(A HUMAN) BEING - a short piece

other possible title
UN-APPROACHING DEATH
(take out the big word though)
cf.more at bottom below

“Program Notes” – As if ALERTS would work…

Winner of Best Experimental Film at St. Louis Filmmakers Festival
AND PLAYED AT
the 2022 St. Louis International Film Festival
AND
the 2023 Defy Film Festival in Nashville, TN

too many words for such a short piece, but then it is (about) nothing
14 years of gestation & very close to failure (as it should be)
While we try to stand on “icebergs of knowledge” (with a very large mass of unknown), any film either stands by itself or does not…
As we have been told before:“All the rest is commentary.”

My teacher Charlotte Joko Beck used to say that one spends the first part of life accumulating, and that the second part is spent getting rid of things.

In 2008 after being unable to move and to communicate while in an ICU for three weeks… when I finally was home – after having scared myself in the mirror by looking like a camp survivor, jawbone and knees protruding & stomach skin hanging – as in some kind of slow motion, all normal activity seemed like actual choices & getting that essential mechanism going again looked like getting hooked into automated addictions (eating, drinking, watching my surroundings…).
Nothing was evident anymore, not even regular speech and words.
I was an outsider to any kind of normalcy. A world of conventions had been revealed as in the Emperor With No Clothes story…

That’s the short of it.

Addressing this film piece more directly: except possibly for Brakhage’s “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,” Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” or Peter Kubelka’s “Arnulf Rainer,” our addiction to images and sounds remains beyond the scope of most films.

Tabula rasa.
This short piece attempts to take off… while trying to remain as grounded as possible.

The movies of the future will take place in between two eyeballs… but this is primarily meant to be a cold shower.

Consciousness is motionless… If time passes, it is necessary that there should be something which remains static. And it is consciousness of self which is static. — Leo Tolstoy, January 15, 1910 (at age 85 – ten months before his death).

About the filmmaker:

In the tradition of Abraham, the iconoclast… Pier Marton is an original, an artist for our age“. — Dr. Sander Gilman, leading American cultural and literary historian, psychoanalyst and the author and editor of over eighty books
He is ahead of us all and behind everything that is.— Tamiko Thiel, Artist (“The Female Supercomputer Designer Who Inspired Steve Jobs”)
Pier Marton rakes the virtual screens and the tablets of our hypocrisies with the sharp claws of the avenging angel, piercing the complacent facade of the status quo to reveal the underlying agonies of our conflicting moralities. — Aribert Munzner, artist, professor emeritus/former dean, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design
… a reflective, thoughtful presence in the field… balancing intellectual rigor with unbridled creativity and curiosity… an integrity and authenticity characterized by an inner strength, giving his work a unique sensibility… rare in our field of media art. — Bill Viola, Leading and Pioneer Video Artist
I am moved by what you are doing, I hope your video will reach many viewers. I hope it will bring them closer to a world they could never enter. — Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize recipient (in a private letter)

An earlier “graphic expression” of one of the lures.

Currently the Unlearning Specialist at the School of No Media and its collection of “imploding words.”
Video works collected in Beaubourg Museum, Paris – Museum of Modern Art, NY – National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario – Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh.

ARTISTS REACTIONS

Phenomenal, so deep, so simple…
The closest thing to facing the mystery of the Easter Island’s faces in a most present manner.

Aribert Munzner – https://www.aribertmunzner.com/

I have watched it many times yesterday and again just now.

Every second of the film, so much to capture: your voice and your eyes change as you balance both realities – yes you can speak from or close to what you call the silence.

But that can’t really last for the nature of those moments of knowing makes it so that, by the very stating that you know, you are expelled from holding onto any kind of trophy.

Yet, honest and reflecting that liminal threshold of access to that ‘silence’… with the words you are allowed to speak in that, and from that moment, that place.

There’s that most human moment when you call it something else, it’s almost done then… the last vestige of it.

And then it changes to ‘addiction,’ a kind of pronouncement, which engages the mind, as in asking who is ‘you’? Is it us, or is it your voice as it leaves that space, speaking to the self that is addicted to images and thoughts? And all of us who are addicted to these…. the energy shifts.

I know that instant of knowing… trying to stay in that moment and keep that consciousness but the words diminish the actuality of that type of being and knowing … it can’t really be held.

But you did it: the entire process is there to witness as it happens… And then you stop, judge yourself, and how it seemed like a good idea…. but in fact you have succeeded, because you are exactly what you name your film, (a human) being.

To me, moment to moment, no editing, a piece so brave… raw, humble, true.

Rose-Lynn Fisher – https://www.rose-lynnfisher.com/

The nuances of a master at his craft – very subtle and very intimate.

William Morris – https://vimeo.com/williammorris

“PRODUCTION STILLS“

[Bring your words, bring your guns.]

If I tell you that this piece could have been called

UN-APPROACHING DEATH
(take out the big word though)

then you think you understand, but it will always be so much more complex than what we think we understand.

To say “we understand” is to acknowledge our lack of understanding.

Leaving complexity and the unsayable behind, we speak…

Formulaic, word-ridden… you should expect no less by reading a text – unless you deal with the sparks of poets and writers.

Only the ineffable is real, the rest are shortcuts, schematics… and our busy lives can often be reduced to paint-by-numbers & fill-in-the-blank tasks.

The problem is that once words come into the picture, we have stopped experiencing. We go from shortcut to shortcut.

As has been said before, we name it, and then “we see it.” But we don’t, we see only a name.

And the School of No Media, with its imploded words, attempts to go in that direction.

ADDENDUM
(related)