Film and direct experience
Quick reflections on mind-revealing filmmaking within Psychepoetic Film Practice and the transpersonal in the film experience.
The continuous sunny weather in the past few days is making me feel better. Like things can be achieved, completed, resolved. I’m reorganising my drawers and pen holders, getting rid of old and useless things. It brings me a peace of mind.
On Friday I walked to Jennycliff beach on my own and sat in the warmth. First sunburn of the year. Achieved. Reading through my RDC.1 draft and making more notes. Completed. A question of whether film is a direct experience. Resolved.
It’s something that my supervisors picked up on when reading my essay, as I highlighted the importance of the idea of direct perception described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception, and direct experience written about by Alan Watts in considerations of zen Buddhism. Because my research is situated within the realm of filmmaking, the question has been asked. I have to be honest, it surprised me.
After an attempt to find out why, I realised that the answer was so obvious to me that I didn’t think the question needed to be asked. But that’s the nature of research writing that I’m continuously learning - nothing should be assumed as obvious.
In my practice, I’m using the filmmaking process to capture, and therefore, interact with, my direct experience. Sensory, emotional, cognitive, the whole range of the phenomenology of my subjective conscious experience. This I see as a process of mind-revealing: the mind, or psyche, (here understood after Jung as the entirety of the conscious and unconscious processes), the sense of self, the sensory experience, as well as the decisions made in the filmmaking process. I do not think that it’s possible to accurately “capture” an exact subjective, direct experience, although I am interested in the work of those that try, perhaps even with the awareness of unavoidable failure, like Hurlburt in his psychological theory of Pristine Inner Experience, or, on scientific and philosophical ground, Francisco Varela with neurophenomenology. I use the tools available to me through the artistic framework of Psychepoetic Film Practice: a developing and evolving set of understandings, approaches, methodologies, processes, informed by psychedelic and flicker film, autoethnography, altered states of consciousness, and intuitive poetic methods, often inspired by my direct experience. My work is not this direct experience itself. Nothing could be. Because just which “one”, which “part” of direct experience would it be? Is there ever only one experience taking place, within the infinite, fluid complexity of sensory, emotional, cognitive, conscious and unconscious processes at any given moment? Is there even a moment? This question has been asked before in different movements of philosophy and, more recently, neuroscience - what is the unit of experience? Can this even be a thing, considering that when I’m experiencing this moment, it already passes and I’m experiencing the next one, in a an infinite, alive, flow of life?
This is why, of course, I am not attempting to capture an experience in a literal way, and my work is not a verbatim “copy” of my direct experience. Like with all aspects of storytelling and art making, a degree of construction, reconstruction, and bias, is unavoidable. But it’s this bias I am interested in - I believe that the act of reconstructing my experience within the framework of filmmaking, makes it a mind-revealing process. The choices and decisions reveal more about my internal experience than the moving image and sound capture of a place I visited reveals about my “external” experience. The construction of both what’s filmed within the frame/captured by the microphone, and how it’s edited together, reveal something about my conscious processes, and perhaps even about the unconscious ones too. This tapping into the unconscious resources that inform my choices and decisions while I’m absorbed in both the capturing and editing, is the reason I consider filmmaking, at least within Psychepoetic Practice, transformative. I construct the reflection of my experiences and put them on a screen for others to experience. In this way, I see the process as transpersonal - and meeting the basic human need to extend oneself, to express and communicate one’s experience and one’s being.
In summary, for example, the film SUN DAY is not my direct experiences of the summer car journey and writing in journals on a Sunday anymore. But it becomes, throughout its duration, a part of the direct experience of the viewer, in the structure and form that it is exported.
To answer the question, no, the film is not my direct experience of making it anymore, but it can be experienced directly by the viewer. Not as an experience of this particular summer car journey, because no two people could possibly have the exact same experience, even if the viewer was in the car with me at the time of filming. The direct experience is of the film, watched in a given moment, in a given space, in a given frame of mind.
What I believe, because of my own experiences watching films, is that not only the filmmaking process, but the experience of a film can be transpersonal. It extends beyond the viewer’s personal, it allows to soak up and witness a wider context, not only a different perspective, but a different world of experience. To this the viewer relates, each person in their own way. I believe, agreeing with Kaplan, who wrote about cinematic transpersonal experience, that the experience of film can enrich our understanding, empathy, and allow to communicate on a whole different level than social interaction, language, and other art forms do.
Ok, that’s enough reflections for today. I’m hoping to write more soon about the meaning of this alternate way of communication to me as a neurodivergent person. Enjoy the sun!