Stories Beyond Perspective

Many years ago, as a student in an art history class, I learned about the development of perspective during the European Renaissance. I saw in slide after slide examples of how perspective created, on a 2-dimensional surface, a sense of 3-dimensionality where objects appeared larger the closer they were to the viewer.

The School of Athens by Raphael (example of perspective)

We take this development for granted today, especially in the photographic arts which are by default based around the perspective of the camera. However, during Pre-Renaissance periods, figures that populated paintings might be painted larger or smaller depending on their social status within the world of the painting - a compositional practice known as hierarchical proportion. A king or queen, for example, would appear larger than a serf, not because they were closer to the viewer but because they were considered more important. As a young art student, I just assumed painting got better during the Renaissance and those poor dark age painters hadn’t quite figured it out. Looking back, I’m not sure how much of this assumption was my own and how much of it was implied by the conventional wisdom of the day that functioned within an ecosystem of the myth of progress.

Maestà by Duccio di Buoninsegna (example of hierarchical proportion)

It is only recently, that I have reconsidered this assumption. Both styles of painting are valuable in their own way. Though perspective does offer a sense of realism, hierarchical proportion, despite the limitations of seeing the world in socially constructed hierarchies, makes an attempt to see into archetypal realms, beyond the physical world. It’s also worth noting that both these modes are not just stylistic choices but reflect vastly different ways of thinking about reality. Perspective represents a transition from a symbolic and perhaps “magical” understanding of the universe to a more scientific, literal one. So it makes sense, thinking again about the camera, that this photographic technology orients itself around perspective since both camera and perspective are a product of scientific thinking.

Just as I have been thinking about the limitations of materialist reductionist science, I have also started wondering about the limitations of perspective. Perspective plants one in a specific place and time. The viewer is a finite being with a bounded view of the world.

In “Revelation to the Disembodied,” I accidentally stumbled upon creating a story structure beyond perspective where the viewer is in multiple places with two different identities at once. Already, the voiceover in the film is the composite of two perfectly synchronized voices - one male and one female. Any sense of a single individual relaying a memory is non-existent. Beyond this aspect however, there exists an even stranger instance of dual possession - the accident I stumbled upon. In the below voiceover narration from the film (italicized), the point of view is seemingly from the human walking with the dog. But since the dog is not just a dog but a symbol of the narrator, or more generally, humanity, wagging its metaphorical tail in excitement at technology, the narrator is both beings at once - one literal (the human) and one symbolic (the dog).

I don’t have many memories from before I was reborn - but one does stand out. 

I’m walking with my dog on an empty beach just after sunrise. 

The dog runs ahead of me - tail wagging - and circles around what seems to be a small plastic shovel that’s freshly washed up. She draws her head back and lifts a forepaw - not sure what to make of the shovel - making sure it won’t bite, I suppose. 

I remember thinking how cute it was - her cocking her head at this object that she couldn’t really figure out.

Excerpt from “Revelation to the Disembodied” with voiceover narration.

In the above text, the human isn’t aware that they are looking at themselves and their relationship to technology through the actions of the dog. Truthfully speaking, I don’t expect viewers to read into the film that the dog and human are the same being at different levels of realization. I don’t even think I read this much into the story as I was writing it. What I have come to enjoy about creating these allegorical stories, however, is that I begin to understand things about the stories long after I have finished them - as if my subconscious creates Easter eggs for future me to find.

But what this particular Easter egg has left me with is an interest in finding similar opportunities - where I can tell an aperspectival story through multiple simultaneous points of view existing in different dimensions.

One other quality of this section of “Revelation to the Disembodied” that complements an aperspectival approach is that the voiceover isn’t completely fixed in one point in time - rather it echoes and loops back on itself. Part of the justification for this sonic treatment of the voiceover is that it serves to mimic the ocean waves that accompany the narration. If we consider wave language, we never completely hear one wave in isolation. Rather the wave’s brothers and sisters, which crash upon the shore at different times, constantly remind us that there is no beginning and no ending to this communication (just as there exists no linear horizon or top and bottom in the oceanic tunnel that one enters in this section of the film). Punctuation, especially the period, doesn’t exist in this language.

The below clip, from a later section of the film, demonstrates where this looping voiceover effect is accentuated the most.

Aside from this wave-like treatment of the voiceover, I’m also interested in the destabilizing effect the looping voiceover creates and hope that it can slightly alter the consciousness of the viewer. Mystical revelations have never been portrayed as soft cuddly creatures but ontologically shattering experiences. I think about the about the angel in the Bible who advises, “Be not afraid.” Sure, I’d be pretty freaked out - even if a Precious Moments version of an angel with wings, a robe, and teddy bear eyes snuck up on me in the bathroom and asked me to be cool. However, I sense that something far stranger and exponentially more alien is being hinted at in these types of encounter stories. To paraphrase a famous quote: reality is not only weirder than we imagine. It is weirder than we CAN imagine.

I do believe there are moments of ontological shock that people can experience, for a variety of reasons, which cause great discontinuity with their sense of reality. Furthermore, I wonder if what is perhaps most shocking to the experiencer is not what happens around them - what they see and hear, for example - but rather the temporary restructuring of the experiencer’s sensory system (or what happens within them). The experiencer might, for example, have a sense of merging with other bodies/objects and lose any sense of time. The default visual and auditory systems of navigation could simply cease to work as in the cases where people’s analytical left brains have temporarily gone off line and things like language become a complete abstraction.

In the below text and video clip (an extended version of the first clip with the ocean tunnel), the narrator in “Revelation to the Disembodied,” expresses this type of ontological shock as a result of the mysterious “flash.” At this moment, the audience experiences the looping narration which nudges them to put their linear sense of time on hold. Additionally, a background harmonic drone grows louder until it drowns out the dialogue completely. There exists an invitation to surrender into a pre-rational state where one can temporarily suspend the burden of thought and enter into a vibrating is-ness.

After a playful moment, the dog grabs the shovel in her jaws, causing a flash of reflected sunlight to trickle from the shovel back into the surf.

Something about that flash seems to trigger a humming sound - first coming from the shovel and then growing louder until it eventually vibrates the ocean waves into existence with a volume that at once destabilizes every molecule in my body and fills me with a warm glow [narration is completely drown out by the drone at this point but shortly after comes back into focus].

The dog casually trots toward the dunes, drops the shovel, looks directly at me with an expression that is very un-doglike and somehow communicates to me, as if there were no space between us -

“Well,” she sighs. “You know if I gave this to you, you’d probably just use it to move small piles of dirt around.”

Again, the below clip from “Revelation to the Disembodied” includes the content from the previous clip but continues past the “flash” moment toward the climax of the enveloping harmonic.

In the second text excerpt, the human and dog seem to switch places in terms of their understanding of the shovel. Early on, the dog is puzzled by this toy. By the end of the excerpt, however, the dog seems to have an understanding of what the shovel is that surpasses human comprehension. After all, if a plastic toy shovel is not for “moving small piles of dirt around” though digging and such, what is it for?

What does that dog know about the shovel that we, as humans, can’t seem to get? If we think about this shovel not just concretely as an object created for a specific purpose (to dig) but also metaphorically as short hand for a larger technological ecology (including computers, apps, and the internet), then this metaphorical interpretation hints that we are not completely aware of the deeper implications of the technology we create. To draw a comparison from the biological world, our gut bacteria may not have a full understanding that in addition to serving its own survival needs, it is also serving a larger organism.

This brings me to a final point. As a film instructor, I haven’t been too concerned with shaping students’ aesthetic and idealogical frameworks. What I have urged them to do is try and have an understanding of every formal and conceptual decision they make. In other words, there may be no wrong way to frame a scene, but it is important to know why the scene was framed exactly the way it was - or why this word was chosen for the story and not that word - or why this shot precedes that shot?

But try as I may in my own films, any attempt to find intentionality in every aspect of these projects seems a bottomless exercise - similar to trying to find the smallest particle of existence. I will tease out one possible meaning from a sentence of dialogue, or the composition of a shot only to meet two more possible meanings. For example, why is it that, halfway through the dialogue, the dog and human (again, different aspects of the same being) switch roles in terms of their level of understanding of technology?

I have thoughts on this, but for the sake of wrapping this post up, I’ll spare the reader (if the reader has made it this far). Thinking about this another way, sometimes, it may just be enough to like the way an image or sound component feels, without having to have it logically figured out. To me, this contentment at not having to have all the answers goes along with the concept of a story beyond perspective. If we simultaneously identify with more than one being/character, in more than one place, then there may be no need to figure things out since one perspective’s truth could be another perspective’s error. Rather the engagement becomes more about stepping into a holographic experience that lies somewhere outside of thought or right and wrong.