Lumen I

LUMEN I

[Posted this a couple of days ago, but the site quickly ran aground. It's up and running again, smoothly, for good. The issue is now a little smaller, but such is the problem of editing...]

A new journal, a collaboration between Edwin Mak and myself. This has been gestating for a long time, and another issue will follow with very little haste — with infinite patience, as Deleuze wrote of Straub-Huillet. In the meantime, please enjoy and share — we'd appreciate it.

Digressions on the photographic agony #3

I / II

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The future city was ruled by an authority able to make anybody disappear. When people from the past were found, a light was shone at them, and images were projected onto a screen — from the past, until their arrival in the future. Once those images appeared, the ghosts disappeared.

--Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010.

Nabua is only light and memory. There are natural illuminations from the sun and from fire. The lights seep through the doors and windows and burn the rice fields. There are artificial ones like fluorescent tubes and LED lights like dots of recollections. And there are simulated bolts of lightning that destroy the peaceful landscape and unearth the spirits.

--Apichatpong Weerasethakul, The Memory of Nabua (via), 18/02/2009.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - A.W., 2010, super 16mm

Des animaux #5

Viaggio in Italia - Roberto Rossellini, 1953, 35mm

Distance(s) #21, or: really existing capitalism

You and Me - Fritz Lang, 1938, 35mm

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Zorns Lemma - Hollis Frampton, 1970, 16mm

History Lesson(s) #4

Flowers - Andy Warhol, 1982, polaroid photograph

Illuminations #5

New York Portrait Pt. I - Peter Hutton, 1977, 16mm

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Having the luxury to behold the simplest things can often be a revelation in itself.

--Peter Hutton, interviewed in A Critical Cinema 3 (California UP, 1998), p.246.

In film nothing is deemed so holy that it might or ought to be safeguarded from being absorbed into the general flow of movement. Everything film shows is translated into movement and thereby profaned.

--Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), p.71.

Yes, I've seen Empire a couple of times. It's an experience, there are many things that happen. At first, when watching the film with other people, everybody's sort of sceptical, they think: this will be so boring, that they will be leaving soon, but at least they have to see something... And then, as time goes by, they begin to relax, to enjoy, to just watch the screen when nothing really much happens. There's some dust, and then, one hour or so into the film, maybe an hour and a half, the light comes up! This huge, incredible event happens when the building lights up. So, of course, everybody applauds, it's a great moment. And then, again, you relax, and you watch, there's some light activity, the building is there, it becomes like a meditation. Those who stay until the end, they all say it is a very meditative, very relaxing, unique experience: just accept what's there, don't ask from it anything, because the activity is really the most, most minimal. There is nothing else like that in cinema.

--a new interview with Jonas Mekas about Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), WNYC, 18/02/2011.