EXPANDED CINEMA

by Gene Youngblood

PART TWO:

SYNAESTHETIC CINEMA: THE END OF DRAMA

“The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.” (WALLACE STEVENS)

Slavko Vorkapich: “Most of the films made so far are examples not of creative use of motion-picture devices and techniques, but of their use as recording instruments only.

It has taken more than seventy years for global man to come to terms with the cinematic medium, to liberate it from theatre and literature. We had to wait until our consciousness caught up with our technology.

The new cinema has emerged as the only aesthetic language to match the environment in which we live.

Emerging with it is a major paradigm: a conception of the nature of cinema so encompassing and persuasive that it promises to dominate all image-making in much the same way as the theory of general relativity dominates all physics today. I call it synaesthetic cinema.

Herbert Read:

We’re beginning to understand that “what is significant in human experience” for contemporary man is the awareness of consciousness, the recognition of the process of perception.

Through synaesthetic cinema man attempts to express a total phenomenon—his own consciousness.

Synaesthetic cinema is the only aesthetic language suited to the post-industrial, post-literate, man-made environment with its multi- dimensional simulsensory network of information sources. It’s the only aesthetic tool that even approaches the reality continuum of conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear, nonconnected electronic atmosphere of the Paleocybernetic Age.

Synaesthetic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites

Synaesthetic cinema is a space-time continuum. It is neither subjective, objective, nor nonobjective, but rather all of these combined: that is to say, extra-objective.

Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage

The harmonic opposites of synaesthetic cinema are apprehended through syncretistic vision, …

Syncretism is the combination of many different forms into one whole form.

Synaesthetic cinema provides access to syncretistic content through the inarticulate conscious.

We begin to realize that Brakhage is attempting to express the totality of consciousness, the reality continuum of the living present.

Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness

Thus, by creating a new kind of vision, synaesthetic cinema creates a new kind of consciousness: oceanic consciousness.

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience

Kinaesthetic, therefore, is the manner of experiencing a thing through the forces and energies associated with its motion.

One cannot photograph metaphysical forces. One cannot even “represent” them. One can, however, actually evoke them in the inarticulate conscious of the viewer.

Synaesthetic Cinema and Extra-Objective Reality

Michael Snow: Wavelength

Like all truly modern art, Wavelength is pure drama of confrontation. It has no “meaning” in the conventional sense. Its meaning is the relationship between film and viewer. We are interested more in what it does than what it is as an icon. The confrontation of art and spectator, and the spectator’s resultant self-perception, is an experience rather than a meaning.

The very essence of cinema is the fact that what we see there is not there: time and motion.