Lunacy was first screened at the Occult Film Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 27th 2017. It was a truly honoring experience for me as the context wasn’t really a context but actually more like a temporary home for many cinematic gems of different kinds.
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016, filmed and shown on 35 mm), Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Invocation of my Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising and The Man we want to hang (all shown on 16 mm) would have been ”enough” to blow many minds. But on top were also the 1920s stag film The Black Mass, the German masterpiece Wolkenschatten (2014) and Pierre Clementis Visa de Censure (1975). In all, a strange and hefty mix of truly artistic expressions of integrity. To have Lunacy screened in this mix was actually more than an honor. It was an acknowledgement, an approval, and decidedly an inspiration for further film projects.
Lunacy isn’t ”about” the moon per se but could perhaps be seen as being permeated by lunar energies. Where my film Sub Umbra Alarum Luna (2016) was a very conscious tribute to Derek Jarman and his work, Lunacy is a free-floating onwards rumination about the moon’s constant (and necessary) presence.
The project began with me writing a text about the moon for the wonderful Danish art magazine Plethora. This text was later cut up by my wife, Vanessa Sinclair, and then randomly re-assembled and recorded by her. I put these four vocal recordings to music, which created a sonorous cycle of sorts: a lunar reflection, a dark brooding on the human need for sexualizing the planets.
We both quite quickly realized that this was good fodder for a film. So instead of making a spoken word soundtrack for an existing film, we made a film for an existing spoken word soundtrack.
After a successful ”Kickstarter” crowdfunding campaign for the project, I could buy a super-8 film scanner. As soon as that was in place, I started scanning material from my film archive, predominantly from the early 1990s (when super-8 filming was still a financially viable alternative!).
Gradually the film grew around the four quite distinct musical/reading pieces. Odd bits appeared/surfaced from my archive. An unmarked roll beckoned my attention. I decided on a whim to include sections from it, no matter what it was. This turned out to be an auspicious fluke. The film in question was one of those strange 15 minute condensed super-8 versions of feature films that were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s (pre-VHS). This film was Michael Reeve’s 1968 horror gem Witchfinder General (aka Conqueror Worm), in which Vincent Price ruthlessly hunts down alleged witches. A perfect inclusion, given witches’ association with lunar and magical forces. The film changed from a cosmic meditation on the concept level to a tangible tribute to Hecate and all the witches who ever suffered injustice at the hands of intolerant lower beings over the times and spaces.
At the premiere screening, I realized how suitable the connection to Kenneth Anger’s work was, as well as that to both Wolkenschatten and Visa de Censure (although I hadn’t seen these gems before). Experimental film captures, like no other medium, the intricacies and complexities of spiritual experiments. The consciously willed dissociation through audiovisual arrangements (or re-arrangements) creates unconscious or subconscious possibilities for insights not available to the rational mind. Being inspired by Anger’s films in my youth helped me formulate an esthetic language of my own through which I show my own findings and speculations. Regardless if we’re talking about manipulatory uses of Eisenstein’s editing/montage ideas or free-flowing, psychedelic superimpositions in slow motion to facilitate epiphanic insights about basically anything, the leaving behind of rational narratives makes a different perspective possible. Or even inevitable. The transition or time/space between Sub Umbra Alarum Luna and Lunacy in my case has been one not only of changing perspective but also of direction. From the outside in has now become from the inside out.
As Lunacy now travels the world to festivals and screenings in different environments and contexts, it becomes like a proxy for my own mind and will. I’m very happy about where all of this is going and am genuinely grateful to everyone who supported Lunacy:
Margareta Abrahamsson, Annette Rawlings, Jennifer Smith, Peter Steffensen, Jack Stevenson, Dolorosa de la Cruz, Douglas Lucas, Evan Malater, Billie Steigerwald, Aleksandra Søderlind, Cecilia Ömalm, Jesper Aagaard Petersen, Nicolas Debot, Larry Farber, Robert Koole, Arild Strømsvåg, Apple Xenos, Sheer Zed, Fredrik Alm, Magnus Cardfelt, Caleigh Fisher, Chandra Shukla, Alexander Fox, Mikael Prey, Alf Wahlgren and Vanessa Sinclair. Thank you!
