One of the highlights of visiting a film studio like Manchu Edison is a visit to the Props Room or Warehouse, a physical archive where all the bits and pieces used to decorate the set of different films are stored, in between the days when they are used as objects for pictures on the actual sound, or silent sound, stage. I remember visiting that very room at the old Japanese studio in Changchun, back in 2000. There were a lot of clocks, telephones, and guns. There are some bad pictures of that, but I'm not going to go hunt them down at this moment.

Here at the reconstruction of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation, we or I [the latter is not plural] also have a room like that, or should I say a collection of shelves, and on some of the shelves that are some useful Ikea boxes [vaguely useful, they have funny shapes, which I think mean something in that country] where the components of unbuilt maquettes are stored. These are pieces for the reconstruction of devices that previously probably existed, and should be stored someplace, but aren't, except as thoughtful fragments not yet used to make maquette reconstructions, which together are being stored in sorted boxes in anticipation of that activity.

Above for instance is the BENSHI box, which word is Japanese for Movietalker. I don't speak the language, so that is the best match I can come with. Please try to remember that the Movietalkers of Manchu Edison are not benshi, they are something that came after that, but more on this subject later.

Here's the first thing out of the box:

This fragment or almost complete device does not have a name or number yet, and thus is not part of the studio. It is a portable device for determining direction, and then transmitting this information in every direction [though not through iron walls, there are limits] using the electrical powers of thought. I am only guessing here, it will of course take more thought so to speak to figure out what it was or how it worked. But I can say that it does work, even through windows, and so probably worked well in Manchuria.

Here is a short, transitioning from the Wikipedia introduction of a previous post, to a closer look at the Steam Nation.

In the fiction, Manchuria is constructed and ruled by the Pure Land Motion Railroad Corporation. You could say that the Pure Land Motion RR is literally embodied here, but in fact that is just the narrator, narrating in the center of the screen as the pictures tell the story. The Pure Land Motion RR came into being many years before, or ago, at a time when the Japanese started to  become expert in the construction of mobile cities. As part of the work of the Railroad, these eventually left Japan, and ended up on the Chinese mainland, in the new country of Manchuria. There is a problem, however, which is that  Manchuria is after the literal End of the World... ie that broken zone after the edge of the flat earth. Having traveled too far, the Pure Land Motion RR has fallen over this end of the earth, and falling, has arrived at Manchuria, which is more than a country, but in fact an entire planet in the sky.

In history, or the Wikipedia, or other books, Manchuria as a nation [of sorts] came into being directly from what was called the South Manchurian Railway Zone, an independent political entity which itself came into being after the Russo-Japanese War, and which in places wasn't much wider than the railroad that ran inside it, from the sea towards the center of the country. Thus, the railway was both the country and the border, in a certain sense.

A continuation of the previous post, a little bit further along into the idea. 

Just as Morse met Daguerre in Paris [the day the diorama warehouse burned down], so do the representatives of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation visit the Pathe Studios in central Paris, not long after the opening of the Manchurian Pavillion at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale. This of course is all reconstruction here, but is more than likely accurate, at least according to the levels of historical science adopted by the machinery of this fiction.

Stereography, or should we say stereopsis, was discovered or invented by Charles Wheatstone, who also measured the velocity of electricy [faster than sound], invented various musical instruments, not including the famous Wheatstone bridge, and in fact was in fact active in telegraphy at the time of the painter Morse. The Cooke and Wheatstone electric telegraph "did not support punctuation, lower case, or the letters J, Q, and Z."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Wheatstone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_telegraph

More on Manchu Edison as it develops, so to speak.

It is a bit of a long story... but the short of it is that about a month and a half ago, I saw the theatre/installation "And All The Question Marks Began To Sing" at the Exit Festival, at the Maison des Arts in Creteil, that communist fantasyland and capital of the Val de Marne, just south of Paris. After a variety of recognitions, I asked Lisbeth Bodd, one of the leaders of the collective, if I could... 1: shoot a short installation documentation, to put on my .com site, to attract arts clients, and 2: use some of the material I shot in "...THE LOST TRIBES". Being both generous and gracious [as well as interested], they agreed. End of the shoot, I gave them all the raw footage, went home, and ended up taking too much time making the first version. The installation is a loop, more than half an hour, with a lot of different aural, image, and movement elements [everything moves, as you will see if you watch the video... everything makes noises and images too, if just shadows and reflections in the simplest cases]. I sat there for almost 6 hours... I must have recorded it 5 times. Since I just shot... this was the first real use I've made of my jib... it was all a bit run and gun, so finding the overlaps and making them make sense was a difficult job. The first version I made used my subtitle writing system... that was useful, but to really get something out, and not overlay their work with my thoughts too much on the first go round, I went to wordless version, and this is the result. My only regret is that it sounds much better with headphones... on bad speakers, the voices of all the children there all day long get foregrounded. I'll leave it like this, however, since it was already too much work.

In LOST TRIBES... well, this is a reconstruction of the Blood Projector in center of the Central Station Planetarium Cinema, in the center of the new Manchuria Capital of Shinkyo, sometime in the mid-1930s. It is an machine used in the presentation of the telepathic cinema. There's a lot of existing visual material [and thoughts, and story] in the project that matches what Verdensteatret built [has built, and continues to build], so I'm glad to have these pictures... thanks! In Wax, I used a lot borrowed scenary as well... for instance, the wax figurines, which were art works made [with bee assistance] by the artist Garnett Puett.

I'll try to get something of the um alternate version out to this blog in the um not too distant future.

Having a system of reading while writing and writing while reading, well, that was always a simple dream from the previous project. I'm old enough to remember that the only way to read through a subject was to be in the university library, or the great hall of the New York Public Library, and call for things as you wrote or as you read, or as you waited and thought, or just waited, or walked to where the catalogue was, or were the book might be.... etc.

About three years ago, having a head that was too full and unable to remember everything, and unable to find a proper tool to do the above... it seemed that my main process and ability was to create archive, rather than remember where things were while writing... which led to my not writing so much... I just gave up and started to print everything out.  And I did that... the picture above is about 1/3 of it, at the peak. What did I print?

My internet research... I'd tried bookmarks, I'd tried Zotero, and I just couldn't get past sorting, much less on to remembering. And of course, reviewing links for printing had the good result of leading to new links and thoughts, so the research expanded in the areas that were of interest at that moment. That gave initial feedback and value to this new old somewhat desperate system.

Not printed, but sorted in, at this point, was typical archive material, papers picked up in places of interest [Aum Shinrikyo tracts picked up on the street in Tokyo, specific stuff like that].

Then I printed the script, broken down to a paragraph a page, for reviewing, remembering, thinking, sorting.

Then I printed a visual log of all the shots in my edit, a grid that went on just about forever.

Why did I do this? Because I couldn't write while making video, couldn't cut video while writing, couldn't remember one either well while doing the other, and so wanted a neutral remembering place. Paper and notebooks were familiar, and not invisible ... that was one of the first things noticed about video, so many years ago, that it was basically invisible, unless you were lucky enough to have machines, electricity, the actual videotape, and a place to use them all at once. So this system worked, at least while putting to together. 

And it served it's rhetorical purpose, at least, which was to find a place which put everything together, or more simply put, to find a way to read while writing and in reverse. Someplace easy to get to, easy to review, easy to take apart and reassemble. Which is what I'm doing now, first taking out the chaff... I'm throwing things away, as you can see in the picture at the bottom... just as I've gone back to the script in the computer, to review systems in the computer [using evernote at the moment for clipping], and to literal and simple video-writing systems [see post before last]. It was good to get everything out of my head, now it's nice to put it back in there, as needed.