The Spiritual Absolute in the Visual Music Film

Abstract

As established in the previous chapter, there was, in music, a move from a purely formal aesthetic of the absolute as advocated by formalists such as Edward Hanslick to one where absolute music could function on a formal and a spiritual level simultaneously. There was also a comparable move in the aesthetic paradigm of visual music. The strict formalism of Eggeling, Richter and, later, McLaren was to give way to a cinema of the spiritually absolute predicated on notions of inter-sensory correspondence and located on the West Coast of America. Visually there was a marked shift from the geometric aesthetic to a more visceral ‘gaseous’ one. In Deleuze, Altered States and Film, Anna Powell draws attention to the use of the term gaseous to describe the films of American West Coast filmmakers Jordan Belson and James Whitney. The term was first used by Gene Youngblood in 1970 in his book Expanded Cinema, specifically in relation to the nebulous, esoteric imagery used in Jordan Belson’s films, before being appropriated by Gilles Deleuze as a category in his discussion of American experimental cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁹⁸ Drawing on the debates surrounding absolute music set out in the previous chapter and questions surrounding the sublime, this chapter will examine what I have termed the spiritually absolute films of James Whitney and Jordan Belson. Focusing on changing parameters of music, viewing contexts and attitudes towards ‘transcendence’ in the wake of the expanding American counterculture that was located in the San Francisco Bay Area of the American West Coast, I will address how both Belson and Whitney attempt to simulate, achieve and promote expanded states of consciousness through their visual music by undertaking a close textual analysis of Allures and Samadhi by Belson and Lapis and Yantra by Whitney.