Anton Vidokle. “The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun.” 2015, film stills
THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE SUN: A PARTIAL SCRIPT FOR A SHORT FILM
A FIELD OF WIND TURBINES.
Enormous white propeller blades fill the screen. They are rotating in slow motion and almost silently, except for a soft, rhythmic swish of air. The NARRATOR’s voice has an echo.
NARRATOR
Make yourself comfortable.
Move around if you need to.
Like you do when you sleep.
It helps to relax.
As you begin to feel comfortable
Move your attention all the way down to your feet.
Imagine your feet starting to feel pleasantly warm.
Warm and relaxed.
Feel your feet relaxing.
Let this warmth grow and spread throughout your body.
And as you breathe in, this feeling of warmth
Will start to flow up into the muscles of your legs.
Feel the warmth and relaxation enter your muscles.
Notice that you are no longer aware of your feet
Because they are so relaxed.
Deeply relaxed.
Without any effort
Your breath starts to carry this feeling
Into the muscles of your lower body.
Your calves loosen up.
Your muscles are so very relaxed
That you can’t be bothered to notice them at all.
Meanwhile, this relaxation is spreading upward
Like liquid absorbed into a sugar cube.
No need to notice your body as it relaxes all by itself.
The muscles of your neck and jaw,
Your tongue,
Your face,
Your scalp and ears,
All the way through from the tips of your toes
to the top of your head.
Warm and relaxed,
Deeply relaxed as you sit
Safe and comfortable
Breathing freely and easily.
You are no longer aware of your body.
You are barely aware of your mass.
Enjoy this feeling
This warm sensation
As your mind starts to feel at ease.
Without effort, your thoughts focus on what is important.
You are in control.
It’s windy. A man is walking in the foothills of the dune. It’s very hot: he walks slowly and with much effort. As he approaches the camera, we realize that he is unusually large – a giant with strong Asian features. He begins to speak very slowly, taking long pauses between sentences.
KONSTANTIN
Lenin died during winter.
According to tradition, the body must be laid out for three days for mourners before being placed in a coffin and buried.
You can see the funeral on YouTube.
Heavily bundled people, snow, flowers, soldiers, and horses.
A river of people moving past the corpse
Looking strange, as if in a trance.
Many are crying.
NARRATOR
More than a hundred thousand people came to view the body during the three days. People kept coming and coming.
A decision was made to keep the body on public display in a wooden tomb.
After some months the whole thing started looking miraculous:
Flesh immune to decay.
Then the winter broke and the body began to decompose.
Something had to be done quickly.
Lenin’s body was embalmed using a combination of glycerin and
formaldehyde: formaldehyde to kill bacteria, and glycerin to keep
the flesh moist. The brain was removed and given to a scientist.
Trotsky missed the funeral because Stalin gave him the wrong date.
A DRESSING ROOM OF A NIGHTCLUB
A young man is applying makeup, slowly transforming himself into a woman slightly resembling Cleopatra. She uses glitter for eye shadow.
NARRATOR
The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul would return to a preserved corpse.
Over three thousand years ago, their pharaoh invented a new religion of one god: the Sun.
This pharaoh worshiped solar energy, and called himself Son of the Sun.
He said:
CLEOPATRA
You are in my heart
There is no other who knows you
Only me, your Son
Whom you have taught your ways and your might.
Those on Earth come from your hand: you made them.
When you have dawned, they live.
When you set, they die.
You are lifetime, one lives by you.
All eyes are on your beauty until you set.
All labor ceases when you rest.
When you rise, you stir everyone.
A VILLAGE CEMETERY NEAR ALMATA.
Konstantin, Musa, and Svetlana are here. It’s very dry and dusty. Wheat fields stretch to the horizon in all directions. The grain has already been harvested and farmers are burning chaff. Black birds are circling plumes of smoke.
It’s not the Earth that feeds us but the Sun!
Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development.
MUSA
The existence of life is not an accident:
Its very being reflects the radiance of the Sun.
The distribution of life on the planet
follows the intensity of solar energy.
The surface of this planet is shaped by living substance.
The biosphere hosts many manifestations of energy:
Energy of movement and energy of transformation.
This energy is amplified and nourished by the Sun.
Solar energy is collected and concentrated
through the living substance of the biosphere.
The biosphere transforms the Sun’s radiance into oxygen
that envelops the entire surface of the planet.
It gives Earth its unique qualities.
KONSTANTIN
The origin and essence of our wealth comes to us
through the radiation of the Sun. It also comes
through the inhuman underground toil of miners.
MUSA
Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy.
Its surplus needs to be spent.
The eating of other species is one such luxury.
Sexual reproduction is another: it ensures
the intense consumption of energy.
Death is also a luxury: it’s not necessary.
SVETLANA
Because the energy of cosmos is indestructible.
Because true religion is a cult of ancestors.
Because true social equality means immortality for all.
Because of love, we must resurrect our ancestors
From cosmic particles
As minerals, as animated plants.
Solar, self-feeding, collectively conscious
Immortal
Transsexual
On Earth, on space ships, on space stations
On other planets.
FIELDS ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF AN INDUSTRIAL CITY
We see coal mines, power lines, and graves.
NARRATOR
This is Karaganda.
We are here to build an aero-ionization dish:
An electric chandelier of invisible energy that
emits a field of negatively charged ion particles.
It will follow the designs of the Soviet
scientist who worshipped the Sun.
He lived in Karaganda for several decades.
First as a prisoner in a labor camp, where the
commandant allowed him to carry out
scientific experiments in a jail cell by night.
Then at the camp’s coal mine, where he designed
an irradiation hall to prolong the life of prisoners.
And a resuscitation chamber.
A FACTORY WORKSHOP
A group of workers are constructing a large metal device: a gridded dish with thousands of small needles soldered to the intersections of the grid.
SVETLANA
The healthy movement of blood throughout our bodies is balanced by the negative electric charge of red blood cells.
This negative electrical charge is what enables the intricate movement of blood through sixty thousand miles of vessels in the human body, without getting stuck or clogged.
Red blood cells absorb oxygen in the lungs and transport it to the body’s tissue and organs.
If electricity is applied to atoms of oxygen, it gives oxygen a negative charge.
Red blood cells transport these negatively charged ions of oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the living organism.
As a result, breathing should become noticeably easier.
Various aches and pains should disappear.
NARRATOR
These chandeliers were supposed to be installed
on all Soviet spaceships, to keep cosmonauts healthy.
Instead, they were installed in the offices of top government officials to keep them from going senile.
SVETLANA
We are building a very large version of this chandelier in a cemetery.
We want to know what it can do for:
a. humans
b. animals
c. plants
d. weather conditions
AERIAL VIEW OF A VAST CEMETERY
From a distance it looks like a strange city. As the camera gets closer, we can make out numerous graves and mausoleums. A group of workers arrives in a truck.
NARRATOR
The scientist who worshipped the Sun got in trouble because he wrote a book.
It was a study of the effect of the Sun on human history.
During the First World War, while observing sunspots through a telescope, the scientist noticed a remarkable coincidence.
Immediately following the passage of sunspots through the Sun’s central meridian, fighting escalated on numerous fronts.
Fascinated by this observation, the scientist embarked on a comparative historical analysis of solar activity and the mass behavior of people.
He compared existing records of solar activity with key historical events recorded in different parts of the world over the course of the previous three hundred years.
The results appear to show that during peak periods in solar activity, the following tend to occur:
a. social upheavals
b. revolutions
c. wars
d. economic booms and collapses
f. et cetera
In the cemetery, workers bring shovels to dig pits, into which they pour cement. They are building foundations to install towers, from which a giant dish will be hung about ten meters above the ground. It’s connected to an electrical generator. When the power is turned on, the dish appears to produce wind.
NARRATOR
Solar activity is cyclical. Sunspots, flares, and coronal eruptions pass through periods of minimum and maximum activity at recurring intervals of about eleven years – nine times each century.
Each solar cycle is also a cycle of historical events – a historiometric cycle.
The scientist divided the historiometric cycle into four distinct periods, each characterized by a degree of excitement in the social psyche.
The first period, corresponding with minimal activity of the Sun, is characterized by an apathetic, depressed state.
The dominant feelings and moods are those of:
a. resignation
b. passivity
c. tolerance
d. peacefulness
This psychosocial atmosphere creates the conditions for conclusion of wars, peace treaties, capitulations. This is the period most productive for arts and sciences, and for creative activities in general.
The second period is characterized by an uplifted social mood and increased activity, a crystallization of social positions and opinions, an emergence of political alliances, and the coalescence of the masses around certain ideas.
During the third period, the synchronization between solar activity and human behavior reaches its peak.
The dominant social moods are those of:
d. enthusiasm
c. decisiveness
b. optimism
a. certainty
Societies enter a passionate state and are easily mobilized by charismatic personalities: political and military leaders, gifted speakers, and so forth.
Political unrest and uprisings, wars, conquests, and insurgencies are the symptoms of this period.
The unity within social groups during this time enables them to solve complex political and military questions.
The feeling of solidarity resolves most social contradictions and disagreements.
Mystical, esoteric, and occult teachings, as well as maniacal ideas, gain in circulation, and mass psychological delusions or “psychotic epidemics” are common.
The fourth historiometric cycle is a time of lessened psychosocial excitability.
The psychological unity of the masses starts to disintegrate.
Political and military alliances fray and fall apart.
Wars come to a standstill and separatist tendencies increase.
The lack of social unity inhibits mass action.
Gradually, the fall in excitability leads back to a depressed social mood.
A number of animals are led under the dish by a shepherd: a cow, a horse, sheep, and goats. There are also some plants and several people who appear to be technicians or scientists. It’s silent and animals don’t move much. Nothing happens. This continues for a while. Eventually the animals fall asleep.
NARRATOR
Even though the Sun does not directly determine the outcome of specific social or economic situations, it exerts an influence on the biological life of the planet.
Therefore, it exerts an influence on the biological, psychological, and social spheres of human activity.
Through this, the Sun influences the rhythm of all historical processes.
The scientist who worshiped the Sun wrote:
A human is not only a terrestrial being,
but a cosmic one
connected by all his biology, all molecules,
all particles of the body
with its cosmic rays
its flows and fields.
Following the publication of his study, the scientist was invited to lecture at Columbia University in New York, and nominated for a Nobel Prize in science. Instead, he was arrested and sent to a labor camp.
Because one possible interpretation of his work could lead to the conclusion that: the Communist Revolution was caused by the sun.
A TWO-LANE ROAD AFTER DARK
Through the car’s windshield, the beams of car lights illuminate the white stripes of the lane divider. The car is moving at medium speed, making the flickering of white stripes hypnotic. The NARRATOR’s voice has an echo.
Focus.
Concentrate.
I want you to imagine that you are standing at a fork in a road.
As you look down the road that leads to the left,
you notice that it is a cold, barren, unfriendly, and dead road.
The sky is dreary and there is a cold drizzle of rain.
The trees are barren of leaves and the grass has long been replaced with hard, cold rocks.
A cold wind blows.
This is a dead place.
This road leads to death.
As you turn from that road, and look down the road that leads to the right, you see a beautiful path.
The Sun is shining brightly in a deep, clear, blue sky.
The trees are full of leaves and the grass is lush and green.
As you begin to walk down this path, you feel a warm, gentle breeze playing in your hair.
With each step, you find yourself feeling healthier and healthier, stronger and stronger.
This road leads to immortal life.
With each step, you feel more alive and more convinced that nothing will ever again make you go back to that other cold, dreary, deadly road.
You have chosen life. Infinite, healthy, strong life.
And nothing can ever change that.
Now, every positive change has been sealed into the deepest part of your subconscious.
And every positive change reinforces itself in your mind, over and over again, with every breath that you exhale.
Note
This script occasionally includes lines from the writings of Akhenaten, Georges Bataille, Nikolay Fedorov, Alexander Chizhevsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky, as well as paragraphs of clinical hypnosis script containing posthypnotic suggestions designed to help patients gain remission from addictions.