Film time

Film time is a fiction that pretends to be a reality. It is a lie. Within the guise of film language, film time tries to tell the story of the reality of the world. History is recorded in cinematic narratives and when historians speak, reams of celluloid is vomited out. The birth of cinema is locked into the time that story-telling was born. There was a definitive birth of storytelling. The search was on from the time language was born for a short-hand, for a way to compress the long-hand of time into the short-hand of narratives. And this short-hand was born as cinematic narrative. When the camera arrived, there was a rush from paper to film. Cinematic narrative gave birth to cinema and cinema gave birth to history. Because of cinema we know where we come from and who we are. And because of cinema, memory has grown. Of course there are somethings which come to us from the time before the birth of cinema. And these things religion tells us. Religion is the long-hand of time filtered through the times of storytelling. Our world looks down on religion. Our time has in its genetic code an unhealthy disdain for religion. Being alive means being a surrogate of time. You cannot really have any regard for religion because deep within the genetic 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 your information archive somewhere.

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

So I am able to rise through with real religious experience. I have intense experiences with religiosity. I can read the dense layers of time deposited over religious stories in a sedimentary fashion. When I read this time I feel special. I feel like I am probing into the deep, dark corners of the intestines of history but I realise that I am outside the clutches of history.

We are trying to frame this experience more distinctly. When a naked experience of time tries to fit into the confined channels of historicity, the traffic screeches to a stop. It does not happen easily.

Correlating film time and real time is wrong. It is not possible. In fact, 'film time' is a misnomer. It should be called anything which doesn't use the word 'time.' Why should one scale be imposed on the top of another?

Film time is a corruption, it allows you to think of itself as a representation of real time. That allowance is pure evil.

Film time ought to be understood as a magical entity. It can put food on your plate though. Being in film-time is a rare privilege. Even the one who pays for the very celluloid cannot be present in film time if s/he does not have the talent to do so. A synchronicity develops between body and cinema and they collaborate to deliver a different pace of narrative that becomes cinema. If you can collaborate in this style, there will always be food on your plate. There is a closely guarded community that has access to these arenas of magic. Not everyone can produce this magic, it is a very specific calibration. And these producers of magic are pampered by the world as if they were pious monks, diligent artists of some mythic origin. These producers of magic are treated in a very special manner. But you have to realise that although the film world seems like it has a real way for people to get involved, but in reality there 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 film time is used up, there will be no more cinema.

In the future when there is no cinema there will be religion.