Wundercamera​

A movie as a personality cabinet

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1.

An attempt to comment Terry Gilliam's oeuvre only by written words seems to be a paradoxical intention. Film director, who is the world builder rather than a storyteller, has got a temperament, as well as a bloated creations sensuality, which do not fit the textual requirements of a linear narrative (which dictate their rules even to the "experimental" essay formula). On the other hand, Gilliam universe deeper analysis lets us notice an unusually "meaningful" network under the fictional surface. The network is woven out of lines of voltages, analogies, visual quotations and erudite references, organized around central points of that symbolic topography. Apparently, anti-psychological world is presented as a set of "masks" – objectified and personified ideas. The visual model in the narrative, accepted by the director, which is more synchronic than diachronic, allows maintaining the original sparking among the images, colliding in dense icon sphere, regardless of the linear story rules.

 

It is believed that the Gilliam world researcher should be geographer rather than historian. The idea of creating a visual guide of this extraordinary universe has become a driving force of the research project, the effects of which were presented in the Wundercamera. The Terry Gilliam's Movies (a book edited by Kuba Mikurda). The book was published on the occasion of the 11th New Horizons International Film Festival together with a review of the director’s works.

 

On the pages of  Wundercamera the traditional types of textual narrative (with more or less performative nature) were supplemented with graphical binder, allows  to include  some visual discourse elements to the film interpreter’s arsenal (such as illustrations, graphs, and symbolic icons).

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2.

The selection of the collage as the dominant aesthetic and methodological conventions allowed restoration of director’s strategy (currently the strategy is present both in his animations and feature films productions), based on the principle of recycling and creative transformation of the available reality elements - from the earthbound everyday life to the effects of cultural sublimation. Sam Gilliam is keen to emphasize that he feels  not as an author (auteur), but as a filter (filteur) - a person who selects and processes the  pondering reality elements (and as a result merges them into a new vision).

 

The introduction essay in the book directly compares the idea of the secondary demiurge with surgery. In accordance to these principles, the creator, or even the pre-creator (as the collages ‘author, collector, film editor) opens the skin’ curtains with a scalpel in order to "sculpt" the world with alive material instead of creating the ex nihilo beings. Gilliam, starting with the early animation projects and up to the current ones, often evokes - as some metaphor for reality - images of the body conventionally tortured, what does not differ much from  the childish cut-out game.

Many artists - the director claims in the conversation with the authors of the book - would agree that the idea is to open our eyes to the world. Sometimes all it takes in order to see it in a completely new way is to dismantle something and turn it upside down.​

In this context, the video edition is also nothing more than a cutting and "stapling" together many seemingly incompatible spaces.

Gilliam uses creative editing and trimming for "filtering" the contemporary American landscape while looking at it through visions from the archives of European culture; the specific historical visual styles can be assigned to the separate movie’ images: Romanesque (The Fisher King), Classicism (12 Monkeys), Baroque (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and American Gothic (Tideland). Strategy of the reality "filtering" is also an excellent illustration of the Time Bandits, where the elements of presented video appeared to be children's toys, observed through zooming lens of the camera.

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3.

Act of “plunder vision” (thus the exploitation of existing images), which Terry Gilliam makes in the archives of visual culture, makes him a collector of peculiarities - extraordinary imagination, crammed into film frames so tightly, that the identification of all details became possible only thanks to the technological revolution. This now allows the viewer to stop film at any time and to test it as if it was under “magnifying glass” (what, in effect, could let us dismantle it, turn it upside down and watch it in a whole new way.)

As the director says: wander cabinet includes a multiplicity of various elements: a little of this, a little of that... And observer can choose himself, led by curiosity and free in some. Another time the director admits: I watch movies, I look at how they are made, and then I think: “I’ll take this, this and that.”

Gilliam's collector passion appears to correspond to the motto of the XVII-century collector Pierre Borel, who placed an inscription: „Here you will see the world at\ home, this is a microcosm or a compendium of all rare things” above the door of his wonder cabinet. Fashion on subjectively redecorated wander cabinets (which were displaced in the Age of Reason by rational museum collections) was turned out to be a measure of a great astonishment by the world and an attempt of taming of fears that haunted a modern man. Girolamo Cardano points out that people like what they know – what they have mastered by their senses. “To master” – is a political word; “subtlety” involves the exploration of the Unknown. According to this view, there is no sphere of experience which itself is non-artistic. Though every “custodian” of wonder camera, a collage of fancy ready-mades, is an artist (hence the creator of the most distant relations - incompatible compliance).

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4.​

Contrary to appearances, the fact that the wonder cabinets’ structure is incomparably more organic than, for instance, a museum, is not the evidence of its totally amorphous nature. Although the Gilliam’s center of the world is almost always empty, filled by mirages, in the best case, elusive, the characters themselves are immersed in constant motion, overpowered by hermeneutical fever, combined with hope of finding the meaning of the story, they are participating in.

 

The metaphorical "movie book" functionalizes almost in every Gilliam’s world, expressing itself in the form of thick manuscripts, maps, notebooks, tables (filled with notes and newspapers’ cuts), collecting boxes filled with significant collections of valuable objects, altars (merging personal memorabilia), variable tarot cards’ configurations (which are equivalent to the story itself - as in the case of "The castle of crossed destinies" by Italo Calvino) and paranoid plans, which playback the networks of people, objects and places connections. Actually this "movie’ book" – which is a form of a diagram showing the content of narrated history - is the beginning of the method used and developed in Wundercamera.

The visual atlas (as a kind of emblem book - emblematum liber), describing the works of Terry Gilliam, is not only archiving  the "path" he marked out, but also interpreting it in a subjective way, such as through hierarchisation of elements and highlighting the symmetry, visible in the relationship of individual parts of the puzzle. An attempt to find the right interpretive key in this case helped to mobilize the arsenal of different patterns of visual structures that are used in different fields of knowledge, such as anatomy (an instruction of intervention in a film body), archeology (tunnel as a time-space "well"), architecture (the tower of power, stressing vertical and horizontal social hierarchical voltage), astronomy (cosmological constellation of "bodies" wandering on orbits), geography (map of territories and forces working within the borders of the "represented world"), technology (user manual of fiction’ "building blocks") and the theory of games (board game as a gods "playground").

 

An attempt of including the “rejected” elements into ready ones determines placing medley print in the book, which is the image created by the juxtaposition of Gilliam’ visual inspirations, and also kind of tableau, documenting the course of the investigation conducted by the authors of the book.

The used method - which main advantage is the openness of image semantic structure - is not spending all the possibilities of visual analysis of the film image, of course; the other "door" could be opened up, for example, by using the color-code or - going forward - "spatial" hypertext narrative.

Generally speaking, one can say that filter, proposed in Wundercamera, works like wide-angle lens (often used by Gilliam), that allows a wider view of the situation, but at the cost of exaggeration of certain elements.

 

5.

The narrative created in the book is being opened and closed by the symbolic picture cage, depicted in two guises: a representation, compatible with the rules of geometry, and - finally –an imaginary impossible figure.

This metaphor can be understood in two ways.

The first interpretation of the image we can find in the preface by Kuba Mikurda: terms like "”eccentric”," mad visionary", "”outsider"  (or even mandatory “member of Monty Python's Flying Circus”), somewhat close Gilliam in the show cage. In this book we try to identify at least a few ways to escape from the cage. But to do this, we had to "”forget Gilliam” we read about and the one we used to. We had to  try - so far as possible – to watch his movies again, one by one, in sequence, as one film’ massive, the progress of images and stories that once again organize themselves around the same themes and opposition.

Another interpretation can be linked directly to the Gilliam "philosophy" of imagination.

Fantasia has nothing to do with a happy ending – it can lead to madness, serial murder, hearing voices in one’s head, which dictate the most terrible deeds – the director declared shortly after the release of his "The Damnation of Faust" opera, evoking a grim picture of the totalitarian power alliance with imagination. Mephistopheles - as an announcer and director’s porte-parole – explains to Faust the powerlessness of mind and his own alienation, which metaphorical image can be cubic monolith levitated among the "romantic" mountain landscape.

This ambivalence, related to the role of imagination, is perfectly illustrated by the vision of cage, hung in a vacuum - a vision which returns at least in several Gilliam’ films and gains probably the most spectacular dimension in the Time Bandits, where the characters wander among the swinging iron cubes in the dark, hoping to find a "permanent " ground. Many times „civilized" version of the prisoning appears at Gilliam’s: a salon, which is illuso​ry oasis of peace, an illuminated spot in a dark space. But just behind the walls there is the start of the hell.

The paradox is hidden in the described situation, while the deliverance from "the mind cage" is not a guarantee of safety, or the final goal to be achieved – it can be a beginning of the journey, full of dangers. The one which denies the stability, aspired by prisoners. The phrase of ecologists in the “12 Monkeys” sounds equally ambiguous: Empty all the cages!. Thanks to fantasy, they get released from the "cage" (and coupled with the power of science) and become as dangerous as the virus, invisible to the eye.

Prison turns out to be asylum, influencing the imagination in a destructive way. On the other hand – Gilliam seems to explain – it’s due to fantasy that a prisoner becomes indivisible master of the cage, treating it with own, “impossible” rights.

You can also consider - Kuba Mikurda says - that this emptiness, which extends beyond the cage, in fact, is a screen emptiness, where we project products of our imagination. In this case, however, the projector is still in the cage.​

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6.

Perhaps it is not the coincidence that in the northern word wunderkammer resounds the Mediterranean camera. In the modern era camera obscura became a metaphor for the eye and mind as a place to which the sensory impressions arrive in the form of images, the one formed into a new entirety. Wundercamera evokes this experience in a physical field.

Camera obscura is undoubtedly one of the symbols of modern "optical revolution”, complemented by the invention of the microscope and the telescope, through which man has become - perhaps more than ever before – “a Space being”. Relating to micro and macro, a size depends on the point of view, and that point is our imagination - phantasia. In fact, a fantasy was that area, the exploration of which was served by one more optical instrument. Although this invention had plenty of names in different ages, the one of them particularly well describes its nature. The term "phantascope " (fr. phantascope), created in the Age of Lights, combines two words (Greek phantasia - imagination / gr. skopéō -  I look), one of which refers to the empirical sciences, and the other one refers to the subjective interpretation of their achievements. It is no wonder that phantascope, which was seen by its contemporaries as "stimulus of provocative excitement", turned out to be prefiguration of cinematography.

(all citations are taken from the book titled Wundercamera. Terry Gilliam's Movies)

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​JAKUB WOYNAROWSKI (1982)

Graduated from ASP in Krakow (the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), where he currently conducts courses at the Narrative Drawing Studio. He is an independent curator, designer, creator of comics, artbooks, movies, installations and site-specific projects for public space.

He analyses possibilities of usage of different visual narration forms as tools of theoretical reflection. He is co-creator of curator gonzo projects and member of the Quadratum Nigrum crew. He is constantly cooperating with Ha!art Corporation (Polish: Korporacja Ha!art).​