Join Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny for three screenings of their first full-length feature film. Following two earlier collaborative film projects in 2008 and 2021, THE SECRET WORLD was initially conceived as an attempt to create a portrait of a mutual friend, Christine Burgin, through the lens of her unique personal library. Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s iconic short story, “The Library of Babel,” they devised a project that would give life to the vast, hexagonal library described in Borges’s narrative through an exploration of speculative spaces within Burgin’s shelves.
The result is a phantasmagoria of structural and intuitive methodologies. Throughout, Burgin is heard informally leading a guided tour of extraordinary books, while the images that appear on the screen, constructed out of polychromatic layers, are scrambled and reformed into a riotous mélange. Everything seen in the film has been transmuted through a process of “re-filming” on a hand-held 16mm Bolex camera, ultimately unifying the incompatible formats of film, VHS video, and 35mm slides. Taking form as a shifting clockwork of thirty short chapters, the film responds to the library’s matrix of visionary ideas. The physical nature of the library – a collection of books in which the authors have each created their own self-contained universe – is re-envisioned as a labyrinth larger than the space that contains it.
Alternating chapters shift between short visual essays built out of an arsenal of hallucinogenic color transformations and an intimate narration describing 19th and 20th century iconoclastic figures, from Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Ford, and Richard Shaver, to Wilhelm Reich. This mostly forgotten cast of characters – while often famous or infamous in their own time – engaged in wildly diverse enterprises, including photographs that purported to directly visualize thought emanating through the skull, histories of the lost Atlantean people discovered inside of rock formations, the creation of perpetual motion machines, and photographic documentation of the manifestation of “ectoplasm” during historic performances. The musical cadence of Burgin’s voice grounds these mysteries, suggesting that together they constitute a necessary way of thinking about collective reality.