THE BROTHER SIDE OF THE WAKE (aka BROSIDEDOC).
"Everything is stupid, everybody isn't"
THE BROTHER SIDE OF THE WAKE - Gerry Fialka and friends reinvent (and reimagine, expound, understand, interpret, translate, articulate, resuscitate, expose, enhance, evoke, de-make) the Orson Welles film The Other Side of the Wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Wind via the Mennipean satire of James Joyce and much more. Delve deep into the hidden psychic effects of the philosophy that the journey is more important then the destination. What are the motives and consequences of Chris Marker's probing of the inability to escape time? Why even make a film when you can just live life as if it is a film? As it lives in your imagination?
BROSIDEDOC is a cheesy genuine fake student film wanna be probing the hidden psychic effects of films about films, form and content, effects preceding causes and sense ratio shifting. Yikes. Broside is a fake fake fake film about film (a new genre that satirizes itself). An example of a fake film (mockumentary) is Spinal Tap. Examples of fake fake films (essay films) include Sans Soleil, F is for Fake and Tribulation 99. Brosidedoc needles somnambulism and explores how to cope with numbness caused by cinema. We celebrate how both empathy and storytelling shape behavior.
Consider these quotes from Orson Welles and others:
"Who do I have to (expletive) to get out of this picture?"
"The great danger for any artist is to find himself comfortable. It's his duty to find the point of maximum discomfort, to search it out."
“You could almost say a director is a man who presides over accidents!”
"One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a John Ford, or a Jean Renoir, or anybody."
“There are only two things it is ever seemly for an intelligent person to be thinking. One is: ‘What did God mean by creating the world?’ And the other? ‘What do I do next?’”
AND consider these quotes by others...
Peter Viertel wrote that John Houston enjoyed working on the Welles film because it was a perilous undertaking and he enjoyed "an adventure shared by desperate people that finally came to nothing."
"The gods graciously give us a first verse for nothing; but it is our task to finish the second, which must harmonise with the first and not be too unworthy of its supernatural brother.” - Paul Valéry
"Nothing is what I want." - Frank Zappa
"I started out with nothing and still have most of it left." - ?
"Pull the wool over your own eyes." - ?
“What he creates he has to wreck.”- film critic in The Other Side of the Wind
Jean Renoir: "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again."
"The voyage will not teach you anything if you do not accord it the right to destroy you." - Nicolas Bouvier
"An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it." - Paul Valery
Michelangelo Antonioni: "The greatest danger for those working in cinema is the extraordinary possibilities it offers for lying."
Gus Van Sant proclaimed the filmmaking devastated his life.
Orson Bean claims that movies saved his life.
"I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind." - Kenneth Anger.
Consider McLuhan's percept: "May I suggest art in the electronic age is not a form of self-expression, but a kind of research & probing. It is not a private need of expression that motivates the artist, but the need of involvement in the total audience. This is humanism in reverse, art in the electric age is the experience, not of the individual, but of a collectivity." Probe "rearview-mirrorism" - when new media looks backwards for content and meaning. When McLuhan yelped "The future of the future is the present," he was revealing that the artist lives in the present and writes a detailed history of the future. "It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively." - McLuhan
This quote probes what reading Finnegans Wake outloud with a group of people can do -:"Every film is narrative simply by virtue of the fact that one frame must follow another in time. Our minds are such that we are obliged to make a story out of everything we experience, obliged to frame things to make them comprehensible. We constantly tell ourselves stories that allegedly interpret the play of light and shadow in the screen of the mind. Story is absolute basic essential of waking, we dream that we are awake, imagining past and future, telling ourselves elaborate stories about both. We invented cinema deliberately as a devise to allow us to dream while waking, and to give us access to areas of the mind that were previously only available in sleep. " - Andrew Noren in PA Sitney's Eyes Upside Down.
"Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable. So if you think that the question, "Will we ever learn?", implies a goal, a particular point and time we will arrive at, a particular object, we will never know that. Because objects like that do not exist, only relationships among objects exist. It is like asking, "Will there ever be silence?" It's like, "Will you ever die?" Well, you'll never know because to be dead is a specific experience that seems to imply isolation which could not be known. Because nothing exists in isolation, you will never experience death. You will only experience those things that involve relationships. The end point of time, death, cannot be experienced because it's not a relationship among events." -Robert Dobbs.
Can the “media multiplicity” art form create the collective consciousness of today? Tactile Situation Awareness (TSA) refers to airplane pilots reacting so fast, there's no time to read data and respond accordingly. They have to focus on the center of the cyclone and even a microsecond look-away, to check dials, could be deadly. Likewise, we are engulfed in sensorial whirlpools. Can we ever really get deeply involved? For self-preservation, we cannot really specialize and truly see one screen, one film, one oneness? Or can we? For more on this please read https://www.laughtears.com/dont-look-at-it.html
Genuine Fake "Broside" SCRIPT -
1=me - what is the function of cinema?
you -
2=me- what is one service of films?
you-
3=me- what is one disservice of films?
you-
4=me- what humanness is extended by the moving image camera?
you-
5=me- if you were a chair, who would you want to sit on you?
you-
6=me- please tell me something good, you never had and never want
you-
7=me- what is the best thing for a human being?
you-
8=me- what is the most important question you can ask?
you-
9=me- are we watching happen or making it happen?
you-
10= me asking the ALAN WATTS questions:
1- Who started it all?
2- Are we going to make it?
3- Where do we put it?
4- Who's cleaning it up?
5- Is it serious?
11="How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?” - McLuhan
12- can you escape time?
13 - do you know who you are? do you know what you are? elaborate.
14- what is the difference between contradiction and paradox?
15 - please reword the adage Ray Charles got from his grandmother, “Life is like licking honey off the thorn of a rose.” or "Living is like licking honey off a thorn. -Louis Adamic
"There is a kind of illusion in the world we live in that communications is something that happens all the time, that it’s normal. And when it doesn’t happen, this is horrendous. Actually, communication is an exceedingly difficult activity. In the sense of a mere point-to-point correspondence between what is said, done, and thought and felt between people—this is the rarest thing in the world. If there is the slightest tangential area of touch, agreement, and so on among people, that is communication in a big way. The idea of complete identity is unthinkable. Most people have the idea of communication as something matching between what is said and what is understood. In actual fact, communication is making. The person who sees or heeds or hears is engaged in making a response to a situation which is mostly of his own fictional invention. What these critics [F. C. Bartlett and I. A. Richards] reveal is that the mystery of communication is the art of making." Marshall McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool Interview,” 69.
The first key to my understanding of McLuhan is grasping the emphasis he placed on the drama of cognition as an artifact, in contrast to Freud's study of the dream as an artifact. This drama is based on the doubleness of consciousness, the folding back on itself - the complementary process of "making" and "matching" that is necessary to create the resonance of coherent consciousness. An example of the "making" aspect of perception is the reversal of the rays of light that occurs in the retina as part of the process of creating the experience of sight. Another example is the fact that when food is ingested, what comes out at the other end is not the same as what went in. This sensory alteration, or closure, occurs with all sensory input. McLuhan used the transforming power of the movie camera and projector as a model of this drama of cognition. When the camera rolls up the external world on a spool by rapid still shots, it uncannily resembles the process of "making", or sensory closure. The movie projector unwinds this spool as a kind of magic carpet which conveys the enchanted spectator anywhere in the world in an instant - a resemblance of the human's attempt to externalize or utter the result of making sense in a natural effort to connect or "match" with the external environment. The external environment responds and the person is then forced to reply in kind and "make" again. This systole-diastole interplay is McLuhan's "drama of cognition" and it is parroted by the movie camera and projector. (Has it occurred to you yet of what the live pick-up in the television camera is a parrot?) This drama is the archetype for all creative activity produced by humanity, from ritual, myth, and legend to art, science, and technology. McLuhan understood that James Joyce was the first person to make explicit the fact that the cycle of Ritual, Art, Science, and Technology imitates, is an extension of, the stages of apprehension. And this is possible because the extensions have to approximate our faculties in order for us to pay attention to them. - Robert Dobbs
"Film is the strongest art ... the cinema is the greatest medium of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." - Stalin
“Film is the most powerful weapon ... of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.” - Lenin
"The role of the creative artist is to make new laws, not to follow those already made” - Ferruccio Busoni
Kristine McKenna asked Captain Beefheart ”Do you hear differently?” He answered, ”I’m here differently!" Brosiders hear differently to probe the many possibilities of a non-verbal language of macroscopic gesticulation. Film historians discussing the vaudeville era, have claimed that films were used as "chasers" to clear the theatre to make room for the next audience. Broside clears hear for where?
"Go where the eyes go" -Andrei Platonov, Russian writer
When we push our paradigms back, we get "history"; when we push them forward, we get "science." - McLuhan, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout
“Today we must all be aware that protocol takes precedence over procedure.” and "Beauty is in the behind of the beholder." - Irwin Corey
Johnny Carson asked Professor Irwin Corey, “Why do men wear shoes?” and Professor Cory said, “Well, a brilliant, brilliant question, Sir Carson! It’s a brilliant, two-part question. The first part of the question is the word ‘why.’ Why what? Why now? Why then? Why anything? Why the unanswerable quest for knowledge and thirst for knowledge, and we should all ask ‘Why?’ every day, every night, every morning, every day — and with women, we do: ‘Why?’ Do men wear shoes? Yes.” (laughing)
"The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug." - McLuhan
"Art isn't." - Dougo Smith
Who said these and why?...
Understatement is a million times more effective than exaggeration.
I avoid cliches like the plague.
I'm am ambivalent about ambiguity
Hyperbole is the very best thing ever.
+++++++
"No Content" (lyrics by Gerry Fialka, the music is traditional) - end titles song
I don't want no sugar in my candy, makes me mean, makes me mean
I do't want no content in my movie, makes me meme, makes me meme
I don't want no flicker in my movie, make me sicker, makes me sicker
I don't want to have a destination, let's just have fun, let's rust have fun
