Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny’s documentary takes a trippy, slantwise look at gallerist and publisher Christine Burgin’s collection of books by nonconformist and iconoclastic thinkers and dreamers.
The Secret World, directed by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny,
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York City,
through Sunday, October 27, 2024
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Swiss writer Robert Walser had a wish: “To be small and to stay small.” The same is true of New York gallerist Christine Burgin. Away from the lights and away from the numbers, she has, for many decades, been devoted to a form of penumbral publishing. Books in a minor key, that speak of shadows: Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems; Walser’s Microscripts, texts written in a sanatorium on scraps of paper, in a hand so tiny they were long dismissed as mad scribbles; Zoe Beloff’s The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle, about a group that sounds fictional but really did seek to create a Dreamland Amusement Park featuring pavilions named “Unconscious” and “The Psychic Censor.”
Burgin brings out titles only when the spirit moves her, in editions modest enough to make owning a copy feel like a privilege, membership in a club governed less by rules and regulations than a shared sensibility. It’s reassuring there are readers drawn to books bearing (sub)titles such as The Telepathy of Archives, A Violet Somnambulist Spiriting the Fugacious Bloom, or The Tenaciousness of Subterfuge. (The latter a sort of group biography that features an eighteenth-century woman from Godalming, just outside London, who claimed to have given birth to rabbits, as well as an Italian boxer known as the Ambling Alp, who became a world heavyweight champion without knowing his manager had paid opponents not to punch him hard on his weak chin.)
The Secret World, itself a secret, slantways documentary by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny, is less about Christine Burgin as a publisher than it is about the books in her life—on her shelves, in her office. She speaks of Paul Scheerbart, a crystal-obsessed speculative architect who believed “colored glass destroys all hatred” and wrote the proto-Dadaist The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention (1910), described by its translator as recording a “two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination.” She talks of Augustus James Pleasanton, a retired Civil War general who wrote The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight (1871)—produced with blue ink on blue paper—which elaborated his conviction that the blue wavelengths from the sun, if correctly located, could eliminate human illness.
There are references to Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvanian ironworker who contributed incredible pieces for Amazing Stories that expanded on his belief that an ancient race had created “rock books”: stones revealing these prehistoric beings had built underground cities in which they abandoned their progeny (“Deros”), who in turn kidnapped humans and used “epilepto” rays to sicken them. And to Eva Carrière, who held séances featuring a spirit called Bien Boa—a three-hundred-year-old Brahmin Hindu (in truth a cardboard cutout of an Arab coachman)—and during which penis-shaped ectoplasm would fall from her breasts. (The ectoplasm was made from cut-up newspapers. That it sometimes bore photo portraits of Woodrow Wilson or King Ferdinand of Bulgaria should have been a tell-tale sign.)
Not to be forgotten: Colonel Dinshah P. Ghadiali, born in India, a vegetarian, theosophically inclined, and, after he moved to New Jersey, the inventor and tireless marketer of a machine called the Spectro-Chrome, whose light, he claimed, could cure epilepsy, make the lame walk, even restore the eyesight of the blind. He set up an institute to publish the colorful science behind his therapeutic treatments: orange was an emetic, scarlet a genital excitant, and green a pituitary stimulant. One of his books was called American Sex Problems. His own problems included the American Medical Association and the FBI, which, in 1951, destroyed his lab.
What is this book collection? A coven of rogues and chancers? An ark for alternative knowledge that may or may not be redeemed in the future? A tribute to “worldmaking” and the “visionary” (words that get used to describe anyone who’s ever drawn a wonky triangle)? Shaver spent time in hospital for the criminally insane. Ghadiali was an anti-vaxxer. Distilling one’s skepticism—“radical” paranoia, even—sounds great until it becomes the core identity of swivel-eyed libertarians fulminating against the bogeyman of “mainstream media.”
Burgin appears in The Secret World but not as an explainer or thesis proposer. Her comments about the books she handles are often disembodied, heard offscreen. “Look at the eye!” “It all goes back to electricity.” “It’s like trying to understand the ether.” “I don’t know where it is. I’ll find it.” It’s possible to imagine these words coming from the authors themselves as they sought to communicate their findings to a baffled or indifferent world. My character sketches above furnish more biographical ballast than is available in this film, which focuses on mood, emanations, whatever we infer from the titles glimpsed on the spines: They Taught Themselves, We Are Not Alone, Reading Is Believing.
Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of “the psychic dreaming that paper allows.” Like Pleasanton, like Ghadiali, the filmmakers focus on color and light, shooting individual book covers so that they recall a Fillmore East poster or Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother. Old formats—VHS video, 35mm slides—are resurrected and then refilmed on a 16mm handheld Bolex camera to produce a temporal fugue. Burgin’s books are no longer physical objects; they’re on their way to becoming spirit dancers.
I found myself wanting more of what French writer Marguerite Yourcenar called “the mysticism of matter.” Or rather, I thought Preiss and McElheny might have paid more attention to the materiality of Burgin’s library: its thermostat levels, the depths of its shelving, the protective wrappers needed to help keep its aging volumes intact—the better to underscore the trippy, kosmische nature of the books themselves.
The dark march of digitalism goes on. Librarians and booksellers, understandably nervous, talk up book spaces as inclusive, empowering, social hubs. In this insistence on utility and relevance, something important about books gets obscured: their obscurity. The Secret World, lonesome and barely scrutable itself, hints at the hermit-hole qualities of Burgin’s library, its idiopathic abundance, the refuge it offers to the useless and the damned. Isn’t that what all libraries should aspire to be?
Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University. A former Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards, he writes for the Guardian, makes radio documentaries for the BBC, and runs the Texte and Töne publishing imprint.