Chakra

Duration:

Year Published: 1972

Creator: Jordan Belson

Complete Record: Experimental short by Jordan Belson Usually the subjects I chose to build images around had some kind of traditional form of their own that I found useful in constructing my film. Take Chakra (1972), for instance. If you study the chakras (the psychic centers in the body), you find that there are seven of them…They’re usually depicted as arranged along the spinal column and described starting from the bottom, going to the top. Each chakra has its own unique characteristics, and centuries of elaboration and analysis have accumulated around these characteristics... In Chakra, I was able to transfer the traditional order of the chakras into a film, starting with the first (lower) chakra and working up to the seventh (top) chakra… While I was doing the soundtrack for Chakra, I came across a list of the sounds people have reported hearing when in deep meditation, traditionally about ten sounds. The first is what they describe as the sound of the honey-intoxicated bee. Then there’s the sound of a motor and the sound of a bell, the sound of a flute, and the sound of thunder. I just went right down the list, exactly as listed in the book, and put those sounds on the soundtrack to accompany the chakras. - Belson, interview with Scott MacDonald, quoted in A Critical Cinema 3 From http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/BelsonFilmNotes.html