Material Memories:
Time and The Cinematic Image
Notes for the Oberhausen Film Festival 2001
By Paul D. Miller
www.djspooky.com

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"Time is invention, or it is nothing at all…"–Gilles Deleuze,
Movement-Image

"I am the OmniAmerican born of beats and blood, the concert of the sun
unplugged…"–Saul Williams, Om Ni American

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It was Maya Deren who said it a long time ago: "A ritual is an action
distinguished from all others in that it seeks the realization of its
purpose through the exercise of form ." The time was 1945 and she was to
later go on to be one of the first cinematographers to document the
Voudon dances of Haiti. For her film was both rupture and convergence–
the screen was a place where the sense of vision was conveyed by time
and its unfolding in the images of her investigation. Black bodies,
white screens–a ritual played out in the form of possession and release
in her projections. The rhythms of fragmentation and loss for her were a
new currency, a new way to explore the optical poetry of the Americas
reflected in the dances of the Caribbean. Time and cinema for her were
one dance, one meshwork of physical and psychological time, the rhythms
were altars of a new history written in the movements of dance. In her
1945 film "Ritual in Transfigured Time" she explored the poetry of
suspended time to try to create a new artform of the American cinema, a
ritual of rhythm and noise that would engage everything from later films
like "Divine Horsemen" (her homage to the Loa of Haiti) to her classic
1948 film "Meditation on Violence" that explored the Wu-Tang school of
boxing (not the liquid swords of Staten Island, but the Chinese art
based on the Book of Changes in China). Ritual time, visual time–both
were part of a new history unfolding on the white screens of her
contemporary world. She sought a new art to mold time out of dance, a
social sculpture carved out of celluloid gestures and body movements
caught in the prismatic light of the camera lens: "in this sense
[ritual] is art, and even historically, all art derives from ritual.
Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms alone, but in
terms of Time created by the camera. " In the lens of the camera the
dance became a way of making time expand and become a ritual reflection
of reality itself. Film became total. Became time itself–a mnemonic, a
memory palace made of the gestures captured on the infinitely blank
screen.

"Money is time, but time is not money." It's an old phrase that somehow
encapsulates that strange moment when you look out your window and see
the world flow by–a question comes to mind: "How does it all work?"
Trains, planes, automobiles, people, transnational corporations, monitor
screens… large and small, human and non-human… all of these
represent a seamless convergence of time and space in a world made of
compartmentalized moments and discrete invisible transactions. Somehow
it all just works. Frames per second, pixels per square inch, color
depth resolution measured in the millions of subtle combinations
possible on a monitor screen… all of these media representations still
need a designated driver. From the construction of time in a world of
images and advertising, it's not that big a leap to arrive at place like
that old Wu-Tang song said a while ago "C.R.E.A.M"–"Cash Rules
Everything Around Me." That's the end result of the logic of late
capitalist representations redux.

Think of the scenario as a Surrealists' walking dream put into a
contemporary context. Andr