The Great Art of Knowing (2004)

On either side of a life, find a library before and an auction after: consider these figures as the sites for a collection created for the purposes of division and dispersal. From Leonardo da Vinci to Jules-Etienne Marey, practitioners of a certain mode of transcendental empiricism turned repeatedly to combinations of words and images describing the flight of birds. This film-as-bibliography of William Byrd's library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius Kircher's 17th century encyclopedia, The Great Art of Knowing. Herein you find tangled texts and crossed destinies, filled with figures at once buried deep and tossed high by history, lined with traces of Evelyn Byrd's hidden romance. Love finds purchase between tightly shelved volumes. In the spaces between the letters. In the lines themselves. An antinomian cinema seems possible; a gentle iconoclasm? The image is always backwards in a mirror. The story unfolds slowly.