... The Pepsi adminstration is doing as expected; mending erroneous errors made by the last regime, yet moving fullspeed ahead with other [yet to be revealed in the public conscious as erroneous] errors. The change is coming from the top (and its depressing), and the bottom had better respond if it wants its own type of change.
Poetry Preface
I began to write
Right before I left
to begin to write
About right beginning's
left to write about.
Postulating the correct preface
for my poetry pamphlet.
Rather, prefacing my poetry
to prepare paradoxes
TO leave a residue of surrealistic symbolism
Symbolizing ‘isms’ so real
of dew resting on a leaf, TOO.
When I write, I wrote
I will write whimsically of white spaces
colored by lead based lines relating together
to create associations of thoughts swirled around
constellations of words whimsically wrought.
Perhaps happenings per beginning will inspire me
to begin beginnings of ethereal excellence,
excreting the lead based lines aforementioned.
Indeed indigenous thoughts roam through my pencil
and release themselves above the signature below.
Jody Rucks – Sept. 29.05
Right before I left
to begin to write
About right beginning's
left to write about.
Postulating the correct preface
for my poetry pamphlet.
Rather, prefacing my poetry
to prepare paradoxes
TO leave a residue of surrealistic symbolism
Symbolizing ‘isms’ so real
of dew resting on a leaf, TOO.
When I write, I wrote
I will write whimsically of white spaces
colored by lead based lines relating together
to create associations of thoughts swirled around
constellations of words whimsically wrought.
Perhaps happenings per beginning will inspire me
to begin beginnings of ethereal excellence,
excreting the lead based lines aforementioned.
Indeed indigenous thoughts roam through my pencil
and release themselves above the signature below.
Jody Rucks – Sept. 29.05
Freud and the Cinema:
Towards a theory of Surreal Relational Cinemart
Towards a theory of Surreal Relational Cinemart
Introduction:
Let’s make a movie!
A bipolar and delusional screenwriter, who speaks his own language, sells a screenplay. The producer thinks him brilliant but mad, and orders a number of revisions. This is your typical hard-nosed producer; he’s seen traumatic times, had success and failure at intense levels, and works to make a profitable film that can make the screenwriter satisfied (or at least not upset the screenwriter). Thus, the producer submits himself to what he thinks are pre-crafted rules of the game. The screenwriter, who has no capital and thus no ability to create the film on his own, submits to the revisions, but he alters the final screenplay so that the symbols in the film will still communicate his original ideas. The producer finds a director he thinks competent enough to bring this screenplay to life, a man not unlike himself (or who he wanted to be before he realized he had no talent). The director is a man schooled in the finest techniques of filmmaking, particularly in attaching words to the visual pictures he creates in his head so that he may communicate and execute his vision more clearly. The director must be our protagonist; his passion and perspective will drive the life of this film. The producer pitches an elaborate pitch; he himself is in love with this screenplay. Enthralled with the ideas of the screenwriter, convinced of the brilliant film to come by a successful producer, the director gleefully agrees. Oh what joy, we’re making a movie!
After rehearsal and pre-production have had their stint, production starts. The director works with the cinematographer to make this vision come to life. The cinematographer is skilled in two areas; in translating the director’s words into particular visual images, and in using the camera to create and record these images. The camera is a pristine one, a product of the 21st century. With its lenses and with the recording material it uses, it records light from the World from a particular perspective. On our film, the director edits in camera based on his transformation of the ideas of the screenwriter, and the producer edits still more after production. After he’s finished, the producer screens the film for the director; the camera acts as the projector, and the cinematographer the projectionist. The screenwriter has been allowed to come to the screening, but must sit in the back and watch silently; the producer doesn’t want him befuddling the director’s head.
The director believes the film more or less representative of his voice, and is more or less pleased. The producer sits directly behind him, telling the director where he strayed from their ideals, and applauding the film’s brilliance. For the screenwriter, the film is both fine and utterly unsatisfying. He needs more; he does not feel that the director truly understands what he was trying to communicate, and that the producer went overboard in the editing room. Wait. What does that mean? The director starts to comprehend something; something related to the strange symbols in the script which he tried to rationalize away. For some reasons these things are referencing some hidden theme, which he sees now during the screening (he is, of course, quite the bright director, and has to be to find these symbols within one screening). He lets out a sigh of consternation. Aha! That’s all I need! The screenwriter hears this sigh, and gets a bright idea. He runs out of the theater; the producer looks back, wondering what that mad man-child is up to now.
The film continues on, nearing its end. The director seems less sure of the piece, now. There’s something the producer’s not telling him about this screenplay. It’s a good film, no doubt about it, but there’s something false about all of it. The producer has just slipped into sleep; guess he’ll miss the climax. Lurking in the shadows, the screenwriter sees the producer’s head bob, and seizes the moment. He dashes to the camera and woes the cinematographer with poetry. The screenwriter hands the cinematographer a new strip of film that contains all the missing elements of the script that were deleted; the screenwriter made the scenes by taking scenes from some of the director’s previous films. The cinematographer starts loading this into the camera. During the chaos of switching reels, the producer wakes up, and quickly realizes what’s happening. He rushes to the camera and arrives just before the new film starts. He tries to rip the film out of the camera, and a small fire ensues. The film catches fire, the camera stops rolling, and the screenwriter starts screaming. MsitonpyH!
The director, who has up to this point stared continuously at the screen, slowly turns to look at the commotion. The producer panics, not wanting the director to speak with the screenwriter or wanting the screenwriter around the camera and cinematographer any longer. He rushes to the screaming screenwriter and tries to no avail to force him to quiet down. He looks at the mangled film in the screenwriter’s hand, at the director’s eyes slowly turning towards all this, and orders the cinematographer to play the burnt film in desperation. The cinematographer complies, the screenwriter calms down, the director turns his attention back to the screen. The director is hypnotized by this wild and experimental portion of ‘his’ film now on screen, certain that he did not make this, but freaked out because he recognizes some of the images as his own. There is something about its mangled, firework, layered images. Am I really seeing this? This film too ends, as does the day and night, and this entire crew, all representatives of different functions and spatio-temporal locales of the psyche-in-society, comes to attention once again to make a million more films in a new day.
The screenwriter is Mr. Id, the producer Mr. Super-Ego, the director Mr. Pcs.Ego, the cinematographer Mr. Cs.Ego, the camera Mr. Perceptive Systems, and the first film is called ‘The Reality-Concept,’ and the final film was a piece of the original screenplay, entitled ‘The Surreality of Reality.’ What we have is an analogy for the mechanisms of the psyche-in-society; a crude analogy, and only one possible analogy amongst many, but an analogy which nevertheless allows for some interesting speculation. By relating psychoanalytic theory to the production of cinema, one is bound to run across meanings and concepts that may aid the practice and experience of both Psychoanalysis and cinema. Throughout the work of Freud one finds passages that allow for iterations along cinematic lines, and Psychoanalysis has of course historically affected the practice of filmmakers, directly and indirectly. In the essay to follow, we will be looking directly at psychoanalytic theory with the perspective of a filmmaker looking to create a synthesized theory of psychoanalysis in cinema.
The synthesis of course comes after the accumulation, and our accumulation will be a dialectical one; Freud’s ideas shall be the departure point from which our speculation begins. Just as psychoanalytic theory ranges the gamut of psychosocial experiences, so shall our speculation range the gamut of cinematic production, interpretation, and experience. We shall have cinematic ruminations regarding dreams, repression, neurosis, thought, visual thinking, the role and function of psychoanalysis, etc. Our strange filmmaking analogy shall act as a guide for our speculation; will move from the screenwriter Mr. Id all the way to the mangled ‘Surreality of Reality’ which was the dream. However, Psychoanalysis is a system of related forces, and as such we will have recourse both to discussing other ‘characters’ while ruminating on any one, as well as altering our analogies and examples in order to more complexly illustrate our intuitions. We shall arrive at a list of possible practices to be incorporated into a systematized theory, film movement, or film genre, which might be called Psychoanalytic Cinema, Dream Cinema, or Surrealist Cinema; one that we shall call Surreal Relational Cinemart.
Conclusion:
Secrets Of The Magical Surrelational Cinemart
Our venture through Psychoanalysis, our interview with the master and our interrogation of the production team, have left us with more than a little insight towards the end of constructing a system of Surreal Relational Cinemart; which, in the end of simplicity, we shall from here forth call Surrelational Cinemart. We shall present the most general conclusions we arrived at. The Surrealists never came up with a theory of Surrealist Cinema; their heir, King Rucks and the Relationalists, shall here, in the Age of Aquarius, amend this omission.
The mad screenwriter woes the cinematographer into showing the Surreality of Reality, but the producer sets it ablaze and distorts it. They play it anyway, and the director turns his attention back to the screen. The director is hypnotized by this wild and experimental portion of ‘his’ film now on screen, certain that he did not make this, but freaked out because he recognizes some of the images as his own. There is something about its mangled, firework, layered images. Am I really seeing this? We must be the mad screenwriter of our shared social world, we the auteurs behind Surrelational Cinemart.
We, who have witnessed the philosophical extension of Psychoanalysis. We see that there is no opposition between Eros and Thanatos, that life is the back-forth rhythm that occurs between these two as ideal limits; indeed, we have passed beyond all oppositions, even subject/object, sexuality/cruelty, and Reality and the Surreality of Reality. We found that there are functions within even the normal psyche which can nevertheless be described as psychotic (disavowal, dreams), and used this insight to show that there is a very real Surreality to Reality.
We, who have seen the power of perspective in the operations of the psyche-in-society, and are prepared to use this insight towards our ends. We must challenge the Ego’s unconscious claim to absolute perspective; careful not to loose anxiety, yet affecting the Ego to make it mindful of its limitations, and potential. Whenever the Ego’s claim to absolute perspective (in a particular Reality-Concept) is challenged, a form of narcisstic wound occurs; a reassessment of the Reality-Concept is then engendered, and this must always have a relatively large affect on the psyche-in-society. Creating such a reassessment in the Reality-Concept (worldview or subjectivity) of the Ego is one of the main functions of Surrelational Cinemart (and art in general); in many ways, it is the most we could ever hope for.
We who have seen the hidden though powerful effect of repetition, and are prepared to catalyze waves of repetition that will potentially alter entire ecosystems. Our cinemart will feed off of repetition; as an editing technique, it shall aid us in awakening memory, and we will utilize repetition as a further attempt to speak the language of the primary process. Repetition shall be an element of the ground of our Surreal Relational Cinemart. The simplest repetition can lead to transformative change (social or psychical); just saying hello to your neighbor everyday, or just repeating the image of a tabooed scene of miscegenation, can lead to a form of a shift in the psyche-in-society’s Reality-Concept. Our Surrelational Cinemart will seek to both use and catalyze the force of Repetition towards our ends.
We know that our art, as only avant-garde art, striving ultimately ineffectively to break the back of old conventions and expectations, can achieve its transformational ends only by degree. We are slowed once more towards our truly medicinal and therapeutic end, as long held psychological issues take extended periods to alter. We know that we are limited due to the loss of the analyst/patient relationship, and the lack of the specific case history of the viewer; for some, this most logically eliminate any real medicinal or therapeutic potential for our cinemart. We are limited to assuming general resistances and defensive mechanisms. We can and shall hypothesize great potential for our cinemart, for the creation of concepts, however idealist or metaphysical, is an avant-garde act, is an historical act, and an act worth taking if at all attached to relational ends; however, we have no misgivings that what we have written here as any value. Not as words written, trains of thoughts followed, or even as Relations and Traces revealed; the materiality of history, the work of producing cinemart and testing theories, the Relational Praxis of creation and situation, these shall give our theories their value.
The aim of Surrelational Cinemart is nothing less than to expand the Pcs.Ego, as well as offer it new values with which to censor and manage its internal and external perceptions and actions. Our visual cure attempts to release the viewer from self-alienation (normal in the performance principle) and self-repression, by relating its Pcs.Ego to its repressed psychosomatic impulses, depriving motives of resistance of their value, replacing these motives with more powerful ones, and working as a representative of a freer or superior Reality-Concept in which the Id need not be [unsuccessfully] dominated, for its needs have been worked into the new reality principle of the viewer in its relation to Others. The extreme turning away from the World as external-Other in psychosis, and the Surreality of Reality, such that any-thing can have enough symbolic value to affect the unsuspecting Cs.Ego in surreal ways, is why we are confident that our cinemart can potentially engender art-experiences which alter the viewer’s relationship to its Reality-Concept, its perspective and relationship to the Other, such that evolutions in the historical reality-principle become possible as well.
Our Surrelational Cinemart is the visual cure, which nonetheless gives more power to the Pcs.Ego. We shall not be putting memories into words, but find memories in images and words. We will attempt to locate the imagistic language of the Id, whereby we can communicate with the Id with more power than the talking cure can. Our use of words shall varying along two lines, instructive and prescriptive, and poetic and symbolical. As we need a participating audience, we shall always provide captions, instructions, and particular words to attach (or not) to the types of events occurring during the cure. We know that attaching words to memories modifies repression, so we will have recourse, usually before or after the duration of the piece, to speaking plainly and prescriptively. We shall also prescribe dialogue after each of our cinemart pieces, so that the thoughts that have become vaguely conscious do not lose enough cathexis to be suppressed and forgotten. For the most part, however, our use of words shall be a continuation of our dream-language; poetic, and symbolic. Even our use of words shall be symbolic and poetic rather than descriptive/analytic. Our cinemart shall use the tools of cinema, time and mechanically recorded reality shot from certain perspectives, to engender the visual thinking of the depths of the psyche-in-society.
Our’s is a cinema of memory, regression, hallucination, an active and relating spectator self-analyzing their associations. Our’s is a rhythmic cinemart in/flux, a perverted cinema which shall ride the bridge of sexuality, fantasy, and the theme of the parent (as a link to repressed ideas and memories) towards deeper layers of the psyche. Our cinemart shall be focused on the repressed and directing ideas behind understanding, and will attempt to reveal and transform the hidden drives which figure so prominently in the psychical life of the psyche-in-society. If we are able to transform (or cause the self-transformation) of Ucs. directing ideas such that they direct certain wishes and impulses into certain trains of thoughts, we may be able to transform the circuitry of the psyche such that the never-ending drives lead to never-ending affirmations of a life of Relational Praxis.
Just as Breton wrote in the Surrealist Manifesto that “Surrealism...creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts,” the need to discharge cathexis during and after our cinemart might be substantial enough to create such frightful revolts. We face the threat of this energy being transformed into anxiety (discomfort) if not discharged through action. As such, we want the viewer to feel impelled to act, in new relational ways. Our cinemart prescribes acting out during and after the experiences in association and relational praxis. We anticipate the viewers’ active self-interpretation; acting out by allowing associations to happen and following them as they occur. We will also look for the viewer to act out as taking practical action after the cinemart experience in order to practically overcome the repression. Even if impulses and repressions are made conscious, not acting on them could drain these insights of attention, and the viewer faces the danger of forgetting these insights and merely repeating in the aid of defense. As such, we will be transforming acting out into remembering through associative action, allowing the patient to overcome self-repression, and begin to act out in a world seen from a qualitatively transformed Reality-Concept or Worldview centered around new ends and new meanings attached to certain relationships.
Ours is a Relational Cinemart because we shall systemize the use of certain relational tools, such as relational images and symbols (nodal-point images, like a baby’s toy, or the face of a God), relational montage techniques where the theme or dream-content is presented in the relation of images to others, and relational transitional techniques (such as the Flux, or repetition) which shall allow us to open up different association tracks with which we can attempt to befuddle the defenses of the Cs.Ego. Ours is a Relational Cinemart as the ‘meaning’ of our cinemart will arrive from the relation of the theme of the piece to the viewer’s own imaginings; the relation of the content of the piece (the resistances, ideas, etc we present) to the ecology of the psyche of the viewer. Surreal Relational Cinemart is only the opportunity, the situation, which is nothing without the viewer as participant/experiencer/patient.
This then is Psychoanalysis as cinematic practice as cinemart as Relational Art as Surrelational Cinemart. Go, make cinemart, and heal this repressed World!
