Todeskino
New Film Conceptions 2 – The Shape of Film to Come
14' 16mm b/w
The film’s composition
follows the algebraic notation of a chessgame, transfering it directly on to
the film strip and the number of frames. The positions of the chess pieces are
indicated by black and clear leader with scratchings or marks showing the
coordinates of the chess board, the moves of the pieces are displayed in the way
that the number of squares in the movements is corresponding to the number of
film frames. On the film strip one could indeed reconstruct the game. (In the
introduction sequences showing the chess board the principles of the golden
section and the Fibonacci numbers in the framework are applied again as in our
previous works.)
Furthermore the six
different chess pieces are illustrated by tarot cards (taken from the Aleister
Crowley/Frieda Harris Thot tarot deck), positive for white and negative for
black, amplifying the collective symbolic connotations of the chessgame for the
human psyche. Chess is a game of representation, historically reflecting the
feudal system and the social forms of power, classes and sovereignity that are derived from religious structures
until today.
Thus the correspondence
with the tarot cards opens up the concept towards a symbolic transgression that
goes beyond the limited aspects of human rationality that is based on and
derived from a godlike reason. Chess is representing a male system of paternal
power and its logic of strategic war. Therefore the first games from the series
of the famous chess world championship 1972 were chosen for the composition (http://tchecmeet.free.fr/parties/view/spass-fischer.htm),
because after a long dominance of soviet players it also had the political
dimension of reflecting the cold war situation on the chessboard, a prestige game
of war and power displaying an almost fetichelike human rationality and
paranoia.
(Note that in the chess
federations in the ELO points rating system there is an unquestioned
discrimination of women, treating their master degree for less, showing that
the chess world overall is traditionally rooted in reactionary surroundings.)
The allusions in the title
„The Shape of Film to Come“ are manifold. Obviously the concept is inspired by
music. In 1968 John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess as a
performance where their moves on an electronically prepared chessboard were transformed into sounds. In
1959 free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman made an album „The Shape of Jazz to
Come“ that was programmatically foreshadowing a new style and conception in
jazz. It has a great irony too for us proclaiming new conceptions for the
future in film exactly at a point where film itself, its materiality, is dying
out, giving way for pure digital cinema that is in most cases very limited and
poor in its scope of thinking compared to the analogue. There is no future for
film and there is no real film to come any more. Todeskino displays death in
motion and was born in the times of the irreversable death of film. But the
fear of death is the crucial basis of human existence. Man is not master of
time. Film is the last art in the row of art forms and the only one to really
create in the field of both space and time, even more expanded than in modern
architecture. With film art dies. The digital image media try to control everything by a binary code
system and the way of „computing“ analogue material fame by frame structurally
appears to us as the only way to transgress that. Chess is predestinated to
illustrate this binary world of black and white in cold logic. It is a
ridiculous, neurotic or sometimes even psychotic, human attempt to challenge
death. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh
Seal a desperate knight plays chess with death and the pool is his life.
But death says „I give no respite“. It is the futile try to suspend what comes
in future, the inevitable move of a „superhuman“ transgressive force. Chess is,
like all art forms, and it is an art in itself in a way, an economic system, in
the closed form of limited economy like Bataille would say, and on the fringes
of its representation that what transgresses it. The art of the chess master is
anticipation of the future until there is no future left and nothing to come
exept the death of the king, the taboo, the feared incestuous transgression. (video, „I see“…)
The gaining of "time" and "space" is indeed a classical term in chess strategy. Today there are absurd
battles reflecting the late global capitalistic status, to write chess programs
with fantastic ratings that are playing the world championships among
themselves and that no human grandmaster is able to beat any more. The machine,
although constructed by humans, overpowers them and leaves a blind spot in a grotesque
unconscious identification or projection: mortality. Through the machine age of
late modern technological civilisation a kind of „immortality“ is tried to be obtained,
neglecting that even gods die… The
battle for space, the 2nd WW, was transformed more and more into a battle for
time, „information“, during the cold war period, now in the post-political post
cold war era the battle to control the masses is raging on as a struggle for
information revealing itself every year in new processors for faster and more
complex calculations, more electronic „space“ for data storage, higher
resolutions for pornographic images, grotesque financial games and so on.
Needless to say that there is another aspect of what is to come: fatality. The tarot is traditionally used for divination. As long as the film is played from the reel there are always frames to come. The shape of film to come is our film. We don't stop playing - far out...
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| the
coordinates of the chessboard used for the algebraic notation of a
chess game, basis for the film's score and notation structurally, frame
by frame
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| Thot, egyptian god of the scribes and of magic
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| tarot card "The Fool" from the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris "Thoth" deck, in the film representing the chessgame's pawn piece
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| The Knight of Wands, representing the knight
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| The Tower, illustrating the rook
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| The Hierophant, representing the bishop
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| The Empress, representing the queen
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| The Emperor, representing the king |
stills from "The Seventh Seal" by Ingmar Bergman
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| the psychoanalysis of a cold war, Fischer vs. Spassky 1972 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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| John Cage & Marcel Duchamp, "Reunion" performance Toronto 1968 | |
John Cage:
In Zen they say:
If something is boring after two
minutes,
try it
for four.
If
still boring,
try
it for eight,
sixteen,
thirty-two,
and so on.
Eventually one discovers that it’s not
boring at all
but very interesting.
Chess & Jazz
Anthony Braxton: Chess is an affirmation of proportional logic, chess is an affirmation of geometry and composition is sonic geometry ... number is also poetic.
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