The Rainmakers (2023)

​

"Thunder and rain set in: the image of Deliverance."

-Hexagram 40, I-Ching

In an ancient Taoist fable retold by Jung's protege Richard Wilhelm, a village suffered from a drought for many months; the situation was catastrophic: the Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally, the people said, "we will fetch the rainmaker." From another province, a dried-up old man appeared. He only asked for a quiet little house somewhere, and he locked himself there for three days. On the fourth day, the clouds gathered, and there was a great storm at the time of the year when no rain was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rainmaker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion, he said: 'They call you the rainmaker; will you tell me how you made the rain?" And the rainmaker said: 'I did not make the rain; I am not responsible." But what have you done these three days?' "Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order; they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore, the whole country is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So, I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and

then naturally, the rain came."

The rainmaker legend is one about the codependency of all things. One that has been lost and confined to children's books on behalf of the spirit of modernity. If western thought has for too long celebrated the divorce between the I and the cosmos, the price was the total impotence of one facing the other, as the lines of dialogue were ripped and the world made deaf and mute. In this context, the looming approach of annihilation coming from the chainsaws symphony, the ashes and seas increase has no rainmaker to make it all stop and restore the balance of the universe. The price of disenchantment is a linear history of loss that doesn't know salvation or eternity, that is bound to apocalypse where the individual is their beginning and end. What does it mean to evoke the rainmaker again? What does it mean to dream of rain in a world of drought like that of cinema? Filmmaking was already born as a post-art form.

While painting, music, sculpture, theater, and architecture were shaped in their proximity to religious rituals, film was first discovered in the secular age. The fatal result is an art form without apparent teleology. While the other art forms always coexisted to manifest the gods, what was film to do if it had no relation to any gods? Wander looking for the scum of profit? Or satisfy itself with the tragic alms of self-expression? The absence of God is the drought of film. Nonetheless, even though a creature of secular modernity, filmmaking has in its conception in celluloid a coexistence of technology and nature; there is where lies its power and resurrection- manifesting what has been lost: the phantom of the Gods capable of scaring audiences after audiences in a train arriving to a station.

Today, everything is film. Everything is embodied in this resurrection, making it banal, powerless, and futile. When everything becomes life, we live in a world of death. Afterward, cinema became merely a medium, it was stripped of nature in the digital form, and its cathedrals of dark are now things of the past. In this sense, to talk about producing rain through film, the only true objective of this project is to align filmmaking once again with its nature, to make digital become celluloid and the screen vibrate again; it is to restore the phantom of God in all its mythology and splendor this is the only reason behind the allegorical fragments of King Kong's odyssey, the film restorer invisible audience and the last tree obsession with making the planet bloom again. To dream of rain through film, to see filmmaking as rainmaking is, in the end, to have faith that it is possible to make the world speak again in the sound of raining moving picture.

​

​

​

​

​