Maya I

What gravity reigns in a laborious work is bound to time and what it permeates. Each image, each sound, word, and imaginable musical note are powers of Cinema, yet in truth, only a few have been written.

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If we could say anything of the infinite, it would always be finite; the word knows this, the image sees it, and the piano feels it—but the camera is a foolish machine (for Deleuze, a spiritual automaton) of dilated mirrors that, nonetheless, remember. Cinema is an illusion of life. The camera is an innocent witness; it is man who turns it. Godard warned that every camera movement implies a moral decision.

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Moral or not, it is public. It tends to be public. It is printed and read, and also forgotten. If one believed in ghosts or in the Eternal Return, perhaps one would choose something more enduring. Not a time fixed only once, but one that settles into eternity, into the infinite ambiguity of multiple readings.

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Harry Smith sought to create magic—not the contraptions of Méliès, but cosmogonies made from Victorian clippings and chemical emulsions, closer to the infernal visions of William Blake or the nightmares of Borges. It belongs to the demon to conceive of the infinite (a degraded one), while it is the angels who perceive the One.

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Smith’s genius could not fit within a closed surface—he wanted to encompass spaces and times, thought of Easter eggs (even those still hidden), and even arranged paper airplanes built joyfully by thousands of children around the world. But perhaps he was never so vast as in his own mind. Who is Harry Smith to Cinema?

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Another thing—8½. For us mortals, Fellini and his Disorder, entropy, the time that spirals inward upon itself to the march of clowns, the elongated ending and the sweet sorrows. Soft as a shroud and silent as a dream—heaven and hell as one. A rhythm and a joy that know themselves as rhythm and joy. Eden in the harem, the fall in the family, Eden in the family, the fall in the harem. Or some magic like that.

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Smith and Fellini—each a world—yet they are two spheres that interpenetrate. Who remains on the margins? The spectator, the author. “So he reasons, on the margin, all right, but on the margin of what, that’s what remains to be seen.”(Beckett, 1997, p. 92)

 

Beckett, Samuel. Relatos. Spain: Tusquets Editores, 1997.