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Portland New Music Society

Every Second Wednesday at 8pm

The Smiling Gums

Thursday, August 28, 8pm – 10pm

Movies

The Hidden Eye - Movie Night

Every 1st and 3rd Sunday 8pm

The Hidden Eye

Every 1st and 3rd Sunday 8pm. Hosted by Vu Pham.

1. An ongoing, meticulously selected series of films whose individual films are unified by a conceptual and thematic flow.

2. A forum for the appreciation and enjoyment of the moving image and open discussions that approach their form and content with intellectual and creative rigor.

SERIES TWO: TIMELESS FANTASY OF THE REAL

The seed of self-consciousness pierces through the egg of The World and in its wake, the first cries of, “I am…” reverberates across the dawning skies. “I am Woman. I am Man. I am Father. I am Mother. I am Master. I am Slave. I am Human. I am Machine.” From the hidden fissure that opens with these revelations, the deed of becoming arises to burn across each vision of self, an unknown face both beautiful and wretched, ugly and sublime, terrifying and exalted.

Pulling back from the close-range lens of the Doubling Affect, we next consider a loose cultural-anthropological reading of subjectivity through the application of an epistemic progression from the particular to the universal or the narrow to the broad. We begin with the shaping of identity as a sociopolitical phenomenon, move toward the philosophical conceptions of it, and end with the spiritual interpretations.

What was the natural projection toward the other in the motif of loneliness, isolation, and desire is now a projection toward a sense of wholeness within and without in the second series of films called “Timeless Fantasy of the Real.”

September 2nd - Modern Times (1936), Charles Chaplin

The first series and the second series of films are thematically threaded by The Prestige’s motif of scientific/technological industrialization. We follow The Prestige with Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times. Chaplin’s last silent film revisits the misadventures of his famed character, “The Tramp,” as he struggles to adapt to a modern industrial society. What is the worth and relevance of the individual in an increasingly mechanistic society? This is a question that Chaplin raises in 1936. Modern Time’s concern for identity and social evolution becomes the historical spectacle upon which we lay our initial discourse of identity

September 21st - Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica

A father and son’s journey across the socially and physically desolate landscape of post World War II Rome in search of their stolen bicycle is our thematic nod to the quiet, meditative beauty of unrequited desire in The Conversation and The Passenger. Bicycle Thieves is Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist jewel and its conceptual proximity to Modern Times makes for a strong transition. It deals with the essential struggles of the working class and under the care of De Sica, this poignant sociopolitical tale is at once complex and simple resulting in one of the most profoundly beautiful films ever made.

October 5th - Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang

Another historical spectacle in this series is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which in the year 1927 turns towards the year 2026. In this utopian/dystopic dream, we find again a fractured society wherein the population is split into two classes: master (planners and thinkers) and slave (underground workers). The son of the leader of the ruling class, Jon Frederson (Alfred Abel), prophesies the coming of a messianic figure who would mediate between the two clashing classes. It is this figure, cyborgian in form, that yields the thematic pivot toward the idea of artificial intelligence. Metropolis presents a modern Hegelian dialectic in which the emerging evolutionary form is the man/machine organic/mechanic amalgamate.

October 19th - Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott

Arguably, Ridley Scott’s finest film, Blade Runner pursues the turbulence of identity which meets its postmodern radicalization in this work of pure cinematic poetry. The future of Blade Runner is a fantastically dark techno-industrial megalopolis. Here we find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), whose government profession as a “blade runner,” relegates his life to the hunting and exterminating of replicants (androids), a neo-genus of sentience that severely threatens the current social order. The initial quandary of artificial intelligence brought on by Metropolis is explored more in-depth in Blade Runner.

November 2nd - Baraka (1993), Ron Fricke

The leap from Blade Runner to Ron Fricke’s lyrical, non-narrated documentary on human spirituality, Baraka, requires a certain amount of intellectual liberalism but no apologies whatsoever. Fricke’s meditation suggests that the universal quest of identity can be partially answered through an understanding of the history of the eternal. Although The Hidden Eye is secular in spirit, it is my personal belief that religion and spirituality are not only venerable but at the very least, deserving of our critical attention and ultimately, it behooves us to do so.

November 16th - The City of Lost Children (1995), Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

In the surreal, timeless, placeless world of The City of Lost Children a mad scientist, Krank (Daniel Emilfork), lives out the autumn years of his life in a Babel-like fortress out on the ocean. He languishes in forlornness, brooding over the dissipating jouissance and vigor of youth, the inability to have sleeping dreams, and the inability to cry. Krank strives to regain youth’s fluttering traces by literally stealing the dreams of children, kidnapped by his henchmen, with his diabolical machines. Krank is a devotee of the twin monolith of religion, science. As its immaculate beneficiary, he is able to find hope and solace in his war against mortality. The dissecting and probing machines of science reveal to him that which is hidden from the naked eye and it is the universe below that gives him absolute knowledge of the universe above.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay, “The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” he describes the paramount and indispensable need for the freedom of human imagination as the “enveloping atmosphere.” The enveloping atmosphere is a part of the “unhistorical”; it is part of the ability to forget, the transformative power of not knowing. I want to close “The Timeless Fantasy of the Real” with this sentiment because the question of identity is not a path toward closure nor is it ever foreclosed but instead it is a constant dynamism of disclosure. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s film carries this allegorical Nietzschean spirit close to its heart.

The first series has come to an end but we leave you the description so you can see where we have been.

SERIES ONE - THE DOUBLING EFFECT

The human being is stretched upon the altar of time between past and future. He remembers yesterday, acts in the present moment, and leans yearningly on the vision of tomorrow. He sees himself and he sees the other but it is only in seeing the other that he sees himself. He is singular but he is also double: here and there, being and nothingness, and within and without. Only by being split, torn, and fragmented, can he be Human Being.

The Hidden Eye will begin the program with a pair of films that explore loneliness, isolation, and desire: The Conversation and The Passenger.

June 15th - The Conversation (1974), Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola’s highly personal and intimate 1974 masterpiece, The Conversation examines the existential impasse of a surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), whose loneliness is both amplified and tempered by the voyeuristic visions of the lives of others.

July 6th - The Passenger (1975), Michelangelo Antonioni

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, David Locke (Jack Nicholson) perplexingly fakes his own death when an opportunity suddenly arises out of the mysterious death of a hotel neighbor. Locke then radically turns away from his past, leaving everything behind, and heads toward a decidedly boundless future.

The Conversation and The Passenger introduce “The Doubling Affect” through the development of a schema: self and other, from out of which a natural projection occurs. Conversation’s Harry Caul is tormented by loneliness (loneliness becomes his locus of self-consciousness); his desire for an other, a sense of social connection leads to his projection of self into the voyeuristic surveillance experience. As a master of surveillance operations, Caul is a hidden eye peering into the most intimate domains of people’s lives. Passenger’s Locke is disenchanted with his life; he has lost a sense of self. Perhaps a life once abound with meaning has now become meaningless. It is never made clear why he abandons his former life but this is ultimately inconsequential to the archetypal search for freedom that Locke embarks upon.

July 20th - Adaptation (2002), Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze’s sophomore effort, the wildly self-conscious film-hermeneutic, Adaptation, is ostensibly lighter fare for the audience (following two dark, deeply introspective “heavies”). It serves to both explicitly touch upon the doubling affect in its literal context as well as reconfigure the ideological forms of the “double.” Adaptation follows the psychologically tumultuous creative ambitions of Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) as he struggles to write an “honest” narrative that is neither transparently self-indulgent nor rife with industry imposed gimmicks. The real-life screenwriter of Adaptation, is Charlie Kaufman. His screenplay is based upon the book, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Both Kaufman, the screenwriter and Orlean, the author are characters meticulously inserted with an avant-garde spirit into the film and it is this unorthodox presence of the author in the text which creates in Jonze’s film a playful oscillation between real and ideal, fact and faction, artist and artifice.

August 3rd - Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer

Adaptation provides The Doubling Affect with an interpretive plasticity that elegantly ushers in its two remaining films but also allows for an arc to be formed between The Passenger and John Frankenhemier’s Seconds. Frankenheimer’s 1966 sleeper masterpiece, contemporarily revitalized as a cult-classic, features the legendary screen icon, Rock Hudson as Antiochus “Tony” Wilson. Wilson, a painter residing in the affluent community of Malibu, California, is the “reincarnated” being of Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), an aging banking executive from New York. When Hamilton is contacted by a supposedly deceased long-time friend and colleague, he discovers an astounding opportunity to escape the malaise of his passionless existence. By accepting the beguiling proposition of a subterranean company that specializes in “rebirth,” Hamilton is able to fake his own death and begin life anew under the ideally coveted figure of Tony Wilson.

August 17th - The Prestige (2006), Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan’s much underrated and overlooked oeuvre and the final installment to The Doubling Affect, The Prestige, is a sci-fi psychological mystery that revolves around the protracted rivalry between two magicians living in the turn-of-the-century London. This is a story about a pair of men who are obsessed with perfecting the art and science of the illusion. Through a labyrinthine series of escapades and machinations, the two fiercely dual over the knowledge for the most advanced methodologies of magic. Without revealing too much, let’s just say that our discourse on Self, Other, and the Double will appropriately be closed by Nolan’s film.