Glitches and Life: Some Precious Things

(2021)

In Some Precious Things, a 5 minute short by Baga Defente, we hear a man leaving an audio message for his daughter in which he tells her a long story with a surprising twist. Visually, Defente has utilized home movie footage and vintage film and TV footage to tell a parallel visual story, translating the man’s message into visual terms in a way that turns our attention specifically to the role of media and personal filmmaking in our lives.

The man tells his daughter about a day he spent exploring family mementos, which he finds in the attic, including old Super 8 and VHS home movies. We’re watching footage of a happy family on vacation, kids swimming and playing in the water, everyone enjoying the sunshine and the relaxation. Over the course of the film, the man’s memories lead him to a recurring dream about dinosaurs he had as a child, which somehow leads into something like a psychedelic experience, where he retreats inside the primordial energy at the heart of all existence, experiencing a revelation about the fundamental nature of reality.

The visual montage which accompanies this deepening of the story takes us to some grainy old footage, depicting the dinosaur age, and eventually the montage includes some fragments from a Brakhage film. The colorized, scratched abstractions from Dog Star Man, superimposed over images of a solar eclipse, provide a visual analog for the experience of traveling down into the fundamental energetic levels of reality. Abstract filmmakers like Brakhage, Defente implies, are trying to probe into the core, inner experience of vision itself, and of cinema.

The film ends with a kind of “return trip” back into ordinary mundane life, as the man closes his message to his daughter with affectionate greetings and a question about how to digitize the home movies he has found. This last section shows us home movies once again, but the frames here are constantly interpenetrated with video glitches and jarring edits. We are returning to the ordinary, everyday world, but this world is now permeated with our awareness of the underlying mechanisms which produce our consciousness and the reality around us. This is a fascinating comment on the use of hand-processed film and video glitches by experimental artists: they transform the smooth, illusionistic quality of conventional footage by permeating it with an awareness of the underlying mechanics of consciousness.

In Some Precious Things, Defente uses home movies as a way of referencing memory and its effect on our awareness. A trip into our personal past sometimes leads us into a trip into the past of the universe itself. With his use of montage, Defente compares this to our experience of archival film materials, and to the drive of artists such as Brakhage to use abstraction to explore fundamental levels of experience. The film is a kind of meta-narrative, using a relatable, everyday story to demonstrate the drive behind some of “experiments” which experimental filmmakers undertake. It becomes a story about why some artists so strongly reject the idea of cinema as an illusion of reality.

Certain people recall having experienced, early in life, a moment of extraordinary revelation, a visionary peek into the nature of reality. I think of Allen Ginsburg and his experience, at age 22, of hearing William Blake’s voice reading his poem Ah! Sun-flower. These revelatory visions become a touchstone for an entire lifetime, guiding and shaping a person’s values and way of navigating through life’s challenges. Memories such as these can indeed be “precious things,” and Defente shows us a man recalling just such a childhood vision, and wanting to share the guidance and wisdom he derived from it with his daughter.

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