the shining (1980)

The idea of the Cinema as a truthful-looking dramatic unfolding of events makes no sense. I have noticed a fundamental shift in my orientation with the motion photographed image [the engraved intersection of time and space] — yet all I've really gained is a crystallized perception of the laissez-faire attitude placing objects, people, and places in front of the camera for the majority of films in existence. This seems natural, as the oversight may be a consequence of the comparative ease in creating the compositions of the motion picture (and synchronized sound) than of, say, an oil painting, marble sculpture, or Gothic church. But of the arts, the Cinema seems to share the most of its significant traits with all of the latter, than of its apparent prototype, the Theater.


















Its permanence makes the Cinema directly serving an aesthetic separate of story depiction; it seems to respond, rather, as something closer to the re-experienced memory, branded into the mind by quick, phenomenal bursts of high-sensation, feelings of beauty and sublimity inspired by the witnessing and experiencing of rare, novel moments, downloaded into the mind by way of mythological projection: like a dream with administrative control on the subconscious. The dramatic stage, due to its temporality and presence, is more inclined to the art of story telling and the performance of the individual conflict, — the combustion / magnetism / sympathy of real people performing in a shared space with the spectator(s), and placed onto a pedestaled stage, is of a different species than even a motion-photographed wide-shot. The Cinema is a streaming formal object, a toy of light and sound, a riddle box, a strange and confounding intersection of time and space captured. If the Author does not treat it as such, the work is reducible to documented environmental theater, or a futuristic pop-up book. The original film-actor is the entire material world, and its primacy of existence.

The desired completion or Oneness should be a state of the soul, a condition of being, not of knowing. Symbolic expression first preserves society by adding emotion to instinct, and secondly it affords a foothold for reason by its delineation of the particular instinct which it expresses; symbols acquire their power to organize the miscellaneous crowd into a smoothly running community; in an army there is one set of symbols to produce automatic obedience in a limited set of circumstances, and there is another set of symbols to produce a general sense of the importance of the duties performed. This second set prevents random reflection from sapping automatic response to the former set. The self organization of society depends on commonly diffused symbols evoking commonly diffused ideas, and at the same time indicating commonly understood actions; pure instinct is never wrong, symbolically conditioned actions may be, however -- the obvious ideographs of the phenomena of nature made the deepest religious impression on archaic man, turning visible the invisible.