Lepus Morbus – Short Film
Synopsis.
An answer to the question, “Why does Hare dance?”. Hare’s narrative is told in four chapters, each delineated by a Heterotopic space, ‘Prairie’, ‘Forest’, ‘Ossuary’ and ‘Concrete’.
Each of the four Heterotopic zones represents a Phenomenology of space who’s significance is constituted in mind. A dream landscape where normal semiotics don’t apply, but the omnipotence of thought persists leading to animistic thought and the attribution of agency.
PRAIRIE :
Hare is born through the motion of a blood clot in the Prairie. In the tales of the White River Sioux a ‘Rabbit Boy’ is created by the kicking of a blood clot. The Sioux believe in Takuskanskan, the power of motion, where motion is a creative force that can bring things to life.
Hare is born but he shakes, equivocates, he is not at ease. Hare is a Trickster, a mediator between two polar terms, and that duality is manifest as equivocation. He mediates between the living and the dead, the ill and the healthy, the liminal and subliminal. The Hare Lip is the origin of the Hare as a split personality, a being between worlds, in the mythology of the tribes of the American Pacific North West. (Levi-Strauss)
FOREST :
The Forest is where Hare learns to manifest the self. In the Northern European mythic tradition, (Campbell). Hare meets himself and a ritual is performed. His four selves sit at the cardinal points and the ritual delineates a figure of eight, infinity. Myth and ritual are reciprocal, manifesting and underlying psycho-sociological system where objects are agents of mediation between opposition and contradiction. The ritual is an antithetical game that is conjunctive, creating union and balance. Rather than the usual disjunction of game theory.
Through the ritual Hare learns to subsume his equivocation, he learns his purpose…. he stops shaking.
OSSUARY:
The Ossuary is where the mediating function is performed. It is a place of Libation. In the Helenic tradition the sacrifices offered to the gods were bones, rather than flesh, since bone was seen as eternal, like the gods themselves. In the centre of the Ossuary stands the world tree, the Axis Mundi or world navel that bridges the world below and the world above.
Hare’s message is passed up through the tree and he waits for the tree to respond. The tree responds and he knows he has fulfilled his mediating function.
CONCRETE :
Concrete is the place of division. It is an ideal of anthropomorphic ontology as it absorbs psychic residue. It is a ghost room, a hauntological heterotopic space. The six stones appear, an attempt to reconcile object oriented ontology with the attribution of agency to inanimate objects.
Hare appears and begins to dance one last time. He dances to mediate between the independent ontology of the stones and the human ‘thinking and being’ correlation. He dances because he inhabits the space between two worlds, he is caught in the updraft and he has no mass.
Hare becomes a Pupa. As Tricksters mediate between opposites their destiny is to divide themselves into new forms that will in turn divide again. The Pupa pulsates and eventually splits, symbolic of Hare’s final metamorphosis.
Lepus Morbus – Short Film