Coil‘s Journey to Avebury was a ten-minute soundtrack made for a pre-existing Derek Jarman film, recorded in the early-mid 90s and never officially released …
… The short film doesn’t just record a visit to a historical (indeed, pre-historical) site; it is a piece of history itself, shot on Super 8 within Jarman’s first year of film-making (1971) and an obvious product of the period’s counter-cultural interest in occult secrets and mystical traditions. This is a film about the English countryside that seems rapturous in its appreciation, and it reminds you that for all of Jarman’s antagonism to the dominant British culture – especially during that grim stretch known as Thatcherism – it’s easy to put him within a group of ultra-English artists and mystics: your William Blakes, your John Dees, your Peter Ackroyds (ici) …
In the Shadow of the Sun
Derek Jarman, UK, 1980, 54 min
A DEREK JARMAN film with music by Throbbing Gristle. DEREK JARMAN used some of his 70s home movie footage to produce this wonderful piece of exploitational avantgarde cinema.
Actually the original material has been slowed down to a speed of 3-6 frames, then JARMAN added colour effects and the pulsating, menacing score by Industrial supergroup Throbbing Gristle. The result is a piece of art not to dissimilar to JARMAN’s painting work in using found footage as elements of memory and mind that resemble ideas reflected in the Cabala and in C.G. Jung’s writings about an archetypical past that is hidden in everyone of us. The first In the Shadow of the Sun (1974-80), was originally put together by JARMAN himself in 1974 from re-shot Super-8 material including footage from Tarot (aka the Magician, 1972) and A Journey to Avebury (1971), amongst several others.
The film was eventually blown-up to 35mm and premiered at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. The focus on ritual, mysticism and obscure alchemical symbolism links it with the work of Anger. However, JARMAN’s preference for the work of Carl Jung and the “white” magician John Dee, is quite distinct from Anger’s invocations of the “black” magician A. Crowley.
“Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.” – Aleister Crowley (Magick in Theory and Practice)
Not long since its inception the cinematic picture has been utilized to express both positive and negative sentiments towards the varied mystical traditions practiced in our present and our past. This is a list for those artists who have put forth questions or symbols alluding to mysticism, the esoteric, and occultism into their work as well as those who utilize the medium as an extension of their personal rituals and systems of practice. READ.
For the Los Angeles artist BRIAN BUTLER, magic (or “magick,” as the case may be) is as modern as technology. Certain teachings may be ancient, he notes, but that doesn’t make them any less relevant. “In the modern world of computers, the same energies are still operating,” he says.
BUTLER was premiering his film, “The Dove and the Serpent” at the LAXART Annex in Hollywood, and a gritty, glamorous crowd had gathered to watch a live musical performance featuring the legendary underground filmmaker KENNETH ANGER. Initially drawn together by a shared interest in Aleister Crowley and the occult, BUTLER and ANGER have worked together for more than a decade, BUTLER producing ANGER’s last few films and acting as creative director of the trippy short he made for Missoni’s fall 2010 campaign. ANGER appears with VINCENT GALLO in BUTLER’s film “Night of Pan,” …
… and the two also formed the band Technicolor Skull. On Wednesday night the spry 84-year-old ANGER accompanied his guitar-playing protégé, teasing ferocious sounds from his theremin as BUTLER’s film screened behind them. (And no, the man in the black hooded robe wasn’t ANGER; the auteur was wearing a purple T-shirt emblazoned with a prismatic skull, orange pants and a matching baseball cap.)
Part of “Images and Oracles,” Butler’s first solo exhibition, “The Dove and the Serpent” is a meditation on alchemy; the title references the Hermetic principle “as above, so below.” Filmed at a castle in Normandy, France, with some friends he rounded up during Paris fashion week last fall, including Dash Snow’s sister Caroline and the cinematographer Edouard Plongeon, whose family provided the locale, the two-and-a-half minute piece is beautiful, hypnotic and vaguely sinister. Shadowy figures shape-shift and meld with the elements, occult symbols flash and fade, and there is some covetable fashion on display, including a Masonic robe and an ivory silk gown by the London designer Qasimi.
The film screens on a loop in the gallery, projected between four cubes covered in alchemical symbols and standing on pillars. “People often think of a goat’s head or these pagan ideas, but these are cubes,” BUTLER says. “I felt like it was an interesting way to blend these arcane teachings with a modernist setting.” He compares the forms, two black and two white, to “machines or maps of the astral world,” adding that they can “get rather complex, like a Rubik’s Cube. Once you turn it, it can be difficult to get back to where you were.”
“Images and Oracles” is up through June 18 at LAXART Annex, 1520 North Cahuenga Boulevard, Los Angeles;laxart.org.
