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magic and art
Spent a pleasant couple of days engaged in collaboration with old friends in Schenectady, NY, last weekend. Lots of different interesting conversations that I've been turning around in my head ever since. Some flirting, some joking, some gossip, some careful negotiation.
Had a conversation late Saturday night about Vincent Gallo in which I speculated, perhaps slightly drunkenly, that Vincent Gallo is a magician. I don't mean "stage magician" or "magician" as a synonym for "genius"—I mean that Gallo is engaged in what can be considered occult practice, and that his films are artifacts of this process.
It's difficult to explain what I look for when I'm looking for evidence of occult practice; it is something that feels easier to intuit than to explain on a rational level. But I think of an "occult" film as being one where the actual sensible object of the film—what you are literally seeing on the screen—is secondary to the supersensible elements of the film, particularly the subtle use of hidden techniques to evoke desired psychological effects in the audience. All film—all narrative really—has an element of psychological manipulation, but I feel films begin to lean towards the occult when the manipulation depends less on narrative structure and more on devices that are cryptic, non-linear, operating on a more subconscious level.
The use of Cheryl Tiegs in The Brown Bunny is a key example: I look at the way Gallo finds a kind of forgotten icon and then taps into the fantasy power that still circulates around it (her), wields it (her) like a dreamweapon found abandoned in a desert. The fact that what can actually be described as "happening" in the filmic narrative is only the tiniest dimension of what's actually happening, and the fact that what is actually happening is almost impossible to articulate because it's so mixed up with the subconscious, to me is a sign of what I'd consider the occult.
The notoriously elaborate setup of gear that Gallo assembled to shoot the film strikes me as another instance where he's attempting to tap into something—some difficult-to-quantify, essentially magical power that resides within the cinematographical apparatus—and, in keeping with the practices of good ritual, once the energy is discharged, the apparatus (now "empty") is promptly discarded. Insert your own Chloe Sevigny/Vincent Gallo "discharge" joke here.
To read: Precipitations : Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, by Devin Johnston, director of Flood Editions.
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Friday, October 22, 2004
1:31 PM
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