“Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You
easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that
when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is:
You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label.
Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being,
is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can
perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with
everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came.
Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back
to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it
and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of
wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and
reflects your own essence back to you.”
Humans like to label everything in an effort to better
understand the world around them. We like to simplify and categorize things in order
to feel more comfortable. Words and verbal language dominate our thinking and
this has both its advantages and disadvantages. Expressing ourselves verbally,
labelling our emotions and what we see can be liberating and exciting. However we
can also speak too much.
In the age of information, we are bombarded with words,
everywhere. We are also bombarded with images. An overload of visual and text
combinations makes us take our rudimentary senses for granted, and we forget to
look at the world with an “innocent” eye.
We have forgotten that there are other languages other than
spoken and written word. We forget that it is not necessary to label every
experience and every emotion with words. It is important to pay attention to
nonverbal languages. Multimedia is useful, but sometimes the simplicity of a
silent film, a movement in isolation, is what we need to bring us back into our
unique human experience.
As Brakhage describes (using words), there is so much more
to what we see than what we label it as. What if we were to consider what we
saw as “incomprehensible,” and avoid the desire to categorize it immediately? Silent
contemplation may allow us to understand what we see before us with a new
depth. Maybe if we stop trying to classify everything, we will find the things
we are looking for. What if we were to envision things that have no obvious
label, things never seen before in this representational world? It is the role
of the artist to move beyond tropes and icons, dig deeply into his or her personal
vision, and push his or herself to broadcast it to the public in the most
genuine. By seeking and creating a “new language,” the artist can help others
to understand themselves and the world around themselves more deeply.
Experimental film, a relatively new media that heavily
utilizes the visual language, is the perfect avenue for this pursuit.
No comments:
Post a Comment