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ricardo

The solipsist or nihilist finds him or herself stuck in bad faith, and that is the case of cinema. In the worst way, cinema’s bad faith is its belief that it is more real than real, while the conscious mind founds nothingness and replaces the world with illusion.

But more importantly, this idea of naked experimentation I think is as repugnant as a calculated, marketed narrative. The reason a child’s drawings are not heralded is because of the lack of content implied, or, rather, the lack of communication. Not to say that there isn’t a communication, but the same child grown would not be able to elucidate, and therefore the work seems to suffer from its ignorance (or lack of memory.) It is useless for us to continue to argue that there is no communication in art, and in fact I think that we must announce, given the proliferation of nothing, that art is indeed the act of communication through an object that transcends its objecthood.

That being said, a child’s drawing may indeed have infinitely more communication than that of an older artist, but my point is that aesthetics without function and marriage to its content, serve the purpose of nothing, and therefore regurgitate nihilism. Why is it that human beings and artists are so pretentious as to directly negate the natural order, that shows aesthetics as arising from the function of its facticity? Instead we must necessarily judge and find something visually pleasing or displeasing; just as fickle as dissecting the layers of a cheeseburger.

For the sake of playing devil’s advocate, if this cheeseburger were made with special care to every ingredient beyond the form of taste, but with an understanding of its authenticity, would it not transcend its sensory experience actually rather than in the form of an illusion?

The artist must recognize that he or she is working in cinema and that cinema beyond anything else is a nihilistic media born out of humans’ narcissistic desire to represent his or her consciousness in a mediated form. That all media is born of the same narcissism and undergoes a process by which it eventually abstracts, conceptualizes, and folds on itself. Warhol’s act is one that ends in bad faith via the aesthetic burial of the symbol into devaluation, while Francis Bacon’s act is one that ends in good faith – transcendent expression of the real.

You cannot escape through abstraction, and you cannot escape through narrative logic. In order to transcend the media, one must saturate the frames with the recognition of itself, therefore developing its own consciousness and voice; through which to voice, in jungian terms, that which is motion picture’s shadow – the real & time-space.

It is the divorce from the real, the obfuscation of the real through a type of holier-than-thou intellectualism, that discredits and devalues it; THAT is pretentious.

And the idea that experimental film has sort of carved out its own genre, under which it would be odd to place such artists as Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, or Bergman (though they seem to be eternal experimenters), is a perfect example of man’s constant attempt to achieve conformity, even in the supposed non-conformity of his or her artistic action. It is an aesthetic or gestural conformity that relies more on its analytical practice than its expression.

In short, the best blues is the blues; the worst blues is a constant preoccupation with the notes and its 12-bars. It must still know the notes, and still understand its 12-bars, but the blues must BE the blues in order to transcend.