Consecration
On ritual, moving image, and the man in the woods
Recently, I’ve been obsessed with films shot on 35mm. Not out of romantic nostalgia or even from deliberately searching, but from unintended stumbling across rural film subjects that happened to be depicted on the medium of photochemical exposure.
I spent yesterday evening watching Ukrainian coal miners dig deep into the earth in the midst of winter. Last week, I witnessed the journey of a Swiss shepherd across the mountains, one of the few remaining at the turn of the 21st century.
It has made me reflect on how much our relationship to moving image has changed in recent decades. What was previously something precious, finite and relatively labour intensive has been ousted by digital sensors, so quickly improved and produced that now anyone can do it.
What is at once democratising is also disheartening: our relationship to image has been desecrated through abundance, its preciousness abused. We have become desensitised from overindulgence and overstimulation.
“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation- All real activity has been channelled into the global construction of the spectacle." Guy Debord once said. Ironic, given the cover of his book depicts an audience on a cinema.
The speed of it all is nauseating, and the psychological game of attention holding has become the main objective at the cost of all else. The medium, like most things in our lives, became commodified and began to have its meaning diluted.
I am in a forest in the south of England. Bluebells carpet the floor. A pheasant strolls around like it owns the place, making strange pheasant noises that I never really noticed until now.
I can’t say where I am exactly, for reasons I am not yet at liberty to disclose. I’m watching a middle-aged man stack wood. He goes over the wood pile, tosses logs into a squeaky wheelbarrow, and trundles over to a dug-out pit where he begins to build, what appears to be, a pyre.
Watching him is meditative, as it is to watch anyone who is deeply present and immersed in what they are doing. His cracked fingernails move carefully over the seasoned logs like someone who is committed to a ritual, a special event.
I am not here as a passive observer, however—I am also immersed: filming the man as he goes through his process. He is making charcoal from beginning to end: from beech trees he cut with a manual saw, seasoned over the year, and now stacked for a multi-day burn, in order to make charcoal for his Iron Age blacksmithing forge.
I’ve heard that when the television was produced on a mass scale in the late 1940s and 1950s, it had a sort of magnetising and hypnotising effect on the viewer. Granted, this power has been massively abused since its inception. But the glowing portal into another world was never an innately bad thing, despite its co-opting by forces that didn’t—and don’t—mean well.
Compared to today, it’s difficult to see anything with screens in a purely positive light. If we live in one of the so-called “developed countries”, we need them in order to do basic administrative tasks. In a way, they have absurdly become essential for our basic survival, such is the degree of our codependence.
Cinema, photochemical or digital, has always been vulnerable to exploitation for malicious purposes. I’ve seen clips from propaganda films from the 20th century and it was clear from the beginning that this would be a double-edged sword.
Yet, at the same time, there seems to be a profound experience that can arise from being in a cinema. The same cannot be said for being on a phone, or on a laptop. In a way, like the man stacking wood in a bluebell forest, it has a ritualistic tendency, ceremonial perhaps.
Is shooting on 35mm the answer? I don’t think so. I recently calculated how much it would cost to shoot a feature length film on 35mm and the cost came to around 100,000 Swiss francs, which may be inflated by its Swiss context, but I’m sure isn’t much cheaper elsewhere.
Digital sensors have granted access to the realms which before were heavily gate-kept. We have been flooded as a result, but the resulting rising tide has also given way to new voices—that before were shut behind the iron bars of centralised media, executives, and the power hungry.
The medium itself is not corrupted, only the context around it. Devoid as we are of processes like these, stripped of our folklore and cultural heritage, perhaps the moving image can redeem itself. The desecrated can once again be consecrated.
The anonymous man finishes his log-stacking. He walks through the forest with a handwoven basket, and begins to dig up oak saplings. They won’t survive in the shade, he tells me.
This is his warm up, before he continues the hazel hedge-laying: an unpaid, purely passion driven commitment to the forest, to the skill of craftsmen who came before, to a way of living that he believes in—while much of the world moves in a different direction.
Perhaps, like this unknown man with his strong sense of stewardship, we can also become stewards of the moving image.
Perhaps, in doing so, it can point us back towards our connection to something beyond the purely rational, to engage our imagination in expanding beyond the confines of the world we know, and what it has become—to what the world could be.
Development stills from the aforementioned mystery project.