Reclamation
vurt834 
Greetings from the abyss. My name is Charles Chadwick. I am an experimental filmmaker and graduate student hailing from San Francisco, California...Treasure Island. The last location is important, as I will explain later in this entry. I have been invited to share with you on this blog the work that I do, and, though I was not explicitly instructed to do so, I will try to contextualize the things that I have made in the world that created them. This is also important, because I believe that all of us are subject to a certain myth: the myth that we are somehow other to our world. We are beings that were born "into" rather than out of the world that we inhabit. We are sinners... but our sin is not that we disobeyed God. It is a sin that is alive and affirmed every day... we believe that we are somehow individuals. We believe that we are "other..." somnambulists who wander through the absurd fiction that is our industrialized life. We have created a world on top of a world. A simulation. We are born...and as children we are unaware of our supposed separation. There is no ontic separation between us and our environment. We are where we are and that is enough... there is no idealized past to return to, and no perfect future to pursue. The moment, our eternity, is enough. There is no death, though not for long. Soon, we are called to look in the mirror... a call that comes not from our parents, but from somewhere fated within... our consciousness achieves an opacity on that phenomenological screen that is a mirror... we are self aware. We exist. We are a body. As we age however, this realization that could have been treated with care: our conscious realization that we constitute a unified awakening from and within a larger phenomenal whole, is divided... we now have a soul. In a body. That is damned to crawl upon the earth....separated from perfection....with its only consolation being that if it behaves, and obeys, then perhaps it will be restored to its "paradise lost" when it is time upon the earth is through. Life is purgatory. That is the fiction. "Be yourself." That is the fiction. There is no "yourself" to try to be. As Sartre would repeat: the being of consciousness is consciousness of being. We are not somehow pilots in charge of fleshly puppets, awkwardly wandering through physical space in Frankensteinian awkwardness. We are. And then, when our bodies die, we aren't. A life is a momentary emergence of a conscious force from the world that dreamed it....and as surreal as its existence was...its avant-garde play of illusions that it belived to be so important was just as any performance: a simulation. A mask upon the way that things really were. It forgot that the play wasn't real. The stage was divested of lights before...
So that's where I find myself. Or rather, that's where I am. I am in the simulation. I'm trying my best to use this brief intermission to describe to you what it is that I try to do: I "create," or rather, disclose distractions. I create distractions for myself, and hopefully for others, to wake myself up from the grand distraction. I am, in fact, engaging in a form of terrorism. Terrorism involves a healthy dose of fatalism: I am aware that my cause, while just in my own mind, is somewhat hopeless. If I am failing to realize who I really am, how could everyone else succeed? All of us are failing. My only hope is that there might be one brief moment, one site of weakness, where I could perhaps detonate a charge of true meaning, and maybe succeed at a process that other artists have failed to complete for the whole of human history: myth. There are millions of people that are myth's devotees... they have become convinced that its stories are real. And there are a not so sizable minority that have not fallen for the spell: myth is a lesson... a means to truth. A vehicle in the search for meaning. I am one of the millions... billions actually... that have been seduced. Sure, I have my moments, but I am, for the most part, asleep. I am standing upon the Leviathan, or rather, I am the Leviathan, and I don't even know it.
So, I weave these distractions in an attempt to wake myself up, and to wake you up. To what? To the fact that you are dying, and that you are surrounded by death. No amount of pretending will change this fact. It is bad faith to believe otherwise. But also a healthy reminder: you are eternal. Not eternal in heaven, but eternal now, and only now. You have as much in common with astral bodies as you do with your next door neighbor. To forget this is to remain as alienated from the world as you now may feel. If I may be presumptuous, I will say that I am one of the good artists. Not that my skill is all that great, nor that I necessarily do good work, but only that my intentions are good. I will deceive you, but only so that I may educate you. There are those artists, if they can indeed be worthy to be called artists, that want to deceive you to make you forget that you are dying. They want to somehow convince you that death isn't part of what it is to be eternal. They are the men that paint the corpses for the funeral, to preserve the illusions of the mourners. For those of you that have visited San Francisco, or for that matter, any modern city, behold what painter Thomas Kinkade would have you believe is the identity of my fair city:
That is Powell street, or what he would have you believe constitutes the authentic spirit of San Francisco. This is actually closer to the truth:
So, in this I can assure you, I am not that kind of artist. I am more like a forensic pathologist. It is my job to find out how things died. The results of my research are neutral... you can do with them what you will. Some people will choose to despair, some people will become more conscious of there own mortality, and thus maybe take it upon themselves to become aware of what it is like to live, and what it is like to die. To get as far away from pretending not to die, and thus pretending that the eternal now is not important.
After writing this, I am tired. It is three in the morning. But as the day ends for me, thus emerges a final metaphor: Treasure Island. Treasure Island is a man-made island that was constructed for the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco. Beaten down as the country was from the great depression, F.D.R., at the urging of local San Francisco politicians, thought that such a grand display of ingenuity and artistry would bring hope of a better future to the country, and to hopefully show the world that the United States was a country of peace and imbued with a spirit of international cooperation. Treasure Island was Disneyland, or rather, if you've been there, Epcot Center. Here is some old archival footage of the fair:
Ironically enough, following this World War II broke out, and the US became the enemy of many of the countries is idealized as international partners in the Exposition. The federal government decided to re-purpose Treasure Island as a Naval Base. Its grand simulacre were destroyed and remade into mess halls and airplane hangers. It played an integral role in the war, but also an integral role in the cold war. Following WWII, nuclear experimentation was conducted on the island. Scientists would intentionally irradiate aircraft on the island and attempt to find ways in which to decontaminate it (using everything from bleach to citric acid). Eventually however, wars, including cold ones, ended. The Navy decided to abandon Treasure Island. What remained was a surreal wasteland, irradiated and contaminated. Circa 2003, when I first discovered the place, there was a movie theater with a flier still up advertising super8 movies every Saturday night. There was a withered old miniature golf course, a decaying Bowling Alley, and of course, a nuclear waste dump consisting of dumpsters full of radioactive material. I was charmed by Treasure Island. Thus, my decision to live there. Currently, much of its decaying architecture is being bulldozed to make way for yet another redevelopment project: expensive condos for the bourgoisie, shopping centers, etc. Treasure Island, from its inception, has been a site of continual death and rebirth... and obviously, not always for the best.
It is in this spirit that I present to you my film Genetic Reclamation Area. It is my attempt at showing the true Treasure Island; its decayed an ambivalent core. Soon, the corpse will be painted again... the island will become a playground for the pseudo-rich of San Francisco, and the purgatorial wasteland that was the Treasure Island I found will be swept away forever. As I hopefully have explained well, Treasure Island is a fitting lesson that humanity can create for itself, virtually out of nothing, dreams for the best and dreams for the worst. What I was trying to get at with this film was: what was behind the dream? Well, without further distraction, a dream for you that lies behind the dream:
Genetic Reclamation Area
Charles Chadwick | MySpace Video
That concludes this entry. I will be posting more films and more contextualizations in the coming months.
-Charles Chadwick
Reader Comments (4)
Glad to have you on board Charles, looking forward to the art!
Welcome aboard, Charles. Impressed with the film!
I do not abide by that myth. I create. Guilt is only due to my own creative actions, not morality. However, I do think that the Western world has lived this myth for a very long time, even those that call themselves Heathens.
i'm just a white punk on dope. right, fee?