Tripping: The Light Fantastic
A few years ago, I stumbled upon an on-line image purporting to be an A.I. generated depiction of “Milton on Acid.” Yes, THAT Milton…And yes, THAT kind of acid! The image itself was predictable, unremarkable. (think “Milton in Wonderland” by way of Tenniel and Dali…) But the idea of “Milton on Acid” stuck with me. I thought of that famous phrase routinely attributed to Milton: “trip the light fantastic” (which is actually an elliptical distillation of two lines from his poem “L’Allegro” : “Come, and trip it as ye go /On the light fantastic toe.”)
In its original 17th century context, “trip the light fantastic” meant “to dance nimbly or lightly to music.” But over the years, Milton’s words have undergone a truly trippy series of transformations : everything from Procol Harum’s “we skipped the light fandango” to “Trip A Little Light Fantastic” (from the 2018 film “Mary Poppins Returns.”) Most poetic of all: Tennessee Williams exquisite variation in the opening monologue from The Glass Menagerie : “our father.. was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town.” Those are just a few of the best known phrases that result from re-mixing the words “trip,” “light,” and “fantastic”
But given that my starting point was “Milton on Acid,” I zeroed in – perhaps inevitably–on the word ”trip” ; and I began to imagine the author of Paradise Lost on an acid trip in which his phrase “trip the light fantastic” mutates (and re-punctuates!) into “Tripping: The Light Fantastic.” (which I thought of as elliptical shorthand for something along the lines of “How ‘fantastical’ the light looked in that totally rad acid trip I took back in 1968.”)
In the course of exploring the way Milton’s words have evolved over time, I was delighted to discover that the linguist Noam Chomsky singles out “trip the light fantastic” as a quintessential example of a rarified linguistic category he calls “syntactically ill-formed idioms.”
I’m no linguist; but I was immediately reminded of Chomsky’s notorious example of a sentence which is semantically non-sensical, but grammatically correct: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That’s the sort of word salad which might have instantly endeared itself to a surrealist like Andre Breton or an acid head like Timothy Leary.
So I began to envision a series of short films that would focus on the role played by light in various sorts of “trips.” Not just acid trips, but altered states of consciousness more generally (i.e. trance and hypnosis, synesthesia, dream states, meditation , orgasm, epilepsy, schizophrenia and –of course– free flowing, boundary blurring, psychedelic experiences.) The thirteen short films which comprise “Tripping: The Light Fantastic” utilize a variety of strategies for inducing perceptual distortions in the eye (and mind’s eye) of the viewer. These include sensory overload and sensory deprivation , stroboscopic effects, flash induced after-images, discordant figure/ground relationships and optical illusions (e.g. the rabbit/duck illusion, the checker /shadow illusion, etc.) The thirteen separate films are each briefly described below:
“Andy’s Gaze” is a contemplative “trance” film, a meditation on Andy Warhol’s “Silver Pillows”: helium filled, mylar balloons which float lazily through the spectator’s field of vision. A series of concentric circles ( rotating hypnosis patterns) are projected onto the shiny, mylar “pillow” in ways that undermine conventional relationships between vanishing point, horizon line, and picture plane. In the foreground of the frame–where projected light bounces off the highly reflective, mylar surface —lush, curving, “vapor-trails” create an illusion of deep space through which the balloon appears to be traveling. Framed by a translucent V-shaped vector, its trajectory—along both vertical and horizonal axes– is cooly Cartesian; but the aura surrounding the balloon feels dreamy and hypnotic.
“Anticipation of the Light” is a homage to the late filmmaker , Stan Brakhage (whose work systematically investigated what he himself called the poetry of light. The title of my film is a direct allusion to one of Brakhage’s best known films: “Anticipation of the Night.” Brakhage’s style was characterized by silence (so as to concentrate more fully on the sense of “sight”) , extremely rapid camera movement, unpredictable cutaways and freeze frames, narrow depth of field, sudden bursts of light and repeated stretches of flickering, 16 mm. countdown leader.
The film critic Fred Camper once praised Brakhage for creating “ the kind of beauty that cleans out one’s sensorium, that seems to scour one’s sight all the way from the cornea to the optic nerve, that reorients the very way one sees.” “Anticipation of the Light” –which was shot entirely on the island of Maui –is an attempt to imagine the way Brakhage might have experienced the legendary “Road to Hana”—a paradisical (but very narrow!) sixty-five mile long road connecting Kahului with the town of Hana in E. Maui.
“The Roots of Munch’s ‘The Scream of Nature’”
What would happen if the gesticulating apple trees in the “Wizard of Oz” were cross-fertilized with the dark energy that spiders its way through Edward Munch’s “The Scream” (originally titled “The Scream of Nature.”)? Here, ominously undulating patterns are projected onto the trunk of a barren tree and its gnarled branches. The tree is photographed from an oblique , disorienting angle. Eventually, the trunk of the tree appears to uproot itself , unleashing the swirling shock waves which reverberate their way through Munch’s canvas.
“Eye/Shadow”
A flickering light bulb (in a small circular lampshade) is positioned so as to suggest a blinking human eye. Concentric circles around the bulb bear a poetic resemblance to the interior of the eye ( pupil, cornea, lens…) The anthropomorphizing of the bulb and its circular, metallic frame create a disquieting tension between the realms of the animate and the inanimate. Analogously, the percussive beats of the music –which underscore the bulb’s irregular bursts of light — create a clash between two irreconcilable rhythms. This “disconnect” between image and sound is intended to generate hallucinatory after-images.
“Ghost/Light” depicts a haunted house , viewed alternately from outside and inside . Its interior and exterior slowly metamorphose into one another. As bolts of lightning strike the exterior roof of the house, what look like gigantic spider webs begin to expand and contract . The otherworldly contents of the interior –sliding doors, shadowy curtains, a levitating bed and a séance table –are all composed of soft, ghostly, ethereal light. The musical score alternates between “found” sound and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
“Triad” begins with an intentionally disorienting, difficult-to-decipher, image: an abstract sculpture consisting of three vertically -arranged metallic rings suspended over three concentric circles of thin wire. Neon light progressively illuminates the contours of each ring until it radiates its way through the concentric metal circles at the base of the sculpture. This three-tiered movement of light suggests droplets of water raining down on the calm, horizontal surface of a pond. This produces a classic “ripple effect,” with the white neon light diffusing into a sea of light blue.
Behind the sculpture is a pane of reflective glass revealing faint, repetitive images of human beings in motion. But it’s difficult to tell whether these figures are standing in front of the glass or behind it.
We then cut to a second image, which also features a descending three-part movement of light. At first, this image appears to be a conventional traffic light; but something is “off.” The three colors it displays are red, yellow, and blue. The circular blue signal light resonates off of the blue haze at the base of the sculpture. Alternating back and forth, the traffic light and the curvaceous metal sculpture mirror each other’s three- part rhythms; and following three sets of three alternations, both images fuse into a larger “triad.”
“Flowering Bulbs” toys with alternative meanings of the word “bulb.”(e.g. “light bulbs” vs. “flower bulbs”) Multi-colored glass lamps, hanging from long, thin wires, swing back and forth like pendulums and eventually metamorphose into blossoming flowers. Light emitted by the swinging lamps create delicate , crisscrossing floral patterns on the ceiling. Nature and culture converge as the sound of electrical buzzing transforms into the “buzz” of pollinating bees.
“Light/Weight”
“…Light pouring into matter, let us praise their equivalence” writes Marsha de la O in her poem “A Natural History of Light” Another (if less poetic) version of this “equivalence” arises when physicists ask a (once classical) question: “Is light a form of matter and if so, does it have weight?” (The “wave/particle duality” is one way of describing this slippery slope on which light appears to be both matter and energy simultaneously.) In “Light/Weight,” flashes of bright, white light strike reflective metal surfaces in ways that appear to “de-materialize” solid matter.
The slippery relationship between light and matter also helps explain why –when employed as an adjective– “light” connotes “lightness” (as opposed to heaviness.) In “Light/Weight,” a levitating light bulb becomes a literal representation of light’s weight(lessness). Of course, the dictionary definition of “light” suggests other connotations as well . (e.g. The word “Light” can, for example, also function as a verb, as in “light the fire.” But the photons generated by fire (which produce both heat and light!) are also weightless. In the final moments of “Light/Weight,” the levitating bulb rotates faster and faster , overheats, and bursts into flame.
“Code Rain: Encrypted Points of Light” takes the viewer on a deep dive into the shadowy world of hidden signs and meanings, the dark web, paranoid conspiracy theories, , encryption software, surveillance devices and paramilitary jargon. Dots of light flicker in syncopated patterns that may (or may not) constitute coded messages. An apocalyptic, Pentecostal sermon invokes Genesis 7:4 ( i.e. “God sent rain for 40 days and 40 nights.”)
Ever so elliptically, “Code Rain” tells the “story” of one of the most notorious of the Jan. 6th rioters: Riley Williams , the insurrectionist who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s office and stole her laptop (with the intention of selling it to Russian intelligence agents). Periodically, we see images of Williams performing a series of Sieg Heils (in video footage that Jan. 6 investigators discovered on an encrypted, white supremacist website.)
“Code Rain” attempts to lure the viewer into a “conspiratorial” state of heightened receptivity or “semiotic arousal,” where he or she begins to connect unrelated bits of information, organizing them into patterns that don’t, in fact, exist.
“Masks or Faces: Lindsay Lohan and the Uncanny Valley” was inspired by two films : John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (the quintessential “slasher” film) and “Freaky Friday,” in which Jamie Lee Curtis (best known for her starring role in Halloween” ) “swaps” bodies with Lindsay Lohan. Repeatedly in “Masks or Faces”, images of Lohan and Curtis are projected onto the whirling blades of an electric fan, which appears to “vivisect” their bodies into a dizzying array of fragments.
Frame enlargements of their faces are also projected onto the sort of African mask that inspired Picasso’s early experiments with cubism in “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon.” In Picasso’s landmark painting, the faces of his female subjects are contorted in ways that make it appear as if they’re wearing African masks similar to the one that serves as a projection screen in “Masks or Faces.” The partial melding of inanimate African mask and projected human face, the slippage between living and non-living, is designed to generate a sensation akin to what neuroscientists call “the uncanny valley,” a disquieting state of mind that arises when we encounter faces that look almost—but not quite—human.
“Cathedral” might be subtitled “Chartes in a Bottle.” It’s an attempt to distill –within the confines of a circular , glass prism–the distinctive beauty of sunlight filtered through luminous stained glass . The tube shaped prism sits on a mirrored surface that appears to double its height. The upward drift of the camera’s movement along the surface of the glass is designed to evoke the vertical elements (pointed arches, flying buttresses, soaring spires) of Gothic Cathedrals like Chartes or Notre Dame.
“Fandemonium” is a vaudevillian interlude, a manic diversion in which psychedelic and pyrotechnic images are projected onto the fast-moving blades of a ceiling fan. The film’s furious comic energy derives from the virtual impossibility of keeping pace with the music that accompanies those whirling fan blades: Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” a musical composition so frenetic and bombastic that any attempt to “match” it with visual imagery is all but doomed to fail. (And failure—of one sort or another–is often the life-blood of comedy.) In the words of British journalist Steven Poole, Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” has become “a kind of global musical shorthand for cartoonish urgency.” In this context, the word “tripping” assumes yet another meaning (as in: tripping over a banana peel.)
“Purple Phases of the Sunlit Night Sleep Furiously”
Of the thirteen short films that make up “Tripping: The Light Fantastic,” the concluding work, “Purple Phases of the Sunlit Night Sleep Furiously” is the one that most clearly resembles a “conventional” 1960’s -style acid trip. A psychedelic assault on the senses , “Purple Phases…” incorporates ear-splitting, flesh -crawling sound, stroboscopic flashes of light, and dizzying spatial disorientations designed to induce vertigo (e.g. hypnotic patterns projected onto hand-cranked lottery drums, iridescent silks and luminescent ping pong balls ricocheting randomly off the walls of tumble dryers.)
The film’s outlandish title is an amalgamated tribute to Jimi Hendrix (i.e. “Purple Haze”) and the linguist Noam Chomsky who—as I mentioned earlier —intentionally composed one of the most eccentric sentences in the English language , a sentence that sets out to be semantically nonsensical, but grammatically correct: “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.” Analogously, the content of this film defies verbally- paraphrasable meaning; but its form is classical, even “Aristotelian” (i.e. it begins with a prologue, followed by a distinct beginning, middle and end, an overall trajectory that includes rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.) In other words, its content is semantically meaningless , but its structure is grammatically correct.