Re: [-empyre-] Nothing is Real?

[Sean Cubitt <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>]

Title: Re: [-empyre-] Nothing is Real?

> >Real: the foam of
> physis
> i had the strangest dream
> . a dream where i went out see a movie
> about a
> man
> http://e8z.org

Funny thing is, I've seen this movie - well, not 'this' movie, but . . .

During the cold war it was really hard to see anything from eastern Europe that wasn't samizdat (Zanussi, Wajda). The head of the Lodz filmschool was a man called Wojzech Has. The only one of his twenty plus films available in the UK was an extraordinary thing called The Saragossa manuscipts. In the late 70s, the Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal screened another of his films, variously known as Klepsydra, La Clepsidra, the Sandglass Sanatarium (I believe a clepsidra is some kind of water-clock).

For years I had only a memory of the film to go on: a memory of a dream, because nothing I'd ever seen before or since gave quite the same sense of transformatins that a dreamlogic has. I recalled: the protagonist hides under a bed. He crawls along, gradually he is surrounded by 19th century redcoat soldiers. There are potted plants. As they crawl along, the plants become denser. it is a jungle . . .  later, in a corridor, he tries a door. The room inside is dark, earthy. He begins to climb the wall. The wall becomes dirtier, it is ful of bones, roots, debris. Above him is a light. He clambers up towards it. reverse angle: he hauls hmself out of a grave surrounded by candles

it strikes me that there is also the bubbling of 'language' into being - the semiotic chora Kristeva wrte about in early texts; the prelinguistic babbling of babies - is there also it seems extremely likely) a pre-semiotic bubing of sensations indistinguishably visual, tactile, sensory, internal/external?

If so, the non-identity of the infant, its immersion in the world, is enabled by its internal non-identity as well as the non-identity of the world itself

and perhaps in dream we revisit?  tho as Brakhage says, we can never go back:

s

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-- 

Sean Cubitt * Screen and Media Studies * University of Waikato * Private Bag 3105 * Hamilton * New Zealand * seanc@waikato.ac.nz * T: +64 (0)7 838 4543 * F: +64 (0)7 838 4767

http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film