The character of the Master was designed to be in vamp face permanently to highlight his age and make him appear more animalistic; make-up artist John Vulich based the Master's appearance on a bat, reasoning that the character has devolved to a more primal, demonic state over the years.
The film is an 80-minute dance (to no sound; Brakhage believed the images should provide their own rhythm) between two broad sets of images: those that evoke a composed, tamed nature (like the opening shot of a red flower blooming before a field of garden shrubbery) and nature in its more powerful, primal state (images of the waves and water surrounding the island).
But his ministering and number crunching concealed a more primal interest in the land he was helping to govern.
In his blurb, writer Chris Weingarten stated "no contemporary musician has a more primal understanding of adrenaline-pumping, pulse-raising, chest-caving bulldozer riffs".
There's an analogy with opera, which Barnes used to think "deeply implausible" until after Pat's death, when he found himself understanding it intuitively; that which had seemed like a flourish, now struck him as the more primal mode of communication: people singing to each other in heightened emotional states.
At best, those artificial states could hope for a day when their people would set aside their more primal loyalties in favor of a broader sense of nationhood.
But experts assume each of these circumstances triggers more primal reactions, such as feelings of loss or danger, which serve to push victims toward a particular mental state.
And because Wehr "likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation," Ekirch proposes that we have lost touch with that deeper, more primal aspect of ourselves which emerges during moments after the first sleep.
Ms. DiViesti's concern is more primal.
It also has a more primal meaning.
