Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
Veterans of this Cabinet will know that the states of absorption or immersion have been ongoing concerns of ours going back to our earliest issues, and even beyond, to “the Pillow of Air” column I used to contribute to The Believer magazine and the aesthetic upon which I originally founded my ill-fated single-issue Omnivore journal—which is to say those moments when our sudden stupefaction facing the world grows so profound that a pillow of air seems to lodge itself in our throats and we suddenly notice we haven’t even taken a breath in tens of seconds.
And some of you may remember two short films in particular which I linked to, I can’t remember the context, which deep-mined that specific territory of regard. The first being “Behold the Face,” the exquisite 1968 short in which the master Russian documentarian Pavel Kogan (1931-1998) trained his concealed camera upon a successions of visitors to The Hermitage Museum as they trained their own hushed gazes upon a magnificent Leonardo Madonna.
more here.
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