Pierre Huyghe's The Host and The Cloud, one of the best films I have seen this year. A two hour gallery piece in Marion Goodman, Rue du Temple, Paris. Masked individuals in and around chaotic abstracted rituals, perfectly disfigured, solemnly absurd. Taken, taken, taken.
As Baudelaire wrote in l'Etranger, the liminal poem from the Spleen de Paris, to the wanderer who had no mother, father, siblings, friends, land or wealth.
Eh! qu'aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire etranger?
J'aime les nuages ... les nuages qui passent ... la-bas ... la- bas ... les merveilleux nuages!
So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?
I love clouds... drifting clouds ... there ... over there ... marvellous clouds!
The advanced technological society is self-perpetuating, it pays us no heed. We create our own rituals, our own systems of law, religion, our own rites, avatars, our own bodies, drugs, personas. Can we wander into the void, experience Zhuangzi's distant lands of marvellous creatures beyond ordinary comprehension, the harmony between life and death?
These are the rabbits in The Host and the Cloud. The spirits of the rituals that we have left behind, unshocked ideas of love, play, salvation, the now useless passions of a categorising nexus. "Save them" the final plea into the darkness.
Please.
