Link:
https://vimeo.com/214119786
Time is a blind guide (5:37)
(Please watch on full screen and preferably with headphones)
Making a film is like painting on time. Like music, film flows like a river over time. In the current digital media scenario, where the number of screens are more than the number of people in the urban world, the understanding of spacetime has changed drastically. The technological imagination has reached a level where we occupy multiple spaces at any given time. The technology functions as a production of virtual time. Every image is invested with a virtual side and every sound is connected to its own silence. Time has accelerated and we are used to watching audiovisual of shorter lengths mostly for entertainment. However, the medium of film can also be used for poetic and political expression and exploration.
For this project, I was inspired by Jean Epstein’s films and writings. His concept of ‘photogenie’ as the essence of cinema, the movement things and camera as a photogenic dance aligns with his belief in universe as a rhythmically regulated geometric system. Epstein’s writings keep returning to the disruption of any linear cause and effect patterns in cinema and how there is a suspension between a received and an executed movement instigated by images — superimposition, decomposition of movement, and reflected images. This transgression and effacement of categories, solid or liquid, sonorous or silent, is cinema’s revolutionary invention and it rests on a superimposition of movements and temporalities.
In his words, “The superimposition of different temporalities invests every present moment with its respective hindsight. The property of cinema is to modulate one time in another time. We are set in front of a dispositif producing a complex, multifaceted time, one that confronts our accustomed perception of time as a continuous succession of present points. The elasticity of time, the variable viscosity of matter, is a result of multiple temporal registers at work. Where there is a fluidity of the perception of space, there is also a porosity of time in disintegrated layers.”
His comparison of the poetics of the film to Pythagoras/ Plato’s poetry — reality is only the harmony of ideas and numbers gives me a sense of designing a visual rhythm that is pleasing to the eye as well as the ears and also mathematically set.
Lastly, his formulation of self belongs to queer dialectic in essential fluidity which inspired my project:
“Individuality is a mobile complex that each of us, more or less consciously, must choose and construct for himself, then rearrange ceaselessly, through a diversity of aspects which, themselves, are far from being simple or permanent.”
Concept:
The running theme of this film is the Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Advaita is a negative term (a-dvaita), which denotes the “negation of a difference,” between subject and object, or between perceiver and perceived. It means that the only thing that exists is the Self, or pure consciousness. That all apparent separation is an illusion. It proffers the idea of non-duality.
Ātman is a central idea in Hindu philosophy and a foundational premise of Advaita Vedanta. It is a Sanskrit word that means “real self” of the individual “essence”, and soul. Atman is the “pure, undifferentiated, supreme power of awareness”, it is more than thought, it is a state of being, that which is conscious and transcends subject-object divisions and momentariness. It is an experience of “oneness” which unifies all beings, in which there is the divine in every being, in which all existence is a single Reality, and in which there is no “divine” distinct from the individual Atman.
From sun’s perspective, it neither rises nor sets, there is no darkness, and “all is light”. From the perspective of a person on earth, sun does rise and set, there is both light and darkness in their multitudes of shades. Both are valid realities and truths, given their perspectives. Yet, they are contradictory. What is true from one point of view is not from another. This does not mean there are two truths and two realities, but it only means that the same one Reality and one Truth is explained or experienced from two different perspective.
In this film, the idea is to recognize that there are two opposite forces/states (duality) playing at all times in the universe which makes our existence complex and rich, yet divided and conflicting. Through the audiovisual, I’ve tried to explore the transcendence of boundaries between the two forces and reach a higher plane which accepts both and cherishes one for the existence of the other. Binaries like light-dark, subject-object, love-hate, day-night, male-female, creation-destruction, fire-water/wind, body-mind, wakefulness-dream, strength-weakness, power-powerlessness, movement (incessant flux) — stillness (rapt attention), confusion-resolution, process-product, search-discovery, new-eternal, stasis-change, luck-coincidence, come together and create a rhythm that embraces the fragilities of life and death.
Process
Cinema is the ultimate negotiator of the state of becoming characterizing existence. Through this film, I explore the idea of self and the other, of capturing the search for oneself while experiencing time for the first time in the city of London. “How does one know where the self ends and the other begins, if the universe is all connected to each other? Is there an objective reality out there for everyone to experience, or does each person constructs his or her own reality according to his own subjectivity. Who has the power to have a subjective experience?”
This film is a projection of a grand reduction, its plot is the tracing of spatio-temporal plane, its action the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness. It’s made of cut ups, collage, free associations, continuities and discontinuities. Shots of different lengths and still images all shot in one day with a digital camera are set to music from Thomas Stronen’s album ‘Time is a blind guide’ and edited according to the rhythm of the music. The film questions the division between filmmaker, actor and audience, observer and observed. The rhythm in the film is such that the effect is pre-existent in the cause. There was no script or storyboard and I approached the film with just the music in my head and made the visuals as they came to me.
Since, all of it is made digitally, I’d like the film to be seen on a laptop screen on full volume. This work expresses the need to communicate poetically through the audiovisual medium. I also uploaded it online, so that the link can be shared with friends and strangers online or as an archive in my own repository of work.
Description
This film is full of signs and symbols serving as metaphors. All the visuals (combination of play of light, texture, shape, movement, tone) are played according to the rhythm of the music playing in the background. The film questions Cartesian duality of body and mind, and moves towards dissolution of boundaries between inner and outer, intermingling of self and the world, dreams are reality, longing for the Other. I’d like the viewer to watch the film and make his or her own meaning from it. But here is one way of seeing it —
The film starts with the camera observing the phenomenal world, of the everyday happenings of the New Cross neighborhood in London. The mobile aspects of the world are recorded as if happening outside of oneself, the camera is at a distance recording the hard industrial modernity that city dwellers live in. One frame shows a collage with the pictures of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte — the two big surrealists with the fade in of 2017 indicating the year this film is shot in. The shots are interspersed with traffic moving outside the window and planes flying signalling the proximity of a more technologically advanced world. The scene then shifts to a dialogue between the filmmaker and another person, both behind the camera (diegetic but off-screen), seemingly contemplating the complexities of finding oneself. The scene is followed by a series of iconic still images of the city (non-diegetic) indicating the desire to become a photographer. This is cut to abstract visuals of the play of light in water (fluid) which is another medium to. This depicts the fluidity of the self and the desire to reach non-duality (unity with the cosmos). This is followed by a scene of a body falling on the ground and a voiceover of a female voice posing questions to the viewer. This cuts to a door opening and a sea wave washing the surface cut to the close up of eyes being rubbed and the throat taking a breath. This might be an indication that the previous footage might just have been a dream. The film ends with paper burning and fire dancing just like light in water in the previous shot, ashes flying in circles and the beginning shot of the screen divided into black and white, closing the loop of filmic space-time. The fire denotes the ephemerality of all matter and existence.
The film explores the details of gesture, brute objective reality, dreams, mechanisms of memory and the interior world through camera tricks and editing like variations of speed, magnification of objects and bodies, manifold angles, superimpositions. The quality of the video is imperfect celebrating its amateur nature.
