Metaphors on vision (1963)

I sang to sing away the colden Oh, the frozen fingers of my white hand. Hie, reign, King Gone Away, how red is arose? How blue the skies over Elfland? Hie, Rain, rain rain away to whiten all'the snows, to kiss the mistle snows over Elfland. The mist tree knows snow's a secret, sea's a dream. The mist tree says: now's a secret, seize a dream. The mist tree is white and green. In the act of editing film I am enough detached from motion to be directly involved 'with the move meant. Whereas, while either photographing or viewing the projected results, my eye movements are so inter-related to the movements of whatever is being photographed or viewed as to render the experience unmentionable. But when motion is perceived through the viewing of series of still images in their arrangement on a strip of celluloid, my eye inhabits a dimension other than what it perceives, a move being only represented, needing eye's per-or-in-ception, being therefore capable of rela-translaor-transforma-tion, being therefore then a move mentionable. Yet I also set these images in motion, thru an editing viewer, and allow the activity of my eye to inhabit their moving space. The first of these procedures may be related to my use of the word "amotional," the second "emotional"! always found it superficially easy to edit for the commercial film industry, which isn't even concerned with the statement that a strip of film has to offer but onlywith what it represents. Most commercial film editors make the mistake of viewing what they are to put together through movieolas, mechanisms which confuse them even more than an editor by rendering the stilled images as emotionally involving as if projected. I remained unmoved enough to endure the debasement of all film values, which the presentation of a moving picture product calls for, by simply editing strips as representations with as little view of their moving as possible. My come-uppence, a nervous break-down, occurred when a producer to whom I'd bragged of my method insisted on my editing a film entirely by using only slides of the first and last frame of each scene photographed, ostensibly to save time. The tight-rope removed, the entire commercial film endeavor was revealed as the thin air it is and my tread upon it but the hallucinatory prelude to a fall. The Romantics of the industry, those not at all concerned with representation (best exemplified by live TV which doesn't even pre but only sents), concentrate on as little visual detachment as is possible, with results more muddie but no less detrimental than the unimaginatively airy. It is, in the making of a medium, very much as in the making of. a life — to make sense (even beloved non) one must act upon both senses of the word ... or I should say: all — for the lively scale is more like an endlessly projecting mobile that what blind justice offers. But however you view the scale, a fall is in either one end or the other of two extremes of it and certain immobility is in the center. An artist, even at his most ego centric, or clearly viewing his medium as instrument of divine forces, is primarily aware of the communion of communicability ... tho' his eye is naturally upon the experience of the work of art itself rather than upon those who will experience it. To the extent that social pressures force the artist to concern himself with audience, he will produce something very like the applicable notes following: "Considerations for Film Expression" "First there is the image moving ... or not in movement, in which case our eye roves it, makes it move in a sense. Then we make something of it ~ what it is. For instance, a certain shape is a pear. Having once seen its form we know it as pear and hold it so in our mind's eye. This is where we search for the meaning in particular. Then wp associ