The Adytum | Official Trailer

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The Imagery in THE ADYTUM and Epilogue

    The images of The Adytum allude to traditional depictions of the virtue of the power of the mind over the body. Recalling the death and the maiden motif made famous by Hans Baldung's woodcuts, together with images of dark, church-like interiors, the prospect of a morality tale insinuates itself. As a skeleton beckons a young woman, the film’s protagonist, Kloeshi, the viewer is set up to anticipate judgment and retribution. Perhaps the young woman suffers from vanity or lust, afflictions or "sins" that result with the power of the body over the mind. Through the economy and tradition of cultural images, the viewer is immediately given over to caution, even suspicion towards the skeleton who surely symbolizes death, the greatest unknown. For with the image of the skeleton we see a human spirit separated from its corporeal vehicle. 

    The skeleton befriends Kloeshi, even teaches her music and language, inviting her to learn love as she develops tools to empower herself against opposing forces. The glorification of the character comes not through themes of body over mind as a reaction to mind over body, but simply through curiosity, improvisation and artistic self-making. She defines herself gracefully through external and internal contemplation and makes a gestalt of her suffering. The friendship with the skeleton reveals the sincerity of her bond to her own inner structure as she makes sense of the external structures. At the same time a sense of foreboding follows the skeleton’s gentle “come hither” gesture, which become more violent as the corrupt monk and the power structures of her actual circumstances confront her. 

    While it is appropriate to associate the image of a skeleton with death, I think it is inappropriate to associate death with immorality or retribution. The recognizable form of the skeleton, specifically in silhouette, reveals the seductive element of mystery in death. In both the case of religious ethics and Socratic ethics, the demonized element embodied by the human skeleton is simply that which remains unknown. Through the lens of Christianity, the locus of the demonized unknown is within our own body. R Joseph has described the role of the limbic system in human spiritual experience with various historic examples documenting human "out of body" experiences. Astral projection in Buddhist religious practice, measures to a great degree, the success of meditation. Much of religious experience, the closeness to God is associated by the individual's feeling that they are "outside" their body, an implication of the temporal lobe, a facet of the limbic system in the human brain. Meanwhile, through the lens of the Socratic tradition, what we learn through reason is made knowledge when we internalize it by expressing it consciously. That which cannot be committed to consciousness through reason is unknowable. Therefore, the locus of the demonized unknown in the Socratic tradition is outside the body. In both instances the body creates a conflict with relation to human understanding. We know either by that which is empirically observed through our bodily senses or by that which can only be experienced as emotion, and insufficiently described by language.

    When the child, Kloeshi meets the skeleton, she is only as hesitant to interact with him as any other stranger. As he gains her trust he leads her downward into a setting of organic patterns and ambiguous primordial matter. A moralist standpoint might point out that he is leading her metaphorically downward to her demise, to hell even, but there is no fire where the skeleton leads Kloeshi. There are only instinctual memories of an era before humanity. The imagery traversed by Kloeshi and her guide changes seamlessly from a recognizable landscape including objects recognizable as trees and sky to what feels more like being inside the body. It is here that the character is most deeply connected to her instincts and unconscious, but simultaneously where she is most divorced from the objective world. Out of balance, she is vulnerable to others’ power in the same way the smallest animals are vulnerable to predators. The silmultaneous interaction between the masked Kloeshi and the intruding monk and the silhouetted Kloeshi and the skeleton are purposefully chaotic and confusing, for ultimately, when a predator overpowers its prey there is at once an individuation of ego and a unification of two beings. In this moment, while the monk hovers in the dominant position, his physical size shrinks while the cowering shape of the child grows as she struggles against it. There is no clear winner or loser in this exchange of power, but there is a climactic effect. There is an epiphany that there is more than one way of viewing the world. 

    Towards the end of the film, the actress’s feet are seen at a white dress drops to the ground and she steps out of it. I intended this image, not as the loss of innocence, which is one way it could be interpreted, but rather as the removal of idealism. 

Again at the film’s closing, I completed the theme as the actress removes the mask staring directly at the camera. Similar to the mask she has worn throughout the piece, her face lacks expression. She might be suffering but she no longer needs the mask to guard her from the difficult lessons she had to learn through experience and chaos. The music is what gives the meaning to the unfolding of events. A slow, meditative musical texture carries us to the final fade to black. She no longer remains idealist but neither does she remain ignorant of the chaos of human experience. Removing the parody of her real face, she becomes fully human.

 

    In creating this film, I employed a great deal of planning that I had to relinquish to the chaos of collaboration. I chose both actors and musicians as collaborators and all of them were people in whom I put a great deal of trust. In this way, I invited them into my adytum and gave some control away to allow for Nietzsche’s Dionysian force. In art, Nietzsche described the Dionysian element of art as the chaos of improvisation; the musical force that causes us to lose our individual egos in the undulation of group chorus or dancing. The Apollonian force applies structure to art and we then see beauty in logic. As we have become more logical, symbolic and scientific as a nation, we come to see the chaos described by Nietzsche as “the spirit of music” as a primarily negative force that threatens the beauty of logic and structure. What results is an over-evaluation of literal elements, lyrics, and formal symbols. In film, this is manifested as the “linear” format, where a story unfolds in sequence and each plot point hinges on the previous. When we set ourselves up to view film this way, we behave the same way we do when we engage in formal debate. We look for plot holes and other elements that are logically amiss. Our willing suspension of disbelief has become extremely contingent and our society watches movies with the expectation that every visual event follows strict logic. In response, filmmakers provide love stories so ideal we feel lied to; or perhaps more realistic explosions, which cost more money, because that kind of documented destruction requires multiple takes. To me, modern cinema shows the imbalance of Western culture. I look to Eastern European filmmakers to break this trend.

   In the works of Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky, the seamless movement between dream and consciousness comes as easily as the slow shots as the camera glides across the action of his long cuts. His subject matter is lonely and contemplative, often prolonged to the point of antagonizing a less patient audience. However, art and viewer form a relationship. When I regard the slow honest beauty of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia or The Mirror, modern American cinema as a whole feels like a one-night stand or a speed-dating convention. This is not to say that there is no art in modern American cinema. There is art, but a director, like any politician, must dance around the boundaries of what is currently socially acceptable. Film is still a relatively young art form, emerging with technology in a time when women were extremely marginalized. Could the popularity, even the perceived authority of the linear format, mirror the minds of the moguls of this industry?

    Biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher presented her work on the brain in love at a TED talk and discussed the differences in brain circuitry between men and women. Of women she says:

"They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers. Men tend to -- and these are averages -- tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead."  (Fisher, 2006)

    With The Adytum, I wanted to express the way I learn as a woman. Fisher’s description of female thought as web-like or “holistic” struck a chord with me. When we see patterns in our lives, particularly those that cause negative emotions, it seems the most efficient and practical to look for the broken link, repair or delete it, then continue living. But this logical approach often leaves us in that same rut, conditioned to seeing the repetition of a pattern as simply a new, similar but different pattern that we should simply troubleshoot in the same way. This is not holistic thinking. For me, discovery and understanding comes with a kaleidoscopic revealing of themes. There is too much to see all at once and there is not one problem on which everything else is hinged. In the world, I find that nothing is extraneous, but everything is part of a larger concern. The goal of science is to help us predict the next line in a sequence, but the goal of prediction is control, whose ultimate goal is comfort. Ironically, there is a great comfort in relinquishing that control and all the associated labors in favor of simply allowing the world in all its complexity to reveal itself to you.   

    I communicated to my collaborators my desire for both documentary and contrived elements in this piece. As a director, I worked more like a mother and an organizer, developing the performances of each of my beloved friends based on what I knew of them individually. Occasionally I filmed them candidly without their specific knowledge that I wasn’t just setting up. Other times I asked for something more acted. In every instance, I simply tried to create a situation that would be comfortable for experimentation and improvisation.  I found that working from large themes and without giving the actors a linear script made me even more open to everyone’s suggestions. Although the story was mine, I truly felt it was anyone’s story, and anything I envisioned was easily influenced by the genuineness of what I could get from my collaborators naturally.  Occasionally the faces of actors are revealed when the two-dimensional masks facing left or right, need to face the opposite direction. These accidents are welcomed as small tokens of vulnerability to the viewer, with whom we tried to negotiate communion. The process, with all its genuine awkwardness and discovery is evident in the product. 

 

    It is because of the era of science that the adytum of technology has opened its walls to me. I feel a profound respect for the inventors and manufacturers of tools I have used in creating this film as well as my fellow artists. Although we are all humans, subject to delusions of wisdom, we are united in our desire to make sense of our world. By science or by myth, we continue walking forward to mysterious silhouettes of the past as they dance on the walls; the seductive shapes of the future.

Graduation

How quickly we lose
Our life's purpose and love, when
Paid scholarships end.

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Hark! A Trailer!

The Adytum | Official Trailer from Lexi Bass on Vimeo.

Vegetarian Morning

A diet of greens
Makes dolphin journeys visits
Instead of sea wars

Winter Forecast for Introverts

Irony's a coat,
Because subjectivity
Is out of fashion.

Fractals

Oh trendy art methodology, so full of catchphrases like "ekphrasis" and "agency!" Let's talk about ekphrasis first. Ekphrasis spent a great deal of time in school, studying language and culture in order to translate Japanese humor for Americans. Lo and behold, the only Americans who even began to get the jokes were the ones who actually were into Japanese culture, and had themselves become scholars of the culture. Sometimes Ekphrasis' comedy fell flat on it's face. So Ekphrasis began evaluating each different audience and lost a little of his honesty. He began to translate, no, convert the Japanese jokesters' verbal chicanery into something of the same spirit as the original joke, but also something that was literally unequivalent... Ekphrasis had become an Agent. He began equating things based on the system he chose for the situation that would give his preferred result. After all, it was all in good fun. 

So we choose our systems of interpretation. 

The older I get, the more I realize that understanding eachother is impossible. Being understood is impossible. We are at every moment, interpreting stimulai. We provide ourselves a variety of systems with which to view these stimulai, because at bottom, if we don't like what we see, we have a box of other lenses to change our interpretation. After all, if we are looking closely, no matter what the lens, the interpretation must be objective.

So let's take science as a lens. As a methodology it seems ahuman. We think of the approach as cold and detached. The objective is not to see what we want but simply to record what we see. So what happens when we look into the microscope and see nothing? We reach for another lens. We raise the magnification. We lower the magnification. We change our lens until we can interpret. But it is not because there is an objective something to be interpreted that we finally see through the correctly chosen lens. It is because we want to understand that we feel understanding. The goal is still happiness. People are "objective" and "scientific" for the same reason that they are "religious" or "sympathetic." There is great joy in the feeling of understanding. In epiphany. 

To say "epiphany" is nothing more than an emotional climax, a release of chemicals in the brain at the end of an arduous attempt to "understand" might sound hideous to one under the objectivity delusion, but I think it's a testament to the awe-inspiring microcosm of our human brains. Each brain is world of carefully balanced extremes, of incompatible elements all co-existing so that to the casual observer, everything is thriving. Our planet, while made up of our microcosmic brains among other equally complicated individual entities, is another system full of oppositions carefully balanced and checked against eachother. And yet our planet appears so solid from space. 

I might be getting more Buddhist in my old age, but I find great comfort in this. That every complication, everything "wrong" with the world is just as much a part of it's structure as what is "right" with the world. And how amazing are humans that they find a lens to look at every uncomfortable disharmony in a way which makes their puny life burst with meaning, understanding, and happiness.