An Ode To Cinema

 

“Most humans are drawn to visual harmony, challenges their visual system or aesthetic preference."

"Colours are the mother tongue of the subconscious." Carl Jung.

A film leader is a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector for a moving reel of images that pass through a film gate. These strips of gelatine have always been enamoured by the complexity of the colours that precede the main images, colours and shapes that linger between the numbers during the countdown. 

The bright shaft of light that eventually sizzles into dust hairs that euphorically turn into luminescent forms that boggle the mind, this light seems to be the genesis of these marvels of the film medium, which  are what makes one nostalgic of the days of shooting on film and projecting the final reels.

Typically made from rejected or retired prints of previously released reels, these snippets conjure up another side to the vision sparked by the persistence of vision, and like painting in motion, they are what I would call film art.

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This video poem, therefore explores changes in human cognition when indecipherable forms are persistently perceived, and the boundaries of the real seen through the boundaries of the real seen through new eyes.

And living in this multilayered video are translucent entities born of light and silver granules, replayed with light and hidden by light. The film gate - a crucible where opposing energies generate their light, is a sacred site.

Like a vast interface with unending flows of the unimaginable, this ode o cinema’s mysterious beginnings and endings, draws a circle in the life of the shifting contours of sight and sought.

Ultimately, the film art offers a personal space to inflict images of one’s unknowable imaginings, seeing what one wills and imagineers, a form of realising (MAKING REAL), the massive microscopic beings lingering in the light at the film gate.

The visuals are modes of self-fashioning owned imageries, signals toward the path still unfolding ahead, a liminal space where the possible in inevitable.

The forms and shapes that dwell in these entanglements between frames, can become forms of dream objects, what has yet to be named; that which invites the beholder to actively participate in shaping them.

Therefore, the video poem is a two-dimensional space of presences, evolving in relation ration to viewers’ perspectives, and their unsupervised methods of listening to inner ideas that rarely have a fixed course; activating forms of attention that escape closure.

Images By: Khahliso Matela