Some years ago I thoughtlessly made a comment at a film festival. Another filmmaker showed a film that was shot by putting a pinhole in place of a lens on a conventional camera. Afterwards, I said to someone, rather inarticulately and without thinking about it, that this was not "a real pinhole film." This comment got back to the filmmaker, and, I'm afraid, did not endear me to him. I felt bad about this; I hadn't meant to criticize the film or its maker; I liked the film. But I also meant what I said: there was something about just using a pinhole lens on a conventional camera which did not live up to my idea of what a pinhole camera should be, at least for myself. I didn't know just how to say it at the time. "That's not a real pinhole film" didn't suffice.
What I didn't see at the time was that the missing piece was materiality. That is, involvement with that which is physical, tangible directly to human senses: that which is made of matter. The body of the world, as opposed to the realm of ideas.
I imagine that every photography student -- and many others besides -- has made and used a pinhole camera. The first version of this was probably made by taking a piece of aluminum can, poking a hole in it with a needle, then affixing it to a cardboard box. This was loaded with a piece of photo paper and exposed in a sunny place, usually just outside the art building. This doesn't always yield a good result; there are often light leaks to tape up, hole sizes to adjust, sometimes plastic lids that aren't actually light proof. But this simple hand-made apparatus eventually yields to even non-expert manipulation, and a photograph is produced. They are typically not the greatest works of photographic art, but their creation proves a pedagogical point: it is possible, using very simple materials and the basic properties of light, to create a photographic image. Mostly, having done this, we go on to take real photographs with "real" cameras.
But in fact we had done more than just prove a point: or, rather, we proved more than we realized. It's true that we explored basic optical principles, and made a photograph. But did we stop to realize just how significant a departure from the world we as modern humans and even modern artists inhabit it was to make a camera with our own hands? Out of junk? We tend to dismiss the act artistically, for it's clear that the image is of inferior quality, the physical and photographic materials of low quality and not designed for the purpose, the workmanship haphazard and unskilled. It's just a student project, after all! But this is a self-fulfilling interpretation: we only allowed ourselves one pass, didn't practice at all, and only allowed ourselves to use sub-standard materials. That we got a result at all is a miracle, and that is usually the point the exercise is intended to make. But we didn't just prove that it's possible to take a photograph, we actually DID make a photograph: we ended up with a finished image, and made the apparatus that created it, with our own hands.
The difference here is crucial, and gets at not just what I meant in my ill-considered pinhole film comment, but also at the nature of the world and our role in it.
Consider, if you will, my washing machine. It stopped working a few months ago. It's essentially the same object that it was when it was working; it weighs the same, looks the same, feels the same, it just doesn't wash clothes any more. We had a repair person come and look at it; he charged us $119 to tell us that it wasn't worth fixing. So my wife and I wrestled it out of the laundry room, and I followed a technician's diagnostic manual inside: there was something wrong with the motor controller board. Probably just something small, a $2 part. But the manual said that if the board doesn't work, replace the whole motor control board. Looking at it, it was easy to see why: even though it was probably an inexpensive component, the board was inscrutable. It was built to combine probably a hundred components into a compact and integrated circuit board, not to be repaired. With some frustration, I looked up buying a new one. It cost $295. The whole machine, brand new, only cost $650. Plus, the rest of it was now ten years old, and there was no guarantee that there wouldn't soon be something else wrong with it. The repairman was right: it wasn't worth fixing. We bought a new one.
This sort of experience is probably familiar to all of us. It says a lot about our relationship to the world, and relates precisely to my experience with handmade filmmaking.
Compare the washing machine to the pinhole camera. With the right applications of tape, a novice can get the pinhole camera to work. That cardboard box need not go to the trash until we're done taking pictures with it, and can be repaired over and over again. Its technology is humane, accessible to human understanding and to human hands. The washing machine, on the other hand, is unrepairable. This huge assembly of material is ready for the trash heap even though 99% of it is fine. What's the difference?
There seem to be two fundamental ones, and they are examples of the practical and moral sides of our degraded relationship with the material world: reparability and responsibility.
First, reparability. The modern washing machine is so complex that the user most emphatically is NOT expected -- nor CAN reasonably expect -- to be able to fix it. Those who use it are using something that is far beyond their comprehension on a material level. Consider smart phones and computers and microwaves and cars and airplanes: they are, all of them, far beyond the material comprehension of those of us who use them. They come to us ready made, as miraculous and mysterious as if they had dropped from the sky, fully formed.
This can be put in an even stronger way. Increasingly, we are surrounded by articulations of the material world that are beyond human comprehension or direct human action. This is the logical end of our technological progress: a world built by machines, that only machines can interact with. Try reading the source code of a Google maps web page, and you'll see what I mean: you can't understand it. Nor is it just your limitation: the code was generated by a machine, to be interpreted by a machine. It is, in this sense, an inhumane technology. The only presence of humanity is the eyes of the viewer; neither she, nor anyone else, was involved in the creation of the image. At the moment, the computer program that generated the machine-interpreted code might have been written by a person, but Google, et al., aspire to have programs that write programs. Maybe that's already the case. The sought after model is production without the need for human hands ? or, it seems, the need for a human mind: think of those beloved talking and listening computers that big companies force you to interact with on the phone! Then ask yourself: do you think that a machine actually cares about your welfare? That it is in any way, as people are, guided by a sense of morality, politeness, or right and wrong?
It's reminiscent of a joke: what does the post-structuralist Mafioso say? He makes you an offer you can't understand. On the level of inhumane technology, we're being made this offer, and it seems that, by and large, we're accepting it.
The second area is responsibility. In throwing out that machine, I'm asserting that I have the right to take all those resources ? all the mined metal, the refined chemicals in the paint, the labor of machines and people that built it, the packaging materials, the energy used to transport it ? and simply throw it away. That it's ok to act as if the world is infinite, that it can cough up an infinite number of these things, even though we know that this is not the case. We used to think this way about the pollution of the air and the oceans: that they are so big, they can be thought of as infinite, and hence we can dump as much of anything as we want without affecting them. We've had to admit that in those cases, it's not true. Why should this truth apply only to air and water, as if they were special cases?
Wallace Stegner pointed out that mankind is the only species that can consciously choose NOT to dominate; that "we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. (1) Surely that imposes on us a responsibility to decide how we would like to make things? Surely this negates any fatalistic invocation of the excuse that we were compelled by forces beyond ourselves to do things this way or that way?
The washing machine did not have to be unrepairable, and if it was repairable, then all of those resources would still be washing clothes today. Instead, it's been hauled off to a trash heap somewhere, and all of the material that was in the first one has been duplicated in another that does exactly the same thing. And because of this idea of replaceability and irresponsibility to what we bring into the world, it is designed to fail in ten years. It would not have been so much more difficult, or probably even much more expensive, and certainly more responsible, to build that same machine to last 100 years or more.
Building things that last used to be the norm. I have an old wind-up clock that was made before World War I in Germany. It survived two world wars, spent some time in European train station lockers, and now hangs on a Colorado wall. It still works perfectly, only needing to be oiled every, say, ten years. It seems to me an example of a responsible use of the material: start with a well-formed idea, and manifest it as a durable, reliable, and attractive material object.
Meanwhile, I have an alarm clock that is only a couple years old, but no longer works. It initially did a number of nifty things, most usefully that it could project the time onto the ceiling. Cool! But it might as well have been an idea jotted onto post-it note: its translation into a material object was so poor that it didn't last three years. Nor was it attractive or appealing as a material object from the beginning: its only value lay in what it could do, and it failed miserably at that. Now it's a lump of ugly plastic, with no value at all. Yet another embodiment of irresponsibility towards the material world: a good idea poorly and inaesthetically executed.
Unfortunately, this relationship to the material world has become all too common. We are surrounded by an ever increasing tide of such objects: inexpensive gizmos that fail to perform as advertised, appliances that fail in all too short a time, mass produced clothes that don't fit right (I spontaneously avert my eyes whenever someone bends over any more). On one level, it's trivial, even amusing, but on another level, it bespeaks a much deeper malaise.
The modern world is becoming ever more an endlessly repeated wasteland of shopping malls, fast food, parking lots, and big box chain stores whose shelves are stocked with (as the 19th century artist, designer and writer William Morris put it) "[cheap] wares that ought to have no value at all," (2) made by what is essentially slave labor in whatever country allows the most human and environmental destruction at the lowest cost. It is a world in which everything has a price, and nothing has value. That hundred year old clock might get to be a family heirloom, but that's hardly even imaginable with most of the stuff we're drowning in. Everything is designed to be as cheap as possible, manufactured by cutting as many corners as can be cut without it obviously failing to be at least a passable simulacrum of what it's supposed to be. Nothing is built to last longer or do more than the minimum that will be expected of it. Ironically, as we are surrounded by more and more material things, more and more of it is junk, with no intrinsic value at all.
But being out of balance with the material is more problematic than not being able to fix things, or having to endlessly put precious resources into landfills, or the ugliness or endless repetition of things that weren't very good the first time around. It is, at its root, antidemocratic, closed, hierarchical. It is elitist and one-sided, even potentially dictatorial. It is an expression of the worst kind of Platonic ideal: that the mere material world is less important than the perfect immaterial world of the Forms, to which all material forms aspire and fail to equal. It posits a class of beings that are capable of creating material echoes of those perfect Forms which will, for a time and to an extent, function, but asserts that most of us, we the people, can never expect to be more than consumers of these things that are made for us. It asserts that we who live, the actual, material people, are but so many imperfect reproductions of the Form of the Human, which is more important than we are: thus our individuality, our existence, has no importance. It says that the merely material has little or no value. The particular qualities specific to its nature can only be a detraction from its proper role, which is to be a substrate, a blank slate onto which we transcribe our ideas. Its only value is as a vehicle for the instantiation of these ideas, but it will never live up to what it is meant to be. And neither will we, being but material beings. Western thinking has famously followed along a hierarchical view of the relationship between human and material, and what we see today seems to be a logical outgrowth of this conception: to say this is nothing new. Plato, that great foundational thinker of the West, was quite clear about the soul's relationship to the body, or the forms? to the material world: it was as the relation of Master to Slave. This idea has been picked up and reechoed throughout western philosophy and religion, from Christianity to Descartes and beyond, and is an unspoken assumption that underlies much of modern civilization. The material world is here to serve us, and never the other way around. Any deviation from this line is the deviation of a minority, usually limited to a specific circumstance.
But before Plato, there were other ideas, and though they were largely overridden by the two and a half millennia that followed, they offered a much more nuanced view of this relationship. In particular, in Homer there is a way of looking at it which always deeply impressed me.
Consider the opening lines of the Iliad:
Sing, oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles,
that visited many sufferings upon the Achaeans
Many the souls (psyche) of heroes it sent to Hades before their time,
and they themselves (soma) became a feast for dogs
and a banquet for birds (3)
What does it mean that the souls of the dead (psyche) go to Hades, but "they themselves" (soma) are eaten as carrion? In a way this is the same as the Platonic or Christian view (substituting the afterlife of your choice for Hades): the soul goes to the eternal abode of souls, and the body is food for vultures. But not quite. For Homer refers to the body not as if it were in a lesser category than the soul, but rather with a term that, if it is to be looked at hierarchically, is superior to the soul: they themselves. It is like the Platonic-Christian view, but on its head: the body, it seems, is more essentially who we are than the soul. Indeed, we see elsewhere in Homer, and in what we know of the culture at the time, that the condition of this soul or shade, the psyche (4) is thought to be insubstantial and frankly pathetic. It has the memories of the person of whom it is a shade, and yet has no power, wandering endlessly along the banks of the river Lethe, doing nothing, deprived of life. The psyche can gain a dim glimmer of its former life on receiving an offering of blood, as Odysseus offers in the Odyssey, but the psyche is a feeble shade, and no more. It is not the robust spirit of the Platonic-Christian world view, that goes to heaven, or the being in Hinduism or Buddhism that is reincarnated. It is a memory of a life, not the life itself. Nor can the body (soma, as it is called elsewhere) live on its own: by itself, it is a lump of meat, worth no more than to be eaten.
To this, the Homeric view adds another part: the thumos, for which there is no good translation, because this part got left out of the dualistic system that came to dominate Western thought. We might call it Life, or vitality. This, in Homer, is what is leaves at the moment of death, and once gone, is gone forever.
That this third part was omitted from later thinking is to my mind tragic, for it adds a way to easily understand, or at least talk about, an aspect of the world that has been neglected by the contortions of a body-soul dualism that insists on its own truth. For we can concede that there is a body, and conceded that there is a "soul," but how do we explain their interrelationship? To call one the master and the other the slave is to force them into a duality that does not fit. Say, rather, as the pre-Socratic Greeks did, that these are but two aspects of a larger set: say that a third part is needed to join the two, and that body and soul are not slave and master, but both equal partners with a third, the life itself of which they are a part.
As with a human being, so to with other tings. The washing machine that doesn't work, even though it may be 99% the same as one that works, is not really a washing machine. It's now just a useless heap of material (soma, the body), laid out along a plan that is probably still easy to grasp (psyche, the immaterial shade). What is missing is that which binds the plan to the material, the thumos, the vital force. It is, in a sense, the relationship between the two: if the plan is good and the materials good, but they do not suit each other, then they will not be well joined: they will lack thumos. If , however, they are well joined, then the result will be a good machine, or dinner, or what have you. In fact, we all can think of an example in which a really talented person made something great out of materials and even an idea that were not in themselves exceptional. The joining, the thumos, is transformative, and when it is well done, that is what we notice.
A thing that is well made, or a healthy prospering person, is one that is in balance both with itself and with the world, however imperfect, quirky, or flawed he/she/it or the environment all around may be. The point here is to listen: listen to who you are, listen to what is around you, and do not force one to override the other. Rather, let each inform the other, and join into a single harmonious whole.
This harmony, this binding together, has been called many things at different times and in different parts of the world, but the term thumos was the one that I first understood.
In order to achieve this balance, we must understand the nature of the material world, and of ourselves. Though Plato may have set the stage for much that has betrayed us in our relations with the world, this he got right: know thyself.
Film addresses just this divide, and how to bridge it: it is at once material and immaterial, both tangible and intangible. It was not designed that way; it was part of the whole-heated embrace of the flight FROM the material, an attempt to enshrine immateriality whose important quality lay precisely in its ability to grant the illusion of that transcendence. Indeed, through most of its life to date, most filmmakers, even ?experimental? filmmakers, approached it as a neutral window through which they might reveal their immaterial visions. Those who best understood the medium (along with those who benefitted from either happy accidents or the built in ability of the medium to sustain illusion) were able to create visions that, in context, did not call attention to their medium, to 'the man behind the curtain,? as it were. If these depictions were rough around the edges at times, we turned the other way; after all, it was the vision, not the imperfections of its realization that counted, right? And if the imposition of a Great Vision overwhelmed the material onto which it was transcribed, annoyingly revealing the irrelevant nature of the medium rather than the seamless grandeur of The Vision, well, we would look the other way.
Eventually, industry found a better medium, a more pliant material onto which to transpose the Great Visions of its authors an institutions. Digital technology allowed even less feedback and autonomy from the material, which after all is a mere beast of burden that no one wants to hear from. Cinema found a more perfect conveyor of its anti-materialist doctrine in digital images, and moved on, leaving film in the dustbin reserved for technologies that did their best to fill the modernist dream but ultimately failed: progress has no loyalty, and discards utterly what it can no longer use. The Digital Revolution is even more effective at suppressing the protests of the material world: we need think even less about things that we don't want to think about, but can instead focus more purely on our Great Visions, those Great Works from Survivor to the Avengers.
But we, now the dumpster-divers of discarded technology, find that film, by the accident of NOT transcending that bond with the material world, has an irrepressible material side which, though ignored, persisted: it was there the whole time, but mostly just tolerated. We find that it is beautiful, and that its imperfection in fulfilling the dematerialized illusion turn out to reveal exactly the cusp that we most need to think about: how to exist fully in both realms, and to unify those disparate realms into a single whole. It is precisely in its irrepressible materiality that film succeeds in achieving an embodied potency that digital technologies cannot reproduce. Film IS material; the industrial world was right to move on, for it is tarnished by its nature. And yet for an artist, those imperfections provide a way in, a language with which to address both what ails us and what sets us free.
We need to reenter a direct relationship with the material world that is within and around us, to retake control of the means of production in whatever ways we can, empower ourselves by rejecting the passivity of consumerism and instead reclaim our birthright as material beings, makers, doers, and authors, IN and OF this world. We must work directly with the material world, with our own hands; we must listen to the material world with our own ears, see it with our own eyes, understand it with our own minds. It would be impossible to suggest that we have no traffic with commodity culture at all, but let us at least purge the sickness from the heart of our creative process: let us, as filmmakers, embrace the handmade. Let us take to heart the injunction William Morris offered to himself: "I will never design anything I could not build with my own hands."
Process your own film. Build your own machines, make technology serve you, do not be lulled into serving it. For behind any technology or idea of its use is an idea, and we, each of us, have, not just the right and the power to evaluate that idea, but the duty to do so. Choose the material truth of your being, and reject the peddlers of the shadow realm of what TS Elliot called "Death's other kingdom." Let us move away from his dark vision and rather embrace the wonder, the infinity that is ourselves and this world we live in, as we and it are, materially and in fact. Let us start with what IS.
Stan Brakhage used to talk about the coming dark ages, that a few of us would be as the medieval Irish monks, preserving an otherwise forgotten culture in monasteries on the margins of a world gone bad, waiting a thousand years for it to heal. If indeed this is something of a new dark age, then let our response -- the only sane one -- be to reclaim materiality and our place in it. Let us assert our own understanding of who we, as individuals, a culture and as a civilization, choose to be.