Eye and Ear Text Countering Ghosts

It was nice to see the Delphi theater full for Jennifer Reeves screening. It was nice to sit in the back, and watch the beautiful abstractions shift and flicker while hundreds of heads looked on, and everyone framed by the luxurious walls and ceiling. I have a friend who paints people watching movies and would love to tell her how great this looked.

Michael Snow called all moving images ghosts earlier in the festival. With a title firmly in the past tense, “When it was Blue” ghosts our planet. But maybe we are so used to vanishings that they are now our commonplace. Vanishings of lands and the creatures that live off them, vanishing of people from disease, from war, from genocide.

I would like to think that we continue to make things, to love, to fight for something, believe in something because of these vanishings and in spite of them. I would like to think we keep doing what makes us good even until the last one of us might stand.

I was reminded of Jarman’s “In the Shadow of the Sun”, while watching Reeve’s work, and this is not as a comparison, because I think that is boring and counterproductive, but it was more the presence of blue to Jarman’s reds, and it got me thinking of when Derek called making films, gardening, doing all the good things people do as practicing a counter magic.

If magic is a trite word, it is not my fault, nor is it Jarman’s. I mean it and he did to. Cinema can be a eulogy for a dying world, but it also is an act of light against what “ghosts” us in an effort to make us even more human. Let the light dance on our eyes.