Illogically Is

HAEC VERBA MENTIUNTUR · an essay film, 36 min

WARNING — THIS FILM CONTAINS SUSTAINED STROBOSCOPIC FLASHING AND HIGH-CONTRAST FLICKER. It may affect viewers with photosensitive epilepsy. Look away when you must. A reduced-flash edition will follow as a separate, labelled upload.

Illogically Is — the title cut out of the film's Language plate as a glyph-shaped wound, the second name Alogical Isness eroding above it, a dim red point at each edge

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The Apparatus · PDF · YouTube

A treatise, read once, by a voice that is not a person, over a picture that fails to hold.

There are no credits. The film's apparatus — its leader numerals, its footnote marks, its section headings — decays as it runs, the way the footnotes of the chapter it comes from decay: See —, —, blank. What the picture refuses to make legible is written down elsewhere, to the second: wuld.ink/illogically-is/apparatus

What is on the screen: the words, which are the only thing that holds. Under them, four films quoted as themselves and seven torn past recognition; the film's own earlier images surfacing for a frame or three whenever the picture reaches for a quotation; a strobe that rides the syllables like a man tied to a horse and slows in the ninth section because the horse tires. Around them, a print: ten reels, cue dots, a changeover that fails at “No self” — the emulsion burns through, the film tears, the lamp shows, the douser drops on the words. After the voice has ended the emulsion catches; it spares the last period until it burns last; one ember is the final frame.

It began as a dream written down on 18 June 2010 — two points of dim red oblivion — and it ends on one.

IET TAMEN ESTand yet it is
IITERTIUM NON DATURno third is given
IIIACAUSALITER FITit happens without cause
IVEX NIHILO OMNIAfrom nothing, everything
VNULLA PERSONAno person
VINOMINA NUDA TENEMUSwe hold bare names
VIINEMO ESTthere is no one
VIIIRELIQUIAEthe leavings
IXSCIO ME NIHIL SCIREI know that I know nothing
XHAEC VERBA MENTIUNTURthese words lie

Chapters

00:00Warning — photosensitivity
00:16I. Prologue — Why This Is Different
02:31II. On Logic and Its Limits
06:34III. On Cause and Effect
10:44IV. On the Void That Generates
13:56V. On Consciousness and What It Cannot Know
16:53VI. On Language and Its Betrayal
21:26VII. On the Self That Isn’t
25:13VIII. On What Remains
29:30IX. On Knowing Nothing & The Gridlock
33:38X. Coda — On the Paradox of This Document

Closed captions are the film’s own text on its own clock. Turn them on when the words go under the strobe.

QUOTED, as themselves: Persona (1966); The Flicker (1966); La Jetée (1962); In Absentia (2000). Torn past recognition, credited because you will not see them: Stalker; Meshes of the Afternoon; Wavelength; Under the Skin; Street of Crocodiles; Samadhi; The Prisoner, “Once Upon a Time”. The stones are copies of stones.

HEARD: Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto, Summvs and Glass; Christina Kubisch, Nine Magnetic Places; Maryanne Amacher, Music for Sound-Joined Rooms; Éliane Radigue, Jetsun Mila; Nina C. Young, Memento Mori (modulated); Alex Taylor, Descent (modulated); La Nuit de l’Arène — uncredited: the recording carries no name; if it is yours, write, and the credit will be corrected.

READ: Alogical Isness; Lacero, from Malgré Tout: a Guide to Nothingness.

Voice: synthetic. Pictures: code, citation, and the film’s own earlier generations. Every source, every window, every rule: wuld.ink/illogically-is/apparatus

W.U.L.D.: Incorporated · wuld.ink · the treatise this film reads: Alogical Isness