Category: On having left, but not yet having arrived

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The Melbourne Flâneur returns to Bellingen, NSW, and, in this lyrical prose poem enhanced with Super 8 film footage, ponders a flâneurial figure in the landscape even more conspicuous than himself—‘the Mem Hall’.

When God decides my days are done, perhaps then He’ll allow me to settle in Bellingen.  Perhaps then He’ll permit me to be as permanent as that pile, the hall in Hyde Street whose peachcoloured walls, for a hundred years, have overlooked it all—even my errances and romances.

At times my eyes gloss the Memorial Hall with the memorious glaze des jours perdus, and the faded veneer of flâneurial souvenirs recover their lost colours.

For we have both been secret historians of this place, observant actors in the life of Hyde Street.  His soldierly, literary footprint is sole and secular and unerasable while mine have been many, mobile and cancellable.

A holy light dawns about his walls and whole falls of buried memory cascade out of obscurity for me.

I hear an aura lingering in Maam Gaduying, scene of solitary sittings in wintry dusks, of escalations of les dames, things I’ve written about or hidden histories I am yet to write, but which the Mem Hall, whole library of unfiled memories, has watched, his façade regarding me as I act out my hours of drama in the Meeting Place Park.

The pillared bras of his façade have embraced it all; the corniced brows of his windowed yeux have watched me curiously through the years.  I’ve read my Parisian poèmes on his scène, and opposite, au parc, I’ve acted out my Parisian vie de flâneur in Bello’s narrow boulevard de Hyde Street.  For there is une autre espèce de flâneur—rooted, loitering—and the Mem Hall, in his commanding prospect de la rue, epitomizes him.

Perhaps one day mes os, in Bello, will be as permanent as the Mem Hall’s walls.

— Dean Kyte, “The Memorial Hall”

When duty called me up to the North Coast for two weeks in February, it had been twenty months since I had last seen Bellingen and a lot had happened during that time—very little of it unambiguously positive.

I dare say that the lifestyle of flânerie, seeking to fly by the nets of society at every turn, made the pandemic a more uniquely painful event for someone like myself who is both a Melburnian by election and a flâneur by inevitability.

And while I seemed, despite my lifestyle of country-wide travel, to come through the pandemic without either the CV or the vaccine ever touching me, the years 2020 through 2022 seem to run together for me in a lasting mental fog, leaving a scar on my life from which I’m still recovering.

Hence Bellingen in June of 2022, at the time when the images above were shot on Super 8 and digital video, seemed a very distant place when I saw the Memorial Hall for the first time in its new blue-and-cream livery in February.

Now I am coming rapidly—sadly—to the end of two months spent at Urunga, the town next door to Bello, which has allowed me to get across on a few occasions to the little town which ranks easily for me with Paris and Melbourne as a world capital of flânerie.

There was one Sunday in June 2022, just before I was due to depart Bellingen, when I spent a cartridge of Kodak Vision3 50D Super 8 film on two visions typical of the years I lived in Bello, including the Memorial Hall—affectionately known by the locals as ‘the Mem Hall’.

I had mentally budgeted out the three-and-a-half minutes of film available on the cartridge and knew exactly what shots I wanted from the two locations. And as is my usual practice when working with Super 8, I took back-up shots from the same set-ups using my trusty Olympus Stylus digital camera and recording location sound with my TASCAM digital sound recorder.

The only issue with the Mem Hall location, shot from the corner of Maam Gaduying, the ‘Meeting Place Park’ in front of the Bellingen Library, is that, at the time of my holiday in June 2022, temporary fencing garnished with a dirty great banner advertising Coffs Harbour Demolitions was set up before the doors of the Mem Hall.

Were they going to pull down our beloved, historic Mem Hall?

Fortunately not.

It was about to undergo renovation—including a new paint job—and although I had to grumpily contend with the banner and fencing prophesying the Mem Hall’s imminent demolition while I was filming it, when, in February, I saw the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ piece of architecture in Hyde Street for the first time in twenty months, now cream and blue instead of the surreal shades of rosy peach and apricot I had always known it as, I was glad that I had had an opportunity, on my last trip, to shoot it on Super 8 as I remembered it and had always experienced it—banner, fencing, and all.

This is not to cast shade on the new façade: I was blown away by the cream and blue. It gives the Mem Hall a more ‘Mediterranean’—rather than tropical—feel, and I actually prefer the new colour scheme.

But on Super 8, cream and blue would certainly not have come out as spectacularly as that peachy orange directly taking the rays of a Sunday afternoon in winter, reminding me, under the hybrid digital treatment I give those shots in the video above, of afternoons I spent sunning myself—gelidly, it seemed—in the Meeting Place Park.

For all the pseudo-Moorish intimations of the Mediterranean the new paint job gives it, whether in cream and blue or a rosy peach and apricot, the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ building in Hyde Street still manages to be marvellously surreal.

We can see the resulting building, a weird exercise in inclusiveness, and an attempt to reconcile irreconcilable functions: a library, a cinema, a dance hall, a theatre, an auditorium, a kitchen, a tea room, toilets, a war memorial and whatever other use you can make of it. Perhaps, in an exaggerated way, it reminds us that all buildings are like this. But at various meetings or in preparation for them people must have sketched designs that included space for the Literary Institute and library, absorbed the functions of the old School of Arts, made ‘provision of exclusive rooms for the use of returned soldiers’, tried to placate the view that ‘there was no form of sacrifice whatever about a hall and picture show as a memorial’. And in these drawings they would have accommodated or got rid of existing makeshift structures like the picture theatre and the dance floor. Rather than the result of a collaborative process consummated by a set of architectural drawings, it seems like the Hall designed and built itself in a self-steering process that went on over the heads of the individuals involved, like a demented version of Adam Smith’s guiding hand.

— Ross Macleay, “The Memorial Hall”, On, in, from, over, Bellingen (2013, p. 149)

The prose-poetic commentary to the video above falls into that category of my œuvre I am now consciously styling as ‘flâneries’—literary peregrinations through sensibility, variously poetic, essayistic or fictional, which arise from my wider wanderings through this country, outside the Melbourne which forms the geographic basis for the prose poetry in The Spleen of Melbourne.

And though it probably sounds like a scoffable claim to mention the name of Bellingen (a town which, even in this country, few people have heard of) alongside such world-class centres of flânerie as Paris and Melbourne, I mean the claim quite seriously.

As much as Paris and Melbourne, Bellingen stands at the absolute centre of my literary life, and I would not be the writer and filmmaker I am today but for thirty months I lived there between 2014 and 2016.

While certain ‘regional writers’ become poetic spokesmen for a place, unofficial laureates of certain cities, communicating the genius loci to readers further afield, I am hard pressed to think of another writer for whom the specificity of place and time is as salient as it is to my work, and yet who has as wide an experience of geographically specific places and times.

Thus, while there was a ‘Gold Coast period’ of my literary life, and there has been ‘Parisian’ and ‘Melburnian’ phases, there has also been the ‘Bellingenian period’, and my years in Bellingen stand in respect to the Melburnian period as my years on the Gold Coast stand with respect to Paris.

Which is to say that Bellingen did not quite ‘complete’ me as a flâneurial writer and filmmaker, but that it is the place, like Paris, where I had the first opportunity to practically implement the evolving principles of my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie—the praxis of a theory I had developed to a certain point of refinement in other landscapes, at other times of my literary life.

In the flâneurial video essay “On having left, but not yet having arrived”—also partly shot on Super 8—I say that Bellingen was ‘the scene of my longestlasting happiness’: splenetic, ennuyé, utterly Baudelairean soul that I am, never was I more consistently happy in my life than during the years I lived in Bellingen.

Only Paris approached it for the number of ‘jours parfaits’ I spent there.

Hence they are, though hemispheres apart, elliptically linked on the prime meridian of flânerie: these are the epicentres of a new and fruitful æsthetic life.

When I left Paris, I wept for weeks like a man who had lost the love of his life—and indeed I had, having seen—in the arms of a Parisienne—a vision of holy wholeness in my dying hours there which I have committed the rest of my life to prophesying and proselytizing.

When I left Bellingen for Melbourne, it was on account of a woman I could no longer bear to see in the Meeting Place Park, or at the IGA, in company of another man, and although I went forward with excitement to the next scene of my literary life, I carried as much buried mourning for the woman—and for Bello—as I had done for Paris and the Parisienne.

There are two paradoxical modes of Parisian flânerie, the wandering walk and the lingering loiter, both of which allow observation of the life of the street.

And as I say in the video above, if, in my years of living in Bellingen, I made a Parisian boulevard of Hyde Street in my dandiacal circuit up and down it, the Mem Hall, in its vantage-point overlooking a particularly animated corner of Bello’s main street, represented, in its outrageous livery of peach and apricot, the other pole of flânerie, observing the spectacle of the passers-by rather than being itself an active, ambulatory participant in that spectacular parade.

Equally, the Mem Hall observed me, many times a day, swanning past its portals in both directions. It had the privilege of observing me doing so at all hours of the day and night in those years, and not infrequently, in those endless hours of happiness, in the midst of some flâneurial experience—often with a woman—that would afterwards find its permanent record in my writing.

It was past the Mem Hall, for instance, that I marched the beautiful, enigmatic Emma in Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016), and it was within sight of the Mem Hall, at the corner of Bridge Street, that I first attempted to ‘mash a pash out of her’.

We set out, manoamano, shouldertoshoulder in the cold, clear air of 3:30 a.m. I built a little light rapport with her by laying out the thumbnail version of how I came to be in Bello, but I was tired of unwinding that yarn and didn’t do it as well as I might have. At the corner of Ford Street, we turned right onto the main drag and walked along the brickpaved sidewalk fronting the park.

…

In retrospect, it seems to me that there had been enough time in the space of that short block to build sufficient rapport with Emma in order for her to feel comfortable with me, yet I couldn’t say just when I had first become aware that I would have to make my move. I think I only became conscious that the moment of truth was fast approaching and I would have to physically turn her steps towards the river when we passed the Mem Hall.

— Dean Kyte, Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016, pp. 34-6)

In Follow Me, My Lovely… the Mem Hall plays a cameo rôle, having been, before the action of the story begins, the place where I first espied Emma at the Barefoot Boogie, a dance party that used to take place there on the night of the full moon during the years when I lived in Bello.

And in another reminiscence of my years in Bello, a longer work, as yet unfinished, called “Sentimental Journey”, the Mem Hall plays a more salient part. It’s the place where my tale begins, when, in the hours before I am due to get on an overnight train to Brisbane, I see Polanski’s La Vénus à la fourrure (2013) there, an event which, by obscure tangents among the degrees of separation in my rather extensive social network in Bellingen, leads me unexpectedly into the arms of another woman.

She plunged her arm into mine and we rounded the corner into Hyde Street….

While she jawed, I cast a cautious slant around as we stepped off the kerb in front of the post office: beside us, Bridge Street was an empty corridor of darkness illuminated by a solitary streetlamp at the other end of Lavenders Bridge.  Across Hyde Street, a lonely brother to it loafing in front of the Mem Hall craned its neck over the main drag, the rose façade lit a livid orange by its yellow glare.

If anywhere in the world was a more romantic playground for seduction than Bello at night, I hadn’t yet experienced it.

We forded Bridge Street and regained the kerb—the kerb where I had tried to mash a pash out of Emma and had told her to come back to my place.  We passed it, walking through those ghosts, and changed tracks, shunting onto the spur of footpath leading into the Meeting Place Park.  A trio of lamps, spaced out in a loping curve, followed the line of the wide brick path sweeping round to the library and council buildings.  Their ramrodstraight figures picked out among the trunks of the eucalypts, almost as straight, on the green sward made the park seem vaguely like an image by Brassaï, reminding me of Paris.

At a lonely hour in the early evening, I sometimes liked to sit here alone, watching the traffic roil around the intersection as I huddled against the cold on the pew in front of the historical museum.  I scoped it out now as a potentially discreet venue for escalation: a lampadaire planted in the Lunchbox Garden in front of the council offices cast an oblique, chiaroscuro glare on that corner.  It wasn’t mood lighting, but it did raise some harsh shadows, and if we huddled at one end of the pew, we should be reasonably protected from view of the street by the corner of the red telephone box and the extension of the Neighbourhood Centre.

— Dean Kyte, “Sentimental Journey”

As I say in the video essay above, both of us, the Mem Hall and myself, have been secret historians of Bellingen, memorious flâneurial observers of otherwise unremarked moments in the life of Hyde Street. The Mem Hall has watched me conducting my vie de flâneur just as I have watched the colourful characters in Bello’s streets.

And I think it is no geographic accident of synchronicity that the Mem Hall, the original ‘literary institute’ of Bellingen, faces the present town library, for as I intimate in the video essay, the building seems to me a vast cabinet of unfiled memories, leaves of time—so sheer as to be invisible—of all it has witnessed in its century of life, the secret history of the town which no one yet has had the soul and vision, the heart and spirit of service to properly write.

As I said in a previous article on Bellingen, a few well-known men of letters have, for a season of their lives, made a home for themselves in Bello, and by far the most famous of these writers is Peter Carey.

Carey, who lived here in the eighties as a tree-changing refugee from Sydney, sets Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in the vicinity of the Gleniffer Hall, but Carey’s historical novel lies well beyond what Henry James calls ‘the visitable past’—the rememberable history of one’s own lifetime and experience.

As the young James, flush from his first adult experience of the Roman relics, wrote his sister Alice, unless one’s mind is veritably sagging beneath the weight of material facts about the subject, historical fiction, for a novelist, is the least worthwhile pursuit: ‘The present and the immediate future seem to me the best province of fiction—the latter especially—the future to which all our actual modern tendencies and leanings seem to build a sort of material pathway.’

As far I know, the high-flying Carey has written nothing to commemorate ‘the modern tendencies and leanings’ of his time in Bellingen, one of the most artistically fruitful places on earth, the very Mecca, in my view, of a global ‘Vita Nuova’ towards which Bellingen, in its present and by its example, builds a material pathway.

I take it as a point of pride that, as the least well-known among the men the letters who have made a temporary life for himself in the landscape of this ‘Promised Land’, I have been the most committed to memorializing the visitable past of my experience in these climes.

And as an unofficial historian of the unnoticed hours of Bellingen life, I see a co-conspirator to my project in the architectural figure of the Mem Hall itself, who reminds me of the eponymous character in Jorge Luis Borges’ ficción “Funes, el memorioso” (1942).

Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes, todos los vástagos y racimos y frutos que comprende una parra. Sabía las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del 30 de abril de 1882 y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas de un libro en pasta española que sólo había mirado una vez y con las líneas de la espuma que un remo levantó en el Río Negro la víspera de la acción del Quebracho. Esos recuerdos no eran simples; cada imagen visual estaba ligada a sensaciones musculares, térmicas, etcétera. Podía reconstruir todos los sueños, todos los entre sueños.

Dos o tres veces había reconstruido un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero. Me dijo: ‘Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo’. Y también: ‘Mis sueños son como la vigilia de ustedes’. Y también, hacia el alba: ‘Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras’. Una circunferencia en un pizarrón, un triángulo rectángulo, un rombo, son formas que podemos intuir plenamente; lo mismo le pasaba a Ireneo con las aborrascadas crines de un potro, con una punta de ganado en una cuchilla, con el fuego cambiante y con la innumerable ceniza, con las muchas caras de un muerto en un largo velorio. No sé cuántas estrellas veía en el cielo.

At a glance, we notice three glasses on a table; Funes, all the stems and branches and fruits that make up a vine. He knew the shapes of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882 and could compare them in his memory with the grain of a book bound in Spanish leather he saw only once, and with the lines of foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. These were not simple memories: every visual image was linked to sensations—muscular, thermal, and so on. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his dreams within dreams.

Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day. He had never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: ‘On my own I have more memories than all the men since the beginning of the world have had.’ And also: ‘My dreams are like the insomnia you fellows have.’ And also this, towards dawn: ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage dump.’ A circle on a blackboard, a right-angled triangle, a rhombus; these are shapes that we can fully visualize. To Ireneo, the same thing happened with a colt’s wild mane, with the very tip of a knife, with the protean flames and innumerable ashes, with the many faces round a dead man at a large wake. I don’t know how many stars he saw in the sky.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, el memorioso” (1942 [my translation])

Like Ireneo Funes, the Memorial Hall, to me, is infinitely memorious of Bellingen. It has seen—in the most exquisite detail—everything that has passed before it in its century of life.

It is truly a book of days.

And although, in its infinite discretion, it does not speak of what it has seen as I have privately journaled it, the Mem Hall remembers everything that has passed before or within it—including my presence on its stage, reciting my Parisian poems at the annual Poetry Slam, and upon the stage of the Meeting Place Park opposite, solitudinously sunning myself at dusk or making out with some dame after dark.

But I’m not entirely alone in this self-imposed project to be a flâneurial historian of Bello, the memorious recorder of its forgotten hours. One local writer I have respect for, and who seems to be involved in an analogous, albeit more ‘official’ project of public memoration, is Ross Macleay, one half of the North Bank Institute, Bellingen’s oldest—and smallest—think tank.

In “The Memorial Hall”, one of the essays in his collection On, in, from, over, Bellingen (2013), Macleay tells us that the ‘Soldiers Memorial Hall and Literary Institute’ opened to great civic fanfare on Wednesday 19 January 1921 with (among other visual confections) a presentation of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy “Sunnyside” (1919).

Describing the cinematic bill of fare on that night in his essay, Macleay explains how ‘the Mem Hall’ as Bellingenians know it today had not even been built on that fateful date, the ‘Grand Opening Night’ of the Bellingen Memorial Hall Pictures being a fundraising event to build the pile on Hyde Street.

The Memorial Hall began its life as a war between two motions passed at two meetings. At the first on 4 December 1918 a motion was passed to build a War Memorial in Bellingen at a cost of no more than ₤500, and a committee of twenty was formed. At the second on 6 June 1919 the original motion was cancelled, a substantial majority voted to build a memorial hall instead, and the committee, trimmed from twenty to seventeen, was given the job of raising funds. The building of the hall would be a war on two fronts, the first was against those who thought a monument was more fitting for military commemoration than the frivolity of a pleasure dome (plus easier and cheaper). The second was the long campaign to raise the money.

— Macleay (2013, pp. 147-8)

The money came, as Macleay tells us, from the showing of movies, and on 19 January 1921, the good burghers of Bello crowded onto the site of the present Mem Hall, under an open-air shed set up as insurance against the rain, to see Charlie Chaplin, Sessue Hayakawa, and a Pathé newsreel at ‘two shillings for a chair up the back, one for down the front on a log, and children [at] half price.’

Thus, from its inception, the Mem Hall, doing surreal double service as a perpetual monument commemorating local casualties in the Great War and as a meeting place for the celebration of living culture in a small town, secularly profaned itself as a picture show.

My first experience of the Mem Hall was when my friends dragged me along to see a John Pilger documentary in the great barn behind the façade—a fragrant experience spiced with the familiar scent of the chai tea concession set up on two trestle tables on the eastern side of the salle.

John Pilger, chai on the side, and barefoot kids running wild: that sums up both the experience of the Mem Hall and of Bello—of the Mem Hall’s significance to Bello life as a communal meeting place. It was at that screening, as I now recall, that I met several of the people who would become significant to me in those years, and among whose ranks, in my hats and suits, I would be the most unlikely ‘hippie’ by comparison.

As I have written in another of my flâneries, ‘the elevating experience of “enlightened” leftwing documentaries spiced with chai tea at the Memorial Hall’ is one of the typical memories I most cherish about Bello.

And that says so much about the centrality of the Mem Hall to Bello life. When I was in Euroa two years ago and attending a presentation of the documentary Happy Sad Man (2018) at the Euroa Community Cinema (which is also housed in the shire hall), the film’s Melbourne-based director, Genevieve Bailey, told the assembled townspeople that she had recently screened her doco at Bellingen, a little town in NSW, she said, not dissimilar to Euroa, and in a hall not unlike the Strathbogie Shire Council building.

As probably the only person in that room besides Ms. Bailey to have an experience of both venues—and then far more extensively, as regards the Mem Hall, than Ms. Bailey herself—I knew in my heart and my gut the visceral truth of the comparison she was making.

I love Bellingen as much as I love Paris—and I love these places as much, and in the same way, as some of the dearest women I have known.

And as I say in the video above, one day I hope my flâneries will at last be done and I can permanently rest my bones in Bello.

To read more about my flâneurial adventures in Bellingen, you can purchase Follow Me, My Lovely… in the Dean Kyte Bookstore. You can also support my work by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Memorial Hall” for $A2.00 from my artist profile on Bandcamp using the link below.

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When I fled Bellingen for Melbourne, making, in one day, the greatest southward bound in my soul’s expansion, crossing a border as yet unmet by my eyes in this lifetime, my heart leapt in intuitive recognition of a place where it thought it might find a new home:  When I first glimpsed Euroa flying by my window on the XPT, I had the brief intimation that here I might refind that paradise of bourgeois bohemia I had, only hours before, reluctantly renounced, fleeing the scene of my longestlasting happiness.

Many times since, shuttling in my aller et retour entre Sydney et Melbourne, I have, beyond Benalla in the one direction, and Seymour in the other, made a point to look out for it, that viaduct over a dusty stream, dapplegladed, which seemed to mark on a map in my mind, the afternoon after my départ de Bellingen, a past in un lieu perdu and a potential avenir, here, which recalled it.

When I had, for the first time, the opportunity to alight at this nom de pays which evoked nothing of Ned Kelly for me and everything of Bellingen, I knew—but not at once—my intuition’s error: this place is not that one.  In seeing, one afternoon, a fleeting image of a landscape which reminded me of the one I had left the day before, I was mourning a life I had lately fled, not imagining the future I was flying to.

—Dean Kyte, “On having left, but not yet having arrived”

In my last post on The Melbourne Flâneur, I alluded to my dream of a ‘flâneurial cinema’, a cinema that is, in effect, the poetry of cinema’s prosy vision of life. It’s a topic I’ve touched on in other posts on this vlog, but today I’m going to explain what I mean by ‘flâneurial cinema’ by examining my own practice.

In essence, my concept of flâneurial cinema has its foundations in the famous definition of the term ‘documentary’ as coined by John Grierson. According to Mr. Grierson, a documentary film is ‘the creative treatment of actuality.’

The actualité is, in fact, the primordial cinematic form. It’s the thing that Edison and the Lumière brothers made when they merely pointed their silent movie cameras at some corner of life and started to crank.

No pans, no booms, no dollies, no cuts, no sound. Just the shot. Unscripted, undirected, unacted.

Slavoj Žižek talks about the ‘autonomy’ of cinematic form—and the inescapability of film’s autonomous, plastic form as the unconscious driver of content.

For me, the actualité, the plain, unvarnished shot of life, the least inflected cinematic shot you can get—even down to the absence of sound—the equivalent of a ‘moving photograph’, is the primordial, autonomous form of cinema.

The shot of actuality is the acorn from which the vast tree of cinematic genres has spread its branches. The most absurd—(some crude souls in love with spectacle would say ‘the most sublime’)—shots of CGI kayfabery that Hollywood shovels out to us today as ‘cinema’ would be unimaginable without the primordial shot of actuality. It is the foundation-stone of cinematic language, the shot from which we build the edifice of a film.

And it’s that primordial primitivism, a return to the fertile root of cinema in the plain, unmoving, silent shot of life, that undergirds my style of flâneurial filmmaking. The video essay above—a ‘video essay’ half-shot on Super 8 film—attests to that æsthetic of elemental, poetic revelry in the prose of reality.

In a taped interview conducted by fellow filmmaker Willie Varela in 1980, Paul Sharits discusses his extensive use of Super 8 and … attempts to strike what he considers an optimistic note by raising the topic of the imminent death of not only film but also video. He informs Varela that, within three years, computer-based systems will allow users to ‘image anything,’ with ‘no discs, no nothing. Digital, just a program … High resolution, total control.’ This is a sea change Sharits claims to be ‘waiting for,’ and he declares with confidence, ‘Some day, film and video will be passé, man. But not imaging systems.’ Since Varela still regards Super 8 as his format of choice and video as an inferior alternative, he replies that Sharits’ prognostication ‘sounds terrible,’ because digital imaging is ‘not the same as going out in the world and shooting something.’

—Federico Windhausen, “Assimilating video”, October, Summer 2011, pp. 76-7

The essence of flâneurial cinema is ‘going out in the world and shooting something’—something actual. Going out into the world is going deeper into oneself. The world without is the world within, and the flâneur penetrates the inward labyrinth of his sensibility and maps it by walking the variegated ways of the world with his Ariadne’s thread of film, charting the landmarks of his voyage en retour à soi-même.

In my films and videos, I generally focus on empty space, art and architecture because in these motionless places and landmarks, I continually see the inward image of myself reflected in these externalized symbols of emptiness, stillness, silence and darkness—the self-哀れness of 無.

In the absence of the human presence, in the absence of movement, in the absence of sound, and even in the absence of light, the things of actuality, these 物の哀れ, have a vivid ‘livingness’ for me, particularly in their contingent interactions with le temps—time, but equally, the weather which does the corrosive work of time.

Flâneurial cinema, in its focus on actuality, is exclusively un cinéma des ‘images-temps’—of Gilles Deleuze’s time-images: In my films and videos, I’m capturing images of time, not movement, the slow—indeed, almost invisible— movement through time of unmoving things which have a soul and transcendent beauty for me. And, trammelled through the cinematic apparatus of filming and editing, I hope that I bring the transcendent, eternal aspect of the ephemeral things of this world to life once again in my films and videos.

Almost every day for three weeks last April and May, I passed the former Court House in Euroa in my flâneries up and down Binney street. Euroa, as I say in the video essay, had long been a nom de pays with as much significant potential for me as the names of Balbec or Venice had for M. Proust. A fleeting image of it from the train when I had first fled Bellingen for Melbourne fooled my intuition into believing that there I might find another Bellingen, redux.

When finally I had an opportunity to investigate the town, I realized, with some disappointment, that I had been mistaken in that tantalizing whiff of vibe I had got from it en passant. Although it’s a very nice town, with many beautiful buildings of provocative weirdness well-preserved, it hasn’t the bourgeois-bohemian atmosphere of Bello.

One of the more provocatively weird is the Court House, built in 1892, ‘a rare example of a courthouse designed in American Romanesque style,’ as the legend alongside it advises. ‘It is noted for its picturesque massing, the heavy portico with its arched entry and the large bulls-eye vent over the portico.’

Euroa Court House, Binney street, morning. Photographed by Dean Kyte. Shot on Kodak Ektar 100. Shutter speed: 1,000. Aperture: f.6.8. Focal range: 15m.
Euroa Court House, Binney street, morning.
Shot on Kodak Ektar 100. Shutter speed: 1,000. Aperture: f.6.8. Focal range: 15m.

I recognized it as a landmark in my consciousness, though of what I could not say. But the image of it—that mass of red bricks, the yellow leaves of the linden weeping in dishabille before it, the green bench fencing off the linden on three sides, the red-and-white poteaux marking the school crossing and rhyming vividly with the red bricks and white trim of the Court House behind them—somehow this sunny image of stillness, silence, and emptiness, this sanctuary of restful attente before the halls of the law, with its unblinking bull’s eye, kept calling out to me as the complex of some thought, or dream, or memory as I passed it.

Perhaps, in retrospect, as I suggest in the Super 8 images of the aspects of the Court House façade, and its spatial relations with tree, benches, poteaux—images which came to me, pre-cut, in my mind, in the order you see them monté in the essay—it is the image of the sanctuary I sought—le nouveau Bello—but didn’t ultimately find in Euroa.

Even now I can’t be certain what relation the images I shot of the Court House that morning and the words I felt compelled to write immediately afterwards—the first draft of the short essay I narrate over those images in the film—had for me, unless I was unconsciously channelling some complex of thought, dream, or memory which the image of the Court House evoked and educed from me.

The smaller filmstrips of Super 8 were more difficult to edit than 16mm … but many reconfigured this supposed limitation as an opportunity to edit in camera and subsequently compared this aspect of 8mm production to ‘a kind of writing with the camera’ or ‘sketchbook cinema’.

—Windhausen (2011, p. 74)

This, too, is a crucial aspect of flâneurial cinema: in its focus on images of time rather than images of movement, it is, perforce, un cinéma littéraire.

Many have been the occasion on this vlog where I have hammered the point (as I do with my clients) that writing is the algebra of thought. M. Truffaut spoke of ‘le caméra-stylo’, the camera as a pen, and the director as the ‘auteur’ of his film. We speak of ‘cinematography’ as ‘writing with movement’, just as we speak of ‘photography’ as ‘writing with light’, the implication being that certain ‘graphic’ manifestations of cognition are better transcribed and translated with the visual lexicography of images than the hieroglyphs of words.

The embodied act of flânerie is of a consciousness moving through a spatio-temporal environment, the external world of Nature, observing the refracted ephemera of time and space, as M. Baudelaire said, like ‘un kaléidoscope doué de conscience’ (a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness).

In Super 8, we have a viewing medium capable of kaleidoscopic colour and abstraction—just compare the backup shots I took with my trusty Olympus Stylus, flat, digital, prosy, to the poetic, psychedelic world of impressionistic blues, reds, whites, yellows, and greens in the Vision3 footage. It’s the same place viewed from the same setups, but the actuality of the world is gloriously transformed.

Digital is prose. Writing with Super 8 is poetry.

As it turned out, when I got the developed and digitized Vision3 footage back from nano lab in Daylesford and fed those shots into the mock-up edit I had made with the digital footage, just to see how that Super 8 montage I had seen in my mind might play, the contrast in textures between two modes of seeing—the prose of digital versus the poetry of film—made both sets of actualités worth preserving in the same piece.

The result is a ‘fildeo’, a ‘vilm’, some film/video hybrid for which there is no name other than the one I have given it:—‘flâneurial cinema’, a type of filmmaking, a type of videography couched in that primordial root of mechanical vision, the greatest special effect I know of, the quotidian miracle of the actualité.

There was a time, right at the dawn of cinema, when the poetry of the prosy actualité was enough to inspire wonder and awe. Maxim Gorky wrote a memorable essay—itself a poem in prose—on his first encounter with the Lumières’ cinématographe in 1896, “Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows”. It must surely rank with De Quincey’s and Huxley’s reports of psychedelic experience as one of literature’s great dispatches from an altered state.

Admittedly, the great man’s reaction to his flâneuristic ‘trip’ was one of mingled fascination and horror at this ‘grey world’ where the boulevards of Paris teemed with ghosts in a silent frenzy, but still, fascination and horror count as wonder and awe.

Seventy years after Gorky’s surreal dérive grâce aux frères Lumière, Jean-Paul Sartre called the spectacle of cinema ‘les délires d’une muraille’—the frenzy on the wall. By then, the actualité had been subsumed and assimilated as backdrop and pick-up shot into the manifold ramifications of generic cinematic fictions.

But the phrase, as a summation of what le septième art is, au fond, is a telling one: The frenetic delirium of actuality and the wall upon which it madly batters itself in simulation, trying to break out of the screen and into our actuality, are both key to defining what cinema ‘is’.

In our ‘post-cinematic’ era—cinema strictly defined as a palpable artefact shot on film—the tendency among moving image-makers is to use the term ‘filmmaker’ rather too loosely to describe their visual productions.

Certainly, I was guilty of that sin for many years. But, when I first got into Super 8, I became deeply conscious of the difference between videography, between shooting and editing a moving image artefact in the low-risk, low-cost, completely abstractive environment of digital screens, one which has no life as an artefact but on digital screens, and filmmaking pur-sang.

The discipline is altogether different, more rigorous, and once you’ve gotten into film, it brings a whole other sensibility of rigour and care even to your videographic productions.

In his essay “The Concept of the Mental Screen: The Internalized Screen, the Dream Screen, and the Constructed Screen” (2016), Roger Odin of the Université Paris III suggests that in this era of ‘post-cinema’, we carry the construct of cinema within us: whatever ‘ceremony’ is associated with the theatrical experience of ‘going to the movies’ and confronting that frenzy on the wall is now purely internalized.

Even if a film is shot on film, the strip of celluloid itself is almost useless. It’s what M. Odin calls an ‘operator’, an object that requires a device, a ‘modem’ in fact, to modulate and demodulate the signal written on the celluloid in a way that is legible by our eyes and brain.

We’re now surrounded by a plethora of such devices. We don’t need, as Maxim Gorky did in 1896, to be in a specific space for the modulation encoded by the cinématographe to be decoded by it onto a wall. That experience—the most purely cinematic of all possible cinematic experiences—is what M. Odin defines as an ‘exclusive rigid connector’—a ‘connector’ being, in his parlance, the device-mediated relationship we, as viewers, have with the multitude of spaces in which cinema occurs.

The projection of a movie in a dark room, the time prescribed of a more or less collective screening, became and remains the unique experience of perception and memory defining the spectator and that any other situation more or less alters. That alone can be called ‘cinema.’

—Raymond Bellour, as cited in Odin (2016, p. 178)

We now carry in our pockets devices analogous to the same elegant design of the Lumières’ cinématographe, capable of both shooting a moving image in one environment and projecting it on a screen in another—or even in the same environment a moment later. Contrary to M. Bellour’s contention, whatever is artistically unique about the experience of cinema is now a kind of ‘portable caliphate’ we evoke and enact within ourselves.

This is the condition of the ‘inclusive rigid connector’, which does not exclude all possible environmental permutations of viewing other than a darkened, chair-filled box ergonomically designed for the optimal accomplishment of a collective screening. The nature of inclusion, M. Odin says, is that a ‘mental cinema screen encompasses and erases the physical space’ surrounding the spectator.

The relationship of connection to this imagined cinema space still remains rigid, as in the traditional, exclusive relationship, because in this internalization of the monolithic cinema screen ‘the spectator makes the effort to mentally force the physical communication space to mimic the cinema space, even in conditions that might first seem incompatible with the cinema experience’.

As a writer, I like precise definitions of words. Along with M. Bellour, I would be quite willing to dismiss the hand-wavy notion that anything other than cinema pur-sang could possibly be ‘cinema’ if it weren’t for the fact that I am neither a digital native nor someone who did all their growing-up before the choking empire of digital screens overran our environment.

But if I am not a ‘digital native’ pur-sang but, rather, one of the first colonists to establish a beachhead in the realm of the digital environment, I am, like all my readers, a native of the world of screens, of which the monolithic cinema screen is the first invader, the conqueror of our impressionable sensibilities, and still the Emperor.

As someone who actually has memories of growing up mostly in an analogue world, and for whom the exclusive rigid connective experience of cinema pur-sang is not a curious anachronism on the bill of fare of media consumption but the Emperor of all moving visual media, I can attest that there are certainly generational differences between screen natives.

The most ‘native’ of these generations born in an era of translucent boxes which surround them, and which are projected, mentally, from the tiny screens in their hands as they walk, are those for whom the computer and the mobile phone were not late-coming novelties when they were already on the threshold of adulthood, but an abstractive environment which was already the environment in which their childhood development took place.

Their lack of a sense of ‘privacy’—indeed, their rejection of the entire notion of privacy—stems from an ontological sense that a screen is not something to shield someone from the gaze of the world but something upon which you actively project the persona of your ego.

We children of the Cold War, like our most purely filmic, pre-televisual ancestors, went to the cinema as to a confessional, to indulge our dreams and phantasies in the privacy of darkness. The great god ‘Screen’ equally boxed us up in our private booths as much as brought us together in communion.

But the post-Millennial generations live in such a mediated relationship to Nature that media is their environmental medium:—they live in their screens. They are naked in their tents, and their tents are made of glass.

Super 8, as a medium of cinema, while it is clearly filmic, with all the æsthetic autonomy that comes along with the plastic film form, thus satisfying my criterion of what is cinematic, clearly does not fit with M. Bellour’s. Indeed, it falls awkwardly among M. Odin’s needlessly nice taxonomy of mental cinemas.

As Super 8 is not generally intended for theatrical exhibition, it is not an exclusive rigid connector, and by M. Bellour’s definition, would not even be classed as ‘cinema’, despite being an artefact of film.

Yet, by M. Odin’s definition of the inclusive rigid connector, Super 8 still ‘aims at preserving the specificity of the “cinema” experience, [although] here the spectator makes the effort to mentally force the communication space to mimic the cinema space’.

This was certainly the case for Super 8 in its classic usage as a convenient small-gauge format for home movies. The object operator (the fifty-foot reel of celluloid itself) was fed into a projecting device in domestic circumstances, a darkened living room with loosely arranged chairs that imperfectly mimicked M. Bellour’s pure cinema experience.

In Les Structures de l’expérience filmique (1969), published at the height of Super 8’s popularity, Belgian psychologist Jean-Pierre Meunier used the term ‘film-souvenir’ to describe the type of domestic cinema we, in English, call ‘home movies’. But the translation is deceptive. As Marie-Aude Baronian puts it in her essay “Remembering Cinema: On the film-souvenir” (2019), the term would more accurately describe ‘a film that addresses an object that is existent and known; in other words, the opposite of a fiction film’.

To put it in still other words, the film-souvenir is a kind of actualité, but one that ‘looks beyond the image, to the person-in-general that it depicts, in order to produce and maintain his existence even during the screening’.

… Meunier’s term ‘refers to films made for private purposes, with the goal of acting as a keepsake or record of an event in the individual’s life, such as weddings, vacations, family gatherings, etc.’ …

The hyphen indicates the closeness and dynamic relationship between souvenir and film and, in so doing, accentuates the value and motif of film as a mnemonic device.

—Baronian (2019, p. 224)

This is certainly far from M. Bellour’s narrow conception of cinema. M. Meunier, en revanche, sees the kind of domestic filmic productions for which Kodak designed Super 8 as ‘mnemonic tools’ or ‘remembering machines’.

The notion of film-souvenir also surpasses its formal and cultural dimensions to become, as it were, the consciousness of cinema itself [my emphasis].

I wonder if the film-souvenir is not solely in the attitude of the spectator, but, as it were, in the attitude of cinema tout court. It is as though the film-souvenir epitomizes, in a sort of media-archeological fashion, the emergence of filmic practices (including proto-cinematic ones) and the numerous practices that pervade the digital age. In that case, could the film-souvenir not be the zero degree of cinematic practice; one that reminds us that, beyond the desire to comprehend (documentary) and to participate (fiction), film is an ongoing search for something or someone that is no more or, at the very least, ‘out of focus’?

—Baronian (2019, pp. 224, 225)

Super 8, therefore, is ‘a medium of memory’, a type of cinema that isn’t capital-C ‘Cinema’, in M. Bellour’s sense, but goes far beyond the traditional cinematic experience to evoke, as in a séance, the living spirit of people who might even be in the same room with us as we watch the film, to re-member them, to reconstitute their living presence in time, just as our memory does.

As Meunier writes: ‘We “play” at believing in this presence, but we never get there since we are always aware of the absence of the other’ (p. 122). And he adds: ‘In the home-movie attitude, our behavior consists of a vain effort to “presentify” the object, an attempt to enter into the intersubjective relations with other people, which necessarily leads to disappointment’ (p.123). This type of identification entails a vain effort to induce a presence that ‘remains irremediably out of our grasp’ (p. 124).

—Baronian (2019, p. 221)

In some sense, my narration in the video essay above serves this purpose: I evoke an invisible place (Bellingen) through a visible one (Euroa). The photo-poetic suggestion is of similarity, analogy; and yet both image and, ultimately, words conclude, with some disappointment, that one is not the other, that the images on the screen are not even similar to the place of memory. The triumph of finally seeing and shooting a place I have long desired to visit ends in Mme. Baronian’s ‘sense of failure’ as I recognize that I do not see in Euroa what I had thought that I might see there.

The film-souvenir, the memory written in moving images, on celluloid, across time, is an interstitial, hybrid space in M. Odin’s taxonomy of mental screen worlds where Super 8, as the pre-eminent medium of memory, would appear to neatly fit, as in its natural niche.

Even if Super 8 exemplifies the cinematic attitude ‘tout court’, as theatrical products, Super 8 films have the ‘para-cinematic’ existence of inclusive rigid connectors, and an apparatus of what M. Odin calls ‘pragmatic introducers’, deliberate interventions designed to replicate the theatrical experience as much as possible in the conceptual screen space, are required to give them even the similitude of being capital-C ‘Cinema’, or ‘cinematic’.

Mme. Baronian’s apprehension of this ‘cinematic attitude tout court’ makes it clear that the caliphate of cinema extended far beyond the experience of sitting in a purpose-built viewing box long before the digital revolution diffused the cinematic experience across multiple platforms, formats, and media. It’s clear, also, that if what Mr. Windhausen terms an ‘anti-artisanal’ small-gauge film format designed for informal home exhibition carries within its tiny celluloid windows ‘the consciousness of cinema itself’—all the higher cognitive capacities of thought and ideation, of dream and memory, in visual form—then the locus of ‘Cinema’—its Mecca—does not really reside in the Kaaba of the purpose-built viewing box.

As a form of actualité, the film-souvenir of Super 8 is the acorn from which cinema, as a means of poetic visual cognition, spreads its branches. And its take-up by artists and experimental filmmakers from Derek Jarman to Guy Maddin indicates that this ‘intimate’, ‘domestic’ form of moviemaking, which has, at best, a tangential relationship with ‘Cinema’, possesses an intrinsic æsthetic of its own that, paradoxically, goes right to the very heart of ‘what cinema is’ as a device for remembering actuality.

… [T]he compact cameras of … Super 8 …, machines small enough to be used often in everyday life, are seen as altering the look of the pro-filmic world in a manner analogous to distillations and distortions of memory.

—Windhausen (2011, p. 76)

It isn’t ‘Cinema’, and yet Super 8 is the essence of cinema: it is the mental screen made actual. This humble medium of memory is the Caliph of the conceptual caliphate of cinema. It’s the stone that the DeMillian builders of ‘Cinema’ refused, but which has subsequently become the cornerstone of the edifice of cinema in its true, poetic function as a ‘remembering machine’, just as, for M. Proust, Swann, the dubious Jew, forms the cornerstone of his own monumental machine of memory.

In its original filmic function, under home-theatrical conditions, Super 8 might be considered an inclusive rigid connector, but it might equally be what M. Odin terms an inclusive flexible connector, in that the mediation of the space around the mental screen in the living room ‘aims at doing everything to preserve our cinema enjoyment, including intervening into the physical viewing space and the cinema space itself.’

But we’re no longer watching Super 8 film in conditions which seek to evoke, even in an ersatz manner, the theatrical conditions of a cinema for which it was never commercially intended: the medium itself, these days, prohibits this. I shot the video essay above on Vision3, a film-stock that has been expressly designed by Kodak as a colour negative film, with the intention that it will not be projected but instead transferred straight to a digital format.

Thus, with my own ‘films’—films on the digital video formats of WMV, or MP4, or MOV—a potential flexible connector is introduced into the experiential mix, one at the discretion of the individual viewer. And I know from my stats on Vimeo that most people who watch my ‘films’ view them on computer screens, mobile phones, and tablets.

These viewers have it within their own power to make the inclusive connector of their experiential relationships with my films as rigid or as flexible as they want or their technology of the moment permits.

M. Odin defines the open connector as one where ‘viewers enjoy, without asking themselves too many questions, the different ways of watching a movie on the various screens available to them’. And, indeed, one could say that the digital video after-life of films like mine, which are shot on Super 8 but can never be screened as a film in a pseudo-theatrical setting, now enables us to have an ‘open connector’ experience with the object operator of the film, one where the multiplicity of potential viewing formats is accepted by spectators as a natural assumption of the environment of screens.

Super 8, it seems to me, as a filmic medium of cinema, an object operator which demands multiple mediations and interventions to view it—and even invites them—is the ultimate mental screen space.

It’s film that was never intended to be ‘cinema’ in M. Bellour’s purist definition of the word, and yet, whether projected in the domestic, communal setting of the home theatre or given a digital after-life on a palm-sized screen, the object operator of Super 8 still retain film’s plastic, æsthetic autonomy of form.

As such, it’s a type of cinema that exists purely in the mind, in conceptual space, in the imaginary cinema of living room or digital screen, and it’s perfectly adapted to its interstitial, liminal condition of film as both physical artefact and digital artefact.

Although Super 8 is technically a device operator, an operator which requires a projecting device to demodulate the signal registered on those tiny 8mm squares, the mere object operator of the film, its status as a physical artefact, is now so uncommon in our abstracted, digital media environment as to make it a fetishistic ‘device’.

To preserve its heritage, the ‘family’ institution has used, throughout history, various operators: graves, chapels, sculptures, painted portraits, medallions, fetish objects (hair strands, menus, candied almonds) that are displayed under a glass dome in the living room or bedroom, or captured on sound recording, photography, film (16mm, 9.5, 8, super 8), analog then digital video. These operators can be classified into two categories: operators with the status of objects (they are there, present, visible to everyone) and operators whose function requires the use of a device that allows them to produce meaning and affects (without this device they communicate nothing). This distinction seems essential to me in order to understand what happened to home movies.

In the early years of cinema, people kept emphasising the benefits of this technology compared to photography. In its issue dated December 30th 1885, the newspaper La Poste wrote: ‘When these devices [film cameras] will be available to the public, when everyone will be able to photograph their loved ones, not in their immobile form, but in their movements, in their actions, in their familiar gestures, with words on their lips, death will cease to be absolute.’

—Odin (2019, p. 180)

As that quotation from La Poste makes evident, the collective consciousness of the cinematic time-image, the significance of cinema as a device for remembering the dead moment, the actuality that can no longer be seen in actuality, was present fully ten years—almost to the very day—before the Lumière brothers inaugurated the first cinematic experience, the first cinematic ‘happening’ of actualités, at the Grand Café in Paris.

To a far greater extent than the photo, the home movie, by means of the life that movement confers on it, is conducive to inducing a high degree of nostalgia, regret, or other sentiments in us.

—Meunier, as cited in Baronian (2019, p. 226)

The simulacrum of life in cinema is really dead, a memento mori, a reminder of death, and thus movement, in this view, makes every image a time-image.

For me, part of the appeal of getting back to cinema’s roots, even in a deeply modified, hybrid fashion, is that, despite the uselessness of the Super 8 film itself for projecting through a device, there is some physical artefact of the art should the digital artefact succumb to death by decommission, by format change, and not survive.

Moreover, as I was getting to the end of my fifty-foot cartridge of Vision3, having got all the shots of the Court House, the tree and the bench which I had envisioned as a preassembled montage in my mind, I saw that there were still maybe ten or twenty seconds left on the reel, a few feet and frames with which I could grab a quick shot of myself sitting on the bench I had filmed, empty, in front of the Euroa Court House—which image you can see in the thumbnail of the video above.

In quite a miraculous shot I didn’t plan and couldn’t predict, bathed in the beautiful shadows of Super 8, hovering between colourful sunlight and deep shade, ‘a bright blot / Upon this gloomy scene’, there is my silhouette, recognizable yet rendered almost invisible by the shadows, as vague and yet as human as a figure on a cave wall at Lascaux.

In other words, on the fetish object of the film itself, there are a few feet in which I exist in longevity, if not perpetuity; for film, despite its fragility, is still a more robust and enduring medium than digital. And again, M. Odin’s classifications break down when it comes to Super 8, for the operator, in this instance, is both object and device: without the enlarging, projecting device, that little sign of me severally repeated at the end of the fifty-foot reel, like a signature on the artwork, will be difficult to see with the naked eye. But even if the last Super 8 projector in the world perishes before that reel of film does, I will still be barely visible on the object of the film itself.

M. Odin is conscious of this problem, the fallacy inherent in the statement made by La Poste, for while a separate projecting device is required to optimally view the object operator, the figure of a loved one inscribed on a sliver of film does not bring him or her back to life. Death continues to be absolute, and the image of the loved one’s movements a time-image.

The solution to this, he proposes, is the ‘dream screen’, a device operator ‘that one can hold in one’s hand, watch as long as one likes, as many times as one likes, alone or with others, a screen that one can carry around, that one can keep with oneself at all times’.

In essence, the dream screen collapses, as the early cinématographe did, image-capture and image-projection into one device, and in the digital after-life of Super 8, where images shot on film can only be screened as ‘videos’, the fetishistic dream screens we port on our persons would appear to square the circle of the object/device problem.

My films and videos are made for this ‘dream screen’: in the last financial year, 39% of all the views of my videos on Vimeo came from either mobile or tablet devices, and the curious thing I’ve observed in the last year and a half is that mobile and tablet viewers tend to be more engaged when viewing my works on these smaller dream screens than desktop or television application viewers.

But beyond the quantifiable stats, the flâneurial cinema of my films and videos are adapted to this diffuse, miniature medium, this conceptual cinema one ports with oneself and imaginatively imposes, by an act of will, upon the environment, because the æsthetic of dreams, of memories, of ideas, of altered states, of abstract, conceptual space informs all my art as a writer and as a filmmaker.

My œuvre is itself native to this conceptual caliphate of a purely ‘mental cinema’, for, in some sense, the mental cinema is a literary space. And similarly, the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the only novelist to successfully establish a second career for himself as a filmmaker, imitates the imagistic and the cinematic, the sense of framing, tracking, panning and cutting, of the contiguity of literary ideas-as-images, and their Eisensteinian disjunction in dialectic with each other.

One might say, with respect to M. Odin’s argument, that the conceptual cinema of the mental screen is, to use André Gide’s term, a ‘mise-en-abyme’, a set of nested frames, and that the variety of introducers and connectors—the media and devices and ‘frames’ by which we screen films—also places them in this reduplicated, recursive dimension of the dream, the memory, the idea, the altered state, which is the abstract, conceptual, eminently literary space.

Carrying our cinema(s) about with ourselves in our va et vient as portable dream screens, we lead ‘framed’ lives, and M. Odin calls this the ‘constructed screen’, whereby the in-built cinematic apparatus of framing, zooming and panning which are features and affordances of our tablets and mobile phones constructs a kind of ‘cubist’ relationship with the external world of Nature.

We frame it by cutting it up into little squares; we frame others, and we frame ourselves in selfies.

… [T]he mobile phone works both as an optical filter (with the zoom it becomes a sort of ‘cultural series’ of prisms, lenses, distorting mirrors, etc.) and as a frame that, as emphasized by Laurent Jenny, violates reality by coercing it. The physical screen is the place of a construction that transforms its into a mental screen leading the viewer to see the world through the pictorial space.

—Odin (2019, p. 182)

Similarly, in experimenting with a dual analogue/digital shooting strategy, as I did in the video essay above, using the latter as ‘backup’ and seeking to emulate in digital the setup of the Super 8 camera as closely as possible, the 4:3 aspect ratio of Super 8 ‘coerces’ actuality to conform to a tighter frame of vision and, consequently, a narrower frame of memory, which, as you can see in the digital sections of the video, the wider aspect ratio of digital more ‘objectively’ expands.

This is to say that the autonomous plastic form of Super 8, the narrowness and constriction of the gauge, acts as much as the impressionistic artifacting of the photo-chemical medium to induce these ‘distillations and distortions’ of vision that are analogous to memory. The narrower aspect ratio is like the constricted diaphragm of our concentrated, microscopic vision on some small corner of actuality we wish to preserve to memory, and which, whenever we seek to re-evoke it, to re-member it, running it through the projector in our mind, we distort and make less clear, gathering more dust and scratches on the positive which obscure the belovèd image.

M. Odin cites my belovèd maître, M. Proust, who made the field of memory his literary empire, and who, in several passages of À la recherche du temps perdu, presents a proto-cinematic, cubistic vision of the external world of Nature, such as the famous approach to Martinville, with its church spires which seem to move across the landscape, or, as in M. Odin’s example, the vision of Balbec severally framed, as on a strip of film, through the dawn-flooded windows of a train carriage.

As M. Proust’s always à propos impressions of the external world make clear, the act of sensitive observation is itself a framing device. Having read one of his memorable analogies, one never sees a thing in the external world of Nature quite the same way again. The moon will always be an actress before her entrance, a box at the theatre an aquarium, a long-distance phone call a propitiation of the Danaids. In making the field of memory his sovereign literary empire, he too induces the altered state. He too creates an abstract, conceptual space in which, as in a dream, things with no obvious relation metaphorically ‘rhyme’ with one another in a way we instantly recognize as a ‘true’ perception of the latent nature of reality, however extravagant M. Proust’s juxtapositions may seem.

Framing is not just simple observation: the screen is a mental operator, a filter that produces distance and changes the perception of reality as it introduces points of reference (the edges of the frame) that lead us to build relationships that do not exist in reality.

Very often, this process is coupled with a will to communicate. … All photographers and filmmakers know this: framing means choosing a ‘view’ on the world and transmitting it to the viewer.

—Odin (2016, p. 183)

And moreover, the self-conscious act of photographic or cinematic ‘framing’ which attends this diffuse, democratic, conceptual cinema reflects, as M. Odin states, ‘a will to transform the world into an aesthetic space’.

This is precisely the dearest existential desire of the dandy-flâneur, that quixotic résistant to the anti-human horror of decadent, late-capitalistic modernity. And failing—as we must do—in our vision to reform the world except through the personal vision of Art, we pedestrian men of fashion turn our pathological desire for ‘a world of Truth and Beauty’ upon the only thing in this landscape of wreckage, ruination and horror we can reform and make an æsthetic object—the object operator of ourselves, a screen upon which we project our civilized ideal of the world.

I have not quite made up my mind whether M. Proust, famously elegant as he was, could be legitimately considered either a dandy or a flâneur, let alone the two combined. Phillip Mann, in his book The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century (2018), is also undecided on this score, although he suggests that the Proustian Recherche, while not being a dandy novel in the manner of Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, or Huysmans, takes full account of the panoply of techniques the dandy employs to æstheticize his life.

M. Proust, in other words, constructs a conceptual persona, ‘Marcel’, le Narrateur, as carefully as the dandy constructs his image. The Narrateur is the dream screen—or the magic lantern, in M. Proust’s case—upon which he projects the image of his own life, rarefied through memory—which is to say, through the creative treatment of actuality.

And if I grant that the technique of æsthetic reconstitution in the Recherche is dandistic, I would add that M. Proust’s ambulatory technique, full of asides off the Guermantes way or the way by Swann’s, the two paths of social progress which direct his neophyte’s journey to the heights of Parisian fashion, is eminently flâneuristic in both design and execution.

The dandy, as Hr. Mann tells us, is a modern Narcissus, and in a world of screens where these operator objects/devices are now used to project rather than to shield the ego, to project a vision of the persona, often unreflecting, often un-self-aware, which we more and more often call ‘narcissistic’, into conceptual space, wherein lies the difference between Narcissus, the dandy in love with his own unattainable Ideal of Personality, which he nevertheless strives to gather into himself in the transcendent image of Art, and narcissist, the bourgeois consumer of images who is in thrall to his or her own selfie?

The matter is a delicate one, but the distinction, I think, lies in this: As I said at the beginning when I spoke of flâneurial cinema as ‘going out into the world and shooting something’, the dandistic gaze, paradoxically, is turned outward on the world, as I think M. Proust gives monumental and consistent proof of doing across 3,000 pages in his Recherche for himself.

Narcissus finds his image mirrored back to him in the Truth and Beauty of the external world of Nature—evanescent, barely (or rarely) graspable, but out there, somewhere, in some transcendent platonic image of what the world—and life—can be like on the best days of flâneuristic æsthetic investigation.

The narcissist, on the other hand, is completely self-regarding and incurious about the external world of Nature, which is merely a backdrop that ‘frames’ his or her selfie. Existing in a totally artificial, conceptual environment of screens, the narcissist is trapped in a self-referential mise-en-abyme of psychosis.

It is only by a creative treatment of actuality, by getting out of oneself and going out into the world and shooting something—some external object in Nature that is real, and tangible, and actual, one that stands as a landmark and a symbol in the inner landscape of the filmmaker—that we escape the abysmal, recursive psychosis which the artificial environment of screens has induced in us.

… Narcissus is not completely without object. The object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy. … If he knew it he would be an intellectual, a creator of speculative fiction, an artist, a writer, psychologist, psychoanalyst.

—Judith Butler (as cited in Mann, 2018, pp. 255-7)

Or a filmmaker.

Going out into the world and shooting something is going deeper into oneself. The world without is the conceptual space of the mental screen, as M. Odin has shown us. The images we choose to crop and frame and subject to the process of ‘cinema’ are very much self-portraits of our own vision and sensibility.

And in the hybrid way in which I manipulate film form, through the abstractive tools of digital media, I am very much seeking a rapprochement with cinematic ‘content’.

Any personal vision in contemporary moviemaking must now come solely from its content, not its form.

—Scott Stark, as cited in Windhausen (2011, p. 72)

But if, as Mr. Windhausen says, ‘for film, the experiment is over’, and the personal vision now lies in the content of a film, not its form, I would argue, as Slavoj Žižek does, that the autonomous, plastic form of film itself, in this conceptually exhausted space, is cinematic ‘content’, an assimilated trope or device of the medium in the conceptual caliphate of cinema(s).

I’m very much of the view that digital media exert such preponderant countervailing resistance to artistic manipulation that the enormous breadth of affordances in digital media negates personal vision.

But I’m a writer, an artist raised in an analogue era and educated in the most analogue and conceptual art forms. I think, by contrast to many artists embracing the digital far less cautiously than I, that my personal æsthetic, what I call the ‘Ideal of Personality’ which manifests itself, for an artist, as his intrinsic sensibility and style, has been sufficiently cultivated by the rugged self-reliance that analogue media, such as the humble pen and typewriter, engendered, the ability and the necessity to cognitively conceptualize and execute the literary work of art for oneself, that I bring a countervailing resistance to digital media’s resistance to manipulation, and that my manipulations of cinematic form ultimately produce ‘content’.

If, as I said at the beginning, flâneurial cinema is a ‘literary’ cinema, then by my definition of writing as the algebra of human thought, flâneurial cinema is a continuation of that cognitive activity, a writing of thoughts, ideas, dreams and memories, inward, altered states in a conceptual space of images composed of the external world of Nature.

There is, therefore, an external object which the dandy-flâneur seeks to represent in the conceptual space, the dream screen upon which he represents himself. We call this external object ‘style’, or ‘artistic vision’: we recognize the independently verifiable world of the senses refracted through the peculiar lens of some subjective mode of seeing, the writer’s unique manner of laying words on the page in such a way as to build up the densest representation of the external world as inward conceptual space.

It is the world, but not as we have seen it before, a world of rare Truth and Beauty, and we see it mirrored, reflected in the elegant sensibility of the artistic dandy, who shows us, as much in his own person as in his artistic productions, his ideal what the world could be.

I’ve found my style as a filmmaker, and it lies in the same dandistic, flâneurial style that undergirds my writing. In the void of emptiness, stillness, silence, and darkness, in images of the external world that reflect the self-哀れness of 無, I continually see the Narcissus-portrait of myself, my inner world, writ large.

Thus, as a screen native at the cusp of the analogue/digital divide, if there is a ‘projection of the self’ in my flâneurial films and videos, it is one where the image of the external world is turned inside out and made into a mental landscape.

Every film and video I shoot is a selfie of some kind, even if the human form—(least of all my own)—never appears in it. In my flâneurial cinema of actualités taken of empty spaces, from which I rip the recorded location sound and substitute for it my own cobbled-together soundscapes, I forge a psychic space which reflects my inward vision of outward things in a creative treatment of actuality.

I create cloistered worlds, artificial paradises of dream, memory, idea, altered state and conceptual space which give an outward representation in images and sounds of the perfect world, the Ideal Image of a World of Truth and Beauty within myself, which I hope I reflect in myself, in my person, and in all my artistic productions.

The dandy invents nothing. It is reality that is rendered artificial. Abstract dreams inspired by memory unfold from a position that seems already to be impervious to time. The dandy has a past but no future. …. While the dandy per se confines himself within the tragic world of Narcissus when he employs his æsthetic memory in the cultivation of his own person, the writer-dandy and by extension the director-dandy are arguably in a privileged position as they can apply their ideals to the limitless realm of fiction. The latter even has the potential to fulfil the depressive’s ultimate dream, the creation of a hermetic, artificial and complete world in accordance with his own highly individual ideal of beauty, his specific tastes….

—Mann (2018, pp. 257-8)

If you’d like to keep me in Super 8 film, you can purchase the soundtrack to the video essay below for $A2.00 via Bandcamp. It’s an expensive hobby, and I’m planning to put out more Super 8-based content this year on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog, so all your support will be greatly appreciated.