Film Premiere: The Secret World | Gene Siskel Film Center

Chicago Premiere! Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny in person!

THE SECRET WORLD
2023, Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny, USA, 90 min. in English / Format: Digital 

Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N State St, Chicago, IL 60601

Sunday, December 15 | 4:15pm
Monday, December 16 | 8:30pm

The Secret World, 2023, is the first full-length feature film by Jeff Preiss and
Josiah McElheny, following two earlier collaborative film projects in 2008 and
2021. The film was initially conceived as an exploration of how to create a
portrait of a mutual friend, Christine Burgin, through the lens of her unique
personal library. 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. Looked at another way, it is a home movie,
a record of the friendships between the filmmakers and the film’s central subject.
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, 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, or histories of the lost Atlantean
people discovered inside of rock formations, to creating 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.

Filmmakers Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny will join John Corbett
(Corbett vs. Dempsey) for a discussion following the Sunday screening,
and Jim Dempsey, former House Manager of the Gene Siskel Film Center
will ceremoniously tear your tickets.

These screenings are sponsored by Corbett vs. Dempsey.
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