Pillars and Tongues - Points of Light

This film was shot on 16mm and super-8 film by Randy Sterling Hunter over a period of 6 months in Vienna, Austria; Trincomalee, Sri Lanka; and Berlin, Germany. "Points of Light" is taken from Pillars and Tongues' October 2013 full-length, END-DANCES (Empty Cellar Records).

"Crowley investigated the creative potentials of humans -- and how through magick, those potentials could be realized. In our contemporary situation the prevalence of irony and mimicry has obscured this process. Often, people will make a film about magick. My aim is not to make films about magick but to make magick films. Similarly, my generation seems quite interested in the psychedelic culture of the 1950s - 1960s. This fascination makes it difficult to see that the psychedelic pioneers were not interested in psychedelia, they were psychedelic. They didn't do psychedelic things, they lived psychedelically.

The film for "Points of Light" is a magick film. When I watch the film, I see my present, past, and future simultaneously. If that experience wasn't possible, then it wouldn't have been worth making. This is not a film for other people, nor are any of my other films. They are public and they exist in the world but they exist only because through making them I am able to exist in the present, past, and future all at once.

I'm not surprised that Mark Trecka and I crossed paths. That was inevitable because we share the same orbit on the same plane of existence. What you see in the document of this crossing of paths is the result of a 6 month long dealing of the cards. The deck Trecka and I needed to use didn't exist, so we brought our own into being."

Special thanks/ additional Camera - Maria A. Mäser
Randy Sterling Hunter, Vienna, Autumn 2013
This film was made under the auspices of a Fulbright grant funded by the Austrian-American Educational Commission.
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"Randy Sterling Hunter and I were connected through our mutual friend Angel Olsen. He and I connected in Vienna, talked briefly, went our separate ways, and met again some hours later, after a brief segue into sleep, starting work on the film more or less immediately.

Just as immediately, an exchange of ideas -- which would present themselves as potential themes for the film -- began. Something that feels profound, in a very personal way, then seemed to happen while working: we rapidly developed ideas, committed to further exploring said ideas, and then discarded such commitments and ideas. This was not an intentional process, nor was it, at least it seems to me, a matter of ambivalence. Instead, I think our collective creative energies created a sort of overflow. Each idea, each concept served to provide a sort of guidance, as they do; but more than that, each concept seemed to collapse time and intention, more like a spread of cards would. These spreads seem to me to be concealed within the work, rather than having just informed it.

My view of this film is obviously skewed by my intimate involvement in it, but I cannot shake the feeling that all of the themes and concepts which were "discarded" have informed the work in such a way that a sort of spell is cast, paralleling in experience one of the primary themes which has been concealed within the work."

Mark Trecka, Chicago, Autumn 2013