abhinav-prayas--cinema.pdf

8/14/2019 abhinav-prayas--cinema.pdf

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narrative, an illusion of space, time and emotion.Where does this come from? How did anyone everthink of a storybook which one could stare at andgo home with a complete dream running in the head.Insomniacs to this day watch movies all night long,

because it is an experience so close to sleeping.Even wet dreams are possible. Cinema is sleep.Cinema is dream-time.

To lovers, embedded deep within the love moment,this will remind them of something else. It willremind of love itself. When you stare at anotherperson and track the fluctuations in their gesturesacross temporal landscapes, you are experiencingcinema. The first war known to humankind startedwhen she said to him, You are my cinema.

But how do you experience this when you are sittingby yourself on a dry rock in the middle of whatwas once a river? Only lovers have the automatic,continuous supply of cinema. Other folk, thecynics, the religious, the traders, the romantic,have no way to ever know this person-propelled-cinema experience.

And the world of cinema, the world of cameras,lights, actors and simulated sex was made to mimicthe world of lovers for others. What shall we callthe others, we dont know. The desire to copy thisworld is an unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled inperpetuity. Vestigial. And this leads us back tothe source of this desire. It lives in the heart ofyearning. The same organ in the body of our emotionthat yearns for love, yearns for cinema. When youare looking into the eyes of your beholder youdont need to watch a movie.

The need to watch a movie arises in the momentswhen you are disoriented, lost, joyless, dry,opaque, idle, wasted or nonchalant. And no movie


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ever made has been able to address that itch.They try to substitute the cemetery of dry as abone hearts with lush green fields of evergreenemotions. But the replacement only lasts till themovie lasts, the landscapes are reset after that.

And because you cant rent an apartment in themiddle of the limelight, cant be the movie starsnext-door, neighbour cinema is peddling biscuits tothe dead baby. Just peddling biscuits to the deadbaby

------Viewership------

When you watch a film you are walking into apuddle of wet mud. Like participating in cross-talk, cinema has the firepower to ignite manycross-polarities and trigger an explosion. Whichweb of connections has the potential to lead to atumbleweed of explosions? When do you escape thesafe area?

All thoughts are only partially thought. You neverhave the time to follow a trail of thought all theway to achieve a closure. So your head is full ofthese live exposed webs of wires. Also you haveno way of achieving insulation. In a web, bunchesof nodes cannot be isolated from the rest. Soeverything is permanently exposed. You are alwaysat risk of entering damaging situations which flareup all the loosely hanging live wires in your headand exploding. And then you watch movies.

Now, when we watch movies we are entering a spa.We lie back, relax and let the water touch the


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surface of our skin and then float away. Like oil-cooled engines, the experience becomes a way ofloosing excess heat which has nowhere else to go.We uncoil, when we watch the space behind our eyes,we realise that it is made of cold and hard steel,

no impression is made by default. The sensors andtentacles are out of course and if there is asense that some pool of data is to be analysed formeaningful masses of substrate, material is scoopedout and laid bare at the collection gates. And thenslowly the material is analysed.

But when you watch a movie you lay yourselfopen. In a manner which reflects innocence andunnecessary trust, you let a story with uncertainfutures mangle with your head. In a dark chamber,you let a story with unknown ambitions play havocwith the space inside your head. Movies are onlysafe to see again, as reruns, as known and tastedfruits. Only media which at first instance seemsfamiliar is worth engaging with. Memories operatethat way, dont ask me how you can remember thingswhich didnt happen to you. You can.

Viewers are not caddies, they are not waiters, theyare not servicemen, they are not paid henchmen. Andif they have a mind of their own, no demographicstudy and focus group can let you scan the probableresponse. Let the language of cinema break downfrom a precipice of artefact, tradition and dogmato the vulnerable lingo of communication. Withevery word you utter, you do not know what isunderstood by the listener. Let cinema live withthat risk.

When a movie plays to an empty theatre what doesit think of itself? When it plays to an uncaringaudience what does it think of itself? Can a moviethink of itself? Is a movie a sentient beingor just a fiction without a body, a fabrication


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without a basis? And if it is the latter why doesit need to be held together? Why does it needto be coherent? Why does it need to be fashionedonly in a particular way, leaving no room forthe coarseness of our everyday lives to enter

the frame? How brave do we have to be to let ourflabby, shapeless bodies be in the frame, doingsomething unscripted and artless? Documentary isthe art of procuring a license to show things asthey are and demand that we read something else inthem. Things can only get better, meanwhile whatswrong with dealing with the disaster?

------Entertainment------

To enter or attain a better frame within whichto see the world and find it enjoyable is theobjective of entertainment. To startle theother out of the stasis of living their lifeis the immediate desire. When we undertake theresponsibility to entertain you, to fulfil thecontract between us, we do a good job. We do sucha good job that never again do you go to the fakeentertainment portals of the city. The portals arefake because they have a very temporary effect.You stay entertained only as long as you watch amovie and then it is over. The way we entertainyou, you will stay entertained at least for halfyour life. For a few decades straight, you willwake up in the morning and you will not need todrink coffee, you will not need to do yoga or doanything to decongest anymore. At least one halfof your life will be one smooth ride. That is whatwe can deliver to you. But we sympathise with the


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economics of the entertainment industry and wehold ourselves back. We release a minuscule partof our entertaining mantra at a time, no more thanone percent is known to anyone during an episode.So you do get entertained but you have to come

back for more. We help the entertainment industrysurvive. We help the industry monopolise accessto entertainment and create fake scarcity in theprocess.

We do this for a reason.

The entertainment industry gives us the privilegeto conduct any operation on any content in itsmachinery. We can go into the machine and changeany movie and any song in any way we want. We donthave to file any reports, we can do anything wecan. When you watch a movie you do not know who isin your head. It might be us or it might be somemercenary film director somewhere if we have notintervened.

This ambiguity allows us to take infinite powerand assume an invincible, absolute position in theentertainment industry. We are dons, we are aboveeveryone else. We get to decide what your piecemealepisode of entertainment is going to be like. Weget to decide how you get entertained.

But no one ever violates the limits placed verycarefully by the corporals of the entertainmentworld. These limits are followed by everyone in thesame way. Either you can negotiate a way to getentertained or you have to sit out in the cold (orthe heat, depending on where you are). There is noother possibility.

There is a story behind this also. The thing isthat we discovered that when you are entertainedsuccessfully, you are actually happy for a few


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moments. There is a presence in your brain of allthe chemicals which indicate joy. It works the sameway as drugs do. Minimum impact, tiny episodicaldrugs. And just like drugs this needs to becontrolled, we cannot spread joy like thin butter

all over the social fabric of this world. It wouldcreate imbalance of the order that will not besustainable. So we play by the rules.

Only when bodies are in our audience, we allowourselves to unwind and let entertainment flow likewater from a jug. For this to happen the beliefin presence and the patience for body to bodycommunication should not fade. In our personalaudience the performances that have happened isthe superset of all the cinema, all the literatureof the world. We will not share our attendanceregisters and also we will not stop

------People-propelled cinema------

This is a new idea. We have surveyed and indexedall the ideas that have ever been and realisedthis. And now we can declare this clearly andprecisely. This is a new idea. And, what idea isthis? This idea involves looking at human bodiesas cinematic narrative machines. We talk aboutcinema for sure but we talk about people-propelledcinema. We talk about a continuous human channel,self-aware of its inherent responsibilities todeliver a continuous stream of experience. Peoplehave called this transmission different thingsat different times. People have called thislove, synthesis and romance. But there should be


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only one name for this, and that singular nameis cinema. When the electricity flows, when thechemistry smells right, the movie has begun. Thismovie has a variable length and might or might nothave intermissions, but it is a movie. A movie

of the same kind that you pay money to see everySaturday but more organic in nature. Produced by abiological system and not a financial one. Producedby the spontaneous combustion of pent-up lust,frustration and boredom in the blood vessels. Whena human body is in this mode of performance and amatter of transient experience is being produced,time appears to slow down and the memory-functionsof the audience becomes sharper. Things which areordinarily not be a part of the archives of thepersonal archives of the memories of a lifetimebecome a part, small and meaningless things thenappear to be carrying deep meanings and bearenormous significance.

People-propelled cinema explores a different setof issues. The themes it explores stand apartfrom those which you see depicted in conventionalenacted cinematic productions. The film theoryof people-propelled cinema also differs. A verydifferent moral compass is in operation. For one,there is no illusion of balancing the delivery ofa good story. The flow of the story evolves inits bitstream and resonantly reflects the presenceof pressure in the pipeline of experience. At onepoint the story might seem to be a tragedy but atthe next instant it can seem to be a gut-wrenchingthriller and at times there are shades of comedyand sarcasm too. This stream of the story thatemerges is so unpredictable that some people donot even accept it as a story. They say that thisis more like a documentary story which requires amacro lens for its perception. They say that thefamiliar manipulable graph of a story with strandsthat hang loose like strings of a parachute is what


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defines a story. The familiar pattern of a storyallows it to actually become one. It offers joyon being discovered by the reader like a hiddenkey or the answer to a riddle. This pattern is thestory and nothing else they say. But we disagree.

The story is the bitstream that is a encapsulatedand encoded form of an experience that has to beimagined to be understood. People-propelled cinemamakes sense as this cinema that is only a narrativehyperlink to another cinematic experience thatactually has to be imagined. In the person-as-moviethere is nothing to see, there are only referencesto be gathered and resolved in terms of hyperlinksto access the screen action going on inside thehead. When we look at you, and you are a movie,we enjoy a movie inside our heads. We enjoy thismovie and end up feeling very sedated and relaxed.So sedated that our fingers could be faucets ofchilled water that have an infinite supply of waterto serve.

When we watch this movie, surprisingly time passeslike the proverbial silk from the eye of a needle.We get to deal with an engaging distraction. Weare trapped within a portable air-conditionerof life-sustaining gasses that are constantlyflowing towards our nostrils . To have a worthwhiledistraction which grips us by the handles of ourconsciousness and gives us enough time to check outof the friction of our ongoing bitstream data is abig thing. We lust after the experience. We seekindividuals who have a cinematic bent. We are noteasily satisfied and we do not make trade-offs.These moments of waiting for the individual wholiterally inhales bitstream and exhales cinema areenchanting in their own way, it feels like you arein love with a person whom you havent met yet. Itfeels like being in the heat of a romantic moment.


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------Screens------

Screens are the surface of cinema. There is no

escaping screens when the moment is one thatcelebrates the becoming of each surface into ascreen and recklessly performs this transformationwherever it can.

The original screen which has been copiedeverywhere was the retinal screen. This retinalscreen cannot be copied easily because it performssuch a different function. Its function is not tobecome a projection apparatus, dumb and receptivein itself. It is an intelligent organ that receivesinformation and it further relays it across a webof channels all of which then compile together thevisual experience. It is more like a Cisco routerup on the ceiling than a white bed-sheet that canbe used as a curtain for throwing a magnified imageon. And this changes many things. This analogyrenders defunct the proliferation of screensthat has happened because this proliferation hashappened on the basis of a misplaced understandingof screens as dumb-waiters. Dumb-waiters that waitfor the image to be projected onto them before theyshow back the same image. Like a mirror or a shinyreflection surface of a different kind.

We need to make screens now that dont yield suchan easy reward. Screens need to be like puzzlesthat only offer pieces of encoded information thatcompiles into a richer experience eventually.Trusting our senses to experience information asit is, raw and without compilation is dangerous.There can be disturbance and noise from too manymalicious sources that corrupts our mind byoffering it noise when it expects narrative. Thiscorruption has already happened of course. Your


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unrelenting dependence on screens to be surfacesfor you to be able to have something to see atall, outside the cavalcade of dull metropolis andblank architectural elements is a symptom of thiscorruption. Also you trust a screen more than

you trust a human face. You believe screens havefidelity, they show what they are being asked toshow. But consider for a moment the possibilitythat the screen which is allowing you to selectyour content and then allowing you to request aplayback is lying by default. You do not possessthe capability to read source-code so you cannotreally browse your files directories as theyare, you will forever need an interface and aninterpreter. If there is a machine-in-the-middleattack in your life, you are done for. I am notsaying the attack has happened. I am only sayingthat there is a potential right there, waitingto be exploited. Your chronic and pathogenicdependence on screens could be a reason for thefall of humans against machines that you have beenrepeatedly warned of in science fiction.

Screens which only transmit sensory informationto be compiled by the onlooker to become a visualexperience will be necessary. Screens which arenot just projection or rendering surfaces to beconsumed externally but smart bio-matter whichour senses can relate to as another organ in ourbody are needed. Only then we can truly experiencecontent visually with as high a transmissionquality as the dreams we are surrounded by everynight.

Your eyes are being burnt by the screens you stareat, they need rest. They will only get a rest whenyou stop taxing them needlessly, when you have themdo only what they need to do and nothing else.


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------Dialog------

Dialog is always only partially heard. Besides the

fragments that get spoken, there are volumes thatvolley in the head. The dialog in the head is moreinteresting, more fractious, more dangerous even.Because in that you will find the unfiltered, rawresponse to the madness around you. When you listento yourself speak, you think that is the story thatgets out and that is the story that matters. Thereis no crime in thought, no risk in letting idlefantasising becoming provocative and disruptivedecisions. But it is not that simple. Your thoughtsare being heard by everyone out there, they areheard loud and clear. They are heard not throughsubtle feedback systems like body language, whichis simple to fake, but through these specialdevices called probes that operate mentally andare deployed like magic spells and charms. Now,you might not believe in magic and you might notbelieve in charm but that is how I am able to getinto your head through your nostrils and have youspin to my tune. Your refusal to believe does notmatter because I already transact with you throughmagic.

This magic of course takes biology into account andoperates through our sensitivity of the array ofthe vibrating pulse of your skin. But beyond thatour magic does not really have a method that can bedescribed in great detail. Outside talk of methodand documentation, we are eager to share details.How do we manage to hear the dialog in your head?How does the event of probing unravel? Ok, imagineyourself sitting there, talking to me cryptically.You see us staring at you, you think that we looklike we are staring at some point even beyondyou. But actually we are looking deep within you.


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We can see your brain cells frothing and fuminginside your head. From long periods of staringinside peoples heads, we are now able to correlatepatterns of cellular activity and words utteredaloud. Sometimes this correlation does not help

as people are thinking and speaking an altogetherdifferent set of things. So we also start doingpoetic extrapolation between the shifting patternsin cellular activity that we see and the opaquelyguarded groups of neighbouring cells. Poeticextrapolation of course needs the existence of apoet to work. Now, what is poetry? Poetry can beunderstood as the codex of language.

The seeds of the urge that allows words to co-inhabit a sentence together punctuated by syntax.Poetry of course is not a media, it is not a media,a form. Poetry is the volatile, the inflammatoryset of words which are acidic and putrid enough forour psyche. Does it burn to read that poem? Great,because if it does, it is actually a poem. Poemsare the only literary entities which hold withinthemselves a qualitative dimension, a criteria forfunctioning. And when we do poetic extrapolation,we are able to unravel everything. There are nosecrets anymore. Like the WikiLeaks of the culturaland psychic industries, we unbolt all doors andlet all the dogs out. With graceful ease we accessall secrets but only selectively reveal them tothe wider world. This selection guards our menacingzeal, else we would only be engaged with a massiveconfrontation with the world-at-large.


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------Film time------

Film time is a fiction that pretends to be a

reality. It is a lie. Within the guise of filmlanguage, film time tries to tell the story ofthe reality of the world. History is recorded incinematic narratives and when historians speak,reams of celluloid are vomited out. The birthof cinema is locked into the time that story-telling was born. There was a definitive birthof storytelling. The search was on from the timelanguage was born for a short-hand, for a way tocompress the long-hand of time into the short-handof narratives. And this short-hand was born ascinematic narrative. When the camera arrived, therewas a rush from paper to film. Cinematic narrativegave birth to cinema and cinema gave birth tohistory. Because of cinema we know where we comefrom and who we are. And because of cinema,memory has grown. Of course there are somethingswhich come to us from the time before the birthof cinema. And these things religion tells us.Religion is the long-hand of time filtered throughthe times of storytelling. Our world looks downon religion. Our time has in its genetic code anunhealthy disdain for religion. Being alive meansbeing a surrogate of time. You cannot really haveany regard for religion because deep within thegenetic makeup of our time resides a deep, viral,nasty disdain of religion.

So to be religious you have to die a little bit,a little bit of death has to hang around in yourinformation archive somewhere.

And I am ashen. I have burnt all the way through,most of what has remained, most of what shinesthrough is dead.


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origin. These producers of magic are treated in avery special manner. But you have to realise thatalthough the film world seems like it has a realway for people to get involved, but in realitythere are a limited number of marked bodies and

there is a finite amount of film time in the world.The day enough movies will be made and all the filmtime is used up, there will be no more cinema.

In the future when there is no cinema there will bereligion.

------Remakes------

Why do some films need to be remade? Why do theylose their lustre after a point?

Is there something left unsaid in stories told onlyonce. Does this unsaid story float in the air likean orphan story, a story with no parent, no savinggrace? Do stories become themselves only when theyare told many many times over.

We want to propose a cinema that does not have anydiversity on the storytelling front. There shouldbe only one story told over and over again. Ifyou want to demonstrate your skill and craft as afilmmaker, do it by telling a story that has beentold a million times before.

You cant rely on the novelty of story line to getaway with weakness in perspective or form.

If all cinema was a cinema of remake. If stories


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existed in singular.

Remakes try to reinvent the story. They work onthe content too much. When all cinema is a remake,the craftsmen of cinema will be forced to withdraw

and work exclusively on the lens as the forcefield of their practice. The lens is all that willremain after nothing else remains. The innovationof cinema will be reduced to the pursuit of theoptical innovation of the lenses.

Lenses are elements of glass that allow you to seethe world in different ways. Looking at the worldin any isolated way is a function of the lens.Lenses do not necessarily need to be made of glass.They can be made of code, they can be mode of aperspectival bias.

Filmmakers can be craftsmen known in their cliquesfor the specialised lenses that they have in theircollection. These lenses will be closely guardedlike trade secrets and will become important toolsfor establishing a craft. A filmmakers life willbe spent in putting together an arsenal of lenseswhich can be deployed as and when needed.

A filmmaker without lenses will be quite poor.

A filmmaker with enough lenses will be consideredto be a magician.

Stories will remain the same, lenses will change.

When the lens changes suddenly everything seemsanew, suddenly everything seems differently layeredwith meaning. The access is altered but easy.

There is no new story to be told, only new ways tolook at existing stories.


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So film are made again. A remake is another filmbut it is still stuck in a recursive frame ofreference to the earlier film. The future film willnot be stuck in such a frame. The future film willbe able to deal with a gaze that is very fixed,

very still and uninterested in wandering.

The future film will not need to be remade becausethat will not be possible. Lenses are unique andstories are same, so there will be nothing to do.

Once as a civilisation, we are freed from the needto tell stories again, we will be freed from thecompulsions of narrative life. A lot of our energywill be freed up and we can dedicate ourselves tothe fine task of crafting our vision.

------The cut------

The cut is the first wound.

Footage being a continuous record of reality hasno breakage. It can be like memory, narrating acontinuous stream of experience. When the desire toconstruct is born, the cut is born. The cut is thecement. Aesthetics and arrangement was born out ofthe need to hide the cut.

When the cut is placed on a timeline, suddenlyfiction is born. Each cut video gets a duration,from a mass of footage it becomes a clip. A cliphas to be put in a sequence of progression andwithin a finite window of time.


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Montage attempts to synthesise a natural order ofvisual experience so that the cut can disappear.It all starts with the cut. Where does it comefrom and why does it want to rupture the fabric ofcontinuous fabric?

The cut was born of the desire to falsify, to tellstories. The cut is a storytelling device.

If there were no cut, there would have been noway to tell a story. To isolate something firstyou have to be able to detangle it from the massrecord of experience. To do this, a surgery has tobe performed on the mind that wants to offer itsmemories for processing as story. This operationis performed on the mind by the cut, the cut isable to perform an incision, bring about a breakin continuous experience and cull out a unit forstory construction. The action of the cut denotesthe entire sequence of action from the performanceof the operation to the moment when the actualincision is performed.

The task of picking the video clip and placingit on the timeline to produce another continuityfor narrative production is another process alltogether. The join is a more insignificant processin terms of narrative production. Once the cut hasbeen made the job is done and very little scope fordecision making is left.

The cut is the main event. The join is the side-event.

There is a lot of information to be processed, alot of decisions to be made before the cut can bemade.

The eventual decision is still the most importantdecision, but the process is transparent to us so


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we can also identify which parts of the processare essential and have a critical effect on theeventual decision.

What is this process?

During the cutting process, when the cutting pointis being identified, there is a kind of scanningat play and this scanning searches for fragility.Which are the moments in the continuous recordof reality, in the footage that seem to want arupture. What records cant hold well together?

Wanting to rupture means acknowledging aninstability and deciding to act on that knowledge.Not all instabilities are so fragile and precariousthat the want to rupture doesnt germinate.

This want doesnt germinate as a result of specialmaterial properties. This rupture has somethingto do with the content. The record has managed torecord a moment, a sequence of moments which donot want to sit well together. The record wants torupture.

The cutting process is about finding the cuttingpoints in the records that want to rupture.

But going forward, cutting might be performedautomatically. Cutting might be a performed as apart of a pattern or the evidence of a logic.

How will the cut find its cutting points then?

The cut will be an expression of the deflectionpoints on the graph of each segment of uncutfootage. If you track the deflection points, youcan access the latent tendencies that exist in thematerial.


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At one level of disassociation the cut can bemanaged by rhythms jointly permeated by noise,randomness and a mimicry of thoughtfulness.

When the cut is able to make stable cuts with a

mindless speed, a threshold will be crossed interms of auto-cognition that can be mechanised.We can make intelligent machines then, machineswith speed as a function and with a sensitivity tocontent as a facility.

As we are already talking of a cinema with no pre-baked viewport, such a cutting device will regulateout sensory experience which will then synthesise acinema on its own.

------Formalism------

If you have a problem with content, can you getaway with working on other parameters of presence?The thing with presence is that each parameter isimportant. You cannot get away with working on formor context in isolation.

Content is always accessible, whether the form ofan entity allows such an access to happen or not.

Formalism is about paying isolated attention tothe form hoping for it to convey everything. Butshould it convey anything at all? Form conveysonly that which it can, a sense of balance betweenthe elements, a kind of frontal pleasure of visualencounter.


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Behind the frontal encounter, what is the taste?How do you account for the experience if youare not even looking squarely at it? We are notconstructing flip-flops of content and form here,we are talking of an expanded vision. A frame that

can hold more than one, a receptacle that can holdthe incident in complexity.

If content is uncomfortable to engage with becauseof its viscidity, the discomfort can be dealt with.The discomfort of dealing with content can becalled a kind of flux anxiety. There is an anxietyabout encountering ideas that hold the potential ofcreating ripples on the surface of their stream.At the same time, this anxiety co-exists withthe desire for social engagement. If content ischanneled into bodies that hold both these force-fields together, then the problem can be solved.There is a value in performance. There is a valuein speech. There is a value in letting spacesresonate with the current of presence. Some canonly receive content mediated through people.

Formalism is the acceptance of a distortedposition. In a moment of honesty, formalismcan dissolve into hunger for presence and itselectricity. It can accept that instead of playingcharades with the arrangement of positions andtheir empty shells, it can be simpler to let itall fall down. Relationships between elements of asurface can be disrupted by chaos. Form struggleswith chaos that doesnt easily betray a pattern.Form eventually hits a wall. This wall is theprecipice of meaning. At the very edge of humanexperience where meaning and delirium interminglefreely, form struggles to make sense of content.

Content could have been the same as anguish butinstead it has become the gooey matter beyond theprecipice, never accessed and never understood.


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Content is never accessed, it might as well begibberish.

The cognitively challenged masses access contentonly through metadata. Metadata is slim, it bears

only the leftover traces of the real thing. At thatpoint there is nothing to do except tinker withform and spark empty passions.

------The invisible line------

Lines can be drawn anywhere. Any piece of undividedsurface can be split with a line drawn in-between.The surface then suddenly becomes smaller, denserand more intensely mapped.

The invisible line is every line that seeks tocreate invisible borders and frames. These lines,borders and frames are scheming and so they areinvisible. If they disclose themselves, theirpositions are revealed and so are the schemes. Bywithholding their visibility, they scheme.

Screens tell us where to be. We cannot be behind,we have to be in front, we cannot be within we haveto be outside - posturing with our gaze. To lookyou have to exclude yourself from the experience.To exclude yourself from the experience you haveto externalise it. To externalise it, you have tothink of something in your head that is a parallelto what the experience offers you. If by somecoincidence you see the same experience outsideas you do inside, you can perform a distinctseparation between what is happening inside you and


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what is happening outside.

The lines that screens draw are still porous. Youcan observe a screen in a mirror, in a memory orin a dream and each observation can have its own

orientation.

The lines that the camera draws are more absolutethan that.

When a camera catches an incident ray of light,it is drawing a clear plot of orientation. When acamera misses the incident ray of light, then theplot of orientation is more ambiguous.

We will talk about the hits and ignore the missesfor now.

When we have a hit, the camera is in control.All the space that is mapped from the rays ofincident lights is holy. A line is drawn aroundit to isolate the flux of the natural happeningsof the space and the enacted happenings of thespace. Once this isolation is performed, the camerastarts behaving obsessively. It starts imposingthe perspective of its lens on the isolated world,self-consciousness is heightened.

After the camera is done with its shooting andafter its obsessions have relaxed, things reacha point of renewal. Lines are drawn wherevermessiness exists and distinction cannot be madebetween landscape that has been photographed andlandscape that has not been photographed.

Photography does not leave a mark on the landscape.But sentient beings respond differently to beingphotographed. Sentient beings get lost - they runup against a visually similar copy and feel thatthey have come up against a mirror or a clone


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being. They cant come to terms with this encountereasily and find it easy to just come up with a lostface.

The invisible line of the camera breaks in the

photograph. Photographs do not sustain the bordersthat are constructed by the shoots. The audience ofthe photograph does not witness or experience theneurosis of the shoot.

Invisible lines persist in experience but get lostin records. A mind cultivated on records is blindto the pragmatics of experiential neurosis. It isblind to the navigation that situations, settingsand environments demand.

To train minds that know how to discern enlivenedmoments from dead ones, that know how to seeinvisible lines and respond to the boundariescreated by them, feed them on products of neurosisand keep them away from records that have becomeonly enactments.

The lines are drawn in our head, in our language,syntax and speech. When we talk to you, you walkinto our trap.


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narrative, an illusion of space, time and emotion.Where does this come from? How did anyone everthink of a storybook which one could stare at andgo home with a complete dream running in the head.Insomniacs to this day watch movies all night long,

because it is an experience so close to sleeping.Even wet dreams are possible. Cinema is sleep.Cinema is dream-time.

To lovers, embedded deep within the love moment,this will remind them of something else. It willremind of love itself. When you stare at anotherperson and track the fluctuations in their gesturesacross temporal landscapes, you are experiencingcinema. The first war known to humankind startedwhen she said to him, You are my cinema.



The need to watch a movie arises in the momentswhen you are disoriented, lost, joyless, dry,opaque, idle, wasted or nonchalant. And no movie


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ever made has been able to address that itch.They try to substitute the cemetery of dry as abone hearts with lush green fields of evergreenemotions. But the replacement only lasts till themovie lasts, the landscapes are reset after that.

And because you cant rent an apartment in themiddle of the limelight, cant be the movie starsnext-door, neighbour cinema is peddling biscuits tothe dead baby. Just peddling biscuits to the deadbaby.




Now, when we watch movies we are entering a spa.We lie back, relax and let the water touch the


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surface of our skin and then float away. Like oil-cooled engines, the experience becomes a way ofloosing excess heat which has nowhere else to go.We uncoil, when we watch the space behind our eyes,we realise that it is made of cold and hard steel,

no impression is made by default. The sensors andtentacles are out of course and if there is asense that some pool of data is to be analysed formeaningful masses of substrate, material is scoopedout and laid bare at the collection gates. And thenslowly the material is analysed.

But when you watch a movie you lay yourselfopen. In a manner which reflects innocence andunnecessary trust, you let a story with uncertainfutures mangle with your head. In a dark chamber,you let a story with unknown ambitions play havocwith the space inside your head. Movies are onlysafe to see again, as reruns, as known and tastedfruits. Only media which at first instance seemsfamiliar is worth engaging with. Memories operatethat way, dont ask me how you can remember thingswhich didnt happen to you. You can.


When a movie plays to an empty theatre what doesit think of itself? When it plays to an uncaringaudience what does it think of itself? Can a moviethink of itself? Is a movie a sentient beingor just a fiction without a body, a fabrication


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without a basis? And if it is the latter why doesit need to be held together? Why does it needto be coherent? Why does it need to be fashionedonly in a particular way, leaving no room forthe coarseness of our everyday lives to enter

the frame? How brave do we have to be to let ourflabby, shapeless bodies be in the frame, doingsomething unscripted and artless? Documentary isthe art of procuring a license to show things asthey are and demand that we read something else inthem. Things can only get better, meanwhile whatswrong with dealing with the disaster?

------Entertainment------

To enter or attain a better frame within whichto see the world and find it enjoyable is theobjective of entertainment. To startle theother out of the stasis of living their lifeis the immediate desire. When we undertake theresponsibility to entertain you, to fulfil thecontract between us, we do a good job. We do sucha good job that never again do you go to the fakeentertainment portals of the city. The portals arefake because they have a very temporary effect.You stay entertained only as long as you watch amovie and then it is over. The way we entertainyou, you will stay entertained at least for halfyour life. For a few decades straight, you willwake up in the morning and you will not need todrink coffee, you will not need to do yoga or doanything to decongest anymore. At least one halfof your life will be one smooth ride. That is whatwe can deliver to you. But we sympathise with the


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economics of the entertainment industry and wehold ourselves back. We release a minuscule partof our entertaining mantra at a time, no more thanone percent is known to anyone during an episode.So you do get entertained but you have to come

back for more. We help the entertainment industrysurvive. We help the industry monopolise accessto entertainment and create fake scarcity in theprocess.

We do this for a reason.

The entertainment industry gives us the privilegeto conduct any operation on any content in itsmachinery. We can go into the machine and changeany movie and any song in any way we want. We donthave to file any reports, we can do anything wecan. When you watch a movie you do not know who isin your head. It might be us or it might be somemercenary film director somewhere if we have notintervened.

This ambiguity allows us to take infinite powerand assume an invincible, absolute position in theentertainment industry. We are dons, we are aboveeveryone else. We get to decide what your piecemealepisode of entertainment is going to be like. Weget to decide how you get entertained.

But no one ever violates the limits placed verycarefully by the corporals of the entertainmentworld. These limits are followed by everyone in thesame way. Either you can negotiate a way to getentertained or you have to sit out in the cold (orthe heat, depending on where you are). There is noother possibility.

There is a story behind this also. The thing isthat we discovered that when you are entertainedsuccessfully, you are actually happy for a few


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defines a story. The familiar pattern of a storyallows it to actually become one. It offers joyon being discovered by the reader like a hiddenkey or the answer to a riddle. This pattern is thestory and nothing else they say. But we disagree.

The story is the bitstream that is a encapsulatedand encoded form of an experience that has to beimagined to be understood. People-propelled cinemamakes sense as this cinema that is only a narrativehyperlink to another cinematic experience thatactually has to be imagined. In the person-as-moviethere is nothing to see, there are only referencesto be gathered and resolved in terms of hyperlinksto access the screen action going on inside thehead. When we look at you, and you are a movie,we enjoy a movie inside our heads. We enjoy thismovie and end up feeling very sedated and relaxed.So sedated that our fingers could be faucets ofchilled water that have an infinite supply of waterto serve.

When we watch this movie, surprisingly time passeslike the proverbial silk from the eye of a needle.We get to deal with an engaging distraction. Weare trapped within a portable air-conditionerof life-sustaining gasses that are constantlyflowing towards our nostrils . To have a worthwhiledistraction which grips us by the handles of ourconsciousness and gives us enough time to check outof the friction of our ongoing bitstream data is abig thing. We lust after the experience. We seekindividuals who have a cinematic bent. We are noteasily satisfied and we do not make trade-offs.These moments of waiting for the individual wholiterally inhales bitstream and exhales cinema areenchanting in their own way, it feels like you arein love with a person whom you havent met yet. Itfeels like being in the heat of a romantic moment.


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------Screens------

Screens are the surface of cinema. There is no

escaping screens when the moment is one thatcelebrates the becoming of each surface into ascreen and recklessly performs this transformationwherever it can.

The original screen which has been copiedeverywhere was the retinal screen. This retinalscreen cannot be copied easily because it performssuch a different function. Its function is not tobecome a projection apparatus, dumb and receptivein itself. It is an intelligent organ that receivesinformation and it further relays it across a webof channels all of which then compile together thevisual experience. It is more like a Cisco routerup on the ceiling than a white bed-sheet that canbe used as a curtain for throwing a magnified imageon. And this changes many things. This analogyrenders defunct the proliferation of screensthat has happened because this proliferation hashappened on the basis of a misplaced understandingof screens as dumb-waiters. Dumb-waiters that waitfor the image to be projected onto them before theyshow back the same image. Like a mirror or a shinyreflection surface of a different kind.

We need to make screens now that dont yield suchan easy reward. Screens need to be like puzzlesthat only offer pieces of encoded information thatcompiles into a richer experience eventually.Trusting our senses to experience information asit is, raw and without compilation is dangerous.There can be disturbance and noise from too manymalicious sources that corrupts our mind byoffering it noise when it expects narrative. Thiscorruption has already happened of course. Your


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unrelenting dependence on screens to be surfacesfor you to be able to have something to see atall, outside the cavalcade of dull metropolis andblank architectural elements is a symptom of thiscorruption. Also you trust a screen more than

you trust a human face. You believe screens havefidelity, they show what they are being asked toshow. But consider for a moment the possibilitythat the screen which is allowing you to selectyour content and then allowing you to request aplayback is lying by default. You do not possessthe capability to read source-code so you cannotreally browse your files directories as theyare, you will forever need an interface and aninterpreter. If there is a machine-in-the-middleattack in your life, you are done for. I am notsaying the attack has happened. I am only sayingthat there is a potential right there, waitingto be exploited. Your chronic and pathogenicdependence on screens could be a reason for thefall of humans against machines that you have beenrepeatedly warned of in science fiction.

Screens which only transmit sensory informationto be compiled by the onlooker to become a visualexperience will be necessary. Screens which arenot just projection or rendering surfaces to beconsumed externally but smart bio-matter whichour senses can relate to as another organ in ourbody are needed. Only then we can truly experiencecontent visually with as high a transmissionquality as the dreams we are surrounded by everynight.

Your eyes are being burnt by the screens you stareat, they need rest. They will only get a rest whenyou stop taxing them needlessly, when you have themdo only what they need to do and nothing else.


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------Dialog------

Dialog is always only partially heard. Besides the

fragments that get spoken, there are volumes thatvolley in the head. The dialog in the head is moreinteresting, more fractious, more dangerous even.Because in that you will find the unfiltered, rawresponse to the madness around you. When you listento yourself speak, you think that is the story thatgets out and that is the story that matters. Thereis no crime in thought, no risk in letting idlefantasising becoming provocative and disruptivedecisions. But it is not that simple. Your thoughtsare being heard by everyone out there, they areheard loud and clear. They are heard not throughsubtle feedback systems like body language, whichis simple to fake, but through these specialdevices called probes that operate mentally andare deployed like magic spells and charms. Now,you might not believe in magic and you might notbelieve in charm but that is how I am able to getinto your head through your nostrils and have youspin to my tune. Your refusal to believe does notmatter because I already transact with you throughmagic.

This magic of course takes biology into account andoperates through our sensitivity of the array ofthe vibrating pulse of your skin. But beyond thatour magic does not really have a method that can bedescribed in great detail. Outside talk of methodand documentation, we are eager to share details.How do we manage to hear the dialog in your head?How does the event of probing unravel? Ok, imagineyourself sitting there, talking to me cryptically.You see us staring at you, you think that we looklike we are staring at some point even beyondyou. But actually we are looking deep within you.


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------Film time------

Film time is a fiction that pretends to be a

reality. It is a lie. Within the guise of filmlanguage, film time tries to tell the story ofthe reality of the world. History is recorded incinematic narratives and when historians speak,reams of celluloid are vomited out. The birthof cinema is locked into the time that story-telling was born. There was a definitive birthof storytelling. The search was on from the timelanguage was born for a short-hand, for a way tocompress the long-hand of time into the short-handof narratives. And this short-hand was born ascinematic narrative. When the camera arrived, therewas a rush from paper to film. Cinematic narrativegave birth to cinema and cinema gave birth tohistory. Because of cinema we know where we comefrom and who we are. And because of cinema,memory has grown. Of course there are somethingswhich come to us from the time before the birthof cinema. And these things religion tells us.Religion is the long-hand of time filtered throughthe times of storytelling. Our world looks downon religion. Our time has in its genetic code anunhealthy disdain for religion. Being alive meansbeing a surrogate of time. You cannot really haveany regard for religion because deep within thegenetic makeup of our time resides a deep, viral,nasty disdain of religion.

So to be religious you have to die a little bit,a little bit of death has to hang around in yourinformation archive somewhere.

And I am ashen. I have burnt all the way through,most of what has remained, most of what shinesthrough is dead.


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So I am able to rise through with real religiousexperience. I have intense experiences withreligiosity. I can read the dense layers of timedeposited over religious stories in a sedimentary

fashion. When I read this time I feel special. Ifeel like I am probing into the deep, dark cornersof the intestines of history but I realise that Iam outside the clutches of history.

We are trying to frame this experience moredistinctly. When a naked experience of time triesto fit into the confined channels of historicity,the traffic screeches to a stop. It does not happeneasily.

Correlating film time and real time is wrong. Itis not possible. In fact, film time is a misnomer.It should be called anything which doesnt use theword time. Why should one scale be imposed on thetop of another?

Film time is a corruption, it allows you to thinkof itself as a representation of real time. Thatallowance is pure evil.

Film time ought to be understood as a magicalentity. It can put food on your plate though.Being in film-time is a rare privilege. Even theone who pays for the very celluloid cannot bepresent in film time if she does not have thetalent to do so. A synchronicity develops betweenbody and cinema and they collaborate to deliver adifferent pace of narrative that becomes cinema.If you can collaborate in this style, there willalways be food on your plate. There is a closelyguarded community that has access to these arenasof magic. Not everyone can produce this magic, itis a very specific calibration. And these producersof magic are pampered by the world as if they


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If all cinema was a cinema of remake. If storiesexisted in singular.

Remakes try to reinvent the story. They work onthe content too much. When all cinema is a remake,

the craftsmen of cinema will be forced to withdrawand work exclusively on the lens as the forcefield of their practice. The lens is all that willremain after nothing else remains. The innovationof cinema will be reduced to the pursuit of theoptical innovation of the lenses.

Lenses are elements of glass that allow you to seethe world in different ways. Looking at the worldin any isolated way is a function of the lens.Lenses do not necessarily need to be made of glass.They can be made of code, they can be mode of aperspectival bias.

Filmmakers can be craftsmen known in their cliquesfor the specialised lenses that they have in theircollection. These lenses will be closely guardedlike trade secrets and will become important toolsfor establishing a craft. A filmmakers life willbe spent in putting together an arsenal of lenseswhich can be deployed as and when needed.

A filmmaker without lenses will be quite poor.

A filmmaker with enough lenses will be consideredto be a magician.

Stories will remain the same, lenses will change.

When the lens changes suddenly everything seemsanew, suddenly everything seems differently layeredwith meaning. The access is altered but easy.

There is no new story to be told, only new ways tolook at existing stories.


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Montage attempts to synthesise a natural order ofvisual experience so that the cut can disappear.It all starts with the cut. Where does it comefrom and why does it want to rupture the fabric ofcontinuous fabric?

The cut was born of the desire to falsify, to tellstories. The cut is a storytelling device.

If there were no cut, there would have been noway to tell a story. To isolate something firstyou have to be able to detangle it from the massrecord of experience. To do this, a surgery has tobe performed on the mind that wants to offer itsmemories for processing as story. This operationis performed on the mind by the cut, the cut isable to perform an incision, bring about a breakin continuous experience and cull out a unit forstory construction. The action of the cut denotesthe entire sequence of action from the performanceof the operation to the moment when the actualincision is performed.

The task of picking the video clip and placingit on the timeline to produce another continuityfor narrative production is another process alltogether. The join is a more insignificant processin terms of narrative production. Once the cut hasbeen made the job is done and very little scope fordecision making is left.

The cut is the main event. The join is the side-event.

There is a lot of information to be processed, alot of decisions to be made before the cut can bemade.

The eventual decision is still the most importantdecision, but the process is transparent to us so


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we can also identify which parts of the processare essential and have a critical effect on theeventual decision.

What is this process?

During the cutting process, when the cutting pointis being identified, there is a kind of scanningat play and this scanning searches for fragility.Which are the moments in the continuous recordof reality, in the footage that seem to want arupture. What records cant hold well together?

Wanting to rupture means acknowledging aninstability and deciding to act on that knowledge.Not all instabilities are so fragile and precariousthat the want to rupture doesnt germinate.

This want doesnt germinate as a result of specialmaterial properties. This rupture has somethingto do with the content. The record has managed torecord a moment, a sequence of moments which donot want to sit well together. The record wants torupture.

The cutting process is about finding the cuttingpoints in the records that want to rupture.

But going forward, cutting might be performedautomatically. Cutting might be a performed as apart of a pattern or the evidence of a logic.

How will the cut find its cutting points then?

The cut will be an expression of the deflectionpoints on the graph of each segment of uncutfootage. If you track the deflection points, youcan access the latent tendencies that exist in thematerial.


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Behind the frontal encounter, what is the taste?How do you account for the experience if youare not even looking squarely at it? We are notconstructing flip-flops of content and form here,we are talking of an expanded vision. A frame that

can hold more than one, a receptacle that can holdthe incident in complexity.

If content is uncomfortable to engage with becauseof its viscidity, the discomfort can be dealtwith. The discomfort of dealing with content can becalled a kind of flux anxiety. There is an anxietyabout encountering ideas that hold the potential ofcreating ripples on the surface of their stream.At the same time, this anxiety co-exists withthe desire for social engagement. If content ischanneled into bodies that hold both these force-fields together, then the problem can be solved.There is a value in performance. There is a valuein speech. There is a value in letting spacesresonate with the current of presence. Some canonly receive content mediated through people.

Formalism is the acceptance of a distortedposition. In a moment of honesty, formalismcan dissolve into hunger for presence and itselectricity. It can accept that instead of playingcharades with the arrangement of positions andtheir empty shells, it can be simpler to let itall fall down. Relationships between elements of asurface can be disrupted by chaos. Form struggleswith chaos that doesnt easily betray a pattern.Form eventually hits a wall. This wall is theprecipice of meaning. At the very edge of humanexperience where meaning and delirium interminglefreely, form struggles to make sense of content.

Content could have been the same as anguish butinstead it has become the gooey matter beyond theprecipice, never accessed and never understood.


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Content is never accessed, it might as well begibberish.

The cognitively challenged masses access contentonly through metadata. Metadata is slim, it bears

only the leftover traces of the real thing. At thatpoint there is nothing to do except tinker withform and spark empty passions.

------The invisible line------

Lines can be drawn anywhere. Any piece of undividedsurface can be split with a line drawn in-between.The surface then suddenly becomes smaller, denserand more intensely mapped.

The invisible line is every line that seeks tocreate invisible borders and frames. These lines,borders and frames are scheming and so they areinvisible. If they disclose themselves, theirpositions are revealed and so are the schemes. Bywithholding their visibility, they scheme.

Screens tell us where to be. We cannot be behind,we have to be in front, we cannot be within we haveto be outside - posturing with our gaze. To lookyou have to exclude yourself from the experience.To exclude yourself from the experience you haveto externalise it. To externalise it, you have tothink of something in your head that is a parallelto what the experience offers you. If by somecoincidence you see the same experience outsideas you do inside, you can perform a distinctseparation between what is happening inside you and


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being. They cant come to terms with this encountereasily and find it easy to just come up with a lostface.

The invisible line of the camera breaks in the

photograph. Photographs do not sustain the bordersthat are constructed by the shoots. The audience ofthe photograph does not witness or experience theneurosis of the shoot.

Invisible lines persist in experience but get lostin records. A mind cultivated on records is blindto the pragmatics of experiential neurosis. It isblind to the navigation that situations, settingsand environments demand.

To train minds that know how to discern enlivenedmoments from dead ones, that know how to seeinvisible lines and respond to the boundariescreated by them, feed them on products of neurosisand keep them away from records that have becomeonly enactments.

The lines are drawn in our head, in our language,syntax and speech. When we talk to you, you walkinto our trap.

------Cinema------

Cinema, the original grand narrative which hastried to replace reality itself as a referenceframe, is misguidedly celebrating that it hassurvived all these years. We hold this celebrationto be a mistake. We believe a mourning is more in


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order. Mourning how over the years it has slid downfrom its pedestal of spectacular magic to becominga random image on a fifteen inch screen that fillstime between advertisements. Mourning how at onetime it was actually a living manifestation of the

urge to create a life-like fabric, with bends,folds, ruptures, tears and mirror-work. In the actof playing God, very quickly what happened was abreak down of the shamanic aura to a material logicof what propels it, the wisdom of awe broke downto the very base conversation about the mechanismsand techniques. So when video offered a fraudulentimage as an alternative, cinema got distracted fora moment. Cinema started talking about method,viewing experience and technical quality. Cinemashould have remembered that people still go tospas, temples, churches and still crave for alittle bit of insulation as long as it is coupledwith mystery, sour suspense and emotion. Thecinema theatre could have grown up from a popcornrestaurant to so many other things.

But now we have a television at a home and atelevision in a darkened room. We have hometheatres at all because cinema theatres are nothingmore. Even commercial jets offer a more adventurousexperience. I go to the toilet on a plane and Iflush the toilet and I know I am flying throughair.

Cinema is deeply wedded to the idea of continuousnarrative, an illusion of space, time and emotion.Where does this come from? How did anyone everthink of a storybook which one could stare at andgo home with a complete dream running in the head.Insomniacs to this day watch movies all night long,because it is an experience so close to sleeping.Even wet dreams are possible. Cinema is sleep.Cinema is dream-time.


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To lovers, embedded deep within the love moment,this will remind them of something else. It willremind of love itself. When you stare at anotherperson and track the fluctuations in their gesturesacross temporal landscapes, you are experiencing

cinema. The first war known to humankind startedwhen she said to him, You are my cinema.



The need to watch a movie arises in the momentswhen you are disoriented, lost, joyless, dry,opaque, idle, wasted or nonchalant. And no movieever made has been able to address that itch.They try to substitute the cemetery of dry as abone hearts with lush green fields of evergreenemotions. But the replacement only lasts till themovie lasts, the landscapes are reset after that.And because you cant rent an apartment in themiddle of the limelight, cant be the movie starsnext-door, neighbour cinema is peddling biscuits tothe dead baby. Just peddling biscuits to the dead


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baby.




Now, when we watch movies we are entering a spa.We lie back, relax and let the water touch thesurface of our skin and then float away. Like oil-cooled engines, the experience becomes a way ofloosing excess heat which has nowhere else to go.We uncoil, when we watch the space behind our eyes,we realise that it is made of cold and hard steel,no impression is made by default. The sensors andtentacles are out of course and if there is asense that some pool of data is to be analysed formeaningful masses of substrate, material is scooped


56/58

out and laid bare at the collection gates. And thenslowly the material is analysed.

But when you watch a movie you lay yourselfopen. In a manner which reflects innocence and

unnecessary trust, you let a story with uncertainfutures mangle with your head. In a dark chamber,you let a story with unknown ambitions play havocwith the space inside your head. Movies are onlysafe to see again, as reruns, as known and tastedfruits. Only media which at first instance seemsfamiliar is worth engaging with. Memories operatethat way, dont ask me how you can remember thingswhich didnt happen to you. You can.


When a movie plays to an empty theatre what doesit think of itself? When it plays to an uncaringaudience what does it think of itself? Can a moviethink of itself? Is a movie a sentient beingor just a fiction without a body, a fabricationwithout a basis? And if it is the latter why doesit need to be held together? Why does it needto be coherent? Why does it need to be fashionedonly in a particular way, leaving no room forthe coarseness of our everyday lives to enterthe frame? How brave do we have to be to let ourflabby, shapeless bodies be in the frame, doingsomething unscripted and artless? Documentary isthe art of procuring a license to show things as


57/58

they are and demand that we read something else inthem. Things can only get better, meanwhile whatswrong with dealing with the disaster?


58/58

Documents

abhinav-prayas--cinema.pdf