Begging to Be Born: Dreaming Together in Storm De Hirsch’s The Tattooed Man
Art & Trash, episode 41
Begging to Be Born: Dreaming Together in Storm De Hirsch’s The Tattooed Man
Stephen Broomer, September 20, 2024
In 1969, De Hirsch received a grant from the American Film Institute to make a film adaptation of her poem, “The Tattooed Man.” The resulting film renders the experience of a dream, imagined as the course of a life, a world in itself. Her players are assigned roles as the makers, dreamers, and killers of the dream. Prentiss Wilhite and P. Adams Sitney appear as the makers of the dream, and as such serve as the film’s central figures; by their designation as makers of the dream, they are cast in god-like roles, sacred beings set apart from the dreamers and the killers, who they are, by some supernatural or hypnotizing psychic force, drawing into a collective dream.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer places De Hirsch's film in the context of her poetry and of the underground community around her. The Tattooed Man is a mythopoeic film, a portrait of genetic memory and trauma, a visionary quest.
SCRIPT:
Children of the Water World drift the ocean
in an empty crystal ball, swim
in beaded beds of mist, and spawn in pools
of murder to see a lantern sunk in the pit
of an empty face. They knock on wood, then
come to watch the Tattooed Man, marked
for life, tattooed
by tears running down the womb,
by thrashing crazy in the cage,
by lure of unscaled mountains
dancing in the specks of space.
I am the Dipper now of Night,
spinning silver on a planet’s silence
filled with whirring answers
begging to be born.
Storm De Hirsch conceived of “The Tattooed Man” first as a poem, in 1967. Its occult themes are common to De Hirsch’s poetry, which often dealt with ancient conflicts dreamt from past lives, unfolding in a cruel wilderness, “in back of the world.” “The Tattooed Man” has mythic implications that enhance a simple metaphor: it evokes the life of the dreamer who transcends the world as-we-know-it, a dreamer cut down by the dawn of an oncoming order. A self-styled tulpa with her faith pitched somewhere between arcane fascinations and psychedelic speculations, Storm De Hirsch was a product of her world, a modern Greenwich Village that was host to colliding cultural, spiritual, and cosmic iconographies. She began to make films after first establishing herself as a poet and as a critic and commentator on poetry. She made her films as an extension of her poetry, giving every roll she shot lyrical titles. Her involvement in the New York underground cinema movement began in the early 1960s, propelled by her marriage to editor Louis Brigante and their friendship with filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas. By the time that De Hirsch wrote “The Tattooed Man,” her films had already begun to assume the structures of an altered, psychedelic consciousness: in the mid-1960s, she started to release hallucinatory, discontinuous films with titles that provoke psychedelic mysticism, such as the hand-painted Peyote Queen, or Third Eye Butterfly, a dual-screen palindrome of unslit 8mm quadrants, an expanding and contracting field of images. Her films frequently visualize the poetic image she was chasing in her writing from the mid-1950s onward: the summoning of a primordial world, something half-imagined out of the barbarism, wit, and ritual found in the modern world.
In 1969, De Hirsch received a grant from the American Film Institute to make a film adaptation of “The Tattooed Man.” The resulting film renders the experience of a dream, imagined as the course of a life, a world in itself. Her players are assigned roles as the makers, dreamers, and killers of the dream. Prentiss Wilhite and P. Adams Sitney appear as the makers of the dream, and as such serve as the film’s central figures; by their designation as makers of the dream, they are cast in god-like roles, sacred beings set apart from the dreamers and the killers, who they are, by some supernatural or hypnotizing psychic force, drawing into a collective dream. De Hirsch had made a fiction film before this, her first film, the feature-length Goodbye in the Mirror, but The Tattooed Man is her longest experimental film. It is an attempt on her part to create a new myth, a myth of apocalypse and of rebirth, an impulse it shares with those films Sitney would later categorize as ‘mythopoeic’. This impulse to create a new myth is made clear by the poem itself, its narrator tattooed in “garments of conquest,” witnessing a transforming world, and finally, becoming a constellation, “the Dipper of night.” The legibility of this myth through composition and screen action is less clear. It is a series of episodes and motifs, a play of intuited meanings concealed in hallucinatory formal treatments, such as tinted and masked images, superimpositions, and projections onto bodies.
The Tattooed Man is a work of dense and elusive symbolism. It is a crowded dream, ‘made’ by three dreamers, the two avatars on screen—Wilhite and Sitney—and the filmmaker herself. It’s further populated by a large supporting cast of dreamers and killers, “the Children of the Water World.” The framework of the dream itself is unusual: Prentiss Wilhite reclines in the opening shot, and what follows, by dint of editing, reads as a subconscious projection; several minutes later P. Adams Sitney appears, in repose, and a new sequence begins. The two and their dreams will converge and overlap: Wilhite’s dream is one of imprisonment, concealment, menace; Sitney’s dream is likewise menacing, but also becomes erotic and tactile. Once introduced, these 'makers of the dream’ encounter one another, they begin to mix among the dreamers. Like a river fed by many tributaries, the flow of this dream cannot be broken down and attributed to either one of them: it becomes a collective dream, one in which rituals will pass episodically, cutting and bleeding into one another. These rituals are likewise broken down into component parts, shots that are intercut, suggesting parallel action occurring between multiple threads of a dream. Even from early in these episodes, it seems certain that there is no liberated ‘waking’ world: that there is something oneiric even to the framing scenes of Sitney and Wilhite. As makers of the dream, are they not dreamers themselves? There are hints of something else flowing from them, as when Sitney looks at Wilhite’s palm and a flash of Wilhite, nude, his body used as a screen for a projected image, briefly appears; subsequently, as Sitney touches Wilhite’s shoulder, he sees himself wearing a kimono in the woods, his proximity to the camera fluctuating with each percussive strike on soundtrack.
The film’s title draws from the considerable western fascination with the tattooed figure, from Groucho Marx’s paean to “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” to Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man,” but De Hirsch’s title, in the source poem, treats tattooing in a metaphoric, elusive way, “tattooed by tears running down the womb,” the tattoo as a burden of past, “tattooed by thrashing crazy in a cage,” the tattoo as a mark of trauma, gained by carceral knowledge and torture, “tattooed by lure of unscaled mountains dancing in the specks of space,” the tattoo as cosmic curiosity and discovery. This cycle guides the strange scenes that play out—scenes that suggest lineage and history; that suggest trauma and imprisonment; and that suggest adventure, cosmic rebirth, the coming into new knowledge and new ways of seeing the world. From early in the film, themes of incarceration are present, with figures peering through a fence, as if it imprisons them: later, the killers of the dream will swing from a giant pendulum, in an infernal space, a kind of limbo, where there are bare studs, another symbolic cage. The killers appear as hipster ghouls, wraiths in dark sunglasses, standing over Wilhite, torturing him. They do not kill the dream so much as interrupt it. The film’s prelude is a glimpse of their oneiric world, which is one of concealment, as a face in pale, overexposed light, a face wearing sunglasses, is glimpsed in fragments through obscuring paint applied directly to the film strip, a two-dimensional optical mask that blots out the details of their features, that sheers head from neck. The face, ever resilient, shows through. This commingling of photographic image and paint speaks to De Hirsch’s ideas of expanded consciousness and its representation through paint on film. In Peyote Queen, De Hirsch employed paint on film as a strategy to draw out subliminal mental images from within the viewer; it served the end of hypnosis. In The Tattooed Man, the symbolic image—in this case an image to fear—manifests as an underlayer, to pierce through the paint. Her use of Afro-Cuban conga percussion on the soundtrack mirrors both the rapid, violent movements of this floating mask and the tribal themes of the film.
This first encounter anticipates many aesthetic strategies that De Hirsch will employ through the course of The Tattooed Man. She repeats images, often with changing colour tints; she projects light and images onto bodies, a camouflage that cloaks the scenes in shadows; and she employs superimpositions to provoke the multitudes of vision. She aims her camera at water and reflections, in shots that provoke her description of the earth in the source poem as “the water world,” whose children “swim in beaded beds of mist, and spawn in pools of murder to see a lantern sunk in the pit of an empty face.” This image is a description of the two sets of players that are overtaking Wilhite and Sitney’s dream, those swimming in beaded beds of mist and spawning in pools of murder. What could this lyric be but the dichotomy of being born to naivety or born to violence? It is a binary of the innocent and the guilty, of the benign and the sinister. In a prolonged sequence, a naked woman is uncovered by a young man and the two sit together, posed in an ouroboros position, him clothed, her naked, the camera zooming in and out on them as the composition changes. Are these the naive children of the water world? Is she a drowned Ophelia or a Sleeping Beauty? When he first unwraps her, the woman’s appearance suggests death. In this dream, the barriers between life and death are porous, but they’re also meaningless because all of the figures that appear are mere symbol, representation, illusion. De Hirsch advances her own mystical syncretic faith, but the symbolism of The Tattooed Man approaches organized religion as well: a woman, tormented by kaleidoscopic religious imagery, slams her fists against a wall in frustration, bows at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and in silhouette, self-flagellating, another image of torture. Later, as a series of women’s faces are shown superimposed on a naked, kaleidoscopic image of a man masturbating, their expressions may suggest horror and revulsion, their hands held in front of their faces as if pressed to glass, posed in tableaux. Woman is looking upon as an erotic object, but, like the woman who self-flagellates at the feet of the Virgin Mary, the women respond to male masturbation with fear and rejection.
The flora and fauna of this 'water world’ is explored in a prolonged sequence: agitated water is tinted red, as De Hirsch’s poem suggests, a “pool of murder”; clouds pass rapidly in time-lapse; and where she had begun with the crude, hyperbolic, abstract masking of paint-on-film, De Hirsch now turns to clean geometric masking, creating a series of elaborate visual abstractions that stack stone, sky and plant life. A figure in profile walks along a tilted path made narrow by clean geometric masking, and the shot is then flipped, an image of futility that is also an X: three pairs of hands, three sets of eyes, and two mouths, all disproportionate with one another, are composited in a bizarre illusion, another image of the new human in its spawning ground, waiting to be born. The camera zooms in and out on flowers as they are superimposed. In this sequence, De Hirsch reveals the primordial fantasy of her poetry: a terrifying garden full of strange visions and creatures, where contemporary eyes might see anew flowers and sunsets and the details of mouths and eyes and hands.
The metaphoric tattoos that De Hirsch describes in her poem—a historical tattoo of genetic memory, a contemporary tattoo of trauma and persecution, and a future tattoo of cosmic adventure—give way to a literal tattoo, a temporary, fluctuating, dynamic inscription on the body of the performer. Projected onto Wilhite’s torso is a stag movie of a nude woman who performs a seductive dance: this is a living tattoo, casting onto one body the flesh of another. All tattoos are dynamic: they age on weathering skin and blood pulses through the flesh that bears them. When he is first seen in this black space, Wilhite appears in two oval masks, each sphere containing profile views of him with the dancer projected on his chest. As the composition shifts from Wilhite’s chest to a close-up on his face, an image of Sitney is projected onto his face. The woman on his chest and the man on his face may represent masculine and feminine divisions within the tattooed man, divisions between the body and the mind, but also another declaration of the communal state of the dream-citizens that occupy this oneiric space. It serves also as a reminder of the psychic occupation that Sitney seems to have taken up in Wilhite’s consciousness. The communal dream implicates all of its dreamers, and this tattooed man is mother, home, and prison to many dreamers. The tattoo is a metaphor for such a reconciliation of self and other—an invisible tattoo that runs through a shared human experience of genetic memory. The film is an act of dreaming together, and it becomes a site of communion between individuals and groups, men and women, people and ideologies, past and future. This sense of the human condition wasn’t just a psychedelic affectation, but a lived conviction for the filmmaker. De Hirsch believed herself to be the reincarnation of an ancient being. According to Jonas Mekas, she could speak in strange tongues. Her eccentric blend of spiritualism, fortune-telling, exoticism, and willful atavism marked her as someone living on the other side of the mirror, a technician of the sacred.
In its climax, The Tattooed Man finds its makers—Sitney and Wilhite—superimposed on one another as they look at their own reflections. The film is a reconciliation of these two subjectivities, magi whose reflections are no longer their own: through the dream even the most personal of details—the face of the dreamer—can become shared expressions of being. Firecrackers and candles shine in darkness, branding the scene with an incantatory power, reminiscent of ancient scrying, of the psychomanteum, where one would stare into a reflecting pool lit only by a single candle and the operations of the mind would present fortunes and prophecies. Are they now, as the poem suggests, “filled with whirring answers”? The final exchange is one of reflections—of the men and the mirror, and of this water world. First she aims her camera at the sky, a deep blue agitated by staccato pixilation; then, she aims her camera at the reflection of this sky in water, the sky and flowers reflected, a deeper and darker shadow of themselves. The radial emanations of water droplets return to the promise of De Hirsch’s poem, that a new world is looming “dancing in the specks of space.”
