Sunday, March 29: Dark Matter Pirate Cinema Tarot Sneak Preview
pirate cinema berlin
sebastian at rolux.org
Sun Mar 29 07:44:18 UTC 2020
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"And if nothing changes, or if we believe too much
in the power of a single image to narrate a story,
then that's the worst thing that can happen."
March 29
Pirate Cinema
Season Eight
Episode Three
Vorfilm
Cinetracts 2020 Footage - Berlin, March 23, Sunset
https://pad.ma/KXC
30 min
Hauptfilm
Fwd: Re: Archive - Dark Matter Cinema Tarot
https://pad.ma/JQR
40 min
Nachfilm
Pirate Cinema Season Eight Sneak Preview - Part 2
https://pad.ma/KXG
42 min
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Among the many technologies and devices invented to make use of cinema in ways
that cinema itself cannot, Silvia Maglioni's and Graeme Thomson's Dark Matter
Cinema Tarot is one of my favorites.(1) Their Tarot is both a set of 78 very
carefully chosen film stills - I haven't seen more than 15 or 20 yet, and no
desire to reveal more than needed: this is the opposite of a picture album or
slideshow, not supposed to be browsed or flipped through - and at the same time
a simple, collaborative technique to activate these images. The "Nocturnal
Committee" that constitutes itself around the Tarot is nothing more or less
than a small group of people who share a common, sometimes urgent concern, in
form of a question. Four cards are drawn from the deck, projected on a screen,
and the session begins. It is not a "reading", however, as the Tarot first and
foremost addresses the sense of seeing, rather than the urge to reassert the
primacy of word over image, show off expertise in intertextuality, withdraw to
the safe space of interpretation, or indulge in blank cinephilia. The Dark
Matter Cinema Tarot is an invitation to think with rather than about images,
and what it provides and allows for is, in the best sense or that term,
"montage": What is missing in an image, what can be seen that is not in it, how
does one get from one image to the other, what is the image that is missing in
that transition, what happens when two images appear together, and so on.
The proceedings of the Nocturnal Committe should not be misunderstood as an
esoteric exercise: the deck doesn't carry too much baggage from the tradition
of the Tarot, other than the element of randomness that is introduced through
the draw. And even though the cards are drawn from the histories of cinema,
they have a beautiful tendency to fall elsewhere than just right back into it.
We have been in two sessions with the Tarot's creators, we know that the
Nocturnal Committee is an experimental setting without any promise of
conclusive outcomes - but we have also seen what can happen, so to say.
You can read a more comprehensive take on the above, in Silvia's and Graeme's
own words, copied from the manual included with the Tarot.(2) "Dark Matter
Pirate Cinema"(3) would have been the obvious program for last week, and it
should be one of the programs that Pirate Cinema is going to reopen with.
Whenever that will be: our sense is that a Nocturnal Committee will constitute
itself more or less spontaneously, and shared, acute questions are still going
to be airborne, maybe even more so than today.
For today, we only have a canned response, even though the question it contains
is still smouldering. It was recorded(4) in Bombay on March 11, 2018, as part
of "Fwd: Re: Archive", a month-long gathering around the 10th anniversary of
Pad.ma. Of course, this choice of program also serves as an extended
long-distance online embrace, as we think of everybody who was with us(5) in
Bombay two years ago: Rosemary and Shaina and Ashok and Ananda and Lawrence and
Iram and Zinnia and Sanjay and Zulekha and Simpreet and Phalguni and Madhushree
and Namita and Ashish and Kaushik and Silvia and Graeme and Salma and Salma and
Philip and Kaya and Jasmina and Özge and Alper and Inder and Mariam and Kush
and Iyesha and Hakim and Izabella and Skye and Ananya and Jensen and Madhuja
and Meenakshi and Stefanie and Kamal and Maha and Mansour and quite a few
others who, today, find themselves, as you can imagine, on very different
latitudes of our current predicament.
Finally: You can watch the program linked above at any time of your choosing.
Any time in the future is totally fine. We're still pirates, not streamers.
(1) First person singular because Jan and I don't agree on _everything_ ;)
Check out his new book though: https://piratecinema.org/images/karl_marx.jpg
(2) DMC manual, pages 2-9: https://piratecinema.org/texts/dmc.pdf
(3) Dark Matter Pirate Cinema: https://piratecinema.org/images/dmpc.jpg
(4) The sound is not fantastic for the first six and a half minutes, but from
then on, it's fantastic. You will find a transcript on the right-hand side.
(5) This includes a number of friends who couldn't come, for a multiplicity of
reasons, many of which remind us that the disaster we inhabit has many more
names than just the one of the crisis that has begun a few days or weeks
ago, and that the primacy of the present over the rest of the time can be
another major problem with what we call "our imagination".
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