through a direct attack upon all oppressive structures, institutions, habits and chiefly thoughts, the work of FoolishPeople lies firmly and proudly in the surrealist tradition, of which Andre Breton wrote,
"Everything leads me to believe that there exists a certain point, a state of mind in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. It would be useless to seek in Surrealist activity any impulse other than the hope of determining this point".
The 'certain point' which Breton refers to is the personal apocalypse, or eschaton, which can take place hourly, daily, over and over again, should you so wish. This is the work of life. Human beings are highly succeptible to mythologies, Cohn has revealed that much. The project of FoolishPeople is to explore such mythologies, to live them and to smash them, to build new ones, better ones, worse ones, real ones, fictitious ones. Life and death, past and future, fact and fiction. The manifestation of whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Minute by minute. Nothing is certain except death. Once you've faced that, the rest is up for grabs.
I'm a hundred quid better off now. The look on their faces when I was right was priceless, still at least they paid up. When will people learn that you can't just skim top-layer data for your model source. That makes five aborted runs due to crashes.
Stick that in your performance review and smoke it.
Meanwhile, mine and Adams' teams? Not one single crash in six months. Because we're [EXPLETIVE DELETED] old-school. Hah.
Mind you, I'm not entirely sure having us dredge up the aggregates for Harvest Festival works, but what the hell do I know – I think they're tweaking it, probably blend it with the Vernal Equinox so the country's proud of its English produce or something.
In all honesty, the whole thing feels like a bad rip-off of The Archers, like my Mum used to listen to on the radio, but I suppose if they want to hammer home the notion of ENGLAND REBORN into the psyche, you could do worse than hit up the old seasonal festivals.
Frantzen says it's all a bit Wicker Man, and I'm inclined to agree. Blake seems to predict it'll work though. Mind you, the way we've been bumped up the paygrades makes me think this project is going to get even bigger.
I took a look at the INDEX the other day – it's tripled in size in just under two months. Just like our budget.
[LAUGHTER]
The shame of it is, I've been looking at the projections, and the fact is, to get the levels of fidelity and accuracy we need in our predictions, we're going to have to piggyback on pretty much everyone's stream 24/7.
The processing power required is going to be phenomenal, not to mention the backups. If what the ideologues are saying even half comes to pass, there simply cannot be any downtime.
Hell, you're going to have shifts of miners working to keep Blake up to date. Which means, at this rate...well, I'm not sure what it means. I've seen some of the papers floating around from psychiatrists and neurologists that are in the loop, and it looks like there's going to be an absolute [EXPLETIVE DELETED]storm when the findings are made public.
How do you tell a population that it's destroying itself?
Of course, no doubt it'll take a couple of years for the outrage to set in – NGO think tanks and that sort of thing, white-papers and all that. Then Whitehall can serve us up as a solution. It's really quite devious when you think about it, to be honest.
The thing that bugs me, is how exactly we'll be presented. More to the point, its almost axiomatic that the more data we have to deal with, the more ferocious and dangerous those ripples we've been seeing will become.
Surfing the riptides and tidal waves of a nation's psyche? I wonder how many more Campbells we'll have by the end?
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)
"Not Roscius nor Aesope, those admired tragedians that have lived ever since before Christ was born, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen" - Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592)
Edward Alleyn (1566-1626) was one of the most prominent actors in Elizabethan England. In William Prynne's 1632 Puritanical critique of drama and performance, Histriomastix, it is recorded that during a performance of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus actual devils jumped through a mirror onto the stage during one of the conjuration scenes. Prynne claimed that some of the actors and spectators were unable to recover from "that fearful sight". It is possible that Prynne was referring to one of the many Faustus performances led by Alleyn, which, it is said, prompted not only his early retirement from acting but his later involvement in charity work.
Ten years after the publication of Prynne's text, as England erupted into civil war, the doors of England's theatres were sealed shut by law, for five years, in an attempt by the English Parliament (under the force of the Protestant Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell) to drive "sinful" theatre out of the country. In 1644 the Globe theatre was demolished. Performers and playwrights were forced to develop their art in secret, putting on illicit shows in private houses and out of town taverns. Once the law expired, another ordinance was issued by the government, deeming that all actors were to be considered vile "rogues". All theatres and playhouses were ordered to be pulled down, all actors were captured and whipped, whilst anyone caught trying to view a play was fined five shillings.
It wasn't until 1660, when Charles II returned from exile in France after the end of the English Civil War, that actors and theatre practitioners were granted freedom from persecution and even better, patronage. Theatre folk were once again encouraged and respected for their talents, no longer regarded as "notorious whores", or worse, to quote from Prynne's Histriomastix:
"The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie, divided into two parts. Wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers arguments, by the concurring authorities and resolutions of sundry texts of Scripture, That popular stage-playes are sinfull, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men. And that the profession of play-poets, of stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians".
“The origins of theatre go back far into the past, to the religious rites of the earliest communities...Songs and dances in honour of a god, performed by priests and worshippers dressed in animal skins, and of a portrayal of his birth, death and resurrection” (Hartnoll, 1968)
Hartnoll traces the development of Greek tragedy (where we are told we can find the origins of the Western theatrical tradition) from the dithyramb, a form of hymn, usually based upon a mythological story, which was sung around the altar of Dionysus during religious feasts. Indeed the emergence of theatre from ritual is often widely regarded as fact. The textbooks tell us so, Wikipedia tells us so.
Alas, there were no anthropologists, biologists, sociologists, theologians, psychologists or theatre scholars present at the time to confirm for our benefit that this supposedly organic process ever took place. We have no solid proof of the emergence of theatre from ritual; our deductions rely on artefacts which hold an infinite number of possible histories within them. And these objects can often mislead us with their tales...
As David George writes, “Ritual has been a popular explanation for the otherwise puzzling fact that theatre clearly originated at different times and in different places that had no connection to each other”. George cites the example of a cave painting featuring a man wearing reindeer antlers. Now there are a thousand reasons why this man may be wearing reindeer antlers other than the possibility that he might be, for example, a reindeer shaman. Now even if he is in fact a reindeer shaman of some sort, he must have at some point learned the efficacy of assuming another persona, the value of “dressing up”. Because as George reminds us, “Acting...is older than shamanism – which depends on it”. If we assert that theatre and drama evolved from ritual then it would be foolish not to recognise that “the religious ontology of that ritual must have had some latently ‘dramatic’ element already”. Theatrics are an essential element of all rituals.
Rather than searching in terms of origin-based theories we would do better to use a little Buddhist logic; to instead focus on the mutual conditionality of ritual and theatre. Neither can be definitely said to predate the other, rather they seem to spring from the same fount. George again:
“[Ritual is] not so much a set of practices as also a cognitive model, one that conceives of a split universe, at once transcendent and immanent...the Ritual originates out of the need to create liminal realms...the cognitive structures of ritual and theatre are very close”
Indeed, once we stop playing the chicken-and-egg game we realise that ritual and theatre did not emerge one from the other, rather that they have a common origin. This origin lies not in the “constructed chronologies of history” but in the “archaeology of cognition...in the most basic act, the one we all begin with as soon as we are born”. It is well understood that infants learn social codes through imitation and that emotions are learned behaviour, adopted through observation and reproduction. The imitation of emotions, in this sense, leads to the emotions themselves (Bermudez, 1995). From birth we are all performers, whether caught up in the social dramas of our own lives, the rituals of our communities, or the theatres of our minds.
Of course this notion of “primordial performance” is nothing new. In many ways it forms the fundamental basis of a great deal of Asian theatre. In Hinduism, for example, ritual and theatre alternate in inspiring each other; Shiva (as Shiva Nataraj) represents the primordial power of performing. Whilst in Buddhism, performance is sometimes considered a medium to enlightenment. Even meditation is a form performance, where “multiple realities, coded in cosmology and enacted in mythopoeic drama...”come alive” in direct experience (Laughlin).
The theatre practitioner and researcher Jerzy Grotowski used performance as a framework in his quest for “a definite and particular form of spiritual knowledge” (Schechner, 1997). He was primarily interested in how particular elements of performance such as sound and movement, as used in traditional rituals, can impact the physical , psychological and energetic states of the performers in a precise and measurable way. It seems that he too recognised the “primordial” foundations of both ritual and theatre; the direct access they provide to our higher consciousness. Grotowski’s work is in some ways akin to Laban’s system of Movement Psychology which is taught in schools of drama and dance today.
The anthropologist Victor Turner refers to the way in which drama (and therefore theatre) because of the way it serves as a form of social metacommentary, is widely regarded as springing from conflict. The same can be said, Turner claims, of ritual:
“Not only rituals of affliction by even life-crisis rituals (birth, puberty, marriage, funerary, and so forth) and season rituals (first-fruits, harvest, solar solstice, and the like) have reference to conflict”.
But if theatre and ritual are practically one and the same, why give them different names? Schechner argues that, “Theatre comes into existence when a separation occurs between audience and performers.”
It is exactly this separation which FoolishPeople attempt to break through by creating immersive theatre and now immersive film. By dissolving the false barriers between actor and audience, ritual and theatre can once again be united, harnessing their unique powers for both social and spiritual purposes. Oh yes, and some "entertainment" value too....but more on that next time.
(Images: Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen; Ceremoni Voudou, by Gerard Valcin; traditional depiction of Shiva)
In a previous post, I discussed the transcendental nature of cinema, noting the parallels which can be drawn between the language of film and the language of religion; particularly with reference to notions of consciousness-raising via means of myth, ritual and symbols.
I would now like to zoom in (sorry...) on that concept, focussing on the parallels between the act of cinema-going and ritual in particular. In fact I propose that cinema-going is itself a form of ritual and cinephilia the religion to which its devotees adhere.
Those familiar with the work of FoolishPeople will understand ritual as a vital tool in the process of storytelling, myth-making and - ultimately- the recreation and renewal of the world. Ritual enactments of mythologies allow for active participation in and concentrated experience of a particular current or lens for viewing the world. These lenses are interchangeable.
Stories are given life by those who engage with and participate in the ritual, enabling the mythology's current to be projected into the world, rebuilding it (the world) from its very foundations.
By means of absolute focus inside a heightened or alternate, mythical reality, ritual participants are able to take the leap from nomos to cosmos, so that the material aspects of the ritual act as some sort of conduit between the individual and the universe, the human and divine. As religious anthropologist Bobby Alexander notes:-
"[rituals] open up ordinary life to ultimate reality or some transcendent being or force in order to tap into its transformative power"
Traditionally, such rituals might be performed using symbolic objects, colours, movement, chants, and so on, with the ritual itself performed within a sacred space, every detail concerned with and deliberately angled towards raising a numinous experience within the spectator.
It is this concentration of experience, the possibility of awe, of the numinous, which is reflected in the movie theatre and picture house, particularly by means by framing. When we enter the cinema we enter something of a sacred space - a cinephile's temple- eager to undergo some form of transformative experience (to quote, as Walter Benjamin does, Georges Duhamel "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images").
When the lights dim we allow the screen to act as a conduit between this world and an alternate reality, and we (hopefully) lose ourselves for a time in the process, re-entering the world with a new experience or filter through which to explore reality.
As noted previously, cinema imbues objects with life, bombards us with symbols and more often than not engages us in some form of mythological narrative (the Hero myth of Star Wars or the Buddhist/Gnostic mythology of the Matrix are prime examples). Perfectly tempered music is used to effect our manipulation and transportation (consider the minimal use of music in Japanese horror movies an example of how eerie mere silence can be to the Hollywood-trained ear), whilst the logos of the big studios provide their own "Once Upon a Time..." scene-setting mechanism. Indeed the logos of studios such as Dreamworks and Universal clearly demonstrate Hollywood's implicit understanding of cinema as ritual - note the heavenly, dream-like, space age connotations of the graphics; both feature clear depictions of the bridging of worlds, of transcendence, as if planting these signals at a movie's opening might prepare the viewer's mind for the optimum experience of the ritual. As anthropologist Mary Douglas points out:
"Framing and boxing limit experience, shut in desired themes or shut out intruding ones".
She is discussing ritual here but I'm certain the same can be said of cinema. Take also this passage from Paden's 'Religious Worlds' and swap each use of the word 'ritual' for 'cinema':
"In ritual, what is out of focus is brought into focus. What is implicit is made explicit. All ritual behaviour gains its basic effectiveness by virtue of such undivided, intensified concentration and by bracketing off distraction and interference".
So, if cinema-going presents itself as a form of ritual, which mythology is it enacting, transforming and projecting? Which world view does it expound?
The wonderful Susan Sontag argues that in cinema's glory days the religion was cinephilia itself:
"The love that cinema inspired...was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral - all at the same time. Cinema has apostles (it was like a religion). Cinema was a crusade. 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".
Sontag is discussing the 1960s and 70s, the cinematic heydey, and mourns cinephilia's subsequent decline, film's hyperindustrialisation, as something that was inevitable. Indeed unlike other forms of art film has always been only a reproduction, a recording. It has declined and fallen as a technology which has aged because it is not just an art form but firstly a technology. It has always blurred the line between art and science, just as it now blurs the line between art and communications media (or propaganda). The current modes of film production and distribution are epitomised by mass production, mass audiences, and mass spectatorship. The mythology now reinforced is a white, heterosexual, male supremacist, consumerist mythology. The Hollywood Mythology. As Benjamin warns:
"The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face".
Benjamin's essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" focuses on film as a medium which epitomises the termination of uniqueness and authenticity (the "aura" of a work of art). In contrast to my view of cinema as ritual, Benjamin argues that cinema is the first form of art purely devoid of any value gleaned from the "fabric of tradition".:
"For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitic dependence on ritual"
Film is not experienced by a few individuals alone in a gallery, bowled over in awe by the mystique wrapped around the original piece of art before them. Rather, film is a mass media. The audience watch a reproduction of a recording. Unlike in the theatre, they do not breathe the same air as the actors, they do not smell the greasepaint. The audience, somewhat disengaged, become well-versed critics. The artist is no longer revered; artists are human and fallible.
In short, cinema is a commodity, a tool of mass communication and it's function is not as ritual but to serve a (political) purpose in our time. I cite The King's Speech, coincidentally released ahead of royal nuptials, as a lighthearted example. Throwaway (yet subliminally charged) entertainment for the masses. Art for art's sake, for the cults of magic, beauty or religion, Benjamin declares dead. However, in reference to Leni Riefenstahl's propoganda films, Benjamin displays the way in which he does believe in cinema's (technologically driven) power to manipulate, infiltrate and transform. He notes cinema's revolutionary use value as a tool for exploring and understanding our world and its history. He also believes that cinema's egalitarian nature allows the masses to not only gain the potential to know but therefore to act. Just as ritual, as FoolishPeople understand it, can be a powerful tool for transformation, so too can cinema. Ritual may, for Benjamin, conjure images of dust-encrusted mummies and skeletons in the closets of history but I would argue that this is a different understanding of ritual entirely: FoolishPeople's work to date demonstrates the possibilities of utilitising ritual to create new and relevent mythologies for our time. Mystique is not false importance, it is a charge, an electrical current and technology in itself and impossible to relegate to the halls of history.
But Benjamin does have a point. Now that cinephilia has declined, now that Hollywood has dumbed down and cashed in, we're in big trouble. It's up to us, the last standing cinephiles, to face forwards, eyes to the horizon, fingers on "PLAY". We need to generate a new mode of cinematic experience, which embraces the possibilities of transmedia to create weaponized cinematic art that lives and breathes, cinema which has the power to transform, transcend and induce awe (in the true meaning of the word). Cinema for our time.
STILL STRUGGLING TO “MAKE IT” AS AN ACTOR, ARTIST, ASTRONAUT, WRITER OR EL PRESIDENTE? FEELING BLOCKED? DISILLUSIONED? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? THE PROVIDENCE EXPERIMENTS HAVE ARRIVED.
“Providence is always on the side of the last reserve” Napoleon Bonaparte
WHAT ARE THE PROVIDENCE EXPERIMENTS?
The Providence Experiments are a unique series of workshops and events that fuse experimentation, visualisation, ritual, psychological intervention and immersive game. Test subjects will be thrust into bizarre events that offer the willing participant the opportunity to undergo a challenging yet positive artistic transformation.
Over one lunar calendar month, you will receive spontaneous transmissions, puzzles, choices and oddities that may pervade any and every part of your life. Prepare your mind for anything.
This experience will be designed specifically for YOU. Perception of self and reality will constantly be challenged. We will initiate you into in a unique journey where you are the hero or villain in your own story.
The aim of the Providence Experiments is to unleash your subconscious creative potential while offering an amazing, unprecedented experience unlike anything you’ve likely participated in before.
The Providence Experiments will consist of one set session per week in Central London over five weeks, starting Friday 5th November. Specialised directions to each venue will be transmitted 5 days before each session.
Warning: The Providence Experiments will not be confined to the five stated sessions. Active engagement and full participation is vital and absolutely necessary.
WHO CREATES THE PROVIDENCE EXPERIMENTS?
YOU and your subconscious will be the true playing ground for the game. However, this experience will be facilitated by FoolishPeople, a group that create immersive occult events using their developed practice Theatre of Manifestation. They will be aided with media and profiling consultation provided by Mythos Media, a team assembled to create modern myths.
HOW DO I SIGN UP?
Prospective applicants must e-mail providence(at)weaponized.net immediately. Do it now: the number of places are extremely limited. If you receive an application form, you are lucky enough to have passed Phase I and are on your way to taking your place within Test Bed One.
DATES
Friday November 5th Sunday November 14th Sunday November 21st Friday November 26th Sunday December 5th
BOOKING PRICE:
Early booking discount: £150 (£30 per week) Available until 17th October Standard booking: £200 (£40 per week) Available from 18th October
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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