The Mysteries of Nature (2008) Online

THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE Dahci Ma's lyrical exploration of the three realms by Deborah Greenhut, PhD

THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE comprises a diptych portraying human beings' spiritual relationships with the sky and the earth. Through beautiful and complex imagery, the film relies on contemporary technology and cinematic capture to illustrate the interdependence of the three realms, sky, earth, and human, which is a core trinity of Korean religion. In the two parts of the film, the primitive and the modern find their complements in one another. Dahci Ma, the director, collaborated to assemble the essence of yin and yang through a careful progression of mirroring images and repetitions of movement and image in the different realms—cinematic quotes that signify their interrelated, yet mysterious, essences.

At one end of the film, the dancers appear to merge with the sky as the climb a minimalist tower; at the other, they build reverential piles of stones. In both sequences of the film, viewers are compelled to strive with the dancers. Ma arranges and shifts perspectives and colors between the blue of the sky and the ochre of the earth. Viewers can easily empathize with the exertions of the dance. That all is interrelated is a point reinforced by Ma's frequent quotations of the film's own narrative. A strategic huddle of humans resembles the earth. The frame divides, offering a witty play on parallax view of the sky through the tower. This filmmaker is always thinking; her portrayal of a multi-layered dialectic is fluid and compelling. The ascent to probe the sky is powered by the angles and lines of the dancers' skeletons, mirrored in the rods of the tower; the corresponding dancers' delve into the earth is accomplished by burrowing their round parts in the dirt….heads, buttocks, musculature, the ball of a foot echo the hard stones so laboriously lifted into the center.

On first viewing, it may appear that two films have been joined together, linked by brief footage of black on white negative imagery in which the poles reverse from modern to primitive. The first sequence, primarily entailing blue-robed dancers' ascent to the sky, includes elements of the second, which depicts "grounded," earth-rubbed dancers probing the earth with every pore. A flock of pigeons, who have access to both sky and earth, seems, at first, to be all that ties the two beautiful halves together. But an attentive look reveals the intense interdependence of the first five minutes on the second. The capture begins with a lingering look at the shadow of a tower on the land, and then the following minute of the film surveys the entire landscape, high and low. The breathing of a single earthbound dancer captures the eye, and the pattern of dirt on his back and shoulders seems to replicate the structural pattern of the tower. One realm is never far from the other; always interrelated. This dancer's earthbound exertions echo the climbers on the tower just as the percussion of his breathing echoes the wind in that structure. By locating echoes of the sky on the earth, the filmmaker profiles the dancer's ascent to the sky. The mysteries are linked, and human efforts to understand or be immersed in them run a similar course. At about two and a half minutes, the film depicts two dancers at the same level of its' lattice work, presented to appear as a two-way mirror image of one another, revealing an idea that repeats in exciting variations throughout the film. Following this mirror, we see the sky reflected on the earth reflected back into the sky as the tower is captured from a new angle that depicts the dancer as a spider patrolling its web. The cranes and wires that enable these striking images are not visible to the viewer, but the impossible positions are another reminder of humans' attempts to merge sky and earth. In the fourth minute, we return to the ground, the sky-draped body curled opposite an earth-covered human around a circular pile of stones, and the ochre color is introduced. The two parts of the film are both divided and linked by a brief black and white sequence that comprises a yin and yang-like assembly of birds, rocks, and humans into the previous image. What we see for the next four or so minutes is the humans' achievement of that circular pile of stones.

In Korean philosophy, a deity can inhabit such a form. Shaky and intense, these dancers climb about the earth and in the dirt with the same passion of the dancing climbers in the first half of the film. In this primal ooze, the dancers exhibit jerky, uncertain infantile motions, contrasting with the agility of the sky dancers, and the image is often framed by fingers of light in the outer corners as if someone is looking down on and perhaps photographing or capturing the scene. This exhausting merger with the earth parallels the climb in the first half. The dancers complete the pile, rest, and then move to another part of the earth to begin moving rocks again. As they start to merge with another hill, there is a blackout, which concludes the film. We can assume the actions will recycle in time beyond the film.

While the film has been related in two parts, there is, finally, little division between the realms apart from the (limited) vocabulary we have to describe them. Ascent. Descent. Exertion. Release. Air. Earth. Birds. Humans. The fluidity of this film is all one verb: Dance. Which is also a noun.

* This article is published with permission from Dr. Deborah S. Greenhut.

Dr. Deborah S. Greenhut teaches writing at New Jersey City University. She serves on the board of Jennifer Muller/The Works, for whom she is developing a film on technique.