Scenes of Depth

Laying low these days, not a lot of energy, a quiet time of cessation, not writing or painting much, so some notes on two great scenes in films, Wings of Desire, and El Secreto de Sus Ojos, and the use of the avatar in Avatar...

These notes are responses triggered by an article sent through via a group email by John Walter, called, Bringing New Understanding to the Director's Cut, by Natalie Angier, one of my favourite science writers in the New York Times, about brain waves and movies, our attention spans and shot lengths...


Speaking about scene lengths, comprehension versus immersion, one of my favourite scenes in all movies is an uncut 15 minutes or so in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire. A scene near the end of the film where Marion and Damiel meet in the bar. He, a Rilkean angel now fallen into mortality for the love of a beautiful woman, and where she utters some of the most profound words in all love poetry, Handke's poetry in collaboration with Wim Wenders, of course, how could anyone but poets have written this script (I used this quote in a suite of poems too): Loneliness means I am at last whole.

Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.'  Wings of Desire.


On Avatar, I found this thought-provoking article which has left me thinking about the alter-ego, the created double, the imagined self, a folded back Platonic emanation of the pure forms, an enhanced version of the self presented on-line, the spy, the scientifically DNA-cloned reproduced enhanced self, the avatar:

From "Avatar and the Flight from Reality" in http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/avatar-and-the-flight-from-reality by James Bowman:

"It’s no accident either that Avatar is named neither for its gentle Na’vi people nor for the nasty corporate and mercenary colonialists nor even for the glorious, shimmering blue bioluminescent world they both inhabit. The name “avatar” comes proximately from the already familiar technology by which people nowadays contrive to become “drivers” (as they are called in the movie) of some second life, some alter ego in a wired-up world that is more in their control and therefore, paradoxically, more exciting to inhabit than the real one. In the case of the film’s human hero, played by Sam Worthington, the status of this sort of “driving” as wish-fulfillment is underlined by making him a paraplegic. Only in video-game mode, therefore, does he become fully alive and mobile, even while retaining his humanity. For him the decision to abandon his earthly body along with his earthly loyalties, to become his avatar and throw in his lot with the Na’vi, is presumably not even a difficult one."

Bowman points out that "the word “avatar” comes from the Hindu idea of a god come to earth."

Something to mull over. I thought Avatar an amazing film, I really did. It was the special effects, yes, but also something in the vision calling. That interconnectedness of all life, the energy of unity. The plot, eh. What's to say? Pretty safe and bland, like a Disney movie. Cameron took no risks there.


And, finally, on an amazing 5 minute nearly uncut scene as the camera weaves following the protagonists in in El Secreto de Sus Ojos...

Now El Secreto de Sus Ojos! -real filming! That scene through the stadium is nothing short of a tour de force. I read somewhere, though of course couldn't find the reference when I went looking, that that scene took 2 years of pre-production, 3 days to film, and 9 months to edit... and it wouldn't surprise me, not at all. Go see the movie at an art house, a revue theatre, wherever it's still playing after winning the Oscar for best foreign film.

I found this website which gives some idea of the camera virtuosity in this scene. Do go and take a look, read about the way the scene was composed, the cameras used, the angles, the challenges and the success:

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5559&page=1


I like that the soccer stadium scene is portrayed (mostly) through a handheld camera; I like that it's not animated somewhere else in the studio and enscripted onto the movie. I like that real people spent many months planning the scene and filming it and editing it so that there are 7 barely noticeable cuts in a swirling 5 minutes... overnight with the Oscar spotlight this scene became world famous. It is being studied around the world.

While I would call this scene 'immersive' rather than a 'comprehending' one, we are running with the protagonists, searching through those crowds, racing up and down stairs, checking cubicles, getting punched in the face, running... I would say that the aim of the film itself, its overall thematic thrust, is to allow us to more fully understand love, the necessity of love, how it drives us, and, watching it, we find we have left Freud's pleasure principle long behind as we immerse ourselves in the depth of this film's messages... on the power of love to motivate us to do what we do in our lives.

                                                        

Angels

As a little girl in Lusaka, Zambia, having come out of years of living in the jungle with my geologist father, frightened of so many people, uncomfortable in shoes, my mother enrolled me in ballet. Within a few months 'they' decided that I should train full-time at the National Ballet, do my schooling there, everything. I was 7 years old. I loved to dance! My soul was free!

My mother, however, refused. Not just refused to let me study ballet, which was probably a good decision for my hip bones now, but took me out of the class and hid my ballet clothes - the little black slippers especially I loved (too young for toe slippers).

I remember crying and crying and looking up one night and seeing a beautiful large angel in the window, and I felt comforted and peaceful and loved. And the angel showed me where my mother had hidden my beloved danskin and slippers, and I took them and slept with them under my pillow that night.

Surely a vision of my guardian angel!

When I came back to angels many years later - Rudolf Steiner says your angels abandon you around your 33rd year and then you struggle through on your own. If we can, he says, we need to open ourselves to the wisdom and guidance of our angels. To 'think as our angels think,' and thus we can find them again...

Angels, I believe, are unconditionally loving forces, and yet also protective. Angels guard us, keeping our vulnerable inner spirit of love alive.

Angels are the opposite of despair. Angels are trust and navigation through the intricacies of each day in the multiples of connections we have with each other.

As I learned to commune with my angels, following Steiner's advice, 'my' angels became a metaphor for my 'intuition.'

Like Blake, I've spent many a long hour communing with angels. Mostly what I understand through my 'angels' or 'intuition' is how the intent to do something operates. There is intent not necessarily before action but firing its energy. How intent becomes a way to explain the motivation for our actions, what propels our actions towards each other. And love, oh, yes, how angels most desire that we love each other. If we think as our angels think then we can think and feel love, compassion, blessing, joy.

I'm not a deist, though. I don't try to fit my notions of angels into any religious system of any kind. I used to play with faeries as a child too - and sometimes can still 'see' the playful little jolly trickster beings and nature sprites...

It's all fabulous! Who is ever alone when you are surrounded by angels and faeries........!
__

Milton's Satan was by far the most inspired character of those beautiful epic poems. Satan was where all the energy was. God was imperial, authoritarian, boring. Though Dante's God was alright, come to think of it. By Milton I think the whole endlessly blessedness of the blessed realm had worn thin and it was time to find the rebel.

I'll never forget Satan's fall to earth - so poignant, almost heartbreaking, yet the most exciting moment in English literature and religious studies up to that point.

Milton was never the sensualist Shakespeare was. Milton, the blind genius composing his epic poems in his mind all night and then reciting to whoever would take dictation the next day. They thought him a hack writer, and felt sorry he'd lost his sight, and oh, how he surprised everyone with his vision and his superlative composition. Milton's writing is, for me, nearly perfect.

Once I fell in love with another graduate student, many summers ago, who was in Toronto for the summer from England where he'd gone to do a dissertation on Milton, and he had a photographic memory, and lay beside me in the night reciting Milton by heart for hours... what bliss, I can't tell you.

Milton understood angels in ways that the Byzantine and Renaissance artists didn't. And he understood the Fall as the story of each person's quest to unite the fissures and splits within, as a journey towards wholeness where opposites are united.

Milton was a visionary.

Wim Wender surely is a visionary filmaker too - at least in Wings of Desire, which is probably my favourite film.

In Wings of Desire, the angels who fall, who become mortal for love.

What epic stories!

Are angels a type of simulation? We imagine them - even if vividly as in my case! - but does that make them figments of an ethereal light, an inner light?

Traditionally angels are thought of as guardians, as guides, as helpers. As emissaries of the godhead. Messengers. What is between the human and the divine. Angels are busy workers who concentrate on individual concerns, rather than the rather distant deity whom they serve. At least in the myths that they've come to us through.

I loved the Buffy shows, and Angel, now that was a most interesting way to present the Satan Milton bequeathed to us - angels with vampiric sides.

A literary study of angels, and surely it's been done and done, would not, I don't think, be as interesting as one on the Hell's Angels.

Or the roar of motorcycles.

Milton enriched our understanding of the power of angels considerably didn't he.

__________
Guardian angel, by Pietro da Cortona, 1656.

Not knowing what to post, I posted this piece, which I wrote a year and a half ago in some correspondence.

I have an idea how to keep this blog going since I feel I am running out of steam... inbetween paintings and prosepoetry pieces, I could grab a book from my shelves, any book, and find a quote in it that I'd underlined in pencil. And write something about that book, or when I read it... so many approaches rather than the dry academic essay to what are, after all, collections of knowledge, our beloved books...