Zoetic Leaves
It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual forms that invite the eye to linger at the brink of transcendence, rather than standing at a distance, remote and unyielding, daring to be comprehended, accepted, believed. Strange and barely recognizable wildlife appears on vellum leaves, creatures that wind and unwind in ceaseless whirlpools of bejeweled abstraction. Or, if you prefer, these are the animated exoskeletons of snakes, dragons and waterbirds — Celtic and Germanic obsessions meeting the Apostles of Christendom. Emerging in the British Isles between 500–900 C.E., The Lindisfarne Gospels provide an arena, lapidary and starlit, where paganism devours Christianity while also birthing the religion anew into “motion pictures”.
Put simply, movies are books made from light, zoetic leaves and letters that move beyond their trellis, leaving us to decipher a purely visual enigma; one all the more impossible to contain within mortal consciousness because the light of this steadfastly irrational art has swallowed up the text.
There are those, however few in number, who have decoded this cryptic iconography, but mysteries remain, not unlike those mysteries — strange, delved, bewildering — contained within the gospels.
They are mysteries that urge upon us a wholly radical reconsideration of silent film; of the book in film, of whispering pages; pages fluttering like leaves. Of Stan Brakhage, who gave us a series of works entitled The Book of Film and otherwise seemed incapable of regarding the universe independent of its sensual properties. Of Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway. Certainly of Robert Beavers, who incorporates the sound and motion of turning pages — placed in relationships and analogies with other actions — and the moving of birds wings in flight. This is not the middlebrow idea of film as purely narrative-bearing text. It is Mallarme’s concept of the book, the Proustian notion of the book. It is its ultimate realization, par excellence, and by far the most apposite. The films of David Gatten, which deeply engage with the idea of the book, the history of books. These are works that require different modalities of reading/touching words and saccadic rhythms involving different velocities of hyphenation and partial retention and compound phrases through the softest of collisions.
Most of all we confront the everlasting mystery of the silent voice, the 'little' voice that is inside each of us. This is the voice that reads to us quietly, not mutely nor aloud, as an imagined external voice, one that is us but seems to be another. This voice is neither yours nor the voice of the author nor the voice of a personified stand-in for somebody who may once have read the most thrilling book in the world to us in our long-ago childhood.
By Daniel Riccuito