Lola On Film

Presentation. Panel 3. One-day symposium. 21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture. Goldsmiths, University of London. Fri 30 Jun, 2023. Convened by Dr Vana Goblot.

This paper is an amalgamation of my earlier work on film as an alchemical medium, with a few new insights on immersion in narratives and cinema and the body, while honouring my lifelong interest in phenomena termed otherworldly, mystical, transcendent, supernatural. For me, these existential curiosities had always presented unexplainable yet authentic experiences that most of us have within our lifetimes, ones we can observe in their effect but not in their causality, and which have, in their scintillating unknowability, provoked multitudes of belief-based and concept-based explanations, for millennia.

IMAGE: WINGS OF DESIRE (1987)

The Alchemical Screen: Enchantment and the Cinema

Keywords: enchantment, early film theory, sacred space, archetypal enchantment, Jung, esoteric cinema, numinous experiences, mythic time, occult medium, narrative immersion, alchemy 

Now, what about the silver? This is what the alchemists say of the silver: Silver is the metal of the Moon. The lunar metal. The seed of the Moon in the Earth. Other such seeds, for instance, are copper, as the seed of Venus, and lead as the seed of Saturn. This idea of seeds means that there is a psychic moisture coagulated in the Earth, these moist vapours, that is — psychic fantasies within the deeper structure of the person. Fantasies in the body.

JAMES HILLMAN (Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5, 2009)

Author: ©Milana Vujkov

Published at Academia.com

Third time’s a charm. Let’s start with three dilemmas, with hope of the third unlocking the entire pack. First, the one about the nature of things. Did human desire for magic escape the scorn of enlightened rational thought through the vehicle of the newly minted medium of cinema? A presence born in extreme turn-of-the-century mechanical circumstances, emerging, ghostlike – its images embalmed in celluloid, its wings coated in silver, this avant-garde light-sensitive designer mummy, travelling through linear time, in circular motion, 24 frames per second, offering its audiences an illusion of movement, while projecting them into a dynamic and abstract mythic moment, a virtual ritual space, an impromptu group reverie — or perhaps a psychological compost-pot where a number of exceptional experiences can occur. If the alchemical temperature of the narrative has accidentally (or purposefully) been set to transmutation. In Marie-Louise von Franz’s Alchemy (von Franz, 2019), she advises how to resurrect the Inner Sun, an alchemical symbol of pure consciousness: Go back to the original point of your consciousness, try to return to the place from which your consciousness comes, to the threshold of the unconscious. And then, link up.

Secondly, there is the dilemma of connection. Did the popular cinematic preservation of apparitions, wizards, demons, witches, and enchantments — film as the custodian of magic, of sorts — a safe place where all our uncanny fantasies reside, somehow directly facilitate the cornucopia of esoteric beliefs and practices in the 21^st century? This renaissance of the casual spiritual at a time when the medium of the moving image is almost entirely rejecting its filmic physical body, becoming its own digital echo. In fact, losing both its metonyms in the additional abandoning of its physical abode, the cinema theatre – and maybe thus causing what could flippantly be dubbed metaphysical spillage — with its very nature fragmented, altered, and forever changed?

Thirdly, a dilemma of place. As all content needs a container, every event a venue, each human a home, or as Donna J. Haraway puts it in her book Staying with the Trouble — Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something (Haraway, 2016) — did 20^th century cinema metaphorically and metaphysically burst into the streets, body-less and abode-less, and take over our own 21^st century physical selves, as well as our residences? Are our own lives now the alchemical silver screen? And if they are, what are the consequences? How does this symbiosis work? Or, are we simply haunted by cinema?

On a side note, not unrelated, in a dystopian dream I had more than a decade ago, humanity had merged with its appliances, ones they had at hand at the moment of a major cataclysm. And not the glamorous one’s either — rather toasters, coffee makers, hairdryers, and such; maybe a few old smartphones. That cyborgian life turned out to be entirely unworkable, as we all ended up using old phone booths, instead — to communicate.

In Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey concludes that there is an irony in the way phantoms conjured up by early cinema have caught up with the ever-increasing crowd of ghosts that now haunt it (Mulvey, 2006). However, cinema’s role in preserving and even increasing societal hunger for the unknowable and otherworldly, the abandonment of the palpable for the ecstasy of the enchanted, as witnessed in augmented and virtual realities, could only have worked if what it was transmitting and (maybe) transforming had always been with us, within us — and then hidden or taken away. It could have, thus, facilitated the retrieval of its loss. At the same time, disconnected from our tangible and intangible magical heritage, did we learn what it means to live in an enchanted universe through the template of cinema? In her Journey Into Dreamtime, Munya Andrews says that a person’s calling to be a healer differs among various nations, and sometimes the ability to heal is handed down from one generation to another through their family Dreaming (Andrews, 2019). Who or what was our source to teach us how to dream?

In arriving at a provisional answer or rather an avenue of inquiry to all the dilemmas proposed, we might need a severe change in perspective, dispelling our own jaded evil eye, untangling a self-fulfilling prophecy demoted into tired tropes of the end of history. To understand the incredible potency of cinematic imagery in our personal histories, a revisiting of both early film theory and early psychology in reframing mystical experiences, particularly relating to our psyche’s immersion in narratives, could prove to be of great benefit. In a sense it would be both an unlearning and a recontextualising, because, lest we forget, cinema and psychology are time twins, born of same late 19^th century empirical desire to technologise and engineer our imaginations and existence, indeed, life itself; un-wild and neatly package that which Freud had so famously and dismissively labelled the black tide of mud of occultism (When Psychoanalysts Believed in Magic, 2019), despite his own enquires in the field, when arguing with Jung on the latter’s passionate interest in such matters. Which, in time, grew into a lonely obsession in his professional circles. It actually might have caused the final rift between the two men. In one great swoop of scientific Eurocentric house-cleaning, magic became fantasy, gods became psyche, and prophecy a bingo card. The mounts of Delphi, where poetry was divination, and divination was philosophy, slowly faded into the mist, and from view.

Now, this blatantly reductive and enthusiastically controversial rewind works in that it retrieves the element lost in a world saturated with images and interpretations — a freshness of framing in considering an entirely unknown phenomenon, or even a complete discipline, by observing it, primarily, in terms of its initial subjective impact.

Antonin Artaud in his essay on Sorcery and the Cinema spoke of film in its raw state emitting something of the atmosphere of [a] trance (Hammond (ed), 2000). André Bazin compared the urge to film with the ancient Egyptian tradition of mummifyng the dead (Moore, 2000). Jean Epstein thought of cinema as polytheistic and theogonic, as it summons objects, creating lives that have little to do with human life, and are more like the life in charms and amulets, […] ominous, tabooed objects (Moore, 2000). Béla Balázs assigned to the film camera the power to photograph the subconscious. (Moore, 2000).

The machines create a double, a doppelgänger, by translating a person into an image (Hauke and Alister (ed), 2001). This conjured mechanical other, our simulacrum sibling, has all the geography of its original, but its nature is not the same. It would be wise to also point out that this process allows for an ample playing ground for both artists and practitioners of the esoteric arts to apply the medium in their own belief-based practice.

But, what of the audience’s participation in this narrative sorcery, its ongoing fascination with haunted universes — the occult patterning of a film, both in execution and in content? Talking about liminal spaces of mesmerising entertainment expanding into uncharted areas of entertaining enchantment, we could conclude that a kind of narrative mesmerism could ring true of all art forms. However, film, in its complete reliance on technology seems to have the most reflective power of all. In sync with Marshall McLuhan’s concept of no history and the perpetual present in media, in removing its audience from linear time, film allows for a cosmic repetition, not a Judeo-Christian completion (Lyden, 2003). Francisca Cho, a religious studies scholar, has pointed out that the dichotomy between historical and mythic time does not exist in Chinese thought, thus the key purpose for all myths is to provide patterns for living a life (Lyden, 2003). As quoted previously, Marie-Louise von Franz spoke of threshold phenomena, allowing for irruptions from the unconscious into consciousness, which have both creative and destructive potential (Hauke and Alister (ed), 2001). In alchemy, bringing the conflict of opposites into consciousness leads to the recognition of an alien other in oneself — the Mercurius, which was conceptualised by alchemists as the source of all opposites. (Papadopoulos (ed), 2006). Balázs believed that the peculiarity of film as art is that, unlike in all other art forms to date, the permanent and inner distance from the work of art both fade out of consciousness of the spectator in order for one to willingly take part in cinema’s mesmerism (Moore, 2000). Finally, Jung, himself, concluded that what he termed ‘primitive’ pathology expresses this exalted condition very aptly as spirit interference (Jung, 2008). In fact, in Jung’s Psychology and the Occult I came upon this fascinating, and perfectly elegant analogy between the said indigenous people’s concepts of soul pathology and Jung’s concept of the unconscious, in the clear distinction they make between two causes of mental illness (and hence, also somatic maladies) – one being the loss of soul, and second, the possession by a spirit. Jung termed the former soul-complexes, unconscious complexes that normally belong to the ego, and the latter, spirit-complexes, ones that normally should not be associated with it (Jung, 2008). If any ego-associated complex becomes repressed, the individual experiences a sense of loss, and when it is made conscious again — an increased sense of power. However, if a complex of what Jung termed collective unconscious, becomes associated with the ego, thus emerging into consciousness, it fascinates the individual, but also carries with it a disturbance, an uncanny presence, alienation from every-day life. Removal of this imposing content from consciousness would hence bring about a sense of relief.

So, where are we now? Perhaps at a place (or phase) I provisionally coined archetypal enchantment (Vujkov, 2009), a state of partial inflation, a steady low-key infection with collective narratives, an emotionally altered state — usually only temporary, while an interest lasts; however in cases of continuous immersion in ongoing virtual narratives, maybe even a phase that could be long-lasting. My further purpose in following this gold thread of reasoning, through a lacework of dream-weaving silver, is to understand how the potentially transformative aspects of this condition of being inundated, overflowing with content one cannot contain can be geared towards growth and healing, as well as co-creation with others — a re-alignment with the human, non-human, and other-than-human. Rather than allowing the genuine pleasure in enchantment, itself, trap the psychic energy of an individual by holding one captive in a perpetual, ritual, and infantile state of imaginary action.

21^st century humanity, with its blossoming need for spiritual revival, arrived at a tipping point, one that could potentially permanently blur the lines between imagination and delusion; the proverbial crossroads. A good time to dispel fantasies and bring back the magic – an act of sculpting a fantastical narrative in poetic time, not unlike in cinema, yet aligned with what might be present in our bodies, and this world. An integration of the two hemispheres at an equal footing, not just within our own psyches. Rather of us, as elements, in the vast tapestry that is the Anima mundi.

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Bibliography

Andrews, Munya, Journey Into Dreamtime (Dimond Creek, Victoria: Ultimate World Publishing, 2019)
Edwards, Emily D., Metaphysical Media: The Occult Experience in Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005)
Hammond, Paul (ed), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000)
Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016)
Hauke, Christopher and Alister, Ian (ed), Jung & Film: Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image (London: Routledge, 2001)
Izod, John, Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Jung, C.G., Psychology and the Occult (London: Routledge Classics, 2008)
Jung, C.G., Psychology and Alchemy (London: Routledge, 1968)
Lyden, John C., Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003)
Moore, Rachel O., Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
Mulvey, Laura, Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006)
Papadopoulos (ed), Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications (London: Routledge, 2006)
Von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2019)

online sources

James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, Lecture – YouTube, Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5 (James Hillman Uniform Edition), 2009

When Psychoanalysts Believed in Magic, Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily, 2019

Film, the Alchemical Medium: Archetypal Enchantment and the Transformative Potential of the Moving Image, PhD Proposal, Goldsmiths, University of London, Milana Vujkov, 2009

cinema oracle

FILMOGRAPHY (ORACLE): STALKER (1979), WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000), THE THIRD MAN (1949), SOME LIKE IT HOT(1959), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999), LA STRADA (1954), CABARET (1972), INLAND EMPIRE (2006), DONNIE DARKO (2001), PULP FICTION (1994), SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), THELMA & LOUISE (1991), ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), THE PIANO (1993), ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984), CASABLANCA (1941), THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), REDS (1981), AMÉLIE (2001), SCARFACE (1983), LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003), TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), VERTIGO (1958), OLDBOY (2003), CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958), ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), STRANGE DAYS (1995), THE MATRIX (1999), SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993), THE GODFATHER PART II (1974), AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980), THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994), TAXI DRIVER (1976), STAR WARS: EPISODE IV – A NEW HOPE (1977), AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), GREY GARDENS (1972), FIGHT CLUB (1999), THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006), MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), THE DEER HUNTER (1978), CHINATOWN (1974), DUMBO (1941), SPIRITED AWAY (2001), THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966), THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980), TOKYO STORY (1953), BREATHLESS (1960), BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985), JULES AND JIM (1962), BEFORE SUNSET (2004), WHIPLASH (2014), THREE COLOURS BLUE (1993), THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISE (1972), PATHER PANCHALI (1955), THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009), NINOTCHKA (1939), MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015), THE LEOPARD (1963), CITIZEN KANE (1941), FARGO (1996), CINEMA PARADISO (1988), THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014), CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962), ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944), BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), ORLANDO (1992), ANNIE HALL (1977), GILDA (1946), THE MASTER (2012), THE GRADUATE (1967), THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979).

filmographY (PRESENTATION)

WOMAN IN THE MOON (FRITZ LANG, 1929, GERMANY)
DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI (MAYA DEREN, TEIJI ITO, 1943, USA)
ANÉMIC CINÉMA (MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1926, FRANCE)
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (MAYA DEREN, ALEXANDER HAMMID, 1943, USA)
DUMBO (SAMUEL ARMSTRONG, NORMAN FERGUSON, WILFRED JACKSON, 1941, USA)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (STANLEY KUBRICK, 1968, UK/USA)
THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY, 1973, MEXICO)
STALKER (ANDREI TARKOVSKY, 1979, SOVIET UNION)
LUCIFER RISING (KENNETH ANGER, 1972, USA/WEST GERMANY)
WINGS OF DESIRE (WIM WENDERS, 1987, WEST GERMANY/FRANCE)
ROSEMARY’S BABY (ROMAN POLANSKI, 1968, USA)
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (DAVID LYNCH, 1992, USA)
DON’T LOOK NOW (NICOLAS ROEG, 1973, UK/ITALY)
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (WIM WENDERS, 1991, GERMANY/FRANCE/AUSTRALIA/USA)
THE MATRIX (LANA WACHOWSKI, LILLY WACHOWSKI, 1999, USA/AUSTRALIA)
DONNIE DARKO (RICHARD KELLY, 2001, USA)
THE WITCH (ROBERT EGGERS, 2015, USA/CANADA/UK)
GAME OF THRONES (CREATORS: DAVID BENIOFF, D.B. WEISS, 2011-2019, USA/UK)