Before I was a Witch, I was a cinephile. When I was younger, I subscribed to the "Auteur Theory" of film appreciation, which posits that the best movies are essentially a masterful reflection of a god's eye view, and that in the case of cinema, the director is god. The Auteur Theory of the director doesn't describe a dreamer or a collaborator, but a visionary master of their medium, who, prior to shooting, has already meticulously perfected their next film in their head. To the Auteur, the sets, actors, and film stock are all uncarved blocks for them to impress their vision upon. Interestingly, though, I don't think many of the great directors of the last century actually experienced filmmaking this way. I think the Auteur Theory is a story created by film critics living in an era dominated by the ontology of scientific materialism, trying to find a way to classify this new art form in ways that conform to these limited beliefs.

If there is a poster child for the masterful Auteur, it has to be Stanley Kubrick. There's an entire feature-length documentary formed out of a collection of wild theories about the "hidden meanings" encoded in Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, all of which hinge on the shared belief that he was such a meticulous genius that any odd or out-of-place props or unrealistic set geography must have been intentional clues to a mysterious puzzle that only they could solve. A common example of Kubrick's perfectionism was the often torturous number of takes he would demand of his actors, even for what seemed like less significant moments in the story. The presumption being that Kubrick needed so many takes to ensure he had captured his unshakable vision.

In just the past few years, deep dives into Kubrick's creative process, through rare interviews with his closest collaborators, have burst this obsessive-genius bubble. His reputation for excessive takes, it turned out, was not an attempt to crystallize his inner vision, but rather giving the scene enough space for something he couldn't have scripted to manifest, no matter how long it took. This same porous approach to storytelling is why his film Dr. Strangelove went from being an existential thriller to a black comedy midway through development. After trying earnestly to adapt the novel Red Alert for months with its author, Peter George, at a certain point, they couldn't ignore the inherent absurdity of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction, and just leaned into it, or learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" as it were. A comedy "masterpiece" was born, completely by accident. Essentially, Kubrick was always just trying to "catch the big fish," as David Lynch would say, but he had such a difficult time doing it that his method became misconstrued as genius.

Although certainly an "Auteur" in his own right, David Lynch never conformed to the Auteur Theory's conception of a master over his craft. Lynch unapologetically rejected "explaining" his often confounding films, to the ire of critics, not because he had ingeniously encoded them like a puzzle for the viewer to solve, but because his films were designed as thresholds for the viewer to cross and experience on an individual level. To Lynch, the meaning of his films was intentionally subjective, circumventing the intellectual interrogation of the critic, who usually seeks to explain and "rate" the work, à la the scientific materialist paradigm. To some, this made Lynch less of a "master" of his craft and more of a madman with a budget.

It's this same use of art and imagination as a threshold state to engage with "The Other" that Chaise Levy sees in the works of William Blake and the Romantic movement he would go on to inspire. How might we see Blakean "Double Vision" as a form of seership? What can Romanticism teach us about animism? Chaise is here to tell us.

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