Collisions/Religions

Paring it down, that's what we're doing with Blood, paring and peeling, flaying and stripping. What's left when there is (seemingly) nothing?

For some reason, I am reminded of Tzintzuntzan,the ancient P'urhépecha (Tarascan) city built on a volcanic slab high above the shore of Lake Patzcuaro, in Michoacan, Mexico. Climb to the top and out there is the slithering verdigris of the semi-tropics and there, below, are the oldest olive trees in the Americas, bone-like and balding, and somewhere up here in the vast ceremonial tableau, humans were boiled or flambeed or just simply bled, in sacrifice to the all-God, Kurikaweri.

Nowadays, the problem is ritual sex and all the empty bottles of Modelo Especial. And the lake below is choking on commercial fertilizer. It would be fun to diagram the biological/ecological and cultural collisions.

Flambe this world and there will still be collisions, only these will particles or atoms following some sequence of events preordained by genes. The particles will collide seemingly at random. And that's what happens in Blood, when there are only remnants left of various human civilizations drawing to a close. People collide, as if at random (and yet we know it isn't random). And are there gods at play? Do our characters--Martine and Santi, Baca and Henry and Juh--exist only in the collisions? Or are they yet seeking and imagining other, more pure, worlds? In an e-mail exchange, Anders and I collided, or grazed slightly, over the existence of "religion" in Blood:

N: The space between the infinite and the intimate is existence and when we touch one of the various lines in that space, for example, to quote a narrator of mine, "Somewhere in here, it occurred to me, there is a pair of animals, great bulbous ants or praying mantises or ducks or foxes or rats, who are fornicating, touching, pressing against the line that separates ecstasy from evisceration," we hit religion.

A: The nagging discomfort is also (somehow) absolutely optimistic in that it presents possibility and one could equate that to a sense of hope. A nice abstract beauty in that. Hopefully that sense will prevent boredom when watching three men riding horses to nowhere. Interesting that you should say "religion", while I understand the sentiment, I also feel that it is very much the opposite of religion, but perhaps in a different way. Camus had a nice line about his disdain for Communism, comparing it to religion in that they both sacrificed the man of today for the man of tomorrow. I'm not saying this to be contrary to what you are saying, it's just funny how these things cross and mesh and blur. I see the film as very immediate and inherently lacking any promise beyond itself.