Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) and an alien masquerade, part 1 of 2.

Rev., Feb 15-16, 23-24, 2022.

An odd encounter in my viewing, yesterday. A movie I have not in the past much liked, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), hit the spot, then, worse, turned out to be exactly about what I am thinking about, and, then, finally, suffered a rrhexis, whereat it came off the screen into my life to underwrite my basic feelings about my fellow man in the coming postcovid era, in which I believe I will never be the same in terms of hoping for the best. I posted about the rrhexis, my term for when a movie as movie ruptures out of itself, and becomes “real” in the space and world around you. This is, in fact, a failure of horror, and an example of an effect I have long since called a brimming over the top, an example of reverse agency.

“My latest thing, if I see creepy old guy reading a weird old 70s paperback in the mud bath in, for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), I get the book and read it; after he gets out he mysteriously asks Nancy, “Have you read Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision’ “? She’s like, “I’ve read Velikovsky seven times!” The exchange pulls the scene to pieces, you think, their world is a patchwork of conspiracy theories, all of them vulnerable, then, to snatching. This sets up a “rrhexis” (or rupture) in the viewing, when Elizabeth freaks out on the street, suddenly aware that in one day, everyone was different, “I’m really scared!” she cries, the movie reached out of itself and I, watching it in 2022AD, I got really scared, for real. (Velikovsky’s claim in Worlds in Collision (1950) that a comet near miss caused all the catastrophe stories you hear in world mythology was so popular that Carl Sagan finally had to take it on in the 70s, attacking it as pseudoscience, still, it’s a great read, blood rain.”

In fact, the whole scene in the public baths always struck me as odd, but I had a better notion of it this time. Let met work that out.

The movie starts, in the title sequence, on a planet not earth, maybe Mars, and we see the growth of some sort of spore that then wafts off into space and comes in down upon earth. We see the sun

then we are on a kind of miasmic Mars, smoking with a sense of life

this then reveals that here and there are gelatinous forms, developing therefrom

then we see it, the whole horror. This is, in my terminology, a vision of hell on earth, Chloros stage two level, a miasmic muck of generative godawfulness

they take on form, and move with form

we see as if germination, inside something

then a view of Jupiter, I think

and now we see the spores rising up into space,

emblematic, Velikovskyian shot, the garden of Eden

off they go

then we sort of backspin on the 2001 Space odyssey wormhole sequence when it arrives at the plateauing level, the surface of a planet, Mars, who knows

and these spores in space make noises, whirrings,

almost like spermatozoa

then very far off, the third rock

we zero in

and in

transition to our world

and, importantly, a tilt, to create a particular kind of fata morgana, a flip, like the one I saw in 2018

then a curious shot, as if rrhexising it all into ambience

I cant exactly say what this is, looks like a cross, apotropaic

and there, as if the stake, being rung by horseshoes from space

then zooming superfast, crashing in

San Francisco

but foregrounded, as never would be, by plants, which seem to be wet with some sort of strange dew, ick

and  touchdown, plant impregnated by the spore from space

more of it, nature covered in it, ew

and the rain brings in more

then we go micro

love the violin screech here, er-eek

and, the logic of the scene tells us, the first pod, which, as soon as a human gets some of it on it, will then germinate, to take him or her over, by way of an Alraune double

it is a beautiful sequence, likely not even carefully watched by most viewers, which lays out the entire Velikovskyian theory. Again, the Velikovsky solar system is not steady state, or imposing, in the sense of presenting human beings with many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to exploration, it is alive in its geological time now, it is as if a million years ago, still going on today; and, indeed, in which solar system as recently as a thousand BC Venus as a comet broke out of Jupiter, then warred with Mars, both events causing tremendous disasters on earth, then it swung around earth in an almost head to head equal scaled encounter, which sounds like earth cast into a death mask situation, in which Venus is the death mask, almost a twinning, with twinfire, and indeed a double, that then the prototype formation astrologically, the goal being to twin oneself with the cosmos, which I see as grotesque egotism, this then also included a solar system which was fertile in itself casting seeds all about on a space age level, that then being the real way by this paradigm that aliens come to earth. That is, just as we make use of unmanned spacecraft to venture out farther than actual human beings could go, aliens send out biological entities to carry themselves to far off places, then once they germinate, voila, an alien has landed.

The suggestion is that aliens have come to earth, but by means of a paradigm entirely different than the dominant one in postwar discourse on the topic of UFOs. That is, if I may make use of a formalist model I developed in the 70s, based on a five point star, there is the material paradigm, the aural paradigm, the formal paradigm, the color paradigm and the time paradigm. By far, in the postwar era, the material paradigm dominated, with the concentration being on the formal gore, the form being the UFO saucer or cigar shapes come to earth. The “material” is worked out mirroring the technical capabilities of earthlings, to then imagine technology in advance of us. But the material paradigm can also subdivide into the idea that aliens could come here by other means, material but different, and the idea that they come by spores and plants and grow us that way is one of those. This counterparadigm is supported by a modernist notion of twinfire of the self, that is, that there are at least two sides to everything, which would open up one of the sides to take over by another. The basic idea is appearance versus reality. In the 70s, the pendulum had swung clearly to the reality versus the appearance, but, now, of course, that has swung back. By this idea a self would have a gap space doubling in his or her shadow, and it is imagined that this space is the space able to be colonized by aliens. As the movie progresses we are going to see the emergence of this shadow space as plant space more dramatically. The complicating part is the involvement of sleep.

Next morning, not quite aware that Geoffrey has turned, Elizabeth wakes up early (she has been coaxed to it by Sutherland, her colleague). She gazes briefly, then she looks over to see an Empty Pillow, this is the Empty Pillow syndrome, the story nicely tucked into it, wherein worst case imaginings are generated, in panic, then she turns over to her side

And, surprise, even shock, she sees Geoffrey just sitting there on her side of the bed, all dressed and groomed, and she is shocked. This is a masquerade, the Empty Pillow, worst case scenario imagining. What would normally happen now is that she would get up, thinking herself awake, and go looking for that scenario, and she would find it.

What happens here is that, presuming that he was just watching her for some reason, he then walks off, we only see his profile and back

And then he keeps walking, down the stairs

And then out down a back porch, and here too we hardly see him at all

And then she goes up front to see him give the garbage directly to the garbage men and it has to be a bit suspicious of who knows what that he stands there until the grey debris he handed in is crunched in.

Then to see him,

perhaps a man who had to be coaxed to take the garbage out, standing in the middle of the street, with the garbage pail, watching the truck move off, as if it was an important thing in his life

This creeps her out.

It is, in fact, a version of the Empty Pillow nightmare fantasy, but in a waking state.

Then a clock on the mantel, symbol of the house, and which he walked right by, perhaps making her suspicious by him not undertaking some little ritual of attention that he did every day, this tilts her head, to make her think, and now here the clock chime wakes her up, as it were (but not in fact in this telling).

It is important in the mis en scene that the house and the garden are vertically below the bed, that is, under the bed. The night before she was off camera most of the time expressing her curious suspicion about the odd plant she found in the park, and he was off camera watching the game. Their apparent lack of face time is perhaps the plausibility enhancing device to make it halfway plausible that Elizabeth would then the next morning wake up and have a firm and fixed conviction that this thing that looked like Geoffrey was not Geoffrey. Her problem here is that she has woken up into a nightmare, and may spend the rest of the movie in it. As a result, the garden and the area ways from it to the street or to the back (and in the use of this space Kaufman picks up a thread from Antonioni in Blow Up) are a classic talus, a elaborate dream space meant to stage a reverie as it sinks in as a game of hide n seek to compromise visuality and make one uncertain what is what. As Elizabeth has her Empty Pillow panic attack waking up, she is in a vigilogogic state, but post-sleepy, this space is very quickly sinking down into hypnagogy.

The last movie that I have seen before which somehow in the moment instantiated to become insightful of my own emotional state was when I came back flummoxed on many levels from the doctor in January and then watched Halloween 5, in which the little girl is clairvoyant, and that whole movie is an extension of the original logic of the field of bedsheets on the line that Michael Myers first scared Laurie Strode with, expanded to Ellie’s house, and her taking a shower, and then the house where the girl is living is remade entirely as a “thrin” of such spaces top to bottom, with the basement and then too the laundry chute to it a central part of conveying how it is by clairvoyance that she follows him.

The same sort of thing goes on here. The vision of downtown San Francisco that Kaufman projects is that each of them, Elizabeth and Matthew, working close to the capitol, live their working lives in little mazes of routine, going in and out of places, and without transition are back in the hallways of their official building again. When he passes by a window, Kaufman shows him rush by from the POV of the Raven’s Gate, which only sees the dead, seeing him we know he is to die. But in perhaps a less extreme form the goal here to show each urban space in a somewhat complicated way as another reverie or whack a mole formation. This involves discourse too, and the idea that the spaces are not coherent but mazes of differing POVs not coming to terms with each other. It is kind of a 70s hangover view of the cultural revolution of the 60s, which has left a lot of people floating in a space where it is unclear what is real or not, almost foo.

Skipping over the book signing party, and the whole interaction on the street with Nimoy as if doing his shrinking in the dark on the street, we come then nonsensically by way of the fact that since his wife works there Jeff Goldblum has taken up bathing at the public bath she works at, and so we go into there.

The bathhouse scene has always struck me as strained, as a mis en trope. Again, a mis en trope is a space or structure that is fashioned self-consciously to rhyme with elements of an earlier scene in the movie, or the overall theme of the movie, or the original movie if this is a sequel, in which the whole thing is a constructed version of the same thing. Since in the title sequence we were shown a nice illustration of the pod spore theory of how aliens came to earth, and that featured yucky viscous nature, creepy greenish spores, a complicated landscape, in fact, alien, and then they came to earth, then it follows that in every scene in the movie the talus is going to have to be constructed of the yucky, viscous, green, complicated, and alien, and, indeed, this is what the bath turns out to be. Not only is it a yucky mess, with some men taking what looks like green mud baths, a heavyset one getting out, showing butt crack as he grabs his towel

Then to be hosed off and massaged by Nancy as if a dead horse. It is odd that Nancy is working in this place, but as we find out that she is a post-hippie and believes it seems in miracle diets and cures it is construable that she has devised the miracle green mud bath and all of this is of her making. As she is a person that works with odd unshapely bodies in close quarters with a lot of green muck mud and hosing and the like, the space presents itself as an elaborate alibi formation, as well as, at the same time, a plausibility enhancing device, we have already been dislodged from normalcy by the fact that it does turn out that Nimoy as a psychiatrist is a bit of a believer in the charlatan as he claims that there is a sort of “hallucinatory flu” going around, and we are in the middle of a strange pandemic (so to make the movie like the Crazies), and so this bizarre set becomes as if the Jack in the Box space in which the mystery is explored and sprung.

And this is where my inosculation comes in. Again, an inosculation is when, watching a movie, I see a work or art or especially an old book of the 70s made use of to write in the underthebottom of the film, and this started with Saint Maud and the Blake book given her by Amanda last Spring, I read that book, and then explore the degree to which the book exists in the honeycomb in the prototypal ur-space of the movie, and ideas in it fed ideas expressed in the movie, making it all more 3D. When Nancy helps the big man out of the green mud, and we are given a bit of butt crack, behind it we see an older man sitting up to the neck in his mud bath reading a little 70s paperback, of the kind I really like and which has become as it were on the core sources of foo in the decade, what I call creepy 70s paperbacks with creepy old pictures with creepy old captions, entirely presented as fact, but entirely inadequate, and it is as noted Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950).

The fact that he would read it so intently sunk deep in the green mud serves as a nice visual metaphor for what is being conveyed, that somehow this book is responsible for the theory of the movie we are in.

Velikovsky posits a catastrophist view of the world, he finds evidence of catastrophes past in the earth and planets, evidence still extant, 10, “signs of recent violence, disruption, and fragmentation have been observed on earth, and elsewhere in the solar system, a submarine gigantic canyon that runs almost twice around the globe, a sign of a global twist; a layer of ash of extraterrestial origin underlying all oceans; ‘gases escaping from craters in the moon”. He says that his view of things came to him in New York after he resettled there exiled from Europe. It started with him seeing that in Exodus passages evince a ‘great physical catastrophe, thus linking cosmic events with a worldly event, and placing that in time. 18 He did this by reading Exodus as history, and then conforming its descriptions of celestial events to actual catastrophes in the past. He believes that this places the exodus at the end of the middle kingdom, and overlays these catastrophes on the plagues of Egypt story. Thus, for example, while stoics believed that the earth would end in the great winter or summer of the year, either a cataklysmos, or flooding, or ekpyrosis, or burning, he takes their beliefs to be literally true, based on actual events witnessed in time. From this, he elaborates, sometimes thrillingly so. Having a long time interest in where the belief in blood rain came from, he argues that a comet passing close to the earth passed its perihelion and thus “touched the earth first with its gaseous tail” 68 A rusty pigment then was precipitated on earth and in rivers and lakes, all then with a “bloody coloring” 68 Ipuwer is called an “Egyptian eyewitness to the catastrophe,” writing that the river is blood, blood is everywhere, 69 The hematoid pigment in the water also killed all the fish, which resulted in another plague, the smell, exodus says, and the river stank, 7:21 In Thrace, their tallest mountain was called Haemus because streams of blood flowed from it, said to be where Zeus struck Typhon with a thunderbolt (which Velikovsky says was the comet). 69 In mythology the world was red with the blood of Tiamat, Osiris and Seth respectively 70 This is also why, says Palmer 1892 the Red Sea was called Erythrean, and the mountainous desert the Israelites wandered in Edom, red. 70 Instances of blood rain, Velikovsky writes, have been recorded in divers countries. This red dust, says Velikovsky, falling from the sky, “does not originate in clouds, but must come from volcanic eruptions or from cosmic spaces”. 71 This rain also included naphtha, or petroleum, which poured down on the earth.

The really remarkable thing about Velikovsky’s narrative is that he follows the passage of the comet from phase to phase, and then finds passages in scripture to validate. Thus, after setting up the basic problem above, he then goes on to explain the darkness plague, and this derived from the fact that the earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet…which resulted in a disturbance in the rotation of the earth… this change or reversal of the angular velocity of rotation caused hurricanes to sweep over the earth, all because of the “sweeping gases, dust and cinders of the comet” 78

couple of weeks later, it occurred to me, a Ukrainian version

An added dimension here is that Velikovsky makes a special point of saying that all of his ideas came to him in 1940 in New York City after he had escaped to Palestine from Europe, then to New York on account of World War 2: and for that I can’t help but think that in the long tradition of celestial visions over cities going back to Nuremberg 1561 (in my tracing this past year), up through Nerval, and on to the opening title sequence in the movie, that he had these sorts of visions in the skies over, I seem to think, the west side of New York. Thus, I retrace the scirpograph in a for instance sky over New York midcentury 20^th century.

This took place in the nine days mentioned in the bible, when “there was no exit from the palace, and no one could see others in front of them, visibility was so bad”. 79 Here too, this deeper moment of darkness was caused by “the earth’s stasis or tilting of its axis, and was aggravated by a thin cinder dust from the comet”, and the effect of this on the globe caused the “a very extended, gloomy day” 80

Then came the earthquake, and here, too, a progress report, “the earth, forced out of its regular motion, reacted to the close approach of the body of the comet: a major shock convulsed the lithosphere and there was earthquake all over the globe” 62. Ipuwer, again, witnessed all this, reporting and Upper Egypt “has become a waste, all is ruin” 82

Velikovsky in Ukraine, the Angel of Death, N3 4 22

This then set the table for the Passover of the angel of death, Velikovsky translates the word Nogaf as “smote” meaning, a “very violent blow, as, for instance, the goring of a horse by an ox.” The firstborn crushed at midnight, the Haggadah says, represents that smote. 83 But, there was also a night as bright as the noon, and this too is explainable by the progress dynamic of the comet, “the head of the celestial body approached very close, breaking through the darkness of the gaseous envelope” 84 (it is of interest, however, that the 13^th of the month was thereafter bad luck because the first born killing happened on that day, the same day as in traditional Egyptian lore Horus waged war with Seth 85

nogaf the smoter of earth, velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

nogaf the smoter 2 Velikovsky in Ukraine 3 4 22

Nogaf the smoter 3 Velikovksy in Ukraine, 3 4 22

Hurakan Velikovsky 1940 2 23 22

end of part 1.

The discovery of “lycosthene” images in Lycosthenes’ Book of Prodigies and Wonders (1557).

Rev., Jan 26, 2022.

A brief, “we interrupt this program” note, on discovering a possible something in Lycosthenes’ (Conrad Wolfhart, Lycosthenes was his latinized humanist name), Prodigies and Wonders (1557) (which I came to this time by way of Jacque Vallee’s Wonders in the Sky). The book is a picture book of images of such wonders, and image by image, I have seen them extracted and shown as an example of the subject at hand. A picture of a man scooping up blood crosses with his cloak comes from this book, as does all sorts of images of Blemmyes, and other exotic deformations of human beings. Such pictures are used by rationalists to demonstrate how superstitious, and no doubt racist etc, human beings in premodern times were (compared to our enlightened modern times!). But when you page through, and see the images on the page, in context with the Latin describing them, it becomes apparent that something else is going on.

For one thing, each image is simple as a stamp pad image, if the ark, then an ark, crosshatched by pouring rain; if an exotic person, that person’s body twisted this way or that within the given square of the stamp pad size; more importantly, if something in the sky, then a shooting star, or a burst of fire, or three plumes of smoke coming up out of Sodom; if a forest fire, a few plumes; a volcano, seven plumes, each tossing a rock; God appears in the same sort of fiery plume in the sky, out of an opening in the middle of the image; Moses leads the Israelites through a Red Sea consisting of two tall jets of water in midprint; stones or hail falls on a town eightfold from four-fluffed clouds; a shooting star zooms horizontally through a redoubt between two curls of cloud; a burst of sunlight out of a fold of cloud; in another one, a clatter of weapons in the sky, framed by the clouds; a great rock falling from heaven, inside a rainstorm, but opposite a sunburst; one sunlight descent looks almost like a ribbon on a medal; and it goes on.

What this indicates is that each image does not so much as illustrate the book, or even really illustrate, in the formal sense, the scene described, but simply provides a visual prompt to how the reader should be visualizing something, or where at least one should start. They serve almost like historiated initials in illuminated manuscripts, prompts to help with visualization. As such it strikes me that each is more like what today is called an emoji, and simply a more visualized form of the text, for the purpose of coming closer to the reader. It seems there is a vocabulary too, and a whole alphabet of such scenes. They have a generic quality, because they are as if letters.

It then also strikes me that if they aid visualization then they do so at a very incipient, that is, at the beginning level, again, they are prompts, not full expressions. Their presence, and more so, inserted into the text, raises the question of what exactly people thought went through their minds when at last exposed to the words of a book and then having to figure out what is going on inside their heads as they read, in terms of seeing the image. This brings us to compare the zone of reading-visualization to the zone of redreaming in one’s head after watching a movie, and then the relation of both to the imagery that can fill one’s head after one closes one’s eyes to try to get to sleep. The latter I call entoptic imagery, and a vocabulary is developing. In recent analysis, I gave names to the Green Chainlink

The Blue Cathedral

 and the Starry Sky

all of which can, according to my theory, then help you drift off, or not, moving down across the in-between into actual light sleep, hypnagogy. By placing these images in the context of visualization in the entoptic zone of mental imaging, one also proposes that at bottom they do not represent what they represent but in fact are psychodynamic representations of various states or twists of mental imaging in the abstract, then figured out. It is also true that the power of visualization to come up with different images is limited by the pool of fluid in which it is manifest, meaning that there is an inherent tendency toward the nonfigurative toward the lightshow explosive effect, and then, too, my use of figures to give form to inner dream dynamics is physiologically validated by the fact that entoptic imagery is often self-generated from the fissures in an irrepressible figurative form.

Moreover, this case becomes more solid, when a second startling fact begins to unfold, upon paging through the book in full. And that is that all of the images or image stamps, or icons, are made use of repeatedly, often, page after page, not only to refer to another instance of a topic as related to the former instance, but also in much more complicated ways. In some cases, five or six such icons are piled up on one page, then a few pages later, two or three are repeated, and repeated again three pages hence. It is almost as if the author of the text is scoring a script of visual effects to orchestrate a fireworks in the head, which would be what visualization was thought to be, to then cause one to experience the reading of words in a second dimension as the registering of nervous startle-effect or excitement effect, and thus reading is a nodding in and out of the image and the text. It is astonishing, if we posit that the first five image-stamps provided at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then you might find in a sequence of tellings, image-stamps repeated to help with the visualization of the event, and it go 1,3,2, then, two pages later, 5,4,3, then two more pages, 2,3,4 and so on. It really is at if they thought of visualization as a series of ZAP maledicta balloon framed devices, to accentuate the experience of the reading or visualizing of the oddity, and that “reading” consisted then of subjecting one’s mind to the strobe or lightning-flashes of such fissure-based imagery that runs on in the head when one reads.

Then, one has a sense of progress through the text, which is never broken by chapter, when one sort of icon subsides, and another gains precedence, then that floods in, then ebbs, and another takes over. It really is an emotional orchestration of internal fireworks of fissures in the entoptic universe. Then, further, when a totally new subject is fed in, that announces the arrival of a new phase. There is a delightfully after-drawing on some images when the rats arrive, they have overdrawn on several images an invasion of rats, to accentuate what is going on.

For me, this breaks images down to psychodynamic graphs, but in an isolated, singularized iconic presentation. So, for example, if I created icons for the various stages of the Eldritch formation, this would involve graphs like this

The first nightmare

The second nightmare

The third nightmare

The truth shot

or if I simply reduce to icons conventional aspects of my system as it has worked out over time,

the Bridge, the Luor, the Village of Dreams (would be like in the book assaulted by storms and lightning), the Forest of Lost Thought, The Hanged woman, the Black Bog, Utrilloi, etc.

This then posits that there must be some secondary purpose for telling history in the way it is told and that is to actually curate the mind of the viewer to accept as the world an expanse in space and time which equals to the expanse created in the entoptic eye and visualizing mind and thus the book as a whole is actually mind-curating the limits of one’s imaginings. As such, then, one’s mind is imagined to be a sequence, in a series of, of visualization effects, which keep exciting one as one reads. A variation on the argument, in a different sense. How?

An example. Lately, since two ER visits in the Fall, I have been I have been put on some meds to attack my chronic sinusitis again. The meds might be working. But the extent of it thus far is limited. That is, I think I can smell things, but the smells are odd, almost not there, unidentifiable. It strikes me that the meds ensemble have cast me into their half life and now I live in a world of half smells, smells, but not really smells, it is like I live in world of pastels, very light colorings, roughly sketched in, like a Bonnard painting, and this befogging, but with a cut in it to hoped for clarity, encircles space in a way that gives my current little regime of routines a sick day feel, which is slightly pleasant, And because it circles me with vague, half-formed impressions, and this foggy state, kind of like a fugue on the symbolic level of dreaming, but rather more ambient, so this is the state I call Snow Mountain, a benign ambient POV which looks back on the dream through a mist and a fog, and sees impressions of this sort.

I have argued, earlier, that the predilection of Germans to see sky armies and blood rain in the sky, was likely induced by a regime of mediation upon their minds; that is, printing, which made of the space between ground and air an in-between wobble space, where in fact they were in a state of perhaps syngogy, unsure if awake or asleep, on our terms,

and thus they saw excitations from within their minds out in the sky; and now Lycosthenes it turns out orchestrates what they see by the paging of the book (so it related to angelspace too). I will have to find a translation, to see what each icon “means” and then translate those into psychodynamic graphs, and from that recreate what it is the author imagined was going through his readers’ minds as they worked their way through his special curations of their mind. I will call all such sky visions as conjured by this sort of icon “lycosthenes” to indicate their iconic origin and conventional nature. A lycosthene is also a conventional image-stamp devised to create a certain visual effect, like a firework for the reading mind. The usage will be as follows, “No, Germans in the sixteenth century did not believe in Blemmyes, a blemmye was a lycosthene image created in support of a text to create inner mental excitement engaged in this new-fangled thing, reading a book.”

Needlesstosay, I might find behind the pictures, only uncertainty, that is, that they too lived in the foo.

Index

Here I collect all instances of skyward wonders in Lycosthenes, identify them as a type of psychodynamic, and then create a comparable example from my vocabulary.

So here, a dark sun

five page turns later, again, same graphic, different event

five more, again

then, the next page, again

that one has a man with a cow on an altar, opposite

which appears on the next page

then again, four more turns

here is one when two symbols are up on the left, repeated lower right

rain twice

and on the next page, accompanied by other acoustics

then again on the next

Some schema run through the whole of it, this sunshine burst

repeats on the next page

and again on the next, likely to give a whole sequence of horrors a thematic unity over the course of a few pageturns

two more, and again

two more again, with a doubling up of the sky is falling

then, six, seems the start of a new chapter, a double 

Which is enough to prove the point.

Sometimes the double page spread has up to eight such stamp images, resulting in a look more like a modern magazine than a book

nine

It is acknowledged that a limited supply of prints were used to illustrate repeatedly different objects. But surely that is incidental. It seems to me that there is a certain degree of orchestration of effects here, it almost feels like Tommy telling his story in Goodfellas, ping, bang, pow, zim, zam, or the sequence of BAMS and SLAPS that in maledicta balloons provided the visual acoustics for a fight in the old Batman television program. If, so, almost related to impresse, these are emblems that bespeak a certain type of routine fear enlisted in a repertoire form to keep the reader ever wary and on the edge of fear. One can almost see in the images a dictionary of historiated letters, speaking of the horrors of the time. I am, of course, in the current interest, partial to signs of wonders in the skies.

There is the full sun

the torch in the sky

this one, not sure what in fact it is

the rain

more rain

rocks falling?

triple suns, twice

another sun

the flood

is this a compound, meant to be read the latter on top of the former?

the sky swords and weapons

a favorable star

manna from heaven

sky fire

this one is torches in heaven

an avalanche?

the smoke of sodom seems to belong to the corpus of sky signs

a different sun

arrows in the sky

a great wind, the implication being a prodigy birth predicted it

the god burst than knocked st Paul off his horse

this strange object in the sky, which brought me here

I think that these serve more in the manner of emojis or emblems to simple signal to the reader what kind of response is required, eeked out of the Latin justification, in terms of visualizing, and as visualizing from reading was a new mental experience for most it had to be learned, or trained in, what is going on the page. And the same used to simply cause in the reader certain bursts of nervous response that got them excited,or brainwashed them into believing something in the text.

But, then, to take it further, I wonder if this orchestration of visualization, all of which, since it is emblematic, taking place on the symbolic level, either vigilogogic, or dropping to hypnagogic, in an emblem space, which is like letterspace, if these signs are not also formatted as shorthand for psychodynamic mental functions that I have discovered to be common in movies etc over the last few years. To repeat the symbols, I then suggest a possible parallel psychodynamic There is the full sun

is this, the High Light ?

the torch in the sky

is the torch, symbol of a vector turned on, and penetrating the ambient?

this one, not sure what in fact it is

could this be the Blue Sun as it passes through the Luor, to see death

This raises the possibility, that if you go back to the icon for rain, and then follow through, the whole book might be mapping out for you a psychodynamic sequence, with the intent to as if hypnotize you. At present, this is guesswork, requiring translation and matching, to continue. But, if this is what is going on, on each page, the author making use of acoustic effects to prompt the mind of the viewer to visualize the current state of the world in a certain way, to get an emotional rise from them, this would mean that each double-spread is as if a score of a soundtrack or saccade stream, to make the words mean something. Something like this.

(which reminds me of thoughtforms too), and thus I could “read” the score in this way. What this means is it is the purpose of these stamps to give visual form to the basic metaphors that inform the discourse of the book and the times, and which form as well the basic building blocks of prejudice or whatever in the narrow minds of the brainwashed. It means that this book is more like a magazine, or even a comic book, in making use of a shorthand symbolism, not to “illustrate” the text, but to prompt the reader to visualize what is in the text in a certain conventional way, to strike home with a reader, resulting in a reaction. This reading also relates this type of book to the art of motion picture closeup montages, and to the art of fashioning a sound effect or score for that, it is protocinematic.

Also, as media, these items are percussive, and exclamatory, and thus represent a book come in close to the conjure phase, when such soundings begin, meaning that reading this you are closed in on by media, to alarm and alert you, just like the news does these days. Thus, I place this study in the symbolic zone, of the hypnagogic, in the bigger picture of the psychodynamics of original prints.

Finally, if these are letters, and considered as if basic building blocks, then they also amount to hieroglyphics, as per Renaissance thought, and thus exist IN nature below human consciousness, that is, in a place more primal and prototype and “immediate” and thus these symbols are ALSO the original ancestral form of foo photos as I am currently looking at them.

In foo photos, I am still collecting types, to encompass a vocabulary of effects. The overall purpose derives from my interest in the false certainty with which captions in 70s paperbacks are assigned to photos with deadpan nature. The craziness of certain wild claims in captions then creates a gap between the claim and the photo, that is the lacunum, and it is back through that that one drops to the prototype space of media, which is the foo. The foo is, it must be, OUTSIDE human agency, preceding human agency, and thus in some way miraculous. It is from the premise of the foo that one then builds back a different kind of consciousness, based on clairvoyance as it coincides with dream theory, and the stages of consciousness there, I am interested in the way people, in the context of legend trips, step aside from the given conventions of art, and presentation, in rational culture, that is, the mainstream, an keep to inhabit a prototype space by finding wiggle room in which to portray immediacy in a foo lacunum. Last night I saw in a book that people devoted to the discourse are still busily adding to the types, which I am trying to catalog.

Angharad Williams’ encounter at Haus zur Liebe (January, 2020) with Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), a note, pt.2 of 2.

Rev., Dec 31, 2021-Jan 1, 2022.

This is then enacted in the real life of the movie as we find out that the not very good doctor of the complex is of course sleeping with his nurse, Lynn Lowry, and as the other doctor is on the phone explaining that if he comes across anyone suddenly behaving in outrageously erotic ways, and just completely inappropriately out of control, that is a symptom, beware. And as he is listening to this, he is surprised by, and this is a classic pornographic scenario, doing something sexual while one is on the line with either the spouse or the world, Lowry at the day’s end of work strips in front of him, no problem (the suggestion is, they are having an affair already, but, this is way out of the norm, he is kind of shocked, these then are the proof of the foo photos that come forward into the experience of the movie, as foo too

she does this while he tells of the doctor’s goal of turning the world into a beautiful mindless orgy

and she strips all the way down

later Lowry is herself attacked

she later gives a speech on behalf of the disease

that everything is sexual (Stringfellow’s omnisexuality theory, from Stereo (1969))

then of course when it all ends with the takeover in the pool, she is at the center of it

then the disease heads out into the world, to infect the whole world with mad nymphomania

since there are a few other visuals along the way, such as the odd lights in the bedroom of the couple (and I am skipping Barbara Steele here because I have written of her in the film),

so it may be that Williams’ other works in the exhibit are construed by her as leading out of the cult from the cult painting inside the movie at the far place, to the cult center where the painting in the movie is reproduced to bring the thing or sense of reality is spreads into the gallery, and then these other images bespeak a broader culture derived therefrom, in the nature of a what if

These paintings, while not exact copies, appear to be an attempt to recapture something of the moment in a scene in Cronenberg’s first movie, Stereo (1969), in which, in a scene in which a man caresses an anatomy statue placed next to a topless women with her larynx removed to see if she responds to telepathic sex, there are paintings of an eye, in close-up, and, more directly connected, an ear.

This places the “art” in the context of an experimental setup (I am not sure why it looks like a talk show set for TV broadcast

and as in the above shot the irrationality of it makes it belong to a corpus of 70s-type imagery in which under hypnosis in psychiatrists’ offices people were said to find lost or repressed memories and they consisted of extremely violent and outrageous unspeakable events. Indeed, Sybil gets down to horrific memories of enemas and such, while the book that started the 80s satanic panic Michelle Remembers (1980), whose photos I have “recurated” for the bizarre false prototype-world they by caption alone to deadpan imagery relate, almost to counter the outrageousness of the remembered images with a facsimilar of faux objectivity

This “crazy” experiment then is tempered by the images, provided perhaps as calming influence.

the repeated inclusion of the picture of the ear suggests, as raised as an issue in Other Tongues, Other Flesh by George Williams, that the ambient-sonic takes over when the norm of sensation is purposefully compromised (and the idea that that might be the realm of telepathy, this relates to magnetic sleep, if the experiment is taken as a ‘dream machine’ derived from the Seeress’s Nervestimmer).

the cold clinicalness of the narration, of course, makes a mockery of the fact that in the culture at large the fact that the woman took her top off would mean many other things, not related to telepathy.

the eye seems to relate to the fact that the model’s eyes have been blindfolded

then the ear represents that he is coming at her by way of a telepathic pathway, an ambient whirr picked up as a tinnitus in the head.

The point of the movie is that Stringfellow was a “mad scientist” who, that is, developed his own controversial because occult theories, and as a result, in spite of the ice-cold delivery of science, most of the movie is, like Dargento’s Suspiria, about things not going well at all. He dwells on the fact that one person becomes the dominant person in the telepathic unit, a variation of Sleeper theory in dreams. Then, a more interesting fault that made me sit up, It seems that as the subjects were pressed by the power of the dominance, their behavior changed

while telepathic rapport was sought after

it sppears that in fact she split in two, so the telepathic self acted as if a false self

and it confused things

the purpose of this nonsense from the false self was to protect her from intrusion against the true self

meaning that her reality became unreadable, and, in my current working definition, “foo,” that is, in a prototype space even proto to that, where nothing is certain, all is confused

all this runaround in what is after all a normal brutalist classroom, is foo, apparent craziness, which bespeaks a danger

this scene reminded me of a visit to a posh high school up by Nicholet, where everything was state of the art, and we could not help but explore, once

the image serving as a foo photo of the threat of parasitism

and this results in the death of the true self

and as a result the true self can only interact with others

through a bizarre malfunction of telepathy

and then it got everyone else depressed

and this foo state is shown by this image of the subject on a light table, in silhouette, as if reverted to a prototypical state prior to knowledge, an entome

this idea, that through some telepathic malfunction, a false self develops in contrast to the true self and this false self after a time by way of malfunction begins to become a parasite to the true self, and even only communicates with others by means of foo images that degrade the relation, is fairly related to my “invented history” idea of my sequitur life as having over time fluctuated from my true self, which, in fact, is beyond my knowing, and my false self, which is the self enabled by others and I just passively went along, I even created a whole city where the false self life occurs, Similitium. Then, too, of course, the link here to schizophrenia links Stringfellow up to various theories about that condition going back to the origin, and by way of Prinzhorn.

In any case, it goes without saying that Stringfellow, if an aphrodisiac theorist, and I think the model here is, as in Shivers, William Reich, and his orgone box, one of which I saw in 2012, is that telepathic bonding depends upon a precondition of sex

and, of course, a theory of pansexuality, as it always ends up there,

the movie then begins to break apart into, in fact, foo photos, formless, confusing, in the prototype space, where things go wrong

finally, cherrypicking from the theorizing in the movie, one more segment is of direct interest to me. At the beginning of the movie, when the subject was introduced to his room

and the theory here is that the objects in the room form a gestalt which becomes the context in which he will operate, telepathically, I think, then there is a very quick flash montage of the objects in the room

and there is a work of art

but there is also a reproduction of Durer

who, this year, seems to have, care of Hoare’s comment about Mann’s Doctor Faustus being based on a rejoinder to Waetzwold’s biography of Durer as racist, but I found in Durer a repeated interest in backbuilding his art from the ‘art mediation” zone of representation he would have been commissioned to do, to the art-in-life zone, where works of art were in fact OES of realities experienced, and not mere works of art. Indeed, Durer might be the godfather presiding over this tendency in my thought in the past six months. Was he in fact only interested in the immediacy of life in the pre-art zone, and does that make him, or some of his sketches, the ancestral images of foo?

But, then, startlingly, later on, much later, the objects come back. In another experiment, two subjects have tea, in the room with the objects in it that we saw earlier

and the idea here is that things are getting sexual by the fact that the objects he handles in the serving of the tea have a form that itself elicits an erotic charge, perhaps due to shape

thus, the objects in the background of a scene, or in a décor, or which a person collects about him or herself, they bespeak an erotic tone, if that is the tone wanted. Then, too, even more importantly, the motion forms a form in space and that too is charged itself with an unspoken erotic charge, just by the motion

and then the two together create a charge, with strikes a person

all of which means without even saying anything, or doing anything overtly suggestive, but simply by serving tea with chosen implements from the gestalt, an erotic charge is communicated to the subject, him to her

this then forms sexual thoughts in the mind

because telepathy is omnisexual by its nature

so she responds, and it is implied she does not know why, because nothing overtly sexual was ever suggested, she takes her top off

and there is a sexual moment

Stringfellow’s ideas about the omnisexual were carried over into the idea of the mad doctor in Shivers, and, indeed, later in the movie, once infected, Lynn Lowry gave an excellent little speech bespeaking the omnisexual nature of reality to a person aphrodisiasticized. These chains of associations or impellations of sex magic in the movie thus might be seen by Williams are being carried over into the idea of reproducing an object from that sequence, and the chain context of the movie, to then transfer it by way of the art telepathically into the space of the exhibition, it is hard to say. But what the theory above says is what I believe is true of every movie and every work of art in every movie and which is why I look at what is in the background and how it stage-directs the scene, and thus bespeaks the subtext, which is only sometimes then brought out in the actual explicit text of the movie. This is basically, above, a cryptophasic explanation for the subliminal messaging made to us by objects. And it is also true that the claim that motion also in form is the essence of my scirpographic study of the psychodynamics of any aspect of a scene of human life depicted in a movie. Because of the preexisting décor of the gallery space, and its bay window, and its location, and the pillar décor element, and then the paneling, it would seem that as a space alone it could act as a receiver of the impellation of Stringfellow carried over ostensively into Williams’ exhibition, much in the way that the kunstkammer functions in Suspiria and in general. Overall, however, I argue that the foo comes from the perception of the sentient beyond the ambient, on a vector that generally stops in the ambient (the fear vector, etc). And if that gets miasmic or disgusting, etc, that is a drop to hell on earth below the sentient, Geithum. Thus, my current standing.

I write my version, or my bespeaking, of the plot of preexisting scripts, to suggest the nature of the sequitur nature of my reality. Williams is doing the same, from whatever POV she is coming from (which I have not yet looked into). But, in general, by painting paintings seen in the background of movies, and bringing forward a suggestion of their role and posture in the culture of the movie, to suggest as well that paintings exist for tropaic purposes in real life too, and are not trophies to be collected to adorn the display case of one’s own wonderfulness, but to speak to one’s cult, intercessional, votive and apotropaic means, and, for that, can involve this relapse back into the half life of life as seen in movies, repositioning reality in a foo zone on the far side of cult grounding, to arrest us in the provisionality and unreality of reality, or something like that.

And it is of interest that her partner, as part of Hergest, in which they set up scenarios that suggest movies in life, having forensic meaning and tropaic meaning as they would in movies, Matthis Gasser does pretty much the same thing, but he is cataloging images in the internet fan culture communities and the whole morass of unreality I call the swamp, but which it might now be time to concede is the reality of reality, really.

And as for Haus zur Liebe, and its positioning in Schaffhausen, this also relates to recent interest again in Switzerland as a kind of fata morgana redoubt where Europe likes to dream of its exoneration of its sins. It has been a point of interest due to the synchronicity in Virgl Abloh dying but having based his last collection on Baldwin’s Stranger in the Village, his “just so” visit to self-characterize himself as the other in the White West, then too Glenn Ligon finishing up his project on Baldwin’s essay.

Angharad Williams’ Witness at Haus zur Liebe (January, 2020) with Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and Stereo (1969), a note, pt. 1 of 2.

Rev., Dec 31, 2021-Jan 1, 2022.

In recent musing, I came across an exhibition that took place two years ago at this time, at Haus zur Liebe, Schaffhausen, by Angharad Williams, a solo show without her partner, Matthis Gasser. The show wove its way through a partly prefabricated space with odd windows, an architectural details, plus a room with wood-paneling, all bespeaking the fact that it is a used or pre-white cube, pre-art space, which art has taken up kind of scrying occupancy of. This sort of installation, responding by vibe to the aura of a place commenced I think in the 80s, and keeps on going, but with a shift. Williams ends up with this painting, meticulously done, in a yellow room in back

The painting is an abstraction, but it is a re-painting of a found abstraction which she is quite open about. Indeed, as one goes on to the Far Place, at the Door of Truth, there is a video set on the floor in the dark, and this is a kind of clipped version of a scene from Shivers (1973), David Cronenberg’s horror movie about a high rise complex on an island in the St Lawrence Seaway south of Montreal. As we step through into the darker room, we see the tv

and then we see a scene, an older man wrestling a younger person to lay still

but, then, the clip is intercut with shots from the title sequence of the movie, in which an unctuous voice in a promotional film is describing all the luxuries of what by today’s standard looks like a pretty routine high rise complex

and they even describe the kitchens

and the tennis courts

so, right from the first, Williams’ painting is a re-painting of the thing I spend more time with than any other form of art in existence, a painting in the background of a scene in a movie, with the assumption that it was put there for some reason, to contribute in some way to the scene. The video in the movie, which was meant to be taken as a deadpan critique of consumerism in the 70s (when we even gravely worried of the fate of the nation due to the proliferation of McDonalds), is here as if further emptied out, for one in retrospect to confirm one’s former condemnation of that world. In Williams’ installation there is a pulpit sculpture next to the picture, and that’s that, in a yellow room, yellow the general color of overall suspectness or spuriousness.

this suggests that the picture is being repainted in homage or in critique to a general philosophy that lies behind it and which it projects and did project in the movie. And, in fact, deeper down, that is exactly what is going on in the movie.

To fill in the backstory, the title sequence gives us the whole tour, with all the deadpan exuberance of consumerist fantasy, everything in one place, isolated from the world, consumption, much like luxury liners today, peddling the same fantasy, and it is complete and full, so if you are a university educated anticonsumerist you are snickering already. There is the perfect bedroom

it’s on an island, yes! away from the awful masses

it is across a bridge, so in a reverie place, a dreamland, and an architectural rendering, of which these photos are a photographic form, is the form that reverie, an altered state of vigilogogy settled in at the level of the symbolic, fugueing on likeness amidst a chain of associations

there is even a parking garage, great luxury, in the basement (do not laugh, when there was a basement parking garage at the shopping center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in our early years there that was a great selling point for going there, and a luxury we loved)

it even has a view of the St Lawrence Seaway, and it is as always mentioned that the seaway goes on its way to the sea, so that one can imagine, from interior Canada, a sort of watery fata morgana far-sighting of the ocean, and an escape from North America (this also places the towers in a spot vis a vis current interest in HBOs Station Eleven, which partly takes place around Lake Michigan, with mention of Mackinaw, and all of the mythological stopping points my imagination has sent up that way over the years).

in the 70s, of course, orange carpet would be cool, hippieish, the wall to wall of it suggests sex and debauchery, but a free reign of one’s libido (as all hotel room fantasies, see White Lotus on HBO this past season)

and there’s the laughable kitchen

then, in the basement, a pool. And, again, this too a selling point for luxury in apartments and hotels at the time. (I last indulged in the pool fantasy of a self-all-inclusive serving when in 2014 I think as a way to get around the heat and maybe to center her visit on the Skyway that wends its way like a fantasy through downtown Lincoln I had my daughter stay at the Husker hotel and that meant she has access to the pool so we invited the kids over to go swimming and I sat on the chaise watching them have a good time, the luxury!)

but, then, even weirder, because it is on an island, and somewhat out of town, there is a convenience store right there in the basement

and a dry cleaner

and a dentist!

and a doctor

So, classic 70s critique, much of it sloughed off by time, and persisting in consumer culture still today, but the sharpness of it yet suggestive of a countercultural stance.

And, then, to start things off we come upon the rather German looking sixtyish doctor wrestling with, who? His daughter, his son, a patient? We do not know, she runs all over, he tries to grab her

she gets away and runs to the door, a painting Williams’ missed, its flowers bespeaking having good feelings coming and going

but it is finally when he uses much more force, and gets him/her on the couch, that we see the skirt hike up and we see panties, identifying the student as a girl

then he is profiled by a well-known portrait by Klee, and another painting, over the couch. In both cases, Klee was mentioned by English as admiring the artistry of the mentally ill shown by Prinzhorn in 1922 and he sought to get to the point of creating pictures like that as well, to show inner selves, and this seems to imply that the doctor is German, and is involved in some sort of medical theory

this is confirmed by his black bag, and that he is urgently doing something to her, not sexual, but medical

oddly, wtfly, he tapes her mouth shut

but, that is not enough, he now brings her over to his dining nook table, not large, and there is the painting in the movie

almost immediately he is shown as if the classic Evil German Doctor, whether from the camps, or from the mad scientist history of German scientists and their dabble with the occult going back in fact to the Seeress of Prevorst, he is definitely, now, a doctor of some sort 

now we see the scene without anyone in it, confirming that, in the reality of the movie, that is, diegetically, the picture is the picture that he has over his breakfast table, there it is

but now he lays her on the table, and clears the table

this is the sequence that is shown in Williams’ video

but, then, he goes further, he rips open her top, and exposes her breasts

the movie switches off to another scene in another apartment in the building, but quickly comes back and by this point he himself has stripped and put on a mask and is engaging in that old trope of mad scientist movies, the emergency surgery, right here, to get rid of a problem that could kill

to see her laid out like this is provocative, and sexual, in 70s movies, to see him without his shirt on next to her without her clothes on is also provocative, putting other thoughts in our mind, this is a very sexualized shot

But then he right away goes to a magic surgery, he is doing something surgical to her

worse, and very Cronenbergian, he has cut her open, and that results in a spillage of blood down her side

this upskirt shot, but with her schoolgirl socks still on, bespeaks invasion of her private parts too, there is blood there

one thinks, abortion? What is this? As the other doctor who was having trouble in the cutaway sequence comes in to apartment 1511 too

and then the police find out about it, and save the day, and a sense of normalcy, or progress toward understanding is suggested, because in like a million movies since 1930 that is what the police are there for

I just want to mention in passing that as the in-house doctor, who is not much of a doctor, and exploiting his situation, so close to the bodies of so many females, discuss, they do so over by the couch and we see that the Klee was balanced out by what looks like a Feininger, so, again, German painting.

It is only later that we find out that the doctor was disgruntled and developed an occult theory that we have become divorced from our primary selves so leapfrogging over research which he had been working on with others to develop parasites to serve bodies as, for example, replacement livers, he develops a parasite to invade one to make one’s libido and one’s aggressiveness heightened, to make modern man more like primitive man, but it sort of got out of control so that if the parasite gets into you you become an aphrodisiac monster (as a result I think him modelled on Wilhelm Reich). So,back to Williams,one presumes this is why there is a pulpit sculpture next to the painting. It is a work of art liked for cult purposes by a disgruntled medical doctor who drops off the deep end of the occult to create a monster that kills. It is, in effect, a work of art grounded in a false reality, a pseudoscience. As a profile of his presence, practicing pseudoscience, trying to get it back under control, it bespeaks the opistoentoptic la Fanu eye of the inner eye gazing with menace or paranoia to see monsters in the world, and its science, its in-sight, has created a monster too. In the movie, the picture is one with the Klee and the Feininger to bespeak the whole pseudoscientific trend in German art and science in thee 20^th century, so he is a type of a Mad Nazi Scientist, having found a place for him to continue to practice his evil in North American life, and so the picture, which might be a real work of art by a named artist, I cannot identify it as yet, but there it is.

Williams makes it seems more like something that is part of the package of the jejune luxury of the apartment complex, and thus a bland even blind item bespeaking the hidden ungrounded unreality of the mindset of most consumers, who are living on lies and dreams. In the 70s, all these luxuries were beginning to curdle into horrors, in real time, Cronenberg was surfing on that wave.

But, then, there is also a more formal element of the painting, taken from the red framing of it, that is, it rhymes with the red streak caused by the escape of the shiver parasite from the girl’s body.

there is an odd half-life line in the movie, by which all the décor of the complex is outlined in red, the couch in the other doctor’s apartment is white, with red trim

his phone is red

and lady walking below has an umbrella lined in red, and when he vomits it out onto her umbrella, it is red on red (the other lady immediately declares that it is the remains of a bird that just crashed into the building)

we see it slither into the grass, for the first time, a sighting

then a random lady doing her laundry in the luxury laundromat downstairs does not see the red streak on the wall

but sees it on the washing machine

and then is attacked, as if by a figuring of the machine, the red thing, leaping out of the bin

oddly, this also a 70s trope, we see her lower limbs all askew, violated above

and it keeps going (they don’t have mail slots in apartment doors anymore)

the kids see it in one too

so, there is a sort of formalist theory evoking the spread of the parasite as it breaks into the lives of everyone in the complex. For that reason, the red in the subject picture could be taken by Williams as symbolic of the spread of the thing, and, on a theoretical level, the replacement of the luxury lifestyle reverie of life in the complex by it seen as an incubator of mad science which makes everybody, to comment on the 70s, in this early example of an anti-sexual revolution movie, becomes a nymphomaniac killer. Similarly, in Williams’ installation, there is another picture in the yellow room, and, as per the chain of association of image in the movies too, this is a sketch.

it is typically divorced in method and material from the main body of work, and for that reason serves as the grounding cult photo of the whole affair, it is the OES original eyewitness sketch, or the foo photo, that is, the evidentiary photos which record in disbelief the unknown thing that is happening, it looks to me like the picture of a man wiping steam off a mirror, to look at himself, but in a half-life situation,

since it features a candle, and an odd, further half-life drawing element at the border, it might bespeak the seerism at the bottom of the reality of the event, and the painting derived from the impellation of it.

the movie, in fact, does have two moments which speak to the doctor’s research, in his files, he has a whole bunch of what appear to be dirty pictures.

so for this to be found rather clinically shot and kept in a file in the doctor’s papers suggests that he might be a perv, if we did not now know from the other doctor’s explanation that he was documenting that subjects who accepted the parasite did indeed begin to become nymphomaniacs with violent sexual attack mode desires. These are the foo photos of this particular case (all pictures in which we do not know what is going on, but there is an occult logic underlying, are foo photos too), because they exist in the past, inside the cult, deep in the file, at the origins of the problem with the science, and taken in a POV of not understanding what he was seeing, nor will we ever see it clearly either.

End of pt. 1 of 2.

Sleeping Beauty (1959) and the fullness of dream-based animation, pt. 3 of 3.

Rev, Jan 18, 2022.

At some point Maleficent did not put two and two together that Rose was the same peasant girl who won over the prince charming, so this hatches a new plot, to twist the knife

But this shot, she is indeed most wondrous fair

It says right there, the god of sunshine in her hair, so she has become as if supernatural

And this, this shot, this is what I call a pinax, which is given to you as an icon or emblem of a lost ideal which you hold up when everything else is falling apart, and maybe in one’s desperate desire to cling to it, and not let it go, you might resist, the sort of cloying perfect perfection of it, this is what this is, so it is in addition to Maleficent’s savor over her victory felt by the close-up nature of the iris, the picture also flips out to us in the audience who want her well, and so we see a pinax which hits very hard, as an ideal.

And then, very much like in Episode 8 of Bly manor by Michael Flanagan, we see Maleficent with her yellow cats eyes exult in the evil of it all, devastating the joys of human life, the years go by, what does she care, they are vacant for her. She says “but a hundred years to a steadfast heart is but a day. She sees the gates of the dungeon where she has thrown prince charming

And she says that he is free to go on his way, problem is, he is 120 years old, a haunting image in a children’s film. And laughs at the proof that true love conquers all. This is a full on clairvoyant visualization in full awareness of the monstrousness of life in the mind of an evil entity in a 1950s Disney movie, magnificent.

But I think in her gloating she might have given away to the godmothers, who might’ve been eavesdropping, where Prince Charming is, so they arm him with the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue, and set him off, to rescue Aurora. This too is mythic, part of the hero quest, in its proper place, the giving of special tools to the hero.

As he is helped by the godmothers to escape from the maze of the castle, whose floorplan is indecipherable, the godmothers turn rocks into bubbles

And arrows into flowers, which means we are in a sleep-waking state

Then in an interesting moment, when he breaks out, and the evil forces were throwing something down on him, the godmothers get him through by creating a temporary canopy of a rainbow. This makes of this moment the one where he breaks from sentient space back into actionable ambient and even hypnogogic space. I wrote about this particular formation as it showed up last January in the work of Justin Matherly

And this was my reading of it

And here it is again, how do they know this? That it had to be there.

The escape is also hairline and devils road-ish, that is because while in the first visit to the castle it was a solid sentient Black Pyramid form, by the time the godmothers come back to it is has as it were been devoured by the demonic miasma of chloros hell on earth and in that capacity the green gas is acid and eats away at the castle and like a demon who comes from hell is spindly and wobbly and all spiderwalking in the world so too the whole physical plant of the castle is shown as having taken on the quality of the spindly collapsing demonic miasma of the world, so once again, excellent that the animation had to get deeper and dipped in hell to make the escape even more touch and go thrilling than the rescue, beautiful work.

But, then, wait, does his movie stop there? No. It goes further. I have traced I think an escalation of intense states of dreaming from simple vigilogogy (nodding off), to hypnagogy (light dream), to syngogy (between waking and dreaming) and finally to the full nightmare zone of epigogy, the seeing of monsters. But Maleficent is so entirely insane and totalist in her mania that she cannot resist, insulted by his escape, or in shock and shame that any force in the universe would even dare to contend against her, she centers herself on her castle, which is now thrust into the very heart of the movie

The stirs up a storm over her, rotating everything in the movie as energy collapsing into her

And by heaving on high nightmare zapping she just about dematerializes and pulverizes the entire world that Prince Charming depends upon to get away

But then that does not work, so she reaches up into the spiral of malice, the aerial volcanation of hell on earth over her castle and head, and calls it down, and actual real live physical hell on earth miasma, borne through the skies on a fog of doom, great, great shot

A forest of thorns shall be your tomb, she has become the Blue Sun, a death force in the universe, this is now in full nightmare

certainly by this point if this was an actual nightmare being had by a child in a bed at night they would have woken bolt upright in bed screaming by this point, but this movie hangs on.

Now go with a curse and serve me well, its right there, I don’t have to graph it, there is a psychodynamic spiral swirling down over the land to create the greatest single effect that impressed as a kid in Disney animated movies, the forest of thorns

And the miasma literally comes all the way across the country, to lock the castle in

The Blue Sun is a dream formation signifying death, and the realm of thanatopsis, which I have situated over ambient-sentient space as seen with epigogic dream consciousness for a while now, she literally, in exactly the right place, reaches up to take it down and activate it as a miasmic evil fog

She literally takes the light of the Blue Sun and extracts it or calls it down in black magic to transmute it into an active fog form which she yields and tosses at the castle with her magic wand

that blue sun light fog then strikes the castle like a thunderstorm and instantaneously materializes in a precipitate that will once and for all jam the nexus, cause it to stop working, end the battle, and clog up the whole situation so that she wins, and Prince Charming is caught in the thicket of it forever

Maleficent casts the Forest of Thorns, Sleeping Beauty, 5 3 22

But then, Prince Charming hacks away, he has a power she did not expect, the sword given him by the godmothers, the thrashing through is also so great. Even more so that things have gotten so bad that he has to cut a hole in the blockage to even get a new iris glimpse at the lost ideal of the castle where Sleeping Beauty sleeps

And because he gets through, Maleficent has to get personally involved, so this time, in a transformation into gas and monster that is once again taken care to have a different form of zap

She casts herself as if a being of fire or a pillar of fire in the way on the drawbridge

Now shall you deal with me, o prince

one of the great shots of the movie

another dazzling shot, transitioning, they felt they needed it, it is kind of Savoyish

And she turns into the dragon, and to do that her usual exist now has to graduate up several scales to pour out of the top of the picture

Then manifest as a great abstract form in green

Maleficent manifests as a demon dragon, Sleeping Beauty, 5 3 22

But then materialize in purple, so a reversal again of Savoy demon, the demon dragon in a purple smoke

A terrific creation, more so that it breathes green fire

I mean, a complete clusterfuck here

A full on monster fight, in hell on earth, where I think this all sinks, in essence, she quickly causes the whole superstructure of her curses to pancake collapse into hell on earth, so more or less in rage (the Disney theme, just like the fairies’ birthday cake), undermines her own power, and sinks down with it.

The dragon Maleficent in hell on earth, Sleeping Beauty 5 3 22

And when he is chased, by I think some sort of collapse of the ground, because the war has driven them into hell on earth, and now we are at the bottom of Chloros, looking over the edge of the bottomless pit

He is trapped and cornered, this is sort of life the place of sacrifice in ambient dreaming, but much deeper, in hell on earth, and what Maleficent in her rage forgets is, in hell on earth, where all agency is stripped away, magic can work to compensate.

So, like magic, with the help of the godmother, hurls his sword at the dragon, and gets it, again, a dream victory.

And the whole thing implodes

Peace returns, he enters the sleeping kingdom

Wakes her up with that kiss

And that’s that, And we end with them dancing in the clouds, as it was originally intended

With the closing of the book we never left.

Though I did not overly emphasize it, the reevaluation I devised over night, playing with the ideas, the idea that the book is left in the bed, and then it simmers, and it becomes, in the child’s mind, the spinning wheel, and then it is the final realization by the child that the parent is not coming back that turns that parent into Maleficent, and it is only at that late or last reel phase that three nightmares occur, the battle at the castle, the forest of thorns, and the fight with the dragon, all almost an inversion of the going out, this strikes me as also interpretable by the model of an under the bed psychomachia, wherein she is the sleep demon, Cinderella the subject, prince charming the telesphorus figure, and it turns out that, though in grave threat of becoming crepusculates, she assumes the position of the Blue Angel, when awoken, and then emerges as herself, Aurora, finally to live as a person. The fact that my word for a body transformed by light in this circumstance is corposant, derived from St Elmo’s fire, and that St Elmo’s fire is also….green, is pleasing too.

Even here, in my analysis, such an animation, that escalated its terrors to the very acme of monstrous dream consciousness, that brought a hint of poetry to the acme of clairvoyant vision run amuck in an evil figure who becomes the very megalomanic center of her own evil world, to hell on earth, actually rendered in a Disney movie, to genuine nightmare, two or three times, and most of all to a contention of good and evil that eschews the distraction of hijinx for comic effect but takes one so deep through the every layer and place of dream in the full mind of a sleeping human being that when you wake up from this one in recoil from sheer terror it seems likely you will not only feel refreshed, but truly alive, nightmares never to bother you again. This then in one sitting from page 1 to 109 my reading of the amazing dream-formed animation of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Sleeping Beauty (1959) and the fullness of dream-based animation, pt. 2 of 3.

Rev, Jan 18, 2022.

Things now settle into narrative passages, which in a movie it must. There is a wonderful burning of the spinning wheels, a kind of reverse image of the horrors of European civilization

and then the godmothers to consult scurry into the miniature world of the kunstkammer, which is a secure place under the bed of the Sleeper of the story, who is Sleeping Beauty

While the godmothers huddle and plan inside the miniature redoubt of the kunstkammer below the under the bed of the Sleeper, representing the fate of Sleeping Beauty, if they cannot find a way, the animation resets the as if curse orb of green cast by Maleficent, as if an arresting presence of High Light in the eye of the Sleeper, making it impossible to take one’s eyes off the crisis that is blocking out any sight of a fata morgana. And that green spiral then itself emits over the whole of the Land of Nod, the entoptic side, the in-between, and the hypnagogic side, a mesh of Green Chain which radiates dismally out to actually, then, the greens in this movie!, construct out of the phantom peripteral dream of ambience-sentience the whole evil castle complex of the Black Pyramid turned into the Miasmic Castle, with a substructured worked out by appropriation of the exhalations of its closely related zone of hell on earth, Chloros, to make for Maleficent a whole dark dream world, a hag universe, exactly where she would be, if she appeared in the sleeping mind. Again, such terrific animation.

It is also just amazing that like in the mountain-set Hammer Dracula movies of the time, the animators knew to toss in a shot which bleakly acknowledges she lives way, way out in the dark sentient space, in the Black Pyramid.

Then plan is then that Sleeping Beauty, in disguise called Briar Rose, is to be hidden away in the forest, and so that no one detect them the godmothers swear off their magic for sixteen years, and let the years pass, and Rose grows up into “womanhood”, safe.

This world of the woods would, in hypnagogy, or light dreaming, as a part of the Land of Nod, be the Forest of Lost Thoughts, which it is, as it is presented to us as a place so thick and deep with mystery you can conceivably hide a girl who looks like Sleeping Beauty in it for that amount of time. I have argued in my treatment of Nerval’s Aurelia (1853) that in the second part when he will begin to dream of episodes of panic in Paris he created in his mind the idea that there was a double of Paris in the spirit world, and thus set up a nexus figure eight spiral of relation between the two realities. A similar thing seems to be at work here, having set up the domain of Maleficent, it is necessary to now sketch back in the entoptic Land of Nod that has been obliterated by the drama of the cursing, and recreate a vision of a world secreted in nature in reactive response to a threat posed by the force in the dark castle beyond. And this is where the animator Eyvind Earle, who seems to be getting a nod himself by the Met in their exhibition, presenting his original concept art of the forest, comes into play.

far from the castle, and, one presumes, equally far from the Maleficient castle, this is by no means a realistic looking forest. It is squared off, rocks with sharp edges, it has built in rock bridges, and trees that top out like cypress trees in Rome

it is deeply scored by widely-spaced verticals, with deep depth beyond, the trees at the edge, looking out to the castle, are boxy, like they have been pollarded, she sports by clear pools with sharp rock edges, sitting on chairlike formed ledges, framed by Mantegna-like rises of grass and hill.

This angular world is, not unlike Joseph Yoakum’s visions of landscape, Earle’s imagining of what the Pillow Hill world of the sleeper dreaming this dream looks like, perhaps pulled to the horizontal by thinking of it as apart from the two castles, one good, the other evil. And as such it is this Pillow Hill pillow world, overcovered as a forest, to convey the idea that Rose is suspended in the mind of an uneasy sleeper, worried about her fate.

I will take as the example my particular recent Pillow Hill sleep environment, as such, spread out into ambient space lateral to the entoptic vigilogogic, but drifting off into the hypnagogic

and imagine that having mapped that out, and sensed its comforts, its inosculatory pull on any little viewer who knows of sleep, that he simply landscaped-over the Pillow Hill formation, and, voila, that, naturalized, is the Forest of Lost Thoughts

And there it is

Earle’s reactive safe world, a landscapization of the Sleeper’s Pillow Hill world, rendered as a counterspace in the Land of Nod, as if recoiling in convincing safekeeping from the grave threat of the miasmic preexistence of Maleficent’s evil gaze. Really, these, this is what they are. And it is hardly surprising that this dreamworld turns into a dance floor to host a spinning bellsong song of love, in a scene that certainly profiles against the love song in Carousel sung by Gordon MacCrea and Shirley Jones.

It is also in this zone too that the dominant power of human voice is replaced by the crawlspace whisper of animal intelligence, and in effect this casts the space into a magnetic sleep, where creatures act out their umwelt instinctively, by the operation of a power upon them. There is also a “place of sacrifice” shot, so Earle knew of that formation, and that Rose is the figure on that spot, the Tarpeian Rock of her existence

but by and large these woods, the Sleeping Beauty Forest, is shown as a bed safely inosculating one, with prince charming providing the premonition of a happy ending, by his arrival. Beautiful dreaming.

There is also, it is true, a certain amount of comic hijinx here, to entertain the kids who happen to be awake in the theater, but here it is kept in enough restraint that it serves an added symbolic purpose by representing the rest of real life as it might turn out if lived without magic. Magic in the Disney film universe seems to mostly have a use power, that is, it is a good way to get around doing homework and doing the dishes, and the worst part about not having magic is that you have to do the homework and the dishes. It is humorous then that the godmothers are so spoiled by having their magic do all the menial chores of their lives, that when they try to do housework by their own power, it is a mess, and in this the collapsing birthday cake whose falling frosting forces her to end-around replace candles before the avalanche is a nice usage of a well-known symbol of the complicated gooeyness of life itself, without magic.

This is especially true in shots of the blue frosting cake having melted all over the room, a splat that perhaps tacitly completes with failure the idea of seeing through the dream to the truth beyond, that is, the presence of ophthchthon in the movie is also blocked by the malicious presence of Maleficent.

But, then, they cheat, and thus give themselves away. This too is another lesson of Disney films, people always get carried away, and out of control, due to impulse or comic spirit or whatever, and it is from this “errative” all but ADHD level of behavior of beings who should have superior power that much of the questionable humor of Disney films come from. Somehow, they came to think that putting down adult pretentions was the way to go, in terms of making kids laugh at their parents.

But, then, as the crow flies, we get some more dazzling Earle animations of the forest, and the cottage chimney spouting out magic sparks, giving away the game. Indeed, the degree to which the depth of the forest is here conveyed, means that to increase the menace of this section Earle dropped from the entoptic to the symbolic and even lattice level.

Again, at this point, some narrative break, and we come now to the fulfillment of the curse. After all their attempts, Maleficent has still found a way to get at Rose. I forgot how Rose ends up with her head on a table in the castle, but when in the dark Maleficent’s dark eyes appear and from the green glow of her staffmace she lets loose the curse

and the curse is conveyed by the light, the degree to which that orb becomes an effective physical power that grabs hold of Rose and the way that it communicates that it does this by casting Sleeping Beauty as if in a purkinjee shift to greened-over blue and greened-over pink skin, and crown, this is genius animation, as that is exactly how a haunted sleepwalking figure would appear in a Land of Nod dream.

But, it is also true, the complete evil control of her by this green orb, and that she follows it, as if unconscious, makes of THIS Sleeping Beauty, not even Rose or Aurora, but a “Waldemar” of either, a mere offpeel of herself, a rhytchron arrested in a full on depiction in a Disney film of the higher sleepwaking state of mesmeric control of a subject. And as this is an evil outcome of a promised white album result this is a rendering in animation of a negative state of backfired intuition I call Dead Wax. The way that she is drawn to the bricked in fireplace

The way that the fireplace opens up into a dark place behind it

And then we see Maleficent in a door that opens up behind that

And that that door seems to open into another

And there are some sort of secret stairs going up into the castle, to a place unknown

Then she circles round up the stairs, up through the stairs

More stairs

To the fateful room, grimacing green, and then to hallucinate a phantom spinning wheel, her to, against all efforts by the godmothers to prevent it, now glowing green, to touch her finger

And the closeup

And Maleficent wins, gloats

Sleeping Beauty dead. And for her victory makes a dazzling green cathedraled tower of dismal Chloric green gas miasmic green. Such terrific animation, as a sequence in horror equal to a sequence I analyzed in 2014 of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, with a Frankenstein castle allure, and an awful blind evil animus

And so the godmothers settle Sleeping Beauty into her coma condition, awaiting that kiss.

This realization of the curse sequence takes place, I think, in Dead Wax, a world of death, the evil nightmare zone of Maleficent’s mind, it is done by her taking over the castle, and making of it a recoiled appropriated version of her castle, the Black Pyramid, but as a phantom peripteral form a float in ambient space, but an ambient space entirely corrupted by hell on earth Chloric pollution gas and miasma.

I think, then, it is true, somehow, the movie did step up from one altered state of mind to the next, and tops out, or bottoms out, at a truly evil depiction of sleep-waking mesmeric mind control in which in evil exploitation and rage a dark force derails any hope for happiness by scuttling it in death and destruction. But, then, more cleverness, the godmothers have an adequate response. Their first rescue is that

But, then, more cleverness, the godmothers have an adequate response. Their first rescue is that they reduced the death sentence to a sleep sentence. So, having been figuratively the Sleeper, she is now literally the Sleeper, taking up a position in the lattice position. From then on, she becomes the point of contention in the movie. At this point, as I noted, as in Nerval, the movie for its climactic climb to intense nightmare moving I think even to the level of actual clairvoyance locks into a Fugue State or Toad Road tug of war situation lodged like a storm that will not budge over the entoptic and symbolic levels of light dreaming. Again, this IS a dream formation, as one can, in light sleep, get stuck in a back and forth, and things just do in fact go back and forth for hours. One can come to not even know if one is awake or asleep, so this partakes of syngogy too. And the two states of mind are deeply confused with each other, you don’t know. So, again, to reset, in general, in this larger simpler dream forms, we are dealing with a figure eight nexus, swirling in front of our eyes, a mano a mano battle, but each joust partaking of a different state of consciousness. In order that time not pass whilst Sleeping Beauty awaits her true prince the godmothers decide to cast the whole castle and its world to sleep. Here again, all green, the literal Green Chains tossed as a sort of sparkling sleeping powder over all, one of the most truly thrilling pieces of animation I saw in my youth, and idea that has long interested me.

So, this is the general shape of the contention, the black figure eight

and then the response to Maleficent’s curse realized is worked out in the green circle, a response form to the first thrust of aggression, to save face and rescue the situation. This Sleeping City is a well known trope, in story, this is the original version, I think.

Then, the godmothers decide that they have to take the battle directly to Maleficent so venture out of their comfort zone to her Black Pyramid redoubt in far dark sentience, under the star of death.

This is a second return to her castle, and while earlier we saw it only as a sentient rrhexis of the exhalations of the Land of Nod, and the green chains, here the whole monstrous geology that it has created for itself in transit of evil impulse from hell on earth to it and maleficent is manifest, and very much like in another movie of the time that I liked, Jack the Giant Killer, and the evil castle of Pendragon’s castle, here too, the crumbling tower, hardly able to stand, and yet it does

The perilous drawbridge

The awful gargoyles, really scary, almost alive

The almost Witches Sabbath maniacalness of the victory dance of evil in the castle

Out of the fire Maleficent wants to go off and be alone and savor her victory in its full consequence of its evil. The godmothers follow her through her green miasmic castle. Then, in her crystal ball, she glories in the fullness of it, and at this point, the scene opens up an iris shot of her vision, and, wow, here is a Disney movie that in my view fully arrives at the horror of evil clairvoyance. The castle rises up green before her.

We see in her iris POV far off and desolate the high tower

And there is the tableaux of Sleeping Beauty, sleeping

end of pt. 2 of 3.

Sleeping Beauty (1959) and the fullness of dream-based animation, pt. 1 of 3.

Rev, Jan 18, 2022.

A grave responsibility now falls upon me, as I transition to part two of my final life spin through the Disney movies that influenced me, maybe, for better or worse, in my 50s childhood. After having taken apart those movies which had a memorable role in my visual life, I also watched The Sword in the Stone (1963), which I distinctly remember, and which I cultivated in coloring books, and books, and maybe even read a small abridgement of TH White, whose Once and Future King was a landmark later in my reading life in the 7^th grade. But the movie by and large is preoccupied with what I call the hijinx of comic character interaction, which was dangled before the eyes of children like shiny pratfall baubles, and in this it picks up on the worst tendency of the worst example of this odd characterization strand in early Disney going back to the increasingly indefensible nonsense of their telling of Peter Pan (1957). But, then, finally, I decided, hmm, the lamentations of conventions of one time against the stereotypes of another, so I look in on Sleeping Beauty (1958), again, maybe for the first time since I checked in on it as to appropriateness before I left my own kids take a look thirty years ago. And, it is true, Rose herself is, if read as a literal attempt to create a character in conscious modern life, and if, in the jargon of the movie-churchgoers, a “role model” or not for young women (forget that Prince Charming is every bit as disagreeable read that way), Sleeping Beauty herself is ugh, But what I instead found was a work of coherent and composed animation, with the overall goal of creating a dream on screen, that remains a supreme achievement of American animation in the mid-20^th century. In so many ways, so many of the locales and forms and formations and functions of dreaming in the mind of a human being are with keen visual wisdom displayed in all their glory right there on the screen, and so, I have to pause to go through with a very fine-toothed comb, maybe as much as or even more as my treatment of Gerard Nerval’s Aurelia (1853), Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1958). That the Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently hosting an exhibition on the influence of fine art on the Disney animators of mid-century is opportune, with special attention to the uncannily odd forest animation of Sleeping Beauty by Eyvind Earle, whom I will write about.

The movie starts, like so many Disney movies of that era, with a shiny cult book, to be opened up, and then transitioning to the animation. But, this one is different (the original property is now featured in the Met’s exhibition, which would merit a cult visitation if my spirit were still in town),

the book opens up its gothic gem-spangled cover

but then, on pages knocked down a bit from the look of gothic illuminated manuscripts as if reimagined by the preraphaelites, we stay a bit in the story, and the pager of the page turns the pages, and we see the headline A daughter was born…and, below, And they called her Aurora….

and then we join the happy king and queen on the balcony facing the dawn sun, after whom they have named their daughter, and at that point the camera closes in and then after a scene of celebration transitions through the page into the world of animation beyond, and we move into the movie behind or inside the book.

This is standard procedure in an intermedial world where movies were still quite often based on books, and opened up to the screen out of a book, thus the forms of movie scenes inherited from book illustrations in the preceding generations. But the idea in general is like that which occurs in the Prince and the Pauper (1961) when the transition simply goes backward from a drawing in a book made based on the set in the movie to the set in the movie, with the set in the movie therefore, by expanding out of the illustration, being a representation of the “reality” into which we have stepped, in a movie, and then after that you live in the real space of the movie and that is that, done.

Except, that is not what happens here. Here, there is a transition from one type of animation, in the book, to…..not a “reality” by comparison, but another type of animation, or the same type of animation. One has simply slipped from foreground to background in a world of animation that began in the book and holds firm through the movie which means that the secret of Sleeping Beauty as opposed to any other of the Disney animations (though I will look at Snow White today), is that in Sleeping Beauty, the movie never opens out of the book, and we remain throughout, in the book.

Or do we? Where, I think, do the Disney animations imagine these books to be. My guess is that the book is imagined to be a precious gem-studded cult image or ‘bible’ of a period of enthusiasm in one’s life, in the hands of a mother or father reading a fairy story to a child as they settle down in bed to go to sleep. It is the tropaic place of stories like this, all of them lullabyes to send by the Sandman children off to sleep. And if in slightly more grown up circumstances that book remains ensconced in the sheets and pillows of a child’s little world of bed, the Land of Counterpane, a vigilogogic-hypnagogic cross over zone, the zone where “falling asleep” happens, then it becomes as if part of the architecture of the mind of the sleeper, and part of the psychogeography of subsequent dreams, foretold by the objects assembled in bed about one, as guardians or psychopomps to lead you off to sleep. That is, the book remains inside a bed-bound masquerade, and this telling of Sleeping Beauty remains entirely inscribed within the spaces of the book as it rests in the bedding next to the head of a sleeping child who either thinks about it in redreaming trying to fall asleep, or in falling asleep; but in a lattice position, the body in masquerade as if figuring forth into the dream one’s sensing of one’s presence in the bed, inside the entoptic forms that drift in the mind as one falls asleep, and then as they might go positive crossing over to enter into the Forest of Lost Thought, and the Village of Dreams, and other places in the lightest dream state I call the Land of Nod, entoptic images, but in a light sleep. I had a revision, too

“It strikes me that if travel was still something I did a pilgrimage to view the original property of the gem-encrusted copy of the Sleeping Beauty book which opens the movie would be merited in homage, it is now at the Met, but if only to emphasize that seeing an art historic influence on a popular art form tells one nothing about where in the mind this supreme achievement of dream animation in 20th century American art originated. I’ve worked it out, the secret is that once it takes you into that storybook not only do you never leave it but when the parent, thinking the child asleep, departs, the book is left in the bed, its presence suspending the child dreamer in a strange entoptic embrace I call the Green Chains out of which the Land of Nod forest by Eyvind Earle’s animation is just the space between child, book, pillow and parent overcovered in green vistas until that is the book itself becomes the spinning wheel the prick of which makes the dreamer realize with horror the parent now is truly gone at which point said Phantom Parent metamorphoses into Maleficent who unleashes three successive nightmares of such unmatched ferocity the child wakes up screaming, ever after to know that the secret of fairy tales is that…the nightmare….has…already…happened …and you are in it. Or something like that”.

Sketches: the book in the bed; Earle landscapes the bed space; the book pricks; the departed parent unleashes the storm in the mind.

There is an additional thought that supports the idea that Earle was animating bed space, or overcovering the bedding of the Land of Nod with Land of Counterpane forest imaginings. I mentioned that his feel for cliffs and landforms relate to Mantegna. In his art of an artificial earth, Mantegna sought to create a meditation device for viewers of the painting, this was the “landscape of renunciation”, to meditate upon, to reject this world for the world beyond

this, of course, became the basis for the same idea used in Exorcist 2 (1977), and it may be here, once again, that Earle is seeking to convey the idea that the world of fairy tales is, in fact, a depleted world, where there is no agency, and that is why it requires magic. Thus, energy flows down through this world in slow trickles, drip, drip, drip. This idea might go back as well to the 1900-period illustrations of Perrault and Sleeping Beauty where Harry Clarke imagined the world of fairy tale as if pressed hard out of all energy between the pages of a book, and basically a frozen world where power only drips through, in the trees

and this entirely depleted, artificial world, an extreme rococoism, all but paralyzing people in their finery

is conveyed by the idea of woods that simply drip out of the sky, where impellations have gone limp

it seems that Earle might’ve got his idea from this under-tradition inside the world of storybook illustration (in popular culture, to leap back to historic culture is too quick a move).

And, indeed, the evidence suggests, this is exactly where in space this telling of the Sleeping Beauty remains throughout. A possible graph of the masquerade (named after the masks that we put on as we sleep, sensing the room and air around our bodies as we sleep) is this:.

that is, the child is left with the book after the parent reading it to them departs (and they feel the departure, even if fully asleep). The book then remains in the space of the Empty Pillow, but in a way that blocks the negativity of that feeling, and even blocks out fears due to the fact that the parent has stepped away to leave one to sleep alone. This is the Storybook Castle, a shiny little place in the nodding off brain, and if you get to it, you can ride it down into sleep. The Phantom Parent is felt as a shadow behind it and off to the side, and their phantom state is problematic, should the child be woken, but it hangs there as part of the mental architecture of the mind as one nods off to sleep. The nodding off is the tricky part. When one “assumes the position,” that is, whatever position you have chosen as THE position by which you nightly launch into sleep (and it likely becomes one spot for most people over time, mine is on my left side), one’s entoptic fissures, that is, the sparkling inside one’s resting but still awake head takes on a certain characteristic of firework in the mind each form of which predicts another kind of descent. Sometimes when I am in the position the whole bedding feels very close in around me, and I am surprised to not be able to find a comfort spot in it. This feeling of the space being close in usually forms in generally yellow or green veils which drop down over the eyes (since most sleepers are in the dark here, variation by way of sleeper skin color is perhaps reduced, but I acknowledge the variations). This zone can be problematic, it is by way of green streaks and what I call the Green Chains that hag attacks are said by a tingling in a body in discomfort to crawl up on the sleeper, possibly, if they are dragged down to nightmare in this place, wake up in a start like someone has touched them. Beyond the Green Chains is the Blue  Cathedral (2) which is when, by contrast, you settle in, and for some reason I have not yet measured, the entoptic space tonight seems vast and high and towers over you (but from here comes the High Light, which causes insomnia, and it is here, if you are in pain, you might encounter that favorite place in the art of 2020AD in NYC, the Blue Room of pain). But this space also can sweep down in great blue streaks, as the Blue Cathedral usually forecasts a good drift off to sleep. Finally, 3 is the Starry Sky, this is usually encountered by way of some sort of proning in bed, that is, changing position, it involves “seeing” the other side of the bed as a wide open sky of sparkling light blue, and in general sight of this entoptic centerfold in the mind promises a swift descent to sleep.

These are actual transition spaces that I “read” as I settle in. The Green Chains

the Blue Cathedral

and the Starry Sky

But, if there is an ecology of objects in and about the bed, including the book left in the bed, if the child on a sick day plays with the toys or whatever that is the Land of Counterpane, but if one drifts off to sleep next to the book and everything else, assuming that in an incubation ritual everything, as often in a child’s bedroom, is arranged and orchestrated by a sort of unconscious feng shui to help him or her fall asleep. This architecture or terrain is felt by the Sleeper and translated into whatever fata morgana imaginings might be construed by a choice of the Green Chains, Blue Cathedral or Starry Sky, to then begin as if a cloud of hovering form as pictured so often in traditional images of dreaming, such as in Blake, this becomes the inner world of the Land of Counterpane, an inosculatory transition state, at the beach, so to speak, of the in-between (I call it the Luor, and picture the wobble-wobble as a river). One then negotiates the descent to dream. Recently, in another January, every one each year pretty much like the last, the month always characterized by great beginnings, but as if hole up in a hideout in the dead of winter (though mild this year here), I am recovering from a series of health episodes which has resulted in a complete rearrangement of my little sleeping culture of bedside objects.

I have got new pillows to keep my head aloft vertical most of the night, it feels like I am sleeping on the side of a mountain, somewhat pleasurably so; I use my fan now more aggressively to circulate the air around me; but I also bought a tiny Japanese humidifier and besides being beautifully designed it’s got a crazy way by way of lights to signal it is working or not and on top a kind of wobble-wobble in plastic meant to represent, its name, Snow Mountain, after which I have named this whole terrain. This whole bedbound ecology of objects, as I have read it in countless horror movies, if the body falls to a lattice position, where in heaviness the dreaming that results is but an external figure of what is going on in or on the body, can shape the mental world of the dream, and since it all starts with the pillow I call this formulation Pillow Hill.

Here is how I imagine this going. There are the scenes, in real life, the bedding, then the landscape, in the mind’s eye, Land of Nod half-dreaming

and again

etc

And what does this have to do with Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Everything, for from beginning to end in wisdom and thrill the entire movie is animated as if a full dream experienced in the Land of Nod of a sleeping child, centered around its Pillow Hill and bedbound world. Somehow, the Disney animators then understood that for the story to enchant it had to be a dream, and the animation had to help the viewer as if by a reverse of the Big Sleep, fall asleep to the story, and dream it through.

Consider the presentation of the child in the throne room, a kind of gothic variation on the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. The animation remains entirely by the book, in the book, it is as if the Sleeper circumscribing the movie is still thinking of the book illustrations and has just redreamt them in their mind and activated them, turning an inanimate picture into an animate sequence. But, then, something magic happens. A radiation of light descends in a slant from the high clerestory of the cathedrallke nave, for we are in the Blue Cathedral, if it not that blue here, and as a spotlight but with some sort of magic virtus or physical presence that allows three fairy god mothers to descend upon it, meaning that this is a descent of an impellation of magic into the scene, from some other place in the dream, a magic presence enters the scene.

This is a visit from spirits of the fata morgana. A fata morgana is a far place that the Sleeper dreams of to cast their mind out past the limit of their worries, and dream away in an open and ambient high place.

This is a real dream form which I have found in numerous movies. The fata morgana is a positive lifting, the igniis fatuus is a negative version of the same. But, here, the energy is reversed, and three small figures in bell-like dresses descend through the sparkle (the entoptic shimmer). And they come down in red, green and blue

Their mission is to honor the child by offering her three gifts, to help her on the path of life. The red fairy godmother gives ever politically correct Aurora the gift of beauty, as she does this, her wand emits a spark, that then spins upward over the cradle

And then breaks out through the space of the scene

to a far off outer space, where it takes on the full form of a spinning galaxy

And we see Sleeping beauty as if created out of the starshine as a beautiful woman she will one day be. Then the lyrical scene transitions, lips as sweet as the red red rose, we see a closeup of roses

That then opens up into a purple place where she walks in sparkle in a kind of purple room, She’ll walk with springtime whereever she goes.

And then all that dissolves into a blue sparkle, shed upon the crib.

Where is this, in the mind?

This requires some mental gymnastics on my part, as in this the movie, a creation of the modernist mindset, which did not overtly acknowledge many of the in-between hypnagogic states between waking and REM dreaming, or deep sleep, the appearance of three gifts, even if in personified form, would entail the work of what I call the state of syngogy, which happens in the second nightmare in the eldritch formation, when one goes a-searching for those three talisman skills and powers unique to you that will help you lead a more intuitive happy life. But this dream formation in my system, as mapped out from watching thousands of horror movies, takes place in hypnagogy, as part of the expanded nature of the searching involved in that second dream. One tiptoes around the under the bed, to open space on the Far Path and there might find indeed Orion’s Belt, or the three talismans as the basis of one’s own Umwelt, as I call it, borrowing from Uexhull. This would mean that, in fact, the Sleeper here, the baby in the crib, is situated in the classic Sleeper pose, as I have worked it out, lying on the lattice position, at the central core of the dreaming mind, in hypnagogy, and, then, AFTER a first nightmare, we go right into the second nightmare, wherein by the bracket above we are cast into a state of syngogy where we do not know if we are awake or asleep, and then the search is made and the talismans found. Since the baby obviously would not so dream, and could not undertake that searching for the talismans, the fairy godmothers intervene to represent by personification the presence of those impulses as they foretell futures, rendered in a talismanic form.

and, this also means that they have descended into the baby’s dream world by way of a turned on averunncate or pursuit-aversion vector, as such

in each case, then, as the spell manifests in a spiral that wafts out into a far space in the mind, their appearance as talisman-bestowers inside the vector makes of them aversion figures to some unspoken danger or pursuit without, and this opens them up like the form of the Blue Well as a kind of gateway to the salvation space benignly imagined of far sentient space beyond, something like this.

which means that the whole action of the spell as it spirals from a crib up into black sentient space traces over countless instances of mirrors opening up into a backspace to then spin out into a talismanic space far, far out in the brain, right here in Sleeping Beauty. It is of importance, in relating this scene to countless others of children settling down for the night in horror movies, that the second galaxy spin of the wish of song spins more quickly and in figure as if the projection of a magic lantern of figures cast by a rotating device set next to bedsides of children to lull them off to sleep

see this in Annabelle Comes Home (2019). The birdlike nature of the gift of song also points to the hit song from the movie which has the spinning waltzlike quality of fauxtry (that is, pseudo-poetry) I call bellsong, evoking a deep ringing crescendo in the ear. The fact that she also ascends as a spinning as if figure on the top of a wedding cake into the far sky of stars, evokes again the fact that she is living under some sort of all but astrological impellation of magic into the world. That that far place is like a feather-thin gazebo and periacqueductal in nature further bespeaks her serene life to come.

So, unknowingly–or perhaps they knew exactly what they were doing–the animators (and I have not parsed whom from whom in the long lists in the credits of various sorts of animating contributors), the Fairy godmothers arrive as if simply descending peacefully down the fata morgana radiation to the Sleeper in “vigilogogy”. But they have set in in a jumpstart to in media res in the second nightmare of the eldritch dream formation at the core of most horror and dream-based movies, as the embodiment of the premature bestowal of her Umwelt talismans onto Aurora so that her life can be lived in “white album”, by intuition. This means two things. One, in the fairy world, we are shown a world that is ALREADY living a nightmare, that is ALREADY involved, before we arrive in a constant nightmare, and suffering mightily from it. And, two, the nature of this nightmare is pursuit by an evil force of innocents who have now by the apotropaic gift-giving votive offerings of the Fairy Godmothers been armed with aversive weapons to like prince charming by her own character’s luminous power fend evil off. So, this is a contested descent, and they know it and knew it.

And therefore it is of no surprise, but yet of wonder, that at this point, the whole nave of the cathedrallike throne room is shaken by a violent gust of wind that breaks upon the main door, in a scene repeated this past year in The Green Knight (2021)

And then the whole room is as if cast back into dark sleep, as one literally sees in the very animation a rendering in lightning-lit form of the Green Chains wiping out the attempt of the place to fall asleep into its dreams of salvation. And then out of the green chains stirs up a mystic miasmic sort of green fire, still insipidly awful and out of it comes a literal Hag Attack, as imagined often by bodies asleep inside the close space of the Green Chains, and it is a malicious presence I perhaps remember best, having often inscribed her in coloring books, Maleficent .

And, really, astonishing, her disruptive presence on screen mimics precisely where she should appear in the unsettled sleep of children, as a green hag attack embodying the Green Chains, wiping out the magic that tried to take hold below.

below.

Maleficent appears, Sleeping beauty, 1 19 22

But she is not, after all, only a Hag Attack, and only borne on the Green Chains of entoptic drifting, yet vigilogogic, she has the fearsome hallucinatory power of a nightmare form suddenly manifest by the sinking of that visualization into dream itself, and she has a depth and richness of sheer malice that cannot derive merely from the interferences of the Green Chain. Notice in my formulation of where the Fairy Godmothers were really coming in, cautiously, hopefully, along the turned on averunncate vector, trying to fend off danger THEY KNEW WAS OUT THERE, hurrying, to get that third wish in, before interrupted. But their talismanic wormhole whooshes out into the dream of a bright far sentience not overcome by the darkness and takes on the colors of, in sequence, blue, green, then, skipping orange, red, and these are in my system the colors of the layers of “hell on earth”, the Avornos blue layer, the Chloros green layer, skip Mulciberium orange, then, the red Pandemonios layer, with black for the Bottomless Pit below. And it would seem that a kind of collision is happening here as the nightmare that the kingdom is already in meets the terrorism done upon it by Maleficent, and she exists in that world at the edge of the Bottomless Pit, and manifests in exhalations of dismal miasma come out of Chloros, the green gas hell that has crept as a kind of fog over the ochlocratic ruins of America in the past year, so that, yep, I think it true, the animators have not only fashioned a lovely hag attack to scare children, but called her up out of the very depths of imagined hell on earth, she the goddess Chloros, evil demon of green gas, miasma, poison, suffocation, death, Maleficent . Magnificent animation, informed by deep, deep visual wisdom,

And, then…and then, she takes us INTO her nightmare world. We spin back down the exhalations here too, this time by gazing at a green spiral in her sceptre top

and it spins now into another dark space, encircled by eyes, the curse,

and then kablooey, she explodes to vanish.

In her spell curse she copies over the talismanic wormholes of the godmothers, casting it perhaps out to her haunted castle, which is the Black Pyramid, or the nightmare-depressed fairy tale world we have been thrown into.

Maleficent ’s curse, 1 18 22

In a recent rereading of Halloween 2 (1978) and 3 (1982) I have newly deeply located the source of the mania of Michael Myers in an ur-celtic goddess of miasma deep, deep below. That same goddess showed up in the stone of The Stone Tape (1972) to pull Jane Asher down and out into its black bottomless pit. In the graph above Maleficent interjects herself as an interruptive presence to block with black magic and rage and the white magic which the godmothers have tried to institute before she got to them. And in this she strikes me as a reverse form of the demon Savoy, a figure of the in-between disturbed. Indeed, I think the final awful vision of Sleeping Beauty on her bier, dead, in pale blue, takes place in Maleficent’s castle

and is meant to horrifically blot out the pleasant dreams the godmothers had spun up to then.

Beauty’s Sleep, Sleeping Beauty  1 18 22

that is, under the Blue Sun, and at a child’s christening, when no one wants to think such things, she sees Sleeping Beauty dead, and makes all dread and see that awful thought too, which they mustve known was a threat, and thus she also brings thanatopsis, the seeing of death, into the happy occasion, and in a way that could also be construed as more work by her presence, kidnapping as it were the Sleeper in vigilogogy and casting her into a dead state in far black sentience

and it is in this rude, not entirely approved of, or in line with my models way, that she in fact ALSO introduces epigogy, of the state of consciousness that results from a negative outcome of the third nightmare, the zone of monsters, of which she is the ONE.

Thus, Maleficent is not that different from any of the other monsters in horror or fairy tale, except that here, by incredible animation, she is made an abrupt, unexpected-dreaded interruptive figure, casting a happy day into utter abject misery.

In any case, now the king is like, attack, and as now in disturbed sleep we see the Green Chains commandeered as lances by the guard of the castle to attack she, rather amazingly, disappears by folding in

under a hovering yellow light, then compresses into a dazzling green glowing orb, the Green Dragon, as I have worked it out in other movies like Sinister (2012)

and she is gone, but the horror is true and real and not a threat but a fact, which now must be dealt with.

But then comes the loophole, the third godmother, red, she can now ameliorate the death spell by paroling it, she will not die, but sleep, until a prince charming kisses her and by true love, in a world so corrupt it must be the true vaccine, to wake her to happiness ever after, a long shot.

but this spell is delivered in darkness, to a dark silhouette of Sleeping Beauty

And in retracing this gift over the stain created of miasma by Maleficent the movie once again shows great command over its dream psychodynamics, and visual wisdom.

I place this last place in the Half-Life space at the top of the conjure vector, where she will be safe.

The “place of sacrifice” in ambience as seen by epigogy has not yet formed, but this suspended animation state, which offers time to find a final way out, is entirely tropaic in horror and dream movies, and in it Sleeping Beauty is both the Cassandran state, the very palladium of the city, and world, and also a bit of Acoupane, a graveyard presence, living in hiding, upon whose safety the fate of the whole kingdom depends. This also means she represents a dream-figure, as I construe it a composite of Cassandran-Acoupane figure (see my piece on David Altmejd), embodying the curse, watching out for its fulfillment, the very palladium or talismanic being, a dream figure, not an actual human girl to emulate as a role model, in its purest form. Even then, before settling into literalism, even then dream figures were given the power to walk as they do in the world they live in. So, a remarkable fact here, all of the animation here is entirely readable as dream formations generated in the mind of a troubled Sleeper, ever aware that, for the sound sleeping, this is the world of dream, and nightmare preexists it.

End, part 1 of 3.

The coffin world of Nosferatu: Murnau’s imprinting of coffin imagery in his effacing masterpiece, part 3 of 3.

Rev., April 4, 2016.

Then there is a genuine carrying, and lifting, in an almost Actaeon pose, as Mina is catched down from the railing she is dangerously sleep walking on, so a carrying of bodies

Nosferatu has been conceptualized throughout as a demon of grasping hands, in keeping with the hypnagogic focus of the period, which saw no worse horror than in a hand grasping in at you close

he has grasped at the picture

he has raised his hands in weird concern with Hutter earlier, but in a way that terrifies Hutter

it was an injury by hand which sparked his vampiric lust

all suggest Nosferatu as a being that operates mostly by hand, and by the menace of his hands. It is true, him carrying the boxes remains weird, but it would seem, as a cinematic device, to remind us that the only other thing you carry like that is a body, and that menace is in his self-service. If moreover you compared the boxes to crates of something else, this carrying might be a camouflage action, but then too suggest objects placed that way, such as large trunks from overseas, or even explosives. This is carried out to its most extreme unreal effect when back in Wisborg Nosferatu also carries his coffin down the street, as if it is a house fan or appliance taken home from the story. It’s just weird.

it is of course meaningful that these carryings are all framed by coffinlike architectural enclosures

even when Mina and Hutter reunite at the house she is staying at, he happens to be outside, like a kind of inverted serenade, his base instrument made over into a coffin, and he bays at the moon in protest of the love with, smelling Mina no doubt, it is very, very eerie

at present then I will just say that the coffin carrying by himself is the result of, intellectually, Murnau symphonically playing with the coffin in the shadows of an imprint of carrying or saving bodies in the movie, but then it also emphasizes Nosferatu’s makeshift, undercover, doithimself ethos, to not let anyone else in on his reality (I am pretty sure that this motif morphed into Django dragging a coffin with a gun in it around the Wild West in Neri’s first outing as him). But back to the cart. The last coffin on top of the cart makes a pyramid. One is reminded that in the text of the movie vampire is spelled vampyre, and so an implication of both pyramidal Egyptian lore and witchburning is suggested in the appearance in the movie of a pyramid form. Then, too, it is made out of wood, and coffins. But then something funny happens. At present, I place this scene’s use of coffins as a motif behind an imprint, with shadows used to empty out the shot seen from afar in a nice set. But it is also the emptiness and the distance which, broken down to a further micro level, allows for yet another previously unrecognized device expressing supernaturalism in the film, and that is that Nosferatu does a hocus pocus with the lid of the last coffin, and it floats up in the air, Hutter cannot believe what he is seeing (it is just a splice device within a speed up device, so related to the carriage)

And then as it floats up into place, to suspend itself over the coffin, Nosferatu rather ably climbs up, lies down in, the lid closes down over him, and then the horses take it all off, all of it magically.

and to make matters even more surreal, when the cart leaves, we see more clearly that it too is fringed as it were below by another draping to the ground, just like the carriage, and for that the whole thing also looks like a rolling coffin, but in this case, the joke is, it actually is, six coffins, with the driver operating it all by magic vibes emitted from his sleeping in the top coffin

certainly, this is not a steady load, not a practical load, not a shippable item, it is magic, and Murnau only turns up the magic by having us believe that this shipment from Varna would come by raft up down river from the castle to the port, over rapids, on a flat raft on which the six coffins in the same pyramid were arrayed, to get things by, a scene of startling poetic unreality

Murnau now pulls everything in his coffin world forward on the screen so that one sees only the side shots and walking off camera effects of the ship, which device is now used more here than anywhere else in the movie, to front in effacement the fact that the imprint is momentarily vacated, to be now filled in as a motif by the coffin-like ship. We see a lot of it just going by, flat and wood, and it moves off camera a lot as if to say it is off course, or not on a steady course

another aloof effacing shot, this time in shadow

the sails are woven back into coffin world by way of the clothing covering on the horses of the carriage and the cart

to then see the ship as pretty much, as a sailor sleeps on canvas in the foreground, an extension of Nosferatu’s coffin

here I guess Murnau felt he needed to accent the supernatural nature of the presence so, just as with the micro-micro hocus pocus in the cart scene, he makes use of the only instance of superimposition of Nosferatu appearing in the crates of the baggage

There is an implication of a miasmic theory here, that his spirit imbues all the boxes, filled with dirt from the black plague, that is, infecting, since it is miasmic disease-infested dirt, it can also, according to miasma theory, reverse the modern notion of nature, and cause to arise to horrible birth from it awful creepy crawlers. I think the implication here is that Nosferatu as an undead being is a kind of negative mother giving birth to horrors in a plague ridden nature, and his offspring in this case would be rats, the rats actually coming with the dirt, and possibly even believed to have been maggoted to life from the dirt

his germinating all that time in that dirt in that box in that wooden ship would also account for his altered appearance when he rises up, with hands that now looks like branches, as if of a mandrake man, he is taller, like the masts of the ship, and his coat is more canvaslike, and covering, it just seems that the process of miasma growth on the dirt which caused rats to rise up also caused him to take on a more gruesome vegetable runamock nature

here too dropping down to a micro level of effects below the emptying out in the background, Murnau has him rise up as if on an invisible gurney, like a sail being hoisted on the ship

so it is no surprise he becomes as it were the figurehead of the ship, the figure of its sails, of its existence as a floating coffin

and then the sails go black

certainly one of the most memorable sequences in the movie is when the ship drifts without crew or direction into the port, and Murnau films this beautifully by reversing and then enacting his commonly used device of walking off or into camera, spied on by an iris 

Herzog understood this as such good filmwork that he basically recreated it in his version

and then the movie uses an actual dissolve, over space, not just time by way of imprint, as the sails reveal themselves as, in fact, covers for the coffins, as they pull back, and dissolve to a shot of the canvas cover over the hold

and then as we saw the coffin magically lifted, by split editing, onto the cart, so now the canvas covering the hatch peeled off of its own accord, magically

and the door opens magically, and the rats, and then Nosferatu come out

since I already discussed him offloading the coffins on his own, without detection from public officials, I will simply wrap up this survey of imprinting of the coffin idea onto the motifs of coffins, and then other motifs, by noting that the house opposite Hutter’s that Nosferatu rents is itself a kind of coffinlike place

its many eyes project a sense of crazy palinopsia Mina’s way

when she submits, to try to keep him the night, to kill him, it is directly to him, across the canal, saying come and get it

and she symbolically sacrifices herself by sinking into the coffinlike grip of the house

with the whole night now filled with Nosferatu’s approach, a miasmic black cloud, covering her, depressing her

again in his coffin grip in this shot

by shadow now the railing, perhaps in a prototype moment relative to all later horror which made so much use of the railing, a coffin, and his hands now grow out into their most extremely vegetable form

Having previously shown us Hutter being engulfed in the shadow, against the coffinlike wood backstop of his bed

Wisborg, Mina to thrust out of her arms in warning, in dread, in her bed and gown

The contagious connection between the bed in which Hutter lost his soul to the vampire, and the bed to which he puts his wife, the marriage bed, act in magic contradiction to each other, for the crime of the one bed to be expunged by her acting now in defense against the vampire in the other. In this scene, she has all but fainted by the realization that Nosferatu is coming, Hutter puts her to bed, as if sick

It is to be noticed that over her, relatively speaking, is an icon of the virgin, over him, a picture of a knight, and then to the right, a small cameo, telling of the old man coming her way, under these property level whisperings of the complexity of the triangle now created by her to save the town, the drama of the moment is enhanced. In order for Mina to carry out her plan, to be, basically, unfaithful to Hutter, by letting a man in her bed, but in a weird, fetishistic way, to suck on her neck, and to keep her there all night, which will catch him at sunrise to kill him (this lore undoubtedly linked to how to kill a unicorn lore, though one doubts that Mina is a virgin, maybe she still is), she must dissociate herself from her personal modesty and values, and do what needs to be done and this is expressed by the fact that Murnau uses mirroring as a device, to show her split off self, to stand between the man and his evil, in her duty. This mirroring device would be a shadowing cast back into the property

having come formerly to Hutter by way of shadows, Nosferatu comes to her in shadowplay too. Here, however, it is much more intense. In silent movies, in the body language of the time, women seemed to grab their breasts more, as a sign that their hearts were constricting with fear. This was yet a time of breast-beating, mea culpaing, and the language of the breast-heart relation, the breast as exterior expression of heart, both as the joint expression of the special heartedness of woman, had not yet given way to the dissociation of body whereby the breasts detached from heart to become a boob with a life of its own bouncing around regardless of the heart on the chest of a woman. For that reason, for their quaintness, to see her grab her heart is intensely touching, and still very moving, and weird

even weirder is that she backs up several steps, bringing herself in profile with the ominous ruins beyond, still clutching her heart.

now she too is backed up in fear into bed, this is no safety bed, but a coffin bed, a place of her death, and being murdered in her sleep, an archetypal fear, bed, as here again amazing shadow play as Nosferatu’s hand comes like a creeping shadow up from under across her torso

to actually, miasmically, and magically, replacing her clutch, with his, to clutch her breast, and cause her to spasm

and then soon after, the cock crows, same shape

Nosferatu feeding on her all night along, in a weird sex ritual, roosters up in shock

Even prison crazy, on whom too much time is wasted in the final reel, in my opinion, hears it, as does his graffito of a monster

the windows now become the coffin, holding the rising sun, he steps over in front of them

and the direct light causes him to go poof, in a rather simple dissolve shot (but with very good alibi use of the curtains, with his face profiled as a physiognomy of the windows opposite, and even the silhouette in a very early appearance signifying, perhaps in a prototypical way for horror, the extermination of his line, he goes transparent

and then there is only miasmic smoke receding into dust between the silhouette cameos, by the coffin bed, where the wife is, in fact, dead, having given herself and her purity to the killing of the menacing vampire Nosferatu

it is interesting that when found to be dead, we again see this news through the second hand grief of an old man out front, then the piece by the door is a replica of the thorn piece that was over the bed that Hutter slept in at the inn, reminding us who started up this business that got her killed, she is reflected in the mirror, as if to state now that her spirit has flown, and then here again is a silhouette, talking of the annihilation of the family line

by this cursory review of Murnau’s classic Nosferatu, which I have seen maybe 35 times, and which I never tire of, simply because it is such a beautifully put together work of silent film art, it is apparent that in splicing film into onionskins of surface, fictive center and support, Murnau made use of surface iris, closeup , but his real art in the foreground was in the draining and effacing gesture, used repeatedly, of the scene walking out of frame, to the side, and that this then delivered the shot into the fictive space in a weird, disconnected way, implying connections between the fictive elements that might not otherwise have been suggested, and that then in the foreground of the fictive space Murnau all but fixated on the formalist property of the imprint and then behind it kept that imprint intensely twisted by dropping it back over a number of related motifs, which he loosened up by way of shadowing from behind, to allow the imprint to pass from motif to motif, and all of then made even more open ended and deeply emptying out by repeated emptying out to properties and sets in weird ways.

By effacing the surface of the film, to focus on the imprint of the fictive space as by shadow it was let to rhyme with forms of other motifs, these rhymes given space by background emptying strategies, Murnau created his haunted art of “symphony pictures,” a unique disposition of push-pulls among the onionskins of the layers of a clip of film. In this note I have shown that one of the primary imprints of the movie was the coffin as an idea, and that through shadowing strategies, and effacing strategies in front of it, this motif was then widely and all but musically transferred to a number of motifs, including the inn oven, the beds in the movie, the table at Nosferatu’s, the doors of his house, then the boxes of dirt, also the ship, and then even the house be bought back in town and then Mina’s bed too. All of this indicates that by this means Murnau was an imprinting formalist who nonetheless involved that imprint in effacing and shadowing strategies either side of it which marshalled form to create a beautifully formal and conceptually weird world of the coffin, the death world of the land of the phantoms.

Murnau’s effacing “symphony picture,” Nosferatu (1922) and the coffin world in it, pt. 2 of 3.

Rev., April 2, 2016.

Now Hutter gets up, and after a good stretch, wants to wash up a bit, there is basin nearby with water, as only good inns have, and then he does something strange. It might be normal in the habitus of the maker of Murnau, or maybe Murnau found out that was how gentlemen in the old days washed up, but he strips his gown half off, and then ties it around his waist, to stand at the basin in that way (I know why he does this, because some days I take off only my shirt to shave and splash water on my face).

But this, directly undernearth the property, the icon of the Virgin Mary, which has become a rather important apotropaic device here, bouning again off imprints already on our eyes of Hutter turning away in fear, as in the inn

Already communicates to me that even in his happy bound out of bed happy body language he is beginning to be weighed down by fears expressed by mechanical responses to triggers of fear. In any case, this pose strikes me as a crucifixion pose, and communicates clearly that he is being set up as a victim, a sacrificial victim, doing his own purification rite. At this point, I want to bounce out of the scene to run the imprint of this through the movie. In fact, it runs symphonically in the fictive space as both a motif, cloth, or, more precisely, bedding, and the crossed body gesture. This pose echoes by imprint in Nosferatu’s clock (note: though named Count Orlok, to avoid copyright infringement, I have always just called him by the title, like “Dracula”)

in Nosferatu commenting on the precious blood of his cut thumb

in his backing off in terror from his entirely inappropriate sucking, hands on an encoffined chair

in a quite different morning stretch the next morning

in his rather remarkably, again proving that human beings believe in the apotropaic power of beds and of not looking, when he covers himself in a bedsheet in that bed, to avoid Nosferatu’s incursion

in Mina’s (sic, named “Ellen”) intuitive calling out

in a reverse shot of the same room, with the door that violated him, him now tearing up those sheets, to make a rope of them

in making that rope, it scowling a you wont get away that easily as he drops down

in the billowing sails of the ship

and in Mina’s heart-breast grabbing gesture

even her remarkable, and remarkably rare, exposure of self to Nosferatu, and I will offer myself up to you shot, the sun seeing through her gown to her armpits, crucified

then too even the death of Mina/Ellen, with Hutter present now as the depositioner, the picture over her

The picture

Which seems to be a lord of some sort, and the virgin again above him. It is clear to me that having already worked with imprinting some gestures and props to carry on an imprint of a triggered feeling through the movie, this shot starts up another whole cascade, to link the movie and its main mis en scene to the very intimate matters of the bed, of cleanliness, of sleep, of love, of sex. I am pretty sure that in his own rational mind conceptualization of his practice Murnau did most of this unconsciously or just because, but he was likely aware that if he was in fact calling his working with film clippings in this way, from imprint to imprint, by way of motifs and shadows, carried in properties and sets, then he understood that the art of it was so new that he only could find one word to describe what he was doing: symphony.

An even better cascade of imprinted terror-triggering is unleashed in the movie based on that coffin motif, which I will explore in the sequel to this note.

In a previous note on Murnau’s Nosferatu, I suggested that he had developed a special craft in film making, which entailed manipulating the back-and-forth internal envelope-pushings of the art film in such a way as to create a “symphony picture.” Unlike a “radio picture,” a symphony picture was characterized by a certain set of movements from surface, through fictive space to ground, in the film shot, and then parsing each space with further micro devices to enhance or efface, and then even to toss in some micro-micro adjustments, to get it just right. In other words, while a viewer looks at a film played on a screen and sees only a flat surface, and this tendency might have been encouraged even more by the credo of flatness which dominated painting in the last half of the 20^th century, in fact what the viewer is gazing into is a box, and that box has at least nine layered screen-skins, each of which might also be peeled back, and it is through that that the director of the movie makes a movie. I imagine if I worked this out in detail, I might almost present, perpendicular to the viewer, a graph of the development of the mis en scene but then, more importantly, the agentic push-pull of the passing imagery on a screen, something like this

This note will make no attempt to do so, but having established that in Nosferatu Murnau had developed an art of layering formal rhymes between motifs, and shadows, all ruled by the concept of imprint, to create a richly layered sequenced movie, which viewers who appreciate pure cinema still acknowledge as cinema, I want to detail the most amazingly weird part of the layering of the milieu of Nosferatu, the imprint of the coffin, as an object, as a concept, and as an imprint itself, which then invests motifs, and by means of shadows even spaces, to make of the entire proceeding a visit to the inside of a coffin.

No doubt, the central shock of the movie remains this amazing shot, when Hutter, searching the castle on the morning after, sees Nosferatu sleeping in his coffin

the shock of that moment is then later reprised when we see Nosferatu rise up from the hole of the ship, and earlier, when we see him rising magically from his coffin, in the hull of the ship, but in some odd way having by the power of the ship or his feeding on it not only grown taller, and bigger, but become more woodlike, with hands that now have expanded beyond even animal claws, into tree branches, the vegetable creature, the mandrake beast of deepest German lore

Going back to a formula of nine layerings of the shot worked out in the previous note,

Nosferatu is presented as seen through, on the surface, an iris, in closeup, as an imprint, this shot to imprint as prototype the whole movie, every leading up to and from it, and that imprint is activated in the motif of coffin imagery, which by way of shadow transfers or circulates back onto a number of other motifs, for all of it, dipped in emptiness, populating property and set, create in its entirety a coffin world, a world where everything is a coffin, where all the horrors are conveyed through coffinlike devices, and where even the supernatural moments in the movie, of which there are maybe, maximum four, Nosferatu gliding too quickly to Hutter’s door, Nosferatu hocus-pocusing the last coffin on top of the pyramid of them on his cart, Nosferatu rising up boardlike out of his ship coffin, and finally the canvas and the lid of the ship’s hill coming off by themselves, all of it is encoffined in back of the imprint of the above two shots.

It is probably best to go as far from the image of Nosferatu’s coffin as possible, to demonstrate that the coffin form, in a hyperformalist symphony picture making process, pervades the movie. I have already stated that the oven in the inn that Hutter stops in is coffin like, and that his bed in that inn is also coffin like. But, now follows surely one of the strangest sequences in the whole movie, or in any movie, the arrival of the Nosferatu coach in the middle of the night (here shot day for night, and still looking rather daytimey). The menace of the country is conveyed by the sight of a very odd structure, a single wooden shed atop an impossible peak, a kind a burial in fact

And then there are crossroads shrines, more wooden enclosures to ward off evil at the roadside

these suggest, as was more or less true, that in Europe nature itself was deeply feared, and culture-in-nature, that is, peoples coming from the outside in, were also frightening, this resulted in a gridding over of the remote parts of the continent with a whole network of watchhouses, toll stations, crossroads shrines, gibbets, etc etc, all of them marking boundaries, like Greek herms, and all serving, from their wooden basis, to ward off evil, and especially death. And yet if you come into such a land of phantoms, where death pervades the atmosphere, and one always thinks about death, and the whole grid of the land is set up to fend off death, this would make the land look like a land of death to you. In fact, this is exactly what spaghetti Western directors made of the American Wild West in those movies in the 60s, and it would appear that that is how Murnau envisioned Transylvania, the land of phantoms and ghosts, and demons and death, with reminders of death, in wooden form, all about, a vast cemetery. Thus, the whole landscape is also, in a way, a kind of coffin, with the coffin-earth itself as a motif having a long, deep history going back to the concept of the landscape of renunciation developed during the Renaissance (more of that in another essay). It therefore figures that nature in that world is also encoffining, that is, always threatening death, and that whatever human comes to you from that world must as it were rise up from the death of the death-in-life of life in that world, and come up from nature to greet you. This I think is why Murnau has Hutter stand like a spectator in a Lorraine painting, while the mystery carriage of Nosferatu comes at him from around the bend, out of nothing, suddenly in the far distance appearing. Because it emerges in this way, there is a moment when it is suspended at the what am I seeing? Moment, which is disturbing, is it nature or culture

then there is something even more amazing in this sequence, and that is that a bush has grown up in the passage, with the actual path having to wind around it. But what it looks like in shot is that the carriage, having begun to clarify itself as such, momentarily ducks in behind, then comes out again, and in both cases kind of recedes back into nature

even more amazingly, when after picking up Hutter, Nosferatu turns the carriage around, and, in a sequencing of the shot never again repeated, has him return exactly to where he came from, by the way he came, all but retracing his steps, as if driven by some automatic magic (a concept picked up in the runaway horses in The Curse of Dracula), the carriage with Hutter in it rides away from the camera, and is momentarily consumed in the bush, Hutter returned to nature, buried in nature, symbolically, in a foreshadowing, killed

as Nosferatu arrives, he could not be weirder. He is dressed in an overlarge kind of overcoat and a pointed and feathered hat that makes him look something like a demented robin hood, his eyes alone evil eye out of this get up, his collars pulled up high. All of it presents him as a “figuring out” of the pine trees all about, a figure seen as a physiognomy in the facture of the foliage of the trees, and now in the flesh, but, even up close, you still are not sure what you are seeing (I have only had this “start” of seeing a person very upclose but starting because you were not sure what of them you were seeing when I saw a man’s face peer up at me from down in the jumble of pants legs on an NYC subway in the 80s, and it was a Vietnam vet who had lost his lower body in the war trolleyed himself by his powerful arms and heavily gloved hands panhandling through the lower cuffzone of the subway cars; and again an earlier time when a little girl asked me what I wanted for breakfast, when I was in the hospital, and when I looked at her, thisclose, I saw she had no face, a victim of fire. This “start” is what we are meant to feel, looking at Nosferatu in this way, what is he?

We also see that the coach is heavily in tarp, as are the horses, ridiculously so

What can this mean? On a simple formal level, perhaps is simply contends with Hutter’s rather lavish coat, to demonstrate that they all lived in a world where dressing warm was done this way. Maybe it is cold still, at that time of year (April). Another possibility is the Ku Klux Klan reading, the draping of the horses, and of the carriage, makes the draping of Nosferatu less noticeable, and thus the mind just sees an invisible blur. It may also be that at one point in his glorious history Nosferatu did do up horses in all the formal regalia of jousting, but now he is reduced to a sloppy, decadent version of it, in the above way. This I have not entirely worked out, but, as a device, this effaces the carriage, the horse, and Nosferatu, to add to their phantom character, simply and only because the mind is presented with something unexplained. But it is when Nosferatu turns the carriage about that we are in for the biggest shock, it hardly seems like an entirely going concern, it looks very boxy, and rather uncarriagelike, it almost looks like a kind of hayride wagon, that has been retrofit cheaply as a carriage, another sign of the rundown notthereness of the place. But most of all, it almost looks like the carriage is just a bunch of boxes, or, rather, a concatenation of coffins, and Hutter has just, unbeknownst to him, just willingly crawled into his coffin

this becomes even more pronounced when we get the full turnaround and see that it is almost as if the carriage has shrunk down into two boxes, being dragged along on the ground by the horses, and the change in the nature of the carriage is so extreme and unexplainable one does wonder if the special effects people devised several versions of the carriage, full, half, quarter, to actually take a shot here of half of the carriage being dragged away

and in those incredibly uncomfortable boxes, being dragged along on the ground, Hutter is kind of knocked into a near comatose state of whatthehell

when the carriage works its way through the weird landscape, it takes on even more the character of a coffin, against a crossroads

the creepiness of the two tier coffin carriage in the above shot perhaps suggest to me that that wooden trunk structure raised on a mount to the left of center, is in fact a pair of statues, maybe at one point crossroads shrines, but now seeming to have been by vandalism turned toward each other to illicitly kiss and embrace

and that the landscape itself is an effacing device, emptying out the coffin, it empties out to an empty shot, framed far forward by an iris, peering back into the film to see if there is anything there left to see (and then too as before the coffin carriage disappearing into, being swallowed up by phantom nature)

as the coach proceeds, the scene now crosses over entirely into the land of the phantoms, as we see it in a solarized shot, with all things negativized

This is a micro-micro device within the arsenal of emptying devices in the background of the movie, and the fact that the carriage goes there, means that Murnau is also possibly working with a dream model, moving from waking to deep dream state, and this would be the whoosh down into dream. It is creepy in the extreme, if only because it is unexplainable (this effect then later rationalized as the St Elmo’s fire of Coppola’s remake). And when the carriage moves through this world, it is all black, and blocked out, more like a coffin than ever before, and even all detail from Nosferatu is effaced, to make of nothing more than a guardian of the grave. This shot then enlists not only empty device micro solarizing to deepen the shadowing of a motif imprinted upon in the movie, but Murnau even has to side ride off screen, to increase the beware-all-who-enter leaving-behind-the-real-world effect, very, very creepy

I just heard a rationalization that the place Jesus was crucified on was called the skull because as a place of execution it had skulls around, but, no, the skull was a skull shape of land, with a skulllike surface, therefore it is no surprise when, after passing throug the St Elmo’s firing of the atmosphere, the coffin carriage comes up onto a skull landscape, on which the castle is built. 

Then when the Charon crossing the river styx points out the castle with his evil eye

we see it in iris, as nothing more than a built reflection of him, and his evil eye

Hutter, now totally freaked out by how spooky that ride was, rushes away in a blur, like a ghost coming out of the coffin

we get our best shot of the carriage now revealed as a hearse (Herzog making literal this notion in his remake)

and the carriage departs, revealing better here than anywhere previously, that it is in its form and presence, a rolling coffin

coffin imagery continues to come up all through the movie. He has now entered into a world that is made entirely of coffins and its types. The chairs at the table he eats at, are coffinlike, easily set to recline with bleeding thumb Hutter on it as a sacrifice

when Hutter backs off, he is effaced, receding into the coffin

and when he continues to back off, into the next room, the fireplace is coffin shaped

the two chairs of coffinesque form behind Nosferatu as he glares his coffin eyes, from his coffin-stiff body, at Hutter, makes of him a walking coffin soul, an undead

later, when Hutter is haunted in his room, to be attacked, it is clear that the door to his room is fashioned crudely, to look like a coffin, and I am pretty certain Murnau told Hutter to open the door as one would peel a lid off a coffin

Nosferatu, all done up now in his warpaint, stands ready and waiting, ceremoniously, in feeding stature, in front of that coffinlike fireplace, ready to rise up to him, a terrifying moment, still beautiful to watch

the open door is then rendered background fronted as itself a menacing form, coffin form

at just this point, Mina (sic) gets up to sleepwalk, and at the end of her spell of dread intuition the iris twists in close to consider the empty shot of a door, wood contaging back to Hutter

we see his bed as a coffin

and Nosferatu come to him, coming into his coffin still another time, by way of shadow

finally like a closing lid, just bearing down on, then sinking down in in Hutter, now reclining, half conscious

when done he departs through the form fit door

the next morning Hutter actually finds the coffin, with the famous shot of the encoffined Nosferatu to follow

Having seen how his attack is entirely worked out as extra menacing by being embrasured within a sequence of shadows surrounding a motif imprinted on screen from earlier, this continues when Hutter looks out of his prison cell window and sees Nosferatu preparing to depart. There is a pyramid of coffins on a cart, it all seems very flimsy, unlikely to travel well, but as a symbol it works. Also Nosferatu is carrying the coffins himself, no helpers, this is one of the oddest elements of the movie.

carrying has only been suggested a few times previously in the movie. When Nosferatu closes in, in shadow, on Hutter, huddled in his bed, it could be said that his hands up, he has “carried” himself into him

End of part 2.

Murnau’s effacing “symphony picture,” Nosferatu (1922), and the coffin world in it, pt. 1 of 3.

Rev., April 2, 2016.

Posted to mark the centennial of the theatrical release of Nosferatu in Berlin, March 15, 1922.

In the film, From Caligari to Hitler (2014), the narrator asks, What does cinema know, that we don’t? it then suggests throughout that cinema in exploring archetypes of unspoken longing in our unconscious, bringing up, for example, in Weimar films, a desire for a strong man to gain control over the chaos of life in the republic, knew something about Germans then, that Germans, in conscious life, did not even know about themselves. Later, it explores to some degree to extent to which in the presentation of daily life in People on Sunday and how Louise Brooks acted in Life of a Lost Girl, film was able to transport us to unconscious states, to tell us things about our impulses and desires that we did not even know ourselves. My major problem with this approach is that it remains modernist, that is, it views film as a static art form, interpretable only on its surface, and in what is explicitly read on screen, and then its secret meanings are only drawn out by reference to psychology, usually Freudian, symbolism, and politics of the time, with the idea being that the film is somehow an allegory of, for example, Hitler. All of this is fine, but the actual truth is that a movie as it plays in front of us is, as Belting has discussed, experienced as a dream, and in that experience in teaches us its knowledge as it goes along and, in fact, from viewing the movie we do know what it knows, and so movies do not know something that we don’t know, because having watched the movie, and experienced it as a movie, we know it, it’s just, we don’t articulate too well what it is that we know. Since the film gave proper due to the key role that FW Murnau’s Nosferatu played in the evolution of German expressionistic cinema, I thought I would make use of my approach to film, as hypnagogic in nature, to uncover how it is that, as it rolls, it informs us of what it knows, and we know, by experiencing it, what it knows.

In another note I have pinpointed the special character of American horror and sci fi in the 1931 period, calling the particular arrangement of surface and depths in the rendering of life through film technique at the time, in intermedial relation with radio, the “radio picture.” I think this is a correct interpretation, and pinpoints exactly what it is that makes movies from right about that time so good, and all of a group, with the same style and effects. With silent film I have a different problem. It always seems to fall back on the stage, to be but, intermedially, the filming of a stage play, and for that it scenes are mere tableaux, and its mis en scene merely a recording of a stage drama, all talk, closeups, group shots, gathering around the body shots, etc., all of which I find very, very stilted.

But then there is German silent film. It seemed right away to unburden itself of the tableaux element derived from seeing itself as a filming of stage events only. This problem remains present, as in, for example, Murnau’s The Haunted Castle (1921), but Murnau in particular sought to transcend this intermedial drag, if you will, to release film from stage, and to let film itself develop its own, independent language. According to the Scorsese thesis, expressed in his two part review of the history of film, DW Griffith very quickly, very early, developed the whole visual vocabulary of Hollywood films for years to come, including the dissolve. So, I am not going to claim that Murnau invented the dissolve, but, it is as if he looked at film, considered its intermedial legacy, decided that that was in books, and in the paging of pages in books, and from there developed a notion of film that was entirely based on the shot being like a page in a book, which then could only communicate meaning by extremely careful editing of it in relation to other shots, in the manner of a flipbook (of course the flipbook notion of the birth of film also goes back). It is very clear that, for him, film related to page, because when Hutter shows up at the lodge, he picks up a book, and then peers into it, and the POV closes in on the page, and we read a page of the book too (though I do not particularly like these reproductions)

Later, when he leans over on the gazebo overlooking the valley, to write a letter, we then get to look over his shoulder at what he is writing

Still later, we read directly from the log of the Demeter, and still later, the wife picks up the book, and we read over her shoulder too. That is, if film by Murnau is triply sliced into physical surface, fictive content in center, and ground of celluloid, then it is related to a page of a book, which would be print type up front, content of the words on the page, and ground in the paper, then in this version of the recreation of the text the relation of surface to print is glamorized slightly, as script translated forward to screen had to be a bit more flamboyant, and could be too, content of letter or book is expressed directly on film, and then the relationship for the moment between shot of film and page of book or letter is implied and taken for granted

Since this would become a cliché in the techniques of film it could be said, for now, that this is the prototype moment of that usage, and Murnau is the source for the device (but only just for argument’s sake). But, then, Murnau would have to have also made the calculation that the equation page=film was not accurate, as film in fact had more agency with regard to make real one aspect of reading that books tried to, but were not entirely successful in realizing, that is, how readers visualize the reading in their minds as they read. That is, breaking it down, the fictive content of the book, in the text, subdivides again into word in the center, its ground in the mind in the common ground of word and image, the entoptic field inside the closed eyeball, when word touches upon that membrane it then fuses to form an image which pushes forward past word to exist in front of the word as image. That image then moves forward into the mind of the viewer, to create, what I will call an imago, that is, the visualization of a read scene in a book, recreated in the mind of the reader

but then Murnau realized that film had more power in capturing what was going on in the entoptic field in the background of word, as the visualization is birthed in the fusion and brought forward, because it was a liquid and moving medium, with a primarily visual focus, and he hints at his understanding by presenting an image of an almost phantom creation, seen in a microscope

and then he brings that microscopy out into the open field, with closeup examination of what might normally be overlooked, the complexities of a spider web

and so he saying in the same way, just as a microscope enhances human vision, to allow us to see into the level of reality that we could not see before, so film gives us a new opportunity to see into connections in reality that we normally do not visualize, and for that a kind of microscopy is developed in his art of film. He develops at least a nine-level (keeping with the model I used in treatment of radio pictures) embrasure of film in which the surface had three effects, the content three effects and the background three effects, and these interacted in which a way as to stretch out on a microscopic level the norm of visualization in the usual level of comprehension of it in the human eye and mind’s eye, and by this parsing to the micro level, in fact, creates a microscopy of film, in which all levels play with each other, back each other up, communicating tacit knowledge, in fact, knowing as doing, so as they watch the viewer does know what he or she knows, and the film if appreciated as film per se and not as static host of externally originating symbolism, would be known as seen. Ok, while this is a bit too imitative of my treatment of the radio picture, I see nine devices, three in the surface, three in the fictive center, three in the ground; in the surface as the iris shot, the closeup, and the walking off camera to the side shot; in the center are the imprint or rhyme device, the motif, or repeated image, and then a bed of shadow; and in the background are the empty shot, the use of properties as ground, and the use of sets as grounds.

since the iris, closeup, property and set shots were already standard film currency, Murnau’s unique character as a film maker is expressed in his use of the side shot the imprint rhyme, the motif, the shadow of it, and then the empty shot clearing out to the meaning of the ground below.

This now leaves me with the rather dreary task of having to point out an example in a simple, out of context, positivist way, of each device, in use, in the movie.

Iris

What I mean by an iris in Murnau, is the same as the iris in any other silent movie. It was device designed to focus our attention and communicate that something odd was going on. Murnau in addition to irising wide some shots to imply the surprised or horrified POV of the character, and the viewer through the eye of the character, also makes use of the whole iris closure, which happens in the micro-micro space of the iris, to snap shut, asleep, on a certain sequence. I suppose the main difference between Murnau’s use of the iris, and others, is that he uses it in the context of and in proximity to other devices which by contagion make use of the iris more linked the alarmed or frightened eye, as that is a device of softening up the eye-mind to horror.

Close-up

Murnau makes rather routine use of the closeup, and in fact does not pioneer in its use, in extreme closeup or other forms.

Side shot

Oddly, enough, this is a type of shot that Murnau makes a great deal of use of. There is a shot, a sequence, and it transpires, but, then, as it ends the person, or, most famously, the ship, walks off screen, or drifts off right or left, and the camera lingers to see the figure pass out of the frame. Why? The only other standard side-based shot I know of is the lattice shot, when a character stands closeup in profile to the right of the screen, and the shot is projected behind her, implying that the shot is in her mind. Here, it seems to be the opposite, it would seem that in this sort of shot the character in question puts the whole of the scene behind his or her back, and thus creates by that behind-the-backedness a kind of menace. More of this as I work it out in sequence.

Imprint rhyme

This is by far the most common and expertly used device by Murnau, in the fictive space in the movie, in its microlevel, he somehow knew, possibly simply by rubbing his eyes, and seeing the blue dot imprint on it, that when an image strikes an eye, it imprints the eye, and its imprint as it were lingers on the eye, and, for that, it would be a very good cinematic device, by way of translating tacit knowledge to the viewer to enact a scene with a distinct imprint image, and then by supporting that imprint abstract shape with a motif, see below, and with a shadow, to capture full experience, the thing seen, but then everything about the thing seen that is not seen, but as it were predicted to grandfathered to upcoming or back to preceding scenes. By means of imprint working with motifs and the device of shadowing therefore Murnau builds up a thick nine-layer visual frame image which in its depth and thickness not only is itself in the present, but simultaneously aftershadows previous scenes, and foreshadows scenes to come, all of which, as we watch the movie, the eye-mind registers, even If unconsciously, to know what the movie is saying to it. I put the above image in place as a reminder to discuss the fact that in his odd fixation on the motif of sheets and bedding, Murnau does much indeed. There is little question that Murnau realized that in identifying a shot with an imprint image, and then with motifs and shadows, working out its flexible depths, and the weaving of them all together, that he realized that he was dealing with a sort of formalist device which was not unlike music, and that would be why he calls Nosferatu a symphony of horror (and why the world has taken this literally, so that, it being a silent movie, we pretend that the art is in us screening the movie along with a new score or even a concert, as my daughter did in Berlin just in February), and why I wil call his particular use of the overlapping forms of imprints, motifs and shadows in the context of the dissolve between all, Murnau broke free of the tableaux silent film, and develop ed the art form of the “symphonic picture.” (But having said the above I do want to amend the previous graph by reagent reconsideration of the motivating force passing horizontally from one layer to another, and that would be the mechanism of the dissolve, the dynamic essence of Murnau’s film art

Motif

As noted, Murnau was an artist in fixating on motifs, that is imprints materialized in objects, and then working with presenting that object or its similar forms in a relational way in which the theme associated with the original motif was carried over tacitly, below consciousness, but we are getting it as we watch, to other like images. So, above, I noted in an arty viewing of the film that he made use of the coffin lid as a motif and then in order to spread the menace of its meaning over all he also made all doors, and carriages, and transports, and the like, all echo that coffin lid. The above shot is Hutter at the door, but the door is straight and flat, he opens is as one would a lid, and it could easily double as a coffin lid, and, is, in fact, kind of one, as it opens out onto the dead in his coffin world.

Shadow

by shadow in Murnau I do not mean, strictly speaking, working with shadows alone, that is, shadow play. Murnau in fact does no real shadow play, well, maybe once, the final vampire attack on Hutter. What I mean is that shadow is used as the background surface onionskin of a preexisting form, for it to exist as well in a less physical shape, and so it is a shadow of a motif derived from an imprint, and, for that, used quite beautifully by Murnau, and making of his movies a passing parade of after-, as- and fore-shadows. Since he is obsessed with presenting phantomness on screen he makes of the background as I have mapped it out here entirely a shadow world, so that all things in the foreground are carried in, pulled back into and sometimes engulfed in shadows. For this, he also subdivided the shadow a few more times, to derive a few additional strange effects to deep the world of the shadow.

That is, within the shadow, at the back of the fictive space, in its ground, further dematerializing, phantomizing devices, the shadow/solarization device, the shadow/speed up device and the shadow/hold until it’s out of range device, all of which are pretty much restricted to the one very weird sequence of the coach picking up Hutter, with the solarization device

The speed up device

And the hold until it is out of range device

All of which, as I will show, makes the coach pick up scene one of the highlights, on a purely cinematic level, of the movie, and still today a deeply weird piece of cinema indeed.

Empty

Once Murnau drops back into the background of the shot, the ground, as it were, of the shots, he has three other recurrent methods that support meaning, but in a way that is likely all but completely overlooked by the average viewer, and yet they tell. The empty shot is the most difficult to figure out. I have mentioned that a device to deepen the micro background of the fictive shot he often holds shots til they are out of range, or fading over the horizon, as, for example, with the horses, but in the background per se he effaces it perhaps to make it momentarily real regardless of gaze. This is perhaps the vestige of the stage unconscious in film in Murnau, but for him if the stage lingers on it is only a vacant stage, and empty, haunted stage, on which film develops. The purpose of this type of shot, then, I would imagine, is to ground, but in groundlessness, the shot, and expose us with unprotected vulnerability to the creepy awfulness of the real, the worst about which is that it gets long entirely without us, before we arrive and after we leave, and, for that, we harbor in our hearts a tacit hatred of reality, for living without us. This sort of negative existentialism of the backdrop is clearly something which Murnau cultivated, and for me it makes me think Nosferatu is once again in a prototype posture relating to films coming later, especially in Germany, which makes great use of the vacant or empty shot, and which, for use of this device, I like, such as Dracula Saga, Horrible Sexy Vampire, The Devil’s Playthings, movies like that, that stilted style that, nonetheless, for being grounded in vacant or empty shots, seem more deeply connected to the reality of reality, that is, its emptiness.

Property

And then Murnau knew that properties were very special, and spoke and whispered messages all over shots, and he does have some terrific props, with deep meaning, even better than this clock being the wolf chair Hutter sleeps in, but the overall evidence still suggests that, being so influenced in the micro dynamics of the fictive center of film, Murnau rather underutilized the special potential of properties in three-dimensionalizing shots with deeper meaning.

Set

and finally the sets, way in the background, all of which, in this outing, are very good indeed. While in too much silent film the set forms a fixated upon ground for all film, to the point where the movie slows down into a tableaux presentation, which is bad, Murnau knows sets are important, and makes use of them, but usually in more pulled-forward-by-other-functions way, and does not overly instrumentalize every aspect of his sets.

For this, then, I will say that in making use of film Murnau created “symphonic pictures,” and that their structure as film is different from standard silent movie fare, and different from “radio pictures” then years later, and that generally speaking that is because, intermedially while radio pictures were intermedially radio-movie interrelating, Murnau’s shots are intermedially book-movie interrelated, with a cast over both in parenthesis of a general symphony metaphor meaning his actual intermedial formula is ((book-movie) music) movie.

Having worked this out, however, in the actual application to the movie, to simply find other examples of particular fixed types of shots, as I have thus far, and identify them in the movie, and ask the viewer to look out for them, as if stills of meaning set inside a movie, would be positivist, formalist, and highly limiting. The real truth of the movie in giving you all you need to know, and helping you know as you watch, so that you know what the movies know by watching the movie, and would know immediately if you watched them in full mindfull=ness, is that in addition to existing on the meso level (most movie criticism obtusely removed to the macro importance of the movie, perhaps related to a modernist movie inferiority complex which is long gone), and on the micro level, and, even, as I mapped out above, with the shadow, in the micro-micro level, the actual working out of scenes, all this I have to say likely unconsciously, in the movement of reality, in the making of the movie, works itself out amazingly on the micro-micro-micro level, where Murnau creates scenes of such tight puttogetherness they remain eminently cinematic experiences, even now, almost a hundred years later.

At this point, in going through some scenes, I will back off from any graphic support of my analysis, not to get too ridiculous in my appreciation of them. One of the most important sequences in any telling of the Dracula story is the arrival at the inn, and accidentally informing the local people that one is off to Dracula’s castle, the crowd and then the proprietor to warn him away. Seemingly, to the average viewer, artlessly, Murnau creates a sense of menace and foreboding by means of incredibly attentive to detail treatment of the leents of the scene. For example, when Hutter is sat at his table, we see that behind him is a big embankment structure, I suppose an oven, with some people sitting in front of it.

apparently a simple set item, which no one will notice, it is half in shadows, therefore communes with the shadowing effects of the backdrop of the fictive space, to create a sense of menace; and then it does have about it a sarcophagal quality that links it to the motif of the coffin used throughout the movie, which in turn makes of the people sitting up front it mourners, and then that central block in the middle of the shot is the result of a an imprinting of a positioning of coffinlike shots in the center of the shot, so it menace again. Right here, in simply turning to ask the innkeeper if there is food, we see Hutter effaced, facing his death, immersed in a world of shadows, sat in mourning over by old grievers. It is a very foreboding presence.

And then Murnau switches to the reactions of the peasants sitting at the banquette, and in their reaction he zooms forward to our POV to echo our response, as they are frightened for him, but the old man is situated in shot in the same place as the bank was, and in the same imprint space as the coffin shots, and his dress, his vest, kind of monumentalizes him as an undead, so it is as if death itself warns him

the imprinting continues as now the landlord comes forward, in another shot, holding his neck, as if choking, and he is in precisely the same formal place in the shot as the old peasant and as the coffinlike bank

He does here a wonderful side walk away, which effaces his concern, and makes of it just the world’s lack of concern, leaving in his wake empty bottles and jugs, objects, indicating that in his wake, others too have been emptied out and made objects.

and now he comes on through the dark spot in the room where the light does not shine and when Hutter sees him in the dark, as a dark hulk, next to this tomb, he sits up, arms back out, in fear, and it is true, though on the surface of the movie in the story the landlord is coming forward to warn him, and be friendly, here in the language of the scene his presence foreshadows as an imprint that of Dracula, and his warning is itself kind of a killing

and the scene ends with the warning all but given inside the imprint of the coffin motif onto the bank like tomb for it to be made quite clear to anyone who is watching, Hutter has just been told he is going to die (but, oddly, in this version, he does not)

The sequence gets even better when the landlord, looking kind of wolverine himself, tells a laughing Hutter that the werewolf runs at night, and the scene then as it were flashbacks-over to what he is talking about, outside, a shot of the werewolf, in this odd case, a hyena

And here is the graph

And then in an emptying device, the werewolf spooks the horses

And then we return to the pub. The odd thing about these shots is that Hutter exists as a shadow figure effaced. Then the werewolf as hyena is a motif transfer of shadowyness to it, and then both it and the horse are situated in shot in imprint fashion to again pile up the references to death, and the fact that both hyena and horses are pictured in a rather disconnected manner in an empty stage, in the background as it were of the shot they are front and center in, empties out the werewolf call to fill the scene with fear again. Thus, the whole sequence then was formalistically restricted by the power of the imprint on the eye of the idea of death as conveyed by the motif of the coffin as it by way of shadowing was cast back onto the property and set of a stone embankment in the pub, and for all that, it makes of this particular visit to the pub a very atmospheric outing.

In the continuation of this scene, Murnau weaves things even tighter. The horses run away in blue, that is, in a blue tint screen. This, I forgot to mention, is yet another device on the micro level of the silent movie in which the mood of the scene is set by a color tint. The effect here is like day for night, to suggest a night scene, but, also foreboding and fear, and this then is transferred from outside in, from out where the werewolf in to Hutter’s room, which we see at first empty, to indicate that it is an unsteady, uncozy sort of place

Then when he is shown the room, it switches back to amber, and in this mood with funny clockwork like score the funny maid comes in and does her introducing in a very mechanical way. The bed, like the bank at the pub, and like other shots in the movie, is yet another foreshadow of the coffin, a coffin bed, which makes her an undertaker, taking care of business in a sort of grim way

The bed even has over it a strange sort of icon, and then off and above to the left a tilted down icon of the virgin. The alcove kind of acts as a bedstead to give it importance, but recessed into the wall by way of imprint suggests again the grave, while the icon leaning in is a signifier of being watched over. But the fact that the maid then rather improbably gets up on a stool before the bed, as if under the cross at golgotha, and then rather personally invasively turns down the bed, an act whose intrusiveness might indicate her impersonal gravedigger manner and in this she is the opposite of Mary, Mary ironic, not at all mourning, but maybe even expecting this man to be killed soon after sleeping in this bed

Hutter then makes the intimacy worse, or laughs at her mechanicalness, by beginning to take off his coat his back to us in her presence, which might have been his way of being inappropriate with her, and she then scurries down from the stool, under the virgin, but him in pose of coat removal perfecting the possibly implicit crucifixion imprint, which comes from later in the movie

and then he laughs at her as she circles out, and basically runs for cover from the scary foreign gentlemen who has possibly been improper with her in his room

Hutter is known up to this point to be clueless because he is laughing and joking about everything, seeing the locals as quaint and ridiculous, and he’s just having a good time, and ignoring everything. But if in the previous shot he was crucified, immediately following, he is the laughing crowd, a Judas, a man putting himself in great danger by his not paying attention to it all. At this point, however, this scene picks up with the previous scene in the inn by bringing back in the outside, only now Murnau realizes he must bring that outside, which has up to then been outside of the inn below, in the window of his small cell, and so we go back out to the horses, and in one of the great and mysterious shots of the movie, which on the surfaces appears to be just Murnau exploiting some all but ersatz footage of horses running, not very creatively, as an emptying shot applied to the window all the space in this shot pulls all the safety out of the space of the cell shot

And then we apparently hear the howl of the werewolf, and for this shot, Murnau now actually figures out how to get a shot of the werewolf-hyena, again on the surface seeming a weak satisficing with an animal in nature, but is so weird it works, he has to pose it looking back, just as Hutter has and will repeatedly look back, and looked back earlier in the pub to the landlord, and all of these look backs create a counter space, which directs the menace in (this shot doubly creepy not only by its shadowing from other shots, but its emptying out in the background of itself, but then too its solidifying it as a property with a somewhat stuffed animal look to it, which further associates it with the room

Murnau now circles that cry back through the inn shot to the ladies sitting at the banquette, or the tomb, for them to as it were hear it, and suffer for it, so there is this weird dissolving spirit of the shots which in this case operates not shot over shot in an actual dissolve visually, but shot to shot in time to imply, without saying so, that one shot looks directly into the other, so the woman not only scream but cower, and cover up, as if that werewolf has the power to look out of its shot, into their shot

and then he empties them out even more by walking away, in yet another effacing or turning away, in this really great side or walk off camera shot that in the foreground now leaves us stuck in the shot, abandoned to our worry that he has done his evil deed, that the space is contagious, and that is now afoot off to do other business

This effacement shot, or side shot, then brought back contagiously by imprint into the cell by Hutter being seen in side shot effacement too, looking out the window, as if he has seen and put together all of the menace, even though it is technically impossible

he now has to kind of repeat that shot by lighting a candle, and bending down to do so. What this communicates to us is that he is now afraid, against his will, and against his surface presenting mood, lighting a candle against the darkness, and, in a niche below the icon, as if in asking protection from the virgin mary, whose spot in the shot is marked by imprint as where the blue bushy tail of the hyena jus departed, meaning that the picture now specifically communicates the device that this particular icon is Mary Protector Against Hyena Werewolves.

I cant quite work out what that image above the bed is, but here it is

It would appear, generally, to be a sort of wreath, perhaps a welcoming device, maybe it is an offering, there seems to be some attached medallion and ribbon to it too, it has a ceremonial appearance, maybe it is related to the Virgin icon, and represents her blessing upon all those who sleep in that bed. At the same time, since Hutter has stretched out his arms, and the maid has stepped up to a tomblike bed as if it is a height, a kind of Golgotha, there is also a faint crown of thorns whisper in it, all of it then, possibly, by the imprint relation of bed to tomb, being a wreathe laid on the dead. It is at this point that Hutter also picks up the bedroom reading left for him, and it is all about the local superstitions which the peasants have tried to warn him about, and he laughs it off as ridiculous, so he is still in a mood of denial that makes him blind what the scenery is communicating to him.

While this is the page of a book, deep in the structural unconscious of a shot in a movie, its script a newmade reproduction of the original, two things, there is a very strange sigil at the head of the title page

it is impossible not to link it by imprint with the similarly formed circle symbol we have just seen

and since I have raised the possibility that the wreathe form over the bed is an accessory of the cult of the protecting virgin in the room, an expression of her watchful eye, here also, in closeup, presider over the candle, and empowered again by a sprig of an herb (perhaps the only hint of the garlic or wolfbane or whatever in this original telling)

So since this book is about evil things, and there is an all seeing eye involved, this immediately puts the book as opposite to the watchful eye of the virgin, but, at the same time, since he found it, like Gideon’s bible, by his bedside, it was put there as part of the apotropaic arsenal of the room, including the candle, the wreathe over the bed, the virgin tilted just so to look over you, and then the book. Thus, this makes of the bed a battleground between the Good Virgin and the evil Vampyre.

Notice too the all seeing eye’s eye lid is perched on by the owl, a bird of ill omen, with its claws in the eyes, indicating that we are dealing here with a hairy eye that sees only glass onion world of symbolism in the world, by a symphony of imprint transfers, and then it is guarded or presided over or even attacked by a buck, a scorpion, a dog and a wolf. There is also a very strange sigil in the upper left hand, which looks like a kind of stripped caduceus, that is, opposite of medicine, or black magic, electrified by lightning bolts, and, also seeing up close that the owl’s claws do scratch those eyelashes into the eye, to most definitely make of it a hairy eye, an eye that sees only its fears and nightmares in a screen in front of the world, this is the evil eye, and an evil eye lore emblem

In the very uneven and sometimes simplistic documentary, The Language of Shadows, this strange sigil, attributed to the occult interests of art director and artist Albin Grau, is linked to traditional eye devices against the evil eye, but, being apotropaic, and made in a like against like strategy, that would imply that the eye in the book could BE the evil eye

The instrumentation of this vampyre, then, starts with the evil eye, that is, he rules by putting the evil eye on you, as in traditional black magic lore. But then the book spells out more

This is an epigenetic theory of the vampire, that is, that they are a race descended from Belial, the devil, but more specifically the lawless, worthless, whoring and murdering ones, a race benighted, that is, bezerkers. They are also called the sons of plagues, and it is interesting that we then find the main connection between Nosferatu and the rats and rationale of the movie’s instrumentation connecting vampirism with the plague, as the earth that Dracula must return to sleep in is the cursed dirt of the black death. This is miasma theory. What it means is that anywhere where the Black Death struck, and the buried were buried there, that dirt then became itself contaminated by the plague, and thought to be a carrier of the plague. Miasmically, it is evil, and the vampire, feeding on the evil, has to as it were return to the earth not as normally conceived out of some need to be grounded in home, but to recharge his evil, to make him, by next nightfall, anew as 100% charged up with plague-spreading evil. As Ekirch in At Day’s Close (2006) explains, too, in Europe before 1800 the night was thought to be a black miasma fog that physically descended on the world, so that relates too. All of this feeds Nosferatu. And, in this sequence in this shot, explains the empty depiction of the out of doors, the running horses, the hyena as distorted nature, all of it, by the imprint of the werewolf gaze, sending it in the window, to menace him. Picking up on the miasma theme, Murnau then shows the night passing as the creeping of a shadow in the mountains, which is very good

and then the daylight itself, as the opposite of that, wakes Hutter up, coming through the window chink, to cross over his face, to touch his face

End pt. 1.