Perhaps what we need now is a new language. When asked in an interview why there was no dialogue in the film, Reggio replied mysteriously that our language “no longer describes the world in which we live.” That response baffled me for a long time, but now I think I understand. This cult experimental film was Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, directed by Godfrey Reggio in 1982 and set to music by Philip Glass. This was the strangest and most beautiful film I had ever seen. The earth rippled and flowed like a river, clouds popped into and out of existence like phantoms, plants failed widely toward the sunshine, shadows walked the earth, city streets pumped red and white blood from car lights at night, and the stars whirled above. There were no actors, no dialogue, just movements. I was afraid to blink or look away for fear of missing hours or days of action. My eyes were glued to the screen, and my jaw remained dropped the entire time.
#Divine clockmaker movie
When I was seventeen, I saw the first-ever feature movie shot almost entirely with time-lapse photography. A camera takes a photo every minute or an hour and runs the images together in a series.
I had a similar experience as a young adult when I first saw a time-lapse film. What if everything was like this but was hidden behind the thin veneer of apparently static objects? What new realities were out there if only I could wait long enough to see them? It suddenly became difficult to think of the moonflower in the same way. What usually appeared to be a static or stable bud or flower magically revealed itself to be a moving process if I just looked long enough. Was the world speeding up or was I slowing down, or both? It was a strange kind of vertigo. This experience was both exhilarating and disorienting. In that time, a typically hidden process, among other flowers, became visible to me for the first time. Some bloomed in as quickly as two minutes. This book takes readers on a journey through the first history of the philosophy of motion and offers a unique ontology of motion along the way.Īs a five-year-old child, I vividly remember sitting outside on summer evenings in my grandmother’s front yard and watching the moonflowers bloom. What motivated this important pursuit, and what are the consequences of it for us today? This is one of the critical questions my work tries to answer. Why has something as simple as movement posed such enormous difficulties for philosophers and scientists? Why have the greatest minds of civilization dedicated their lives to discovering something genuinely immobile that would explain motion? Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” Archimedes’ fixed “point,” Descartes’ “unmoveable” certainty, Newton’s divine clockmaker, and even Einstein’s idea of a block universe were part of this great effort.
0 kommentar(er)
