#but in form and content it was very oneiric

[franzias-cave]

today I was walking from the bathroom to my desk at my very boring job when i see a someone's calendar image is a dutch angle image of a goat making very intense eye contact with a golden retriever captioned with text in the 90's anti-piracy font that says "LOVE SEES NO DIFFERENCE"

[lizmindpalace]

Blood and Crime

Summary: A new and unusual murderer will make Sherlock change in ways he would have never expected.

Warnings: In this work there will be eventual explicit content, graphic depictions of violence, there may be a lot of triggers such as anxiety, depression, paranoid, mental illness, murder, suicidal tendencies, horror, very toxic relationships, manipulation, sexual innuendoes, gore, lots of blood, nightmares, fantasy and vampires.

You can find it also on AO3.

Chapter 1- Darkness

It had been a long time albeit it felt like time had been paused at that spot, now his shelter, where darkness was the only inhabitant besides him. This was the way death felt like. It was like falling asleep waiting for waking up without realising it, without waking up and being mindlessness during the act, sleeping without dreaming, forgetting to raise. A fine scarlet line ran as if it was a drop of blood that expanded quickly through his eyes, painting them in red once he had been able to open them. His head was spinning around. He attempted to identify the place he was trapped in, he was not able to remember beyond the pain he had suffered, shadows covered completely the place he was lying on, some seconds later he noticed his hands were unintentionally over his abdomen, his icy fingers were intertwined and he could hardly move them, allegedly, they had been in that position for ages and had lost the ability to move. He searched through the cavity: wooden roof, old and chipped wood, that made his index feel a stabbing pain. The ground was soft; the smell coming from the outside, leaked through a hole, a draught filled with the smell of wet soil, petrichor. It reminded him of the times when he was a child and he would lay on the ground after the rain and would stare at the trees, and in fact, as if he had gone back in time, he was enjoying the night whilst resting on his arms, or at least that was what he was trying to picture, a good moment although at the time he could not remember what existence was like.

The pain in his body, the sensations harassing him and the trembles increased gradually, as if he was coming back to life after a long journey from the unknown to Earth, through the breath of the bottomless pit of hell; he could not breath, or see, or hear, he was disabled due to the restrictions of his prison, that in this case was his own body.

 Going out and leaving that place he was caught in behind became a priority, as soon as he was able to think properly, like he used to. Notwithstanding the fact that despair was aiming to hold him between its cold arms, he would keep moving, he didn't want to be restrained anymore, and yet, his body was so weak, his forces weren't enough to set him free. Tiredness made him fall into the land of sleep for an amount of time he was not able to keep track of.

It was insane he didn't feel as he used to be, because he didn't have any memories he could use as reference of his old self, and he couldn't bring back any memory which could tell him what circumstances had taken him to that specific place and time in those gloomy conditions either. Perhaps it was the effect caused by the darkness, being all alone for such a long portion of time, perhaps it was the fact he was still sleeping among the dead, who also happened to have nightmares.

He was thirsty. He had never been this thirsty in his whole life, if it could be called life this new form of confusing and poisoning existence, there, he could barely receive what was needed in order to survive, which didn't felt like it should, or at least that was what he could think, existence as an idea shouldn’t feel like this. It could be possible he was not really there and he was just drowning in drugs as many times he had been before and his hallucinations had taken him to that oneiric world feared by human conscience, under conditions where weaker minds would develop phobias. Fortunately, his was not that dim, he had to remain in calm and find a way out of the grasp of death. 

Despite the fact he was unable to see, he could perceive the night had come, his weak body felt it, the best way to save energies was by sleeping, or whatever was called the trance he had woken up from a brief interval of time ago.

Days passed, they would not stop just because a man was a convict confined in a wrinkle of time. And even the strongest mind has trouble when found in complete isolation and seclusion, despite the fact he would sleep for most of the time, while he was awake terrible hallucinations would abuse his fragile mind, it was due to it he started to scream and to strike everything at his reach, suddenly, he noticed his prison was not comprised by solid materials, at least not as solid as he had thought of them in the first place, the wood was creaking, a sign it was tearing apart. A hit with his now covered in blood, leg, and he could assert he was not under the soil, because he could feel the air hitting his face, but most important, he was able to hear distant echoes, and sound is a wave that travels through an elastic medium, through a fluid, in this case, wind.

"Help me, please" his gruffly and weak voice due to the lack of use had barely broken the deafening silence. And he decided his loss of voice must have been worse than he had thought because no one came in a long time, and even if he tried it a few more times, not even a murmur or the reverberation of his voice replied.

So he kept fighting, using his fists, legs, arms, hands, fingers along with his head and chest, everything he could to break the now cracked and fragile wood, making injuries that bled, or what else could it be the liquid running through his face until reaching his lips that tasted like metal?

Dawn was about to come to Earth again, he knew because through the hole he had opened, he could clearly observe the roof and darkness was not as dense as it was over the last hours, the darkness his unholy eyes had grown used to, for being plunged into it for so long. The distant cry of a fowl confirmed his deduction, joy spread through his body, it was the first good message he had received from the world in a long period, ever since he had woken up to life; if the day came soon, he could expose his numb limbs to the sunlight, he would be able to feel the wind on his face, nothing would have been more meaningful to him, even if during the past he had never felt the urge to appreciate nature, now it looked like it was a sign that told him everything would get better, and his fears were a product of his human weakness under such conditions. A couple more of hits and he would be free.

It was perhaps the fatigue that came as a result of the strength he had used in order to break his cell, or the lack of food, or just because the day had come and it meant he had to hide from it, but he fell asleep again, before this adventure he had never slept that much.  The sun and the wind would have to wait for him.

-

Next chapter

Notes:

This is the first chapter of this work, I decided to publish it today due to Dracula's release anniversary, however, I plan to post more regularly during autumn and finish it by Halloween.

You can read the finished work in Spanish on Wattpad.

[ivy-kissobryos]

Defining Witchcraft

This post is made in response to some topics I find commonly debated about within the Thai witchcraft community, but I want to post the English version here too. I will never tell someone who is or isn’t a witch- that is for you to decide. But if you claim to practice traditional witchcraft, especially those which lean towards western traditional witchcraft, then I will argue that the word ‘witch’ has a weight and history to it which you cannot ignore. It has a meaning. 

A witch, traditionally, is someone to be feared. A witch to the common folk is a terrifying figure, at times appearing vindictive, ‘intent on wrecking economic and physical havoc’ (Tangherlini, 2000). As discovered from stories and court proceedings collected between the seventeenth century to early twentieth century, witches have been accused of horrific crimes, ranging from assult to sabotage, poisoning to larceny and kidnapping to murder (Tangherlini, 2000). The book by Bever (2008) also name the crimes commonly associated with witchcraft to include ‘harming livestock’, and ‘physical acts like poisoning and surreptitious battery of children and animals through ailments’, and ‘cursing’ through ways such as ‘subliminal forms of communication like eye contact’. Hence, a witch is someone who practices ‘maleficium’, a word which originally meant  ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘mischief’, but later became specifically associated with harmful magic in Roman times (Bever, 2008). Between veneficium and casting the evil eye and worse, witches were never good.

The usage of natural materials within the casting of witches’ spells were also commonplace. Historians have found ‘various cursed things, or fatture,’ like ‘bones ... human nails ... seeds ... coals ... and the teeth of the dead’ which were ‘found in a sick woman’s mattress’ (Bever, 2008). Curses, as done in the past, were not pretty and palatable. Likewise, ‘a mixture called lazaro puzzolente containing quicksilver, urine, and asafetida resin was known to be made to work a similar magic when placed under victims’ thresholds’ (Bever, 2008). Bottling urine and harmful material under the ground of someone’s threshold is a classic method to curse an enemy. Historians had also discovered ‘spells, herbs, roots ... and hair’ believed to ‘cause hailstorms and untimely frosts, sickness in man and beast; impotence; miscarriage and death’, alongside other forms of sympathetic magic such as ‘cursing tablets’ where one sample was made with ‘the skin and bones of a frog, which had been pierced by several large pins’ found at the ‘bottom of a well’, and curse poppets were also found historically, an example being ‘a wax figure with a pin through it’ (Bever, 2008).

Witches also work with an otherworldly entity (or entities) who teaches them and guides them, the most infamous being the Devil. Who the Devil is is a question for you to discover on your own. Witches of the past has been reportedly flying to meet the Devil in what is called a Sabbath. Bever (2008) touches upon this, noting that ‘witches flew to Sabbaths to worship the Devil through a variety of obscene rites, including perversions of the Christian sacraments’. Those familiar with witchcraft may notice that the description of the ‘perversions of the Christian sacraments’ sound similar to what many practicing witches call the ‘red meal’, which can be one way to commune with otherworldly forces. There have also been numerous claims and confessions of those who claimed to have met the Devil.

A man named Hanß described the Devil to be ‘a black man with horns’, who had appeared ‘to him both day and night, scaring and threatening him’ until one night ‘he had finally agreed to give himself to the Devil, who thereupon carried him to the “merry and happy” festivities where he saw the women and the musician.’ This description of the Devil as a horned dark man fits traditional folklore well, and so does the tale of the Sabbath. In the tale, ‘at the dance, the Devil fussed over him, carried him on his shoulders, brought him bread and meat, “told him to call him father, and called him his son,” and eventually carried him back home’ (Bever, 2008). This correlates with how many traditional witches nowadays may associate the Devil with the Witchfather, the father of witches and maker of witches (as I have seen the term Witchmaker used too).

The relationship with the Devil may also be partly devotional, like a woman who claimed that ‘she did homage to him’ and prayed ‘I worship you, oh lord and Devil, attend my soul’. This is similar to the admission of Maria Gekin’s testimony, who claimed to have said an incantation that dedicated herself to him:

To the Devil I want to be, To the Devil I want to stay, To the Devil I want to be bound, To the Devil want never from his hand, The Devil has made me, The Devil has saved me, The Devil has sanctified me, In his hands I want to stay, To the Devil I want always and eternally to be.

All of the above claims are explored in Bever (2008).

Historically, there have been claims about uses of a salve: an ‘ointment witches reputedly used to travel to their dances’ (Bever, 2008). The witch Apolonia, whose case occurred late in the period of the witch trials, claimed to have used the ointment which is commonly referred to as the flying ointment. Moreover, Apolonia reported her ‘flights to the witch dances’ to have ‘merged dream content with reality’. The concept of an oneiric Sabbath is also commonplace today among currently practicing traditional witches, with groups such as the Cultus Sabbati placing a high importance on the concept of the dream Sabbaths. An interesting point that should be taken into account though is that in the past and in certain cultures, there is no difference between dreams and reality. Likewise, as stated in Bever (2008): ‘dreams in which the dreamer was transported to another place to participate in magical events and which the dreamer experienced as real rather than as dreams, were, as we have seen, experienced in other parts of early modern Europe, and indeed, were recorded in other cases in Württemberg, by younger people whose cerebral integrity was not in question.’ It can be concluded that these witches who flew in their dreams were not insane, and their experiences should not be dismissed just because they were dreams.

These spirit flights or dream flights were not also known to be just flights where witches fly to meet the Devil, but witchcraft can be accomplished through these journeys. Bever (2008) notes that ‘in Slovenia sorcerers flew to fight against each other in trance or dream, as some Siberian shamans claimed to, and some Hungarian witches both fell into trances to make soul journeys and also were said to abduct victims and transport them similarly to their revelries’. Similarly, ‘other Hungarian practitioners specialized in traveling to the land of the dead while in trance and in Milan, ‘four women claimed in the late 1300s that they had ‘ecstatic experiences with the ‘good lady and her folk’ and were therefore able to cure and to look into the future’. Soul flight can be used to connect all kinds of otherworldly forces, and knowledge can be gleaned and lessons learnt from these flights.

Aside from the aforementioned acts accomplished by the old witches, a concept which I believe is integral to walking the path of traditional witchcraft is the concept of initiation, through which a witch faces spirit death and their eventual rebirth. Not only were witches ‘thought to gain from their attendance at the Sabbaths the power and knowledge to commit maleficium’, some historians believed that ‘the next step in a witch’s initiation was to fly to a witch dance at which she worshipped the Devil with other witches.’ Other historians disagree, claiming that ‘shamanic initiation often, but not always, involves a ritual experience of death and rebirth, while a witch’s initiation did not’. Still, the author of the previous quote added that ‘the witch’s renunciation of her Christian identity and assumption of a new, diabolical one could be seen as a symbolic equivalent, and overall the parallels seem strong enough to raise the question of what possible connection there might be’ (Bever, 2008).

In my personal view, cutting off old vows, making new vows, initiating, dying and being reborn is vital to being a witch in the traditional sense. To quote Aaron Oberon, a practicing witch and author of Southern cunning:

Folkloric witchcraft in the American South: ‘initiation is a death [...] something in you has to die in order to be initiated, to be given the information or power these spirits have. Sometimes initiation can result in physical illness, life changing events, job losses, or emotional upheaval’. Oberon (2019) stated that ‘initiation comes from spirits, and so what the spirits put you through is going to be different for each person […] It is incredibly personal and involves being torn apart.’

I will not go into detail about my personal practice, but every word he says rings true. In my view, to have something bore your way through your very spirit and irrevocably change you is what it means to be a witch.

So far, my attempts to define witchcraft has been quite negative. Yet, a witch does more than maleficum too. To quote Vita Tortuosa, a book co-written by Daniel Schulke, the presiding Magister of Cultus Sabbati: the path he practices is the path which ‘serve with both hands alike’. To ‘serve with both hands’ is an idiom that is commonly said among the traditional witches I have known, meaning that a witch may do harm with one hand and give blessings with the other. Magic is manipulation and so is witchcraft. Bever (2008) had found from cases of witch trials that:

‘[...] among the manipulative uses of magic, healing was by far the most important, accounting for half the manipulative cases, or almost a third of all beneficent magical practices, and was almost as numerous as all types of divination combined. Furthermore, the other kinds of manipulative magic comprised a polyglot miscellany including various enhancements to normal human capacities like strength and marksmanship; a limited number of magical countermeasures against natural and supernatural aggression by others; exorcism of bothersome spirits; a few cases involving claims of truly supernatural powers; and a couple of occurrences that were anomalous even within the magical worldview of early modern Europe.’

Witches can heal and bless and are capable of more than harm, just as there is more to magic than cursing. Not all magical practitioners are witches, but witches are a type of magical practitioner. Moreso than hurting or blessing, witches are liminal creatures, dealing with life and death and spirits and ghosts and necromancy. Bever (2008) describes how ‘technically, necromancy meant conjuring the spirits of the dead, but in the late Middle Ages it was used more broadly to refer to conjuring spirits in general’. Witches are spirit workers, as modern occultists may say. To be a witch is to work with the Otherworld, to have a foot standing in this world and the other planted in another.

Witches historically have also used the power of words and poetry to their benefit. Take this case study explored in Bever (2008), done by the accused witch Maria who was said to use an incantation to keep a horse from eating. For the curious, the incantation went: 

Your mouth must blocked be, Your mouth must stopped be, You are the Devil’s, You must bewitched be, You must the Devil’s be You won’t eat for 24 hours.

At the risk of providing a checklist and a box one must fit to be considered a ‘witch’, I want to again state that this essay is simply exploring what it means to be a witch from a historical perspective. You decide what it means for you, but to fly, to curse, to bless, to work with spirits, to deal with some Devil, to initiate and die and be reborn and more- that is what I mean when I say the word ‘witch’.

Diverging slightly from the main topic and venturing more into the area of UPG, I want to argue that at its core, this tradition of witchcraft has existed since over two thousand years ago. As explored in Ogden (2009),  pharmakeia - which is the art of poison and magic from plants - has been practiced since the times of Ancient Greek. Likewise, there also existed the usage of bindings known as ‘katadeseis’, whether it be through binding tablets or kolossoi dolls. And so is the use of incantations, referred to as epoidai. Necromancy was also talked about in the past, with ‘divination from the dead’ described in Homer’s Odyssey. Hekate and Medea and Circe are witches and witch-goddesses people may typically think of when hearing about Ancient Greek witchcraft.

Moreover, consider this quote from Ogden (2009) by Ovid, writing about the drunken bawd-witches:

“She knows the craft of magic and Aeaean incantations. By her craft she turns flowing waters back to their source. She knows all too well the powers of the herb, the threads twisted by the spinning rhombos-wheel, and the secretion of the mare in love. At her wish, clouds crowd over the entire heaven; at her wish, the daylight shines in a clear sky. If you believe it, I have seen the stars dripping with blood. The face of the moon was deep red with blood. I suspect that she shape-shifts and flits about among the shades of the night and that her old body is covered with feathers. This is what I suspect, and this is what they say. Also, double pupils flash from her eyes, and the beams shine from twin circles. She calls forth great-grandfathers and the great-grandfathers of great-grandfathers from their ancient tombs and cleaves open the solid ground with a protracted incantation.”

The quote from a 1st-century BC poet bears striking resemblance to what I consider to be a witch of the traditional, crooked path. It describes a witch who uses incantations, who draws power from the herbs and natural materia, who commands the natural world like a witch commanding the wind to howl or rain to fall, someone who practices necromancy and perhaps ancestor veneration, and also perhaps what we now call spirit flight as she ‘shape-shifts and flits about among the shades of the night’ in a feathered form of a fetch. Personally, the description of the moon and stars dripping with blood reminds me chillingly of not just the witches of Thessaly but also the witches of America, as it speaks similarly of a ritual where a silver bullet is used to kill the moon and initiate the witch (Davis, 1975).

In conclusion, the craft has been alive far, far longer than we are. Therefore, there is a history associated with witchcraft, giving weight and meaning to the word ‘witch’ whose definition is both complex and particular.

Bibliography:

Bever, E. W. (2008). The realities of witchcraft and popular magic in early modern Europe: Culture, cognition and everyday life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davis, H. J. (1975). The silver bullet, and other American witch stories. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David.

Oberon, A. (2019). Southern cunning: Folkloric witchcraft in the American South. Winchester: Moon Books.

Ogden, D. (2009). Magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds: A sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schulke, D., & Fitzgerald, R. (2018). VIA TORTUOSA: An Exposition on Crooked Path Sorcery. Xoanon Publishing.

Tangherlini, T. (2000). "How Do You Know She's a Witch?": Witches, Cunning Folk, and Competition in Denmark. Western Folklore, 59(3/4), 279-303. doi:10.2307/1500237

[feralpumpkincatgirl]

What is your favorite aspect of your fantasy world™️?

oh bro there is SO MUCH HERE but probably my favorite thing i've designed for it are the Chaos Gates. i'm answering this on mobile so i can't do a readmore but i'll try to explain this both thoroughly and succinctly

so, for starters, the bulk of my original content takes place in the Shattered Multiverse. It is, as you may guess, one universe that got shattered. But that's another story When doing lore dumps I usually call it the SMV so that's what y'all get now

The SMV is a kinda complex planar system. There's four planes of existence that all took different amounts of damage in the Shattering. The Oneiric Plane (which is, again, another story) os completely broken, the Material and Ethereal planes took the exactly the same damage (15 larger chunks that became universes and a lot of much smaller chunks in the cracks), and the Astral plane is actually completely intact.

The cracks between the universes filled with tinier fragment universes are called Planar Chaos, and unless you're a specific type of entity (AGAIN another story) you can't go through it. You can travel through the Astral plane to get to other universes in a similar way that hyperspace travel works in a lot of sci-fi media but it's really expensive for larger vessels to do.

Now, one last context detail is that the smaller a universe or fragment universe is in the SMV, the more magic it produces. Knowing that, this dude named Tyrel who's one of the entities that can go through Planar Chaos found a way to stabilize two fragment universes that would have been adjacent before the Shattering and stabilize them with the very magic they fire off, allowing them to be used as instant portals at any distance, even outside the SMV! There are a lot of smaller ones but twelve extremely big ones form the backbone of the SMV's realspace highway system. And these highways are in space of course, and the people driving them do so in warp drive spacecraft. I also have a whole spiel about the advantages and disadvantages of different types of FTL craft in the SMV but that is, you guessed it, another story.

Thank you anon for fucking ACTIVATING me

[jewishphilosophyplace]

(Pasolini) Hardscrabble Religious Image (The Gospel According to St. Mathew)

I think one could reasonably argue that in modern art, including cinema, including cinema that touches upon “the spiritual in art,” the background frames are more important than the figures operating on the foreground. The ones that grabbed me most in Pasolini’s classic black and white The Gospel According to St. Matthew are the dark, hardscrabble shots. These are the flinty landscapes, Herod’s rough and buff young man-soldiers at the massacre of the innocents, stony Jerusalem cityscapes, tough priests and imposing headgear, and the death of Judas by suicide. We could organize these under the rubrics “landscape,” “cityscape,” and “anthro-scape.” Drawn from southern Italy, the created environment is inhospitable to life. In this piece of Vitalist visual thinking, the rough material and cruel social substrate appears as if dead in order to highlight the mysterious, life-sustaining miracle of the revelation. Reflecting no doubt a Jewish prejudice of my own construction, I was less drawn to the shots of Jesus and his companions. Just too pretty, Jesus and Mary were unable to match the raw topographical, urban, and human brutality of the background. To do that, they would have needed to be as nasty, brute, and “ugly.”

More so than the figure of Jesus himself and the gospel words, it was the soundtrack that carried for this viewer the strong sense of “spirit.” There was Bach (Mass in B Minor) along with Odetta’s “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” the thundering “Gloria” from the Congolese Missa Luba, and a quiet Kol Nidre. All of these were complemented by the haunting sound of “wind” insinuating itself over the landscape, the literal form of spirit as ruaḥ.

About sound in relation to topography I’m grabbing a piece from Deleuze in Cinema 2. He’s not writing here about Pasolini per se, but he makes good sense of the point I’m trying to make. That point concerns how in film the “aesthetic of the visual image …takes on a new character: its pictorial or sculptural qualities depend on a geological, tectonic power as in Cezanne’s mountains…The visual image reveals its geological strata or foundations, whilst the act of speech and also of music becomes for its part founder [sic], ethereal (Cinema 2, p.246). (The use of that term “ethereal” gives Deleuze away; it appears, he had an eye and an ear for “the spiritual in art.”)

In avant-garde films like the Gospel According to St. Matthew, what should be most clear is that narrative-linguistic content is subordinate to images, understood as poetic. This seems especially necessary in movies that handle religious or spiritual material in which “content” threatens to overwhelm and flatten the aesthetic sensation that shapes the shape of the content. The opposition between poetry and prose is one of the basic points in Pasolini’s well-known essay “The Cinema of Poetry” (1965). There he develops the idea of the irreducibly irrational, oneiric essence of cinema as being more like poetry than prose. While I would reject much of Pasolini’s thinking as too binary in structure, the structure gives one a good idea regarding what to look for in his larger body of work, this film included. Simply put, the landscape in the background, I would argue, is more irascible than the primary figures. In much the same way, Derrida privileged the picture frame over the picture in his unjustly neglected Truth in Painting.

http://ift.tt/2aDYVJs You can read all of “The Cinema of Poetry” here. While it is not Pasolini’s intention in this essay to write about religion and art, I want to focus on how his analysis  highlights the brute irrational as the most “significant” component in “the spiritual in art.” Again I want to direct attention to environmental features such as a landscape, cityscape, and anthro-scape. Pasolini writes, “Here, we must immediately make a marginal observation: whereas the instruments of poetic or philosophical communication are already extremely perfected, truly form a historically complex system which has reached its maturity, those of the visual communication which is at the basis of cinematic language are altogether brute, instinctive. Indeed, gestures, the surrounding reality, as much as dreams and the mechanisms of memory, are of a virtually pre-human order, or at least at the limit of humanity in any case pre-grammatical and even premorphological (dreams are unconscious phenomena, as are mnemonic mechanisms; the gesture is an altogether elementary sign, etc.).”

Setting aside the semiotic terms of Pasolini’s analysis, about the imagistic quality of the shots that I selected above, see this 1965 interview, in which the filmmaker underscores again the brute, mystical and irrational, which in The Gospel According to St. Matthew are best evoked by non-human and inhumane features. http://ift.tt/2pHmLh2 Pasolini explains, “Although St. Matthew wrote without metrics, he would have the rhythm of epic and lyric production. And for this reason, I have renounced in the film any kind of realistic and naturalistic reconstruction. I completely abandoned any kind of archaeology and philology, which nevertheless interest me in themselves. I didn’t want to make an historical reconstruction. I preferred to leave things in their religious state, that is, their mythical state. Epic-mythic. Not desiring to reconstruct settings that were not philosophically exact—reconstructed on a sound stage by scene designers and technicians—and furthermore not wanting to reconstruct the ancient Jews, I was obliged to find everything—the characters and the ambiance—in reality.”

What is of interest here in the analogical method is the collapse of time into a single image that belong neither entirely to the past nor entirely to the present. The Gospel According to St. Matthew was intentionally made in such a way as to not resemble conventional biblical epics built on a logic of “representation.” The register is not historical, but nor is it ahistorical. Building on top of temporal strata (Scripture, Catholic tradition, and Italian art), the film is supra-historical in structure, the brute milieu being non-specific to the text and the time of its origins. The landscapes are what below we will see Deleuze refer to as “any-place-whatever.” In Pasolini’s film, the place of the film is southern Italy, not Roman Judea. The “jews” are Italian. Relating to what Deleuze called a “time-image,” I want to mean by this term simply the way the sense of the past and the sense of the present are crystalized into a single image. The image includes biblical gospel compressed alongside ongoing realities of poverty and revolutionary struggle, caught best in long shots devoid of either a human presence or sympathetic visage.

The reality has been made strange by film, and that too was deliberate. On shooting the film piece by piece, Pasolini describes his own working method as a filmmaker. “My work is facilitated by the fact that I never shoot entire scenes. Being a ‘non-professional’ director I’ve always had to ‘invent’ a technique that consists of shooting only a very brief bit at one time. Always in little bits—I never shoot a scene continuously. And so even if I’m using a non-actor lacking the technique of an actor, he’s able to sustain the part—the illusion—because the takes are so brief.” This then is the trick in relation to the shots framing my own analysis. On one hand, the sense of strangeness depends upon long and extended shots, the camera lingering in sharp, mosaic segments, on the other hand.

The roughness that is characteristic of the raggedy film-segment conveys something that Elizabeth Castelli observes in her introduction to her translation of St. Paul, the screenplay of an uncompleted project just published by Verso. Against what Pasolini dismissed as the modern “bourgeoisentropy,” Castelli notes his claim that modern consumerism “would overwhelm modern society and render the peasant and the worker invisible. Such entropy would, in his view, make unsentimental expressions of authenticity increasingly difficult, not to say completely impossible.” “Translating Pasolini Translating Paul” in St. Paul, Verso, 2017, p.28)

What I am picking up from Castelli is not the filmmaker’s otherwise unremarkable Marxist-Christian critique of modern capitalism. What matters more to the analysis offered here is how she flags Pasolini’s critique of sentimentality, which is a feature so often an infelicitous part of the warp and woof of religion and film. Pasolini’s shots of landscapes, cityscapes, and anthro-scapes are powerful as “religious” or “spiritual” only to the degree that they are, on the whole, the most unwarm quality of his film on Matthew.

This lack of sentiment glosses those silent moments and spaces, figures of alienation which are haunting as wordless and without world. About long topographical shots in Pasolini and in other works of postwar cinema, Deleuze is keen to show how the movement-image (i.e. the image of action, which, like language, works according to a cause-effect chronological sequence of an extended shot) is suspended in the compressed form of the time-image.

I can conclude this post no better than by citing Deleuze, who writes, “The break in the sensory-motor link does not only affect the speech-act turning in on itself and hollowing itself out, and in which the voice now refers only to itself and to other voices. It also affects the visual image, which now reveals the any-space-whatevers, empty or disconnected spaces characteristic of modern cinema. It is as if, speech having withdrawn from the image to become founding act, the image, for its part, raised the foundations of space, the ‘strata’, those silent powers of before or after speech, before or after man. The visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic. Not that we are taken back to prehistory (there is an archaeology of the present), but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed according to variable orientations and connections. These are the deserts in German cities. These are the deserts of Pasolini, which make prehistory the abstract poetic element, the ‘essence’ co-present with our history, the archaean base which reveals an interminable history beneath our own” (Cinema 2 pp.243-4).

http://ift.tt/2pHE9Ct

[deltamovies]

A Cure for Wellness Free Full HD watch online & movie trailer

Release Year: 2016

Rating: 6.5/10 ( voted)

Critic's Score: /100

Director: Gore Verbinski

Stars: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth

Storyline An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company's CEO from an idyllic but mysterious “wellness center” at a remote location in the Swiss Alps. He soon suspects that the spa's miraculous treatments are not what they seem. When he begins to unravel its terrifying secrets, his sanity is tested, as he finds himself diagnosed with the same curious illness that keeps all the guests here longing for the cure.

Writers: Justin Haythe, Justin Haythe, Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Ivo Nandi, Adrian Schiller, Celia Imrie, Harry Groener, Tomas Norström, Ashok Mandanna, Magnus Krepper, Peter Benedict, Michael Mendl, Maggie Steed, Craig Wroe, David Bishins, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cast: Dane DeHaan –

Lockhart

Jason Isaacs –

Volmer

Mia Goth –

Hannah

Ivo Nandi –

Enrico

Adrian Schiller –

Deputy Director

Celia Imrie –

Victoria Watkins

Harry Groener –

Pembroke

Tomas Norström –

Frank Hill

Ashok Mandanna –

Ron Nair

Magnus Krepper –

Pieter The Vet

Peter Benedict –

Constable

Michael Mendl –

Bartender

Maggie Steed –

Mrs. Abramov

Craig Wroe –

Morris

David Bishins –

Hank Green

Details

Official Website: Facebook |

Instagram |

Country: USA, Germany

Language: English, German

Release Date: 3 Jan 2016

Filming Locations: Castle Hohenzollern, Hechingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Box Office Details

Budget: $40,000,000

(estimated)

Opening Weekend: $5,004,463

(USA) (17 February 2017)

Gross: $8,103,139

(USA) (17 March 2017)

Technical Specs

Runtime: 146 min

Did You Know?

Trivia: The scenes in the grotto were planned to be shot in Vienna but the shooting was canceled shortly before the start. The film studio in Babelsberg therefore had to build an entire grotto of 2000 sq m on their own. See more »

Goofs: When Lockhart hides behind the door after trying to gain access to transfusions flugel, the door in the close-up shot being stopped from closing with his crutch is different. See more »

Quotes: [

User Review

Author:

Rating: 5/10 OK, well, this is going to be a tricky review, folks, because this is a weird movie, very weird. A Cure For Wellness has the great merit of being different, and to reward the movie goer with something that stands out from the crowd; but, once you have appreciated this aspect, you might also want to be rewarded with a kind of content that gives the form some substance. And here is where A Cure For Wellness lets you down. I thought the first part of the movie was very good (rating: 8): you are simply smashed by the oneiric, hypnotic power of the images, by the stunning photography, by a breathtaking use of the camera, pretty good acting; and the intrigue created by the plot is such that you just keep asking yourself where this can reasonably go. That should have been the job of the second part (rating: 2) , where instead most of the potential built in the first half is wasted: the story, from intriguing, turns silly; the mysterious plot turns into a surreal Dracula movie which just does not make justice to itself.

The post A Cure for Wellness appeared first on The Movie Entertainment of the 21st Century!.

from http://ift.tt/2roDCUe

[otherpeopleslobsters-blog]

One Closing, An Opening, Buy Feelings! : Mild Climate & Zeitgeist Gallery April 1

all images appearing here are property of the galleries & artists in mention

Grey pools, a few self-conscious attempts at commodity sculpture, and festival art; the monthly art crawl in the burgeoning Wedgewood-Houston arts neighborhood in Nashville premiered it’s April edition this past Saturday, April 1st, replete with an orthodoxy of muted pastels, tacked wall prints, and gestural paintings - all the makings of a proper, albeit disparate, arts district - a full review of that later. 

Among a number of events on April 1st was the closing of Corner Palace at the artist-run curatorial collective Mild Climate. One of the more convincing shows this past month, Corner Palace featured artists Bridget Bailey, Douglas Degges, and John Dickinson, all of whose scale oriented works smartly implicated the constraints of the tiny exhibition space. In particular, Dickinson’s aptly named Yellow Pool (2016) and Grey Pool (2016), two low relief sculptures made of silicone, laminate, and MDF, haphazardly displayed in the center of the room like two displaced geological survey’s or personified shrouds - anchored the show.

Corner Palace March 4 - April 1, Bridget Bailey, Douglas Degges, & John Dickinson

The subtlety in detail and nuance of overall color in Dickinson’s work elevated the experience of these “pools” from what could have otherwise been formal or material studies to a curious reinterpretation of object spatiality. Scale is configured as a linear concept wherein these two shapes could be seen as either amplifications or reductions from an original form. The “pools” become memory-objects autonomous from real life, derived from the internalized oneiric house (a late mid-century concept by Gaston Bachelard averse to structuralism which imbues architectural spaces with psychological significance). 

John Dickerson, Grey Pool (2015), silicone, laminate, MDF, 30″ x 42″ x 5″

***image from Mild Climate  

Bailey’s and Degges’ pieces also approach these ideas of spatiality, yet are less abstracted from their real life applications, ie; in Bailey’s “Kitchen Table - Floor - Bed - Socks” (2017) the socks, although small, are interpreted only within our experience of socks, and while Degges’, whose small black canvas reliefs imply a number of conceivable perspectives - outer space, memory, etc,- they are limited by the surface potential of being hanging-paintings-on-a-white-wall. Conceptually and stylistically, I wonder, are these not just inverted and miniaturized  Rauschenberg white paintings? Regardless, Mild Climate, in a display of contemporary conceptual-curating, succinctly designed an aesthetic experience that converged on a spatial thematic. 

In a similar vein, At Home at Zeitgeist Gallery, which held it’s reception April 1 and will be open until April 29, also featured a number of paintings and prints that recalled midcentury stylistic sentiments. 

Featuring local and national artists Ky Anderson, Amelia Briggs, Rami Kim, Vicki Sher, Jessica Simorte, Sonnenzimmer, Sarah Boyts Yoder, and art & design retailer Wilder, the show was a comprehensive introduction to gestural works on paper, minimal constraints, and contemporary design aesthetics. Amelia Briggs’ small fabric prints from her series “Small Green Plane” were a wise curatorial choice and worked well to break up the mass of large gestural paintings. At 14″x14″ and housed within thin white frames, Briggs’ muted prints of partially erased - or intentionally incomplete - illustrations retained a level of conflicting austerity with what would otherwise be playful drawings. On first encounter the works are reminiscent of early 20th Century animated cartoons, yet maintain no particular image or recognizable form that would indicate this. Rather, the effect is produced from the quality of line and indicated action within the frame. 

Ambiguously specific, Briggs’ prints surreptitiously engage the viewer in content that is not there, letting the viewer complete the image for her. 

Amelia Briggs, SGP (Untitled 4) (2017), print on fabric, 18.25″ x 22″ 

Amelia Briggs, SGP (Untitled 12) (2017), print on fabric, 18.25″ x 22″

***image from Zeitgeist Gallery

In a similar palette, Sonnenzimmer’s (art and design duo Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi) series of screen prints were at the very least, a showcase of technical mastery and precision as I did not see elsewhere that night. Graphic in nature, the prints recall the experimental visual language of Tibor Kalman, a hyper-sensitivity to contemporary nostalgia, and a design aesthetic conscious of the eventual digitalization of all print matter. Seen through the lens of graphic design, these works are pure aesthetic candy. In terms of curatorial context, I am not sure they served to enhance a conceptual agenda or interact visually with any of the other work shown. They did however, in their proximity, broach a consideration for contemporary “gestural” painting as a graphic impulse, and implicate works on paper as being consciously produced for a digital interface. 

Ky Anderson, Slit, (2016) acrylic on paper, 38″ x 41″

***image from Zeitgeist Gallery

Sonnenzimmer, The Arts Club of Chicago: Establishment (2016), 10-color screen print, 1 pass foil stamp, 26″x 36″ 

***image from Sonnenzimmer 

Although gestural in genre and constructed with the accoutrement of the subconscious mind - unframed canvas, raw edges, sweeping paint strokes, splashes, etc. - the majority of paintings/acrylic collages included in At Home felt decidedly constrained and calculated - graphic even. I wonder at the contemporary inclination to paint in this manner; are these types of works simply a study in formal and technical properties? Do they serve a fundamental aesthetic purpose? Or more so, are works like these born from a confirmation of “recognizable art”, wherein, because they embrace a previously established visual cannon, they are comfortable choices for exhibitions? 

Interestingly, Mild Climate and Zeitgeist Gallery represent a microcosm of contemporary art both in terms of aesthetic inclinations and foreseeable agenda’s. Particularly at a point in time where galleries struggle to stay open and increasingly, a person’s interaction with art is mediated or exclusive to a screen, galleries exhibit work that is familiar and purchasable. How do you sell a psycho-spatially concerned silicone yellow pool? It is more agreeable to gaze luxuriously at fields of color you have been assured are real art. Feelings please!