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Film as Subversive initiation.

 
  

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Eek! A Freek!
14:02 / 18.04.08
Film as a form of Subversive Initiation.

Allow me to play the role of Mason Lang for a moment:

Has anyone noticed that there are quite a few films revolving around an initiatory theme kind of on the sly? Perhaps I only notice these things due to the nature of the books I read, but there are full blown initiations being played out in front of unexpecting and unassuming eyes.

An amazing example would be “el Topo” by Jordowsky, and more blatantly, his “Holy Mountain”.

A more recent example is the adaptation of Moore’s “V for Vendetta”, which is obvious for those of us who are comix fans and practitioners of Magick, but I know many people who are neither who were shaken to the core by that movie.

Although I’ve never seen “Lost”, it’s my understanding that devotees are gaining a magickal primer. It seems that TV is an even better medium for initiation as the Magus can reveal smaller bits over longer periods of time to allow the subliminal gnosis to sink in...

There are many, many more, but I’d like to hear from others on this. Would Mason Lang be right? Are there many occultists subverting the unenlightened masses to Magickal thinking? Can this thought-stream tie into Quantum’s “Death of Christianity” thread as more and more people are unknowingly brought towards Gnosis and questioning a "catholic" christianity?

Thoughts?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
14:44 / 18.04.08
You're like a time machine with the dial set to 1998 aren't you.

Has anyone noticed that there are quite a few films revolving around an initiatory theme kind of on the sly?

The two examples you give (El Topo and V for Vendetta) were written by people (Jodorowsky and Moore) who quite openly are magicians. However, I would offer that instances of "the initiatory journey" occurring in popular culture is due to it just being one of the most basic tropes of storytelling.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
14:57 / 18.04.08
I reference Lang because he's current to me: I quit comics in '93, and only got into Morrison again Last year... It's still fresh for me, and I keep recognising connections.
I've only discovered Jordowsky(apart from Heavy Metal magazine) a couple of months ago...
I had read V when it was published in individual issues. (I Just turned 36, by the way)and while I liked it, didn't understand it and didn't know Moore was a Magickian at the time.
I've gone through phases of studying "the occult" since I was 5, but I never really committed myself to thoroughly dive in until last year, actually practicing ritual, writing, etc... Before that, I was very freeform. I'd do something, turn around and say, "Tah-Dah! That was Magick!"
But yes: 98 is important for me:That's when I moved to England for 9 months (Long enough to be born) and re-structured my personality. I'm still in an adolesent period, but I'm growing into someone I like a helluv alot more...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:02 / 18.04.08
It's funny you should mention Lost, in an ironic kind of way...

I'm trying to find where I was reading it (and I'm too far behind with the show itself to say one way or the other) but I'd heard that Abrams was an ex-Scientologist, and that a lot of Lost is mocking Scientology. If that's the case, then you'd be kind of right, except in reverse... sort of- the hidden stuff is attacking the "occult secrets", rather than promoting them. That said, I can't find where I read it, so I could be talking out of my ass.

(Wild Palms was DEFINITELY taking the piss out of Co$, though).
 
 
grant
15:02 / 18.04.08
Funny thing about the date on this screenwriting article....

But yes, the initiation journey is pretty basic to human existence in the same way that good stories (and especially good movies) try to be.
 
 
grant
15:17 / 18.04.08
Abrams: not too likely an ex, but he and Thomas Dolby aren't joining Anonymous any time soon.

So mmmaybe not on that. I haven't watched Lost, so I dunno.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:19 / 18.04.08
Ah, fair enough. Wild Palms is an interesting case, though, for the same reasons, especially given that they drafted in Genesis P-Orridge to write a lot of the Synthiotics stuff. In which case it's working in both directions at once, and I'm confused.
 
 
grant
17:16 / 18.04.08
On Wild Palms: It's strange that some of the stuff that seemed the most "Oh, they're trying toooo haaard to be weeeird" when I watched that for the first time really seems to have been the stuff lifted from Scientology. The little kid in the naval uniform speaking like a grown-up - that's one thing I remember.
 
 
grant
19:55 / 18.04.08
I seem to remember a lot of critical material on movies resembling the language of thought. Christian Metz is the only one who comes to mind (which is lucky, because he's one of the few film theorists whose name I remember).
 
 
penitentvandal
22:00 / 18.04.08
Didn't there used to be a thread on this, somewhere?

I don't think the recurrent trope of initiation is due to film directors being s3kr3t1y ma61ck1an5 OMG!1!, as much as it's due to them being generally liberal arts majors who've read Jung and Campbell.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
22:03 / 18.04.08
Aren't pretty much all superhero movies initiatory journeys? Even Daredevil, with Ben Affleck?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
22:49 / 18.04.08
Give me the Sun Dance over Daredevil any day.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
19:50 / 20.04.08
Watching Daredevil was the initiation, rather than the film itself. An initiation into pain...
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
20:29 / 20.04.08
...that said, I seem to recall reading, during my undergrad, that 2001: A Space Odyssey was designed to have a specifically Kabbalistic structure, only they didn't have the technology available to mimic Saturn and its rings -- so they had to squash that part over to Jupiter and throw off the overall "plot."
 
 
Essential Dazzler
23:22 / 20.04.08
Velvet Goldmine is ACE
 
 
Rev. Wright
08:13 / 20.05.08
I stumbled across this thread whilst looking for ones concerning Magick practice and creative process. Its is interesting that moving image texts can be seen as magick process/practice, but this may well be down to the origins of narrative structure and purpose in any story. IMO great texts are inherently linked to myth systems and archetypes.

I'm embarking on filmmaking again after a 12 month break, during which I've had a rather intense liberating experience. I wish to engage my creative process through a re-engagement of a magickal practice. I've been drawn the occult horror genre and this has rekindled my interest, through the research. I'm now amassed with new copies of old texts that I once owned and newer perspectives from people such as Alan Moore.

Although my practice eventually grew into a very spontaneous form of shamanism, this dried up after some rather negative relations with charlatans and serial manipulators. So many visions and experiences were pushed aside by a need to realign myself.
Now I am preparing to renegotiate the antipodes of my mind and recall some of the most vivid and connected as content and direction for film.

Not sure if this is off topic, but the possibility of expressing magickal practice within filmmaking may elucidate further comprehension of the medium as magickal?
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
12:31 / 20.05.08
Well, it’s not exactly on thread, but I’m up to discussing: Using film as a medium for sigils, or spells is fascinating. Studying the films of Kenneth Anger or Alejandro Jodorowsky or magickal documentaries such as Deren’s Divine Horsemen or the even the cult Witchcraft through the Ages to understand the creative process of such spellcasting is well worth looking at. Having a filmmakers perspective would be amazing…
I am also interested in looking at films through a magickal lens as an observer. Whether the filmmaker had intended it or not, some films take on a magickal slant to someone who has been initiated, or has studied such things, and the film can take on secondary meanings… Maybe it’s just the observer imprinting his/her worldview on the film. Maybe the filmmaker has purposely embedded meanings and messages to impress upon an unsuspecting audience.
Take the movie Hard Candy with Ellen Page: On the surface one could look at the film as a simple yet edgy revenge film, but if you look deeper, other meanings emerge, both magickal and psychological. The film as a whole looks like it would be great for the stage and because of that really becomes personal for the observer.
The gist of the story is that fourteen year old Page seduces a man on an online chatroom by being herself, a fourteen year old “lolita”, and arranges to meet with him.
I really don’t want to give too much away, but she proceeds to drug him, and torture him, until she extracts a confession. It is a battle of wills and readers of The Invisibles may draw parallels of the psychic battle between King Mob and Sir Miles.
The striking difference is that Page plays an elemental force of vengeance. She cannot be reasoned with, she cannot be fooled: She is like an embodiment of the Norns or Fates. She does experience one moment of weakness and almost seems to doubt, but never really loses her resolve. Page’s character does not need motive: she is above that, she has a job to do and she does it without compunction. She plays the Devil as Redeemer, and puts her male adversary through hell in an attempt to save his soul, which ultimately she does. Again, the ending reminds me of Sir Miles.
Now the original purpose of this thread was to discuss whether these “Magickal Meanings” were placed in the film intentionally or not, or is it our own minds adding meaning where there is none. Are there filmmakers secretly trying to subvert people who are uninitiated? Are messages being passed between creative artists and others who are “in the know”?
It’s like smoking a joint and listening to certain music: it speaks to you on a different level. Perhaps as a filmmaker, Rev., you can shed light into whether this is a conscious undertaking or not. Is it the artist or observer? Obviously some films are spells, outright, but some are (or seem to be) magickal parables.
 
 
doctoradder
12:42 / 30.05.08
Food for thought... a recent L.A. Weekly piece touches on these themes, describing a recent symposium on "Hollywood, UFOs & the Occult." Select bits:

* snip *

Jordan Maxwell, an expert in occult symbolism and secret societies... expounding upon the secret fraternal orders to which our government and religious leaders are bound, remarked, “The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure are teasers. The powers behind Hollywood are Knights Templars, showing you what they can do.”

“What does Hollywood know that we don’t?” asked panelist Jay Weidner, producer of the documentary 2012: The Odyssey. Was Eyes Wide Shut a representation of a sex cult for rich perverts, or a portrait of the Illuminati? Subversive director Stanley Kubrick died two hours after bringing a rough cut of the film to Warner Bros. “Like the Zapruder film, you can see what he was trying to say by what’s missing,” said Weidner, who believes Kubrick fled for England in the ’60s after experiencing events depicted in the film. (Scientologists Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, he said, were simply cast as part of “an inside joke.”)


* snip *
 
 
doctoradder
12:51 / 30.05.08
freektemple: excellent point -- Maya Deren basically invented the American "experimental film". Subsequent practitioners included Crowleyan ceremonial magician Kenneth Anger & alchemist/Qabalist Harry Smith. A significant percentage of film students in the last 40 years have probably been exposed to the work of at least one of these filmic mystics... an optical initiation that may have worked on a subconscious level, at least.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
14:56 / 30.05.08
The powers behind Hollywood are Knights Templars, showing you what they can do.

No, they're not.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
15:05 / 30.05.08
This Jordan Maxwell seems to be a terribly easily impressed little "expert in occult symbolism and secret societies." If National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code are the best that a latterday order of Knights Templar can do, I'm sorely disappointed.
 
 
electric monk
15:07 / 30.05.08
Scientologist (...) Nicole Kidman

And no, she's not.
 
 
doctoradder
15:25 / 30.05.08
Scientologist (...) Nicole Kidman

>>And no, she's not.

She was at the time Eyes Wide Shut was shot. (She bailed out of the church about a year before she divorced Cruise.)

Not that I'm supporting or defending any of the (mainly silly) theories quoted in this article.... but the Mason Lang-like overreaching interpretations seemed related. Carry on.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
16:41 / 30.05.08
If National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code are the best that a latterday order of Knights Templar can do, I'm sorely disappointed.

Well, he did say these films were teasers... (I still think that films like these can become "gateway drugs" but that's been stated and contested elsewhere...)

Neither of these films offer any sense of initiation, but I kinda liked them nontheless as pure escapism with an "occult-y" theme... Gotta love/hate Cage's overacting...

I guess there are films overtly initiatory (Such as Jordowosky) but I'd like to try discuss those films which are percieved as covert. I'm trying to think of a quick example, but I'll wait until I'm at home, looking over my DVD's... I'll be honest: many times I "see" hidden initiatory rites in films, it may be after I've had a nice little bowl...
 
 
ghadis
19:28 / 30.05.08
I've said it many times before on Barbelith before and i'm sure i'll say it again but...

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory!!

Once you immerse yourself in the esoteric Mysteries of Lickable Wallpaper or Fizzy Lifting Drink or engage with the internal Klesha Smashing power of the Umpa Lumpa and find yourself in that Great Glass Elevator careering up the middle pillar you won't be able take Crowley seriously again.

We are the Music Makers, and we are the Dreamers of the Dreams

Indeed
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
19:51 / 30.05.08
Original or remake or both... I've seen neither I'm afraid, but I plan to now...
 
 
ghadis
20:19 / 30.05.08
The original definitely. Its a fantastic film. Sit yourself down with a huge pile of Wonka Candy in your lap and enjoy the ride.
To whet your esoteric buds heres a clip of Wonka as Charon perhaps. Passing through the Abyss. Crossing over from East to West.

Once over on the other side each of the initiates are tested of course.
 
 
ghadis
20:34 / 30.05.08
The initiate Augustus Gloop didn't get this far,of course, being as he was so completely consumed by and stuck in Malkuth.
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
03:21 / 31.05.08
"She was at the time Eyes Wide Shut was shot. (She bailed out of the church about a year before she divorced Cruise.)"

The story goes that she and Kubrick became fast friends during filming and that it was he who convinced her to leave the church.

Or so they say.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
03:30 / 31.05.08
And since then she's been in, among, obviously, other things, remakes of The Stepford Wives and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. She's a good actor- she can, and does, get better roles.

I suspect SHE may be trying to tell us, and possibly her ex-husband cultist, something.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
05:05 / 31.05.08
I am also interested in looking at films through a magickal lens as an observer.

You should watch 'Oh Lucky Man' and 'Open Season'. In the latter case, Paul Westerberg from The Replacements was out of his mind, apparently, when he wrote the score - he needed the money, so it's a Disney, animated tale of a busted-up bear. And 'Oh Lucky Man' (from the team who brought everyone 'If ...) is basically the last important British movie ever made.
 
 
Rev. Wright
11:21 / 01.06.08
'When I spent some time living in the Amazon with a primitive tribe, trying to explain what film was like, and how you could travel from place to place, and look at things from different angles, and cut both in space and time, I remember the shaman of the tribe said, "Oh yes, I do that too. When I go into a trance, I travel like that."

John Boorman - Moviemaker's Master Class by Laurent Tirard
 
 
Tomb Zero
13:29 / 01.06.08
I agree with Jim Morrison, who wrote, in The Lords, that:

"Cinema derives not from painting, literature, sculpture, theater, but from ancient popular wizardry. It is the contemporary manifestation of an evolving history of shadows, a delight in pictures that move, a belief in magic. Its lineage is entwined from the earliest beginning with Priests and sorcery, a summoning of phantoms."

The origins of cinema are, according to Mr. Morrison, twofold:

"One is spectacle. Like the Phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total substitute sensory world. The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window without need of color, noise, grandeur."

...in this quotation you can glimpse something of his ambivalent attitude towards cinema - an ambivalence that is evident throughout The Lords (which really is essential reading for anyone interested in the magic of cinema). He seems drawn to cinema's magic, like a moth to a magic lantern, but at the same time repelled by it's voyeurism, the way it splits us into "dancers" and "spectators":

"There are no longer 'dancers', the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time... We are content with the 'given' in sensation's quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark."

So anyway, to address freektemple's question about the possibilities for film as an initiatory medium - personally, I think that it's more magical to be "a mad body dancing hillsides" than "a pair of eyes staring in the dark".
 
 
grant
17:27 / 02.06.08
You should look up the Theosophical background of The Wizard of Oz sometime. I just sort of tripped over it.

It's far more overt in the books, but even in the film, there's a lot of elemental symbolism and transfiguration.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
18:42 / 02.06.08
I think that it's more magical to be "a mad body dancing hillsides" than "a pair of eyes staring in the dark".

Absolutely... If you're aware that that's an option. Sometimes films will work in the back of your awareness, then one day you pick up a book or meet someone who tells you, "It's all true!". By that point, the film may have "prepped" you or the ideas may be more familliar because of it.

Many "classic" occult texts and secret societies teach by allegory, hiding the true meaning behind the words, symbols, etc... Don't you think that Film may be a perfect vehicle for passing on teaching? What's the real difference between sitting in a dark room with a well crafted film and sitting around a campfire listening to a bard/storyteller?

I believe you usually start in the dark then progress to dancing...

I'm going to have to revisit Oz. (O/T: Loved Moore's Lost Girls treatment of Dorothy...B/T/T)

I caught the end of Big Trouble in Little China yesterday... Haven't seen it since the eighties. I want to see it again both for pleasure and to look for hidden secrets...
 
  

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