In In Search of… episode The Man Who Would Not Die (About Count of St. Germain), it is stated “Evidence recently discovered in the British Museum indicates that St. Germain may have well been the long lost third son of Rákóczi born in Transylvania in 1694. If he died in Germany in 1784, he lived 90 years. The average life expectancy in the 18th century was 35 years. Fifty was a ripe old age. Ninety… was forever.”

I first met Leilah Weinraub doing a film for the spring summer 2010 collection of Telfar who’s about to flex with the SB crew in Paris and recently discovered she went to high school with SB sister Scarlet Rouge. We chilled in the garden where Monkeys dwell while Lauren Devine stirred the cauldron… I knew it would be magical. I first caught a glimpse of this film that summer afternoon and so amped to see its about to come to fruition. Must be Angie on the mic…

www.telfar.net

bpNichol – First Screening from Anon. on Vimeo.

Be looking for your black holes.

Aa is sick today. He was maybe sick yesterday, and the day before, but tomorrow will be better. An old anthropologist grandmother gave him herbs from the bush, a long time ago. He boiled them to juice and made his sister drink. She crashed the car.

Smoking herbs from the driveway totally drives the eye of me crazy. Crazy is right, and why I’m fresh out of work, scraping exhaustion off the road.

Aa lies wrapped in his fever bed, on a straw mat outside the hut. His forehead shines and sweat darkens his pillow. Mold grows on his mind as he sighs into being a thing, into forming a word. Everyone hates writing, they say. Flicking at flies, shooting curious children, obsessing about a book, the anthropologist grandmother guards him.

At midday tomorrow he will light the fire. Not everyone in the village will eat. Fearing a neighbour’s jealous magic, I take care not to fall asleep.

The women ask, ‘What’s wrong with Aa?’ I say, ‘He’s tired from the journey. Resting. Tomorrow he’ll get up and tell us about everything: his job and wife and house. Do not worry.’

His body parts being measured, sure, enough to fend for that mind’s need to make shapes on more than one level and so, anyone’s. Ph.D.

Ingenuity comes in small packages beneath the staircase of forgetting. Words have gone cornering my mind, I think in order to break free of their meanings. The most minimum reminder keeps inner blindness away, anyway. As the sweat comes, Aa sees his sister’s altered face in the troubled surface.

I walk in the empty streets of Florence. Passing along forms is surviving. Bodies don’t always need to be present.

Most scientists from the late Twenties would never have consider Cinema as tool of scientific observation. For this reason, movies by Jean Painlevé were despised and never given credit as an educational interface.

Ironically, what goes around comes around and Painlevé is regarded today as one of the fathers of scientific documentary. Here are 2 short films he shot around 1930.