(1)
"The world within reach": these words, uttered by Gaston Méliès in reference to the movie camera, are carved onto a little plastic plaque attached to Peter Hutton's camera. They are synonymous with another phrase: "to inhabit the world poetically." The poetic camera is not a "window onto the world"; it doesn't open onto the foreign, the unfamiliar, onto a promise of exotic variety amidst quotidian tediousness. The world within reach is just that: what of the world is within one's reach. In French, Gaston Méliès might have said, perhaps, "le monde à la portée de la main." Yet it is not the hand that reaches. The hand grabs. The hand connects the world and the mouth.
Reaching the world, yet abandoning touch to the realm of desire, rending desire for that world within reach, the camera, always fixed, embraces a world fragment, as arbitrary as life, and records its ephemeral form.
Elect a passing thought as your abode. A small patch of sunlight traveling across the mountain slope, now swelling into an outcry of color. The bleached façade of a house risks being splintered in the blaze. A white pang. The wind patches the cloud.
(2)
The image is silent. It is not a pure or an essential image. Merely an image within reach. A world apart from words. Where words remember, the image forgets. Imagines forgetting. You who are looking at it, forget already. Forget yourself in the image.
Great distance and great proximity free objects of their contours. Forgotten, un-named, they forge the image.
Electric flickers, shards of moonlight, shivering screen of muddy water. Nothing else.
The gesture of a grey hull suspended in grey haze: a steel deck, the tip of a mast, adrift in white noise. Or yet: the dark wall of the woods, separating twilight and the river, grazed by a silver gleam: the advance of a prow without a ship.
The image is silent and nearly still. Movement reduced to slight oscillation, to a momentary intervention, or to a faint transition in mood, takes film to the limit of photography.
(3)
Peter Hutton said, half-jokingly: "Feel free to fall asleep during the screening. My films are kind of made for sleeping. I might fall asleep myself."
Contemplation of the film image puts one in a state of reverie, its intensity akin to the alertness experienced in a dream; on the verge of falling asleep, yet as if from within the dream, where slipping into unconsciousness would be to awake, unsure of the direction of the passage.
What does the image dream about?
The camera transforms the world fragment into a dream image. In that sense, it is not a document, mindful of the historical context it hopes to expose or subvert. The image possesses its own temporality that is the loss of any sense of time. Timelessness of the ephemeral.
(4)
Silent, the image ceases to be a representation of the world. It is what it imagines. Silent, the viewer becomes absorbed in the image the way one gets lost in one’s thoughts. In the darkness of the movie theater, you are turned inside out like a glove. The image of your thoughts, which are not yours, only clouds, passing, unwritten. Blank thoughts, grey thoughts, forgotten even before they are formulated. Entirely image. The cinema within. The within outside.
Cease naming things. The sky below the rugged crest, the sea above the fog, the island beneath its shadow. Passage from grey-blue to black-grey to green-white and black. Grain, rock, vapor, mist, sand. Brushed, smudged, torn. Granite tattered by the sky’s edge. Land ruffled by the wind. Clouds folded and solidified in twilight.
"The world within reach": these words, uttered by Gaston Méliès in reference to the movie camera, are carved onto a little plastic plaque attached to Peter Hutton's camera. They are synonymous with another phrase: "to inhabit the world poetically." The poetic camera is not a "window onto the world"; it doesn't open onto the foreign, the unfamiliar, onto a promise of exotic variety amidst quotidian tediousness. The world within reach is just that: what of the world is within one's reach. In French, Gaston Méliès might have said, perhaps, "le monde à la portée de la main." Yet it is not the hand that reaches. The hand grabs. The hand connects the world and the mouth.
Reaching the world, yet abandoning touch to the realm of desire, rending desire for that world within reach, the camera, always fixed, embraces a world fragment, as arbitrary as life, and records its ephemeral form.
Elect a passing thought as your abode. A small patch of sunlight traveling across the mountain slope, now swelling into an outcry of color. The bleached façade of a house risks being splintered in the blaze. A white pang. The wind patches the cloud.
(2)
The image is silent. It is not a pure or an essential image. Merely an image within reach. A world apart from words. Where words remember, the image forgets. Imagines forgetting. You who are looking at it, forget already. Forget yourself in the image.
Great distance and great proximity free objects of their contours. Forgotten, un-named, they forge the image.
Electric flickers, shards of moonlight, shivering screen of muddy water. Nothing else.
The gesture of a grey hull suspended in grey haze: a steel deck, the tip of a mast, adrift in white noise. Or yet: the dark wall of the woods, separating twilight and the river, grazed by a silver gleam: the advance of a prow without a ship.
The image is silent and nearly still. Movement reduced to slight oscillation, to a momentary intervention, or to a faint transition in mood, takes film to the limit of photography.
(3)
Peter Hutton said, half-jokingly: "Feel free to fall asleep during the screening. My films are kind of made for sleeping. I might fall asleep myself."
Contemplation of the film image puts one in a state of reverie, its intensity akin to the alertness experienced in a dream; on the verge of falling asleep, yet as if from within the dream, where slipping into unconsciousness would be to awake, unsure of the direction of the passage.
What does the image dream about?
The camera transforms the world fragment into a dream image. In that sense, it is not a document, mindful of the historical context it hopes to expose or subvert. The image possesses its own temporality that is the loss of any sense of time. Timelessness of the ephemeral.
(4)
Silent, the image ceases to be a representation of the world. It is what it imagines. Silent, the viewer becomes absorbed in the image the way one gets lost in one’s thoughts. In the darkness of the movie theater, you are turned inside out like a glove. The image of your thoughts, which are not yours, only clouds, passing, unwritten. Blank thoughts, grey thoughts, forgotten even before they are formulated. Entirely image. The cinema within. The within outside.
Cease naming things. The sky below the rugged crest, the sea above the fog, the island beneath its shadow. Passage from grey-blue to black-grey to green-white and black. Grain, rock, vapor, mist, sand. Brushed, smudged, torn. Granite tattered by the sky’s edge. Land ruffled by the wind. Clouds folded and solidified in twilight.
