Kerrigan's production company at the time of 'Clean, Shaven' was called DSM III, after the manual of mental disorders, revealing his intentions in attempting an accurate portrayal of mental illness, and specifically schizophrenia. The result is a radically subjective film that immerses viewers in the terrifying world of its protagonist to a degree seldom seen in film. (Only a few other examples of such subjective madness come to mind: David Cronenberg's 'Spider' and Roman Polanski's 'Repulsion'.)

The main character, Peter Winter (Peter Greene), suffers from almost constant auditory hallucinations, paranoid delusions and compulsive behavior. After being released from a mental hospital, he travels in his car looking for his young daughter, who has been put up for adoption during his absence. A subplot - somewhat superfluous - has a police detective follow Winter, suspecting him of murdering another young girl.

Apart from Greene's astonishing performance, much of the film's power lies in its sound design, by Hahn Rowe. From the start we are made to experience Winter's hallucinations with him, through a soundtrack filled with radio static, random voices, children laughing and menacingly buzzing power lines. Contrary to cinema's conventions, much of the sound has no clear connection with what we see, forcing us to accept it as pieces of a puzzle that will never really fit. It even leads us to distrust the narrative itself, and makes us realize that closure is a luxury of the sane. As one voice on the radio (or in Winter's head?) exclaims: "For you it's paranoia, for me it's reality."

Reality is always a subjective experience, but what if our normal filters of non-relevant input malfunction, and everything we perceive attains the status of 'meaningful'? How could we ever - quite literally - make sense of the world around us? As critic Michael Atkinson points out in his video essay 'A Subjective Assault' (available on the Criterion DVD), "it's the lack of context that is terrifying, and it's the absence of focus of context that seems to make mental illness in general so painful, and life for the schizophrenic a litany of unreadable codes."

The same fragmentary and chaotic perception is carried through in the film's visual style, again making us experience reality through Winter's eyes. Early on we see him covering the rearview mirrors and side windows of his car, in an attempt to shut out his own reflection - but also to reduce his world to manageable proportions. While he finds relative moments of peace in small rituals, putting sugar in his coffee or spreading mustard on a sandwich, the world to him is mostly a scary, incomprehensible place filled with ominous meaning just beyond his grasp. Thus the imagery is dominated by disjointed close-ups of wall, skin and food textures, weird newspapers headlines and other compulsive details - crosscut with Winter's terrified, piercing eyes. (See for example this series of stills.)

Like 'Keane', 'Clean, Shaven' deals with fatherhood as a redemptive ideal, restoring some degree of stability to a mentally diseased mind. Though Winter's intentions towards his daughter are long left in suspense, when he finally meets her we recognize it as the only genuine communication he's had throughout the film. It makes the scene where Winter explains to his daughter that he has a radio receiver in his head and a transmitter in his finger - both of which we have seen him try to remove - truly heartbreaking. Only a child would accept at face value such psychotic ideas, but it is precisely what Winter was looking for all along: someone to listen to his version of reality without judgment.

'Clean, Shaven' has often been called "uncompromising", and it definitely makes for some very uncomfortable viewing. But Kerrigan's "subjective assault" is effective enough to make one interpret the film's tragic ending, not as Greene who doesn't comprehend the outside world, but the outside world (personified by the pursuing detective) who doesn't comprehend him. By that time we have learned to see through his eyes and acquired psychological insight in his tragically troubled mind.

Most of all, though, we have gained empathy for those who are engaged in a continuous, desperate struggle with what most of us take for granted: reality itself.

In 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', Douglas Hofstadter used this picture as an example of what he called 'strange loops', where two levels of reality interconnect in an endless circularity: the man in the picture gallery looking at a picture of a town with a picture gallery containing the man looking at the picture, and so forth ad infinitum.

But as Hofstadter realized, the picture also suggests another kind of loop, contained in the white patch in the middle, where Escher put his signature.

...Escher could not have completed that portion of the picture without being inconsistent with the rules by which he was drawing the picture. That center of the whorl is - and must be - incomplete. Escher could have made it arbitrarily small, but he could not have gotten rid of it.

What the team at Leiden University showed is that in the center the picture would endlessly repeat in smaller versions of itself. This is what in Dutch is called the Droste effect, after the famous Droste cocoa tin with the nurse carrying a tray with a cocoa tin with a nurse carrying a tray with a cocoa tin, and so forth ad infinitum again.

Thus 'Print Gallery' contains an infinitely recursive infinite loop. Its dizzying effect is best experienced in these animations.

See also this NY Times article.

While most of their creations needed some form of photographic or software trickery to achieve Escher's optical illusions, 'Relativity' is just Lego (though definitely in the advanced category).

The first one, 'Metamorphosis I' (1937), is still of 'normal' proportions, depicting a single transition from a coastal town via a block pattern to an Oriental figure. The town is inspired by the tiny Italian town Atrani, which had already been the subject of an earlier Escher print ('Atrani, Coast of Amalfi').

'Metamorphosis II' (1939-40), measuring almost four meters in length, features a whole series of transitions, both morphing patterns and pictorial transitions. The town of Atrani reappears, this time transforming into a chessboard.

Elaborating still further, 'Metamorphosis III' (1967-68) is almost seven meters long and interposes a number of new transitions into the earlier version. New elements include, for example, birds becoming sailing boats becoming fish. Would be awesome to see this one up on a wall sometime.

Behold and scroll through full-length images here:

• 'Metamorphosis II'
• 'Metamorphosis III'

They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose - Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them - not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

"We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches," said Abe. "Nevertheless Dick isn't the only man with repose -"

"Oh, yes, I am."

"- but he may be the only sober man with repose."

A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched - whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.

(...)

"You see," said Dick smugly, "I'm the only one."

Ironically, this repose is precisely what Diver will be losing in his subsequent downfall, when the relationship with his wife - a former patient of him - starts unravelling and he must face the fact that he was bought by her family as a personal doctor.

By the end, looking back on this scene, it seems to contain the moral of the story: money doesn't buy repose. It is what separates the American nouveau riche from the old European nobility, and it is shown painfully in Diver's ugly antics in the final part of the book. (If embarassing behavior is the opposite of having repose, Diver embodies it, loudly and drunkenly.) But at the same time, the European repose conceals a whole spectrum of eccentricity and mental illness, as witnessed in Diver's wife and the patients that flock to his clinic in Switzerland.

Thus Fitzgerald paints a curious mutual dependency between America and Europe, like the lame trying to cure the blind while the blind tries to teach the lame to walk suavely. Both fail, but in Fitzgerald's story the American fails much more miserably. The story's cynical conclusion is that Diver's wife emerges from their broken marriage, perhaps not cured but at least stronger, more balanced, while he himself, the once idealistic psychoanalyst, has lost everything and drifts away into obscurity.

Owing to Fitzgerald's long struggle with 'Tender is the Night', two versions of the book are in print (and available online): the original edition (1934) using flashbacks, and a revised edition (1951) which tells the story chronologically. Though the first version is more suspenseful, the second version brings out more clearly the 'rise and fall' structure of the story, which has an almost Greek tragedy inevitability.

Meanwhile the smaller stages yield such discoveries as Toto Bona Lokua, the global collaboration between Richard Bona (Cameroon), Gerald Toto (France/Martinique) and Lokua Kanza (Congo), with an African-Carribean sound and extended jamming reminding of Orchestra Baobab.

And then - to complete the NSJ spectrum - you stumble upon a solo performance by Dutch singer Leine, tucked away on a side stage and almost too fragile for its surroundings. Her own breezily soulful songs were complemented by an endearing rendition of the oft-covered Kermit the Frog classic 'Bein' Green'.

It's not that easy bein' green
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer being red or yellow or gold
Or something much more colorful like that

It's not easy bein' green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're
Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
Or stars in the sky

But green's the color of Spring
And green can be cool and friendly-like
And green can be big like an ocean
Or important like a mountain
Or tall like a tree

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But why wonder, why wonder?
I am green and it'll do fine
It's beautiful!
And I think it's what I want to be

(Watch the original Sesame Street version here.)

Update: NRC has a podcast with Leine.

His life's work, a collection titled 'Animal Locomotion' and containing 20,000 photos in all, is a curious mix of biomechanical science and Victorian naughtiness. Various animals and humans are shown in characteristic movement: horses and cats running, birds flying and nude males conducting sports (jumping, rowing, throwing, boxing, fencing) -- while nude females are shown waving a handkerchief or putting on a dress.

Here the scientific titles of his plates turn slightly ridiculous, with descriptions like 'Movements, Female, Miscellaneous phases of the toilet' or 'Movements, Female, Lifting shawl, putting around shoulders, turning.' But the most hilarious example must be the one titled 'Throwing Self on Heap of Hay', showing a woman, well... throwing herself on a heap of hay. (A partial animation of this plate, alas lacking the actual 'throwing herself', can be found here.)

Described by a contemporary as "Walt Whitman ready to play King Lear," Muybridge's biography reads like an improbable adventure novel. His death, like his life, befitted his eccentric genius: after returning to England, he died in 1904 while building a model of the Great Lakes in his backyard.

UPenn, which at the time provided many of Muybridge's models, has a great Muybridge Collection.

Stanford Magazine has an interesting article on Muybridge, 'The Man Who Stopped Time'.

So, drop me a line ;)

Official project launch is at Siggraph next month.

Via Neural and BBC.