I went to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. The Cathedral is stunning, but I was more dazzled by the surprising inhabitant of the Cathedral’s gardens. Here is even more evidence of the breathtaking unpredictability and wonder of New York.

In trying to understand the sky and heavens above New York, I decided to take the most simple approach I could muster: observation. Everyday for two weeks I took reference footage of the sky above New York with my cellphone in the off chance that I would capture something that I haven’t noticed during my day to day operations.

At the end of those two weeks of observation I met a man, Jonathon (with his kids), on the sidewalk outside of a small East Village congregation and he proceeded to welcome me inside and talk with me about his perception of heaven. I recorded our conversation on my cellphone.

This a portrait of my three friends Lou, Blake and Xavier, who also happen to be roommates.

However, instead of focusing on each individual’s portrait, in THREE BROTHERS I explore to what extent my perception of each individual is an entity that would be incomplete without reference to the others.

All three tell of adventures either true or fictitious: Holus Bolus.

T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock’ has influenced and continues to influence my ‘days and ways’ ever since I first encountered the poem when I was thirteen. I remember hating the poem when I first read it, but I hated it only because I did not understand. After reading and re-reading it many times, reflecting and considering its winding ways, I began to understand: I began to understand that life is beyond our capacity to understand and therefore by quelling our pressing desire to make sense of the senseless, we can understand it more: as George Orwell said in his book ‘1984’, “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength” What I take from Orwell is that the minute we categorise and label something is the minute its mystery, its boundless form, its ability to surprise is quite removed.

In this film, I wanted to show man walking away from what he knows, to turn his back on the ‘one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants’, to remove himself from the ‘streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent’. The image of the sophisticated world: the highways, the cars, the consumerism, the happy MacDonald smiles that infiltrate a increasingly dissatisfied society is overlaid with the simple image of a pair of feet that walk towards the camera; away from the flow of traffic into the city; away from our ‘civilised’ society. Why I wanted to do this was because I feel that so much of the way we think today, the way we act, is mediated and influenced by the media and governing powers. We’ve come to depend too much on the thinking of others, denying our instinct to the point where we no longer feel our instinct.

In essence I wanted this short film to be a turn on everything we are educated to do and to believe in: this idea that we must have jobs, we should marry and have a family. But what happens when the day comes where we look at ourselves in the mirror and say: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, the day we realise that we kept telling ourselves ‘there will be time, there will be time’, and now all that time is gone. That our lives have been wasted on dreaming of the future and living in the past, it’s such a rare thing to meet someone who lives every day as it comes, who lives entirely in the present, but why?

[Greek tuphlos, blind + -logy.]   I ultimately decided on the word “typhlology,” the medical study of blindness. Since coming to school in New York City, I have always been mystified and amazed when I see blind people effortlessly traverse the treacherous new york city streets. But what I really wanted to know, in a playful sort of way, was what these people imagined the city scape around them looking like. Everyone sees, understands and perceives the world around them differently, but what distorted visual perspective does someone without sight imagine New York to look like? Using 1957 film NY, NY: A Day in New York by Francis Thompson, which I found to be the perfect articulation of what I wanted to convey through a play on visual perspective, combined with a personal animated study of a blind man in New York City, I arrived at this…

“A Thousand Eyes” was created in conjunction with the Abecedarium: NYC project through the New York Public Library.

Of the 26 words I chose BIBLIOMANCY. My initial attraction to the word bibliomancy derives from my fascination with the absurd. I sometimes find that the most complex implications can be gleaned from absurdist expression in any form. Be it through performance, human interaction, film, literature, art, etc… Bibliomancy is the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers using a book, sometimes a bible or other sacred text is used. The book will be opened at a random page and while keeping your eyes closed you will point at a line or passage in the book. My passage was selected from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Siddhartha is one of my favorite books sitting on the shelf and also one that has had a significant impact on my attitude towards existence. Thus, I deemed it significant enough in my life to warrant such a divination. The inspiration for the film was the following passage:

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“Tenderly, he looked into the rushing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its drawing, so rich in secrets. Bright pearls he saw rising from the deep, quiet bubbles of air floating on the reflecting surface, the blue of the sky being depicted in it. With a thousand eyes, the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky-blue ones. How did he love this water, how did it delight him, how grateful was he to it! In his heart he heard the voice talking, which was newly awaking, and it told him: Love this water! Stay near it! Learn from it! Oh yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it. He who would understand this water and its secrets, so it seemed to him, would also understand many other things, many secrets, all secrets.”

I really wanted to represent my own view of New York through a lens. So I went out to the Brooklyn Bridge with my camera and shot this footage. “A Thousand Eyes” is essentially my own exploration of the possibilities of the apparatus of the cinema. I really wanted to exploit the camera and force it to do the opposite of what is expected. The result: Beauty.

It was edited to my own mix of hauntingly beautiful and reminiscent sounds from the Epson Stylus 600 printer, as recorded originally by melack from The Free Sound Project Organization.

blah.

Ryan P. Nethery
2009

PLEASE WATCH IN HD at: “A THOUSAND EYES” by Ryan P. Nethery