Moving Image Probe by Gerry Fialka
(14 minutes, 2020)
Produced by Bruno Kohfield-Galeano
Cinematography by Bruno Kohfield-Galeano
3-17-20 Venice, California
Thanks: Mike Mosher, Art/Communication MultiMedia Professor, Saginaw Valley State University.
Gerry Fialka probes the hidden psyche effects of moving image (film, tv, etc) via modern thinkers.
Hearing many aphorisms, the viewer is challenged to re-invent these maxims, ala McLuhan, who reworded Robert Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is heaven for?" into "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is a metaphor? (meta for)."
Please post your rewording of any aphorisms in this comment section on Youtube. For example, "There ain't no Santa Claus on the evening stage" - Captain Beefheart is reworded into "There ain't no sanity clause on the mourning stage" - Gerry Fialka. Join in the collective nitty-gritty.
Please, we welcome your input on these questions:
What is the function of the (cinema) moving image?
What humanness is extended by the moving image camera?
Is perception reality?
Is TV real?
What question regarding moving image remains unresolved for you?
What is the mystery of art?
What is beyond infodemics?
McLuhan's Tetrad: 1) What does the moving image camera enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into?
We are probing the psychic and social effects of the environments created by the invention. Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones) generates environments that provide services and disservices, and none of them reflect how the invention was originally intended to be used (= its content). For example, the CAR: ENH= private mobility, OBS=horse & buggy, RET=knight in shining armor, REV=bomb, home, traffic jam.
"Everything in nature is realized through interaction with its opposite" - Giordano Bruno, who repeated Aristotle's statement: “To think is to speculate with images.”
"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.
"Whether for good or bad, Godzilla decided the course of my life" - Ishiro Honda, Japanese film director
"I think movies are against nature. It's the most perverted art form. It's trying to replicate life. Which is fucked up - so powerful." -Josh Safdie. Is that anthropomorphizing an invention? Him and his brother Benny also talk about the "the true colors of society" and "deep untrust how life is presented" and how you can usurp them with art in weird way.
"Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just Insomnia, and agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep." - Henry Miller.
"Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"We are confronted our whole lives by threshold and transitional states - the passage from night to day, waking to sleeping, joy to sorrow, presence to absence, life to death." - Bill Viola.
Bunuel said about his film The Exterminating Angel: "Its images, like those of a dream, do not reflect reality but create it."
++++++++
Dream Awake Handout Flyer Gerry Fialka Laughtears.com 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com Probe the hidden psychic effects of human inventions (words, cars, philosophy, art, cellphones, etc) as extensions of our senses. Marshall McLuhan explored how artists reveal these effects so we can learn to cope with their disservices, and flip them into services. Consider his aphorisms like "We shape our tools then they shape us" and how they can be reinvented. For example, he updated it: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools ape us." McLuhan reworded Robert Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is heaven for?" into "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is a metaphor? (meta for)." Contemplate & reword these: "If it works, it's obsolete." ... "You mean my whole fallacy is wrong." ... "Carefully make plans then do the opposite." ... "The Balinese have no word for art they do everything as well as they can." ... "How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?” ... "The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' have tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity." ..."Understanding is not having a point of view."... "Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
Walter Benjamin recommended "mastery, not of nature itself, but of the relationship between nature and humanity."
McLuhan called his probing process "applied Joyce" examining Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which must be read outloud with a group of people. Joyce sought epiphanies in everydayness, satirized information overload, and invented language about language with new words like "laughtears" and "feelful thinkamalinks."
"Artists live in the present and write a detailed history of the future." - Wyndham Lewis
"This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life." - Marcel Duchamp..."Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." - Confucius ..."Get your job and your life as mixed up as possible" -?
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" - Banksy
"Art is anything you can get away with." - Andy Warhol...
"Most people don't know what they like, they like what they know." - Igor Stravinsky
"I am a failure, but not a miserable failure" - Frank Zappa.... "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett...."Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill.
"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it." - Jean Cocteau
"The goal of the artist is to attempt to sell out, but fail." - Paul Schrader
People change and forget to tell each other - Lillian Hellman
Moshe Feldenkrais said that it is literally possible to identify a weakness and incorporate it to become a strength. We are normally taught to overcome a weakness. Turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, flip rejection into redirection. …"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes." -Marcel Duchamp
"I remember the images I filmed.... They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed." - Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, who said:“I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago
"The key is to bring the audience up onto the stage and into the scene with you. It is they who must give you even more than you give them in way of imagination and creative power." - Ruth Draper...“The pressure of experimentation is greater than the fear of embarrassment. That is the essence of art.” - Wolfgang Tillmans....“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” - Pablo Picasso…"The artists that I'm interested in are the ones that make a picture of the times they live in....The eye always craves what it doesn't see." - Marilyn Minter …."Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.” - Thorton Wilder …"My task as a poet entails the work of seeing the world without language and then bringing that seeing into language." - Gary Snyder
"I would like to think that the sounds people do hear in a concert could make them more aware of the sounds they hear in the street, or out in the country, or anywhere they may be...I prefer laughter to tears." - John Cage
"Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." - Martha Graham
"The real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. Instead of calling it work, realize it is play." - Alan Watts... "Bob Fosse's dancers seemed as if they were playing at dancing more than actually dancing." - Sam Wasson...
"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" - W.B. Yeats
“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
Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad: 1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into? We are probing the psychic and social effects of the environments created by the invention. Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones) generates environments that provide services and disservices, and none of them reflect how the invention was originally intended to be used (= its content). For example, the CAR: ENH= private mobility, OBS=horse & buggy, RET=knight in shining armor, REV=bomb, home, traffic jam
Watch The Brother Side of the Wake preview trailer on YouTube. The Fuse Family Four Films conjures neologisms like homeless hagiographical ethnofiction. These new genres of performative cinema evoke ethnofiction reality, ethnographic docufiction and having fun with all media. The "quadtandra" of The Brother Side of the Wake, The Mother Side of the Wake, The Sister Side of the Wake, and The Father Side of the Wake evoke the aedificium (from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco), which has 4 towers at 4 cardinal points. We need your help. JOIN IN. "I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue on the side-lines to distract the trigger-people, or to needle the somnambulists."-McLuhan We need your help. JOIN IN LAUGHTEARS.com - Enjoy human transcendental connections with eye-contact & verbal exchange - Music, Art, Film, Literature, Political, Poetry, Comedy, New Media, Subversive Social MEET UPS free cultural events
++++++++
My Pecha Kucha presentation (entitled Experimental Film is Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny) for the Ann Arbor Film Festival 2020 was postponed due to CV, infodemics and more.In Film Comment magazine 1-14-20, Jordan Cronk wrote, "'Taste' and the elite nature of experimental film is counterintuitive to the true societal development we seek." He includes two quotes from Jodie Mack: "I'm thrilled that curators are looking at younger filmmakers from a wide range of backgrounds." "No one is a genius; everyone is a genius. Authorship is dead. Long live the community!"
Bravo Jodie, well said! We can probe this "exuberance of being" through live community gatherings, and exploring the hidden psychic effects of our inventions.
I want to nurture the community to share in the creative process via connectedness not consumerism. We hoick up an ecstatic new state of tribal immediacy and simultaneity. Let us reimagine Bucky Fuller's "All crew, no passengers."
+++++++++++++
BIO - Gerry Fialka, artist, writer, and paramedia ecologist, lectures world-wide on experimental film, avant-garde art and subversive social media. He has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as “the multi-media Renaissance man.” The LA Weekly proclaimed him “a cultural revolutionary.” "Gerry is deeply dedicated to the exploration of new knowledge" - Leslie Raymond, Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His interviews have also been published in books by Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. Fialka's interviews have been heard on Pacifica KPFK radio, appeared in magazines: Canyon Cinema, OtherZine, CineSource, Artillery, AMASS Magazine, LA Jazz Scene, Jazz News, Bird, Flipside, Venice BeachHead. His PXL THIS Film Festival celebrates 30 years of electronic folk art in 2020.
https://laughtears.com/PXL-THIS-29.html
2020 marks the 40th year of Gerry Fialka in Venice, CaliforniaAs well we celebrate the following:PXL THIS Film Festival, established 1990 - 30th annual Nov 22, 2020Marshall McLuhan – Finnegans Wake Reading Club since 1995 - 25th year Oct 6, 2020Venice Film Fest 2003 - 17th annual Jan 26, 2020 The Lit Show (Suzy Williams & Brad Kay celebration of song and literature) 2005 - 15th annual July 18, 2020The Poetry of Venice Photography 2010 - 10th annual Feb 1, 2020 MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon – interview series) since 1992Documental (film series) since 19957 Dudley Cinema (film series) since 1998RIA (live cinema performances) since 2005M.O.M. (Meditations On Media) since 1990Laughtears Salon (discussion group) since 2015BSP - Black Shoe Polish - avant funk blues jazz music collective - since 1982
The CV effects of by Andrew McLuhan
"The future of the future is the present." - McLuhan.
"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art." - Museum curator.
Narrative is born among the "animal necessities of the spirit" because we are "waiting to die." - Hollis Frampton.
"Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." - Wyndham Lewis.
"Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language." - McLuhan
Revitalize Mad's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and yell your answers outloud:
What is your name?
Where were you born?
What town do you live in?
If you were an experimental film, what subject matter would you be?
What is your favorite experimental film?
Who is your favorite avant-garde filmmaker?
Who is over-rated in experimental film?
Can art-making be egoless?
Is perception reality?
What is more important: conviction or compromise?
Is ambition based more on fear or joy?
"If it works, its obsolete" -McLuhan