Friday, March 16, 2007

abstractions from la cartomancienne

water sequences from jerome hill's film la cartomancienne / fortune teller, 1932.

this film contains 2 sublime abstract water sequences.

r. bruce eder explains that the film uses ideas about the transformation of the self that c.g. jung found in alchemical texts. although i find the rest of the film not exactly to my taste, the 2 abstract sequences certainly seem to be fine examples of the possibilities of alchemy and avant-garde film.
the first sequence looks like a stan brakhage hand-painted film, the second has a figure swimming under water, abstracted by the sun.

this film is on the disc the mechanized eye from the unseen cinema series curated by bruce posner.







2 comments:

woolgathersome said...

These are beautiful!! The second image from the top really reminds me of these moss-covered stones I found in northern Scotland -- they were like lttle individual abstractions...

the art of memory said...

they must have been beautiful.
i went to the oakland columbariam recently (the 30s modernist one, not the julia morgan) and the gravedigger there brought me on a tour of all of the marble work and brought my attention to all the abstractions found within them (which was sort of a surreal experience). they had the same sort of qualities as well.
the world is just full of them~