Maya II

What we ask ourselves and cannot understand—until we stop asking. Cinema must be something improbable, never shown in full. That would explain the greater darkness at the beginning, when it flickered at sixteen frames per second. Digital cinema promises less death—black and static microseconds between each image that conjures movement and, beyond itself, time. The existence of Cinema is a lasting illusion.

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But how can we presume the illusion will be remembered? Degraded film reels salvaged as bytes, the Voyager’s golden record venturing beyond the sun’s gravitational pull, the Arecibo message, destined to reach the Hercules Cluster in twenty-five millennia. Perhaps a battery-powered radio would suffice—there will be someone who believes their voice is enough. Someone will hear it.

 

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, "continue to play in our corner of the sandbox", were recognized by the very industry that houses them. Hollywood. Oscars. Yet the brothers seem to have something else in mind when they make films about uncertainty.

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In every film, as in life, some object or accident abruptly halts the characters—and the viewers—for its sheer coincidence, and it is then that life becomes symbol, becomes art. The green traffic light in No Country for Old Men, the UFO in The Man Who Wasn’t There, or the enigmatic bathroom pipe in Blood Simple—each is an exception and an evidence of a plan (divine writing) that the characters inhabit unknowingly. The viewer is confronted with a trace that resists logical explanation and implies another observer.

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This is how the Coens create a predestined, eternal world with an ignorant, trivial reality. They borrow a world—be it from a novel or a genre—and apply to it their own amoral laws of gravity. It’s not that moral judgment is absent from their films, but the camera only observes; it does not judge. With Javier Bardem’s character, their nihilistic and objective style was emphasized in their film, No Country for Old Men.

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In life, in Cinema, and in the Coens’ work, nothing is ever fully resolved. The mystery of the unexplainable always remains. From the illusion of movement to the labyrinths of edited time, there is a trace that weighs upon all that may become meaning. The uncertainty of being understood—even by other forms of life in space.