Updates, Live: Willard Maas, Geography of the Body, 1943

Willard Maas
1906-1971
(image source: Experimental Cinema)
no copyright infringement intended

It was the first movie created by Willard Maas, in 1943; his next film (Image in the Snow) would come in 1952; bur let's go back to 1943, the year of the Geography of the Body; a 7 minutes black and white; Marie Menken did the cinematography, and George Barker authored the poem to be recited off-screen; two nude bodies (seemingly Maas and Menken themselves); the camera browsing them without any haste in extreme close-ups, from ear to nombril to eye to knee to mouth to tow, and so on, and so on; no genitalia showed (it was 1943, c'me on!); meanwhile George Barker (a poet considered a genius in his prime, largely forgotten nowadays) is heard reciting without any haste a strange litany, about ultimate experiences lived on ultimate settings; image and sound in counterpoint; a geography of the human body as a site of miriads of small exotic mysteries; a geography of the earth as a site of miriads of exotic spots of mysterious initiations.

The desire and pursuit of the whole
is called love - Aristophanes
(capture from the movie)
no copyright infringement intended

Maybe it is interesting to stay a little more on the relation image-sound here in this movie. It seems to me that here the relation is paradoxical. R. Bruce Elder comes with a great interpretation (A Body of Vision: Representations of Body in Recent Filme and Poetry, Wilfried Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1997, pages 36, 37): we would expect from the text to emphasize the meaning of the image, but here, the extravagance of the poem leaves the language in almost meaningless ruins, signaling the impulse to deal with energies that have a preverbal source; the image of a human body is an experience of a more primal sort than lenguages can accomodate.

And maybe we are not far from the universe of Rudolf Otto with his theories of Numinous.