Anniversary of Nikola Tesla's birth - films programme:

“Giving Evidence on Tesla”, Vladimir Pogačić
“The Day Tesla Returned”, Nikola Stojanović

THE ART OF FILM IN TESLA'S CODE

"The film art begins the moment future film pictures start to appear in front of the eyes of the one who wants to make the film. Only if he/she points to his/her point of view, hence if he/she is a kind of a philosopher, then the director is also a kind of an artist, and the cinematography is an art..."

Andrei Tarkovsky

In the evening of the faraway 1882, while walking with his friend Sigety through the Budapest City Park and, carried away with the sudden inspiration, reciting lines from Goethe's "Faust", in front of Nikola Tesla's eyes and in his mind appeared the precise picture of the rotating magnetic field, the problem he had been occupying his attention long before this event. Precise mental pictures appearance in the ingenious inventor's mind followed many of those inventions that cleared the way for civilization that was, according to some contemporary authors, invented by Tesla. On the basis of this feature he founded the idea of creating a device that could, once the people in the future master adequate technologies, transfer mental pictures projected from the unreachable brain workshop to the nerves of the inside of the eyes making it possible for the others to take them and thus realize direct communication between the individual and the outer world. In his film "Until the End of The World" (1991), Vim Venders is occupied with the similar apparatus-computer.

In an interview given to "The New York Times" (1937) Tesla foresees radio-messages broadcasting to another planets. Just one year later Orson Welles makes his radio-play "War of The Worlds" (1938) that turns the attention of anxious public both to the author and the radio medium he has used and whose inventor was Nikola Tesla. On his invention of the radio Tesla says: "Cheap and simple device that you can carry in your pocket or put anywhere at sea or at land. It will anyway broadcast world news or any other special messages that are intended for it. That way the whole Earth will be turned into one giant brain whose each and every part can react to the received signal". Many years later Andrei Tarkovsky was making his science-fiction film "Solaris" (1971) in which he gave the role of the "giant brain" to one entity of planetary dimensions – the ocean that thinks! But Tesla is both philosophical interpreter and technological realizer of that magnificent global idea that, on the other hand, Plato, from his Antique perspective, perceives in Timaeus in broader and more esoteric shape as "the soul of the world". "According to this, says Plato, we can consequently state that: this world is really the living being gifted with soul and intelligence... unique visible living entity that consists of all the other living entities, that are, by their nature, all interconnected. (Timoteus, 29/30; IV BC). The film "Anima Mundi" will be made many years later (1991) by Godfry Reggio, the author of famous film "Koyaanisquasi". But following this philosophical anticipation line, the furthest went Anaximander who lived in the VII and VI BC and talked on apeiron as timely unbounded material origin of all things existent, with no definition for quality and area, that abstracts contrasts from itself with the help of the eternal movement and that way makes creation of individual things possible. That individual, thinks Anaximander, at the end of the process goes back to general, undefined, infinite, in apeiron. It could be said through the logics of the current Physics, it goes back to that eternally concentrated dot where later comes Big Bang creating the new Cosmos.

On the other hand, humanity did not send either a book or a theatre as its precursor and vanguard to the Cosmos, but it did send film camera and Tesla's radio-messages, specific media, many of which were invented and in his philosophical way explained by Tesla. Why? Because concrete media (radio, television, film, radar, computer...) bring to our senses reverse information on space and time to which they where launched. They also bring us one new sensibility, morality, ethics and aesthetics that are dedicated to fight for survival and not destruction of the world. On that Tesla's code, through which we come to Christianity and Buddhism and our Antique roots, Vim Venders, Tarkovsky, Verner Herzog, Godfry Reggio, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa, Jim Jarmusch, Emir Kusturica, Stanley Kubrick, Jean Jacque Anui, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Steven Spielberg. Filip Kaufman, Abaas Kiarostami, Ken Russell, Piter Weir, Lars von Trier and others found their works.

If we establish our basic thesis on the fact that the anthropocentric is what the civilization wants (to create and impose history, ideology, authority, dogma, violence, language, profit, race and class division, cultural identity of this or that profile), then this is where the dramaturgy of amusement is, creation of the black-and-white world of interpersonal and intercivilizational confrontations, this is where the films of classical cinema narration and provenience are as well as so many authors that we better not list them. But, if we start from the fact that this text is dedicated to the art of film that originates precisely from the Tesla's code, then it should be clear that this code is cosmocentric, that this code deals with what is wanted through us, and not what we want. The code is the one that determines that according to the Cosmic laws this civilization unites and spreads, survives, dreams, loves, amalgamates, discovers laws of nature and, without disturbing the harmony of relationships that have been given and posed beforehand in this sphere, use them to create its own existence, to develop in the unique being, brain, soul and body of the planet we live on. It, therefore, becomes more clear why the choice of authors have been made, since it could easily be said that they rather belong to some experimental form or film alternative than to classical entertainment industry that is offered to the mass and ever growing consumers of the film achievements.

Finally, let me paraphrase Vim Venders: Once I also thought that the toughest task for the interpreter of Tesla's work was to precisely describe how the inventions, electricity and apparatuses Tesla had invented look like. Today I realize it is even harder to give an answer to the question - how does the world to which Tesla intended his inventions look like.

Miodrag Novaković