Some years ago I thoughtlessly made a comment at a film festival. Another filmmaker showed a film that was shot by putting a pinhole in place of a lens on a conventional camera. Afterwards, I said to someone, rather inarticulately and without thinking about it, that this was not "a real pinhole film." This comment got back to the filmmaker, and, I'm afraid, did not endear me to him. I felt bad about this; I hadn't meant to criticize the film or its maker; I liked the film. But I also meant what I said: there was something about just using a pinhole lens on a conventional camera which did not live up to my idea of what a pinhole camera should be, at least for myself. I didn't know just how to say it at the time. "That's not a real pinhole film" didn't suffice.

What I didn't see at the time was that the missing piece was materiality. That is, involvement with that which is physical, tangible directly to human senses: that which is made of matter. The body of the world, as opposed to the realm of ideas.

I imagine that every photography student -- and many others besides -- has made and used a pinhole camera. The first version of this was probably made by taking a piece of aluminum can, poking a hole in it with a needle, then affixing it to a cardboard box. This was loaded with a piece of photo paper and exposed in a sunny place, usually just outside the art building. This doesn't always yield a good result; there are often light leaks to tape up, hole sizes to adjust, sometimes plastic lids that aren't actually light proof. But this simple hand-made apparatus eventually yields to even non-expert manipulation, and a photograph is produced. They are typically not the greatest works of photographic art, but their creation proves a pedagogical point: it is possible, using very simple materials and the basic properties of light, to create a photographic image. Mostly, having done this, we go on to take real photographs with "real" cameras.

But in fact we had done more than just prove a point: or, rather, we proved more than we realized. It's true that we explored basic optical principles, and made a photograph. But did we stop to realize just how significant a departure from the world we as modern humans and even modern artists inhabit it was to make a camera with our own hands? Out of junk? We tend to dismiss the act artistically, for it's clear that the image is of inferior quality, the physical and photographic materials of low quality and not designed for the purpose, the workmanship haphazard and unskilled. It's just a student project, after all! But this is a self-fulfilling interpretation: we only allowed ourselves one pass, didn't practice at all, and only allowed ourselves to use sub-standard materials. That we got a result at all is a miracle, and that is usually the point the exercise is intended to make. But we didn't just prove that it's possible to take a photograph, we actually DID make a photograph: we ended up with a finished image, and made the apparatus that created it, with our own hands.

The difference here is crucial, and gets at not just what I meant in my ill-considered pinhole film comment, but also at the nature of the world and our role in it.

Consider, if you will, my washing machine. It stopped working a few months ago. It's essentially the same object that it was when it was working; it weighs the same, looks the same, feels the same, it just doesn't wash clothes any more. We had a repair person come and look at it; he charged us $119 to tell us that it wasn't worth fixing. So my wife and I wrestled it out of the laundry room, and I followed a technician's diagnostic manual inside: there was something wrong with the motor controller board. Probably just something small, a $2 part. But the manual said that if the board doesn't work, replace the whole motor control board. Looking at it, it was easy to see why: even though it was probably an inexpensive component, the board was inscrutable. It was built to combine probably a hundred components into a compact and integrated circuit board, not to be repaired. With some frustration, I looked up buying a new one. It cost $295. The whole machine, brand new, only cost $650. Plus, the rest of it was now ten years old, and there was no guarantee that there wouldn't soon be something else wrong with it. The repairman was right: it wasn't worth fixing. We bought a new one.

This sort of experience is probably familiar to all of us. It says a lot about our relationship to the world, and relates precisely to my experience with handmade filmmaking.

Compare the washing machine to the pinhole camera. With the right applications of tape, a novice can get the pinhole camera to work. That cardboard box need not go to the trash until we're done taking pictures with it, and can be repaired over and over again. Its technology is humane, accessible to human understanding and to human hands. The washing machine, on the other hand, is unrepairable. This huge assembly of material is ready for the trash heap even though 99% of it is fine. What's the difference?

There seem to be two fundamental ones, and they are examples of the practical and moral sides of our degraded relationship with the material world: reparability and responsibility.

First, reparability. The modern washing machine is so complex that the user most emphatically is NOT expected -- nor CAN reasonably expect -- to be able to fix it. Those who use it are using something that is far beyond their comprehension on a material level. Consider smart phones and computers and microwaves and cars and airplanes: they are, all of them, far beyond the material comprehension of those of us who use them. They come to us ready made, as miraculous and mysterious as if they had dropped from the sky, fully formed.

This can be put in an even stronger way. Increasingly, we are surrounded by articulations of the material world that are beyond human comprehension or direct human action. This is the logical end of our technological progress: a world built by machines, that only machines can interact with. Try reading the source code of a Google maps web page, and you'll see what I mean: you can't understand it. Nor is it just your limitation: the code was generated by a machine, to be interpreted by a machine. It is, in this sense, an inhumane technology. The only presence of humanity is the eyes of the viewer; neither she, nor anyone else, was involved in the creation of the image. At the moment, the computer program that generated the machine-interpreted code might have been written by a person, but Google, et al., aspire to have programs that write programs. Maybe that's already the case. The sought after model is production without the need for human hands ? or, it seems, the need for a human mind: think of those beloved talking and listening computers that big companies force you to interact with on the phone! Then ask yourself: do you think that a machine actually cares about your welfare? That it is in any way, as people are, guided by a sense of morality, politeness, or right and wrong?

It's reminiscent of a joke: what does the post-structuralist Mafioso say? He makes you an offer you can't understand. On the level of inhumane technology, we're being made this offer, and it seems that, by and large, we're accepting it.

The second area is responsibility. In throwing out that machine, I'm asserting that I have the right to take all those resources ? all the mined metal, the refined chemicals in the paint, the labor of machines and people that built it, the packaging materials, the energy used to transport it ? and simply throw it away. That it's ok to act as if the world is infinite, that it can cough up an infinite number of these things, even though we know that this is not the case. We used to think this way about the pollution of the air and the oceans: that they are so big, they can be thought of as infinite, and hence we can dump as much of anything as we want without affecting them. We've had to admit that in those cases, it's not true. Why should this truth apply only to air and water, as if they were special cases?

Wallace Stegner pointed out that mankind is the only species that can consciously choose NOT to dominate; that "we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. (1) Surely that imposes on us a responsibility to decide how we would like to make things? Surely this negates any fatalistic invocation of the excuse that we were compelled by forces beyond ourselves to do things this way or that way?

The washing machine did not have to be unrepairable, and if it was repairable, then all of those resources would still be washing clothes today. Instead, it's been hauled off to a trash heap somewhere, and all of the material that was in the first one has been duplicated in another that does exactly the same thing. And because of this idea of replaceability and irresponsibility to what we bring into the world, it is designed to fail in ten years. It would not have been so much more difficult, or probably even much more expensive, and certainly more responsible, to build that same machine to last 100 years or more.

Building things that last used to be the norm. I have an old wind-up clock that was made before World War I in Germany. It survived two world wars, spent some time in European train station lockers, and now hangs on a Colorado wall. It still works perfectly, only needing to be oiled every, say, ten years. It seems to me an example of a responsible use of the material: start with a well-formed idea, and manifest it as a durable, reliable, and attractive material object.

Meanwhile, I have an alarm clock that is only a couple years old, but no longer works. It initially did a number of nifty things, most usefully that it could project the time onto the ceiling. Cool! But it might as well have been an idea jotted onto post-it note: its translation into a material object was so poor that it didn't last three years. Nor was it attractive or appealing as a material object from the beginning: its only value lay in what it could do, and it failed miserably at that. Now it's a lump of ugly plastic, with no value at all. Yet another embodiment of irresponsibility towards the material world: a good idea poorly and inaesthetically executed.

Unfortunately, this relationship to the material world has become all too common. We are surrounded by an ever increasing tide of such objects: inexpensive gizmos that fail to perform as advertised, appliances that fail in all too short a time, mass produced clothes that don't fit right (I spontaneously avert my eyes whenever someone bends over any more). On one level, it's trivial, even amusing, but on another level, it bespeaks a much deeper malaise.

The modern world is becoming ever more an endlessly repeated wasteland of shopping malls, fast food, parking lots, and big box chain stores whose shelves are stocked with (as the 19th century artist, designer and writer William Morris put it) "[cheap] wares that ought to have no value at all," (2) made by what is essentially slave labor in whatever country allows the most human and environmental destruction at the lowest cost. It is a world in which everything has a price, and nothing has value. That hundred year old clock might get to be a family heirloom, but that's hardly even imaginable with most of the stuff we're drowning in. Everything is designed to be as cheap as possible, manufactured by cutting as many corners as can be cut without it obviously failing to be at least a passable simulacrum of what it's supposed to be. Nothing is built to last longer or do more than the minimum that will be expected of it. Ironically, as we are surrounded by more and more material things, more and more of it is junk, with no intrinsic value at all.

But being out of balance with the material is more problematic than not being able to fix things, or having to endlessly put precious resources into landfills, or the ugliness or endless repetition of things that weren't very good the first time around. It is, at its root, antidemocratic, closed, hierarchical. It is elitist and one-sided, even potentially dictatorial. It is an expression of the worst kind of Platonic ideal: that the mere material world is less important than the perfect immaterial world of the Forms, to which all material forms aspire and fail to equal. It posits a class of beings that are capable of creating material echoes of those perfect Forms which will, for a time and to an extent, function, but asserts that most of us, we the people, can never expect to be more than consumers of these things that are made for us. It asserts that we who live, the actual, material people, are but so many imperfect reproductions of the Form of the Human, which is more important than we are: thus our individuality, our existence, has no importance. It says that the merely material has little or no value. The particular qualities specific to its nature can only be a detraction from its proper role, which is to be a substrate, a blank slate onto which we transcribe our ideas. Its only value is as a vehicle for the instantiation of these ideas, but it will never live up to what it is meant to be. And neither will we, being but material beings. Western thinking has famously followed along a hierarchical view of the relationship between human and material, and what we see today seems to be a logical outgrowth of this conception: to say this is nothing new. Plato, that great foundational thinker of the West, was quite clear about the soul's relationship to the body, or the forms? to the material world: it was as the relation of Master to Slave. This idea has been picked up and reechoed throughout western philosophy and religion, from Christianity to Descartes and beyond, and is an unspoken assumption that underlies much of modern civilization. The material world is here to serve us, and never the other way around. Any deviation from this line is the deviation of a minority, usually limited to a specific circumstance.

But before Plato, there were other ideas, and though they were largely overridden by the two and a half millennia that followed, they offered a much more nuanced view of this relationship. In particular, in Homer there is a way of looking at it which always deeply impressed me.

Consider the opening lines of the Iliad:

Sing, oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles,
that visited many sufferings upon the Achaeans
Many the souls (psyche) of heroes it sent to Hades before their time,
and they themselves (soma) became a feast for dogs
and a banquet for birds (3)

What does it mean that the souls of the dead (psyche) go to Hades, but "they themselves" (soma) are eaten as carrion? In a way this is the same as the Platonic or Christian view (substituting the afterlife of your choice for Hades): the soul goes to the eternal abode of souls, and the body is food for vultures. But not quite. For Homer refers to the body not as if it were in a lesser category than the soul, but rather with a term that, if it is to be looked at hierarchically, is superior to the soul: they themselves. It is like the Platonic-Christian view, but on its head: the body, it seems, is more essentially who we are than the soul. Indeed, we see elsewhere in Homer, and in what we know of the culture at the time, that the condition of this soul or shade, the psyche (4) is thought to be insubstantial and frankly pathetic. It has the memories of the person of whom it is a shade, and yet has no power, wandering endlessly along the banks of the river Lethe, doing nothing, deprived of life. The psyche can gain a dim glimmer of its former life on receiving an offering of blood, as Odysseus offers in the Odyssey, but the psyche is a feeble shade, and no more. It is not the robust spirit of the Platonic-Christian world view, that goes to heaven, or the being in Hinduism or Buddhism that is reincarnated. It is a memory of a life, not the life itself. Nor can the body (soma, as it is called elsewhere) live on its own: by itself, it is a lump of meat, worth no more than to be eaten.

To this, the Homeric view adds another part: the thumos, for which there is no good translation, because this part got left out of the dualistic system that came to dominate Western thought. We might call it Life, or vitality. This, in Homer, is what is leaves at the moment of death, and once gone, is gone forever.

That this third part was omitted from later thinking is to my mind tragic, for it adds a way to easily understand, or at least talk about, an aspect of the world that has been neglected by the contortions of a body-soul dualism that insists on its own truth. For we can concede that there is a body, and conceded that there is a "soul," but how do we explain their interrelationship? To call one the master and the other the slave is to force them into a duality that does not fit. Say, rather, as the pre-Socratic Greeks did, that these are but two aspects of a larger set: say that a third part is needed to join the two, and that body and soul are not slave and master, but both equal partners with a third, the life itself of which they are a part.

As with a human being, so to with other tings. The washing machine that doesn't work, even though it may be 99% the same as one that works, is not really a washing machine. It's now just a useless heap of material (soma, the body), laid out along a plan that is probably still easy to grasp (psyche, the immaterial shade). What is missing is that which binds the plan to the material, the thumos, the vital force. It is, in a sense, the relationship between the two: if the plan is good and the materials good, but they do not suit each other, then they will not be well joined: they will lack thumos. If , however, they are well joined, then the result will be a good machine, or dinner, or what have you. In fact, we all can think of an example in which a really talented person made something great out of materials and even an idea that were not in themselves exceptional. The joining, the thumos, is transformative, and when it is well done, that is what we notice.

A thing that is well made, or a healthy prospering person, is one that is in balance both with itself and with the world, however imperfect, quirky, or flawed he/she/it or the environment all around may be. The point here is to listen: listen to who you are, listen to what is around you, and do not force one to override the other. Rather, let each inform the other, and join into a single harmonious whole.

This harmony, this binding together, has been called many things at different times and in different parts of the world, but the term thumos was the one that I first understood.

In order to achieve this balance, we must understand the nature of the material world, and of ourselves. Though Plato may have set the stage for much that has betrayed us in our relations with the world, this he got right: know thyself.

Film addresses just this divide, and how to bridge it: it is at once material and immaterial, both tangible and intangible. It was not designed that way; it was part of the whole-heated embrace of the flight FROM the material, an attempt to enshrine immateriality whose important quality lay precisely in its ability to grant the illusion of that transcendence. Indeed, through most of its life to date, most filmmakers, even ?experimental? filmmakers, approached it as a neutral window through which they might reveal their immaterial visions. Those who best understood the medium (along with those who benefitted from either happy accidents or the built in ability of the medium to sustain illusion) were able to create visions that, in context, did not call attention to their medium, to 'the man behind the curtain,? as it were. If these depictions were rough around the edges at times, we turned the other way; after all, it was the vision, not the imperfections of its realization that counted, right? And if the imposition of a Great Vision overwhelmed the material onto which it was transcribed, annoyingly revealing the irrelevant nature of the medium rather than the seamless grandeur of The Vision, well, we would look the other way.

Eventually, industry found a better medium, a more pliant material onto which to transpose the Great Visions of its authors an institutions. Digital technology allowed even less feedback and autonomy from the material, which after all is a mere beast of burden that no one wants to hear from. Cinema found a more perfect conveyor of its anti-materialist doctrine in digital images, and moved on, leaving film in the dustbin reserved for technologies that did their best to fill the modernist dream but ultimately failed: progress has no loyalty, and discards utterly what it can no longer use. The Digital Revolution is even more effective at suppressing the protests of the material world: we need think even less about things that we don't want to think about, but can instead focus more purely on our Great Visions, those Great Works from Survivor to the Avengers.

But we, now the dumpster-divers of discarded technology, find that film, by the accident of NOT transcending that bond with the material world, has an irrepressible material side which, though ignored, persisted: it was there the whole time, but mostly just tolerated. We find that it is beautiful, and that its imperfection in fulfilling the dematerialized illusion turn out to reveal exactly the cusp that we most need to think about: how to exist fully in both realms, and to unify those disparate realms into a single whole. It is precisely in its irrepressible materiality that film succeeds in achieving an embodied potency that digital technologies cannot reproduce. Film IS material; the industrial world was right to move on, for it is tarnished by its nature. And yet for an artist, those imperfections provide a way in, a language with which to address both what ails us and what sets us free.

We need to reenter a direct relationship with the material world that is within and around us, to retake control of the means of production in whatever ways we can, empower ourselves by rejecting the passivity of consumerism and instead reclaim our birthright as material beings, makers, doers, and authors, IN and OF this world. We must work directly with the material world, with our own hands; we must listen to the material world with our own ears, see it with our own eyes, understand it with our own minds. It would be impossible to suggest that we have no traffic with commodity culture at all, but let us at least purge the sickness from the heart of our creative process: let us, as filmmakers, embrace the handmade. Let us take to heart the injunction William Morris offered to himself: "I will never design anything I could not build with my own hands."

Process your own film. Build your own machines, make technology serve you, do not be lulled into serving it. For behind any technology or idea of its use is an idea, and we, each of us, have, not just the right and the power to evaluate that idea, but the duty to do so. Choose the material truth of your being, and reject the peddlers of the shadow realm of what TS Elliot called "Death's other kingdom." Let us move away from his dark vision and rather embrace the wonder, the infinity that is ourselves and this world we live in, as we and it are, materially and in fact. Let us start with what IS.

Stan Brakhage used to talk about the coming dark ages, that a few of us would be as the medieval Irish monks, preserving an otherwise forgotten culture in monasteries on the margins of a world gone bad, waiting a thousand years for it to heal. If indeed this is something of a new dark age, then let our response -- the only sane one -- be to reclaim materiality and our place in it. Let us assert our own understanding of who we, as individuals, a culture and as a civilization, choose to be.

1. William Cronin Trouble with Wilderness (1995), in William Cronin, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, pp. 69-90. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
2. Morris, William Art and the People, London, GBR: Electric Book Company, 1883 p.24
3. Homer, Iliad translation by the author
4. As described in the text, the English word "soul" is a misleading translation for the Homeric word psyche, because the word "soul" is so closely associated with the religious concept "soul". I therefore use the italicized transliteration psyche, in hopes that the reader will not think "soul" in the conventional sense. But note that it is not the term "psyche" adopted by psychology, either!
5. In TS Elliot's poem, The Hollow Men

Introductory Remarks, address to the Brakhage Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, February 9, 2015

As a starting point for this discussion, consider this three minute video of a performance of a piece of music: Elliot Carter's Catenaires, written in 2006, performed by Sean Chen in 2009:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdPW8oMwjoY

I wanted to open with this because it offers a good example of what music, as a long-established art of organizing events in time, has to offer to experimental film. As I see it, it's offerings are in two major categories: the formal (conceptual) and the physical.

Music shares with other arts a certain irreducibility of its meaning from its totality. This ambiguity of meaning in music is not unique in the arts; Robert Frost is reputed to have responded to a question about the meaning of one of his poems, "what, you want me to say it less well?" Art is not communication in the sense that an artist has a message, encodes it in the work, with the viewer then decoding the work to end up with exactly the message the artist started with, such that communicating the message is the sole purpose of the work of art, in the same way that the string of gobbledygook resulting from the encryption of a message serves only to carry that message from point A to point B. This is no more true of poetry or painting than it is of music.

However, music is unlike the other arts in at least this respect: whereas for most of human history arts like painting and poetry have used symbols that correspond to actual things -- words and representational images that have denotative and connotative meanings, symbols and depictions already laden with meaning -- music has always been devoid of reference. It is in this sense that I take the expression Brakhage liked to repeat, that "All art constantly aspires to the condition of music." (1)

Music is pure: non-referential and unencumbered with the ten thousand things that clutter this world.

As philosopher Susanne Langer put it:

"Music ... is preeminently non-representative ... It exhibits pure form not as an embellishment, but as its very essence; we can take it...and have practically nothing but tonal structures before us: no sense, no object, no fact." (2)

Music offers "..the mystery of a work of art without ostensible subject matter..." (3)

It is ethereal, spiritual, disembodied, substanceless form.

Secondly, the video makes a material point, one that is perhaps so obvious that it is easy to overlook. Making music is fundamentally a physical act: it is, at root, the production of a pattern of vibrations in the air, and something physically must be caused to vibrate so that the air will vibrate. It invites us as embodied beings to immerse our whole physical selves not just in listening, but more importantly I would say as a maker of films, in the making those vibrations that are the tangible, sharable art of music.

One of the saddest conceits of the digital age is to ignore this fact, and it is important to realize that there can be no music apart from something vibrating, whether a vocal chord, string, or speaker: something is moving. One of the most important qualities of music is that it is intimately related to our bodies: vibrating and moving are in intrinsic part of what we are, and thus music is made of the very stuff of our being. This kinship between our body and the art of music is vital, and relates to film as well.

Music can offer us these possibilities, both actively as a maker and more passively as a listener, because it is of the same stuff as we are: it is like us, both intrinsically physical and profoundly immaterial. It shares the duality that is central to our own natures, one that is often referred to as the duality of mind and body. It is essentially like the life of a living being. To quote Langer again,

"...there are aspects of so-called "inner life" -- physical or mental -- which have properties similar to those of music -- patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment, excitation, sudden change, etc.." (4)

We exist in time, our thoughts and feelings rising and falling, quickening and slowing, having flashes of insight and moments of despair; our bodies full of energy or lethargy, excitement and vitality or calmness and peacefulness. Physically, emotionally, and intellectually, we are never at rest, but always passing from one state to another, always existing, until we no longer do.

The practices and techniques of making music, particularly in it's construction and playing, have evolved so as to create forms and feelings that resonate with us, whose living processes are like those that it creates.

So what of film, and experimental film in particular -- film as art, in the purest sense?

The relationship between music and film that is most often understood is that music provides emotional connotation to images which otherwise are either emotionally ambiguous or lack inherent emotion altogether. And this is certainly one of the ways in which music can relate to film. One of the basic exercises in a film scoring class is to have every student take the same film clip and give it an emotional content using music. The variety of meanings that the different pieces of music can give to the clip can be amazing: the same clip can be, thanks to the music, sad, happy, frightening, peaceful, or unsettling. Music is used universally for this purpose, and beginning film teachers knows how difficult it is to get students NOT to rely on music to give a film coherence, but to achieve coherence with images alone. We are used to music being used by films: it is a convention.

But there is nothing necessary or intrinsic about it, and the reason that what we call "conventional" cinema is thought of as conventional is, I think, the result of the circumstances into which the medium of cinema was born, and these initial circumstances have colored and constrained it ever since.

Photography was invented in the early 19th century in order to extend representational painting in two directions: to make painting automatic -- the "pencil of Nature" as Fox Talbot put it -- and to be more hyper realistic than even the most detailed painting, as realistic dioramas Daguerre thought. Photography was thus born with a very strong realist agenda, and inherited all the extensive theoretical apparatus that came with that territory, which was considerable.

Cinema was an extension of photography, created with the same realist goals. Once it became a fact, it was quickly snapped up and coopted by the existing art of theater, which saw in it a possibility of creating what Brakhage referred to as "cine-plays," wherein the film itself merely serves to create a transparent window with no qualities of its own, one which calls no attention to itself. This became "Conventional Cinema."

Conventional cinema is thus characterized by rules and practices that come from other art forms.

I need not here elaborate as to what these alien rules prescribe. Many, many others have thought deeply and extensively about the issue. Suffice it to say that while it is true that film is quite capable of producing "cine plays," this is only a fraction of it's full capabilities. The entire history of experimental cinema has been in large part a long effort to cast off these rules. The good side of this conventional neglect is that they remain relatively free from the contamination of commerce and instrumental appropriations in the service of power: they are useless, and thus an unspoiled province for art.

And what are these qualities? William Wees' term seems most apt: cinema is "Light Moving in Time." It is a temporal organization of cinematic representations of what in Brakhagian terms might be called objects of the eye-mind. These objects consist, on their most basic perceptual level, of instantaneous registrations of light which enter the mind trough the eye as the eye jumps and drifts through the world around us, forming a kaleidoscopic stream of light-impressions which are constantly shifting, constantly changing, and constantly renewed. (5)

Most often, the human mind interprets these eye-objects as pieces of a static puzzle, and assembles them into an image of a stable world around us. Conventional cinema relies on this "conventional" process, depends, in fact, on its continuing unnoticed.

But if we suspend that process of automatic interpretation and attend to the as-yet uninterrupted eye-objects -- or, as Brakhage might put it, to see with an untutored eye -- then it becomes natural to ask after the nature of these eye-objects. What are they like, raw and uninterested?

Here we run into a problem: if we try to use words to describe them, then we are interpreting them, abondon-ing them as they are. But if we don't use words, if they are essentially irreducible, how then can we talk about them, understand them, or organize them? What kind of meanings can they have?

And here it is that music suggests itself, for this is very much akin to the landscape of music: as already noted, music creates structure out of irreducible "musical" objects that have no specific meaning other than themselves. Music is both physical and immaterial, as is vision; music presents an uninterrupted stream in time, as does vision; music is even tinged with emotional associations and a smattering of onomatopoeic suggestions, even as eye-objects come with hints of images, that can be brought out or not, depending on both the musician/filmmaker or listener/witness.

Film's similarity to music pertains to what it is that other arts are not: "Light Moving in Time," a temporal stream of irreducible perception-objects. It is in thinking of it at this most basic and, at one and the same time, most abstract and most materially specific sense, that the methods, practices, and insights developed over millennia in the art of music most apply to the art of the moving image.

1. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: studies in art and poetry, (London: MacMillan and Co., 1922) p.135

2. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) , p. 209

3. ibid, p.216

4. ibid, p. 228

5. Wees, William C., Light Moving in Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), Chapter four, especially sec. 3, pp. 85ff

I've decided that I'm going to learn to really play the piano.

I have reached a point in life when the end suddenly seems nearer than the beginning. It happens to us all, a point of reckoning when the sum of what we have and haven't done begins to weigh heavily upon us, demanding action before it is too late, as if a perspective zoom had suddenly telescoped the ordinary world into something new and vaguely threatening. What you thought you knew becomes uncanny and unfamiliar, and what you weren't thinking about becomes almost too real. Tempus fugit: so it is to be human.

I have a long and spotty history with the piano, so for me thinking about the piano doesn't come out of nowhere. My mother was (and still is) a rather good amateur classical pianist, and I grew up listening to her play Bach's Well Tempered Klavier and Beethoven piano sonatas. Classical piano has always been a part of the fabric of my life, and I've played it myself -- really more like played with it -- on and off since I was small. But I never learned play it very well. That's the problem I'm setting out to correct now.

I played for less than a year when I was eleven (more on this below). I picked it up again when I was in my twenties, studying music composition in college. I practiced ferociously to pass the audition to get into the program (I learned a Chopin Mazurka), and then played it as a compositional tool rather than as a performative instrument. I played Brahms Intermezzi to amuse myself and my friends, and still could for years, but that ability gradually faded away for want of practice and enthusiasm.

It's been some twenty years since I last actively played.

As an experimental filmmaker I'm of course deeply engaged with the creative arts, and even specifically with time-based art. Experimental film is for me visual music more than it is anything else. I have continued (somewhat sporadically) to write music, both as a part of my films and as just music. Playing the piano (and the piano was always the instrument that I either did or did not play) never seemed very far away. But I never achieved any fluency at it, so it was never more than an aspiration, something I always vaguely meant to do.

New awareness of my own mortality has forced the issue. I realize that if I don't do it now, then it will never happen. Now is the time: I'm finally going to do the work needed to be able to really play. I'm going make an effort, to put in the time required to play it well, if I can. And perform on it, for other people, which is something I never did before -- whether or not I embarrass myself in the process.

That's the first half of this project.

But there's another half, too, one that I've either struggled with or avoided for my whole life: the music itself. The piano is a musical instrument. That is, it is equal parts "instrument" and "music." I am setting out to learn the instrument, but the real challenges and difficulties of this project for me are as much about the music. It turns out (and I don't know why this was news to me) that if you engage the instrument, then necessarily you engage the music.

The reason I quit piano as a child offers an example of this interrelatedness. It was the music, not the instrument: I wanted to play Beethoven's Fur Elise, a real piece that mattered to me, rather than the easy graded and "age appropriate" pieces which my teacher wanted me to play. She insisted that the Beethoven was too hard, and from a technical point of view, from within the standard pedagogical paradigm of the piano teacher, she was probably right. But from a human point of view she couldn't have been more wrong. As a teacher, she had the sacred duty of responding to the precious enthusiasm of a child, and I was, after all, just a kid. She took away what mattered to me, and my enthusiasm was crushed. I quit.

Playing music, it turns out, is a short and effective route into your inmost emotional being. Whether you do it in a supportive environment or a denigrating and discouraging one matters: it goes right to your heart, for good or ill.

Which leads me to an observation that I wouldn't have been able to articulate at age eleven, but seem to have intuited nonetheless: there is no intransitive ability to "play the piano," independent of any particular piece of music that you're playing. After all, you can't play without playing something.

I understand a lot more now than I did at age eleven or even at twenty five. This time, I'm doing it consciously for myself. It's a journey of empowerment and discovery about the musical world around and within me. I am not setting out to be able to play the masterworks of classical piano music. I will fall short in the eyes of many for not being able to play what is considered to be basic repertoire. So be it. My goal is more specific, and reflects an understanding I now have that learning an instrument is not just a technical act so much as it is diving into the whole of a musical culture. I want to be conversant as a player with the musical style that I like to listen to and write in, music that I am moved and impressed by: for me this is "atonal" classical music, for lack of a better term. I am being forced to declare myself, to define what interests me and to embrace it.

To this end, I have vowed to play only music that, 1) is less than 100 years old, and 2) does not use traditional common-practice harmony.

I am thus taking a difficult task and making it harder. My approach is not what most piano teachers would suggest to their not-so-accomplished students (it was, in fact, hard to find a teacher who could and would help me), nor is it the way that the vast majority of people would proceed to learn to play. These conditions are like a one-two punch that immediately cuts me off from virtually all existing piano pedagogy and most piano literature. Not to mention departing from the musical tastes and sometimes even the patience of the people around me. But I figure, since life is beginning to seem tragically short, why spend time on anything less than what I truly care about? Others can (and will!) play Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. I am interested in something else, in music written, say, after the invention of things like the light bulb and the automobile; serious music that reflects the intellectual, artistic, cultural, and historical events of more recent times than the days of the horse and buggy (which is when those classical masters were writing, however great they were). That hardly seems radical, does it?

I decided to start at the beginning of this modernist musical arc, with the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. He is, to my mind, a great liberator of music from the confines of tonal tradition, and his ideas and practice of atonality and serialism stand at the beginning of the musical aesthetic that interests me. So I started with a piece that he wrote one hundred years ago, in 1913: Sechs kleine Klavierstucke, Op. 19.

I'm now two years into this project. It took me a while to decide to keep this record, and then to make it work.

What follows in this blog is an account of my struggles as an amateur player with a very difficult musical repertoire that was never written for amateurs, and the many thoughts about music and culture to which this engagement has led.

I will begin where I am now, filling in past events as they seem to fit.

It's 21.7 degrees F in my studio right now. Too cold to play! I have to wait until the dry twigs that I broke off the tree on my walk down here catch fire sufficiently to light the last remaining pieces of firewood that I dug out of the snow. I hope it's not too wet; it's having a little trouble as I write this, and I've had to relight it several times. I feel a little like I'm in a Jack London story, only I just have to wait for the woodstove to warm the studio up to, say, 55 F before I can practice. It's late afternoon, and I hope this leaves enough time before it gets dark and I have to stop -- there's no electricity here. If I know the music, I can play by candle light, but right now I'm still learning new material, and candles just aren't bright enough for me to read music by.

So I'm writing in the meantime, draped in a blanket and warming up my fingers every few minutes.

I guess it's not just the decision to play unconventional music that makes this project difficult, but before I am criticized for an almost pathological pursuit of difficulty, let me just say that trudging the quarter mile down what is now a well-established path across a forested mountainside, through several inches of powdery fluff that fell today on top of a growing winter snowpack that is now some three feet deep in places, with the sun sinking into a frozen haze and painting pastel colors over a silent winter wonderland -- this is not exactly hardship.

It's all a matter of priorities. Having a practice space with only a woodstove and no power that is far from an already remote off-grid house is not the easiest way to live, but neither is playing my chosen repertoire. The one reflects the other. In both cases, to paraphrase Robert Frost, it is the choice of path that makes all the difference. The difficulty is inherent in the nature of the task, so I embrace it in both its inward and outward forms.

My reward, in music as in place, is that I get to enter actively into a living musical conversation that resonates deep within my core, and get to play it in a place where I want to be. I look out the window at the silent clouds drifting slowly over snow-covered forests, a world of solitude and peace without any other sign of human presence as far as I can see in any direction, and I am happy just to be here. Being here is not just to touch the divine, but to inhabit it.

This "Piano Project" is about the music, yes, and the instrument, and the cultural and social context in which music lives, but it is also about what makes life worth living. Why live if you're not doing the things that matter to you? And if that's work, so what? No one else will care if I don't make the effort, if I take the easy way out, but I'll notice. I'll know that I gave up. In a way, having to make the effort to trudge down here and deal with all the inconvenience it entails -- snow, cold, building fires, waiting for warmth -- reminds me that I AM making an effort; that I, a living, physical being, am making something happen that, absent a consistent application of my energy and will, wouldn't happen. It's a physical reflection of the aesthetic and spiritual discipline that I am choosing for myself. And the reward is, to use Joseph Campbell's word, bliss, a sense of rightness. It's not just my mind telling me that I am doing the right thing, but all the senses of my body: I see beauty, feel the coldness and the growing warmth, am surrounded by the silence of a world that is just as it should be.

For now, when I am here, I am really here. All I have to do is think and play and write, without noise, distraction, or interruption. I know that the wider world is fraught, full of suffering, death, and injustice, but in this moment, in this place, everything is right, and that which I am undertaking is a part of that world, the one I see outside this window, as surely as are the rabbits and deer and cougars whose footprints articulate the landscape.

The thermometer by the chair says it's up to 56 degrees F in here now after writing all this (but colder on the floor, and below zero outside!). I'm afraid that the light is waning too soon to get much playing done. Oh well! If I got benighted like this very often, I guess I would have to find somewhere else to play, but mostly it works out. Usually I can start earlier, and usually it's not so very cold outside to make it so cold in here.

For today, it's ok. I'll play my warm-ups and what I can of the Allouette Lulu from memory (not the whole piece yet...). Then once the daylight has fully faded away, I'll walk slowly back up to the warmth of home, through a glowing sculpture garden of white and graceful trees, pausing every few steps to contemplate the stars above and the ever-changing patterns of light and shadow cast all around by the brilliance of the rising moon, as if they wrote a message on the hillside, one whose meaning is at once both profound and indecipherable.

I've been working on Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux Book VI: L'Allouette Lulu for the past six months. It's the third piece I've played, after Schoenberg's Op. 19 and the first two movements of Messiaen's Variations for Violin and Piano (which I played with my wife, herself by far a more accomplished violinist than I am a pianist -- she could more or less sight read her part, whereas I had to work on mine for months).

L'Allouette Lulu is by far the hardest of the three, an order of magnitude (or two) beyond the others.

Today, for the first time, I played it from beginning to end for my piano teacher.

I realize that that might sound like a lot of time for not much result, but that is the nature of this project. Those fifteen minutes felt like the most important thing I've done in a long time. I had to force myself to breathe and be calm and fight off nausea just as if it had been a real performance. My nervousness was far more intense than I had expected. Afterwards, Sam (my teacher) congratulated me and confided that when I'd started to learn this piece months ago he didn't think I'd ever finish it: "usually when my adult students pick a piece that's too hard for them, they learn the first page and that's all." I told him (perhaps less concisely at the time) that I don't have time not to finish; that if I hadn't meant to, I would have saved the money and time that I've invested in this for something else.

I was so unexpectedly relieved that I allowed myself to go see a movie afterward, the way filmmaker Stan Brakhage used to say he rewarded himself after getting enough work done.

I've felt like a musical Sisyphus working on this piece, endlessly throwing myself at an impossibly huge rock on an impossibly steep hill, both unyielding and unchanging, finding myself every day back at what seems like the bottom of the hill again, as if yesterday's small progress had never happened, never seeing any end, any relief. Day after day, there was yet another difficult figure, followed by another, and then another, difficulty without end, new passage after new passage. As Sam has pointed out, I'm missing the basic technical foundation that most (all?) pianists have before they get to this sort of music, and I'm having to learn techniques piecemeal as I go. But I forced myself to keep at it.

I would play a few bars at a time, over and over again until I could do each passage five times in a row without making a mistake. If I messed up the fifth repetition, I'd have to start again at one. Occasionally I would let sloppiness pass just to finish the five and move on, but at least half the time I realized that this did me no favors, and with a sigh I'd start over, keeping to strict interpretation of what "without a mistake" means. Then I'd move to the next passage the same way, then do both five times, and expand outward until my one allotted hour a day was up.

And then, suddenly, I saw the end, before I'd even realized it was near. The end! For I found that the last two pages were, compared to the rest, easy: they mostly consist of slow chords and figures that I've learned already. Who knew? Who knew that after seven pages of unrelenting difficulty, the only difficult figures in the last two would be ones that I've already learned?

It's a tremendous relief, and the ending is beautiful, transcendent to play. The music itself reflects the great release I feel in finally reaching the end of a piece against whose colossal difficulty I've been throwing myself at for months.

There are plenty of rough spots, of course, passages that I never entirely got despite the seemingly endless practice, but now I can work on them in the context of the whole piece. Now that I know (at least nominally) the notes, I can begin to make music of it. I don't know if I'll be able to get it up to it's notated speed. But suddenly it exists as a whole, as music and meaningful form, emerging like the view of a mountain above breaking clouds after a long and rainy approach through the forest. I have two months before the student recital at which I'm going to play it. It might actually work!

To warm up at the start of practicing, I have been playing an exercise that my piano teacher calls the Rachmaninoff exercise, after the late romantic Russian composer and formidable pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff who evidently used this exercise himself. It's excellent for developing finger flexibility and hand strength. It works like this:

In both hands, play the same major chord two octaves apart with all five fingers, adding a major sixth. Starting on C, this would be C-E-G-A-C. This is a wide spacing for the fingers, and just fingering it is a good stretch.

Play this chord, both hands together, four times.

Then, lower the fourth finger of the left hand and the second finger of the right hand one half step, to E flat (both are playing the same note), leaving all the others the same. You now have this chord: C-E flat-G-A-C. Play it four times, not breaking rhythm. Then lower both the third fingers a half-step, so you have C-E flat-G flat-A-C, and play this four times in the same rhythm, then lower the fourth finger of the left hand and the second finger of the right a half step, so the chord is C-E flat-G flat-A flat-C, and play this four times.

You have basically slid fingers 2, 3, and 4 down half a step; what comes next? It's been a great physical exercise so far, lowering successive widely-spaced fingers by half steps, and what seems natural to me is to continue this pattern by lowering the first finger (the thumb) and fifth fingers of each hand by a half step (all four at the same time, since they're playing the same note), which takes you to C flat-E flat-G flat-A flat-C flat, or, enharmonically, B-D sharp-F sharp-G sharp-B -- that is, the same chord as you started with, the whole thing half a step lower.

You can keep moving down the keyboard without ever breaking the physical pattern, which is, in fact, what I do, reveling in the different stretches that happen between the fingers as they move.

This, however, is not what Rachmaninoff did. When he reached the fourth chord -- C-E flat-G flat-A flat-C -- he stopped following the physical pattern, and followed instead a theoretical one out of common practice music theory: he recognizes that the chord is a dominant seventh chord in first inversion -- A flat 7, the dominant of D flat. He then proceeds to resolve the chord to D flat, and moves the first and fifth fingers not down to B to continue the physical pattern, but UP half a step to D flat in adherence to the theoretical pattern. All the other fingers move up a whole step, departing from the physical pattern altogether.

Thus, at the end of each four-chord physical pattern of sliding half steps, you move the whole chord UP a half step, and can continue in this manner up the keyboard.

It's as if he was proceeding merrily along with a simple physical pattern, but when he got to the fourth chord, the theoretical pressure due to it's happening to have the form of a dominant seventh chord became stronger than the momentum of a purely physical pattern of movement. So he breaks the physical pattern and satisfies the theoretical pattern.

This interplay of the physical and the theoretical strikes me as vaguely similar to the tension in chemistry that constantly exists between an atoms drive towards achieving electrical neutrality on the one hand and the simultaneous pressure to achieve a stable electron orbital configuration on the other, a tension that is sometimes resolved in favor of one and sometimes the other -- with one big difference: whereas the charge / orbital tension is an inherent and vital property of nature that reflects two things that exist in the same way, the physical / theoretical tension described here is anything but inevitable, because the is no inherent theoretical tension in music. The idea that A flat seven has a tendency to resolve down a fifth to D flat is a conventional construction that is part of common European musical practice as it evolved after the middle ages and which was formally described by Rameau in his Treatise on Harmony in 1722. This set of relations has been the foundation for Western music for many hundreds of years, and now is spread all over the globe. But it is fundamentally arbitrary, something made, not something discovered. (1)

Rachmaninoff was very much working within that system, and thus was effectively serving two masters: a physical one, that of the technical piano pedagogue, and a theoretical one, that of a tonal composer, who was impelled to make even his exercises satisfy the rules of the common practice framework.

And so I see, with surprise, for I don't feel that theoretical pressure; for me this isn't really music and I doubt I would have noticed the dominant seventh form except that I was looking to understand why Rachmaninoff broke off from a clear physical pattern. To my naive and atonal mind, I wanted to know, why not let a physical exercise follow its own logic? In fact, from a physical point of view, maybe finger one should move first, then two, then three, four, and five.

Which raises a further point: what is the relationship between technical exercises and music? And even further, what is the relationship between music and theory? Maybe the development of technical ability on the keyboard is hampered, not helped, by an adherence to accepted theoretical patterns whose dictates depart from what makes sense physically. What exercises might suggest themselves from a physical point of view if there was no concern whatever for any sort of music theory? Would they be music, or even musical? Does that matter, if they help develop physical pianistic ability? Should a composer aspire to creating exercises which are both physically and musically effective?

Speaking for myself, I am willing to endure a certain amount of playing that is not music in order to build technique, but certainly there are limits as to how long one can stand to play without playing music!

1. The arguments of Rameau and others that the Western system represents the one true theoretical understanding of musical relations ring as hollow as similar claims made by religions, however interesting and useful the actual theory described may be.