A finales del año pasado unos amigos me regalaron un vale en una Bookstore de la ciudad, y ya saben comprar libros para mí se asemeja a comprar ropa y zapatos, me emociono y quiero todo. Así que tuve que decidir sabiamente a la hora de comprar y me decanté por un poemario de Jim Morrison; aparte de la afición que tengo por los poetas malditos, siempre me gustó que el líder de The Doors estudió Cine en UCLA, entonces era un buen momento para conocer un poco de su obra.
En sus poemas se encuentra psicodelia, protesta y lucidez; Morrison fue un alma errante que entendió que la vida es un viaje por las estrellas que iluminan el futuro. El motivo del post sobrepasa el contenido de los poemas que integran la seria The New Creatures. Notes on Vision (1968) y The Lords (1969), se centra en los poemas que escribió Morrison acerca del cine, uno de sus amores tormentosos; es más como una compilación y una reflexión breve acerca de los mismos. Es que particularmente me gusta saber que piensan otros acerca del cine, un ejemplo es Andrés Caicedo quien sigue siendo fuente de inspiración para mí.
XXV
Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological Garden, male performers from the University. The women were professional artists' models, also actresses and dancers, parading nude before the 48 cameras.
Films are collections of dead pictures which are given artificial insemination.
XXVI
Films spectators are quiet vampires.
Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable jewels.
XVII
Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.
Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema has a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite mythology to be dipped into at will.
Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable appearance.
XXVIII
The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
The modern East creates the greatest body of films. Cinema is a new form of an ancient tradition-the shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation of it. Born in India or China, the shadow show was aligned with religious ritual, linked with celebrations which centered around cremation of the dead.
XXIX
It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that cinema belongs to women. Cinema is created by men for the consolation of men.
The shadow plays originally were restricted to male audiences. Men could view these dream shows from either side of the screen. When women later began to admitted, they were allowed to attend only to shadows.
XXXV
Cinema has evolved in two paths.
One is spectacle. Like Phantasmagoria, its goal is creation of a total substitute sensory world.
The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window need of color, noise, grandeur.
XXXVI
Cinema discovers its fondest affinities, not with painting, literature, or theater, but with the popular diversions-comic, chess, French and Tarot decks, magazines, and tattooing.
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. With, a first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire, men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind. In these seances, shades are spirits which ward off devil.
XLIV
Early film-makers, who like the alchemists delighted in a willful obscurity about their craft, in orders to withhold their skills from profane onlookers.
Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of Ars Magna, and its heir, the cinema.
The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of mechanical hermaphrodite.
In his retort the alchemists repeats the work of Nature.
XLVI
Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather. These disturbing connections: an infant's cry and stroke of silk; the whorl of an ear and an appearance of dogs in the yard; a woman's head lowered in sleep and the morning dance of cannibals; these are conjunctions which transcend the sterile signal of any "willed" montage. These juxtapositions of objects, sounds, actions, colors, weapons, wounds, and odors shine in an unheard-of way, impossible ways.
Film is nothing when not an illumination of this chain of being which makes a needle poised in flesh call up explosions in a foreign capital.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which givs each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings.
Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
Bueno, esos son los poemas que hizo Jim Morrison con alusión al cine; lo veía como un arte antiguo y místico, que rompía con las barreras convencionales, occidente lo satanizó con sus mega producciones que dejaron por un lado las escenas que deben quedar grabadas en el subconsciente de la humanidad. Nunca hay que olvidar que el cine es alquimia.
