Decrypting the Vectors of its Own Evolution – Ken Rudolph’s Crystals

Ken Rudolph’s film Crystals [1968] is microscopy at its most carnivalesque. A synchronized choreography of shape-shifting shards and opalescent slithers create the mineralized equivalent of a Busby Berkley scene. Dendritic spiracles elongate to form microscopic mega-cities but the isometric skyscraper view is flattened into a fractal flatland. Radial diffusions grow like bacterial colonies – the urbane sprawl of molecular lattices inter-fitting with space-filling intelligence.

The music, simultaneously at odds and perfectly at one with the scenography, implies a drama of multiplicities, city building, contagion spreads, early forms of life decrypting the vectors of their own evolution. Cascades of rising notes annotate the accretions of tiny mountain peaks forming and the fanning of microscopic alluvial terrains.

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

‘It looks like a crystal’

‘Well, gentlemen, there’s our answer’

‘To what?’

‘How Andromeda functions without amino acids’

‘Yes. I’ve often thought that living matter might be based on crystals of some kind. All these wedge-shaped compartments, they’d serve to separate biochemical functions very well’

– The Andromeda Strain.

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Crystals -  Ken Rudolph & Herbert Loebl

Ken Rudolph was known in the academic film world for a series of films that applied synthesizes of sound and video informed by counter-cultural and psychedelic currents of the late 60s and early 70s. No wonder his film is a take on the first person view through the liquid crystal dream of a lysergide adventurer.

Related:
Form Constants of Optical Mineralogy
The Logic of Crystals – William T. Astbury & Kathleen Yardley’s Space-group Diagrams

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