Wees, William C. “Light-Play and the Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film.” In _Avant-Garde Film_, 23:183–96, 2007. doi:10.1163/9789401200035_011. > "...as illustrated in films by Jim Davis, Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, cinema offers a unique means of **creative light-play** that cannot be duplicated in digital media, leaving open the question of whether – or how – the philosophical-theological-aesthetic significance of light can survive in avant-garde digital art." Quoted from (Moholy-Nagy 1969: 80): > "I remember the overpowering impression of the first film I saw in Munich in 1912; the content of the film was tasteless and left me totally unmoved – only the power of the alternating brilliant white to the deepest black – what a wealth of new expressional possibilities. Needless to say, these primary means of filmic representation – **moving light arranged in a rhythmic pattern** – was totally disregarded in this film as it is in modern films, in which time and again the literary content of the action plays the principal part." Quoted from (Germaine Dulac 1978: 46): > To strip the cinema of all those elements which did not properly belong to it, to find its true essence in the understanding of movement and visual values: this was the new esthetic that appeared in the light of a new dawn. \[...\] Within pure cinematic means, beyond literature and theatre \[avant-garde filmmakers\] sought emotion and feeling in movement, volumes and forms, playing with transparencies, opacities and rhythms. It was the era of pure cinema. Quoted from (Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema 2003: 15, 92): > When I first encountered avant-garde films in the early 1960s, the works I found most interesting were those that were discovering a language unique to film, a language where film itself became the place of experience and, at the same time, was an evocation of something meaningfully human. […] Beyond everything else, film is a screen, film is a rectangle of light, **film is light sculpture in time.** "This extra-filmic quality is most apparent when light is the principal subject of the film; that is, when the film is not only made with light, but is about light" p184 Wees distinguishes between "lighting" vs "filmically representing light". as "a means of expanding perception beyond the inherent properties of the medium." I would propose "***presenting light***" rather than (re)-presenting (or reproducing). I.E. the presented light (projected and reflected) is the medium. Quoted from (Moholy-Nagy 1969: 80) > “The essence of the reflected light play is a product of light-space-time tensions in color or > chiaroscuro harmonies and (or) in various forms by kinetic means, in a continuity of motion: as an optical passage of time in a state of equilibrium”. > "Moholy-Nagy was writing ...not about film, but about the visual effects of his own kinetic light modulators and what he called (1969: 21) “reflected light and shadow plays” created by several other Bauhaus artists in the 1920s. These experiments with ‘light play’ (including Moholy-Nagy’s series Lichtspiele \[1928-32\]) are a reminder that the background for an aesthetics of light in avant-garde film includes a non-cinematic art of “creating a light-space-time continuity in the synthesis of motion” – another phrase from Moholy-Nagy (1969: 21) p186 > The history of Western philosophy includes a metaphysics of light that was concisely stated by the 9th century philosopher-theologian Johannes Scotus Erigena: **“Omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt”**, which Ezra Pound translated in Canto 74 as, “All things that are are lights”, and Stan Brakhage re-stated as “All that is is light” when talking about his film The Text of Light (1974). > Later ‘light philosophers,’ most notably Bishop Robert Grosseteste, elaborated on Erigena’s dictum, proposing that the light permeating the universe emanates from the Godhead (light in its purest, most spiritual form) and becomes visible in the everyday, material world. Within a less metaphysical and more familiar tradition of Christian art, light is commonly equated with the Deity and with such visible manifestations of divinity as the halos and rays of light representing the divine entering the earthly sphere. Even light passing through stained glass windows could acquire an aura of holiness for worshippers observing its glowing colors from within the gloom of medieval cathedrals. wees goes on to outline a number of Music>Light artists, Laszlo's Sonchromatoscope, and Wilfred. Wilfred on film > Wilfred refused to have lumia performances filmed. He felt that even projected at 24 fps. the lumia’s continuity of motion would be destroyed if recorded as separate, still images. He also believed that “the intensity range of a lumia was too vast for any known reproduction process” (Stein 1971: 30). ^2d4f3a followed by an extensive section on Jim Davis Davis is covered at length in Suárez, Juan A. “Ruins, Magical Objects, Litter, Synthetics.” In _Experimental Film and Queer Materiality_. Oxford University Press, 2024. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197566992.003.0002. Davis, Jim. 1992. The Flow of Energy. (ed. Robert Haller). New York: Anthology Film Archives. Evolution. Directed by James Davis. Filmmakers Showcase, 2015. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/Evolution-4.